AS I ENTERED MACKENZIE’S LOFT, A DELIGHTFULLY Mediterranean fragrance greeted me: essence of peppers, olives, and tomatoes that still seemed hot from the sun.
I could get used to coming home to a lovingly prepared repast. I could get used to having a good old-fashioned wife.
I’d spent a few hours taking care of scut work—retrieving a silk blouse from the cleaners, drudge shopping for kitty litter and lightbulbs, restocking Macavity’s bowl so that the oval kitty didn’t starve to death in my absence, and returning a phone message from my mother. Normally, I’d have let that last item slide, particularly since I was still miffed about her tossing Lowell at me. But her message was too bizarre to ignore, even considering the source.
“This is your mother,” she’d said although I’m such a quick study that I can, at age thirty-one, recognize my mom’s voice. “With such a good idea! Mandy—join AA.” End of message.
I was sufficiently worried to dial her back. “Mom,” I said when I reached her, “I must have misunderstood. It sounded like you wanted me to join Alcoholics Anonymous.”
“Yes!”
“But I don’t have a drinking problem. And although Lowell Diggs has not turned out to be Prince Charming, that isn’t going to drive me to drink, either.”
“Do they check? Is there some kind of secret password or salute? Does somebody have to verify that you drank too much?”
“I…well, from what I know, of course not. But what—”
“If they don’t check, then who’s going to know whether or not you belong there?”
“I will. What is this about?”
“Now listen, Amanda, Mrs. Farber’s niece?”
I hated it when she inventoried strangers’ genealogies. It almost always led to a Lowell Diggs. I didn’t know who Mrs. Farber was, let alone her niece. But if I dared to ask, my mother would insist that I did know by default, because I knew ten other people with connections to the Farbers, a delusion she would work to prove by chopping at more and more family trees. To my mother, the fabled six degrees of separation is nothing. She’s willing to go seven, ten, fifty degrees of separation—to find the missing links between all mankind.
I remained silent.
“The girl—Claudette, I think is her name—the blonde with the ankle bracelet, remember?”
I waited.
“She had a problem with liquor, caused her family a lot of grief.”
“Mom, I’m on my way out. I have a date.” That generally stops her, and in fact it worked now, too, but only for a second.
“With the cop? The…Chuck person?”
I admitted that I was, indeed, seeing C.K. Mackenzie again. Déjà Mackenzie. I’d never told her I didn’t know his first or middle names. Actually, she was fond of the man she called Chuck. She used to slow down significantly in her matchmaking when I mentioned him. But she refused to come to a full stop. Her bumper sticker read: I BRAKE ONLY FOR SERIOUS MARITAL CONTENDERS. After a year and more of our dithering, she was beginning to fear there was no future with him.
“Chuck can wait,” she said. “The point is, Claudette went to AA and met the most wonderful man. He was drying out, too. They were married last week.”
“Give the Farbers my congratulations.”
“You’re missing the point.” She sounded almost testy. “They’re there.”
“What’s where?”
“Men! Eligible men. Eligible again, but only for a short window of opportunity. While they were drinking, most of their marriages have been wrecked, they’re—”
“You’re telling me to use AA as a dating service? Scope out the drying out at their meetings?”
“Why wait until they’re all better and set loose to scatter over the face of the earth? Then, who knows where to find them? Then, when they’re all fresh and dried out—”
She made them sound like they’d been to the cleaners for One Hour Martinizing.
“—they’re scooped up by other women!”
Why I continue to be amazed by her skewed approach to love, I don’t know.
“Think about it,” she said.
I thought about the time, instead. Maybe Mackenzie wasn’t as prime a candidate as a semidrunk, otherwise unwanted stranger attempting recovery—but he was what I had, and he cooked, and I didn’t want to keep him waiting. “Sure,” I said. Why not? I would definitely think about what she’d said. In fact, it seemed unforgettable. My dark mood lightened. Not everything was about hate and division. Some things—albeit dizzy and wrongheaded—were about love. Or at least about Bea Pepper’s tireless attempts to fill in for a goof-off Cupid.
“One more thing,” she said as I was hanging up. “Only meetings in good neighborhoods, you understand? Meet a better class.”
*
“So,” I asked Mackenzie, after I had shared my mother’s latest aberrant scheme, “I got to wondering what you’d do at an AA meeting. They don’t use last names and you don’t use a first or second. Who would you be? C.K.M.?”
He grinned. “Have some more wine. Then we’ll go to meetings together and figure out what to call ourselves.”
The ratatouille and sea bass were delicious and the company just about its equal. Mackenzie was becoming a better end-of-day destination because he finally understood that he was on the mend. He was sloughing the pessimism that had weighed him down like so much dead skin.
“Welcome back.” I lifted my wineglass. I wasn’t sure either of us understood where he’d been, but I didn’t care. I was trying to treasure these moments when I had the best of Mackenzie—he had regained his personality, but not his profession.
“A few more days,” he answered. “Then I’m back.”
More or less. The cast would come off and he’d be on crutches or a cane and would require lots of therapy to restore his muscles and agility. But it was nonetheless a major step forward. Flesh was always preferable to plaster as leg casing.
We were becoming giddy with the possibilities ahead. I decided to keep his mind busy in the meantime. “Tell me,” I said, “how’d the great detective like to do a little consultation for the next few days?” Beneath my mother’s foolishness and Mackenzie’s new buoyancy, I still saw the dejected image of Flora Jones.
“I don’ like the words detective and consultin’ to be in the same sentence, when that sentence is spoken by you.”
“Okay, I’ll split them up. How’d you like to do some detection while you’re recuperating? But not firsthand—or firstfoot. Only as an adviser, or consultant.”
“What I was tryin’ to say, in plain English, is: Are you getting yourself involved again?”
“Me? I’m trying to get you involved again.”
He sighed. “You can be straight with me. I’ve been wonderin’ how long it’d take you to bring her up, is all. I actually thought, for a while, that you were goin’ to let this one lie. Let the police handle it.”
I pushed a dollop of eggplant around my plate as if food rearranging might cure murky thinking. Then I put down my fork. “How do you know about Flora?”
“Who is Flora?”
“I’ve told you about her. She’s that supercompetent computer whiz at school. Can handle anything, I thought, a dynamo, but she’s going through…wait a minute—if you didn’t mean her, then what were we talking about?”
“I know what I was talking about, but I don’t know what you—”
“Who?”
“Shouldn’t it be whom? I’m talking about whom?”
“You’re talking about death if you don’t answer me soon!”
“The girl on the six o’clock news. The Vietnamese girl.”
“Oh, God. Do you remember her name?”
“Not Flora.”
“Not April?” Please not on the six o’clock news. None of their news is good. April had been absent, that was all.
“That was it. April. They said she went to your school, but hadn’t shown up today.”
“And that made the news? Jeez, it used to be the truant officer got upset, but not the media! And they say we’ve gotten lax.”
He looked at me oddly.
“I’m sorry. You’re making me so nervous….”
“If you’d get that car radio fixed, you, too, could know what’s goin’ on all on your own.”
“But still and all—she missed a day of school. Big deal. Why broadcast it?” My vital signs accelerated until they broke the speed laws. That damnable belly squish had been on the mark again. Something terrible had happened to April Truong, and I didn’t want to know what. Had to know, but didn’t want to.
He poured himself more red wine. “I’m sorry. Sounds like a whole lot more than truancy. More like abducted.”
“April?’
“Last seen about eleven last night in Chinatown. In front of a massage parlor. As soon as her brother couldn’t find her, he called the police, but April’s eighteen, old enough to decide to cut out, and it wasn’t even twenty-four hours that she was gone yet. Then somebody found her backpack. It had all her ID, plus books and notes. No money, assuming she carried some. They called the number on her ID. Thought there might be a reward. That’s when the parents called the police again. Since then, they’ve found a witness who says he saw a girl being dragged into a white van in the area where they found the backpack.”
“Somebody saw and didn’t do anything?”
“It’s not the best neighborhood, and he said kinky things happen around the massage parlor. He wasn’t about to interfere.”
I stood up, just to have something forward-moving to do, and I cleared our plates. I scraped and rinsed and put the dishes in the dishwasher, then I leaned against the sink and waited for Mackenzie to tell me what to do from now on.
“I thought you knew already,” he said. “I wouldn’t have said anything if…as it was, I waited until you brought it up—or I thought you had. What were you talkin’ about if it wasn’t that girl? What about Flora?”
I shook my head. “She’s being harassed, but it has nothing to do with—this is awful! What was April doing at a massage parlor? She had a job at a restaurant.”
Mackenzie managed to make his shrug exceptionally cynical.
“She didn’t work in a massage parlor!” I snapped.
“They showed a photo. Pretty.”
“Extremely,” I said softly.
He stood up as best as he could. “Isn’t much consolation, but I made you dessert.”
I couldn’t stop picturing April. Stop realizing that last night, while I was sitting on that blanket listening to Brahms and thinking the worst problem in town was being with a grumpy Mackenzie, April was terrified and in danger, grappling, perhaps, for her life.
“Peaches and toasted almonds,” Mackenzie continued. “Sit yourself down, while I whip up the cream topping. Maybe it’ll make you feel a little better.”
“Thanks,” I said, “but I’ll have to pass.” My stomach was otherwise occupied, predicting disaster.
*
The next morning, as I walked into school after a troubled night, even Rina was animated. Rina normally confined herself to overwrought, sultry body language, but today I heard her as soon as I neared the building and continued to hear her until the door was shut behind me.
“So I go ‘Stop the B.S., what do you mean, like snatched? I mean, like right off the street or what?’ And he’s all, ‘Snatched, snatched. You know, like snatched? You never watch TV or what?’ He goes, ‘It was on the six o’clock news’—like duh, that’s what I’d do when I come home after a whole day here, watch news, right?”
Rina’s sullen silences no longer seemed all that offensive. But obviously April Truong’s disappearance—I refused to call it any more than that—was the morning’s universal topic of conversation. Particularly in my first-period class, where her empty chair sat as mute testimony.
We had an essay exam scheduled, but everyone seemed so unnerved, I suggested postponing it. “We could talk instead,” I told them. “I don’t suppose anybody has answers, but saying how you feel can help.”
“Help who? Not April,” somebody muttered.
“Right,” I heard in several low variations.
At first I was upset by the anonymous hecklers. Then, in a way, I was glad. The class had bonded, even if I hadn’t noticed. There was concern. There was a Them versus a Me. On some small, irrelevant scale we’d made progress.
“Too depressing to talk about,” Miles said. “What’s to say about April?”
“Which one was April, anyway?” The blonde girl, Miss Lethargy, yawned after she asked the question.
The class—close to the most unacademic bunch imaginable—voted to take the exam and then to work on dangling participles and gerund phrases.
Boring, perhaps, but within their control. At least Shakespeare and grammar—unlike real life—made a rough kind of sense.
They settled into their chairs and gradually into themselves. Even Miles seemed willing to commit ideas to paper rather than sing his opinions or turn them into a cartoon panel on the blackboard.
About ten minutes later the deep quiet was broken by the squeal of the door. There’d been no knock, which violated pedagogical etiquette. I should have known my rude caller would turn out to be Helga, the office manager, She Who Is Impervious to All Rules that Apply to Peons Known as Teachers.
A woman in a blue uniform followed her in.
“She’s from the police,” Helga said in a stage whisper.
“Ah, duh,” somebody in back said.
Everyone had stopped writing. That wasn’t amazing, but the fact that they seemed sufficiently transfixed to actually watch us rather than use this test break to copy one other’s papers was nothing short of historic.
Helga continued to behave as if what she was saying was for my ears only. “They think maybe one of our students might know something,” she said with bellowing confidentiality. “About that little Vietnamese girl who disappeared. She wants to talk to them about it. The disappearance. The whole school, really. She’s talking to everybody.”
“Well, of course she can—” Silly me. I’d thought Helga had been asking permission to disrupt me, but she’d already turned away.
She clapped her hands twice, as if summoning chickens. “Children, someone wants a minute of your time and all your attention. This is Officer Deedee Klein. Now pay good attention because it is your civic duty to cooperate with her.”
The class was sufficiently engrossed to not make fun of Helga’s manner of speech, which would have struck even preschoolers as patronizing. Eyes shifted between the secretary and the policewoman, between Helga’s hennaed hair and Deedee’s: sandy brown curls. I expected my students to look heavenward as well, to thank the Deity that had sent in an actual, legitimate reason to interrupt their exams.
I, meanwhile, nodded at Officer Deedee, pretending that I was giving her permission to go ahead, pretending that she needed it. Pathetic, but I needed it.
“I’m sorry to interrupt you.” Her voice matched her hair, soft and tentative. It was not the sort of voice to shout, “Halt in the name of the law!” or whatever they shouted these days. But maybe she upped the amps on the street. She wrote a two-foot-high phone number on the board, then turned back to the class. “You probably all know about the disappearance of your classmate, April Truong. She was last seen at eleven P.M. the night before last and is presumed to have been criminally abducted. We know that this summer class is made up of people from a lot of different area schools, so you don’t have the usual longtime relationships with everyone, and in fact some of you may not even know April. But if you do, or if you know anything at all that might be of some help—please call the number on the board. Ask for me—Officer Deedee Klein—or for anybody else on duty. Anything you say will be handled with total confidentiality. I thank you in advance for your concern for April Truong and for the help you will, I hope, give the Philadelphia Police Department. Anybody?”
Then, for what felt an eternity, she silently faced the class, as if expecting someone to leap up and present the tidbit of information that would crack this case.
No one moved. I looked at Woody as inconspicuously as I could, but he had adopted a purposely blank gaze, as if his eyes were sightless and made of glass.
Officer Klein gave up. “Thank you,” she said. I wondered if a more forceful official could have generated a response. That raised esoteric questions of gender identity and style, so I squelched that concern.
I made a separate plea for cooperation after she left. “It won’t help April if you play us versus them—whatever you feel about the police, get past that. Whatever you know, tell. If you don’t want to deal with the police, call in anonymously or tell me and I’ll pass it on. But whatever you can do—do it.”
I thought that was pretty stirring, but the class looked at me with the same impassivity they’d shown Officer Deedee, then they suggested that it was time to return to their Romeo and Juliet exam. Eventually, after what felt like years, the morning session ended.
I walked toward the back stairs, deciding to bypass the faculty lunchroom and Lowell’s greetings altogether. In fact, to bypass lunch. I thought I’d walk for the hour, despite the day’s clamminess and drizzle. I needed to be alone, and I hoped a moving meditation might produce a useful idea about this abrupt, awful turn of events.
En route, I passed Five’s crowded room. I’d had one devoted student, and she’d been snatched away, literally, but Five’s boys’ club, as I thought of the lunchtime convocation, bubbled along. News flash: life wasn’t fair.
I peeked in. They didn’t look organized. Two were talking to each other in a huddle in a corner, three were reading, and Five was talking to another. What was the allure?
I realized how pathetic I looked, the impoverished orphan at Christmas, peering through Five’s window while I clutched the piece of coal that had come in my stocking. I turned and walked on. I heard his door open behind me.
“Mandy,” he called, leaving his classroom and his disciples behind. “Have a minute?”
I stopped and nodded, mutely.
“Did you hear?” he asked. “I had no idea. I spent last evening reading, didn’t turn on the TV, and I walk to school, so once again—my morning class told me. Who do you think could have done it, and why?”
“Maniacs don’t need a why.”
“So you think it was just another random city thing?”
“I don’t know what else to think. It’s not as if anybody’s asking for ransom—and what could they ask for, anyway? She’s poor. So I’m afraid—”
“I feel a special tie to her, don’t you? You and I—we were the only teachers here who had her. That makes me feel responsible for her welfare. As if I should have been able to predict—or prevent—or solve this.” But he turned his palms up, empty. He had no more solutions than I did.
I smiled in sympathy. We were two well-meaning, absolutely useless adults. I felt sorry for us, too. I changed the subject, hoping to ease his discomfort and some of mine, as well. “Five,” I said, “what are you doing with those kids at noon? What goes on?”
He smiled disarmingly. “The truth?”
I nodded.
“And you won’t tell your coworkers?”
I nodded again.
“Nothing much goes on. No offense, and I hope they aren’t your best friends, and I don’t want to sound like a complete egotist—but I couldn’t stand the lunchroom scene and nothing I did seemed to stop it. Leaving the premises didn’t help—I was ‘accidentally’ joined.”
The Phyllis and Edie Bake-Off. “There hasn’t been a homemade goodie since you disappeared,” I said.
He nodded. “So I, ah, offered extra credit to those who wanted to be part of a noontime current events discussion.”
“A bribe,” I said with a smile.
He nodded. “Absolutely. But not a complete lie. Sometimes we do actually discuss government, or foreign affairs, but mostly they discuss current sports events, current women, current movies, MTV videos, things like that, and I eat my lunch in peace. Are you going to turn me in?”
“I salute your diplomacy and determination. Besides, having no break from students all day seems a terrible price to pay for your deception. You’re already being punished. Of course, I could blackmail you, tell the bakers what’s really going on….”
He grinned, as did I; but then the subject had run its course and the atmosphere changed as once again April dominated my mind. And at the same instant, it became obvious that Five had made the same transition.
“What was she doing at a massage parlor?” he asked. He didn’t have to say her name. “She didn’t seem the type to make her money that way, even if—”
I waited, but he didn’t seem willing to finish his sentence. “Even if what?” I prompted. “Go on.”
He shrugged. “Even if you never really know a person, not in the superficial way of a classroom. Besides, I was told that most of those places—the massage parlors—are run by Asian mobs.”
“But April wasn’t a mobster.” The word sounded ridiculous. “She wanted—wants to go to college. You know her.”
“That’s why I didn’t want to finish that sentence.”
“Sorry. But I’m sure there’s a logical explanation for where she was seen and why. And I’m sure she didn’t work at a massage parlor.”
“But I hear her parents didn’t know where she worked.”
“Nonsense. I know. It’s in Chinatown at some café.”
“The kids said the name she’d given them—Star’s Café—doesn’t exist.”
“Her brother drove her there every day.”
“Dropped her off at a street corner. Tenth and Race. Near the massage parlor he and his gang members run, the place she was last seen.” He looked thoughtful. “Mystifying, makes me wonder if there might be something we know that could be helpful to the police. Through her writing, or class discussions, or the tutoring you did.”
“You’re assuming a logical reason for all this,” I reminded him. “A plot to be untangled, deciphered.”
“And you aren’t? You think this has no logic? That it’s irrational, unfathomable? I don’t accept that idea. Everything has its own logic.”
“What logical reason could there be to force a struggling wisp of a girl off the street and into a van?” I said. “Everything may have a rationale, but that isn’t the same thing as logic. Or sanity.”