Twenty

You know that thing where you know you’re missing something and you don’t know what it is?” I said.

“Mm,” said Todd. We were in his room now while he selected an outfit for our afternoon’s mission.

“I’ve got a big stinking pile of that going on. It’s like … you know when you’ve got a bit of popcorn shell stuck on one of your teeth and you can’t tell which one?”

“No. What?” said Todd. “For god’s sake, Lexy, get your gums checked. What?”

“Okay! Jeez. Well, you know when you’ve got a hair on your face and you can’t find it but you can’t ignore it?”

“How many times have I offered to take you to my waxing lady?” Todd said. He was dressed now in a pair of grey-blue twill slacks of Roger’s, a pair of black brogues, a white shirt, and a cashmere vee neck. And he had removed all his diamonds. He’d put plain silver hoops in his ears instead.

“I don’t mean growing out of my face, Todd,” I said. “God, you’re annoying. I mean like an eyelash or something. Never mind. Why have you downgraded your earrings and then worn cashmere, by the way?”

“I haven’t downgraded anything,” Todd said. “I’m trying to look more Mexican. And there’s no point taking earrings out if you’ve got pierced ears. It just makes you look like you’re hiding something.”

Of course we were planning to hide a great many things on this afternoon’s expedition. It was pretty much a massive con, but I chose not to dwell on that. “Look more Mexican?” I said. “She’ll know you’re Mexican, Todd, from your perfect idiomatic Mexican Spanish.”

“Okay, you caught me,” Todd said. “I’m trying to look ‘respectable Mexican,’ like maybe I just went to church. Instead of ‘me Mexican.’”

“Church?” I said. “Should I change too?” I was wearing my California winter uniform of yoga pants, Fuggs, and a hoodie.

“No point,” said Todd. “You’ll never pull it off. You better go with recent immigrant, clueless but harmless.”

That, I could do. That, I could hardly avoid doing, even after nine months here. Whether I was wondering what day of the week Thanksgiving was this year, mixing up Labor and Memorial Day, or asking for a knife to eat a salad, I was basically the resident fool. A stick with a bell on the end wouldn’t have been out of the question.

“What makes you think she’ll talk to us?” I said. “She was fairly forthright on the phone.”

“She didn’t know who we were on the phone,” Todd said.

“And who are we?”

He rubbed his hands with aftershave and slapped himself in the cheeks before answering. “I think we could go with ‘people who found Tam’s body,’” he said. “It’s less to remember than a cover story.”

Mrs. Ortiz lived in a neat yellow house in old east Cuento. As we walked up the path, I saw a lace curtain flutter in the big living room window and by the time we were on the porch the door was open and she was facing up to us. She was tiny, truly miniscule, a little dot of a person, with white hair cut in a style so brutal it made Noleen’s look like a salon do. She glared up at us out of miniature black eyes tucked into nests of wrinkles.

“I’m not buying,” she said. “Don’t care if it’s God or brooms.”

“We’re not selling,” said Todd. I was thinking Todd’s church-going uniform was obviously a good one and wondering what about me looked like a broom-seller. “We want to talk to you about Patti.” The door started to close.

“And Thomas Shatner,” I added.

The door stopped moving and then slowly opened again.

“Did you phone?” she said. “Was it you who called and asked to speak to my daughter?”

“I’m very sorry about that, “ Todd told her. “I was trying to find you and I didn’t think about what would happen when I did find you. Lo siento.”

“Lo sentimos,” I said. “I was there too.”

She sniffed deeply and then stood back to let us in. “You are forgiven,” she told us. “Sit. I’ll make coffee.”

Her living room was as neat as the yellow siding. Her chair, to one side of the fire, had panniers on both arms, with remotes, knitting, a phone, and rolled magazines all ready for a quick draw. The bigger chair, on the other side of the fireplace, was dented from long use but its cushion was plumped up now and balanced on one corner. The table beside it was empty except for an amaryllis bulb just beginning to burgeon. Todd and I sat on the couch, facing the fireplace wall, from where a photograph of Patti, blown up to poster-size, looked back at us.

Mrs. Ortiz came back in minutes with a loaded tray. I recognised the beloved beverage of my youth—instant coffee—but not the plate of bright pink sponge cakes in paper cases that sat beside them. “Eat, drink,” said Mrs. Ortiz, sitting down in her armchair. “Then speak.”

The coffee, even with a dash of nostalgia, was truly disgusting, but the pink sponge cakes were so sweet—could they really be spicy?—that I couldn’t taste it.

“So,” said Todd after a sip of coffee that made him visibly shudder, “we understand that Patti left home years ago?”

“My Patti,” said Mrs. Ortiz. “She went out to a party the night of her graduation and we never saw her again. She has never seen her nieces and nephews and her great-nephew now. I don’t even know if she knows that her father is dead.” She nodded at the empty chair on the other side of the fireplace. “I don’t even know if she is dead. Sometimes I hope she is dead because that means she is not cruel. Sometimes I hope she is a cruel girl who left us and doesn’t care because at least that means she is alive. Somewhere. With children and grandchildren of her own. But if she loves them, how can she not love us? Me?”

I couldn’t think of one damn thing to say. And a glance at Todd showed him with tears in his eyes. It was Mrs. Ortiz who broke the silence.

“So what is it you came to ask me? All dressed up like a good boy.” She smiled at Todd, who blushed as he smiled back.

“No puedes engañar a una abuela,” he said.

“I’ve lived too long to be fooled,” said Mrs. Ortiz, but she said it a proud way, not a sad way.

“Tell us about Thomas Shatner,” I said. “What you know of him from back then.”

“He was a bad boy,” said Mrs. Ortiz. “Not a boy with a leather jacket and a bottle of Scotch in his pocket. Not a bad boy to make a mamá afraid for her good girl. He was a bad bad boy. Mean. Cruel. I don’t know what makes a person go wrong, but whatever it is, it had happened to Thomas before he got to high school and met my Patti. He was a bad, bad boy. No one liked him.”

“And yet he was the vice president senior year,” Todd said. “Someone liked him.”

“John Worth,” said Mrs. Ortiz. “But he didn’t like Thomas. I think Thomas had something, you know what I’m trying to say?”

“Had something on John Worth?” I said. “Like something to blackmail him over?”

“Blackmail is a big word,” said Mrs. Ortiz. “But there is no other way to make it sensible.” She sighed. “Do you think I’m a foolish woman to be saying all these things about children’s lives from fifty years ago?”

“Not at all,” I said. “We think the students’ lives, as you say—their problems and squabbles, from fifty years ago—are absolutely at the heart of what happened to Thomas Shatner last week.”

“It’s just, you see, that I spoke to them all, back then. Looking for clues. Looking for Patti. And then I’ve thought it over and over so many times all these years. It’s all in my head and it won’t go away.”

“So what did they tell you, abuela?” said Todd. “Mrs. Ortiz, I mean.”

“Abuela is good,” she said. She gave me a flick of a look. “You can call me ma’am.” But she was kidding.

“Well, ma’am,” I said, winking at her, “I’d like you to start further back than what the other students told you after the graduation. I want you to start—if it’s not too painful to talk about her—with Patti and Thomas at school together.”

“I love to talk about her,” Mrs. Ortiz said. “She was my baby. My son came early in my marriage and then nothing for ten long years. Then my miracle. My Patti.”

I did a quick calculation and upped her age from the eighties, where I had put her, into the nineties. Old enough to have been married, say, eleven years in 1950.

“And she was a good girl,” her mother said. “She wasn’t a genius or an angel and she wasn’t going to be a movie star, but she was my good, good girl. And I loved her.”

It was kind of wonderful to hear a mother being so clear-sighted and so unsickening about her only daughter and a long lost daughter at that.

“And everyone else loved her too,” Mrs. Ortiz said. “It was different back then. For us. For … people like us.” She gave Todd a questioning look, which I intercepted.

“You can talk,” I told her. “I’m an immigrant but I know—”

“Querida!” said Mrs. Ortiz. “You are not an ‘immigrant.’”

“That’s what I was just going to say!” I said.

“There were names they called us,” Mrs. Ortiz said. “Me and my good man who worked so hard. Sometimes it felt like the harder we worked, the more bad names. Like working hard made them hate us. So when Patti joined the junior class council and helped to make the decorations for the junior prom and she went to the junior prom with a nice boy who picked her up in a nice car and came to the door and said hello to her father and me? We were more happy than I can tell you.”

“So … not Thomas Shatner?” I said. “The nice boy?”

“No one went to the junior prom with him,” she said. “A boy like that. Then senior year came and she was on the senior class council too, and her grades were good. Not great, but good. And her friends were here every day after school, playing records and giggling. Nice friends, from good homes. Good girls.”

“Mo and Mo?” I said. “And Joan?”

“The four of them,” said Mrs. Ortiz. “See? I said to my husband. See? She is not lonely. She doesn’t need us to move to a house near your cousins. She is happy here. He was worried about her. About where she would find a husband. About whether she would marry one of those … ”

“Gabachos,” I said, and she rewarded me with a small smile.

“That night,” she said. “That graduation night, we argued.”

“You and Patti?” said Todd.

“Me and Joe,” said Mrs. Ortiz. “Her father. We argued about her going to the dance. The senior dance. Because she wasn’t going with a nice boy who picked her up in a nice car. She was going with those girls. I told him it was sweet—all four of them going together in a rented car—but it wasn’t the usual way. He found it strange and we argued.”

“The girls all went to the graduation dance together?” I said. I turned to Todd. “Is that strange?”

Todd shrugged. “Not these days. Back then? Why did they do it, Mrs. Ortiz?”

“So that John Worth didn’t have to choose,” she said. “Or maybe better to say so that John Worth didn’t get to choose.”

“So they all went to the dance together,” I said again. “But Patti didn’t come home?”

Mrs. Ortiz screwed her face up. “That doesn’t sound right,” she said. “Patti was the one who wanted to come home. After the dance, all the kids were going to park somewhere on the edge of town. But Patti had promised me and her father she wouldn’t do that. So she came home. She left to come home.”

“Wait,” I said. “You’re telling me the other three girls just let her walk home on her own in the dark while they took the car off to park somewhere and keep the party going?”

“Not on her own,” Mrs. Ortiz said. “Someone offered to escort her.”

“Thomas Shatner,” said Todd.

She shook her head. “John Worth,” she said. “He swore on his Bible that he walked her to the stop sign at the end of that street.” She pointed with a jabbing motion. “And watched her walk up the path and onto the porch. He swore.”

“And Tam?” I said. “Was he with the others? Parked up somewhere, partying?”

“They said no,” Mrs. Ortiz told us. “They said he left the dance at nine o’clock. He was drunk and the teachers threw him out. No one saw him later.”

I considered this while I finished off the last of the pink cake and grey coffee. Todd looked at me as if I was eating worms. My theory that Patti and Tam ran away to Florida together had taken a bit of a hit from this news of him disappearing early on and Patti making it to her front porch with John Worth watching. Still, since we were here, I was going to check.

“And in the time since, Mrs. Ortiz,” I began, “have you ever had any sense of where Patti might be? Has anyone ever thought they’d seen her? Anywhere? Have you ever had anyone else look for her?”

“Have I ever had anyone look for her?” The woman was glaring at me, but I honestly did not know what she was reacting to. Was it stupid to doubt that she’d turned the earth upside down looking for her little girl, or was I being Marie Antoinette to think this woman in her modest little house could afford to employ private detectives? “I spent every penny I earned on posters and radio ads,” she said. “I hired people. I wrote to every cousin and cousin of cousin in the country, sent pictures … then later the internet. Such sadness. You would not believe the sadness of the mamás and papis looking for their niños.”

“And did you ever hear anything?” I said. Todd was dumbstruck. But then he’s an anaesthetist, not used to asking tough questions of people.

“A few photographs of pretty girls,” said Mrs. Ortiz. “None of them my Patti.”

“And how about Florida?” I said. “Do you have cousins there?”

“I have cousins who moved there,” she said. “But it’s a big place. Why?”

“That’s where Tam Shatner went after he left Cuento,” I told her. “That’s where he’s been all these years until he came back here last week for the high school reunion. Well, not for the reunion exactly. But while it was on.”

Todd took a sharp breath in then, making both of us look at him.

“This place,” he said, “where all the kids went to park after the dance. You said it was on the edge of town. Do you know exactly where?”

Mrs. Ortiz nodded and pointed. “Out that way,” she said, pointing. “There’s nothing there now. Back then the old house was still standing. But it wasn’t the house they cared about. They liked … oh, now what was it? I’m getting old. I’m not so sharp. There was a story.”

“An Indian—” Todd began.

“—burial ground!” she finished for him. “That’s it. An Indian burial ground at an old farm out there. I don’t see why a cemetery is a good place to go with a sweetheart, do you? When we were young, Joe and me, we used to sit on the edge of a cliff looking out at the sea, breathing in flowers and listening to birds. Not looking at graves and hearing ghost stories.”

“You were the wise ones,” I said. “When did he die?”

“Only last year,” she said. “He couldn’t wait any longer. I can’t wait forever. If you can tell me what happened to my Patti, maybe I will just lie down on my soft bed and go home.”

“Or,” I said, “if we find her, you can stay right here and catch up with all her news.”

Mrs. Ortiz shook her head. “My Patti wasn’t a cruel girl,” she said. “She would never do this to me. When I go home, soon, I will join her like I will join Joe.”

“Do you think she believes it?” I said to Todd out on the doorstep. “That she’ll be seeing Patti again on the other side?”

“No doubt.”

“Hmph,” I said.

“You don’t?” said Todd.

I shrugged. “You’re the expert. Speaking of which, what’s the explanation for those fairycakes?”

“Don’t say fairycakes!”

“Cupcakes, rock cakes, scones, cookies.”

“Tres leches,” Todd said. “Delicious.” I snorted. “Okay, better than the coffee at least,” he said instead.

“She loved having someone to feed,” I said. “Fifty years, Todd.”

We drove off in silence. But he didn’t take me home. Instead we went back to the old Armour homestead and got out of the Jeep and stood there on the mound and stared at where the cutty sark had lain and thought of Patti.

After five minutes, Todd punched me lightly on the arm. “Let’s go,” he said. “Tomorrow we take this to Mike. Agreed?”

“Deffo.”