We drove north on the 605 toward the foothills which were shrouded in rain clouds. The road technically ran right through the San Gabriel River, but after decades of engineering marvels, the river had been transformed into a series of dams, watersheds, and reservoirs that channeled the rain off the mountains and ran it all the way to the ocean. Normally bone dry, the sun-bleached boulders were buried beneath gray water, and the sluices that I once thought were permanently rusted shut were now open to relieve the pressure building behind them.
Our last stop that day didn’t come from the list of addresses on the navigation system. Earlier that morning, I’d logged into my firm’s digital document center and pulled up any and everything we had on Julie St. Jean. For once, my firm’s hyperparanoia of being sued actually came in handy.
Manic documentation of everything we ever did was a hallmark of the company. We once had an entire floor dedicated to file storage, but when the cost became unmanageable, we went through the arduous task of digitizing every sheet of paper once stored there. Now I had every document at my fingertips with a quick search in the database.
I started with thirty years of invoices paid out to Power of One. This caused me to waste twenty minutes calculating and then resenting the annualized gross income made off the back of my firm. I stopped counting when it reached the eight-figure mark. That was an impressive amount to fritter away, if my assumptions about their financial state were accurate.
I then moved to the personnel files and found the original W-9 that Julie had first filled out when she was a one-woman shop doing executive coaching with Pat Faber. The tax form had some very valuable information, including her social security number, her city of birth (Vero Beach, Florida), and the date she was born. I had to check the math when figuring out her age because it didn’t seem right. By this record she was nearly seventy years old, but to me she didn’t look a day over fifty. I found myself subconsciously touching the sides of my head where I knew the gray hairs were coming in faster than I wanted them to. As a septuagenarian, Julie had thirty years on me and far more grays but she also looked like she could take me handily in a fight. The last bit of helpful information on the W-9 was an address in Sierra Madre, a hippie enclave nestled in the mountains just northeast of Pasadena.
We took the road up, a straight two-mile stretch of such perfect pitch that if you rolled a marble from the top it might not stop until it hit San Diego. I watched the outside temperature gauge on the dashboard as it dropped one degree for every half-mile we traveled. Oaks lining the road slowly gave way to towering pines and foreshadowed the mountain retreat that awaited us. At the crest was the L-shaped downtown, forever a decade late in whatever trendy fad was happening down below.
“Says to keep heading north,” Rebecca instructed.
Instead, I turned west.
“You’re supposed to take that street all the way up.”
“Shortcut,” I said, even though I had never been in this town before and didn’t know any of the streets. I wanted to get off the main drag and onto quieter streets to see if the Cadillac was still behind us.
I’d noticed it back in Baldwin Park and then again as we got off the freeway. There weren’t that many old Coupe DeVilles driving around Los Angeles outside of the occasional cholo lowrider, so it was easy to spot. I couldn’t quite get a good look at the driver but it appeared to be the same bowling ball of a man who barged into Rebecca’s hotel room. As I made a series of turns that got us deep into a residential area, I glanced in the mirror to see if it was still back there.
“Is someone following us?” Rebecca asked.
“I don’t think so,” I lied.
I directed us back toward our initial destination but made periodic checks in the mirror to see if the Caddie had reappeared. It hadn’t.
The roads narrowed as we entered the part of Sierra Madre that clawed its way into the foothill canyons. A log sign indicated the fire warning level and for once it was firmly pointing to green. The prior year, a careless hiker had caused a small fire that took out a stretch of the forest and a few houses. That was modest in terms of damage, but the bigger danger came after the flames were put out. The scorched earth, already bone dry from years of drought, had nothing to hold it in place without the trees and their roots. All it would take was one extended rainstorm to loosen the earth from the bedrock and half the mountain would come down like a lava flow of black mud. And the houses would come with it.
Unlike the perfect symmetry of the grid down below, up here they put the streets where nature dictated. The result was a narrowing lane constantly bending around giant boulders, and only when that wasn’t feasible did you see the drill holes where the dynamite had been inserted. We got to the street indicated on Julie’s original W-9 form and were greeted with a temporary sign that said only residents’ cars were allowed beyond that point. It didn’t look like two cars could fit on the road anyway, so I pulled over under a set of sprawling sycamores and parked. The rain collected on their large brown leaves sent big drops down onto the roof of my car, each one sounding like a muzzled gunshot.
We were going to have to make it the rest of the way on foot, but one glance in Rebecca’s direction caused me to reconsider. She didn’t look well, despite her protests that she was fine. There was an ancient general-store-style coffee shop at the beginning of the street, and I suggested we grab a bite to eat. She was more tired than I thought because she acquiesced without much of a fight.
The place didn’t look like it had been redecorated in fifty years. There were about ten tables topped with picnic-checkered vinyl tablecloths. An entire wall was covered in perforated board and shelving that displayed cheap ceramics and other used knickknacks for sale. A potbellied stove in the corner provided the heat for the entire place.
Several locals’ gazes lingered on us but they quickly returned to their coffees and conversation. Rebecca and I sat at the counter on a couple of stools. The elbows of countless customers had worn perfectly spaced out circles across the length of the Formica top. A mirrored rack opposite us held coffee mugs with names inscribed on them, which I assumed were for regulars. I spotted one with “Julie” on it, but doubted it belonged to the woman we sought.
An old man behind the counter approached with a pot of coffee and laid out two mugs without names on them. It was assumed that anyone sitting at the counter was there for one purpose—a cup of joe. We didn’t disagree.
“You want menus?” he asked, but before I could answer he informed us that they didn’t have any. Instead, he pointed to a chalkboard on the wall with about six items to choose from. We each ordered soup and a sandwich.
“Been open a long time?” I asked when the old man returned with our food. He didn’t dignify my question with a response. Instead, he held up the pot of coffee as an offer for a refill. I nodded, then asked him if he knew someone from this area.
“Know lots of people,” he informed me.
“Her name is Julie St. Jean?”
I detected a slight hiccup in his otherwise smooth coffee pour.
“Sounds familiar,” he replied, but I got the sense he knew more than he was letting on.
“She lives up the road here, right?”
“Used to,” he corrected.
“When did she move out?” I asked.
“I just work here,” he said, laughing, and filled up Rebecca’s mug. “I’m not the Hall of Records.”
He tried to play it off as a joke, but my questions were clearly unwanted. He found something more pressing to do and left us to our lunch.
Atmosphere can sometimes trump quality, as it did when the warm shop with the woodstove pumping heat on our backs somehow managed to make two shitty grilled cheese sandwiches and bowls of canned tomato soup taste like the ones from fond childhood memories.
“Like my mom used to make,” I said, holding up the half-eaten sandwich. “Where’d you grow up, Rebecca?”
“A long ways from here.”
I wasn’t surprised by the vague response. We’d spent the better part of the day together but our conversations never managed to go very deep. Even the foolproof method of two individuals sitting in traffic in a locked car couldn’t get her to open up. It was deliberate, but I didn’t know why.
“Where’s Julie from?” I pressed, even though I already knew she was born in Vero Beach.
“Back east,” she said casually.
“Everything but Hawaii qualifies for that,” I replied.
“I can’t remember. Florida, I think.”
“You guys are married, right?” I laughed.
I was being a smartass but there was a legitimate question in there, one I had been asking other same-sex couples for years. Once the state recognized gay marriage—and the health insurance benefits that came with it—there was an influx of requests by our employees to put their significant others onto the company health plan. It fell upon my group to weed out the frauds, an impossible task of determining if couples were “legitimate” in the traditional sense of the term or if an employee was just seizing the opportunity to offer his loser roommate free health insurance. The answers Rebecca gave me were not indicative of two people in a lifelong bond of love and devotion.
“How long have you been in the Palos Verdes house?”
“Seven years come March. Well, Julie lived in the house long before I moved in,” she clarified.
“But you two have known each other for a long time.”
“Since the eighties.”
“And together for…?”
“Since the eighties.”
I wanted to define my question by adding the word “romantically” but decided against it.
“Julie never mentioned Sierra Madre?”
“Not that I can remember,” she answered.
By my records, Julie had lived at the address up the road—or claimed she lived here on the W-9—for almost seven years. It seemed unrealistic that someone wouldn’t mention it at least once, even in a casual conversation. And it was equally odd that her wife lacked any curiosity about the discovery at all.
“You know, you’re allowed more than three words per answer.”
I said it lightly but couldn’t mask my growing frustration.
“I don’t like talking about myself,” she said.
“I’m just trying to learn more about Julie. The more I do, the better the chances that we find her.”
“You’re curious about her but I don’t think knowing her past is going to help you understand her.” She spun on the stool to face me. “I’m not trying to be difficult. You can ask all you want about me and Julie but just know that we never delved into the past, so I won’t be much help. Our relationship is very much of the present.”
“That sounds like consultant gobbledygook,” I said. It also sounded like more Julie nonsense, but I let that go unsaid. “You’re telling me you and Julie never asked each other about your lives before you met each other?”
Rebecca shook her head. “The past lies, too, you know.”
I called for the check. The old man had his back to us but responded very quickly, as if anticipating the request. I wasn’t too surprised because the entire time we were there, I got the sense that he was listening in on our conversation.