Betsy Sorenson resided in a pastel-colored duplex in North Surrey. The neighboring properties were constructed from the same kit, the same brick-patterned facades, tile roofs, satellite dishes anchored beneath the eaves. Her lawn was a strip of sculpted mulch, giving forth exotic arrays of color in the morning light. Herbs grew in gray casks near the kitchen window.
Tabitha’s mother looked to be around fifty, a soft-featured woman in full makeup and heels. Her professionally cheerful smile would have been the envy of any realty office. The smile diminished when I mentioned her daughter.
“I’m trying a new recipe,” she said. “If you don’t mind me dashing to the kitchen every now and then, I can spare a few minutes.”
“All I need, Mrs. Sorenson.”
“Ms., please, and it’s Betsy.”
She saw me situated in a high-backed chair in the living room before returning to the kitchen, promising she’d be back in a jiff.
I smelled garlic and poultry and faded potpourri. I spotted an old-fashioned cordless phone on its own stand near the door. My fingers touched the ficus in the blue urn near my feet, verifying it was plastic.
Betsy Sorenson came back with a silver tea service, cups, saucers, and doilies. She poured chai out of a squat copper saucepan. Seating herself across from me and taking up her cup, she said, “You mentioned you’re from her school.”
“I’m an independent arbitrator hired by a representative,” I said. I’d buttoned my flannel shirt to the collar and carried a black raincoat, and looked reasonably trustworthy if not all that prosperous. Betsy Sorenson smiled and nodded. “I need to talk to Tabitha about some of the recent events.”
“You’re referring to the scandal,” she said.
I gave her a series of gestures that could be interpreted as a yes.
“Not that we think she’s involved,” I said, “but she’s uniquely placed to tell us just what went on there.”
“I don’t see why you wouldn’t.”
“Pardon?”
“Think she’s involved,” Betsy Sorenson said. “The auditors practically accused her.”
“Well, I’m not associated with them,” I said. “I’d like to make up my own mind. And that entails talking to her.”
“You’re welcome to try.”
“When did you last see your daughter?”
Betsy Sorenson sighed. She lowered her blue eyelids and regarded her cup of tea. I waited expectantly.
“Tabitha has decided not to stay in touch,” she said. “It was just before the audit. Early January, a few weeks into her semester. She told me I was a—she said some bad things.”
“You haven’t seen her in nine months?”
“She hasn’t wanted to see me.”
“Do you think she could be missing? That something happened to her?”
“Tabitha is at a foolish age,” Betsy Sorenson explained. “She’s made choices that don’t include her family. Well, what can I do?”
She pursed her lips and tapped her knees in a gesture of soldiering on.
“She’s always kept me at arm’s length. When we lived in Abbotsford she’d sneak out to meet people, or sneak them in when I was at work. It was one of the reasons we moved here, to get her away from people like that. A fresh start.”
She freshened our drinks, centering the dishes on the tray, pausing a moment to admire the symmetry. People like that. I wondered who that encompassed.
Betsy Sorenson sipped and continued. “Once Tabitha started college, I didn’t see much of her. She never mentioned her friends. She moved out soon after that, closer to the school. Then I saw even less of her.”
“And you don’t have her address.”
Betsy Sorenson bit her lip. “She doesn’t want me to have it.”
“What about her father?” I asked. “Could she be with him?”
“Tabitha’s father isn’t in the picture,” she said. “He has a new family and doesn’t have much time for Tabitha. Once, when we were fighting, she ran away to him. I guess she thought she’d live with him. Mitch wasn’t having any of it. He sent her back.”
“Sounds like a very tough environment, emotionally—for everyone involved.”
“We make our own world,” Betsy Sorenson said.
“I’ll need to talk to him.”
“Of course. Would you like something to go with your chai?”
I followed her into the kitchen, using the excuse to examine the rest of the house. It was clean and bright and the furnishings had been picked out with great deliberation, but it didn’t seem lived in. No one had ever shifted the rattan chairs to clear space for a drunken game of Twister. The fireplace had never been sparked for warmth or ambiance. No one had ever pushed the crockery to the kitchen floor to fuck on the cutting board island. It was a model house, built to scale and furnished for strangers.
Tabitha would have grown up feeling on display. She’d fashion her personality in opposition to her mother’s, scorning and disregarding the stale middle-class lifestyle Betsy Sorenson had perfected. I felt I understood. Wherever she was, she’d be looking for something honest. Something raw.
“Did Tabitha leave anything here?” I asked, after we’d returned to the living room and I’d complimented Betsy on her chocolate zucchini cookies.
She shook her head. “Just old clothes and books. I donated them all to Goodwill when I redecorated the room. The mess I found when I cleaned it—dirty dishes, piles of paper. Cigarette butts, even after I told her not in the house. Even a couple of used you-know-whats.”
“It’s an awkward time of life,” I said.
We chatted about food, about curries and squab and the Michelin system, and I thanked her for the hospitality. She mentioned her website and the recipe books she had for sale. “I just got the second one back from the printer’s,” she said. “Let me show you, you just wait right there.”
“Mind if I make a call?” I asked her. “Brief and local.”
Once she left I picked up the receiver. The phone’s contact list was empty. In the top drawer of the stand was a gold-leafed leather address book. I trained my cell phone’s camera on the book and slowly flipped pages.
Beneath the address book was a photo album in the same ornate style. The photos covered thirty years in about as many pages. A young Betsy Sorenson in wedding dress, next to a bearded, mulleted man with Tabitha’s sharp features. The birth of her daughter, kindergarten, soccer practice, school recital. Photos of Betsy meeting her culinary idols.
A two-page spread near the end of the album stuck out. Every previous page, the photos had been laid out with skill, spaced perfectly, the plastic preservation film smoothed to transparency. On this spread, two photos were missing from the left page. The remaining school photo sloped diagonally, and the plastic was seamed as if hurriedly replaced.
The opposing side featured a group photo, a teenage Tabitha and classmates on a field trip to the planetarium. George Norris’s chrome crab fountainhead loomed behind them. Two South Asian kids stood to Tabitha’s right. All three were smirking. The right quarter of the photo had been cut away with multiple hacks from dull scissors, leaving a ragged edge. A fragment of black T-shirt was the only trace that another person had once shared the frame.
Footsteps. I snapped a photo of the torn photograph, then closed the album. Betsy Sorenson approached carrying two spiral-bound books, each cover white with a rudimentary stencil design in Easter pastels. Classy Cooking, volumes one and two. I perused them politely.
“Usually I wouldn’t do this,” she said, “but you seem like such a nice person. These are seventeen ninety-five each. Yours, two for twenty.”
I passed her the money and she asked if I wanted them signed.
“Make it out to Kay,” I said. “My sister will absolutely love these.”