Brandy slept soundly, but I had too much on my mind to be able to sleep, period.
I got up at four in the A.M. and put on a pot of coffee. There was some beef left over and I warmed that up. When they were both done I took them into the living room with me and set them down on the coffee table. Next I took out Penny Hopkins’ diary and tried to force the lock with my hands. When that failed I fetched a steak knife from the kitchen and jimmied it open with that.
I settled down to what I hoped would be some very informative reading.
The handwriting was a childish scrawl, barely legible at best, but after a few pages I seemed to get used to it and the reading went fairly swiftly.
The entries began when she was seventeen, about two years ago. It started with: “I had such a crush on Paul as a child, but now that I’m a woman I realize that I love him.”
A lot of it was about her love for the track, the horses and the racing people, specifically the jockeys. She lamented in several entries that she had grown up too big to be a jockey.
There was a segment, just a couple of months old, that read: “Little Louie gave me flowers again today. I know he loves me, and he is sweet, but Paul would never understand.”
I put the book down in my lap and shook my head. Paul wouldn’t have given a shit, you dumb broad.
There were continued references to the on-going rivalry between the only two men she loved, Lassiter and her father.
“If only Paul and Daddy could become friends again, like they used to be.” The thought was repeated in different words throughout the last pages of the diary.
I was getting an entirely different picture here. The diary read as if it were written by an eleven year old, not a young woman in her late teens. Could it be possible that Penny Hopkins was still a little girl? I mean, inside her head, maybe she had never grown up.
And maybe the problem was more medical than emotional.
Later in the diary, just two weeks before her disappearance this entry appeared: “I can’t take it much longer. I feel like I’m being torn apart, I love them so much.”
I was starting to get pissed off the further I read. The girl obviously needed help and all she was getting was continued pressure from those two idiots she “loved.”
The final pages grew even more anguished, until the very last entry: “I saw something just now that I think gave me the answer. I must go see Louie and ask for his help. I know he’ll help me, but I know what I’ll have to give him to get him to do it. It will be worth it, though. Daddy and Paul will be friends again.”
The entry was dated the Friday she disappeared. She saw something that gave her the answer?
Like what?
And how could Melendez have helped?
“Hank?” Brandy’s voice called from the bedroom, thick with sleep.
“Out here.”
She came out wearing a sweat shirt I had gotten as a gift once. On the front it said PRIVATE and on the back it said EYE. When she saw it she went crazy and ended up sleeping in it. That was all she wore, but she was so little that it covered up the most vital parts.
“You okay?” she asked, sitting next to me on the couch.
“I’m fine. There are just things going ‘round and ‘round in my head that won’t let me sleep.”
“What’s that?” she asked, indicating the now closed book in my lap.
“A diary, Penny Hopkins’ diary. I took it out of her room. I was hoping it would give me some insight into her character, or some idea of where she went.”
“Did it?”
“Yeah, a little. She’s confused, disturbed. She needs help.”
“Do you think she went on her own?”
“I was starting to. I thought maybe she finally realized that the two men she loves didn’t think any more of her than they did of a horse they fought over. She was just something else they were fighting over, not because either of them loved her, but because she was another piece of property to compete for. I thought maybe she’d seen that and took off.”
“And now?”
I tapped the book cover. “The girl in this book is too naive to ever realize that. She was still looking for a way to bring them together, the two men she loved most in the world. Jesus!”
I got up to bring my dish and cup into the kitchen, and to shake myself from the mood I was in. I thought about a drink but decided against it. I was pissed, but I didn’t want to get maudlin.
“If only I could get one solid picture of her in my mind. Everyone agrees that she was beautiful on the outside, but I get different opinions on what she was like on the inside. Whatever she was like, she didn’t deserve this kind of treatment.”
“Hank, you talk about her as if she were … dead. Is that what you think?”
“I don’t know what I think, Brandy. She says in her diary that she saw something before she disappeared that might have solved her problem. If I could figure out what she saw, where she saw it, maybe I could figure out what it told her.”
Brandy came over and put her hand on my arm.
“Maybe you should try to sleep on it.”
“No, I can’t sleep. You go on back to bed. You’ll want to get to the track early, for the workouts. I’ll drive you.”
“You don’t have to — ” she started to protest.
I kissed her briefly, to shut her up. “I want to. Go on, get some sleep.”
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
“I don’t know, maybe I’ll watch some television. Go on, will you? I’ll be along soon.”
She agreed finally, kissed me and went to bed.
Earlier, I had some intentions of asking her about what I’d read in the transcript I’d found in Hopkins’ desk, but I hadn’t been able to. You have to have more faith than that in people you like.
I sat on the couch again. Actually, I didn’t want to watch any damned television, I just told her that to —
Wait a minute!
It came to me like an electric shock.
She saw something, as in “saw” on television!
The TV guide I had seen in her room had check marks next to several programs.
That was what she had seen, a program on TV.
From what I could see from the diary, she was naive enough and impressionable enough to be influenced by something she saw on the television, but what could it have told her that would help her with her problem?
In order to know that, I’d have to see the movie, too. And to do that I had to get a hold of a TV guide and see if I remembered what shows had been circled.
Step one for tomorrow, then, was to identify that movie.