“Sanchez has taken over,” he said. “It’s his territory, after all. He’ll call when he has something to tell your family.”
“Whatever,” I said. “Do you remember how to get to Aunt Eileen’s?”
“Not very well. I’ll drive more slowly if you really want me to.”
“Please. I’ve had enough shocks for one day.”
We managed to arrive at Aunt Eileen’s without causing any accidents. As we climbed the stairs to the front porch, Uncle Jim opened the front door to greet us. He’s a tall, hulking man, not fat exactly, just large all over, and at that time his gray hair still sported a wide streak of its original red. He threw one arm around me and squeezed out a hug to half-drag me inside.
“Glad you’re here,” Uncle Jim said. “I think he’s run away. First the trouble with your damn mother, and then I never should have yelled at the kid over that damn TV. Jeezus H, he’s a good kid under all the crap, and I—”
I could smell whiskey. “Uncle Jim, it’s not you. Don’t blame yourself, okay? I talked to Michael yesterday, and he told me you’d worked things out.”
“Oh.” Uncle Jim pondered this in a sudden calm. “Then why the hell did he leave my truck in the park?”
“That’s what the police are trying to figure out.” Aunt Eileen hurried into the room. She was wearing a pink playsuit from the early Fifties, shorts and a short-sleeved blouse all in one ugly button-up piece. The color almost matched her fuzzy slippers. “Jim, darling, why don’t you go rest in your study? I put the old TV in there so you could watch the ball game.”
“Watch the ball game when my nephew’s gone missing?” Jim pulled himself up to the full height of indignation.
“Well, there’s nothing you can do.” Aunt Eileen turned to Nathan. “Or do you need to talk with him?”
“Probably not, Mrs. Houlihan.” Nathan had most likely smelled the whiskey cloud.
Grumbling to himself, Uncle Jim shuffled off down the hall, heading for the study and the Giants game. Eileen led me and Nathan over to the family side of the room, where she hovered in front of the brown armchair. Heat blasted out of the wall unit. I shed my jacket in a hurry. Nathan hesitated, then left his on.
“Where’s Brian?” I said.
“Upstairs in his room,” Eileen said. “He’s horribly frightened and can’t admit it. He’s blaming himself for not going with Michael this morning, but that would only mean they’d both be missing, I suppose. I just don’t know what to think.”
“I’d like to talk with your son,” Nathan said. “If I may.”
“Of course. I’m sure he knows more than I do. You know how boys are, keeping things to themselves. Should I call him?”
“I think it would be better,” I broke in, “if Nathan talked with him without us girls right there.” I was remembering the scent of marijuana in my brother’s hair.
“Good idea,” Nathan said, then turned to Aunt Eileen. “If you could show me up?”
“Yes, I’d better. It takes a while to learn your way around this house. It’s all the add-ons, I suppose.”
“Very well. Another thing—can you give me a good, clear photo of Michael? The police need one for the television news. We need a description of what he was wearing when you last saw him as well.”
She started for the hallway with him right behind. I flopped into the blue armchair, which had been moved around to take up the empty place left by the stolen television. In a few minutes Aunt Eileen returned and sat down heavily in the brown chair, which faced mine.
“When they’re done upstairs,” she said, “would you go talk with Brian? He needs reassuring.”
“Sure. I’ll be glad to.”
“Thank you, dear. He’s been so upset, first Jim ranting and raving at him, and now this. I keep thinking of the poor driver of that truck the thieves used.”
“Yeah, so do I. It’s not a happy thought.”
“Losing the TV seems so trivial now. We’ve heard nothing about the burglary, by the way. I don’t suppose the police have the time to worry about little things like that.”
“They should. It’s a felony,” I said. “That system must have cost a couple of thousand at least.”
“Three thousand plus, as Jim reminds me several times a day. Not that it seems to matter much now. This is so awful! Nola, be honest. Do you think Michael’s dead?”
“No. As far as I can tell, he’s still alive. I just don’t have any idea where he is.”
“I see. Do you think the burglary had anything to do with this?”
“It could, yeah. But then again, it might just be a coincidence.” Chaos, I thought, reaching a grimy claw toward my family. “It’s probably got something to do with Pat’s journals, the ones Michael gave me. Pat had gotten himself into trouble, and he wrote about it.”
Aunt Eileen leaned her head back against the chair and closed her eyes. “What kind of trouble?” she said. “I hope he didn’t bite someone again. Or did he get some girl pregnant?”
“No, no, nothing like that. As far as I know, he never did anything wrong himself. Someone approached him about getting involved with drugs, serious drugs. He turned them down. He was planning on going to the police about it.”
“If he wrote all that down, no wonder they wanted the journals.” She sat up straight again and fished a tissue out of the pocket of her playsuit to wipe her eyes. “But why take the television?”
“To make it look like an ordinary robbery.”
“Oh. Yes, I can see that.” She sighed and shoved the tissue back into her pocket. “I still don’t understand why Michael’s disappeared.”
“Neither do I, but I’m wondering if that Sam Spade guy from your dreams thought he was me.”
Eileen grimaced and looked away for a long silent minute. “Well,” she said at last, “I hope your Mr. Morri—I mean Nathan can find him. Nathan’s his last name?”
“Yeah, and he’s just a colleague. Honest.”
Aunt Eileen raised a skeptical eyebrow. I was saved from the gimlet eye when Nathan came clattering down the stairs. He stood hesitating in the doorway. I got up and went over to talk with him.
“Brian didn’t know much.” Nathan spoke in a soft voice. “He did tell me that he and Michael were riding bikes in the park when they saw that doorway. This was a month or so ago. They liked to pedal up to the top of Twin Peaks and then coast down O’Shaughnessy all the way to Seventh and the park.”
“I don’t even want to think about how fast they’d be going when they hit level ground.”
“Quite so. I told him to stop doing it, not, I suppose, that he will. At any rate, they left the house every chance they had, he told me, because your uncle was raging about the property taxes.”
“As he does twice a year every year,” I said. “Huh, this is interesting, if it’s not a coincidence. Jerry and Annie noticed the first Chaos symptoms in late January.”
“Yes, very interesting. Sanchez tells me that Persian white began showing up at around that time, too. They had an uptick in street arrests involving it.”
“No coincidence, then. But about Michael—”
“Michael was convinced that some kind of energy curtain was hanging inside the pillars. Brian says he couldn’t see anything. I gather that Brian then teased him about it. Told him he was seeing things because he smoked too much dope, that kind of silly stuff.”
“Which is probably why Mike went back when I told him I couldn’t see it, either,” I said.
“Good guess. He took it like a dare, I’d say. I would have, at his age.”
I could see him doing just that. “Look,” I said, “I’m going to go talk with Brian, too. Let’s hope Aunt Eileen doesn’t drag out the family photos again.”
“It’s fine with me if she does. The police will need a picture of Michael, something they can ID him from if necessary.”
Necessary, I thought. Like if they find his body somewhere. I winced and headed for the front stairway, the one close to the living room. Like so much of the house, it never would have passed an inspection, which was doubtless why the Houlihans never bothered to get building permits. Some Houlihan who thought he knew carpentry had put these stairs in way back before World War Two, and they creaked, complained, and bounced under my feet as I climbed.
Brian kept his room far neater than many teens, certainly neater than I’d kept my half of the room when I was his age. He had a black pressboard desk overflowing with papers and schoolbooks, and rock posters littered the white walls, but the only thing on the floor of the narrow room was the blue and gray striped rug. When I came in, Brian himself was lying on his bed looking miserable. He sat up and swung his legs over the side. I took the only chair.
“I’m sorry,” he blurted. “I never should have ragged on him like that.”
“It’s okay, Bri! You couldn’t know.”
“That something was really there, you mean?”
I started to explain, but he kept talking in a burst of self-deprecation.
“I know I don’t know shit about anything,” he said. “I’m not like the rest of you. I know I don’t have any talent—”
“Whoa!” I held up one hand for a silence. “That’s not what I meant at all.”
He did stop and for the first time looked at me, really looked, that is, instead of keeping his gaze somewhere near me. It had never occurred to me before that Brian might envy the family members with wild talents. Those of us who had them usually considered them a damn nuisance at best and a hindrance to our long-term survival at worst.
“I meant that you couldn’t know that Michael would stop there at the pillars,” I said. “I bet he didn’t know it himself until he drove by.”
“Oh.” Brian considered this briefly. “Maybe not. I figured he was really going to see Lisa, and the pillar thing was just an excuse.”
“Lisa? That’s the new girlfriend?”
“Yeah. I told Inspector Nathan about her, too.” He paused and looked to a poster of U2 as if he were contemplating an icon. “Was that cool?”
“Sure. The police have to know everything. You never know what might be important.”
“Okay. But what happened to Mike? I don’t understand.”
“Nobody does at the moment. I’m working on the theory that someone saw him there and didn’t like the idea for some reason.” I could hear the doubt in my own voice.
“Did they kidnap him, you mean?”
“I don’t know. I really don’t. I just know that he’s gone somewhere where he shouldn’t be. Which reminds me. From now on, be careful, will you? You and Mike look a lot alike. Don’t go out at night alone. You know what happens to those guys in the horror movies who ignore all the warnings.”
“Yeah.” He tried to smile, but his voice quavered, and he swallowed hard. “They didn’t kill him, did they?”
“I doubt it. I’d know if he were dead. You can trust me on that.”
“Okay.” He paused for a long moment. “I just feel like shit for teasing him.”
“Don’t. It’s not your fault. Whatever happened to Mike, you didn’t do it.”
“Okay.” His voice dropped to a whisper.
I left before my presence brought him to tears. He didn’t need embarrassment on top of everything else.
I’d just come back downstairs when a phone began ringing in the kitchen. Aunt Eileen got up and hurried to answer it, but the ringing stopped when she was only halfway down the hall. Uncle Jim had picked it up in his study.
“It’s your sister,” he called out. “It would be.”
“I’ll take it in the kitchen,” Eileen called back.
I gathered that Mother still had her habit of phoning everyone in the family on Sunday in order, usually, to berate them about their various failings. I sat down in the chair Aunt Eileen had just vacated, opposite Nathan, who was just closing a photo album.
“I’ve found several clear images of your brother.” Nathan tapped his shirt pocket. “Your aunt told me to take whatever the police needed.”
Uncle Jim wandered back out into the living room to join us. He stood aimlessly between our two chairs, his hands shoved in the pockets of his gray trousers. “Can I offer you a drink—” he began.
“No, no thanks,” Nathan said. “I’m on duty.”
“Oh, right. Jeezus H, I never realized how much waiting there is, when something like this happens.” He turned and looked down the long white room to the portrait of Father Keith. “It would happen on a Sunday! Well, I’ll give Keith a call when Eileen’s off the damn phone. See if he’s done with business yet.”
I smiled at another family joke, Father Keith’s “business day.” Uncle Jim shifted his weight from one foot to the other and back again. Nathan looked at me, I looked at him, we both looked away, because we could do nothing, sure enough, but wait for Sanchez to call. I had the grim feeling that when he did, he’d have nothing to report anyway. With the slap of fuzzy slippers on a polished floor, Aunt Eileen bustled into the living room and broke the ugly mood with an uglier one.
“Nola, I’m sorry, but I had to tell your mother. She’s on her way here.”
“Oh, Jeezus H God in heaven! ” Jim muttered. “That’s all we need, that old dragon!”
“Now, Jim darling.” Aunt Eileen laid a hand on his arm. “Michael’s her son, and she’s really upset.”
I got up fast and motioned to Nathan to join me.
“Please, try to remember.” Eileen was looking earnestly into Jim’s eyes. “We haven’t heard from Nola in weeks. She hasn’t come back into town. Can you remember that? She isn’t here.”
“Of course I can. Why the hell do you think I couldn’t?”
With a dignified toss of his head, Uncle Jim stalked off, heading for his study, where, or so I devoutly hoped, he’d fall asleep in front of the old TV. I turned to Nathan.
“We need to leave,” I said. “Now.”
“Very well.” He looked and sounded utterly puzzled. “Mrs. Houlihan, try to stay calm. The police are doing their best.”
“For all the good that’s going to do,” Aunt Eileen said. “But thank you anyway.”
I steered Nathan out of the house and down to the car as fast as I could. For a change I appreciated his predilection for high speeds on city streets. Once we’d made the turn onto O’Shaughnessy, I could relax despite the occasional screech of brakes and the way he laid on the horn. Mother would never have recognized me in this unfamiliar car if we zipped past her on the road.