Now what? he wondered. He tried Maura. He didn’t know why. His girlfriend barely knew Derek and had never met Crystal and the kids. The people in his life didn’t know one another. His connections with family were disparate and shallow, something that had never occurred to him until now.
“Dr. Riley,” she answered with crisp efficiency. A fourth-year medical student, she was working at Portland’s Legacy West Hospital this year.
“Hey, Doc, it’s me.”
“Sean!” A smile brightened her voice. “What’s up?”
“I’m not sure. I’m with my brother Derek’s kids. There was some mix-up and their parents are MIA.”
“So call them and—”
“I can’t get hold of either one of them.”
“Well, then…look, I’m in the middle of rounds. And I’m staying in the city for a seminar, did I tell you that? Can I call you in a few?”
“Sure, whenever. Bye.” He had no idea what he expected
her to do. She didn’t even know these kids. This sure as hell wasn’t her problem.
Ashley was yelling and banging something in the kitchen. Cameron had turned the radio up loud again.
Sean hit the caller ID button on the phone and looked at the display. The first came up Private, the second was “Coombs, Jane.” The next one was “Robinson, Lily.”
The schoolmarm, he thought. There was something vaguely familiar about the name. Maybe he’d met her before, though he doubted it. He tended not to hang out with schoolmarms, but maybe that was about to change.
“Help me out here, Miss Robinson,” he muttered as he dialed the number.
Friday
7:30 p.m.
L
ily sighed with contentment and snuggled down into her favorite overstuffed chair. There was a large bowl of popcorn and a glass of red wine on the table beside her. On the coffee table in front of her, a map of Italy lay spread out with the sinuous route of the Sorrentine Peninsula highlighted in yellow. The names of the towns, which she’d circled in red, came from story and legend—Positano, Amalfi, Ravello, Vietri Sul Mare.
Two more months, she thought. Then summer would be here and she’d go jetting off on an adventure she’d been dreaming about for half a year. She’d be all by herself, gloriously, blissfully alone.
Her colleagues at school thought it odd that she loved to travel solo, but for Lily, making her own way and answering to no one were her favorite parts of the adventure. Her annual summer trip was hugely important to her. It always had been.
Travel gave her balance and perspective and made her feel like a different person. It occurred to her to wonder why she would want to be a different person, but she didn’t think too hard about that.
She loved seeing new places and making new friends. Crystal always asked her what was wrong with the old ones. Nothing, Lily thought, except that sometimes they made you do exhausting emotional work. Lily was good at a lot of things, but not at nurturing the deep, sometimes painful bonds of true intimacy. Life simply hadn’t prepared her for that. She could understand the heart of a child, could find ways to inspire and teach, but she’d never been capable of taking a headlong plunge into lifelong commitment. Some people, she had long ago decided, were not cut out for the dizzying, dangerous adventure of loving someone until it hurt.
That didn’t mean she was immune to the occasional pang of yearning. Maybe she’d even have a romantic fling this summer. A flirtation, free of complications and commitments. It was supposed to be easy to do in Italy. At the end of summer, she would return to Comfort refreshed and ready to greet a new crop of students.
This, the cycle of school year and summer, was the rhythm of her life, and it made perfect sense to her. She had only to look at her own family to know she was right. Following a tragedy that was both shrouded in mystery and publicly recorded, her parents had spent their entire marriage making each other miserable. They were still at it to this day.
Lily had taken the lesson to heart and plotted out her life carefully. Her younger sister, Violet, had taken the opposite route, opting for an early marriage and two kids, a husband who earned too little money and a large rental house in Tigard they couldn’t afford.
By comparison, Lily had a job she loved, a small but com
fortable place of her own and the freedom to do as she pleased. She meant to keep her life this way, quiet and safe.
You’re all alone, said an inner voice.
She ignored the voice, which sounded remarkably like Crystal, and sipped her wine as she read an article about a ceramics shop in Ravello where Hillary Clinton and Dustin Hoffman ordered their dishes. After a while, she set aside the map and glanced at the clock. Her usual Friday night routine was a movie at the Echo Ridge Pavilion, but the rain had started up again, and she didn’t feel like going out.
A guilty pleasure video, then, she thought, perusing her DVD collection. That was another advantage to being a free agent. If she had a man in her life, she probably wouldn’t be choosing something like
Steel Magnolias
or
Two Moon Junction.
To her knowledge, no man in history had ever willingly sat through
Sense and Sensibility.
She narrowed her choices down to
Under the Tuscan Sun,
which would get her in the mood for Italy, and
Bull Durham,
about a sexually liberated schoolteacher getting it on with Kevin Costner in his prime. She thought about his famous speech about kisses that last for three weeks, and the decision was made.
As she was watching the opening credits, the phone rang. “Great timing,” she muttered, but stopped the disc and went to get the phone. Crystal, probably, calling to talk about Charlie.
Just the thought brought a heaviness to Lily’s heart. Ordinarily, school and personal matters were kept strictly separate, but in this case, they intersected. Her best friend, and her best friend’s precious daughter.
It seemed to amuse Charlie that she knew her teacher outside of school. The little girl usually got a secret smile on her face when she called Lily “Miss Robinson,” but she never took advantage of her intimate knowledge of her teacher’s personal
life. In school, Charlie tried not to draw attention to herself at all. Which was why this current habit of stealing was so alarming.
“Hello?”
“Uh, yeah. Is this Miss Robinson?” The male voice was deep and strong, completely unfamiliar.
“I’m afraid I don’t accept solicitation calls,” she said crisply, and started to put down the phone.
“I’m not—wait. This is about Crystal Holloway.”
Lily frowned and cradled the receiver against her cheek. Was Crystal seeing someone? Last time they talked about it, Crystal said she was swearing off men once and for all. “I blame men for all my troubles,” she’d said dramatically, not long ago.
“Don’t you mean one man specifically?” Lily had asked.
“No, actually.” Crystal hadn’t elaborated.
“Who is this?” Lily asked the caller.
“Sean Maguire. I’m Charlie’s uncle.”
Ah, yes, Lily thought. The fabled Uncle Sean, one of Charlie’s favorite topics for show-and-tell. Since he’d moved back to town, Charlie had related several overly long stories about him, but the main point always got lost in translation. Hero worship was usually the topic.
According to Crystal, Sean was cut from the same cloth as Derek, “only younger.”
Lily had the vaguest memories of him from the Holloways’ wedding. He had reminded her of Brad Pitt in his first movie, but that only made her dislike him more. “Never trust a pretty man,” Crystal had once told her.
“Hello?” His smooth, somewhat disturbing voice intruded on her thoughts.
“Mr. Maguire,” Lily said. “What can I do for you?”
“I’m not exactly sure.” There was a muffled sound, as though he was intimately cupping his hand around the mouth
piece. “I’m here at Crystal’s house, watching her kids. She’s not home yet.”
“I see.” What a loser, she thought. Couldn’t look after his own flesh and blood without calling for help. “And how can I help you?” she asked.
“I figured you might know where she is.” Tension crackled in his voice.
“Well, I don’t,” Lily said. “You should call her cell phone. I can give you her number, or you can get it from the kids—”
“I’ve been trying her cell phone all evening,” he broke in. “She doesn’t answer. Derek doesn’t answer his, either.”
Lily’s grip tightened on the receiver. She frowned, causing her glasses to inch down her nose. “That’s not like either of them.” With three kids and two households, both Crystal and Derek were vigilant about making sure they could be reached at all times. They had tormented each other through separation and divorce, but to their credit, they’d tried to shield the kids from the worst of it.
“I agree,” said the stranger.
“When was the last time you were in touch with them?”
“As near as I can tell, you were the last one to speak with them,” he said, and Lily wondered if she detected a hint of accusation in his voice. “Crystal forgot to pick up Cameron from the golf course and Charlie from her friend’s house. Do you have any idea what’s going on?”
Now the phone felt damp and slick in Lily’s hand. “No. I’m afraid I don’t.”
“I see. Well, then.” He made an impatient sound, clearly about to hang up. “Thanks, I guess.”
Lily flashed on the notion of hanging up and going back to her movie. Finishing her wine and reading up on the Amalfi Coast. Now, however, that was no longer a possibility. She would simply worry about Crystal and the kids all night.
“Why did you call me, Mr. Maguire?” she asked.
“I heard your message on the answering machine, so I figured you might know something.”
She wondered what Crystal would think of her ex-brother-in-law, in her home, listening to her messages. “Well, I don’t know where she is. Sorry.”
“All right. Just thought I’d ask. I have a night job, and I figured—never mind. I’ll call in and let them know I can’t make it.”
“Mr. Maguire—” Lily broke off when she realized he’d hung up. “Nice,” she muttered, setting down the phone. She paced back and forth, trying to decide what to do. A few minutes ago, this was her living room, her refuge, a cozy place filled with books and one shelf of framed photographs. A favorite shot of her and Crystal, laughing on the beach in front of Haystack Rock, caught her eye. Something was the matter, Lily knew it in her heart.
As she grabbed her purse and rummaged for her keys, she glanced in the hall tree mirror. “Nice,” she said again with an even more sarcastic inflection.
She was dressed for DVD night in heather-gray yoga pants and an oversize hockey jersey, which was the only thing of value left behind by Trent Atkins of the Portland Trailblazers. He hadn’t been a serious boyfriend, just someone she’d gone out with a few times. She couldn’t remember why a basketball player was in possession of a hockey jersey and decided she didn’t care.
She wore no makeup and her brown hair was caught back in a scrunchy. So what? she thought, pushing her feet into a pair of red rubber gardening clogs and donning a rain hat, thus completing the look. “Early frump” might be a good term for it.
Like that mattered, she thought, grabbing her raincoat and dashing out the door.
Friday
7:40 p.m.
S
ean Maguire wasn’t pretty anymore, Lily observed the moment she opened the door. He was utterly, undeservedly, unjustly devastating. He was what the girls at school liked to call the whole package, in perfectly faded jeans that hugged his body, a golf shirt with the Echo Ridge logo, a lock of hair falling negligently over his brow and contrasting with the piercing blue of his eyes, a five o’clock shadow outlining the strong lines of his facial structure. He had a mouth that made her think about Kevin Costner’s
Bull Durham
speech, but at the moment, Maguire wasn’t smiling.
“I was hoping you’d be Crystal,” he said, holding open the door.
How gracious of him.
“Lily Robinson,” she said in her most prim tone. She always sounded insufferably prim when she felt defensive, and she always felt defensive around devastating men. She defi
nitely felt that way now, as she stood dripping on the doormat. Her Totes rain hat was functional though hardly attractive, with its deep brim currently serving as a rain gutter. A steady drip trickled down, right between her eyes, splashing on the mat.
She took off the hat and hung it on a hook behind the door, admonishing herself not to feel self-conscious as she surrendered her coat. He towered over her, even taller than his older brother. Against her will, Lily felt a brief, subtle spasm of reaction to his nearness. He was just a guy, she reminded herself. If not for the kids, they’d have nothing to do with each other.
“Where are the kids?” she asked, removing her fogged-up glasses.
“Upstairs. I told them there’s probably some mix-up in the plans. The girls are watching a video and Cameron’s watching them.”
Or more likely, thought Lily, he was watching instant messages on the Internet. Clearly this man knew nothing about children.
“Any word from Crystal or Derek?” She finished polishing her glasses and put them back on.
“None.” He shot a glance at the stairs. “Let’s go in the kitchen.”
That was all. No “thanks for coming.” He was worried, she conceded. So was she.
As Lily followed him, she couldn’t help but notice the absolute perfection of his butt. Crystal had mentioned his golf career was on the skids. With that butt, he could always turn into a Levi’s model.
A moment later, she realized he’d turned around and caught her staring. Mortified, she shifted her gaze to a stack of three pizza boxes on the cluttered table.
“Want some?” he asked.
For a moment she felt disoriented and a bit flustered. “No, no thanks.”
“So here’s a rundown,” he said, hooking his thumbs into his rear pockets and pacing. “Derek’s fiancée, Jane, has no idea where he is.”
“She’s his fiancée?” Lily felt her stomach lurch. Crystal didn’t know that. If she did, Lily would have been the first to hear of it. Actually, the whole town probably would have heard the screams.
“I guess. As of last weekend, they made it official.”
“When was he planning to tell Crystal?” Lily sat down on a stool at the breakfast bar. She eyed the pizza boxes again, but felt too nervous to eat. Especially pizza. She hadn’t eaten pizza in ages. It was a nutritional nightmare, and stuffing herself with carbs and fats wouldn’t help anything.
Over the years, she’d spent countless hours in this kitchen, sipping herbal tea with organic honey and a slice of orange, savoring the company of her best friend. It felt weird being here with a stranger, speculating.
“Oh, God,” she said. “I bet he told her today. Maybe that’s why they didn’t come home.”
“Why would they disappear with their cell phones turned off?”
“They probably drove somewhere out of range.”
He turned and looked at her, one eyebrow lowered in skepticism. How did he do that with just one? she wondered.
“I don’t get it,” he said.
He wouldn’t.
“Think about it. If Derek remarries, these kids’ lives are going to change drastically. Crystal and Derek have got a lot to talk about.” She didn’t elaborate. Maybe Maguire knew more about the situation, maybe he didn’t. Lily didn’t see it as her place to enlighten him.
“I can’t believe they’d just take off without checking in with the kids,” he said quietly, as though talking to himself.
She drummed her fingers on the counter. An unexplained disappearance wasn’t impossible. In the final years of their marriage, Derek and Crystal had been known as the Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald of the PGA, with a reputation for partying, passion and public rows. They had a way of focusing on each other with total absorption, letting the world fall away as they went at each other. It wasn’t too much of a stretch to imagine them so caught up that they temporarily forgot the kids.
Love did strange things to people, Lily reflected, then shivered with the next thought. Had they harmed each other?
She forced herself to ask the hardest question of the night. “Have you called the police?”
He winced. “Yes. I told them the make and model of both cars. There hasn’t been any report of an accident from the highway patrol.”
A small measure of relief seeped through her. “I’m glad to hear that. So are they out searching?”
He shook his head. “No. Once they established that Derek and Crystal are adults with no medical conditions, they put me off. Twenty-four hours seems to be the magic number.”
“This is not going to take twenty-four hours,” Lily said, pushing her hand into her pocket to keep from biting her nail.
“So now what?” Sean asked.
Before she could reply, a crash sounded upstairs, followed by a loud, angry cry from Ashley.
Both Sean and Lily ran to the stairs. He took them two at a time and she followed close behind.
Crystal had remodeled the upstairs some years ago, creating a common playroom for the kids’ toys, plus a nook for a TV and their own computer. Now Lily found Ashley sitting beside a broken bean-pot lamp and howling while Charlie
looked on with a tight-lipped disapproval that eerily resembled Crystal. At the computer, Cameron ignored them both as colorful instant-messaging boxes cluttered the screen. They didn’t completely manage to mask the browser window with the ominous title, “Porn Ponies.”
Lily took this all in with a glance. She reached down and scooped Ashley into her arms. She’d always felt proprietary toward Crystal’s children. “Hiya, sweetie,” she said in a soothing whisper. “Are you all right?”
The child’s sobbing subsided. Then she looked at Sean and howled again. “Don’t like you,” she wailed.
He turned his hands palms up. “I never did a thing to her,” he said.
“I like you, Uncle Sean,” Charlie said, climbing him like a tree. “Hello, Lily.” Outside of school, she was allowed to call her teacher Lily. She hung upside down on Sean’s arm and offered a gap-toothed grin.
“How’s my big girl?” Lily patted the baby’s back.
“We’re waiting for Mom,” Charlie said.
“I know.” Lily sidled over to Cameron. “Lose the Porn Ponies,” she murmured. “Now.”
“Porn Ponies?” Sean scowled. “You were looking at porn on the Internet?”
“He always looks at porn,” Charlie said, dropping to the floor.
“Do not,” Cameron said.
“Do so.” She stuck out her tongue at him. “You look at it so much, I bet your pornograph machine’s going to break.”
“Moron.” He clicked the mouse and the screen went black. Ashley stopped crying and stuck her thumb in her mouth.
Note to self, thought Lily. Check parental controls on the computer.
“What are you doing here, Lily?” Charlie asked. “If you came to see my mom, she’s not home yet.”
“Tell you what,” Lily said. “You and Cameron get that lamp cleaned up. Your uncle will help you. I’m going to get our little friend here ready for bed.”
Ashley’s mouth made a popping sound as she removed her thumb. “No bed,” she said, and put her thumb back.
“You’re right. You need a bath first, you smelly little thing.”
As she carried the baby to the bathroom, Lily buried her concern behind a smile. She chattered cheerfully away as she ran a shallow bath and peeled off Ashley’s clothes and diaper. The bathroom was cluttered with brightly colored plastic toys and bottles of shampoo and bubble bath, combs and toothbrushes, barrettes and mismatched towels.
Crystal always made this look so easy, Lily reflected, trying to keep hold of the squirming child while opening a bottle of baby shampoo. Lily couldn’t abide the thought of letting go of Ashley or looking away for a single second, so she opened the cap with her teeth. The taste of baby shampoo filled her mouth.
“Ptooey,” she said, wiping her mouth on her shoulder.
Ashley laughed at her and splashed her hands on the surface of the water.
And to think the evening had started out with Italy, wine and Kevin Costner in his prime, thought Lily. Now, with every moment that passed, her conviction that her best friend was missing tightened in her chest.
Missing. There could be no other explanation. Something was terribly wrong.