“Umm, Mikey, don't you think she's a little young-looking for this campaign?”
He injected the question with the right amount of jest, but his expression was troubled. Michael frowned and looked down at his drawing table.
The sketch was all wrong. Where there should have been a sexy woman in a bikini, there was a young girl in blue jeans and a ruffled peasant blouse. Blond. With wide and innocent eyes. And not just any girl, either.
That girl. The little lost girl on the side of the road. Michael had zoned out while talking to Jillian and somehow the pencil had taken over. His subconscious had changed the sketch, had filtered into his hand. He had drawn her without even realizing what he was doing.
A shiver went through him. The likeness of her face was enough to push a picture into his mind, an image of that little girl outlined in the glare of his headlights, those big eyes sad and more than a little afraid. For all that he had been trying not to think about her, it was obvious that he couldn't let it go. Couldn't let her go.
Scooter
. Her name still made him want to laugh. What the hell kind of name was that? A sudden rush of guilt went through him as he wondered what had become of her.
“Michael?” Teddy prodded.
“Huh?” He glanced up at his partner again.
Teddy's brow was furrowed with concern. “Are you all right?”
“Yeah, fine.” Michael waved the inquiry away, heart fluttering with embarrassment. “This is . . . this isn't what we talked about, I know. But I was thinking maybe . . . maybe we should give the client a more familiar option. Kind of merge their
Saturday Evening Post
track record with a hipper, today's-kid kind of thing. Go for the younger demographic.”
For a long moment Teddy only stared at the drawing. Then he shrugged. “We could bring it up, but not yet, I don't think. Do you? If the campaign starts to work, we can start segmenting demographics. For now I really think we should focus on what they've asked for. Play it safe, at the beginning, at least.”
Michael nodded. He was bullshitting, and from the look on Teddy's face, he thought his partner probably knew it. But the last thing he wanted to do was try to explain. And how would it look, anyway, him obsessing over the girl so much that he was drawing her into his work?
Teddy studied him. “You going to tell me what happened to your face?”
Michael forced a wan smile. So far, most people had been too polite to ask. Those who had, however, had all received the same bullshit story.
“Tried to get the neighbor kid's cat out of a tree,” he said. “It didn't feel like coming down.”
For a long moment Toddy regarded him dubiously. Then he smiled.
“All right. I'll let you get back to it,” Teddy said. He rubbed his hands on his prodigious stomach. “Don't forget we have lunch at one.”
At the door, he paused and glanced back into the office. “Oh, and seriously, artiste. Leave the slogans to me. I don't know what you're going for with that, but it's kind of creepy. If we were doing a riff on old milk cartons or the Amber Alert or something, all right. But it's ice cream. No Dennis Miller effect, all right?”
Michael didn't know what he was talking about. When Teddy had departed, he glanced down at the drawing table again. His attention had been focused on the sketch itself, but now he saw that there were other things on the page. Words, drawn in pencil. Big and bold, and small scribbles as well. Block, logo size letters, and elegant script. And all of them said the same thing.
Come find me.
For an instant, Michael had the disconcerting idea that this was not some obsession erupting from his subconscious, but a kind of message, a reminder. The idea was foolish and he dismissed it, but he found that despite the heat ticking in the vents in the ceiling, he was cold all over.
What the hell is wrong with me?
he thought. He sat back in the chair and took several long breaths, trying to clear his head. His nostrils flared. Then he froze, inhaling sharply, his eyes wide.
Popcorn. Fresh popcorn, with too much butter and plenty of salt.
There was just a hint of that smell in the air. It was a homemade popcorn smell, not that chemical movie-theater stuff. People didn't often make popcorn that way anymore.
But you've caught that same smell somewhere else recently, haven't you?
In that house.
Troubled, he rose from the chair, needing air, needing to be away from his office for a minute or two. He went out into the hall and glanced around at the cubicles, at the doors to the other offices. There was a break room down the far end of the hall.
“Does someone have popcorn?” he asked, feeling foolish even as the words left his lips. Phones were ringing, people were rushing about, doing their jobs. Somewhere there was a radio on. Conversations taking place. It was too early for lunch. And as Michael inhaled again, he discovered that the smell was gone.
He took a long breath and turned back toward his office.
Once more he froze, head cocked, trying to listen hard, searching for a sound he had heard a moment before. Just the tiniest snippet of music. Calliope music, the sort of tinny, buzzing music that piped out of the speakers on top of an ice-cream truck in the summertime.
CHAPTER SIX
Downtown Andover was a colorful strip of quirky little shops, upscale consignment stores, and restaurants. There were few chains—a pharmacy, a doughnut shop, an ice-cream place—and the street was impeccably cared for. The cars parked along the curb were Benzes and BMW's and the occasional Volvo. Students from nearby Merrimack College strolled the brick sidewalks alongside mothers pushing their babies in canvas-and-steel jogger-strollers. The moms weren't jogging, of course, but those all-terrain baby carriages were the rage.
Michael stood in front of Sacred Ground, the finest coffee shop in town. Somehow the owners managed to convey a Bohemian atmosphere and love of exotic coffee beans while remaining as snootily upscale as most every other business on the strip. Bohemian and snooty was not an ordinary combination, but their product was so good they could afford to be unorthodox.
After an hour bent over his drawing table, he had gotten nothing done. The sketch with the lost girl on it—and those words—had gone into a drawer, and all he had succeeded in doing since then was to pencil in the rough outline of a female form that looked more like a balloon animal twisted up by some party clown than an advertising campaign.
Finally, he had surrendered. It was lunchtime, and though he was not at all hungry, he needed fresh air desperately.
He told himself it was just to clear his head. That the October chill would shake him out of the strange fugue state he had been in most of the morning. And it was nice to be outside, no question. Michael leaned against the back of a bench—unwilling to sit at the moment—and sipped at a double cappuccino. His breath came in slow, purposeful inhalations, and the day was brisk enough that it steamed a bit when he exhaled.
The scent of the cappuccino was strong, wafting up from the hole he'd torn in the plastic cover of his cup. The bank just across the street attempted to put forth the ambience of an earlier age, a Frank Capra age, and so from early autumn to early spring they had a wood-burning stove inside. The smell of its smoke was a pleasure. Even the exhaust fumes from passing cars and buses were welcome.
“Michael?”
It took him a moment to register that someone was speaking to him. Then he blinked and glanced over his shoulder to find Brittany Hurley staring at him curiously. The girl looked even younger than her nineteen years, and was not as dim as most people assumed. She was sleeping with the boss's son, after all.
“Are you all right?”
He gave her a smile and tapped one finger against his temple. “Just cogitating. Working on the new campaign.”
Brittany flashed him a cheerleader's smile. “Oh, cool! No wonder you looked so far away. But aren't you cold?”
“That's what double cappuccino is for.” He toasted her with his cup and took a sip, pleasant enough to be courteous, but just wanting her to go away.
Miraculously, she did, cooing that she would see him back in the office. It occurred to him that Brittany was the perfect combination of sweetheart and slut for the Newburyport Premium campaign. As he returned his attention to the cars rumbling through downtown Andover, he knew he would use her as a mental model for the sketches he was supposed to be working on. That was good. Having a picture of her in his mind would help keep the other image out.
The image of the lost girl. Scooter.
Come find me.
The words came back to him, and for the first time he realized that they were really what had driven him out into the chilly air. The coffee, the walking, the crisp breeze, they were all helping to clear his head after all. Subconsciously or not, he had been obsessing about her. Michael was an intelligent man. He understood why. In the condition he had been in on Saturday night, and with what little he remembered of the house, and the circumstances of his leaving her off there, he felt responsible for anything that might have happened
to her.
There was only one solution for that.
He was going to have to find her.
A sudden gust of wind whipped up, blasting amongst the shops and restaurants, and his cheeks stung with the cold. Michael tipped back his coffee and took a long gulp, the heat of it warming him from within. His upper lip curled and he glanced down at the cup. It tasted bitter to him, suddenly. He tossed it unfinished into a nearby trashcan and turned back toward his office.
There was work to be done, but he knew he wasn't going to be able to focus on it until he got this other thing out of his head.
A trio of women had gathered on the sidewalk in front of him, physically different but all glowing with health and affluence. Friends, he thought, who had been out and about on various errands and run into one another by happenstance. They laughed about something or other, and there was a brightness to their eyes and a warmth in their features that made him smile, helping to further dispel the shadow of the weekend.
Upstairs, Michael ignored the bustle at Krakow & Bester and went into his office, turning to the computer. Stray puzzle pieces drifted around in his mind and he tried to put them together. All he knew of the girl was her description and a nickname. But he had seen her home, had driven her there himself. No matter how inebriated he had been, he felt certain that he could put together the bits and pieces of memory from Saturday night and figure out where she lived.
The place to begin was where that surreal evening had begun. The masquerade had been held at the Wayside Inn in North Andover. Michael did a quick Net search for the place and found it had its own Web site. There was no map, but it did give him the exact address. With that, it was a simple matter to call up a map of the area with the inn as its center point. It was too broad, so he magnified the image.
Old Route 12 was there, a thin red line running through the Merrimack Valley. The road had long since been supplanted by more modern streets, but Old Route 12 had been relied upon by locals since the nation was young. Much like Boston Post Road, however, it was used by very few outsiders, because they had no idea just how far they could travel on that one street.
Should've taken 125. Or gotten on 495.
The recriminations came unbidden into his mind. Either of those options would have been the long way around, far less direct, and yet might actually have been faster. The Danskys preferred Old Route 12 because it was peaceful and beautiful, particularly in the autumn. In addition, Michael would always prefer the most direct route, and traveling to West Newbury from the Wayside Inn made Old Route 12 by far the most direct course to take.
He dragged the cursor over the map, using it as a guide. For a moment he retreated into his mind, trying to picture that night. His memory was gray and hazy, yet somehow the hum of his tires on the pavement was fresh in his head. He focused on that sound and was able to recall driving down Old Route 12, Jillian snoring softly in the backseat. He had nearly wrecked the car, and righted it just in time to come within scant feet of running down that lost girl.
Where the hell had he been when that happened?
Michael clicked on the tab that magnified the map even further. A couple of miles down Old Route 12. No more than that, surely. The entire road at that point was a scribble on the map, where it twisted and turned as it wound through the Merrimack Valley.
Maybe if I drove out there,
he thought, peering at the screen.
He ran a fingertip along the curves of that red line, and he paused, tapping the screen. It was a bit further along than he thought, but the most harrowing of the turns seemed the most likely place for him to have nearly run off the road. Once more he magnified the map onscreen.
Could be.
He drew the cursor over to the northeast corner of the map and clicked there, shifting the image in that direction, revealing the next segment of Old Route 12. Somewhere along that way was a tiny little side road, buried in the trees, that seemed an unlikely conduit to several other neighborhoods. His initial turn had been a right; he recalled that clearly.
“Turn right here.”
Then, a little ways further on, he had taken a left. There had been a lot of streets, plenty of houses, roads that gently rose up a long hill, at the top of which was the dilapidated mansion the little girl lived in.
Come find me.
“Exactly,” he said aloud. Self-conscious, he turned to make sure no one was standing in the open door to his office.
When he looked back at the screen, he noticed for the first time how inadequate the map was. It was a tiny little square. To search for anything by shifting that square around was ridiculous. He needed a better map.
He closed the screen and went out of his office, pausing a moment to glance around the various cubicles and at the doors, closed and open. Karlene Dietrich's cubicle had fresh flowers in a vase. Barry Waid had posters and magazine cutouts of thirties Art Deco images all over the interior walls. Those were the only two that Michael could see from just outside his door, but he ran through most of the employees in his mind, trying to figure out who could help him. On the door to Vic Birnbaum's office were crayon masterpieces done by his children.
A thought struck him and he went back out toward the foyer. Brittany's desk was the only thing in the foyer of Krakow & Bester's offices, aside from a pair of sofas and a coffee table for people waiting to be admitted for an appointment. There were the double doors of a coat closet, and some modern art on the wall that looked more like junkyard trash. Frosted glass separated the advertising firm from the building's main corridor.
When he came out into the foyer, she gave him a frankly appraising look.
“Brittany,” he began.
“What's up?”
“You live in Boxford, don't you?”
She shrugged. “Well, my parents do. I moved out earlier this year. Can't afford to live in Boxford myself. But I grew up there.”
“I'm not sure it's in Boxford,” he forged ahead, “but I drove through this neighborhood off of Old Route Twelve this weekend, without paying attention to how I was going. Got a little turned around, you know? Anyway, it was an interesting place. I'd like to get some pictures or sketches out there. It was on top of a hill, sort of a few different neighborhoods all dovetailing off one another, the way a lot of them do around here. Y'know, one built in the twenties, then the next in the forties, then the sixties, then some new development. But at the top of the hill there were just a few houses, all pretty big. Must have been wealthy people living there once upon a time, but the neighborhood's kind of rundown now.”
Brittany listened carefully and he could see from her expression that she was trying to figure out what the hell he was talking about. He could also see that nothing rang a bell.
“This one house was fairly ugly, but it might have been beautiful once. It has a turret, sort of Victorian, but is a weird mix of architectural styles that—”
Her eyes lit up. “Know what? I think I have seen that house, now that you mention it. Not for years. In junior high, I had this friend, Sarah, who would invite me to her birthday parties and stuff. I think we used to pass it going to her house. It's not in Boxford, though. Could be Jameson. I mean, chances are it's probably not the same house you're thinking of, but it might be in the same neighborhood.”
“Could you give me directions, do you think? Or find it on a map?”
Brittany's eyes went wide and she shook her head. “Oh, I don't know. Sorry.” Her lips pulled into a pout. “No way on the directions. But if I had a map I might be able to figure out the general area.”
Shit!
Michael gnawed his lower lip a moment and then nodded. “Could you? That would be helpful.”
“Sure!” She stood up from behind her desk and crossed to the closet. Pulling open the doors, she reached up to a shelf above the coat rack. There were half a dozen phone books up there, an old coffee machine, and random winter mittens, hats, and scarves that people had left behind over the years.
From amongst the phone books Brittany pulled down a thinner volume and brought it to him. Michael glanced at the cover. It was a complete street map of eastern Massachusetts, dated the previous year. At her desk, she opened up to the pages for Boxford and began skimming through. He stood in front of the desk and, even upside down, had no trouble spotting the place where Old Route 12 passed through the northwest corner of the town. There were several sharp curves on the map. Brittany traced her finger along it, frowning.
“Not Boxford, I don't think,” she said without looking up.
“Try Jameson,” Michael said, unable to disguise the urgency in his voice.
She glanced up at him and smiled. “You must really want to find this place. Sure you don't have some old girlfriend you're trying to find?”
A shiver went through him. He shook his head but did not smile. “I don't really have any old girlfriends. Not serious ones. Jillian and I have been together since I was in college.”
“Lucky girl,” she said, smiling as she returned to perusing the map. She flipped to the double-page spread of the town of Jameson. Old Route 12 passed right through its center, winding up from southwest to northeast, then into Georgetown.
“Hanover Street,” Brittany said, tapping the map.
“Is that it?” Michael said, snapping off the words more abruptly than he'd meant to.
She frowned. “No.” Her fingernail traced the short road that ran north from Old Route 12 in Jameson, just south of the Georgetown border. “There used to be the most amazing ice-cream stand right there. Hanover Street Cone Corner. On the way home, my mother would take me there, but it was a little further away than Sarah's house. So . . .”
Brittany drew an invisible line with her finger around a section of the town to the south of Old Route 12.
“It's got to be in this square somewhere.” She gave him an apologetic glance. “Sorry I can't be more helpful.”
“No, no, that's a start,” Michael told her. He lifted up the map book. “Can I borrow this?”
She shrugged again. “As long as you bring it back eventually.”