Chapter 28
TWENTY-EIGHT
Rikki
Los Olivos reminds me of the San Joaquin Valley.
Instead of stubborn, sun-baked fields, grapes grow from gentle rolling hills.
It’s a place that has embraced its history, either that or just not grown out of it.
The feeling, as I drive down the street with the flagpole in the middle of it, is charming but cloistered.
Blond Elvis was right. With a population of about one thousand, there’s not a high school to be seen, but there are two elementary schools. Armed with no name, only my file and photos of Julie Larimore, I hit them both.
I’m not sure what to expect. Towns like this can be genuinely open, like Fort Bragg in the Mendocino, California, area.
Or they can be closed. This one seems to fall in the former category.
All of the people I talk to at both schools are helpful, but none can help me.
One directs me to a retired art teacher who operates one of the town’s many galleries.
Roberta Matlock looks as though she never left the sixties.
With long gray hair and no makeup, she is still as unassuming yet striking as the wheat-colored linen dress that almost covers her sandals.
I meet her in the backyard of her gallery, which is an extension of the business itself.
Wild sculptures—some decidedly western, some impressionistic—spill out onto the fenced-in lawn, among the pots of cactus and pansies.
Standing there, still and straight, in the middle of them, she could be another sculpture.
I introduce myself and tell her I’m looking for someone who might remember someone who attended elementary school here in the late seventies or early eighties.
“That’s like yesterday to me,” she says. “I can remember far back or close up. It’s the middle that gets murky sometimes.” In spite of her low-key appearance, she has a school-teacher voice.
“The principal’s secretary said if anyone could remember a student, it’s you.”
“That’s because I was smart enough to retire before my brain was completely stewed.
” She settles down on a wooden bench, so crudely fashioned I’m sure it was carved by hand, then painted white.
Above the back, which is painted to resemble white bones, three skulls sit, mounted on red strips of wood, barely wider than sticks.
The legs and base are fashioned to resemble those of a skeleton.
“Join me, and let’s see what you have here. ”
“I don’t know,” I say, regarding the skulls. “Those guys don’t look too friendly.”
“It’s a Day of the Dead piece,” she says. “From Guatemala, although most associate Día de Los Muertos with Mexico. Comfortable as all get-out if you don’t let your mortality issues get in the way.”
I could tell her a thing or two about mortality issues.
“That’s one way of putting it.” I sit beside her on the bench. “Are you aware of Julie Larimore, the Killer Body spokes-model?”
“We do get an occasional newspaper out here. Have they found her?”
Dread tinges her voice. She knows there’s only one way such disappearances usually end, and so do I, although I don’t want to think about that right now.
“This may sound strange,” I say, “but her name isn’t really Julie Larimore. We can’t find a trace of her before she went to work for Killer Body.”
“I’ll be.” She frowns and nods. “Kind of sounds made up, now that I think about it.”
“Julie told someone she went to elementary school here. I know it’s a long shot, but I thought maybe I could find someone who remembers her.”
She closes her eyes. “So many pretty little girls. I run into them, those former students, around town, ages later, and I can’t see any of those little girls inside them anymore. They’re all used up.”
“Maybe if I showed you some photographs of Julie, it would help.”
I open the file and take out the promotional shots, along with a portrait and a couple of candids of Julie and Bobby Warren.
“She would have been a beauty, even back then. When did you say, late seventies?” She rubs her palm over her chin. “Looks like she’s frosted her hair. That’s what they call it, isn’t it? So, it would have been brown back then, right? What we used to call dishwater blond?”
“Probably,” I say, pushing away thoughts of Lisa.
“Son of a gun. If the hair were different—” She grabs the portrait, pulls it close to her face.
My arms prickle, and I realize I have to get off this bench right now. “Do you recognize her?”
She nods slowly, unable to take her gaze away from the portrait. The look in her eyes showers me with more chills. “The girl wasn’t lying about one thing. Her name was Julie, all right.”
Tania Marie
The photographer’s name was Garza, whether first or last, she didn’t know.
He was the kind of man you could be alone with and forget he was a stranger.
Part of it was his ability to remove any intimacy from the experience.
He could tug her collar, move her arm and look at her as if she were a piece of artwork in progress without making her feel violated.
Unlike the paparazzi, his goal was not to expose her, to reveal her flaws, but to uncover her. His dark hair and intense gray eyes made him good-looking, in an innocuous, preoccupied way.
Tania Marie felt comfortable with him at once and hoped to hell she was getting better at judging character.
She hadn’t done badly with Jay Rossi, at least so far.
She felt better knowing he was in the other room, although for a moment there, she was afraid he was going to march right in behind her.
He waited outside while Garza posed her on a stool so small she was certain she’d slip off of it.
“It’s not going to show,” Garza said, as if reading her mind. “It will just give us some interesting angles to play with. In a minute, I’m going to have you sit on the floor.”
Shit. That’s all she needed, to have her thighs spread out like butter on that black tarp. She held the gaze of the camera. Smiled. And even though it wasn’t showing, sucked in her gut.
He clicked and moved in, turning her head, ever so slightly, with his thumb.
“Do we have to do the floor?”
“I think it might free you up a little. Now, big smile. Good.”
He had a point; the floor did free her, whatever the hell that meant. With the camera pointed down at her, she felt less inhibited.
“Another smile, Tania Marie.”
For months, people with cameras had been asking her for smiles. And for months, she’d been running from them. Maybe Rossi was right, and it was time for her to take charge and tell her story, her way.
Garza seemed pleased with his efforts, and they made plans to meet the following week for an outdoor session.
“You don’t look too bad off,” Rossi said after they were outside.
She’d heard the term golden complexion all of her life, seen it in beauty articles and on makeup containers.
His was the first deeply burnished skin tone that qualified as the real thing.
Golden. In this light, Rossi’s eyes were golden, too.
And interested. Interested in her. That made the whole day worth it—to return to someone who actually gave a flying flip.
“It wasn’t as horrible as I thought it would be. Different from my usual experience with photographers.”
“That has to be a bitch.” He spoke in the same tough-kid voice he’d used when he told her he would have kicked that stranger’s ass at the tequila bar.
“You can’t imagine.”
“So, why are you still protecting the bastard?” he asked. “Why don’t you tell your side of the story?”
She felt the flare of heat in her cheeks, as if she’d been slapped. “Watch it, Rossi. There are some lines not even you can cross.”
“Have it your way.” He marched into the elevator, holding her garment bags like a barrier between them.
They didn’t speak until they reached the sidewalk.
She opened the back of her car, and he slid the bags inside into the empty taupe compartment.
Whatever kinship had developed between them had been killed by his reference to Marshall.
He had no fucking right, and she ought to tell him that right now.
Better to just let him go. She’d let go of plenty in the last year. What was one more man?
“Thanks for your help today,” she said, not making eye contact.
“Anytime.”
Great. He was finally out of her life, walking in his shit-kickers, toward that battered embarrassment of a truck, which would no doubt carry him back to her mother’s restaurant and a career as star chef or star lackey, depending on how good he really was in the kitchen.
She could let him go, or she could speak. Silence would be best.
“Only one thing.” Rossi turned, his arms stiff and fisted. “Why do you have to take the heat for that affair, anyway? Cameron’s the one who’s married, not you. You’re looking out for too many people.”
“And what about you? Who the hell are you looking out for?”
“You.”
She started to tell him to go to hell, but that hypnotic, caring light in his eyes stopped her before she could. So what did she tell him?
“I don’t want to share my secrets with anyone,” she said. “Enough of me has been spread across the headlines. They say I almost destroyed Marshall Cameron’s reputation. But I’m the one who was destroyed, no ‘almost’ about it.”
“You could even the score. Hell, even write a book.”
“I’ve had offers, and I might one day.”
“One day means never. You won’t do it, because you still love him. That’s the reason, isn’t it?”
“Of course not. Now, get out of here.”
“Fine. But first, tell me how you could love anyone who said what he did about you.”
She slammed the back door of the car shut. “You don’t know he said it.”
“But you do.”
She closed her eyes to stop the sudden tears.
“You think I’d believe anything his wife said in some pathetic interview, especially then, with all of the pressure on both of them? She could have lied.”
In reality, Lucy Cameron had wounded her in her frigging magazine interview Princess Gabby would call so California.
Lucy had said their marriage was stronger than ever. Tania Marie expected that. She had said she loved her husband. Good luck, lady. But the quote that sent Tania Marie on a week-long Milanos binge still hurt so much she tried to forget she ever read it.
“Indeed, my husband made a mistake, one that was probably based on pity. He started out really wanting to help this girl, his assistant, and he had no idea, until it was too late, that she was infatuated, obsessed with him. He also told me, and I believe this in my heart, that he could never, ever carry on a serious relationship with someone with a weight problem.”
Rossi came back to where she stood. “Forget the son of a bitch. Can you do that?”
“For Virginia? Is that what she sent you here to do? Are you just another…?”
The rest of her anger was crushed against his lips. The middle of Los Angeles, broad daylight, and she was kissing the hell out of this man who worked for her mother. She broke away, pressed her forehead against his.
“Let’s go,” he whispered.
“Not so fast.” She ran her fingers over his thin, rose-colored lips, sexier than Marshall’s full, lying ones.
“Come on.” He pulled her closer. She fought the internal signals of attraction that had proved to be lies the last time. She couldn’t fall head-first again, not physically, not metaphorically, thank you very much, Marshall Cameron.
“I can’t.”
“You don’t want any baggage going into Killer Body?” he asked.
“As if I have a rat’s-ass chance.” She leaned against him again, and for some reason, they both laughed.
“What’s really bothering you?” He breathed the question into her ear.
She forced herself to step back, look into those golden eyes. “I already have baggage, Rossi.”
“What kind?”
“Big-time baggage.” Might as well just say it. “I saw something that might not mean anything. Or it might mean everything. It could save somebody’s life or ruin it. I don’t know. But if I tell it, I’ll have to admit something else about myself,”
Now the tears escaped, warm as his arms back around her, but not as a potential lover this time, as a protector.
“What did you see?”
“Julie Larimore.”
His arms tightened. “You saw her? When?”
“I don’t want to go into that.”
“After she disappeared?”
“No, right before.” She pulled away from him, trying to erase the image from her mind. “It was Julie Larimore, but it wasn’t.”
The Interview
Do you really think you’ll go back, or will Bobby Warren find a replacement?
Of course I’ll go back. I wasn’t running away from Killer Body or Bobby Warren.
I was taken away by a problem that has since been solved.
He will never know what happened during the Secret Hours.
He’ll welcome me back. That’s my face, my figure on the poster, my dress that the stores can’t keep in stock, that soft sweep of black wool jersey.
He will never replace me. I’m like a daughter to him.
You don’t replace your own daughter. You wouldn’t, would you?
Do other women do this? Do they engage in imaginary interviews in their own heads, interviews so real they can hear them? They’re shorter now, the questions less connected, but I continue to answer. I always answer.
Will he replace me? The question brings tears to my eyes, and I burn from the inside out, unable to writhe away from the pain that drains my strength. No one replaces me. Don’t let them. Stop anyone who tries.