Day Eighty-Nine
The woman she’d called from Newark had agreed to meet her for coffee at an out-of-the-way café.
Lally wore sunglasses and a scarf on her head, afraid she might run into Jesse or someone Jesse and Norman knew, although she was well aware of his frustrations with small-town life in Joshua Tree and couldn’t imagine him going out of his way to spend so much as a minute somewhere even more remote.
It was soon obvious she attracted more attention than she deflected, resembling the kind of horny widow in the market for an off-duty Marine that Diane Lane might play in a movie, so she decided to lose the scarf before she was even seated.
Each time the bells on the diner door jangled, her heart leaped into her throat, but the new customer was always in fatigues.
That was how it was in a military town, especially one that catered to America’s endless thirst for desert warfare.
She did her best to study the menu, her eyes returning to the tuna melt after every distraction.
They’d agreed on coffee, but maybe she could eat. Would that be rude?
At noon on the dot the bells jingled again, and a woman with long white hair stood just inside the door.
She was seventy, maybe older, and donned a navy tunic and matching pants in a loose fabric like linen.
She wore her hair down in the way few older women do; it was the color of moonlight against the dark sky of her clothes.
Jesse would assign her a hippie-ish nickname, Joan Baez perhaps, although Joan’s white hair had been short for some time.
No, not Joan Baez—Woodstock or Grateful Dead.
Lally’s feet were firmly planted, stuck to the floor beneath her booth from years of café grime or perhaps simply her own fear.
But she stood just enough to catch the woman’s attention, and when she approached Lally held out her hand.
“Hi, I’m Lally Alfano. I believe we spoke on the phone?”
“Yes,” the woman said, and when she held out her hand a dozen silver bracelets slipped to her wrist, piling up like cars on a freeway. “Edith Marsay.”
“Please,” Lally said, gesturing for her guest to sit down. She motioned for the waitress, who held up a finger to signal she would get to them shortly.
“I hope this is all right,” the woman said.
She looked tentatively around the diner.
“Not a lot of options. I would have offered to meet elsewhere, but I sold my car to help finance the search for my son.” She explained how the police had only done so much, and then friends and volunteers picked up the slack for a time.
The money had gone to a lawyer, who helped her keep pressure on local officials.
“It’s fine,” Lally assured her; she had her own mounting bills with Harlan.
“You’re probably used to something fancier.” The woman offered a weak smile. Her teeth were quite yellow next to her hair. If only she knew how often Lally ate on the run—she was not one to put on airs.
When the waitress made it over to their table Edith ordered hot tea with lemon, whatever they had, she wasn’t fussy. Lally ordered tea as well, hers iced, but felt silly when it came to the tuna melt, yet she still needed food to settle her stomach, so she ordered toast.
“That’s it?” the waitress asked. Lally indicated it was, but tried to say with her eyes that she’d tip well.
The waitress returned so immediately with their drinks it was almost unnerving.
She served Lally her iced tea while gesturing to the sweetener already on the table, then set a teacup and saucer in front of Edith alongside a selection of tea bags before filling the cup with steaming hot water from a carafe.
Lally added lemon to her drink as Edith selected her tea, Earl Grey.
When they had their beverages just so and Lally had fussed awkwardly with a packet of Sweet’N Low, she blurted out that she was sorry about Edith’s son.
“River,” Edith reminded her, and now that she was in front of her it seemed exactly like a name she would pick.
“Do you have children?” Lally smiled, surprised to find her eyes growing wet.
What was it with her recently? The woman recognized a struggle and cupped her hand over Lally’s to console her before squeezing lemon into her own tea.
“And I’m sorry about your brother. Tell me. ”
“About him?”
The woman nodded as she added honey.
“He was older. Is older.” Lally hated that slip of verb tense. “He was like a father to me at times. Our father was, well, he was not always available to me. Emotionally.”
“Most men of my generation aren’t.”
Lally smiled. It was a little more complicated than that.
“Was it just the two of you?”
Lally gently explained that she had another brother who died when she was young. Edith’s eyes were pained, perhaps for her parents.
“River was my one and only,” the woman explained, showing a photo of them on the home screen of her iPhone, a model more than a few generations behind.
River towered over his mother and held an arm around her so tight Lally couldn’t imagine him letting go.
“It’s unfathomable, the pain of losing two. ”
“That’s just it.” Lally leaned in so as not to be overheard. “Did we lose them?” It seemed odd to speak of them with such finality. Maybe they were but temporarily misplaced. “I suppose that’s what I’m here to ask.”
Edith strummed her fingers like that was the million-dollar question.
“He’s very handsome,” Lally finally said of River, extra careful this time to fudge the verb tense.
“That’s his father in him. He died long ago.” Lally thought of the embryos in the freezer and wondered whose genes were stronger, hers or Jesse’s, and what those children might look like one day. She hoped to find out.
“It’s not fair,” Lally remarked.
“Fair?” Edith chuckled. “I’m not sure that’s how life works, dear.”
The waitress delivered Lally’s toast alongside a jam caddy. She whispered her thanks, then offered a piece to Edith, who declined. When they were alone again, Lally confessed, “I hired a private investigator.”
The woman cocked an eyebrow. She blew on her tea and steam encircled her face.
“He’s based out of Los Angeles. I could give you his name.”
Edith smiled grimly. Lally felt silly; certainly there was no money for that. “Did he find any clues?”
“He found your son’s poster and a couple others. But other than that?” Lally bit her lip. Nothing concrete yet. “We’re really just starting our search.”
Edith looked down at her lap. “I’m not sure he’s going to be of much help, dear. I don’t want to see you waste your money. Some people don’t want to be found.”
She wouldn’t allow herself to think Norman was one of those people. “You mentioned on the phone—” Lally began.
“Rumors,” Edith interrupted.
“Rumors are about all I have to go on.”
The woman lowered her gaze sympathetically, moving her phone from the center of the table off to one side. “Who was the last one to see your brother?”
“Before he went missing? That’s hard to say. I would say probably his husband.”
“Did he mention anything about the lights?”
“He didn’t mention much of anything at all. He mentioned Norman was in Minneapolis.” Then, at the woman’s confused look, Lally added, “My brother is not in Minneapolis.”
It was one of the first things Harlan had done.
Checked with the City of Minneapolis for permits and that sort of thing.
There were several medical buildings currently under construction, but Norman was not listed as the architect of record on any of them.
None of the commercial buildings, either.
Lally could have explained this, but fortunately the woman seemed to take her statement at face value.
“Before River disappeared, he talked nonstop about the lights. Strange lights that appeared from the sky.”
“Had he…seen them?” Lally asked, remembering her own encounter with lights in the sky.
Was she in danger of disappearing next? But maybe he hadn’t seen them firsthand, maybe he’d just heard about them from a neighbor, say, and they became a topic of interest. She knew small towns and how rumors spread.
Her family was the subject of many cruel ones after Robbie died. It wouldn’t be that unlikely.
“Not when he first mentioned them. The first time I remember him talking about the lights, he was repeating what he’d heard secondhand. River was not the first to go missing, you know.”
Lally didn’t know, or at least not exactly, only that there were other posters and several more for cats and dogs (although that could have been the work of coyotes). Up until this moment, she hadn’t thought about a chronology of disappearances.
“He was not the only one fascinated. There were whispers at the grocery store, talk around town. People hadn’t seen the lights themselves, but everyone knew someone who had.
The math on that doesn’t add up. Not in a small town.
Someone had to have seen them with their own eyes given the number of people who professed to know someone who had. But you know how word gets around.”
“I don’t understand. What kind of lights?” Lally imagined those lights they used at movie premieres, three beams that crossed in the sky. But the woman corrected her. This was a light from above shining down, like someone holding the brightest flashlight you’d ever seen from the sky.
“A beam of light,” Lally clarified, and the woman agreed that was the right description. “And what does that have to do with the people gone missing?”
The woman furrowed her brow. “It’s certainly odd.” She held on to her teacup with both hands and challenged Lally to deny it. “Beyond that, I don’t know.”