Chapter Fourteen
O n my lunch break, I called Lalena. “Do you have a second?” I asked.
“I have a tarot card reading for Dylan in ten minutes. Why?” she asked.
I pictured Lalena setting out the tarot cards on her linoleum-topped kitchen table.
All through high school, Dylan had been our intern, and he’d charmed patrons in his vintage suits, culled from his dead grandfather’s closet, and his regular references to Cary Grant films. Now he was preparing for college.
I hadn’t known he was into divination, but the movie I’m No Angel , with Mae West and Cary Grant, featured a fortune teller.
That might have persuaded him to give it a try.
“It’s about Ian,” I said. “Have you heard from him?”
“No. What do you know?” she asked quickly.
“I have an idea, that’s all. Can you call me when you’re finished with Dylan?” I didn’t want to say anything that could further upset, or mistakenly hearten, her until I had better information.
An hour later, instead of calling, Lalena turned up at the library in person. “What did you want to tell me about Ian?” she asked, breathless from hurrying up the hill.
I was in the conservatory, cleaning up after a midday meeting of the crochet club, an offshoot of the knitting club formed when a faction of knitters disagreed about the superiority of knitting over crochet, an argument that had devolved into unflattering comments about one another’s stitching abilities and yarn choices.
In my two years in Wilfred, I’d seen the crochet club rise and fall three times as members fought and made up.
Soon the knitting club would be whole again.
“Have a seat.” I lifted a few snips of rose-colored wool from a chair. “You haven’t heard from Ian at all, right? No missed calls? Nothing?”
Eyes wide, she shook her head. “No. I told you so.”
Once again I remembered Ian’s body on the atrium floor. Lalena caught me glancing toward the doorway to the atrium, and she followed my gaze, an eyebrow raised. I hoped what I’d seen hadn’t been real, maybe a misplaced vision of what had happened to him. I turned to her.
“And you’re certain he’s gone, not that you’ve simply missed him somehow.”
Despite her obvious pain, Lalena was losing patience with me. “He’s gone. We’d never gone a day with out talking, and now it’s been almost a week. Besides that….” As her words trailed off, she examined the floor.
I stooped to pick up a stray piece of yarn near where she stared. “Besides that, what?”
“I broke into his trailer.”
I stood suddenly. “Say that again?”
“Don’t get so high and mighty. You’ve broken into a few places.”
Lalena was right, and she’d even helped me once. I’d only done it under life-or-death circumstances, however. I was beginning to wonder if Ian’s disappearance counted. “He wasn’t there.” Buffy and Thor’s surveillance had proven that much.
“I knew he wasn’t there. I wanted to see if he’d left any sort of clue.” Her voice caught. “The milk carton was on the counter, like you said. I put it away.”
It was undoubtedly sour by now, but Lalena had prob ably wanted some way to feel she was doing something productive. “Could you tell if he’d packed a suitcase?”
“Not really. I don’t even know if he owns a suitcase. His wheelchair wasn’t there, of course, and his bed hadn’t been slept in.” She twisted her hands. “His coffee cup and cereal bowl were in the sink. It was like he dropped everything after breakfast and never came home.”
Again, I urged Lalena to sit, and I took the chair next to hers. “Anything else?”
“He’d taken his medication with him,” she said. “Because of his injury, he takes blood thinners.”
Which prompted another thought. Whether it was helpful, I wasn’t sure. “Do you know how he lost the use of his legs?”
“No. Why would that have anything to do with why he left?”
“I don’t know. You have to admit he’s secretive about it.”
Her lips tightened. “It’s none of our business.”
“I’m sorry. Of course you’re right. I—”
“Don’t apologize. I’ve wondered, too. He won’t talk about it.”
The grandfather clock in Popular Fiction chimed. Soon some of the laborers from the nearby rose nursery would be coming in for instruction in English as a second language.
Time to float my theory. “He left at about the time the construction crew showed up at the Empress, right?”
“Yes.”
“Have you seen Lise Bloom?”
“The lady with the freckles? The stranger?”
I nodded. I didn’t know any way to soften my next question. “I can’t figure out what she wants in Wilfred, but she’s been wandering around for a few days now. What if she’s someone from Ian’s past, and he wants to avoid her?”
Lalena leaned forward, and her words came in a rush. “You mean, an old girlfriend?”
“I didn’t want to bring it up, but we need to consider every angle. Do you know anything about his romantic history?”
“It would have been a really nasty breakup to make him leave town without a word,” she said. “But to answer your question, no, I don’t know about his past relationships.” She looked at her fingers, then added in a quiet voice, “Do you think he was married and abandoned her?”
It sounded outrageous, but wasn’t unheard of. Maybe he was shirking fatherhood or owed her money. Maybe he was simply ashamed and didn’t want Lalena to know about her. Extreme, but possible. Ian had kept a lot about his life hidden. Plus, the timing fit.
“I don’t know. It was a thought,” I said.
Lalena stared, unseeing, toward the potted banana tree. Surprisingly, when she looked up again, it was with a happy glow. “If it’s true, it’s good news.” At my puzzled expression, she added, “It means he’s alive.”
I hoped she was right. If only Sam and I were on better terms, I could ask him to look into Lise Bloom.
Even without him, however, I could still nose around.
As that thought settled into my brain, a book title wafted through the ether: Think Again: The Power of Knowing What You Don’t Know . What did that mean?
“I’ll see if I can get some answers,” I promised. Maybe Lise Bloom would have them.