Two Girls Down(33)
Vega’s face didn’t move, her eyes still on him. Jamie came back in, on the phone.
“I’m coming. They’re driving me….Jesus, Mom, I’m coming, shut up, okay?” She hung up and put her phone in her purse, then looked up at them. She was awake now, scared and sick all over again. “Can we go?”
Cap glanced at Vega and tried to read her, but she was a stone.
“Yes,” she said, nodding up at Cap as if they’d already discussed it: “Your car, right?”
“Right.”
Cap took another quick sip of coffee and grabbed the jacket off the back of his desk chair. Brand-new day, and here we go.
—
Every fucking one looked the same, thought Vega, as Cap parked on a wet dirt road. All the houses here looked like they’d suffered a few winters without maintenance; they all had water stains on the siding near the ground, the gutters on the roofs over the garages twisted dripping glum puddles into the driveways. The homes varied by style, either row house or ranch style or A-frame, but they were all old, all depressing in their disrepair. Her house in the Sacramento Valley was nothing special, two small bedrooms and a narrow kitchen, arched doorways and bright blue tiles in the bathroom. Spanish eclectic, the realtor had called it. It didn’t evoke any emotion in her in particular; she didn’t miss it when she was gone, had no feelings either way about sleeping in her own bed or taking a bath in her tub the way other people seemed to, but this place, Denville, made her miss the heat in the air when she left the screens open on the windows in her kitchen, and the squat peeling palm tree in the backyard.
She watched Cap pocket his keys, listened to him ask her something and thought, Except his place. Something about it she liked; something made her want to sit in his living room in the summertime and feel a warm breeze blow through.
“So? What do you think?” Cap said again, squinting through the windshield at the house.
“About what?” said Vega.
Cap glanced sideways at her, a smile creeping onto his mouth. He knew she hadn’t been listening and was amused.
“We go straight to Cole Linsom’s house after. Unless we get a break.”
“Sure.”
“And you talk first,” said Cap.
They got out of the car and walked the short distance up the road. The house had a little land around it, overgrown grass and shrubs and a few trees framing the property. It was raining lightly, speckling the grass, tapping the roof of the porch as Vega and Cap stepped up. Cap knocked on the wooden pane of the screen door; it rattled under his fist.
They waited a couple of minutes, and then a woman opened the door behind the screen. She was thin, with curly red hair and no eyebrows. She also had a plastic tube running across her face with a prong in each nostril, the tube running to a nylon bag she wore on her shoulder, and which contained, Vega suspected, a portable canister of oxygen. Vega felt just for a moment like she’d been punched in the nose, all the bones in her face radiating heat. And it came to her: cannula. That’s what the tube was called, a nasal cannula. Just one word in the lexicon of the sick and dying, one stone in an endless riverbed.
“Hello, Ms. Marsh?” said Vega. “I’m Alice Vega; this is Max Caplan—we spoke on the phone?”
Maryann Marsh opened the screen and smiled, a weak, crooked line.
“Hello, come in,” she said.
She seemed to struggle with holding both doors open until Cap stepped in and pushed them to the wall. Vega followed him inside, wiped her shoes on the gray mat by the door like he did.
The house was dark inside and smelled old, like water had been spilled on the carpet a long time ago. There were tables and sideboards against every wall with no space in between, and on top of them, knickknacks and pictures and ashtrays with hardly a spot of bare surface showing.
Maryann walked slowly ahead of them and sat on a pink brocade couch, the upholstery faded and shredded in spots on the arms. Cats, thought Vega. But she saw none.
Maryann touched the cannula, pressed the prongs up her nose with two swollen fingertips.
“Sorry to keep you out there,” she said. “Don’t move too fast.”
Vega nodded.
“Ma’am, I received this email this morning.”
Vega unfolded the sheet of paper and handed it to Maryann. She squinted at it and looked disappointed.
“Who sent this?” she said to them.
“We don’t know. The email address is just a Gmail; we’re trying to trace the actual machine it was written from. Do you have any idea why someone would link your son’s disappearance to the Brandt girls?”
Maryann paused to consider, then shook her head. The red hair, which was now very clearly a wig, moved stiffly on her shoulders.
“He’s been gone three years November. Other than the fact that there’s all three of them missing now, I’m not sure….” She took a deep breath through her nose then and coughed.
Vega felt everything that was bothering her just then—the toe she had stubbed that morning, a cut below her knee from a razor two days before, most of all the smell of the house, some kind of lotion and mold, like a cellar stuffed with old clothes. It seemed to be getting worse.
“Could you tell us what happened to your son, to Nolan?” said Vega.
Maryann nodded.