And Now She's Gone(36)
Gray watched a black Range Rover roll toward the Lawrence house—Not Sean; not with that cheap, bubbled window tinting—and listened as Noelle’s phone rang … and rang … Finally, a female voice told the caller to leave a message. And so Rebekah Lawrence left a message.
Gray thanked the woman, turned to leave, but turned back again. “Who in your family handles phone service?”
Rebekah Lawrence sat her purse back on the Cadillac’s passenger seat. “Noelle does. Phone, internet, and all that. To tell you the truth, Miss Sykes? It’s all Greek to me.”
Play moms. Missing women. Confused boyfriends …
Gray sighed. It’s all Greek to me, too, Clair Huxtable.
SEVENTEEN YEARS AGO
LOVE, LOST
On the last Saturday of the month, Special Agent Dominick Rader stood on the porch of 787 Lyndon Street in Monterey, California. In his arms, he held bags filled with eggs, bread, and paper towels—and since Natalie was home on spring break, he included a box of Cap’n Crunch with Crunch Berries. He smiled at the college senior, his gray eyes bright even as the smell of death rolled past him and mixed with the hopeful aromas of evergreens and the Pacific.
Natalie was always thrilled to see Dominick Rader. He always brought light into the house, brought light into her heart. Nowadays, the Grayson house needed light from all sources.
Cancer killed everything.
Natalie’s mother, Faye, was still sharp in her sky-blue knitwear, but a little heavier from stress and a diet of fast food. On this morning, she met Dominick in the hallway. “You don’t have to do this, Dom. It’s such a long drive down from the city.”
“I don’t mind coming, Mrs. G.,” Dominick said. “You and Vic would do it for me.” Then he followed Natalie into the kitchen and together they unpacked the groceries. He removed the empty carton of eggs from the fridge. Changed the old box of baking soda and replaced it with a new box. He whistled as he worked, usually Nirvana, sometimes Pearl Jam.
After he and Natalie straightened the kitchen, she led him to the master bedroom, the source of that smell of decay. That’s where he found his boss, Victor Grayson, now a whisper of himself at sixty years old, a brown-skinned husk of a man, lost in a hospital bed.
“Looking good, sir,” Dominick said.
“Always,” Victor answered, his voice still strong. “Nat and Faye are good nurses.”
Seven years before, Faye and Victor Grayson had adopted fifteen-year-old Natalie Kittridge. Since then, Faye had taught their only child the art of conversation, ways to spot a liar, how to manage a bank account, how to make a proper martini, how to make a proper pitcher of lemonade. Faye had regularly taken Natalie to the library and to bookstores, and before Victor’s diagnosis, they often ate in restaurants that utilized several pieces of flatware.
Natalie had learned that there were “everyday” plates and special occasion plates with scalloped edges rimmed in gold. She had become the proud owner of pink razor blades and a separate kind of lotion for her face. Her face!
She’d been a Baptist, an Adventist, an Episcopalian. She’d been a vegetarian and a carnivore. An independent and a socialist. She had believed in science in May but, by Christmas, was a believer in herbs and Mercury in retrograde. Like most kids in foster care, she’d lived as a chameleon until Faye and Victor Grayson rescued her.
The Graysons saw that she was a bright kid, eager to learn, not scared of much. They put her in a club soccer team and enrolled her at a girls’ school. They gave her a bedroom, a giant box with sea-green walls. The big bay window was true to its name and she spotted the Pacific Ocean right there. And she could decorate her room however she wanted. Posters of Michael Jordan, New Edition, and Janet Jackson covered her walls. She filled her tall bookcase with Tom Clancy, Stephen King, V. C. Andrews, and Jackie Collins. There was a lock on the door that she’d stopped using on her fiftieth night in the Graysons’—no, her—home. “This is your house,” Faye always told her. “You have nothing to fear here.”
The men who had visited the Grayson house were as tall and muscular as the men who’d visited Mom Twyla’s home. These men carried guns, too, and they also cursed. But these men talked with her new father about presidents and rule of law, amendments and old Scotch whiskey. They were a different flavor of dangerous, and Natalie’s nerves knew the difference.
She had listened and performed and excelled, to please Victor and Faye more than anything. She graduated high school with gold cords around her neck and a full scholarship to Cal State, Fresno. All of this to keep them from changing their minds about her and dropping her back at Casa Del Mar Group Home. But they’d kept her, and they’d legally adopted her. The Graysons loved her.
It had been a good life.
Even with the drives to doctors’ appointments and nurse visits, Faye hadn’t stopped being Natalie’s mother. She never sweated and never swore, even now. Her outfits were still the color of flames on weekdays and the colors of Atlantis on Saturdays and Sundays. Freckles still danced across the bridge of her caramel-colored skin, even though her cheeks were often wet with tears.
Victor couldn’t perform daddy duty now, but before his sickness he had taught Natalie self-defense and weapons, chess and justice. He had been a big man, six five and as thick as the trees surrounding their home. His hair, when he’d had it, had lived in a black man’s crew cut, and his eyebrows had been tangled tufts of fishing lines.