The House Guest by Mark Edwards(26)

‘That’s right. You can’t trust her. But a couple of the details are true. She is from Bakersfield, as far as I know. And she has been living in LA. The part about the musician, though. That’s bullshit.’

Our burgers appeared and Callum took a huge bite, wiping a dribble of ketchup from his beard.

‘You said you’d lost your daughter?’ I said, prompting him to continue.

‘Yeah. Sinead. Eden took her from me.’

‘What do you mean?’

He chewed more of his burger and seemed to stare down a gloomy but vivid memory lane. ‘I thought everything was fine. Sinead’s mother, my wife, died when she was sixteen. Cancer.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘It was tough. Tough.’ He swallowed. ‘But Sinead grew up, went to college, had boyfriends, moved into a shared place in the city. She had some problems holding down a job, seemed to flit from one thing to another, but I thought, She’s still young. She’ll figure out what she wants to do. She still came home for lunch every Sunday. Still had time for her old man. And then she told me she’d made a new friend.’

‘Eden?’

‘Met her at some convention. Some hippy-dippy thing, out in the desert. A spiritual festival, she called it. Discovering your true inner self. Building inner strength through meditation. Vegan food and yoga.’ He laughed. ‘I thought it was an excuse to sit around and smoke pot and listen to, shit, I don’t even know. In my day it was the Grateful Dead.’

He looked at me like I would know what kind of music modern-day hippies listened to. When I didn’t respond, he went on: ‘I should have known it was more than that. Ever since her mom passed away, Sinead has been looking for something. Meaning, I guess. I wasn’t much help there. I’m a lapsed Catholic myself and we weren’t a religious household. Maybe it would have been easier if we had been. She could have gone to church. I would have been cool with that. Instead, she spent years searching for something to make her feel better. One week it was politics, the next she was getting into tarot cards. She even called herself a witch for a little while, when she was in high school. She and her friends formed their own coven. But no matter how much she searched, she could never settle.’

‘That sounds familiar.’

He cocked an eyebrow at that.

‘That’s Ruth, too.’

He nodded. ‘And then she met Eden. She came round for dinner after she’d been to this convention, and the way she was talking about her I thought maybe she was a girlfriend or something. You young people, you’re all bisexual or pansexual, fluid this and fluid that.’

I smiled.

‘Anyway, that didn’t bother me at all. I’m not one of these bigots. But Sinead assured me they were just friends. Best friends. It was cool. I met Eden at Sinead’s apartment and I liked her. She seemed a little intense, a little full of herself. But she had something about her. A spark. I could understand why my daughter was so besotted.’

I knew what he meant about that spark.

‘And then I stopped hearing from Sinead so often. She called but she sounded distracted. She started talking about all this weird shit.’

‘Like what?’

‘Like the end of the world.’

‘What?’ I hadn’t seen that coming.

‘Right. How we were all screaming towards the end times. None of it made much sense to me. I told her she was talking nonsense. She pressed it. We argued about it. We argued about how she still didn’t have a job, too. She stopped coming round on Sundays. Until one day, last fall, when she turned up asking if I could loan her some money. She said she needed it to take a course. She was going to train to be a masseuse. Eden was waiting outside in the car and wouldn’t come in, and I got the feeling Sinead was lying, that she wanted the money for something else. The way she looked, I thought it might be drugs. But then she laid the whole guilt trip on me, started crying, and I could never resist her tears. I gave her the money and off she went.’

He drained his pint.

‘That was the last time I saw or heard from her. She stopped answering her phone. Then I started to get a message saying the number was out of service. I went to her apartment and her roommates said she hadn’t come home one night. She still owed them rent. All her social media accounts were deleted. Of course, the cops were of no use whatsoever.’ He stroked his beard. ‘You know what I thought? That she and Eden had run into trouble with a gang of drug dealers. That the two of them were probably buried out in the desert. I can’t begin to tell you how I felt . . .’

For a moment I thought he was about to start crying.

‘I spent months searching for her, going to all the places she used to hang out, talking to all her old friends, but got nowhere. So then I decided to concentrate on Eden. I knew they’d met at this spiritual convention and I found the Facebook page, which was full of comments from people who’d been too. I started messaging them, explaining the story, saying I was trying to find Eden. Most of the people ignored me and I was on the verge of giving up when someone messaged me to say he knew Eden. What he told me, well, it gave me the chills.’

It was busier in the bar now. I had to lean forward to hear what Callum said.

‘This guy told me Eden is a recruiter.’

‘For what?’

Callum paused. ‘I need another drink.’