Karen Olson - The Missing Ink

Alison Cho was giving the introduction just as I hit the remote.

“Elise Lyon had it all: youth, beauty, money, and she was going to marry the son of one of the richest men in the country. But she threw it all away, running from her fiancé to Las Vegas a week before her wedding, where she was last seen in a tattoo shop asking for a tattoo with the name of a man no one had ever heard of.”

The screen filled with a close-up of the devotion ink I’d drawn, “Matthew” prominent, larger than life.

“Who is Matthew?” Alison’s voice-over emphasized. “Is she with him now? No one knows, because after visiting The Painted Lady, Elise Lyon was never seen again.”

The commercial was for Viagra. I muted the TV, mulling the dramatics, the mystery perpetuated by the media. Granted, I had a personal interest in Elise Lyon and Kelly Masters, but most of the country wouldn’t even know about her if the media hadn’t pounced on the story, like they had so many stories like this one. She was, as Jeff Coleman had insensitively put it, “a rich bitch,” but she was also, in a sense, the princess who threw it all away to go slumming in Vegas. The public would eat it up.

I went into my bedroom and found my laptop, bringing it into the living room, turning it on, and logging into the wireless Internet-another post-Shawna splurge for Tim. Too bad he couldn’t break up with her twice; maybe I could get him to buy us both iPhones and GPSs.

I Googled Elise Lyon.

A wedding announcement from the New York Times’ Sunday Styles section popped up in the search, and I clicked on it.

Elise Lyon, 26, daughter of the world-renowned architect Richard Lyon and his wife, Madeline, of Philadelphia, will marry Bruce “Chip” Manning Jr., 31, of New York City, son of developer and entrepreneur Bruce Manning Sr. and his wife, Helene, on June 29. Richard Lyon most recently designed Versailles, Bruce Manning’s new resort in Las Vegas. The couple met through their parents at a cocktail party in Manhattan.

Elise Lyon attended Mary Baldwin College in Staunton, Virginia, studying psychology, and Chip Manning is vice president of marketing for his father’s holdings in Atlantic City and Las Vegas, based in his father’s offices in New York City.

Doing the math, I quickly deduced that if Elise Lyon had gone to college when most high school graduates did and then graduated on time, it seemed unlikely she had pursued any sort of career path, otherwise the story would’ve said so. These stories were big on pointing out the high-powered jobs that the brides and grooms held. Maybe marrying Chip Manning, who was most definitely on a career path with his father’s empire, was her calling.

I didn’t get it. But I’d been working since I was sixteen.

I knew enough about Bruce Manning Sr. to skip the rest.

The voice on the TV tugged at me. I looked up from the laptop to see Alison Cho asking me questions. Joel had been right about the outfit. It totally worked, but I didn’t look like me. At least not the me I knew. I heard my voice and wondered if I really sounded like that.

The phone rang.

“Brett? Brett? Why didn’t you tell me you were on TV?” My sister’s soft, hurried voice echoed in my ear.

I’d conveniently forgotten she was obsessed with the news shows. “It happened so fast, Cathleen,” I tried.

Cathleen was the first to leave the nest-and the East Coast. Her husband was a software engineer, and they moved to Southern California ten years ago, right after they got married. Even though they were just a few hours away, we never saw each other. Cathleen thought I was a bad influence on her six-year-old daughter, who’d decided after my last visit that she wanted a tattoo of Tinker Bell on her arm.

“You should’ve called. Where’s Tim? Why didn’t he call? You were the last to see her? What was she like?”

I wanted to tell her to just hang up and let me finish watching the show, but she wouldn’t stop asking questions. To shut her up, I told her everything that was being said, at about the same time.

Except for one thing.

“A man named Matthew Powell was found murdered in Chip Manning’s suite at Versailles earlier today. Police will not say whether Matthew Powell, who was Chip Manning’s driver, was Elise Lyon’s Matthew.”

But by saying that, Alison Cho certainly implied it.

My sister was still babbling. I ignored her, my eyes trained on the TV.

I wasn’t prepared for the next statement.

“Police have confirmed that they have brought Versailles manager Simon Chase in for questioning.”

I told my sister I would have to call her back. I hung up even as she was arguing with me about it.

I sat on the couch and took a drink of wine. I wished I liked something stronger, but the wine was going to have to do.

Simon Chase? What did that mean, they were questioning him? Did the police think he had something to do with Matt Powell’s murder? I thought about how he’d brought me up to the suite to see what I’d seen. If he’d already been there, he certainly hadn’t shown it.

He’d egged me on about inking Chip’s chest. Maybe he did know more about this than he was letting on.

I shivered, thinking about how he’d flirted with me.

My brain started going backward, like a video in rewind, through the events of the last couple of days, trying to get Simon Chase out of my head.

I thought again about Jeff Coleman. And Kelly Masters. I wanted to find the connection between Kelly and Elise. They seemed separate, but they weren’t. They couldn’t be.

I pulled my laptop out again and Googled Kelly Masters this time. I found a MySpace page, but it wasn’t her. It was a Kelly Masters at NYU who was advertising her Wiccan religion. An accomplished harpist named Kelly Masters had gone to Juilliard and now played with the Boston Symphony. And then there was the Scientologist named Kelly Masters who had a YouTube video, preaching L. Ron Hub-bard’s words much in the same way Tom Cruise did, but to her credit she didn’t jump on anyone’s sofa. I shuddered and hit the button to go back to the previous screen.

A small item in Entertainment Weekly from a year and a half ago caught my eye. A picture of a woman whose features were similar to the picture on my cell phone-without being dead, obviously-accompanied two paragraphs about a Kelly Masters from Los Angeles who’d won a modeling contract with a top agency after some reality program on an obscure channel no one watched. Alive, she was very pretty in that skinny-model sort of way.

I couldn’t see a tat on her neck.

I couldn’t be sure if it was the same Kelly Masters. Jeff had said she’d been living in L.A. the last he knew, so it was possible. But he also said he hadn’t seen her for a long time, so she could’ve been anywhere.

Except when I went to the next page, another small item popped out at me. Kelly Masters had been stripped of her modeling contract because she’d lied about her age during the competition. She was too old.

It was just a segue into the next hit. A tattoo shop site. Planet Tattoo. I clicked on it.

The shop was in Malibu; it advertised that all the hot celebrities had gotten tats there, prominently featuring the one I was supposed to ink earlier today.

And in the center of the screen was a photo of their star tattooist: K-C, who wore a wide, sexy smile, a black bustier, black leather pants, and eagle wings spread across her neck. A short bio said that K-C had trained in Las Vegas-but there was no credit for her ex-husband-and that she had won a modeling contest previously.

She should’ve been stripped of her title solely for choosing the moniker “K-C.” Those TV tattoo shows were creating monsters.