Marcia Muller - Vanishing Point

As Patrick and I approached the front door, a dog began barking, and I heard the scrabbling of toenails on hardwood. Then a second canine voice joined in, and a woman called, “Augie, Freddie-stop that!”

The dogs quieted instantly.

“Well trained,” Patrick murmured.

The door opened partway, and a tall woman with dark blonde hair who bore an unmistakable resemblance to Jennifer Aldin looked out. She was holding fast to the collar of a black dog of indeterminate breed; the dog’s eyes were lively and inquisitive.

“Ms. McCone?” the woman said. “I’m Terry Wyatt. Just give me a minute to put the dogs outside.” She closed the door and went away, calling, “Come on, I don’t want you bothering my company.” After a moment she returned, admitting us to an entryway.

“They sound like watchdogs,” she told us, “but actually they’re just overly enthusiastic about visitors.” She glanced questioningly at Patrick, and I introduced him as my assistant. After they’d shaken hands, she said, “Would you mind sitting in the dining area? I’m making some jam, and I need to keep an eye on it.”

Terry Wyatt led us through a roomy kitchen to an area containing a baker’s table and invited us to sit. Behind us was a living room with a fireplace and built-in bookcases, and beyond it a glass door overlooking the backyard. The dog I’d glimpsed earlier and another tan one stood outside, noses pressed to the glass.

“Ignore them,” Terry said, noticing the direction of my gaze. “They’ll get bored and go play.”

Up close, Terry’s resemblance to Jennifer was even more striking; while her hair was darker and cropped short, she had the same high cheekbones and scattering of freckles, the same direct gaze. Her movements were similar, too-quick and economical-but I sensed an absence of the tension that was present in her sister; in fact, Terry radiated calm well-being.

She brought us soft drinks, then went back to check a big pot on the stove. A tantalizing odor rose from it as she raised the lid. “Pluots,” she explained, taking a seat at the table. “My favorite produce guy at the farmer’s market insisted I take an entire box. You can only eat so many Pluots-hence jam.”

“Are you going to put it up in jars?” I asked, taking out my tape recorder.

“Sure.”

“I’ve always been afraid to do that.”

“Botulism, you mean?” She grinned. “Maybe, if you were putting up green beans and really didn’t know what you were doing. I have a degree in home ec from UC and teach at a cooking school. Haven’t killed anybody yet.” She glanced at the recorder.

“You mind if I tape our conversation?” I asked. “It makes for greater accuracy.”

“Not at all. It’s just that seeing the recorder brought me back to the point of your visit. Jen’s really serious about finding out what happened to our mother, isn’t she?”

“Yes. How do you feel about that?”

She shrugged. “Ambivalent, I guess.”

I glanced at Patrick. He’d taken out a notebook and was uncapping a pen.

“In what ways?”

“Well, it’s important to Jen’s peace of mind, and that means it’s important to me. We’re closer than most sisters; we had to be. After our mother disappeared, we had kind of a weird upbringing.”

“In what way?”

“Our father became very distant, wrapped up in his own grief, I suppose. Our Aunt Anna assumed the mother’s role in our lives, but she made it clear she resented the responsibility. And Mom’s best friend, Aunt Sally, whom both of us loved and would gladly have gone to live with, was more or less banished. Dad and Aunt Anna were really strict with us; we weren’t allowed to hang out with friends or date, and they always wanted to know exactly where we were at any given time. If we were delayed at school or something like that and didn’t call, we were grounded. Which was ridiculous, really, since the way we lived was like being grounded anyway.”

“Perhaps they were afraid you’d vanish like your mother did.”

“I suppose. But in a way, their overprotectiveness did make us vanish, because once we left for college, we seldom went home.”

“All this started when you were four years younger than Jennifer, at a very impressionable age,” I said, “but your father’s recent death doesn’t seem to have triggered any need in you to find out what happened to your mother.”

“I think that’s precisely because I was so young. To tell the truth, I don’t remember Mom all that well, and I never missed her the way Jen did. Besides, I have a feeling…”

“Yes?”

“A feeling that we may be opening up a Pandora’s box here. I mean, whatever you find out, it’s not going to be good, is it?”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, odds are Mom’s dead, has been dead the whole time. Once we know for sure, we’ll have to grieve for her all over again. And if she’s alive, it’ll mean she went away of her own volition, or was taken away and didn’t try to come back to us. Her being alive is the absolute worst I can imagine, because it means that she was just acting the role of loving mother. It means she never cared for Jen or our father or me at all.”

“I understand how you feel.”

“Do you?”

“Yes. A while back, I found out I was adopted, and decided to locate my birth parents. I did, and it turned out they’re good people, and I’ve established a relationship with both of them. But every now and then-even though I understand the circumstances that led to them giving me up-this anger just comes out of nowhere. On some level I feel that they didn’t love me enough and should have tried harder to keep me.”

Terry nodded. “If you get angry, even though your parents had good reason for what they did, imagine how angry Jen and I will feel if our mother’s alive. Because I can’t imagine any reason that would justify her abandoning us.”

“Yet you didn’t try to talk Jen out of going ahead with the investigation.”

“No, and I’m willing to help any way I can. As I said before, if it’s important to her well-being, it’s important to me.”

“Then let’s get started.”

For the next hour we went over Terry’s memories of when her mother disappeared. Her recollections were much the same as her sister’s, although less detailed and insightful, which was natural, given her age at the time. Some details conflicted: Terry remembered being brought home from school the day after the disappearance by the neighbor woman, while Jennifer had said the school bus dropped them off; Terry didn’t think their Aunt Anna had been particularly upset that afternoon, while Jennifer had taken specific note of it; Terry remembered their father telling them at the dinner table never to say their mother was dead, while Jennifer had said it was at breakfast. Understandable discrepancies, given her youth and the passage of time.

But one of Terry’s memories was puzzling, a new memory that had only surfaced after their father’s death, when Jennifer had begun calling four or five times a week, often late at night, to talk about their mother and speculate on what had happened to her. Terry remembered waking on the morning of her seventh birthday, some nine months after her mother’s disappearance, to the smell of Laurel’s perfume in her room, and finding a fuzzy toy lamb tucked into bed beside her. Excited, she’d shown it to her father, saying it must be from her mother. But he said he’d put it there, and that she must have imagined the perfume.

“He was lying, though,” she told me. “Kids can tell when adults lie. I don’t know who put that lamb there, but it wasn’t Dad. Besides, it was one of those promotional items they spin off successful children’s book series, in this case the Littlest Lamb. The book that my mother was reading to me at the time she disappeared was The Littlest Lamb and the Biggest Gnu . Big coincidence, wouldn’t you say?”