Timothy Hallinan: Everything but the Squeal

There were two boys, she said, and another girl. She spelled their names. Wherever possible, they all had extraneous vowels tucked here and there, sad little head starts on distinction. She finished the litany and looked over at him out of luminous blue eyes. “Isn't that cute?” she said to me. He concentrated on the bright squares of his plaid madras sport coat, paying particular attention to a kelly-green area on his right cuff.

“Aimee’s the youngest,” I said neutrally. It was Saturday, and I wanted to be out of the house.

“She's the baby,” Mommy said. There wasn't an ounce of fat on her, just a slender, expensively maintained woman well-wrapped in a sleeveless dress, long delicate tendons in her forearms, a big sapphire glittering on one hand, as dry and bright as her eyes. “She's also the problem child.”

Daddy grunted something that could have been a negative. It could also have been gas.

“How do you know she ran away?”

“Well, she's missing.” She gave me the cool blue eyes full-bore. Daddy fidgeted impatiently in his chair, plucking at a button.

“As opposed to, well, foul play,” I said. Inwardly I cursed Janie Gordon, whom I'd once brought kicking and screaming home to her mother, for telling her distant cousins the Sorrells where I lived and what a whiz I was.

“She left a note, of sorts,” Mommy said. “Aimee’s not much of a writer.” She reached into the enormous Louis Vuitton purse on the floor at her feet and pulled out a much-creased piece of paper. Mommy , it read, I alwayshateditwhenyouplayedyourfartyoldmusic. AbunchofoldgeezersactingliketheirYoung. Butthere'sonesongIlike. PushPlay .

“Play?” I said.

“This is pretty cute,” Mommy said with obscure pride. “I have to give Aimee credit for it.”

Out of the purse came a little chrome cassette player. She put it on the coffee table in front of me. “It's the big black button,” she said. I pushed it.

Paul McCartney's voice, distorted by the small speaker, sang the opening verse of “She's Leaving Home.” When he got to the words “stepping outside, she is free,” there was a click, and a young girl's voice, too close to the microphone, said, “Here's another one.” Four raucous, unmistakable guitar chords, and even before I heard the singer's voice, I knew it was the Kinks.

“I can make the most ordinary little man in the world into a star”-Ray Davies leered, all pinky rings and cigar-smoke flash, while his brother Dave chopped the air into fuzzy heavy-metal chords. Then there was another click, and the young girl was back, a little farther from the mike this time. “That's all, folks,” she said. Then she giggled. And a bank of strings cut the giggle short, and Judy Garland sang “Over the Rainbow” all the way through. Then there was nothing.

Daddy cleared his throat in the silence. “She's crazy about TheWizardofOz ” he said, shaking his head. “Punk music and TheWizardofOz .”

“Why wouldn't she be?” Mommy said with a rasp you could have struck a match on. “Dorothy got out of Kansas.”

“She wants to be an actress?” I asked.

“At her age, who doesn't?” Mommy said. “I sure as hell did.”

“How old is she?”

“Thirteen.” That was Daddy. “But she's mature for her age. She can take care of herself. I know she's okay.”

Mommy and I looked at him in disbelief.

“Well, I have to believe that, don't I?” he said defensively. “Stop staring at me like that, Mommy. Otherwise, where would I be?” It was his longest speech to date.

“Where you should be, maybe,” Mommy said. “Worrying about her instead of yourself.”

Daddy subsided. He looked back down at the bold squares in his plaid coat, moving a finger from one to another like someone tracing the moves in a classic chess game. His bony face worked slightly.

“Got any pictures?” I asked.

“They're almost a year old.” Mommy scooped out four little color shots taken for a yearbook: crumpled blue-paper background and the kind of lighting Joan Crawford made lifetime enemies to get. Daddy notwithstanding, Aimee was a young-looking twelve, a pretty little blond with a hopeful smile, but also with something knowing around the eyes, an expression that could have been either premature confidence or something much less attractive.

I let out a sigh. I didn't want any part of it. “How long has she been gone?”

“Six weeks,” Mommy said.

“Any communication since she left?”

“One note.” She pulled it out of the ubiquitous bag.

“The note is how you know she's in L.A.?” I asked, opening it.

“Yes.”

“She's a good girl,” Daddy said suddenly. He sat up, buffed a cufflink, and crossed his ankles. “She and Mommy don't always see eye to eye, like women don't sometimes, but she can always talk to me. Always. If she has homework trouble or gets a crush on some little jerk, she'll always come to me with it. The boys really like her, though. They really like her.”

Mommy's foot tapped the carpet as I opened the note. If Aimee was on the loose in Hollywood, being attractive to the boys was going to be a mixed blessing at best.

The note was written in pencil on blue-lined paper. It said: OvertheRainbow . Then there was a telephone number.

“Have you called?”

“Five or six times,” she said. “No one had ever heard of her. I think a different man answered every time I called. Some of them sounded, well, like they were drunk or something. There was loud music and people talking and laughing in the background. It sounded kind of noisy and frantic.” She reached out and moved the tape recorder about a quarter of an inch to make it exactly parallel with the edge of the coffee table. Her hand shook very slightly. “It sounded awful,” she said.

“Well,” I said, “let's give it a try.”

First I had to find my phone. It was wedged on one of the bookshelves, behind a warped and rippled copy of Gibbon's DeclineandFalloftheRomanEmpire , a casualty of the perpetual leak in the living-room ceiling. I'd opened it up and leaned it against the phone to dry it out. The phone cord is long enough to let you place a call from the bottom of the Marianas Trench, so I took it over to the couch and sat, giving Mommy a grimace that was intended as an encouraging smile as I dialed. She was looking at her fingernails. Daddy cracked his knuckles. It sounded like a ton of popcorn.

The phone rang two, three, four times, and then someone picked it up and dropped it. There was an interval of clattering and a thick male voice said something that sounded like “Yunh?”

“Hi,” I said brightly. “Is Aimee there?”

Mommy was still looking at her fingernails, but she was as still as an insect in amber. Daddy was gazing intently at the opposite wall and he'd poked his tongue into his cheek, adding one more lump to an already lumpy face.

“Who?” the voice on the other end said. Head-banger music filtered through the wire. “Who the fuck you want, Jack?”

“Aimee,” I said. “Aimee Sorrell. She gave me this number.”

“I don't care if she gave you the clap, I never heard of her. Good-bye.”

“Wait,” I said. “Tell me one thing, okay?”

He paused. A woman made a sound in the background that could have been a laugh or a cry.

“Depends,” he finally said.

“Where are you? Where's this phone?”

“It's a pay phone,” he said reluctantly.

“Yeah, but where?” The woman in the background made that sound again. This time it sounded like a bray.

The guy at the other end breathed heavily. “It's the pay phone at the end of the world,” he said. He hung up.

Mommy and Daddy were both staring at me. “It's a pay phone,” I said, “with a single-digit IQ answering it. Sounds like a very public place, not ’21’ or Spago maybe, but not anyplace illegal either. It's a hangout.” Neither of them looked very impressed. Well, it wasn't very impressive. It was so unimpressive that it nettled me,sol picked up the phone again and called Al Hammond at home.