Jon Talton - Concrete Desert

When the first Sun City subdivisions were cut into the lettuce fields in the early 1960s, someone asked Grandmother if she would be moving out there. “No,” she said. “I don’t want to live around all those old people.” But tens of thousands of other folks weren’t like Grandmother-especially retirees from Cleveland and Rochester and Detroit who couldn’t bear the thought of another brutal winter-and now Sun City has a settled, almost crowded look that would have seemed impossible thirty years ago.

But “the active lifestyle” was still for sale here: Golf carts piddled up and down the spotless streets. Every few blocks held some kind of activity center, promising summer painting classes, swimming lessons, and, for the adventurous, martial arts and rock climbing. A couple of hardy souls were speed walking in the 110-degree broiler, past a sign discreetly promoting the Sun City Symphony’s summer season. A Sheriff’s Office patrol car sped past me, going in the opposite direction: maybe to a heart attack, maybe to a murder.

Dr. Sharon was on the radio-her show was addictive-lecturing some tremulous-voiced bag of emotions about “woulda, coulda, shoulda.” “Stop that!” she commanded in that voice that had attitude but somehow never made anybody mad. I thought, Shoulda known something was wrong with Julie; woulda worked harder to find Phaedra if I’d known she was in trouble; coulda seen the Stokes case would lead to trouble. Stop that, I said to myself. I turned off Del Webb Boulevard at 105th Avenue and parked in front of the single-story home of Avis Riding, Julie’s mother.

I knocked four times on the aluminum screen door before I heard a little dog barking and sensed someone looking out through the peephole of the main door. I held up my ID card. More barking. Then: “Please go away. I’ve answered questions until I just can’t talk anymore.”

“Mrs. Riding, it’s David Mapstone.”

The dog started in again. I momentarily considered shooting the.357 Python through the door at dog level just to get some peace.

“Julie and I dated when we were at ASU.”

“I remember you.” She was there suddenly, the door opening quickly. She was smaller than I recalled, with hair the color of winter straw. She was wearing a white top and light blue shorts, and her skin was that leathery brown that comes from too many years in the Arizona sun. She regarded me with puffy eyes.

“I thought you were some kind of a teacher now.”

“I’m working with the Sheriff’s Office again,” I said over the barking. “I’m very sorry to bother you at a time like this, but it’s important.”

“Wait.” She carried the little dog away, and I heard a door shut somewhere in the back of the house. She came back and invited me in. While she led me into a living room drowning in the smell of potpourri and wet dog, I went through the essentials, saying how sorry I was about Phaedra, how Julie had come to me, asking me to help find her sister, and how I now needed to find Julie.

“Do you have children?” she asked in a voice that sounded like it hurt even to speak.

I told her I didn’t.

“Then you’ll never know,” she said. “You’ll never know what it’s like to lose your child, to outlive your child.” My eyes went to a large high school graduation photo of Phaedra on the wall.

Mrs. Riding avoided it, staring out into the backyard, a sunny, narrow space with a neat Bermuda grass lawn and low hedges.

“Julie and I aren’t close. We never have been, and we’ve hardly spoken the past three years. I don’t have any idea where she is. Why?”

“I think she knows something about what happened to Phaedra.”

I expected some reaction, but she continued in the same monotone. “I knew something like this would happen someday. I knew if Phaedra kept trying to help Julie, I’d end up losing both of them.”

“Mrs. Riding, I got the impression it was the other way around, that Julie was trying to help Phaedra.”

She snorted an unhappy laugh. “Julie was never sober enough to help anybody but herself, even if she would have been inclined. That’s what lost her her daughter. And it’s a good thing.”

“And you have no idea where she might be?”

She shook her head slowly. “Julie ran with a fast crowd,” she said. “Money, parties, powerful men. But it was all going to catch up with her. She couldn’t keep her looks forever.” She looked from the lawn to me. “She was so much like her father. She was her father’s daughter. Phaedra was my daughter.” Her voice skipped a bit, like a stone skimming water. “My hope.”

“I thought Julie and her father didn’t get along.”

“They hated each other,” she said, “because they were the same. Do you want something to drink?”

I said a diet Coke would be nice, and she brought me one. She poured herself Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.

“Both my daughters were very complicated, very smart young women. But Julie, Julie had something in her, something like what was in her father. It was something that you could never know, that made it possible for her to do things I could never do.”

“I’ve decided we never really know the people we’re close to,” I ventured.

“Maybe,” Avis Riding said. “Maybe so. I know that my husband-” She stopped herself. “That’s not the entire truth. I know we both did things that made life harder, more painful for the girls. Well, isn’t that what we’re supposed to believe? That whatever happened to Julie and Phaedra was ultimately the parents’ fault? That’s what all those women who call Dr. Sharon on the radio say.”

“I don’t think Sharon agrees with them,” I said.

“I don’t know what I think,” she said. “I know I was married to a cold, angry man with too many secrets, and it somehow seemed to bring out the worst in me, too.”

“What was Phaedra’s relationship with Julie?”

“Complicated. Phaedra was very strong, very independent. But she loved Julie unquestioningly, and so many times, Phaedra was there to get her out of a bad love affair, get her into detox for the cocaine.”

“You stayed in touch with Phaedra?”

She nodded.

“What about the month before her death?”

“She’d call. She seemed worried, didn’t want to talk. I told all this to those other men, the black detective and that annoying partner of his. I didn’t know she was in danger.”

“Did Julie call you in the past month?”

“Yes, she did,” she said. “It was probably the first time we’d even spoken in months.”

“What did you talk about?”

“She wanted to know where Phaedra was.”

“What did you tell her?”

“I told her if she wasn’t at her apartment, she could call Phaedra’s new boyfriend. Noah was his name. Do you want the number?”

“No,” I said a little too quietly, and then said I had to leave.

“Wait,” she said. “I’m a little surprised you don’t have a family of your own by now. You seemed like a nice boy.”

I smiled a little. “Life doesn’t work out like we expect.”

“I don’t mean to go on like a lonely old woman. I just haven’t talked to a soul for days, except the police. And I know you are the police, but you’re also someone I know.”

“I thought you never liked me.”

She spread her hands. “Oh, those were hard times. I know Julie used to bring you over to dinner to keep the peace, knowing with an outsider we’d all behave ourselves.” She smiled just a little. “I knew. But you were the only boy Julie ever brought home who seemed to have some substance to him. A little intimidating perhaps, but smart as a whip.”

I mumbled some thanks.

“I always loved to read, you know. That’s where I found Phaedra’s name. I always loved that name. I tried to instill that love of learning in my girls.” She looked me over for the first time. “You’re how old, David?”