David Silva - The Disappeared

“What happened to us?” Teri said.

“I don’t know. I guess we changed.”

“It feels like a waste, doesn’t it?”

“Sometimes.”

The young woman and the little girl walked by, on their way out. They paused briefly at a rack near the front window, then the bell rang again and the woman held the door open for her daughter.

“Thanks for coming,” Judy said.

The woman smiled.

The door closed.

Judy pulled out a two-piece jacket dress, black with turquoise, and padded shoulders. She held it up, pressed against her body. “What do you think? Too simple?”

“Not at all.”

“Good. I like simple. But I like elegant, too.” She replaced the outfit and nodded to herself, as if she had finally come to a decision of some sort. “How about if I get you some phone numbers and addresses?”

“The old gang?”

“Yeah.”

“You’ll never know how much that would be appreciated.”

“Maybe we could throw a reunion one of these days? What do you think? You think anyone would come?”

“It worked for Woodstock.”

Judy smiled. “Yeah, I guess it did, didn’t it? I’ll be right back. Just give me a second. My address book’s on the desk.”

“No rush.” Teri wandered across the room and browsed through a rack of sweat suits, finding a pink shirt with kittens on it and a matching plaid design that went great with gray sweat pants. It came in a medium or a large junior. She took out the large and held it up, thinking it looked better than anything she had bought for herself in a long, long time. The price was a very reasonable thirty-five dollars. It would be the least she could do, she thought, after all the help Judy had offered.

Then her pager went off.

Walt had given it to her this morning on his way out the door. He had picked it up over a year ago, he said, so his clients could get hold of him on the spur of the moment. This was only the second time he had actually used it, though.

Teri glanced down at the strange vibration at her hip. The phone number where Walt was calling from was listed at the top of the black box. It wasn’t a familiar number. She turned the pager off, and carried the outfit she had chosen over to the cash register.

Judy came back a moment later with her address book waving in one hand. “I never realized how many of us came up from the Bay Area. Did you know there were almost thirty of us?”

“No,” Teri said, surprised at the number. It had never felt like that large of a group. Now, looking back, she found it rather amazing that they all got along as well as they did. If the years had taught her anything, they had taught her that relationships were infinitely more complicated than you ever imagined they were.

“Listen, Judy, I’ve got a page. I was wondering if you had a phone I could use?”

“Oh, sure. It’s in the back, right around the corner, on your right.” Judy handed her the address book. “Here, why don’t you take this with you? There’s paper and pencils in the upper right hand drawer of the desk. Go ahead and pull out whatever names and addresses you need.”

“You’re a blessing, Judy. And I want that outfit on the counter.”

“You don’t have to—”

“I want to. It’s a nice outfit, especially the kittens on the shirt.”

In the back, Teri pulled out a chair and sat down at the desk. She dialed the number on the pager, and waited for someone to pick up the other end.

“Walt’s Fake and Bake. We fake it, you bake it.”

“You better have something more than that to say.”

“Well, if it isn’t little Miss Sunshine.”

“Walt, I thought you were only going to page me if it was something important?”

“This is important. I needed to make sure the pager was working.”

“Well, where are you?”

“In a phone booth across the street from the clinic. Our Dr. Childs, being the true conscientious professional that he is, has been conducting business as usual all morning.”

“Nothing new then, huh?”

“Nope. Sorry. How ’bout on your end?”

Teri picked up the address book and turned it over in her hands. “I’m still at the boutique. Judy’s given me a good list of phone numbers, though. I think I’ll head back to the apartment and call from there.”

“No more fears about the place being bugged?”

“No, I think you were probably right. They got Gabe. That’s who they really wanted.”

“We’re going to find him this time, Teri.”

“God, I hope you’re right.”

“And it isn’t going to take ten years, I promise.”

Michael slept in late, until almost ten, before he finally talked himself out of bed and into the shower. It was a long time before the water turned warm. The shower was short and perfunctory. Afterward, fully awake, he went across the street to have breakfast at a little coffee shop called Molly’s.

On his way, it was everything he could do not to look across the lot at the dark blue Ford. He listened intently for the sound of the engine starting up, and then for the sound of the tires against the blacktop as the car inched its way along just a few short yards behind him. But those sounds never came, and it wasn’t until he was sitting in a booth in the coffee shop that the Ford finally pulled out of the motel lot and parked half-a-block down the street, just at the edge of his line of sight.

He knew then, without a doubt, that when the time came, he would have a way of losing them. That little piece of knowledge, like coming out of the doctor’s office with the news that it wasn’t cancer after all but just a meaningless little cyst, made his breakfast one of the most enjoyable in memory.

He tipped the waitress an extra two dollars, then returned to his motel room, not caring if the dark blue Ford was on his heels or still parked at the curb half-a-block back. He had told himself, nearly promised himself, that today would be the day, but suddenly that didn’t seem as urgent as it had just a short time ago. When the time came he would know it and escape would no longer be a problem.

Michael set the bolt lock behind him, took up the list of friends and acquaintances he had started yesterday and sat on the edge of the bed. The list had grown nearly two pages long as one lead had taken him to another. By now, though, most of the names had been scratched off. No one in their old circle of friends had a clue as to Teri’s possible whereabouts. In fact, no one seemed to have had much contact with her at all over the past five or six years. She had just drifted away , as it had been described to him time and again. Michael understood perfectly well what that was like.

He folded back the top page of the pad and took a long look at the scribbling underneath. As new names had occurred to him, he had added them at the bottom, and as he looked at the list now, he realized most of the added names belonged to people neither he nor Teri had seen in years. These had been their friends back in their college days.

At the top of the list was Peggy Landau.

Michael dialed the number he had found in the phone book, then leaned back against the headboard and listened as the other end of the line rang three times before being picked up.

“Hello?” It was a man’s voice.

“Yes. I was wondering if I could speak with Peggy Landau, please.”

“Who is this?”

“My name is Michael Knight. We’re old college friends.”

There was a pause on the other end, and as sometimes happens in life, Michael suddenly had a very clear, very intuitive impression of who he was talking to and what had happened. He did not want to believe it for a moment, though, and instead tried to push it out of his mind.