Linwood Barclay: Stone Rain

Claire threw her arms around her sister, and they were both crying now.

“Soon,” Miranda said. “I’ll try to leave soon.”

Claire sniffed, wiped her nose with her sleeve. “I’ll help you. Whatever you need, anything, I’ll help you. I will always help you, no matter what.”

“I love you,” Miranda said.

“I love you too,” Claire said, and then she slipped out of the room.

Miranda watched from the window as Claire ran down to the road. Don threw his arms around her, opened the passenger door of his old Camaro for her, and then they drove off into the night.

Miranda did not cry long. You’re on your own, she told herself. Start getting used to it.

Back at the office, I banged out the stun gun story after first placing a couple of calls, one to the chair of the police commission to see what her reaction was to officers meeting with a guy who was selling stun guns when such weapons were not approved for use.

“Go on the Net and read up on these things,” she advised.

A number of stories came out of Florida. A disabled man in line at a theme park, disgruntled because he’s had to wait so long, gets zapped with a stun gun by a security guard. A twelve-year-old girl, skipping school, is located by authorities hanging out at a swimming pool, smoking. When she tries to run away, she’s stun-gunned. A father who gets hold of one illegally uses it to keep his three kids in line. An off-duty cop pulls out his stun gun and shoots a buddy who’d just beat him at poker.

Just for a moment, I imagined the advantages a stun gun might offer an exasperated parent. And I recalled a comment Sarah once made, upon hearing a radio newscaster say, “Police do not understand why the mother of three small children snapped and wiped out her entire family.” She said, “Well, there’s your answer. She’s the mother of three small children.”

So I threw a bit of stuff from the Net into the story, put a “-30-” on the end, and sent it on to the cityside basket with a note that there were photos with it. I felt someone behind me, but I was sure this time that it was not Dick Colby. Especially when a pair of hands fell softly onto my shoulders.

“I tried to call you,” Sarah said.

“I must have been in a bad zone,” I said.

“Bullshit,” she whispered. “I’m sorry about this morning.”

I didn’t say anything.

“I’m still finding this hard, being the person who you most often have to report to.”

“It’s fine, don’t worry about it.”

“Listen, if I get the foreign editor thing, we won’t have these kinds of problems, unless you get posted to Beijing or Baghdad or something.”

“If you could get me sent there now, maybe it wouldn’t be as urgent to become the foreign editor.”

I felt her hands lightly squeeze my neck. “Don’t think I haven’t thought of it.”

I waited a moment, and then said, “There’s something I want to ask you.”

Sarah’s hands stopped moving. I could sense her wariness. “What?”

“Can you name two German political parties?”

Her fingers tensed. “Okay, hang on. There’s a couple that sound very much alike. There’s the Christian Democratic Union, and the Social Democratic Party.”

“Correct. Now, a bonus question. Can you name a third German political party?”

Sarah was hunting in some inner recess of her brain. “Well, there’s the Green Party, right?”

“That’s correct. You’ve won what’s behind Zipper Number One.” I reached up and touched one of her hands. Sarah laced her fingers into mine.

“We okay?” she asked. I nodded. Then, “Did you see Trixie?”

“Yeah. She had a problem I couldn’t help her with.”

“What was it?”

“I can tell you all about it later, but I can say that it involved a violation of journalistic ethics. I think she was pissed.”

“So she didn’t ask you to run away with her?”

“I suspect she was working up to it, but when I turned her down on the other thing, I think she abandoned the idea.”

Sarah had things to do. I was pretty much done for the day, but there were some things niggling at me that I wanted to look into before I left the building.

I knew I couldn’t do what Trixie’d asked of me, to try to scare another reporter off his story, but I was feeling uncomfortable with the way we’d left things. Trixie, who’d never worked in journalism and probably didn’t fully understand how impossible her request was, had left our meeting feeling betrayed. She’d thought we were friends, and no doubt believed I’d let her down.

It’s not that I was unsympathetic. I could understand why Trixie wouldn’t want any publicity for her business. She was probably getting all she needed now. Word of mouth, as they say, is everything. When you’re the best dominatrix in the burbs, your reputation gets out there. You hardly need your picture in the local paper telling the world how you make your living.

But Trixie’s concerns about her picture running in the paper seemed to go beyond how it might disrupt her livelihood. She seemed terrified by the repercussions of Martin Benson running, as Trixie called it, her “mug shot” in the Suburban.

Was Trixie on the run from the authorities? Had she been on some episode of America’s Most Wanted that I’d missed? And what was to account for her skittishness when that biker came into the Starbucks?

I typed “Trixie Snelling” on the Google page. The only thing that came back was a reference to a woman by that name who, at the beginning of the last century, married a man who wrote a cantata for a church in England. I didn’t think that was my Trixie. Next I tried a Yahoo “people search” and came up with a big fat zero. I tried Google and Yahoo again, this time with the name “Trixie Snell,” who, I learned, was a character in the 1933 movie called Sensation Hunters that featured a young Walter Brennan as a stuttering waiter. But I didn’t learn anything more useful than that.

I went into the paper’s library and checked our own database. It would find any story the Metropolitan, or any other major North American newspaper, had run with the name Trixie Snelling. I figured, if police were looking for her, her name could have been mentioned at some point.

But I came up with nothing. Which seemed, on the face of it, to be a good thing.

I returned to the newsroom, found an Oakwood phone book on the shelf where we kept directories from all over the country-even though more and more of them were online-and looked up Snelling. Nothing. I guess all that proved was that Trixie had an unlisted number.

Of course, if the police were looking for Trixie, and given her line of work it was not beyond the realm of possibility that they might be, chances were pretty good she was not using the same name today that she was using when she’d originally come to their attention.

If she’d come to their attention at all.

Maybe she’d come to the attention of someone other than the police.

Whoever might be looking for her was going to have a hard time finding her, at least if they looked for her under the name I’d always known her by. Because, using the most conventional resources at my disposal, it appeared that no one by the name of Trixie Snelling had ever actually existed.

I was home before Sarah and started throwing something together for dinner. I concluded, from the presence of the backpack full of books by the front door and the absence of Paul, that he had preceded me home and gone back out again. Clearly, not to the library to work on an assignment.

I had some pasta on the counter and was looking in the fridge for a half-full jar of spaghetti sauce when Angie came into the kitchen. I felt the same thing I always felt when I saw her-that I had the most beautiful daughter in the world, and I’d be a fool to think I could take any of the credit.