Jonathan Kellerman - Gone

“Did the Dowd kids have any musical experience?”

“Brad played a little guitar. Nothing fancy, a few chords. Billy held a guitar like a spaz, Amelia was always adjusting it. If he could carry a tune, I never heard it. Nora could but she couldn’t harmonize and she was always bored and spaced out. She’d never shown interest in anything other than drama club and clothes.”

“Fashion plate,” I said.

“Not really, she always dressed wrong. Way too fancy. Even at Essex things had gotten casual.”

“Was joining drama club her idea or her mother’s?”

“Hers, I always thought. She always pushed for the big parts, never got them because she couldn’t memorize lines very well. A lot of people thought she was semi-retarded. Everyone knew Billy was, I guess the assumption was it was hereditary.”

“What about Brad?”

“Smarter than those two. Anyone would be.”

“How’d he adjust socially?”

“Girls liked him,” she said. “He was cute. But he wasn’t what I’d call popular. Maybe because he wasn’t around much.”

“Why not?”

“One year he’d be there, the next year he’d be gone- at some out-of-state school- because of trouble he’d gotten into. But Mrs. D sure wanted him around the year she tried to start the band.”

“How far did you guys get?” I said.

“Halfway to nowhere. When I showed up at their house for the first rehearsal and saw what utter bullshit it was going to be, I went home and told Mother, ‘Forget it.’ She said, ‘We Ryans don’t have quitting in our blood,’ and notified me that if I wanted my own car I’d better buckle down.”

She slapped one palm against the table, then the other, sounded a slow, ponderous four-four beat. “That was Nora’s idea of playing drums. Billy was supposed to play rhythm guitar and he’d managed to learn two screechy chords- C and G, I think. But it sounded like a pig being strangled.” She screwed up her lips. “As if that wasn’t bad enough, we tried to sing. Pathetic. That didn’t stop Crazy Amelia.”

“From what?”

“Dragging us to have promo pictures taken. She found a discount photographer on Highland near Sunset, some old fart who slurred his words and had forty-year-old black-and-whites of people you’ve never heard of taped to the walls of his studio.” She wrinkled her nose. “The place smelled like cat pee. The costumes smelled like an old-age home. I’m talking boxes of stuff, all jumbled together. We had to pose as Indians, pilgrims, hippies, you name it. Everyone in a different color. ‘Varied garb and hue,’ as Mrs. D phrased it, was going to be our ‘signature.’ ”

“It worked for the Village People.”

“So where are they ? Once the photos were done, it was agent-time, one blow-dried sleaze after another. Amelia flirted with every one of them. I’m talking hip rub, deep cleavage flash, calculated eyelash flutter, the works. She had this blond bombshell thing going on, played it to the hilt.”

“That doesn’t sound like someone a conservative DAR lady would trust,” I said.

“Funny about that, isn’t it? I guess showbiz trumps everything. You ask people in this city if they’d give up a vital organ for a walk-on in a movie, I guarantee you most would ask where’s the scalpel. Half the people in my business have had some connection to the industry. Come over to the office and you’ll see faces you vaguely recognize but can’t place. I’m talking the girl who served coffee to the banker lady on The Beverly Hillbillies during the second act of one episode. She’s still got that SAG card in her purse, works it into every conversation. The smart ones learn that even if they make it, it lasts as long as warm milk. The others are like Amelia Dowd.”

“Living in fantasyland.”

“Twenty-four seven. Anyway, that’s the history of the Kolor Krew.”

“The project never got anywhere.”

“We must’ve done two dozen auditions. None lasted longer than fifteen seconds because the moment the agents heard us sing they winced. We knew we were horrendous. But Amelia would be standing there, snapping her fingers, beaming. When I got home I’d light up a doobie, call my friends, get all hysterical-giggly.”

“How’d the Dowd kids handle it?”

“Billy was an obedient robot, might as well have come with wheels. Nora spaced out, just like always, did the whole Mona Lisa thing. Brad was always hiding a smirk. He’s the one who finally spoke up. Not disrespectfully, more like, ‘C’mon, we’re not getting anywhere.’ Amelia ignored him. I mean, literally, just pretended he wasn’t there and went on talking. Which was a switch.”

“In what way?”

“Generally she paid plenty of attention to Brad.”

“Abusive?”

“Not exactly.”

“Special attention?”

Elise Van Syoc tried to impale a lime wedge on her stirrer. “This could be the important part of my book.”

“She seduced him?”

“Or maybe it was the other way around. I can’t even say for sure something happened. But the way those two related wasn’t exactly mother-son. I never noticed until I started spending all that time with them. It took a while to notice Mrs. D being odder than usual.”

“What’d she do?”

“She was no great shakes as a mom. With Billy and Nora she was distant. But with Brad- maybe she figured, technically, because Brad was an adopted cousin and not her son…still, he was fourteen and she was a grown woman.”

“Hip rubs and cleavage?” I said.

“Some of that but usually it was more subtle. Private smiles, little looks that she’d sneak in when she thought no one was watching. Occasionally I’d catch her brushing his arm and he’d touch her back. Nora and Billy didn’t seem to notice. I wondered if I was imagining it, felt like an alien dropped on Planet Strange.”

“How did Brad react?”

“Sometimes he’d pretend not to be aware of what she was doing. Other times he’d clearly be liking it. There was definitely some kind of chemistry going on. How far it went, I don’t know. I never told anyone, not even my friends. Who thought in those terms, back then?”

“But you were grossed out.”

“I was,” she said, “but when Amelia’s own kids didn’t seem bothered I started to wonder if I was seeing things.” Small smile. “Being fortified by puffs of an illegal herb fed my doubts.”

“Amelia was seductive,” I said, “but she sent Brad out of state.”

“Several times. Maybe she wanted him out of the picture so she could deal with her own impulses? Would you call that a psychological insight?”

“Sure would.”

She smiled. “Maybe I should be an analyst.”

“How many times is ‘several’?”

“I’d say three, four.”

“Because he’d gotten into trouble.”

“Those were the rumors.”

“Did the rumors get specific?” I said.

“Your basic juvenile deliquency,” she said. “Do they use that term anymore?”

“I do. What’re we talking about, theft, truancy?”

“All that.” She frowned. “Also, some people in the neighborhood had pets that went missing and there was talk Brad was involved.”

“Why?”

“I honestly don’t know, that’s just what was said. That’s important, isn’t it? Cruelty to animals is related to being a serial killer, right?”

“It’s a risk factor,” I said. “When was the last time Brad was sent away?”

“After Amelia gave up on the band. Not right after, maybe a month, five weeks.”

“What convinced her to quit?”

“Who knows? One day she just called up Mother and announced that there was no future for popular music. As if she’d made the choice. What a loon.”