Emily St. John Mandel - The Lola Quartet

"Go ahead," Gavin said. Jack swallowed three without water. " Sorry about your back."

"Yeah, well. The pills help."

"I need to know," Gavin said. "I really need to know where she is. I know you and her were friendly, I mean, we were all friendly, I just thought maybe you'd kept in touch. I wondered if you ever saw her again after that concert."

Jack leaned back against the sofa cushions. He stared up at the ceiling for a moment before he spoke. "You should ask Daniel about all this, Gavin."

"Daniel as in Daniel Smith? The bass player who turned into an asshole cop?"

"He helps me out sometimes," Jack said. "You shouldn't call him that. He's nice." His eyes were drifting shut.

"Jack! Jack, wake up."

Jack's eyelids fluttered open.

"Sorry," he said. "Nodding off when there's company. Way to be a bad host, right?"

"It's okay," Gavin said. "When was the last time you saw Anna?"

"I dunno. While back." Jack's eyes were closing again. "Few years ago."

"How about Chloe?"

" Sweet kid," Jack murmured.

"Jack," Gavin said, but it was hopeless. Jack was snoring softly. Gavin stood and checked his clothing for cockroaches. Out in the darkened hallway the girl was standing where he'd left her. Her eyes were closed and she was leaning against the wall, her forehead pressed to the edge of the door frame. He remembered a fairy tale he'd read as a kid, or perhaps Eilo had read it to him— a story about a castle in the middle of a labyrinth of thorns, everyone sleeping for a century inside. There was something eerie about the drugged silence of the house, a spellbound stillness that made him want to run. Gavin held his cell phone near the girl's face and took her picture. She startled awake at the digital click of the shutter and stared at him, blinking. He closed the door, went back to his car and drove as quickly as possible away from there.

In his room at Eilo's house he sat on his mattress with the notebook on his lap. He wrote Has met Chloe and Pills under Jack's name.

Gavin put the notebook down and went to the window. The squalor of the house and the tent in the backyard weren't things he wanted to think about. He'd always liked Sasha and Daniel but Jack was the one he'd felt closest to. Gavin wore fedoras and read noir and watched Chinatown over and over again and Jack understood, Jack was in the wrong decade too, Jack was going to be a jazzman. There had been long stoned hours in Jack's basement after school, listening to jazz and talking about how things used to be, how things were going to be, talking about anywhere other than the stultifying present.

Gavin's room was at the back of the house, facing the freeway. On the far side of the yard pylons rose up with dark shadows beneath them, cars passing in a blur of light high above. How could he have let Jack slip away so completely? The traffic was no more than two hundred yards from him, but with the windows closed the room was silent. There were evenings when he didn't understand the world at all.

"Y o u ' r e c e r t a i n you don't know where they went?" he asked Eilo that night. " Chloe and that woman she was with?" They were eating Thai food out of takeout containers.

"I drove by the house two days after I took the photograph," Eilo said. "They were gone already."

"No forwarding address?"

" These people don't always leave forwarding addresses," Eilo said. "They used to, before the economy tanked, but sometimes now they just disappear."

"I've been thinking about trying to find them," Gavin said.

"Good luck," Eilo said. "I wouldn't know where to begin. Have you thought of hiring a private investigator?"

I want to be the private investigator. He couldn't bring himself to tell her this. "I'll look into it," he said.

In t h e morning Gavin returned to the police station.

"I'm surprised to see you again," Daniel said. He had kept Gavin waiting for an hour. His fingers tapped almost silently on the side of his coffee cup, a nervous flicker. "Aren't you hot? Wearing a fedora in this heat?"

"It's a summer fedora," Gavin said.

"And here some of us make do with baseball caps."

"I went to visit our multitalented piano and saxophone player yesterday," Gavin said. "You remember Jack? He speaks highly of you."

Daniel sighed and his face softened a little. "Sure," he said, "I try to keep an eye on him. He's been arrested a couple times."

"I asked him about Anna," Gavin said, "and he said to ask you."

"Me? Why would I know anything about your high school girlfriend?"

"Well, she hung out with us at school, with the quartet. We were all friends."

"I don't know that you were much of a friend to her. Was there some reason you wanted to see me, Gavin, or is this strictly a social call?"

"What do you mean by that comment? How was I not a friend to her?"

"I'm pretty busy," Daniel said. "You know, doing police work and stuff. I'm going to get back to work now."

"Okay, look, the main reason I came is, Jack's staying in this house on Mortimer Street—"

"Eleven ninety-six Mortimer," Daniel said. "I've been there. Lovely home, isn't it?"

"A girl answered the door when I knocked. No older than thirteen or fourteen, maybe twelve, stoned out of her mind. Jack said she was his roommate's sister or her stepsister or something, just staying there for a while. I came to see you because I thought maybe she was a runaway."

Daniel took a slow sip of coffee. "I'm getting the strangest sense of déjà vu," he said. "Have you talked to a shrink about these phantom girls you've been seeing?"

"I knew you wouldn't believe me. I took her picture." He passed Daniel his cell phone and Daniel studied the image for a moment. The phone looked very small in his hand. "Her name's Grace."

"Wait here," Daniel said. He pushed himself up on the edge of the table and left the room. Gavin waited alone in the interrogation room for twenty minutes, listening to the hum of central air conditioning and staring at the fine cracks in the paint on the opposite wall until Daniel returned.

"Thanks for the photo," Daniel said. He was awkward now, looking away. "The tip might be useful to us."

"A runaway's got to be worth a couple of questions, right?"

"Gavin—"

"Two minutes of your time."

"Fine," Daniel said. "A couple of questions."

"Do you know what happened to Anna after high school?"

"She left town after the eleventh grade and went to live with her aunt in Georgia. I thought everyone knew that."

"You know what's funny? She was my girlfriend for two years and we spent half our waking hours together, and she never so much as mentioned that aunt in Georgia."

"I've really got an awful lot of work to do," Daniel said. He opened the door.

"You said two questions."

"Thanks for stopping by, Gavin."

"My cell phone?"

"See, now there's your second question. It's at the front desk."

Gavin walked back out into the heat with his fedora in his hands.

Jack was good but not good enough for Juilliard. He auditioned after high school and didn't get in, but what he found strange— and in retrospect this should have been a warning sign, he thought— was that he was almost relieved. In the September after high school he packed up his car and drove north to South Carolina. His roommate at Holloway College was good enough for Juilliard, but he saw New York City as an inevitability and wanted to stay in the South a little longer. Jack's roommate was from the suburbs of Miami. He was going to play every major city on the continent no matter where he studied, because he actually was that impressive. Jack liked him, though he was prone to grandeur in his drunker moments.