Chapter One
Her name was Gladys Melbourne and she was crying.
We were sitting together in my office, with the door closed. Outside, the street sounds came through my partially open window. A particularly loud Harley rumbled by so loudly that the fillings in my teeth nearly rattled out.
Gladys ignored the Harley. She was looking away and wiping tears from her high cheekbones.
Women crying in my presence wasn't something new to me, and so I calmly waited it out. Meanwhile, my natural shyness to people in general prevented me from saying the soothing words she no doubt needed to hear.
I waited. She buried her face in both hands. I looked at the ceiling and sat back in the chair, and silently wished I could find it within me to say something, anything.
She continued crying.
Outside, a street person yelled something. I thought I recognized the voice. I knew most of the street people. When I'm feeling generous, especially when work is steady, I usually gave abundantly to the local homeless.
A bird squawked outside my window. I was sure it was a crow, although it could have been a raven. I wasn't sure which was which, although both struck upon some primal fear within me. Perhaps in a past life I had my eyes pecked out by such a bird. A black, soulless, pitiless bird.
Gladys's shoulders quaked. A tissue appeared in her hands. She used it to dab her eyes. She looked up at me and I promptly looked away.
Her breathing was harsh and ragged. She was still not ready to speak.
On my desk was a closed laptop, a clear plastic cup of half-finished iced coffee, a pen, my car keys and my cell phone. Next to the laptop was a picture of my dead wife and son. As I looked at them, I smelled again their burning flesh. I would never, ever forget the smell, or the image of their blackened bodies. I kept the pictures up on my desk to remind myself that they were so much more than blackened lumps of charred flesh.
But it never worked. Always, I saw them burning, burning.
I closed my eyes. The smoke stung them all over again.
As I rubbed my eyes, I finally remembered the forgotten dream I had had just this morning, the haunting memory of which had been plaguing me all morning. And so now the memory of it came blazing back into my consciousness, awakened by the woman's heartbreak and the psychosomatic scent of burning flesh....
I was in a forest with my son, holding his hand. Massive tree trunks punctuated the earth, rising up like magnified hair follicles. A sticky mist lay over the forest and the sound of falling water was nearby. We were heading to the falling water. I sensed our great need for water. For hydration. No, I sensed it for my son's benefit. He needed the water. Desperately. And now I was recklessly crashing through the forest like a bear drunk on fermented elderberries, dangerously towing my son behind me. I looked down at him but his sweet, angelic face was blank, his lips parched and dry and white. The forest opened into a clearing and there before us was a beautiful waterfall, cascading down through the mist as if falling from heaven itself. And when I looked down again, I saw that I was holding my son's dead and blackened hand. The water crashed idyllically just a few feet away. I held his scorched hand and sat in the high grass and wept.
The woman in front of me was breathing normally again. When I came back from the forest, when my wet vision cleared again, I saw that she was watching me curiously. I tried to smile, but smiling never came easy to me.
"Can I help you?" I asked.
"Yes," she said. "I need help."
"I know."
"I'm sorry for crying."
She needed encouragement. She needed to know it was okay to cry in my presence, that everything would be okay. I said nothing. I was never very good at small talk. I was never very good at much, and sometimes nothing was okay. Sometimes things crashed around you, and they kept on crashing for years to come.
"My granddaughter ran away," she said. "Step granddaughter."
I sat back. I thought the woman was going to cry again, but she held it together. Thank God. Instead, she gazed at me steadily, her wet eyes unwavering.
She went on, "I was told you specialize in finding the missing. Missing children, in particular."
I did find them. And sometimes I found them dead. But I did not tell her that. With a runaway, there was still hope.
"When did your granddaughter run away?" I asked quietly, taking out a notepad and a pen from my top drawer.
"A week ago. Six days ago, to be exact."
"Who told you I could help you?"
"Detective Hammer. He said it wouldn't hurt to see you. That you had a knack for this sort of thing."
I did. When it came to finding missing children, one needed to be dogged and relentless. No stone left unturned. Having good instincts helped, too. But the funny thing about instincts was that one never knew when they would kick in. That's where the dogged and relentless part came in.
"How old is your granddaughter?" I asked. Always use the present. Never, ever refer to a child in the past tense.
"Sixteen or seventeen. I'm not really sure. Her birthday is next month."
My son's birthday would have been next month, too, but I didn't say anything about that. There was enough heartache in this room without bringing that up. He would have been thirteen. Instead, he died when he was nine.
At the thought of my son's birthday, my breath caught, and I was briefly back in the forest, sitting in the short grass, holding his charred hand as the nearby water bubbled with life.
Presently, a small breeze made its way through the open window behind me. Los Angeles smelled of exhaust and oil and burned rubber.
"Has she run away before?" I asked.
"No."
"Do you have a photo of her?"
"Yes."
She reached into an oversized purse and pulled out a manila file. "At Detective Hammer's suggestion, I put together a package for you. Everything about her is in here, pictures, friends, her likes and dislikes, favorite places to hang out, anything and everything I could think of. There's even a list of her favorite books. All vampire books."
I took the proffered file, flipped through it. I got to the list of vampire books. She seemed to prefer one author in particular.
"Thanks," I said. "This will help a lot."
Gladys nodded. "I have some more information that might help you, Mr. Spinoza."
I waited.
"Her parents were killed three years ago. She's lived with us off and on ever since."
She waited, as if expecting a reply. None came. She went on awkwardly. "Yes, well, there's something else you should know about her. Something that worries me a great deal."