I’ll admit, I did a half-hearted pursuit of The Lovely Joanna when I left Tony’s, but I’d been too distracted to see what kind of car she drove, other than it was large and black—and black SUVs and crossovers are thick on the ground in West Texas. Besides, it had been too long since she left. She could be all the way across town by now.
I drove aimlessly for a few minutes, debating whether I should go back to Tony’s and have a discussion, or do what I said I was going to do—meet Viv.
I checked the time. Viv’s meeting at the Perez house had started about ten minutes ago, so I was going to be walking into the middle of things. And I might not even be able to find their house—I hadn’t gotten an address.
But I needed something to occupy my brain, so I didn’t work myself up into a hysterical fit and go back to start a fight with Tony. If nothing else, I could try to minimize any damage Viv might be doing in her insensitive zeal.
The house turned out to be very easy to find. There was nothing but dirt for three blocks, filled with heavy equipment and vague (to me) construction stuff: PVC pipes running along the ground, metal boxes that suggested electricity connection, a concrete mixer.
At the edge of the last block stood one lone white frame house with a shaded front porch. Two blue metal chairs sat on the porch. Viv’s Cadillac was parked on the street out front.
Viewed from a certain angle, the scene looked like something from a dystopian movie. I imagined the people inside felt they were living in post-apocalyptic times, too.
Before I had a chance to talk myself out of it, I parked and knocked on the front door. Through the screen, I could see Viv, standing with her back to me and talking to someone in the next room.
“Oh, that’s Salem, my assistant!” Viv hurried to let me in. “Good, you were able to make it after all!”
“Your assistant, huh?” I whispered as she opened the door for me.
Viv introduced me to Sid and Helena Perez, Gia Perez’s father and older sister. I must have had “where’s the mother” written on my face, because Sid Perez said, “My wife passed on about fourteen years ago.”
Mr. Perez appeared to be in his mid- to late-fifties, with black hair shot through with grey. His cheeks and around his eyes had the dark brown patches that I thought was an indication of diabetes.
Helena Perez was about my age, so I realized she must have been Gia’s much older sister—older by at least ten years. And her mother had died when Gia was only a baby. So, effectively, we could be talking to the two people who had raised Gia.
They both looked vaguely familiar, but it wasn’t until I spotted the school picture of the teenage girl in the frame on the shelf that everything fell into to place.
I’d seen that girl. I’d seen her family. They were on the news occasionally, asking for help finding their daughter and sister, and complaining that the police weren’t doing enough to find her.
“Everyone else gets big searches and crime tip lines. My sister gets nothing! She gets discarded like she’s nothing!”
Helena had stood in front of their house, holding that same picture. Then a woman detective had been interviewed, who had assured the public that they were doing everything they could to find Gia, and they would continue to pursue every lead until she was found.
“What do you say to the criticism that the police department isn’t doing enough to find her?”
“I say I understand their concern—they want their loved one home. We do, too. And I’m glad Gia’s family is keeping this in front of the public eye, because we need the public to help find her. The way we operate is to investigate leads. Some of you watching this program may have seen something that you do not even realize may be important. It could be an unusual vehicle that was in the neighborhood—even if it was a few days prior to the date Gia went missing.” She gave the number for the tip line.
I remembered because I’d talked about it at work the next day. I’d wondered, too, why I had seen so little about it. A fifteen-year-old girl going missing? Why weren’t there Amber alerts and big search parties scouring the area?
“I heard she’s a runaway. It’s not like she was kidnapped off the street or something,” Flo had said.
“Yeah, the family doesn’t want to talk about that part,” Tammy said.
And at the time, that explanation had made sense to me. Yes, the girl was too young to be on her own, but also old enough to get pretty far away, if she wanted to. It was probably hard to find someone who didn’t want to be found.
But she’d been gone a year now. And she was still only sixteen. Even if she had left of her own volition, it had to be torture to not know if she was okay.
Viv had already made significant progress with Sid—when I arrived on the scene, I’d interrupted him bringing out boxes of photographs from a cabinet in their small dining room.
Helena was a different story. “Like I said, how can we know you’re going to find Gia? How do I know you’re not just looking for something sensational to sell your show?”
I prepared myself for “spin” from Viv, but to my surprise, she was completely honest. “You don’t know. I mean, you don’t know that we’ll find her, because we don’t know that we’ll find her. How could we know that?”
Helena looked at me. I shrugged. It was true.
“What I can say is that we haven’t failed yet to solve a case. And you’ll never meet anyone more stubborn that I am.”
Sid looked at Helena, who had her arms crossed over her chest, her mouth set. “Well, I guess we’ll see about that,” was all he said.
He hefted one box onto the dining room table with a groan and opened it. He pulled out a brown envelope. “These are the flyers we placed when she first went missing. And these are some more that we did later.”
He laid everything out on the table while Viv chattered on about interviewing Gia’s friends, taking notes about who had seen her last and what they’d done to locate her so far.
I tried to listen to the conversation and take mental notes, I really did. But the image of Tony smiling at The Lovely Joanna was front and center in my mind. I made a conscious effort to point my face in the general direction of whoever was speaking at the moment, and nod slightly as if I were taking it all in, but my head was not in the game.
“We’ll need to speak to all of these people, and they’ll need to sign waivers if they want to be on the podcast.”
“We’re not signing anything,” Helena said. “How much is he paying you? Polk?”
“That tightwad isn’t paying us a dime,” Viv said. “We don’t sell advertising, either. We don’t charge to pursue a case. We are privately funded by a foundation whose only objective is truth and justice.”
“Yeah, right,” Helena said. “I’ll be doing a background check on you.”
Viv shrugged as if she had no skeletons in her closet, but I figured this meant the end of our search for Gia Perez. The “foundation” was just Viv and the buckets of money she’d inherited from the final two of her five deceased husbands.
In an attempt to redirect the conversation, I reached for a stack of photographs that Sid had placed on the table beside the brown envelopes. “Is this Gia?” I asked. I hadn’t even really looked at the picture, but Mr. Perez was beginning to look pained, and I wanted to steer the conversation in a more productive direction.
“No, that’s Helena and Janet, her cousin,” Sid said, coming around to look over my shoulder.
“Oh,” I said, then smiled at Helena. “Very pretty.”
Helena wasn’t having my empty flattery. “Those are old pictures.”
“This is Gia,” Sid said.
“Dad, that’s old. She’s, what, nine there? We need up-to-date pictures.”
“I know. I was just going through, looking for good ones. That’s her.” He pointed as I sifted through the photos.
I pulled out the picture and flipped it around so Viv could see. “Look at this cutie,” I said, hoping to remind her that there was a young girl here who was the point of this whole situation.
“Adorable,” Viv said. “I’ll send the waivers to your lawyer to review, if that’ll make you feel better.”
I sighed and sat beside Sid Perez, and together we flipped through the photos while he pointed out cousins, aunts, friends, telling whose house they were at, what occasion it had been, while Viv and Helena entered into an unspoken contest to see who could be the most determined and impossible to please.
In many of the pictures, I recognized the house where we sat, with the tableau of family and friends during happier times. Helena, frosting a birthday cake. Gia with her hair in enormous rollers and a ridiculous amount of lipstick for a child. Sid in the living room recliner, feet away from where we now sat, listening as a cousin or uncle stood before him and told an apparently fascinating story, judging by the rapt attention of everyone else in the room.
“You have a big family,” I noted.
“Eight siblings on my side, ten on my wife’s. And they all live within fifty miles of here, for the most part.
That was a lot of aunts, uncles, and cousins. “I’ll bet they’re all anxious to find Gia,” I said.
He nodded and swallowed. “Yes. Everyone wants her home, safe.”
Again, I wondered what Viv and I could do. There must be 50 or 60 grown people in these pictures. Most of them had probably been looking for Gia. If they couldn’t find her in a year, how could we, possibly?
Mr. Perez seemed to have lapsed into a trance, looking through the pictures and telling me the names of everyone there, how they were related, if they had any secondary relationship to Gia. “She’s the same age as Gia, but she went to a different school.” Or, “They did first communion together.”
There was no way I would remember it all, but I nodded and commented appropriately, anyway. He slid one picture by me, and I almost let it pass by, until a familiar face caught my eye.
Everything in me froze.
Heart hammering, I watched as if from a distance as my hand picked up the picture. “Who is this? I mean, when was this?”
“That’s Gia’s ninth birthday party. Here at the house.”
I nodded and smiled. Too much, a voice in my head said. You’re nodding too much. Smiling too much.
It took everything in me not to stare. The focus of the picture was Gia, grinning ear to ear with one of her birthday presents, but my focus was on one of the many faces around the room, watching her.
I knew that face.
“Oh, here’s a better one. This was when she turned fifteen. We didn’t have – ” Sid cleared his throat. “Of course, we didn’t get to celebrate her sixteenth birthday with her.”
I pretended to study the more recent picture, but my head spun.
It wasn’t him. Surely it wasn’t him. It just looked like him, but of course it wasn’t him.
It was him.
I hadn’t seen him in over 20 years, not except in the occasional picture when Susan, his mother, visited her best friend—my mother.
Shawn. The man who’d abused me as a child.
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