Ginny took me back to my apartment to get me sobered up. I didn't have a car, and she'd left hers at my apartment, so we had to walk.

I live in one of those run-down apartment houses on the edge of the old part of town. The place was just far enough from the center to have been named La Cienga Apartments, but still close enough to be in danger of being torn down for urban renewal every time the city fathers felt like they had to make some kind of choice between "modern" and "quaint." In Puerta del Sol those words are really two different names for "profitable"-the city is growing, and people like to come for a visit, so it's just a question of whether money is going to be made from redeveloping real estate or from tourism.

Right then I didn't give a damn. They could blow up the place or sell tickets to my bedroom for all I cared. I was in one of those horrible "between" places any drunk can tell you about-too drunk to cope, not drunk enough to be anesthetized. I was half blind with dread and my mind kept repeating, Alathea Alathea, Alathea. I wanted Ginny to talk to me, tell me what was going on. But she just hung on to my arm and dragged me along and didn't say a thing.

The walk must've done me some good. She didn't have to carry me upstairs.

At least I was spared the embarrassment of a messy apartment. I'm tidy enough when I'm sober, and I hardly ever visit my apartment when I'm drinking. The place smelled musty and it needed dusting, but it wasn't a mess.

I was a mess. Getting sober is something I usually do for myself. It's not a pretty business, and you don't like having people watch. With Ginny there I kept noticing things that didn't usually bother me-like the fact that I couldn't put one foot in front of the other. Or that I stank. How many days had I been wearing these clothes? I had no idea. I needed a drink, and I didn't like having Ginny see it.

She didn't give me any choice. Before I could get past Alathea's name to try do something for myself, she had me undressed, God knows how. When you're six foot five and two hundred forty pounds, other people usually can't just take your clothes away from you. Then she pried me into the shower. She slammed on the water and left me there as if she wanted me to drown. But after a while she came back, scrubbed me, got me out of the shower and into an old bathrobe. Then she began pouring coffee down me.

That lasted for a while. Then the coffee and the other stuff started to do a little dance inside me, and I threw up for a while. After that I felt better. I was about to tell Ginny about Alathea when I fell asleep.

It was dawn before she woke me up and began treating me again. Orange juice, coffee, toast, vitamin pills of all kinds. She's a vitamin freak-carries whole bottles in her purse, along with her .357. She even got me shaved. But it was close to nine before I was in any condition to go anywhere. All that time she didn't say a word. And I didn't ask any questions. I was too sick.

I was going to be sicker. Already I wanted a drink so bad it brought tears to my eyes-and this was just the beginning. Shame is an awkward thing to live with, and having Ginny there, having her see me like this, made me ashamed on top of all the other remorse and responsibility. And there aren't many cures for it. Sometimes work is one of them. But the only one you can actually count on is alcohol.

But Alathea was missing. When Ginny asked me if I was ready to go, I didn't answer right away. I went over to the dresser in the bedroom half of the apartment and got out my gun, a .45 automatic, which is about the only gun I've ever found that doesn't feel like a toy in my hand. I checked it over, made sure it was loaded, then strapped on the shoulder holster and put the .45 under my left arm. Then I looked Ginny in the eye as steadily as I could and said, "Alathea is my niece. My brother's daughter. She's thirteen years old, and beside the fact she's one of those cute kids that makes you happy just to look at her, she also happens to like me. For some reason, Lona has never told her exactly what happened to her father. She thinks I'm just her nice old Uncle Brew. And besides that, she's solid as a rock. Half the time these days when things get too much for Lona, Alathea carries her-which is one hell of a job for a thirteen-year-old-and she does it beautifully. It doesn't matter whether I'm ready or not. Let's go."

For a second there, Ginny almost smiled. The lines of worry around her eyes faded. She seemed to shake herself, and then it was as if she hadn't been up most of the night taking care of me. She didn't look tired anymore. "That's more like it," she said, mostly to herself. She handed me a jacket, and a minute later I was walking down the stairs.

Talk is cheap. I wasn't ready, and it showed. I almost didn't make it down the stairs. My knees felt like mush, and the stairwell kept trying to stand on edge. There was a little voice in the back on my head saying, You need a drink you need a drink you need a drink. It wasn't easy to ignore, even with Ginny watching me.

But I didn't figure out why she was acting so much like she was worried about me until she took my arm to steer me toward her car. Of course she knew all about the connection between me and Alathea. Now she thought something serious had happened to my niece. She was afraid of what knowing that would do to me. She knew killing Richard had pushed me right to the edge. She was afraid whatever happened to Alathea would push me over.

I wanted to ask her about that. Ask, hell! I wanted to drag it out of her. But I put it off. Just climbing into her Olds left me weak as an old man. And I'd forgotten my sunglasses. Already the sun was beating down on the streets like bricks out of the dry thin blue sky. Made my eyes hurt. If it hadn't been for the tinted glass in the Olds, I might not have survived as far as Lena's house.

Lona Axbrewder, my brother's widow. I wasn't exactly her favorite person. There was one question I had to ask. When we parked in front of the house, I stayed where I was for a minute, trying not to hold my head in my hands. Then I said, "Why did she call you? You know how she feels about me."

"Ask her yourself," Ginny said. "I'm not a mind reader." But her voice was stiff, and I'd heard that stiffness before. It meant she knew the answer and didn't want to tell me.

"Maybe," I muttered to myself. Maybe I would ask her. I was in no condition to know what I was going to do. I had enough problems just getting the door open and climbing out onto the sidewalk.

Lona lives down on Mission Street in a neighborhood that's only about two levels up from my apartment building. None of the houses for blocks in all directions are new, none of them look big enough to have more than two bedrooms, and none of them are out of spitting range from the house next door. But it's a nice enough neighborhood, and people don't spit. Lona's house is adobe, but that squat brown shape is softened by rose trellises that frame the top and sides of the front door. She must've watered those roses twice a day to make them look so nice.

I spent a minute standing on the sidewalk, looking around. Trees along the walk cut out a lot of the sun, and after the glare of the roads and traffic it was restful in a way to just stand there, looking. The whole place was restful-shade, trees, grass, tidy brown houses. It looked like the kind of place where nothing ever happens. I didn't want to move-didn't want to find out any different.

But Ginny took my arm again, and before I knew it we were standing in front of the door, and the door was opening, and Lona was telling us to come in. Then the door shut behind us, and my retreat was cut off. I felt like I'd made a fatal mistake. The voice in my head started to shout, You need a drink! It sounded desperate.

Dumbly, I let Ginny steer me. We followed Lona into the living room and sat down.

I couldn't see very clearly. The room was too dark-she had all the shades pulled down and didn't turn on any lights. That made the air dim and cool and comforting, which was nice. It almost seemed like she did it for my benefit, as if she had any reason in the world to give a good goddamn how I felt. But it didn't let me read her face. I wanted to know how hard she was taking this thing. That would tell me a lot.

The outlines I could do from memory. She was small and vague and somehow brittle, like most wives of cops I've ever met. They don't start out that way. It just happens to them because they're afraid of losing their husbands, and they can't share the danger-or even the strain-and they can't feel good about it because nobody loves a cop. It's like living with a man who has some kind of terminal disease. She had medium-length brown hair and a habit of pushing both hands through it, pulling it away from her temples as if she were trying to drag some horrible grimace off her face. Even before she lost her husband she used to make me nervous. Now she could've made me scream with no trouble at all.

She sat Ginny and me down on the Naugahyde couch across from the TV, then asked us if we wanted any coffee. Ginny said, "Yes, thanks," before I could even think about the question. Lona pushed her hands through her hair, then left us alone.

I suppose I should have been thinking about Alathea- as a way of fighting off the need-but I was too strung out to have any control over my thoughts. I was sitting exactly where I used to sit when Richard and I watched football together. I knew from memory that there was a picture of him sitting on top of the TV, staring at me with that lopsided grin of his. Richard Axbrewder, my younger brother. Rick and Mick. It was when he died that people stopped calling me Mick.

Died, hell. I killed him, and half the city knows it. The papers didn't exactly play it down. One of them had it right there on the front page,

PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR KILLS COP. BROTHER SHOOTS BROTHER. There's no way I can pretend I didn't do it.

It happened five years ago, when Ginny and I were partners. I remember everything about it. I was sitting at a table by the window in Norman's, which is one of those downtown bars that caters to the business-man-getting-off-work trade. It just happened to be right across from the First Puerta del Sol National Bank. I was having a few drinks-exactly six, according to the testimony of the barkeep-and trying to make up my mind about whether I wanted or had the nerve to ask Ginny to marry me. Not an unpleasant kind of indecision, and I had enough stuff in me to glow while I thought about it. It was almost dark outside, but the streetlights hadn't come on yet so I couldn't see very well, and the air was dim and relaxed.

Then I heard gunfire. I snapped a look out the window and saw a man running away from the bank in my direction. He was carrying a bag of some kind and waving a gun over his shoulder, shooting at something behind him. There was a cop chasing him. I jumped to the conclusion he'd just robbed the bank.

I was out the door and on the sidewalk in no time. I had the .45 in my hand. I shouted at the man to stop. When he pointed his gun at me, I fired a couple of times. He kept running, but the cop chasing him went down.

It turned out the man was a purse snatcher. Richard had already been chasing him for three blocks. If the snatcher hadn't had a gun, I would've been indicted for manslaughter. As it was, the commission read the results of my blood-alcohol test, charged me with "negligence," and took away my license. For good.

The cops were not amused. For a while, a bunch of them used to roust me every time we ran across each other. I spent a lot of time in the drunk tank in those days while bruises I couldn't remember getting turned black-and-blue on my ribs and face. Probably that was where I got in the habit of not letting anybody touch me. But after a couple of years they let it ride. Then I got into trouble only when some cop got the bright idea I was working for Ginny without a license. But that's pretty hard to prove, because I was careful and I never got caught doing the kinds of things you're not allowed to do without a license. So far I've been able to get away with it.

So what? So now I don't drink in bars like Norman's anymore. I go down to the old part of town, where they don't care what I look like or smell like as long as my money's green and my Spanish doesn't sound like it came out of a textbook in some Anglo school. When I'm not working on a case for Ginny, I'm drunk. When I am working on a case, I'm sober. She's the one friend I've got, and everybody who remembers Richard hates me. Except Alathea. She doesn't know I shot her father.

Or at least she didn't know. Maybe she was missing because she ran away when she found out the truth-the truth her mother hadn't told her.

I was trembling deep down inside my gut. When Lona brought the coffee, I had to hold the cup with both hands to keep from spilling it. While I drank it down, she stood right in front of me as if she was waiting until I finished to start screaming at me. But she just refilled my cup, then put the pot down where Ginny could reach it, and went to sit in the armchair beside the TV. Her hands she knotted in her lap, as if she were trying to keep them out of trouble.

When she spoke, her face was aimed at me, and her voice was brittle. "Will you take the case?"

"Of course," Ginny said smoothly. Her tone was sympathetic-neutral. Gentle but businesslike. The kind of tone she uses when she doesn't want a client to break down. "But I have to ask you a lot of questions."

"Yes." Lona sounded small and far away. The light was so dim I couldn't even see her lips move-her voice could've come from anywhere in the room. All of a sudden, I knew for a fact it was serious. Lona wouldn't have me sitting in front of her like this if it wasn't serious. She kept the room dark so I couldn't see the need in her face.

The trembling climbed up through my bones. I had to clamp my forearms between my knees to keep from shivering.

"How long has she been gone?" Ginny asked.

"Eight days." Her voice was as brittle as it could get. Brittleness was the only defense she had left. "Last week Tuesday she went to school and didn't come home."

"Did you call the school?"

"Yes. That evening. First I called some of her friends, but they didn't know where she was. They said they hadn't seen her since PE. So then I called the school. She goes to Mountain Junior High. It's just five blocks up the street. They said after fifth period she wasn't in any of her classes. Fifth period was PE. They thought she must've gotten sick and gone home. But she didn't come home. She didn't." Lona was insistent. "I don't have anywhere to go on Tuesdays and I was here all the time."

"I understand," Ginny said. As smooth as Vaseline. "What did you do after you called the school?"

"I waited-I waited a while." Her hands were starting to twist in her lap. One of them went up to push at her hair, but she jerked it back down again. "As long as I could stand. Then I called the police."

"You called the police." Ginny was good at neutral sympathy. I wasn't. Alcohol is a jealous comforter, and it doesn't like to let go. Right then my nerves had all the abstinence they could stand, and now they were going to get even with me. I was going into withdrawal. I was shaking all over. My head was shivering on my neck-my brains rattled in my skull. The need was using a vise to squeeze sweat out of my forehead. My jaws hurt because I was grinding my teeth, but I had to do something to keep from groaning out loud. I had to have something to hang on to, and the only thing in reach was Lona's voice.

"Yes," she said, in the same small brittle voice. "I talked to Missing Persons. Sergeant Encino. I've talked to him half a dozen times, but he doesn't help. He says he wants to help, but he doesn't. The first"-for a second her voice shuddered as if she was about to lose control, but she didn't-"the first time I talked to him, he said she'd probably be home in a couple of days. He said kids are like that, they run away, and then they come home. He gets cases like that all the time. He said-he said it's department policy that they don't even start looking for runaways for three days. It's about impossible to find runaways because most of them are trying hard not to be found, and anyway most of them come home in three days. That's what he said.

"If I wanted the police to start looking for her right away, he said, I'd have to go down and swear out a complaint against her. File charges against her! He advised me not to do that. If I did, he said, the police would start looking for her right away, but if they found her they wouldn't bring her home. It's not against the law to run away and they couldn't bring her home against her will. They'd put her in some kind of juvenile shelter-he called it a JINS facility-where she could run away again whenever she wanted, and I wouldn't get her back until a judge in juvenile court ruled on my complaint.

"I said, What if she hasn't run away? What if something happened to her? But he just told me to try not to worry, and to call him when she came home."

She dug out a handkerchief and blew her nose. Then she went on. "So I did what he told me. I tried to wait. He's a police officer, isn't he? He works for Missing Persons, doesn't he? He knows what he's talking about, doesn't he?" She was talking to Ginny now, asking Ginny to tell her she'd done the right thing.

But after a minute, she aimed herself at me again. "I tried to wait. But I couldn't. I called him again Wednesday, and Wednesday night. I asked him to check the hospitals. Maybe she was hurt. Maybe she was in a hospital, and the doctors couldn't call me because they didn't know who she was and she was hurt too bad to tell them.

"He told me I didn't have to worry about that. He said the hospitals always call the police when they have a patient they can't identify and they hadn't had any calls like that recently.

"I wanted to call the hospitals myself, but I didn't. I waited. I used to do a lot of waiting when Richard was alive."

I was dripping sweat, and my head almost split open when she said his name.

"I tried to do it again, but it wasn't the same. He was a grown man. He was doing what he wanted to do. She's a child. A child!"

"What happened then?" Ginny asked. She might as well have been living in another world. Lona was talking to me. She and I were tied together in that dim room by fear and need. Ginny's questions were just cues, promptings.

"Thursday in the mail I got a letter from her." She didn't offer to show it to us. "It said, 'Dear Mom, I'm not going to be coming home for a while. I've got something to work out. It might take a long time. Don't worry. I'll be all right. Love Al-Al-' " But she couldn't say the name. For a long minute she didn't go on. I could feel her eyes on me, but I wasn't looking at her. I was looking at the place where the sweat was dropping from my face onto my pants and sinking in, making a dark patch in the material-just watching the sweat fall and hanging on to her voice.

"What did you do after you got the note?"

With an effort, Lona got started again. "I-I called Sergeant Encino. What else could I do? I asked him to help me. He told me I'd have to file a complaint. Even though she's just a child." She didn't shout, but the protest in her voice was so strong it almost made me lose my grip.

Ginny asked softly, "Did you do it?"

"No."

"You don't believe the note." It was just a statement of fact.

"No!" She was so vehement I looked up at her. "She wouldn't run away from me. Never!"

"I appreciate that, Mrs. Axbrewder, but it doesn't prove anything. Can you tell me why you're so sure?"

The question didn't faze her. She'd thought about it a lot since Missing Persons had asked her the same thing. "Because she wasn't the kind of girl who runs away from problems. If she had something bothering her, something she hadn't told me-which I don't believe-she wouldn't have to run away from it. Her father taught her"-then she faltered, but only for a second-"her father taught her to stand her ground."

I believed her. I was in pain from head to foot-I wanted to pound my hands on my knees, just to distract myself from the hurting inside-but I believed her. If Alathea had run away because she found out about me and her father, found out her mother had never told her the truth, then the note didn't fit. She would have been angry, and it wasn't an angry note. And I couldn't think of anything else in the world she would run away from. She wasn't the kind of kid who gets herself into trouble she can't handle. She had too much common sense.

Lona was right, the note didn't fit at all. There had to be something wrong with it. Something. But I was in no condition to figure out what. I wanted more coffee-

wanted to try to trick my nerves into thinking the stuff was on its way-but I couldn't control my shakes enough to even pick up the cup. Something inside me was at the breaking point. If this withdrawal went on much longer, I was going to be a basket case.

Ginny must've been thinking along the same lines, because she asked, "What about the handwriting? Do you recognize it?"

"It's hers," Lona said carefully, "but it's different than usual. She has such neat writing, she's always gotten A's in penmanship, and this is so messy. It looks like she wrote it while she was riding in a car over a rough road."

"How about a postmark?"

"Sergeant Encino asked me about that. It was mailed right here in town."

Suddenly I passed over the crest and the crisis began to recede. You never know if the first one is going to be the worst or the easiest, but this one was beginning to let go of me. The pain ran out of me like dirty dishwater. It left me feeling like I'd been bedridden half my life, but at least I was able to get my voice back. Without looking at Lona, or unclenching myself at all for fear the need might turn around and come back at me before I had the chance to recover, I asked her, "How was the note signed?"

She didn't answer. I could feel the air of the living room pleading with me, raging at me, hating me, but she didn't answer.

My voice grated in my throat. "How did she sign her name?"

A long time passed. Finally Lona pulled herself together enough to say faintly, "Alathea."

Alathea. That was it. Proof this whole thing was serious-that there was trouble worse than just a runaway thirteen-year-old. It was a minute or two before I realized I hadn't said what I was thinking out loud. From somewhere inside I mustered up the strength to say, "She never called herself Alathea. Everyone else did, but she didn't.

She called herself 'Thea.' That's what her father called her, and she never called herself anything else."

"That's right," Lona said. Just echoing what she heard in my voice. She knew it was true. It just hadn't occurred to her.

"All right." Ginny said. "I can accept that." Back-to-business Ginny Fistoulari. "We'll take the case on that basis. I don't know what all I'll need from you, but I'd like to start with a list of her friends. Names, addresses, phone numbers for everyone you can think of."

"Sergeant Encino asked that. I thought you'd want a copy." She got up and handed Ginny a sheet of paper, then went back to her chair. She never turned her face away from me the whole time. We weren't finished with each other yet.

But Ginny wasn't finished either. Maybe she didn't like being left out of the silence. She stood it for half a minute, then said, "I've just got one more question, Mrs. Axbrewder. Alathea disappeared last week Tuesday. Why did you wait more than a week to call me?"

"Sergeant Encino told me to wait and try not to worry. He told me she'd come back when she was ready. I thought I was doing what Richard-what Richard would want me to do. But then I read, in yesterday's paper-I read about that Christie girl." She was under too much strain. Her brittleness was starting to crack. "Since she didn't come home, I've been reading the paper every day. Every word. I've been looking for some kind of news that would tell me what happened.

"Yesterday I read about that poor Christie girl. Carol Christie. The paper said"-she was right on the edge- "she ran away from home three months ago, and Monday they found her body in the river. She was just thirteen, the same age as my Alathea." Her hands were jammed into her hair, pulling at the sides of her head as if that was the only way she could keep herself from crying. "The same age."

I didn't have anything else to offer, so I gave her something to get mad about, hoping it would help her hang onto herself. "But why us, Lona? Why me? If you have to have a detective, you could've called some of Richard's friends on the force. They would've referred you to someone you could trust."

"Because you owe me!" Her sudden vehemence was as physical as a fist. "You took my husband away from me! You owe me my daughter back!"

"We'll do our best." Ginny came between Lona and me as if she were afraid we were about to start hitting each other. "There are no guarantees in this business, but well do everything we can. Which is more than the police are doing.

"Now." Ginny was on her feet, and I joined her. Force of habit. I didn't actually feel strong enough to stand. And I sure didn't want to tower over Lona like that. It was a cheap advantage, and with her I didn't want any cheap advantages. But I've been following Ginny so long now, taking orders from her, I hardly ever think about it anymore. "There's one thing we have to settle before we can get started. My fee."

"There doesn't have to be any fee," I said, ashamed money had ever been mentioned.

"Mrs. Axbrewder has to pay something," Ginny snapped. "If she doesn't, I can't call her my client. And if she isn't my client, I don't have any legal standing. Anybody who wants to can tell me to stuff it."

There was no help for it. Lona was looking at me, and I had to say, "She's right, Lona."

She didn't say anything for a long minute. When she found her voice again, she wasn't angry any more, just weak and helpless, and at the end of her rope. "I don't have much," she said. "Richard's pension is so small. And my job-I work as much as I can, cleaning house for some of the neighbors. It's hardly enough to pay for clothes." Then she said, "I have a hundred dollars."

Ginny said, "Fifty will be plenty." Fifty bucks would just about pay two days' rent on her office. "If I get in trouble with the commission I can always tell them it was only an advance."

The commission frowns on private investigators who work cheap. The same kind of argument doctors and lawyers use-people who work cheap are presumed to be shoddy and unscrupulous. Unprofessional. If I still had a license, I'd be in danger of losing it twice a day.

Lona shuffled out of the room and came back a minute later with the money. Ginny took it without counting it and gave her a receipt. Before I could think of anything else to say, Ginny and I were out on the walk again and Lona had closed the door behind us. In the whole time I hadn't had one good look at her face.

Ginny made straight for the car, but I dawdled along for a moment. Though the sun was getting hotter, in the shade of the trees it was still bearable. I wasn't eager to sear my butt on the vinyl of the Olds. And I wasn't satisfied, either. There were things I needed to know.

"All right," I said at Ginny's back. "Spill it."

She stopped, then turned around, looking blank. "Spill what?"

But she couldn't fool me with that. Her face has more than one kind of blank, and this wasn't the right kind. Besides, she'd turned around too quickly-like she was expecting me to say something.

"You know what I'm talking about."

She came back toward me a couple of steps. "When you've been drinking I never know what you're talking about."

That was a cheap shot, and she knew it. As soon as she said it, she winced in regret. But I sloughed it off. It just confirmed she knew something she wasn't telling. So I said, "The hell you don't. You're scared of this case, Fistoulari. You're scared of it because of me. You're afraid something about it is going to get to me. I want to know why."

"You heard her." Ginny nodded at the house. "She didn't tell me any secrets."

"Yeah," I growled. "First you're worried about me, and then you won't tell me why. If you've got so goddamn little confidence in me, why didn't you just leave me out of it? You don't need me to find a runaway."

Now she came close and looked right up at me. "She's your niece. You've got a right to be involved. Besides, I thought you'd want-"

"Don't say it. Of course I want to help find her." For a minute I glanced around the neighborhood, looking for suggestions. Then I locked on to her again. Something about that broken nose of hers did funny things to my insides. Sometimes I wanted to kiss it so bad I had to grit my teeth. Now I wanted to hit it. "Maybe I'm asking the wrong question. Let's be professional about it. It's just a case. Like any other case. There's just one thing wrong with it. You don't do missing persons. Why start now?"

"She's your-"

I didn't let her finish. "Don't do me any favors."

That got through to her. All of a sudden, her eyes went cold and narrow, and her nostrils flared. Just for a second, her voice had the soft hot sound of an acetylene torch. "That's cute, Axbrewder. All right, you want it? You got it. I read the papers, too. I read about Carol Christie. There's one little fact your sister-in-law neglected to mention. According to her parents, Carol Christie was an excellent swimmer."

An excellent swimmer. Oh, hell. You don't have to be an excellent swimmer to be safe in the Flat River. If you're half as tall as I am, you don't have to know how to swim at all.

"When a reporter asked the cops if they had any reason to think she might've been killed," she went on, "they didn't deny it."

I scanned the neighborhood one more time. It still looked like the kind of place where nothing ever happened. It was too tidy, and there was too much sunshine.

I turned my back on it and followed Ginny to the Olds.