Men Are Trouble | Page 6

lunch starts at eleven-fifty and I have recess duty at
twelve-fifteen." She clicked off.
I had nothing to feel guilty about, so why was I tempted to wriggle down a storm drain
and find the deepest sewer in town? Because a mom believed that I hadn't worked fast
enough or smart enough to save her daughter? Someone needed to remind these people
that I didn't fix lost things, I just found them. But that someone wouldn't be me. My play
now was simply to stroll into her school and let her beat me about the head with her grief.
I could take it. I ate old Bogart movies for breakfast and spit out bullets. And at the end
of this cocked day, I could just forget about Najma Jones, because there would be no
Sharifa reminding me how much it cost me to do my job. I took out my sidekick, linked
to my desktop and downloaded everything I had in the Jones file. Then I swung back
onto my bike.
The mom had left a message three days ago, asking that I come out to her place on
Ashbury. She and her daughter rattled around in an old Victorian with gingerbread gables
and a front porch the size of Cuba. The place had been in the family for four generations.
Theirs had been a big family -- once. The mom said that Rashmi hadn't come home the
previous night. She hadn't called and didn't answer messages. The mom had contacted the
cops, but they weren't all that interested. Not enough time would have passed for them.
Too much time had passed for the mom.
The mom taught fifth grade at Reagan Elementary. Rashmi was a twenty-six year old
grad student, six credits away from an MFA in Creative Writing. The mom trusted her to
draw money from the family account, so at first I thought I might be able to find her by
chasing debits. But there was no activity in the account we could attribute to the missing
girl. When I suggested that she might be hiding out with friends, the mom went prickly
on me. Turned out that Rashmi's choice of friends was a cause of contention between
them. Rashmi had dropped her old pals in the last few months and taken up with a new,
religious crowd. Gratiana and Elaine and Kate -- the mom didn't know their last names --
were members of the Church of Christ the Man. I'd had trouble with Christers before and
wasn't all that eager to go up against them again, so instead I biked over to campus to see
Rashmi's advisor. Zelda Manotti was a dithering old granny who would have loved to

help except she had all the focus of paint spatter. She did let me copy Rashmi's
novel-in-progress. And she did let me tag along to her advanced writing seminar, in case
Rashmi showed up for it. She didn't. I talked to the three other students after class, but
they either didn't know where she was or wouldn't say. None of them was Gratiana, Alix
or Elaine.
That night I skimmed The Lost Heart, Rashmi's novel. It was a nostalgic and sentimental
weeper set back before the devils disappeared all the men. Young Brigit Bird was
searching for her father, a famous architect who had been kidnapped by Colombian drug
lords. If I was just a fluff doing a fantasy job in the pretend economy, then old Noreen
would have crowned Rashmi Jones queen of fluffs.
I started day two back at the Joneses' home. The mom watched as I went through
Rashmi's room. I think she was as worried about what I might find as she was that I
would find nothing. Rashmi listened to the Creeps, had three different pairs of Kat
sandals, owned everything Denise Pepper had ever written, preferred underwire bras and
subscribed to News for the Confused. She had kicked about a week's worth of dirty
clothes under her bed. Her wallpaper mix cycled through koalas, the World's Greatest
Beaches, ruined castles and Playgirl Centerfolds 2000-2010. She'd kept a handwritten
diary starting in the sixth grade and ending in the eighth in which she often complained
that her mother was strict and that school was boring. The only thing I found that rattled
the mom was a Christer Bible tucked into the back of the bottom drawer of the nightstand.
When I pulled it out, she flushed and stalked out of the room.
I found my lead on the Jones's home network. Rashmi was not particularly diligent about
backing up her sidekick files, and the last one I found was almost six months old, which
was just about when she'd gotten religion. She'd used simple encryption, which wouldn't
withstand a serious hack, but