Concrete Desert Read Online Free PDF Page B

own airplane. Bought her clothes, Indian art, whatever she wanted, I guess. But who knows what he was really like. Some real bastards can spend lots of money on you.”
    “You two talked?”
    “She’d call.”
    “Did she seem happy?”
    “It was always hard to tell with Phaedra. At first, yes.”
    “Did he abuse her? Hurt her physically? Make threats?”
    “No,” Julie said, leaning forward, seeming to search for the words. “She never mentioned anything like that, although she had been in a relationship like that a few years ago. Greg was—I don’t know, he seemed like a flake to me. New Age. One of these going-to-extremes athletes. Lots of money. But nothing real underneath.”
    “Well, you know what they say, ‘No money, no life.’ How’d it end?”
    “Let me put it this way, David. Phaedra was always good at making her escape. I think she looked at Mom and Dad together, looked at all my disasters in love—God, what a bunch of role models!—and she decided she was never going to be trapped. Never going to be dependent on a man. She walked. Her relationships always had a short half-life. Greg was no different. Phaedra called me one Sunday and said she was back in Phoenix, asked if she could stay with me a few days.”
    “That was when?”
    “In the spring. April, I guess.”
    Julie said her sister got a job as an assistant to a photographer who had done some work for the Phoenician. I jotted the photographer’s name below Greg Townsend’s on the envelope. Phaedra started seeing a therapist and attending family gatherings again. She found a one-bedroom apartment in Scottsdale. She and Julie talked on the phone almost every night.
    “Did she meet anybody else?”
    “Nobody serious,” Julie said.
    “Flirtations? One-night stands?”
    Julie shrugged like an older sister. “She was fairly burned out on relationships. She felt very suffocated by Greg.”
    “And nothing struck you as strange in the days or weeks before her disappearance? Nobody new in her life? Nothing about her personality that changed? No sense she felt in danger?”
    “No. She seemed to be very healthy about it all. Which was new for Phaedra, because when she’d break up with a lover, she would usually just fall apart for a while. I was very distracted, though. My ex and I were in court. Visitation, custody, all that. Work was a nightmare.”
    We talked maybe another half hour. Then I walked her out to her car, just like the other night.
    The sun was gone, and the street was deserted except for a few parked cars. I could hear a set of sirens over on Seventh Avenue, running north from downtown.
    “I’m not trying to be a selfish bitch,” Julie said. “I just need help. Phaedra is the only family I have really. Dad died five years ago, and Mom is more and more out of it. I just feel so scared about Phaedra.”
    “I understand,” I said, and realized I had stepped into something that could have a really bad ending. I pushed the thought away.
    We hugged out in the ovenlike heat, and for just a moment, stroking her hair, I felt like I had twenty years ago. Then she kissed me on the mouth, a nice kiss, and she drove away.
    ***
    Back inside, Charlie Parker had finished and the house felt as if it hadn’t been lived in for a hundred years. I looked around, freshly aware of how odd or brilliant Grandfather’s floor plan was. The high-ceiling living room with bookcases behind a stairway that went nowhere—well, it went to the garage apartment in back, via an open-air passage. The illusion of space, when the house only had two small bedrooms. The quirky charm of a garden courtyard off the little study that connected to the living room. I suddenly missed my grandparents so much. Wished I could walk into the dining room and find Grandmother watching her soap operas. Wished I could get a whiff of Grandfather’s pipe as he paced in his study. Even Patty had loved this house—she’d encouraged me to rent it out after my grandparents