Gilda Joyce: The Ladies of the Lake (33 page)

“Well, Brad,” said Gilda, dumping her backpack on a chair, “it was probably the worst day anyone could ever have.”

Brad bared his teeth in a broad grin. “I bet I can top you on that one. What happened, anyway? Something I shouldn’t know?”

“Mrs. McCracken took away my scholarship, for one thing.”

Brad’s mouth fell open. “What’d you do?”

“I didn’t do anything.”

“You must have done
something
. Shirley might act tough, but from what I remember at the car dealership, she’s a big teddy bear.”

“A teddy bear with claws and fangs.”

Brad vibrated with silent laughter. “A teddy bear with fangs. That’s funny.”

“It’s not
that
funny.”

“I bet you made a joke about her hair or her girdle—something like that.”

“That would be dumb.”

“I could understand it if you did.”

“I actually figured out the
real
story about what happened to that girl who drowned in the lake, and ‘Shirley’ resents me because she’s afraid I’m going to get her and the whole school in trouble with the law.”

Brad hurled his body against the throw pillows on the couch in a pantomime of exaggerated surprise. “I was
not
expecting you to say that.”

“It’s true.”
I can’t believe I’m telling Brad this stuff
, Gilda thought.
But what do I have to lose at this point
?

“So Shirley’s playing hardball with you,” said Brad, after Gilda told him the whole story of the Ladies of the Lake. He rubbed his hands together. “This is going to be the most fun I’ve had all month.”

“What’s going to be fun?”

“Tell you what we’ll do. Tomorrow morning I’ll put on my power suit with the lucky red tie, and we’ll both go into old Shirley’s office. And I’ll say, ‘Look, lady, pony up the scholarship money, or expect to find a lawsuit on your desk after we go talk to the drowned girl’s mother, and tell her everything we know.’”

Gilda had to admit she found the idea appealing. “I think Mrs. Lambert already moved to Hawaii,” she pointed out.

“Easy enough to find her.”

“Wouldn’t that be
blackmailing
Mrs. McCracken?”

“Just a little negotiation tactic.”

Gilda suddenly liked Brad more than usual. Maybe they actually had something in common: they were both people who loved their work but were either unappreciated or unemployed.

“To be honest, I’m not even sure I
want
to keep going to school at Our Lady of Sorrows.”

Just then, something on television caught Gilda’s attention. Priscilla Barkley was on the local news. Rather, Priscilla’s senior picture illuminated the television screen.

“A Bloomfield Hills teenager is missing today,” the news anchorwoman announced in a nasal monotone. “Lisa Fallows brings us the report.”

“Police are seeking information concerning the whereabouts of Priscilla Barkley, a senior at Our Lady of Sorrows in Bloomfield Hills. Priscilla was last seen heading to play practice at school. Her worried parents contacted the police when their seventeen-year-old daughter failed to return home.

“Priscilla Barkley has blond hair and green eyes. She’s five feet, five inches tall and weighs approximately one hundred and twenty pounds. She was last seen in her car, a 1998 Ford Escort, which was found abandoned at the intersection of Woodward Avenue and Highway 696.

“If you have any information that might be of use in the search for Priscilla Barkley, please contact the Bloomfield Hills Police Department.”

Gilda was stunned. Why was Priscilla missing? The image of her abandoned car at the edge of the highway was eerie.

“You know that girl?” Brad asked, noticing Gilda’s shocked response.

Gilda nodded, still taken aback by the sight of Priscilla’s picture on television. “That’s the girl I was telling you about—the girl who’s president of the Ladies of the Lake!”

“Pretty girl.”

“What does that have to do with anything?”

Brad shrugged. “Just stating a fact.”

A commercial for Puppy Chow blared into the room, undercutting the somber news of Priscilla’s disappearance.

“Well, you can bet the police will be talking to old Shirley now,” said Brad.

Gilda had a sense of foreboding—a feeling that somebody was in danger. She knew there was no more time to waste: she had to go to the police herself.

A
t the Bloomfield Township police station, Gilda and her mother were led to a messy office where a short man with a broad grin jumped up to greet them. “Hi there!” he said, shaking hands with Gilda and her mother cheerfully. “Mrs. Joyce? Gilda? I’m Detective Latmos.”

I’ve never met such a happy police officer
, Gilda thought.

“I spoke with someone on the phone about a situation at my daughter’s school,” said Mrs. Joyce. “It concerns that girl who’s missing, Priscilla Barkley.”

Detective Latmos held up his hand as if he were directing traffic. “Mind if I talk to Gilda alone for a minute, Mrs. Joyce? Sometimes works better that way.”

“But Gilda’s already told me everything.”

“It’ll just take a minute.”

“Take a seat, Mom,” said Gilda, pointing to a chair outside the door.

Detective Latmos chuckled. “You always talk to your mother that way, Gilda?”

“Just when she’s being disobedient with the police.”

“The answer is yes,” said Mrs. Joyce, sitting down in a plastic chair outside the door. “She often talks to me that way.”

“Something happens when they become teenagers, doesn’t it?” The detective gestured for Gilda to take a seat in his office. “I have a fifteen-year-old and a seven-year-old, and which one do you think is nicer to me?”

“The seven-year-old?” Gilda asked.

“You got it.”

Stacks of paper littered Detective Latmos’s desk. A photograph of a boy sticking out his tongue was perched next to his computer. Gilda wondered why they were wasting time talking about the detective’s kids when Priscilla Barkley was missing. Wasn’t every second crucial to finding her?

Detective Latmos sat down in a swivel chair and reached for a bag of pretzels. “You friends with Priscilla?”

“Not exactly.”

The detective frowned and reached into his pretzel bag. “Well, maybe you’ll still be happy to know that we just found her.” He delivered the news in an understated tone, as if he were telling Gilda that he had just found a pair of gloves he had misplaced.

“You just
found
her?”

“S’right,” said the detective, munching a pretzel.

“Is she alive?”

“Any reason she
wouldn’t
be alive?” He offered the bag of pretzels to Gilda.

“It just seems like whenever you hear of someone going missing, it ends up being bad news.” Gilda stared at the bag of
pretzels and wondered if she should take one. Maybe it was rude to refuse a snack from a police officer. Gilda reached into the bag and grabbed a pretzel.

“This time there’s a happy ending, Gilda. We picked her up hitchhiking near the Ohio border.”

It was hard to imagine Priscilla standing at the edge of the highway with her thumb stuck out.

“Lucky for her, it was a police officer who offered her a ride.”

“I wonder why she was hitchhiking.”

“Runaway,” said the detective, crunching another mouthful of pretzels as he leaned back in his chair and swung his short legs back and forth like a young child sitting in a shopping cart. “Well, she
tried
to run away, but then her car broke down and she had to hitchhike.”

“Oh.”

“So I take it you must know something about why she was running away. You kids in some kind of trouble?”

“Sort of,” said Gilda. “Priscilla and two other girls at my school did something a few years ago—something that ended up getting someone killed.”

Detective Latmos stopped swinging his legs, and the half smile on his face faded. He leaned forward to listen to the story of the Ladies of the Lake with keen interest.

As Gilda spoke, a series of worst-case scenarios ran through the detective’s mind. This was obviously a hazing incident, but could it also be considered negligent homicide? He began to take notes, writing names and details and envisioning the series of interviews he would conduct. He would start with the headmistress and teachers, then gradually circle in on the three girls
involved. By then, a civil lawsuit would probably be filed by the drowned girl’s parents. It had the potential to become a big, interesting mess. For the first time in months, he felt excited about delving into a case.

“And how do you
know
all this, Gilda?” It seemed to Detective Latmos that she was telling the truth, but how could a freshman be so certain about something that happened three years ago, during a time when she didn’t even attend the school?

Gilda handed one of her psychic investigator business cards to Detective Latmos, who frowned at it skeptically, as if he suddenly wondered whether he had just wasted the last thirty minutes.

“Is this a joke, Gilda?”

“Of course not. I’ve been working on this case ever since school started.”

“You’re telling me you’re a
psychic
?”

“Yes.” Gilda sensed the detective’s skepticism, but she didn’t care. After all, she had solved the case all on her own, hadn’t she? Hadn’t she earned her professional title?

“You mean, you just saw this whole story in your crystal ball or something?”

“Well, just because I’m psychic doesn’t mean I don’t use my
brain
. I also searched for evidence.” Gilda thought of the minutes to the Ladies of the Lake meetings and found herself wishing she had shown them to Detective Latmos instead of Mrs. McCracken.

Detective Latmos laughed. “So you’re saying you have a strong
intuition
about things like this.” He preferred the word
intuition
to
psychic
.

“That’s right. But just ask the headmistress of the school if you need evidence; she has the notes to all their secret meetings.”

“Sounds like you might make a good detective.” He popped another pretzel in his mouth.

“Call me anytime if you get stumped on a case.”

The detective had a coughing fit, and for a second, Gilda wondered whether she should rush over and slap him on the back. “Sorry,” he said, reaching for a bottle of water “Choked.” He brushed some crumbs from his pants and stood up to shake Gilda’s hand. “Thank you for bringing this to my attention, Gilda. And you never know what will come up in this case. We just might need to give you a call.”

As Gilda shook Detective Latmos’s hand and met his twinkling gaze, she felt that her work had finally been acknowledged and appreciated. She hadn’t expected to leave the police station feeling happy.

“This is so heinous,” said Leah. Sitting at a computer surrounded by issues of
The Petunia
, she peered up at Gilda with disbelief. “I mean, I’ve heard all the rumors about Danielle, Nikki, and Priscilla getting in big trouble for some reason—but are you sure
this
is what happened?”