Sisters of the Road (7 page)

“Trish,” I called half-heartedly one more time, but I knew she wasn’t here.

I picked up
Jane Eyre
again and looked at the scrap of paper inside.

“Dear Pam, I’ve gone out for a little while, don’t worry. See you later. Trish.”

Had she gone out to score drugs or to meet Wayne or to turn a few tricks? Who had she been talking to on the phone? Had anyone else been here, had they taken her away against her will?

There was no sign of a struggle, as they say in mysteries. There was no sign of anything at all except this note.

“Do you think she’ll come back?” I asked Ernesto. “Do you think she’s all right?”

He sat on his haunches and stared at me accusingly.

“I never should have left her alone without finding out who she’s afraid of.”

And Ernesto yowled to show he agreed.

I
WAITED UNTIL ABOUT NINE
, hoping that Trish might show up. When I wasn’t pacing the floor I was watching the phone. I ate some of the cannelloni left from the night before; I didn’t have much interest in cooking. Once the phone rang, but it was only Betty, the classical guitarist, who had an extra ticket to Julian Bream at the Opera House in February. Would I like to go? I decided that February was far enough away to say yes to anything; besides, it showed that Betty no longer had any immediate designs on me and really did want to be friends.

I also thought about calling June, but I was afraid she might not give me either the sympathy or the advice I wanted. If my car were broken down she’d be the first person to help; I wasn’t so sure about her when it came to emotional support. She’d probably tell me I could have expected it, which wasn’t what I needed to hear, and recommend a good movie on TV. There was always Carole; she had a good heart—and a blow torch—but it was hard to know how reliable she’d be as a sidekick.

Around eight-forty-five I looked in the Yellow Pages under professional photographers for anyone with the first name of Wayne, but didn’t find a single one. Not that I really thought I would. This so-called artist lover of Trish’s sounded faker than a xerox copy to me. She said she loved him—what did she know about love!

Suddenly I put on my jacket and yellow-striped cap, my blue muffler and mittens, and went out again. I thought about taking my car, but still couldn’t face the dried blood in the back seat. Instead I walked up to Broadway and got on the Number 7 again.

Four hours had made a difference. The Market and shops were closed; street life had taken over on Pike. I recognized some of the same kids from earlier; many were high now, running back and forth across the street, sharing cigarettes, talking in loud, excited voices.

I went up to one of the girls, a quiet looking thing of thirteen or fourteen, standing on the edge of a crowd, not sure whether she fit in or not, but determined to look as if she did. She was smoking in small, furtive gestures and was hardly made-up at all. Like Trish she wore a black felt hat; maybe that’s why I approached her first.

I touched her shoulder. “Excuse me?”

She jerked around and her eyes widened when she saw me. “Yeah?” she said, trying to be tough. She didn’t want any of the others to think I knew her or anything for godssakes.

“I’m looking for a… friend of mine,” I said. “I wonder if you know her? Her name’s Trish.”

The girl stared coolly. “Trish what?”

I tried to act tough as well. “She goes by a lot of different last names.”

The girl shrugged and moved in closer to the others. I thought for a minute she was going to ask her friends if they knew, but then I realized she was ignoring me.

“Please,” I said, in a low and urgent voice. “It’s important that I talk to her. You must know her or where I can find her. She’s tall and has streaked blond hair and she wears a black hat like yours. She had a friend named Rosalie.”

I discovered the whole group was listening. Another girl, older and harder-looking, with a small rosebud tattoo next to her left eye, said, “We don’t know nobody named Rosalie.” And with that they all dispersed, simply swam away like a school of disturbed fish, to other parts of the street.

Great, now I’d really blown it. They had probably been asked about Rosalie by the cops; they probably thought I was a cop myself. And the way news spread on the street, nobody was going to give me information. I could see members of the group floating warily about, tipping the others off.

I leaned against the wall of the abandoned department store and thought about what to do next. I could hit some bars in Belltown, the ones where artists hung out; maybe someone would know Wayne. But the thought didn’t appeal to me much. Whoever and whatever Wayne was, he had a hold on Trish; he probably wouldn’t like the idea of me looking for her one bit. Especially if he was the one who’d gotten her out of my apartment.

I stood there for a while and watched. Near me was a seasoned older girl instructing a younger one to keep off her turf; a crazy-looking boy in a leather vest and T-shirt was yelling he was going to kill the next guy who stole his hat. Among the kids walked a couple of older prostitutes, arm in arm, tight skirts twitching over round asses; a man in a white suit and cowboy hat followed them drunkenly. On the corner was a tall thin guy in a sweater and corduroy coat talking earnestly to a lethargic girl in a pink sweatshirt and pants; he’d taken her by the arm and was showing her a pamphlet. He must be on the Lord’s business—she looked too dazed to protest.

I stood there and for some reason began to remember an Introduction to Anthropology class I’d taken as a sophomore at the U. It had been a reassuring thing to hear, at twenty, that your own society was a mere episode in millions of years of human history, no better and no worse than countless societies that have existed or will exist. I recalled the kindly expression of Mr. Lieberman as he told us this, and the varying degrees of disbelief—and relief—on my fellow students’ faces.

Like some of my classmates I’d dreamed briefly of following a career in anthropology. Find a Polynesian island of my own and chart its kinship systems, bring honor and fame upon the name of Nilsen. I’d be the Ruth Benedict or Margaret Mead of my generation, braving hardship, weird food and malaria to understand just what made those tribal people tick.

But I’d gotten a little bogged down trying to remember the relative skull sizes of the toolmaking Australopithecus and the homo heidelbergensis, and eventually anthropology, like many scholastic obsessions, had died a natural death at the end of the quarter. Besides, there weren’t all that many undiscovered Polynesian islands left.

Being on the street, however, brought back memories of Mr. Lieberman and his lectures on society as a cultural organization. “Go downtown,” he used to urge us, “and take a look around. You’ll be surprised what you see.” That was urban anthropology and nobody wanted to do it. What was Seattle compared with Samoa? But now it suddenly occurred to me that that’s exactly what I was doing—looking at this society from the outside, with an anthropologist’s eye.

And that wasn’t necessarily a good thing.

There were things here that I needed to feel as well as witness. The sexual energy, the danger, the excitement. The way the music was bringing back memories of reckless sexy new kinds of feeling. The way the cold air felt like freedom downtown at night.

“I heard you’re looking for Trish. Who are you, anyway?”

The voice, woolly with a cold, was harsher than its owner. She had soft, paper white skin and dyed black hair shaved closely at the sides and long on top, falling into her eyes. In spite of her motorcycle jacket and pierced nose, she was very fragile and young-looking; I could have more easily imagined her curled up by the fireplace in a fluffy bathrobe reading fairy tales than out on the street.

“Pam Nilsen,” I said and waited.

She looked disconcerted for a moment, then threw back, “Trish doesn’t know anyone named Pam.”

“She does now. She stayed at my place last night.” I didn’t go into it. If she knew something she could tell me, but I was starting to realize you didn’t get anywhere if you came on too strong.

The girl took out a cigarette and lighter from her pocket and threw a rapid glance at some of her friends across the street. They’d probably appointed her to be the one to check me out. She obviously wanted to look like she had it all under control.

“I knew Rosalie too,” I said. “I was the one who took her to the hospital. She and Trish were together out near Sea-Tac when I picked them up.”

“I don’t know a Rosalie,” she snapped, but she was frightened.

“It doesn’t sound like the girl had too many pals around here. Now that she’s dead anyway. It’s a sad thing when people stop caring what happens to their friends.”

I said it casually but I watched her reaction under the fall of dyed black hair. She sniffled and blew out smoke. “Why should I trust you?” she finally asked.

“No reason. Just because Trish did, that doesn’t mean you have to.”

“Look,” she said hoarsely. “There’s a million cops out tonight, poking their noses into everything, driving by every five minutes—and all because of… because of that girl getting killed. We can’t do a damn thing without them picking us up. It’s a drag, a fucking drag.”

So much for my powers of observation. I’d been out here almost half an hour and I hadn’t noticed a single cop. It must be the plainclothes vice squad, obvious to everyone except me, who expected to see the protectors of the peace in regulation blue.

And for the first time it struck me that I wasn’t just observing a scene here; I was being observed. The cop and detective from two nights ago had probably driven by me two or three times. And they were probably wondering what a nice girl like me was doing leaning against the wall of an abandoned downtown department store.

I talked fast. “You don’t have to believe me, but I wish you would. Trish has been staying at my apartment because she’s pretty scared of something or someone. Late this afternoon she wrote me a note saying she’d be back in a little while. Well, she didn’t come back and I’m worried about her. I feel like she’s in trouble and I want to help her.”

For the first time the girl seemed to listen. She cast a brief, anxious glance at her friends. “Ask Beth Linda, she knows Trish. Maybe she can help you,” she said rapidly through her stuffed-up nose.

“Beth?” I looked helplessly over at the group. “Can you point her out? Will she talk to me?”

“Beth’s not here. She’s a
social worker.
At the Rainbow Center over by the bus station, the place we go to get warm and eat and talk and stuff. They’re open late. Yeah, go see Beth. But don’t tell anyone I told you!”

T
HE RAINBOW CENTER WAS
full of the same sort of kids I’d seen out on the street; some long-haired druggies and some punks with shaved heads and torn T-shirts. There were a lot of gay boys, some of them incredibly femme with red lipstick and bouffant hair. The main room of the converted office building was thick with cigarette smoke and rang with the sound of laughter and shouting; in one corner a video game pinged relentlessly.

I felt my age immediately.

“Hi,” said a woman in jeans and a sweater, coming up to me. “Need some help?”

“Does Beth Linda work here?”

“I’ll go get her.”

After a few minutes a tall woman with solid fat packed around her big frame came into the room and asked what she could do for me. About thirty-seven or eight, she had short strawberry blond hair that dipped into her forthright green eyes. Freckles saved her from looking like she’d seen a little more of life than she wanted to.

“My name’s Pam Nilsen. I’m looking for a girl named Trish. I’m… I’m worried about her.”

She nodded. “C’mon in back. Coffee or tea?”

She took me to a small office with a couple of ratty armchairs, bulging file cabinets and a desk that looked more like it was used for piling papers on than for working. Over the desk was a poster of a cat lolling on its back that said, “Take It Easy.” The walls didn’t keep out the sound of the kids.

I had tea. She took her coffee strong and black, and with one of those papery excuses for a cigarette, a Carlton. She was wearing an oversize pink sweater with a cowl collar that came up to her double chin, polyester pants and fluffy pink bedroom slippers.

“My feet swell at the end of the day,” she smiled, when she saw me looking at them. She leaned back in her chair.

“Well, I’m not going to let you explain why you’re looking for her, and then give you the runaround. I’ll tell you right now that I don’t know where she is… I haven’t seen her for a few months. But I’d still like to know what she’s up to. I like the girl.”

I told Beth the story, from picking Trish and Rosalie up to Trish’s note. I had to talk loudly to make myself heard above the uproar in the front room.

Her freckled face was somber. “I can see why you’re worried. Especially with Rosalie dying, and all that stuff about the Green River killer. I didn’t know her unfortunately, but it’s scary. It could have happened to any of the kids.”

Beth lit another cigarette. “All I can tell you is what I know about Trish. She dropped in here on and off for three months or so, last summer and fall. You know, we offer counseling and dinners and some medical and educational services, but it’s mainly just a place for kids to feel safe. Trish had had a drug problem and she’d been in a treatment program. She was off drugs when I met her and she was in a group for ex-druggies here. The hard thing about these kids is getting them to attend anything on a regular basis—their sense of time, day to day, week to week, is so erratic. And then we had her in a prostitute’s group for a while, that’s a weekly rap group, and she seemed to be getting a lot out of it. But like I say, it was a problem getting her to come regularly, and a few months ago she dropped out. It’s not like we have any hold on her. We couldn’t make her come.”

“Who has legal responsibility for her? Her parents?”

“No. She was made a ward of the court the third time she was arrested. She’s been in foster homes and group homes, she was institutionalized once. It doesn’t matter, she just runs. Until the next time she’s picked up and put somewhere. Her parents gave her up as ‘incorrigible.’ The real name for kids like her isn’t runaways, it’s throwaways.”