After a few minutes, Jacqui entered; she’d changed out of her fluttery taupe skirt into a floor-length, belted black dress. It wasn’t a formal gown, just a tasteful cashmere at-home dress.
Another woman stumbled in behind Jacqui. She had Billy’s freckles, or he had hers. The auburn curls he cropped close to his head stood out around hers, like the hair of an ungroomed poodle. So this was Annie Lisa, Billy’s mom. An older woman, encased in magenta silk, kept an arm around Annie Lisa as they waded through the heavy pile. We were never introduced, but I assumed she was the wife of the corporate counsel, Linus Rankin, since he came in a few minutes later.
I knew from my database that Billy’s mother was forty-eight, but she appeared more like a schoolgirl, with her uncertain, almost coltlike gait. She looked around with a puzzled face as if she didn’t know why she was on the planet, let alone this particular bit of it. When I moved across the room to greet her, her husband immediately went to her side as if to forestall her talking to me. He took her elbow and almost pushed her to an armchair as remote as possible from the middle of the room.
When everyone else was seated, and Sneedham had served weak coffee, Buffalo Bill stumped in, using his silver-topped walking stick like a ski pole to push himself through the high pile. He went to the heavier of the armchairs Mildred had moved; she took the one to his left. Mrs. Bysen sat on a couch and patted the cushion next to her for me.
“Well, young woman? Well? You’ve been trespassing on my warehouse, spying on me, so you’d better have a good explanation of what you’re up to.” Buffalo Bill glared at me and blew so heavily that his cheeks pouched out.
I leaned back against the thick cushions, although the couch was so deep it wasn’t very comfortable. “We do have a lot to talk about. Let’s start with Billy. Something happened at the company that upset him so badly he didn’t think he could talk to anyone in the family about it. What was that?”
“It was the other way around, Detective,” Mr. William said. “You were present the day Billy brought that ridiculous preacher up to our offices. We spent days trying to smooth over—”
“Yes, yes, we know all that,” Buffalo Bill cut his son off with his usual impatience. “Did you say something to him, William, to make him run away?”
“Oh, for heaven’s sake, Father, you act as though Billy were as delicate as one of Mother’s roses. He takes everything too hard, but he knows how we run our business; after five months in the warehouse, he’d seen everything. It’s only been since he came under the thumb of this preacher that he started behaving so strangely.”
“It’s that Mexican girl, really,” Aunt Jacqui said. She was sitting on an embroidered hassock, her legs crossed, the skirt of her long dress falling open just above her knees. “He’s in love, or thinks he is, and it’s making him imagine he understands the world from her perspective.”
“He did get very upset when he found that Pat Grobian at the warehouse had been spying on him and reporting back to you, Mr. William,” I said. “He went down to the warehouse on Sunday afternoon to confront Grobian. Grobian says he knows Billy cleared out his locker on Monday, but he didn’t see him then. You also were there on Monday, Mr. William, but you say you never saw your son, either.”
“What were you doing down at the warehouse?” Buffalo Bill demanded, lowering his bull’s head at his son. “First I ever heard of it. Don’t you have enough to do without shoving onto Gary’s turf?”
I pictured the family chart I’d seen in my law enforcement database—it was hard to keep track of all the Bysens. Gary was Aunt Jacqui’s husband; I guess he handled domestic operations.
“Billy has been behaving so strangely I wanted to check up on him in person. He is my son, Father, although you delight so much in undermining me that—”
“William, this isn’t a good time for that,” his mother said. “We all are devastated about Billy, and it doesn’t help for us to attack each other. I want to know what we can do to help Ms. Warshawski find him, since your big agency hasn’t succeeded. I know they tracked down his car and his cell phone, but he’d given those away. Do you know why he did that, Ms. Warshawski?”
“I can’t be sure, but he knew they were easy to trace, and he seems to have been very determined to disappear.”
“Do you think that Mexican girl has talked him into a runaway marriage?” she asked.
“Ma’am, Josie Dorrado is an American girl. And I don’t know any state where it’s legal for a fifteen-year-old to get married. Even a sixteen-year-old needs written permission from her guardian, and Josie’s mother isn’t eager for this relationship, either—she thinks Billy is a rich, irresponsible Anglo boy who will get her daughter pregnant and abandon her.”