Chapter Three – Focus
Many hours later, Phoenix came into view. Sprawled out in front of me were mile upon mile of houses and neighbourhoods set within the dry, Arizona landscape. The bus arrived at the bus station later that afternoon, and I disembarked into the fading light of the late September afternoon. I pulled my coat closer around and flagged a cab to take me to the motel I had researched prior to leaving home. It was half way between Alison's parents' residential neighbourhood and the bar from which Charlie had disappeared. I checked into the motel using my Grandmother's name and dropped off my bag in the basic but clean room.
I didn't linger, deciding instead to take a walk around the neighbourhood that Charlie had been staying in to get a feeling for the place before it got dark. There was nothing sinister about the rows of detached houses, selection of shops or the diner that I stopped in to get something to eat. I wasn't sure what I had been looking for, to be honest. It wasn't as though I was likely to find a sign outside one of the neat little houses saying "kidnapper lives here".
I guess part of me wanted to walk around and see and hear the sights and sounds that Charlie might have experienced. I was looking for some sort of connection, but ended up with a sinking sense of confusion and loss.
Looking down at the half eaten plate of omelette and fries in front of me, I pushed it away, no longer hungry. I gathered my things together and made my way across the black and white tiled floor to the counter to pay. It was getting late, and the diner was only occupied by a few customers. A waitress came over to collect my half full plate from the now empty table and walked off towards the kitchen before she noticed me waiting.
She came behind the counter and put the plate down as she moved over to the till with a small frown on her face. I looked up, trying and failing to make my lips curve into a polite smile as something behind her shoulder caught my eye making me freeze.
"Was everything okay, you didn't seem to eat much?"
With a mouth that seemed suddenly dry as a desert, I made a sort of choking noise in reply.
"Are you okay?" She turned to look at what I was staring at and made a little clucking noise in response.
On the cork board behind the waitress was Charlie's face smiling out of at me from a missing poster. I recognised the picture, it had been taken on the day of my birthday and had originally been of both of us posing in our new coats. The picture had been cropped to remove me, but my hand could still be seen on Charlie's shoulder and the outline of my waist and shoulder was still visible along one of the edges of the picture. I felt suddenly sick with bone deep loneliness.
"Oh, yes that. That's been up for a while now. So sad, pretty girl isn't she? Somebody must be missing her, those posters are all over town."
I forced my focus back to the waitress, weirdly grateful to the woman for referring to Charlie in the present rather than the past tense.
"Yes, very pretty." I wetted my dry lips with my tongue. "What happened exactly?"
The waitress shrugged, her attention focused away from me as she concentrated on pressing buttons on the cash register. "She was visiting from out of town and apparently went out to a local bar and never came home."
"Bar? Was it near here?" I asked, already knowing the answer but interested to see if she could give me some local knowledge.
"Yes, it's out by Route 60. Mahoney's Sports Bar. It's a busy place, gets a lot of the soldiers from the army camp out at Fort Rutledge, out the other side of Scottsdale. It can get rowdy from what I hear but it's not particularly known from trouble. I guess she must have met with the wrong sort." She shrugged again as I extended my hand towards her with some money. My eyes were drawn back to Charlie's smiling face in the picture.
"Who knows, perhaps she met the man of her dreams in uniform and got swept off her feet. Maybe there's a happy ending behind that poster."
"It would be nice, wouldn't it?" I tried to smile and didn't think I was very successful as I waved away the hand that she was extending with my change. I wanted so much for that happy ending to be a possibility. So much that it hurt to think about it, but in my heart of hearts I knew it wasn't possible. Charlie would have contacted me, if she had been able.
"Please keep the change, the food was great. I just wasn't very hungry."
"Thanks, you have a good night now."
"You, too," I said politely before walking towards the door.
I made my way back to the motel on tired legs but with a renewed sense of purpose. I feel asleep on top of the covers of the motel bed re-reading the note books that contained the details of Charlie's police file.
ooOOoo
My morning started with a trip to the Motel reception desk to extend my stay by another night, and a longish walk to Mahoney's Sports Bar. When I arrived to a locked up building, and no sign of life, I called myself every kind of idiot. It wasn't as though I knew much about bars, but even I should have realised that they wouldn't be open this early in the morning.
The bar was on the corner of a busy street made up of shops and offices with a wide paved walk way outside and parking bays to the side and front. The road and buildings formed a square around a small park which offered a manicured patch of green grass and trees, neat flower beds and benches in the middle of the tarmac and brick of the buildings and road which surround it.
Rather than admit to myself that this venture might add up to a wasted morning. I decided to stay in the area, and watch the comings and goings around the bar until it eventually opened. I started by ordering coffee and oatmeal for breakfast in a nearby diner, and later settling myself onto one of the park benches with a newspaper to hide behind.
Nothing much happened for the first couple of hours. People came and went on the sidewalk across the road from my amateurish little stakeout location. Suited and booted office workers and children walking to school. Housewives leaving the Piggly Wiggly with brown paper grocery sacks filled with shopping, and mothers pushing babies in prams. I watched them all from my bench, but nobody seemed to notice me.
It wasn't until mid morning that there was any sign of activity at the bar. A short, stocky man with greying red hair unlocked the front doors and came out onto the sidewalk. He was smartly but practically dressed in a white shirt with the sleeves rolled up, dark tie and dark trousers and a black apron. It was likely that he was one of the barmen, perhaps the owner. I had no way to know for sure. I thought back to reading one of Charlie's deputy's reports and the name of the owner, Michael Mahoney, come to mind.
I watched as he went around to the side of the building and opened large, metal doors which were set into the sidewalk at the same time as a brewery truck pulled up to where he was standing. A younger man dressed in army fatigues joined the older man and they both conversed jovially with the truck driver before starting to unload crates of rattling glass bottles from the back of the truck, and kegs of beer. The younger man and the delivery drive seemed to do most of the heavy lifting, while the older man read through some sort of paperwork on a clipboard which he marked from time to time with a pen.
The truck eventually left, and the delivery doors were closed up again. The older man slapped the younger on the shoulder affectionately before heading back into the bar. After rolling his shoulders and stretching out his arms like a runner warming up before a race, the younger man pulled a cloth cap out of his belt. With the hat pulled onto his head, and a quick look at his wrist watch, he set off down the sidewalk purposefully.
I continued to watch until the bar began to fill up as early afternoon turned into mid afternoon. What the diner waitress had told me yesterday seemed to be true. The bar seemed to be popular. The people entering the building were mostly men, though not exclusively, and many were in uniform.
When there appeared to be enough people coming and going to make me think I might be able to blend into the crowd, I got up from my bench and headed across the road.
I wasn't sure what I to expect when I entered the building in the middle of what I assumed must be a lunch time rush. Moving from the brightness outside into the dimly lit interior of the bar required a moment of adjustment for my eyes. The bar was large, set below street level, and there were steps down into a large space who's main feature was an oval shaped bar made of dark, highly polished wood. A mismatched collection of wooden tables and chairs were scattered around the floor and booths were lined up around the outside walls.
The walls were painted brick, dark red in colour and decorated with a selection of sports memorabilia and posters about different types of beer and brands of cigarettes. People were either arranged around the bar nursing drinks, talking and laugh, or sitting at the booths and tables eating.
A curtain framed archway lead off to another room from which the sound of loud conversation and active pool games could be heard. A large radio was placed near the bar from which a commentator was excitedly narrating the progress of a baseball game.
It was a dark, smoky sort of place, full of animated conversation, loud laughing voices and bustling activity.
Shifting nervously from one foot to another, I realised something. Other than a couple of waitresses moving around, I was almost the only female customer in the place; the others being a group of three women in uniform who were sat laughing and eating at a table to my left. From the badge on the shoulder of one of them, I guessed they might be nurses.
In my neat but utilitarian navy suit, without makeup and my hair rolled and pinned at the back of my head I look very out of place beside the pretty and colourfully dressed waitresses. I looked more suited to the afternoon crowd of secretaries at the diner downs the street, than this very male orientated environment.
It wasn't quite the movie moment when the beautiful, young ingénue walks into a crowd place and awkward silence follows, but I could see that I was drawing a few speculative looks. Though I was young, I would never have called myself beautiful, so the reason for the looks was very likely to be more about my awkwardness than my appeal to the opposite sex. Either way, I clearly was failing to blend with the crowd.
Forcing my reluctant feet to move, I approached a quiet spot at the bar and waited with less than one clue about what I would do if somebody actually bothered to speak to me.
The older man that I had observed that morning was standing behind the bar wiping the surface with a towel while laughing and talking to a group of customers who were standing at the bar close to the radio. He looked up and caught my eye. Being a moron, I looked off in the opposite direction blushing. I must have screamed guilty conscience and might as well have had a sign hanging around my neck saying as much.
Giving myself a mental slap, I looked back towards him and tried to smile winningly. He slung the towel over his shoulder and walked toward my end of the bar.
"What can I get you?"
I went blank. Shit. I was going to say Cola, but a look to my right towards the nurses had me requesting the drink that they all had in front of them.
"Beer." I tried for another smile. "Please."
He cross her arms across his chest and looked at me with a challenge on his face before rattling off words that I didn't understand. I felt my face begin to flush even warmer. This was just going from bad to worse.
I repeated back one of the names randomly to him.
"Tap or bottle?"
"Bottle?"
He mouth curved in a sort of sarcastic smile and he turned his back to get the drink. When a filled glass was put down in front of me I lifted it quickly to my lips. The taste of ginger beer filled my mouth and his smile widened. I was so busted.
He pulled a newspaper out from under the bar, laid it down on the surface and drew a pencil from behind his ear. He slipped some half-moon style reading glass onto his nose before he began calmly to complete a crossword.
"So, want to tell me why a pretty young thing like you has been hanging about outside my bar all morning?"
My face was so red by now that it could have been used to heat the room.
He didn't even bother to look up from his puzzle as he filled in "platoon", as the answer to an anagram of "top loan". I watched him fill the boxes with neat, grey block capitals as the pencil scratched against the paper, completely unable to think of anything to say in reply.
He pushed the glass of ginger ale towards me without looking up. Taking it as a reprieve, I gulped down a mouthful of the sugary drink and tried to remember how to breathe.
"Are you trying to follow your boyfriend, maybe?" His voice wasn't unkind.
"I'm sorry, I really didn't mean any harm."
"Do you have a crush on one of these soldier boys from the Fort, hmm?"
I tried to unscramble my brain to think of what Charlie might have done and was coming up blank.
"It nothing like that. I-ehh..."
He looked at me over the top of his glasses, his expression sceptical.
Guiltily, my eyes dropped from his gaze and down to the crossword, I scanned one of the clues while stalling for a suitable excuse because "I was staking out your bar" really wasn't going to work as an answer.
The answer, to the crossword question – not my current predicament– came to me easily. One of the benefits of being a keen reader. A rapid case of nervous word vomit, had me blurting out the answer without thinking first.
"Steadfast!"
He quirked a grey eyebrow at me. I pointed a not altogether steady finger at the newspaper.
"Not likely to wobble the slow. Five Down. Steadfast."
Light blue eyes met me over the top of his glasses again. I had to stop myself from squirming. His expression reminded me of our former Head Teacher, and the way he would silently stare whenever I had been pulled in front of him with Charlie after one of our misadventures. Charlie was the cool under pressure one of us, I was more of a choke out a confession sort of girl.
He straighten up, and looked me up and down, his eyes lingering on the over full backpack that I had at my feet. I realised what it looked like. I was an idiot, what sort of woman brought anything other than a handbag to a bar. The bag held all my worldly goods. I hadn't thought it a good idea to leave it at the hotel. I'd be lucky if he didn't report me to the police as the underage runaway that I was.
"Are you in some sort of trouble?"
"No, I was just in the area. I'm...relocating from...Sedona...for family reasons," I muttered unconvincingly, giving the name of a town fifty miles in the opposite direction from my real home.
"Do you have somewhere to stay?"
"Of course."
He watched me for several seconds, and I tried to hold his gaze without flinching. When he refocused his attention onto his crossword again, I let out an unsteady breath.
"Twelve across, descriptively deceptive truth, ten letters." He tapped the pencil against his lips, then looked up at me again.
"Dishonestly," I replied, desperately wishing that my hair was not pinned tightly to my head so that I could hide behind it like I would when I was a child. He calmly wrote the word in the same neat, precise block capitals.
I felt tears well up in my eyes. He had me. I knew it, he knew it...
Charlie, I'm so sorry. I haven't even started, and I've already failed you.
"Twenty three down, antonym of twelve across, eight letters." He was looking at me again.
"Honestly," I whispered.
He folded the newspaper in half it replaced it back under the bar, and the pencil was tucked back behind his ear. Our conversation was over apparently. I looked down at my fingers which were gripping the edge of the bar so tight that my finger nails were white.
I made myself let go, and look up at him, submitting to my fate .
"So you're here about a job?" he asked.
I stared at him wide-eyed, rabbit in the headlights style.
"Yes?" Filled with uncertainty, I made my answer a question.
"I've got to say, you look more like a librarian than a waitress, girlie."
It was a fair comment and ironically accurate. Charlie would love that, but here in the moment, I found it more difficult to appreciate the potential humour. I grimace as I looked down at my navy skirt and sensible shoes. I had nothing to losing, and everything to gain by being pushy. Straightening up, I looked at him squarely.
"I know, but it doesn't mean that I'm not a hard or reliable worker. If it helps, I can cook."
"It's not your skills in the kitchen I'm worried about; it's your ability to handle that lot." He nodded towards the noise and bustle of the crowd as he stood with his arms crossed across his chest.
"I can handle myself," I blustered.
"Fine. Come back tonight, at eight thirty. Dress pretty, but nothing skimpy or immodest. This is a respectable establishment and I expect that kind of behaviour from my staff. The guys that come here might look, but touching is not tolerated. I can promise you that much.
"My names Michael Mahoney, you can call me Mr Mahoney, I'm the owner." He held his hand out to be shaked, and I returned the gesture, making sure that my grip was firm.
"And you are?"
"Isabell–ah...I mean... Isabel Marie Reynolds. Sorry, I don't really use my first name, everyone calls me Marie."
He looked sceptical. I didn't blame him, as slick liars went, I was an abysmal failure.
"Thank you, Mr Mahoney, for the opportunity."
He laughed. "We'll see if you still think of it that way after tonight. You may not realise it, but I'm throwing you in at the deep end. Nights in here can get crazy.
"I won't let you down."
"We'll see, Girlie. Besides, it's been a while since I had somebody to finish the crossword for me. Remember eight thirty, dress pretty."
I turned and walked out. Before I knew it, I found myself blinking owlishly in the afternoon sunshine as though the last few minutes had never happened. It was surreal.
I gather my scatter wits together. I had some shopping to do in a hurry. Something pretty but not whorish. I could pull that off – I think. I turned and walked briskly towards the bus stop. I needed to travel into town and find a department store.
Sitting on the bus as it drove into the centre of the city, I pulled our journal out of my bag and opening it to the photograph of Charlie and I, wearing our birthday coats, arm in arm. I traced the outline of Charlie's smiling face with my finger.
I'm trying to get closer, Charlie, I promise.