Mind Over Matter

of an agent. Do you know, I wanted to sign with her and she wouldn’t have me?”
    David forgot his own cigarette in simple astonishment. “I beg your pardon?”
    Alice laughed again and relaxed. She’d needed a moment to remember life went on. “It was a few months after the kidnapping. A.J. figured I’d come to her out of gratitude to Clarissa. And maybe I had. In any case, she turned me down flat, even though she was scrambling around trying to rent decent office space. I admired her integrity. So much so that a few years ago I approached her again.” Alice smiled at him, enjoying the fact that he listened very carefully. Apparently, she mused, Clarissa was right on target, as always. “She was established, respected. And she turned me down again.”
    What agent in her right mind would turn down a top name, a name that had earned through sheer talent the label of “megastar”? “A.J. never quite does what you expect,” he murmured.
    “Clarissa’s daughter is a woman who insists on being accepted for herself, but can’t always tell when she is.” She crushed out the cigarette after a second quick puff. “Thanks. I’d like to continue now.”
    Within moments, Alice was deep into her own story. Though the camera continued to roll, she forgot about it. Sitting in the sunlight with the scent of roses strong and sweet, she talked about her hours of terror.
    “We would have paid anything. Anything. Peter and I fought bitterly about calling in the police. The kidnappers had been very specific. We weren’t to contact anyone. But Peter felt, and rightly so, that we needed help. The ransom calls came every few hours. We agreed to pay, but they kept changing the terms. Testing us. It was the worst kind of cruelty. While we waited,the police began searching for the car Jenny had seen and the woman she’d spoken with in the park. It was as if they’d vanished into thin air. At the end of forty-eight hours, we were no closer to finding Matthew.”
    “So you decided to call in Clarissa DeBasse?”
    “I don’t know when the idea of asking Clarissa to help came to me. I know I hadn’t slept or eaten. I just kept waiting for the phone to ring. It’s such a helpless feeling. I remembered, God knows why, that Clarissa had once told me where to find a diamond brooch I’d misplaced. It wasn’t just a piece of jewelry to me, but something Peter had given me when Matthew was born. A child isn’t a brooch, but I began to think, maybe, just maybe. I needed some hope.
    “The police didn’t like the idea. I don’t believe Peter did, either, but he knew I needed something. I called Clarissa and I told her that Matthew had been taken.” Her eyes filled. She didn’t bother to blink the tears away. “I asked her if she could help me and she told me she’d try.
    “I broke down when she arrived. She sat with me awhile, friend to friend, mother to mother. She spoke to Jenny, though there was no calming the poor girl down even at that point. The police were very terse with Clarissa, but she seemed to accept that. She told them they were looking in the wrong place.” Unselfconsciously she brushed at the tears on her cheek. “I can tell you that didn’t sit too well with the men who’d been working around the clock. She told them Matthew hadn’t been taken out of the city, he hadn’t gone north as they’d thought. She asked for something of Matthew’s, something he would have worn. I brought her the pajamas he’d worn to bed the night before. They were blue with little cars across the top. She just sat there, running them through her hands. I remember wanting to scream at her, plead with her, to give me something. Then she started to speak very quietly.
    “Matthew was only miles away, she said. He hadn’t been taken to San Francisco, though the police had traced one of the ransom calls there. She said he was still in Los Angeles. She described the street, then the house. A white house with blue shutters on a corner lot. I’ll never forget the way she described the room in which he was being held. It was dark, you see, and Matthew, though he always tried to be brave, was still afraid of the dark. She said there were only two people in the house, one man and the woman who had spoken to Jenny in the park. She thought there was a car in the drive, gray or green, she said. And she told me he wasn’t hurt. He was afraid—” her voice shuddered, then strengthened “—but he wasn’t hurt.”
    “And the