P Is for Peril

worked his way through a flap in her tunic and began to nurse. Taken aback, I averted my eyes. I thought kids his age had been twelve-stepped out of that.
    She indicated a nearby chair, paying him not the slightest attention as he suckled her right breast.
    I glanced down at the chair and removed a half-consumed peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich before I settled on the edge. Josh's medical emergency apparently entitled all of the children to escape the chill and dark outside. The next thing I knew, a cartoon show blasted from the TV set. Heather and Amanda sat cross-legged on the floor, and Josh joined them moments later holding the towel-wrapped ice cubes to his head.
    I tried to concentrate on what Blanche was saying, but all I could think about was that even at my age, a tubal ligation probably wasn't out of the question.

Chapter 8
    I glanced at my watch, a gesture that wasn't lost on her.
    "I know you're in a hurry so I'll get to the point. Has Mother filled you in on Crystal's past?"
    "I know she was a stripper before she married your dad."
    "I'm not talking about that. Did she mentioned Crystal's fourteen-year-old daughter was born out of wedlock?"
    I waited, wondering at the relevance. I leaned forward, not from avid interest, but because the whistles, bangs, and manic music from the television set were loud enough to cause permanent hearing loss. I watched Blanche's lips move, putting the sentences together belatedly like the subtitles on a foreign film.
    "I'm not even sure Crystal knows who the father is. Then she married Lloyd somebody and had another child by him. That boy died when he was eighteen months old, an accidental drowning-this was four or five years ago."
    I squinted. "And you think this is somehow connected to your father's disappearance?"
    She seemed startled. "Well, no, but you said you wanted all the facts. I wanted to fill in the picture so you could see what you're up against."
    "Meaning what?" A commercial came on, the sound ratcheted up a notch so the little children who lived across the street wouldn't miss the pitch for a vitamin-rich cereal that was supposed to look and taste like licorice.
    Blanche was saying, "Doesn't Crystal's behavior strike you as odd?"
    I was largely lip-reading by now and her comment had gone completely over my head. "Blanche, could we turn down the sound on the television set?"
    "Sorry." She reached for the remote control and muted the sound. The silence was heaven. The children continued to sit on the floor, arranged in front of the set as though gathered around a campfire. Frantic images danced across the screen in colors so vivid they left an afterimage if I glanced away.
    Blanche returned to her commentary. "I don't know about you, but Crystal doesn't seem at all distraught about what's happened. She's cool as can be, which seems inappropriate to me."
    "It has been nine weeks. I don't think anyone can be distraught for that long. Defenses kick in. You manage to adjust or you go insane."
    "I just think it's interesting that Crystal's never made a public appeal for information about Daddy. She's never offered a reward. She's never sent out any flyers. No psychics have been consulted…"
    That caught me up short. "You think a psychic would help?"
    "It wouldn't hurt," she said. "My friend Nancy's uncanny. She has this amazing, quite incredible gift."
    "She's a psychic? Is that why she's offering to consult with me on the phone?"
    "Of course. When I lost my diamond ring, she was able to pinpoint the exact location."
    "How'd she do that? I'm really curious."
    "It's hard to describe. She said she smelled something sweet. She saw glimpses of white, maybe something nautical. She did two separate… readings, for lack of a better word… and the images were the same. Then I realized the last time I remembered seeing the ring, I'd taken it off to wash my hands at the bathroom sink. I'd already searched that area half a dozen times. As it turned out, I'd set the ring in the soap dish and it was embedded on the underside of the soap, which is exactly what she smelled."
    I said, "What was the white part? Was that the bathroom sink?"
    "Not in that bathroom. The sink is hunter green in there, but the soap was white."
    "Got it. What was the nautical part?"
    Blanche's tone was defensive. "Not everything's literal. Some of the images she sees are metaphorical… you know, associative."
    "Nautical… faucet water," I suggested gamely.
    "The point is, Nancy's offered to