Rebecca Schwartz 05 - Other People's Skeletons

had started to wear off— about thirty seconds down the line— we started to realize what had happened.
    “Is it me,” said Chris, “or did someone just try to run us down?”
    “I think they must have pulled out of a parking place— that’s why we didn’t see them before.”
    “Does this have a familiar ring?”
    It could have been Jason McKendrick all over again; we could have. But before I could speak, Mrs. La Barre came tearing out of the house. “Are you all right? Did she get you?”
    “You saw the driver?”
    “Who would it be but the slut? Look. Go talk to Eddie. What do I care? He doesn’t see her anyway. He has way too much sense for the little bitch. He took the kids to the park. Go. Go see him.”
    “Thanks.” I wasn’t much in the mood, but I managed a kind of smile. “What park?”
    “Golden Gate. Kristin likes the garden.” She turned back.
    “Could you tell us what your husband looks like?”
    “No. No, I couldn’t.”
    But a moment later she must have regretted her rudeness. “Just be careful,” she called. “The slut’s a killer.”
    “How do you know that?”
    “Tommy told me you told him.”
    I sighed. That was how gossip got started.

Chapter Twenty
    So off we went to a park nine blocks wide and four and a half miles long to find a man whose description we didn’t have who was accompanied by an unknown number of children.
    If they’d gone to Kristin’s garden, that might narrow it down— probably they were somewhere near the Music Concourse. There were gardens all around there, some simple flower beds and others more formal. There was the Rhododendron Dell, but it wouldn’t be in bloom now, so they probably weren’t there. The Conservatory was fabulous, but we thought if that was what Kristin liked, Mrs. La Barre would have mentioned its name.
    That left Strybing Arboretum and the Japanese Tea Garden. We opted for the latter because it had “garden” in its name and because it was by far the more exotic of the two, the more likely, we thought, to appeal to a kid. We had decided on the simple method of calling “Eddie! Eddie La Barre!” as if looking for a lost child, meanwhile keeping eyes peeled for a man with at least two children.
    But if they were in the Japanese Tea Garden, they eluded us. We climbed the moon bridge and elbowed our way through the teahouse, making ourselves obnoxious to one and all, but to no avail.
    Next, we tried Strybing Arboretum, which is quite a bit bigger and harder to cover. We still had no luck. Undaunted, we popped over to the Garden of Shakespeare’s Flowers, and then we did go to the Conservatory, knowing perfectly well that just because Kristin liked some garden or other didn’t mean an entire family could spend a whole afternoon there. They could have gotten a quick hit of flowers and then gone rowing on Stow Lake for all we knew. It was starting to seem like a wild goose chase, but we couldn’t see turning back at this point— though Chris did insist on getting a hot dog before trekking to the Conservatory.
    We entered the giant wedding cake, calling lightly, “Eddie? Eddie, where are you? Eddie La Barre! Oh, Eddieeeee.” It must have driven the other park goers nuts.
    But it worked.
    A man’s voice said, “Who’s that? I’m in here— who’s calling me?”
    We followed it into the Pond Room, which was like a rain forest dripping tropical moisture, hot and sensuous. We could barely see anyone through the steamy mist. “Who’s that?” said the voice.
    And we saw a man, a short, thick blond man who looked enough like Tommy La Barre to be his twin. He had four children with him, three of them clinging, apparently unnerved by the strange voices calling their dad. There were three boys and one little girl, a gorgeous thin little creature with hair that was neither thick and blond like her dad’s nor thick and black like her mother’s, but brown and wavy. She was dressed, not in a T-shirt and jeans, but in a sort of organza skirt topped with what looked like a bathing suit top. She was clearly at the age of dress-up, four or five, I thought.
    The boys were small, though one may have been as old as ten, and they were dark like their mother, with finely wrought features. Genes, I thought, are wonderful things, and reflected that I’d really never seen an ugly child.
    Eddie La Barre was a father of five and had recently had an affair with a twenty-three-year-old. It was a good escape, I guessed, but the memory of