CHAPTER I

I topped a little rise on Ridgmar Boulevard and could see forever into the west. I could look past Carswell with its giant planes landing and taking off into the brushy hills that rolled gently all the way to Weatherford. It was just past ten o’clock on a Monday morning in October, and the early haze in the air was starting to burn off. The air coming in the window of my Ford had a tang to it that wasn’t caused by pollution. The first frost would come before the month was out, I figured.

I almost missed the road where I was supposed to turn. It’s a funny thing about the Ridgmar section of Fort Worth. Some of the town’s wealthiest people live there, and they’ll go to any lengths to make their fancy houses unique, and yet they still all look alike, to me, anyway.

The house I was looking for sat behind a screen of trees and hedges on the side of a hill. An asphalt driveway turned off the road through a gap in the hedge, and I followed it through an acre of lawn. The house at the end of it was a three way brick with dark wood trim, fairly modest for this neighborhood but still miles above my apartment in Arlington Heights.

I parked in front of the house and slipped my jacket on before I got out of the car. My shirt was clean, and I had brushed up my scuffed boots the best I could. People who lived in places like this probably expected all their employees to be neatly dressed, even private detectives.

The front door was heavy and ornately hand carved. A maid in a black uniform opened it almost as soon as I knocked. She gave me a pleasant but suspicious smile and said, "Yes?"

"My name is Cody," I told her. "I have an appointment with Mrs. Traft."

"Come in, please." I stepped into a hall with a big mirror on one side. "I’ll tell Mrs. Traft you’re here."

She moved quickly and silently into another room, leaving me in the hall. It was paneled with rich dark wood, making it quite a bit dimmer than the bright sunshine outside. My eyes were just adjusting when I heard footsteps returning. I was facing the mirror, so I stayed that way.

"Mr. Cody? I’m Gloria Traft."

I studied her reflection for a moment before I turned around. She was in the neighborhood of forty, and on her, it was still a very good neighborhood. Her hair was ash blond, her complexion pale. The worried look on her face didn’t make it any less attractive. When I turned around, I saw that her eyes were very blue.

"I’m Cody," I nodded. "My service told me you called."

"Please, come into the study."

She wore a powder blue dressing gown that swirled around her feet as I followed her down the hall and into a comfortable room lined with books. She sat down behind a big mahogany desk and motioned at an armchair in front of it. I sat.

"My lawyer recommended you, Mr. Cody," Gloria Traft said. "He wanted to handle this business himself, but I decided I’d feel better taking care of it personally."

She paused as if for me to comment, but I kept my mouth shut. I wanted her to come out with it herself, rather than having to pull it out of her.

After a moment, she went on. "This is about my daughter, Mr. Cody, so discretion is of the utmost importance. My stepdaughter, I should say. I think of Mandy as my own."

I nodded and said, "I understand," even though I didn’t, not yet.

She took a deep breath. "I suppose I should be blunt. My stepdaughter Amanda is missing, and I want you to find her, Mr. Cody."

"How long has she been gone?"

"Since last Thursday."

"Have you called the police?"

"No."

Now it was my turn to breathe deeply. "You should. They can look for your daughter a lot better than I can."

She shook her head. "I don’t want any publicity. I don’t even want this to be a matter of official record."

"Why?" It wouldn’t hurt to ask, even if she might not tell me.

"Mandy’s father is out of town on business right now. He doesn’t know she’s missing." Her face twisted just for a second, and I caught a glimpse of the self-control she was imposing on herself. "If you can find Mandy and bring her back before he returns on Wednesday afternoon, he’ll never have to know she was gone."

"Are you sure he needs so much protection from the situation?" I couldn’t help but ask.

She laced her fingers together on the desk and stared at them. "My husband has a great deal of pressure on him in his business. He doesn’t need anything else to worry about."

I thought for a moment, and then decided to let that go for now. I said, "Tell me about Mandy."

Mrs. Traft turned a gold-framed picture on the desk around where I could see it. It showed a teenage girl standing on the deck of a sailboat. She wore white shorts and a blue sweater, and her long blond hair was blowing in the wind. She was very pretty.

"This was taken last year," Mrs. Traft said. "She’s twenty now, but she hasn’t changed much. She’s always been a very lovely girl."

"Does she live here with you and your husband?"

"No, she and another girl share a house near the school. Mandy just started her junior year at TCU. She still has a room here, of course."

"And you say she’s been gone since Thursday?"

"Yes, she was gone when Lisa got up Thursday morning."

"That’s her roommate?"

"Yes. Lisa Montgomery. She and Mandy have been friends for years. They sing together. I mean they have a group, a trio really. A boy named Jeff Willington is the third member."

She wasn’t going to volunteer very much. I said, "Mrs. Traft, I’m going to have to know a few things. Do you mind if I just ask you some questions?"

"Not as long as they’re relevant."

I had a feeling that her idea of relevant and mine were going to be different. I said, "Was there any trouble between you and Mandy?"

Her blue eyes took on a hard look. She used it on me for a minute and then said, "Why do you ask that? Because I’m her stepmother?"

I sighed. "I’m just trying to find out how the two of you got along. That’s the kind of thing I have to know if I’m going to take the job."

"Are you going to take the job?"

I realized I was nodding slowly. "I think I will."

"All right. That means you will keep everything I tell you confidential?"

I nodded again. "If at all possible."

"There was no trouble between Mandy and myself. I suppose we’ve never been as close as mother and daughter sometimes are, but we’ve always been friends. We have few interests in common, though."

"How about her father? How do they get along?"

She permitted herself a slight smile. "Mandy is Austin’s only child. I know he loves her very much, and I believe she loves him. There was no problem there. They are very close."

"How about friends?"

"Mandy has always been very popular, but as far as close friends go there’s no one but Lisa."

"Boyfriends?"

She hesitated. "Mandy and I have never been close enough for me to know more than the basics of her relationships. She has had several boyfriends, but I do not believe any of them were serious. I do know that she just broke up with the most recent one, a boy named Richard Ferrell. He is also a student at TCU."

"Do you know if she was sleeping with him?"

Her eyes got even harder than before. "I suppose that’s relevant, too."

"It could be. They could have made up and run off to get married."

"Amanda wouldn’t dare. Besides, I think Richard was more interested in her than she ever was in him."

I changed the subject. "What happened when Lisa found out your daughter was gone?"

"She looked around to see if Mandy had left her a note. Mandy’s bed had not been slept in, and some of her clothes were gone. Lisa called to see if Mandy had spent the night here, but we had not seen her."

"Why did you wait so long to try to find her? It’s been four days."

"I . . . I was hoping that Mandy was just off on some spree, that she would be back in a day or two."

"Has she ever disappeared like this before and then come back on her own?"

"No, never."

"You didn’t have much to base that hope on then, did you?" The good mood I had started out with earlier had disappeared with the haze. I didn’t wait for Mrs. Traft to answer my question. "Your best bet now would be the police. I can look into it for you, but the cops can do it a lot more efficiently. A trail can get pretty cold in four days."

Her hand went out and plucked a pen from a holder on the desk. She took a check from the middle drawer and began to fill it out. "I told you I do not want the police, Mr. Cody. My lawyer has heard that you are a competent man at this sort of work." She slid the check across the desk. "I’m placing the matter in your hands. Is two thousand dollars satisfactory as a retainer?"

I picked up the check and looked at it, and it looked very nice. I said, "Okay, Mrs. Traft, I’ll see what I can find out for you."

I folded the check and put it in an inside pocket, taking out my notebook as I did so. "I’ll need the address where Mandy and Lisa live, and also Richard Ferrell and this Jeff Willington."

She gave me the first one from memory and then looked up the other two in a black address book. Ferrell lived in the TCU area, not far from the girls, and Willington had an apartment on Byers, just off Camp Bowie Boulevard, less than two miles from where I lived.

When I had written down the information, I said, "Do you have a picture of Mandy that I can use? I’ll return it."

"Yes, I have some snapshots." She looked in another desk drawer, found a photograph, and handed it to me. "You can keep it. It was taken at her high school graduation."

Mandy Traft was just as pretty in this picture as in the other one. I slipped it into my shirt pocket and said, "If you don’t mind, I’d like to take a look at Mandy’s room here."

"Why is that necessary?"

"When you’re looking for a missing person, it always helps if you can get some idea of what that person is like."

She frowned and a brief shudder passed through her. I wondered if it was just soaking in on her that Mandy was indeed a missing person.

"All right," she said after a moment. "I’ll show you where it is."

I was a little surprised. She could have had the maid show me the room.

We went back out into the hall and up a flight of stairs at the end of it. Mandy’s room was on the second floor at the front of the house, and when Mrs. Traft opened the door to it, I saw that a big window overlooked the vast green lawn.

The room was large and bright, the walls painted a pastel blue. A double bed with a sparkling white spread was on one side, a massive wooden dresser on the other. A portable color TV was on a stand at the foot of the bed, and there was a modular stereo unit next to the dresser. A chest with several drawers stood on one corner. There was some make up, a mirror, and a hairbrush on top of the dresser, but nothing else. I opened the dresser drawers and looked in them quickly, because Mrs. Traft was frowning her disapproval at me.

I found more make up, some stationery, and a few paperback books in the dresser. The drawers in the chest contained a few sweaters and some lingerie, and in the closet were only two blouses, a pair of blue jeans, and a skirt. There was nothing on the walls.

For all of its neat attractiveness, it was one of the most coldly impersonal rooms I have ever been in. It was hard to believe that a teenaged girl had ever lived here.

"She didn’t leave much when she moved out, did she?" I asked Mrs. Traft.

"No, she took most of her things with her. This used to be such a lively room. She had posters and pennants on the walls, and stuffed animals all over the bed, and Muffin standing guard on the chest."

"Muffin?"

"A jade statuette of a dog, a Pekinese, I believe. My husband bought it for her in Hong Kong. She took all of that with her when she left."

"Was there any particular reason she left here and moved in with Lisa Montgomery?"

"Oh, just a desire for independence, I think. Of course, we paid the rent on the house, but being away from us made her feel like she was on her own."

I nodded and took a last quick look around the sterile room. It still didn’t tell me anything.

As we walked down the stairs, I said to Mrs. Traft, "What kind of work does your husband do? His name sounds familiar, but I can’t quite pin him down."

"He’s an executive with Westco. They manufacture oil field equipment. That’s why his work takes him all over the world. He’s in Canada right now."

"You said he’s supposed to be back Wednesday afternoon?"

"Yes." We had reached the front door, and she opened it for me herself. "I imagine you think I should have let him know about Mandy."

I looked into her blue eyes and said, "That’s your decision to make. Just like I decided to take this case."

"I hope we were both right."

"So do I."

We stood there awkwardly for a few seconds, and then she said, "Please find Amanda, Mr. Cody. If anything has happened to her . . ." She let it trail off.

"I'll do what I can," I said.

Copyright© 1980 Manor Books

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JAMES REASONER has been a professional writer for more than twenty-five years, authoring dozens of novels in a variety of genres and over a hundred short stories. He is best known for the mystery novel Texas Wind, which has achieved legendary status as a collectible paperback.  For several years early in his career, he wrote the Mike Shayne novellas in MIKE SHAYNE MYSTERY MAGAZINE under the famous pseudonym Brett Halliday.  Under his own name in recent years he has written a ten-book series of historical novels set during the Civil War and several historical novels about World War II.  He lives in Texas with his wife, award-winning mystery novelist L.J. Washburn.
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