The next morning I drove out to Elmhurst. Annabelle’s address was a small bungalow on a treelined street. The grass in the small yard hadn’t been cut in a week or so. Spiderwebs shrouded the front window. I checked the mailbox next to the front door. Empty.
I pressed the doorbell three times, 30 seconds apart. No answer.
If I were a real P.I.—by which I mean, a fictional P.I. on TV or in books—I would have picked the lock and sneaked inside for a search. Since I didn’t want to only see Rachel on visiting days in prison, I settled for peering through the front window into the living room.
Magazines on a coffee table, a sofa and a chair, a TV in the corner. A bookcase with candles and plants stood against one wall. A painting hung on another.
I glanced over my shoulder to see if anyone was watching me. Then I leaned forward and shaded my eyes for a better view. A stack of unopened mail sat on the coffee table next to the TV remote. A dog toy lay on the carpet. A clock on the wall over the bookcase was five minutes fast. And—
Wait. A dog toy?
I reached over to press the doorbell again. Standing in front of the window I caught sudden, frantic movement, a shadow rushing around a corner, jumping toward the door. A small dog, a pug, its mouth yapping, tail quivering. It ran to the window, saw me, and pawed the glass with its front legs.
I stepped back, checked around me again, then headed back to my car. Time for a stakeout.
Rachel called two hours later. “Any activity?”
I figured that eventually someone would have to walk the dog. So far nobody had, and I was going to need a bathroom myself sooner or later. At least I was able to do some work with my laptop. No one appeared to notice me. It was a quiet street.
“I’ll give it another hour or two,” I told her. “No one’s mowed the grass in a while, but someone’s picking up her mail. I’m hoping a neighbor or someone—wait.”
A young Black woman in her 20s leading two dogs on their leashes walked up the sidewalk to Annabelle’s porch. “Gotta go. I’ll call you.”
I got out of my car as she unlocked the front door. By the time she came out with the pug on a third leash, I was at the bottom step of the porch. “Hi.” I waved what I was hoped a nonthreatening hand. “Tom Jurgen. Could I talk to you a minute?”
“Uhh . . .” She wore jeans and a University of Chicago sweatshirt, a canvas nag slung over one shoulder, her hair pulled back under a yellow scarf. “What’s it about?” The three dogs scurried around her feet while she reached for a back pocket to Mace me if I was a stalker or an overly enthusiastic Jehovah’s Witness.
I held out my card. “Annabelle Silvestri’s son has been trying to get in touch with her. Do you happen to know where she is?”
She blinked at the card without taking it, her hand still in her pocket. “Uh, she didn’t say. She called me a few days ago to come walk Pearl twice a day. I’ve walked him before.” As if confirming this, the pug nuzzled her ankle.
“Did she say where she was going? Or how long she’d be gone?”
She shook her head. “I, uh, I have to get going. Come on, boys!”
I didn’t blame her. My questions were pretty suspicious. But at least I’d established that Annabelle wasn’t home, and hadn’t been for several days. It was something. Not much, but—
Then the dog walker turned. “Hey? I, uh, don’t think it matters too much if I say this, but she said if I had to get in touch with her, talk to Haley.” She pointed to the next house. “Haley Brooker. Next door? I guess it’s okay to tell you that.”
I nodded. “Thanks. I’ll leave my card in the door here. If you want to call me.”
She gave me a “whatever” shrug and pulled Pearl and the other dogs for their walkies.
So I went next door. Haley Brooker was in her 40s and frazzled. I could hear dogs and kids behind her in the doorway. I explained quickly who I was and told her that Annabelle’s son was trying to find her.
She sighed and took my card. “I suppose I can call her. I don’t know where she is.” Like the dog walker, she was clearly skeptical of a strange man asking questions with only a flimsy excuse.
I nodded. “Thanks.” And then, because I had to try: “Do you have any idea where she’s gone?”
“I didn’t know she was going anywhere. It must have been a last-minute thing.” A child shouted “Mom!” behind her. “Look, I have to go.” She closed the door before I could say thanks again.
I went back to the car, called Rachel, and headed for home.
“Carrie’s friend Nikolai knows Anna Silver,” Rachel told me after I’d used the bathroom and fixed myself a sandwich. “Here’s his number.” She sent it to me on her phone. “How’d the stakeout go?”
“Like usual. Maybe someone will call me.” Finding a missing person isn’t so much a matter of finding them as asking a lot of people where they are—and maybe one is willing to tell you. I sipped my coffee and called Nikolai.
“Hey man.” Nikolai had a faint Jamaican accent and a friendly voice. “Yeah, I helped Annabelle set up her website. She’s pretty cool. We, uh, had a little thing for a while.” He laughed. “Haven’t seen her lately, though.”
“So you don’t know where she is right now? Can you contact her?”
“I got her on my phone, yeah. What’s it all about?”
I told him that Adam was trying to find her, and that his father was missing, and that she’d been trying to get something from him. I didn’t mention the door into nowhere. “Do you have any idea where she might go? Who she’d talk to?”
“Let me see . . .” I heard music near him. “Maybe Lincoln. He’s a wiz. I mean, he’s an accountant, but he does stuff with his mind. Moves things, you know? Psycho, uh psychokinesis. Makes some money doing—stuff. And Jaye, she did readings with Annabelle sometimes. Personal readings, for rich people. That kind of stuff.”
“What’s she like? Annabelle, I mean.”
Nikolai laughed again. “She can be wild. I mean, we dated for a while, right? And she’s older than me, but she’s not—well anyway.” He cleared his throat. “She’s pretty intense. Like, when I was working on her website, she wanted everything yesterday. She wasn’t mean or anything like that, just—anxious. Same way in, uh, other stuff, you know? She was always learning new things, right?”
“Like what?”
“New tricks. Magic, you know. Carrie said you know about that stuff?”
More than I’d like, sometimes. “What kind of magic?” The word made Rachel’s jerk up.
“How to get inside people’s heads. That’s what her readings are all about, the other person’s mind. So she can tell them what they want to hear. Not like she was lying,” he said quickly. “So she’d know what they really wanted. So she was looking for anything that could let her get inside. And then stuff like opening doors. Portals.”
“You mean, other dimensions?”
“Yeah. But that always sounded too far out there, you know? I never saw her do anything like that. That worked, I mean. She was always trying.”
Maybe she’d figured it out.
He gave me contact information for Lincoln and Jaye, and I thanked him and hung up. “You know this guy?” I asked Rachel.
She shook her head. “I think I’ve met him once or twice. At parties. What kind of magic were you talking about?”
“She was interested in portals. Very interested.”
“Huh.” We’d actually gone through some portals to other realities a few times. Sometimes my job is weird. “That must be what happened to Adam’s father. What’s she looking for, though?”
“Good question.”
I called the other two. Lincoln didn’t have much to add. He’d never dated Annabelle, but he knew about her passion for knowledge about portals and other types of magic.
“Yeah, we worked together sometimes,” Jaye told me when she called me back. “Usually some older guy who wanted a private reading in his house. They’d want sex too.”
I raised an eyebrow that she couldn’t see. Jaye went on: “But Silver likes money. She’s always buying stuff. Not jewelry and regular stuff, but books and charms so she could figure out more magic.”
“What kind of magic?”
“Mind reading. Other realms.”
Did that mean—“What kind of other realms? Other dimensions?”
Jaye giggled. “I could show you. Tonight? My place?”
I glanced at Rachel. “Sure. Can I bring an associate?”
“More the merrier.” She gave me her address. “I’ll have to charge you. $200? For supplies and stuff.”
“I’ll need a receipt.”
“What’s that?” Rachel shot me a glare from her desk across the office.
“We’re going exploring in other realms tonight. You in?”
She rolled her eyes. “Better than sitting in a car on a stakeout, I suppose.”
Jaye’s apartment was the top floor in the Ukrainian Village neighborhood. We walked up the outside stairs and knocked on the door. Jaye opened it with a smile. “Hi! Come on in!”
She was short, with black hair in a ponytail and amber eyes behind wire-rimmed glasses. She wore a turquoise necklace and a black T-shirt for a punk rock band I’d never heard of. She looked to be in her 20s.
I introduced Rachel. They shook hands, and then Jaye walked us into a small living room. It held the usual TV, sofa, and chairs, some magazine on a coffee table, and candles. A mirror hung on a wall between two bookcases, facing the sofa where Rachel and I sat. I handed her a check, she gave me a handwritten receipt, and then she poured some red wine.
“Okay.” Jaye rubbed some jasmine-scented oil over her hands. “This is going to be fun. I don’t know as much about this as Silver does, but I learned a little. I mean, I can do séances and a little mindreading, but this is really weird.” She took a sip of wine and opened a thick, leatherbound book. “You ready?”
I can’t read minds, but I can read Rachel pretty well. She was restraining her urge to snort in derision. I nodded. “Let’s go.”
Jaye knelt in front of the table and lit a candle. Then she placed her hands on either side of the book. A feather sat on one side of the book, a black crystal on the other.
Leaning down, Jaye began to recite from the book—a chant in a language I didn’t recognize. Her breath pushed the feather a few inches. The candle flame flickered with every other word.
The crystal stayed still. But after a moment it started to glow, as if a white light underneath was streaming up through it. Jaye kept chanting, closing her eyes and repeating the same spell over and over.
I glanced over at Rachel. Her eyes were narrow, and she gave me a quick nod. “I feel it,” she whispered.
I did too—a breeze through the room. Cold air, not a storm, just gentle murmurs across my face and shoulders.
Jaye smiled. “Look up.”
Where? Then I saw it—in the mirror on the far side of the room. Rachel and me, and the back of Jaye’s head, were gone. For a moment the mirror was solid black—and then it flared with light. I blinked, and when my eyes focused again I saw a tall mountain, covered with snow, a castle perched on the top. Flying dinosaurs circled its towers.
Again I looked at Rachel. “You see this?”
“Yeah.” She licked her lips. “A castle on a mountain. Flying lizards. You too?”
“Right.” I stood up. “Can I—?"
“If you touch it, it goes away.”
I had to try. I stepped cautiously around the table and across the room. When I reached the mirror, I leaned forward.
The pterodactyls or whatever they were looked like circled in the sky like flying drones. On the mountain I could see small figures climbing upward. One lost his balance and fell, disappearing beneath the snow. The rest kept climbing.
I stretched my hands out—tensing for the black cloud that had burst from the doorway in the Rosen basement.
A shock of cold met my fingertips, but nothing more. Then, like Jaye had predicted, the mountain and the castle vanished. First the surface was black, and then it was a mirror again, and I was staring at my own puzzled face.
“Where was that?” Rachel picked up her wine.
“It was—let me see—” Jaye turned a page in the book. “Bettina Roishe. I can’t read the language that describes it, just the name, and the spell. Pretty cool, huh?”
“Definitely.” I sat down next to Rachel again. “Did Silver teach you to do that?”
“We learned it together. She’s a lot more involved in it. I can’t actually bring up a door—” She pointed to the mirror. “But that’s what she’s working on.”
“Where’d you get the book?” I sipped some wine to calm my nerves.
She smiled. “His name’s Marlowe.”
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