Read Not A Girl Detective for Free Online Page B

VW
    Bug so new it didn’t even have a license plate.
    I stopped short in front of a green Honda Prelude. It was parked next to the minikilt’s VW. Nancy’s car—it
    had to be. Was that good or bad? I stood there for a
    minute, bewildered. I think it was bad. But not necessarily. It didn’t mean her body was sprawled lifeless on her living-room floor. Or that her head was in the washing machine, clunking around on the spin cycle. It was too quiet for that. The only thing I could hear was the buzz of the broken fluorescent light.
    There were many possible explanations. Nancy
    could be out of town. Or in town and hiding from her
    mother. Maybe her car was in its parking place because Nancy enjoyed walking. The Holly View was conveniently located. Within a couple of blocks going east or west there were markets, movie theaters, bookstores,
    restaurants. And nightclubs. The girl was a singer. An artist who sings, rather. Those types are unpredictable.
    The driver’s-side door was unlocked. I looked to the
    right, then to the left. No one down here but me. I’d just take a tiny peek and see if anything out of the ordinary jumped out at me. That was it. Then I was going home.
    Getting back to work. Packing for the weekend. Calling Clarissa. Shit.
    I opened the door as quietly as I could and slid in.
    The car was a mess. There were half-drunk containers
    of milky coffee in both cup holders, and the floor was covered with supermarket tabloids, the movie section
    of last Sunday’s L.A. Times, an army blanket, candy wrappers. A rock-hard bagel down by the emergency
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    brake. Nothing unusual. Except for the green leather
    Filofax under the blanket.
    People don’t just leave their Filofaxes in their cars.
    That was like leaving your baby at a 7-Eleven. Well, not exactly, but you wouldn’t do it unless you were in the middle of a nervous breakdown or something.
    I picked it up and immediately felt squeamish, as if I were violating this person-I-didn’t-even-know’s entire being. Which is worse, sins of commission or sins of
    omission? All those years of catechism and I couldn’t remember. Squeezing one eye shut so it didn’t really
    count, I flipped through the pages.
    On paper, at least, Nancy Olsen was having an un-
    eventful week. Something with Jeff at nine in the morning on Monday. Something at three-twenty that
    afternoon. Hip-hop last night, Wednesday. An appoint-
    ment at Lola’s in Silver Lake, also on Wednesday. I’d been to Lola’s for a consultation once. I’d wanted to straighten my hair. But the prices were outrageous, and I’d decided against such drastic measures anyway.
    What about Nancy? Had she been booked in for
    highlights? A trim? A mullet cut to spite her mother?
    Looked like it’d been something. Tucked into a side
    pocket of the Filofax, along with some receipts and
    scraps of paper that I’d inadvertently sent flying all over the place, was a parking ticket issued yesterday on Hillhurst Avenue, just around the corner from the salon.
    Thirty-five bucks for a meter violation. Well, at least that meant she was alive and well and breaking the law.
    All good things. I could tell Clarissa her daughter was okay. But first I had to stick everything back where it belonged.
    I reached between the two front seats to retrieve the 42
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    stuff that had fallen in there, then bent down to pick up some tiny pieces of cardboard that had gotten stuck inside the movie section.
    But they weren’t tiny pieces of cardboard. They were
    slides. I stepped out of the car and held them up to the busted fluorescent light so I could see them more
    clearly.
    Odd.
    One was an image of a little girl sitting on a river-
    bank, lost in thought. It reminded me of Alice before her visit to Wonderland. Another was a photograph of a female nude, curled up into herself, like a seashell. The next was a Japanese print of a geisha girl holding a
    handful of cherry blossoms.