Read The Manipulated (Joe Portugal Mysteries) for Free Online

another guy. Sweetest man in the world, came highly recommended, seemed to understand our concerns. For two weeks everything was perfect. Then people stopped showing up, and for the last two months it had been a constant game of will-they-won’t-they. We were considering firing the new guy too. But what guarantee did we have that anyone else would be better?
    I endured the music until a quarter to ten, when I left for the library. I ran into Theta on the way out. She said Ronnie’d called, and they’d decided to extend the Hawaii shoot a couple of days. She’d be back on Friday.
    When I reached the library I took a chair and sat staring at a computer screen. I’d been dragged kicking and screaming into the information age, finally making the grudging admission that using the Internet didn’t mean I was giving up all that was good and true about my life.
    That didn’t mean I had to enjoy it.
    I clicked and typed and found the Staples Center site. Went to the seating chart, printed it out, marked where the Lennox Productions box was and approximately where Mike thought he’d seen his long-lost wife. Then I got a page of contact information.
    Next I went after Donna. Found a couple of references to her disappearance. Nothing I didn’t know. They mentioned DL Tea. I clicked my way to its website.
    I drink tea because I don’t like the taste of coffee. Most of the time, whatever bags they happen to have at Trader Joe’s. I’d never visited the big wide wonderful world of loose tea. So the DL site was a revelation. I went to the Darjeelings because that was what was in my current TJ’s bags. They had fifteen of them. They compared them to apricot, cinnamon, and muscatel. They talked about the scent and the briskness and the fullness.
    There were other black teas, and green, and white. But I went next to the oolongs. It was an oolong, Mike had said, that Donna was after when she vanished. Oolongs, I discovered, were partially fermented. Sure to come in handy if I ever went on
Jeopardy!
    There were eight of them, four from Taiwan, three from mainland China, one Darjeeling oolong just to confuse me. I moved in on the mainland ones. Each had a Chinese name and an English one. Ti Kuan Yin, for instance, was Iron Goddess of Mercy. Was one of these the one Donna’d been after on the trip she never came back from?
    I printed the oolong page and wandered some more. There were pages about tea history, preparation, equipment. I went back to the home page and spotted a link I hadn’t noticed. Donna Lennox. Our Founder.
Click
. Donna was a brunet, her hair to her shoulders, her eyes very dark. She was smiling like she had a secret, standing in front of a rack of copper-colored tins. The photo didn’t look like a portrait. The focus was soft, like it was a snapshot that should have ended up in a shoebox in Mike’s closet.
    The text underneath didn’t address her disappearance. It was written so, if you didn’t know what had happened, you’d get the feeling she wasn’t around anymore. But you wouldn’t be sure.
     
    I’d promised to help out at the Kawamura Conservatory, repotting plants that had outgrown their pots. This killed the rest of the morning, and I made it kill the afternoon too. Later Gina and I went to Red Moon for Vietnamese. When we got home Mike was on the machine. I didn’t have anything to tell him about what I’d found out or what I was going to do. But I did have a question. I called him and we worked over the seating chart and pinpointed the exact location he’d “seen” Donna. He said I was a good guy.
    I hung up. Something was bothering me. That web page from the tea shop. If it had been a handsome studio portrait of Donna Lennox, I don’t think it would have come up. But that snapshot, taken in an unguarded moment, with Donna doing what she loved, expecting to go on doing it for who knew how many more years …
    I’d picked up a copy of
National Geographic
because there was an article about