Vanished by Kat Richardson Page B

curb, a long driveway on one side to a garage in the back. It was only a few blocks, a short walk, from what was now Paul Arkmanian’s office.
    My memory saw the house as much larger than its narrow two stories. I sat and stared at it a moment, the house looking just the same in both the Grey and the normal so it seemed to be sitting in a pale shadow of itself. Wind chimes and shiny crystals hung from the porch rafters and in the windows. A rainbow-striped flag made a curtain for one pane on the upper floor. Subtle signals of the private life the residents kept quietly confined within the walls they’d cleaned of any trace of previous tenants. There weren’t any particular lines of energy or gleams of residual emotion clinging to the house. No one loved it, or hated it, or lingered in it. It was just shelter, nothing more.
    I got out of the car and walked across the street to look more closely at the house, but nothing changed. There were no ghosts here, no extraordinary extrusion of the grid or traces of more than passing emotional storms. It was as clear as scrubbed glass. Curtains twitched in nearby windows and I sighed, knowing it was only a matter of minutes before one neighbor or another called the cops to investigate me and my obsession with the house on Louise Street. I shrugged and went back to my car.
    I wasn’t any closer to talking to my father or figuring out what had tied us both to the Grey or when or how. I could almost understand, in a confused sort of way, why he’d written his suicide note to me—or at least not to my mother—but that didn’t answer the questions I had. Disappointed, I turned the car around and headed back to Hollywood and up the hills to my mother’s stormy white villa.

THIRTEEN
    My mother was on the terrace, practicing a complex yoga pose when I arrived. She looked like a scarlet pretzel wrapped in green energy tissue. She untied herself as I entered with the box on my hip.

    “I’ll be done in just a minute, sweetie. You can put that on the kitchen counter and sit down out here.” Then she wriggled into a more tortuous position than before and became very quiet.
    I put the box down on one of the empty chairs—petty rebellion, that—and sat down on another, surveying the table for signs of lunch. It was just on two o’clock according to my watch, so her lack of preparation wasn’t due to me. She just wasn’t ready, which was no different from my childhood; if we had an appointment that furthered her ideas for my life, she’d be sure to have me dressed and prepped at least an hour before we needed to be gone. I would sit or stand, careful not to muss my audition clothes, until she was ready, which would always be in the nick of time, or just past it. We would rush to auditions and photo shoots in a flurry of shouting and speeding and narrowly missed traffic accidents. If we were too late, the drive home would be a misery of recrimination.
    I shook off the urge to grind my teeth and put my booted feet up on the empty table while I waited. Ten minutes later, my mother unwound herself and trotted over to glare at me as she wiped her face on a designer towel.
    “Really, Harper, I taught you better manners than that. Get your feet off the table. Now.”
    I left them where they were. “I thought we were having lunch.”
    “We certainly won’t be having anything if your feet are on the table, Snippet.”
    I wanted the things from the box too much to tell her off. Narrowing my eyes in annoyance, I lowered my feet back to the ground.
    My mother gave me a plastic smile and headed into the house. “Come on inside. Bring the box.”
    Shaking my head at myself in disgust, I picked up the box and carried it into the kitchen. She pointed to the end of the spotless granite counter.
    “Just put it there. You can make a salad while I take a quick shower. Be right back, sweetie,” she added, and whisked off, leaving me standing in the middle of the kitchen, too stunned to shoot