“Julie and I aren’t close. We never have been, and we’ve hardly spoken the past three years. I don’t have any idea where she is. Why?”
“I think she knows something about what happened to Phaedra.”
I expected some reaction, but she continued in the same monotone. “I knew something like this would happen someday. I knew if Phaedra kept trying to help Julie, I’d end up losing both of them.”
“Mrs. Riding, I got the impression it was the other way around, that Julie was trying to help Phaedra.”
She snorted an unhappy laugh. “Julie was never sober enough to help anybody but herself, even if she would have been inclined. That’s what lost her her daughter. And it’s a good thing.”
“And you have no idea where she might be?”
She shook her head slowly. “Julie ran with a fast crowd,” she said. “Money, parties, powerful men. But it was all going to catch up with her. She couldn’t keep her looks forever.” She looked from the lawn to me. “She was so much like her father. She was her father’s daughter. Phaedra was my daughter.” Her voice skipped a bit, like a stone skimming water. “My hope.”
“I thought Julie and her father didn’t get along.”
“They hated each other,” she said, “because they were the same. Do you want something to drink?”
I said a diet Coke would be nice, and she brought me one. She poured herself Jack Daniel’s on the rocks.
“Both my daughters were very complicated, very smart young women. But Julie, Julie had something in her, something like what was in her father. It was something that you could never know, that made it possible for her to do things I could never do.”
“I’ve decided we never really know the people we’re close to,” I ventured.
“Maybe,” Avis Riding said. “Maybe so. I know that my husband-” She stopped herself. “That’s not the entire truth. I know we both did things that made life harder, more painful for the girls. Well, isn’t that what we’re supposed to believe? That whatever happened to Julie and Phaedra was ultimately the parents’ fault? That’s what all those women who call Dr. Sharon on the radio say.”
“I don’t think Sharon agrees with them,” I said.
“I don’t know what I think,” she said. “I know I was married to a cold, angry man with too many secrets, and it somehow seemed to bring out the worst in me, too.”
“What was Phaedra’s relationship with Julie?”
“Complicated. Phaedra was very strong, very independent. But she loved Julie unquestioningly, and so many times, Phaedra was there to get her out of a bad love affair, get her into detox for the cocaine.”
“You stayed in touch with Phaedra?”
She nodded.
“What about the month before her death?”
“She’d call. She seemed worried, didn’t want to talk. I told all this to those other men, the black detective and that annoying partner of his. I didn’t know she was in danger.”
“Did Julie call you in the past month?”
“Yes, she did,” she said. “It was probably the first time we’d even spoken in months.”
“What did you talk about?”
“She wanted to know where Phaedra was.”
“What did you tell her?”
“I told her if she wasn’t at her apartment, she could call Phaedra’s new boyfriend. Noah was his name. Do you want the number?”
“No,” I said a little too quietly, and then said I had to leave.
“Wait,” she said. “I’m a little surprised you don’t have a family of your own by now. You seemed like a nice boy.”
I smiled a little. “Life doesn’t work out like we expect.”