Free Past Perfect by Susan Isaacs Page B

didn’t mean much in the first place. Like Lisa Golding. She was one of those people who had been stuck between acquaintance and friend. Someone with a discerning eye to shop with. Someone eager to go to the theater—and it didn’t have to be a Kennedy Center revival. Someone whose tales of being propositioned by powerful men were either amusing lies or tiny naked truths bedecked in outré clothes. Someone you would never open your heart to.
    Lisa had come back into my life pleading urgently for my help.
    Then she’d said, “It can wait till tomorrow.” I’d been straining to recall something more I could use to track her down: who her parents were, where she’d grown up, names of friends. All I could come up with was that once she’d told me she’d been an army brat and had lived all over the world. However, another evening, at a bar with a bunch of people from the office, I’d heard her talk of her father, who had been a highly paid international troubleshooter for American-something-Airlines, Express—and that her family had moved some ridiculous number of times —thirty or forty— by the time she’d been sent off to boarding school in Switzerland at age fourteen.
    Again I Googled, this time like a woman possessed, which I guess I was. All I was able to come up with was more of the same, an impossibly long list of Goldings —military Goldings, American Express Goldings, American Airlines Goldings, American Standard Goldings, Bank of America Goldings. There were Goldings all over the world who might or might not be related to Lisa.
    A couple of days after my meeting with Huff, the name Tara floated into my consciousness. Somewhere in Lisa’s genial babble, there was Tara the gourmet cook, brilliant golfer, daredevil skier, and the sweetest, most loyal friend a person could have. But I’d never met Tara and had no idea what her job or her last name was. I sat at my computer for about ten minutes staring at “Tara” in the Google box, trying to bring up another association, sensing that “amazing swing” wouldn’t get me far. I squeezed my eyes shut to concentrate. When I opened them, it hit me that Lisa could have created Tara, the way kids invent imaginary friends. Then I tried the phone numbers Huff had given me. All I got were generic recorded messages to leave a message.
    So I finished making dinner for Adam and me. I was still as far from finding Lisa as ever. Farther, because now I knew from Huff that she’d dropped out of sight. Had she phoned me with someone holding a gun to her head? Or as part of some crackpot scheme she cooked up? Should I be as frightened for her as I was beginning to be? Should I be frightened for myself?
    Well, at least I could agonize and not give any thought to dinner. The advantage of being married to a guy whose mother served green Jell-O mayonnaise squares with radish and carrot circle “surprises” as the salad course was that Adam appreciated simple cooking. My salad was baby spinach from a bag and sliced mushrooms from a box with a thirty-second lemon juice and olive oil dressing. I defrosted a container of my father’s Bolognese sauce, dumped it over a bowl of fettuccine. Voilà, dinner was served.
    Sitting across from Adam, I knew that if I continued to flake out about what Huff had told me about Lisa, my husband would pick up my remoteness. Either he’d be annoyed or start wondering if I’d gone from obsessed to unglued. He was eying me as I tossed the salad with excessive gaiety. My vivacious act wasn’t playing.
    So I went into my genial bit—smiling with an excessive number of teeth. I also crinkled my eyes adorably. “You know what I need from you?” I asked him.
    “What?” Cautious, looking at my smiley face almost the way he would at an orangutang trying to cadge another banana.
    “I need advice about something for the show.”
    “Oh.” A slight upturn of the right side of his mouth told me he was pleased, or maybe just relieved, that what I