“No, it’s just-” Kevin glanced at Lyle, then looked down. “No.”

Joey said, “If you had to guess, what do you think happened to Rico?”

“He had some business deal going,” Lyle said. “Like a stock market thing.”

“What kind of stock market thing?”

“Well, I don’t know that’s what it was, but there’s this old movie Wall Street. It was on TV. Then Rico bought the DVD and studied it, and now he’s all portfolios this and that, reading the paper, the business section. I’m like, Dude, to have a portfolio you gotta have something to put in the portfolio, but he said he had it handled.”

“So he did have money or he didn’t?” I asked, confused.

“Okay, gargantuan allowance, but one time we were watching TV, I’m going, What would you do for a million dollars, would you eat a live rodent? and Rico goes, A million’s pocket change. By the time I’m twenty-five I’m gonna buy and sell my dad.”

“That was a career goal?” I said. “To buy and sell his dad?”

“You ever meet his dad?” Lyle looked at us, then shook his head. “Hard-core.”

Kevin stood. “Hey, I gotta get to Union Station, catch a train.”

“Yeah, I gotta pack too,” Lyle said, not moving from the sofa. “Driving up to Lake Arrowhead for Thanksgiving.”

Joey asked to use the bathroom, and on impulse, I asked to see Rico’s room. Kevin led me down the narrow hallway. “Cops took his computer and his mom and dad took things, but there’s still stuff left.”

If the room was picked over, it was hard to imagine what it had looked like before. Bunk beds, desks, and chairs overflowed with sheets, blankets, clothes, running shoes, weights, underwear, fast-food wrappers, dishes, coffee mugs, textbooks, notebooks, and backpacks. A teenage-boy smell filled the room, sweat and hormones and deodorant and dirty socks. “We shared. It’s a little-we haven’t cleaned in a while,” Kevin said, dragging a duffel bag from a closet. He cleared off a chair for me, throwing a wet towel on the floor, along with some jeans. Coins rained onto the dirty carpet. I looked out the window. Either the glass was gray with dirt or the sky had darkened in the time we’d been in here. I’d rarely seen such a mess, from floor to-

Ceiling.

“Was Rico the top bunk?” I asked.

“Yeah. Check it out if you want.”

I eased out of my slingback pumps and climbed the ladder. The male-animal smell intensified up here. I moved aside a pillow, soft and doughy in its red flannel pillowcase. There were matching red sheets and a plaid blanket, all bunched up and personal. I tried to imagine the girls he’d brought up here, but the strongest impression was of a child sleeping soundly in sheets his mother had sent him off to school with. My sense of trespassing nearly sent me back down the ladder.

But the wall was information central. Phone numbers doodled in blue and black ink. Appointment times. Address-book graffiti. I pictured Rico, a kid in his treehouse, talking on his phone, drawing on the wall. “Kevin, did the cops look up here?”

“Maybe. They were in here a while. Hey, um…”

“Yeah?”

“Do you-is Annika okay, do you think?”

I leaned over the bed to look at him. He sat on the floor, selecting dirty clothes to throw into the duffel. I said, “I’m pretty worried about her, actually.”

“I met her on the beach.” He didn’t look up. “She was reading this book, The Naked and the Dead, about World War II. She wanted to know what Americans thought about Germany. I thought that was so cool. I told her, Don’t worry about it, nobody our age hates Germans, that’s like a century ago. You finding anything up there?”

There were names on the wall and the ceiling. Boys’ names. Girls. Nikki. Jillian. Heather. Courtney. Emily. Initials: L.B., R.A., J.B. “Maybe.”

“I heard them one time. Up there.”

“Rico and Annika? You’re kidding.”

“No, not-I mean, they were arguing. They probably thought I was asleep. They were whispering.”

“Yeah?”

“She said something like ‘It’s not a problem for you; if we get caught, you’ll get out of it.’ She said for her it was a big deal, because she’s German, the rules are different for foreigners. Stuff like that. Okay, it wasn’t as clear as I just said it, but I was thinking, He’s pressuring her into something.”

“What do you think it was?”

“I don’t know. Rico was like, C’mon, no big deal. That’s how he was. Nothing was a big deal for him. I think when you have a dad like his, and money, you don’t think about how it is for other people.”

I leaned down again, watching him pack. “What about drugs?”

“You mean, did he do them?” Kevin looked up at me. “No more than anybody. Why would he? If you’re into drugs, you don’t go to Pepperdine. It’s not the biggest party school on the planet.”

“Ever hear of something called Euphoria?” I asked, but he shook his head. “And Annika? You think she did drugs?”

He looked at me steadily. “Not with me…”

“But?”

“She was-you know how she was. But he’d walk in and she’d turn into…”

“What?” I was leaning down now, straining to catch his words.

Kevin sighed. “Like Lyle said. A loser. Sort of. So I don’t know what she’d do to be with him. We call it the Rico Effect.”

Glenda Nacy, the au pair volunteer, had called it “boy crazy.” I leaned back against the wall. I wanted to think Annika was more than that, smarter about men, but I’d been that girl too, the one with the head on her shoulders until the right guy waltzed in and rendered her mindless… I could imagine Rico talking straight-arrow Annika into things she wouldn’t otherwise consider. And if he’d talked her into something illegal, drugs or otherwise, if the two of them had, as Glenda might say, fallen in with a bad crowd, then the reasons for disappearing multiplied.

As if to confirm this, her number appeared on Rico’s wall, the 818 area code and Encino prefix I’d dialed so often in the last ten days it was committed to memory.

How much evidence did I need? Annika wanted a gun, wanted a lawyer, asked where to find drugs, had drugs under her bed, acted depressed and distant, had trouble with the German police… and had contemplated quitting Biological Clock, a job she’d once loved. If I couldn’t reconcile smart, smiling, happy Annika with the one I kept hearing about, maybe I was in denial. I sat up. I should be copying down these numbers. “Kevin,” I said, “ever hear Annika talk about someone named Richard Feynman? Or Marie-Thérèse? Britta?”

“Britta, yeah. She’s been over here a couple times. I never really talked to her. And who’s the guy you just said?”

“Richard Feynman?”

“Sounds familiar. Is he an astronaut or something?”

I tried to imagine Annika dating an astronaut. I thought she would’ve mentioned it. I said, “Did you tell the police about the argument you overheard?”

“No,” Kevin said. “They didn’t ask.”

He gave me a pen and paper and went on talking, about the girls who’d show up at Lovernich at all hours, girls Rico had invited over and forgotten about. I listened with half an ear, then no ear at all, because I found something on the wall, something I knew. Something I’d seen before. A squiggle. It was the logo on the pill that had been under Annika’s bed.