Disappearing Nightly Read Online Free

Joe screamed an emphatic negative, she turned to me and added, “It was horribly expensive to repair, Esther.”
    “Uh-huh.”
    “Considerably more than your salary.”
    “That’s easy to believe.”
    She frowned at me, then bellowed, “Shall I tell them you’re coming, dear?”
    I don’t think Joe heard her. He was still shouting. So I said, “Tell them someone will come for it. If he won’t go, I will.”
    “Well, yes, I suppose it’s the least you can do.”
    “Look, Matilda, someone had to get Golly out of—”
    “She wasn’t in there, if you recall,” Matilda said through clenched teeth.
    Joe heard that. “Go on, remind me, remind me, just keep reminding me.” He hurled the words at her, coming down the hallway toward us. “Just keep rubbing it in that I made a woman vanish!”
    Matilda glared at him and went back to her telephone conversation. I stared at Joe, thunderstruck.
    “Wait a minute! Wait just a minute!” I realized I was shouting, too, and lowered my voice. “What’s going on here, Joe? Are you having delusions of godhood? Do you honestly believe—do you even entertain the possibility—that Golly really vanished? Abracadabra, a puff of smoke and oblivion? Do you believe all your own hocus-pocus publicity?”
    He had the good grace to look sheepish. “You don’t understand, Esther. She…I felt…There was…”
    I took him by the shoulders and shook him hard. “Joe! Pull yourself together! Let’s have a reality check here!”
    Matilda put down the phone. “The shop closes at six o’clock. You’ll have to hurry.”
    “But she did vanish,” Joe insisted.
    “She didn’t vanish!” I snapped. “She…wandered away. Maybe she felt an urgent need to speak to Robert Kennedy Junior. Maybe she thought she saw Elvis. Maybe she was abducted by one of those plastic surgeons she owes so much money to.”
    “Huh?” Joe said.
    “Or maybe she’s just trying to get a raise,” Matilda said.
    I stared at her. “Good God, there is evil among us.”
    “Excuse me?”
    “Forget it. Give me the keys to your truck. I’m going to go get the crystal cage,” I said. “It, and I, will be at the theater tomorrow morning at ten o’clock sharp for a full dress rehearsal. And so will you, Joe, or I will come here and get you—and this time the beautiful assistant will saw the magician in half!”
     
    “Beautiful assistant” is an exaggeration in my case. Indeed, being fitted into Golly’s wardrobe that morning had driven that point home like a wooden stake: her costumes were all a little too large in the chest and extremely tight everywhere else. I figured the girl must never eat. The wardrobe mistress advised me to suck in my stomach—and give up the Ben & Jerry’s.
    At five foot six, I was also shorter than Golly, so all the costumes had to be hemmed. Some of the colors would never look quite right on me, since I’m fair-skinned and brown-haired. I wondered if I’d be given a wig to play Virtue, since my simple shoulder-length hairstyle didn’t resemble Golly’s waist-length blond ringlets (which, in my darker moments, I had described as “hooker hair”).
    I inherited my father’s brown eyes and my mother’s good cheekbones. The result is a face which, as one of my acting teachers put it, is more versatile than beautiful. Still, I was rather flattered when Golly asked if I’d had cheek implants. (The feeling wore off when she told me she knew a doctor who could fix my nose.)
    As I drove downtown, I wondered how a young woman Golly’s age knew so much about fake body parts. She must have had a pretty dreadful life. Now that she wasn’t around to irritate me, I felt kind of sorry for her.
    I guess I felt kind of guilty, too. Exceptfor a few stunned moments Saturday night, I hadn’t worried about Golly at all since her disappearance. Mostly I’d gloated over getting her job.
    Now I tried to imagine what could have happened to her. How had she disappeared like that? And why?