maintained and had a welcoming appearance, a home most brides would appreciate, so I doubted that disapproval of the real estate had played a part in Alicia’s flight.
I rang the doorbell and waited. Jeanette had told me Garth would be here, since he ran his computer consulting business from home. I was beginning to think he’d left to make a house call, when the heavy wooden door with its tiny wrought iron-covered window swung open.
Standing on the threshold was a tall, gangly man in his mid-twenties. His sandy hair stood in unruly peaks, as if he’d recently run his fingers through it, his feet were bare, and he was dressed in khakis and the most obnoxious plaid shirt I’d ever seen. His eyes were glazed with the look of someone who’d just awakened or been pulled from the depths of concentration. With his thick glasses, he reminded me of guys who, in my youth, would have worn plastic pocket protectors and carried slide rules on their belts. Nerds, we’d called them. I didn’t know if the term was apt in today’s lingo, but Garth definitely had a geeky air about him.
Until he smiled. His welcoming look brightened his face and exuded warmth. The kid was a charmer.
“Ms. Skerritt?”
I nodded. “Garth Swinburn?”
“Come in,” he said. “Mrs. Langston said I should expect you. Have you found Alicia?”
He sounded so hopeful, I hated to disappoint him. “I don’t work quite as fast as those computers of yours. This may take a while.”
“Of course.” He blushed until the tips of his ears turned red. “Silly of me. I was just hoping—”
“Can you answer a few questions?”
“Sure. Anything to help. Come in.”
I stepped through the open door into a completely bare living room. Not even draperies on the windows, just a high sheen on the hardwood floors. He must have seen the surprise in my expression.
“The only room that’s furnished is my office,” he said. “I even sleep there. I’m waiting for Alicia to decide how she wants to decorate.”
From the way he spoke her name, I could tell Garth was crazy about his fiancée.
We crossed the living room, passed through a newly remodeled kitchen and stepped into a sunny family room at the back of the house. Every flat surface was covered with monitors, computers, piles of software, boxes of parts and rolls of cables. The only uncluttered spots were a rolling stenographer’s chair and a sofa topped with a pillow and blanket.
Garth tossed the sofa bedding to one side and offered me a seat, then settled into the chair. “I’m worried sick,” he said.
“You still haven’t heard from Alicia?”
His shoulders drooped, and he shook his head. “I can’t believe she’d just walk out without saying something. She’s not a callous person.”
“According to her mother, her note said she was trying to ‘find herself.’ Maybe she has to figure out what she wants to do.”
Garth looked doubtful. “I don’t get it.”
“You had no clue she was unhappy?”
“She wasn’t unhappy,” he insisted. “Just the opposite. She seemed to be walking on air. I figured she was glad to be finishing her dissertation and looking forward to our wedding. That’s why I’m so worried. I don’t believe Alicia left of her own free will.”
“How do you explain the voice-mail message and the written note?”
He scratched the tip of his nose. “Someone could have forced her to leave them.”
“Did Mrs. Langston share them with you?”
He nodded. “I insisted we call the police.”
“You think Alicia left the messages under duress? Could you hear it in her voice, tell it from her writing?”
Garth thought for a moment, then shook his head. “She sounded normal, and her handwriting looked typical.”
“Then why your conviction that someone’s taken her against her will?”
He confronted me with guileless brown eyes. “Because Alicia wouldn’t do this to me or her parents. She knows how much pain it would cause. Like I said, she’s not a thoughtless or selfish person.”
“When did you last see her?”
“The night before she disappeared. We had dinner at Angellino’s.”
“What did you talk about?”
His face reddened again. “I did most of the talking. I was excited about new software I’m developing for user-friendly multi-computer interfacing with business applications and told Alicia all about it.”
That conversation might have put the girl into a deep sleep but not necessarily on the run. “And what did Alicia talk about?”
“Alicia’s not like most girls.”
“How do you mean?”
He scrunched his face as if searching for the right words. “She isn’t into fashion and trends.”
“Then why the big wedding with all the bells and whistles?”
He grimaced. “Her mother’s idea. You know how it is.”
Boy, howdy, did I ever. I nodded and tried to ignore the sympathetic clenching in my gut. “So she wasn’t looking forward to it?”
Garth shook his head. “But she didn’t really mind it too badly. She wants to make her mother happy. Alicia’s like that, always thinking of others. And always looking inward, as if material things don’t matter.” He flushed again. “Since I’m usually neck-deep in my work, we make a good pair. Not exactly social butterflies.”
So good a pair that she left? “You were about to tell me her topic of conversation that night.”
“Right.” He sat with one leg crossed over the other, his ankle resting on his knee, giving me an eye-level view of his bare size-thirteen foot. I contemplated popular mythology and wondered about their sex life but was smart enough to know what not to ask.
Garth leaned forward. “Alicia was expounding on one of her favorite themes that night—who am I and why am I here? You ever ask yourself those questions?”
“Only when I’ve had too much to drink.”
He flashed his boyish grin again, reminding me of Adler, another point in Garth’s favor. “Until our dinner at Angellino’s, Alicia had worried that she’d never find the answers. But that night she said she thought she’d discovered the key.”
“Did she say what it was?”
“Nope. Said she didn’t want to talk about it further until she was sure.”
“Did she say where she’d been, what she’d been doing, who
