MARCH: THE MISSING MODEL

     Monday, March 13

     8:30 am

It was my first appointment of the day.  Okay, so it was my only appointment of the day.  Female private investigators may have case after case in popular fiction, but in slow moving Ridgeboro, Louisiana, where I’m the only female private eye in town and the food section of the paper is as widely read as the front page, things are different.  If my free-spirited grandmother didn’t allow me live in the garage apartment in back of the Victorian house she and my straight-laced mother share, and if I didn’t have my office in the rear of their antiques shop in the downstairs section of said house, I’d be in big financial trouble.  As it is, my financial woes are only middling.

I suppose that at twenty-seven I should be more independent, and I’m working on it.  At night I go to school to earn my Master of Arts in Counseling.  I’d much rather soothe than sleuth, but for the time being, I’m stuck with snooping.

Fortunately, I’ve never married.  I say fortunately because the men I’ve been with so far have all been losers.  I like to think it has nothing to do with my personality.  I’m a thin, six-feet, four-inches tall, a challenge for a lot of men, a put-off for a lot more. 

My name is Rose Marie McDowell, though I’m listed in the yellow pages as Tree McDowell, and that’s what most of my friends and family call me.  More on that later.

Right on time, I hit the doorbell of the yellow, period bungalow and waited.  A short, gray haired woman, late seventies, answered the door and invited me inside, after first making an extensive eye search of the middle-class neighborhood.  I assumed this was Mildred Bundric, the woman who called.  She didn’t introduce herself.

“This beautiful model is really your daughter?  And she’s missing?” I asked the frightened old lady seated across from me as I glanced at the magazine cover.

Maylynn Bundric stared back at me from the glossy page of the fashion journal, lips slightly pouting, the better to show off the latest lipstick color being touted that year by Alyce Martin Cosmetics.  The black hair was pulled sleekly back in a way worn well by few women, the dark eyes fringed by double thick lashes, a la Liz Taylor.   

The magazine lay, along with its sisters, on an imitation marble-topped coffee table in Mildred Bundric’s cozy living room, the most recent dated seven years earlier.  I gazed back at the face on the colorful page and then at my own, reflected in the mirror over the couch.  The reflection churned up a clabber of discontent.  In comparison with the woman on the magazine cover, I didn’t fare too well.  Tree, I said to myself, you should go home tonight and put a rinse on that mousy blonde hair of yours.  But this Maylynn Bundric would be a hard act for any woman to follow, especially a woman like me with not much going for her but a clever face.  Still, as the only female private detective in town, I don’t have to be model perfect in looks, and my height can be an advantage.  Or a hindrance, depending on how one views the ability to intimidate.

“Yes.  I guess it is hard to ‘magine me havin’ a daughter as pretty as Maylynn.”

“No.  It’s just strange to think of someone from Ridgeboro being on the cover of Le Beau Monde.”  But she was right.  It was hard to imagine this frail, dumpy woman, face like a lump of unbaked cookie dough, having an offspring that gorgeous.

“S’cuse me a minute,” she said and tottered down the hall toward the bowels of the small house.  I could hear water running.  I took advantage of her absence to unfold myself from the butt-sprung chair and take a closer look at a series of pictures I’d noticed on the paint worn, lace skirted mantel.  The beautiful brunette from the magazine pages was no less attractive in these amateur photographs.  Most were of the model with Mrs. Bundric and a wasted older man.  There were also photos of a dark-haired, smiling youngster with a middle-aged couple - Maylynn as a child with her parents, I assumed.  The man looked wasted even then.

When I heard the toilet flush in the back of the house, I turned self-consciously away from my snooping and returned to the cramped chair.  I’ve never become entirely comfortable with snooping.  I do it, but I can always hear my mother’s voice in the background, chastising me.  “That’s not lady-like, Rose Marie.  Nice girls don’t pry.”  My mother has a lot to learn about nice girls.