Bret meets Abigail Mallory at La Scala | La Scala Boutique becomes the setting for a private, increasingly acrimonious confrontation between Bret and Abigail Mallory. She confirms that Robert had dated Katherine Latchford, the first girl associated with the Trawler, while Bret sets out a wider timeline connecting Robert to multiple disappearances and to Matt Kellner’s death. Abigail offers a different account of Robert’s history: he had reported being followed and watched, and his family had arranged a psychiatric evaluation after a crisis in Chicago. The meeting supplies crucial facts but no verdict; it leaves Bret’s suspicions and Abigail’s defense in direct conflict.

The Request for a Meeting

On a Wednesday morning, Bret learns from Rosa that a woman has left a message on his mother’s answering machine. The caller identifies herself as Abby Mallory, Robert’s aunt, and refers to a recent conversation with Bret about Robert’s whereabouts. Robert has already left for school, she explains, and has told her things Bret said the previous night. Abigail wants to speak in person, does not want Robert to know she called, and says there is something about him that Bret needs to understand. She proposes meeting that afternoon after school, around five, at a place in Beverly Hills.

Bret phones her back, and she asks him to meet at La Scala Boutique. He drives there in the 450SL still wearing his school uniform. Abigail is waiting alone in a booth near the kitchen, dressed in a cream blouse and black blazer, with sunglasses and a glass of white wine. She has just come from an appointment with her attorney and explains that she is in the midst of a difficult divorce. The setting is ordinary and public, but the secrecy of the call and her insistence that Robert not be told make the meeting feel like a disclosure held apart from his account.

Abigail’s Account of Robert

Abigail confirms Bret’s recollection of Robert at a theater in Westwood on a Saturday in May: Robert was there with a girl. She names her as Kathy Latchford, whom Bret recognizes as Katherine Latchford, the first Trawler victim. The confirmation gives Bret a specific link between Robert and Katherine, but it does not establish that Robert had anything to do with her disappearance or death.

Abigail recounts that Katherine had described unexplained intrusions into her privacy: someone called and hung up, her books had been rearranged, and clothing had gone missing from a drawer. Katherine believed Robert had left her a poster that later drew police interest, but Abigail says he had not. Bret identifies the poster as one by Madness for the album One Step Beyond. Abigail’s account therefore separates the suspicious gift from Robert while preserving the broader pattern of harassment that Katherine had experienced.

She also describes the sequence of Robert’s reported fears. After Katherine disappeared, Robert initially assumed she was hiding out. When it became clear she was missing, he said that someone had started following him. Abigail says he received silent calls on his private line and felt watched in public throughout the summer in Los Angeles, while Katherine was missing and before her body was found in August. Robert sometimes joked about the attention, but Abigail believed it was affecting him. She says he continued to feel followed later: the sense stopped while he was in Chicago, returned when he came back to Los Angeles in December, and was accompanied by anonymous letters he never showed her and renewed calls around Christmas. In her account, the pressure culminated in Robert’s breakdown.

Bret’s Timeline and Accusations

Bret asks whether Abigail believes Robert had nothing to do with Katherine’s disappearance and death. She objects that this kind of suspicion is precisely why Robert did not go to the police. She says he was panicked after returning to school in September because someone from Buckley had seen him at the movie with Katherine. Robert did not remember seeing Bret there, Abigail adds, and had been looking for Katherine after her mother dropped her off. Her defense does not erase the connection Bret is trying to establish; it disputes what that connection proves.

Bret insists that timing matters. He says Katherine disappeared while Robert was in Los Angeles and her body was found before he left. He also points to Sarah Johnson and Julie Selwyn, whose disappearances he places during periods when Robert was present, and says Robert was not on the school field on the night Audrey Barbour disappeared. He further alleges that Robert had stalked Audrey at the Promenade in Woodland Hills. Abigail responds that she does not know these other girls well and has not followed the cases as closely as Bret. She resists his effort to turn a sequence of associations into proof, while Bret sees the accumulating dates and locations as a coherent pattern.

The argument extends to Matt Kellner. Bret tells Abigail that Robert knew where Matt was during the week Matt disappeared and says he has a recording from the night Matt died on which he believes Robert’s voice can be heard. He alleges that Robert drugged Matt at the Benedict Canyon house, took him to Crystal Cove, assaulted him, and brought him back. He also accuses Robert of killing Matt’s cat and fastening its head to a column. Abigail says Robert has already spoken to Ronald Kellner. Her response does not settle Bret’s allegations, but it shows that the Kellner family has already been drawn into Robert’s account of events.

Family History and Unresolved Doubt

Abigail adds a separate account of Robert’s earlier crisis in Chicago. She says Robert’s twelve-year-old stepsister, Ashley, developed a rash and blamed Robert, alleging that he had instructed her to shave and implying that he had behaved sexually toward her. Robert denied the accusation. Abigail says he then overdosed, perhaps not as a serious attempt but as a way to make his father, William, feel guilty for believing Ashley. William arranged for Robert to be placed in a facility for treatment and a full psychiatric evaluation. Robert entered the facility in Jacksonville about a week after returning to Chicago; by the time he was released, the family had decided he should move to Los Angeles to live with Abigail. She urges Bret to consider what Robert had endured and calls it unfair and dangerous to assume the worst of him.

The meeting leaves neither side with a settled account. Abigail asks Bret to get to know Robert, arguing that familiarity would make the crimes Bret describes seem impossible. Bret, meanwhile, has already followed Robert to the house on Benedict Canyon and searched its grounds. When Abigail asks how he knew about the house, he lies that Robert must have mentioned it to a group at lunch. Abigail explains that she and her husband first lived there, that her estranged husband is now in Scottsdale, and that Robert keeps some belongings upstairs and has a key. Bret’s concealed knowledge reinforces the distance between what he tells Abigail and what he has been doing on his own.

La Scala brings together two incompatible readings of the same warning signs. For Abigail, the calls, surveillance fears, family accusations, overdose, and treatment show a young man damaged and unfairly suspected. For Bret, the theater sighting, the timing of the disappearances, the house on Benedict Canyon, and the recording involving Matt form a case against Robert. Abigail confirms a consequential connection to Katherine and supplies a history that complicates Bret’s theory, but she cannot account for every point in his timeline, and Bret does not accept her appeal to Robert’s vulnerability as an answer to the evidence he cites. The encounter narrows the mystery without resolving it.