Authors: Alison Gaylin
Nelson didn’t answer.
“Nelson?” She pulled herself away from the fridge and looked at him, standing in front of the stovetop, staring into the open drawer beneath it as if it were a tragic headline.
Brenna went to him. That close, she was aware of his hands, which clasped the drawer so tightly that the tips of his fingers were white. “What’s wrong?”
He took a step back. “Carol’s credit card,” he said. “It’s gone.”
“I
was good to her,” Nelson said. He was sitting in a small chair to the side of the stairs, gazing into the drawer of the sewing table, the drawer where he and Carol kept all the bills. He said it so quietly, Brenna could barely hear him. But it was the first sentence he’d uttered since discovering his wife’s credit card was missing, and so Brenna jumped on it.
“You supported her.”
“Pardon?”
“That’s one of the ways you were good to Carol, right? You supported her in full.”
“Yes.”
“So, does that mean you also wrote the checks?”
“No,” he said. “Carol handed the finances. She was . . . She
is
better with those things than I am.”
Brenna moved a little closer, leaned against the stairs. “So if Carol wanted to keep a purchase hidden from you, she could.”
“Ms. Spector, Carol would
not
.”
“Remember, Nelson,” she said slowly, “I’m on your side.” She took one of Carol’s credit card bills out of the drawer, texted her card number to Trent. “We should have her charges within the next day or so. My assistant has a very good source at this particular company. Now, you’re sure she didn’t have any other cards? Maybe one she told you she was canceling?”
Nelson didn’t answer. Ever since he’d sat down here, he’d been worrying a spool of bright blue thread he’d plucked off the table and now he just stared at it, a thumb pressed into either side, pressing so tightly the thumbs quivered—the spool the only thing on earth that, at this moment anyway, Nelson seemed capable of controlling.
Brenna sighed. Clients like Nelson Wentz made her glad for the two years she spent at Columbia, working toward a psych degree. “Can you do something for me?” she asked. “Can you do something for me, Nelson?”
He looked up. “Yes.”
“I want you to think back to your last night with Carol. Retrace your steps in your mind.”
“Why?”
“We need to see if there’s anything that stood out—strange behavior, maybe . . . something that might clue us in to her reasons for leaving. I mean—if she had any. We still don’t know whether or not she was abducted.”
“Okay,” he said. “Where should I start?”
“How about breakfast?”
He gave her a blank look. “You want to know what I had for breakfast that morning?”
“Sure.”
“I do not remember.” He said it like he was in a court of law.
“Okay.” Brenna sighed. “Well . . . it was a Thursday, correct?”
“Yes.”
“Did you run any errands after work?”
“I do not remember.”
“Try.”
“I don’t—”
“Sometimes it helps to remember what you were wearing.”
Nelson closed his eyes. “A pair of very uncomfortable shoes,” he said, finally. “I bought them at Target for twenty dollars. Half a size too small.”
“Ouch,” she said. “But if they were just twenty bucks, I can’t say I blame you.” She gave Nelson a smile, and he smiled back, and then his memory seemed to relax back into working order. He described his full day at the office and his commute home on the train and a brief stop at CVS to buy corn pads, and just as Brenna started to drift off into a bored stupor, Nelson said, “And then I came home, and I saw Carol in the living room.”
“How did she seem?”
“Fine.”
“Just fine?”
“Yes.”
“Can you remember what she was doing?”
Nelson put his head in his hands, massaged his eyes.
“Take your time,” Brenna said.
And he did. He rubbed his eyes for what must have been a solid minute. “I think she said, ‘You startled me.’ ”
Brenna looked at him. “Where was she when she said it?”
Nelson took her back into the living room. “Here.” He was standing a good twenty feet away from the couches, so she couldn’t have just gotten up. He was far from the fireplace, too, but he was just about three feet away from a door Brenna hadn’t noticed earlier.
“What’s that door behind you?” she asked.
“Carol’s crafts closet,” he said. “She . . . uh . . . she might have just been closing the door when I came home. I’m not sure.”
Brenna walked up to the closet. She opened the door. Nothing but craft supplies, it seemed, but she and Nelson started taking them out anyway.
Bolts of fabric and knitting bags filled to bursting with luxurious yarn, folded-up scarves and needlepoint kits and three latch-hook rugs that, Nelson informed Brenna, Carol had made back in college. Underneath it all, they’d found a small, black box. “What’s in here?”
“I think that’s where she keeps her quilting supplies.” Nelson removed the lid. Sure enough, Brenna saw bright scraps of cloth, pincushions, thick needles and thread, scissors with handles shaped like strawberries, and several puffy squares, already sewn . . . She closed the box. “I guess that would have been too easy.”
“Huh?”
“Nothing. It’s just that when people have something they want to hide, they usually choose a space that’s theirs and theirs alone. So in other words, the kitchen drawer, the coffee table . . . even that sewing area judging from your familiarity with it . . . none of those would be ideal places. If Carol had something she wanted to keep from you, she would pick a place like her crafts closet. A place that belongs only to her.”
“She doesn’t,” Nelson said.
Brenna turned to him. “What?”
Nelson stared hard at her, his jaw tight. “Carol doesn’t have anything she wants to keep from me.”
N
elson’s wife didn’t love him. Nelson’s wife kept secrets.
After Brenna Spector left his home, Nelson sat on his couch for a long time without moving, barely blinking, until he started to remind himself of Anthony Perkins at the end of
Psycho
, sitting stock-still in the detective’s office with his mother’s voice coursing through him, refusing to move even as a fly crawled across his hand.
A ball of rage, trapped in a shell
. That’s what Norman Bates was, wasn’t it? And that’s what Nelson was turning into. He needed to stop. He needed to kill the rage before it overtook him and melted the shell and burned everything in sight.
The missing credit card, the crafts closet, and then, finally Nelson’s own computer. Not Carol’s
personal space
, as Ms. Spector had put it. Not by a long shot. It was her
husband’s computer
. Yet according to the history check Ms. Spector had done, Carol had been sneaking onto this computer when her husband wasn’t around. She had made several visits to a search engine called Chrysalis.org, yet she never seemed to use the site to search for anything.
Another secret.
Nelson got up, and moved over to the oil painting of Sarasota Beach that hung over the TV. It had belonged to Carol’s grandmother, and more than once—several times, Nelson could now recall—he’d come into the living room to find Carol standing in front of this painting, hands on her hips, a slight dreamy smile on her face . . . “What are you thinking about?” Nelson had asked her one time.
And Carol—typical Carol, with that brick wall in front of her thoughts, never letting you past: “The painting.”
“You’re thinking about the
painting
?”
“I just like it. That’s all.”
What had Nelson done to deserve this? For more than twenty years, he’d been good to Carol. He had given her everything she wanted. She never had to work. She’d done the cooking, yes, but only because she liked to cook. He’d never raised his voice, never hit or swore at or even threatened Carol . . . Nelson had been nothing but kind. Nothing like his own father and if Carol could have
seen
Nelson’s father, full of Glenfiddich with a red face and meaty fists and a voice like a bomb exploding . . .
Nelson glanced at the clock over the fireplace. Midnight. He probably hadn’t been up this late in twenty years.
At least it’s a new day
. Quietly, he moved to the crafts closet, to that black trunk, still plunked in the open doorway.
When people want to hide things, they choose a space that’s theirs and theirs alone.
But wasn’t everything about Carol hers and hers alone? Wasn’t her mind like this black trunk—hidden beneath layers and layers, the lid slammed shut?
Nelson opened it.
He saw bright scraps of fabric, spools of thread, a few pairs of scissors. Quilting supplies. He started lifting it all out, putting it on the floor, thinking,
That’ll show you. That’ll show you, Carol. I’m in your space. Your private space, and there’s nothing you can do about it . . .
He didn’t think that way for long, though, for the phone was ringing. Whose phone rang at midnight?
My phone is ringing at midnight
.
Nelson thought,
Carol
, and he was following the ring, rushing toward it. The nearest phone was in the kitchen. He leaped at the sound and by the time he got there, he was close to completely out of breath and feeling as if his heart might burst and not caring if it did, not caring about anything except getting her on the line . . .
Caller ID read “Unknown Caller.” Nelson yanked the phone from its stand, pressed it to his ear. “Carol?” he said, on the edge of his breath.
There was no answer, just thick static, and Nelson thought,
Cell phone. Out of range
. But he kept talking, as though maybe his voice could bring her back into range and then pull her through the phone. “Carol? Is that you? Where are you?”
The static cleared enough for Nelson to hear her breathing. He said Carol’s name again, but when she finally spoke, her voice wasn’t the voice of Carol at all. “It’s my fault,” the voice said, before hanging up. And all Nelson could do was stand there, dead still, until the spell wore off and his tears finally fell. It was the voice of a teenage girl.
C
lea stood over Brenna’s bed—a shadow with a seventeen-year-old’s body and a halo of yellow hair. She said nothing, but Brenna knew that Clea was leaving home. Again.
Brenna was dreaming. She knew she was dreaming. In her memories—those fallible, presyndrome memories—Clea was all different ages and emotions and actions, but in Brenna’s dreams, she was always seventeen and always leaving. “Don’t tell Mom,” Clea said. “I’ll call in a few days—promise.”
“No you won’t,” Brenna said. “You will get into a car with a man I can’t see. You will lean into the passenger’s side window and tell him you’re ready. He will tell you that you look pretty and call you by a funny name. You will get in the car and the car will drive away and I will never hear your voice again.”
Clea moved closer. She knelt down beside her, and put her face so close that it was all Brenna could see.
“Oh my God.”
Clea’s entire face was wrapped in thick bandages—her eyes and mouth completely hidden, her nose and cheekbones gauze-covered slopes.
How can she breathe like that?
Brenna reached out to take the bandages off, but Clea slapped her hand away. “Please, Clea,” she said. “Please let me help you.”
Brenna heard her sister’s voice, vibrating beneath the bandages. “I don’t need to breathe.”
“What happened to you?”
“Don’t you
know yet
, Brenna? Shit, man, it’s been
twenty-eight years
.”
The section of bandages that covered Clea’s mouth began to tremble. Brenna wondered if she might crumble into bits. Were the bandages the only solid thing about Brenna’s sister? Was Clea the Invisible Man?
“It’s your fault,” Clea hissed. “You should never have let me go with him. You heard his
voice
. You heard his
deep, devil voice
.”
You look so pretty, Clee-bee . . .
“Stop,” Brenna whispered.
“You heard that voice.”
“No.”
“You heard it and
you did nothing
!”
“No, please!”
An enormous butterfly wing pushed out of Clea’s bandaged mouth and another emerged from her forehead, and Brenna screamed herself awake.
“Christ,” she said, once her screaming had subsided and her breathing calmed and she found herself alone in her apartment, hoarse and slick with sweat.
Brenna got out of bed. She went into the kitchen and poured herself a glass of water and gulped it down quickly, listening to the traffic sounds on Thirteenth Street, the dream still rattling in her head. She hated being awake at this hour, hated being alone after a dream like that. She hated being alone, period.
She thought about turning on some music, but that might make it worse, this feeling of one
A.M.
in this stretched-out apartment, Brenna the only living thing in it and her bare feet hitting the wood floors too softly as she moved from one end to the other.
The three days a week Maya was here, Brenna could wake up in the middle of the night and go to her doorway. She’d hear her daughter’s heavy sleep-breathing—that whistling little snore—and it would relax her back to bed.
She walked back to Maya’s room. Not a good idea now, she knew. Not when there would be no little snore, only the memory of it. Maya was at her friend Larissa’s, after all. Larissa, whose mother had left those two girls alone in the apartment on May 4, 2001—and quite frankly Brenna didn’t give a rat’s ass whether it was just to get her mail or whether it was for three minutes or five minutes or twenty-eight years.
You don’t leave little girls alone
.
Maya’s room was dark. No one here to wake, so Brenna flicked the light on, her gaze floating from the manga posters on the walls to the bookshelves, lined with old schoolbooks and adventure stories and graphic novels, the top shelf stacked with filled-up sketch pads—Maya the artist, just like her grandmother, but with Clea’s huge blue eyes that burned right into you, appraising . . . Brenna glanced at the clean white comforter on the bed, the silent bed, everything exactly where her daughter had left it, including the framed photo on the nightstand, the one Brenna never looked at, the photo of Jim and his second wife, Faith.