Authors: Alison Gaylin
As he replaced a tomato-shaped pincushion, though, his hand went very deep into the box and he touched cardboard. A layer of it, about six inches up from the bottom of the box. Nelson’s hand flew out.
False bottom
.
He stared at the box, breathing in and out, and then his hands were back inside, acting on their own, yanking out all the fabric and thread and those charming little squares and satin ribbons and the strawberry-handled scissors and velvet pincushions, throwing it all to the floor. All of it props, all soft and colorful lies covering a false bottom. He slipped that out of the box, too, this piece of cardboard his wife had cut so carefully.
Cut it to fit, didn’t you, Carol?
And then he stayed there on his knees, doubled over like an exhausted runner, panting deep into his chest.
Look inside. Look now. See what she’s been hiding from you
.
Nelson peered into the bottom of the box. He saw a stack of manila folders. The one on top had a Post-it on the front, a man’s name and number written in Carol’s careful hand.
Graeme Klavel
. Nelson’s heart dropped. His hands trembled a little as he lifted the folder out.
But then the doorbell rang and his shoulders shot up and he dropped it to the floor, some of its contents spilling. Nelson glanced down thinking,
Love letters?
But no, the papers looked official, and as the doorbell rang again, he saw the stamp:
Tarry Ridge Police Department
. He saw the date, September 15, 1998, and then he saw the heading, “Interview Transcript: Lydia Neff.” He stared at it, frozen.
Again, the doorbell. “Just a minute!”
Lydia Neff
He opened the door on a child. It took him a few seconds before he identified the child as Max, the eleven-year-old son of Gayle and Stephen Chandler, who lived a few doors up from them. The son of Gayle, Carol’s book club friend. Gayle, who had told Detective Morasco she had seen Carol with a man in a Mount Temple diner.
“Is Carol around?” asked Max, a towheaded boy with the type of hard eyes that made it seem as if he was always challenging you. Max Chandler looked a lot like his mother, Nelson realized. And his mother had never liked Nelson much. Stephen was okay—a financial consultant who worked out of the home, always good with the stock tips and a genial smile, but Gayle . . . Gayle. Seeing Carol with another man must have made her so happy, though it was interesting she hadn’t told her son about Carol’s disappearance. Maybe she had. Maybe she’d sent Max over here to find out how Nelson was taking the whole thing—or maybe to goad him into anger so she could tell the police that, too?
Well, then
. Calling Carol by her first name—if goading Nelson was Max’s goal, well, then, that had been a good start.
“Mrs. Wentz is not home,” Nelson said. “Is there anything I can help you with?”
The boy looked him in the eye. Strange how deeply it affected Nelson, that look. At this child’s age he could never meet the gaze of an adult without cringing, especially an adult man. Nelson couldn’t help but feel his hackles rising, his anger growing toward Max Chandler—all four-foot-six of him—for being so confident as to look him in the eye like that, to stare at him with his mother’s eyes, Gayle Chandler’s eyes, as if he could read Nelson’s thoughts and he didn’t like what he was reading . . .
Lydia, Carol? You’ve been looking into Lydia? My God, it was more than ten years ago, and even then, it was nothing! I told you it was nothing. Didn’t I tell you it was nothing? Didn’t you believe me?
Max said, “I’m here to pick up your recycling.”
“Right,” Nelson breathed. “Friday. Right.” One of Carol’s many neighborhood projects was organizing a recycling drive, along with Gayle, for the sixth grade class at the local elementary school. Every Friday morning before their classes began, Max and his classmates would show up at each participating house, collect plastic bottles and cans, and redeem them at the Stop & Shop on Main, all proceeds going directly to the PTA’s playground improvement fund. Nelson and Carol, of course, were childless and therefore had no reason to be involved with the PTA. But Gayle had asked Carol to help, and as with everything else her friends had asked of her, Carol had dived in one hundred and ten percent.
It just went to show how much care Carol put into her projects—whether it was the school recycling drive or her book club meetings or the knitted afghans she made for the old folks home . . . or whatever it was she’d been doing with this Klavel, this
research
she’d been conducting on Lydia Neff . . .
Max Chandler was still glaring up at Nelson. “So . . . uh . . . bottles and cans?”
Nelson realized he hadn’t taken the recycling out all week. “I’ll go get it out of the kitchen,” he said. The boy started to follow him, but Nelson didn’t want the boy following him, didn’t want that ice-gaze on him for one single minute longer. “There’s more bottles in the garage in the blue plastic crate. Why don’t you go out there, and I’ll meet you.” The garage door opener hung from the line of key hooks next to the front door. Nelson plucked it off and pressed it into Max’s hand in one quick movement. “Go,” he said. He shut the door behind him.
Nelson sighed heavily. He headed in the direction of the kitchen, but again he was sidetracked by the file on the living room floor, and when he looked into the open trunk, he saw more files—a stack of them. He quickly pulled another one out. Inside this file was a collection of yellowed newspaper articles, all about Lydia’s daughter’s disappearance. Another held a series of posed family photographs—Lydia, smiling next to a man Nelson had never seen, the two of them holding a black-haired baby who must have been Iris.
What have you been doing, Carol?
Nelson put the papers back into the folders, placed them back into the trunk. He stacked the quilting supplies on top of the folders and closed the trunk and put it back into the closet. He loaded the closet with the rest of Carol’s crafts and closed the door.
There
.
Nelson needed to be practical. He couldn’t think about all of this now. Later, he would call Ms. Spector. Forget the police; they didn’t care. He would call Ms. Spector and he would tell her about Carol’s apparent interest in Lydia—that was the phrase he would use, “
apparent
interest”—and he would ask her advice. He would tell her about these papers, and if she wanted to see them, he would show her. If it could help her find Carol, he would show her the papers. But for now, Nelson had to calm down and collect the recycling so he could send Max Chandler on his way.
Nelson hurried into the kitchen, and grabbed a small garbage bag full of plastic bottles and cans.
Take it, Max. Take it and go.
From Nelson’s doorstep, he could see that the garage door was open. He caught a glimpse of Carol’s rear bumper, and a pang went through him, an extra shot of hurt. “Max?”
There was no answer. Seconds later, he felt plastic crunching under his foot, and the garage door started to close, then sprang back up. He picked the garage door opener off the ground.
Careless
. He started to get angry again. Out of the corner of his eye, he saw a small figure running down the center of the road, running fast, as if for his life. “Max?”
Where the heck is he going?
“Max!”
As Nelson neared the garage, he noticed a smell.
Dead mouse
, he thought. No, worse. Dead cat, maybe, trapped in the garage, which had been shut all week long . . . His anger lifted a little. No wonder the kid dropped the opener. No wonder he was running away.
He threw an arm in front of his face, breathed into the crook of his elbow, the bag of recyclables clasped in his other hand. He could empty out the bottles and cans. Put the dead animal in the bag. Throw it in the heavy trash can, get it out of here quick. Had he missed garbage pickup?
As Nelson neared the garage, he saw what looked like a moving black stain at the back of Carol’s white Volvo. Closer, the stain revealed itself as flies. Maybe a hundred of them, crawling around the lock, over the car’s logo, edging their way down to the license plate and back . . .
Maybe the dead cat was under the car. Holding his breath, Nelson crouched down and peered beneath the carriage. Nothing. He circled around to the front, peeking into the windows—nothing there, either. He checked the metal shelves that lined the sides of the garage—but the smell didn’t seem to be coming from any of the cardboard boxes stacked on the bottom shelf, and the top ones were bare, save for Nelson’s metal tool chests, with the largest tools—Nelson’s Hoyt hammer, his biggest Phillips-head screwdriver, power drill, hedge clippers—hanging cleanly from hooks above them with one missing. Had he used the flat-head screwdriver recently?
The smell was definitely coming from the car. The flies were nowhere else except . . .
Nelson went back to Carol’s car, reached through the open driver’s side window, and used the button to pop open the trunk. The hum of flies grew louder.
He clutched the garbage bag, following the sound, the other hand over his mouth.
Just hold your breath and ignore the flies and get that animal into the bag as quickly as . . .
How would an animal get into the closed trunk of a car?
The thought seeped through him at the same time as he reached the trunk and lifted it and stared inside. For a few suspended seconds, he just gaped at it without knowing. That ruined thing, oozing bugs. What was it?
It can’t be, it can’t be, it just can’t . . .
And then he saw the small white hand, fingers curved as if it were holding a wineglass.
Nelson heard sirens blaring down the length of the street, and cars screeching to a stop behind him. His face went numb and his ears throbbed, and he stared at that white hand and he knew. He knew why Max had run home to his mother and he knew why she had called the police, just as he’d known from the start that it was no cat, it was no dead animal, the smell was too strong for that. The way his shoulders had tensed, the way his skin had gone cold. Something inside him had known.
He was breathing in the smell and feeling that death hum—though he couldn’t feel or breathe, not really.
Not at all
. Nelson’s gaze stayed locked on the hand—on the plain gold wedding band, just like his own. And what little was left of Nelson’s heart exploded to dust.
N
elson Wentz lay in the hospital bed, staring with stunned, glassy eyes, IV hooked up to an arm so frail and white it looked like it belonged to someone either much younger than him or much older than him, Morasco couldn’t decide which.
Morasco hated questioning Wentz in the hospital. He felt physically at an unfair advantage and emotionally at a disadvantage—moreover, it was unnecessary. Wentz had suffered what the doctors here at Tarry Ridge General called a vasovagal syncope after finding his wife’s body in the trunk of her car. Meaning he fainted. Meaning there was no reason why he couldn’t be questioned later, at the station. He’d experienced a bad reaction to the sedatives the doctors had given him—hence the IVs and observation—but otherwise he was fine. Fit, even. They’d be releasing him before dinnertime.
Of course, when Morasco had tried explaining all this, the chief hadn’t come close to agreeing with him. “The guy’s wife has been moldering in the garage for a week, and if it weren’t for that Chandler kid, she’d still be there,” Chief Hutchins had said. “You want to invite Wentz out to brunch? Question him over banana pancakes?”
(“Moldering,” Morasco had replied. “Good word.”)
So here he was, in Wentz’s hospital room alongside Gil Pomroy—a red-faced, ticking bomb of a heart attack risk who took the role of “bad cop” way too seriously for anybody’s good. There was no such thing as partners among Tarry Ridge detectives; too few of them for that. But Morasco got paired with Pomroy more often than anyone. Chief Hutchins’s sense of humor, he supposed.
Pomroy hadn’t said a word since entering the hospital room, but Morasco could tell he had a raging boner for Wentz. Driving over, he’d said, “You know how easy it is to fake a fainting spell?” So he knew what side the guy was on, as if there had ever been any question.
“How are you feeling, Mr. Wentz?” Morasco asked.
“Terrible.”
Pomroy snorted.
“Thanks for letting us in to see you,” Morasco said. “I know you’ve been through a lot. I’d like you to meet Detective Gil Pomroy. We’re working together on Mrs. Wentz’s case.”
Morasco turned and glared at Pomroy until finally, he untensed his neck enough to nod.
“If you can find out who . . . who did that to my wife, I’ll . . .” Wentz swallowed hard. “Anything I can do . . . to help.”
Morasco took a breath. It was hard to look at Wentz in the hospital bed without thinking of his own father. Not that Nelson Wentz looked anything like Morasco’s strapping, six-foot-one-inch dad. But he had been around the same age Wentz was now—felled by a sudden brain aneurysm—and Morasco had come home from college, camped out in his father’s hospital room for weeks. Sitting next to the bed, holding the big hand as dry and cool as reptile skin, watching the barrel chest move up and down at the whim of the ventilator, begging under his breath, “Don’t go, please don’t go . . .” Begging and bargaining. His father never regained consciousness. That had been the last time Morasco had been in a hospital room for personal reasons—unless you counted Holly giving birth, and he never counted that. Not ever. He asked, “In the weeks before she disappeared, did your wife seem to be acting differently at all?”
“No.”
“I know you told me she was using your computer. Did you find any strange e-mails she received?”
“No. As far as I know, she’d only used it to search for information on the woman I wound up hiring as my own investigator.”
“Brenna Spector?”
“Yes. I don’t think my wife had her own e-mail address.”
“Do you have any idea why she’d want to hire an investigator?”