Authors: Alison Gaylin
“She used to be Lydia Neff’s neighbor.”
“That’s right.” Nelson squinted at her. “How do you know that?”
“I just remember the name.”
He took a breath. “Anyway, Gayle Chandler had it on good authority that Morasco was demoted for insubordination. There was a rumor, too, that he’d wasted police resources on . . . how did they refer to it? He was following up on the wrong clues. He was pursuing the wrong line of—”
“A bad lead.”
“Yes! That’s it.”
Brenna recalled her phone conversation with a young Morasco, eleven years ago, too young for his job. Patronizing and dismissive, she had thought. But it wasn’t that way. He’d been shamed. Morasco, perfectly friendly until he’d heard those two words and then his voice had gone cold. “Blue car.” Two words that had ruined his career.
“
That never should have been leaked to the press.”
“No, I’m glad it was leaked because—”
“It was a bad lead.”
“A bad lead?”
“It was false.”
“People change,” Brenna said. “Detective Morasco isn’t young anymore.” She got out of the car and opened Nelson’s door.
“None of us are young anymore.” Nelson’s voice was small, defeated. He pulled himself out of the car without looking at her, and Brenna was overwhelmed with pity. She heard herself say, “I’ll help you.” Said it even before the idea had fully formed in her mind.
N
elson’s garage, the door still wide open, was completely empty now—a big, hollow mouth trapped in a gasp.
As she and Nelson passed the garage, Brenna said, “Don’t be surprised if the house looks a little different.”
“Different how?”
“Well, police aren’t exactly known for cleaning up after themselves.” By now, Nelson had flung open the door and switched on the light, and to Brenna’s surprise, the house was in surprisingly good shape. There were a few open drawers and cupboards in the kitchen, but all the fixtures looked spotless, without a trace of fingerprint powder if there had ever been any—and even the block of knives remained intact. Nelson, though, was focused only on the answering machine—on the word “Full” blinking on the digital screen. “I don’t think this answering machine has filled up since we bought it.” He shut his eyes tightly and Brenna knew what he was thinking.
We
. He’d said the word so naturally, but now, it stuck in his throat.
“Probably reporters,” Brenna said. “They can wait, right?”
Nelson pressed the button. Sure enough, the first call was from a young
Daily News
reporter, offering condolences in a voice much too chipper for the words she was saying. Nelson deleted the message without listening to the rest, only to receive yet another sympathy call—this one more sincere-sounding—from Steve Sorensen, the senior crime reporter at Jim’s paper, the
Trumpet
. “I know him,” Brenna said. “Nice guy.”
Nelson looked at her. “Do you think I should talk to him?”
“Not yet,” Brenna said. “You give interviews too soon, people will think you’re being defensive. They think you have something to hide.”
Nelson snapped, “I don’t have anything to hide,” just as Steve’s message ended and the next one began.
“I know you don’t, Nelson. But for now, the only people you should be talking to are me—and a lawyer if you need one.”
Nelson’s face was white. He was staring at the machine. Brenna stopped talking, aware now of the hoarse whisper coming out of it, the words. “ . . . fucking animal. Murderer. You’ll pay. I’ll
make
you pay.”
Nelson turned off the machine.
“Crank call,” Brenna said. “You should get an unlisted number, soon as you can.”
Like a sarcastic comeback, the phone rang. “Can you please pick that up?” Nelson said quietly.
Brenna answered the phone to static. “Hello?” she said again. “Is anyone there?”
No response.
Brenna glanced at the caller ID, which said, “Unknown Caller,” then she looked at Nelson. “I think we have a bad connection,” she said. “I’m going to hang up—”
“Please don’t.” It was a female voice—not a woman. A girl. A teenager. “Who is this?” the voice said.
“Shouldn’t I be asking you that?”
“Is it a girl?” Nelson asked.
Brenna nodded. “I’m Brenna Spector,” she said into the phone. “Mr. Wentz’s investigator.”
“I’m sorry,” the voice said. “I’m so, so sorry.”
“Why are you sorry?”
“I’m sorry about . . . Carol.”
“Mr. Wentz accepts your condolences.”
“No.” The girl said something else, but static enveloped the words.
“What did you say?”
“ . . . Carol. It was my fault.”
Brenna froze. “Your fault?”
Nelson grabbed the phone from her. “Who are you? Please. This is Mr. Wentz. I lost my wife and I don’t know why. But . . . but maybe you do? If there’s anything you know, then please, please young lady, I—” Nelson stopped. Carefully, he replaced the phone. “She hung up.”
“Who is she?”
“She called last night,” Nelson said. “She said, ‘It’s my fault.’ ”
“Strange.”
“I thought it was probably a prank, but . . . Maybe it was just the mood I was in. The loneliness . . . It stuck with me. Even in the hospital, when I was coming to, I could hear it in my mind. She sounded so sad.”
“Did caller ID say unknown last night, too?”
“Yes.” Nelson sighed. “I think I’m grasping at straws. Looking for meaning where there is none . . .”
Brenna was scrolling through the phone’s call roll—all the incoming calls from today and the day before. “She said Carol’s name to me.”
Nelson’s eyes widened. “She actually said—”
“It still could be nothing—Carol’s name has been all over the news. But here’s the thing I find strange.” Brenna glanced up at him. “You didn’t get any other calls today from Unknown Caller.”
“So?”
“Even Mr. I’ll-Make-You-Pay. He called from an actual number. Looks like a cell.”
“Okay . . .”
“So this call from the young girl, which we got two minutes after we walked through the door. This call where she told me she was sorry about Carol. That was the first time Unknown Caller called, all day.” Carefully, Brenna replaced the receiver. “You know what I’m saying?”
Nelson stared at her. “I’m starting to.”
“Either this girl has amazing timing,” Brenna said. “Or she knew we’d just come home.” She gave him a long look. “I think she’s been watching your house.”
“S
he couldn’t be watching the house,” Nelson had said—not once but five times, the tension growing in his voice so that, by round three or so, the sentence’s meaning had reversed.
She could be watching the house.
A thought that clearly disturbed him to a surprising degree, considering everything else he’d been through today. But then again, this was a man who had said, “My house has been ransacked,” over the tiny adjustments made by the police—the coffee table to the left by around two feet, the couch pushed back a few inches, the braided throw rug half a foot nearer the window . . . all noticeable only to someone with perfect memory—or chronic OCD.
“Why would she be watching?” he had said of the teenage girl. “I can understand her calling. But why would she be
watching
?”
Walking out to her car, Brenna could feel eyes on her—not from the neighboring homes or the small woods flanking all of their backyards, but from inside Nelson’s house. When she turned, she saw his silhouette in the big bay window in the living room, a shadow, staring, terrified at the thought of someone staring back—terrified of some sad-sounding teenage girl.
Brenna was nearing the garage now. She walked up to the gaping door, and stared inside—at the empty hooks, all Nelson’s tools removed and bagged and brought to the lab. Her gaze drifted from the lone band saw in the corner to the oil stain on the garage floor and then again, she recalled Carol’s car, that grim procession headed for the county crime lab garage. She caught a hint of death smell, and gagged—unsure whether it was the scent of decay that lingered here, or just the memory of it.
Brenna backed away, headed fast for her car. She needed to pick up Maya at chorus practice, and that was all she thought of as she walked. She didn’t turn to look at Nelson in the window, searching the darkness for his troubled young caller, nor did she pay much attention to the sound she heard, drifting from a pathway in the woods behind the house. It was a hissing, undermined by a slight, rusty squeak. And it wasn’t until she was driving away, recalling the sound, that she identified it as the wheels of a very old bicycle.
M
aya was not a performer. In the third and fourth grade, she used to play the clarinet—played it quite beautifully, in fact—but all Brenna had to do was bring that up, and her daughter would go into a frenzy of eye rolling. “Oh come on, Mom, you hated the way I played.”
“Not true.”
“I can’t believe you would say that. It’s not like you
don’t remember
, so it can only mean you’re
lying
to me.” It got so Brenna stopped mentioning the clarinet altogether. Maya was an artist, after all, happier behind a canvas than on a stage—why should Brenna force her child up there, especially seeing as she’d never enjoyed the spotlight much herself?
But then this year, out of the blue, Maya had signed up for the school chorus—which rehearsed four nights a week—giving up both her cartooning class and the new
Dr. Who
on BBC America in order to fit it into her schedule. Brenna couldn’t figure out why, and Maya never offered an explanation, but tonight, as she stood in the back of the brightly lit auditorium, watching the P.S. 125 All-Classes Chorus belt out “We Are the World,” Brenna got it.
Maya’s music was on a stand in front of her, but it might as well have been in another school across the country for all the attention she paid it. No—as far as Brenna’s daughter was concerned, every word, every note in the song was dedicated to a Justin Timberlake look-alike, back row center (easily six feet tall and with a beard—how old
was
this boy?), who gazed out into the spotlight as if he owned it.
Brenna caught Maya’s eye and smiled. Maya nodded, but when Brenna cast a quick, quizzical glance at JT Jr. and then back, the girl’s eyes went dead, then pointedly dropped to the music book. Brenna cringed into the shadows at the edges of the room—
Okay, sweetie. Won’t mention it again . . .
The boy was launching into a solo now, his fully mature,
American Idol
–ready voice urging, “Let’s start giiiivvvvvinnnng,” with enough runs to give Beyoncé pause. He had to be at least sixteen, which—apart from being much too old for Maya—made Brenna start remembering Iris Neff again. Iris, who would be sixteen now if alive—sixteen and putting in calls to Carol Wentz, according to Carol’s chat room friends.
About a week ago. Late night. Lydia said her daughter called
, ClaudetteBrooklyn20 had typed. Reading it, Brenna had assumed Carol had made it up, that Iris’s phone call had been created in the depths of the same fevered and desperately lonely mind that allowed Carol to be Lydia Neff—her husband’s rumored lover—online. But now, Brenna wasn’t entirely sure that Carol had made anything up. Brenna recalled the teenage girl’s voice on the phone at Nelson’s house.
It’s my fault . . .
She remembered the squeak of old bicycle wheels in the woods behind Nelson’s house—woods that stretched all the way down the length of Muriel Court, ending at the old Neff home, where she’d seen Iris’s childhood bicycle peering out of the shadows.
Stop.
If Iris had come back to Tarry Ridge, why would she have called Carol instead of the police? How could a missing girl come home and stay hidden? Even as those thoughts came to her, though, others followed—Clea disappearing. Clea staying hidden. Hidden for twenty-eight years and yet still Brenna hoped, still Brenna
knew
. . .
Brenna closed her eyes, forcing her memory to bring back the days after Iris Neff disappeared—the news reports she’d listened to, the TV magazine segments she’d watched, rapt. Then she plucked her cell phone out of her bag and texted Trent:
September 14, 1998.
Dateline NBC
did a story on Iris Neff. Pls. contact NBC get a pic of Iris from archives and put it thru yr computer aging program.
Trent immediately texted back:
On it.
The song was over. When Brenna looked up, the chorus was dispersing and Maya was coming toward her, face red and her jaw tensed, eyes aimed straight ahead and filled with pain. It took Brenna only a few seconds to see why, for there was JT Jr., lit up like the Chrysler Building, running across the room to greet a wild-haired girl in very tight jeans—a girl five years and a boob job shy of Trent’s bulletin board. He crossed right in front of Maya in order to do it, too, fell into the girl’s arms and kissed her full on the mouth with that oh-so-embarrassing teenage directness—both of them so new to physical maturity that it was something to flaunt, to rev like a motorcycle engine on a peaceful street. Yes, she was more age-appropriate than Maya. But if her jeans were any tighter, she’d be wearing them internally, and Brenna hated her and him both.
“You’re on time,” Maya said. “What a surprise.”
“Spare me the sarcasm.” Brenna tried not to notice Maya’s trembling lip. Still, she wanted so to hug her, the way she had during Hannah Friedman’s fifth birthday party at the Tompkins Square Playground on May 17, 2000, when Maya had fallen off the jungle gym and lay on the dirt, crying “Mama!” and clutching her skinned knee. Brenna wanted to run to her daughter, just as she’d done then. She wanted to take her in her arms and stroke her hair and tell her,
Everything is okay, it’s okay, it’s okay, sweetheart . . .
But Brenna knew that wasn’t called for and wouldn’t be appreciated. She took Maya’s backpack instead, slipped it over her shoulder. “You ready?”
Maya didn’t answer. She headed for the door, and Brenna followed, both of them walking out and into the chemical purple twilight without saying a word. The whole way to Brenna’s apartment, she and Maya walked in silence. Nothing new for them, but still her chest tightened, May 17, 2000, playing in her mind—leaving the party early, taking the 6 train to Serendipity, the pink cloth napkin tucked into Maya’s collar and the banana split with two long spoons, little fingers patting at the Scooby Doo Band-Aid and
I feel all better now, Mama. I love you.
The whole day, start to finish, every sight and smell and emotion and sensation, the whole day as if it were happening now and wishing Maya could have that, too, wanting to share it with her so badly . . .