Authors: Alison Gaylin
Once they got to the front door of Brenna’s walk-up, she stood back and let Maya use her own key. It wasn’t lost on her, the way her daughter’s hand shook when she slipped the key into the lock, the way she swatted at her eyes. Brenna knew that there had been such different scenes scrolling through Maya’s head during the walk home—but lucky for her, they were scenes she would one day forget. “He runs like a girl, you know,” Brenna said.
Maya turned, and smiled, just a little.
R
emembering Morasco’s words at the hospital, Brenna pulled out her cell phone and tapped in his number once she was inside her building, following Maya up the first flight of stairs. He picked up fast. “About time.”
“I had to pick my kid up at chorus.”
“You’re a mom?”
“Yes,” she said. “I’m surprised that didn’t turn up in your research.”
He laughed. “I’m surprised, too.”
“So . . .”
“So.”
“Was there something you wanted to tell me?”
“Oh, right,” he said, as Brenna rounded the final flight to find her daughter at the apartment door. “Actually it was something I wanted to
ask
you.”
“Why am I not surprised?”
“Is Trent still here?” Maya said.
Brenna checked her watch. Seven-thirty. She shook her head.
Morasco was saying, “ . . . when Detective Pomroy and I were speaking to Nelson.”
“Pomroy,” Brenna said. “Nice set of wheels he’s got there.”
“You’ve seen the ride!”
“You don’t
see
a 1982 Pontiac Trans Am,” Brenna said. “You
experience
it.”
Morasco laughed. “You know your vehicles.”
“Bet you guys call him Knight Rider behind his back.”
He laughed harder. A grin pulled at Brenna’s face. “I’m right, aren’t I?”
“I take the Fifth.”
Maya was staring at her. “Who
is
that?”
Brenna mouthed,
Work call
.
Maya raised an eyebrow.
What?
Maya pointedly turned away, got her keys out of her pocket, and set about unlocking the door. God, she could be infuriating sometimes.
“Anyway,” Morasco said, “what I wanted to ask you about is Nelson’s tool collection.”
“His what?” she asked.
Maya pushed the door open.
“He had a pretty extensive one in his garage—and I’m wondering if he ever spoke to you about any of those tools in particular, maybe one that went missing . . .”
From the other side of the door, Brenna heard Maya scream.
“Gotta go.” Brenna rushed into the apartment to find her daughter, frozen in the doorway, pointing at the man sitting in Trent’s chair. “What are you doing here?” Maya said.
The man gaped back at her, mirroring her panic. “He let me in. The . . . the assistant. He told me to wait.”
“Who are you?”
“It’s okay, Maya.” Brenna’s gaze dropped to a small stack of files in the man’s lap, the manila folders faded and beige as the face, the hair, the watery eyes pleading up at her. “This man is one of my clients. His name is Nelson Wentz.”
B
renna suggested Maya go into her room and do her homework, and for once she got no argument. Maya was through the kitchen and down the hall and closing the door behind her in a matter of seconds, without so much as one eye roll.
I should ask Wentz to come here more often
.
“Your daughter?” Nelson squinted after Maya, his eyebrows pressing into each other. “She . . . uh . . .”
“I know. She looks nothing like me.” It was true. In fact, apart from inheriting Brenna’s long, lanky build, Maya looked nothing like either one of her parents—a blonde-haired, blue-eyed shiksa goddess in their Semitic midst. “Switched at birth,” Jim used to joke, and Brenna had never wanted to say it, knowing how much it would trouble him, the mention of the name. But the one person, the
only person
out of both of their families whom Maya looked remotely like was Clea. She looked more like Clea every day.
“What brings you here, Nelson?” Brenna asked.
He cleared his throat. “The trunk.”
“What?”
“Do you remember Carol’s trunk—the one with the quilting supplies?”
Brenna nodded.
“It . . . it had a false bottom,” he said. “A piece of cardboard. I pulled it out, and underneath it . . .”
Brenna’s gaze shot at the manila folders. “Those files?”
“Yes.” He handed them to her. “I want you to have them,” he said. “Not the police.”
Brenna flipped open the first file. She began to read the first page and for a moment, she was sitting across from Errol Ludlow in the Skyline Diner in White Plains on October 23, 1998,
Errol sliding a manila folder across the Formica-topped table, smiling that oily smile, and Brenna looks into the eyes, dull like black olives, guilt heating up the backs of her ears . . .
Brenna gritted her teeth, closed the file fast. “The Neff police report.”
Nelson nodded. “That’s what was in Carol’s trunk. Nothing but pictures of Iris, her family, old newspaper clippings . . .”
“Really interesting . . .”
“At first I was thinking she was obsessed with
Lydia
because . . . Well, you know.”
Brenna nodded.
“But after you left tonight I looked through these files, Ms. Spector. I looked through all of them.”
“Yes?”
“I think she was trying to find Iris.”
Again, Brenna recalled the girl’s voice on the phone, the squeak of bicycle wheels behind Nelson’s house.
It’s my fault . . .
Yes, it seemed bizarre. But still . . . Still. “I think so, too, Nelson.” Brenna cleared her throat. “And you know what else?”
Nelson gave her a long look, a strange emotion working its way into his eyes—a mixture of hope and dread and growing knowledge. “What?”
“I think she may have found her.”
B
renna convinced Nelson to let her show Carol’s papers to Morasco—only to Morasco, no other police—with the added caveat that she would memorize them first. She told him that by tomorrow, she would have a perfect age-enhanced photo of Iris, and she would bring him a copy, plus she and Trent would canvass the neighbors, post it on the Web . . . if anyone had actually seen Iris Neff wandering around Tarry Ridge, they would soon know.
After hearing this, he seemed to relax a little, but as he was making for the door, Nelson’s body stiffened again. “I hate going back to that house.”
“I know. It must be so difficult for you.”
“Not that,” he said. “I mean, it’s awful going back there, knowing what happened to Carol . . . But the phone calls, Ms. Spector.”
“Reporters?”
“Yes, and worse. So many hateful calls . . . They think I killed her. They think I had an affair with Lydia and she found out after all these years and confronted me and I . . . I can’t believe they would think that. People I don’t even know . . .”
“Nelson?” Brenna said.
“Yes?”
“Is there anything I should know about your collection of tools?”
Nelson’s lips tightened. The blood drained from his face until he looked the color of skim milk, and he shook his head, very slowly. “Why would you ask that?”
“Well . . . they’ve all been bagged and removed from your garage. I’m just wondering if you’ve noticed any of them missing in the past few weeks.”
“No.” He turned and left Brenna’s apartment, shutting the door hard behind him. Brenna heard Maya’s door opening, light shuffly footsteps as she approached. “He’s gone?” Maya said.
“Yep.”
She exhaled. “Weird guy.”
“His wife was murdered,” Brenna said—a halfhearted protest. She looked at Maya. “But yeah. He’s definitely weird.”
B
renna fixed spaghetti Bolognese for dinner. She plugged her MP3 into the speakers and put on some Rachael Yamagata—one of those rare artists she and her daughter both liked—and the two of them sat at the table, eating and listening to Rachael’s sad, yearning voice and not saying a word. Typical for them, but that didn’t make it right, did it? More and more, Brenna and Maya brought to mind those zombie couples you see in restaurants, eating entire meals without speaking, without looking at each other directly, without even chewing in unison.
Maya didn’t seem to mind the lack of talk, but really, how was Brenna to know that? Perfect memory or not, Brenna still viewed the world through her own eyes, no one else’s. For years, she’d thought of Maya as quiet and laconic, not one for the spotlight—but was that really her daughter’s personality, or was it simply the effect Brenna had on her? “So what’s his name?”
Maya looked up from her plate. “Who?”
“You know. Back row center. Mr. Vibrato.”
Maya put her fork down. She gazed at Brenna with those eyes—Clea’s eyes, blue as a baby’s, yet so full of knowledge you wanted to look away. “Miles.”
“As in, Miles to go before he grows up?”
Maya swallowed hard. “Apparently.”
“He’ll be sorry.”
“You think?”
“If he has half a brain.”
Maya rolled her eyes and went back to her plate. Brenna thought,
I tried
. For quite a while, there was nothing in the room, no sound at all but forks clinking on china and Rachael want, want, wanting to be your love and Brenna’s thoughts, teetering on the edge of a memory, wishing back to a time when she knew the right thing to say.
“Mom?”
Brenna wasn’t sure whether Maya had said it in her mind or here at the table. She put her fork down and waited until her daughter spoke again.
Maya said, “When you were my age . . .”
“Yes?”
“Did anything like Miles ever happen to you?”
Brenna nodded. “Dave Handly. But I wasn’t your age. I was sixteen. And two months.”
“Was he older?”
“Yeah . . . He was one of those guys you hear about. Nineteen years old, and they still hang around their old high school, go to all the parties . . .”
“You mean a total loser.”
“Yes, honey. But I wasn’t as sophisticated as you, and so to me he was . . . a man.”
“Did you go out with him?”
“Honestly? I didn’t even talk to him. I pretty much just stood across rooms from him, staring,” Brenna said, her mind reeling back . . . “Until this one party at Lisa Minor’s house. October 7, 1986. It was 10
P.M.
I’d been there for an hour. I was sitting on the couch with my friend Becky Joseph. She was telling me how she’d gone to third base with Kenny D’Amato, and . . . I probably shouldn’t have told you that.”
“I know what third base is, Mom.”
Brenna sighed. “Anyway, Becky is talking, and then this song starts playing on the stereo . . .”
“What song?”
“ ‘And She Was’ by the Talking Heads. It caught me by surprise and it . . . it triggered a . . . sad memory . . .” Brenna’s eyes went hot, her throat clenched up.
Damn
. Brenna dug her fingernails into her palms . . .
Get it together . . .
“You okay?”
Brenna took a breath and blinked . . . “Fine . . . Anyway, like an idiot I start crying, right in the middle of Becky’s story. She says, ‘What the hell is wrong with—’ But before she can finish the sentence, there’s Dave Handly on the other side of me—right there on the couch, handing me a Kleenex.” Brenna swallowed some ice water. “Seriously, Lou Reed could have been handing me a Kleenex, I wouldn’t have been more starstruck.”
“Lou who?”
“Funny.”
“So then what happened?”
“We . . . uh . . . we spent some time together.” Brenna cleared her throat. “And Dave said some wonderful things . . .”
“Like?”
“He told me to tell him all the songs that make me cry. He wanted to know my favorite books, favorite movies, if my heart was ever broken and by whom . . . He said, ‘I want to know everything that makes you
you
.’ ”
“Wow.”
“Yep. But then two days later, I was waiting for the bus to take me home from school. He pulls right up in his black Karmann Ghia, picks up Lizzie Karp . . . and completely ignores me.” Brenna could feel the chill fall air at the back of her neck and on her cheeks, the waistband of the black corduroys she’d been wearing,
Lizzie Karp’s giggly “Hi!” and the crunch of drying grass under her sneakers as Brenna shifts her weight, back and forth, back and forth . . .
“That sucks,” Maya said.
“Sure does.” She drank more water, forced a smile. “Like your grandma says, ‘Beware of men who can string words together like pearls.’ ”
Maya nodded slowly. “You know what Miles told me?”
“What?”
“He said even our first names are a perfect fit.”
“God help you.”
“And he said they should call us M&M—because we’re so
sweet together
.” Maya rolled her eyes. Then she started to cry. Brenna moved around the table and took her daughter in her arms, and Maya let her—not quite hugging back, but resting her head on her shoulder, allowing Brenna to comfort her and that was enough . . .
“Why did you have to give me a name that starts with M?” Maya said.
Brenna smiled. “You can change it if you want.” But then the smile froze and died. She saw the letter M in her mind, typewritten on a page, the letter taking her back to October 23, 1998, meeting Lydia Neff for the first and last time at the Waterside Condominiums, then driving to the Skyline Diner in White Plains for the appointment with Errol Ludlow and hoping with her whole mind that no one would be watching, no one would see
. . . The Skyline lot is nearly empty. She parks and walks up to the front door, the envelope in her hand . . . She can’t yank the image out of her mind—an image of herself, walking through the door, as viewed through the scope of a telephoto lens . . .
“Mom?”
The diner door is heavy and she pushes it open and her eyes go right to him—Errol Ludlow, third booth from the back, and peering up at her over black half glasses, smiling like a friend. Errol Ludlow with his oversized head and his tree-trunk limbs and oven mitt hands, too big for the booth, too big for the diner, and smiling at her, six-foot-eight-inches of unadulterated bullshit. Errol Ludlow, meaty hands resting on a manila folder—the Neff police report, Brenna knows—and the cuts on her face sting, each bruise aches . . . the sight of him pulling at her wounds, waking them up.
I could leave now,
she thinks
. I could turn around and leave
.