Authors: Alison Gaylin
“Her past. Her wild college years. Her ex-husband, Iris’s father. A genius, but wrecked his brain with drugs—methamphetamine, I think . . . He was in an institution back then. I don’t know that she told anyone else about him, other than me.”
Brenna looked at Nelson. “She trusted you.”
“It was never an affair. We weren’t doing anything wrong—just talking.”
“Sometimes, talking is more intimate.”
Nelson stared down at his hands
“Especially if no one else is talking to you.”
Nelson picked at a thumbnail. For the briefest moment, he lifted his gaze to Brenna’s face, and his eyes looked different, bright—as though someone had suddenly flicked the switch behind them. “Timothy O’Malley.”
“Huh?”
“Timothy O’Malley. Lydia’s ex-husband—that’s his name.” He looked up at Brenna again, his eyes still blazing. “She went to Syracuse, majored in art history. Her freshman roommate was a prudish girl from Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, named Marianne Stanhope. I remember everything she ever told me, Ms. Spector. Every single detail of her life—I’ve kept them all in my head like . . .”
“Souvenirs.”
“Yes.” He breathed in and out. “Souvenirs.”
“I understand,” Brenna said, and she did. Probably more than anyone, though her mind didn’t pick and choose the way Nelson’s did. She knew what it was like to be a human time capsule—to be the only one in a conversation to remember its details. She knew how one-sided that could feel, how terribly lonely it could make you, especially when those details held within them that feeling—that crumbling of the heart . . . “Did Carol know about your friendship?”
“She never asked,” he said, “so I didn’t say anything.”
Brenna’s mind went to the folders under Carol’s quilting supplies, the photographs and police reports and the secret chat room life she’d been leading as LydiaTR . . . “She suspected something.”
He nodded. “The funny part was, the whole thing—whatever you want to call the thing that was going on between Lydia and me . . . By the time Carol said something about it, it was more or less over.”
“How so?”
“Lydia’s train rides started tapering off, till they were around once a week at most,” he said. “Lydia was still friendly, but she seemed more distracted. My feelings, thankfully, started to fade.”
“Okay . . .”
“Then one night . . . God, I remember it like it was yesterday. It was a Saturday night, and I was watching the ten o’clock news and Carol walks into the room. She says, very matter-of-fact, ‘Someone told me that you and Lydia Neff are having an affair.’ ”
“What did you say?”
“I told her that it was completely untrue, of course,” Nelson sighed heavily. “Carol told me she’d heard it from her friend Gayle Chandler. She said Gayle had heard it from Lydia herself. Can you imagine? Why would Lydia tell a lie like that?”
“That’s horrible.”
He nodded. “I told Carol the whole story. She seemed to believe me, but still I was bothered. After Carol went to sleep, I drove over to Lydia’s house. There was another car leaving, just as I was getting there. It made me feel . . . strange.”
“Jealous?”
“Maybe. Anyway, I knocked on the door, and it was the weirdest thing. Here I’d driven there at that ungodly hour to tell Lydia what Gayle Chandler had said and ask her if it was true . . . But I didn’t wind up saying any of that.” He cleared his throat. “I asked her about the car.”
“The car,” Brenna repeated. “The one leaving the house.”
“Yes, and she acted so . . . so bizarre, I forgot everything else I’d been planning to say.”
“Bizarre?”
“She told me to forget I saw the car. Forget I was ever there. Tonight never happened. I left pretty quickly—Iris was sleeping upstairs and I didn’t want to wake her, and besides . . . Lydia frightened me.”
Brenna leaned in closer. “Your feelings for Lydia . . .”
“They went away that night.” Nelson’s gaze dropped to the floor. Brenna knew he wasn’t telling the complete truth about that, but she wasn’t going to call him on it. It wasn’t important. The phone rang once in the kitchen, and the machine picked up silently. Neither one of them moved. That wasn’t important, either.
“I thought Carol was over any hurt feelings or suspicions she may have had,” Nelson said finally. “It was more than a decade ago, and it was nothing to begin with. We never talked about it . . . But then seeing . . . seeing everything she’d been up to before she went away . . .” Nelson’s voice cracked. “If it was my feelings for Lydia . . . If that was the reason why someone
did that
to Carol, I don’t think I’m going to be able to live with myself.”
Brenna put a hand on Nelson’s shoulder. It felt delicate as a bird’s wing. “It’ll be all right,” she said. “Don’t worry. It’ll be okay . . .”
Finally, he caught his breath. “I wish she would call again.”
“The young girl.”
“Iris. Yes.”
Nelson reached for his glass, sucked down a piece of ice, and chewed it up. They sat there for several seconds, the crunching sound filling the air around them. “You want to know something weird?” Nelson said finally.
Brenna looked at him.
“The car—the one leaving Lydia Neff’s house that she seemed so frightened over . . . Carol and I had just been at the Subaru dealership that day, looking at the exact same model.”
“Subaru dealership?”
“Yes. Coincidental, huh?”
Brenna opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her throat was dry. She grabbed her glass of water off the table and took a long, draining gulp.
No. No it couldn’t be . . .
“Are you all right, Ms. Spector?”
“Nelson,” she said. “Do you happen to remember the color and model of the Subaru you saw?”
Strange, there were dozens of Subaru models available twelve years ago, ranging from the rugged Forester station wagon to the citified Impreza sedan. Yet before Nelson spoke, Brenna knew exactly what he would say.
“It was a Vivio Bistro. Light blue.”
M
eade wouldn’t have chosen the car for himself. It was too compact for a man his size, and getting into and out of it was a process that bordered on arduous. Over the years, though, he’d learned to appreciate the unfolding of his powerful legs and arms, the tilting of his broad shoulders to maneuver them out the door, the pushing back against the seat to propel himself out of this tiny sedan—
propel
himself, like a missile. The effect was surprising—onlookers would often double-take, wide-eyed. Adam Meade thrived on surprise. So Meade was grateful for this undersized vehicle. It reminded him of his place in the world.
When Meade parked the Vivio this time, though, he made sure there were no onlookers. He found a quiet residential street a few blocks up from his destination, the sidewalk shaded by maple trees ablaze with dying leaves. He pulled beneath a tree with especially thick and remarkable foliage—a bright orange distraction. Before getting out of the car, he checked the sidewalks, then the windows of the modest apartment buildings and brick row houses. Finally satisfied that he was alone, Meade propelled himself out of his metal cocoon of a car and walked through this neighborhood in Mount Temple as if he were another, less remarkable person. He could not afford to surprise anyone today. Surprise made people remember and Meade did not want to be remembered.
Columbus was a busy avenue where the buildings all appeared somewhat sea-worn, as though the constant whooshing of buses, trucks, and speeding SUVs had eroded their facades. The apartment house was by far the most forlorn on the street, and to make matters even worse, Graeme Klavel’s office was in the basement apartment. Meade had yet to meet Klavel in person, but he felt as if he had a good sense of the man, eking out his living under a city street, buried and forgotten, as if he were already dead.
Meade wasn’t fond of most of Mount Temple. But he did like the Blue Moon Diner. He’d eaten a late, leisurely breakfast there, and, as always, it reminded him of a place his father used to take him when he was a little boy—a coffee shop near Dad’s base back in Jacksonville, where “the men of the house” would go for biscuits and gravy every Sunday morning while his mother and sisters were at church . . . It pained Meade to think of those times now, but still he enjoyed the Blue Moon, where he could brush up against his past without going all the way in.
While he’d been eating, he’d stared at the sports section of the
Daily News
without reading it, listening instead to the two women at the next table—Mrs. Bloom and Mrs. Archibald, discussing their lives while lamenting the rash of switchblade murder/robberies that had hit the town and surrounding areas in recent months. “Just when we thought it was safe,” Mrs. Bloom had sighed. And Meade had sat there with his ham and eggs, nodding at a photo of Alex Rodriguez sliding home and thinking,
How true, Mrs. Bloom. How true.
Meade reached the front door of the apartment building without passing so much as one other human being on the sidewalk—a gift. Life often worked in his favor, he realized. He needed to take note of those happy coincidences, to focus on what he had rather than what had been taken from him. Meade needed to remember to always be grateful.
Klavel answered his buzzer. “Klavel Investigations.”
“Hi, Mr. Klavel,” Meade said into the speaker. “I was referred by Mrs. Bloom from Patterson’s Dry Cleaners?”
“Oh yes . . . Elaine’s a good friend.”
“Nice lady. Anyway . . . I have some work for you. It’s kinda personal though. It, uh . . . it involves my wife.”
“Yes. Yes of course.” Klavel buzzed him in.
Meade walked down the stairs. Within moments, he was inside the shabby office, the barrel of his Glock .45 pressed against Klavel’s forehead. Klavel’s rodent face was bathed in sweat. His breath, as you might expect of a man who lived and worked underground, smelled like sewage. Right now, it was coming out of him in short, popping gasps.
“Where did Carol put it?” Meade asked quietly.
“Wha . . . what did you . . .”
“Carol Wentz.”
“Y-y-yes. I know,” Klavel cleared his throat. His body was trembling. He swallowed, the way a dying man would when offered the smallest sip of water. “I know Carol, but I . . . please take that gun away.”
“Tell me.”
“Tell you what? Christ, I can’t even think. I’ll tell you anything you want if you would please . . . please . . .” His eyes were slick. “I . . . I don’t know what to say.”
“Where did Carol put the drawing?” Meade waited. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the Glock could make people do whatever you wanted—whether it was getting into the trunk of a car, setting fire to their own hair, or telling the truth. You just needed to be patient, to watch.
“The what?” Klavel asked.
“The
drawing
.”
“I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about. God help me, I don’t.” Klavel’s eyes had gone big. Gazing into them, Meade knew he was being honest.
“That’s a shame,” Meade said, meaning it. “It’s a shame that you don’t know.” Without taking his eyes away from Klavel’s, he reached into his jacket pocket with his free hand, touched the handle of the switchblade. Another of Meade’s strengths was his ability to make the right decision.
“Please,” Klavel whispered. The word half dissolved in his sewer breath, an assault. “What do you want me to do?”
Meade thought.
Klavel said, “Anything you want,” and Meade cut him off, if only to get him to close his mouth.
“I want you,” he said, “to make a phone call.”
“B
efore I forget,” Brenna told Trent over the phone, “I need you to contact car dealerships in Tarry Ridge—find out if any light blue Subaru Vivio Bistros were sold there in 1996, ’97, and ’98.”
“How exciting is my job? Jay-Z got nothing on me.”
“You know, sarcasm and nipple rings really don’t mix.”
An explosive “Sssh!” cut her off.
“Man,” she whispered.
“Why can’t you just buy a freakin’ iPhone?” Trent said for the third time this conversation. His voice in Brenna’s earpiece had a whiny edge that made her want to slap him, but he did have a point. She was at a computer in the Tarry Ridge library, trying to go over Carol Wentz’s forwarded phone records with her assistant, but the enormous librarian kept truncating their conversation with these abrupt, spastic shushes—it was almost like a form of Tourette’s.
Brenna had just gotten shushed for the fifth time in five minutes, which would have made a lot more sense if there were anyone else besides the two of them in the computer room.
Brenna glanced at the librarian—who glared back as though she couldn’t wait to bite off her head and spit it into the book return box. “Just so you know,” Brenna muttered into her hand, “somebody around here could really use an anger management class and about fifteen Xanax.”
“I’m serious, dude,” Trent said. “If you had an iPhone or a BlackBerry, you could access your e-mail anywhere—your car, a nice park . . .”
“Can you please not call me dude?”
Trent sighed audibly. “You watch your movies on a Betamax, too?”
“All right, fine, point taken.” Brenna went back to the list of numbers on her screen. It covered Carol Wentz’s last two weeks of phone use, with nothing at all after 9
P.M.
on September 24—the last day Nelson had seen her. “She made a decent amount of calls here,” Brenna whispered. “Did you check out all these numbers?”
“Yep. All except that last one—looks like a Westchester area code. She called it a few times that week—five on the 23rd.”
“I see it,” Brenna whispered. “One ten-minute call and four three-minute ones, all less than thirty seconds apart.”
“Like she kept remembering stuff she’d forgotten to say.”
“Or she kept getting hung up on.”
“Sssh!”
“Yo, even
I
heard that,” Trent said.
Brenna turned to the librarian. There was a name tag pinned to her sprawling bosom, but frankly, Brenna couldn’t make herself keep her eyes there long enough to read it. “Look, I know you’re just doing your job,” she tried. “But this is important business. I’ll be out in five minutes, promise.”