Authors: Alison Gaylin
“Let me guess,” said Brenna. “One.”
“Yep.”
“Very perceptive, Trent,” she said. “I’m impressed.”
“My biggest strength is still my bod,” he said. “But I’m learning.”
“So the big question is, who has Meade been working for for the past ten years?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. I’m thinking maybe he must hire himself out—private security, maybe? I
can
tell you that he’s tried to join the army four, five times, both before and after he got fired by Wright. But he never made it.”
“Why?”
“Psych test. Flunked the thing every time.”
“How could Lydia Neff get involved with a guy like that?”
“Really?” Trent said. “When she was hot? Or, uh . . . more recently?”
Brenna sighed. “I gotta go, Trent.”
Brenna ended the call as she hit the stoplight on the corner of Main and Muriel Court, Lydia Neff on her mind—or rather, Nelson Wentz’s description of Lydia Neff twelve years ago, just after the Bistro had pulled out of her driveway . . .
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 . . .
Then, she thought of the question she’d asked Trent—
How could Lydia Neff get involved with a guy like that?
Brenna knew the answer, of course she did. She’d known it when she’d asked, and it was an easy one. When it came to love, people were crazy. People were self-destructive and self-punishing and irrational and sad. They didn’t look for what was good for them, but for qualities they wanted, needed for whatever sick, shoot-yourself-in-the-head reasons. They looked for those qualities again and again because they were adults and it was their absolute right to look for those qualities, to ruin the lives that were theirs to ruin . . . No, that wasn’t the question at all. The question Brenna had really wanted to ask was this:
How could Lydia Neff let a guy like that near her daughter?
Brenna’s cell phone vibrated in her lap. She looked at the screen. Morasco. “Hey, listen. I have a name for you on the Bistro owner, and you’re right. He isn’t a cop.”
“Who is he?” Morasco’s voice was very quiet.
“Adam Meade,” Brenna said. “He used to work for Roger Wright Industries.”
Morasco was silent.
“Hello? Nick? Are you still—”
“How did you get the Neff police report, Brenna?”
“I told you. Nelson Wentz—”
“Not the new one. The old one. The one with page 22. How did you get that?”
“Errol Ludlow got it for me. Why?”
Morasco took a breath. “I never saw that page.”
“But you were in charge of the case.”
“I never knew that interview had been done. Chief Griffin interrogated this John Doe guy—this guy who had been talking to Lydia Neff on the phone—without ever telling me.”
Brenna pulled over to the side of the road, turned the car off. “I think John Doe was Meade,” she said. “He was a security guard for Wright Industries. He was fired—or laid off—after Iris’s disappearance, and he seemed to have been involved with Lydia.”
“Unbelievable.”
“Actually, it is pretty damn believable,” Brenna said. “One of Wright’s employees is questioned by the police in a child’s disappearance because there’s late night phone calls from him to and from the kid’s house . . . he’s going to want to keep that quiet. God, wait a minute . . .” She took a breath. “It would explain why they didn’t want you pursuing that lead. The little girl you interviewed. She described Meade’s car perfectly . . .”
“Brenna, I don’t want you working this case anymore. It isn’t safe.”
“What are you talking about?” she asked, but even as she said it, the image clicked into her brain yet again—Meade at her car window ten years ago, Hutchins at his side. “When Hutchins was a uniform, he was working the Iris Neff case,” she said.
“Yes.”
“He was working under you.”
“Yes.”
“What job did you assign him?” she asked, though the answer was obvious, her skin bristling with that knowledge, even before Morasco told her himself.
“He was going over Lydia Neff’s phone records.”
W
hy was Hutchins allied so closely with Adam Meade? Why had the chief called him “sir” in the interview? What type of sway did he hold—a former security guard? Whatever the answer, he did hold sway, and the best Brenna could do would be to do as Morasco said, get out of this now, leave it to him—a police officer himself—to get to the bottom of this.
But what about the girl who had called Nelson? What if Iris was out there somewhere, alive and needing help? Brenna gripped the steering wheel.
Carol tried to help. Tim O’Malley tried to help. Klavel, too . . .
Past Muriel Court was the entrance to the 287 South, and that’s where she needed to go—cross Muriel Court, take the entrance, leave Tarry Ridge. Leave with a woman dead in the trunk of her car and something missing from the back of Iris’s framed drawing, leave with Lydia Neff invisible and Adam Meade everywhere. Leave without knowing.
She saw Nelson Wentz in her mind, Nelson Wentz, lying in bed, fragile in his undershirt. Nelson, whom Lydia had clearly used as a smoke screen. Oldest trick in the book—spread rumors you’re screwing the unimportant little guy, it steers everyone away from the big guy you’re really screwing. During her tenure with Errol, she’d seen five different mistresses pull the exact same scam, yet still she’d assumed Lydia had been telling Gayle Chandler the truth.
You’re honest. You expect other people to be the same
.
She stared out her window, recalling her conversation with Nelson.
I’m not going to be in need of your services anymore
, he’d said, without explanation, his voice so hollow and still.
You hire a PI because you need answers, Nelson. Did you find the answers? Is that why you fired me?
Brenna squeezed her eyes shut, focused on the road. She would leave Tarry Ridge. She would leave Nelson Wentz. She would leave Nick Morasco and all the ghosts that haunted Lydia Neff’s house. She would try to not think about the past three days. She would try to move on. She would fail miserably.
It is July 29, 1985, 9
A.M.
, and Brenna is finishing a bowl of instant oatmeal she made for herself. Ricky D the deejay says, “Next up, Talking Heads!” and then the song. “And She Was.” About a girl slipping into thin air. Brenna’s friend Carly says it’s about an acid trip, but Brenna thinks it’s just about disappearing.
In the garden outside, Mom is sitting cross-legged in the grass. She is staring up at the sculpture she made—an exact replica of Ammannati’s Neptune. Nude and burly and bearded, looking over his left shoulder like he just heard someone sneaking up on him. Neptune is embarrassing, but he’s been here so long he’s also sort of a comfort.
Mom carved him out of a huge slab of expensive marble that arrived at their house one week after Dad left. Brenna had been just seven years old at the time—she can barely remember her dad’s face now—but she can remember that marble slab, five men unloading it from the back of a big truck.
“What are you going to make with that, Mom?” Clea had asked.
And Mom had replied, “Someone that won’t ever leave.”
Now Clea’s gone. She’s been gone for almost four years. Brenna knows she’s alive because she has to be. Brenna wonders if Clea’s heard this song. “And She Was.” She pictures Clea, closing her eyes and listening to those words and singing along about a world of missing persons . . .
Brenna wonders if Clea ever pictures her. She wonders if Clea ever pictures Mom, sitting cross-legged in her garden, not having spoken to Brenna in three days. She wonders if Clea has any idea how much it hurts to watch Mom out the window, staring up at Neptune’s face as if he can talk, as if he is telling her why everyone here seems to leave but him.
“I’ll find her,” Brenna whispers. “I’ll find Clea for you, Mom.”
Brenna put the car in park and turned off the ignition. She hadn’t crossed Muriel Court as she’d told herself she would. She had made a left, driven down four blocks, and pulled up in front of Nelson Wentz’s house—what she’d wanted to do all along.
Fire me if you want, but I need the answers, too, Nelson. You don’t have to pay me. I just need to know.
B
renna leaned on Nelson Wentz’s doorbell for a solid minute. No answer. Nelson was home, though. His car was in the driveway, so he was either (a) avoiding her or (b) zonked out on sleeping pills. Brenna wasn’t going to let him get away with either. She walked over to the plastic rock by the bay window, twisted it open, and took out the key.
Once Brenna got inside the house and closed the door behind her, she called out Nelson’s name. No answer, but she did hear water running upstairs. “Nelson?” she yelled again. “It’s Brenna!” She took a few steps into the living room. “I need to talk to you!”
No answer. He obviously couldn’t hear her down here. She’d wait in the living room until he finished his shower.
She walked over to the couch. It had been moved a good foot back from its usual position. The throw rug, too, was against the window rather than in front of the fireplace, and the wooden bust of Don Quixote at the center of the coffee table rather than on the mantelpiece. Weird . . . for Nelson, anyway. Did he think he was turning over a new leaf? Was this barely noticeable redecoration part of that? She sat down on the hard wooden chair—her usual chair, she realized, and that’s when she noticed something under the easy chair, Nelson’s chair. A book.
A book on the floor? In Nelson Wentz’s house?
The water was still running, the pipes above her groaning. Brenna crouched down, peered under the chair, and slipped it out.
Safekeeping: A Memoir
. She flipped it open and started to read, sliding a fingertip under the dust jacket on the back cover . . .
There was something taped back there. Brenna removed the dust jacket and saw it—a slim envelope, stuck to the inside of the back cover with what looked like an entire roll of Scotch tape, like Nelson was figuring on sending the thing off into space.
No, not Nelson. Carol
. This was Carol’s book club book. This was the book Carol had called Gayle about, the book Nelson had seen Carol reading on the last night of her life. Brenna’s mouth went dry. Her heart pounded. The envelope was slim enough to fit under the jacket of a book. Slim enough to fit behind a picture, in a frame.
She pulled the tape off the envelope, freeing it. Then she held it in her hands for a few moments, debating the ethics of all of this before finally she succumbed. She had to open it. Of course she had to open it.
In the envelope was a piece of paper, neatly folded. Brenna’s eyes went to the lines, drawn in red crayon. A stick-figure girl at the center of a giant flower, with squares drawn in the background, a sun poking out from the upper left corner . . . Another drawing of Iris’s . . . It was more detailed than the others yet it made less sense. Why was the girl trapped inside a flower? What were those squares supposed to be? Carefully, Brenna unfolded the drawing, wondering,
Why was this hidden behind a picture frame?
Three snapshots fell out, onto the floor.
Brenna picked them up, turned them over . . . She gaped at them, these three happy vacation photos, all with a digital date of August 20, 1997. And then she took a breath and closed her eyes and looked at them again, one by one, staring hard into each, as if it might somehow turn to dust and poof away, as if she were stuck in some strange dream . . .
The first was of Lydia Neff, tanned and young and smiling. She wore a white T-shirt and cutoffs, and leaned against the hood of a light blue Subaru Vivio Bistro. The second was of Lydia on what looked like a hotel bed, under the covers, an arm thrown over her eyes, sleeping. And the third . . . The third was of a naked man, on the same hotel bed. He was lying on his stomach and staring into the camera lens with an emotion so raw, so serious and true that Brenna herself could feel it, twelve years later and in the living room of a house where neither she nor the photo belonged. She could feel it, tightening in her chest until she could no longer look at him. It wasn’t her place to look. The emotion belonged to the man, and it was for the woman behind the camera, for her and her alone . . . The emotion was love. The man was Roger Wright.
Not Meade. Wright. That was the affair Lydia Neff was trying to cover up by telling Gayle she was sleeping with Nelson. It was Roger Wright who’d been driving the company car before Meade had bought it. Lydia Neff hadn’t invited a gun-wielding psychopath into her house as her daughter slept. She’d invited a very rich, very powerful, very married man. A man who, at least for one moment in time, had looked at Lydia as though he would give it all up for her—his family, his fortune, all that and more. He loved her.
Iris said that when Santa visits Tarry Ridge, he drives a blue car.
It had been Wright leaving Lydia’s house when Nelson had gone to talk to her. Wright whose car Lydia told him to forget ever seeing, Wright whose car Iris had clearly seen as well. Brenna could imagine the conversation. She could practically hear it.
Whose car was that at our house, Mommy?
Nobody, honey.
No, Mommy, no. I woke up in the middle of the night. I saw a blue car, leaving our driveway.
Oh. That was . . . It was Santa, sweetheart.
Santa? Really?
Yes. Sometimes he visits our house. But you mustn’t tell anyone or he will never come again.
Brenna shoved the drawing and the pictures into her bag and ran upstairs. “Nelson!”
No answer. Just the sound of running water.
Brenna walked through Nelson’s bedroom to the bathroom and pounded on the door. “Nelson! It’s Brenna! I need to show you what Carol found.”
Still no answer. She put her hand on the knob and the door drifted open. Steam poured out. The mirror was completely fogged. She stepped inside. It was like stepping into a rain cloud. How long had the water been running?