Authors: Alison Gaylin
Four wrought-iron benches stand evenly around the fountain. Everything so perfectly placed. So balanced, except . . .
A slender, black-haired woman sits alone on the farthest of the benches, her head down. She wears a long black coat. Her hands are folded in her lap.
Brenna moves closer.
On the back of the woman’s right wrist is a tattoo: a dragonfly with a red body and blue and green wings.
When she looks up, Brenna recognizes the high cheekbones, the dark eyes, the downturned mouth, laugh lines like faint parentheses . . . She recognizes Lydia Neff’s face from an interview she saw on
Good Morning New York
, three days after Iris’s disappearance. And for a moment, Brenna has the strangest feeling, an almost starstruck feeling, and the question she’s planned to ask this woman, the one she’s rehearsed in her head and used on half a dozen other people, the one about Iris getting into a blue car, couched in the explanation that Brenna was an investigator, helping out with one small part of the case . . . those carefully organized sentences crumble and scatter, and instead Brenna hears herself say, “I know how you feel.”
Lydia stares at her.
Brenna clears her throat. She looks into the black eyes. “My sister got into a car. The car drove away. I didn’t know who was driving that car, or why she got in, but it drove away, and she was gone. This person I woke up to every morning, who knew most all my secrets—this person who was such a part of my life that her presence in it was . . . It was like . . .” Brenna’s gaze moves to the fountain—water hitting pale, sculptors’ stone. And then back to Lydia’s pale face. “It was like breathing.”
Lydia’s eyes cloud and glisten. A tear spills down her cheek. “Next Wednesday is Iris’s birthday. I swear to God I don’t know what I’m going to do.”
“What are you doing here?”
A man’s voice pulled Brenna out of the memory, the date ringing in her head. Next Wednesday. October 28. 10 28. But she couldn’t punch Iris’s birthday into the keypad—couldn’t move at all.
Brenna knew the voice. It belonged to Morasco, and when she spun around, there he was, watching her hard-eyed through those thick glasses, his palm flat against the breast pocket of yet another tweed jacket, the tips of his long fingers grazing the opposite lapel, inches from where Brenna knew his shoulder holster would be.
M
orasco walked Brenna off the property and to her car in silence. He’d come, he said, because a neighbor had reported a suspicious vehicle in front of the Neff house. But while he seemed to find Brenna’s explanation reasonable enough—
Nelson Wentz hired me to find Carol. I figured, if I came to the place where her wallet was found, I might be able to talk to some of the police involved in the case
—he kept giving her odd, sidelong looks. She expected a follow-up question, and when they reached her car she got one. Of course, it followed up on nothing she’d ever anticipated: “Does Nelson Wentz know you used to be one of Errol’s Angels?”
Brenna stared at him.
“Come on,” he said. “You have to know they called you girls that. In fact, I think Ludlow coined the term himself.”
“You know Errol Ludlow?”
Morasco shrugged. “Not personally, but as PIs go, he’s legendary.”
“And by legendary, you mean a flaming jackass.”
Morasco smiled a little.
“It’s okay. I worked for the guy for three years. I know his reputation, and let me tell you, it’s well-deserved.”
“Well . . . since you mentioned it.”
“I am wondering two things, though.”
“Yeah?”
“First, why would Nelson Wentz care that I used to work for Ludlow?”
Morasco shrugged. “He may have opinions on a PI who hires a bunch of pretty girls to do his dirty work.” His gaze dropped to the ground. “Especially if ninety percent of it is trapping cheating husbands.”
“I needed a job,” Brenna said. “I’d just dropped out of college because I . . . I wanted to learn how to . . . to find people. There weren’t a lot of options.”
He gave her a long look. “Your sister.”
“What?”
“You wanted to find people because of your sister, didn’t you? She was never found.”
Brenna stared at him. Her face felt hot, as if Morasco’s eyes were two spotlights, burning her. “Okay,” she managed. “That brings me to my second question.”
“Yes?”
“How do you know I worked for Errol Ludlow?”
“It’s not that hard to find out. Go to any private eye database, it’ll have an employment history.”
“I phrased that wrong,” Brenna said. “What I should have said was ‘
Why
do you know I worked for Errol Ludlow?’ ”
“Well, I—”
“Why do you know about my sister? Why do you know so much about me and why do you care?”
Morasco adjusted his glasses, his eyes glittering in the dim light from the streetlamp, his lean face tinged with some emotion Brenna couldn’t quite identify. “It’s interesting,” he said, finally, “how one word can completely change the meaning of a question.”
Brenna exhaled hard. She stuck her key in her car door. “I never knew Carol Wentz. Trent showed you our phone records. You saw yourself I haven’t received a new client call in two and a half weeks.”
“I know.”
“I had nothing to do with Mrs. Wentz’s disappearance.”
“I know.”
“So, then, Detective Morasco . . .”
“Nick.”
“Nick. Why are you researching me?”
“Well . . .” He cleared his throat. “You’ve got to admit, you’re kind of . . .”
“Kind of what?”
“Fascinating.”
Her eyebrows went up.
“I mean . . . the disorder. I never heard of anyone having perfect memory until I read Dr. Lieberman’s book.”
Brenna stepped closer. More than anything she wished she could see inside his head, read his thoughts. She was usually pretty perceptive, but for the life of her, she couldn’t figure out whether Morasco was being genuine, or whether he was completely playing her. And if the latter was true, what was he playing her for? Brenna felt her cheeks heating up again, and she was glad for the relative dark. “Maybe if you guys spent as much time researching Carol Wentz as you do researching . . . my disorder,” she said, “her husband wouldn’t have to waste his money on PIs.” She opened her car door and slid into the front seat. “Bye, Nick.”
Brenna started to close her window, but Morasco placed his hand over the frame and she stopped. He leaned down, put his eyes level with hers. “Carol Wentz never withdrew more than fifty dollars a week from her bank account, but the day before her disappearance, she went to an ATM and took out five hundred dollars.”
“What?”
“I guess Nelson Wentz didn’t tell you.”
“No . . .”
“Interesting—because
we
told
him
,” he said. “Oh, also three days before, Carol was seen at a diner in Mount Temple, sitting close to another man.”
“Are you serious?”
He cocked an eyebrow at her. “You aren’t the only person I know about.”
She shook her head. “Nelson Wentz told me . . .”
“Let me guess. He had a happy marriage, and his wife would never leave him, but for some reason he can’t get the cops to understand that?”
“Yes,” she said. “In fact, that was almost word-for-word.”
“Nelson Wentz is a nice guy, but he’s not what you’d call a reliable narrator,” Morasco said. “They had a crappy marriage, Brenna. Any of their neighbors would tell you that. And at least one of them would tell you that at her last book club meeting, Carol Wentz confessed—without going into detail—that she felt guilty and ‘unfulfilled.’ ”
She stared at him through her open window.
He gave her a small, sad smile. “I’m telling you,” he said, “because it helps to know what you’re up against.”
By the time she got her thoughts together enough to reply, Morasco was gone. And so she watched him, jogging up the block to where his car was parked, waiting.
N
elson Wentz was boyish, in the literal sense of the word. He was fifty-eight years old, which Brenna had learned from running the check on him, but sitting on an easy chair in his living room, he could have been twenty-five or fifteen or even five. So slight and delicate he was for a middle-aged man. Such a weak little shadow he cast—as if he’d managed to age half a century without making it all the way through puberty.
Nelson wore khaki pants and an off-white polo shirt, and the easy chair he was sitting on was of a grayish cloth, and in a way, it all camouflaged him. Like his wife, Nelson was pretty much completely beige—skin, hair, lips . . . They could have been brother and sister or even twins, save for Carol’s startling eyes. Nelson’s eyes, on the other hand, were small and pale and frustratingly restless. It made it hard to have a simple conversation with him, because whenever his gaze met Brenna’s, it would dart all over the living room, landing on random objects—the framed seascape hanging over the TV, the wooden bust of Don Quixote on the mantelpiece, the orange striped cat stitched into the couch throw —and then it would stick there, as if Nelson was begging his own home furnishings to back him up.
And here Brenna had barely
asked
him anything yet. “How long have you and Carol been married?” was her latest.
Not exactly phone-a-friend material. Yet in response Brenna had gotten, “Fourteen years?” Delivered like the world’s most embarrassing question. Directed at a book on the coffee table.
Okay, fine. You want to play tough . . .
“Nelson?”
“Yes?”
“Why did you hire me?”
For the first time since she arrived, Nelson looked her in the eye. “To find my wife.”
Brenna met his gaze. Briefly, she recalled Nero’s Playground—the smell of sweat and old smoke, the blinging slot machines, the headachy taste of the white wine she was drinking, and the bachelor’s glint in Larry Shelby’s eye when he leaned in . . .
“You chained?” he asks, and all Brenna can think of is Annette, knowing in her heart her husband is alive, knowing that fact without question . . . but knowing so little else about him.
Brenna squeezed her eyes shut. When she opened them again, Nelson was still watching her, his whole face twisted up like a question mark. “What are you going to do,” Brenna said, “if Carol doesn’t want to be found?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I think you do, Nelson,” Brenna said. “I’m thinking you weren’t totally honest with me about the state of your marriage.”
Nelson’s gaze darted to Brenna’s shoes. “I’m always honest.”
“I spoke to Detective Morasco,” she said. And that was all it took. Nelson seemed to deflate in front of her, the energy draining out of him and giving way to a type of hard weariness until, delicate as he was, he finally looked his age.
“Detective Morasco doesn’t know the whole story.”
Brenna stared at him. “Fine,” she said. “But see, I
do
need to know it. If Carol took a significant amount of money out of an ATM right before she left, I need to know that. If she was talking to a strange man, I need to know that. If your marriage was . . . less than perfect—”
“It was fine. We were fine. Maybe we weren’t . . . like other couples. Certain
overdemonstrative
couples . . . But I loved her and she loved me. We had a future together. We were going to spend our retirement in Provence. She wouldn’t leave me.”
He said it all quietly, but as he spoke, his face grew redder and redder.
Brenna nodded.
“We were fine.”
“I understand.” Brenna moved to the chair next to his—a spartan wood desk chair that seemed more a space filler than a piece of furniture, and angled herself toward him. “Now let me ask you something,” she said. “Do you
want
me to understand—or do you want me to find your wife?”
“Both.”
Brenna sighed. “Look, Nelson. I’m going to be asking you a lot of questions—some of them you might not want to answer because
thinking
about the answers—the honest ones—may hurt. Or maybe you’ve blocked certain things out of your mind . . . I need you to put all those feelings aside—to answer everything. Even if it means dredging up memories you’d rather stay buried.” She pulled the chair a few inches closer. “Nelson,” she said quietly, “do
you
understand?”
He looked at her for a long while, the red slipping out of his face, his features settling back to normal. “I promise,” he said. “I’ll tell you everything.”
“Okay great.” Brenna gave him a smile. “Now that that unpleasantness is over with, how about you give me her credit card number so we can see if there are any new charges . . . Any old bill is fine.”
“I can do better than that,” Nelson said. “I can give you her credit card.”
“You have that?”
Nelson got up. “She has one credit card, and it’s just for emergencies. We use my cards for all of our major expenses.”
“Your cards.”
“Yes. From my bank, and a few others.”
“Your bank?” Brenna said. “You never combined your finances?”
Nelson looked at her as if she’d just socked him in the jaw. “No,” he said. “We didn’t.”
“Why not?”
“I’m sorry . . . I have to get used to . . . probing questions.”
Brenna hadn’t considered that question particularly probing—
What’s he going to do when I start asking about their sex life?
But because she could practically feel the anxiety flying off of him, Brenna pulled back. She nodded and said, “It’s so hard, I know,” and hoped that it put Nelson on the verge of at-ease.
“Keeping everything separate was easier.”
“Sure,” said Brenna. “So you’re positive she didn’t take the card with her?”
“She never takes it out of the house. She is very frugal.”
Brenna followed Nelson into the kitchen, and as he moved toward the drawer beneath the stovetop, she couldn’t help but step back and gasp. While the other rooms required few adjectives, other than “clean” or maybe “sufficient,” the Wentzes’ kitchen was a gourmet’s dream come true—stainless steel fixtures, polished cherrywood cupboards, copper pots glimmering from a rack placed over a state-of-the-art gas stove, a good-sized island, complete with a Michelin chef–worthy block of knives and even a basket of fresh fruit, not to mention a refrigerator large enough to feed a kibbutz . . . Brenna loved this room, loved the bounty of it, the happy excess. It stood out like a Christmas tree in the Wentzes’ otherwise prosaic home, and more than anything, it gave Brenna hope for their marriage. “Who’s the cook?” she asked.