Next Time You See Me (6 page)

“So where is he?”

“Question of the hour,” Billy said, and got to work. Mac was his close friend and he wasn’t going to wait the usual twenty-four hours before launching a missing persons investigation.

On my way home I called my mother’s cell and found out that she and Ben were at the playground near the hospital, so I joined them there. He was settled into one of the low-slung baby swings, careening back and forth, happy as could be. Mom watched me intently as I crossed over to them. I kissed her cheek and took over pushing Ben for a while.

So that was it. Mac was gone. And no one knew where he was.

But I couldn’t stop hoping he would appear at any moment. He loved me and he loved Ben. I knew he did. And today was our second wedding anniversary. I
knew
he would come home soon.

A
t six o’clock that evening, as I sat in my kitchen watching my mother cook dinner—sustaining the vigil with me, refusing to leave me alone until we knew something—my cell phone rang.

I hopped over Ben, who was playing on the kitchen floor with a couple of small pots and a wooden cooking spoon, and ran to my purse in the front hall. I answered quickly, without looking to see who it was, my heart beating fast.

“Mac?”

“Mrs. Schaeffer?”

I never liked hearing that. It was
Ms
. Schaeffer, Karin Schaeffer.
Mrs.
Schaeffer was Jackson’s wife, and both of them were gone.

“Who’s this?”

“Your cake is ready any time you want to come get it. We’re open until nine. I thought maybe you forgot.”

“Nope, just running late.” A lie; I had totally forgotten. I left Mom with Ben for fifteen minutes to go pick up the cake. And then, waiting on line at the bakery, my cell phone rang again.

“Karin.”

“Hi Billy. Anything?”

“Yeah, but I don’t get it.”

“Just tell me.”

“He rented a car in midtown at about three o’clock yesterday afternoon, and it hasn’t been returned.”

“Why would he rent a car? We have a car.”

“Exactly.”

I reached the counter and pulled a twenty-dollar bill out of my wallet, having already left a five-dollar deposit, and whispered to the young woman, “Picking up a cake for Schaeffer.” She went to the back and returned with a brown cake box.

“E-ZPass had him going through a toll on the Triborough Bridge at four-eleven
P.M.
,” Billy said. “So it looks like he left the city, heading north.”

“What did he do between renting the car at three and going through the toll? It isn’t that long a distance.”

“A Friday afternoon in the summer? Probably sat in traffic.”

“Right.” The bakery door dinged as I exited. “Any E-ZPass after that?”

“Nothing. And no credit card use.”

“He must have gone up to Westchester to see Danny, maybe get him a lawyer. That would make sense.”

“It
would
make sense, Karin, except that he didn’t do any of that. I talked to Pawtusky again, called the jail, gave Rosie another call. Nothing.”

“What now?” But even as I asked that I knew it was a useless question; it was what frustrated family members always asked the detective when they had hit a dead end.

“We hang in there.” Billy summoned an authoritative confidence to his tone, having shifted gears from friend to detective.

“Call me the minute you know something.
Anything
.”

“I promise.”

“Day or night.”

“You’re in my speed dial, trust me.”

I knew Billy wouldn’t rest until he had found out where Mac was. He loved Mac and wanted him safely home almost as much as I did.

Back at the house, I slipped the cake box into the refrigerator and sat down for dinner with my mother. Gave Ben his bath and put him to bed. And then night descended with its menacing stillness and quiet. Mom and I played cards at the kitchen table while the wall clock ticked off time.

Eight o’clock.

Nine.

Ten.

Eleven.

Midnight.

Another night passed. And the phone didn’t ring again. And the door didn’t open. I moved the cake from the fridge to the freezer and went to bed.

Chapter 4

O
n a perfect September morning—a Friday two weeks to the day since Mac disappeared—I returned home from an early class to find Billy Staples running up and down the sidewalk on my block, laughing like I had never seen him laugh. He was chasing Ben, who loved to run and hated to fall but always picked himself back up and kept going. We dressed him in blue jeans, never shorts, to protect his knees. Billy caught up with Ben and lifted him into an aerial spin that made him shriek with joy. My mother, who sat on the bottom step of my stoop, smiled watching them. It was a beautiful, happy moment to stumble into, a temporary bubble that popped the moment Billy saw me coming down the block.

He set Ben down, crouched by his ear, and said, “Go on, go to Grandma.”

Ben ran off as instructed, turning twice to make sure Billy was running after him.

“Come!” Ben shouted to Billy, his tiny fingers clawing at the air as if he could draw Billy onward.

“Gimme a minute, little man!”

Ben scrambled into my mother’s lap.

“That kid’s going to outrun me any day now.” Billy breathed heavily. “Gotta get into better shape.”

It was an odd statement because Billy, of all the middle-aged men I knew, looked like he was in excellent condition. Actually, watching him play and let loose like this, for the first time I really noticed how handsome he was . . . and quickly chased the thought away. In the two long weeks Mac had been gone, my mind had been a hive of unexpected and usually unwelcome thoughts:

He had left me.

He had sunk into a horrible depression and was alone somewhere, eating what he could find from a garbage can.

He was on a beach in the Caribbean sipping margaritas under a palm tree with another woman, a wealthy woman who paid his way, as nothing had been charged on his credit cards since the unaccounted-for rental car.

He was dead.

No
. I still
felt
him. He
wasn’t
dead; he was just gone.

The Sturm und Drang of all those thoughts and more, in discord with the rationale that in fact I knew nothing except that Mac wasn’t here with us, crashed through my mind as I walked toward Billy. It was how my days were now: skirting premonitions, refusing dark fears, grasping for facts. But so far, in two weeks, no facts other than the rental car had presented themselves. All anyone knew was a timeline: Mac’s parents were dead; his brother Danny had been arrested for their murder and was sitting in jail while the prosecution struggled to build a case against him; and Mac had rented a car and vanished, swallowed, presumably, by an onslaught of depression.

I stopped in front of Billy and we stood there looking into each other’s eyes. His were dark, lush brown. He didn’t smile. After a moment he took the book bag off my shoulder, the release of its weight instantly lightening me. He slung the bag over his own shoulder and said, “Let’s go inside.”

“No.”

“Karin—”

“Tell me here. Right now.”

One side of his mouth pinched in defeat. He knew how stubborn I could be.

“They found the rental car.”

“And Mac?”

“Just the car.”

“Where?”

“Long Island Sound. A lady saw it from her house in Stony Creek. She’s got a private boat launch and they’re thinking he drove right into the water, probably in the middle of the night when all the neighbors were sleeping and she was out of town.”

“
No
.”

“It’s a long drive. Why don’t you come with me? See for yourself.”

But I had dissolved and couldn’t answer. Tears flowed uncontrollably as my brain tried to shore up against a tidal flood with imbecilic rationalizations for why Mac’s rental car would turn up in an ocean:

He had taken a wrong turn onto a private launch and jumped out at the last minute, delirious from grief, possibly drunk, and was wandering Connecticut.

Someone else had driven into the sound: a carjacker. Mac had been mugged at a rest stop heading north and suffered amnesia. He was out there, trying to remember who he was, trying to remember who loved him.

The car rental company had mixed up Mac’s credit card information with someone else’s.
Someone else
had driven into the sound. Not Mac. Mac was alive and well somewhere else, nursing his grief, stealing time until he was ready to come back.

But Mac hadn’t drowned.
He wasn’t dead.
He was alive.
I felt it.
I had been a widow once. I knew the difference.

“But they didn’t find him?” I asked Billy again.

“Not yet.” His soft tone masked the awful probability that Mac’s body had floated into the depths of the ocean by now.

“So there’s no evidence he was even in the car?”

Billy shook his head. “They’re just pulling it out now.”

I
sat beside Billy in his gray sedan as we drove north on Interstate 95. After a while he put on a CD for distraction: bluegrass; he was a country music fan, which seemed odd for a black guy born and bred in Brooklyn, New York. I stared out the window as we drove through the knotted arteries of New Haven and farther north where suburban sprawl gave way to pockets of the seafaring countryside that snaked up the coast. Billy took the Branford exit and drove us through a neighborhood that grew more affluent the closer we came to the shore.

Once we turned onto Flying Point Road, it was easy to find the house because of the cluster of emergency vehicles from seemingly every department: police, fire, medical. The sight of an ambulance parked by the curb jump-started my pulse. I got out of Billy’s car and walked straight to two medics standing there talking with a fully uniformed fireman.

“Was there a body?” I asked.

All three stared at me, obviously stunned by the interruption.

“A body. In the car.
Was there a body?
”

“Who are you?”

“I’m the wife.”

“Whose wife?”

Billy then appeared at my side, got a firm hold of my elbow, and guided me away.

“Karin, cool it. They don’t know who you are. They don’t even know what they’re doing here. They’re just waiting.”

“Right,” I said, though more than anything I was confused. If all these emergency workers were gathered, wasn’t it to save someone? To save Mac? But a voice from the dormant police officer and detective buried deep inside me rose with a strong reminder to get my bearings and look at the facts.

The facts
. I reminded myself of the litany of facts as we knew them:

Murder.

Arrest.

Disappearance.

Discovery of car.

There had been three facts; now there were four. In two weeks, we had come one step forward.

Billy led me across a vast lawn toward the house, freshly painted white, with a veranda that wrapped from front to back and three chimneys. An overtanned, fiftyish woman in a turquoise floral dashiki stood on the veranda with a small, skinny woman in khaki pants, a bright pink shirt, and a matching silk scarf tied around her head, its long ends floating on a breeze I couldn’t feel in the air. The shorter woman was talking and listening like a cop but wasn’t in uniform, and the scarf seemed too dramatic . . . unless she was sick. In the seconds it took to walk up the veranda steps onto the porch, all the signs jumped out: emaciated, bald, tired. She was a cancer patient, in chemo. Billy went right up to her and introduced himself.

“Detective Billy Staples, Brooklyn Eight-four.”

“Patrol Sergeant Eleanor Jones, Troop G, Connecticut State Police.”

They shook hands.

“You’ve got the missing persons of the guy who rented the car.” She didn’t ask it as a question; it was obvious why Billy was here.

“That’s me.”

Jones’s eyes—small, pale brown, and lashless—strayed over to me, standing beside Billy. But before she could say anything the other woman spoke in a surprisingly high, childish-sounding voice.

“I’m Sally Owen, this is my house.”

Billy acknowledged her with a nod.

“Are you . . . ?” she asked me, not finishing the question because she knew the answer.

“When did you see it?”

“The car? This morning. I was sitting on the back porch having my coffee. Just looking out at the water, you know? And I saw something floating, some kind of raft. Then I realized it was the top of a car. I didn’t believe it at first, but I called a neighbor and she saw it, too. It wasn’t there yesterday.”

“Could have drifted,” Sergeant Jones said, “or surfaced for some reason.”

“I couldn’t believe it,” Sally Owen said, “a car, floating right in my backyard.”

She led us through the front door of her house, into an opulent foyer and out again through a set of glass French doors that led directly onto what she called the back porch. It was a massive veranda with a broad awning providing shade for expensive outdoor furniture, facing her own private sliver of the sea. A small marble table sat between two chairs near a swath of dripping honeysuckle.

“There.” She pointed at the table. “I was sitting right there when I saw it.”

My eyes fled from the veranda and the table to the emerald lawn whose hand-laid stone edge met the gently splashing water. Perfect. This place was
perfect
. It must have made Mrs. Owen’s day, her week, her
life
to have sat there in her beautiful bounteous solitude, spotted a car in the ocean, and now,
now
, have her own house the center of an investigation that might have been something right out of a movie. You could see how excited she was by all this. Now, no matter how awkward a situation might be, she would always have this trump card of a conversation piece.

I hated her.

I hated this place.

Because the first thing I saw when I looked past the luxury was a dark blue two-door Honda Civic sitting on the asphalt boat launch that led directly into the water. Sitting there—not just a car but
the
car, the last car Mac drove—baked dry in the hot sun. Half a dozen investigators went about their work, looking as if they had been at it for a while and were finishing up.

“When they pulled it out,” Sally Owen said, “
blankets
of water just
cascaded
off. And one of the doors was hanging off
like a broken wing
. What you
imagine
when you see something like that . . .”

Sergeant Jones sighed. Nodded. “Could have been open when the car drove in. Can’t be sure.”

How long had she been here, listening to the dramatic rendition of a house, a yard, a car? If she was like every other cop I had ever known, she had seen too much to be swept away with the kind of fluffy interpretation of events that had entranced Mrs. Owen.

“Is that always there?” I pointed to a boat sitting on a trailer on the grass near the blue car. Two squad cars were parked behind it.

“Usually the boat’s parked on the launch near the shore,” Jones said. “They had to get it moved off to the side before the tow truck could get into the water.”

“How could anyone drive into the water with a boat parked there?” I asked, pointing out the obvious . . . one more reason it wasn’t possible that Mac had driven himself into the ocean.

“It wasn’t there two weeks ago,” Sally Owen said. “I was gone most of August and early September, sailing off Bermuda with my boyfriend.”

As we descended from the porch and crossed the back lawn, I saw that the boat was named
Free at Last
. The money here—fancy neighborhood, big house, nice boat, lady living alone—reeked of high-priced divorce. Not that I cared. I wanted only one thing. One person.

Billy, Sergeant Jones, Mrs. Owen, and I stood about twenty feet from the car. I wanted to move forward and touch it but didn’t dare. So this was it: the car Mac rented two weeks ago. The car he paid for with his credit card. The car he drove north in the hours before I even went to the restaurant to wait for him. Had he already reached Flying Point Road by the time I ordered my first glass of wine? I felt sick at the thought of it.

Billy and Sergeant Jones approached the car to get a closer took, while I stood back with Sally Owen and watched as investigators finished up. The trunk and hood were open. Obviously the car had been thoroughly searched and no body had been found. I didn’t know if not finding Mac in the car was good news or bad news, and took a step forward. Sally grabbed my arm to stop me.

“Maybe you shouldn’t,” she said.

I pulled away and joined Sergeant Jones and Billy, who put his arm around me as soon as I came close. His warmth startled me; I hadn’t realized how cold I felt until his skin touched mine. I looked at him: He didn’t appear any more relieved than I was that Mac had not been found in the car.

“The driver’s side door was open when they hauled it out,” Jones reminded us, as if reading our minds. She didn’t have to say it: The body could have floated out, dragged by currents into the greater ocean.