Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
“Uh-huh.”
“She was driving. I thought that was a good thing. You know how many times I’ve had people stagger in here after too much tequila, get behind the wheel, and take off?”
Fighting the impulse to ask him why he doesn’t stop them, Ivy reminds herself that this isn’t about one’s civic duty to keep the roads of New York safe from drunk drivers. It’s about finding Carlos.
“What kind of car were they in?”
He shrugs. “I might be able to remember . . . but . . . I’m not sure.”
“I don’t suppose you got the license plate number?”
Another shrug.
She sighs. If she gives him any more cash, she’ll be out of spending money until payday.
“Never mind.” She starts to turn away. There’s no way he got the license plate number anyway. She might as well—
“Lady?”
She turns back.
“I didn’t get the plate, but we got records here.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean you park here, we get your plate. What day did you say it was?”
Ivy hesitates. “I can tell you, but how are you going to know which car was hers?”
“Because we write down the make and model, too. And I remember your brother—and his date. And what she was driving.”
“You do?”
Mutton Chops nods. “She was driving a Beemer. At least fifteen, maybe twenty years old, but in good shape.”
“You really remember all that?”
“Yeah, I remember, because I helped her load the dude into the car.”
Ivy’s heart skips a beat. “What do you mean?”
“I told you—he was wasted.”
“So wasted that he couldn’t get into the car himself?”
He shrugs. “Happens all the time.”
“So . . . you can look up the license plate, then?”
“I can . . .”
For a price.
She gets it. She looks at the money she’s clutching—all she has to last another week—then hands it over.
Carlos is worth it.
Back home in the climate-controlled hush of his fortieth-floor apartment, Ben decides it’s a good thing he lost his phone tonight.
Yes, it’s his lifeline. But as such, it’s the only place he has Gaby’s new contact information. Without it, he won’t be able to break down and call her in a weak moment.
Feeling fairly strong—for now, anyway—he pours himself a Bourbon and sits on the couch in the dark. Beyond the plate-glass window, Manhattan’s sparkling skyline illuminates the night sky.
One day in the near future, a new building of his own design will rise to tower above many of the others, replacing the crumbling tenements that have occupied that run-down block for more than a hundred years.
Out with the old, in with the new . . .
You can’t stand in the way of progress . . .
Ben thoughtfully sips his Bourbon, staring at his laptop, sitting open on the desk across the room. When Gaby texted this afternoon that she was suddenly free, he’d been about to log onto his InTune account again. That was Peter’s suggestion.
“You had your last hurrah, son,” Peter had said as they got dressed in the locker room at the gym after a swim. “Now get on with your life. Find someone you want to date.”
“I did.”
“That’s great! Who is she?”
“Gaby.”
Peter groaned. “Seriously?”
“Seriously.”
“Okay, then, if that’s the case . . . then why aren’t you?”
“What?”
“Dating her.”
“I tried. She’s busy tonight.”
“With someone else, right?”
“She didn’t say.”
Peter had no reply to that, just shook his head.
Before they parted ways, he asked Ben to meet him at the Stumble Inn later. Ben figured he might as well, even if it meant being lectured again. Anything was better than sitting home alone on a Saturday night. That’s what his father used to do, not just Saturday but every single night, all alone and feeling sorry for himself . . .
That’s not going to be me.
But does he really want to go out to a bar now? Nothing good is bound to happen there after midnight. Nothing he won’t regret later, anyway—though Peter might beg to differ.
Ben reminds himself that his friend has his best interests at heart. And that he may have been right—about a lot of things.
Peter had said that maybe he and Gaby had to be together one more time to get each other out of their systems for good. He’d said it wasn’t easy to say good-bye, even the second time.
He’d also said the key to moving on was to date other women, women who have very little in common with Gabriela.
“You have to force yourself to keep looking, Ben. Sooner or later you’ll meet someone worthwhile.”
Mind made up, Ben tops off the glass of Bourbon, opens his laptop, and logs into his InTune account.
“That’s it.” Stockton leans back in his chair and yawns, eyes closed. “I don’t know about you, but I had five large coffees in the last couple of hours and I’m still wiped
out
.”
Sitting at her own desk across from him, Sully glances up from her computer screen. “Really? I could run a marathon.”
“Either you’re talkin’ smack or you’re slipping something extra into that tea of yours,” Stockton decides.
“Just the usual: milk and sugar.”
She must be the only cop in the precinct—or maybe the entire city—who doesn’t drink coffee. She’s never been the least bit tempted by the murky brew that perpetually fills the filmy carafes on the two-burner Bunn in the kitchenette—one marked green for decaf, but filled with the caffeinated stuff anyway.
Sully keeps a tin of strong Irish breakfast tea, a strainer, and a teapot and mug next to the stack of Styrofoam cups beside the microwave. She’d spent her girlhood summers in Breezy Point with her Nana Leary, who taught her to brew a proper cup of tea in a vintage copper kettle on her prized white porcelain O’Keefe and Merritt gas stove. Nana would roll over in her grave at the idea of microwaved water, but at least Sully uses the loose leaf variety instead of tea bags.
“Listen, I’m tired, too,” she admits to Stockton—understatement of the decade. “But I’ve got a few more files to look at before I call it a night. I’m up to the second week of October.”
She’s gone over every missing persons case in the tristate area beginning on Friday, September 20, searching for something that might fit the pattern that emerged with the December 13 disappearance of Jake Fuentes. So far, no luck.
A few cases seemed, on the surface, to potentially fit the bill. There were several Hispanic men in the right age group, and one even worked in construction. But when Sully dug into their files, she found out that every single man has since been located, and all of them had skipped out on their loved ones because they wanted to. The circumstances fit the usual missing persons statistics to a T: eventually resolved, and no foul play involved.
Meanwhile, Stockton has been combing the InTune Web site in search of clues to a possible female predator targeting Hispanic males. He also set up a dummy profile—posing as a single Hispanic man with as many of the victims’ matching criteria as possible—in an attempt to lure the predator.
Now, he tosses a stack of empty coffee cups into a nearby wastebasket and gets to his feet.
“Sweet dreams,” Sully tells him.
“What sweet dreams? You stay, I stay. Think I’ll try some of that miracle tea of yours, though. Give it here, Gingersnap.”
She pulls the tin of tea leaves and strainer from her drawer and places them into his outstretched hand.
“Thanks. You want some, too?”
“No, thanks.” She’s already focused on her screen again, clicking to the next file, though a deep yawn overtakes her. Maybe she should have another cup of tea after all.
She will in a minute. After this file. Let’s see . . .
Bobby Springer.
Age thirty-seven, lived in Jersey City, reported missing October first, last seen . . .
September twentieth.
The date is like a caffeine jolt to her tired blood, and she sits up straighter in her chair, scanning the file.
Two facts immediately jump out at her.
Bobby Springer worked in Manhattan as a building infrastructure technician.
And he was reported missing by his uncle, José Morales.
Morales?
Sully looks more closely at the photograph of the handsome, dark-haired Bobby Springer, then clicks over to check his ethnicity.
Hispanic.
“Hey, Stockton!” she calls. “I think I’ve found something.”
The dried blood on Alex’s hand is her own, from when she slapped away the mosquito before she put on the latex gloves and went into Mr. Griffith’s house and killed him.
Still, the moment she walks in the door back home, she scrubs away the caked-on smear with bleach. She hums “Livin’ on a Prayer” as she scrubs, standing at the kitchen sink, thinking about Ben.
Gato watches her from beneath a kitchen chair beside a bowl of food Alex left out this afternoon—or was it this morning? It smells foul. She should clean it up. But not now.
She washes out the sink with bleach before going up the stairs into the bathroom, careful not to touch or brush up against anything along the way. Most of Mr. Griffith’s blood was on the clothes she threw into the Dumpster, but you never know.
In the shower, she sings as she scrubs herself from head to toe and is pleased to see that the water running down the drain is merely sudsy, not tinted reddish brown with blood.
“Oh . . . we’re halfway there,” she sings, and wonders again if Ben listens to the same classic rock station on the radio. When they’re together, she’ll tell him that “Livin’ on a Prayer” reminds her of him. It will become their song.
She turns off the water, steps out onto the mat, and pulls on the robe hanging on the door hook. Then she takes a spray bottle and paper towels from beneath the sink and methodically wipes down the tub and the faucet handles.
Back downstairs, humming their song, she cleans the doorknobs she touched coming into the house. Out in the garage, she cleans the steering wheel in her car, and
then the leather upholstery.
“Take my hand,” she sings, “and we’ll make it, I swear . . .”
As she works to obliterate the slightest spot of blood—real or imaginary—that might have been left anywhere in the house, she reminds herself that the task is largely unnecessary. No one would ever link her to the murder of an old man who lives in a bad neighborhood nearly twenty miles away; she would have no motive to do such a thing.
Now that it’s over, even she can’t quite recall why she felt compelled to do it. There was the racist comment Mr. Griffith made, but that was a while ago and she’d thought she was over it.
She remembers feeling stressed and anxious earlier; remembers that she wished she had some sleeping pills; remembers wishing she could find a way to blow off some steam and relax, but . . .
Murdering an old man in his bed was a little extreme, she tells herself. Some might call it overkill.
Overkill. Ha.
Her mouth quirks into an appreciative smile at her own wry wit.
Satisfied that her scrubbing has eliminated any stray speck of blood, she puts the paper towels into a garbage bag, ties it, and sets it in the trash can to go out tomorrow night and be collected Monday morning.
At last, her reward for all that hard work: she turns her attention to her InTune account. It was all she could do not to grab her phone to check for messages the moment she walked in the door. But she didn’t want to risk tainting it with her bloody hands, and anyway, she almost relished the buildup now that the other tension—the unpleasant kind of tension that makes her head throb and her mind confused—has been relieved.
She unplugs her phone from the wall charger in the kitchen and logs in, her heart beating faster in anticipation.
This time, she just knows Ben will be there waiting for her.
And this time . . . he is.
Sunday morning, Gabriela sits, as always, in a chair by the open window with her coffee—iced today; it’s far too muggy for hot beverages. And instead of reading the usual morning newspaper or a manuscript on her laptop, she’s toying with Ben’s cell phone.
What she should be doing is figuring out how to let him know she has it, or throwing it away. Those are the two options she gave herself last night, and she figured sleeping on it would yield the right thing to do.
But she hadn’t slept at all, and the gray morning light brought with it a third option.
It’s definitely not the right thing to do, but . . .
Temptation, along with the residual sting of what she found on the phone last night, seem to have gotten the better of her.
She has to know what Ben has been saying about her to Peter.
She clicks on the green icon that indicates a new message, and sees that Peter texted a final time, early in the morning:
You never showed. Guess things are going well w/ G after all. Just watch your step and remember what I told you.
What? What did you tell Ben?
She scrolls to earlier messages. Most of the communication between Ben and Peter involves plans to swim or meet after work, along with their usual banter about sports.
How many times, when she and Ben were dating and married, did she hear the two of them go back and forth endlessly analyzing scores or trades or bad calls?
With a pang she remembers how Peter alternately teased her like a kid sister and confided in her like a big sister. After his divorce, he’d come over for dinner and stay at the table pouring out his heart to her while Ben dozed on the couch.
Peter is Ben’s best friend, but he was her friend, too. At least, he acted as though he was. And she considered him a friend. Considered him family.
He stood beside Ben at the altar when they were married. He came to the hospital with an oversized teddy bear when their son was born. And on that horrible morning they lost Josh, Peter came running. It was Peter who held the curious neighbors at bay and accepted wrapped trays of food; Peter who made arrangements that were too heartbreaking for them to consider; Peter who held them up when their own legs wouldn’t do the job; Peter who—with Ben’s brother—carried the tiny casket at the funeral . . .
Luis. There are text messages from him on the phone as well. Most are brief, a couple of words at most. Gaby scans them. None make reference to her.
Maybe she overreacted to what Ben wrote. Maybe it wasn’t about her at all. Maybe
last hurrah—take 2
meant something else.
She remembers that horrible blonde Peter had videotaped at the bar, the one who called him “Pete”—which nobody who knows him well would ever do.
So the woman doesn’t know him well, and she doesn’t know Ben at all, yet she knows things that are none of her damn business?
Clearly, “last hurrah” meant exactly what she thought it meant in the first place. Ben had told Peter they slept together the other night, had obviously told him that he was . . .
Hooking up with the ex-wife.
A moment ago she had no intention of snooping further into Ben’s files.
Now, a renewed feeling of betrayal snaps that resolve like a sapling in an ice storm.
She clicks on the icon for his InTune account. The password, as she’d guessed, is saved on the log-in page. All she has to do is hit Enter . . .
It’s blatantly wrong.
She does it anyway.
I’m not perfect. Nobody is. Right, Ben?
Now she can see not just the public profile she was able to view from her own account, but also Ben’s private interaction with other members.
She isn’t surprised to see he’s connected with quite a few women on the matchmaking site. Most don’t seem like his type at all; quite a few are overly made-up blondes, like the woman in the bar last night.
Hi, Ben, I’m Laney.
Every time Gaby thinks of it, she feels violated anew, yet her stomach churns with the wrongness of her own actions as she snoops through Ben’s InTune account. It’s not that she’s completely lost touch with her conscience—it’s still there, still sending twinges and the occasional crippling stab of guilt, like a nerve that’s been injected with almost—but not quite enough—Novocain.
This isn’t me. This isn’t who I am; it isn’t what I do . . .
No? Really? Then who the hell are you? Do you even know anymore?
She scans Ben’s private messages. Many of his female admirers’ notes are tentative, sweetly appealing. It hurts to see her ex-husband interacting with those women, flirting with some, even. Yet she forces herself to keep looking, no longer certain whether she’s punishing Ben or herself.
As excruciating as it is to read about Ben making plans to meet various women, it’s oddly satisfying to see him politely extract himself from those who are a little too breezy, or much too brazen. She knows him well enough, even now, to be able to zero in on the female missteps in the course of an electronic flirtation with Ben.
One woman uses “party” as a verb—a longtime pet peeve of his, and one that brings back poignant memories for Gaby.
Several others have the nerve to ask Ben thinly veiled questions about how much money he has and how he spends it. Another mentions the deadbeat dad of her children so many times in a matter of paragraphs that she’s clearly fixated.
Then Gaby stumbles across a woman asking direct questions about the child Ben lost:
What happened? Was it a boy or a girl? How old? How long ago?
Ben hadn’t responded, though Gaby is tempted to, seized by an urge to type,
none of your damn business
.
But then, this account is none of her own damn business, is it? She’s prying where she doesn’t belong. Yet somehow she still hasn’t seen enough, compelled to read on even when she comes across another nosy woman asking Ben about Josh.
And then another.
It serves them right that Ben cut off further communication with all them—though it serves him right that they asked in the first place. What did he think was going to happen, putting it out there for everyone to see?
She’d wondered before whether he’d done it to get sympathy. Now, seeing how he sidestepped the women who attempted to pry into the loss, she knows that wasn’t the case.
She continues to read through his messages, from oldest to newest, noticing that positive connections are becoming fewer and farther between as time goes on. A steady stream of women continues to reach out to Ben, but he seems less interested in dating them. He hasn’t done much reaching out of his own accord lately either.
Maybe he decided he was finished with online dating. Maybe it was because he truly did want to try to rekindle their marriage.
The spark of hope sputters and dies when she scrolls to the final private message in the folder. It came in just yesterday from a woman named Alex Jones. According to her profile, she’s a nurse and lives in Vanderwaal, a small, well-heeled town in Westchester County.
Ben responded to her well after midnight, after they parted ways so abruptly. She scans through a lengthy back and forth exchange, during which Alex expressed her disappointment that he’d taken so long to get back to her.
So long?
Rather than shut her down right there, as Gaby would expect Ben to do, he responded almost apologetically, saying he’d lost his cell phone and usually uses it to check his account.
The woman wanted to know how that had happened, and he said he must have dropped it on the street somewhere while he was out.
Where were you?
she asked—a bold question, Gaby thought. That would turn off Ben for sure.
But rather than skittishly back away from the conversation, he gave the woman a vague reply about having had dinner downtown with a friend.
The next question, even bolder:
Was it a date?
Gaby’s gut twists at his one-word reply:
Nope
.
Why, she wonders, is she doing this to herself? Why not shut off the phone and mail it back to him or toss it out the window or whatever? Why keep reading about Ben’s private life when it no longer has anything to do with her?
She’d thought she was punishing Ben—violating his privacy because he’d violated hers. But maybe she’s punishing herself, forcing herself to feel the pain. Maybe it’s like when somebody dies, and—according to Abuela, anyway—your mind refuses to accept it unless you go to the wake and see the dead person lying there.
This, then, is the metaphorical corpse in the casket. The final step toward beginning to heal.
She reads on.
The woman, Alex, suggests that they get together.
Ben agrees.
Great,
she writes.
How about tomorrow?
Pushy,
Gaby thinks.
But again Ben agrees. He’s the one who suggests where they should meet.
He’s with her right now.
At the beach.
Their
beach. His and hers.
Fury floods Gaby’s gut like a tide of molten lava.
At last she clicks out of the screen and tosses the phone aside. She’s seen enough.
This, Ben decides, was a bad idea.
It may, in fact, be the worst idea he’s ever had in his life.
What was he thinking, suggesting to some woman—a total stranger—that they meet here at Orchard Beach, of all places?
He wasn’t thinking; he was drinking.
The Bourbon he’d poured last night when he got home from the disastrous date with Gaby had gone straight to his head. So determined was he to forget her and move on that he’d jumped at the chance to connect with someone—anyone at all—on InTune.
When he woke up this morning, it was to a splitting headache and a series of realizations that went off like grenades in his skull.
Bam! You lost your phone!
Bam! You made a date with a total stranger whose name you can’t even remember!
Bam! You and Gaby are finished—again. This time, for good—again.
Remembering what she’d said to him at the cocktail lounge, he grew angry at her all over again—and more determined than ever to get on with the day. With his life. He took a shower, swallowed a couple of Advil, drank a cup of strong coffee. It helped. Not enough, though.
He went back into his InTune account to reread the private message exchange he’d had last night with his date, whose name turned out to be Alex. Last name Jones.
Yeah, sure.
Whatever. He won’t hold an uninspired pseudonym against her.
She’s a statuesque blue-eyed brunette, and her profile picture is attractive enough. There’s something about her smile, though, that seems to lack warmth.
Maybe you’re just trying to find something wrong with her,
he told himself as he closed out of the account and got dressed.
Give her a chance. You have nothing to lose.
Now, walking on the beach where he’d spent some of the most carefree moments of his life, he’s not so sure.
If only he hadn’t suggested that they meet here. The idea had been spontaneous, his filter numbed by Bourbon. Once it was out there, she jumped on it, mentioning that she absolutely loves the beach.
Come on,
he thought, rereading the exchange this morning.
Who
doesn’t
love the beach?
But at the time, he wrote back to Alex that he feels the same way, babbling about the surf and sand being good for the soul—a line that makes him cringe, in retrospect.
She met that with an enthusiastic comment about how much they seem to have in common.
Yeah? Based on . . . what?
They do have the same taste in music, according to her profile. And they’re about the same age. But that’s about it, as far as Ben can see. It’s not as though they’ve shared a barrage of earth-shattering coincidences.
She lives in Westchester, where she owns a house—a cozy brick cape built back in the 1950s.
Have you ever considered moving to the suburbs, Ben?
When he responded that he hadn’t, she shifted gears and told him all the things she loves about the city.
Her overboard enthusiasm may have pierced the fog of inebriation and inspired him to ask her out last night, but it only made him queasy this morning. Or maybe it was old Bourbon percolating in his stomach with black coffee and ibuprofen.
Somehow, he pulled himself together, rode the subway to the end of the line at Pelham Bay Park in the Bronx, boarded the shuttle bus, and came to the beach.
He’ll get this date over with and platonically part ways with this person who thinks they have so much in common for reasons that remain unclear. Tomorrow, he’ll be back at work, he’ll replace his phone on his lunch hour, and things will be back to normal—whatever normal even is now. The new normal he’d adapted in the months following the divorce suddenly seems as elusive as the old, married normal.
The mile-long beach, always crowded when the season is under way, is swarming with people of every age, race, and socioeconomic status. Cops patrol; hawkers hawk; families spread out on blankets shout to each other and their wandering children; old folks snooze; groups of kids blast hip-hop music; tanned girls chatter, lying on their stomachs with bikini top straps undone; the guards sit high above the action, keeping a watchful eye and occasionally blasting their whistles. No clean salt air smell here, or at least not today. The aroma of fried fish and Cuban food from a boardwalk stand mingles with dank marine life and tobacco smoke courtesy of a group of twelve-year-old punks sneaking their first cigarettes.
Hands shoved in the pockets of his khaki shorts, Ben weaves his way among the umbrella-shaded chairs and people and litter—since when is there so much litter in the sand? Or did he just never notice it before?