Authors: Wendy Corsi Staub
It’s now or . . . well, not never. But now or later, and later isn’t an option on this sticky afternoon. At least the bus will be air-conditioned.
When it stops, Gaby gets on. It’s standing room only. She jostles her way to the middle, wedges the box onto the floor amid the other passengers’ legs, and grabs an overhead bar.
Ten blocks pass. Twenty.
She fights to keep her balance with every lurching stop as the box threatens to slide away like a hockey puck.
Es loco,
as Jaz would say.
Maybe she’ll get off at the next stop.
But when they reach it, a couple gets up from a pair of seats closest to Gaby and makes their way to the door. She hesitates only briefly before sliding into the vacated row, box on her lap. Leaning her cheek against the glass window, she watches the familiar Bronx scenery flash past as the bus continues its uptown run toward Orchard Beach and Ben.
Ben is everything Alex imagined. Everything and more. Carmen was never quite this handsome.
Well, maybe when he was younger. But it’s hard for her to even remember that Carmen, the man she married. Whenever Alex thinks of him, she pictures him weathered and worried, overworked and overtired and . . . unhappy. Always so unhappy.
Not always, to be fair. He seemed happy with her at first. But as their years together went by, he started to complain. To her. And then about her. Nothing she did seemed to satisfy him. Eventually he began to sound just like his nitpicky mother. It was disturbing, and upsetting, and infuriating, but . . .
But she knew she couldn’t do to him what she’d done to her mother-in-law. Of course not. And she didn’t want to. Most of the time, anyway.
Just, once in awhile, she’d glimpse something ugly in his face, or in his tone, and . . .
Well, her own reaction to that, to the man she loved, scared her. It really did.
Thank goodness things are different with Ben. Maybe because this is only the beginning of their relationship, but still . . .
Everything about him is perfect.
Plus . . .
They share something huge, something very few people could possibly understand. Ben knows what it’s like to hold your child in your arms one moment and have him ripped away the next. Ben is longing to make his world whole again, just as she is.
He didn’t say it. He didn’t have to. She just knows.
She hasn’t asked him about his loss, of course. Not yet. Remembering how she would recoil whenever someone asked her about Dante back in the beginning, she would be the last person on earth to ever put Ben in that position.
No, they just walk on the beach, meandering their way around umbrellas and blankets, lifeguard stands and garbage cans, Frisbee games and people, people everywhere, getting in their way.
If only they were alone. If only they were holding hands—which they’re not, to her regret. If only they could talk about their future together.
Instead they talk about other things.
Music, mostly.
She can scarcely hold back her enthusiasm when she hears him mention that he likes Bon Jovi. In fact, she asks him, just to be sure that she heard right: “Did you say Bon Jovi?”
She asks because sometimes Carmen would tell her she was reading into things that never happened, or hearing things that nobody ever said.
“Yes, Bon Jovi,” Ben confirms, wearing a strange look that strikes a chord of fear in her heart.
Carmen sometimes wore that look, too, back in the beginning.
“I thought you said something else,” she quickly tells Ben. “It’s hard to hear well with all this noise.”
“It is,” he agrees, to her relief.
No one would disagree that the din on the beach is distracting. Even the music blasting from portable speakers is unpleasant—most of it hip-hop, with some salsa thrown in here and there.
She loathes hip-hop. And Latin music reminds her of Carmen.
Deciding to drop the subject of Bon Jovi—for now—she asks Ben, “Have you ever been to Mexico?”
“No.” He sips from the bottle of iced tea she so thoughtfully brought for him on this hot day. One for him, and one for her—carefully marked, of course, so that she’d know which one was which.
“It’s a beautiful place. You should go sometime.” She just catches herself before saying,
We should go sometime
.
Maybe it’s too soon for that. She doesn’t want to scare him off, and something tells her it might have.
In the half hour or so since they met in person, she’s glimpsed a fleeting, skittish expression in his eyes. Better not to come on too strong. Maybe he’s shy. Or maybe the setting just isn’t romantic enough.
If only they were strolling hand in hand on a serene honeymoon beach south of the border instead, where the only sound would be swaying palm fronds and clear aquamarine water lapping at white sand . . .
She’s about to tell Ben more about Mexico when a toddler in a diaper darts in front of them, making a beeline for the water.
The child is trailed by a too-large woman in a too-small bikini. “Get your butt back here!” she screeches. “Josh! Josh!”
Noticing the pained expression that crosses Ben’s face, Alex is almost certain he’s thinking of his lost child.
Maybe, she thinks, it was a drowning. Or maybe that toddler looks like his dead son or daughter.
Which was it? A boy or a girl? How old? How did it happen?
There are so many questions she wants to ask, but again she holds her tongue, asking only, “Are you all right?”
Ben abruptly tosses the iced tea bottle—empty, she realizes—into a garbage can.
“I’m not feeling very well. I’m sorry—I think I’ve got to go home.”
No. He can’t leave her. He
can’t
.
“You look like you might be a little dehydrated, Ben. I’m a nurse,” she adds hastily.
“I’ll grab a bottle of water before I get on the bus.”
“Bus?”
“Shuttle bus. To the subway.”
“You can’t wait around for a bus feeling sick. I’ve got my car. Come on, I’ll drive you home.”
“I can’t let you do that. You live in the opposite direction.”
“It’s really not a problem.”
“It’s way out of your way. Thank you anyway,” he adds politely—but firmly.
Afraid to push the point and scare him off, she shrugs as if it doesn’t matter. “Then I’ll just drive you to the subway. Pelham Bay Park, right? That’s on my way.”
“You don’t have to—”
“Don’t be silly. But first I’m going to go get you something more to drink. You’ll feel better if you sip something cold.”
Well over a million people live in the Bronx. Gabriela is pretty sure that most of them are on Orchard Beach today.
But then, she wonders as she trudges up the wide steps leading to the paved veranda above the beach, is it ever
not
busy here?
A memory barges into her mind: sitting with her back to Ben’s chest, head against his shoulder, bare legs intertwined on sand that still holds the heat of the day. The only sound is their quiet breathing and the water lapping at the shore and the laughter from distant swimmers . . .
A hard lump of despair forms in her throat at the recollection of that summer night, and hundreds of other nights like it.
Yeah. Okay. So there are times—at least, there
were
times—when the beach felt like a secluded slice of heaven.
What a far cry that was from this garish nightmare of noise and strangers.
She heads toward the sand. Reaching the edge of the boardwalk, she stops to set down Ben’s box and wipe sweat from her brow, surveying the scene before her.
Ben is there someplace . . . with someone else.
What if she finds him—them?
What does she say? What does she do?
Oh, come on, who are you kidding? Finding him here would be a miracle.
Deep down, she knew that all along, yet she was swept into this riptide of an odyssey nonetheless.
That’s what you do when you get caught in a rip, right? It’s one of the first lessons you learn as a lifeguard. You let the current take you away. You go with it rather than struggle against it. Sooner or later it’s going to break, so you can swim out of it, back to shore; back where you belong.
But when it grabs you, there’s nothing to do but keep moving with it. And so she does, doggedly making her way toward the crowded crescent of sand, keeping an eye out for Ben . . .
Forgetting all about the box she left sitting at the edge of the boardwalk.
It’s Sully’s day off, one she was supposed to spend with her father and various Leary family members celebrating the christening of her cousin Paddy’s infant son, Patrick III. Or maybe Patrick IV. There are at least half a dozen Patricks in various generations of the Leary family; how is anyone supposed to keep track?
But rather than gathering with the family on this gray summer Sunday for mass in Bay Ridge, followed by food platters from the local pub, Sully is back at work after a long night and a few hours’ sleep.
But it’s just as well. Eating hot food in an un-air-conditioned apartment packed with hordes of relatives and at least one colicky baby lacks a certain appeal. Anything is better. Even this.
Perspiration beads around her hairline and tickles the sides of her nose as she and Stockton climb a third dimly lit flight of stairs in an un-air-conditioned Harlem apartment building.
The air is heavy with humidity, the unappetizingly mingled scents of curry and basil, and an argument in an unrecognizable guttural-sound-laden language courtesy of the tenants in 2A. From a television or radio somewhere above, a baseball announcer is shouting about a player rounding second, and then third . . .
“Someone just hit a home run,” Stockton observes. “Too bad it’s the Mets.”
He hates the Mets.
“Yeah, well, maybe it’s a good omen.”
“For who?”
“For us.”
“Met home run’s never a good omen for anyone.”
“It is when you’re on a roll with a case that you can’t afford to fumble.”
“Wrong sport, Gingersnap.”
“Okay,” she swipes a sticky palm across her stickier forehead, “then we can’t afford to strike out. Better?”
“It would be if we already had two strikes. You need three to—”
“I know that, Stockton. I just—”
“Then why—”
“Never mind,”
they say in unison, before trudging up the final flight in silence. It’s too oppressive to bicker, although the people in 2A missed the memo.
José Morales, the man whose nephew, Bobby Springer, apparently went missing exactly three months before Jake Fuentes did, lives on the fourth floor. They’d spoken to him by phone this morning, and he promptly buzzed them into the building when they rang the bell in the vestibule below.
Sully is convinced Springer’s disappearance is linked to the others. Her initial search indicated that he maintained an active social networking presence and has profiles on several online dating sites that aren’t nearly as popular with local singles as InTune is. Her hunch is that he might have had one on InTune as well—and that someone, perhaps not Bobby himself, deleted it after he vanished.
He’d been planning to leave for a week-long vacation on Sunday, September 22—flying out to the West Coast to visit his friend Danny, who’d recently gotten married and moved to L.A.. Bobby had e-mailed Danny from his cell phone early on the morning of Saturday the twenty-first to say that he couldn’t get away after all; something had come up at work.
That was a lie, according to colleagues who were interviewed last fall by the detectives on the case. There had been no last-minute upheaval at the office. As far as Springer’s coworkers knew, he’d gone away on vacation as planned.
Thus, more than a week went by before anyone realized anything was amiss. When he didn’t show up back at the office on Monday, September 30, his supervisor assumed he might have missed his flight home and left him a couple of messages. Tuesday, after again trying unsuccessfully to contact him, the supervisor notified Human Resources, and they got in touch with José Morales. He’d gone over to his nephew’s apartment, found his packed suitcase and unused plane ticket to California, and called the police.
This morning, Sully and Stockton had met with Detectives Lonnie McClure and Mike Needham, who were handling the case in Jersey, where Springer had lived. Both felt that he might have staged his disappearance. He had an on-and-off drinking problem and a boatload of credit card debt, and was a month behind on his rent.
“What did the uncle think about that?” Sully asked them.
“What do they all think?” McClure shrugged. “He swore up and down that the kid would never walk away.”
Yeah. That’s what they all think. Most of the time, they’re wrong.
Sully blots sweat from her forehead with her sleeve as she and Stockton arrive at the fourth-floor hallway. There are three doors. The middle one is ajar, the baseball game blasting from within.
After checking the number on the door—4B—Sully knocks on it. “Mr. Morales?”
“Yeah, it’s open,” a male voice calls.
She looks at Stockton.
“Ladies first,” he tells her with an exaggerated sweeping gesture, and she rolls her eyes.
“You didn’t say that this morning when we made our pit stop at that gas station in Jersey.”
There had only been one rest room. Stockton beat her to it.
“After three cups of coffee? Uh-uh.” Having given her Irish tea a try last night, he’d declared it ineffective in combating exhaustion. This morning he was right back to the burnt-smelling brew from the Bunn in the office kitchenette.
With Stockton on her heels, Sully crosses the threshold into the apartment’s entryway. The room isn’t exactly spacious, but they both would have fit comfortably inside were it not for copious clutter. A top-heavy coat tree is layered with so many garments that it’s tipped over and precariously balanced against the wall. An oversized bureau sits beside the door, and a chair in front of it blocks the drawers. Magazines and unopened mail are scattered in piles on top of the bureau. On the chair is a plastic crate filled with men’s sneakers and shoes, with more crates and boxes stacked on the floor beside it.
Hoarder in residence. You don’t have to be much of a detective to reach that conclusion.
Then Sully spots the label on an envelope sitting atop the bureau. It’s addressed to Robert Springer, forwarded to José Morales.
Okay. Maybe not a hoarder after all. At least some of this stuff obviously belongs to the missing nephew.
“In here,” the voice calls from the next room.
Through the doorway, Sully can see a large flat-screen television where a sports announcer finishes recapping the home run and updating the score as the inning ends and the game goes to a commercial.
She and Stockton step over the threshold to find a man heaving himself out of an easy chair facing the television, directly in the path of the large white plastic turbo fan humming in the room’s lone window.
Here, too, there’s more furniture than there should be: two couches, two coffee tables, and two televisions: the flat screen on the wall, plus a big, boxy older television, unplugged and sitting on the floor in a corner.
Sully’s father has one of those ancient TVs on the floor in his living room, too. He keeps trying to give it away, but it’s too unwieldy for anyone to move. Even charitable organizations aren’t interested.
“I bought it for two grand when the Yankees got into the ’96 World Series so that your mother and I could watch it on the big screen,” he told Sully—the big screen, at the time, encompassing thirty-five inches. “Took me five years to pay it off, with interest. Now I can’t even give the damn thing away.”
“You’ll have to pay someone to haul it to a Dumpster, Da,” she told him. But the last time she visited, the TV was still sitting there like Sully’s hefty, aged Aunt Eileen, who always overstays her holiday welcome, in part because no one is quite up to transporting her back home to the suburbs.
Sully and Stockton flash their badges at José Morales, introduce themselves, shake his hand. Unshaven and potbellied, the man wears a white sleeveless undershirt, basketball shorts, a backward Mets cap, and a sad, tired expression. He clears a heap of clothing and a thick Sunday newspaper off the nearest couch. In Spanish-accented English he offers them a cold beverage—which they politely decline—and a seat on the couch, which they accept.
Morales sinks heavily back into the chair he’d just vacated. The newspaper, now sitting on an end table, flaps around in front of the fan, with its breeze that doesn’t quite reach the spot where Sully and Stockton are sitting.
Again she wipes a trickle of sweat from her forehead.
“Do you mind if we . . .” Stockton gestures at the blasting television.
“Sorry.” Morales aims the remote at the TV and presses a button to freeze the action on a beer commercial. “Tie game,” he explains.
Sully is about to tell him to turn it off altogether. But then he says heavily, “I know why you’re here,” and she sees dread mingling with the sorrow and weariness that have already etched deep lines on his face. He buries his forehead in his hands. “You found Bobby. He’s dead, isn’t he?”
“No, we didn’t find him,” she tells him. “That’s not why we’re here.”
The man looks up, wide-eyed. “But . . . I thought you said when you called . . . Isn’t this about my nephew?”
“It is,” Stockton assures him. “But he’s not . . . that is, he’s still missing, as far as we know.”
“Gracias a Dios!”
Morales crosses himself and slumps back in his chair. “That’s good. I mean—not good, but better than . . .”
Right. Better than hearing that his nephew—whom he’d raised as a son after his sister took off when the kid was ten—has turned up somewhere as a corpse.
“We just want to ask you a few questions about him.” Sully takes a pen and pad from her pocket. She flips through, looking for the notes she made this morning in New Jersey. The pages are limp. Freaking humidity.
“I’ll tell you anything you want to know,” Morales is saying. “I don’t have any kids of my own. Bobby is a son to me. He isn’t perfect. He used to be a drinker, but he’s straightened out, been in AA for a few years now. He doesn’t want to end up like my sister.”
“And she’s his mother?”
“Was.”
Morales sighs. “She was an alcoholic. She walked out on my nephew. No note, no nothing. One day she was there, the next she was gone.”
“Where did she go?”
“Who knows? She was in Florida when she drank herself to death a few years later. But Bobby, he’s different. He has a good heart. I miss him.”
Sully notes that he speaks of his missing loved one in present tense. They always do—with a few notable exceptions.
Years ago, Sully’s first missing person case that ended in homicide involved a missing woman whose husband—a fine, upstanding citizen—referred to her in past tense, but kept correcting himself. As it turned out, he’d bludgeoned her to death on their yacht and tossed her overboard.
She takes notes as Stockton asks him to go over the details leading up to reporting his nephew’s disappearance. He recounts the situation pretty much exactly as it was outlined in the case file.
He and his nephew weren’t in daily contact, but saw each other once or twice a month. Bobby lived alone now, having moved last summer from the Brooklyn apartment where he’d lived with his girlfriend to a studio in Jersey City.
“Do you know why they broke up?” Sully asks.
“She said she didn’t want to get serious.”
“And your nephew did?”
“
Sí
. Bobby has old-fashioned values. He wants to get married. Like I said, he has a good heart and he’s been sober for a few years now. So he moved out and moved on.”
“He was dating other women, then?”
“Sure.”
“Do you know who they were? Or how he met them?”
“No.”
“Did you know that he had online dating profiles?”
“No.”
“Have you met any of his friends?”
“Not lately. Just Danny, and I haven’t seen him in a few years now.”
McClure and Needham had interviewed Danny, along with Bobby’s ex-girlfriend, colleagues, and a few casual acquaintances, none of whom could shed any light on the disappearance. Reading between the lines, Sully could see the general consensus was that Bobby had simply walked away from his life, just as his mother had years before. Maybe he was upset about the recent breakup; maybe he’d fallen off the wagon; maybe he was trying to escape his financial obligations, feeling underpaid and overworked like the rest of the world.
No one—other than a frustrated José Morales—seemed to think it might be foul play.
“I wish I could believe he just left,” the man tells Sully and Stockton now. “But he didn’t. I guarantee you that.”
“How are you so sure?”
“Because—here, I’ll show you.” He gets up and weaves his way across the room, stepping around tables and chairs to get to a desk.
“This is Bobby’s. A lot of this stuff is his. I couldn’t pay his rent, so I had to move it out of his apartment. Do you know how hard it was to carry it up all these flights? Mostly by myself. Threw my back out of whack for a month. It still bothers me. But I’m keeping everything until Bobby comes back. And when he does, I’m going to treat him to a new TV because I like this one. It’s a lot better than mine. Does all kinds of fancy stuff.”
Mr. Morales opens a desk drawer, rummages through it, closes it, opens another one.
Sully wipes more sweat from her forehead and watches the newspaper fluttering in the breeze from the fan, wishing she’d accepted the offer of a cold drink after all.
The exhausting weekend is beginning to catch up to her. There’s a burning ache between her shoulder blades, and her eyeballs feel as though they’ve been sandblasted. When the alarm went off this morning just a few hours after she’d set it, it was all she could do not to roll over and go back to sleep. Only the thought of the missing men—four of them, at least—got her up and moving.
Now she’s even more determined to see this through. José Morales needs closure. All the families do.
“Here it is. See?” He pulls something out of a drawer and carries it back over to the couch.
It’s a framed photograph of a grinning, heavyset woman with an arm casually resting on the shoulders of a slender, dark-haired boy. The kid wears a tentative half smile and has both his arms wrapped around her ample middle like he’s trying to hold on for dear life.