Die for You (20 page)

She watched Emily now and saw the same pure soul she knew existed in her sister. In Trevor she saw the same conviction that good would always triumph over evil, a belief fueled by the mythologies of his comics and the legends of
Star Wars
, that there was a clear right and wrong in every situation. He sulked over by the doorway, battling his conscience and the nagging feeling she knew he had that following the rules in this case might not have been that right thing. He looked confused. She wanted to tell him that he was only going to get more confused as time went on, that things would never be as clear as they were right now. She’d been like him once, so righteous and sure. Poor Fred could attest to her punishing standards. She wanted to tell her son that it was all just shades of gray. But that was a lesson for another day.

“You did good, Trev,” she said to comfort him. “Izzy needs our help right now, even if she doesn’t know it.”

Her son nodded uncertainly, wrapped his arms tightly around his thin middle. Emily gave Trevor a dirty look.

“Tattletale,” she hissed. “What a
baby.”

“Shut up,” he said, his voice rising high and breaking. “It was
your
idea to check the spyware.”

“Emily, give me a break,” Linda said.

“What?” she said. “He
is.”

They started yelling, speaking over each other unintelligibly. They always did this, reacted to stress by fighting with each other. The sound of it was maddening.

“That’s enough,” Linda said, raising her voice. They both stopped and stared at her, mouths in wide, surprised
O’s
. Emily returned to her seat and flopped herself down dramatically. Trevor went back to his corner to sulk.

“I need some quiet,” she said more softly. “Please. I have to think.”

She wanted to be angry with her sister for bolting again. But she couldn’t, the same way you couldn’t be mad at a cat for scratching furniture or a dog for chewing up your shoes. Isabel was just being Isabel.

There was an experiment Linda had read about, where people were asked to deliver electric shocks to a person seated in another room out of sight. The experiment revealed that most people would keep delivering the shocks, no matter how loud and tortured the screams from the other room became, as long as someone in authority told them to do it. Linda knew that she’d be one of those people. She’d be racked with guilt and self-doubt, but she’d keep pressing that button until someone told her it was time to stop.

Izzy would be the one who stood up and protested, who bucked authority. She’d beat the crap out of the person delivering orders and then race to rescue the injured. And in some circles, this would make her a bad seed, an undesirable.

Until her affair with Ben, Linda had never broken a rule in her life. And she’d been brutally judgmental of people who in her opinion had. She tortured Margie and Fred for years, because to her it seemed that Margie should have kept her vows to her husband, even in death. And, of course, her father had been the ultimate rule breaker. He’d defied the strictest rules of all:
Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Love me forever, Daddy
. And how she’d hated him for it. It took years of therapy for her to come to this realization.

Even in her art she never took risks, followed the rules of convention, the typical ideas about what comprised a beautiful image. And how she’d been praised for it, lauded and paid ridiculous sums for art and journalistic photographs that she secretly believed were common, maudlin—as Ben had reviewed her—or appealing to a base and silly chicken soup sentimentality.

Reflexively she dialed Izzy’s number and was surprised when her own husband answered.

“Hey,” he said. Even in that one word, she heard all his shame and despair. She ignored it, could not deal with his emotions or what he’d done to their life. In her mind, financial infidelity was a more egregious betrayal than a sexual one. She honestly didn’t know what the future held for them, but for the time being, she couldn’t think about it. She’d forgiven him before he’d even confessed; she’d meant it, too. But that didn’t mean she didn’t hate him at the moment.

“You found her,” she said, feeling the flood of relief. She felt both Emily’s and Trevor’s eyes on her.

“Uh, no. She left her phone. I found it on the floor of Trevor’s room.”

“Oh, God.” She shook her head at the kids, and both of them seemed to slump in disappointment. Izzy had dropped the line that connected them, gone off the grid. This terrified Linda more than anything else.

“I’ll find her. I promise,” he said. She could hear how badly he wanted to do that, to be the hero here. “She Googled someone named Camilla Novak. Do you know who that is?”

She searched the memory banks of her rattled brain. “No,” she said finally.

“There’s an address in SoHo, not far from here.”

Linda rummaged through her bag and found a capless Bic pen and a receipt from the coffee shop where she’d fucked Ben just hours before. It reminded her that they both had a lot to regret.

“Give it to me,” she said, her tone harder, less yielding than she intended. She just couldn’t help her anger, couldn’t keep from expressing it. She scribbled down the address, wondering aloud to Erik why Izzy had taken the uptown N/R.

“I don’t know. But she also looked up someone named Kristof Ragan. Ring any bells?”

“No.”

She wrote the name down. “Anything else?”

“She went to some site called Services Unlimited. It looks like an escort service masked as temp services. Weird.”

“Why would she go to a site like that?”

“No idea.”

“Anything else?”

“Just American Express. She was probably trying to track charges.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it. Hey, are you going to give that to the detective?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Okay,” he said, then he paused and issued a sharp breath. “Just give me a head start. If I can get to her first, maybe I can convince her to turn herself in to the lawyer. We don’t want her taken into custody, right? She’s been through enough.”

The detective returned to the room then with sodas for the kids and a coffee for her. She thought he wore too much cologne; it made her sinuses ache.

“Okay,” she said. “Give me a call back when you find something.”

She ended the call and stuffed the paper in her bag. She looked at the detective, offered him a grateful smile for the coffee he handed her. “He’s checking the computer now. He’s going to call right back.”

The detective nodded. “Okay,” he said, handing her a card. “Call me on my cell if he finds anything.”

“Where are you going”?

“I have a lead I want to follow up.”

They stared at each other and in that moment it was hard to keep what she knew from him, an authority figure. He’d been open with her, told her everything he’d learned about Izzy’s husband. She felt guilty, nervous for keeping things from him, even if it was only to give Erik a head start so that he might talk some sense into her crazy sister. She was glad when he moved toward the door.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. He paused with the knob in his hand and turned back to look at her. “Did you ever suspect that your brother-in-law wasn’t who he said he was? Was there ever anything that gave you pause, something that’s coming back to you now?”

She’d thought about it since he’d told her everything, about the missing man, the stolen identity. But other than the nebulous feeling she’d had that she didn’t care for him or trust him and didn’t think he was good enough for Izzy no, there was nothing, no clue that might help them now. She told him as much.

“Just think about it. Let me know if anything comes to mind. No matter how small or inconsequential it might seem.”

Then: “Does the name Camilla Novak mean anything to you?”

She couldn’t hold his eyes, dropped her gaze to the floor. “No,” she said. “Uh-uh.”

He let a beat pass. Then: “You sure?”

She nodded and forced herself to meet his eyes with a wide, earnest gaze. “Why? Who is she?”

“Someone who might have information. We’ll see. Call me,” he said, and then left the room.

“Did you just lie?” Emily asked, incredulous. Linda considered lying again but didn’t have the heart, not with both of them staring at her like that.

“Shh,” Linda said, moving over and sitting next to her daughter, dropping an arm around her shoulders. Her little girl felt so thin, so fragile.

“You lied to the police?” Trevor said, his voice high with anguish, looking like he did the day she had to break it to him about Santa.

“I’m just giving Dad a head start,” she whispered, glancing over at the door. She moved over to him and put both her hands on his thin shoulders. “We want to find Isabel before the police do.”

“I thought you said I did the right thing.”

“God, stop whining for once,” said Emily.

“You
did”
said Linda. “You did do the right thing. But this is the right thing, too. In a different way.”

It was nothing but shades of gray, she wanted to tell him, none of it black and white. But instead she opened her free arm to him and he came and sat on her lap; he wasn’t too big for that. Emily rested her head on Linda’s shoulder and she took her brother’s hand and squeezed. They could be so mean to each other, scream and whine to beat the band, but Linda knew they shared the same ferocious love that she and Izzy did. And now, with foundations shifting, and life as they knew it crashing around them—in ways they weren’t yet aware—they’d have this. They’d always have this.

A slow unraveling occurs when one thread separates from the fabric; it can’t help but catch on something. One tiny pull, then another, and eventually the whole garment comes apart. He’d broken the first rule he’d set for himself: Leave at the first sign of trouble; cut your losses, take what you can, and change that garment before you’re left half naked in the cold. It was attachment and arrogance that brought him to this place. Sara’s earlier admonition rang in his ears.

He moved over to the couch and sat, put his chin on one fist, watched her. There was a time when he thought he could love her. But when she’d given herself to him so easily and served her purpose, his passion for her cooled quickly.

Beneath their jokes about Marcus Raine was a current of resentment. Marcus had been hired early, before any of them. He’d been paid a very low salary and given a large number of company shares to make up for it. When the company went public, Raine became a very rich man. The company rewarded his loyalty and hard work by raising his salary on top of it. Rumor had it—and in a small company there were always rumors—he made nearly as much as the CEO. But he didn’t begrudge Marcus Raine his success; it didn’t make him angry or jealous. It made him curious. What was it like to be Marcus Raine?

Isabel got a certain look on her face when she was working—and she didn’t have to be sitting at her computer to be working. It was a faraway glaze to her eyes, a kind of thoughtful cock to her head. He could almost see synapses firing in her brain as it struggled to
know
. It was a place she went to imagine, to understand, to be something that she wasn’t so that she could write it. He found it fascinating but not foreign. He had the same drives, the same desires for very different reasons. He’d had them all his life.

It was Camilla, Raine’s girlfriend, who impelled him to action. Raine, apparently, had forgotten his lunch. He brought the same lunch every day. Some type of meat on whole wheat bread and an apple. He drank water from the cooler, in a cup he kept in his desk and washed in the break-room sink when he was done. He was so precise, like an old clock, so predictable and self-contained. He never could have imagined Raine with a woman like Camilla. She breezed into the office, wearing a flouncy, printed dress, extraordinarily lean, delicately muscular, outstanding legs ending in dangerously high heels—red. She had an electrifying energy, white-blond hair, a voice that sounded like a singing bird to him.

“Can I just leave this for Marcus Raine?” she asked, holding up a brown bag.

“Oh, I’ll call him,” the receptionist said with unmasked enthusiasm. She wanted to see him interact with his girlfriend. “Can I give him your name?”

She hesitated, looked around. “Camilla,” she said finally.

The reception desk stood directly in front of the door; behind that was the field of cubicles where everyone sat. One by one, people found a reason to look over the walls, like prairie dogs popping quick, curious heads up from their holes. From where he sat, he had an unobstructed view as Marcus Raine strode up to the front and took the bag from her hand. He watched Camilla’s face brighten at the sight of him. Her smile widened—no, deepened—as Raine wound a strong arm around her waist and kissed her. He whispered something to her in Czech and she laughed, a tinkling, musical sound like ice in a glass.

Suddenly Marcus Raine didn’t seem so laughable. He watched the faces of their colleagues, mocking smiles dropping in surprise, resentment waxing like a moon, cold and hard.