Authors: Alison Gaylin
An e-mailed photograph—of a boy named Jordan Michaels who’d gone missing in the spring
of 2004—was taken in front of the sign for Niagara Falls. And of course that had flung
Brenna back, for the second time today, to the
Maid of the Mist
on October 30.
Those biting winds, that hail. . .
The day had gone where it always went—in and out of wormholes, with Brenna swallowed
up by memories, then snapping herself back to reality
.
Back and forth, back and forth. She turned to Trent. “So how did your meeting with
Mrs. Shelby go?”
“Fine.” Trent picked at a fingernail.
“You don’t look like it went fine.”
“It did, but . . .”
“But what?”
He sighed. “Ever get . . . you know . . . emotionally invested in a client?”
She looked at him. “What do you mean?”
“Never mind,” Trent said. “So are we officially on with Errol? Did you get the rest
of the Lula Belle videos?”
Brenna didn’t reply—flashing instead on her last meeting with Annette Shelby. Poor,
fragile Annette in her hotel room at the St. Regis on September 30—the room she’d
reserved for her and her missing Larry—for the big reunion, the second honeymoon—only
to find out, via Brenna, that Larry had wanted to stay missing. Annette, with that
sad, searching look in her eyes, Johnnie Walker Black mingling with the scent of expensive
perfume.
Annette slips an envelope out of her Prada bag and hands it to Brenna. “Your check,”
she says. “You’ll see I included a little extra for that yummy assistant of yours.”
“Yummy? Trent?”
“Come on. Don’t play dumb. Those pecs!” Annette grabs another bottle out of the open
minibar, twists off the top, and downs it in one gulp. “God, he’s a delicacy.”
Brenna cringed. “Trent?”
He was back at his desk now, Lula Belle on his screen in all her spread-eagle, loose-jawed
glory. “Yeah?”
She cleared her throat. “By emotionally invested, you don’t mean . . . Uh . . .”
He stared at her.
She tried again. “You and Annette . . . You’re not . . . I mean, Annette is a very
fragile woman, and after what she went through with Larry, I’d hate to see her get
hurt again.”
“Why would she get hurt?”
“
Trent
,” said Brenna. But then she noticed his bulletin board.
For the six years that he’d been working for her, Trent had covered the board with
pictures of himself—on the beach, at clubs, in front of random parked sports cars
he’d passed on the way home from those places—always shirtless or close to it, always
next to some gorgeous, scantily clad babe with a deer-in-the-headlights look in her
eyes. Now, all those pictures were gone. They’d been replaced by photographs of Annette’s
cat, Persephone. “Mrs. Shelby says it’s okay I haven’t found her,” Trent was saying.
“She says we can keep looking—long as it takes. But sometimes I go to bed at night,
and I think about her all cold and alone and I can’t sleep. Those big sad eyes of
hers. They freakin’ kill me.”
Brenna said, “You’re talking about Persephone.”
“Who else would I be talking about?”
Brenna smiled. “Nobody.”
“Whatever.”
“Listen,” Brenna said. “It’s good that you care about her. It’s normal to get involved
with your missing person . . . uh, animal . . .” She cleared her throat. “Happens
to me all the time.”
“Still?”
“You know that it does,” she said, Lula Belle’s voice in her head again, singing about
cement mixers . . .
Outside the door, Brenna could hear footsteps on the stairs. Maya’s. At this point,
she could recognize them—such heavy steps for a slight girl. She thought about her
daughter, the clumsy innocence of that gait, that shy smile and the way she tugged
at her hair while she was daydreaming, and she wondered how long these things would
last—these faint remnants of childhood.
Of course, Maya wasn’t ready to let go, either. Cleaning her room the other day, Brenna
had found evidence of this fact on Maya’s top bookshelf, behind all her filled sketchpads
and the graphic novels and mangas she devoured.
The Very Hungry Caterpillar.
It had been her favorite at age four—the first book she’d learned to read. But on
November 19, 2004, when Maya was eight and a half, Brenna had put
The Very Hungry Caterpillar
in a box along with all her other picture books and early readers, and donated it
to the library. Five years later, there it was—the same book Brenna had put in that
box, its cover riddled with Maya’s unmistakable preschool crayon scrawl.
She stole it back
, Brenna had thought, smiling. But she hadn’t told Maya that she’d found the book.
She never would.
Everyone needs their secrets
.
Maya’s key twisted in the front door. Brenna’s eyes went to Lula Belle. “Can you minimize
that image, please?” she told Trent.
“Sure.”
The door opened, just as the phone rang, and Trent answered it.
Maya dropped her backpack on the floor, made for the refrigerator. “Hi Mom. Hi Trent.”
She seemed to have grown an inch since this morning—barely thirteen and a half and
already she was nearing Brenna’s five-nine. “Hi, sweetie. How was your last day of
school?”
“Whoa.”
Brenna looked up at Maya, saw her staring at Trent’s screen. “Trent, for godsakes.”
“Aw, bite me, I’m sorry,” Trent said into the phone. “No, not you, sir. One sec.”
He minimized Lula Belle’s image and got back to the caller.
Maya said, “Was that like . . . a bottle?”
Brenna cringed. “Never mind that.”
“How could anybody
not mind
that?”
Brenna sighed. “It’s just a case Trent and I are working on. Nothing you need to be
concerned with.” She forced a smile, yet still Maya looked very, very concerned. “So,
anyway . . . I thought maybe we could go out for sushi—celebrate your first night
of Christmas break.”
Maya kept staring at Trent’s black screen.
“Pizza?” said Brenna. “Greek? Dim sum?”
Finally, she snapped out of it. “Didn’t you get my text?”
“Huh? No,” Brenna said. “I didn’t even hear my phone go off.”
“Oh . . . Well, uh . . . I wanted to know if I could stay at Zoe’s tonight. Help her
decorate her tree.”
Brenna looked at her. “Didn’t you already decorate your own tree? With your dad and
Faith?”
“Yeah, but I’m with you right up until Christmas.”
“You make it sound like a prison sentence.”
“Mom.”
“Well, come on.”
“Mom. You’re Jewish. You don’t have a tree. It’s that simple.”
“I know. I’m just playing,” said Brenna, who sounded anything but playful.
“So . . . you understand, right?”
“Sure.” Brenna sighed. “You can spend the night at Zoe’s.”
Maya peered at her. “You’re hurt.”
“Give me a little credit. I’m not that much of a wimp,” said Brenna, who sounded,
to herself, like very much of a wimp.
“Mom.”
“Don’t
Mom
me. It’s okay. We’ll have plenty of time together.”
“Great! I’ll go pack.” She grabbed a handful of cheese sticks out of the refrigerator
and hurried down the hall, Brenna watching her lanky teenage daughter but seeing the
chubby four-year-old from May 8, 2000 . . .
Maya running out the bright yellow door of her classroom at the Sunny Side Pre-School,
Maya stumbling into the courtyard, wrinkled white construction paper clasped in her
little hands, Maya’s pink cheeks and that smile—running toward Brenna, barreling into
her stomach, the sun on her messy blonde hair, and Brenna’s heart swells at the feel
of her, the smell of playground sand in her hair, it fills to bursting
.
“Mommy! I drew this for you!”
“Incoming!” said Trent.
Brenna’s phone rang. She glared at him. “Trent. You can’t just transfer calls to me
without warning.”
“Sorry,” he said. “But he wouldn’t give me his name and he said it was urgent.”
Brenna rolled her eyes at him, picked up the phone. “Hello?”
“Brenna Spector?” The voice was kind and resonant—utterly unfamiliar, but with a lilt
to it, as if the caller knew her and expected her to recognize him.
“Yes?”
“Is anyone in the room with you?”
She glanced at Trent. “Yes.”
“Then please don’t respond to anything I am about to tell you.”
“Who are you?” Brenna glanced at the caller ID: PRIVATE NUMBER.
“I need to be clear you understand,” the voice was saying. “I cannot have you responding,
or reacting in any way to any information I am about to give you.”
“All right,” Brenna said.
“Good,” he said. “I am going to give you a number. I need you to write it down—very
discreetly. No one is allowed to see the number.”
I don’t need to write down numbers
, Brenna started to say, but he was still talking.
“ . . . and call me in exactly five minutes, from a completely private place. This
call must be confidential. If I find out that anyone else knows about our conversation,
I will never speak to you again.”
And I should care about that because . . .
“All right.”
He gave her the number.
Brenna swallowed hard. She knew it. It was the same number Errol Ludlow had tapped
into her phone earlier that day.
“Do you have it written down?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Brenna.
Yes, Gary
Freeman
.
“You don’t need me to repeat any of the numbers.”
“No, I don’t,” she said. “But . . .”
“You know who I am.”
“Yes.”
He took a deep breath, slowly in, slowly out. And when he spoke again, Brenna felt
as though he was with her, in the room, smiling. “I know who you are, too.”
G
ary Freeman was a fan. At least, that’s what he told Brenna, once she’d taken her
cell phone down the hall to her bedroom and called the number he’d left and assured
him, repeatedly, that there was no one within earshot. “Ms. Spector,” he said, “I’m
one of your biggest fans.”
Considering the way he’d been ordering her around for the past two phone calls, it
was the last thing Brenna had expected to hear. “You are?”
“Yeah, I admire you so much—the work you’ve done.”
“How do you even know who I am?”
“I heard about the Neff case on one of those shows my wife watches—you know the ones,
with all the yentas, sitting around discussing current events and complaining about
men?”
Brenna smiled a little. “Yep.”
“I was very impressed with what they said about you—how you solved that case, of course,
but also how you’ve dealt with so much family tragedy. You did one interview, I guess?
You mentioned a sister?”
Brenna snapped the ties on her wrist. “Yes,” she said. “
Sunrise Manhattan
.” Big mistake to name the show, because as soon as she said it, she was back into
October 5,
the hot TV lights on her face, and Faith sitting across from her, her clear blue eyes
glittering in the kliegs as she opens the yearbook, shows her the picture . . . “You
miss her don’t you? You miss Clea.”
Brenna snapped the hair ties, hard.
Gary was saying, “ . . . and I guess you’d call it a disorder? Your memory . . .”
“Works for me.”
“I found the book you’re in—
Extraordinary Children
. By RF Lieberman. Checked it out of the library.”
“My childhood shrink.”
He sighed. “I . . . I can’t even imagine what your life must be like.”
“Most people think it’s a gift.”
“The yentas did. ‘Perfect memory,’ one of them said. ‘If I had that, I’d never lose
my keys again.’ ” He laughed—but Brenna could hear the tension in it.
“You don’t view it as a gift, do you?”
“No. I’m sorry . . . I don’t mean to offend.”
“I’m not offended. Believe me, if all I remembered was where I put my keys, I’d be
a whole lot happier.”
“Good,” he said. “Good, because I wouldn’t want to . . .”
“You didn’t.”
“Good.”
“Is there a lot, Mr. Freeman, that you would like to forget?”
There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “You can call me Gary.”
Okay . . . New topic.
“You know,” Brenna tried, “for a book written in 1990, it’s sure been getting a lot
of play lately. I’m thinking Dr. Lieberman should give me a percentage of the royalties.”
Another laugh, easier this time. “I could work a deal for you.”
“I’m sure you could.”
Freeman said, “I fired Ludlow.”
“You . . . Wait.
What?
”
“That was abrupt, wasn’t it?”
“Well . . . yes.”
“Sorry. Force of habit. Producers, casting directors. They always want you to cut
to the chase.”
“You fired Ludlow?”
“I gave him a nice severance payment, but to tell the truth, I don’t think missing
persons cases are his strength.”
“Yes.”
“And . . . his voice irritated me.”
“I definitely get that,” Brenna said. “What I’m confused about is why you hired him
in the first place.”
“I saw that endorsement from you on his Web site.”
Brenna sighed.
“Looking back, I guess that was a pretty dumb reason. But he did tell me that he was
still in touch with you. When he said he’d signed you on, I figured, hey, may as well
cut out the middle man.”
“Why didn’t you just hire me in the first place? I’ve got a Web site, too, you know.”
Another long pause, longer than the last. And then finally, “Ms. Spector?”
“Brenna.”
“I need to ask you something, Brenna.”
“Ask away.”
“Are you tape-recording this phone call?”
She frowned. “That’s what you wanted to ask me?”
“You realize that by California law, which applies whether or not you are in this
state, it is illegal to tape-record another person without his permission. And if
you are, in fact, recording this conversation, you are breaking the law.”
“I’m not recording you, Gary,” said Brenna who never recorded anything—she had no
need to.
“All right,” he said finally. “I believe you.”
You believe me?
“Why wouldn’t you?”
“I will not permit any of our conversations to be recorded, from here on in.”
“Fine,” Brenna said. “Agreed. No recording.”
“And you are to reveal my identity to no one.”
“Not even my assistant?”
“No one. As far as he’s concerned, you’re still working for Ludlow.”
“But—”
“And you are to be the sole point person. Your assistant reports to you and you alone.
Are we clear?”
“Yes, Gary. We are clear.”
“Good.” Gary took a deep breath, in and out. “I know you have a Web site. I looked
it up, right after that yenta show. I even wrote down the contact number.”
“But you didn’t call it.”
“No.”
“Why?”
Yet another pause. Brenna listened to him breathing again—long, slow, labored breaths—and
she wondered who they were intended for, these pauses? Were they due to Gary Freeman’s
discomfort, or were they intended to make Brenna uncomfortable—because they did. They
made her feel as though she was hurting him with her questions—this kind-faced man
with his pretty family and his charity events. They made her feel as though all she
needed was a bright light and a cigarette and she could break him. And that wasn’t
what Brenna wanted at all, to break him. All she wanted was to understand. “Why didn’t
you call me, Gary?”
“Because—” His voice cracked and she flashed on her own father, her blur of a father
with his strong hands and his kind voice, Brenna’s father at the wheel of his car,
sobbing.
My God did that really happen?
Brenna closed her eyes. “Because what?”
“Because . . . I was ashamed.”
I
t was an affair. Not a physical one, as Gary Freeman had never met Lula Belle—he’d
never even seen her face—but an affair nonetheless, Gary had insisted to Brenna over
the phone. An affair of the heart, the mind, the wallet.
It had started two years ago—and at a time of weakness, as all affairs do. Money had
been tight. Very tight. With more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars
in credit card debt staring him in the face, Gary had been on the computer, paying
the monthly bills—one thousand dollars for Tessa’s modeling course, fifteen hundred
and fifty dollars combined for Hannah’s and Lucy’s piano lessons, and let’s not even
talk about the looming orthodontist bills for the two older girls (God, why hadn’t
Gary listened to his mother and gone into dentistry?). Then there were the car lease
payments and the mortgages on their Pasadena house and on the second home in Santa
Barbara and the yacht they hardly ever used and, of course, there was Jill—his beautiful,
serene wife with her spa and salon visits and her yoga classes and all that instruction
from those billionaire rabbis at the Kabbalah Center—instruction, of all things, on
how to find spirituality in a materialistic world. Gary was staring at those numbers,
his hands shaking over the keyboard, his thoughts darkening into bankruptcy, foreclosure,
living on the street with nothing to keep his family warm and dry but the philosophy
of the Kabbalah . . .
That’s when he’d received the e-mail from her.
It wasn’t Gary’s fault—the debt, that is. After seventeen or eighteen flush years,
it had just sort of descended on him, with one client getting fired from a long-standing
Disney gig when his voice changed, another bowing out of commercial work when her
parents decided she should focus more on school, yet another suddenly un-hirable after
getting hospitalized for an eating disorder . . . The list went on. Show business
is cyclical, especially when it comes to children, and Gary had swung into a major
downturn without preparing himself or his family . . .
Okay, he supposed it was his fault.
Anyway, he received the e-mail from Lula Belle, and he jumped on it.
Make me a star
, it read,
and I’ll make you rich
. Sounded like spam, sure, but once he’d viewed the attachment, he was sold. They
worked out their deal: He created the Web site, opened a PayPal account, as well as
a separate checking account, and then he put his expertise to work—the expertise Lula
Belle had told him she valued because
Really
,
Mr. Freeman
, she had typed, so fragile and helpless.
I don’t know where to start
.
All it took was a few strategically placed posts on certain well-traveled message
boards, a cryptic Craig’s List announcement, subscribers came pouring in. Gary’s debt
eased. His blood pressure went down. He couldn’t have been more grateful. “She was
like a guardian angel,” he’d said, before realizing how that sounded.
On the second of every month, he’d receive an e-mail from Lula Belle at the special
e-mail address he’d created just to correspond with her. The e-mail would consist
of a PO box where he would send a check for sixty percent of the Web site proceeds,
made out to cash, as well as four or five attachments, which he would screen before
announcing their availability on the site.
This was how it became an affair—Gary viewing those attachments, four or five a month
for nearly two years. Gary in the dark of his home office, after his wife and kids
had gone to sleep, watching that bare, backlit body, listening to those very private
confessions that made his breath hitch in his chest. He could not see her face. He
did not know her real name. But never, in Gary Freeman’s life, had he ever been with
a woman who had made herself this vulnerable before him.
“How do you know her stories were true?” Brenna had asked.
“I knew.”
Cement mixer, turn on a dime . . .
“Did you know anything about her? Her family?”
“No.”
“Then how did you—”
“I just knew.”
“Because you—”
“We had a connection.”
Between e-mails, Gary would watch Lula Belle’s videos again and again until, at some
point, she consumed him. Every morning, he’d wake up tingling, her voice slithering
through his brain. It was all he could do not to quote her to his family, his clients,
all he could do not to speak in her whispery accent, to close his eyes and lose himself
in her world, her life, thinking of all those things she’d told the camera,
told him through the camera
. Not the subscribers. Him. The subscribers got sloppy seconds, but he had her first
. He knew her first
. . . “I know,” he’d told Brenna. “I sound like a freak.”
“You don’t.”
“I do. See, that’s why I thought Ludlow was perfect—he spends his whole life dealing
with creepier guys than me. You, on the other hand . . .”
“Don’t worry about it.”
Lula Belle cleared up Gary’s debt. She got him hard. She broke his heart. And then
she just left, with no explanation. She’d been gone for two months now—two months
without a single e-mail. It was the only thing on his mind—the lack of her—and yet
no one knew. Come on, who could he tell? “I’m afraid something may have happened to
her,” he had said. “I mean . . . God . . . if she ever existed to begin with. Sometimes
I feel like I’m going nuts.”
“Have you deleted all the e-mails?”
“I have her last one.”
“What about the downloads?”
Deep breath, in and out. “I have them all.”
Brenna had asked him to forward them to her, along with the last e-mail from Lula
Belle, and as many of the PO boxes as he could remember.
“I don’t remember any of them. I’m bad with numbers.”
Brenna sighed. “Just the locations would be fine. You can probably remember a few
locations, right?”
“Of course,” he said. “Thank you, Brenna.”
“Gary,” she had said, finally. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”
“Pardon?”
Cement mixer, turn on a dime . . .
“Is there any other reason you’re hiring me—other than my missing persons expertise
and yentas saying nice things about me?”
There had been a long pause on the other end of the line. And then, “What other reason
could there possibly be?”
She was off the phone with Gary now, leaving a message for her detective friend Nick
Morasco. (Was that how she thought of him now? Her
detective friend
? Man . . . ) Already, the secrecy of this case was getting to her. She understood,
of course, why Gary Freeman wanted his name kept out of this investigation, but to
ask her to lie to those closest to her . . . It made Brenna feel more alone than she
usually felt—and that was really saying something. She was mad at herself for letting
Maya sleep at her friend’s tonight. She didn’t want to be all by herself in this quiet
apartment, nothing to keep her company but the Lula Belle downloads, the persistent
stink of Trent’s cologne, and Gary Freeman’s voice in her brain . . .
You are to reveal my identity to no one
.
“Wanna come over to my place after work, watch some porn?” Brenna blurted into Morasco’s
voice mail. She cringed. “It’s . . . uh . . . It’s not porn actually. It’s performance
art. And it’s for a case. I’ll explain when you get here. If you get here. I mean
. . . You know . . . if you don’t have any other plans.” She hung up.
“Smooth,” said Trent.
“Shut up.”
“No worries. Girls are cute when they sound like idiots.”
Brenna rolled her eyes. Without saying a word, she e-mailed the folder of Lula Belle
downloads to Trent.
“Hey!” His voice pitched up like a tween girl at a
Twilight
premiere. “You got all of ’em?”
“Now who sounds like an idiot?” Brenna said. “Remember, this is serious work. I want
you to try and look at them frame by frame. Pay attention to shadows, the way she
moves, any details you might see in the room with her that might give us some clue
as to her identity and whereabouts.”