Authors: Alison Gaylin
Trent returned carrying Morasco’s cup of coffee and read the chapter title out loud: “The Girl with the Tape-Recorder Mind.”
“Yeah,” Brenna said. “That’s me—Well . . . me when I was a kid, anyway.” The book,
Extraordinary Children
, had first come out in 1990, with Brenna referred to simply as B. But after she was outed in the Science section of the
New York Times
on April 14, 1995, the book’s editor called and got permission to use her full name in subsequent editions.
“I didn’t know you were in a book,” Trent said.
“It was a long time ago.” Brenna’s gaze ran down the page. She saw that she was called B. in this library copy—a first edition—and her own signed first edition clicked into her mind, the one that Lieberman had sent her right after it was published, the one she couldn’t bring herself to read, but used to keep by her bed because she intended to read it, someday.
She could see the book on the green wicker nightstand of her first New York apartment on 112th and Amsterdam, her white metal reading lamp trained on the cover
. . .
“Yo!” barked Trent.
Brenna cleared her throat, focused on Morasco, who was watching her intently behind his wire-framed specs—making up for lost time with the eye contact, as it were. His eyes, she noticed now, were quite dark, with a disarming softness. Brenna suspected that the quality was a result not of inherent compassion, but of myopia—the glasses were very thick. But it probably helped Morasco a lot when questioning witnesses.
He said, “You were remembering something, weren’t you?”
“Huh?”
“The book—looking at it triggered something in your mind.”
Brenna nodded. “It’s just the way this . . . condition works, so . . .”
“I have to show you something.”
Unfortunately, the way he said “show you” triggered the image of Trent and his nipple rings—she could have killed him for that—but Brenna blinked hard and squeezed the thought away.
Morasco was back at the bag again, rifling through it. “You asked about Iris Neff over the phone. Did you know Iris Neff?”
“Huh? Oh . . . No, I—”
“How about me?”
“You?”
“How did you know who I was before I told you?”
“I talked to you on the phone once.”
“Once.”
“October 16, 1998,” she said, “9:23
A.M.
”
He stopped rooting through the bag and looked up at her. “Must have been some conversation.”
“I happened to be looking at a clock.”
Morasco went back to the bag. “What was the conversation about?”
“I called the station to ask a question. You blew me off. Lasted about thirty seconds.”
Trent said, “Dude, she remembers the exact date when they aired that master-of-my-domain episode on
Seinfeld
. You know, where they all make the bet about who can go the longest without—”
“So the conversation she had with me is in good company.”
Trent nodded. “She also can tell you when Shirley MacLaine called David Letterman an asshole, the date
Star Wars: Phantom Menace
opened at the Ziegfeld, and . . . oh, and the one day last year when Hostess Cupcakes were half-price at Gristedes.”
“Trent,” Brenna said. “Can you contact Annette Shelby and arrange time for me to meet with her about her husband?”
“Already did. I told you it’s tonight at seven-thirty.”
“Well can you call her
to confirm
?” Brenna gave him a meaningful glare. “Then you can check the traffic on our Web site? Maybe call your mother?”
“Oookay. Got the hint.”
As Trent left them for his workspace, Morasco slipped a manila folder out of his canvas grocery bag and placed it on the desk. “Cupcakes, huh?” he said. “I’m a Twinkie man myself.” He looked up at her, and Brenna knew he wasn’t a Twinkie man. He probably hadn’t touched a Hostess product since he was eight.
Nothing like being patronized by a guy in tweed
.
Morasco opened the folder. Inside was a series of photographs, all of the same woman—in a cream-colored suit and stiff white blouse holding a bouquet of flowers, in a red apron, carving a turkey at a church soup kitchen, on the beach, in a modest black bathing suit. “Do you remember her?” Morasco asked.
Brenna peered at the bouquet shot—a photo from a very low-rent wedding. “No,” she said. In the picture, the woman appeared to be standing in front of an office cubicle, literally fading into the background with her cream suit and her lank sandy hair and her pale lips and skin . . . Everything about this person more or less off-white—save her eyes, which were large and silvery—not so much haunting as
haunted
. Brenna couldn’t stop staring at them. “Who is she?”
She could feel Morasco’s gaze on her, and when she turned to him his eyes were narrowed, sharp. Now she understood what Trent meant by intense. “You don’t know the woman in these photos.”
“I’ve never seen her before.”
“You’re sure.”
“Yes.”
The irises were jet-hard now, the pupils like drill bits—amazing interrogation tools, those eyes of his. Good cop and bad cop, rolled into one. “Have you spoken to her on the phone? Received any e-mails from her?”
“I don’t even know her name.”
“Carol Wentz.” He leaned on the name, aiming it at her.
“I don’t know anyone named Carol Wentz.”
“She’s fifty-one years old,” Morasco said. “Married, no kids. Happy, more or less. In good health. She went missing five days ago. Her husband says before that, she hardly ever left Tarry Ridge, even. Last night we found her wallet.”
“Detective,” said Brenna. “Why are you telling me this?”
“In the wallet, we found a piece of paper with a name and phone number printed on it.”
“
Why are you telling me this?
”
Morasco watched her face for a drawn-out moment, as if he was trying to see through it to her brain. “The name and phone number on the paper,” he said. “They were yours.”
Brenna’s eyes widened. “Maybe she’d looked me up,” she said. “Maybe she was planning on hiring me.”
“The wallet was found by a Realtor. You know where?”
She looked at him. “I told you I don’t know Carol Wentz. How would I know—”
“2921 Muriel Court.”
Brenna swallowed hard. She felt some of the color drain from her face.
Morasco exhaled and took a step back, and Brenna knew she’d given him what he wanted. “You know the address,” he said. “You remember it.”
She nodded.
“
Why
do you know it?”
Brenna didn’t want to answer that question, not with so many other questions running through her mind. So she turned away, cast her gaze across the room at the back of Trent’s head as he talked on the phone, oblivious. And then she said aloud what she and Morasco both knew. “That house,” she said. “The house where her wallet was found. It was Iris Neff’s house.”
1. I remember the name of the dog I had when I was in kindergarten.
2. I remember what I ate for lunch on my first day of junior high school.
3. I remember my father’s favorite brand of Scotch.
Nelson Wentz stopped typing and stared at the screen. The assignment for his online memoir-writing course was to write four things you remember, four things you don’t—but was this really enough information? Should he have typed, say, that his father liked Glenfiddich? Should Nelson have said that his dog’s name was Coco and he wasn’t allowed to keep her because his mother was allergic, or that he remembered what he’d eaten for lunch that day because it had been an egg salad sandwich and the children at his new school had teased him, telling him his locker smelled like feet? He didn’t see why some writing instructor three thousand miles away would care about these things—Nelson barely did himself. But then again, he knew that when writing memoir, all sorts of details were important—just as they were in police investigations.
4. I remember what Carol was wearing on the day I met her.
Nelson wasn’t sure why he’d signed up for this course. At this point, he really wasn’t sure why he’d done anything he’d done prior to five days ago, when he’d woken up in bed to find Carol gone—not in the kitchen, not in the bathroom or the living room or anywhere. When he checked the garage and saw that her car was still in it, Nelson had thought,
Visiting a neighbor
. An odd thing to do at 7:30
A.M.
, but not so very odd for Carol, who’d rush to neighbors’ houses on a moment’s notice when they called her for help with so much as a sticky jar. (“You’re the Wonder Woman of the suburbs,” Nelson had once joked. Carol hadn’t found it funny.)
So that morning, which had been a Friday, Nelson had showered and gotten dressed like it was any other Friday morning. He had taken the train into the city and worked eight hours at the reference service Facts of Note, just as he had done for the past thirty-two years. When he got home at five-thirty and saw her car still in the garage, Nelson had fully expected Carol to be in the kitchen starting dinner. But she was not.
The day I met her, Carol was wearing a dress with red and blue sailboats on it and the type of flat-brimmed straw hat you see in Impressionist paintings. I am now head of research at Facts of Note, but at the time, I had just started there as a junior copy editor. It was our company picnic, and I saw Carol from a distance, talking to a group of people I still hadn’t met. I learned she was the cousin of one of the women from accounts payable. She didn’t look like someone’s cousin, not in that hat. She looked as if she’d been beamed into Shepherd’s Field via time machine. I had an urge to pick flowers for her.
Nelson started to read what he’d just typed, but he couldn’t get through it. He kept picturing that police detective—Nick Morasco—standing over his shoulder and reading the screen.
Why are you doing a writing assignment when your wife is missing?
the detective said in Nelson’s mind.
Detective Nick Morasco, while nice enough, had repeatedly referred to Carol as “your wife” this afternoon—the possessive, lest Nelson forget she legally belonged to him, and here he’d gone and lost her.
Has your wife been acting strangely lately? Would your wife have had any reason to visit 2921 Muriel Drive?
Before her disappearance, would you have described your wife as happy?
“Define happy.” Nelson said it out loud, even though he hadn’t intended to. He didn’t like the sound of his voice—quavering in the empty room.
Manic
. Was this the beginning of insanity? Had Carol’s presence in this house all these years been the only thing keeping Nelson from losing his mind?
I’m just trying to help you, Mr. Wentz. You wanted to talk to me about your wife.
“Her name is Carol!” Nelson fairly shouted it.
Don’t think about him anymore.
He started to read his paragraph again—just for the sake of doing something normal. He’d gone to work today for the same reason. Why take another personal day? He would rather be in his office than in this empty house, thinking about Carol. He’d rather be top-editing pages at Facts of Note than hearing, “Nothing new,” from that snide female desk sergeant every single time he called.
He hadn’t been on his computer since Carol had gone away, but somehow it felt better to be in this room than in any of the others—the room Carol never ventured into, on the computer she’d never learned to use.
A hat from an Impressionist painting . . . I wonder if Carol still has it. If she does then maybe someday we could visit Provence together and I could take pictures of her in that hat among the haystacks. Surprising we’ve never been to Provence . . . Carol loves French cooking. In fact, Provence would be the perfect place for us to retire to. Why didn’t I ever think of that before? Why didn’t I ever tell Carol, “We could retire to Provence”? If I had brought up the idea, we’d both have something to look forward to. Today we might be in the city, taking French classes at the Lycée. Afterward, we’d be drinking wine at some little bistro on the Upper East Side, practicing our French together, laughing at how bad we both were, but knowing we’d be better in time.
When Nelson had first gone to the police station, the desk sergeant had asked, “What was Mrs. Wentz wearing when you last saw her?”
“Excuse me?”
“Last night.”
“Yes.”
“When you went to bed, your wife was still wearing her street clothes?”
“Yes, yes she was.”
“Describe the clothes.”
“Well . . . I . . . I don’t really . . .”
“Is there one item of clothing you remember enough to describe? A sweater? A piece of jewelry?”
“Jewelry?”
“Mr. Wentz.”
Nelson had felt as if he was flunking a test. He’d closed his eyes and opened them again, and after what seemed like an eternity, he was able to picture Carol on the couch Thursday night, reading a book. But he couldn’t remember the book’s title, or what she’d been wearing while reading it. “Her wedding ring,” he had told the desk sergeant, finally.
“What did the ring look like?”
Nelson pointed to his own. “Like this.”
“Plain gold band?”
“Yes.”
“Okay. What is the inscription?”
“No inscription.”
“No inscription?”
“We didn’t . . . We . . . No. Just blank.”
If Nelson and Carol were to retire to Provence, they wouldn’t need a sprawling chateau. There were only two of them, after all, and they had simple tastes. All they really needed was a cottage—a one-bedroom, with a nice garden and a big, beautiful kitchen for Carol to cook in.
We’d be better in time.
Carol’s wallet had been found inside the old Neff house. “The wallet contained your wife’s driver’s license and one hundred dollars in cash,” Detective Morasco had said over the phone today. “No credit cards.”
“She only has one credit card, and she keeps it in the kitchen drawer,” Nelson had said. “She is very frugal.”
Frugal
. Nelson’s voice had cracked on the word—though on the positive side his instinct had told him to use “is” to describe Carol, not “was.” She was still an “is” in his mind. That was something, wasn’t it?