Authors: Alison Gaylin
A
t first, Nelson had believed that Carol had left him voluntarily. He’d imagined her calling one of the neighbors—perhaps Gayle Chandler from her book club. He’d pictured Carol picking up the phone late Sunday night and asking Gayle in a whisper to drive her to the bus station in White Plains. He’d pictured his wife of fourteen years buying a one-way ticket for some distant town she’d never been to before—Phoenix or Cleveland or Memphis or Des Moines—his practical-minded wife, thrown off her head by the mother of all mid-life crises, leaving home with nothing but her wallet and the clothes on her back and some dream about starting a new life, and it infuriated him. Made him angrier than he’d ever thought he could feel, angrier than he’d ever admit to feeling.
Driving to the police station that first evening, it had been more an act of spite than concern.
This will show her
, he had thought.
She’ll come back to a full-blown police investigation and won’t she be embarrassed?
Making it even worse, the police seemed to agree that Carol had left of her own volition—their “full-blown investigation” amounting to that desk sergeant limply filling out a report.
Nelson had driven home hating the world. Parking in his driveway, he had glared at the garage that held Carol’s car. A one-car garage, and all these years he’d let Carol have it—let her keep her Volvo in there, protected from the elements, while his Volkswagen Golf camped out in the driveway at night and in the train station parking lot every weekday, his car a second-class citizen—a worker-drone.
He’d glared at that Volvo through the narrow window at the side of the garage, Carol’s garage, the closed door like a giant closed mouth, smirking at him. He’d walked straight up to that door and kicked it so hard his foot bled.
Waking up alone again the next morning, though, and again the next and the next, Nelson’s anger had quieted to loneliness, only to be replaced by gnawing dread. Carol hadn’t left him of her own accord. She would never do that, and Nelson knew her, knew her better than anyone. He had known her for twenty-five years.
Carol’s wallet. Left at the Neff house. That had sealed it.
No one had lived in the Neff house for two years. It was nicely kept up by Realtors, and Nelson had just heard that a developer had finally bought the property—the same one who built those expensive Waterside Condominiums at the eastern edge of town, which was good news, he supposed, for Lydia Neff, wherever she was . . . But for all intents and purposes, the house was abandoned. And Carol’s wallet found in an abandoned house—the abandoned house of a woman Carol had never liked in the first place. Carol’s wallet dropped in a house she’d never go to voluntarily. That couldn’t mean good news.
I don’t remember the last time I kissed Carol.
Nelson felt a tear slip down his cheek. He exited out of his assignment, then clicked on the file and dragged it into the trash folder. Only after he did it, though, did he realize that the images he described—Carol, talking to her friends at the Facts of Note picnic, Carol’s old hat with the pink satin bow—they were, for now, all he had left of her.
He clicked on the trash icon, opened it up. The memoir file was easy to find—Nelson emptied his trash with relative frequency, so there weren’t many others. He undeleted it, amazed at how relieved that simple action made him feel. Then he shut down the computer.
As he was getting up from his chair, though, it struck Nelson that there had been another file in trash. An unfamiliar file . . .
Nelson booted the computer back up. The process took longer than he would have liked—he needed to do something about the spyware on his PC once and for all—but finally the computer booted up and the desktop loaded. He clicked on the trash icon again, three quarters convinced he’d hallucinated the file.
But he hadn’t. There it was—a download, from Thursday at 10:30
P.M.
Nelson knew he had been asleep by then—he always tried to get to bed before ten on work nights—and when he clicked on it, the empty feeling in his chest loosened. Carol had downloaded the file. Suddenly, the present tense fit Nelson’s wife.
Carol does know how to use the computer. She does, she does.
The file had been downloaded from the DMV Web site. Its name was “Replacing Your Missing Driver’s License.”
Nelson wanted to laugh, but laughing while alone was for crazy people, and Nelson Wentz was not going crazy. Not anymore.
Carol downloaded the file, and she did it here, at home,
after
losing the wallet
. He opened up the DMV file and stared at it for several minutes—as if he expected it to tell him something else. Then he went online, clicked on recent history . . . and learned exactly how, as he slept, his wife had been using her computer knowledge.
W
hen he “died,” Larry Shelby had left his wife, Annette, more than twenty million dollars, furthering Brenna’s belief that he was far more attractive as a memory than as a man.
Annette Shelby, however, felt otherwise. As soon as she’d heard from Brenna that he was alive, Annette had flown down to the city from her home in Great Barrington and spent a significant amount of that inheritance on a deluxe suite at the St. Regis. “It will be the perfect spot for our reunion,” she had explained over the phone.
Brenna had tried to talk her out of it. Odds were, a man with six new identities wouldn’t be ripe for a reunion, no matter how classy the hotel. But Annette wasn’t having it. And Brenna, who’d been going through a hell of an ordeal booking a last-minute flight to Las Vegas with a beyond-bitchy airline rep, couldn’t find the energy to argue with her.
So now the two of them—investigator and client—were stuck in this gorgeous room with its Central Park view and its sculpted, chandeliered ceiling and its king-sized bed with the tulle canopy pouring down on it like something out of a Cocteau movie—the whole scene romantic to the point of mockery, not to mention the mix CD that Annette had brought—“Larry’s Favorite Songs”—inexplicably, sadistically playing out over the room’s stereo system. And they were
doing business
.
On the plus side, it took Brenna’s mind off what Morasco had told her three hours earlier—a missing woman’s wallet, her name and number in it, found at Iris Neff’s old house. It took her mind off Morasco’s questions, too.
But the fact remained that, for anyone with a shred of empathy, the business being done here was achingly unpleasant. Brenna had already showed Annette copies of her husband’s various IDs and now she’d gotten out the photos she’d taken at Nero’s Playground of Larry aka Gregory getting screamed at by his latest spouse, Vivica. “You don’t have to look at these, Annette,” she tried.
“Oh yes, I do.” Annette had just polished off her fourth airplane-sized Johnnie Walker Black and was now washing it down with a handful of chocolate-covered cashews. That was one thing that could be said for this room—it had an excellent minibar.
Brenna slid the folder across the desk as the next of Larry’s favorite songs kicked in—Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” of all things. Brenna managed a sip from the bottle of seltzer that Annette had insisted she take and watched her slide open the folder, wincing at its contents. She had never felt quite this uncomfortable in her life. “Should I . . . Do you want me to turn off the stereo?”
Annette shook her head. “Larry’s gained weight.”
The sad truth was that physically speaking, Vivica seemed a better match for Larry. Annette was willowy and waspy-elegant, with golden hair and sculpted cheekbones and tiny, implacable pores. Upset as she clearly was now, she still looked as if she couldn’t break a sweat if she tried, whereas Larry and Vivica seemed to be cut from the same earthy cloth. But that was neither here nor there, was it?
Looking
as if you belonged together? If you were going to judge on looks—
real
looks—Annette looked right now as if someone had stuck her with something huge and sharp and drained all the hope out of her. “Can I ask you something, Brenna?”
“Sure.”
“How did you find him?”
Brenna cleared her throat. “Well, the first credit card he applied for . . .”
“I know—you told me that, but Larry got rid of that card fast. How did you pick him up after that? He went from New York City to Wyoming to—”
“Montana, not Wyoming.”
“How did you keep finding him, Brenna? How, when he obviously . . . didn’t want to be found?”
Brenna looked into her eyes—a pure, pale blue, fogged slightly from alcohol. She nipped the bud of a memory—Larry calling her a tall drink of water—then realized that within two days, she’d watched both Shelbys get drunk. “We found Larry the same way we find most adults. Interests.”
“Interests?”
She nodded. “You can change your name, your hair color, you can get plastic surgery. But it’s a lot harder to change what you like, and no one really thinks they have to. Somebody likes guns, for instance, they’re going to apply for a license, maybe join the local NRA. Or say they’re into golfing, they’ll join a country club.”
“What was it with Larry?”
“Sorry?”
“What interest couldn’t Larry give up?”
Annette asked the question in a way that made it clear she knew the answer, but still Brenna was careful with the response. “Expensive restaurant reservations,” she said. “Private club memberships, purchases at high-end jewelry stores . . .”
“Women.”
Brenna opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. What could she say? “Would it help if I told you you’re best off without him?”
“Not really.”
The Elvis song ended, and then Brenna recognized the opening notes to “Wishing on a Star” by Rose Royce. Larry had some goddamn heartbreaking taste in music, that was for sure. Annette closed her foggy eyes, the singer’s voice like clear water, wishing and wondering what a dream means
. . .
Brenna tried not to think about the fact that “Wishing on a Star” had been Clea’s favorite song—the one she said “told the truth about love, real love.” Brenna tried not to feel the pink shag rug beneath her bare legs as she sat in Clea’s vacant room at 11
P.M.
on June 2, 1983. She tried not to remember listening to “Wishing on a Star” with her eyes closed, her head resting on Clea’s quilted futon, searching the song for clues. She tried not to feel her eyes squeezing tight, tears hot in the corners.
The song is empty. Empty as this room . . .
“You look a million miles away,” Annette said. “What are you thinking?”
Brenna swallowed hard. “Nothing. Larry wasn’t the right guy for you.”
“I know,” Annette said. “But who the hell wants the
right guy
?” She slipped an envelope out of her Prada bag and handed it to Brenna. “Your check,” she said. “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 cracked open another Johnnie Walker Black, downed it in one gulp. “God, he’s a delicacy.”
How and where had this intelligent woman gotten such phenomenally bad taste in men? Brenna shrugged into her jacket as the Rose Royce song faded away and Annette turned off the player. “Last song on the CD,” she said.
“I guess I should head out.”
“Thanks, Brenna. For everything. I mean that.”
Brenna gave her a quick, tight hug. “You will be okay.”
Annette nodded. “Crappy as this feels, it still beats the hell out of not knowing.”
As Brenna was heading toward the door, Annette said, “Oh, did you ever hear from Lydia?”
Brenna turned. “Who?”
“Friend I made on this New York Families of the Missing chat room . . . She lost her daughter, years ago. She’s had some bad luck with PIs, so I recommended you.”
Brenna shook her head, her mouth dry.
Lydia Neff, Iris’s mother . . .
“That might not be her real name. Christ, I called myself AlbanyMarie. No idea where I got that one.”
“We haven’t had any new client calls for weeks.”
“Weird. She private messaged me about a week ago, asking me if you were good at finding adults. She sounded like she was going to call you right away.”
“Her daughter was an adult?”
Annette shrugged. “Don’t know.”
Brenna’s cell phone vibrated at her hip. She held up a finger and answered it fast, without looking at the number on the screen. “Hello,” she started to say. But a man’s voice cut her off. A brittle, angry voice she’d never heard before. “Brenna Spector?”
“Yes. This is—”
“This is Nelson Wentz,” the voice said, Brenna’s eyes going big at the last name. “What have you done with my wife?”
“N
o disrespect or anything, Brenna, but you are seriously romping on my game.”
“What’s the big deal? You’ve done it for me before.”
“Not when I’m playin’!”
Trent’s voice, slathered in cool-dude lilt, was particularly tough to take at top volume through Brenna’s Bluetooth, competing as it was with the thudding, shrieking din of Roseland or Lotus or whichever club Trent happened to be gracing with his presence tonight, no doubt working the room like a badger in heat. But Brenna was driving to Tarry Ridge for the first time in eleven years—Tarry Ridge, rife with tens of hundreds of potential memory triggers—and knew herself well enough to realize that in this case, biting her lip and reciting the Twenty-third Psalm wasn’t going to do it. She needed live interaction, no matter how inane, to keep her in the present. The more inane the better, come to think of it—it was actually
harder
to get lost in a memory when she was baffled and annoyed. “Think of it as part of your job,” she said. “Making sure the boss stays sane.”
“Why can’t you just sexually harass me?”
“Trent.”
“Okay, fine.” He sighed. “What do you want to know?”
Brenna passed a sign on the 287—“Tarry Ridge 4 miles.” She swallowed hard. She drove a 2002 gray Sienna minivan, bought used three years ago, but when she inhaled now, on this part of the highway, Brenna caught the new-car scent of the maroon Camry she’d rented on October 16, 1998, from the Avis on Twelfth and University.