The little Steiff bear had been Karen’s last present to her daughter, the thing she left with her seven-year-old—along with cookies and Coke—before she locked her in the basement, drank a bottle of vodka, and drove herself into a tree. Forevermore. The tag had been gone for a long time, but the brass button was still in his ear. Anna smoothed the loose thread on Mr. Ted’s nose. Kristin had never gone anywhere without him. She even used to take him to school in her backpack, his little head sticking out of the top where the zippers met. Now meeting his black glass eyes, Anna Carson allowed herself to wonder for the first time if her stepdaughter was dead.
“No!” She said it out loud. “No.”
If she stepped too close to that whirlpool she’d never get back. Anna stood up and slid open the wardrobe door.
As usual Kristin’s clothes were a mess. Things hung every which way. Shoes were piled on the floor, boots shoved to the side. A silk dress Anna didn’t recognize had slid off its hanger and lay pooled on the floor. She picked it up, fixed it back on a hanger, and then got down on her hands and knees to find what she was looking for. The bright red backpack with Kristin’s initials embroidered on it was part of the luggage set they’d given her for this trip. Anna tugged it out from the very back of the wardrobe and, holding it up, wished it wasn’t so new, or so red. An Alitalia tag, from the flight Kristin had taken to get here in September, dangled from the back strap. She pulled it off, then laid the pack on the bed, unzipped it, and turned to the bureau. Opening the drawers felt like another violation. “Don’t!” Kristin had always screamed. In her room, in the bathroom, even in the changing cubicles at the country club swimming pool. Anna heard the echo, like a stone dropped far away. She took a breath and told herself, again, not to be stupid.
She had seen her fiftieth birthday come and go, but for all that, Anna Carson was not much bigger than her stepdaughter. It was, she supposed, partly thanks to genetics, and partly thanks to the running that Ken referred to—only partially joking—as her “addiction.” More than a dozen marathons in as many years had kept her leaner than she had any right to be. Kristin was as tall, and thinner through the hips and chest than she was, but Anna didn’t think she’d have a problem finding things that would fit.
Winter helped. Kristin favored bulky sweaters, ethnic stuff. Anna chose two and laid them on the bed. Then she pulled out a pair of fashionably slouchy boyfriend jeans and a pair of camouflage pants. Socks and underwear came next. After she’d made her selections, Anna untied her running shoes and peeled off her leggings and thermal top. She folded her own clothes into the bottom of the backpack, packed the things she’d chosen on top of them, then pulled on the camouflage pants. She found a black turtleneck in Kristin’s middle drawer, then put one of the sweaters on over it.
A belt and a scarf were easy. Shoes were more difficult. Her feet were a size bigger than Kristin’s and she couldn’t afford to hobble. She was about to give up, dig her own running shoes out and put them back on, when she noticed the cowboy boots. Kris had complained after buying them online that they were too big, by which time she’d worn them too much to send them back, and had shrugged and said she could always put on an extra pair of socks. Anna grabbed one and stepped into it. Perfect.
Looking at herself in the mirrored door, she saw an aging, boho graduate student. She pulled her hair out of the ponytail, braided it quickly, then tucked it under a gray wooly hat she’d found on the top shelf.
Satisfied with the overall effect, Anna went down the hall to the bathroom. In the cabinet that was a complete mess, and therefore obviously Kristin’s, she found several lipsticks, some gray eye shadow, and a too-black mascara. Anna daubed her eyes, then painted her mouth a purple pink that didn’t suit her, or Kristin—or anyone who wasn’t a corpse, for that matter. Now all she needed was a jacket. She had noticed Kris’s new parka—goose down, and if she remembered correctly, costing a small fortune at Barney’s—still hanging in her closet, obviously abandoned, like the backpack, for something more chic and Italian. Back in the bedroom Anna slid it off the hanger. The fabric was beautiful, dark olive green and satiny. She stood holding it, her hand fastened on the collar, suddenly paralyzed by the memory of another jacket, much smaller, but also expensive. Also smooth and shiny. The first gift she ever bought her stepdaughter, almost exactly eight years ago.
It was bubblegum pink. With silver piping and a hood trimmed with white rabbit fur, and personally, Anna thought it was hideous. Not Kristin, though. The minute she saw it, the little girl had fallen in love. Hanging on Anna’s hand in Saks Fifth Avenue, she had pleaded and whined and reminded Anna that she had promised, absolutely promised, that this stepmother-stepdaughter shopping trip was all about her, all about whatever special treat she wanted to pick out for her birthday.
Looking at the jacket, Anna had known Ken would have a fit. That he would say his daughter looked like some kind of cheap Barbie doll. Then again, she’d thought, Ken would dress her in Brooks Brothers if he could. If they made clothes for little girls instead of dour suits and club ties for middle-aged men.
So she had handed over her credit card, knowing, even as she did it, that it was absolutely against her better judgment. That she was falling for the oldest trick in the book—the new wife being manipulated into buying her stepdaughter’s favor.
But it had been worth it. When Kristin threw her arms around her, squealing. And afterward, at their special lunch—Kristin’s choice at The Creperie on Newbury Street—when the little girl kept peeking into the bag, stroking the fur collar as if it was a pet. Anna had known she would shrug off the money, and the crap she would take from Ken, if only for Kristin’s smile. Which was radiant, but too rare, and almost never bestowed on her.
She’d been a fool, of course, and even half realized it at the time. But for a few days she’d actually deluded herself that somehow the gift had sealed something between them. That maybe it had taken away some tiny bit of the hurt that had hovered like a storm cloud over the little girl since her mother’s death.
So a week later, when Ken was away at a conference, leaving them alone together for the first time, and the school called to report that Kristin had asked for a bathroom pass and vanished, Anna had not only panicked, she had defended her. Determined to stand up for her stepdaughter even as the headmistress pointed out that this had happened before, Anna had insisted that whatever had happened was not Kristin’s fault, and that the police be called, and that they organize a search team. Lunchtime that winter afternoon had found her, not at home making Kristin the grilled cheese sandwiches she then professed to love and later decided were gross, but wading through the bog along the Concord River, certain the next thing she would see would be not more golden bulrushes rippling in the late sun or a flight of green-backed mallards, but the shiny satin and muddied fur of the pink jacket.
Which was, in fact, found at about the same time. In a Dumpster, smeared with you wouldn’t want to know what, behind a mall two towns away.
Kristin herself was inside the mall. In an outlet of GapKids, where she was nabbed for shoplifting. By the time the dots were connected and her parents notified, she was being held in juvenile detention by a social worker and a cop.
Ken came roaring back from New York, on the way calling his lawyer, who obligingly made the whole thing vanish and charged them the better part of a thousand dollars for it. Anna, having given righteous lectures to both the school and the police, apologized profusely, and went home with her tail between her legs feeling like a hysterical idiot. Which was nothing compared to how she felt that night, when Ken—after reassuring his daughter that they loved her, and that they really, truly wanted to understand—had asked Kristin why on earth she had done something like this?
Sitting at the kitchen table drinking hot chocolate, Kristin had looked at her father, her beautiful blue eyes welling with tears, and replied, sadly, that she was sorry but she “really, really needed a new jacket.”
At the sound of the words
, Anna, who had been standing at the stove making Kristin’s favorite dinner, cheeseburgers, had felt something inside of her stop. Later she thought it was like the moment when you see someone you love raise their hand and understand that they’re about to hit you.
“I mean, Daddy, I couldn’t wear that queer pink thing Anna made me buy,” she’d heard her stepdaughter say. “It was so gross! She made me wear it and everybody laughed.”
Standing in the dim light of the bedroom, Anna blinked, amazed that after all this time the pain was still there. Not as searing as it had been at first, but there nonetheless. Like a thorn covered by a hard callus.
She put Kristin’s green down parka on, trying not to notice that her hands were shaking. Then she picked up the backpack, fitted it over her shoulders, and buckled the waist belt. The last thing she did before she left the room was grab Mr. Ted and stuff him into her pocket.
* * *
“So, yeah, I saw her.” The big man’s face split into a grin. “A fox,” he said. “That blond hair, it was fake blond—I can always tell—but pretty. You know, with those stripes. Streetlights, whatever. Sometimes they’re pink, or even green. Hers wasn’t like that, though. She looked like that actress, you know the one? All in black, and her hair twisted up.”
Enzo did not know which actress Benny was talking about and he didn’t care. Knowing Benny, it was probably the star of some movie he saw in his head. Probably several times a night, on rerun. Not that it mattered. All that mattered was that it really did sound like he’d seen Kristin Carson.
Benny Ibrahim, which was almost certainly not his name, was well known to the police, and particularly to the Angels. He was harmless enough, a big North African guy who sold counterfeit sunglasses and cheap gloves with MADE IN ITALY tags that came from Morocco. For a while Benny had lived in the Cascine, which was where Enzo had met him. They’d gotten to talking and found they had a few things in common. Benny, for instance, didn’t like drugs, and he didn’t like men who hit women. A few years ago, he’d tipped Enzo off about a particularly unpleasant Bulgarian trafficker. The information had been good and the bust that followed significant.
Even after that Benny didn’t feel real warm and fuzzy about the police. They tended to confiscate his gloves. But over the years he’d come to the Angels a couple of times. Personally Enzo thought it was a good deal. He was perfectly happy to turn a blind eye, no pun intended, to a bunch of fake Ray-Bans in return for information on immigrant teenagers who thought they were coming to work in sunny Italy as chambermaids and found themselves paying for their tickets by turning tricks in motorway rest areas. It had been his suggestion that one of the Angels looking for Kristin have a word with Benny, who sometimes worked the area around the Carmine. It was worth checking if he’d been around a week ago Tuesday. As it turned out, they got lucky.
Benny had folded up his pitch, and been wandering down toward Piazza Gaddi, when he’d noticed a big black car pulled up on the opposite side of Lungarno Santa Rosa. It had struck him as strange because it was too early and the wrong part of town for curb crawlers, and there was no reason to stop there. Then he’d seen the girl. The fox. All dressed in black and hauling a suitcase on wheels.
* * *
Sleet splatted against the plate-glass window of the café they were sitting in. Tiny ice crystals twinkled briefly in the pink neon light of the sign, then slid away. The Angel who had found Benny had already bought him a sandwich and a coffee while they had waited for Enzo. Now she got up and went to the bar again.
“OK,” Enzo said. “So what else?”
Benny shrugged, his big shoulders hunching in the black woolen jacket that matched the watch cap pulled down almost to his eyes. He knew the routine. The details were what you got paid for.
“Well, if I’d known I was looking for her—”
Enzo waved his hand in an OK-come-on gesture.
“OK, OK.” Benny smiled. “Like the man said, hindsight is a beautiful thing.”
Enzo resisted the impulse to roll his eyes. Benny occasionally waxed poetic. Putting up with it was the price of admission.
“She didn’t look forced,” the big man said suddenly. He shook his head. “She didn’t look like, you know, she was scared. If she had been—” One of Benny’s more endearing fantasies was that he was some sort of superhero, drifting through the Oltrarno protecting young women in peril. Once he’d hit a pickpocket who was stealing a girl’s bag and scared the girl so much she fainted.
“The car?” Enzo asked.
As much as he agreed, he really wasn’t in the mood for one of Benny’s soliloquies on the evils of men and the vulnerability of young girls. After hearing the news about Antonio Tomaselli, Enzo had told Pallioti about his visit to Kristin’s apartment. Pallioti had heard him out, saying nothing, and Enzo had felt a pang of relief that he had not decided to share his apparently increasingly loony fantasy about Anna Carson. Given what they now knew, it would make him look like one of those conspiracy theory nutcases who thought 9/11 had been planned by the Israelis, and Jim Morrison and Elvis were running a diner in Havana. Instead he’d followed Pallioti’s advice and hightailed it back down into the labyrinth, where he’d spent the better part of the last few hours in the computer labs watching the geeks re-create the hard drive of Kristin Carson’s netbook and pry it apart again.
As for Anna Carson, she was probably guilty of nothing more than thinking Antonio Tomaselli’s face reminded her of somebody else’s. It happened all the time. The admission, even to himself, left Enzo with an unaccustomed punch of embarrassment. He was sorry he’d wasted James MacCready’s time, and would buy him dinner for it.
There was not a shred of doubt in Enzo’s mind that Giorgio and Antonio Tomaselli were one and the same, which made him all the more eager to catch this slimeball—even if he was, as Pallioti posited, possibly perfectly innocent. Of an actual by-the-book crime, maybe. Of manipulation, nasty little sex games—with however willing a victim—and basically of general slimeball-ness, Enzo thought, no way. The emails pretty much nailed him cold on those fronts.
Giorgio had first noticed Kristin on Facebook where, stupidly but not uncommonly, she’d posted a Hotmail address for use by new friends. That was one of the things Enzo really hated about Facebook—what it had done to the word friend. That from now on one of the most beautiful words in any language would carry, at best, the hollow ring of false intimacy. At worst, the stink of outright lies.
By May he was sending her presents. One of the first had been the netbook, which had been delivered, not to her home, but to an address at somewhere called Mailboxes Etc., where he had thoughtfully suggested she acquire a mail drop. The emails suggested he’d taken care to do this by snail mail—still the most untraceable method of all—sent to her boarding school. There would be a little cache of letters and cards somewhere, Enzo thought, under a drawer liner or in another heating duct, probably tied with a ribbon. All of which explained why they hadn’t picked up anything on the original laptop. No history of connections. No Hansel and Gretel trail of bread crumbs. The netbook—along with a new email address—and Skype had taken care of that. All set up so they could talk freely. Have, as Giorgio put it, some real privacy. In July he’d mentioned the course in Florence, and sent Kristin the link.
Parsing the emails had made Enzo feel like he was watching a snake slithering through tall grass. A very well-prepared snake. Because it was clear, at least to Enzo, that before he ever contacted her, Giorgio aka Antonio Tomaselli knew an awful lot about Kristin Carson. He knew where she lived, and went to school, and what she looked like, all of which he could have figured out from her Facebook page. What was a little more puzzling was how he had known about her mother. Because he had.
It was skillfully done, Enzo had to hand it to him. He’d let Kristin actually tell him about her mother’s death. But, reading the emails, it was easy to see he’d been priming her. Fishing for it the whole time, lacing his comments with sympathy and understanding th
at was so pointed that eventually she’d poured out the whole story. All the details of the night when Kenneth Carson, who was chairing a panel in Cape Town, South Africa, had left his seven-year-old daughter home in the States with her mother, his wife, Karen. Who, suffering from clinical depression rebooted by a recent miscarriage, had proceeded to drink the better part of a bottle of vodka before, probably in a half-baked effort to protect her child, locked her in the basement with a new teddy bear and a six pack of Coca-Cola and a package of cookies, then picked up the car keys and headed out to the parking lot of a local recreation area where she’d unbuckled her seat belt, got up a good run of speed, and driven herself hell-bent-for-leather into a tree.
The accident had happened around one a.m. Karen wasn’t found until the park personnel arrived the next morning. She had no ID on her. By the time the police figured out who she was and that she had a child, Kristin had been in the basement for almost twenty hours. When they finally got to her, the little girl’s hands were raw from clawing the locked door.
Reading the description she had written to Giorgio of how she’d felt waiting for her mommy to come home had made Enzo queasy. It had made him feel far more like a Peeping Tom, the worst kind of voyeur, than his earlier pawing through her underwear drawer. The queasiness had turned to rage when Giorgio responded with his own confession. He had never told anyone else, he wrote, but his mother drank, too. And she, too, had died young. When he was only eight. Just a year older than Kristin. It was a sign, he’d said. He’d known from the first time he read her poems that he could also read her heart.
Benny stirred the cappuccino that had been placed in front of him and nodded.
“The car,” he said. “Right, the car was big-ass. A Beamer. Black. You know, fancy. When he saw her coming, before she got there, he popped the trunk. Opened it up like a smile. That’s what I remember.” He laughed and sipped the coffee. “That big-ass car looking like it was grinning.”
The Lost Daughter Page 11
