by Lisa Unger
“That’s right.” With the exception of the last piece of information, I’d told him as much last night. He wasn’t wowing me with his detective skills.
“Worked for a start-up called Red Gravity, made a small fortune when the company went public in 1998.”
I nodded. It wasn’t enough money to retire forever. But it was more money than Marcus ever thought he’d make in his lifetime—or so it had seemed at the time.
“He did well enough to set up his own company shortly after we were married,” I said.
He offered a mirthless smile. “Well, no. That’s the thing.”
I didn’t appreciate the know-it-all, smarter-than-you swagger to his bearing; it caused me to flush with the shame of a liar or a fool. I tried to push past him again. The room was suddenly too hot. He waited a second before yielding to me. I didn’t go far, just to my bed, where I sat heavily, though the sheets and comforter had been shredded. It looked as though someone very strong had sunk a knife deep into the mattress and then cut ugly swaths through the material. There’s so much rage evidenced here. Was it possible that Marcus and I had made love here just the morning before last?
“Marcus Raine,” he said, following me and pulling a folded piece of paper from his jacket pocket, “disappeared in early 1999.”
He handed me the paper, a printout from the Times online. When he did, I noticed that the skin on his knuckles was split, his hand swollen and looking sore. I almost asked about it but figured I had my own problems.
With a vein throbbing in my throat, I read a small news item about a young man, a successful software engineer, and his sudden disappearance. It told of how his parents were killed and he was raised by his aunt in a town just outside of Prague during communism, how he came to the U.S. and made good, realized every immigrant’s dream of America. And just as the rags-to-riches tale came to its happy ending—he’d met a girl and fallen in love, had asked her to marry him—Marcus Raine disappeared. Didn’t come to work one day. When his girlfriend reported him missing, police gained entry into his apartment. There was no sign of a struggle. Some items—keys, wallet, a watch he wore every day—were missing. The article confirmed what I had learned about missing men: No one waged much of an effort to find them. No one heard from him again. His whereabouts were still unknown.
I looked up at the detective. I don’t know what he expected to see on my face, but I could tell by the way his eyes went soft that he felt sorry for me suddenly.
“Someone else with the same name,” I said weakly.
“And the same life story,” he said. “Possible. But how likely?”
I found myself looking at his shoes. I could tell they were expensive. From the leather and stitching, I’d say Italian. He couldn’t afford shoes like that; I figured he was in debt, maybe a lot of debt. My brain switched off like this when I didn’t want to deal with what was in front of me.
“Isabel.”
I looked up at him. He held out a photograph, and I took it from him.
“Do you know this man?” asked Detective Crowe.
For a second, I thought I was looking at a picture of my husband. But no, this man was narrower at the shoulders, the features of his face weaker, eyes hazel, not haunting blue. Really, as I looked closely, he was nothing like Marc except for his coloring, his nearly shaved head and blond goatee.
“That’s Marcus Raine, born June 9, 1968, disappeared January 2, 1999.”
Same name, same life story, same birthday as my husband—but not my husband.
I guessed the photograph was taken on the observation deck of the Empire State Building; the city lay tiny and spread out behind him. This strange man with my husband’s name had his arm draped around a pretty blonde. They both wore stiff tourist smiles.
“Do you know him, Isabel?”
Was there something vaguely familiar about him? It seemed as if I could have seen him before, somewhere, though I couldn’t have said when or where. I’d never met anyone from Marc’s life before me, not family, friends, or even colleagues.
“There’s a resemblance, wouldn’t you say?” said Crowe.
“I don’t know,” I said, not wanting to give Detective Crowe anything. “Maybe.”
“What about the girl, Camilla Novak?”
The girl in the photo had that kind of hard-featured, lean beauty that seemed to characterize Czech women. I remembered noticing in Prague how gorgeous they all were in the way of gems or metals, stunning but not inviting. She had that same aura to her—Look, don’t touch. I didn’t recognize her, but something about her name rang familiar. Had I seen it or heard it somewhere? I couldn’t remember.
“No. I don’t know either of them.”
I had a thought that caused me to get up quickly. Too quickly; I almost sank to my knees but Detective Crowe steadied me with a hand to my elbow.
“Take it easy,” he said, leading me back to the bed. “What is it?”
“There was a small photo album, really a canvas-bound book with old photographs, letters, and recipes from his mother. He kept it in the back of his closet.”
“I’ll get it. Where is it?”
I pointed to the closet, battling a terrible nausea and dizziness. When he opened the door, I saw that all Marc’s designer clothes remained untouched, arranged by color, meticulously maintained. Suits and collared shirts were hung, sweaters and knits were folded. It was an oasis of order in the chaos. It felt like an insult. But, of course, the album and all the personal items within were gone. Detective Crowe turned to show me his palms.
“There’s nothing here.”
I felt a rush of sadness and fear. That album, with its worn edges and yellowed pages coming loose from their binding, was the only piece of the past Marcus had, he claimed—a couple of grainy black-and-white pictures of himself as a child, a picture of the parents I’d never meet, recipes in a woman’s pretty handwriting. There were letters in Czech from his aunt. I used to look at these things when he wasn’t home, when we were fighting. It comforted me to know that he was a boy once, fragile, vulnerable, that there were reasons he seemed so closed off now. Was it a fabrication? I wondered now. Were those pictures of someone else?
“Seems Marcus Raine was a bit of a loner—no family, no friends really, other than the girl,” said Detective Crowe. “One of those guys, I guess. Even his former colleagues at Red Gravity said he kept to himself, didn’t party after work or go to lunch with anyone. He worked hard but didn’t socialize. According to the notes in the file.”
“What are you getting at, Detective Crowe?” I asked.
“Before I answer you, let me ask you a question.” He went on without waiting for a response from me. “Last night you told me that you didn’t know anything about his business, didn’t have much to do with it at all.”
“That’s right.”
“Then why is everything in your name? Why was your Social Security number used to establish the EIN?” Another bomb dropping, another structure crumbling like powder.
“It wasn’t.”
“But it was.”
We held each other’s eyes, both of us disbelieving, both of us watchful. I saw Detective Breslow come stand in the doorway to my bedroom. I think she’d been standing just outside the whole time. I broke Crowe’s gaze to look at her.
“We think he used your information to avoid using his own, Mrs. Raine,” said Detective Breslow.
A thin, dark film started to stain the lens of my memory. Our meeting, our passionate courtship, how quickly we married. How he waited until we returned from our honeymoon—three weeks in Italy—before he devoted himself full-time to starting up Razor Technologies. So many new beginnings; it was thrilling. When he told me that he hoped I’d be part of the business, a partner, I was touched that he wanted to share that with me. I signed a flurry of documents without really looking twice.
He insisted we change accountants, use someone who knew about his industry. I fired a man I’d worked with most of my career and let Mar
cus take over everything with the help of a firm with which I wasn’t familiar. I signed papers quarterly and at year end for both the company and my own earnings.
When was the last time I’d looked at any of it, really perused it? Numbers frightened me, literally shut me down. I was happy someone else took it all over. My accountant left multiple messages: “Isabel, you must return my call. We need to talk about this new firm you’ve hired.” I’m ashamed to say I ignored the voice mails, never gave him the courtesy of answering.
Dread was coming on like a bad flu. I thought of Linda. She’d done the same with Erik, put her signature where her husband asked. Two smart women who knew better, who should have learned early, the hard way, not to surrender our power, our financial security to any man. Detective Crowe was still talking.
“It’s easy enough to walk around with someone else’s name and résumé, especially if he had all the documents, the driver’s license, the green card,” Breslow went on. “They look alike enough that he—whoever he is or was—could just become Marcus Raine, especially if neither of them had any real ties.”
Breslow cut in. “The afternoon of January 2, 1999, Marcus Raine, or someone posing as him with all the necessary documentation, cashed out his accounts,” she said, handing me another photograph.
A man in a blue baseball cap, jeans, and a sweatshirt stood at a bank teller’s window. His face was partially obscured by the brim. It could have been Marcus, true. But it could have been anyone with his build and coloring.
“This is crazy,” I said, finally finding my voice and some reserve of physical strength. I stood and faced both detectives. “You can’t just slip into someone’s identity, become that person, use his history as your own. Eventually someone would have discovered he wasn’t who he said he was.”
“Maybe someone did discover it,” said Crowe. “Maybe that’s what this is all about. He needed to disappear again. Everything that might have been used to identify him is”—he swept his arm—“all gone.”
“His fingerprints are all over the place—here, at the office,” I said. “DNA—everywhere.”
“That only helps us to identify him if he’s in one of the systems already,” Breslow said patiently, as if she’d responded to this statement a hundred times before. “And we won’t know that until the fingerprints and DNA we found here are processed and put through IAFIS and CODIS, the national databases that store this type of data. It could take a while—maybe a week for a priority case, between processing and getting the information to the FBI, waiting for them to respond. And if he hasn’t been arrested and processed for anything else in the U.S., or if his DNA doesn’t show up on another unsolved-case file, we’ll have nothing.”
I sank back down on the bed. I felt him slipping away, this man I loved and lived with for five years. I remembered him stepping into that elevator, calling, “I love you, Izzy” as it took him away. I thought that’s what he said; I assumed it was. But maybe that’s not what I heard at all. I relived that horrible screaming again, feeling a cold finger trace the back of my neck, raising the hair there.
“No,” I said. “No. This is not right. You’re making some kind of mistake here.” It wasn’t possible, was it? That the man I married was someone else entirely than I believed him to be?
Detective Crowe was leaning against the wall, staring at me hard. “He needed your Social Security number to start his business. The name Marcus Raine doesn’t appear anywhere on the corporation documents. He’s not even an employee of the company. Everything’s in your name. Yours and Rick Marino’s.”
I didn’t even know what to say. I just sat there mute, reeling.
“Do you know what Social he used to apply for your marriage license?” asked Breslow. Her tone was gentle, empathetic. I glanced over at her and saw compassion on her face; she was a woman who’d been lied to, knew how it felt. It hadn’t made her bitter, like it had with Crowe. It had made her smarter.
Our files were all gone; they knew that. “I have no idea.”
She handed me three more pieces of paper. A copy of Marcus Raine’s green card with his picture, a copy of his Social Security card, and a copy of our marriage license.
“That’s Marcus Raine,” she said. She came to stand beside me, pointed a finger at the stranger’s picture. Then she tapped the copy of the Social Security card, then the marriage license. The numbers were the same.
Crowe picked up a picture of Marc from my desk. “This is not the same man.”
We were all quiet, my mind racing through options, possibilities, ways this might all be a mistake.
“So you’re saying that he stole another man’s identity, used his Social Security number to marry me, then used my name and Social to establish a corporation for Razor Technologies.”
I couldn’t believe I was still speaking. I was shredded like the mattress I was sitting on, little pieces of me drifting into the air and floating away.
Breslow nodded. “It looks that way to us at the moment.”
“Then what happened to this man?” I asked, holding up the copy of the green card.
“That’s another very good question,” said Crowe.
I thought I should rail in defense of my husband, the real Marcus Raine, rant about what a terrible mistake they were making, threaten to sue, do something other than sit there and stare at the wall. But I couldn’t.
“So, Mrs. Raine, any thoughts on who you might have married?”
I had the oddest sensation, sitting in my ruined bedroom faced with two detectives who knew more about my husband than I did. It was as if my train had reached its final destination, except when I stepped out onto the platform, I was in a place I hadn’t intended to visit and couldn’t name, but one that was vaguely familiar just the same.
My phone vibrated in my pocket again. I flipped it open and read the text message there, feeling the bottom drop out of my stomach. I tried to keep my expression neutral but my cheeks warmed.
“Your sister again?” Crowe asked. I couldn’t tell if there was suspicion in his tone. I nodded but couldn’t find my voice, shoved the phone back in my pocket, walked over to the window.
“Mrs. Raine,” said Detective Breslow, “I strongly suggest you check your bank accounts.” Her tone implied that she already knew what I’d find.
SHE LET HIM take her against the heavy porcelain sink in the unisex bathroom. She clung to his wide back in what she knew he thought was passion. Really she was just afraid that their weight was going to pull the sink, cold and painful beneath her buttocks with each deep thrust, from the wall. She felt his passion, his desperation. And even if she didn’t share it necessarily, it felt so good to be wanted like this. Wanted by someone who hadn’t watched her give birth, who didn’t shave while she peed, who hadn’t seen her sick in bed with the flu. With him, she was a mistress, still a mystery, something not quite possessed.
“I love you,” he whispered, his voice tight, his eyes closed in pleasure. “I’m sorry, I do.”
She’d asked him not to say it. She didn’t feel obliged to answer. She found herself watching his face, thinking, No, I don’t love you. And as she succumbed to an earthquake of an orgasm, she buried her face in his shoulder to keep herself from crying out, I don’t love you. I love my husband. Strange as it was to be thinking this as he shuddered and moaned with pleasure. “Oh, God.” He let his weight press against her. She felt his chest heaving and she clung to him.
She was someone else with Ben, not a mother, not a wife, not someone defined by her relationships with other people. She was an artist, an unencumbered heroine in a story that took place in her imagination.
“Are you okay?” he asked, pulling up his pants and glancing at the door they’d locked behind them. She always hated these moments when the pleasure had passed and they hastily pulled on their clothes. The groping and ripping off of garments was always exciting. The aftermath was just cheap. A grimy happy holidays sign hanging on the back of the door just made it worse.
“You can’t do this,” she said lamely. “Turn up at my apartment like that. We both have families.”
“I know,” he said, looking ashamed and miserable. “I know.”
She didn’t feel guilty yet. That would come later when he was gone, when the kids came home, or when she was laughing with her husband. Now she just felt sated, or rather as if something that pained her had been salved.
“I have to go,” she said, moving to him, resting against him.
“What’s going on?” He put a gentle hand on her arm, looked at her with concern. “A family emergency, you said.”
She hated when he did this, acted like their relationship was real, not some asinine mistake they were both making. He always wanted to chat and cuddle, or talk about his feelings like some teenage girl. Didn’t he understand? She just wanted to forget about herself for five minutes. When they first started seeing each other, what thrilled her the most was that her worries about the kids, money, her career, disappeared during these little romps. If the relationship evolved, all those worries would just carry over into this new place. The euphoria, the blessed escape of it would disappear; it would become just another thing to worry about. And that she couldn’t manage.
She told him quickly about Marcus and her sister, tried not to be curt or dismissive. Someone knocked on the restroom door; it was the only one in the back of the small coffee shop. Outside, she heard the clinking of silverware, the mutter of conversation. The aroma of bacon and maple syrup made her remember she’d skipped breakfast.
“I’ll be just a minute,” she called. There was no answer.
“What do you think happened to him?” he asked.
“I don’t know,” she said, pulling her phone from her pocket and glancing at it, looking for messages.
“I’ll see what I can find out,” he offered. “I know the crime-beat reporter pretty well.”
