by Lisa Unger
Linda did this all the time, I knew. She checked the Amex bill daily, since they used it like cash, tracked all their expenses that way.
“Poor Erik can’t even buy a cup of coffee at Starbucks without my knowing about it,” she joked. The joke was on her, though, wasn’t it? She was so busy looking at the little things that the big ones completely eluded her. Not that I was one to judge.
I hadn’t looked at my credit-card statements in months, charged what I wanted, took out cash from the accounts I was told to and never once thought about what I was spending. I’d only checked a couple of months ago because my card had been declined.
“You’re using an expired card, Isabel,” said Marcus when I’d called him. Funny how I’d not thought to contact Amex or my accountant. “I left the new one on the kitchen counter about three weeks ago.”
I sifted through a pile of mail and found it with a little note: “Tear up your old card and use this one. Love you, M.”
Still I’d been sufficiently annoyed to think I should start taking more interest in our finances. But I’d quickly lost interest after a couple of days of checking things out.
At Trevor’s desk I found myself scanning Marc’s charges, his small-business card sharing an interface with our personal cards.
I sifted through a few months of charges before I started to see a pattern emerge. On or around the fifteenth of every month, there was a large charge on Marc’s business card, nearly two thousand dollars spent at a vendor listed on the statement as Services Unlimited, Inc. It really could have been any kind of legitimate business service, cleaning or document shredding or some kind of software licensing maybe. But it was the only thing that I could see that brought up any questions—even his charges on our personal card at Cornucopia (my favorite florist), dinner at the Mandarin Oriental, an obscene sum at La Perla, all coincided with gifts and evenings out that I remembered well.
I searched the Internet for Services Unlimited and found a Web site offering temporary “reception services.” Uniquely beautiful women in scanty business attire leaned over provocatively to take dictation or reach for files, listened attentively with pens in their mouths at a board meeting. I would have laughed under other circumstances at the raunchy silliness of it, but instead my insides clenched as I scrolled through page after page of leggy, pouty girls offering their “business skills.” Services Unlimited was an escort service, legal, ostensibly not offering sex, just arm candy. They took credit cards like any legitimate business. I tried to imagine Marcus with the type of woman I saw on page after page; I just couldn’t. I tried to imagine him paying for sex. He was too arrogant; it didn’t seem possible. But what did I know about Marcus? About anything? I’d only in the last few hours learned his real name.
I grabbed a worn Transformers notebook and a purple-inked pen from the shelf above Trevor’s computer. I was about to write down the number emblazoned across the top of the screen, a 718 exchange, meaning one of the outer boroughs, when I saw her, the woman from Marcus’s office. She was listed simply as “S.” Her description read: Six feet of pure stamina and efficiency.
I unconsciously lifted a finger to the cut on my head and startled myself with the pain—of the physical wound and the memory of the text message. I can still feel you inside me.
I tried to force the pieces together—the text message, the woman who’d attacked me carrying a gun, impersonating an FBI agent, now vamping on this Web site, the monthly charge on my husband’s credit card. This was beyond my experience, beyond my ability to weave a narrative from disconnected facts. I was still staring at her, all kinds of dark imaginings parading through my thoughts, when my phone started ringing. I checked the screen. Jack calling. My agent.
“Hey,” he said when I picked up. “Good news. A nice check arrived. On signing from the UK sale.”
She seemed to be challenging me, standing with her legs spread apart, clutching a phone, lips parted. I wanted to leap through the screen and strangle her, all my rage at the situation directed at her. Who are you? Who are you to my husband?
“Iz?”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“What’s wrong?”
“Nothing. I’m fine.” When would all this hit the news? I wondered. Soon, I would think. Authors are rarely celebrities, but something like this could make me one. It would be just the kind of hook the media needed to sell the story: BESTSELLING AUTHOR’S HUSBAND TURNED VILLIAN—TRUTH STRANGER THAN FICTION.
“I need that money, Jack.”
“Okay,” he said, drawing out the word. “I’ll wire it tomorrow.”
“No. I need it today. In cash.”
There was a pause where I heard him tapping on his keyboard—multitasking, which I hated. Then: “Very funny.”
“Jack, pay attention,” I said. “I’m not kidding.”
Another pause, but the tapping stopped abruptly. “What’s going on?”
Jack and I had been friends since NYU. We met in a creative writing class. But he never had the patience—or the talent—for the actual writing, he realized. He just wanted the sale. After graduation he went straight to work at a literary agency, where a few years later he represented and sold my first novel. Eventually he started his own agency. We were allies, friends, and colleagues.
And once, just weeks before I met Marcus, we’d traveled together to a conference, where we’d gotten loaded at a local bar and wound up sleeping together. It might have always been there, this attraction, just beneath the surface, but the friendship and business relationship were so good that we’d just ignored the other, more volatile, aspect of our affection. I talked to him almost as often as I did my sister or my husband, but neither of us had ever again addressed the night we spent together. In the wee hours after our lovemaking, I’d dressed hastily and left his hotel room while he slumbered heavily. I wasn’t even certain if he remembered what happened that night.
Now I told him everything about the recent events of my life. Everything beginning with the night Marc didn’t return home, ending with the Web site open in front of me.
“Holy Christ,” he whispered into the phone when I was done. “Isabel, is this for real?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Unfortunately, it is.”
“You’re hurt. Are you okay? Really okay?”
“I think so. How do I know? How is one supposed to handle a situation like this?”
“I think you’re not, Iz. I think you’re supposed to get into a bed somewhere and let the professionals handle it. Cops, lawyers—that’s what these people do.”
If we were in the room together, he’d put a hand on my shoulder or usher me to a chair somewhere. I imagined him running a big hand through his thick, dark hair. I wished I was looking into the warmth of his dark eyes, noticing he needed a shave, feeling relaxed and calmed by his presence. Instead I stared at the harsh beauty of the woman still on my screen and felt something akin to indigestion, some acidic brew of anger and fear.
“I can’t do that. I’ve already given too much power away. He stole from me. He hurt my family. He’s not going to stroll off, with the police always just behind chasing warrants and following leads. No.”
Jack issued the exasperated sigh that I’ve heard often in our relationship, a kind of tired blowing out of his lips. He regarded me as generally pig-headed and stubborn and had said so many times—during contract negotiations, with editorial matters, regarding women he’d dated whom I found wanting, or where to have lunch.
“So now what?” His voice had raised an octave in concern. “You’re on the run from the police? This is not good. We need to rethink this.”
“I’m not ‘on the run.’ I didn’t do anything. I’m just trying to figure out what’s happened here, to fix all the damage. So, are you going to give me my money or what?”
“Am I aiding and abetting you right now?”
“I didn’t do anything,” I repeated.
“But if asked by the police, I’m supposed to say you haven’t contact
ed me and I don’t know where you are?”
“I haven’t. You called me,” I said. “And you don’t know where I am.”
There was silence on the line. “Okay. I’ll get you some cash.”
“I’ll find you later.” I was about to end the call but I heard his voice and put the phone back to my ear.
“I wish I could say I was surprised that this guy turned out to be a disaster,” he was saying. “I never liked him.”
“This guy? He’s my husband of five years.”
“I know. I never liked him,” he said, sounding grave. “Seriously.”
“You never said so.”
“You never asked.”
“Still.”
“I was trying to be supportive. I could see that… you loved him.” There was a strange pitch to his voice, something I hadn’t heard before. And in that moment I realized: He did remember.
“Jack.”
“Just please be careful.”
AFTER I’D FINISHED with Jack, I wrote down the number on the screen. But rather than dialing, I searched the online reverse directory and got an address in Queens. I wrote that down as well. It took all the strength I had to stop looking at my dirty-hot assailant. But I felt a clock ticking, knowing that the longer I was here, the more likely whoever might be looking for me—police or otherwise—would catch up.
I logged on to my Web site e-mail account and searched the trash folder, which I’d never emptied. The second of the two e-mails I’d received was still there; the first one was gone. I knew that the trash folder automatically purged after a week. I stared at the message, the cursor bar blinking blue over it. The name in the “from” field was Camilla Novak. The subject line read: Your husband…
The text in the body read:
Your husband is a liar and a murderer. The past is about to catch up with him. And you need to save yourself. You’re in great danger. Please call me.
She ended with her name and a phone number.
Even reading it now, I can see why I deleted it. It was so overwrought, so silly. A week ago, I would have imagined it spam, on par with all those e-mails announcing that I’d won some European lottery, or that someone who’d had a crush on me in high school was looking for me. My box was always full of this kind of garbage. They were lures, looking for the most gullible, loneliest, most paranoid fish in the pond. I deleted mercilessly. Too bad I didn’t have such good judgment in the real world.
I hesitated just a moment and then dialed the number on the screen from my cell phone. It rang so long, I didn’t think anyone would pick up. Then there was a very sultry female voice on the line.
“Hello?”
I found I wasn’t sure what I wanted to say. I hesitated, almost hung up.
“Hello?” she said again.
Finally, I found my voice: “It’s Isabel Raine.”
There was only silence on the line where I heard her breathing.
“You wrote to me about my husband,” I went on. “You said he was a murderer and a liar. That I was in danger.” I sounded amazingly cool and distant, my voice not betraying the adrenaline pulsing through my veins.
Still silence. Then: “I made a mistake. I lied. I’m sorry.”
“No. Don’t. You need to tell me the truth.”
“It’s too late. It’s too late.” I heard a buzzer ring on her end. “I have to go. Don’t call again.”
She hung up, and I immediately called her back. My call went straight to voice mail.
“I know about your boyfriend, about the real Marcus Raine. What happened to him? You have to help me.” But I was talking to air.
I quickly found a local listing for Camilla Novak online, wrote down the address and phone number, hoping it was the right person. The listing was in SoHo, not too far from where I was now. Then I Googled: “marcus raine missing nyc.” I wanted more details. I needed to arm myself with information before I raced into the fray.
A list of matches filled the screen and I scrolled through old newspaper articles, which didn’t offer any new information beyond what I’d already learned from Detective Crowe. The rest were inaccurate links: Another Marcus Raine was looking for a girlfriend on a dating site, someone named Marcus who lived on Raine Street was selling a mattress, an old man left his dog Marcus out in the rain (misspelled raine) and wrote a ridiculous poem about it.
I was about to move on when a listing toward the bottom of the page caught my eye: What happened to Marcus Raine? I clicked on the link and it brought me to a site called forgottennycrimes.com.
“On television, the haunted cop works the case until he retires—and even then he can’t let it go. But in the real world, people disappear and no one ever finds out what happened to them,” some copy on the makeshift page read. “Someone goes out for groceries and never comes home, is never heard from again. Everyone moves on except for those of us who are left behind, haunted by loss, anger, and unanswered questions.”
Grainy images faded in and then faded out on the screen—school portraits, mug shots, vacation shots, candid and posed images.
I clicked on Marcus Raine’s name and saw the same image Crowe had shown me, except that the girlfriend had been cropped out. The blurb there, about how Raine was living the American dream when he disappeared, how he’d been raised by his aunt in communist Czechoslovakia, how his parents died, how he came to the U.S. and was educated, got rich, was my husband’s story exactly.
Camilla Novak, another émigré from the Czech Republic, thought he was acting oddly in the weeks before his death. He seemed paranoid, installing several new locks on the door, refusing to answer his phone unless she called him by coded ring, phoning once, hanging up, and calling again. “He believed he was being watched. But he wouldn’t say by whom or why. I was worried; mental illness ran in his family,” Novak said. “But I never thought he was really in danger.”
There was a phone number on the site, too. If you have any information, call 1-21-COLD-CASE.
On a whim, I entered the name Kristof Ragan into the search engine. But nothing useful appeared, just lists of names for schools and corporations that included “Kristof” or “Ragan.” I kept looking through page after page on the screen, just hoping, becoming more desperate with each bad link. Finally, I reached the end. And that’s when I lost it for the first time.
In my nephew’s bedroom, surrounded by Star Wars and Skater Boy paraphernalia, stuffed animals and sports posters—walls, ceilings covered with it all—bunk beds the size of apartments I’d had, I put my head on his desk and wept, feeling all my rage, confusion, and grief pour out of me in one mighty rush. I could have drowned in it. Two days ago, I would have turned to my imperfect husband for his intellect and calm in such a storm. I would have reached for him and he would have lifted me from the chaos of my emotions.
“Isabel, relax,” he’d say. “Clear your head.”
And I’d feel that fog—the one that descends over me in time of stress or high emotion, the one that inhibits logical thought—I’d feel it start to lift.
“There is no problem that doesn’t have a solution. There’s always a way,” he’d tell me. And I’d listen, know he was right.
I felt his loss so profoundly that I almost just crawled into Trevor’s bed and pulled the covers over my head. My friend, my husband, my lover was a liar at least, quite possibly a criminal as well. But still the thought of being without him nearly crippled me. For all the fractures in our marriage, all the things that caused me pain, I truly loved him, had the most basic kind of faith in him, even if I’d never really trusted him again after his affair.
For some reason, I found myself thinking back to my conversation with Detective Crowe. And love forgives? he’d asked bitterly. Love accepts, moves forward, I’d answered him. But maybe, in my case, love accepts too much, wants to live so badly that it creates what it needs to survive.
Next to the computer keyboard my cell phone vibrated, started shimmying along the smooth white surface of the desk. I
looked at the little screen. Erik calling. I hesitated, then answered it but didn’t say anything.
“Don’t do this, Iz,” he said. “You don’t have to do this. Just come back and we’ll work it out together.”
I didn’t say anything.
“Or at least go to the lawyer’s office. You know where he is, right? John Brace and Son, on Park Avenue. He’ll know what to do. That detective said if we can’t get you to come back, he’s going to consider you a person of interest in all of this. A suspect, Iz. Let’s not have this get any worse than it already is.”
I pressed the End button on my phone and set it back down. It started buzzing again a second later. Linda calling. I let it shimmy itself off the desk and fall to the floor. Eventually it stopped ringing.
As I got up and walked away from it, it started buzzing again. That little phone, the fat silver weight of it, smooth and warm like a worry stone, had always been a source of comfort to me. Seemed like it was always in my hand, all the people in my life just one push button away. All those voices—my sister, my mother, my husband—at least as loud as my own, often louder. I left them all there calling after me.
I took an old coat from my sister’s closet and I was about to leave when I had a thought. I ran to the room Erik used as an office and went into their file cabinet, which I knew they left unlocked. It was easy to find their passports—and mine among them. Linda and I had traveled with the kids last summer, an impromptu trip to Mexico. In the melee of traveling with two kids, our passports got confused. I had Linda’s at my apartment, or did. She had mine. I grabbed it with a wash of relief and euphoria. I thought that sometimes fate smiled on you, even when she had been slapping you around in every other way like the abusive, narcissistic bitch she is.
*
GRADY CROWE HATED hospitals—not that anyone liked them especially. But he didn’t dislike them for the same reasons as other people. He hadn’t watched anyone die in a hospital; he didn’t feel uncomfortable around sick people. It didn’t remind him of his own mortality.
