The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1

by Douglas Kennedy

  “Hannah, you okay?”

  The door opened. He looked at me. The story came out fast. He too couldn’t believe what he was hearing. When I was finished, he said, “Call Lizzie now.”

  I went back to the bedroom, grabbed my cell phone, hit her number, but was connected to her voice mail. So I rang the office. One of her colleagues answered the phone.

  “She’s not in,” he said. “In fact, nobody knows where she is right now. Who’s this?”

  “Her mother.”

  “Well, I don’t want to freak you out, Mrs. Buchan, but we’ve had two calls from the Brookline police this morning. They’re looking for her too.”

  I gave the guy my cell number and asked him to ring me if he heard from her or learned if the police had found her. There was one last possibility: her apartment. I hit the number on my cell phone. It rang out. I hit the off button, turned to Dad, and said, “I’m going to Boston.”

  “I’m coming with you,” he said.

  Twenty minutes later, we were in my car, heading down Route 93. Around the time we crossed the border into New Hampshire, Dan phoned. I gave him the full chain of events—from Lizzie’s telling of the tale to McQueen’s horrifying revelations. Dan always goes very quiet in a crisis. When I finished speaking, he said, “I’m getting into my car now to meet you in Boston.”

  “Good,” I said.

  “Before I leave, I’m going to call the Brookline police, explain that we’re both en route south, and that we want to help them find Lizzie. I’ll also see if they have an update about her whereabouts. Has your dad called his psychiatrist friend—Thornton—the one who’s taken Lizzie on as a patient?”

  “We tried him ten minutes ago. He hasn’t heard from her yet, but he has been briefed about what’s going on, and he has my cell number in case she does call him.”

  “All right, then. I’ll phone you from the road.”

  “Dan, do you think she’d . . . ?”

  “I don’t know.”

  That was also typical Dan. He never tried to sweeten the pill, never tried to pretend that something was right when it was very wrong. But now, what I really needed to hear were lies and reassurances that everything would be all right. Even though I knew that everything would definitely not turn out well.

  Ninety minutes later, when we were around fifty miles from Boston, the cell phone rang. It was Dan. He had spoken to the Brookline police. There was still no word of Lizzie’s whereabouts. They’d checked her apartment. They’d checked her office again. They had someone posted outside McQueen’s house. They had obtained a photograph from her employers and had emailed every local police department around Boston and Cambridge. They were very much on the job.

  “The detective I spoke to said that they were primarily treating this as a missing persons case—that the doctor had come clean to him about their affair and he didn’t want a lot of publicity about him having to get police protection for his family after his ex-lover . . .”

  “That son of a bitch,” I said. “His career is more important than poor Lizzie’s whereabouts.”

  “I also managed to speak to her psychiatrist.”

  “You did?”

  “Well, you did give me his name yesterday. After you phoned me, I called Cambridge Information and got his number. Luck was on my side. He was in. Better yet, he seemed like very good news—and he was naturally very concerned. He did sound one optimistic note. From the few sessions they’d had so far, he didn’t think she’d do something extreme like take her own life . . . that her condition was delusional, but not brimming with the sort of appalling self-loathing or depression that would make her see suicide as the only way out. At the same time, however, his worry was that she might attempt something that was an extreme cry for help.”

  “Like what?”

  “Well, like attempt suicide, in the hope that the man who spurned her would feel so guilty that—”

  “I get the scenario,” I said.

  “The doctor is very hopeful that Lizzie might call him,” Dan added. “Whenever things got too much for her recently, she always picked up the phone and rang him. So . . .”

  “Let’s hope.”

  “Yeah. Hope.”

  I brought Dad up to date on this new—and not particularly encouraging—news. He listened in silence. Then, “I feel a lot of this is my fault.”

  “But why?”

  “Because I should have contacted you straightaway when she started talking to me about the affair. At least we would have been able to exchange notes on her mental state, and maybe . . .”

  “Stop this now.”

  “The thing is, Hannah, I loved the fact that she was confiding in me . . . that she was entrusting me with this big secret.”

  “So you should. You’re her grandfather.”

  “But I should have picked up on the fact that she was starting to come apart . . .”

  “You didn’t sit on your hands. You found her a psychiatrist. You did the right thing.”

  “I didn’t do enough.”

  “Dad . . .”

  “I didn’t do enough.”

  When we got to Boston, we drove directly over to Lizzie’s apartment in the Leather District. Dad looked at the new loft developments, the hip furniture shops, the latte bars, the twentysomethings in suits, and said, “Back in the sixties, urban renewal was about improving poor inner-city neighborhoods for their residents. Now it’s about getting the young professionals with money to buy up the housing stock and raise the real estate values.”

  The concierge at Lizzie’s apartment was on duty. He had last seen Lizzie yesterday morning when she went off to work. Since then . . .

  “You know, the cops showed up with a warrant and asked me to open her place. They looked around, but didn’t turn the place upside down or anything like that. They said it was a missing persons thing, which, I guess, is why they didn’t go gangbusters through the place. They found her car in the basement garage, where she has an allotted space . . . and we’ve got CCTV down there twenty-four-seven, so we’ll be able to see her if she comes back to claim it.”

  “Is there any chance we could go up to her place?” I asked.

  “I’m afraid I can’t be letting anyone in without permission of the owner. And since Ms. Buchan isn’t around . . .”

  “I’m her mother and this is her grandfather . . .”

  “Nice to meet you. And I really wish I could help you, but the rules are the rules . . .”

  “Please let us in, sir,” Dad said. “There might be something there that we’d see that would perhaps indicate where she might have disappeared to . . .”

  “If it was my call, we’d be up there now. But my boss is a toughie—and I’d be out on my keister if he found out I let you look around without the owner’s permission.”

  “We’d just be five, ten minutes, no more,” I said.

  “Really wish I could help, ma’am. Because between you and me, your daughter’s about the only polite, nice person in this building. The rest are yuppie scum.”

  We found a Starbucks nearby. As we drank two cups of milky coffee, Dan rang. He had just arrived in Boston and was heading directly to the police in Brookline. When I told him that we’d been refused entry to Lizzie’s loft, he suggested we call the management company that ran her building to plead our case.

  “Can you also get in touch with her boss at work,” he asked, “and see if we can schedule an appointment to see him tomorrow morning?”

  “We’re going to find her before then.”

  “I’m sure we will,” he said, in such a matter-of-fact, dismissive way that it was clear he didn’t believe it but was saying it for my benefit.

  “Now, I’ve talked to our travel agent in Portland and she’s found us two rooms at this new hotel near North Station called the Onyx. The area’s a little seedy, but . . .”

  “I’m sure it’s fine,” I said, thinking: The few times I’ve ever seen Dan in distress, he’s always managed it by staying bus
y, focused, taking charge. So I let him talk about the good hotel deal, the free parking they were arranging, and how he thought we should fan out across Boston to help in the search for her.

  By nightfall a considerable amount had been accomplished. Dan had had a long interview with a Detective Leary of the Brookline PD who was handling the case—and who impressed Dan with his resolve to crack it quickly. Already, he’d put a tag on all her credit cards and bank accounts—and had had one small breakthrough: she’d withdrawn one hundred dollars yesterday and today from two different ATMs in the Boston area, one in Central Square in Cambridge, the other in Brookline, at a location around five minutes’ walk from the doctor’s house.

  “Leary thinks she could still be stalking him, or clandestinely watching his kids,” Dan said. “Which he’s happy about . . . from an investigative standpoint only . . . because it means that she should turn up soon near his office or his home. And thanks to the ATM withdrawals, we know she’s still in the Boston area.”

  Dan imparted this information in the bar of the Onyx Hotel. It was eight in the evening. We’d just checked in. Dad had already gone up to his room. He was exhausted, and the strain of worry had been so evident on his face that I insisted he get to bed. But my God, how he’d thrown himself into the detective role that afternoon, heading off on his own on the T to Cambridge to talk to Lizzie’s psychiatrist. He had no new insights, though Dad seemed pleased by the doctor’s reassurance that she wasn’t displaying telltale suicidal tendencies, and his confidence that, when she was found, her delusional condition was very treatable, with a high chance of a cure. He’d also called the management company of her building—and after some gentle arm-twisting, he received approval from the head guy there for us to be admitted to her loft the next morning.

  While Dad had been in Cambridge, I’d been in the downtown financial district, speaking to Peter Kirby. He ran the division of the mutual fund where Lizzie worked. He couldn’t have been more than thirty—fit, well polished, highly preppy, full of concern about my daughter’s whereabouts, but also—I sensed—very much wanting to get through this meeting with me as fast as possible, so he could get back to the business of making money.

  Still, in the fifteen minutes we had together, he was genuinely solicitous, telling me that Lizzie was one of the best members of his team—“someone who always gave two hundred percent and was incredibly goal-oriented.”

  “Everybody here,” he said, waving his arm in the direction of the large floor of open-plan offices beyond the plate-glass windows covering his own, “is seriously motivated. You have to be to survive in this milieu. But Lizzie always exceeded everyone else here just by her sheer need to win all the time. It wasn’t enough for her just to close a deal or get a client a seven percent return on investment. She had to try to push it up to nine percent, or she had to close three deals at once. And the hours she put in were phenomenal. The security guys would often report back to me that she’d been in all day Saturday and Sunday two weekends a month. A manager can’t ask for more dedication than that. But, if I can talk openly here . . .”

  “Please,” I said.

  “I always worried that Lizzie was heading for some sort of burnout or meltdown. You just can’t sustain the sort of intensity that she displayed all the time. I kept encouraging her to find other outlets . . . like the cycling club I know she joined, because that’s where she met Dr. McQueen.”

  “You know about him?”

  “The police filled me in on the details. But to be honest with you, I’d heard stuff on the office grapevine about her being involved with a married man. Not that it’s any concern of mine . . . or, for that matter, this company’s . . . unless it becomes public information.”

  “And if that happens?”

  “To be honest with you, Mrs. Buchan, if word gets out in the newspapers that your daughter has gone missing after threatening Dr. McQueen and his family, I think that her position in the mutual fund world will no longer be viable. Which would be tragic, because she’s a great performer.”

  “In other words, you won’t be taking her back.”

  “I didn’t say that, Mrs. Buchan. If she’s found soon—and if, after the appropriate medical intervention, she’s given a clean bill of mental health—I will fight very hard to have her reinstated. But if this entire affair goes public, well, honestly, I think her position with us will be untenable. We are, I think, a very humane company when it comes to our employees . . . especially valued ones like your daughter. But the board is also quite conservative as regards the company’s public image. And given that we’re living in rather conservative times, I would be engaged in an uphill battle with my superiors to keep her on. I’m sorry to sound such a pessimistic note, but I’d rather not pretend that it will be easy to get her reinstated.”

  As I recounted this conversation to Dan over a glass of wine in the Onyx bar, I found myself thinking: Lizzie the great team player . . . Ms. Two Hundred Percent? It was so unlike the young woman who, during college, often mocked the sort of student obsessives who spent eight hours a day studying and were in thrall to the success ethos. And now . . .

  “I never knew she put in such time,” Dan said. “They were obviously very impressed with her.”

  “Stop talking about her in the past tense.”

  “I’m talking about her former employers. You know they’re going to let her go.”

  “That’s no bad thing.”

  “From where you sit. From where Lizzie sits . . .”

  “It helped drive her to where she is right now. She’s always hated the work.”

  “She never mentioned that to me.”

  “That’s because she’s never really talked to you about all this.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Just what I said. She didn’t raise this with you.”

  “Because?”

  “Because she didn’t.”

  “You’re getting at something here, aren’t you?”

  “Come on, Dan . . .”

  “Come on what?”

  “I don’t want a fight over this.”

  “Over what, Hannah? Are you implying that I haven’t been there for my daughter when she’s needed me?”

  I tensed. We hadn’t had one of these child-based arguments in years. And I knew that, on the rare occasions that Dan got mad about something, it was impossible to get him off the subject.

  “Dan, we’re both very tired and very scared . . .” I said.

  “But you still think I was never there for my daughter, and that’s the reason why she’s gone off the deep end . . .”

  “Don’t accuse me of something I haven’t said . . .”

  “You don’t need to say it. It’s evident that it’s what you think.”

  “No, what’s evident is that you are taking your own guilt about your absences during Lizzie’s childhood and turning it into—”

  “There—you said it. My absences. I was off, building up my practice, bringing in the money, giving us the life that—”

  “Dan, why are you going down this road?”

  “And because I wasn’t there, she could never confide in me . . .”

  I put my hand on his. He pulled it away.

  “I don’t need your solace. I need . . .”

  He turned away, biting hard on his lip, his eyes wet with tears.

  “I need Lizzie,” he whispered.

  I touched his shoulder. He flinched.

  “Danny, don’t beat yourself up . . .”

  “That’s easy for you to say. You had the relationship with her.”

  He stood up.

  “I’m going for a walk,” he said.

  “It’s cold out there.”

  “I don’t care.”

  And he grabbed his coat and stormed out the hotel front door.

  I didn’t run after him—because I knew that when Dan got into one of these angry, guilty-conscience phases, he needed to be left alone. But—and this was a big but—I couldn’t
help but be saddened and unnerved by his remorse; his sense that he had let Lizzie down during her childhood by being so often otherwise engaged.

  And yet did he really damage her by being away so much? Lizzie always adored her father, even during her manic adolescent years when I was, in her eyes, the maternal anti-Christ. There were never any major conflicts between them. So why should he now think himself a bad father, and blame himself for Lizzie’s breakdown?

  Because that’s what parents do, I guess. They privately fret that they haven’t gotten it right—that, deep down, they are to blame for, well, everything. You’re so grateful to have children in your life. And yet you feel this undercurrent of ambivalence, this sense that, truth be told, life would be so much less rich . . . but so much easier . . . without them. And this, in turn, begs the question: why do we entangle ourselves in lifelong commitments that also bring such pain?

  I finished my glass of wine. I signed the bill. I went upstairs to our room, undressed, got into bed, and, for around the tenth time that day, rang Lizzie’s cell phone and her apartment. No answer. Having already left five messages, I added another one—giving the number of the Onyx Hotel and telling her to call us at any time, day or night.

  Then I flicked mindlessly through thirty channels of televisual crap. I’m such an infrequent viewer—the news, the occasional old movie or series on HBO—that I’d forgotten just what a wasteland it could be. Eventually I could take no more. I snapped off the television, went into the bathroom, dug out an herbal sleeping pill from the bottle I always travel with, downed it, and returned to bed. I looked absently for a while at a copy of The Boston Globe I’d picked up at reception, until the chamomile fogginess of the pills crept over me and I passed out.

  The next thing I knew, the bedside light was snapped on and Dan was crawling in beside me. I squinted at the clock radio on the bedside table. One-eighteen.

  “You’ve been out all this time?” I asked.

  “Needed the air.”

  “But four hours?”

  “Ended up in a bar over in Back Bay.”

  “You really walked all the way to Back Bay?”

  “I was looking . . .”