The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1

by Douglas Kennedy

He stopped himself, turned away from me.

  “Looking for Lizzie?”

  He nodded his head.

  “Whereabouts?”

  “Around the Common, where there are a lot of homeless. Went to every hotel I could find, asking if a Lizzie Buchan had checked in. Then there were all the bars and restaurants toward the top of Newbury Street. Eventually, when I got up around Symphony Hall, I decided that what I really needed was four or five malt whiskeys . . .”

  I reached over and put my arms around him.

  He pulled away and said, “I really don’t feel like being held right now, okay?”

  He punched up his pillow, put his head into it, and passed out. I sat up in bed for a very long time, looking at my sleeping husband, thinking about how he was sometimes so easy to read and sometimes so damn opaque; and how, after all these years, there were parts of his life, his mind, that were completely closed off to me.

  The wake-up call I’d requested woke us at seven-thirty. Despite his hangover, Dan was the first out of bed. He staggered into the bathroom. When he emerged a few minutes later, accompanied by the steam from the ultrahot water he always showered in, he looked at me with downcast eyes and said one word, “Sorry.”

  “Okay,” I said.

  “I just couldn’t face . . . uh . . . things got a little on top of me and . . . look, it was the wrong way to . . .”

  I held up my hand.

  “Like I said, Dan: it’s okay.”

  He managed a sad smile. “Thanks.”

  When we went downstairs for breakfast, Dad was already there, a New York Times open in front of him, alongside a yellow legal pad filled with his completely illegible writing.

  “Did you sleep as badly as I did?” he asked.

  We both nodded.

  “Well, get some coffee into yourselves. I’ve taken the liberty of drawing up a plan of action for today . . . if, that is, you don’t mind me doing this, Dan.”

  I knew Dan minded, because I also knew that he’d be thinking: She’s my daughter, so I should be in charge. Because when I’m in charge, I feel like I can exercise a little control over stuff that is really beyond my control. But he simply sipped his coffee and said, “I don’t mind at all. What do you want us to do?”

  Dad’s program of action took three days to execute and essentially involved looking into every possible corner of Lizzie’s life. It was comprehensive and very rigorous—my father also attempting to keep his own anxiety under control by playing general and setting out a battle plan to trace his granddaughter. Men really do need to believe they can take command and solve the problem. It allows them to mask their own desperate fear that they are as helpless as everyone else.

  Still, over the next few days, we all ended up finding out enormous amounts about Lizzie. The landlord who finally let us into her apartment told us that, upon learning that one of the concierges had a six-year-old daughter who had leukemia and was undergoing an experimental bone marrow program that wasn’t covered by health insurance, Lizzie wrote him a $2,500 check as a contribution to a fund they’d set up to pay for the treatment. When we got inside her loft, her grandfather was quietly shocked by the lack of books on her shelves.

  “She used to be such a great reader,” Dad said, looking sadly through her thin collection of glossy paperbacks. “What happened?”

  “She started working fifteen-hour days,” I said.

  More surprising was the discovery I made when I opened one of her closets and discovered box after box, shopping bag after shopping bag, of unopened clothes and shoes. There must have been nine pairs of unworn designer jeans, four boxes of different Nike running shoes (all of which still had the brown packing paper stuffed inside), a dozen or so bags from cosmetics and specialty shops like MAC and Kiehl’s filled with unused compacts and lipsticks, and innumerable other shopping bags from places like Banana Republic and Armani Jeans and Guess, Gap, and . . .

  It so distressed me, looking at all this untouched stuff. It spoke so much of her despair. Even Dan was shocked by this back-of-the-closet trove of consumerist paraphernalia.

  “Jesus Christ,” he said under his breath, looking at all those bags.

  Dad said, “Dr. Thornton did mention to me that she talked about being a compulsive shopper . . . someone who constantly had to be buying things, even though she’d never use most of the stuff. It’s the same sort of obsessional disorder that affects gamblers or even drug addicts . . .”

  I said, “And I’m sure he told you that it’s all desperately symptomatic of profound unhappiness and low self-esteem.”

  Dad looked away into that closet full of shiny detritus.

  “Yes, that’s pretty much what he said.”

  I managed to obtain an appointment with the guy at First Boston who handled Lizzie’s financial life. He was a quiet, chubby man in his mid-forties named David Martell—and he made it very clear from the outset that he wouldn’t be able to give me exact facts and figures about what Lizzie had in her accounts and assorted savings plans.

  “I’d be breaching several laws if I did that, Mrs. Buchan. But I understand from the police that she has gone missing, so if I can help in any other way . . .”

  “Without divulging the exact amount in her checking account, would she have enough money to, say, float for a while, or even set up a new life for herself elsewhere?”

  He thought for a moment, then turned to his computer monitor, typed in some numbers, and turned back to me.

  “Put it this way, she could probably last about three or four months if she lived carefully.”

  “That’s all?” I asked, genuinely surprised.

  “Without giving you hard numbers, Mrs. Buchan, the truth is that your daughter was always having money problems.”

  “But how could that be? She earned a huge salary and she got a large bonus every year.”

  “Well, I did discuss this with her on a regular basis—the fact that she was running through money. Even after her mortgage and her car payments, she still had a considerable amount of disposable income per month, but she was always edging toward being overdrawn, and she never saved anything.”

  “Didn’t she have any mutual fund investments or IRAs or anything like that?”

  “She did, but six months ago, when she hit a cash flow problem, she cashed most of them in. There is one IRA left, which would give her the three- or four-month comfort zone you asked about. Otherwise, her sole assets are her apartment and her car.”

  “What the hell did she spend all that money on?”

  Mr. Martell shrugged.

  “I’ve got plenty of clients like your daughter. They have big jobs in the financial sector, they make impressive salaries—and they often have little to show for it in terms of financial assets. Their money goes on eating out, shopping, expensive weekends away, more shopping, personal trainers, health clubs, cosmetic dental work . . . diversionary stuff, if you want my opinion. At least Lizzie invested in property, which means there’s something for her to fall back on.”

  Mr. Martell assured me that if Lizzie tried to liquidate her IRA account, the police would be informed immediately. Just as the cops were also continuing to monitor any ATM withdrawals she was making.

  “I’ve got a daughter who’s just started Boston College and another who’s a junior in high school,” he said. “So I just want to say that I really sympathize with what you’re going through right now. It’s every parent’s worst nightmare.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it is.”

  While I was at the bank, Dad had inveigled his way into Lizzie’s office and managed to speak with three of her colleagues, including a woman named Joan Silverstein, who turned out to be her in-office confidante . . . even though Lizzie had never mentioned her to me before.

  “It seems,” Dad said, “that Lizzie kind of got mixed reviews from her coworkers. She could be very supportive and simultaneously cold and arrogant.”

  “That’s a new one,” I said.

  “It seems th
at a couple of the people who worked directly under her did complain to her boss, a Mr. . . .”

  “Kirby.”

  “That’s it . . . Anyway, they said Lizzie could be extremely demanding and didn’t tolerate mistakes. She fired a young trainee after she messed up a transaction that cost the client around $10,000—money Lizzie then made back for him the next day. And once, when she was let down on a big deal, she actually threw her computer monitor across the room. She was reprimanded about that by Mr. Kirby and paid for a new one herself. She also made a point of giving everyone who witnessed that event a bottle of vintage champagne as an apology. That was a pretty expensive way of saying sorry.”

  “She had this habit of throwing money around,” I said, and explained what I had learned about her finances from Mr. Martell.

  “Well, that doesn’t totally surprise me. All of her colleagues commented on just how generous she was—always picking up the tab, lending cash to people in the office who were short, giving considerable amounts of money to charities, especially this pro-choice group, the Massachusetts Women’s Health Organization.”

  “That’s a fact we’d better keep from her brother and, most especially, her sister-in-law. Any idea why she chose this women’s health group for a contribution?”

  Dad looked me directly in the eye.

  “She had an abortion three months ago.”

  This took a moment to sink in. I was stunned—not by the discovery that Lizzie had terminated a pregnancy, but by the realization that I had never known about it.

  “Who told you this?”

  “Her friend Joan Silverstein.”

  “She just volunteered this information out of the blue?”

  “After Mr. Kirby allowed me to have a little seminar at the office with her colleagues—where I convinced them to speak openly to me. I asked Joan, who seemed to know her best, if she’d like to get a bite with me. A lovely young woman, Joan. Harvard educated, a postgraduate year at the Sorbonne, fluent French, and a delightful sense of humor.”

  I heard myself saying, “Let me guess. You asked her out for a date tonight?”

  Dad winced—and I felt shitty.

  “Sorry,” I said, “that was uncalled for.”

  “Anyway,” he said, “over lunch I asked Joan if there was anything else about Lizzie that might hint at her whereabouts. It took a little friendly persuasion, but then she told me about the abortion. Lizzie had confided in her. It happened around three months ago. McQueen was the father, and he insisted that she terminate the pregnancy, but also swore to her that, when he left his wife and kids for her, they’d have a baby together.”

  I felt ill. Sick with anger that McQueen, the bastard, had promised her a baby, and had also convinced her to terminate her pregnancy. Even then he was probably thinking of ways to jettison her while simultaneously spinning this lie of a future life together to keep her sweet and keep her sleeping with him. No wonder poor Lizzie created this pregnancy fantasy: she’d been deceived into thinking that a baby was in the cards with the wonderful Dr. McQueen.

  “Did this woman tell you how Lizzie dealt with the abortion?”

  “She had it done over lunchtime and asked Joan to go with her for moral support. As soon as she came out of the post-op room, she acted like nothing had happened, and insisted on going back to work . . . though Joan tried to get her to go home. But she returned to work and put in another eight hours. And for the rest of the week, she did these crazy long days. Then, just before they were all about to leave for the weekend, Joan went into the bathroom at work and heard this woman howling her head off in one of the stalls. It was Lizzie. Joan said it took about twenty minutes to calm her down—and then Lizzie begged her not to tell anyone. On Monday, when they all came back to work, Lizzie acted like nothing had happened.

  “There’s something else you should know, Hannah. After lunch, I called the Massachusetts Women’s Health Organization and asked to speak to their public relations office—a woman named Gifford. She didn’t at first believe me when I said I was Lizzie Buchan’s grandfather, and asked me a lot of questions about her because, as she explained to me, the organization was constantly getting threats from pro-life lunatics. But when she figured out that I was who I said I was, she didn’t mention anything about Lizzie’s abortion—patient confidentiality and all that, thank God—but she did say that she had made one of the biggest personal contributions to the organization that they had ever received.”

  “How much exactly?”

  “Twenty thousand dollars.”

  “You’re serious?”

  “Well,” Dad said, “it is supporting a very good cause. Still, it is a rather breathtaking sum of money. They must have helped her enormously.”

  This conversation took place back in the bar of the Onyx. It was a little after six, I was operating on around five hours’ sleep, my nerves felt shredded, and my little girl was still missing. This new revelation felt as if it were going to split my head open. All I wanted to do was disappear and be alone.

  “Dad, I’m going upstairs to lie down for a while.”

  “Are you all right?”

  “No. I’m not all right.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “When Dan shows up, please tell him everything you just told me.”

  “I will.”

  Upstairs, I kicked off my shoes, stretched out on the bed, and stared up at the ceiling. I suppose this was the moment when I should have broken down and cried, weeping for my lost daughter and the desperate sadness that drove her to come apart. But I just felt a deep, terrible numbness—the same sort of numbness that accompanied my mother’s Alzheimer’s diagnosis. But at least my mother had had a full and complicated life by the time the disease began to seize her mind. Whereas Lizzie . . . Lizzie was still so young, still just trying to find her way. Her story was still evolving. That’s what so unnerved me about her disappearance—that she somehow considered this disaster with the doctor to be the end of things. In her delusion, she staked her entire future happiness on an opportunistic shit who took advantage of her breakneck need for love.

  But another thought struck me: just how much I didn’t know about Lizzie. And no, it wasn’t the same thing as realizing that there were hidden compartments in my husband’s brain to which I would never have access. This was my daughter: someone I raised; someone who always—until very recently—told me everything that was going on in her life; someone whom I thought I fundamentally understood. To discover all these other terrible and extraordinary things about her . . . the shopaholism, the chronic money problems, the extreme generosity, the angry outbursts, the demands she made on others—and, most tellingly, on herself—the abortion . . .

  That really shattered me—the fact that she’d kept this huge decision to herself . . . or, worse, that she couldn’t bring herself to tell me about it. And it wasn’t as if I would have gotten judgmental about it. She knows how pro-choice I am, and how I would stand by her in any situation. I could only begin to imagine the lonely grief she suffered afterward, especially when she realized that McQueen was going to renege on his promise of having a child together, a life together.

  Oh God, why had she been so naive? And why did she squander such love on a married man, someone who was so clearly unworthy of her?

  But it was clear to me now that there were several sides to Lizzie which had simply eluded me . . . or, maybe, which I knew were there but never wanted to see.

  I stared up at the ceiling for, well, I lost track of time. Then the room door opened and Dan came in, looking drawn and sapped. He said nothing for a moment, just flopped into the armchair opposite the bed. I sat up.

  “You okay?” he asked.

  “Not really. Did you see Dad downstairs?”

  He nodded.

  “And did he tell you what he found out about Lizzie today?”

  He bit his lip and nodded again. Then, in a near whisper, he said, “I am going to get that shit McQueen.”

  “It�
��s all just so damn unreal. And now it’s my turn to wonder why she couldn’t call me . . . why she was scared of letting me in on this big thing in her life.”

  “Maybe the abortion wasn’t a big thing at first. Maybe it only became so after McQueen dumped her.”

  “But giving twenty grand to that women’s health group? That’s a huge sum of money no matter how much they helped her through the abortion. And all the useless stuff she bought herself . . .”

  “Sad people with a bit of money often shop,” Dan said.

  He covered his face with his hands, took a deep breath, pulled them slowly away, and said, “When I was sitting in Leary’s office at the Brookline Police Department this afternoon, the thought struck me: this nightmare really isn’t happening. I’m in some alternative reality, and any moment now, someone will flick a switch and I’ll be back in my so-called normal life.”

  “When Lizzie turns up, that switch will be pulled.”

  He looked away from me.

  “There are couple of things you need to know,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “The first is that, if Lizzie isn’t found by Sunday, they’re going to start dragging the Charles.”

  All I could say was, “So soon?”

  “Leary says it’s normal procedure in a missing persons case. The second thing is that they are now treating McQueen as a suspect in her disappearance.”

  I felt as if I had been slapped hard across the face.

  “They think he harmed her . . . killed her?” I asked, my voice shrill.

  “They’re not saying that. And they still have good reason to believe that she’s gone missing through her own volition. But they can’t rule out the possibility that McQueen was so worried about being exposed by her that maybe—”

  He broke off, biting hard on his lip.

  “As Leary told me, it’s not exactly a new scenario: the married man silencing his mistress when she starts to threaten his family. But what’s worrying them is the fact that they spoke to the guy who worked at the Seven-Eleven on Causeway Street near North Station—that’s where the first ATM withdrawal was made—and though he can’t completely remember, he’s pretty damn sure that he didn’t see a woman come in and use their ATM at the hour when the bank registered a withdrawal from her account.”