Lost

by Joy Fielding

  “Can we go in now?” Cindy interrupted, knowing that if they waited any longer, if she had to listen to any more malignant words like decomposition and discoloration, or even to formerly benign words like dental records and hairbrush, she would go mad.

  Mark Evert’s hand hesitated on the doorknob. “You’re sure you’re ready?”

  Cindy marveled at the question. How could anyone ever be ready for something like this? “I’m ready,” she said, feeling Tom’s fingers digging into her own as the door opened, and they stepped into the morgue.

  It was like a huge operating room. Cindy’s eyes bounced from the cream-colored tiles on the walls to the darker tiles at her feet. In the center of the room, and running its entire width was a big, stainless steel refrigerator at least ten feet high, containing three rows of compartments. There must be room for a hundred bodies in there, Cindy thought with a shudder, wondering how the attendants removed those bodies from the lockers without straining their backs, becoming only slowly aware of the narrow table directly in front of her, of the white vinyl body bag stretched out across its smooth surface.

  “This is Dr. Jong, the pathologist,” Mark Evert said of the disconcertingly young-looking man doing his best to look invisible, the doctor responding with an almost imperceptible nod of his head.

  He’s here to cut her up, Cindy realized, a sudden, loud buzzing filling her ears, as if a thousand bees were trapped there.

  “Remember,” Mark Evert was saying, “you have to be one hundred percent sure.”

  Cindy turned to Tom. “Do you remember when Julia was a little girl, and she was showing off on that new bicycle you bought her, and she fell off and broke both her arms?”

  “I remember,” Tom said, clutching tightly to her hands.

  “And I rushed her to the hospital, and of course, we had to wait about four hours till somebody saw us, and she kept saying, ‘Why doesn’t God like me, Mommy? Why doesn’t He like me?’ And I told her, ‘Don’t be silly. Of course God likes you. He loves you.’ But she was adamant. ‘No, He doesn’t love me, or He wouldn’t have broken my arms.’ And we laughed about that later. Do you remember how we laughed about that later?”

  “I remember,” Tom said again.

  “And then the poor thing couldn’t feed herself or go to the bathroom with both her arms in casts.”

  “It didn’t take her long to get the knack.”

  “And she was embarrassed to go to school.”

  “The teachers probably thought she was an abused child.”

  “And then you got that rock ‘n’ roll band you represented—who were they again?”

  “Rush.”

  “Yeah, Rush. I remember. Such nice guys. They all signed her casts. Then she couldn’t wait to get to school to show everybody. And when it came time to take the casts off, she cried and carried on.”

  “We had to keep those damn, smelly things for years.”

  “I remember that just after the doctor removed them, Julia fainted, and the doctor, who was standing on the other side of the room, came flying back and caught her before she fell off the table. She might have cracked her head open on the floor. And there I was, standing right beside her, and I didn’t realize what was happening.”

  “Cindy,” Tom said softly, “don’t do this.”

  “If I’d watched her more closely, she would never have fallen off her bicycle.”

  “Kids fall off their bicycles every day.”

  “If I’d paid closer attention.…”

  “Mrs. Carver,” the morgue attendant said gently. “Do you think you’re ready now?”

  “Do you think she had any idea how much I love her?” Cindy asked her former husband, tears filling her eyes and spilling down her cheeks.

  “She knows,” Tom said.

  “I yelled at her. The morning of her audition. I yelled at her about the dog, I yelled at her for banging on the bathroom door, I insisted she come to the bridal fitting that afternoon when I knew she didn’t want to come.”

  “This didn’t happen because you yelled at her.”

  “What if she was kidnapped on her way to the fitting? What if whoever did this to her saw her as she was getting on the subway and followed her?”

  “Cindy.…”

  “I should have been paying more attention.”

  “You’re a great mother, Cindy,” Tom told her.

  “She must have been so scared.”

  “Mrs. Carver,” Detective Bartolli ventured, then stopped.

  Cindy confronted the young-looking pathologist. “How long does it take to strangle someone?”

  “Cindy.…”

  “Please, Dr. Jong. Tell me how long it takes to strangle someone?”

  “Approximately two minutes,” the doctor answered.

  “Two minutes,” Cindy repeated. “Such a long time.” The buzzing in her ears grew louder.

  “We’ll get through this,” she thought she heard Tom say.

  Words jumped out at her only to retreat.

  “Are … ready … Mrs …?”

  Cindy noticed the police shield on the front of the body bag as a man’s hand reached for the zipper, the sound of the zipper cutting through the buzzing in her ears, like a chainsaw through a chunk of wood, one sound magnifying the other, until Cindy felt her head about to burst.

  Hands parted the zipper. A head emerged, as if from the womb. Cindy saw the straight blond hair plastered against the ghostly white skin, tried not to absorb the unsightly blotches of purple, blue, and red that stained the colorless cheeks like paint on canvas.

  Oh God, she thought, recognizing the once-lovely face.

  And then the room filled with the sound of angry bees, and Cindy fell unconscious to the floor.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  “ARE you all right?” Tom was asking.

  Cindy opened her eyes, lifted her head from the soft beige-and-ivory-print silk of the sofa, stared at the man looming over her. “I don’t know.”

  “Maybe this will help.” He pushed a tall glass of something cold into her hands.

  “What is it?”

  “Vodka and cranberry juice.”

  Cindy pushed herself into a sitting position, took a long sip. “It’s good.”

  Tom sank down beside her. He stretched his long legs across the wood-and-glass coffee table in front of him, laid his head back against one of the pillows. “That was quite the ordeal.” He leaned sideways toward her, clicked his glass against hers. “To better days.” He promptly downed half his glass in a single gulp.

  “Better days,” Cindy agreed, taking another sip of her drink, the presence of the vodka both flattening and emphasizing the tartness of the cranberries. She looked around the large, expensively appointed room, with its muted furniture and bright needlepoint rugs, its bold splashes of modern art against pale ecru walls, its south wall of floor-to-ceiling windows providing a magnificent view of Lake Ontario. “This is some place you’ve got here.”

  “You’ve seen it before, haven’t you?”

  “First time,” she reminded him. “It’s beautiful. I didn’t realize the Cookie had such good taste.”

  “The Cookie?” Tom looked genuinely perplexed.

  Cindy turned her head to hide an unexpected blush. “Sorry. Fiona.”

  A slow smile crept across Tom’s handsome face. “You call my wife ‘the Cookie’?”

  “Term of endearment.” Cindy took another sip of her drink. “What am I doing here?”

  “You fainted. Remember?”

  “Yes. I seem to be doing that a lot lately. But then I woke up.”

  “And said you couldn’t face going home, that your mother and sister were driving you nuts.”

  “They mean well.”

  “Yes,” he said cryptically. “I remember.”

  “So you brought me to your condominium,” Cindy stated, choosing not to explore his last remark, marveling at everything that had transpired in the last hour. “Where’s the … Fiona?” she asked, listeni
ng for the click of the woman’s high-heeled shoes on the marble floors.

  “Muskoka.”

  “She’s at the cottage?”

  “We decided it was probably a good idea for her to stay up there this week, what with everything that’s going on, and Heather being here.”

  Cindy glanced toward the long hall that ran the length of the huge apartment. “Is Heather at school?”

  “I think she said she has classes till six.”

  Cindy checked her watch. It was barely four.

  Tom brought his feet to the floor, leaned forward, rested his elbows on his knees. “She’s planning to go back home this weekend.”

  Cindy nodded gratefully. “And Julia?” she asked, speaking the name that had gone unvoiced since that awful moment in the morgue when the attendant had unzipped the white vinyl bag.

  It’s not her, she heard Tom whisper. It’s not Julia.

  “We wait,” he said now. “What else can we do?”

  Cindy jumped to her feet, her drink sloshing around in her glass, spilling onto her hand. “I feel so guilty,” she said, wiping the back of her hand on her jeans.

  “Guilty? Why on earth would you feel guilty?”

  “Because when I saw that poor girl’s face and realized it wasn’t Julia, I was so relieved, so grateful, so happy.”

  “Of course you’d feel that way.”

  “I think it’s Sally Hanson,” Cindy said.

  “Who?”

  “The girl who disappeared the week after Julia. Her poor parents.…”

  “At least they’ll know.” Tom swallowed the last of his drink, then deposited his glass on the coffee table with an authority that was missing from his voice.

  Cindy nodded. Would it be better to know? she wondered.

  “At least there wasn’t any blood,” Tom said, his eyes returning to the morgue, still clearly haunted by what he’d seen.

  “As we were leaving, I heard the dispatcher talking to Detective Gill about some couple who were killed in a car accident this morning,” Cindy said, remembering. “He said the car exploded, and the people were badly burned. He called them ‘crispy critters.’ ” Cindy stared at her former husband in disbelief. “Did he really say that or did I just imagine it?”

  Tom shook his head. “I heard the same thing.”

  “I can’t believe they talk that way.”

  “I guess you’d have to develop a pretty thick skin in order to survive in that kind of environment.”

  “Still …” Cindy shuddered. “Crispy critters?”

  “Think they’re anything like Krispy Kremes?” Tom asked.

  A bubble of laughter suddenly burst inside Cindy’s throat, then tumbled into the air, like a child tossed from a toboggan. Immediately, Tom’s laughter somersaulted after hers, the disparate sounds becoming hopelessly enmeshed, impossible to separate one from the other. “I can’t believe we’re laughing,” Cindy said, laughing harder.

  “I’ll have an order of Crispy Critters, please,” Tom said.

  “Hold the mayo,” Cindy embellished.

  “Oh, that hurts,” Tom said, doubling over from the waist, holding his sides.

  “What’s wrong with us?”

  “We could use another drink.” Tom took Cindy’s almost empty glass from her outstretched hand, retrieved his own glass from the coffee table, and marched out of the room.

  Cindy followed after him, as if afraid to be left alone, even for an instant. She ran her hand along the dark oak finish of the long dining room table as she walked purposefully toward the kitchen, stopping to stare at the impressive wine cabinet built into the wall between the two rooms, each bottle of wine neatly labeled behind the thick layer of glass, the bottles secured in metal berths, stacked one on top of the other. Like bodies in a morgue, Cindy thought, fresh giggles gathering in her throat. “That’s quite a collection,” she said, coming into the gleaming marble-and-tile kitchen, watching as Tom refilled their glasses. “How many bodies are there?”

  “What?”

  “Bottles,” she corrected. “I meant to say bottles.”

  Tom smiled. “There’s room for four hundred.”

  “You always wanted a wine cellar.”

  “I always wanted a wine cellar,” he agreed.

  It was Cindy’s turn to smile. “So, what shall we toast this time?”

  “How about no more visits to the morgue?” Tom offered.

  “Sounds good to me.” Cindy took a long swallow. This time the vodka overwhelmed the subtle hint of cranberries. She noticed that a pleasant tingle was beginning to settle around the back of her neck. Any minute, her head would separate from the rest of her body and float into the air, like a helium-filled balloon. “So, how many bodies do you think that thing at the morgue holds?”

  Tom laughed, once again finishing half his drink in a single swallow. “You asked that question on the drive home.”

  “I did? What was the answer?”

  “Detective Bartolli said ninety. Apparently, it’s at three quarters of its capacity right now, and most bodies are in and out within forty-eight hours.”

  “And they use a forklift to take the bodies from the top row. I remember now.”

  “You were very concerned about their backs.”

  Cindy laughed, shook her head, grabbed the side of the island in the middle of the room to steady herself.

  “You all right?”

  “Feeling better every minute.” Cindy took another swallow. “So, are you going to show me around this dump?”

  “My pleasure.” Tom made a sweeping gesture with his hands. “This is the kitchen.”

  “We can skip the kitchen.”

  “Still don’t like to cook?”

  “Hate it.”

  “Which is a real shame, because if memory serves me correctly, you were a very good cook.”

  “Really? How would you know? You were never home. What’s down this way?” she asked before he could protest. She let go of the island, skipped from the kitchen, turned left at the hall.

  “This is the library,” Tom said of the wood-paneled room they came to first. Except for the southern expanse of window overlooking the waterfront, the room was essentially wallpapered with hardcover books.

  “Very impressive.”

  “The view helps.”

  “And I didn’t even realize the Cookie could read.”

  “Fiona is a very prolific reader,” Tom said curtly, although there was laughter in his eyes.

  “A woman of many talents.”

  “Yes, indeed.” Tom led Cindy into the next room, its east wall completely taken up by an enormous flat-screen TV. “This is the media room.”

  “Still like leather, I see.” Cindy gave the dark red leather sofa a seductive squeeze. “Where are the bedrooms?”

  “Down this way.” Tom led her back down the hall, past the marble powder room to the right of the marble entrance. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “I’m fine.” Cindy followed after him. Like a puppy at his heels, she thought, recognizing she was way beyond fine and teetering into plastered. It didn’t take much, she thought. A dead body, a couple of vodkas—pretty soon she was sailing.

  “This is the guest room.”

  Cindy peeked inside the green-and-white bedroom, saw a pair of Heather’s jeans draped over a small, flowered-print chair, several of her blouses strewn across the white bedspread covering the queen-size bed. “It’s lovely.”

  “It has its own bathroom, of course.”

  “Just like the comfort room.” Cindy giggled. “Amazing how they think of everything, isn’t it?”

  “Amazing,” Tom agreed.

  “You think Granger, McAllister designed it?”

  “Who’s Granger, McAllister?”

  “Our neighbors, the Sellicks. My neighbors,” she corrected, leaning against a wall to keep from lying down on the floor. “He’s an architect with Granger, McAllister.”

  “You think he designed the morgue?” Tom asked
, one word sliding into the next as he directed her toward the master bedroom suite.

  “No.” Cindy giggled. “You’re so silly.”

  “You’re so drunk.”

  “I certainly hope so.” Cindy kicked off her shoes, burying her toes in the plush white carpeting. “Wow,” she said, her eyes sweeping across the enormous room, taking in the full-length sofa and chairs that were grouped in front of the southern wall of windows, the ornate credenza that sat against the wall opposite the bed, the bed itself a king-size extravaganza complete with tall pillars swathed in yards of cream-colored satin. “Looks like something out of the Arabian Nights. Spend much time in it?” she asked pointedly.

  “Cindy, Cindy,” Tom said, coming up behind her, his hands falling heavily on her shoulders, his slender hips pressing into her backside. “What am I going to do with you?”

  Cindy felt his breath on the back of her neck, recognized the once-familiar tingle creeping between her legs. “What’s in here?” she asked, extricating herself from his grasp and diving toward a small area off the main bedroom. “Wow. Do you actually use all this equipment?”

  Tom moved easily between the treadmill, the StairMaster, and the stationary bicycle. There was also a large, red, exercise ball in one corner, and an impressive selection of free weights stacked against one wall. A medium-sized TV sat on a high shelf across from the treadmill. “I work out most days for about an hour. What about you?”

  “I do yoga,” Cindy told him, recalling her one visit to The Yoga Studio.

  “Really? I wouldn’t have pegged you for the yoga type.”

  “Why is that?”

  “I wouldn’t have thought you had the patience.” He laughed. “I can just see you lying there, thinking, Can we please speed this up a bit?” He shook his head. “What do I know? Anyway, it obviously agrees with you.”

  “You told me before that I look like crap.”

  “I did? When?”

  “In your office.”

  “Ah, yes. But that was before our little trip to the morgue.”

  “You’re saying I look great in comparison to that girl on the table?”

  “I’m saying you look great. Period.”

  “So you lied before, when you said I looked like crap.”