Forgotten: A Novel

by Catherine McKenzie

  My punishment for all this easy sleep is that I once again wake up early, early, early, with my brain whizzing a million miles a minute.

  I slip into my bathrobe and go to the kitchen. I rinse out the coffeepot, start a fresh one brewing, and dive into the Mutual Assurance file. By the time I’m surrounded by coffee smells, I’m deep into it, trying to make a trail out of the scattered crumbs of information.

  Two hours later I’m no further ahead, but I do have a splitting headache for my troubles.

  I rest my head in the palm of my hand, rubbing my eyes with my fingers. I feel sick to my stomach, like I had too much to drink last night, though I hardly drank a drop.

  Can’t anything in my life be simple and straightforward? And wasn’t I supposed to be getting a turning point in here somewhere? I must be in the third act of this farce by now, right? Which means there’s just one twist left, and I can have my happy ending.

  Better get on that, then.

  When I get to the office, I find Jenny surrounded by several of the other secretaries. The object of their collective cooing delight is a simple vase of multicolored tulips.

  “What’s all this?”

  Jenny’s friends shoot me guilty looks and scurry back to their cubicles.

  “They’re for you!” Jenny says excitedly.

  “Oh . . . um, well, I’ll take them to my office.”

  I hold out my hands. She lifts the vase toward me. I catch a whiff of their subtle scent, the soft caress of spring.

  “I think they’re from him!” She raises her eyebrows suggestively.

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Because he delivered them himself.”

  “What? Dominic was here?”

  “Does Dominic have dark hair, green eyes, and a really cute butt?”

  “Um, maybe.”

  “I told him he could wait for you, but he just wanted to leave the flowers and go.”

  “Did he say anything else?”

  “No, but he left a card, see?” She points to the flowers. There’s a small white card tucked into the large, flat leaves. “What do you think it says?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Did you guys get in a fight or something?”

  “Or something.”

  I close the door to my office and hit the switch to turn the clear glass opaque. I sit down on the chaise longue and place the flowers gently on the coffee table. I pluck the card from its perch. My name is written in the same block letters as Dominic’s postcoital note. I fight off a flash of the feel of his lips as he kissed the inside of my thigh and open it.

  I’M SORRY, it says. I’M SO SORRY. FORGIVE ME?

  Without stopping to think, I dig my phone out of my purse and dial.

  “This is Dominic. Leave a message.”

  “Hey, Dominic, it’s me. Emma. I got your flowers. They’re beautiful. Thank you. And I wanted to say . . . you don’t have to keep staying somewhere else. You can come . . . home. If you want.” My voice catches in my throat. “I—”

  Beep!

  Goddamnit.

  Well, maybe I said enough. I hope so, anyway.

  I sit there for a while, waiting for the phone to ring, waiting, wishing, for Dominic to call me back. But wishing someone would call me hasn’t worked before, and it doesn’t work now. Of course it doesn’t.

  When I’ve arranged my flowers on the windowsill and composed myself, I go to the boardroom to check on the Initial Brigade.

  One look inside convinces me that leaving them with instructions to use whatever resources they needed to evaluate the videotapes quickly was a bad idea.

  The blinds are pulled down and someone’s taped the edges so no light creeps in. At the front of the room are three flat-screen TVs on metal rolling stands, the kind I last saw a member of the AV club pushing into health class. The guys are each sitting in front of a screen, ensconced in a dark brown leather club chair. Their quasi-identical blazers are draped over the backs. Their eyes are trained on the flickering black-and-white images.

  “E.W.!” I. William drawls as he hits Pause. “Pull up a chair and join the fray.”

  “The fray” is right. The room is littered with half-empty food cartons and soft-drink cans. I can see the green edge of a beer bottle poking out from behind the garbage. The air smells like the inside of a locker room.

  “I asked you guys to work hard, but this . . . this is—”

  “Surprising, ain’t it?” Monty says, keeping his eyes on the moving images on his screen. “Who would’ve thought working would actually be kind of fun?”

  “You call watching TV working? You guys ought to spend some time in the Ejector.”

  I. William looks indignant. “A little respect, please. We’ve been wearing out our eye sockets here.”

  “What have you been doing, precisely?”

  “Let me show you,” J.P. says, pausing his own screen.

  He walks toward the enormous whiteboard at the front of the room. The louvered wood doors that normally cover it are folded back into the corners. On the board are two columns headed “Entered” and “Left.” Below each heading is a list of names, some of which I recognize from the list Detective Kendle showed me.

  “I. William’s watching the entrance camera. When he identifies someone on the list, he writes their name here and notes the time they arrived.”

  I glance down the list. “Weren’t there a lot more people than that at the party?”

  “That’s where Monty comes in. You see, the celebrities and socialites were the easy people to identify. That knocked off about fifty people. But the rest of the list, well, I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t know Bill Gates if I bumped into him on the street, let alone tried to identify him from the distance those cameras are set up at.”

  “Do you have some massive knowledge of rich people’s faces I don’t know about?” I ask Monty.

  “Nah, I looked up pictures of the guests on the Internet. When I find a good one, I print it up on the color printer and we all stare at it until we’ve memorized it. Then we search for that person until we find them. When we do, we add them to the list.”

  That would explain why the far wall is plastered with the (mostly) smiling faces of over a hundred men and women, some of whom are vaguely familiar. None of them looks like someone who steals paintings for a living. Then again, what does an art thief look like? Blending into a rich crowd is probably an essential skill.

  “This is going to take longer than I thought.”

  “You’re telling us,” I. William says. He picks up a glass tumbler from the floor and shakes it. The ice rattles. “Looks like we’re going to need some more supplies.”

  “I’ll send Jenny out for some things. How can I help?”

  Monty scratches his chin. “Well, it’d go faster if we had two people who could search for the ‘unrecognizables.’ ”

  “All right. Why don’t I spend some time getting to know our party guests?”

  They nod in agreement and turn back to their TVs. I use the conference room phone to call Jenny and let her know where I am. With a bubbly laugh, she agrees to get some nonregulation supplies.

  I stare at the faces on the wall one by one, trying to associate the name with some defining characteristic. Pointy ears = MacAfee. Widow’s peak = Grafton. Sharp nose = Hosseini. It’s like that memory game I played when I was a kid, where the faces popped up on a yellow plastic flap. I can’t remember the rules, but I’m pretty sure I kicked some kindergarten ass.

  “Okay, I think I’m ready,” I say about twenty minutes later.

  I. William turns and hangs over the back of his club chair. “Such a sweet kid. There’s no way you memorized enough faces in that amount of time.”

  “I think I did.”

  “All right, then. Pull up a chair.”
<
br />   I drag one of the conference room chairs across the room and sit next to him.

  “You ready?”

  “Hit it.”

  He points the remote at the screen, skipping backward through several hours of footage. He gets to the beginning and presses Play. The camera is pointed at the entranceway. There are two rectangular metal detectors manned by a team of bored-looking guards. The time stamp in the right-hand corner of the screen reads 7:04. The black-and-white images make the building’s features sharper but also somehow blur the guards’ faces.

  Maybe this is going to be harder than I thought.

  “This is when the first guests started to arrive. And in case you were wondering, no one you’ll recognize shows up for a long time.”

  “All fashionably late, huh?”

  “Oh yeah.”

  An elderly couple comes into view. They’re both wearing dark fur coats. He’s thin and angular with pointy ears and a sharp nose. She’s softer, a little frail, and might have a widow’s peak.

  I. William shoots me a look. “Any guesses?”

  “Um . . . Mr. and Mrs. Jenkins?”

  “Nope.”

  “The Cliftons?”

  “Not even close.”

  “You know who it is, don’t you?”

  “Of course. They were the easy ones.”

  “How come?”

  He nods toward the screen. “Watch.”

  The elderly couple passes through the metal detector. The man sets it off and is directed to the side by a security guard in his late forties with a protruding belly. The elderly man’s annoyance is apparent in the set of his shoulders, even in blurry black and white.

  As he’s being patted down, Victor Bushnell strides into view, looking immaculate in a well-fitting tux. He says something to the security guard. The big-bellied guard shakes his head. Bushnell stabs his finger into the security guard’s lapel. The guard shifts nervously from foot to foot. A younger guard with stripes on his shoulders walks over and says something. Big Belly shrugs and returns to his post. The elderly man straightens his shoulders and collects his wife. Bushnell’s super-white teeth flash at the couple. The older woman kisses him gently on the cheek.

  I. William hits Pause. “Can you guess who they are?”

  “Obviously someone important to him.”

  “Go on, you’re getting there.”

  Why would Bushnell get angry because the security guard was doing his job? Who would he want to protect like that? And why would he get a kiss for his efforts?

  “Are they his parents?”

  “Correct!”

  Monty gives me a weary smile. “That’s two down and four hundred and ninety-seven to go.”

  Three hours later, I’ve identified a grand total of seven new faces. My vision is blurry, and I feel like I’d have trouble recognizing my own face on these tapes.

  There’s a knock at the door.

  “What’s the password?” J.P. bellows, his eyes never leaving the screen.

  “The Daily Show,” a muffled voice answers.

  “You know, having her yell it through the door like that kind of defeats the whole purpose of a password.” I walk to the door and let Jenny in. Her arms are loaded with bags of “supplies.”

  She dumps them on the conference table. The Initial Brigade hits Pause in unison and pushes past her to the goods.

  “Where are my Nibs?” J.P. mutters. “I gotta have my Nibs.”

  “They’re there already. Sheesh. What are you guys up to, anyway?”

  “Sorry, Jenny, but it’s top secret.”

  “Yeah, I know, but you can trust me. I swear.”

  I hesitate, then decide to give in a little. “We’re working on something for the Mutual Assurance file. And that’s all I can tell you.”

  “Okay, I get it. Say, did you call him yet?”

  The tips of my ears feel pink. “Call who?”

  “Oh, you know. Him.”

  I. William’s head rises. “There’s a him?”

  “It’s no one.”

  “Oh, there’s someone,” Jenny says.

  “That’s enough. Back to work, Jenny.”

  I follow her to the door to lock it behind her. I’m not quite sure why I’m being so security-conscious, but I feel justified when I see Sophie lurking in the hallway. I walk into the hall and close the door behind me.

  “What do you want?”

  She flicks her stick-straight hair over her shoulder. “What’s going on in there?”

  “Nothing.”

  “You expect me to believe that?”

  “I don’t care what you believe.”

  “Everyone’s talking about how you’ve commandeered the Initial Brigade and all the AV equipment. Do I smell alcohol?”

  “Just give it up, Sophie.”

  She folds her arms across her chest. “I know it has something to do with the Mutual Assurance file.”

  “Brilliant deduction.”

  “I want to know what’s going on.”

  “Well, you’re going to have to learn to live with disappointment.”

  “This isn’t over.”

  “Oh, but it is.”

  I slip through the door so she can’t see inside, then I lock it behind me. The Initial Brigade are back in their seats, snacks at the ready in their laps, hands curved around their remotes.

  “Should we go to orange alert?” I. William asks as I sit down next to him.

  “If orange alert is the color for not telling Sophie anything, then yes.”

  “Orange it is.”

  I stare at the screen. I’m not sure I can take much more of this. “Maybe we’re going about this all wrong.”

  “What’s that?” Monty says.

  “Pause for a second, will you guys?”

  They hit their Pause buttons with practiced synchronicity. I walk to where I can face them. Behind me on the wall is a blowup of the museum.

  “Follow me here. Our theory is that the thief found a way to hide himself in the bench in the Bushnell Gallery, probably while the security guards were getting the next group of guests.”

  “How come the security guards didn’t notice that someone was left behind?” J.P. asks.

  “I’m not sure, but he probably created a small diversion somehow to confuse them.”

  Monty lifts his hand.

  “I told you, Monty, that’s not necessary.”

  He grins. “Right. Well, what if he said he was sick? Then he could pretend he was going to the bathroom but actually hide somewhere close to the gallery so he could slip back in between groups.”

  I turn and examine the map. “He could have hidden himself in this bathroom here.” I point to the bathroom around the corner from the Bushnell Gallery. “I’ll find out from Detective Kendle whether there are alarms on the bathrooms.

  “So group leaves, thief slips back in, making sure to stay out of view of the cameras, and conceals himself in the bench. And there he waits overnight until the alarms are turned off in the morning. Then he gets out, removes the painting from its frame, conceals it inside whatever he’s wearing, and leaves the museum once it reopens.”

  I. William’s eyes light up. “Which means . . . we should be able to see him leaving on the video!”

  “Precisely. If we can identify one of our guests on the video footage the next morning, then we have our man.”

  J.P. sighs. “So now we’re going to have to try to identify people from the back?”

  “Plus the guy has to be wearing something different from the night before, or he’s a total idiot,” Monty adds. “That could take days.”

  “Do we even have that footage?” I. William asks.

  “The recordings are twenty-four hours long. What time do they start?”

  “At
noon.”

  “What time do they open in the morning?” J.P. asks.

  I think back. “The party was on Saturday. I think they only open at eleven on Sunday.”

  J.P. goes to the computer and types for a few seconds. “Yup. She’s right.”

  “Which reduces the window to one hour.”

  “That’s pretty tight.”

  “But he must’ve been eager to get out of there. I can’t believe he’d hang around for longer than he’d have to.”

  “Stands to reason,” I. William agrees.

  “Let’s hope so,” Monty says emphatically.

  “All right, let’s give it a go,” I say.

  I. William picks up his remote and starts to fast-forward toward the day after the party. The video blurs through endless hours of an empty lobby punctuated by the infrequent visits of the overnight security guards. When it gets toward 11 A.M. on the video, he slows it down to real time. We watch the screen intently. The time stamp says 10:52.

  “That’s the head security guy from the night before,” I. William says, pointing to the man I recognize from the altercation with Bushnell’s parents. “He left around eleven.”

  “How come they didn’t find the painting missing overnight, by the way?” I ask.

  “They don’t patrol the whole museum,” J.P. says. “There are heat and motion sensors in all the galleries. The guards just patrol the halls.”

  “The day guards are coming on shift. Do they have to disable the alarm section by section, or is there a master switch somewhere?”

  “There’s a master switch,” J.P. replies. “It was in that security manual the museum sent over.”

  Monty rolls his eyes. “Show-off.”

  The time stamp flips to 10:59. The head security guard comes into view, followed by three other guards. The head guard gesticulates as he gives them instructions. Two of them lumber off reluctantly, while one takes his station at the metal detector. The head guard nods to someone off-camera and makes a slashing motion at his throat. It’s 11:02.

  “He must be telling someone to turn off the alarm,” I. William says.