If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense

by Alafair Burke

  “Got the message, boss.”

  “So you going for the book?” When she didn’t respond, Vance held up both palms. “Fine, I tried. I still need four thousand words from you by end of day tomorrow. You working on this subway mystery gal or what?”

  Was it work, or was it personal curiosity? Was she seeing things in that grainy cell-phone video? She wasn’t ready to talk about it yet.

  “I was hoping to find a different angle on the story, but there may not be much more to it.”

  “I thought you told me someone might have a video.”

  “It didn’t pan out.”

  “Did you get the video or not?”

  Sometimes McKenna wondered whether Bob Vance should have been a lawyer instead of a magazine editor. “The girl sent it, but it was just a bunch of shaking and bumping around.”

  “Better than nothing. Let’s pop it on the website and see where it goes.”

  “I promised the girl I wouldn’t post it,” she said, stretching the truth. “Trust me, it’s so useless that people would scream at us for wasting their time.” At a time when print media was still trying to find its way in an online world, the specter of anonymous Internet vitriol was enough to make Vance back down.

  Her first big feature as a journalist had happened because Bob Vance had taken a chance on her. He’d given her a paycheck and a new start. Now she was looking the man straight in the eye and lying to him: “The subway story’s not going anywhere.”

  Alone again in her office, she pulled up the video on her screen and hit replay to view it from the beginning. She hit pause at just the right moment to freeze on Susan’s face. Maybe Susan’s face.

  One thing she hadn’t lied about to Vance: the quality was crap.

  But there was something about the face that was so distinctive. Susan was one of those naturally beautiful women with clear skin, wide bow-shaped lips, and a knowing smile. Her bright green almond-shaped eyes always glinted with the humor of a silent joke. Her appearance gave off alertness and intelligence. Somehow, despite the video’s poor quality, McKenna could make out all of this. Above her left eye, right by her hairline, wasn’t that the same small scar?

  Or maybe she wasn’t seeing anything. Maybe she was projecting the resemblance. Had all this talk about the ten-year anniversary of the Marcus Jones shooting pulled her memory back to the time when she left the DA’s office? Was that why she was thinking about Susan? Missing her. Wondering about her. Seeing her ghost in grainy images.

  She let the video play and watched the ghost turn from the camera and sprint up the stairs. Even the sprint was familiar. While many women ran with arms swinging side to side as if rocking a baby, the ghost pumped her arms like an Olympian, fingers outstretched like knife blades. How many times had Susan lost McKenna with those effortless dashes? She would wait patiently outside the subway entrance until McKenna emerged from the darkness, slightly out of breath.

  McKenna paused it again. There was something in the woman’s right hand. Something black and rectangular.

  She hit rewind and watched from the beginning. There. Pause. It was right after the woman had hoisted her weight from the tracks to the platform. Both palms were braced past the platform’s edge. She swung one leg up to the side. As she pressed herself to standing, she reached her right hand along the cement. Grabbed something.

  McKenna had her suspicions that Nicky Cervantes was not the honor-student athlete the morning papers had made him out to be. Now she thought she might know why this woman had been chasing him.

  She dialed Nicky’s home number. When he answered, she said, “Nicky, it’s McKenna Jordan. I talked to you today during baseball practice.”

  “From the magazine. The lady with all the questions.”

  “I need to know something very important. And I promise not to tell anyone.”

  “There’s nothing else to tell. I fell.”

  “Just listen, okay? I need the real truth, Nicky. And I won’t print it.”

  “Right. ’Cause reporters are all about keeping things on the down-low.”

  “I’m also a member of the New York bar.” She wasn’t. Not anymore. “That means I’m licensed as a lawyer. I will get disbarred if I repeat anything you say to me.”

  “Will you give me legal advice for free?”

  Sure, why not? “I need to know the truth. You took that woman’s cell phone, didn’t you?”

  “Why you asking me that?”

  “I need to know.” She realized she sounded desperate. She tried to calm herself, but she knew her instincts were right. That rectangle in the woman’s hand. The city’s familiar warnings to commuters not to use their handheld electronics on the train. “You took her phone, didn’t you? And she was chasing you to get it back.”

  She knew from his pause that he was about to come clean. “Yeah,” he finally said, his voice quiet. “And then when I was down there, thinking about that train, she jumped in like Jackie Chan. Threw my ass to safety.”

  Fast. And strong. Like Susan.

  “Now what?” he asked. “What’s your advice?”

  “Keep it to yourself, Nicky. Don’t tell a soul. And don’t ever do something so stupid again. Snatching a phone from a distracted commuter might seem minor to you, but the state of New York views it as robbery in the third degree. It can land you seven years. Bye-bye baseball, hello prison yard.”

  “I’m done with all that. Told Coach I need to go back to the paint store. He says we’ll work something out on practice. Like I said today, I changed. Laying there next to the rats, the sound of that train—I changed.”

  Though McKenna had heard so many defendants say the same two words at countless sentencing hearings, she actually believed Nicky. She gave him her number in case he ever needed a favor, then she wished him luck with the season.

  She watched the video one more time. There was no way to be certain, but the woman in the video looked more like Susan with every viewing. If Susan were alive, where had she been all this time? Why did she leave? Why didn’t she tell anyone? And why was she back now?

  McKenna thought about the wealth of information stored on her own phone. Text messages. To-do lists. Voice mails. Call logs. Notes to self. E-mails. Whoever Superwoman was, she had gone to tremendous lengths to get that little black rectangle back.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  An hour later, McKenna gave up her surfing efforts, no closer to learning anything about Susan’s disappearance than when she’d started.

  McKenna used to think about Susan constantly; then, with time, for only a fleeting moment per day. Like she’d pass the bar where Susan had been asked to leave after breaking multiple strings of Mardi Gras beads on the impromptu dance floor she had created. Or McKenna would see a trailer for a new comedy aimed at teenage boys and think, Susan will see that with me. Or her phone would ring a little too late for any polite caller, and she’d expect to hear Susan’s voice on the other end of the line. In retrospect, McKenna struggled to pinpoint the last time her mind had really focused on a memory of her friend.

  If forced to guess, she would have to say it was five years earlier—on a Sunday morning, two days after McKenna and Patrick’s wedding. She remembered because she hadn’t meant to think about Susan that day. She hadn’t meant to cry. Even five years ago, the tears had been less for the loss of her friend than for her guilt at having moved on without her.

  The morning hadn’t started on a heavy note. She and Patrick were next to each other on the sofa, opening the wedding gifts their friends had given them, despite pleas to the contrary. She could still picture Patrick blushing as he pulled a hot-pink rabbit-shaped vibrator from its beautiful wrapping.

  “All righty, then. This one’s clearly for the wife,” Patrick announced, wiggling the rubber device in McKenna’s direction.

  Husband. Wife. After five years of playing other roles in each oth
er’s lives, boasting that marriage was only a piece of paper, McKenna and Patrick had pulled the trigger. As a lawyer, she should have realized earlier that papers mattered. Papers created rights and responsibilities. Papers defined families.

  Today, she couldn’t imagine a world in which she wasn’t married to Patrick Jordan, but that morning she and Patrick were just beginning to enjoy their new spousal titles. She’d shaken her head and pursed her lips like a stubborn child refusing a floret of broccoli. “But I would never stray from my husband,” she’d said in a Scarlett O’Hara voice. “Not even with a battery-operated bunny.”

  The pink toy was from Emily and Glenn. McKenna could barely imagine reserved, preppy Emily perusing the aisles of a tawdry adults-only shop.

  McKenna and Patrick hadn’t wanted a wedding. Just a couple of rings, a few nice words, and a great party. No walking down the aisle. No puffy dresses. No white tulle vomit. And no gifts.

  As a pile of wrapped packages accumulated in the corner of their private dining room at Buddakan, they’d realized that their friends hadn’t complied with the request. “What part of ‘no gifts’ do our friends not understand?” Patrick whispered. “There better not be a toaster oven in there. Where in the world would we put a toaster oven?”

  As it turned out, their friends may not have obeyed the stern no-gifts admonition, but they’d known better than to clutter the overstuffed apartment with nonsense like crystal vases and bread makers. Instead, they had conspired to find the tackiest gag gifts imaginable.

  The rabbit wasn’t the only X-rated toy. There were the his-and-her G-strings. The bubblegum-flavored massage oil. The “just married” condoms. Especially creative: the pasta shaped like boy parts.

  That Sunday morning, their two-day anniversary, Patrick and McKenna were showing their gratitude in a similar spirit, giddily opening the presents while sipping champagne and taking turns writing ironic thank-you notes. Dearest Emily and Glenn, McKenna had written. Thank you so very much for the delightful personal massager. Its rabbit-like shape is at once both whimsical and bold. We would be remiss, however, if we did not ask: where is our fucking tea set? Lovingly, McKenna and Patrick.

  McKenna had saved a special present to give to Patrick last. She reached over the edge of the sofa and lifted a shoebox-sized gift from the floor. “The final one.”

  “Feels pretty hefty,” he said. “If it’s another one of those”—he gestured toward the personal massager—“you’re going to be walking funny for a week.”

  “This one is for the husband from the wife.”

  He tore away the elegant white-and-silver wrapping paper, opened the box, and removed a tight mass of bubble wrap. Beneath the transparent layers, the shape of a glass beer mug was visible.

  “Is this like when Homer Simpson gave Marge a bowling ball for her birthday?”

  McKenna was the beer drinker in their household. Patrick was strictly a Scotch and wine man.

  He placed the beer stein on the coffee table. Pint-size. Thick handle. A shield insignia on the side, embossed with Westvleteren, the manufacturer of a Belgian Trappist beer.

  “So what gives?”

  For the first time, McKenna told Patrick about the night she and Susan wound up with that mug. And then she felt guilty for not thinking more often about Susan over the years. And then she cried. And then she apologized for ruining the last day of their wedding weekend with silly drama. Then she blamed it on too much champagne.

  That was five years ago. How could she have gone five years without thinking about Susan?

  Susan and that stupid mug. The night McKenna met Patrick. The year Susan left. The year her job fell apart. The stories all belonged together.

  She heard once that a novel was really a collection of fifty to seventy scenes that could be woven together at the author’s will. The agent wanted McKenna’s book about the Marcus Jones case to read like a novel.

  She opened a file on her computer and typed: “Chapter One.”

  CHAPTER SIX

  It was a Thursday, right around the time when single, childless city dwellers had labeled Thursday “the new Friday,” meaning it was the night to go out, get drunk, and forget that one more day of work—albeit a casual-dress one—still awaited us.

  It wasn’t just any Thursday but a first Thursday of the month, meaning it was the night of a Susan Hauptmann happy hour.

  I arrived late, even relative to the obscene hours we all kept back then. I had been burning the midnight oil that entire week. I told my colleagues I was taking the extra step of preparing written motions for all my upcoming trials. Their deadpan looks were the silent equivalent of “Whatever, nerd.” But I’d been in the district attorney’s office for four years and was still trying drug cases. I had vowed that this would be the year when I got some attention.

  By the time I made it to Telephone Bar, it was well past ten o’clock. The party was in full swing, meaning fifty or so friends and at least three times as many drinks consumed.

  Susan raised her arms in the air and reached across two guys from the usual crew for a long-distance hug. “McKenna! You made it!”

  Vocal exclamation points were a sure sign that Susan was getting her drink on. The girl worked her ass off at one of the biggest consulting firms in the world. She deserved to cut loose every once in a while. Back then, we all did.

  “Pretty good turnout,” I yelled over the thumping soundtrack. That was the year when you couldn’t help but Get the Party Started with Pink everywhere you went.

  Susan was beaming, which made her even more gorgeous than usual. She was always so proud when the happy hours went well, as if they somehow validated all the steps she’d taken in life to lead to all those friendships. Now some people were leaving the city. Others were getting married and having children. They couldn’t stay in their twenties forever. That night, though, everyone seemed to be there, just like the old days.

  “McKenna, this is my friend Mark Hunter.” He was one of the two guys I recognized next to us. “McKenna was my roommate the first year I came to the city. She went to Stanford for undergrad and law school at Berkeley. Mark just left a dot-com, but his MBA’s from Stanford. You guys could have bumped into each other at a Stanford-Cal game.”

  And then off she went to introduce some other solo attendee to another friend. That was Susan’s thing. She collected friends. Back before random strangers “friended” each other online after a chance meeting, Susan was that person who found something interesting about every person she met, then pulled out her cell phone with an easygoing “Give me your digits. I’m getting some friends together in a few weeks. You should join us.”

  Unlike most of the people who do those things, Susan would actually cultivate the friendship. As a result, her happy hours brought together an eclectic crowd that mirrored the divergent pieces of Susan’s impressive life: military friends, business school friends, gym friends, “just started talking at the bookstore one day” friends, childhood friends from all over the country, thanks to her army-brat youth. Her capacity for socializing had earned her the nickname Julie the Cruise Director, at least among those friends who remembered The Love Boat.

  Unfortunately, Susan didn’t always recognize that she was singular in her ability to connect to people. To her, my non-overlapping undergraduate years at Stanford should have been common ground to bond with Mark the former dot-commer. Instead, the two of us stumbled awkwardly through a series of false conversational starts before Mark pretended to recognize a friend farther down the bar. I let him off the hook before he felt pressure to pay for the Westvleteren Trappist I had just ordered.

  As I took the glass from the (of course) scantily clad bartender, a small wave of foam made its way over the rim onto my hand. I was licking away the spilled beer—and not a sexy, titillating, “I’m coming for you next” lick but a spazzy kid with jam on her hands kind of lick—when a girl yelling “
Woooo” bumped into me. A second, larger wave of beer foam cascaded onto the man next to me.

  “Sorry. Oh my God, I’m so sorry.” I patted at his sweater futilely. Again, not a sexy, titillating, “I’m taking my time” pat, but a clumsy, ham-handed, “this might really hurt” pat.

  “Ah, beer and boiled wool. That’ll smell great in the morning.” Another person might have made the comment sound prissy or even cruel. Thanks to the friendly smile that accompanied the words, I found them comforting. It also helped that my beer-soaked victim was six feet three with wavy dark hair and hazel eyes. After getting a better look at him, I registered how firm his stomach had felt beneath that wool sweater.

  “Seriously, I’m really sorry.”

  “It’s not a problem,” he said, accepting a bar towel from the bartender, who apparently noticed the needs of this kind of man without request. He wiped the beer off my hands and shirtsleeves, ignoring the drops of ale on his own clothing. It sounds corny, but there was something familiar about the feel of his skin against mine. “You’re here with Susan, right?”

  “Um, yeah. I guess you are, too?”

  “Patrick Jordan.” He offered a firm handshake. “Susan’s pointed you out a couple times at these things, but we’ve never managed to meet.”

  “Oh sure, you’re Patrick from West Point.”

  That’s right. Susan’s wildly diverse and impressive background included college at the United States Military Academy at West Point. According to her, the predominantly male student body might not have treated her as well if it hadn’t been for a popular trio of supportive cadets led by Patrick Jordan.

  “And you’re—”

  “McKenna Wright. Susan and I lived together for a while a couple of years ago.”

  “Wait. Are you the one who calls her Bruno?”

  Yep, that was moi. “The first time we met, she said her name—‘Nice to meet you, I’m Susan Hauptmann,’ like any normal person. And then I go and blurt out ‘Bruno!’ It was the first thing I thought of.”