If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense

by Alafair Burke

  “Of course, because doesn’t everyone know the name of the kidnapper of the Lindbergh baby off the top of their heads? Basic knowledge, really.”

  He raised a finger toward the bartender and I soon had another Westvleteren Trappist in my hand. The truth was that I usually dreaded Susan’s parties. I’m neither a mixer nor a mingler, so a night of serialized chitchat, yelled between casual acquaintances, was my version of being poked in the eye with a needle for three hours.

  But that night involved no further mixing or mingling. I barely noticed as the crowd thinned and familiar faces paused for a quick shoulder grab or a “Sorry we didn’t get to talk more.” Before I knew it, the bartender was announcing last call.

  Patrick and I paused our conversation only when Susan showed up and squeezed between us, throwing an arm around each of our shoulders. “Yo, I’ve been sippin’ on gin and juice.”

  Yes, the song was already old by then. It didn’t matter to Susan. It was newer than her other hip-hop standby—“Rapper’s Delight” by the Sugarhill Gang, the long version if she was wasted on mojitos. She gave Patrick a peck on the cheek. “That’s your prize for keeping this one here so late. She’s not usually a closing-time lady. Let me get you guys another round.”

  The bartender shook her head and made a cutoff motion. Susan made an exaggerated sad face. “Party pooper.”

  Patrick patted his hands against his pant legs. “Well, I guess that’s a sign that we’re out of here. Any interest in sharing a cab?”

  The words were spoken to both Susan and me, but his gaze was directed at me.

  Susan made a loud buzzing sound. “Not tonight, Patrick. She’s heading downtown. And not in the dirty way, like you’re thinking,” she said with a devilish tone and an accusatory index finger. “You can get to the Upper East Side on your own.”

  “All right, then. Very nice to meet you, McKenna.” We ended like we began, with a handshake, but this time I didn’t want to let go.

  Susan hugged me as we left the bar. “Aw, you look like a puppy who got left at the shelter. Don’t worry, girl. I just did you a favor.”

  “How’s that?”

  “You don’t get out enough. You don’t know the rules.”

  “What rule was I about to break?”

  “You put out on the first date, and a guy never respects you. And don’t you go looking at me with all that virgin-y indignation. If you’d left with him, you totally would have dropped those drawers. Knowing what a dry spell you’ve been in, they’re probably granny panties, aren’t they?”

  All I could do was laugh.

  “Ah, see? I did you a favor. Don’t worry. He knows how to find me, and I know how to find you. He’ll call.”

  As crass as Susan could be, she always managed to do it in a silly way that was never threatening or offensive. When we were roommates, I had hoped that her brand of infectious directness might rub off on me, but no such luck. She told me once that her sense of humor had gotten her through army culture. Susan was by no means the first female West Point cadet, but even now women made up only a tenth of the class, and cadets still referred to military-issued comforters as their “green girls.”

  As one of the most attractive women on the West Point campus, Susan could have had her choice of boyfriends. But she was the daughter of a general. All eyes were on her. She had to choose her company carefully. For the most part, she stuck with the “Dykes in Spikes,” as the female athletes were called, but got along with the men by joking around like a kid sister.

  I thought Susan had fallen asleep in the cab, her head resting on my shoulder, but then she reached into her briefcase and handed me something wrapped in a white cloth napkin. She pulled out a Westvleteren beer stein.

  “You stole a glass? That’s a Class A misdemeanor, I’ll have you know.”

  “Then you’re about to commit receipt of stolen property.” Her speech was slurred. “Because I saw how you were with Patrick. And I saw him with you. And neither of you is ever like that with anyone. Someday you’re going to marry that man, and you’re going to want a souvenir from this fateful night.”

  Five years later, on my two-day anniversary, I gave that glass to my husband as a wedding gift.

  I saved that beer stein for five years, through three moves, two changes in profession, and countless on-and-offs with Patrick. I saved it because I wanted more than anything for Susan to be right.

  When the cab stopped that night outside my apartment on Mott, Susan tucked the beer stein into my bag as I kissed the top of her head. “Drink some water when you get home. I love you, Bruno.”

  I made sure the cabdriver knew Susan’s address, and I covered the fare plus a generous tip before hopping out.

  I was too distracted to take seriously Susan’s prediction about Patrick and me. At the time, my entire focus was on making this the year when I finally got the attention I deserved at work.

  Both Susan and I turned out to be right.

  McKenna stopped typing and read the last sentence again. Both Susan and I turned out to be right. Neither McKenna nor Susan had been prescient enough to realize that 2003 would also be the year when Susan would disappear without a trace.

  Now McKenna wondered if Susan was finally back, resurfacing to pull Nicky Cervantes from the tracks of a 1 train.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  McKenna was sitting on a stool at the kitchen island, hunched over her laptop, when she heard keys in the front door. Patrick maneuvered his bicycle into the apartment, careful not to let the tires bump the walls, a practice that had taken months of training after the building had sacrificed the bike storage room for an expansion of the laundry room.

  “Hey, you’re home!” Patrick said, surprised at the sight of her there.

  Theirs was one of a growing number of households in which the female half tended to work later than the male half. Patrick was almost always home in time for the six P.M. episode of SportsCenter. He was not only fine with a routine, he liked it. If every single day could be the same for the rest of his life, Patrick would be happy as could be.

  But today she was the one who had wrapped up work early, wanting to be alone with that video from the subway platform.

  For as long as she had known him, Patrick had insisted on riding his bicycle to work. Another part of the routine. The very idea of riding a bike in Manhattan—the fumes; the horn blasts; the texting, Bluetoothing drivers—scared the bejesus out of McKenna. But Patrick insisted he was safe. Helmet. Side-view mirrors. And though his office closet at the Metropolitan Museum of Art was stocked with conservative suits, for the commute, he donned the look of a badass bike messenger, complete with fake tattoo sleeves on his arms. According to him, drivers were less likely to mess with a cyclist who looked like he might slit a throat over a near miss.

  As Patrick carried the bicycle to the far corner of their open loft, he paused behind her for a quick kiss on the cheek. “You started cocktail hour without me?”

  She let out a distracted “Huh?,” then realized he was referring to the beer stein resting beside her computer on the granite countertop. “No, it’s empty. I was just looking at it.”

  The mug had felt like such a special possession when she’d given it to Patrick, but five years later, McKenna had located it at the back of a kitchen cabinet, blocked by a panoply of coffee mugs and the cheap glasses that emerged only when they had more guests than good stemware. The beer stein deserved better placement, but a lot had changed since they got married.

  “Why would you—” His bike propped safely against a wall of bookshelves, Patrick turned his full attention to her. “Oh, it’s the mug. That was sweet.” He wrapped his arms around her waist and gave her a kiss on the neck, letting his breath graze her ear.

  She spun around on the stool to face him. “Actually, I was thinking about this mug because I was thinking about Susan.”

  Hi
s expression went blank. Apparently McKenna wasn’t the only one who hadn’t thought about Susan in a long time.

  “Susan. Susan Hauptmann. She’s the one who stole it from Telephone Bar that night.”

  “Oh my God, that’s right. I always thought of it as the mug you stole.” He took a seat on the sectional sofa, extending his legs in front of him. “Why were you thinking about Susan?”

  She carried her open laptop to the couch, scooting next to him. The video was cued up. “You know that story about the woman who pulled the high school kid off the subway tracks?”

  “I believe you tried to bet me twenty dollars yesterday morning that the kid wasn’t really an honor student. I didn’t take the bet. Plus, we’re married, so it doesn’t matter. Besides, twenty dollars in this city would barely fill that beer mug.”

  “Well, a girl on the platform managed to get it on videotape.” She hit play.

  Patrick chuckled as the scene played out on the screen, a subtle twitch in his face each time the cell phone jerked in a new direction. “You can’t use this, McKenna. Did you try the MTA? They have cameras in the stations.”

  She held up a finger to cut him off. Listening to the now-familiar audio, she prepared to hit pause. The high-pitched scream. The “Oh my God.” The something-something “train!” A thump as another passenger bumped into the amateur cinematographer. The “Don’t go down there.” “Grab him.” “Get his wrists.” “I’ve got him, I’ve got him.” “Is he conscious?”

  And . . . pause.

  “Look. Do you see it?”

  “I can see why everyone’s calling her Superwoman. Takes a lot of strength to lift a person like that. Hard to tell, but the kid didn’t appear to be helping any. Probably suffering from shock.”

  “Look at the woman, Patrick. Look at her face.”

  He leaned closer to the screen and shook his head. “I know the MTA’s video coverage is spotty, but really, did you at least check? Maybe you’ll get lucky.”

  “Yes, I checked. Just look at her face, okay?”

  He raised his brows at her snappish tone. At least he hadn’t called her shrieky, as he was prone to do when her tone became too strident for his tastes. “I’m not sure what I’m supposed to be seeing here, McKenna, and I’m obviously frustrating you. Just tell me. You said something about Susan.” He looked at the image on the laptop screen again. “Oh, McKenna, no. There’s no way.”

  “The face. The face is the same.”

  “You can’t even see her face.”

  “The shape, like a heart. The lips. And the arch in her brow. Plus, look.” She pointed to a spot just beneath the woman’s hairline. “You can see that scar, from when she fell running across campus—during the Maharathon or whatever.”

  “The Mahanathon,” he said, correcting her. The cadets called the sprint from the West Point gym to Mahan Hall the Mahanathon. Despite Susan’s usual speed and dexterity, she had managed to trip on a curb and wipe out face-first. “You can’t tell that’s a scar. It could be a loose hair or a splotch or something. This woman could be anyone. Seriously, the MTA must have better footage.”

  “They don’t, okay? The guy said an entire hotspot or something crashed. This is all I’ve got, but look at it. You said yourself the woman would have to be incredibly strong to lift a kid like that. Fast, too, to be chasing a high school athlete. You should see her haul ass up the subway steps. Susan is strong and fast. The only female cadet in your class to get that prize—”

  “The Commandant Prize. Because Susan was fast. She was strong.” He placed a hand on her knee and gave it a squeeze. “And she’s been gone for a really, really long time.”

  “People aren’t just gone. They never found a body. I don’t even think she’s been declared dead legally.”

  He pulled his hand away and shook his head. “You’re contradicting everything you’ve ever said since Susan disappeared. ‘She’d never just leave.’ That’s what we all said. It’s what we all told the police. That somebody must have done something terrible to her. Now you’re saying she’s alive and well and living in New York after all these years?”

  “I didn’t say she was well. Maybe, I don’t know, you hear these stories about people with head injuries who don’t even know who they are. They eventually start life all over again.”

  “McKenna, amnesia? Come on.” He walked to the refrigerator and grabbed a bottle of water. When he returned to the sofa, he didn’t sit quite as close to her.

  “She’s just missing, which means she’s somewhere. She could be back in New York. You can’t ignore the fact that the woman in that video looks exactly like Susan.”

  “We haven’t seen her in ten years, McKenna. And that picture—it’s like a blur. You went through all of this before, all those years ago. You cried every day for a month. You stopped eating. You were walking around Hell’s Kitchen at all hours of the night, trying to find her.”

  She remembered those nights. She had wanted so desperately for Patrick to comfort her. He was the only person McKenna knew who was also close to Susan—they never would have met if not for Susan. They had taken very different paths to New York City. Patrick had attended West Point and served in the army before going to work at the museum; McKenna had gone to school on the West Coast and was working downtown as a prosecutor. They had tried the game of tracing six degrees of separation between them, but the one and only direct route was Susan Hauptmann.

  So if anyone could help her through the grief of Susan’s disappearance, she had assumed, it would be Patrick. And McKenna knew that Patrick felt a sense of loyalty to Susan.

  She had heard both versions of the story about the beginning of their friendship. According to Susan, she had pulled the old West Point trick of stuffing her bed, tucking laundry beneath her blanket for bed check so she could celebrate her twenty-first birthday in Chelsea. Nights in the city with the friends she’d made outside the army were an escape for her. They helped remind her that she had a life beyond the one she’d chosen in order to please her father. She used those nights to doll herself up and blow off a little steam, to nurse a side of her personality she could never show the other cadets. That night, she wasn’t the only cadet who’d left the grounds. When Patrick Jordan walked into the same city bar at one in the morning, she was sure her reputation was done.

  In Patrick’s version, the only reason he ever walked into a club like the Limelight was because he had a two-day leave from campus for a cousin’s wedding, and the bride and groom decided to go bar hopping after the rehearsal dinner. His ears were beginning to adjust to the thumping music when two of the bridesmaids began gossiping about the girl “slutting it up” on the dance floor with two different men. When he looked at the woman grinding against her dance partners, something about her seemed familiar. He recognized Susan just as she made eye contact with him.

  He was aware of the whispers about her on campus—the General’s Daughter, they called her, or sometimes Hot Lips Hauptmann—but he knew that cadets routinely exaggerated their sexual accomplishments where the female cadets were concerned. Now it appeared that in Susan’s case, the whispers might be kinder than the real thing. And as the son of a mere colonel—though a full one, a “bird”—he could only imagine the panic going on behind his classmate’s mascara-laden eyes.

  The two versions of the story converged from there: Patrick turned around, left the club, and never said a word to anyone on campus about the encounter. Not even Susan. Back at West Point, popular, trusted Patrick found subtle ways to bring outsider Susan—female, attractive, last name Hauptmann—into the fold. Susan knew she had a real friend.

  So when Susan disappeared, McKenna knew Patrick cared. They had been friends long before McKenna was in the picture. But he had been almost angry about it. Not angry at Susan or even about her disappearance. Angry at McKenna. At her reaction. At the crying and the sobbing and the picking at food and the
inability to sleep. At what he saw as overly dramatic displays of emotion. At her expectation that it was up to him to make her feel better.

  “What you’re doing right now isn’t about Susan,” he said to her at last. “I’m worried about her, too. So is her father. So is everyone who knows her. But you’re making this about you. Things suck for you at work, and you’re using this as an outlet.”

  That statement—and the hour-long yelling match that followed—marked the first of many offs in their relationship. Ten years later, he was clearly worried that she would unravel once again.

  “I’m not doing any of that now. I just— You know, even if the woman on the subway wasn’t Susan, it doesn’t matter. She’s been gone all this time, and I haven’t even thought of her in years. I want to know what happened to her. She deserves for someone to still be looking.”

  He started to push back but thought better of it. “So what should we do about it?”

  We. Patrick was like that. He could play devil’s advocate. He could try to convince her to pursue another path. And then just like that, he could climb aboard and support the mission. That was probably how he’d been able to make it through the army. It was why he was still at the Met—his first civilian job out of the military—after all these years. What were we going to do about it. She didn’t give him enough credit for that loyalty.

  “Her dad started getting sick years ago, and he was the one putting pressure on the police. For all I know, no one’s been looking for her. Maybe her loser sister knows something. What was her name again?”

  “Gretchen.”

  “Right. Maybe you can contact the army crowd. See if they know anything?”

  “I think I would have heard—”

  The expression on her face stopped him. “I’ll call around.”

  “I’ll start with the basics. Public records. Credit reports. We can play it by ear.”

  Playing it by ear sounded so simple. No promises. No rules. Just following intuitions on a lark. As though, if the melody didn’t work, you could simply walk away from the piano. But searching for answers wasn’t like fiddling with notes on a keyboard. Once you started asking questions, it could be impossible to stop, even when you knew you should.