“I haven’t been a good father.”
“That’s not true.” He looked at me in surprise. “You were a great father, for Bob and for Marni. You were just a shit father for me, and a shit husband for Mom.”
He looked away again. “You are determined to punish me.”
“You remember what you always used to say to me when I was a kid? To Bob you always used to say, ‘You can do it, Bob! You can do anything you put your mind to!’ To me you used to say, ‘You made your bed, Lacklan, now you have to lie in it.’ Well, Dad, you made your fucking bed, now you can lie in it.”
I left him there, sitting, hunched and small at that ancient table, and made my way upstairs to my room. I found it exactly as I had last left it, over thirteen years earlier.
Four
I was up at five and went for a long run in the woods and to spar with some trees. They make great opponents: however hard you hit them, they never go down. At six, I went to see Rosalia in the kitchen. She’d been my father’s cook for thirty years and had seen me grow up from a skinny, disobedient kid into—into whatever it was I had become.
After she’d squealed, pinched my cheeks and smothered me in kisses, she sat me down at the table and made me the best bacon and fried bananas in the world, and the best Colombian coffee. While I was eating, she sat with me and kept grabbing my hand and pinching my face, which made it hard to get on with the task in hand. But it was nice. It almost felt like being home.
After a bit she looked said and asked me, “You gonna find Marni?”
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“Tu papaíto, he really miss her, you know?” I drank my coffee and didn’t answer. She gave a smile that was eloquent of sadness and gripped my hand. “He really miss you too. I know you don’ belief it. But is true.”
I shrugged. “Mucha historia, Rosalía.”
She threw her hands in the air. “Sure! Lots of history in every family! But what you gonna do in life, more important than make peace with your family?”
I gave her a kiss and stood. “Right now, find Marni.”
She gripped me in a tight hug. “Ay! Do that, and you make your daddy very happy, and me.”
I gave her another kiss, on the top of her head. “And me.”
I took the back route through the woods. It was the way we used to go when we were kids. Where our land joined with theirs, there was a dry stone wall—or rather, there had been one once—but it had decayed and crumbled with the years. And quietly, unobtrusively, Frank and Silvia’s land had melded with ours. That meld had been a simple expression of the fusion between our two families, especially after Frank died and my parents divorced.
I had wondered in later years if there had ever been anything between Silvia and my father. If there had been, they had kept it quiet. But I was never quite sure.
I clambered over the crumbling, mossy wall and continued under the beech and chestnut trees until. Here and there a twig cracked, wings flapped in the canopy above, a crow cawed in the early mist.
Eventually I came to the fringe of the woods, fifteen or twenty yards from the back of the house. There I lay on my belly and stayed motionless for twenty minutes, watching and listening. Apart from the birds and the squirrels, there was nothing.
When I was satisfied I was alone, I rose and walked to the back door that opened into the kitchen and peered through the windows. As my father had said, there was a dirty plate and a cup by the sink. There was also a book, a mug and some mail on the large pine table that stood at the centre of the room. I spent the next hour wandering around the surrounding woodlands, examining the undergrowth and the turf. Then I walked up and down the driveway.
I didn’t find anything in the woods. But I found something on the driveway. It was mostly gravel, though there was one patch on the bend where the gravel had been worn away by the recurrent passage of vehicles, and the dirt had been revealed beneath. There I saw two tire marks, one overlaid on the other, each with a different print. The first was hard to make out, but it looked like a small car. The one that had gone over it was a big SUV. I thought I recognized it as a Q7. I pulled out my cell and took a photograph.
Then I made my way down to the house and let myself in with my father’s key. The house wasn’t as grand as ours. Frank had been a very successful Harvard professor, so he had made a lot of money lecturing and writing books. He also came from old money; but my father was a very successful son of a bitch who made his money by legal extortion, political manipulation, and exploiting people in weaker positions than himself. And he was extremely good at all that. He came from a long line of Boston Brahmins, and he had married an English aristocrat. All of these things gave him an edge in life.
In a universe where we have to eat each other in order to survive, it pays to have no soul, and the instincts of a cannibal.
I stood in a large, silent hallway. Silvia’s study—or what I had grown up thinking of as Silvia’s study, but was now Marni’s—was on the right. The drawing room was on the left. Behind it, separated by louvered doors, was the dining room, with tall French windows out onto the formal garden and the dark woods. Beyond the study were the games room, the breakfast room, and the kitchen. In the centre of the hall stood the broad staircase, rising like a pair of ram’s horns to the galleried landing and the bedrooms.
It was all quite formal and understated. My mother used to say it was painfully upper-middle class. Her English friends used to laugh when she said things like that. Her American ones didn’t know what she was talking about but pretended to be amused. One always had to be amused.
I realized I had been standing there for several minutes, not so much lost in memories as living them. I’d been nineteen the last time I had walked through that door. I had come to say goodbye to Silvia, and to Marni. They had no butler, so Silvia had opened the door to me herself, and led me through to the drawing room. They had both listened to me, serious and quiet, until I’d finished explaining. Then Marni had run from the room, stomping up the stairs, and Silvia had asked me to think very carefully about what I was doing, and what I was throwing away.
I crossed the hall. Ours was tiled, theirs was old, stained wood. It creaked slightly under my feet and echoed in the vast silence of the house. The drawing room was sunlit, bright compared to the gloom of the hall. It hadn’t changed much. Most of the furniture was the same. My mother had said it was eclectic. Antiques mixed in with expensive modern stuff. Large slabs of sunlight lay across the Persian rug. Marni’s chair, the one that had been her mother’s favorite, had a New York Times open on it, crumpled as though thrown down suddenly while going to do something else. I picked it up and looked at the page she had been reading. It was the science page. The rate of Greenland’s melt had been underestimated—again. There were fears of drought in the Ukraine.
I threw it back down on the chair and looked around. The room didn’t tell me anything, except that it wasn’t the room of a person who has decided to go away for an extended period.
I climbed the stairs to the upper floor. There were five bedrooms, and all but one of them were obviously unoccupied. They had bare mattresses on the beds, covered in dust sheets. In her room the bed had been slept in and left unmade. The duvet was thrown back and the sheet was rumpled. In the bathroom, as my father had said, her toothbrush was missing, as was the toothpaste. Her hairbrush was also gone. I looked around for her tampons. I found the cupboard where she would have kept them, but there weren’t any there.
So, there had been a last minute decision to go away for a prolonged period. I checked through her drawers and her wardrobe. There were no pants, no bras, and no socks. But there were other clothes.
I sat on the bed and wondered where she had decided to go. And, perhaps more to the point, what had made her decide. I allowed the images to arise in my imagination. She was sitting in her chair, reading the Times. Something happened. Something made her get up and dump the paper.
I thought of the kitchen, of the letter on the table
. The postman? Or had that been before she went to read the paper? I frowned. The sequence of events was wrong. Wouldn’t you read the paper over breakfast?
I went down to the kitchen.
It was a broad, ample space with windows above the sink that gave views of an herb garden and the woods about twenty or thirty yards away. There was a deep blue Rayburn cooker on the left, and a long, heavy pine table in the middle of the stone-flagged floor. A half-empty bottle of washing up liquid glowed green on the windowsill. For the moment, I ignored the table and went to the sink.
There was a plate and a knife. They both had traces of butter and maple syrup on them, and crumbs, probably from pancakes. Next to the plate there was a small espresso cup on a saucer, with dried coffee stains on it.
That was breakfast, probably taken at six or seven A.M., before the paper arrived.
Now I turned and looked at the table. At the head there was a placemat. The chair had been pulled out and angled slightly and by the mat there was a pen and a book of New York Times cryptic crosswords. I felt a warm pellet of adrenaline as I remembered the way she used to sit at breakfast, doing the crossword, with her right leg slung over her left, biting her pen. I was willing to bet that was where she sat every morning for breakfast.
But two places down, on the near side, that chair had also been pulled out, and there was a mug there that still had coffee in it. Beside the mug there was an envelope, the one I had seen from the window. I stepped over and picked it up.
It was printed and addressed to her by name: Ms Marni Gilbert. The postmark was downtown Boston. There was no letter inside it. I did a tour of the kitchen, pulled out the trash and went through it item by item. It hadn’t been thrown away, at least not here. Then I went over the whole house, searching for the letter in every conceivable place. I even checked the fireplace for ash. Neither the letter nor its remains were in the house. Eventually I went back to the kitchen, made myself some coffee and sat opposite where she had sat to read it. I allowed my imagination to recreate the events.
She’d been having a lazy morning. She’d had an early breakfast in the kitchen—she was always an early riser—pancakes and maple syrup while doing a crossword. When the paper had arrived she’d risen, collected it and gone to the drawing room, where she had sat in her favorite chair reading the article about the melting of Greenland.
Then the postman had arrived. She’d heard him and got up from her chair, dumped the paper and gone down the path to get the letters from the mail box. Among them she had found a letter—not just a bill or an official notification, but an actual letter. A rare occurrence in these days of e-mails. So she’d taken it to the kitchen, to make a second cup of coffee, and sat down to read it.
And whatever she had read had made her decide her to leave, immediately, without letting anyone know except Anita, her cleaner. That made sense, even if she had wanted to disappear. If she hadn’t given her some kind of explanation, Anita would have alerted the cops and started a search in earnest. This way there was no official cause to go looking for her.
But that raised the question, what stopped her from phoning my father and telling him she was going away? I could only think of two reasons. A: she was trying to protect him somehow; B: she was running from him.
I found a plastic sandwich bag, slipped the envelope into it and put it in my pocket. Then I went out and opened the garage. My father had told me that she had a blue Honda Civic, but there had been no car keys in the house, and there was no car in the garage. So she’d left in her vehicle. And after that a large SUV had arrived. Maybe the cops.
Maybe.
Four
I called Detective Mendelson and he agreed to see me if I could make it within the hour. I told him I could make it in half an hour. I walked back through the woods, climbed in my car and headed down to Weston, through the early autumn woodlands, in absolute silence. Fifteen minutes later I pulled up in the parking lot outside the big, friendly, blue and white cop shop and stepped inside to tell the desk sergeant I wanted to see Mendelson. She gave me a friendly smile and asked me to take a seat while she called him. Then she offered me coffee. Cops in Weston are not like cops anywhere else.
Mendelson arrived two minutes later and shook my hand.
“Walk and talk,” he said, as he held the door open for me.
I followed him across the parking lot to the State Bypass and we started strolling east into town.
“You said your name was Lacklan Walker?” I nodded. “It’s an unusual name. You must be Robert Walker’s son.”
“Yeah.”
“I can understand why you’re concerned about Ms Gilbert. It’s certainly out of character for her to take off like that. But, like I told your father, there is no indication of a crime having been committed, and the fact that she gave her cleaner time off, kind of suggests it was voluntary, and she knew what she was doing. So really there are no grounds for the police to get involved.” He looked at me curiously as we crossed onto Colpitts Road. “What is your interest in this, Mr. Walker? I understand you’ve been out of the country for about ten years.”
“Yeah. I was in England.” I shrugged. “My interest? Marni and I grew up together. She was like a sister. We’d lost touch, but when my father told me she’d disappeared without telling him… It felt wrong.”
He nodded once. “She’s a lecturer at Harvard, right?”
“Yeah. Did you contact the university?”
He took a deep breath and let it out slowly through his nose. “Did you?”
I was a bit surprised by his answer. “Not yet. I only arrived last night.”
He didn’t say anything for a bit until we turned onto the Boston Post Road, which in Weston is like the High Street.
“I did contact them,” he said, “and her department head said he was aware that she had taken some time off, and they had no reason to think there was anything amiss. So, I’m kind of curious as to why you and your father are so sure something is wrong.”
“Like you said, it’s out of character. Also,” I shook my head, “It doesn’t quite jive. She’d had her breakfast and was reading the paper in the drawing room…” I watched his face as I spoke. “She received a letter, took it to the kitchen to read it over coffee, and then immediately packed up, called her cleaner—but not my father—and left. Apparently she called the university too. So…” I shrugged again. “Why not my father, who was like a second father to her?”
He shrugged. “Any number of reasons—a lover, a boyfriend, somebody she didn’t want your father to know about. It’s like that sometimes, especially in a father-daughter relationship.” He grinned. “I should know. I have three daughters.”
We’d come to a café-cum-pizza restaurant. He stopped and pushed open the door for me. We went in and he ordered coffee and blueberry pie. I ordered coffee and we sat at a blue Formica table by the window. I sipped as he wolfed his pie.
“I haven’t got any kids, Detective, but I know Marni. She is not impulsive or rash. She is grounded and very smart. She would only behave like this if something was wrong. The letter she received is nowhere in the house. Her pants are gone, her bras are gone. So are her socks and her tampons. The bed is unmade and the washing up was not done. She didn’t arrange for Anita to come in, clean up and then not come back for a week or two. She paid her to the end of the month, and put her off for an indefinite time. You and I both know it’s because of what was in that letter.” He watched me with interest and chewed. I watched him back and asked, “What vehicle did you use when you went to the house?”
“Ford Focus, why?”
“Anybody go there with a big SUV?”
He shook his head. “Not that I know of. Why?”
I showed him the photograph of the tire marks. “After she left in her Honda Civic, somebody went down there in a big SUV.”
He looked at the photograph and handed it back. “Strange behavior does not constitute grounds for a police investigation, Mr. Walker. If it did, New Engl
and police would be swamped. Academics are notoriously eccentric.”
I sighed. “I understand that, Detective, but maybe you can help me anyway.”
He looked up from his pie with eyes like scalpels. “How?”
I sat back and watched him a moment. “How long have you been on the force, Detective Mendelson, twenty years?”
“There abouts.”
“So I’m wondering, why does a cop with your experience waste time on a guy like me who is chasing shadows looking for a girl who just went away for a week of debauchery in Hawaii? Why the walk and talk? You could have told me what you’ve told me in two minutes on the phone and had lunch with your wife, or one of your three daughters.”
He smiled, finished his pie and sat back, holding his coffee cup like a glass of beer. “What’s your point?”
“You’re as curious about this case as I am. But I am curious because I knew Marni like I know myself. What’s your reason? What has made you curious?”
He nodded several times, then sat forward and put down his cup without drinking from it. “OK, I’ll tell you. I’ve been expecting you to turn up.” I raised an eyebrow at him. “I know who you are. Everybody in Weston knows who you are. Your dad is the big shot and we all know how he stepped in and helped the Gilberts after Frank died. And we all thought you and Marni would get married. It’s a small town. You guys are our celebrities, our own, living soap opera. But then you went off to England, and we thought we’d seen the last of you. You passed out of village gossip.”
“You’re losing me.”
He reached in his pocket and pulled out his wallet. From among his cards, he extracted a photograph and dropped it on the table in front of me. It was a picture of Marni. She was smiling into the camera, squinting slightly because of the sun. All you could see behind her was pine forest. It had been printed out on a computer, and there was a broad white border under the picture, where she had written ‘Lack.’
OMEGA SERIES BOX SET: Books 1-4 Page 3
