Into the Dark

by Alison Gaylin

  “Next week we’ll what?” said Ruth.

  The phone in Gary’s shirt pocket was vibrating.

  He held up a hand. “Back in just a few,” he said.

  “But Gary . . .”

  Deep intake of air, slow release, and then he was out the door, in Ira’s little courtyard with the colorful tile and the blush-red hibiscus plants and the bubbling fountain in the middle. He moved past the fountain and plucked the phone out of his pocket and looked at the screen . . .

  Ludlow.

  “Yes?” Gary said.

  “I have good news and bad news.”

  Gary winced. It wasn’t just the words themselves that grated—no one ever really has good news when they use that cliché—but the way Ludlow said them, so precise, hanging on to each syllable like it was a goddamn life preserver. Why had he believed this windbag? Gary said, “Yes.”

  “Which would you like to hear first?”

  Jesus. “I don’t care. The good news, I guess.”

  “I’ve spoken to Brenna Spector.”

  Gary’s eyes widened. “You have?”

  “Yep.” The P exploded out of Ludlow like cannon fire. Gary practically needed to wipe the spit out of his ear. “And I hired her.”

  “What?”

  “You wanted her missing persons expertise—I got it for you. She’s on our team.”

  “But—”

  “You don’t have to worry about the cost—I’m cutting her in out of my very generous paycheck.”

  “I’m not concerned about the cost.” Gary closed his eyes. “You didn’t tell her anything, did you?”

  “Nope.”

  “So,” he breathed, “what’s the bad news?”

  “I had to give her your name and number.”

  Gary’s mouth went dry. “You said you didn’t tell her anything.”

  “Only your name and number,” he said. As if that’s nothing, nothing at all . . .

  Gary put the heel of his palm to his forehead and rubbed in slow, soothing circles. “Okay,” he said. “Okay. I can deal with this.” And he could, he knew. It was what made him such a successful agent and manager, that flexibility. He could roll with the punches, move past Plan A. It was a talent he’d acquired out of necessity. Don’t fall down. Don’t freeze. Keep moving out of the room . . . But that door was locked, the key long gone. And for now, Gary had his job to do. “You’re fired, Errol.”

  “What?”

  “Keep the initial payment.”

  “But . . . that isn’t . . . It’s not . . .”

  “And I will give you the same amount in one month, provided you do not tell anyone else that we have ever met or spoken. Consider it a severance package.”

  “But . . .”

  “Great. It’s been a pleasure.”

  Gary hung up with Ludlow and headed back into Ira’s studio. Ruth rushed at him, still apologizing. Gary smiled. “Don’t worry about it,” he said, Plan B already taking shape in his mind.

  Brenna had no intention of calling Gary Freeman—at least not anytime soon. No way was she going to get any truthful information out of a man who’d worked so hard to mask his identity that he didn’t even want Errol’s subcontractors to know his name. (Hell, the number he’d given Errol himself had been a disposable phone, its minutes bought in advance, virtually untraceable.)

  No, Brenna had wanted Gary Freeman’s name and number so she could find out who exactly she was dealing with. Who exactly Lula Belle had been dealing with. And once she found that out—very quickly, it turned out, as Gary Freeman, successful Hollywood theatrical agent, was all over the Web—she’d be all the more able to understand Lula Belle.

  Already, Brenna understood why Freeman had wanted to keep her on the down-low: His life was about as far from that Coke bottle trick as you could possibly get.

  An agent specializing in children and an adjunct professor “at several renowned arts schools,” according to his website bio, Freeman had been married for twenty years to the same lovely blonde woman, and had three lovely blonde daughters—aged fifteen, twelve, and seven—all of whom seemed to accompany him to any event where he was photographed. Turned out there were many of those. When he wasn’t doing paid engagements at high schools and youth centers about navigating the treacherous world of Hollywood “with your values intact,” Freeman was participating in walkathons, auctions, days at the races, and fund-raising dinners for Wise Up—a literacy program for inner city kids founded by his wife, Jill.

  Scrolling through Google Images back at her office, Brenna found a picture of the Freeman family, posing with a clown at a Wise Up circus event this past summer. She blew it up so that it filled her screen, and then gazed at Freeman’s face—a nice face. What’s a nice guy like you doing pimping out silhouettes?

  He wasn’t a classically handsome man. He was stocky and ruddy and slightly shorter than his wife, with a thick hank of graying hair and a nose that looked as if it had been broken one too many times. But there was something about that face—a comfort level in the set of the features, a warmth to the eyes. Brenna imagined he had a wide circle of friends who thought they knew him a lot better than they actually did.

  A voice behind Brenna said, “Looks like that dude on the cornflakes commercial.” Trent’s voice. She recognized it immediately, but she jumped a little anyway. “You scared me.”

  “I usually have that effect on women. But in a good way.”

  “There’s a good way to scare women?”

  Trent started to answer, but Brenna held up a hand.

  “The question was rhetorical,” she said.

  “So who’s the cornflakes guy?”

  She opened her mouth, then closed it. “Potential client.” She minimized the screen. “I thought you were meeting with Annette Shelby.”

  “Uh . . . that was at one-thirty? There’s a little thing at the bottom right side of your screen. It’s called a clock. Check it out sometime!”

  Brenna glanced at the clock: three-thirty. “Oh no . . .” It was her day to have Maya—the last day before Christmas break, and she had her for the rest of the week. Brenna had been hoping to surprise her, meet her at school, take her out for cupcakes at Molly’s, which Maya now liked much better than Magnolia Bakery. But it was too late now. She would be home from school any minute, and Brenna had blown it as usual. She sighed. “Where did the day go?”

  Trent shrugged. “Same place it always goes.”

  And yes, that was exactly where it had gone—the same place. After saying good-bye to Ludlow, Brenna had returned to her office, checked her e-mails, dealt with a large list of potential clients—business had actually picked up too much since the Neff case—while trying not to lapse into the past. And that, as ever, had been easier said than done. A woman searching for a long-lost brother, for instance, was named Rachel Fleischer, which had brought to mind Brenna’s eighth grade English teacher, Rosemary Fleischer, which had whisked Brenna into third period English, February 11, 1983—the dry heat from the radiator, the smell of chalk dust, and Miss Fleischer detailing the “lethal allure of Desdemona.”

  An e-mailed photograph—of a boy named Jordan Michaels who’d gone missing in the spring of 2004—was taken in front of the sign for Niagara Falls. And of course that had flung Brenna back, for the second time today, to the Maid of the Mist on October 30. Those biting winds, that hail. . .

  The day had gone where it always went—in and out of wormholes, with Brenna swallowed up by memories, then snapping herself back to reality. Back and forth, back and forth. She turned to Trent. “So how did your meeting with Mrs. Shelby go?”

  “Fine.” Trent picked at a fingernail.

  “You don’t look like it went fine.”

  “It did, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  He sighed. “Ever get . . . you know . . . emotionally invested in a client?”

  She looked at him. “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind,” Trent said. “So are we officially on w
ith Errol? Did you get the rest of the Lula Belle videos?”

  Brenna didn’t reply—flashing instead on her last meeting with Annette Shelby. Poor, fragile Annette in her hotel room at the St. Regis on September 30—the room she’d reserved for her and her missing Larry—for the big reunion, the second honeymoon—only to find out, via Brenna, that Larry had wanted to stay missing. Annette, with that sad, searching look in her eyes, Johnnie Walker Black mingling with the scent of expensive perfume.

  Annette slips an envelope out of her Prada bag and hands it to Brenna. “Your check,” she says. “You’ll see I included a little extra for that yummy assistant of yours.”

  “Yummy? Trent?”

  “Come on. Don’t play dumb. Those pecs!” Annette grabs another bottle out of the open minibar, twists off the top, and downs it in one gulp. “God, he’s a delicacy.”

  Brenna cringed. “Trent?”

  He was back at his desk now, Lula Belle on his screen in all her spread-eagle, loose-jawed glory. “Yeah?”

  She cleared her throat. “By emotionally invested, you don’t mean . . . Uh . . .”

  He stared at her.

  She tried again. “You and Annette . . . You’re not . . . I mean, Annette is a very fragile woman, and after what she went through with Larry, I’d hate to see her get hurt again.”

  “Why would she get hurt?”

  “Trent,” said Brenna. But then she noticed his bulletin board.

  For the six years that he’d been working for her, Trent had covered the board with pictures of himself—on the beach, at clubs, in front of random parked sports cars he’d passed on the way home from those places—always shirtless or close to it, always next to some gorgeous, scantily clad babe with a deer-in-the-headlights look in her eyes. Now, all those pictures were gone. They’d been replaced by photographs of Annette’s cat, Persephone. “Mrs. Shelby says it’s okay I haven’t found her,” Trent was saying. “She says we can keep looking—long as it takes. But sometimes I go to bed at night, and I think about her all cold and alone and I can’t sleep. Those big sad eyes of hers. They freakin’ kill me.”

  Brenna said, “You’re talking about Persephone.”

  “Who else would I be talking about?”

  Brenna smiled. “Nobody.”

  “Whatever.”

  “Listen,” Brenna said. “It’s good that you care about her. It’s normal to get involved with your missing person . . . uh, animal . . .” She cleared her throat. “Happens to me all the time.”

  “Still?”

  “You know that it does,” she said, Lula Belle’s voice in her head again, singing about cement mixers . . .

  Outside the door, Brenna could hear footsteps on the stairs. Maya’s. At this point, she could recognize them—such heavy steps for a slight girl. She thought about her daughter, the clumsy innocence of that gait, that shy smile and the way she tugged at her hair while she was daydreaming, and she wondered how long these things would last—these faint remnants of childhood.

  Of course, Maya wasn’t ready to let go, either. Cleaning her room the other day, Brenna had found evidence of this fact on Maya’s top bookshelf, behind all her filled sketchpads and the graphic novels and mangas she devoured. The Very Hungry Caterpillar. It had been her favorite at age four—the first book she’d learned to read. But on November 19, 2004, when Maya was eight and a half, Brenna had put The Very Hungry Caterpillar in a box along with all her other picture books and early readers, and donated it to the library. Five years later, there it was—the same book Brenna had put in that box, its cover riddled with Maya’s unmistakable preschool crayon scrawl. She stole it back, Brenna had thought, smiling. But she hadn’t told Maya that she’d found the book. She never would. Everyone needs their secrets.

  Maya’s key twisted in the front door. Brenna’s eyes went to Lula Belle. “Can you minimize that image, please?” she told Trent.

  “Sure.”

  The door opened, just as the phone rang, and Trent answered it.

  Maya dropped her backpack on the floor, made for the refrigerator. “Hi Mom. Hi Trent.”

  She seemed to have grown an inch since this morning—barely thirteen and a half and already she was nearing Brenna’s five-nine. “Hi, sweetie. How was your last day of school?”

  “Whoa.”

  Brenna looked up at Maya, saw her staring at Trent’s screen. “Trent, for godsakes.”

  “Aw, bite me, I’m sorry,” Trent said into the phone. “No, not you, sir. One sec.” He minimized Lula Belle’s image and got back to the caller.

  Maya said, “Was that like . . . a bottle?”

  Brenna cringed. “Never mind that.”

  “How could anybody not mind that?”

  Brenna sighed. “It’s just a case Trent and I are working on. Nothing you need to be concerned with.” She forced a smile, yet still Maya looked very, very concerned. “So, anyway . . . I thought maybe we could go out for sushi—celebrate your first night of Christmas break.”

  Maya kept staring at Trent’s black screen.

  “Pizza?” said Brenna. “Greek? Dim sum?”

  Finally, she snapped out of it. “Didn’t you get my text?”

  “Huh? No,” Brenna said. “I didn’t even hear my phone go off.”

  “Oh . . . Well, uh . . . I wanted to know if I could stay at Zoe’s tonight. Help her decorate her tree.”

  Brenna looked at her. “Didn’t you already decorate your own tree? With your dad and Faith?”

  “Yeah, but I’m with you right up until Christmas.”

  “You make it sound like a prison sentence.”

  “Mom.”

  “Well, come on.”

  “Mom. You’re Jewish. You don’t have a tree. It’s that simple.”

  “I know. I’m just playing,” said Brenna, who sounded anything but playful.

  “So . . . you understand, right?”

  “Sure.” Brenna sighed. “You can spend the night at Zoe’s.”

  Maya peered at her. “You’re hurt.”

  “Give me a little credit. I’m not that much of a wimp,” said Brenna, who sounded, to herself, like very much of a wimp.

  “Mom.”

  “Don’t Mom me. It’s okay. We’ll have plenty of time together.”

  “Great! I’ll go pack.” She grabbed a handful of cheese sticks out of the refrigerator and hurried down the hall, Brenna watching her lanky teenage daughter but seeing the chubby four-year-old from May 8, 2000 . . . Maya running out the bright yellow door of her classroom at the Sunny Side Pre-School, Maya stumbling into the courtyard, wrinkled white construction paper clasped in her little hands, Maya’s pink cheeks and that smile—running toward Brenna, barreling into her stomach, the sun on her messy blonde hair, and Brenna’s heart swells at the feel of her, the smell of playground sand in her hair, it fills to bursting.

  “Mommy! I drew this for you!”

  “Incoming!” said Trent.

  Brenna’s phone rang. She glared at him. “Trent. You can’t just transfer calls to me without warning.”

  “Sorry,” he said. “But he wouldn’t give me his name and he said it was urgent.”

  Brenna rolled her eyes at him, picked up the phone. “Hello?”

  “Brenna Spector?” The voice was kind and resonant—utterly unfamiliar, but with a lilt to it, as if the caller knew her and expected her to recognize him.

  “Yes?”

  “Is anyone in the room with you?”

  She glanced at Trent. “Yes.”

  “Then please don’t respond to anything I am about to tell you.”

  “Who are you?” Brenna glanced at the caller ID: PRIVATE NUMBER.

  “I need to be clear you understand,” the voice was saying. “I cannot have you responding, or reacting in any way to any information I am about to give you.”

  “All right,” Brenna said.

  “Good,” he said. “I am going to give you a number. I need you to write it down—very discreetly. No one is allowed to see the
number.”

  I don’t need to write down numbers, Brenna started to say, but he was still talking.

  “ . . . and call me in exactly five minutes, from a completely private place. This call must be confidential. If I find out that anyone else knows about our conversation, I will never speak to you again.”

  And I should care about that because . . . “All right.”

  He gave her the number.

  Brenna swallowed hard. She knew it. It was the same number Errol Ludlow had tapped into her phone earlier that day.

  “Do you have it written down?” he asked.

  “Yes,” said Brenna. Yes, Gary Freeman.

  “You don’t need me to repeat any of the numbers.”

  “No, I don’t,” she said. “But . . .”

  “You know who I am.”

  “Yes.”

  He took a deep breath, slowly in, slowly out. And when he spoke again, Brenna felt as though he was with her, in the room, smiling. “I know who you are, too.”

  Chapter 4

  Gary Freeman was a fan. At least, that’s what he told Brenna, once she’d taken her cell phone down the hall to her bedroom and called the number he’d left and assured him, repeatedly, that there was no one within earshot. “Ms. Spector,” he said, “I’m one of your biggest fans.”

  Considering the way he’d been ordering her around for the past two phone calls, it was the last thing Brenna had expected to hear. “You are?”

  “Yeah, I admire you so much—the work you’ve done.”

  “How do you even know who I am?”

  “I heard about the Neff case on one of those shows my wife watches—you know the ones, with all the yentas, sitting around discussing current events and complaining about men?”

  Brenna smiled a little. “Yep.”

  “I was very impressed with what they said about you—how you solved that case, of course, but also how you’ve dealt with so much family tragedy. You did one interview, I guess? You mentioned a sister?”

  Brenna snapped the ties on her wrist. “Yes,” she said. “Sunrise Manhattan.” Big mistake to name the show, because as soon as she said it, she was back into October 5, the hot TV lights on her face, and Faith sitting across from her, her clear blue eyes glittering in the kliegs as she opens the yearbook, shows her the picture . . . “You miss her don’t you? You miss Clea.”