Annette shook her head. “Larry’s gained weight.”
The sad truth was that physically speaking, Vivica seemed a better match for Larry. Annette was willowy and waspy-elegant, with golden hair and sculpted cheekbones and tiny, implacable pores. Upset as she clearly was now, she still looked as if she couldn’t break a sweat if she tried, whereas Larry and Vivica seemed to be cut from the same earthy cloth. But that was neither here nor there, was it? Looking as if you belonged together? If you were going to judge on looks—real looks—Annette looked right now as if someone had stuck her with something huge and sharp and drained all the hope out of her. “Can I ask you something, Brenna?”
“Sure.”
“How did you find him?”
Brenna cleared her throat. “Well, the first credit card he applied for . . .”
“I know—you told me that, but Larry got rid of that card fast. How did you pick him up after that? He went from New York City to Wyoming to—”
“Montana, not Wyoming.”
“How did you keep finding him, Brenna? How, when he obviously . . . didn’t want to be found?”
Brenna looked into her eyes—a pure, pale blue, fogged slightly from alcohol. She nipped the bud of a memory—Larry calling her a tall drink of water—then realized that within two days, she’d watched both Shelbys get drunk. “We found Larry the same way we find most adults. Interests.”
“Interests?”
She nodded. “You can change your name, your hair color, you can get plastic surgery. But it’s a lot harder to change what you like, and no one really thinks they have to. Somebody likes guns, for instance, they’re going to apply for a license, maybe join the local NRA. Or say they’re into golfing, they’ll join a country club.”
“What was it with Larry?”
“Sorry?”
“What interest couldn’t Larry give up?”
Annette asked the question in a way that made it clear she knew the answer, but still Brenna was careful with the response. “Expensive restaurant reservations,” she said. “Private club memberships, purchases at high-end jewelry stores . . .”
“Women.”
Brenna opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out. What could she say? “Would it help if I told you you’re best off without him?”
“Not really.”
The Elvis song ended, and then Brenna recognized the opening notes to “Wishing on a Star” by Rose Royce. Larry had some goddamn heartbreaking taste in music, that was for sure. Annette closed her foggy eyes, the singer’s voice like clear water, wishing and wondering what a dream means . . . Brenna tried not to think about the fact that “Wishing on a Star” had been Clea’s favorite song—the one she said “told the truth about love, real love.” Brenna tried not to feel the pink shag rug beneath her bare legs as she sat in Clea’s vacant room at 11 P.M. on June 2, 1983. She tried not to remember listening to “Wishing on a Star” with her eyes closed, her head resting on Clea’s quilted futon, searching the song for clues. She tried not to feel her eyes squeezing tight, tears hot in the corners. The song is empty. Empty as this room . . .
“You look a million miles away,” Annette said. “What are you thinking?”
Brenna swallowed hard. “Nothing. Larry wasn’t the right guy for you.”
“I know,” Annette said. “But who the hell wants the right guy?” She slipped an envelope out of her Prada bag and handed it to Brenna. “Your check,” she said. “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 cracked open another Johnnie Walker Black, downed it in one gulp. “God, he’s a delicacy.”
How and where had this intelligent woman gotten such phenomenally bad taste in men? Brenna shrugged into her jacket as the Rose Royce song faded away and Annette turned off the player. “Last song on the CD,” she said.
“I guess I should head out.”
“Thanks, Brenna. For everything. I mean that.”
Brenna gave her a quick, tight hug. “You will be okay.”
Annette nodded. “Crappy as this feels, it still beats the hell out of not knowing.”
As Brenna was heading toward the door, Annette said, “Oh, did you ever hear from Lydia?”
Brenna turned. “Who?”
“Friend I made on this New York Families of the Missing chat room . . . She lost her daughter, years ago. She’s had some bad luck with PIs, so I recommended you.”
Brenna shook her head, her mouth dry. Lydia Neff, Iris’s mother . . .
“That might not be her real name. Christ, I called myself AlbanyMarie. No idea where I got that one.”
“We haven’t had any new client calls for weeks.”
“Weird. She private messaged me about a week ago, asking me if you were good at finding adults. She sounded like she was going to call you right away.”
“Her daughter was an adult?”
Annette shrugged. “Don’t know.”
Brenna’s cell phone vibrated at her hip. She held up a finger and answered it fast, without looking at the number on the screen. “Hello,” she started to say. But a man’s voice cut her off. A brittle, angry voice she’d never heard before. “Brenna Spector?”
“Yes. This is—”
“This is Nelson Wentz,” the voice said, Brenna’s eyes going big at the last name. “What have you done with my wife?”
Chapter 5
“No disrespect or anything, Brenna, but you are seriously romping on my game.”
“What’s the big deal? You’ve done it for me before.”
“Not when I’m playin’!”
Trent’s voice, slathered in cool-dude lilt, was particularly tough to take at top volume through Brenna’s Bluetooth, competing as it was with the thudding, shrieking din of Roseland or Lotus or whichever club Trent happened to be gracing with his presence tonight, no doubt working the room like a badger in heat. But Brenna was driving to Tarry Ridge for the first time in eleven years—Tarry Ridge, rife with tens of hundreds of potential memory triggers—and knew herself well enough to realize that in this case, biting her lip and reciting the Twenty-third Psalm wasn’t going to do it. She needed live interaction, no matter how inane, to keep her in the present. The more inane the better, come to think of it—it was actually harder to get lost in a memory when she was baffled and annoyed. “Think of it as part of your job,” she said. “Making sure the boss stays sane.”
“Why can’t you just sexually harass me?”
“Trent.”
“Okay, fine.” He sighed. “What do you want to know?”
Brenna passed a sign on the 287—“Tarry Ridge 4 miles.” She swallowed hard. She drove a 2002 gray Sienna minivan, bought used three years ago, but when she inhaled now, on this part of the highway, Brenna caught the new-car scent of the maroon Camry she’d rented on October 16, 1998, from the Avis on Twelfth and University.
The steering wheel is smooth plastic. It feels strange under her hands compared with the leather-covered wheel in Brenna and Jim’s Volvo—and it gives her a weird thrill, that differentness.
“Brenna? You there?”
It’s only one morning out of your life. Satisfy your curiosity and it’s over . . .
“Yo, Bren-na!” Trent said, and she was back in the Sienna, on the night of September 30, 2009, with a dull ache behind her eyes, and the Tarry Ridge exit looming five car lengths ahead.
“Tell me anything,” Brenna said. “What club are you at? What are you drinking?”
“I’m drinking Bacardi and Coke. I’m in bed.”
“You’re in bed?”
“No, that’s the club’s name,” he yelled. “Bedd! With two Ds! It’s in Brooklyn!”
Brenna’s palms were sweating. “You scoring or what?”
“Not yet,” Trent replied, as if she’d asked if he’d bought tickets for tomorrow night’s Rangers game. “But I’m about to.”
“Who’s the luck
y girl?”
“Blonde in a pink tube top. Man, I love tube tops. They like . . . do what you want to be doing, know what I mean?”
She rolled her eyes. “Oh yeah, I totally get that.”
“This blonde . . . she’s kinda got a Jessica Alba thing going on.”
“Jessica Alba isn’t blonde.”
“I’m talking from the neck down,” he said. “And she is massively checking me out . . . Hey baby. How about I buy you another one of those cosmos—with chaser of Trent.”
Brenna winced. “That couldn’t possibly have worked.”
“What’s your name, gorgeous? Diandra. That is a name that’s made to be moaned in ecstasy. Know what I’m saying, sweet thang?”
For several seconds, Brenna heard nothing but ambient noise—a thumping bass pressing through super-powered speakers, the whooping chatter of at least a hundred club patrons . . . “Let me guess,” she said. “Diandra’s throwing up.”
“Wrong, Miss Wiseass. She’s giving me her digits.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“What? No, baby, no I wasn’t calling you wiseass I was . . . Yeah, I’m on the phone with my . . . but . . . No, I’m telling you, this is my boss. I swear, I . . . Wait . . . Oh now don’t be like that . . . Damn.” Trent groaned. “Completely carpet-bombing my game.”
“Sorry.”
Trent sighed. “So tell me about this new client in Tarry Ridge.”
“His name’s Nelson Wentz,” Brenna said. “He’s the husband of Carol Wentz. That’s the woman Morasco was asking about.”
“I remember. Just because I don’t have your memory thing, it doesn’t mean I’m brain-dead.”
“Yeah, well . . .”
“Why’d he contact you? Did Morasco throw him your way?”
“Hardly.”
Nelson Wentz had called Brenna’s cell as she was leaving Annette Shelby’s hotel room, accusing her of abducting his wife. Within twenty seconds, though, she’d been able to tell he was grasping at straws. Carol ran five searches on you before she disappeared, he had said. She wanted your Web site, your address and phone number, your career history. She did a search with your name plus “missing adult” . . . But when Brenna had suggested that perhaps Carol had been interested in hiring her—Do you know anyone she might have been trying to find?—Wentz had caved, weeping into the phone.
Brenna wasn’t proud of it, but the sound of grown men crying always made her skin crawl, and this phone conversation had been no exception. She’d offered up half a dozen I’m sorrys. (Such an ineffectual phrase—as if Brenna was to blame for Nelson Wentz’s tears and could, by way of apology, make him stop.) But then he’d started telling her how no one on the Tarry Ridge police force would help him look for his wife, how he’d had the interest of one detective for about five minutes, but now it was back to business as usual. Your wife left you. You’ll just have to get used to it. No one had said that, of course, but it didn’t matter. That was the feeling Nelson had gotten from the police in his hometown—the same feeling Brenna and her mother had gotten from Detective Grady Carlson of the Pelham Precinct on September 8, 1981—he of the bile-brown Members Only jacket and the crumbs in his mustache and the statistics about unhappy teenage girls who run away from home . . . “Would you like me to help you find Carol?” Brenna had heard herself say. And thus she and Nelson Wentz had struck a deal.
“He cried?” Trent said.
“He misses his wife.”
“Whatevs. Seems a little dramatic for a phone call with a stranger. You got his social? I can run a check.”
“Already did,” Brenna said. “Absolutely clean. Not even a late credit card payment. Nelson Wentz misses his wife, Trent. He loves her. He’s at his wit’s end.”
“Hel-lo. Smokin’ hot brunette at five o’clock.”
“God, you’re so sensitive.”
“I am. See, most guys would only notice the double Ds. I notice the legs, too, and the face.”
Brenna sighed. She was on Main Street now—3.5 miles away from Nelson Wentz’s home according to Lee, the suave Australian voice on her GPS and for close to a year, the only man in her life. As Trent told his brunette that heaven must be missing an angel—They still used that one?—Lee requested Brenna make a right at the next intersection. She crawled toward it, checking out the retail space: Gap, Barnes & Noble, a Starbucks, plus an art-house theater, three galleries, a very high-end boutique, and a paint-your-own pottery store—all of them new to her.
Main Street was no time capsule, that was for sure. It was more like the Growing Dinosaurs Maya used to play with as a five-year-old. They started out as specks of sponge, but if you put one in a dish with a drop of water, it would expand overnight into a four-inch T-Rex—five hundred times its original size. For Tarry Ridge, it had been two drops—the ultra-exclusive Waterside Condominiums, brand-new eleven years ago, when Brenna had last been here, and the five-year-old Riverview Shopping Center, which was not so much a mall as Fifth Avenue with escalators. It had a Barneys, a Nobu, a Tiffany’s with marble floors and chandeliers . . . The New Yorker had once done a Talk of the Town piece on the Riverview Shopping Center, referring to it in the headline as “Privilege under Glass.”
Both were the brainchild of New York City developer Roger Wright—aka Donald Trump without the divorces, bankruptcies, Page Six mentions, and hair jokes. For sentimental reasons apparently, Wright had deemed his hometown a good place to build and, as ever, his instincts had proven correct. Over the past decade, this one-two punch of prime real estate had transformed the town from sleepy suburb into a glittering T-Rex of a bedroom community, with property values tripling and quadrupling on even the smallest of homes and more or less staying there, even with the housing bubble bursting. Nelson Wentz had made Brenna a very generous offer, yes. But unless he was leading a secret double life as a high-stakes gambler, the man was good for it.
“So, uh . . . Brenna?” Trent was saying. “You still need me to yap at you or what?”
“I’m fine. See you tomorrow. Have fun in Bedd.”
“That would be the plan.”
“Trent.”
“Yeah?”
“Thank you.”
Brenna ended the call. She saw one place she remembered—a stationery/candle store called Wax Attax—and pulled over to the curb to get a closer look. The last time she’d been here, it had been morning, and it was now more than three hours past the store’s 6 P.M. closing time. Plus the window display consisted entirely of Webkinz—Internet-friendly stuffed animals that didn’t even exist eleven years ago. But the spiky logo was the same—“Wax Attax!” rendered across the top of the window in thick, chrome-colored spray paint.
Looking at the name, Brenna returned to the morning of October 20, 1998, when she’d rung the bell on the counter and was greeted by a clerk with a halo of frizzy white hair, a black sateen blouse, and a name tag that said “Kaye.”
The store had reeked of scented candles—vanilla mostly, with a little licorice worked in as if to intensify the headache. Kaye had been pleasant, though. Standing in front of the crepe-paper black cat and grinning cardboard jack-o’-lantern that had been tacked behind the counter for Halloween, she’d resembled a kindly witch. Seemed to know it, too.
“What spooky delights can I help you with?”
“Actually,” Brenna says, “I couldn’t help but notice all the kids’ items you have . . .”
“Are you a mom?”
“I have a three-year-old.”
“Oh, well you might be interested in our Sunday story hour! Do you live around here?”
“I live in the city.” Brenna takes a breath. “I was just wondering . . . Did Iris Neff ever come in here? For the story hours?”
“Are you a reporter?”
“What? No, I—”
“Because I really can’t say anything. I know you’re just doing your job.”
“I’m not a reporter.”
“Iris is a very smart little girl. With
a wonderful imagination. My prayers are with her and her mom.”
“I’m not a reporter,” Brenna says for the third time. She slips one of her old cards out of her purse—“Brenna Spector—Errol Ludlow Investigations.” She hasn’t used these cards since marrying Jim, and that feeling seizes her again—that weird, guilty thrill.
With the pen from the counter, she crosses off Errol’s number and writes down her cell. “Sorry—we have to get new cards,” she tells Kaye. “I’m a private investigator. And actually, I’m just helping out with one tiny part of the case.”
Kaye blinks. “Okay . . .”
“Did you ever hear Iris mention anything about a blue car with a dent in the back?”
Kaye shakes her head. “No,” she says. “Certainly not that I remember.”
“Have you maybe seen a car fitting that description that you haven’t—” Brenna’s sentence is cut off by the chirp of her phone.
“I’m sorry. We really don’t allow cell phones in here,” Kaye says. “People always speak so loudly on them.”
“I understand.” Brenna hurries outside the store to take her call, but by the time she does, it’s gone to voice mail.
Brenna knows who it is before checking the message—she always knows when it’s Jim calling, and again, this very specific sixth sense proves right.
“Can’t wait to give you that surprise,” he says. Brenna’s stomach tightens. What would Jim say if he could see her here? What would he say if he saw her give that woman a card with Errol Ludlow’s name on it? Go home. Now.
She puts the phone in her pocket and starts down the street toward her rental car.
She hears a rush of footsteps behind her. “Miss Spector?”
Brenna turns. It’s Kaye. Her cheeks are flushed. “Listen, this is probably nothing,” she says. “But I . . . I do remember one time in story group, Iris got into an argument with another little girl.”
And She Was Page 5
