And She Was

by Alison Gaylin

  “Dude!” Trent called down from the top of the stairs. “Are you aware that you’ve got Mailkeep?”

  Trent arrived in the room and said it again.

  “I don’t know what that is.”

  “You get some work done on your computer on August 29?”

  Nelson thought for a moment. “Yes. At least I’m pretty sure that’s the date. I’ve had some spyware issues, and the Kleins’ oldest son, Jonathan, took a look at it.”

  “Did he download any new programs for you?”

  Nelson nodded. “Some antivirus programs to allegedly erase the spyware. None of them very good . . . Oh, and he said he threw in a few extras—word processing and the like.”

  “Well, one of those extras is Mailkeep. It automatically makes a copy of all e-mails and saves it to the hard drive.” Trent grinned at Brenna. “So in other words, we can check out everything OrangePineapple98 wrote without having to hack her password.”

  Nelson looked at Trent. “OrangePineapple98?”

  “Your wife’s screen name for her e-mail account. I was gonna ask—any idea what that might mean?”

  Nelson’s eyes were flat as quarters. “I didn’t even know she had an e-mail account.”

  The phone rang. The three of them turned toward it. The machine picked up right away, and Brenna started for it, hoping it was the girl calling again.

  The machine beeped and the caller began speaking before Brenna reached the kitchen—not a girl at all but a grown woman, the voice shrill and angry and more than a little off-balance. “I saw you on TV, you evil smiling piece of shit. Smiling after you butcher your wife. You’re gonna die. Die and rot in hell, scum.”

  Brenna picked up the phone and disconnected on the caller, but the voice still hung like a fog in the house. She went back into the living room, hoping Nelson hadn’t heard. But she saw the look in his eyes and she knew he had. The phone rang again. “It’s only the beginning,” Nelson whispered. “Only the beginning.”

  Chapter 17

  Nelson seemed a little better by the time Brenna and Trent left his house. Of course that was like saying someone with a terminal illness who’d tripped and fallen seemed a little better—simply on the basis of his having gotten up off the floor.

  After the third hate message (didn’t these people have anything more productive to do with their lives?), Brenna had tried convincing Nelson to get an unlisted number, but he refused. If I do that, he’d explained, Iris will never be able to call me. So she’d set the answering machine to pick up after only one ring and turned the volume all the way down, and then she’d made Nelson call Phil Reznik, a good criminal defense attorney she knew, and set up an appointment with him for 5 P.M. Next, she’d gone into his immaculate upstairs bathroom, found some sleeping pills in the medicine cabinet, given him one, and made him go to bed. Mission accomplished.

  Throughout it all, Trent had remained quiet. Strange for him, but Brenna hadn’t really thought about his reasons until they were on Nelson’s front step with the door closed behind them, the few remaining reporters shouting questions from the curb. “Excuse me, ma’am? Sir? Are you relatives?” “How do you know Nelson Wentz?” “Can you answer a few questions about Mr. Wentz’s current state of mind?”

  “No comment!” Brenna said. But as she started to step down onto the walk, Trent took her arm and said, through his teeth lest reporters read lips, “What makes you so sure he didn’t do it?”

  She stared at him.

  “Don’t go all Pollyanna on me, Spec. People do bad things. No one knows that better than you.”

  “Excuse me,” said Brenna, “but did you just call me Spec?”

  “New nickname I’m trying out. You likey?”

  “I hatey. It’s even worse than TNT, which— Christ, why can’t you just talk like a normal person?”

  “Hey, chillax.”

  “You think Nelson killed his wife. You think he stabbed her to death, shoved her body in the trunk of her own car, then begged the police and me to find her.”

  “I’m just telling you what’s on my mind. The cops think he did it.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Some of them do. The press thinks he did it . . .”

  “So therefore you think he did it, too?”

  “I’m just saying I don’t know. He’s one of those little guys with the psycho eyes. One of those dudes his neighbors always say, ‘He was such a quiet man,’ and ‘He kept to himself.’ ” Trent surveyed the reporters across the street, then leaned in closer. “And not for nothin’ but his wife takes a shitload of money out of the bank and doesn’t tell him, but tells her book club she is feeling ‘guilty’ and ‘unfulfilled’? She doesn’t even tell him she can work a computer? Come on. Even I know that’s a sucky marriage.”

  “He reported her missing. He begged the police to investigate. He hired me. Twice.”

  “It’s a good cover.”

  Brenna sighed. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “Just sayin’.”

  “I hate that expression.

  Trent gave her a little nod, then started to head down the walk, reporters shouting at him again. Midway, though, he stopped and spun around, as if he’d forgotten something. “Brenna?”

  “Yeah?”

  “You’re not mad at me are you?”

  “Not any more than usual.”

  “Okay because . . . I don’t know if you know this, but you’re more than just a boss to me.”

  She looked at him.

  “I mean it. You’re like my hot female brother.”

  Brenna smiled. She couldn’t help it. “I’m not mad at you.”

  “Cash.” Trent turned and took the rest of the walk quickly, then jogged out onto the street, past the news throng to his car—a surprisingly staid gunmetal Ford Taurus he’d inherited from his parents.

  Brenna headed down the walk. Several of the reporters asked for her name and how she knew Nelson Wentz, and Brenna said, “No comment” again, grateful to Faith for not having told them who she was. There was safety in anonymity. They were directing their stares and shouts at Brenna, but she wasn’t being watched or spoken to, not really. She could escape into her thoughts.

  Brenna had reached the end of the walk and the reporters’ shouts were getting louder now, more insistent. She heard, “Ma’am, did Nelson Wentz kill his wife?” A familiar voice. She turned. The reporter’s name was Cyrus Whitney. She’d seen it six years ago, in white letters, sandwiched between the New York 1 logo and “StormWatch ’03!” He’d been covering the nor’easter on February 22, heavy parka shielding his face, shouting over the sound of pelting ice. Brenna smiled at him and said, “Moved up in the world, huh?”

  He squinted at her.

  She sighed. “Never mind.” She turned back toward the street.

  “Ma’am?” Cyrus Whitney said again. “Did Nelson Wentz murder his wife, Carol?”

  Brenna didn’t reply. She couldn’t. She was staring through the windshield of a passing car. The cop.

  As the car turned up the next street, Brenna stayed still, ignoring the reporters around her, remembering the morning of October 21, 1998, smelling the clean of the rented car, feeling the unseasonably warm sun through the windshield, one hour into her second morning of watching the Neff house, waiting for a blue car to pass . . .

  Brenna watches the two white-shuttered windows, sneering out of the yellow paint. She sees a shadow pass through one and draw the shades. Lydia. Brenna whispers the name. Can she feel Brenna watching? Get out of the car. Knock on the door. Speak to Lydia Neff. Ask her about a blue car, and put this day, this week, this feeling behind you . . .

  Brenna puts her hand on the door.

  There is a crashing knock on the passenger’s side. Her hand flies away, and her heart pounds, and when she turns toward the knock, his face fills the window . . . thick and angry, and . . . weird. He has a button nose, a small cupid’s bow mouth, a black beauty mark, square on the left cheek . . . It is a face u
gly in its prettiness, with features too delicate and small for the meaty jaw and square forehead, for the eyes—flat and mean as shark’s eyes—and for the hand, moving toward the breast pocket of the brown polyester jacket—a cop’s jacket.

  She swallows hard. Opens the window. She tries to put on a smile, but her mouth twitches. Her palms sweat. “Hello, Officer. Can I help—”

  “You need to leave.” His voice is deep and hollow.

  Brenna’s stomach clenches up. Her skin feels cold. “Am I doing something illegal?” As she says it, Brenna notices a uniform standing behind him—fortysomething and bulky, with a surly thin mouth buried in beard scruff. The muscle, presumably, though at least to Brenna he’s far less threatening.

  “You need to leave,” the big, pretty one says again, and of its own accord, Brenna’s hand turns the key in the ignition, starts the car.

  “Has Mr. Wentz thought about turning himself in?” one of the reporters called out. A stupid enough question to bring Brenna out of the memory. She nearly thanked him, but instead managed to stay quiet, slowing her breath as she walked to her car, putting the cop’s strange, pretty face out of her mind.

  It wasn’t until Brenna was getting into her Sienna that it hit her that, when the cop had driven by, she’d never even glanced at his license plate. Or that his car had been blue, and at least eleven years old.

  Nelson found it so strange—this desire people had to put the grieving to bed. The more hopeless the situation was, the more they wanted you to sleep it off. You need your rest. Go in that room and turn out the light. Take this pill. Everything will be so much better once you’re unconscious and can’t infect me with your depressing existence.

  “Please get some sleep,” Ms. Spector had said after giving him the pill and a Dixie cup full of water. She’d even gone so far as to turn down Nelson’s covers, her homosexual assistant standing behind her with his big arms crossed over his chest like a bodyguard. Get some sleep, or else.

  “Thank you,” Nelson had said, not meaning it at all.

  The thing was, sleeping pills didn’t work on Nelson. You’d think a five-foot-seven-inch, 133-pound man would be no match for a single Ambien, but for whatever reason, it took two or even three to make him slightly drowsy. He hadn’t bothered letting Ms. Spector know this, though. She thought he needed rest, let her believe he was getting it. Anyway, he could use the peace and quiet.

  Nelson was reading in bed. Trying to, anyway. He had that book Carol had been reading for her club—Safekeeping. The book was a memoir, and Nelson thought it might help him with his online course.

  But there was another reason, deeper and less logical and so much harder to admit, even to himself. Especially to himself. Nelson wanted to hold something Carol had held. He wanted to put his hands where hers had been only a week and a half ago, turning pages with blood coursing through them, a pulse beating in the wrists. He wanted to put his eyes where hers had been, see the words she had seen. He wanted to climb into that mind and think those thoughts. So badly, he wanted to be with Carol. The living Carol. He wanted to know her.

  But it wasn’t working. He couldn’t read a sentence of this memoir without recalling Carol’s lifeless eyes, Carol’s face, rotting on the bone, Carol’s paralyzed hand, still wearing the wedding ring. Was this the memory he’d take with him for the rest of his life? From now on, would he hear Carol’s name and envision that thing in the trunk?

  His wife.

  How could they believe Nelson had killed Carol? Detective Pomroy, those reporters . . . She was his wife. How could they have thought he’d gone to his garage, taken his flat-head screwdriver, and shoved it into the heart of his own wife, who hadn’t been having an affair to get him back for Lydia, who hadn’t been preparing to leave him, who had simply been trying to find a lost little girl . . .

  Nelson cringed. Don’t think on that, don’t think, don’t think . . . think about the living, think about Iris . . . At the thought of that name, Nelson bolted up in bed and the book dropped to the floor. And then the phone rang. Or maybe it was the screeching phone that made him drop the book. The timing was so close, Nelson wasn’t sure.

  The phone was on Carol’s side of the bed. Nelson grabbed the receiver and saw “Unknown Caller” on the ID screen, and hit the talk button, cutting off his own voice on the prerecorded message: The Wentzes aren’t in right now . . .

  “Iris?”

  There was no answer. No static, either—she must have been calling from an area with better reception, or else she’d charged her battery.

  “Is that you?” Nelson was on the edge of tears. “It’s okay. Whatever it is that happened, whatever you . . . you think you did to Carol . . . I’m not angry with you. Please. I could never be angry with a child.” Nelson took a breath, aware of how tightly he was grasping the receiver. Like a lifeline. His fingers hurt.

  “Mr. Wentz, this is Graeme Klavel, returning your call.”

  Nelson sighed, the air falling out of him. “Oh, yes,” he said. “Sorry. I . . . I thought you were someone else.”

  “Right, well . . . in answer to your question, I did do some work for your . . . uh . . . your late wife.”

  “Can you please explain to me what that work was?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line.

  “Mr. Klavel?”

  “Do . . . do you hear a . . . a clicking sound?”

  Nelson swallowed. “No.”

  “Listen, I . . . I’ve been getting a lot of phone calls about your wife. Yours is the only one I’ve returned.”

  “Yes. I appreciate that.”

  “I’m calling you, Mr. Wentz, because I was married once, too, and . . . You sure you don’t hear that?”

  “Hear what, Mr. Klavel? Please, I . . .”

  “I don’t feel comfortable discussing this with you over the phone.”

  “Mr. Klavel, did you and my wife find Iris Neff?” He fairly yelled it, but it didn’t matter. Mr. Klavel had already hung up.

  Nelson felt light-headed. His gaze drifted up to the wall over the bed—to the picture of Carol and himself on their wedding day—May 26, 1995. They were standing in front of city hall in New York City—Carol in a sensible cream-colored dress, Nelson in the suit he’d worn to work at Facts of Note that day. They had been married during his lunch hour. Carol took the train in for it, then commuted back to their house once the judge had finished with the ceremony. The picture had been taken with a disposable camera, by a stranger on the street, a black man. Nelson couldn’t even remember whether the man had been young or old. But he did know that Carol had bought her own flowers, from a bodega on Chambers Street. I remember my wedding day, Nelson thought. And then the phone rang again.

  Chapter 18

  The pretty-faced cop had been driving a Subaru Vivio. Ever since her older sister had disappeared into a car that Brenna had only been able to describe as “light blue,” she’d made a point of learning about cars, noting the model and make of most vehicles she came in contact with. And this tendency, combined with her memory, made it possible for Brenna to look at most any car and identify, with reasonable certainty, the year as well. This particular Subaru Vivio was in the Bistro series. Most popular in ’95–96, it had a sort of retro, European feel for a K-car, with a rounded front like a MINI Cooper. Brenna and Jim had looked at Subarus in 1997 before settling on their Volvo four-door, so that’s how she knew. She also knew that the Vivio, introduced in 1992, was discontinued in 1998. Translation: The car that had driven by Nelson’s house today was definitely around when Iris Neff had disappeared.

  Could it have been the same blue car Iris Neff had gotten into? Could Morasco have placed his job in jeopardy by implicating a fellow police officer in the disappearance of a little girl?

  Brenna would have written off the whole idea as an Olympian jump to conclusions, but for one detail: Two of the more distinctive features of the Bistro were the round, evenly spaced parking lights directly under the headlights, and the slig
ht curve to the bumper—round eyes and a smile. It was a happy car. A car that looked like a toy so that any child—particularly a three-and-a-half-year-old like M—might be safe to assume that elves had made it.

  Brenna tapped the Tarry Ridge Police Department number into her cell phone and asked for Morasco. Again, she got his voice mail. Was he just not picking up?

  She had been to the Tarry Ridge Police Station once—October 21, 1998. She’d stood at the tiny building’s front desk for all of six minutes, talking to a very young female uniform with frizzy blonde hair, a thick body, and a name tag that said “Fields.”

  “I have some information regarding the Iris Neff case.” Brenna’s face is flushed. She barely has enough breath to get out the words because she’s parked her car three blocks away and jogged all the way here. What kind of a police station has no public parking?

  “You can give me the information, ma’am.” Fields has a shiny face, a thick layer of acne on her cheeks. Brenna puts her age at twenty-one, tops.

  “I’d rather speak to Detective Morasco, if that’s all right.”

  “He isn’t around, ma’am. I can take your information.”

  “I’m . . . I’m a private investigator. Yesterday, I spoke to Kaye at Wax Attax—she runs the children’s story hour?”

  Fields gives Brenna a look like she’s just recited page 78 of The Brothers Karamazov to her, in its original Russian.

  “Anyway . . . at story hour, Iris once told Kaye that Santa visited her house. And that he drove a blue car.”

  “Santa?” Fields spits out the name, with as much attitude as someone with a name tag/acne combo can muster.

  “Um, the important information here would be blue car and visited her house.” Brenna hands Fields her old business card, Ludlow’s number crossed off and her cell written in its place. “Could you give this to Detective Morasco, please?” She doesn’t bother waiting for a response—just pushes open the door, leaving Fields standing there, in the corner of her eye, twirling the business card between her stubby child’s fingers.