And She Was

by Alison Gaylin

  “The car—the one leaving Lydia Neff’s house that she seemed so frightened over . . . Carol and I had just been at the Subaru dealership that day, looking at the exact same model.”

  “Subaru dealership?”

  “Yes. Coincidental, huh?”

  Brenna opened her mouth, then closed it again. Her throat was dry. She grabbed her glass of water off the table and took a long, draining gulp. No. No it couldn’t be . . .

  “Are you all right, Ms. Spector?”

  “Nelson,” she said. “Do you happen to remember the color and model of the Subaru you saw?”

  Strange, there were dozens of Subaru models available twelve years ago, ranging from the rugged Forester station wagon to the citified Impreza sedan. Yet before Nelson spoke, Brenna knew exactly what he would say.

  “It was a Vivio Bistro. Light blue.”

  Chapter 20

  Meade wouldn’t have chosen the car for himself. It was too compact for a man his size, and getting into and out of it was a process that bordered on arduous. Over the years, though, he’d learned to appreciate the unfolding of his powerful legs and arms, the tilting of his broad shoulders to maneuver them out the door, the pushing back against the seat to propel himself out of this tiny sedan—propel himself, like a missile. The effect was surprising—onlookers would often double-take, wide-eyed. Adam Meade thrived on surprise. So Meade was grateful for this undersized vehicle. It reminded him of his place in the world.

  When Meade parked the Vivio this time, though, he made sure there were no onlookers. He found a quiet residential street a few blocks up from his destination, the sidewalk shaded by maple trees ablaze with dying leaves. He pulled beneath a tree with especially thick and remarkable foliage—a bright orange distraction. Before getting out of the car, he checked the sidewalks, then the windows of the modest apartment buildings and brick row houses. Finally satisfied that he was alone, Meade propelled himself out of his metal cocoon of a car and walked through this neighborhood in Mount Temple as if he were another, less remarkable person. He could not afford to surprise anyone today. Surprise made people remember and Meade did not want to be remembered.

  Columbus was a busy avenue where the buildings all appeared somewhat sea-worn, as though the constant whooshing of buses, trucks, and speeding SUVs had eroded their facades. The apartment house was by far the most forlorn on the street, and to make matters even worse, Graeme Klavel’s office was in the basement apartment. Meade had yet to meet Klavel in person, but he felt as if he had a good sense of the man, eking out his living under a city street, buried and forgotten, as if he were already dead.

  Meade wasn’t fond of most of Mount Temple. But he did like the Blue Moon Diner. He’d eaten a late, leisurely breakfast there, and, as always, it reminded him of a place his father used to take him when he was a little boy—a coffee shop near Dad’s base back in Jacksonville, where “the men of the house” would go for biscuits and gravy every Sunday morning while his mother and sisters were at church . . . It pained Meade to think of those times now, but still he enjoyed the Blue Moon, where he could brush up against his past without going all the way in.

  While he’d been eating, he’d stared at the sports section of the Daily News without reading it, listening instead to the two women at the next table—Mrs. Bloom and Mrs. Archibald, discussing their lives while lamenting the rash of switchblade murder/robberies that had hit the town and surrounding areas in recent months. “Just when we thought it was safe,” Mrs. Bloom had sighed. And Meade had sat there with his ham and eggs, nodding at a photo of Alex Rodriguez sliding home and thinking, How true, Mrs. Bloom. How true.

  Meade reached the front door of the apartment building without passing so much as one other human being on the sidewalk—a gift. Life often worked in his favor, he realized. He needed to take note of those happy coincidences, to focus on what he had rather than what had been taken from him. Meade needed to remember to always be grateful.

  Klavel answered his buzzer. “Klavel Investigations.”

  “Hi, Mr. Klavel,” Meade said into the speaker. “I was referred by Mrs. Bloom from Patterson’s Dry Cleaners?”

  “Oh yes . . . Elaine’s a good friend.”

  “Nice lady. Anyway . . . I have some work for you. It’s kinda personal though. It, uh . . . it involves my wife.”

  “Yes. Yes of course.” Klavel buzzed him in.

  Meade walked down the stairs. Within moments, he was inside the shabby office, the barrel of his Glock .45 pressed against Klavel’s forehead. Klavel’s rodent face was bathed in sweat. His breath, as you might expect of a man who lived and worked underground, smelled like sewage. Right now, it was coming out of him in short, popping gasps.

  “Where did Carol put it?” Meade asked quietly.

  “Wha . . . what did you . . .”

  “Carol Wentz.”

  “Y-y-yes. I know,” Klavel cleared his throat. His body was trembling. He swallowed, the way a dying man would when offered the smallest sip of water. “I know Carol, but I . . . please take that gun away.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Tell you what? Christ, I can’t even think. I’ll tell you anything you want if you would please . . . please . . .” His eyes were slick. “I . . . I don’t know what to say.”

  “Where did Carol put the drawing?” Meade waited. Ninety-nine percent of the time, the Glock could make people do whatever you wanted—whether it was getting into the trunk of a car, setting fire to their own hair, or telling the truth. You just needed to be patient, to watch.

  “The what?” Klavel asked.

  “The drawing.”

  “I . . . I don’t know what you’re talking about. God help me, I don’t.” Klavel’s eyes had gone big. Gazing into them, Meade knew he was being honest.

  “That’s a shame,” Meade said, meaning it. “It’s a shame that you don’t know.” Without taking his eyes away from Klavel’s, he reached into his jacket pocket with his free hand, touched the handle of the switchblade. Another of Meade’s strengths was his ability to make the right decision.

  “Please,” Klavel whispered. The word half dissolved in his sewer breath, an assault. “What do you want me to do?”

  Meade thought.

  Klavel said, “Anything you want,” and Meade cut him off, if only to get him to close his mouth.

  “I want you,” he said, “to make a phone call.”

  “Before I forget,” Brenna told Trent over the phone, “I need you to contact car dealerships in Tarry Ridge—find out if any light blue Subaru Vivio Bistros were sold there in 1996, ’97, and ’98.”

  “How exciting is my job? Jay-Z got nothing on me.”

  “You know, sarcasm and nipple rings really don’t mix.”

  An explosive “Sssh!” cut her off.

  “Man,” she whispered.

  “Why can’t you just buy a freakin’ iPhone?” Trent said for the third time this conversation. His voice in Brenna’s earpiece had a whiny edge that made her want to slap him, but he did have a point. She was at a computer in the Tarry Ridge library, trying to go over Carol Wentz’s forwarded phone records with her assistant, but the enormous librarian kept truncating their conversation with these abrupt, spastic shushes—it was almost like a form of Tourette’s.

  Brenna had just gotten shushed for the fifth time in five minutes, which would have made a lot more sense if there were anyone else besides the two of them in the computer room.

  Brenna glanced at the librarian—who glared back as though she couldn’t wait to bite off her head and spit it into the book return box. “Just so you know,” Brenna muttered into her hand, “somebody around here could really use an anger management class and about fifteen Xanax.”

  “I’m serious, dude,” Trent said. “If you had an iPhone or a BlackBerry, you could access your e-mail anywhere—your car, a nice park . . .”

  “Can you please not call me dude?”

  Trent sighed audibly. “You watch your movies on a Betamax, too?”r />
  “All right, fine, point taken.” Brenna went back to the list of numbers on her screen. It covered Carol Wentz’s last two weeks of phone use, with nothing at all after 9 P.M. on September 24—the last day Nelson had seen her. “She made a decent amount of calls here,” Brenna whispered. “Did you check out all these numbers?”

  “Yep. All except that last one—looks like a Westchester area code. She called it a few times that week—five on the 23rd.”

  “I see it,” Brenna whispered. “One ten-minute call and four three-minute ones, all less than thirty seconds apart.”

  “Like she kept remembering stuff she’d forgotten to say.”

  “Or she kept getting hung up on.”

  “Sssh!”

  “Yo, even I heard that,” Trent said.

  Brenna turned to the librarian. There was a name tag pinned to her sprawling bosom, but frankly, Brenna couldn’t make herself keep her eyes there long enough to read it. “Look, I know you’re just doing your job,” she tried. “But this is important business. I’ll be out in five minutes, promise.”

  “I’m not just doing my job. You want to conduct business, go to Starbucks.” Her voice sounded exactly like the serial killer’s from Silence of the Lambs.

  Trent said, “Hey, is she one of those librarians with the cute little glasses and the tight skirt with the garters underneath?

  “You mean a librarian from a porn movie?”

  “Uh . . .”

  “No. No, she is not.”

  “Sssh!”

  Brenna went back to the list. The Westchester number, the one Carol had called so many times. “It’s Graeme Klavel—the PI she hired.”

  “Damn, you are so good with phone numbers,” Trent said. “I should take you to clubs. Chicks could give me their digits, they’d go right into your brain . . . I wouldn’t even have to break eye contact to put ’em in my phone.”

  “I can only remember the numbers, Trent,” Brenna said. “I can’t make them give you their real ones.”

  “Hilarious.”

  “So anyway, it looks like he was working for her recently—not just whenever it was he got her the police file. There was that lunch at Blue Moon, but all these calls before and after.”

  “She had him looking for Iris. Explains why she never called you.”

  “I’ll call Klavel again after we hang up.” Brenna was now looking at the three calls Carol had made to Buffalo. If this bill were any indication, she didn’t like to spend a lot of time on the phone—most all her calls lasted five minutes or less, yet the ones to the Buffalo number were thirty, twenty-five, and thirty-five minutes respectively.

  “You looking at Buffalo?” Trent said.

  “Read my mind.”

  “Sssh!”

  Brenna looked at the librarian. “Careful—you might break a tooth.”

  “I checked those Buffalo calls,” Trent was saying. “They’re all to someone named Millicent. Bet it’s that aunt Wentz told us about.”

  Brenna said, “Did you ever find out what she spent forty-two eighty-nine on at that convenience store?”

  “Yep.”

  “And?”

  “Carton of cigs.”

  “Really?”

  “Hey, she was a charitable lady. Cigs are expensive. The owner says somebody picked them up. I assume Aunt Millicent.” Trent went back to the phone bill. “That one at the top of page 2 is to Carol’s friend Gayle Chandler and the rest are mostly errand calls—dry cleaners, beauty salon, some French grocery store in Bronxville. Except for this one Tarry Ridge number—7651.”

  Brenna scanned the list. During the last few days of her life, Carol Wentz had called the number eleven times, each call lasting ten seconds or less. “Why does she keep calling and hanging up?” Brenna said.

  “Got me.”

  “Do you have information on it?”

  Trent gave her a name: Willis Garvey. An address: 225 Morning Glory. Not anyone Nelson had ever mentioned, and not a neighbor. In fact, once Brenna Google-mapped it, she saw that Morning Glory Road was located in the Waterside Condominiums complex—about as far away from the Wentz house as you could get and still be in Tarry Ridge.

  After ending her call with Trent, Brenna printed out the phone records and placed them in her bag, along with a few more copies of the age-enhanced Iris Neff photo.

  “In a library, we observe library rules!” the librarian shouted after her, her voice echoing.

  Brenna turned, gave her a “Ssshhh” that lasted a solid ten seconds as the hulking woman stared, saucer-eyed. “Hypocrite,” Brenna said.

  Once outside, Brenna tapped Graeme Klavel’s number into her cell phone. Again, she got the answering machine with the Klavel Investigations message. Some business this guy must do, never answering his phone. She left him another message and headed for her car, ready for her next step. A simple one.

  If Brenna were a fan of conspicuous consumption, the Waterside Condominiums would have blown her out of her chair. As it stood, the place gave her a headache. Apart from maybe a handful of trees and the marble sign out front, the property was virtually unidentifiable as the dozen luxe but understated homes she’d driven to ten years ago—the peaceful, out-of-the-way spot Lydia Neff liked to visit every morning in order to, as her neighbor (and apparent town gossip) Gayle Chandler had put it, “meditate by the fountain.” The marble sign that read “Garden” was gone—along with, Brenna imagined, the garden itself and all the other elements of the complex that had been somewhat restrained. There were still grounds here, yes—but they were endlessly rolling, painstakingly landscaped grounds that would have been at home in Versailles. The gated recreation area was now the size of a country club, with tennis courts that rambled on for acres.

  There was something grotesque about the Waterside Condos now—the residential equivalent of that once-beautiful actress with the overzealous plastic surgeon. And while Brenna couldn’t help but remember the original, she doubted many others did. With this type of rapid, unfettered expansion, the people living with it tend to suffer from post-traumatic amnesia. What are you talking about? It’s always looked like this . . .

  Following Lee’s polite orders, Brenna winded her way past malachite lawns bedecked with rose bushes and topiaries, past mini mansions with multiple chimneys and bulbous turrets and chandeliers glistening from behind bay windows that stretched up three, four, sometimes even five stories. But her mind wasn’t on any of it . . .

  Willis Garvey. The name kept taking Brenna back to tenth grade, to the smell of Pine-Sol mingled with her history teacher Mrs. Carmody’s rose hips perfume, the cold, hard waddle of Brenna’s hinged metal desk pressing into her knees as she watched Sophia DelVechio start her oral report on Marcus Garvey . . . Completely pointless memory, but the syndrome didn’t discriminate, with Sophia DelVechio as alive in Brenna’s mind as Jim ever was, or Morasco, or Grady Carlson, and all of them more so than her father, more so than Clea . . .

  225 Morning Glory Road crept up on Brenna and slapped her in the face. She’d been driving on autopilot, following Lee’s instructions with Sophia DelVechio’s yawn-inducing oral report running through her mind from start to finish. (Too bad an in-depth description of the Pan Africa movement wasn’t something Brenna needed right now, or she’d be in great shape.)

  Brenna pulled to a stop in front of the Garvey home. Like all the others in the complex, it was white and muscular, flexing out of its smallish lot in a way that was almost obscene. The car in the driveway was a car you’d expect at a house like this—2008 black Esplanade, assiduously waxed. Brenna had no doubt she’d be able to use the hood as a makeup mirror should she so desire.

  Brenna recalled the Wentz house—so decidedly nonshowy, save for the kitchen. She thought about Carol Wentz’s 2002 Volvo, a car known for its good mileage and high safety ratings that had probably never seen a coat of wax since its showroom days. Why had Carol been calling these people and hanging up? Why had she been calling them at all?

 
; She rang the doorbell, and a maid answered, in uniform. It was one thing to hire a housekeeper, quite another to make one wear a blinding white dress and bib apron. What was this, Masterpiece Theatre? All she needed was a doily on her head. The maid was very short and of Hispanic descent and could have been anywhere from thirty to sixty. “Can I help you?” she said, eyeing Brenna warily, her gaze moving from Brenna’s hands to her pocketbook and resting there, no doubt expecting the stack of Jehovah’s Witness flyers.

  “I need to speak to Mr. or Mrs. Garvey, please.” Brenna dug around in her purse for her wallet and slipped out a business card. “Is either one of them home? I noticed the car in the driveway.”

  The maid’s eyes narrowed. “There is no Mrs. Garvey,” she said. And as if on cue, a Greek sculpture of a man appeared behind her—golden hair tousled just so, bright green eyes glittering out of his chiseled face like the chandelier in his gargantuan window, sparkling white polo shirt setting off a perfect tan—he could have been a CEO, but only if real CEOs looked like CEOs as described in romance novels, so perfect and gleaming that Brenna couldn’t look him in the eye without blinking repeatedly. This is who Carol Wentz called and hung up on eleven times? “Mr. Garvey?”

  “Yes?” His smile was bright enough to make Brenna’s pupils contract.

  “I’m Brenna Spector.” She handed him the business card. “I’m working with the police on the Carol Wentz murder.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you know Carol Wentz?”

  “No. I mean, I’ve certainly heard of her, on the news and all. But no.” He frowned at her. “Why?”

  Brenna said, “She seemed to know you.”

  The frown deepened. “Would you like to come in?”

  “Please.”

  Garvey nodded at the maid. She promptly left. Brenna followed him into the great room and gasped—she couldn’t help it. Everything in the entire space was white—from the chandelier, staircase, and balcony to the puffy chairs and handwoven rug, to the sparkling floorboards, to the Ionic columns framing the white brick fireplace. All of it tailor-made to show off Garvey’s tan, it seemed, save for the two Emmys on the mantelpiece and the small collection of pictures—Christmas card–worthy photos of the same boy and girl at different ages, the boy younger and always with a goofy grin, the girl more serious and straight-backed, both of them immaculately dressed, with Garvey’s golden good looks.