And She Was

by Alison Gaylin

  “Why is that?”

  “I think,” Sarah said, “that she’s just a good listener.”

  Brenna looked at her.

  “Everybody needs that one person, you know? The one person they can talk to.”

  Brenna thought about Nelson, falling in love with a woman he barely knew, a woman he commuted into the city with for just a few weeks. Falling in love with her via that simple, rare act of talking and listening. She thought of Jim, whom she hadn’t laid eyes on in seven years, but whom she still needed so much, to read the words she typed on the screen, to see her thoughts, to listen . . . Then she thought of Maya, who last night had let go of the eye rolling and the silence and the contempt and spoken to Brenna, really spoken to her for the first time in so long . . . yet much as Brenna knew that need, much as she could feel it, her mind had abandoned Maya. It had abandoned them both.

  Brenna swallowed hard. “Every mother should be a good listener, Sarah.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “What I’m saying . . . is that I’ll do everything I can to find Elizabeth.”

  Over the next hour, Brenna and Sarah discussed Elizabeth’s likes, dislikes, passions, and pet peeves. They talked about her favorite foods (garlicky pasta, fresh tomatoes, crème brûlée) favorite types of music (Sinatra, Rimsky-Korsakov), sense of humor (Marx Brothers, Woody Allen), pets (a series of panicky Chihuahuas, a cat, fussy and obese)—the high and low points of her long, complicated life. Unlike Nelson, Sarah could answer any question Brenna threw at her. She knew everything about her mother and clearly loved relaying the details—from her tiniest quirk to her most important belief, all those things that put flesh to the idea that was Elizabeth Stoller, that made her live again. By the time Brenna was ready to leave, it was as if Elizabeth was in the room with them. And Sarah was smiling, some of the color back in her face. “You’ve given me a lot to work with,” Brenna said.

  “Me too.” Sarah put a hand on her shoulder. “Thanks.”

  As Brenna started up her car, her thoughts moved back and forth from Nelson and Lydia, to Jim and herself, to Sarah Stoller and her mother . . . Everybody needs that one person. And then she thought of Carol Wentz. She and her husband barely spoke, her chat room friends only knew her as a fictionalized screen name. Gayle Chandler, whom Nelson had referred to as Carol’s “best friend” . . . Brenna had met Gayle Chandler ten years ago, and at that time she’d positioned herself as Lydia’s best friend. “Check the new condos. Every morning, Lyddie goes there to meditate by the fountain. She’s a very spiritual woman, you know . . .”

  Gayle, who, two years prior to that, had falsely informed Carol—for whatever reason—that Lydia was screwing her husband. Brenna didn’t know Gayle Chandler, but she knew a crisis queen when she saw one—a woman with very little life of her own, dying to insinuate herself at the center of any tragedy . . . No, Gayle wasn’t that one person, either.

  It wasn’t until she was pulling out of the medical center and onto busy Bloomingdale Road that Brenna found herself recalling Carol Wentz’s phone bill—those three thirty-minute calls to Buffalo buried amid all the seconds-long errand calls and brief chats with friends. It hit her that two of the three Buffalo calls—presumably to Carol’s cigarette-smoking aunt Millicent—took place right after a conversation with Klavel, her private investigator.

  That one person. Carol could have been telling Millicent everything she learned that week. And what exactly was it that Carol Wentz had learned?

  Images flooded Brenna’s brain—announcing themselves one by one like a line of light switches flicking on . . . The blue Vivio Bistro at Lydia Neff’s house twelve years ago: Lydia urging Nelson, Forget you ever saw the car. Forget you were ever here. Three-and-a-half-year-old M from the police file, telling Morasco that Iris had gotten into Santa’s “happy” car, which had “round eyes and a smile.” The big, pretty-faced cop, in front of the Neff house eleven years ago; driving by the Wentz home this morning, staring through the windshield with his shark’s eyes, his predator’s eyes. Staring through the windshield of Santa’s happy car.

  Then, Brenna recalled the voice of the girl over Nelson’s phone, buried in static but still clear enough. It was my fault. The voice of a teenage girl. A sixteen-year-old girl, taking the blame for Carol’s death.

  That one person . . .

  What if the girl on the phone really had been Iris Neff? What if Iris had been taken away in that Vivio Bistro eleven years ago and had returned two weeks ago? What if, in a bid to escape her captor, she’d phoned Mom’s old confidant Nelson Wentz? What if Carol had answered instead? What if Carol had become that one person for Iris—that one person who could listen. The one who might help.

  Carol hadn’t called the police . . . Of course she hadn’t. Brenna thought of Lane Hutchins, ten years ago in uniform, standing next to that pretty-faced cop, the cop even Morasco claimed not to have known. Lane Hutchins. Now, chief of police. Then, the muscle. Of course Carol hadn’t called the police.

  She had called her own “one special person.”

  Brenna pulled into a gas station and parked. She closed her eyes and took herself back to the computer room at the Tarry Ridge library—to the smell of Windexed plastic, to Trent’s voice in her earpiece, “You looking at Buffalo?” and the scroll of telephone numbers on the screen in front of her . . .

  Brenna dug her nails into her palms and she was back in the present, Aunt Millicent’s number still fresh in her head. She picked up her phone and tapped it in. Okay, Aunt Millicent. Tell me what you and Carol were talking about. She hit send.

  “We’re sorry. The number you have reached is no longer in service at this . . .”

  Must be some mistake. Brenna stared hard at the phone, and tapped it in again, making sure she got each number right.

  “We’re sorry . . .”

  Could she have seen it wrong on the screen? Brenna called Trent, asked him to read the number back to her . . .

  “Same one I remembered,” she whispered.

  “There a problem?” Trent said.

  “It’s disconnected.”

  “The aunt’s phone? But she was just talking to her last week.”

  Brenna said, “Can you do a reverse directory on that number?”

  “You gonna go up to Buffalo now?” Brenna could hear his fingers clacking away at the keyboard.

  “Don’t know.”

  “You sound kinda weird. You on to something, Spec?”

  “Not sure. And don’t call me Spec.”

  He sighed. “The address is 811 Mulberry Street, Buffalo.”

  Brenna’s breath caught. Her mouth went dry. “Mulberry.”

  “I don’t see any apartment number.”

  “That’s because it’s the whole house.”

  “How do you know that?” Trent said, with Brenna’s mind already answering, already pulling her back into the Las Vegas airport at 1 A.M. on September 30, returning home after finding Larry Shelby, the air-conditioning chilling her bare arms as she approached her gate . . . Brenna glances up at the two TVs flanking gate A23 as she nears it. CNN coverage of a fire in upstate New York. On each TV, the image of a blazing, four-story house at night. The screens glow like devil eyes. Why is cable news so pyromaniacal?

  A female voiceover intones, “A fire claimed the lives of five residents of 811 Mulberry—a group home for recovering addicts in Buffalo, New York, early this evening, with two more rushed to the hospital in critical condition. Firefighters are still trying to control the blaze, believed to have been set by one of the residents . . .”

  Brenna flips her MP3 player back on, Iggy Pop singing about his Chinese rug, as an elderly black woman appears on the screen . . .

  “You there?” Trent was saying.

  “What is Millicent’s last name?”

  “You mean the aunt?”

  “Millicent,” Brenna said. “The one with the Buffalo number.”

  The elderly black woman is talking animatedly, tears in her eyes, her he
ad shaking and shaking, as if she’s in her own world—a world of no-this-can’t-be-happening—as if she doesn’t know the camera is there.

  “Her name is Millicent Davis,” Trent said.

  Brenna said the last name along with him, her mind still in the airport, with Iggy Pop shouting about success in her ear and white letters appearing under the distraught woman’s face “MILLIE DAVIS, OWNER, 811 MULBERRY.”

  “Millie Davis isn’t Carol’s aunt. She’s the owner of a group home for addicts,” Brenna said.

  “Huh?”

  “A week after Carol called her there, the whole place burned down.”

  “What?”

  “You heard me,” Brenna said, another idea gaining strength. A group home for addicts . . . “Trent, did you get anywhere on that search for Lydia Neff?”

  “Nope—very weird. I’ve run traces on her credit cards, her phone—nothing’s been used in the past two years. It’s like she dropped off the planet.”

  “Look on other planets then.”

  “Huh?”

  “I’m serious, dude.”

  Brenna ended her call. She was ten minutes away from the Tarry Ridge library, and it closed in twenty. She needed to get there, fast.

  The library was of the same smooth white stone as the police station, with Ionic columns out front as some kind of symbol of higher learning. The architecture was that cold blend of classical and modern—synagogue-meets-mausoleum. Like most other buildings in Tarry Ridge, it seemed just a little too big for its own good—as Brenna recalled from her previous visit, there weren’t anywhere near enough books in the place to justify its sprawl. Out front, a long table stretched out, laden with pies, cookies, and stacked-up brownies, three middle-aged socialites lined up behind it, pimping the library bake sale at the top of their lungs. “Pleeeease donate to the library!” yelled one—a barrel-chested blonde in pink shirtdress. “Lemon Lulu cake is only seven dollars!” hollered another—this one younger and skinnier, her style somewhere between high school cheerleader and subway panhandler. “The Lulu cake is spectacular! You will not be sorry.” It always amazed Brenna how enthusiastic the rich were about raising money. They could be fighting tooth and nail against the estate tax, but give ’em a tin can and a relatively pointless cause—more money for an already overly endowed library, for instance—and they were on you like Lincoln Tunnel hookers.

  Brenna rushed through the marble foyer, around the expansive checkout desk, her footsteps echoing—through the reference section, left at Books on Tape, and back into the computer room, the super-sized librarian standing up at her desk to give her the stink eye.

  Brenna smiled up at the librarian. She had to be at least six-foot-five. “Have you grown taller since the last time I saw you?”

  The stink eye intensified.

  “Computer password, please,” Brenna said. “Sorry I can’t chat, but I’m in a hurry.”

  The librarian handed her a piece of paper with a password typed on it and crashed back down on her chair, glaring.

  Brenna took a seat at the first computer, the idea burning through her as she logged on. Why was Carol having half-hour-long conversations with a group home owner? Brenna went to Google News and typed in 811 Mulberry. A slew of articles about the fire popped up. She clicked on the one from the Buffalo News, reading it all the way through, her heart pounding. When she finished, she closed her eyes. I was right . . . For several seconds, she was back in Nelson’s living room, just a few hours ago, Nelson expounding on Lydia, the Scotch floating off his breath . . .

  “Her past. Her wild college years. Her ex-husband, Iris’s father. A genius, but wrecked his brain with drugs—methamphetamine, I think . . .”

  Five residents of 811 Mulberry—all recovering addicts—had perished in the fire. “. . . Timothy O’Malley. Lydia’s ex-husband—that’s his name . . .” One was listed in critical condition, at Sisters of Charity Hospital in Buffalo. His name was Timothy O’Malley, and the fire was believed to have originated in his room.

  “He was in an institution back then. I don’t know that she told anyone else about him, other than me.”

  Brenna went to Google images, typed in O’Malley’s name and then the address 811 Mulberry. In a follow-up news article, she found a picture—the face gaunt, the long hair thinning, dark circles under the eyes like bruises, but still . . . it was the same young man from the family portraits in Carol’s folder.

  811 Mulberry was a group home. All residents shared a phone. Carol had been talking to Iris’s father. She’d bought him a carton of cigarettes, probably to get him to talk more.

  Brenna picked up her cell phone and started keying in the number. The librarian stood up.

  “I’m calling the police so you’d better not freakin’ shush me,” Brenna snapped.

  The librarian sat down so fast the room shook a little.

  Brenna asked Fields to connect her with Morasco, and he was on the line fast, his voice strange, cold.

  “Nelson didn’t kill Carol,” she said. “Her death was a part of something else. Something bigger.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Iris’s father spoke to Carol on the phone. Less than a week later, Nick, five days after Carol’s death . . . Iris’s father’s home burned down.”

  “Timothy O’Malley?”

  “Yes. He’s in critical condition.”

  Morasco inhaled sharply. Brenna could hear his breathing shake as he let the air go. “My God,” he whispered.

  “Listen,” she said quietly. “I know you don’t want to do any more damage to your job than you’ve already done. I get that. But if you could just give me the name of that cop I told you about—the one with the mole . . .”

  “I don’t know who you’re talking about.”

  Brenna pressed on. “I’m not asking you to get involved, Nick. But I think that cop might have had something to do with Iris’s disappearance. And since he seems to be the only one around here who can still talk—”

  “I swear to God, Brenna. I don’t know who that is.”

  “Christ, are you that afraid? You said yourself we’re on the same side.”

  “You don’t understand.” Morasco said it through his teeth, and so quietly she had to press the phone to her ear. “I need to ask you something.”

  Brenna exhaled hard. “What?”

  “Graeme Klavel. The investigator whose number you found in Carol Wentz’s files.”

  “Yes?”

  “Did you ever talk to him? Find out if he’d done any work for her?”

  “No,” she said. “He never called back.” She closed her eyes. “We have Carol Wentz’s cell phone records, though.”

  “You do?”

  “Don’t ask how,” she said. “Carol spoke to Klavel repeatedly—five times during the last week of her life. His office was in Mount Temple. He was probably the man she met at the diner.”

  Morasco took another deep breath, and Brenna listened—a slow inhale and release, as if he was trying to calm them both. “Coincidences happen all the time.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “This isn’t some movie. Real life, things happen. They don’t really fit together—they just look that way. That’s why you have to look at the facts. Houses burn down for all sorts of reasons. Tim O’Malley was a chain smoker. Carol Wentz wasn’t Klavel’s only client. Mount Temple has a high crime rate.”

  “Nick.”

  “Yeah?”

  “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “Just a second.” Brenna heard the shuffling of feet. When Morasco spoke again, his voice was barely above a whisper. “Brenna, Graeme Klavel was murdered.”

  Chapter 22

  Brenna stood just outside the open door of Graeme Klavel’s basement apartment/office, crime scene techs swarming his wrecked body so that she was only able to see it in parts—an outstretched arm here, a foot there, shoeless and sallow, and blood, so much of it, the rotting smell so thick she had to breathe into her sh
irtsleeve. As with what few other crime scenes she’d been to, Brenna hated to look, yet there was that car-crash curiosity that made it impossible to turn away. It was sick, yes, but it was also instinctual. You’re the only species that knows it’s going to die, you will stare at the preview. You can’t help it.

  Though Brenna was technically outside the apartment, she still felt trapped. Klavel’s space was so small to begin with, and with all his files upended, his closets emptied, clothes and papers strewn all over the floors as if the apartment itself had been assaulted, it was a wonder all those cops and crime scene techs could fit in there.

  Brenna’s gaze slid from the body to the tipped-over kitchen table to the pulled-out drawers—Klavel seemed to do all his living in two small rooms—then rested on the dark window over the sink, a window looking up at the street. Sad. Brenna heard her name then, and saw Morasco, moving through the room toward her, a stocky, silver-haired guy at his side in a navy blue blazer and a checkered oxford that dug into his neck. Brenna assumed it was the Mount Temple cop who’d heard her message on Klavel’s answering machine. As Morasco had told Brenna on the phone, one of the detectives on the case had called him because her message had mentioned Carol’s name.

  The two men made their way out the door, Morasco touching her arm lightly when he greeted her. “Brenna,” said Morasco, “this is Detective Wayne Cavanaugh, Mount Temple Police.”

  “Good to meet you.”

  Cavanaugh nodded. “You too.”

  Oddly, Brenna’s gaze settled on his nose—the tiniest afterthought of an Irish nose buried in his meaty face, bright blue eyes hovering over it. “You’re a PI?”

  Brenna nodded. “I work out of the city.”

  “So . . . I’m taking it you didn’t have much contact with Mr. Klavel?”

  “Never spoke to him,” she said. “In fact, I was getting a little annoyed he wasn’t returning my calls.”

  “What were you calling him about?”

  “He had done some work for Carol Wentz. Her husband, Nelson, is my client.”

  The blue eyes narrowed, and for a moment he reminded Brenna of her mother’s cat, Rodin—overfed and milky-eyed, always teetering on the brink of a nap. “You mentioned that on the machine,” he said. “Do you know what the work was?”