And She Was

by Alison Gaylin

  “You didn’t find it in his files?”

  “Please answer my question.”

  “Yes,” Brenna said. “I know what the work was.”

  He sighed. A heavy sigh with a wheeze attached, which again made Brenna think of Rodin. Twenty-two years old and so fat he could barely stand up, so uncomfortably bulbous his skin seemed a size too small, yet still that cat was alive, proof that nature made no sense, never did, never would . . . “Gimme a break.”

  “Hey, I answered your question.”

  “You go to law school or something?”

  “Nope. I studied psych.”

  “Great.”

  “Now my turn,” she said. “Did you find Klavel’s files regarding the work he did for Carol Wentz, or were those files missing?”

  Another massive sigh. “All of his electronic equipment was stolen,” Cavanaugh said, as Morasco made his way back to them. “He kept all his files on a laptop, so, to answer your question, yes, Carol Wentz’s files were missing. All of Mr. Klavel’s files were missing.” He looked at her. “My turn.”

  “Yes?”

  “You know the friggin’ question.”

  Brenna smiled a little. “Klavel got Ms. Wentz the police files for the Iris Neff case.”

  “That little girl? From eleven years ago?”

  “Yep.”

  “Weird.” Cavanaugh looked at Morasco. “But it’s probably more interesting to you guys in Tarry Ridge.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Four of these in less than half a year, I can’t get one fuckin’ witness, one latent print, nothing . . . this guy is too smart,” he told Morasco, between his teeth. “You’re lucky.”

  Brenna said, “Why is he lucky?”

  Cavanaugh gave her a tight smile. “No more questions,” he said.

  Morasco and Brenna walked away from the crime scene, the silence between them somehow punctuated by the near-constant roar of traffic. It was dark already, with that insidious fall chill in the air—another year beginning the slow fade to black—and that added to the feeling.

  Brenna had spent a decent amount of time on Columbus Street back when she was working for Errol. She’d stood in the doorway of number 2034—then a boarded-up building, now a vacant lot—haunted it for a good two hours, all so she could snap pictures of a cheating husband by the name of Victor Gomez getting some afternoon delight from one Sam McFarlane, who lived in 2037, directly across the two always-busy lanes. Sam had not been a Samantha but a Samuel—a mountain of a New York City bus driver, and Brenna had used her telephoto lens to capture images of the two men in the doorjamb, Victor standing on tiptoe to kiss big Sam good-bye. It had been one of her sadder assignments—Brenna had always viewed men who cheated on their wives with other men to be acting not so much out of selfishness or even weakness, but out of physical need . . . Anyway, Columbus had been a crap street back then and it was still a crap street now—the type of street the real Columbus would say, “Thanks a whole hell of a lot” over, maybe reconsider that whole claiming-of-America thing, if this crap street was all it was going to get him.

  Morasco started to walk toward the nearest cross street, where his car was parked. Brenna thought for a moment he was just going to leave her there, without saying another word, when he stopped and turned to her. “Nelson needs a good lawyer,” he said.

  “That’s why Cavanaugh called you lucky. Because your murder is already solved. You’re going to arrest him.”

  Morasco nodded.

  “Unbelievable.”

  Morasco took a step closer. “Here’s the thing, Brenna,” he said. “Cavanaugh told me Klavel’s killing was identical to the other switchblade murders in the area—stabbed in the neck and gut in the exact same way. That information was never in the papers.”

  Brenna looked at him. “What was stolen from Klavel?”

  “You heard Cavanaugh. Same thing that was stolen from all the switchblade victims.”

  “Electronic equipment.”

  “TV, recording stuff, speakers, spy cams . . .”

  She gave him a flat look.

  “And yes,” Morasco said. “The iBook that Klavel did all his business on.”

  “If someone wanted to find out what he’d told Carol,” Brenna said, “then these particular robberies were an excellent cover.”

  “Yeah, but—”

  “Just like a chain-smoking addict could easily burn down a group home.”

  “Right.”

  “And an unhappy marriage could end in murder.”

  “Yes,” he said quietly. “So we’ve either got one super-genius killer, desperate to cover up an unsolved disappearance from eleven years ago . . .” His gaze dropped to the sidewalk. “Or, seeing as this is life, Brenna, we’ve got what’s known as a rotten coincidence.”

  Brenna put a hand on his shoulder. She watched his face until finally, he looked back up, into her eyes. “Which do you think it is?” she asked.

  “Does it matter?”

  “Yes.”

  Morasco said nothing. He didn’t need to.

  “So,” Brenna said, a smile coming on. “We are on the same side.”

  As Morasco walked Brenna to her car, they discussed Carol Wentz and Iris Neff, searching for connections beyond the gossip that once swirled around Nelson and Lydia. There was the blue car, of course. The Vivio Bistro, which had cruised by the Wentz home following Nelson’s press conference and had obviously been parked outside Lydia’s house more than once. But Brenna was now convinced that Morasco truly didn’t know who its pretty-faced cop driver was—or if that driver, the one with the mole, had ever been a cop at all.

  There was Carol’s wallet, found in the Neff home, and the files and files of research Carol had kept on Iris’s disappearance and Carol’s claim to her chat room friends that her “daughter” was alive and back in touch . . . but beyond that, there wasn’t much that tied together this middle-aged, murdered woman and this eleven-years-missing girl. Except, of course, for another vanished person. “We’ve got to talk to Lydia,” Brenna said as they turned up the street where her car was parked.

  Morasco shook his head. “We’d have better luck finding Jimmy Hoffa than Lydia Neff. No one around here has seen or spoken to her in two years, and that includes her Realtor.”

  “Hoffa. Timely reference there.”

  “Hey, it’s a classic.”

  Brenna smiled. He smiled back.

  “Listen, Nick. If you were concerned about sharing facts with me because I work for a possible murder suspect, you don’t have to worry anymore.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Nelson Wentz fired me a couple of hours ago.”

  “What? Why?”

  “I have no idea.”

  Her phone chimed, and she answered it, well aware he was still gaping at her. “Brenna Spector.”

  She heard a choking noise on the other end of the line—a cutting off and releasing of the breath in drawn-out, trembling whispers. “Who is this?” Brenna said, before she recognized the sound. Crying. “Hello?”

  And then she heard the voice. “I’m a terrible person,” said the voice, the wet, choked voice of a teenage girl. The same girl who had called Nelson. “I’m so sorry, so, so sorry.”

  “Who are you?” Brenna whispered.

  The girl ended the call. Brenna looked at Morasco. “We need to find Lydia Neff,” she said.

  Visiting the last place a missing person had been seen. Retracing steps in reverse. It was something Brenna had always done at the start of investigations—but not this one. And she knew she had to. Lydia Neff hadn’t been heard from in two years, but her furniture was in her old house—pretty much everything she owned was in that house—and, as Morasco said, “Far as information on Lydia goes, that’s as good as it’s gonna get.”

  Brenna wasn’t working for Nelson, true, but she couldn’t turn back now. She owed it to Carol and Timothy O’Malley and Graeme Klavel and to the girl on the phone. She owed it to all those
pieces of information shoved into her head, from eleven years ago and from today, all those bits of knowledge bumping into one another, like a machine full of bum parts, nothing really clicking.

  On what was probably the last night of her life, Carol Wentz had gone to the Neff house. What had brought her there? What had made her leave that house in such a hurry that she left her wallet behind, never wanting to go back—this practical-minded woman choosing instead to replace her driver’s license? What had she been so frightened of?

  “I’m going to the Neff house,” Brenna told Morasco once they reached her car.

  “I figured.”

  Brenna opened the car door and the light switched on, illuminating the age-enhanced photo she’d left on the passenger’s seat. Morasco picked it up, his gaze soft on the girl’s face. “Iris?”

  “Yes.”

  “It’s funny, I had one of these made up every year, from when Iris would have been ten through fourteen, maybe fifteen. Every year. I’d fax or e-mail the photos to the hospitals, the missing children’s organizations, FBI, every place that might be able to track her down . . . I did it behind the chief’s back—it was a closed case by then, after all, and hell, I wasn’t even supposed to be on it when it was open.”

  “I’ll bet Lydia appreciated it.”

  “She never knew,” he said. “I figured, why get her hopes up, you know? But the thing is, Brenna, I’d get my hopes up. Every time I sent that damn thing out I’d imagine Iris walking through the station door, asking for her mom.”

  Brenna said, “I know exactly how you felt.”

  “You do?”

  She studied the soft gaze, the way his hands held the picture, that tenderness . . . “You felt like, if Iris were to come back, then anything would be possible,” she said. “Anyone could come home.”

  Morasco swallowed hard. He looked up from the picture and into her eyes, and she saw that his eyes were clouded—not with tears but with the threat of them. “Yes,” he said softly.

  “By any chance,” she said, “are you a father?”

  “No.” The word sounded dry enough to crumble in the night air. Brenna knew there was something Morasco wasn’t telling her—a pain under his skin he couldn’t talk about out loud, and she wasn’t going to make him. She had pain, too.

  She put a hand on his arm. “Would you like to come with me to the Neff house?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, I really would.”

  Iris’s childhood bicycle was still propped up at the side of the Neff house, frayed handlebar streamers glinting in the garden lights.

  Seeing the bike for the second time, in the exact same spot as it had been three nights ago, Brenna couldn’t help but picture Iris herself—sixteen-year-old Iris—sneaking onto the grounds of this house after so many years away. She pictured this long-captured girl knocking on the front door and whispering her mother’s name, searching the grounds for anyone alive but finding only her own bike, splayed in the dirt, dripping with cobwebs and rust. Brenna pictured Iris righting the bike, wishing there were so much more she could right with that blue car lurking somewhere, its engine running, waiting to take her back.

  “You coming?” called Morasco, who was already around the side of the house, moving toward the back door.

  Brenna hurried to catch up. Before meeting her here, Morasco had stopped at the Realtor’s place to get the alarm combination. At the back door, Morasco fished the paper out of his pocket and started to key it in.

  “1028, right?” said Brenna.

  He turned to her. “The Realtor changed it after the break-in, but that was the old combination. How did you know that?”

  “Iris’s birthday. October 28. Lydia Neff told me.”

  “When?”

  “Eleven years ago.”

  He smiled. Pushing the door open, Brenna noticed the smell first—a mustiness. It brought her for a few seconds to October 19, 1985, day two of a five-day family trip to Florida, to walking through the haunted house at Disney World with her twin cousins Liz and Deb . . . She recounted the first three lines of the Pledge of Allegiance to pull her back, but that same scent was still here—not manufactured and sprayed into the air to give you chills as it had been back then, but real. The smell of ghosts. “Why did Lydia Neff leave?” Brenna asked Morasco. “Where did she go?”

  “That would be the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question.”

  “Another incredibly dated reference,” she said. “How old are you, anyway?”

  “Sometime I’ll do my Jack Paar impersonation for you.” Morasco turned a light on, and Brenna looked around the kitchen—that long wooden table, the dry sink stocked with plates, the refrigerator humming. If it weren’t for the smell, you’d think someone still lived here and they simply were out for the night.

  “There were renters here for a while,” Morasco said, reading her thoughts. “Three sets of them, six months apiece. It’s only been totally vacant for four or five months, and I think the Realtor still has high expectations.”

  Brenna nodded. “Do you know exactly where the wallet was found?” Brenna asked Morasco.

  He nodded. “This way.”

  Brenna followed him through the kitchen, then through a small room with hard floors and creamy white walls, empty, save for a bamboo yoga mat. On the wall facing the mat was a dark wooden plaque, painted with white letters:

  CONQUER THE ANGRY MAN BY LOVE

  CONQUER THE ILL-NATURED MAN BY GOODNESS

  CONQUER THE MISER WITH GENEROSITY

  CONQUER THE LIAR WITH TRUTH

  Over the doorway, one more: “The greatest achievement is selflessness.”

  Brenna said, “Lydia liked to meditate.”

  “Yeah,” he said. “I don’t know whether that was a real interest, or just how she was coping with her grief, but back when I was working on the case, we had to work around the meditation and the yoga classes.” They entered the formal dining room, the walls painted a forest green, with white trim over the doorways. There was a fireplace against the wall and a dusty table lined with chairs, a pewter dish at the center filled with smooth, yellow stones that had been cut to look like pears. Brenna’s eyes went to a framed photo over the fireplace—a larger version of one of the family pictures Brenna had seen in Carol’s folder: a posed black-and-white of a longer-haired Lydia, smiling in a sundress, baby Iris in her lap. A young man stood behind her, hand on her shoulder. He had wavy brown hair that grazed his collarbone, a thick beard, but she recognized the eyes from the later pictures in Carol’s folder—the troubled eyes. Timothy O’Malley.

  “I questioned Tim just once—he was living at a rehab up in Albany.” Morasco said. “He wasn’t a great source of information back then, but if he wasn’t . . . Well, if the situation were different, he’d be able to help us now.”

  “Why?”

  “He knew Lydia. Probably better than anyone. When Iris disappeared, he was in lock-down rehab. He wasn’t reacting well to the methadone. Couldn’t have weighed more than a hundred ten pounds and half of what he said made no sense at all, but Lydia was still visiting him regularly—telling him her problems.”

  “Wait. She was telling him problems?”

  Morasco nodded. “Her ‘strong shoulder.’ She told me that herself.”

  Brenna looked up at the picture again—the pain in the young man’s eyes, the young woman, so pretty but so serious, and the baby, smiling, all of them touching each other, his hand on her shoulder, her hand covering his, both of them holding the baby’s chubby arms. Support. “They’re all gone,” Brenna said. “A whole family.”

  “Yes,” he said. Then, “Life.”

  She turned to Morasco. He was staring at the picture. “Life,” he said again, and again Brenna sensed it, that pain behind the skin, behind the eyes, held back by the thinnest of threads. She had an urge to touch the side of his face, but bit it back like a memory. “Where was the wallet found?”

  “The living room,” he said. “Next room over,” and they bot
h moved toward it in silence.

  The living room looked instantly familiar—the couch with the cream and brick red Southwestern print, the soft chair beside it, dark green cloth, placed against a wall the same brick shade as in the couch. Brenna moved toward it. “. . . exactly where the wallet was found,” Morasco was saying, but his voice was fading even as he said it, Brenna careening back to September 10, 1998, three days after Iris Neff disappeared, to the taste of black coffee in her mouth and the feel of the hot mug in her hands, the cold, smooth hardwood floor beneath her bare legs as Brenna sat in the living room of her Fourteenth Street apartment wearing Jim’s long-sleeved “Ski Aspen” T-shirt, her back propped up against the couch, watching Good Morning New York at 10:15 A.M. . . .

  “It’s every mother’s worst nightmare,” the newscaster’s voice intones. Lydia Neff appears on screen, staring at a framed picture. Brenna looks at the pale face, the raven hair—a woman both striking and strikingly sad. The image fades into a snapshot of a smiling little girl. Pigtails. Purple overalls. The newscaster says, “Lydia Neff’s six-year-old daughter, Iris, wandered off from a playdate on Labor Day. She has not been seen or heard from since.”

  Brenna takes a swallow of her coffee. The screen blinks, and now Lydia Neff is seated in a dark green chair, three framed pictures behind her. “I know she’s out there somewhere,” Lydia says. Her eyes glisten. Tears. Brenna can’t look at Lydia Neff for too long. Every time she does, she flashes back to her mother two weeks after Clea disappeared—the same pain in her eyes as Brenna told her, “Yes. I saw her leave. She told me not to tell you, Mom . . .”

  Lydia says, “A mother knows these things. I can feel it.”

  Brenna focuses on the framed pictures behind her head—all crayon drawings on white paper, hung in a vertical line. On top, a stick figure standing beside a puffy green tree; at the center, a round, smiling face with long eyelashes and black hair—“MOMMY” below it in a child’s scrawl; at the bottom, a pink Valentine with a rainbow hovering over it, surrounded by stars. Iris’s artwork. Framed.