And She Was

by Alison Gaylin

  “If your daughter is watching right now, Lydia, what would you like her to know?”

  Lydia Neff looks directly at the camera. Her upper lip trembles. “Just that . . . that Mommy loves you and . . .” A tear trickles down her cheek. “Please be safe. Please come home . . .” Brenna stares at Lydia Neff’s eyes. She can’t look away from them. She clutches her coffee cup, slipping back into July 29, 1985, 9 A.M., finishing a bowl of oatmeal in her kitchen, bringing it to the sink and looking out the window as Ricky D the deejay says “Next up, Talking Heads!” and Brenna notices Mom in the garden, cross-legged on the grass, staring up at that sculpture she made after Dad left. Staring at the sculpture as if it could talk, as if it was talking to her, as if it was telling her why . . .

  “ . . . Brenna?” Morasco was saying. “Are you all right?”

  Brenna bit the inside of her cheek so hard she tasted blood. “I’m okay,” she said. She was still gazing at the chair.

  “I don’t know if you heard me. But right where you’re standing,” he said. “That’s the exact spot where Carol Wentz’s wallet was found.”

  Brenna didn’t answer. Not right away. On the wall behind the chair, the three pictures were still hanging. “She left Iris’s artwork behind.” As Brenna said it, though, she realized the order had been switched—the Valentine drawing was now at the center. Mommy was on the bottom. “Carol’s wallet was found under these pictures?”

  “Yep.”

  She walked up to the pictures, gently lifted the three of them off the wall, and placed them on the table next to the window. Compared to the other two, Mommy felt light. Brenna turned it over, and sure enough, the drawing pressed against the glass, unprotected. The back of the frame was missing. When she looked down, she saw it lying there at the base of a table—a thin square of black cardboard. Brenna picked it up. “Whatever Carol took from this house,” she said, “I’m pretty sure it was hidden in the back of that frame.”

  Chapter 23

  They were just outside the door, Brenna keying the alarm back on, when the thought hit her. “That girl who’s been calling. If she actually is Iris . . . or if she’s someone who knows her, then maybe she was the one who asked Carol to get whatever it was that was hidden behind the frame. I mean . . . who else would know it was there?”

  “Maybe,” said Morasco. “Or it could have been something that Tim O’Malley told her about.”

  The alarm light flashed on. Brenna stepped away from the door. “You don’t believe Iris is back.”

  He shrugged. “I’d like those calls to be coming from her,” he said. “But sadly, too good to be true usually is.”

  “God, you’re a nihilist. Lighten up. Let’s hear some of that Jack Paar.”

  Morasco smiled, but then a car was screeching into the Neffs’ driveway—the door slamming, footsteps crashing around the hedges and up the walk.

  Brenna looked at Morasco. His hand went to his lapel. She thought of Carol, a woman nearly as meticulous as her husband, leaving this house so fast she left the pictures in the wrong order. Never to return, even for her wallet, even for her license. What had scared her off so fast?

  Footsteps.

  They grew louder. Brenna’s heart pounded . . . and then she heard a voice. “Hello!” She recognized it. Immediately, Brenna’s shoulders relaxed. Annoyance blotted in her chest. “What’s she doing here?” she said.

  Morasco frowned at Brenna. He started to call out, “Hello,” and then sure enough, there she was, tromping around the corner of the house, Coach bag clutched in both hands as if someone might pry it away at any moment. “Hello, Detective,” she said.

  Morasco said, “Brenna Spector, I’d like you to meet—”

  “Gayle Chandler,” said Brenna.

  Gayle’s eyebrows shot up. “Do I know you?”

  “We’ve met.”

  Morasco said, “Gayle is the Realtor.” He glanced at her. “Brenna is a private investigator, working for Nelson Wentz.” He smiled a little. “She never forgets a face.”

  But honestly, Gayle looked almost exactly the same as she’d looked eleven years ago, when Brenna had approached her in front of her house. The hips might have been a little wider, and there were a few more lines around the mouth, but otherwise, she was unchanged down to the frosted coif and the big gold knot earrings and the smug, placid smile. “I just wanted to make sure you were able to get in okay.”

  Brenna said, “So you were the one to find Carol’s wallet in the house.”

  Gayle’s smile dropped away. “Yes . . . Poor Carol.”

  “You were her best friend.”

  Gayle glanced at Morasco. “I wouldn’t say that. I did like her very much, though. We were in the same book club.”

  “Nelson said you were.”

  Her eyes went hard.

  “Nelson Wentz said you were best friends,” Brenna repeated.

  Gayle Chandler turned to Morasco. “Well then, I’ll just check the door and be on my way.”

  Brenna said, “What did Carol call you about during the last week she was alive?”

  “Huh?”

  “There was a call from her to you on her cell phone records. One and a half minutes.”

  “Oh, right,” she said. “She called to ask if I’d finished our book club book. Safekeeping.”

  “Because you were book club friends.”

  Gayle eyed her. “Yes.”

  Morasco frowned at Brenna.

  “Lydia Neff, on the other hand,” Brenna said. “You were very close to her.”

  Gayle blinked. “I haven’t talked to Lyddie Neff in two years.”

  “I said were. You were close to her.”

  “Yes . . . So what?” She looked at Morasco. “Is this official police business?”

  Brenna said, “Can I ask you something?”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Why did you tell Carol that Lydia and Nelson were having an affair?”

  Gayle’s face went slack. “What?”

  “You were friends with Lydia Neff. Such close friends that you knew her daily schedule. After Iris disappeared, you knew that she went to the Waterside Condominiums every morning at nine to meditate.”

  “And you know this about me because . . .”

  “During the week of October 18, 1998, you stopped by Lydia’s house four times that I know of. At 11:30 A.M. on the twenty-first, you brought a bag from Dunkin’ Donuts and two large coffees and stayed two hours. On the twenty-second, you brought her a casserole and stayed an hour and a half . . . You were close.”

  Gayle gaped at Morasco. “What is wrong with her?”

  He shrugged. “She has a good memory.”

  “But one year earlier than that, you told Carol Wentz that Lydia was having an affair with her husband.”

  “I don’t—”

  “Let me tell you something, Gayle. If there’s one thing I know for sure, it’s that time doesn’t have an eraser on it.”

  “What is that supposed to mean?”

  “It means that when you tell a lie, it’s still as much of a lie five, ten, twenty years later as it was on the day you told it.”

  “I didn’t tell any lies.”

  “You do the wrong thing, you hurt someone, you figure, ‘Well, time will pass. People will forget. It’ll be just like it never happened.’ Right?” Brenna gritted her teeth, her anger building. “It happened, Gayle. The whole world can forget, that still doesn’t change the fact. Twelve years ago, for whatever petty reasons, you told an awful, malicious lie.”

  “I didn’t.”

  “Oh please.”

  “I did not!”

  “Your lie hurt Carol Wentz more than you ever could have imagined. It led to an obsession that probably killed her.” Brenna glared at her. “Time doesn’t heal wounds, Gayle. Sometimes, it infects them.”

  Gayle’s eyes were watering. Brenna cast a quick glance at Morasco, who was looking at her in such a way, she couldn’t tell whether it was admiration or shock or f
ear or a blend of all three. “Why did you tell Carol that Nelson and Lydia were having an affair?”

  Gayle swallowed, visibly. When she spoke, it was very quietly, between her teeth. “Because they were.”

  “Oh now, come on.”

  “Lydia told me. She said it had started one night, when he’d given her a ride home from the train station. They stopped and had a drink and the wine got the best of them. It was supposed to be just a fling, she said, but it kept . . . happening.” She cleared her throat. “By the time she told me, it had become very serious—overwhelmingly serious, too serious for her. Lyddie knew she should end it, but she didn’t know how.”

  “Lydia Neff . . . and Nelson.”

  “I told her she could do a lot better than him,” Gayle said. “But Lyddie told me . . . they could talk to each other.”

  Brenna stared at her. Everybody needs that one person . . .

  “It sounded to me like he’d gotten obsessed with her, though,” Gayle said. “Lyddie was a mess. I didn’t want to get involved. Why would I? I told Carol for one reason: to help Lydia. I told her so that Nelson would have to let Lydia go.”

  Brenna said nothing. She just watched her, this woman whom she’d figured for a crisis queen, shallow to the bone. For a few moments, she flashed on Gayle eleven years ago, with her frosty pink lipstick and her popped collar, the two Range Rovers in the driveway, one black, one white, so gleaming-new you expected bows on them. “Every morning, Lyddie goes there to meditate by the fountain. She’s a very spiritual woman, you know . . .” And Brenna had thought, One of those. One of those people like Roger Wright the developer. One of those shiny people who never wanted for anything, raised under glass so that pain never touched them . . .

  Gayle swiped a tear from her face. In a few seconds’ time, she seemed to have aged ten years, all that shine and smugness melting away. “There is a lot of anger in Nelson Wentz,” she said.

  Brenna was starting to believe her.

  Gayle started toward the door, then stopped, turned. “If you want to talk about wounds,” she said, her voice still shaking, “I suggest you talk to your client. I imagine he knows a hell of a lot more about them than I do.”

  Brenna and Morasco walked to their cars without saying a word. Once they reached her Sienna, she leaned against it, facing him, Gayle’s words swirling through her head.

  Gayle wasn’t a crisis queen. Her friend had told her about an affair she’d begun—an affair she was trapped in and couldn’t leave. An affair with Nelson Wentz. There is a lot of anger in Nelson Wentz.

  “You okay?” Morasco said.

  “Just because I remember everything, it doesn’t mean I’m right about everything.” She looked at him. “Correct?”

  “You’re honest. You expect other people to be the same. That’s a good quality.”

  “You sound like my shrink,” she said. “Well, this shrink I went to fourteen years ago, actually. I don’t see anybody now . . .”

  “I questioned Nelson Wentz when I was working Iris’s disappearance, Brenna. He told me he and Lydia had never had an affair. I believed him, too. Okay?”

  “So we’re both gullible.”

  “Hey,” he said. “At least you’re not alone.”

  She felt herself smiling a little. “I still don’t think he’s a murderer. Does that make me extra-gullible?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Am I alone?” Brenna said, and then a switch went off in her head, and again she was alone, in her kitchen the previous night after Maya had gone to sleep, looking through Nelson’s folders and then remembering the missing page of the police report . . . “Remember when I asked you if Chief Griffin ever interviewed Nelson?”

  “Yeah. I told you no.”

  “Were you telling me the truth?”

  He frowned at her. “I talked to Nelson in his own driveway. He said he’d barely ever spoken to Iris. He said he hadn’t had an affair with Lydia—it was just a very close friendship. I promised to keep it between us, and it didn’t go beyond that.”

  “So he wasn’t John Doe?”

  Morasco frowned. “John Doe?”

  “Page 22. Well, it was page 22 eleven years ago. Now the first page of the Theresa Koppelson interview is page 22 and . . .”

  Morasco was staring at Brenna as if she’d suddenly burst into Greek opera.

  “You have no idea what I’m talking about.”

  He shook his head.

  “Something from the Neff police file. I transcribed the interview from memory. I’ll e-mail it to you later.”

  “Okay.” He looked into her eyes, gave her a small, sad smile.

  “What?”

  “Brenna,” he said. “Do you ever feel like you’re a better person than everybody else? Not just smarter. But more genuinely good?”

  “No.”

  “Well, you should.” He touched her arm, so lightly she could barely feel it. He didn’t say anything more, but the gesture, the utter gentleness of it . . . Don’t look at me like that, Detective Nick Morasco. Do not look at me like that because I will remember and it will hurt.

  They stood there, staring at each other for a drawn-out moment. Until finally, Morasco spoke. “There must be a better way of making a living than this.”

  Brenna blinked. “Huh?”

  Morasco said it again, with an accent—an effete lockjaw. “My Jack Paar impersonation,” he explained after.

  They both forced themselves to laugh.

  Chapter 24

  Brenna arrived home at six twenty-five—maybe twenty minutes late at the most, but she knew Maya would be angry. “It’s hostile you know,” Maya had once said of Brenna’s lateness. She’d said it on June 20, to be exact, when Brenna had met Maya for brunch at the Cowgirl Hall of Fame at ten forty-two rather than ten-thirty—and all Brenna could think at the time was, Hostile? Where did she get that word?—and then, in the middle of their eggs Benedict, Maya had said, “Faith is never late,” which had struck Brenna as pretty hostile right there, and so she’d pointed that out, and then the two of them had spent the rest of the meal in icy silence.

  Brenna expected the cold stare tonight. She’d texted Maya an apology but hadn’t heard back—of course.

  And once Brenna opened the door to her apartment, she was greeted, not by Maya at all, but by her backpack, sitting on the kitchen table like a bulky centerpiece. “Maya!” Brenna called out. No answer. She noticed a Post-it on her computer screen:

  CHECK YOUR E-MAIL

  TNT

  P.S. Buy an iPhone.

  She started to turn the computer on, but realized Trent’s e-mail would have to wait till later because from here, Brenna noticed that there was another backpack next to Maya’s. She moved closer, put her hand on it. A black JanSport. Completely unfamiliar.

  “Maya?”

  She heard a man’s voice. “You really are so good,” the voice said, and then, “Where did you learn?” Brenna moved toward Maya’s bedroom, she could tell the voice was coming from behind the door—a deep, young voice. You look so pretty, Clee-bee. Brenna gritted her teeth. Knocked. “Maya?”

  The door opened, and there was her daughter, flush-faced and with that crooked, embarrassed smile—so young and so old at the same time. “Hi, Mom,” she said. “I was just working on my art project.”

  Brenna peered past her daughter, at the source of the deep voice, sitting cross-legged on her bed . . .

  “Hi, Mrs. Rappaport. My name is . . .”

  “Miles,” said Brenna.

  “That’s right.”

  “It’s Spector. Not Rappaport.”

  The smile dropped away. “Uh . . . Sorry.”

  Brenna heard herself say, “What are you doing here?”

  Maya cleared her throat. “Mom. I told you. We’re working on an—”

  “Art project,” Brenna said. “I know . . .” She closed her eyes for a moment, counted quickly in her mind from twenty to sixty-four, shutting the memory out of her head—September 8, 1981, the
cold metal chair on her bare legs and the smell of pine soap on the wood-planked floors of the gym at City Island Elementary. Brenna sitting in morning meeting like a ghost. First day of sixth grade. First school day without Clea. The principal talks about a fundraising drive for underprivileged youth in the South Bronx, and Brenna feels eyes all over her. Cold, staring eyes. Aaron Spiegel right behind her whispering to Katie Johnson. Brenna doesn’t want to hear, but still she strains to listen . . .

  “. . . Talk about total sluts! My brother Steve said she was humping the whole football team at George Washington.”

  “Gross!”

  “Clea-mydia. That’s what Steve calls her. I bet she’s one of those runaway hookers now.”

  Brenna bit her lip.

  “Maybe she’s doing pornos.”

  “Mom?”

  “I’m sorry, Miles, but you need to leave. It’s getting awfully late, and Maya’s got homework to do.”

  “Mom. This is my homework.”

  “Maya.” Brenna took a breath. “Please.”

  “That’s okay. Bye, Ms. Spector. Bye, Maya.” Miles got off the bed. It wasn’t until Miles passed her that she noticed he actually was carrying an artist’s notebook and a set of pencils. Nice prop.

  After Miles left, Brenna turned to Maya, and for several seconds, they stood staring at each other, saying nothing.

  Finally, Maya said, “Should I order pizza?”

  “What the hell is going on in your brain?”

  Maya stared at her. “Chinese?”

  Brenna closed her eyes for a moment. “Can I talk to you?” she said. “Please?”

  Maya followed her to the kitchen table. After they both sat down, Brenna said, “I don’t want to see you get hurt.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Yes you do. Just yesterday, Miles broke your heart, and today he’s in your room? Number one, he doesn’t deserve you. Number two, it’s totally unacceptable to have a boy on your bed with the door closed.”

  “I wasn’t . . . I mean . . . Mom . . .” She sighed heavily. “What part of ‘We were working on an art project’ don’t you understand?”