And She Was

by Alison Gaylin

  I’ve seen her face a million times since then. She comes to me in dreams and she asks me why. I am never able to give her an answer. At first, I thought it was because of what happened between you and Nelson on those train rides. But that was never the reason. I’m afraid I simply didn’t like the way she asked me for a juice box.

  With deepest apologies,

  Carol Wentz

  Tim says, “Is there anything in that letter that I need to know?”

  Brenna looks up at the bandaged face. She stares into the dark, lost eyes and she sees the eyes of his only daughter. “I don’t think so,” she says.

  The boat was docking now, everyone stumbling to get off. Brenna watched them as they passed—a pair of elderly women with hunched shoulders and wet noses, holding each other’s hands. A little boy, weeping against the side of his exhausted mother. A shell-shocked young girl, her mascara dripping, tapping at her lip, her boyfriend clutching her shoulder so tightly his fingertips were white . . . All of them with secrets, all of them with shame and regret and at least one mistake they wished with their whole hearts they’d never made—even if that mistake had simply been getting on this boat.

  Brenna turned to her daughter. “You were right,” she said.

  “What?”

  She pushed a lock of hair out of the huge blue eyes—not Clea’s blue eyes but Maya’s, Maya’s wet yellow hair, Maya’s confused little frown. “You were right about the Maid of the Mist. You were right about Niagara Falls,” she said. “You are right about a lot of things.”

  Maya broke into a smile. “It’s about time you figured that out.”

  Brenna smiled back. In this moment at least, she was glad for her memory.

  Author’s Note

  Hyperthymestic Syndrome is real, but quite rare with only a handful of cases known to exist since its first introduction in medical journals in 2006.

  The condition has been described as perfect autobiographical memory—the ability to call up any date of one’s life and remember it, in full, with all five senses. Though some with hyperthymestic syndrome can compartmentalize these memories, keeping them tightly locked within a type of mental filing cabinet, others—like Brenna—find themselves plagued by frequent, random intrusions of the past. As one subject, interviewed by researchers at UC Irvine put it, “It is like a movie in my mind that never stops.”

  For me, that concept calls up so many questions: With the past so vivid in your mind, how can you fully experience the present? How can you move on from an event—whether tender or traumatic or even mundane—without the ability to let at least some of it go? How can you put things in perspective when they’re all sharing equal space in your mind—your wedding day, the moment you heard that a loved one had died, the cornflakes you had for breakfast on June 12, 1995? How can you forgive and forget if you simply can’t forget?

  In creating Brenna, I tried to answer those questions as best I could, while keeping in mind that memory is also a blessing—our only way of truly holding on to those we care about.

  February 5, 2011

  She’s only a shadow, a silhouette stretching provocatively on a computer screen, revealing scandalous details of a life story that most likely isn’t true. Yet when private investigator Brenna Spector is hired to find missing webcam phenomenon Lula Belle, her perfect memory tells her she’s seen this mysterious young woman before, and at a time when she may have been in terrible danger. As Brenna comes closer to tracking down the real Lula Belle, she discovers shocking truths about her own past—and the disappearance of her sister Clea—that will change her life forever.

  Read on for an excerpt from the thrilling sequel to

  And She Was

  Coming Winter 2013

  from HarperCollins Publishers!

  She wants to die.

  The thought flew at Brenna Spector like words on a passing billboard—there for just an instant but solid, real. Brenna was staring at the image on her assistant, Trent La Salle’s, computer screen—their latest missing person, if you could call what they were looking at a person. She was more a shadow, standing behind a scrim, backlit into anonymity—all limbs and curves and fluffy hair, but no detail, no color. No face. It looked as though she was naked, but you couldn’t even be sure of that. But then she tapped her lower lip, the shadow-woman on the screen. She tapped it one, two, three times . . . and the thought flies at Brenna as she looks into the girl’s watery eyes for an instant, just an instant, with the chill wind in their faces and the boat creaking beneath them, everything so icy-wet, so cold it burns . . .

  “She’s so freakin’ hot,” Trent said.

  Brenna came back from the memory, fixing her gaze on the screen once more. “Uh, Trent? She’s a silhouette.”

  “Hey, so are those chicks on truck mud flaps?”

  Brenna rolled her eyes.

  “You’ll get it when you see more.”

  As if on cue, the shadow-woman began stretching her body into a series of suggestive yoga poses—a slow backbend, followed by the sharp V of the Downward Facing Dog, a seamless shift to standing, after which she reached down, grasped her right ankle and pulled her leg straight out and then up, until her knee touched the side of her head.

  “See?” Trent said.

  With shocking ease, she yanked her leg, stole-like, around her shoulder. Her voice was a soft Southern accent, drifting out of the speakers like steam. “I’ll bend any way you want me to.”

  Trent nearly fell off his chair.

  “I get it, I get it.” Brenna grabbed the mouse and hit pause. “Who is she?”

  “Lula Belle.” He said it the way a nun might say the name of a saint. “She’s an artist.”

  Brenna looked at her assistant. He was wearing a black muscle tee with a deep V-neck, the Ed Hardy logo emblazoned on the front in glittery red letters. His hair was spiked and gelled to the point where it could probably scrape paint off the side of a bus, and, Brenna now noticed for the first time, he was sporting a new tattoo: a bright-red lipstick print, hovering just above the left pec. Trent’s definition of an artist was, to say the least, dubious.

  “A performance artist,” he said, as if he’d been reading her mind. “She’s on the web. You can download her, uh, performances.”

  “She’s a webcam girl.”

  “No.” Trent pointed to the screen. “Lula Belle isn’t about porn. I mean, you can get off to her for sure, but . . .”

  “But what?”

  “Here—I’ll show you.” Trent moved the cursor, fast forwarding the screen image. Brenna watched the shadow twist and bend, watched her drop into splits and pivot, throw her pelvis over her head and somersault backward to standing, watched her pull up a stool and straddle it, legs spread wide as a Fosse dancer, watched her produce an old-fashioned Coke bottle from somewhere off camera, tilt her shadow-head back, touch her shadow-tongue to the tip, then take the bottle down her throat all the way to the base, all of this inside of twenty seconds.

  Brenna said, “Well, I guess you could call that an art.”

  “No. Wait.” When Trent hit play, Lula Belle was on the stool, legs crossed, fingers twisting in her hair. “Listen.”

  “ ‘. . . You know that little soft part of your head, Lula Belle? Right next to your eyebrow? That’s called your temple. Daddy took his gun, and he put the barrel of it right there at his temple, and he pulled the trigger, and his whole head exploded.’ That’s how my mama told me. I was just eight years old. ‘Do you understand Lula Belle?’ she asked me, and my heart felt like someone had taken a torch to it, melted it down to liquid right there in my chest. But I knew I couldn’t cry. I wasn’t allowed to cry. Mama didn’t . . . she didn’t take kindly to tears. . . .”

  Trent hit pause and turned to Brenna. “You get it?”

  “She bares her soul. Shares her secrets.”

  He nodded.

  “And people pay for this.”

  “Big-time.”

  Brenna shook her head. “Weird.”


  “Well, the Coke bottle thing helps . . .”

  “When did she go missing?”

  “Six months ago.”

  “And the client?”

  “It was a third party.”

  “Who was the third party?”

  “A PI. Lula’s manager hired him.”

  “And the PI’s name is . . .”

  “Brenna?”

  “Yes?”

  “Can I ask you something?”

  “As long as you’re not asking me in order to avoid my question.”

  “Seriously.”

  “Okay.”

  Trent cleared his throat. “When I first showed you Lula Belle . . . you . . . remembered something, didn’t you?”

  “Yeah.” Strange how remembered could be such a loaded word, but in Brenna’s world it was. Since she was eleven years old, she’d suffered from hyperthymestic syndrome, a rare disorder which allowed her to remember every minute of every day of her life, and with all five senses, whether she wanted to or not. It came, her first psychiatrist, Dr. Lieberman, had recently told her “from the perfect storm of a differently shaped brain and a traumatic experience”—storm, as it turned out, was a good metaphor, seeing as how the syndrome had descended on Brenna, battering her mind into something so different than it had been before. She had two types of memories now: the murky recollections of her childhood and the vivid, three-dimensional images of everything that had happened from August 22, 1981 to the present.

  Brenna could recall, for instance, what she had for breakfast on June 25, 1998 to the point of tasting it (black coffee, a bowl of Special K with skim milk, blueberries that were disappointingly mealy and two donut holes—one chocolate, one glazed). But her father, who had left her family when she was just seven, had existed in her mind only as strong arms and the smell of Old Spice, a light kiss on the forehead, a story told by her mother, years after he’d gone. He wasn’t whole in her head. She couldn’t clearly picture his face. Same with her older sister Clea, who had gotten into a blue car on August 21, 1981 at the age of sixteen and vanished forever. Clea’s disappearance had been the traumatic event that had sparked Brenna’s perfect storm—yet ironically that event, like Clea herself, was stuck in her fallible pre-syndrome memory, fading every day into hazy fiction.

  Brenna had known that would happen—even as a kid on August 21, 1982, the anniversary. . . . Sitting at her bedroom window with her face pressed against the cool of the screen, glancing at the digital clock blinking 5:21 A.M. and chewing grape Bubble Yum to stay awake, her throat dry and stingy from it, trying with everything she had to remember the car, the license plate, the voice of the man behind the wheel . . .

  Brenna shut her eyes tight and recited the Pledge of Allegiance in her head—one of the many tricks she’d figured out over the years for willing memories away.

  “So?” Trent said.

  She opened her eyes and took a breath. “What was your question again?”

  “What were you remembering when you looked at Lula Belle?”

  “Not much—a gesture,” Brenna said. “On October 23, Maya and I were in Niagara Falls on vacation, remember?”

  He gave her a look. “I can remember four months ago.”

  “Well, we were on the Maid of the Mist, and there was a girl on the boat who tapped on her lip three times, just like Lula Belle did at the start of the tape.”

  “What did the girl on the boat look like?”

  “Probably in her twenties. Red hair. She was leaving the boat with her boyfriend and she had mascara running down her face,” Brenna said. “She looked like she wanted to die.”

  Trent’s eyes widened.

  “I know what you’re thinking, but we all probably looked that way,” Brenna said. “We were getting hailed on. It was freezing and windy and everybody was seasick and Maya was about ready to call Child Protective Services on me for taking her on that boat in the first place.”

  “Still,” he said. “It could have been Lula Belle you saw. Two months after she went missing. On that boat with some jerk-off. Praying to be saved from him . . .”

  “Hell of a coincidence.”

  “Happens all the time.”

  “Trent, it was just a gesture. Do we have any idea what Lula Belle looks like?”

  “No.”

  “What about this third party? Do they?”

  “Nope.”

  He shook his head. “Her own manager doesn’t even know what she looks like. He lives in California. Never met her face-to-face. He maintained her site, made the checks out to cash, sent them to a P.O. Box . . .”

  Brenna sighed. “In that case, I could be Lula Belle.”

  “Oh man, that would be so awesome.”

  Brenna’s gaze shot back to the frozen image on the screen. “Do we at least have her full name?”

  “Uh . . . no.”

  “What about her Social?”

  He shook his head.

  “So let me get this straight. All we have on this woman is a fake name, a fake accent, a P.O. Box, and a very obvious skill-set.”

  “You think her accent’s fake? Really?”

  “Trent.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Why did you accept this case?”

  He picked at a fingernail.

  “Trent.”

  “I’m a fan, okay?”

  “Oh, for godsakes.”

  “I know, I know . . . I mean, I never heard of her before yesterday, but I can’t get her out of my head. I can’t stop watching her. I don’t even care what her face looks like or how old she is . . . It’s like Errol said—she gets under your skin and stays there.”

  “Errol?”

  “Crap. I didn’t mean to say that out loud.”

  “Errol Ludlow? He’s the third party?”

  Trent’s face went pinkish. He bit his lower lip and stared at the floor like a shamed kid. “Yes,” he said finally. “Errol Ludlow Investigations.”

  Brenna stared at him. “No.”

  “He said you were the best around at finding missing persons—that’s why he wanted to hire you.”

  “No, Trent. Absolutely not.”

  “He wants to let bygones be bygones and—”

  “No!”

  Trent looked close to tears.

  Brenna hadn’t intended to say it that loudly, but she wasn’t going to take it back either. In the three years that Errol Ludlow had been her boss, he’d put her in serious danger four times. Twice, she’d been rushed to the hospital. Her ex-husband had made her promise to quit and then one time, three years after Maya was born, Brenna had made the breathtakingly stupid mistake of taking a freelance assignment from him; it had ended her marriage for good. Brenna couldn’t let bygones be bygones. Trent should’ve known that. There were no such things as bygones in Brenna’s life—especially when it came to a king-size jackass of a bad memory trigger like Errol Ludlow.

  “No, Trent,” she said again—quieter this time. “I’m sorry you’ve grown attached to this girl’s silhouette, but we can’t take this case.”

  Trent started to say something—until Ludacris’s “Moneymaker” exploded out of his jeans pocket, interrupting him. His ringtone. He yanked his iPhone out of his pocket and looked at the screen. “My mom.”

  “Go ahead and take it,” Brenna said.

  Trent moved from the office space area of Brenna’s 12th Street apartment, past the kitchen, and into the hallway that led to the living room. Brenna glanced at the shadow on-screen caught frozen, one delicate hand to her forehead—the swooning Southern Belle. “Sorry, Lula.” Brenna wondered why Errol had accepted a missing person in the first place. From what she knew, he only handled cheating spouses. Work must be tight.

  She clicked play. Lula Belle arched into a languorous stretch that seemed to involve every muscle in her body and sighed, her voice fragile as air. Brenna watched her, thinking about what Trent had said. She gets under your skin and stays there . . . Was Errol a fan, too?

  “I miss my daddy
,” Lula Belle said. “He was the only person in the whole world could stop me from being scared of anything.” She turned to the left and tilted her head up, as if she were noticing a star for the first time. “I used to be afraid of all kinds of stuff, too,” she said. “The dark, ghosts, our neighbor Mrs. Greeley—I was sure she was a witch. Dogs, spiders, snakes . . . even cement mixers, if you can imagine that.”

  Brenna’s eyes widened. She moved closer to the screen.

  “I somehow got it in my head that those cement mixers were like . . . I don’t know, giant vacuum cleaners or something. I thought they could suck me in through the back and mix me in with all that heavy, wet cement and I’d never be able to get out, wouldn’t be able to breathe.”

  “Me too,” Brenna whispered.

  “But my daddy, he made everything better. He got me a nightlight. He protected me from mean old Mrs. Greeley. He told me those dogs and snakes were more scared of me than I was of them, and he was right. But the best thing my daddy did. Whenever we’d be driving and I’d see a cement mixer, he’d sing me this song . . .”

  No . . . It can’t be . . .

  “I don’t know whether he’d made it up or not, but it went a little like this . . . Cement mixer/Turn on a dime/Make my day ’cause it’s cement time/Cement mixer, you’re my pal/Ain’t gonna hurt me or my little gal . . .”

  Brenna’s breath caught. She knew the song—knew it well enough to sing along. She knew it like the blue leather backseat of the white Mustang her dad had called the Land Shark, knew it like the strong hands on the wheel, the smell of Old Spice, and the voice—the deep, laughing voice she loved, but couldn’t hold on to. “It’s okay, Pumpkin, it won’t hurt you, it’s just a bus for building materials.” Dad. “Just like the one that takes the big kids to school, only this one is for the stuff they make the playgrounds out of . . . Cement mixer/Turn on a dime . . .”

  “You know what my daddy called those cement mixers?” Lula whispered to the camera. “He called ’em school buses. For playground ingredients. Isn’t that funny?”