Buried Secrets

by Joseph Finder

  He was wearing a navy blue robe over pajamas, and he had deep circles under his eyes. He looked exhausted.

  He released me, then pushed against my chest and leaned back to examine my face. “Look at you—you get more and more handsome each time I see you. Enough, already! You don’t age. You make a deal with the devil, Nicky? Is there a portrait of you looking like an alter kaker in your attic?”

  “I live in the city,” I said. “No attic.”

  He laughed. “You’re not married, are you?”

  “I’ve avoided that so far.”

  He put a palm on my cheek and slapped gently. “Punim like this, I bet you gotta beat off the girls with a stick.” He was trying valiantly to feign his customary high spirits, but I wasn’t convinced. He put a pudgy arm around my lower back. He couldn’t reach as high as my shoulders. “Thank you for coming, Nickeleh, my friend. Thank you.”

  “Of course.”

  “This new?” he said, jerking his head toward my car.

  “I’ve had it for a while.”

  I drive a Land Rover Defender 110, which is boxy and Jeep-like and virtually indestructible. Hand-cranked windows. Rock-hard seats. Not a very comfortable ride, and pretty noisy inside when you exceed thirty miles an hour. But it’s the best car I’ve ever owned.

  “Love it. Love it. I drove one of those around the Serengeti once on safari. Ten days. Annelise and Alexa and me. Of course, the girls hated Africa. Spent the whole time complaining about the insects, and how much the animals stank, and…” His smile disappeared abruptly, his face drooping as if worn out by the effort of keeping up the façade. “Ahhh, Nick,” he whispered, a look of pain contorting his face, “I’m scared out of my mind.”

  6.

  “When did you last hear from her?” I said.

  We sat in the only room downstairs that looked like it got any use, a big L-shaped eat-in kitchen/sitting room, in comfortable chairs covered in slouchy off-white slipcovers. The view was spectacular: the steely gray waves of Cape Ann lapping against the rocky coastline.

  “Last night she drove down to Boston—she told Belinda she’d be back later, which Belinda assumed meant, you know, midnight or something. One or two in the morning, if she was having a good time.”

  “When was this—what time did she leave the house?”

  “Early evening, I think. I was on my way back from work.” Marcus Capital Management had an entire floor in one of the new buildings on Rowes Wharf, which I could see from a corner of my own office. He always worked long hours when Mom was his assistant, and he probably still did. A town car would take him into Boston every morning and take him home to Manchester every night. “She was gone by the time I got home.”

  “What was she doing in Boston?”

  He heaved a long sigh, more like a moan. “Oh, you know, she’s always partying, that one. Always going out, to discos or what have you.”

  Disco: I couldn’t remember when I last heard that word. “She drove herself? Or did she get a ride with a friend?”

  “She drove. Loves to drive. She got her permit on the day she turned sixteen.”

  “Was she meeting friends? Or was this a date? Or what?”

  “Meeting a friend, I think. Alexa’s not dating, thank God. Not yet, anyway. I mean, not as far as I know.”

  I wondered how much Alexa told her father about her social life. Not much, I suspected. “Did she say where she was going?”

  “She just told Belinda she was meeting someone.”

  “But not a guy.”

  “No, not a man.” He sounded annoyed. “Friends. Or a friend. She told Belinda…” Marcus shook his head, his cheeks quivering. Then he put a hand over his eyes, squeezing hard, and gave another long sigh.

  After a few seconds I asked softly, “Where’s Belinda?”

  “She’s upstairs, lying down,” Marcus said, his pudgy hand still covering his eyes. “She’s just sick about it. She’s taking this really hard, Nick. She didn’t sleep all night. She’s a wreck. She blames herself.”

  “For what?”

  “For letting Alexa go out. Not asking enough questions, I don’t know. It’s not Belinda’s fault. It’s not easy being the stepmother. Any time she tries to, you know, lay down the law, Alexa bites her head off. Calls her the ‘stepmonster’ and all that—it’s not fair. She cares about Alexa like she was her own, she really does. She loves that girl.”

  I nodded. Waited half a minute or so. Then I said, “Obviously you tried her cell.”

  “A million times. I even called your mom—I figured maybe it got late and she didn’t want to drive and she didn’t want to call us, so maybe she decided to spend the night at Frankie’s. She loves Francine.” My mother’s condo was in Newton, which was a lot closer to downtown Boston than Manchester-by-the-Sea.

  “Do you have reason to believe something happened to her?” I asked.

  “Of course something happened to her. She wouldn’t just run off without telling anybody!”

  “Marshall,” I said, “I can’t blame you for being scared. But don’t forget, she does have a track record for acting out.”

  “That’s all behind her,” he said. “She’s a good kid now. That’s the past.”

  “Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.”

  7.

  Some years back, as a kid, Alexa had been abducted in the Chestnut Hill Mall parking lot, right in front of her mother, Annelise, Marcus’s third wife.

  She hadn’t been harmed, though. She’d been taken for a ride, driven around, and a few hours later dropped off at another parking lot across town. She insisted she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and an examination by a doctor confirmed it. She hadn’t been threatened. They hadn’t even spoken to her, she said.

  So the whole thing remained a mystery. Did her abductors get scared off? Did they change their minds? It happened. Marcus was known to be very rich; maybe it had been an aborted kidnapping-for-ransom attempt. That was my assumption, anyway. Then her mother left, telling Marcus she couldn’t bear to live with him anymore. Maybe it was precipitated by her daughter’s kidnapping.

  Who knows what the real reason was. She’d died of breast cancer last year, so she wasn’t around to ask. But Alexa was never the same after that, and she wasn’t exactly an easygoing, well-adjusted kid before the incident took place. She got even more rebellious, smoking at school, breaking curfew, doing whatever she could to get into trouble.

  So one day a few months after it happened, my mother called me—I was working in Washington at the time, at the Defense Department—and asked me to drive up to New Hampshire and have a talk with Alexa at Exeter.

  I tracked her down on the stadium field and watched her play field hockey for a while. Even though she didn’t consider herself a jock, she moved with a sinewy grace. She played with immense concentration. She had the rare ability to completely lose herself in the flow of the game.

  She wasn’t easy to talk to, but since I was Frankie Heller’s son, and she loved my mom unambivalently, and since I wasn’t her dad, eventually I broke through. She still hadn’t metabolized the terror of the abduction. I told her that was normal, and that I’d worry about her if she hadn’t been so deeply frightened by that day. I said it was great she was being so defiant.

  She looked at me with disbelief, then suspicion. What kind of mind game was I playing?

  I said I was serious. Defiance is great. That is how you learn to resist. I told her that fear is a tremendously useful instinct, since it’s a warning signal. Fear tells us we’re facing danger. We have to listen to it, use it. I even gave her a book about “the gift of fear,” though I doubt she ever read it.

  I told her that she was not only a girl but a beautiful girl and a rich girl, and that those were three strikes against her. I taught her how to look for danger signals, and then I showed her some rudimentary self-defense techniques, a few basic martial-arts moves. Nothing fancy, but enough. I’d hate to be a drunken Exeter boy who tried to push her too far.
r />   I took her to a dojo outside Boston and introduced her to Bujinkan self-defense techniques. I knew it would be great discipline for her, instill some self-confidence, be a healthy outlet for some of the aggression that had been building up inside her. Whenever I came to Boston and she was home from school, we’d make a point of getting together and practicing. And even, after a while, talking.

  It wasn’t the solution I’d hoped it would be, though. She continued doing stuff she knew would get her in trouble—smoking, drinking, whatever—and Marcus had to send her to some kind of reform school for a year. Who knows why she went through such a difficult period. It might have been the trauma of the abduction. But it might just as well have been a reaction to her mother’s running off.

  Or maybe it was just being a teenager.

  “WHAT’S WITH all the security?” I asked. “It wasn’t here last time I visited.”

  Marcus paused. “Times have changed. More crazies out there. I have more money. Newsweek did a story about me. Forbes, Fortune, the cable news—I mean, it’s not like I’m a shrinking violet.”

  “Have you received any threats?”

  “Threats? Like, did someone come up to me on State Street with a gun and threaten to blow my brains out or something? No. But I’m not going to wait.”

  “So it’s just a precaution.”

  “What, you don’t think I should be taking precautions?”

  “Of course you should. I just want to know if you had any specific warning, a breakin, whatever—anything that inspired you to tighten your security.”

  “I made him do it,” a female voice said.

  Belinda Marcus had entered the kitchen. She was a tall, slender blonde, extremely beautiful. But icy. Maybe forty, but a well-cared-for forty. A forty that got regular Botox and collagen fillers and the occasional well-timed mini-facelift. A woman whose idea of “work” was something you had done at a plastic surgeon’s office.

  She was all in white: skinny white ankle-slit pants, a white silk top with wide shoulder straps that looked like they were made out of origami, a low neckline with seamed cups that drew your eye to her small but pert breasts. She was barefoot. Her toenails were painted coral.

  “I thought it was absolutely mad that Marshall didn’t have any guards. A man who’s worth as much as Marshall Marcus? As prominent as he is? We’re just sitting ducks out here at the end of the point. And after what happened to Alexa?”

  “They were out shopping, Belinda. A movie, whatever. That coulda happened even if we had a … an armed battalion surrounding the house. They were in the Chestnut Hill Mall, for Christ’s sake!”

  “You haven’t introduced me to Mr. Heller,” Belinda said. She approached, offered me her hand. It was bony and cool. Her fingernails were painted coral too. She had the vacant beauty of your classic trophy-wife bimbo, and she spoke with a sugary Georgia accent, all mint juleps and sweet iced tea.

  I stood up. “Nick,” I said. All I knew about her was what I’d heard from my mother. Belinda Jackson Marcus had been a flight attendant with Delta and met Marcus in the bar at the Ritz-Carlton Buckhead, in Atlanta.

  “Pardon my manners,” Marcus said but remained slouched in his chair. “Nick, Belinda. Belinda, Nick,” he added perfunctorily. “Is she not a gorgeous creature, this girl?” A wide, pleased smile: he’d gotten his teeth capped too. That and the new hair: Marcus had never been vain, so I assumed he’d done all this work out of insecurity at having a wife so much younger and so beautiful. Or maybe she’d been pushing him to renovate.

  Belinda tipped her head and rolled her eyes, a coy, fawnlike gesture. “Have you offered Mr. Heller some lunch?”

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “Now, what’s wrong with you, sugar?” Belinda said.

  “What kind of lousy host am I?” he said. “See? What would I do without Belinda? I’m an animal. An uncivilized beast. How about a sandwich, Nickeleh?”

  “I’m good,” I said.

  “Nothing?”

  “I’m fine.”

  Belinda said, “How about I fix y’all some coffee?”

  “Sure.”

  She glided over to the long black soapstone-topped island and clicked on an electric kettle. Her tight white pants emphasized the curves of her tight butt. She clearly spent most of her time working out, probably with a trainer, with a special focus on the glutes. “I’m not really much for making coffee,” she said, “but we have instant. It’s quite good, actually.” She held up a little foil packet.

  “You know, I’ve changed my mind,” I said. “I’ve had too much coffee this morning already.”

  Belinda turned around suddenly. “Nick,” she said. “You have to find her.” She approached slowly. “Please. You have to find her.”

  She was freshly made up, I noticed. She didn’t look like she’d been up all night. Unlike her husband, she looked refreshed, as if she’d just awakened from a long restorative nap. She wore pink lip gloss, her lips perfectly lined. I knew enough about women and their makeup to know that you didn’t roll out of bed looking like that.

  “Did Alexa tell you who she was meeting?” I asked.

  “I didn’t … she doesn’t exactly tell me everything. Me being the stepmother and all.”

  “She loves you,” Marcus said. “She just doesn’t realize it yet.”

  “But you asked her, right?” I said.

  Belinda’s glossy lips parted half an inch. “Of course I asked!” she said, indignant.

  “She didn’t tell you what time she’d be back?”

  “Well, I assumed by midnight, maybe a little later, but you know, she doesn’t take it too well when I ask her that sort of thing. She says she doesn’t like to be treated like a child.”

  “Still, that’s pretty late.”

  “For these kids? That’s when the night begins.”

  “That’s not what I mean,” I said. “I thought kids under eighteen aren’t allowed to drive after midnight—twelve thirty, maybe—unless a parent or a guardian is in the car with them. If they get caught, they can have their license suspended for sixty days.”

  “Is that right?” Belinda said. “She didn’t tell me anything of the kind.”

  I found that strange. Alexa would never have planned to do something that might jeopardize her driver’s license, and all the autonomy it represented. Also, it seemed out of character for Belinda not to have stayed on top of all the rules. Not a woman like that, attentive to every detail, who lined her lips before meeting me at a time when she should have been a mental wreck over her missing stepdaughter.

  “So what do you think might have happened to her?” I said.

  Her hands flew up, palms open. “I don’t know.” She looked at Marcus in bewilderment. “We don’t know. We just want you to find her!”

  “Have you called the police?” I said.

  “Of course not,” Marcus said.

  “Of course not?” I said.

  Belinda said, “The police aren’t going to do anything. They’ll come and take a report and tell us to wait until twenty-four hours is up, and then it’s just gonna be file-and-forget.”

  “She’s under eighteen,” I said. “They take missing-teenager cases pretty seriously. I suggest you call them right now.”

  “Nick,” Marcus said, “I need you to look for her. Not the cops. Have I ever asked for your help before?”

  “Please,” Belinda said. “I love that girl so much. I don’t know what I’d do if anything happened to her.”

  Marcus waved a hand and said something like “Poo-poo-poo.” I think that was meant to ward away the evil eye. “Don’t talk like that, baby,” he said.

  “Have you called any of the hospitals?” I said.

  The two exchanged a quick, anxious look before Belinda replied, shaking her head, “If anything had happened to her, we’d have heard by now, right?”

  “Not necessarily,” I said. “That’s the first thing you want to do. Let’s start there.”

  “I think
it may be something else,” Marcus said. “I don’t think my little girl got hurt. I think…”

  “We don’t know what happened,” Belinda interrupted.

  “Something bad,” Marcus said. “Oh, dear God.”

  “Well, let’s start by calling the hospitals,” I said. “Just to rule that out. I want her cell phone number. Maybe my tech person can locate her that way.”

  “Of course,” Marcus said.

  “And I want you to call the police. Okay?”

  Belinda nodded and Marcus shrugged. “They won’t do bupkes,” he said, “but if you insist.”

  None of the hospitals between Manchester and Boston had admitted anyone fitting Alexa’s description, which didn’t seem to give Marcus and his wife the sense of relief you might expect.

  Instead it seemed that the two of them were harboring some deep-seated dread that they refused to divulge to me, that they were holding back something important, something dire. I think that gut instinct was the reason I took Marcus’s request seriously. Something was very wrong here. It was a bad feeling, and it only got worse.

  Call it the gift of fear.

  8.

  Alexa stirred and shifted in her bed.

  It was the throbbing in her forehead that had awakened her, a rhythmic pulsing that had steadily grown stronger and stronger, tugging her into consciousness.

  Knife-stabs of pain pierced the backs of her eyeballs.

  It felt like someone was pounding an ice pick into the top of her skull and had just broken through the fragile shell, sending cracks throughout the lobes of her brain right behind her forehead.

  Her mouth was terribly dry. Her tongue cleaved to the roof of her mouth. She tried to swallow.

  Where was she?

  She couldn’t see anything.

  The darkness was absolute. She wondered whether she’d gone blind.

  But maybe she was dreaming.

  It didn’t feel like a dream, though. She remembered … drinking at Slammer with Taylor Armstrong. Something about her iPhone. Laughing about something. Everything else was blurry, clouded.