She's Not There

by P J Parrish

  He stared at the large main photo at the top of the page. Most people chose a landscape, some place that held sentimental value. Mary Carpenter’s was a vintage postcard of Hialeah Race Track in Miami with a flock of flamingos wading in the infield lagoon.

  Something was itching at his brain. He clicked on the left column to bring up Mary Carpenter’s photos. Just the usual shots of friends and family, but then he stopped, staring at a picture of Mary Carpenter behind a desk, probably at her office at McCall and Tobias. She was grinning, with a phone receiver at her ear, and all around her were . . .

  Buchanan bolted from the chair and went to the bed. He rummaged through the papers and memorabilia from Amelia’s cardboard box and pulled out the plastic flamingo.

  It had to have been there, somewhere in the back of his brain when he first went through the box, that the plastic flamingo didn’t belong there. The cardboard box held Amelia’s best memories: of her dancing, her brother, favorite childhood books, and the T-shirt from Lake Okoboji. Nothing from Florida.

  Buchanan examined the plastic flamingo. It was dirty, its pink feathers frayed, no writing on it, no clue where it had come from. It was just a cheap bobblehead. He turned it over. On the bottom was a piece of double-sided adhesive tape.

  He looked up at the ceiling, but in his mind’s eye he was seeing another piece of adhesive tape stuck to the dashboard of Mary Carpenter’s car.

  He held the toy under the light and turned it slowly. Under the dirt, he saw a spot of a different color, dark reddish-brown. Blood.

  A dashboard trinket spotted with blood. Had it been in Mary Carpenter’s car just before she went into the canal? And if it had, how did it end up in Amelia’s box of mementos sent from Iowa?

  The scenario began to play out in Buchanan’s head. Mary Carpenter had learned something about the law firm she wasn’t supposed to know, probably something to do with SEC violations or insider trading, maybe even a Ponzi scheme. The kind of thing that would have brought in the windfall of profits that rocketed Alex Tobias into Broward County’s one percent.

  Or maybe the Feds, conducting a secret investigation, came to Mary Carpenter and asked her to turn on her bosses. Either way, she ended up dead, a fatality in a one-car accident out in the middle of nowhere.

  Alex Tobias, for whatever damn reason, took the flamingo and kept it. Until it turned up in Amelia’s possession. She had to have known of Mary’s accident, and undoubtedly had been to her husband’s office often enough to see the flamingos on Mary’s desk.

  Had she put it all together? In recent months, had an already unhappy Amelia come to realize she was married to a murderer?

  Buchanan went back to his canvas bag and pulled out the police report from Amelia’s accident.

  A second one-car accident, out in the middle of nowhere, during a rainstorm, meant to leave a woman dead. How had this one happened? Had someone tampered with the gullwing’s brakes? No, that left too much to chance. McCall had to be certain the car crash would be fatal.

  Buchanan sifted through the police photos of the smashed gullwing Mercedes. There were several flash-lit color photos of the interior, and Buchanan focused on a close-up of the area behind the bucket seats. There was a suitcase wedged in the small space and he realized it was a duplicate of the old tan one he’d seen in the garage of the Tobias home.

  He let out a long breath. How had he missed this before? When he had researched gullwings, he’d read that they had no trunks, and they came outfitted with two matched pieces of luggage. That explained why Esperanza had seen Amelia bringing the old tan suitcase back into the house—she had removed the top suitcase to make room for something.

  Her own suitcase? But nothing had been found at the accident site. What had she needed the extra room for in the car?

  Buchanan moved on to the other photographs, sifting through the shots of the exterior. He stopped, staring at one that showed the entire car sitting on the side of the road after it had been towed out of the saw grass.

  Damn.

  Something about the car had bothered him the first time he had seen the it back in the Fort Lauderdale police compound lot, but now he knew what it was. Both the gullwing doors of the wrecked Mercedes were closed. The cops would not have shut them because they needed to record the car exactly as it had been found, for insurance purposes. Amelia had sustained a concussion and wandered away from the car, so she wouldn’t have taken the time to close the doors. Which meant someone was in that car with her.

  Someone who had caused the wreck.

  Someone who had stuck around just long enough to make sure Amelia was dead.

  But Amelia had survived, and the scheme had fallen apart.

  McCall had caught a break—Amelia remembered nothing about the wreck. They had time to get her home and clean up their mess, maybe even try to kill her again.

  But when she bolted from the hospital, the hunt was on. Why did she run? Was she spooked by her husband because she suspected he had something to do with Mary Carpenter’s death? Had she remembered something about her own accident? But why hadn’t she just gone to the cops? Why hadn’t she told someone?

  Buchanan knew she must have confided in someone because in his experience no one kept something like this buried inside them.

  Joanna McCall said they were friends, but if Amelia suspected Alex was involved in Mary’s death, there was no way Amelia would have confided in Joanna.

  Who would Amelia have turned to?

  He went back to the bed and sifted through the mementos. He picked up the children’s book titled The Graveyard Book. It looked much newer than the other books in the box, he realized now. He opened to the title page. Someone had written an inscription there—Kiss a lover, dance a measure, find your name and buried treasure. Love, J.

  There it was again—the mysterious “J” from her Day Runner. And this time Buchanan was damn sure it wasn’t Joanna.

  He set the book aside and picked up the packet of letters from her brother Ben. He had gone through them before, but maybe he had missed something, just like he had missed the inscription in the children’s book. As he slowly read each one, he began to feel like an intruder into the intimacies shared between brother and sister. The letters began when Ben was in boot camp in the late 1990s and ended with his last letter from Afghanistan in summer 2011. Scribbled at the bottom of the last letter was a postscript: “I told you once to get out of Morning Sun, Mellie, don’t stay in an empty place. Now I’m telling you don’t stay in an empty marriage.”

  Buchanan set the letter down.

  Ben had been her confidant, the trustee of the most private of her emotions, and he knew Amelia was unhappy with Alex. But there were no hints in his letters that Amelia was suspicious of something at the law firm. Who had she confided in? Was it “J”?

  Buchanan pulled Amelia’s Kindle from his bag. Whoever it was, he was still convinced the person was locked inside the pink tablet.

  He turned the Kindle on. When the tiny padlock appeared, he swiped it and hit the “Give Me a Hint” button.

  Hint: The Birds Nest

  A week ago, it had made no sense to him, but now it did. He began to type in various new combinations with The Bird: Arnolds Park, Avis Martin, lake house, beach, amusement park, Edge of Heaven. He looked up in frustration, his eyes falling on the old souvenir T-shirt on the bed.

  He typed “O-K-O-B-O-J-I.” The padlock popped open and the desktop appeared, a rainbow of covers for books Amelia had downloaded.

  The Secret Life of Bees by Sue Monk Kidd.

  Lady Oracle by Margaret Atwood.

  All the Pretty Horses by Cormac McCarthy.

  Once a Dancer: An Autobiography by Allegra Kent.

  The woman who read these was not the same woman who read the bland books shelved in that cold white bedroom. There were many other books, but what Amelia read in private wasn
’t what Buchanan was after now.

  He clicked on the envelope icon, and her e-mails appeared. There were only five. Four of the fonts were bold, which told Buchanan Amelia had not yet read them. Once an e-mail had been read, even if the recipient saved it as “New,” the font style reverted to its normal density.

  It also meant she hadn’t remembered her password or she likely would have walked into any Internet café and read her mail. What else had she still not remembered?

  He shook his head slowly. The idea that she had survived this long without a good part of her memory and no one to help her took his admiration for her up a notch. The knowledge that he had actually wrapped his hands around her neck turned his stomach.

  Move on, Bucky. Move on.

  He switched over to the SENT e-mails, but there was nothing there, which probably meant that at some point she had deleted them all. He jumped back to her inbox. All five e-mails were from the same person—DancingKingSFB.

  Buchanan clicked on the newest one, dated yesterday:

  Where are you? Why aren’t you answering your cell? I’m worried. Call me. –J

  The next one was from three days ago:

  Are you okay? You were supposed to be here by now. –J

  Then from five days ago:

  Are the plans still on? –J

  Ten days ago, on the night of her accident:

  Sorry I missed your call. Send me flight info. –J

  The last one came twelve days ago, forty-eight hours before the accident in the Everglades. It was the only e-mail not in bold face, which meant it was the only one Amelia had opened and read—and then saved as “new.”

  Kiss a lover,

  Dance a measure,

  Find your name,

  And buried treasure.

  Love, –J

  Buchanan leaned back against the headboard, remembering what Esperanza had said about finding Amelia crying in the bathroom, holding her Kindle. Was this what she had been reading? This had to be the “J” whose birthday Amelia had noted in her Day Runner. He had always felt in his gut that Amelia had a lover. And it was probably this man, this “Dancing King,” who clearly had deep affection for her. But who was he? And where was he?

  Buchanan went to his Acer, connecting again with his iPhone, and pulled up a browser window. But when he typed in “Dancing King,” all he got were gyrating teenagers on YouTube and some lyrics to a song with the same name. He added the letters “SFB.”

  The first site that came up was for the San Francisco Ballet. He called it up and clicked on the link that listed the artistic director, dancers, administrative and artistic staffs, and board of directors. He scanned quickly through the dancers but there was no man with a first name that started with J. He bypassed the administrative staff and board and brought up the artistic staff.

  Then, there he was. His name was Jimmy Reyes, and he was a ballet master. He was maybe forty, with a craggy thin face, wavy dark hair, kind eyes, and an easy smile. A man comfortable in his skin. A man the complete opposite of Alex Tobias.

  Buchanan’s gaze moved back to the mementos spread out on the bed.

  So now he had it.

  Amelia’s story, from her closed-fisted and closed-hearted childhood to the hypnotic spotlights of first New York and then Miami, where she crawled across the stage and into the arms of a man who cut up her soul and had the shards reconstructed into that ugly portrait hanging on his bedroom wall.

  Buchanan picked up his burner phone and punched in McCall’s number.

  “Yeah?” McCall answered.

  “I know where she’s headed,” Buchanan said. “It will be over in a couple days. The next time I call, all I want to hear from you is where the fucking locker is.”

  He hung up.

  Maybe it was a stupid move, playing both sides at the same time and still expecting to get the two million. But he needed to buy some time. Flying was out of the question because he didn’t want McCall to know where he was headed. He would have to drive, and San Francisco was eighteen hundred miles away.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  It was almost ten when Alex Tobias walked out of his office and punched the “Down” button for the garage elevator. He had spent the last hour on the phone with a Chinese investor and between his mind wandering to Amelia, watching the stock market drop two hundred points, and trying to understand the Chinese man’s heavy accent, he was tired, disgusted, and discouraged.

  Alex stepped from the elevator into a cool rush of air. Even though he was in the garage of his office’s high-rise, he could hear the wind from Tropical Storm Bruno whistling through the concrete corridors. He shifted his briefcase and reached for his keys.

  “Mr. Tobias, sir?”

  Alex’s head shot up. Huddled near a concrete pillar was a man. He was tall, big shouldered, wearing a dark jacket. But his face was lost in the shadows.

  “Come out where I can see you,” Alex said.

  The man moved into the gray light, slowly withdrawing his hands from his pockets. His face was round with skin the color of oak, his black hair dripping rain onto his collar. He was Latino, maybe mid-thirties.

  Alex stepped closer. “Who are you?”

  “Jack Pineda.”

  Alex stared at him.

  “Jack Pineda, Mrs. McCall’s driver,” the man said. “We met before, at the house.”

  “Right, sure,” Alex said, still not remembering the man with any clarity. “What are you doing here?”

  “I need to speak with you, sir.”

  “Look, Jack, it’s late. Maybe you can come to the office tomorrow. I have to go.”

  Alex stepped around him and continued toward his car.

  “It’s about your wife, sir.”

  Alex stopped walking and turned back to Jack. The man’s hands were stuffed back into his pockets and he looked ready to cry. Alex moved back slowly.

  “Mel? What about her?”

  Jack ran a sleeve across his face and shifted his weight. Somewhere above them, the squeal of tires echoed through the garage.

  “Talk to me, Jack.”

  “Mrs. Tobias didn’t just have a car accident, sir,” Jack said. “I was out there that night.”

  “Out where? In the Everglades? Why?”

  “Oh Jesus,” Jack whispered. “I didn’t want to do it. I swear to God I never wanted—”

  “Stop it,” Alex interrupted. “Start at the beginning. What happened that night?”

  “I was washing the Crossover, you know, Mr. McCall’s SUV, and Mrs. McCall comes out to tell me she won’t need me to drive her to Marco Island, that she is—”

  “Marco Island?” Alex asked.

  “Yes, sir. That’s where you and Mr. McCall were supposed to be, celebrating that big business deal your firm had.”

  The Leggett merger, Alex recalled. The plan had been to celebrate with Leggett at his estate on Marco Island through the weekend. Amelia had told him she didn’t want to go. He had used her absence to go to Palm Beach to get a fuck in with Megan before flying over to the West Coast on Saturday night to join the party.

  Then something Jack had said finally registered. “Mrs. McCall? What did she have to do with this?”

  Jack hesitated. “Mrs. McCall told me she didn’t need me to drive her to Marco Island because your wife was going to pick her up.”

  Jack stopped again and wiped a hand over his sweating face.

  “Go on,” Alex said.

  “Mrs. Tobias came by around six. I helped Mrs. McCall put her overnight bag and her leg crutches into the back of that little blue Mercedes car, and they drove away. About two hours later, I got a phone call.”

  “From who?”

  “Mrs. McCall,” Jack said. “She tells me she needs me and to come quick, that she had an accident and she’s stranded out in the Everglades,
on 29.”

  Alex was quiet, his neck growing warm with anger. Why hadn’t McCall told him Joanna and Amelia had been together that night?

  “So I go out there quick as I could,” Jack said. “Mrs. McCall is sitting in the car, all banged up and wet, but okay. Mrs. Tobias is lying on the ground, and at first I think she’s dead, but then she makes a sound and tries to get up but she can’t.”

  “And you didn’t help her?”

  “Mrs. McCall told me . . . Oh, Jesus, oh, Jesus.” Jack’s eyes filled with tears and he started walking a small tight circle.

  “Jack!” Alex snapped.

  Jack faced Alex, drawing hard breaths. “Mrs. McCall told me to kill her,” he said.

  Alex stared at Jack, not sure he’d heard him correctly. Joanna—his partner’s wife, Amelia’s friend. And Owen—his partner, confidant. Alex couldn’t count the number of times they had vacationed together, shared dozens of dinners, hundreds of bottles of wine, and millions of dollars in profits. It didn’t make sense.

  “You’re lying,” Alex said. “What are you trying to do? Shake me down? Shake Owen down?”

  “I’m not lying, sir.”

  Alex spun around and blew Jack off with a wave of his hand. “Get lost!”

  Jack yelled after him, his voice hollow in the empty garage. “I can prove it!”

  Alex turned back. “How?”

  “I have your wife’s phone.”

  Alex walked back to him and threw out his hand. “Give it to me.”

  Jack reached into his jacket and withdrew an iPhone. He set it gently into Alex’s hand.

  Alex set his briefcase down and looked at the cell. It was encased in a pink cover, like Amelia’s Kindle. The cracked screen was spattered with mud. It was hers, Alex was sure.

  His eyes moved back to Jack’s face. The man was standing very still, with slumped shoulders. Tears streaked his face.