Necessary People

by Anna Pitoniak

  “Well, maybe they forced her to open it.” My voice was getting louder.

  “Miss Trapp, I know how distressing this is.”

  “You’re implying that this is all her fault.” My righteous indignation almost felt real.

  “We’re investigating every possibility,” the detective said. “But the evidence suggests no foul play. No blood, no damage, no sign of a struggle. That e-mail made it clear that she wanted to get away for a while. Also, the Bradleys have a camera installed at the gate. The footage doesn’t show anyone entering the house, except you two.”

  “A—a camera?” I startled. How did I miss a camera?

  “See,” he said, taking another paper from his folder. A photograph. “Here’s you, leaving the house around eleven p.m. on Saturday. That’s the last activity the camera captured. Just after Stella made those phone calls. Did you hear what she was saying?”

  “I was in the other room,” I said. “I couldn’t really hear. But she sounded…agitated.”

  The detective squinted at me, nodded slowly. “Agitated,” he said, making a note. “Those phone calls probably are the key to figuring out what her plan was. Wherever she went, she got there by boat. Unfortunately, there’s no camera down by the boathouse. Could’ve shed some light. Damn shame.”

  “Shame,” I echoed dumbly.

  “The woman at the motel confirms that you arrived just before midnight.” He chuckled. “A small town like this, everyone notices everything. Not many visitors this time of year.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “But other than you, there was nothing unusual about that weekend. No strangers coming to town. No one casing the Bradley property.” The detective sighed, shut his folder. “Would you do me a favor, Miss Trapp? It’s the mother. Believe me, I know how hard this is on her. But she needs to let us do our job. She can’t be second-guessing us at every step.”

  “Anne likes to be in control,” I said. “That’s how she operates.”

  “But sometimes parents can’t see the truth about their kids. She thinks this drug thing is some crackpot theory. I’m only asking that you help her stay calm. Open-minded. I’m afraid this case might be a lot simpler than she thinks it is.”

  I had come up to Maine for the police interview, but Anne insisted I stay there for Thanksgiving. She treated me as a talisman. Stella had brought me into the Bradley family. The two of us were a package deal. Surely, by staying close to the family, I’d draw Stella back.

  Stella’s grandparents arrived with turkey and stuffing and pies prepared by their housekeeper in Boston. “Routine is key,” Grandmother Bradley said sternly while we sat at the long dining table, soft strains of Bach in the background. “Anne, you have to keep your wits about you.” Thomas, Oliver, and I returned to New York after the holiday, but Anne stayed in Maine. Her daughter had now been missing for two weeks. There had been no activity on her credit cards. The police confirmed with the cell carrier that her phone had been shut off the whole time. Anne’s worry had deepened into a more serious panic.

  If we were producing this story for TV—and our audience loved a story like this, a beautiful rich girl gone missing—most of the footage would be useless. Anne, berating the police for their inefficiency, channeling her frustration into excessive exercise. Thomas, remaining laser-focused on his work, answering every e-mail and calling into every meeting. Oliver, speculating snarkily about where Stella was. They weren’t reacting like they were supposed to, because they didn’t know yet how the story ended.

  What we needed were the freighted silences, the teary interviews, the panning and zooming of pictures from Stella’s childhood against a sentimental soundtrack. We needed the money shot: the bereft mother, breaking down when she realized that she’d ignored the warning signs. Preferably while she was sitting in front of a wall lined with family photos. Keep the camera on her for several long seconds. Let the audience feel her pain.

  The Bradleys didn’t know how to be vulnerable in public. They were determined to look normal for as long as they could. They didn’t want Stella’s photo splashed across the news. They didn’t want the neighbors organizing a search through forests and fields. They didn’t want their dirty laundry aired for all of America to see.

  Detective Fazio was retiring from the Rye Police Department at the end of December. After thirty years, he had a pension waiting. But Thomas offered to pay him five times his police salary if he would serve as a private investigator. They would spare no resources in the search. There would be a bonus when he found Stella. When. That was the operative word.

  Anne called me in mid-December, several weeks into the investigation. It was late, nearly midnight. I could tell that she had been drinking, and crying.

  “I’m so worried, Violet.” Her voice was thick and quavery. “I know something terrible happened to her. I just know it.”

  “I’m worried, too,” I said.

  “She was so beautiful. Too beautiful. It makes other people do crazy things. Some nutjob just taking her, doing God knows what to her.” She let out a whimper of pain. “I always knew this would happen. I always knew someone would take her away from me.”

  After Anne had sobbed and recovered and sobbed again, and finally hung up, I lay flat on my back, looking up at the unfamiliar bedroom ceiling.

  “That was my mother?” Oliver propped himself on his elbow and gazed down at me, at my naked body draped in his high-thread-count sheets.

  “The poor woman,” I said.

  Oliver ran his fingertips lightly across my bare stomach. He took my hand and lifted it to his lips. “Poor you,” he said. “Poor Violet. You’re bearing the brunt of everything.”

  I closed my eyes. Oliver meant well, but his sincerity could be cloying. I often worried that I’d give myself away. The mattress distended as he rolled over. When I opened my eyes, his face hovered above mine. He brushed the hair from my forehead. “You’re so pretty,” he said. “My poor, pretty Violet.”

  “Oliver—”

  But he leaned down and kissed me, and I felt his erection pressing against my thigh. We’d just had sex fifteen minutes earlier, but he seemed to have the pent-up energy of a teenage boy. He was a good kisser. I’d never really been kissed with that kind of affection.

  This whole thing was new for me. There were a handful of guys in college and in New York, one-night stands occasionally stretching into repeat hookups. But those were expressions of the lowest kind of desire: how it felt to have a boy grab your ass on the dance floor, how it felt for him to gruntingly relieve himself inside you when he barely knew your name. I treated sex as an obligation to be dispensed with every six months, like going to the dentist. There were men happy enough to oblige me in this. I did this mostly to avoid the judgment of Stella, who talked constantly about sex.

  But a man who wanted to take me out to dinner? To gaze at me and compliment me, to have me spend the night and stay for breakfast in the morning? This was a novelty.

  It felt deliciously inevitable. After dinner at an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side, we walked back to his apartment on the pretext of a drink, hand in hand, slightly tipsy. Oliver kept stopping to kiss me. We skipped the drink and went straight into the bedroom. “Why didn’t we do this sooner?” he said, afterward.

  We both knew the answer to that, but it was as if there were a quota on how often we could say her name. Initially, I took pleasure in how it could trigger Oliver. Listening to him complain about Stella was as satisfying as watching a rant-filled hour of cable news that confirmed all of your biases. I had years of grievance built up, but Oliver had decades.

  “You hate her even more than I do,” I said once, laughing. We were sharing a bottle of wine over dinner, and Oliver was fixated on some adolescent episode.

  But then his eyes, animated with old slights in the half distance, shifted back to the present and locked onto me. “I’m joking,” I said quickly. “Just joking.”

  “I don’t hate her,” he said, smoothi
ng the tablecloth, shifting his fork and knife into parallel alignment. Then he looked up at me. “If you do, that’s unfortunate.”

  “Of course not,” I said. “I’m sorry. That was a bad joke.”

  After that, I was careful. I only mentioned her name enough to show that I was worried, concerned about the investigation’s lack of progress. For his part, Oliver seemed to accept the police’s prevailing narrative: that Stella had gotten mixed up in a bad crowd. That, if there was foul play, it was of her own making.

  It was when we stopped talking about her that things changed for the better. The shared heat of our feelings toward Stella—our frustrations, our jealousies—descended into the unspoken and charged everything with an electric pulse. Neither of us was stupid. We both knew that, if she were here, we wouldn’t be together.

  But sometimes, when Oliver and I were having sex, I’d close my eyes and think of Stella. How much she would hate this. Her words on the boat that night: leech, suck-up, fraud. And now my connection to the family was stronger than ever. Friendship has no legal status, no promise of future offspring. This did. And who knew what this was, how far this could go? A wedding announcement in the Times, a new last name, a classic six on Park Avenue. A thorough whitewashing of the past that was only achievable through marriage. If Stella weren’t dead already, the sight of me and Oliver in bed together—naked, flushed, flourishing—might have killed her.

  “We have to say something,” Ginny said. “I’m getting too many questions. The media reporter from the Times has been calling every single day.”

  We were gathered in the Bradley living room, a week before Christmas. I was there as Stella’s friend, but also as Oliver’s girlfriend. Anne and Thomas seemed unsurprised. These kinds of things happened, like a widow marrying her dead husband’s brother, pairings of those unmoored by loss. But when Oliver held my hand or rubbed my back, Ginny’s eyebrows arched. I could tell she doubted this performance of sadness, even though she herself was proof that grief makes strange bedfellows. Ginny and Anne had become especially close over the last month. Oliver told me they spoke on the phone multiple times a day.

  Increasingly, Ginny was taking charge of the situation. She had summoned this meeting. The office had been gossiping for weeks, aided by the trail of bread crumbs that Stella herself had left. People had seen her lose her temper, or yell at Jamie. Maybe she was the type to just…snap. Or maybe it was leverage. “Her contract is up for renewal,” I overheard one assistant speculating to another. “I bet she’s trying to drive the price up.” Soon the chatter spread beyond KCN. It began on a blog that covered the TV news industry, with a blind item about negotiations for Stella Bradley’s new contract being put on hold. It was then pointed out that Stella hadn’t been seen on TV since the Danner story. Around the month mark, the rumors were boiling rapidly enough that the steam drifted up to more mainstream publications.

  “I don’t need the world digging into my daughter’s business,” Thomas said.

  “But it could help,” Anne said, touching her husband’s arm. “What if someone out there saw something, and that’s how we find her?”

  “Shouldn’t we tell the truth?” Oliver said. “Just say exactly what happened.”

  “For what it’s worth,” I said. “There are enough people out there who know that she’s missing. One of them is going to leak something, eventually.”

  “A short, simple statement,” Ginny said. “No explanation. Just the facts. The family asks for respect and privacy at this time. It’s the best path forward.”

  A few days later, a statement was released simultaneously to the media and to KCN employees. This was an active investigation, and any further questions should be directed to the police. The family prays for Stella’s safe return home. They love her and miss her, and they are grateful for the well wishes.

  My name appeared throughout the coverage. A picture of us, scraped from social media, accompanied every story. It was strange to see myself this way, a stock player in a larger drama. Violet Trapp, friend and coworker and roommate. Violet Trapp, the last person to see her alive. After the statement, the gossip at KCN went from heated to feverish. I was bombarded with invitations to lunches and drinks from coworkers I barely knew. “In case you need someone to talk to,” they said. “I can’t even imagine how hard this is for you.” People found excuses to stop by my desk, but before long, they always changed the conversation to Stella. The boldest ones presented their own theories of what happened.

  But I noticed that no one did this for Jamie. No sympathetic inquiries, no invitations to lunch. The police had interviewed him, but since then he’d been kept in the dark. I counted as family; an ex-boyfriend didn’t. Jamie was tainted, possibly dangerous. He was one degree too close to the problem.

  “They think it’s my fault,” Jamie said, staring at his beer, at our usual place.

  “Don’t say that.” I waved a hand. “They’re just gossiping idiots. They’re bored. Something new will happen tomorrow, and they’ll move on.”

  “I don’t mean our coworkers. I mean the Bradleys.”

  “Oh.”

  “Well? Don’t they?” He was pale, and his face looked cramped with nausea. “And aren’t they kind of right? Stella would still be here if I hadn’t broken up with her. But—Jesus Christ. How was I supposed to know that this would happen?”

  Jamie never said what he thought this was. He had, I was discovering, a squeamish side.

  “Obviously you couldn’t know that,” I said.

  “I thought I was doing the right thing! I was being honest with her! You see that, don’t you? You knew how bad things were between us. Right, Violet?”

  He looked at me pleadingly, like an altar boy at confession. Jamie was so strident about his innocence. He wanted the world to know that his hands were clean, that it wasn’t his fault. This was part of what I found so refreshing about Oliver. “I was a terrible brother to her,” he’d said. “But to be fair, she was an even worse sister. Truly awful.”

  And it’s not like Jamie was going to catch any real heat for this. His alibi was airtight. He’d been at the office that fateful weekend, his movements recorded by the security guards and cameras. None of it was Jamie’s fault—it would be cruel to think that. But when other people blamed themselves for what happened to Stella, I allowed myself to imagine an alternate universe where it wasn’t my fault, where it wasn’t my burden. Because, except for those moments, the weight of that knowledge was always there. Even when I wasn’t fully conscious of it—often the ambient anxiety arrived before the memory itself did. Rinsing the shampoo from my hair in the shower, standing in line at the coffee cart, riding the descending elevator late at night, I’d find myself thinking, I’m stressed, but what am I stressed about, again? Then I’d remember, and I’d remember that this problem was unfixable.

  “Right,” I said finally, after a long beat. “Of course I see that. And so will everyone else, soon enough. Just let the police do their work.”

  He laughed bitterly. “Yeah. Sure. Because they’ve been doing such a great job.”

  After the press release, the police in Maine set up a tip line for anyone who might have seen her. The line was, predictably, flooded with crank calls and flimsy sightings, information from people with the most tenuous connections to Stella. The police weren’t making any progress. “God, these people are idiots,” Anne said, after hanging up the phone with the police one day in January. “Walter, I am so glad we have you on the case.”

  Walter was what Anne called him, now that Detective Fazio was officially retired and working for the Bradleys. And it was true. Fazio caught things that the Maine police didn’t. He was the one who discovered Stella’s passport was missing. It could just be a coincidence—that’s what he emphasized. Maybe she’d lost it, at some earlier point. But Anne knew her daughter. Stella might be messy, but she wasn’t a scatterbrain. She wasn’t the type to lose her passport.

  A turning point came when a dead body was di
scovered in a town about thirty miles away from the Maine compound. The police were elated to have something to work with. I was sure Anne would harass them for constant updates while they worked to identify the body. But instead, she became very still. She sat on the Bradleys’ porch, staring at Long Island Sound, with a tearless silence that was almost serene. It was like a superstition. If she didn’t turn around, if she didn’t look, Stella would remain alive.

  Anne took it as a sign when the body wasn’t Stella. This, along with the missing passport, was proof to her that her daughter was alive. Anne had spent dozens of hours online, reading about similar disappearances. Women who vanished and returned alive, weeks or months later. There was something called a fugue state. Couldn’t this have happened to Stella? She had forgotten who she was. Now she was wandering the world, waiting to be found.

  “Don’t you see?” Anne said, brandishing articles printed from the internet in the skeptical faces of her husband and son. “She’s lost. She could be anywhere. I have to go find her.”

  It took me a long time to realize that I was witnessing the unraveling of a family. The brave front the Bradleys presented to the media was convincing. I even believed it myself, for a while. But when January turned to February, and there was no sign of Stella, the Bradleys started to crack. In all my years, I had failed to understand how tenuous their self-assurance was. A life that appeared solid in construction, laid with bricks of wealth and good manners and good genes, was as flimsy as a house of cards.

  The Bradleys, it turned out, were just as screwed up as anyone else.

  Thomas’s workaholism became pathological. Plus, he had decided that he was going to summit Mount Everest before the year’s end. He was pushing sixty, in mediocre shape, and had never once expressed an interest in mountain climbing. But ever since Stella disappeared, he had become obsessed with the idea. He would do it in her—not her memory, but her honor. He hired a trainer. He woke up early to go on runs with a weight-filled backpack. Thomas, once taciturn to the point of rudeness, now could not shut up about the best route up the Lhotse wall.