The Hollow Girl (A Moe Prager Mystery)

by Reed Farrel Coleman

  “None. Anything else?” she asked.

  “Yeah, it would be nice if you could muster up some genuine feelings, like you used to have when we first met. Your worry’s not exactly palpable.”

  “Worry about whether my money’s palpable, Moe. My feelings are my business.” She wrinkled up her nose and dropped the corners of her mouth.

  “I don’t need your money, Nancy. I’ll take it, but I don’t need it. What I need is the distraction. Till tomorrow morning, then.”

  “I don’t like being dismissed,” she said, sliding out of the booth and standing close to me. I had to confess, she smelled awfully good.

  “That’s not what I’m doing, dismissing you. I have to get some food in me and I have to do some research on my own. I have to get started.”

  “Okay, then.” She reached out her hand as if to touch my cheek. Reflexively, I grabbed her by the wrist before her hand could touch me.

  “Please don’t do that again.” I let go of her wrist, the stones on her bracelets leaving little red marks in the flesh of my palms.

  Nancy Lustig shook her head at me and walked away, her heels making sharp clacking sounds on the unforgiving terrazzo floor. I did not look after her. Instead I waved to the waitress and opened the menu that sat before me, untouched until then.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  What the fuck was that all about? That was the question I kept asking myself as I walked from the diner back to my condo. The weather had turned cool on me. I stopped, about-faced, and used my hand to block the light from the sun that hung fierce and low in the western sky. It had already begun telling its late September lies. My hand could shield me from its light, I thought, but not from its lies. Soon, early darkness would follow. Too bad life wasn’t like that, darkness following the lies. It was my experience that a lot of life was built on lies, mostly the ones we tell ourselves. I had reached a kind of Zen about the ones I told myself. Most of my life had been a wrestling match with them. Not anymore. Om. But it wasn’t my lies or the sun’s that concerned me. I was thinking about the ones Nancy Lustig told herself, and the ones she would tell me.

  When I got inside my flat, I poured myself a Dewar’s and thumbed through the mail. It was the usual daily mix of bills and begging. That particular day’s charity requests claimed that my contribution would cure pancreatic cancer, diabetes, AIDS, and autism. My donation would feed the poor of Africa, continue to reconstruct Long Island in the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, and rebuild the lives of our wounded veterans. I was a powerful man, apparently.

  It wasn’t that I was cold to the begging. I wasn’t numb. I believe my prodigious drinking in the wake of Pam’s death had proven as much. It was just that everything had been turned into a crusade. Not everything is worthy of a crusade. Sometimes it became just so much noise that translated into Give money, stop death. It was the biggest lie we shared. That if we only gave a few dollars more, we could all spread lamb’s blood above our thresholds and the angel of death would walk on by.

  I put the glass of blended Scotch to my lips, then put it quickly down. Instead, I decided to call Sarah. I wanted to test some of what Nancy had told me. If the Hollow Girl was as legendary as she claimed, I wondered if Sarah would know the legend. I also longed to hear my daughter’s voice, and hoped she would put the phone in front of Ruben. I held the phone in my hand, punched in ten of the eleven digits, and stopped. What if she was screening her calls and wouldn’t pick up? I wasn’t sure I could take that. The thought of it, of Sarah staring at my number on the screen, refusing to pick up, made me want to reach for the Dewar’s again. Even during the years she had shut me out in the fallout from her mother’s murder, Sarah answered my calls. Of course, our conversations in those years were stilted and contrived, more chilling than if we hadn’t spoken at all. Still, I never doubted she would answer my calls. Things were different now. She was married, a mother. Her husband, her son, they were her life now. But what is life without risk? I punched in the last digit.

  I got her answering machine, but then she picked up: “Hey, Dad, sorry, I was changing Ruben.” I couldn’t speak for the tears. “Dad, Dad! Are you all right?”

  “Fine,” I finally said. “Sorry. No, I’m good. I’m good.”

  “Okay …” she said, those two syllables thick with suspicion.

  “I’ve taken a case.”

  “My dad, the PI. That’s great.” She sounded like she meant it. “What kind of case?”

  “Missing persons. Listen, kiddo, have you ever heard of the Hollow Girl?”

  “Oh my God, Sloane Cantor is missing?”

  “You know I can’t talk about that. So you’ve heard of—”

  “Heard of! Dad, I used to be glued to my computer every night. For a year, the Hollow Girl was all we used to talk about in school. She was like this phenomenon.”

  “Did you begin watching her when she was the Lost Girl?”

  “Yeah, but after that suicide thing … it got crazy. She totally blew up after that.”

  “What was the appeal?”

  “She spoke to the ugly girl in all of us.”

  “But you’re beautiful. You were always beau—”

  “You’re my dad. You’re supposed to feel that way, but the world is tough on girls. Even pretty girls never feel pretty enough. We’re never thin enough or big-breasted enough, or we’re too big-breasted, or we’re too this and not enough that. The Hollow Girl spoke to that in all of us because she looked how we felt, and she felt it harder than we did. It’s like that show on HBO about the young women living in hipster Brooklyn. It’s about women in their early twenties, but it speaks to all women at some level because we either were that age, are that age, or will be that age, so—”

  “Thanks. Can you put Ruben on the phone?”

  “Sure, he’s right here. Hold on a second. Ruben, it’s Baba Moe. Say hello to Baba,” she said in her high-pitched happy mommy voice. Then I could hear my grandson squealing with joy into the mouthpiece. I wasn’t so egocentric to think it was because Baba Moe was on the other end. It was enough to hear him be happy because Sarah was happy. “How was that, Dad?”

  “Great. Thank you for e-mailing me all those photos of him. He’s getting big.”

  “Okay, Dad, I’ve got to go. He’s gonna be hungry soon.”

  “I love you guys, kiddo.”

  “We love you too, Dad.”

  I breathed a giant sigh of relief. Any conversation that didn’t include the phrases, “Have you stopped drinking, Dad?” or “Are you still trying to drink yourself into a coma?” was a good one. It was progress of a sort, and it was great to hear Ruben’s voice again. Then, as I was enjoying my little reverie, I realized I was sipping the Dewar’s.

  I put the glass down again and went to my computer. I typed “the Hollow Girl” into a search engine and couldn’t quite fathom how many hits I got. If the search engine was actually an engine and if life was a cartoon, sparks and smoke would have shot out of my desktop. Apparently, neither Nancy nor Sarah was exaggerating. The Wikipedia page alone scrolled down the length of a football field. Sloane Cantor, as my daughter had called her, was the cause of a minor revolution at the close of the last millennium. But as is often the case, the Hollow Girl’s high point was her low point too. Within two months of her suicide posting in December of ’99, it all came undone. First came the outing—“That’s Sloane Cantor. She’s not even in college.”—then the outrage, heartfelt and otherwise, the lawsuits, the investigations; then it was over.

  Even after the Hollow Girl was outed as just some aspiring high school actress, she had a huge following, an even bigger one than when she was just lost. It quickly evaporated. When the women and girls who were vicariously living or reliving their own trials and tribulations through the traumas of the Hollow Girl discovered it was an act—inspired though it may have been—they felt cheated and betrayed. There were angry tirades about the Hollow Girl in women’s magazines and several op-ed pieces in papers large and small about th
e “hoax” Sloane Cantor had perpetrated on the world. Her attempted suicide act had transformed her from an “everygirl” hero into a kind of Evel Knievel/Harry Houdini hybrid: What stunt would she pull next? When none was forthcoming, her followers vanished. Age has some benefits. If she had been a bit more experienced, Sloane might have realized that once the suicide bit aired, she would be in the position of playing Can You Top This? with herself.

  The lawsuits came to nothing. By the time depositions came around, the world had moved on. Besides, Sloane had been underage when the postings aired and there was no indication of malice on her part. In her own small way, Sloane’s Hollow Girl suicide had produced a reaction not dissimilar to what had happened in 1938 in the wake of the War of the Worlds broadcast. What surprised me was how little mention there was of the Lost Girl, the Hollow Girl, or of Sloane herself after 2002. Oh, there were clippings from the New Haven and Yale papers about some great performances in small roles by Siobhan Bracken, “an actress to watch,” but very little else. There was a thing in Variety about a pilot for a sitcom that was an updated version of the old show Hazel. Siobhan Bracken, née Sloane Cantor, “who first came into the public eye as the Internet’s Hollow Girl, is slated to play the lead.” That, too, came to nothing. Either the pilot was never made, or, if it was, the show wasn’t picked up.

  After my brief session of playing catch-up, I decided I’d watch a few old, random postings to get a feel for what the Hollow Girl’s more typical diary entries were like. When I finally looked up from my computer screen, it was 1:42 A.M. I had been totally sucked in for hours. I could not stop watching her. Sloane Cantor was a compelling presence onscreen. She had a knack for turning the mundane details that make up all of our lives into joy and heartbreak. It was no wonder to me that she had attracted a huge following. I think if I would have known about her, I would have followed her, too.

  I wasn’t quite finished. I did a search for Siobhan Bracken. I wanted to see if there was anything remarkable about her under that name, or anything about going missing. If there were any police reports that had leaked into the public domain, or if some enterprising TV reporter or entertainment reporter had picked anything up. Nothing. I shut down my computer, my mind wandering back to earlier in the day to my thoughts on darkness and lies. Though I was well-versed in darkness, I got the feeling I would need help navigating through the minefield of lies that had already been told to me, and the ones laying in wait.

  CHAPTER SIX

  In spite of the sun’s 9:00 A.M. position in the sky ahead of me, I wanted a drink. There wasn’t anything particularly novel in that desire. Since Pam’s death, thirst for alcohol had been my baseline state of being. But it hadn’t just happened. There wasn’t any genetic predisposition toward alcoholism in my family. The only things the previous generation of Pragers were predisposed to were abject pessimism and failure. For the most part, Aaron, Miriam, and I had managed to steer a pretty solid course away from those things. Then why could I hear my late mother’s voice in my head? She whispered, It’s never too late for things to fall apart. It’s never too late. Disappointment is always just a breath away. When my downward spiral had begun, there was a determined willfulness in my drinking that had morphed into something else, something disconnected from my will.

  I’d made the drive east toward Long Island hundreds, if not thousands, of times. Our third and most profitable store—Red, White, and You—was located in an obnoxiously fancy shopping center on the cusp of the Gold Coast. We opened the store at the end of the 1980s, but little had changed about the store or its setting in nearly two and a half decades. The parking lot was always so full of Porsches, Jags, Beemers, Mercedes, Bentleys, and Maseratis that it felt more like an ultra high-end auto mall than a parking lot. Around these parts, driving a Cadillac meant you were either an iconoclast or your portfolio was underperforming. The population had churned, but not changed, really. Whereas the old Gold Coast had been populated by the Vanderbilts and Astors, its current incarnation smelled of new money. Our customers at Red, White, and You tended to equate price with quality, so was it any wonder that it was our most profitable store, or why it was my least favorite?

  Nancy Lustig lived off Route 107, less than a mile away from the store. And when I pulled down the driveway, I saw that she hadn’t lied about everything: The address remained the same, but the house no longer remotely resembled the one that had sat on the property thirty-five years earlier. The old house had been mostly just big, a lovely red brick colonial with a cobblestone driveway, nothing that was going to give Gropius or Gehry the hives. That was no longer the case. The new house was something out of the Hollywood Hills. Three stories high, it was all angles and beautifully sculpted concrete. The concrete was perfectly smooth, painted a flat black, and the interior, obvious through the miles of glass, was almost completely white. Some of the interior seemed to flow directly out into the exterior. The four-car garage, made of the same materials, was set off to one side, but more traditional in shape and function.

  I pulled up next to the brushed steel front door, which swung open even before I got out of my car. I wasn’t exactly shocked that my presence had been noted. Since 9/11, it felt like the whole world had surveillance cameras. In Manhattan, it was safe to assume that every step you took was being recorded somewhere by someone. And when you had a house in the fancy-schmancy part of Long Island that seemed like it was built mostly of glass and open spaces, you needed security cameras, a lot of them.

  Nancy greeted me just inside the door. She was dressed in a silky white robe that accentuated her breasts and curves and revealed a lot of the tanned skin of her still-muscular legs. She was barefoot, I suppose to give me the impression that she had only recently gotten up and was just lounging about. Yeah, sure. I wasn’t buying it. No one who had sculpted herself out of the unremarkable clay she had begun with would come to the door freshly out of bed.

  She was perfectly made up, her hair falling just so: this much in front of her shoulders, that much behind. And her brown legs fairly glowed with the skin cream she had probably rubbed on them not a half-hour before I arrived. At least she had been wise enough not to load on the jewelry. That really would have murdered the illusion. Still, I had to confess that Nancy had turned herself into a very attractive woman. It was difficult to reconcile old Nancy with the new. And as she had the previous day, she smelled awfully good, like a hint of honey mixed with raw, freshly crushed herbs.

  She caught me off guard, leaning in and kissing me on the cheek. God damn me if I didn’t flutter some. I tried not to show it. I’m not sure how successful I was at that. Now the urge to drink, which I had pretty much battled to a draw on my way here, was reasserting itself.

  “You look like you could use a drink,” she offered, turning, walking straight ahead.

  Maybe she really could read my mind. “Nothing for me. Thank you. I’m fine,” I lied, and tried deflection. “This is an amazing house. Awfully white in here.”

  “Thank you. I helped design it. Come on out to the pool.”

  I followed her out through one of those interior/exterior spaces. Here, though, the white concrete flooring not only flowed outside, it flowed directly into the heated pool, wispy clouds of steam rising off the water as it blended with the crisp fall air. The pool was one of those multitiered infinity edged designs with a cascade feature. It was constructed of a dark gray slate, or what looked to be slate. It was hard to know what was real and what was make-believe around Nancy. Beyond the pool, the rear yard was a blend of styles, none of them native to Long Island. I could see a Japanese rock garden, koi pond, and a lone bonsai tree. On the opposite side of the pool, where the table, grill, wet bar, and cabana were, the design was vaguely Southwestern. Somehow it all seemed to blend well together.

  When we got out by the pool, Nancy stopped. She half-turned to me and said, “There’s coffee, tea, and scones on the table and a full bar over by the cabana. Help yourself.”

  With that, she u
ndid her robe, letting it fall to the floor at her feet. She hesitated a beat before walking slowly into the pool. The beat of hesitation was purposeful. She wanted to make certain I noticed her, noticed that she was wearing only her tanned skin, noticed the six-pack abs, noticed that the only hair on her body was on her head. For a woman in her mid-fifties, she was in incredible shape. Seeing her that way was equal parts exhilaration and sadness, for apparently she had exchanged her soul for beauty. When we’d first met, she was guileless and honest, whereas everything Nancy did now seemed to come with a secret or not-so-secret agenda. The problem for me was trying to sort out if whatever was going on was about Nancy, or her daughter, or me.

  I watched Nancy long enough for her to be swallowed up by the water, then I headed over to the table and poured myself a cup of coffee. I buttered up a raspberry scone. The fire pit was going full blast and its heat blew at me in pleasant waves. I chose to watch the flames and not Nancy. I heard her step out of the pool, listened to her wet feet slapping the baby-smooth concrete as she walked. At least she had the good taste not to ask me to dry her off, though I would be lying if I said there wasn’t at least a part of me that wanted her to ask. She stopped by me, again only briefly, so that I might get a close-up view of her wet body glistening in the mid-morning sun.

  “I’ll be out in a minute,” she said and moved on to the cabana.

  Fifteen minutes or so later, she emerged: hair dry, face made up, a bottle of Irish whiskey in her hand. Now she wore a long, white, terry cloth robe tied at the waist. She didn’t say anything, not at first. Instead she busied herself with the whiskey and a cup of coffee.

  She waved the bottle at me. “Would you like some?”

  I held my cup out to her and she poured. “That’s fine. Thanks.” I sipped as she sat down close but at an angle to me. “So you wanna tell me what this tango is all about? Is your daughter even missing? And if she is, do you actually give a shit?”