Vanished in the Dunes

by Allan Retzky

  When he doesn’t answer, and just stares at her, she says, “Then let me show you what I like.”

  Later they speak long into the night about the Middle East. She abhors the mullahs that govern modern Iran, and he detects that part of her enmity was based on how her family had been treated. She dislikes the Israelis, not, she protests, because they were Jews, but because of the way they abuse the Palestinians. She had read Tolstoy and Shakespeare, and they laughed together when he remembered the bard’s quote about first killing all the lawyers, as a reason for their both becoming doctors.

  “After all,” she said more than once when she rolled on top of him, “Doctors have to stick together.”

  Henry waits for her at a table against the far back wall of Luca’s on First Avenue. That’s where they always meet for dinner. He watches as diners come in, most of them locals like him, there for the fish stew, or the tagliatelle with duck ragout, which is his own favorite.

  Heidi has agreed to meet him at eight, but it is already past nine. He’s already finished two glasses of the house Chianti. He wonders if she’s standing him up on purpose. When they last met, two nights before, the evening had become a disaster. When she was ready for sex he just couldn’t perform. At first she was angry and threw curses at him in German. Then she softened somewhat.

  “It happens sometimes,” she said, but still steered him to the door.

  Yet he knew why the problem arose. A week before he had seen her emerge from a private office looking disheveled, her lipstick slightly smeared and her hair in disarray. A tall young intern followed her. He could have killed her at that moment, but all he wanted to do was lose himself within her body. He realized that he needed to calm down, but when the next opportunity came, he couldn’t do it.

  There is a state of hopelessness when obsessive love becomes uncontrollable. People in love generally share some aspects of life; culture, music, books, art, even political discussion, or debate, but she would have none of that. She wanted to fuck away their time together, and he became a slave to that excess. Yes. That’s what he had become, a toy, a plaything. She was a psychiatrist, and had pushed his buttons for her own gratification, as well as her sense of control. There was even more to it. One night, about a month before, Heidi had more than her usual quota of wine.

  On reflection, he wasn’t all that surprised when she said, “I like Jewish men. They’re both very intelligent and oral. All my life I’ve heard how Jews outperformed the general population in academics, business, law, and, particularly, medicine. Especially here in New York. It’s a challenge for me to outperform them.”

  So Heidi is a user and a manipulator whose social goal seems to be to sexually dominate men, particularly Jewish men. But it didn’t matter. All he cared about was the few times each week he could bury his face in her flesh. He knew she saw other men; she collected them like stamps, or coins, one-time stands of sex, but always Jewish men from what he came to observe, yet she stayed with him for the most part, and in some recess of his brain he somehow hoped she would stay there forever.

  They were both off on the day when she said she wanted to take the bus to East Hampton, and she’d pointedly avoided inviting him to spend time with her until the evening. He was pissed and took it out on the Avis rental agent when he picked up the Chevy at mid-morning. A sudden impulse made him anxious to drive back upstate to where he grew up even though there were no relatives or friends still there. He just needed a break.

  He took the Taconic Parkway and kept the radio on the classical music station until the hills delivered more static than music. He exited at the Hillsdale turnoff and drove around aimlessly, even past his old house, now expanded and likely modernized by the weekenders who had bought it from his father’s estate, but it was shrouded behind a cluster of blue spruce much like his own past was hidden. He ate a sandwich at the Taconic Diner and headed back. He dropped the car off about five, and then went back to shower and change for dinner.

  Ten o’clock passes, yet she hasn’t come. The previous day she had told him she was taking the Hampton Jitney to East Hampton on her day off.

  “Ever since I’ve been in New York people always talk about the Hamptons and the beautiful beaches out there.”

  So she went on an early bus despite the chill. After he got back to his apartment he checked his cell phone for messages. He had been so upset that morning he’d forgotten to take it with him. He saw that she had called. Since that day he played it over a hundred times.

  Just wanted you to know I’m out here at the beach. Actually, I’m in a house with a view of the ocean. I met this nice guy and he invited me in for a view. I might be a little late for dinner, but I should be there.

  And there wasn’t anything more. He tried to call her that same day, in the early evening, probably shortly after dusk, but her phone rang until her message pickup. He tried again later but could never get through, even to her voice mail. Maybe she was out of the regular service area in one of those dead spots. She never came to the restaurant, but also didn’t show up for her shift the next day. That was more surprising, as she was always diligent about her shifts.

  The next afternoon he got a call from her supervisor. There was no secret about their relationship. “Do you know where she is?”

  He somehow suspects that Heidi has found another partner. Another lover. The thought tears him up, as it has before. Another mouth seeking out and gliding above the brown skin, moving a tongue into her crevices, bringing her off. Still, it is not like her. Two more days pass. He convinces her superintendent to open her apartment, but there is no evidence she has been back. A toothbrush rests on the ledge of the sink, clumps of aqua caught in bristles, just next to the strands of dark hair that float above her hairbrush. He picks up the toothbrush and sucks the stiff blades into his mouth, but it isn’t her. She’s not there, and for the first time since they met, he feels a chill, and realizes with horrific suddenness that he may never see her again. That’s when he decides to call the police.

  People appear to go missing in New York with amazing frequency, yet most are found. They turn up after a few days, or weeks, either after a drug or alcohol binge, or a tryst with a secret lover. They make excuses and apologize to the authorities.

  The voice on the other end of Henry’s call is reassuring.

  “If she went to East Hampton for the day by bus, there will likely be a record. We’ll check it out and ask the town police to look for her. Do you happen to have a recent photo?”

  He does. They’d spent a long weekend in Bermuda three months before. He’d placed the camera on a balcony table, set the timer, and then taken a number of shots. He chooses one with her silhouetted against the balcony wall. She wears a new sleeveless pink-and-white dress that shows off her tan. Her short black hair barely grazes her cheek. He uses a scissors to slice away most of his own image and delivers the photo to the appointed address that afternoon.

  He tells the investigator that he thinks her parents might live in or near Vienna, but that they should seek an Austrian address through the hospital since he doesn’t have one and Heidi never spoke of them.

  “No.” As far as he knows she doesn’t have any relatives that live in America.

  And later, “I don’t know if she had relationships with other men.”

  The last question raises an edge of angst. It wasn’t possible that they might think he had anything to do with her disappearance, yet a tiny seed of doubt rises, and makes him tremble. He doesn’t tell them about the message on his cell phone. Not then. He couldn’t admit there could be other men.

  They thank him and ask that he tell them if she turns up. From past experience they expect that would happen within a few weeks at most. In the meanwhile, they will check with the Hampton Jitney and advise East Hampton P.D. to be on the lookout. They’ve done this sort of thing before. Everything they do seems so routine to Henry, yet he lives on the edge for the next several weeks.

  But time does not solve the problem
. Eventually he goes back to the police and plays the cell phone message she left. They seem to pass off his original failure to provide the information as jealousy, which it was. He is advised that a detective named Peter Wisdom of the East Hampton Police still has the case file unless for some reason he’d turned it over to the Suffolk County Police Department, which handles major crimes. In this case, at least so far, there is no evidence yet of anything sinister. They tell him that Detective Wisdom has interviewed all the passengers who live in East Hampton who took the same bus as Heidi that morning. They give him Wisdom’s direct number at work.

  He thinks about this for a few more days and then decides to call the Hampton Jitney bus company directly rather than Wisdom. He wants to speak to the same passengers as well as the bus driver, but they deny him access to the lists. They say it’s confidential information. He calls a lawyer he knows from their undergraduate days at Yale. Judah Cohen greets his call with collegial enthusiasm and arranges for an associate to provide him with an insight into the maze of a legal system that has simultaneously become America’s strength and soft spot.

  Several days later he speaks to Detective Wisdom to confirm that he can access the passenger list if he files a Freedom of Information Act request, called a FOIA. Anyone can do it. A citizen can look into reading Nixon’s Watergate notes, the background behind Lyndon Johnson’s Tonkin Gulf Resolution, aged FBI files on a relative or friend sucked into the McCarthy Senate hearings, or possibly even certain CIA communications to President Bush about potential problem weapons in Iraq.

  Wisdom is forthcoming. “We prefer that private citizens not get involved, but to be honest, sometimes you people pick up things we miss. If you find out anything unusual, please let me know. Henry readily agrees to this and also offers to send Wisdom one of the photos of Heidi in the pink-and-white dress.

  The process is not swift, yet moves along. In ten days he has the list of passengers, more due to Detective Wisdom’s intervention than anything else. He recognizes none of the names. People who live in the New York area. Some of them in the town of East Hampton. He makes a copy of the list. He decides to start with the driver, who lives in a small town on the eastern end of Long Island, but the results are spotty.

  “I wouldn’t even have remembered her if the police hadn’t asked some questions,” the driver says. “There’s not much I can add to what I told them. I think she spoke to a few people on the bus, but that was when she was getting ready to leave.”

  He doesn’t really expect anything more. The bus driver clearly spent his time looking at the road ahead and not at the passengers seated behind him. There is also a female attendant who left the bus at an earlier stop, but the young woman remembers nothing. Then he searches for the male names on the listing. There are nine of them. The seventh name on the list is a man named Amos Posner in Amagansett. The name means nothing to him.

  He decides to visit the area, books a rental car and a motel room for one night. He opts not to call anyone in advance, but to take his chance that some of the people will be available. Heidi has been gone for nearly six weeks, and there is no word, sign, or evidence that she was ever there. He has paid her rent for the past two months. He learns that her parents in Austria have already been informed of her disappearance by the NYPD, but a short answer in good English says they are not planning to come at this time. A third party signs the reply. The response confuses him. He wonders what kind of people they are, and immediately speculates what kind of relationship they had for them to take such a distant approach. Most families would have arrived on the first available flight. Was it a Muslim or an Austrian cultural thing, or something else? His confusion grows apace with his fear. He increases the dosage of the anxiety meds he’s taken for several years. He needs a clear rational mind if he has any chance of finding out anything more.

  He sits on the bed in his East Hampton motel room with the police summary he obtained from his FOIA filing. Amos Posner is one of only three people on the bus who live in the town of East Hampton. All of the names came up on Google. One was an eighty-year-old former staff member of The New Yorker magazine, but the man was clearly barely coherent when Henry called.

  Posner’s Google listing was brief. He had been involved in international trade for years with a large firm, but suddenly lost his position two years before. He is married and lives in Amagansett.

  Henry calls and after four rings expects an answering machine to pick up, but the dial tone continues. The man must be away, or has turned off his machine. He marks the space next to Posner’s name for follow-up after noting the time of his call.

  The final name is a man named Welbrook who also lives in Amagansett. A number of Google references indicate a position in entertainment law. He answers on the first ring.

  “Well, I already told the police that I didn’t remember her. It’s been a while since the day they said she disappeared, and I go back and forth to the city at least once a week, sometimes more often.”

  Henry has introduced himself as a doctor and a friend of the missing woman. The doctor part always helps. There is still respect in society for the profession, although far from where it was when he was a kid. Today’s icons are more likely to be athletes, investment bankers, or maybe international specialists like that guy Posner.

  “Could I stop by and show you some other pictures of Heidi? They’re much better than the fax copy the police showed you. I promise you it won’t take much time and it might jog your memory.”

  “As long as you make it quick,” says Welbrook and gives directions from the motel. Henry has already picked up an area map at the front desk provided by a local real estate broker.

  He traces the route on the map with his pen, stands and reaches for the envelope with the three color photos. The bottom one was taken on their Bermuda trip. She’s standing on the beach and squinting slightly into a bright sun. A calm ocean lies in the background. She’s wearing the new pink-and-white dress.

  Welbrook’s house is less than ten minutes away, and lies at the end of a stretch of road dominated by large modern homes with decks that face the ocean. Many seem to have enclosed pool areas. Henry realizes there is great opulence here, and that most of these houses have ocean views. A vintage Mercedes sedan is parked in a cutout just off the driveway.

  “Yes. Now I remember her. It’s the dress. Pink and white. It was sorta cut low on top, if you know what I mean.”

  John Welbrook is a good-looking man in his early forties with curly blond hair. Henry feels an immediate and absurd sense of jealousy as soon as the man opens the door. Welbrook has the looks and obvious self-confidence to have attracted Heidi, and from his memory of her dress, she would have attracted him as well.

  They stand in the wide hallway. Henry’s attention is drawn to the walls, which are decorated with photos of various celebrities from the theatre, sports, and politics. Welbrook notes his interest and claims they are all clients of his firm that specializes in entertainment law. Stern turns his attention back to a short flight of stairs that rise from the hallway and empties into a large room with a vaulted ceiling. He follows Welbrook up the stairs, but is not invited to sit.

  “So do you remember anything else about her?”

  “When I spoke to the police I wasn’t sure I remembered her from the faxed picture, but the color photo and that dress—it’s not easy to forget that dress.”

  “Did you talk to her? Did she happen to say anything?”

  “Actually, I was going to the rest room. That’s in the back of the bus. She was sitting near the back and stopped me and asked how to get to the beach from the East Hampton stop. I probably told her she’d have to take a cab. That’s when she asked me if I could drive her.

  “Told her no. Even though I live in Amagansett, told her I was getting off in East Hampton village. That’s where I parked my car. Said I had things to do. Didn’t have the time to drive her to the beach. Nor the particular interest.”

  Henry lets the words slide
past him, and looks around the room.

  “Nice house,” Henry says.

  “We like it,” answers Welbrook.

  “Oh, you’re married,” says Henry.

  “Not at the moment,” answers Welbrook, and slips away a tiny laugh.

  Henry takes a few steps towards a floor-to-ceiling glass window and looks out.

  “That’s quite a view.”

  “Sure. Most houses anywhere this close to the beach usually have some ocean view. It’s what people pay top dollar for.”

  Henry takes a chance and decides to see if Posner’s home without first calling since the drive is only minutes away. Welbrook’s house is clearly larger and closer to the beach than Posner’s, but both houses do indeed seem to have an ocean view. Henry’s rented Chevy climbs the driveway and stops behind a parked Lexus.

  Without an entry bell he raps with the brass knocker that guards the door. There is no response for at least thirty seconds, and he’s just about to leave when he hears a voice from inside.

  “Who is it? I’ll be there in a minute.”

  The voice is clear and slightly faint, almost tired, Henry thinks, before he raps again, more briefly this time, and announces himself as a doctor friend of Heidi, whom he describes as the missing woman from the bus. The door opens. He apologizes for the unannounced nature of his visit and watches as Posner releases the door even wider as an unspoken invitation to enter. He follows Posner up the stairs to a living area with its own ocean views. He sees the twin green sofas, set around the art deco coffee table, and imagines that Heidi might have been here, just as she might have been in Welbrook’s home, or one like it. He inhales the affluence of the room. Doctors may be paid well by comparison to other work, but there is no way he can ever see affording such luxury. There is art on the walls, probably original prints. Some of the images are familiar: a Picasso Don Quixote and a full-sized Rauschenberg share space on the far wall. From what he’s read on Google, Posner has not worked for a few years, yet his art collection seems significant enough, and the house is quite grand by Henry’s standards even if slightly more modest than Welbrook’s.