Vanished in the Dunes

by Allan Retzky

  It’s not locked, yet it still takes time to bring himself to the point where he slides the lid open. When he does, he sees the weapon, a Smith & Wesson Chiefs Special that sits on the cushion of a soft hand towel. He remembers that the revolver is compact, which makes it lighter than many handguns. He also recalls that it only carries five rounds. Beyond that he can’t remember much from the one lesson he had years before on loading and firing. He knows it would be a comforting thought to have the gun available if the doctor invades his home, and so he lifts it from the box. He stands and holds the revolver as he had been taught in his right hand with the left hand steadying the right wrist. He pans the room. There is an unmistakable sense of power. At first he thinks he would be afraid to use it, but just holding it allows him to feel like a different person. The only issue now is whether he waits for the doctor to come to him or he seeks him out. He thinks that it would be better to meet him on his own terms, which means here in his home where he could easily claim self-defense against an intruder. As his mind runs through this scenario, he realizes that just the act of holding the gun permits him to no longer fear this man and he decides he is prepared to kill if necessary. No. More than that. If he is to ever have peace again, he will have to kill this man. He replaces the revolver in its case, slides the box closed, and returns it to a lower shelf in a spot that’s easier to reach.

  He walks to the door, then stops, turns, and faces the floor-to-ceiling bedroom windows. The shades are open and a concentrated beam of white outside light slashes across the room. “An artist’s light,” people have called it; an indigenous element that runs throughout the East End of Long Island that supposedly attracts creativity in the fine arts. Such enlightenment is not on Posner’s mind at that moment. His eyes follow the shaft of light that arrives and settles on the king-sized bed. He cannot help but imagine for the thousandth time what might have happened if he’d taken her hand and moved into the bedroom instead of allowing her to slip into eternity.

  They have sex, but he is far from perfect. Too far. It’s all over in minutes. They dress without speaking in what seems like seconds and the silence continues as he drives her back to the bus stop. She walks from his car without a goodbye and he goes home. End of story.

  That is how it might have been. Maybe he would have felt guilty, but that could have passed by now. She might have mocked him, but he would have deserved it and nothing more would have ever developed. No one would have died. His earlier fears about federal crimes would return as his only worry.

  He calls Sara to find out her travel plans. This will be her first trip out since that day. She says she’s getting a lift and is already in the car with a neighbor’s family who are coming out for a few days. They’ve left early and traffic is light. She won’t be too long. She’s anxious to see him.

  Everything’s changed in the last month. Things between them were still in limbo, trapped somewhere between reconciliation and the edge of collapse, until he arrived unannounced at the apartment one afternoon. He knew he was losing her. Or driving her away. It was all the same. She might even be seeing someone else. He’s thought of that and worried about the possibility. And the jealousy of it all made him want her like he hadn’t in months. So he’d made a decision to surprise her and see where things went. Maybe she wasn’t interested anymore, but he had to find out. When he opened the door, he was half afraid someone else would be there, but she was alone. Even so, her only greeting was a glare. When she spoke her voice was clipped and impersonal.

  “What are you doing here? I thought you were back at the house staring at the ocean. And how long has it been since you were here? A month? Longer?”

  She moves to the living room window, turns her back to him, and appears to stare across the street at the corner of Third Avenue and Ninetieth. He stays in the middle of the room, several feet from the door he’s just entered. One hand leans against the polished wood arm of his favorite wing chair. A small bag rests at his feet. He takes a step toward her and then stops. He almost wants to ask her if she’s missed him, but decides it’s wiser not to go there.

  “It’s only been a few weeks plus a couple of days since I was here.”

  “It seems longer.”

  “I can’t help what it seems like.”

  “You can’t help anything anymore.”

  She turns back from the glass and faces him. Her eyes widen. He feels the heat of anger.

  “For months now you’ve been distant. You’ve changed. You can’t keep sweating out what the Feds might do, or keep cursing the bastards at your old firm for throwing you to the wolves. We’ve covered all of that already, and I’m fed up with your self-pity. All you’ve done for several months now is sit around the beach house and keep away from me. It all started back in May. Did something happen then? Something that made you change even more?”

  He ignores the fact that she’s the one who’s been distant and wanted to separate, yet realizes that she isn’t accusing him of having an affair. Not this time. His reaction spills out. Almost too fast, but he has prerehearsed a possible answer for months.

  “No. I swear. It’s nothing. And it’s not you. I just can’t take the city anymore on top of my issues with the Feds.”

  “Bullshit! You’ve worked here all your life.”

  “It’s not the same when you’re not working. Now all I sense is the crush of people, the noises, the trash, and, most of all, the loneliness of someone without a place to go.”

  “This marriage hasn’t had a place to go either. It’s close to being finished as far as I’m concerned.”

  “Stop it. I love you.”

  That’s when he should tell her about what happened. But he can’t. He can swear fidelity all he wants, but fidelity was what got him here.

  “Then prove it.”

  Her voice has softened and is now throaty and barely audible. She again turns back to the window without waiting for an answer, but he knows that if he says or does nothing it would all be over. Done. Finished.

  He doesn’t speak again, but moves up from behind and presses into her. The window reflects a faint yet true image of her eyes closing even as her mouth parts to pull in short breaths. She moves a few inches, as if to reaffirm the source of the pressure. They stand like that. A car horn blares from the street, but they don’t move. Not an inch.

  “Get undressed,” he says at last.

  There’s no answer, but she doesn’t move away.

  “Take off your clothes before I tear them off.”

  The smile in the reflection widens.

  “Go ahead and tear away, but take care of the blouse. It’s silk.”

  That’s when it all changed. She wants him again and that’s all that matters. He still isn’t sure why, but his sex drive is all the way back and it elates him despite all the issues that still exist. He still hasn’t told her about what happened. He can’t. He knows she senses his worry and assumes she just attributes it all to his potential matters with the Justice Department. Now it’s much too late to tell her the truth, although he longs to do it.

  He sees a light out there somewhere. He can’t risk losing her after he came so close. The longer he’s waited the less likelihood there is for anyone to believe him. All he can think of now is deflecting attention to Stern if it comes to that. Our marriage or Stern? No choice. No choice at all.

  Her attitude has also made a complete shift in the past month. It’s clear that she now seems to want to put the past behind them and make a new start. In the past few weeks she often speaks about moving away. This is new. She says she’s grown tired of the firm, the hours, and the useless feeling she gets from some of her clients. She says more than once that she’s mostly tired of not being with him. Since he’ll only stay in the apartment for limited periods, her solution is to switch her career and move if he wouldn’t mind.

  Wouldn’t mind? The thought makes him positively giddy, and he embraces the idea. Yes, sell the apartment. Yes, sell the house. He can bear it he says
as he withholds his hope that he might never again see the red quarry tile floor. She even has a future career plan. A law school friend is a dean at Cal-Davis in California. There’s an associate professorship opening in corporate reorganization law available and she’s interested. What does he think? He doesn’t hesitate to affirm her idea. A new start for both of them. And it’s all her idea. Wonderful. Now all that’s left is to take care of the doctor.

  He goes back and reenters the bedroom. He pulls the box from the closet and moves it to a shelf in the upstairs hall closet just feet off the living room. What better place to keep a weapon than near where he would entertain an unwelcome visitor. He moves back into the main room with the ocean view. He’s ready in case the doctor decides to pay a visit, although he has doubts the man would actually try.

  CHAPTER 15

  She leans into the cushioned backseat. Her eyes flutter closed.

  “Relax. Grab some sleep if you like.” Ed Whelan’s voice is soothing. He’s even been told he sounds like warm syrup.

  “It’s just past noon and we’re between rush hours, so we should be there in less than three hours.”

  Ed and Frances sit in the front of the Volvo and listen to Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony on a CD. The volume is down. They have an apartment a few blocks away from the Posners’ in Manhattan and a house just around the corner in Amagansett, which makes it easy to give Sara a lift to or from the city when the timing works out.

  The music rolls through the car in quiet waves. There’s an image of a forest clearing. Red-and-yellow foliage enclose the open space. A spotted fawn stands nearby and arches its neck toward a low-hanging green morsel. After several minutes, Ed tilts his head toward the backseat and blinks his eyes a few times. Frances nods.

  “Yes. She’s asleep. Let’s be quiet.” She mouths all of this.

  There’s no need for speech. They’ve already played catch-up gossip an hour earlier while they waited in their car for Sara to come downstairs.

  Frances keeps pivoting her head to view the front door of Sara’s apartment house while they speak. It wouldn’t seem right to have Sara interrupt them.

  “She was really shaky when we met for a drink several months ago. First his old firm screwed him over for doing what they asked him to do. Then they hung him out to dry when the Feds got involved. He seemed to be handling it pretty well though until last spring. That’s when she said he fell into some kind of deep depression and shut everyone out. Especially her. I gather they might even have separated for a while. I know she hasn’t been out to the beach for months.”

  “Is that when she thinks he started an affair?”

  “She never said that. I’ve already told you, I just picked up some vibrations. It’s my hunch. But maybe I misread the signs. Maybe I was wrong.”

  “Honey, you’re not usually wrong about these things. And what makes her so pure? Remember a few months ago I told you that I thought I saw her walking arm in arm with some guy out of a steak house on Forty-Seventh Street.”

  “That means nothing. It was probably business.”

  “Even so.”

  “Even so nothing. Whatever either of them might have given into is gone now.”

  “What makes you think that?”

  “Simple. When she called and asked if we were going out this weekend and wanted a lift her whole attitude was different. She was anxious to see him. Even ventured that he’d changed. And all for the better, so I assume whatever it was he had going on was over. She also said they might be moving out West sometime soon. Said she might get a teaching job at a law school in California. I asked her if we could have first dibs on their apartment if they sell. She laughed at that. You don’t laugh at the idea of selling your apartment unless you’re either happily getting divorced or staying married. And I don’t think they’re getting divorced. Not after speaking to her.”

  “I hope so. Amos is good people. They both are.”

  Frances glances at the backseat just as Sara opens her eyes.

  “We’re only about an hour and a half away if the traffic holds.”

  Sara nods and smiles just as her cell phone rings.

  “It’s Amos,” she says as she looks at the caller number unable to suppress a widening grin.

  CHAPTER 16

  Stern wakes just after six and curses after he sees that Posner’s car is gone. He resigns himself to wait. What else can he do? He wanders through the house he’s appropriated and searches the kitchen. He finds a plastic bag with frozen bread in the freezer along with a quarter pound of butter. The only thing in the refrigerator is a large bottle of Evian. He unscrews the cap and drinks a third of the bottle. He checks the taps and confirms the water is still on and so he uses the bathroom. His face in the mirror is somehow unfamiliar. The deep shadows under his eyes confirm his recent stress.

  While he slept, thoughts spun through his mind about how to confront Posner and whether to somehow engage the police to be there. He knows that if they’re present he’ll have to give up any idea of harming Posner, at least at that time. He still wants to either follow the man or drag him back to the overlook area to the spot where Heidi is buried. And he’s sure of it. Sure that Heidi lies near where he saw Posner. That’s why he’s so mad at himself for not being awake when Posner left. He can’t search the whole area without Posner to show him exactly where. At that moment, almost in mid-thought, he decides right there that his best plan of action is to just knock on Posner’s door and take it from there. He finds a tube of toothpaste in the medicine cabinet and works a dollop of Colgate across his teeth with a finger. He needs a shave but doesn’t bother. He doesn’t need to be clean shaven to confront a murderer.

  He moves back to the bedroom window with his binoculars and waits for Posner to return. He picks up his cell phone and turns it on for only the third time since he left the city. There are two messages. The first is from Detective Wisdom from the East Hampton Police Department. They’d like to meet with him as soon as possible to review some aspects of the case. They’d tried his New York apartment, but he wasn’t in, and would he please call them at his earliest convenience?

  The second is from the neighbor he’d asked to get his mail. A policeman had stopped by to see if he knew where Stern was. That was all. He checks his home phone next. There’s just the one message from Wisdom that repeats the sense of the one on his cell phone. He looks up just in time to see Posner pull his car up the driveway. He watches as the man moves into his house with an almost carefree abandon.

  “Have you decided something, my friend? Well, I have. I’ll see you soon. No doubt about it.” Stern laughs as he speaks, and the words tumble from his mouth with a hysterical edge.

  He moves back to the kitchen and drinks more water. He checks the case holding the lethal needles. The only issue that remains is whether to contact Wisdom. For now, no one knows where he is. That’s good, he thinks. Fuck the police.

  CHAPTER 17

  Wisdom arrives at his desk later than normal, courtesy of his annual departmental physical. Except for a slightly elevated blood pressure reading, which will be rechecked in a month, everything else looks fine. A particular report he’s been awaiting sits in his in-box buried under assorted other matters. It takes him almost an hour to get to it.

  The report is a GPS summary of Stern’s recent cell phone activity. There was a call to Welbrook’s home from a site quite near Welbrook’s home. Then two days ago he’d called Posner’s home from somewhere in town. And this morning there were two calls: one to Stern’s apartment and one to his cell phone voice mail. Both calls were made from a location only a few hundred feet from Posner’s home. He asks the department’s resident techie to check out and see if the calls were made from the street or a house. The GPS chip in Stern’s phone is a new one, unlike Heidi’s. This allows them to pinpoint the source of the call to within a few feet.

  He checks in with the patrol cars doing drive-by surveillance on Posner’s home. No blue car was seen in the vicini
ty on any drive-by over the past day. He asks patrol to go back again over an area within a few hundred feet of Posner’s house while he waits for a more exact answer. He tells them to look for any sign of human activity. Do the houses look occupied? Any lights on? Are there cars in the driveway? Anyone walking in the street?

  Looking at the report, it has occurred to Wisdom that Stern may have left the blue car somewhere else and could be hiding in the area. How else could he explain the location of the source of the calls and the absence of the blue car? He decides he will need to advise Posner to stay indoors until he visits him.

  He calls, but Posner’s line is busy. Then he dials Brigid’s number. She answers after three rings.

  “It’s Detective Wisdom here.”

  “Hello, Detective. How can I help you? Are we on for tomorrow?”

  “Not sure yet about tomorrow, although I frankly doubt it. But there is something I have to tell you. I should have mentioned it already, but I first thought it better not to be too specific.”

  “Please go on.”

  Brigid is being quite formal, and the tone makes Wisdom all the more comfortable.

  “There are two possible suspects who might be involved in Heidi’s disappearance. One’s a local from out here. The other is a doctor with whom she had a relationship when they worked at the same hospital. The doctor hasn’t been home for a few days, and we have reason to believe he’s stalking the guy who lives out here.”

  “Because the man who lives out here is responsible?”

  “Maybe. But we think it’s more likely that the doctor is the one involved because of jealousy and that he’s trying to shift suspicion to the guy out here.”

  “So what do you want to do?”

  Wisdom smiles at her pronunciation of what and want, with a vee instead of a wah sound.

  “First, I wanted to advise you that if these two men meet up, there could be some danger. We already know that the local guy’s been followed and we also know that the doctor’s been traced to near where the local guy lives. In short, I don’t think we should go ahead with the plan, at least for now.”