Vanished in the Dunes

by Allan Retzky

  He has only the one son, but doesn’t correct her. He smiles at the thought that with woman’s intuition maybe she knows more than he does.

  “Is something funny?”

  “No. I’m just happy you don’t blame me for putting you in possible danger.”

  “You did no such thing.”

  But he did screw up and no amount of sugarcoating can hide it. He knows he’ll just have to live with it all and move on. He starts to step back into the street, but holds onto the top of the open door with one hand.

  “Goodbye then. Safe flight.”

  “Goodbye to you, Peter. Oh, I forgot something.”

  She turns around to reach behind her and with a small effort pulls an object closer before she hands it to him.

  “It seems foolish to just throw it out. Your people were very nice and gave it back to me. After all, it did cost well over a hundred dollars. Perhaps you can give it to someone to use. I’ve even had it cleaned.”

  Her arm swings forward and passes him the top of a metal hanger that supports a clear plastic dry cleaning bag. The pink-and-white pattern is plainly visible. He takes the bag and in the transfer process feels a fleeting touch of her fingers. He steps all the way out of the car, turns and waves to Weis who has seen his movement and is already walking toward the car with the uniformed driver in tow. They shake hands again. He waves at the rear of the black car as it moves out of the lot, and notes with mixed emotions that Brigid doesn’t lookback.

  At the automatic glass door entrance to headquarters he realizes that he’s still holding a metal hanger with a clean, almost new pink-and-white dress. He stares at the dress for a moment and wonders how such a seemingly insignificant garment could have in its own way propagated the death of two people and ruined the lives of two others. He looks around, a combination of indecision and embarrassment, and then drops the garment in the metal wastebasket to the right of the automatic doors. It will sit undisturbed among the used coffee cups, food wrappers, and other assorted garbage that visitors and cops both leave there until the next day’s pickup.

  He nods to the desk officer, walks through the side door to his cubicle, and punches in his home number. Maybe they could all go out for pizza tonight.

  CHAPTER 31

  Posner enters the house for what he imagines will be the last time. It’s his first trip back without the police since Sara died. He unlocks and pushes open the front door and half expects a weight to impede its progress. Yet the door has no memory and glides open smoothly, as if Heidi’s body had never blocked its movement. He steps into the hall and for a moment stands where Sara died in his arms. He cannot stop the tears that come and doesn’t try. The impossibility of the two separate deaths within almost the same space overwhelms him. He hesitates in the doorway as he regains some control, while he burns with anger first at Stern and then at himself.

  Others are waiting behind him, but they are patient and say nothing. They all know what he’s been through. He’s listed his home with a local broker. There are two movers with him and someone who calls herself a relocation consultant. He needs the help. They will go through everything he owns and segregate items either for disposal, contribution, sale, or storage pending ultimate shipment to the West Coast. For now he still sleeps in the New York apartment, but he’s also put that up for sale. He tries to think of other things. Nothing will bring Sara back. He lives with his own guilt.

  He needs to move far away and plans to make a deposit on a two-bedroom house rental in Napa Valley. From the photos the house seems small, which is what he wants. It sits on a third of an elevated acre, but the adjacent house has at least ten acres of planted grape vines that roll up the hill toward him. An option to buy is included in the lease. The purchase price seems very high, although he understands that Napa seems to have inflated real estate values. He is now prepared to spend his days looking at sunsets over a vineyard instead of sunrises over the ocean.

  The important thing now is to get away. He spends the next two hours supervising what to do with furniture, paintings, lithographs, file cabinets, and an assorted medley of things he’s kept without purpose. He’s long since disposed of the windbreaker and its content of broken heel and bit of plastic. Satisfied with their progress, he leaves the others to their tasks, retreats to the master bedroom, and closes the door. He tosses a suitcase on the bed and fills it with those items of his clothing he wishes to keep. The rest he consigns to a large plastic bag for delivery to a local nonprofit, or into another trash bag to be tossed. He fills a separate bag with Sara’s things, first from the closet and then out of the undersized dresser. She never kept too much clothing here. It might make too much of a commitment.

  In her second dresser drawer he swallows a deep breath as he pulls out a few worn pages from a dated woman’s magazine wedged behind two sweaters. The article seems to be a brief guide to enhancing prospects for pregnancy. He notes it begins with a discussion of ovulation cycles and the heading immediately ratchets his memory back several years.

  He repeats the same thought he’s had since his legal troubles began that everything might have been very different if there were children. He might have shifted his workload, or more importantly, his work ethic, so he could spend more time at home. There would never have been a Heidi or a Stern. He still thinks of this, years after he and Sara have stopped trying to get pregnant. Yes. Things would have been very different if there were children. He crumples the pages into a tight wad and flings them into the bag of trash.

  The last item from a side drawer is a black tee shirt. He holds it in his hands before he buries his face in the cotton. The cloth mutes his sobs so those in the next room cannot hear. He staggers backward until his legs reach the bed. He sits and blames himself over and over, but there is nothing more to do.

  Stern is now under observation in a psychiatric ward. There is no question of his guilt in Sara’s death. Wisdom and Bennett have both told him that if a person introduces a lethal weapon to a scene, then the person is guilty of a crime, probably manslaughter, even if the ensuing death was accidental.

  Stern will also likely be convicted of Heidi’s death, despite the man’s denial of guilt and attempts to implicate Posner. The theory seems clear. Jealousy must have possessed him to follow the bus in a rented car and then trail the two of them through their tour of the area and then to Posner’s house. While he was out searching for his wallet, Stern came in and confronted Heidi. He either pushed her or she fell to her death. Everything after that just added to his need to protect himself. His report of her disappearance, the visit to the local police, and even his visit to Posner were all meant to draw suspicion away from himself.

  The only dicey part was the burial. At first, Stern must have gone nuts wondering why her death wasn’t reported. Indeed, he did follow Posner out to the overlook and that’s what he’d told the cops. Still, it was his word against Posner’s, and Stern was the one with both the motive and opportunity. And besides, anyone involved can see the man’s a nutcase. Posner is blameless with regard to Heidi’s death according to the County District Attorney’s Office. He has no intention of ever admitting to the burial. What good would it possibly do? He has even researched the penalties for unlawful disposal of a body and they are relatively minor. No. He will not involve himself in the burial. He is now free to move to the coast whenever he wants, as long as he makes himself available, if necessary, for a trial.

  He seethes with hate whenever he thinks of Stern. The man will get what he deserves, but it will not bring Sara back. Dammit! He thought things were going to be better after that weekend in the city. And then everything fell apart. Like Humpty Dumpty. Except that no one can put his life together again. He wipes his face with her shirt, holds it to his cheek, and then slips it into the bag with the rest of her clothes.

  He’s gone through everything except for the white leather jewelry box on the dresser. He remembers she only kept costume stuff in this house. She either wore her engagement and wed
ding rings, or kept them in the apartment with other items like the Mikimoto pearls and the jade pendant he’d bought for her in Taiwan. He sighs, pulls the box off the dresser, and sits back down on the bed.

  There isn’t much to go through. Certainly nothing of value. It’s much more a sort of junk container than a jewelry box. He finds a broken Swatch watch, a “Kerry ’04” button, and three boxes of matches from The Lodge restaurant in East Hampton crammed under schedules for a local yoga studio and the Hampton Jitney. He reaches for the trash bag and begins to drop in the junk items. There is no jewelry and so he decides to toss the box away as well. When he lifts it though, he hears a small rattle. He reopens the box and sees a part of a gold chain wedged in the back of the lower shelf. A slight pull and it springs free. It is a thin gold chain necklace from which hangs a small capital H.

  He freezes. The chain drops to the carpet, but his hands cannot move. There is no question where it came from. His image of Heidi is real. She stands near the stairs and fingers the necklace while she tells him it was a gift from Stern. He sees her chest heave and her lips swell and part. It’s all so real.

  “Ahhhh!” The sound flies wildly from his mouth.

  “You okay in there?” One of the movers asks. He mumbles an answer.

  “Yes. Okay.” That’s all he can summon.

  He reaches down and lifts the necklace. He fondles the H as Heidi once did. A deep breath barely helps, but the hammering in his heart eases. He closes his eyes.

  “You were here, weren’t you?”

  He speaks as if Sara is still in the room. Putting away laundry or combing her hair in front of the dresser mirror.

  “It wasn’t Stern. It was you. You came home early. While I was out looking for my wallet. Maybe you were planning to get here early all along to check out whether I was with someone. Maybe there never was a meeting with a client here on Long Island, but you did have a rented car. That’s how you got here. And when you found her here you thought you were right all along, didn’t you? Thought I was screwing someone while you were in the city.”

  He stops and opens his eyes, but she’s not there. He can’t explain. She can’t explain. He closes his eyes again.

  “Did you fight? Did you push her? Maybe she started to fall and you reached out to help.

  “Maybe you grabbed onto the necklace and it came away as she fell.”

  He unclasps his hand and looks down. The chain is broken in the rear clasp where it was torn from her neck.

  “I can see it.”

  And for a moment he can. He watches as Heidi falls down the stairs in a grotesque dive as death swallows her scream.

  “You tried to save her and she fell away. Right away you thought she was dead so you left. Maybe you didn’t even know you were holding the necklace until you’d driven off. Is that how it happened? Answer me, dammit! And when were you going to say something? Were you waiting for the cops to come calling? Or were waiting for me to confess it all? That we had a thing going, but I never did because nothing ever happened. Nothing.”

  His eyes begin to glisten. He turns his head and looks through the bedroom window, but the view is limited to the oldest house on the block, a weather-beaten cottage across the street on nearly an acre. There is no ocean view out there to lose himself in while he tries to make sense of it all.

  “But she might also have fallen while I was out and before you came home. I mean the stairs were newly refinished, weren’t they?”

  The thought brings him a moment’s reprieve from his first instinct, but the idea loses steam almost as quickly.

  “If that’s what happened, then why would you take the necklace if you came in and found Heidi dead? No way. And even if you thought I’d killed her and then gone out for something to help cover it up, you never would have just bent over and pulled the necklace away. No. You had to have struggled. That’s the only way it could have happened.”

  A knock on the door brings him back.

  “Mr. Posner.”

  Another knock.

  “Mr. Posner. You all right?”

  “Yeah.”

  “We’re almost finished out here. Anything else that needs to be done before we get to the bedroom?”

  Posner cannot speak.

  “Sir. Anything else?”

  “Just one thing. I’ll be a minute.”

  Footsteps move away from the door. Posner stands and walks around to the other side of the bed. He looks down at the night table, on which rests a lamp, clock radio, and phone. One hand still grasps the necklace. He spreads the necklace out on the table and smoothes out the chain.

  “And the night just after it happened. The night I planned to meet you at the airport and you cancelled and said we needed a separation. I thought it was just more of your growing jealousy and looking for you in the terminal, I couldn’t think of anything else. It all made a kind of mad sense at the time. Your suspicions had been developing for months. And when you saw Heidi at the house, it all came together. You thought you knew it all about Heidi and me. And you never let on. Not a word. So we spent all those days and nights afterwards either not speaking at all, or when we did, never daring to share our secrets. God, you must have hated me then, yet somehow time allowed you to change enough to forgive me in spite of everything you thought I did. Maybe you forgave me because it was the only way you could forgive yourself for what happened to Heidi.”

  He blinks his eyes a few times, but there are no more tears.

  “Just one thing,” he repeats to the empty room, but it’s not really empty. Sara’s here.

  Wherever he looks she’s here.

  He pulls out his wallet and fishes out a card. He sits on the bed, picks up the phone, and punches in Peter Wisdom’s direct line.