Vanishing Act

by Barbara Block

“She gave it away the night Jill Evans died.”

  “It’s very bad luck giving it away.” We studied the pictures on the scapular together. “I made this for her. I made one for her and one for Bryan every year. Like the rose petals.” Mrs. Hayes turned her face toward the window. “To keep them safe. If Melissa had worn it, maybe she’d be here now.”

  I doubted it, but then, I’ve never believed in magic of the conjuring kind. I didn’t say that though. It wouldn’t have been right. Instead, I watched people walking to and from their cars in the parking lot outside the hospital, and when I got bored with that I studied the red and white blinking lights of a plane flying through the night sky until I couldn’t see them any longer.

  “Why didn’t she tell me?” Mrs. Hayes whispered, her face still turned away. “Maybe I could have helped.”

  The classic question. Why doesn’t anyone ever tell the people that matter the important stuff, the stuff that counts? I didn’t know. No one does.

  “I could have helped,” Mrs. Hayes repeated.

  What was that line about wishing making it so? A hospital cart clattered by outside. Someone down the hall laughed. Someone else moaned.

  “She probably didn’t want to worry you,” I said, trying to console her.

  Mrs. Hayes turned her head toward me, but her eyes weren’t on me. She was staring off, looking, I suspected, at a scene from an earlier, happier time.

  “When she was little and she lost something, we used to pray together.” Mrs. Hayes’s voice became higher, quavered, and cracked. “Please St. Anthony, come around. Something lost must be found.”

  I reached over and took her hand. It was as pale as the bed sheet, as fragile as a luna moth’s wing.

  “Tell me about Tommy West’s father,” I urged.

  I was sitting in front of Tommy West’s fraternity house, watching the ends of the orange streamers wound around the pillars on the front porch blow in the wind, while I waited for him to turn up, thinking about the story Mrs. Hayes had told me. It was an old one, a classic. Flaubert or Stendhal would have elevated it to art. Proust would have dwelled on it for four volumes. It went like this.

  A woman works for a man for a while. He’s married, has a kid, a business that’s expanding. She’s widowed with two children, happy to have something that pays the bills, dreaming of more, seeing her position growing as the firm does. She and her boss have what the woman considers to be a good working relationship, which is the way she wants to keep it.

  Then he starts putting the move on her. At first it’s just hints, jokes. She thinks he’s kidding. He steps it up a notch. Finally she gets “it.” But she pretends she doesn’t and ignores the hints, hoping if she plays dumb, maybe her boss will get bored and stop. He doesn’t. He gets more persistent, figuring, no doubt, that she’ll change her mind. After all, he’s gotten where he is today by never taking no for an answer. Only she doesn’t change her mind. Instead, she spells it out. Now it’s his turn to pretend he doesn’t understand. At this point she could have packed up her pencils and left, but she doesn’t want to. She needs the work. And she has her eye on the promotion he’s promised her.

  Which is when she makes her mistake. She threatens to tell his wife, figuring that’ll end things. But she’s miscalculated with whom she’s dealing. He promptly fires her, and then, when she goes looking for a job, proceeds to tell everyone who calls up for a recommendation he canned her for stealing. Only she doesn’t know this at first and she can’t figure out why she can’t get hired.

  “Today you have agencies you can go to about that kind of thing, but we didn’t back then. I used to lie awake at night, wondering how I was going to feed my children and planning my revenge. But then one of my friends offered me a job in her store, selling dresses. I thought I’d take it for a little while. But I stayed.”

  “Did you still think about revenge?” I asked. I know I would have.

  “At first.” Mrs. Hayes gave a little smile. “But then I forgot about it. Between the kids and my jobs and the house I was too tired when I got into bed at night to do anything but sleep. Later, I decided that maybe things had happened the way they had for the best.”

  I leaned forward slightly. “Why?”

  Mrs. Hayes squeezed my hand with hers and let go. “Because that was when I found my faith again, that’s when I began to pray. If everything had been going the way I’d planned, I don’t think I would have.” She closed her eyes and opened them again. I noticed her eyelids seemed as thin as rice paper.

  She was fading. I asked my last question. “How did Bryan know?”

  “He overheard me on the phone when I was talking to one of my friends.” She made a disapproving sound, moving her tongue against the roof of her mouth. “There was a little alcove off the hall. I found out later he’d sit under the table I’d put there and listen to my conversations.”

  Her eyelids fluttered and dropped for the second time. Her lower jaw fell, bringing even more prominence to the hollows under her cheekbones. A gentle snore escaped from between her lips.

  I got up from my chair, leaving her there, all alone in her bed. People should have someone with them when they die, I thought as I walked to my cab. The lights in the parking lot leached the color out of my hands, making them look ghostly, making me wonder if loneliness wasn’t contagious. I shook my head to clear it, lit a cigarette, and drove over to Tommy West’s fraternity house, but he wasn’t there. I could have gone home, but I decided to kill a couple of hours waiting to see if he’d show up. Fifty minutes later he did.

  Tommy West stared at me in amazement when I tapped him on the shoulder. I’d caught him as he was about to go into the fraternity house. He was holding a pizza box in one hand and a six-pack of soda in the other.

  “Pineapple?” I asked.

  He wrinkled his forehead in befuddlement. “What are you talking about?”

  I pointed to the box. “Does your pizza have pineapple?”

  “You’re not supposed to come near me,” he sputtered. “I have an order of protection out on you.”

  “True,” I replied, taking advantage of his confusion to take the pizza and the soda out of his hands and lay them on the porch floor. I didn’t feel like getting belted in the face with six full cans of root beer. “Now you know why no one pays attention to the judicial system. It doesn’t work.”

  He reached for the pizza. I put my hand on his shoulder to stop him. “After you answer two questions.”

  “I can have you arrested.”

  “So you said.” I grinned.

  Tommy West turned toward the door. “I’m calling the police.”

  “Go ahead, but then I’ll tell them.”

  “Tell them whatever you like.”

  “Do you really want them to know you were at the party the night Jill Evans died,” I said, making a logical extrapolation.

  He whirled back around. “Who told you that?”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Well, they’re full of shit because I wasn’t there.” His voice rose. Anyone driving by could have heard him.

  “Beth was. Melissa was. From what I heard, for all practical purposes the entire undergraduate body was.”

  “But I wasn’t,” he insisted. “Even if I were, so what? Since when is going to a party a crime?” His voice was high with fear.

  “It’s not. I just want to know why my mentioning it upsets you so much?”

  “It doesn’t. You do.” He went inside the fraternity house where, I had no doubt, he was at that very minute calling the police.

  Gee, I thought, kicking an empty beer can lying on the sidewalk as I walked back to the cab. And I hadn’t even gotten around to asking him my second question. I paused to light another cigarette, all my attention momentarily diverted to shielding my lighter flame from the wind.

  I accomplished it on the second try.

  Maybe I should have started with the question about his father.

  Oh, well.

  I gu
ess I’d have to talk to Builder Man tomorrow.

  I took another puff and blew smoke rings out into the night air.

  Call it intuition, I thought as I watched the white vapor vanish, but somehow I didn’t expect him to be much more cooperative than his son had been.

  Chapter 27

  Con Tex’s parking lot had been emptying out for the last half hour or so. At six at night the only items remaining were a dozen cars and a flock of sea gulls squabbling over the day’s litter left behind on the macadam. I was parked off toward the edge of the lot, partially shielded from full sight by a scrim of arborvitae, which gave me a good view of both Onondaga Lake and the entrance to Michael West’s office building. The lake was a sullen dark gray in the early evening dusk, while the white stone ultramodern office building, lit by spotlights placed every thirty feet or so, seemed garish and ill at ease among its evergreen plantings, like a girl who’d overdressed for a party.

  I took a sip of my root beer, another bite of my corned beef sandwich, and wiped off the drop of Russian dressing that had fallen onto my black leather jacket with the tip of my finger. Luckily, I thought as I watched Michael West head out of his office building, the man didn’t believe in strict security procedures. I hadn’t seen one guard come by since I’d been parked there. But for all practical purposes Con Tex’s office was a ten-minute ride away from the city. This wasn’t the sort of place you’d drop in on. If you didn’t have a reason to be there, you probably wouldn’t be. Anyway, it wasn’t as if they were manufacturing weapons. I took a last bite of my sandwich, put it down on the brown paper bag resting on the seat next to me, started my cab up, and drove toward West.

  He was a fast walker. He looked neither to the right nor the left, just took one small, rapid step after another, swinging his briefcase in time with his stride. He walked, I decided, like a man who was preoccupied with the day’s events, a man eager to get back home. I put my foot down on the gas. Lost in thought, he didn’t look up. Which was fine with me because I wanted to waylay him before he got to the protection of his car. Since I’d been sure he wouldn’t see me if I called his office to make an appointment, I’d chosen this route instead, hoping that the element of surprise would work for me.

  For once it looked as if I’d made the right decision.

  West had his hand on the door handle of his black Infiniti when I rolled alongside of him and called his name.

  He turned toward me. “Do I know you?” he asked, puzzled. Given the circumstances, some men would have been alarmed, but not him. Part of it, I suspect, was that I was a woman, and part of it was his assurance in himself, an assurance he wore like a well-tailored suit.

  “I doubt it,” I said as I stopped my car and got out.

  “You look familiar.”

  “It’s possible.” By then I was standing next to him. I was surprised to realize that he was only five feet six and on the slender side. Somehow he’d looked bigger when I’d seen him in the fraternity house.

  He studied my face. Then he frowned. His expression hardened. Enlightment had struck. “I’m going to have you arrested,” he informed me, using the same words his son had the night before.

  Only Tommy hadn’t made the call. Or if he had, the police hadn’t shown up at my house.

  “On what grounds?”

  “Trespassing.”

  Maybe Tommy hadn’t told him after all.

  West reached in his briefcase, took out his cell phone, and pressed the power button.

  As he did, I noticed something that wasn’t apparent in any of the pictures I’d seen of him in the local papers. A faint scar zigzagged its way from the corner of his mouth to just below his eye. It was hard to see unless the light was right. Whoever had done the sewing had been good.

  “Mrs. Hayes doesn’t have long to go,” I informed him as I wondered how he’d gotten hurt.

  “I’m sorry to hear that, but that doesn’t have anything to do with me.” He began to depress the phone’s buttons.

  “Given the circumstances, don’t you think you owe her,” I said quietly.

  He puckered his lips in an expression of distaste. “She told you ‘the story,’ didn’t she?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  Under the streetlights I could see anger warring with irritation on his face. Then the irritation was replaced by an expression of martyrdom. He sighed and pressed the phone’s off button. Nearby, a couple of gulls squabbled over a McDonald’s wrapper. “I don’t know why I still care about this, but I do. Maybe it’s because I went out of my way to help that woman, and all she’s been doing ever since then is bad-mouth me to everyone she meets and blame me for all her troubles.” He sighed again. He was put upon, misunderstood.

  “So you’re saying what she told me about you harassing her isn’t true?”

  West flashed me a forbearing smile. “Ask anyone. In fact, I’ll give you a list of people to call. I tried to help her, I kept her on for as long as I could, but then I had to fire her.”

  As I crossed my arms over my chest and waited for the rest of his explanation, I pondered the wonders of self-justification. It wasn’t long in coming. In the gloom, West’s blue eyes looked gray.

  “She wasn’t showing up for work, she was making mistakes, she was taking money. Nothing big. Little stuff. But nevertheless, you don’t like to see that.” He turned up the collar of his coat against the wind that had begun to blow, bringing with it the sound of the waves lapping against the lake’s shore.

  “Why was she doing that?”

  He leaned forward slightly. “Because she’d developed a drinking problem,” he confided, one friend telling another an unfortunate piece of news. “In those days we didn’t do interventions. I tried to overlook the absences, the petty thievery, for as long as I could. I felt sorry for the woman, but when they got to be flagrant I had to fire her. Naturally, when anyone called for a reference, I had to tell them the truth.”

  “Naturally.”

  He looked pained. “You don’t believe me, do you?”

  “Not at all.”

  He frowned. This was not someone who was accustomed to having his word doubted. “That’s the way it was. For God’s sake,” he added, “when her son got in trouble, who do you think she turned to?”

  “You?”

  “Damn right.” He made a fist and punched his leg.

  “Damn right. Why do you think I paid for those years at that fancy school?”

  “Guilty conscience?”

  He glared at me. “That’s insulting.”

  “Maybe.” Obviously, he’d expected a different answer, but from what I’d heard, this was a man who’d never contributed anything to charity until he’d decided to get involved in politics. “Then why is she going around saying those bad things about you?”

  “Because it’s easier than admitting she screwed up her life herself. If she hadn’t found religion, she’d probably be dead from cirrhosis.”

  I thought about what Bryan had told me and about how Mrs. Hayes had said he had found out.

  “It’s simple,” West snapped when I asked him for an explanation. “They’re both lying, just like they always have. It’s a family habit.” He poked me twice in the shoulder with one of his fingers for emphasis. It felt as if I were being jabbed with the blunt end of a butter knife. This was someone who had done manual labor for a living, that was for sure.

  “Ask anyone. Anyone at all. Now you see why I don’t want to have anything to do with her? Now you see why I didn’t want my son to have anything to do with her daughter? The whole family is crazy. Who needs that kind of aggravation in your life?” He bit his lip. “You want to know what happened to Melissa, ask her brother why he was sent away.”

  “I already have.”

  “Did he tell you he punched Melissa in the face?”

  “Lots of brothers punch out their sisters.”

  “He shattered her jaw.”

  “That was a long time ago.”

  “People don’t c
hange. Not fundamentally.” West got into his car and peeled off, leaving me standing in the parking lot nursing a growing headache.

  Everywhere I looked, Bryan’s name kept coming up.

  I could see why Mrs. Hayes was concerned.

  Chapter 28

  “Jilly was such a nice girl,” Ms. Cascoff told me.

  We were sitting in her kitchen, sipping tea and talking about her niece, Jill Evans.

  I’d called Ms. Cascoff on impulse at eight-thirty the previous night when I’d gotten back to the store after my conversation with Michael West, telling myself as I dialed the number that since Melissa’s problems seem to have started with Jill’s death, perhaps Ms. Cascoff could provide me with a lead. But the truth was, I was making the call because my other option, the thing I should have been doing, trotting over to the hospital to talk to Mrs. Hayes about her son and her past, was something I wanted to delay as long as possible. I was hoping by some miracle I’d find something that would render the conversation unnecessary.

  Which was why I was drinking caffeine-free Lemon Lift from a mug at three-thirty in the afternoon and paging through copies of the Post Standard that contained the articles on Jill’s death, hoping to get something that would point me in the right direction. So far, though, I hadn’t learned anything except that Ms. Cascoff’s niece was the perfect child, and that she herself was thankful, after seeing what this had done to her sister, that she’d never married and had children, a sentiment I was interested to note also put forth by Professor Fell and George.

  Ms. Cascoff was one of those small, thin, birdlike women who always seemed to be in perpetual motion. She’d brought the copies of the newspaper out unasked, and under her urging I’d been dutifully plowing through the articles on her niece’s death again because I didn’t want to tell her that I’d found her by doing what I as doing now: reading Jill Evans’s obituary.

  “She was so nice,” Helen Cascoff was saying as she laid a plate of Oreo cookies on the table in front of me. She’d been talking nonstop in a quick staccato manner since the moment I’d walked through the door ten minutes before. “So quiet. She always came in when she was supposed to. She aways got good grades. My sister never had a minute’s trouble with her. I don’t understand it. I don’t suppose I ever will.” She sat down across from me, then jumped back up to get something else.