Confessions on the 7:45

by Lisa Unger

  “The con,” Pop always said. “Isn’t violence. Isn’t a smash and grab. It’s a dance. It’s a seduction. You always have to give something first. And then they’ll give you everything.”

  She’d taken her time with Ben. They had a relationship, nearly three months of texts and long emails, phone calls where she kept her voice breathy and low. She told him about her scars from the car wreck. One on her leg, one across her chest, how self-conscious she was, how she didn’t like to bare her skin.

  He didn’t talk about his wife much, far less than most men talked about their ex-wives, or girlfriends who had left them. Those guys couldn’t wait to rattle off their list of complaints and criticisms, catalog the many wrongs they’d suffered, painting unflattering portraits of the unfaithful, the controlling, the addicted women in their pasts. But Ben mentioned her only a couple times, briefly, warm memories, or funny anecdotes. He never talked about her illness or death. She didn’t pry; she really didn’t want to know. In fact, she liked him a bit more than was smart.

  She closed the lid on the laptop, stared at the flames in the fireplace.

  “Are you going soft on me?”

  Pop sat in the chair, just a shadow tonight. She was never sure what form he was going to take. Sometimes she could hear his voice, clear and strong. Sometimes it was just an echo on the wind. He was a reflection in a mirror, a creak on the stairs. She turned away from his dark shape; she didn’t want to see him. But he was always with her.

  “Of course not.”

  When she looked back at him, he was gone.

  The closed laptop. The silence of the house. The howling wind. She tried to sit with it, to go blank. Sometimes she tried to go back and back and back to the girl she was before, her true self. What was that girl like? What was her favorite food, color, flower? What had she wanted to be once upon a time? She loved animals. She remembered that about herself, how easy it was to be with a cat or a dog; how present they were. Occasionally, she caught a glimpse of herself, like a shade slipping into darkness.

  She picked up her phone. Nothing back from Selena.

  She flipped on the television, scrolled through the news channels. Nothing at all about a missing girl. Opening her laptop again, she did a search. Nothing.

  “I’m not sure I’m with you on this one.”

  Pop again, this time standing in the corner. He’d bought this house for them. This is going to be our forever home, he’d told her. The place where we can really be who we are. And that had been true for a time. But the wolves were already at their heels then, though neither of them knew it. And forever isn’t forever.

  “I don’t see what you have to gain here. They probably don’t have that much money. And that Selena, she’s not biting.”

  She felt herself bristle; she didn’t like having to defend herself to Pop. She shouldn’t have to. The student had far surpassed the teacher.

  “This one is not about the money,” she said.

  “Ah. One of those.”

  She opened the laptop again, visited Selena’s social media pages, which had no security settings whatsoever. Her life out there for everyone to see—her friends, where she worked, where her kids went to school. Where she spent her time, where she shopped. The entirety of her life, just out there like chum in the water for any shark that happened to swim by. Stupid.

  Selena hadn’t posted anything since her happy pictures from the weekend. What a bunch of liars everyone in the world had become with their inane social media feeds; Selena’s husband was fucking the nanny and she took the time to make everyone in her life jealous of her pretend-perfect little family.

  Selena Murphy, formerly Selena Knowles, was nothing special. Not the school homecoming queen. Not the valedictorian of her class. Just a pretty, upper-middle-class girl, with a traditional upbringing. Smart. Good grades. NYU graduate. Successful in her chosen profession—marketing and publicity, of all things. Lots of friends. Happy marriage (or so she’d like everyone to believe). She was a mother of two adorable boys. No, she was nothing special, a normie as Pop liked to call them—except that she had everything.

  “You’re not jealous. Of her.”

  Pop was over by the fireplace now. He was as she had last seen him, eyes glassy, a hole blown though the middle of his chest. She heard the echo of her own voice, carrying over years. Please don’t leave me here. Pop, please.

  “I’m not sure it’s jealousy, exactly,” she said. “It’s just that it doesn’t seem fair, does it? That some people have everything. That things are handed to them. That they walk through life not even knowing what it’s like to want and struggle, to live without a safety net. You can see it on her face, can’t you? That blank entitlement, that ignorance to critical truths of the world.”

  “So, this is about social justice?”

  They both knew it wasn’t. That it ran so much deeper. That it was personal. “Maybe,” she said anyway.

  He laughed. “I got bad news for you, kid. You can’t con a con.”

  She threw a throw pillow at him and it landed softly by the hearth. She could still hear the echo of his laughter.

  * * *

  Pearl and Charlie slipped right into it. It only took her a couple of days to forget Pearl, to become Anne. And Charlie with his new glasses, his crew cut growing out into its natural salt-and-pepper color, became Pop, the father she never had, never even knew she wanted. Somehow, he’d managed to age himself ten years. Or maybe with his other look, the round specs, the baseball hat, the black hair dye, he’d been able to capture a youthful essence for Charlie. Charlie, the young hipster Stella had brought home, the bookstore marketing whiz, he was someone else, too. A man she used to know, one she remembered fondly but knew she wouldn’t see again.

  “Think of your discarded selves as other people, distant family members. You know them; they’re part of your life. They’re characters, you can take pieces from them, use those pieces to flesh out your current self. But keep it simple. The more lies you tell, the more you have to remember.”

  Pearl enrolled in an online high school. In the tiny isolated house, she got up and made breakfast for them. She took her online classes in the morning, while Pop went out to look for a “job.” When her schoolwork was done, she’d wander down the dirt road, finding the trailhead. And she’d walk and walk through the towering pinyon-juniper, aspen, spruce, cottonwood, her head filled with silence, her senses alive—the smell of sagebrush, the cerulean blue of the big sky, the whisper of wind. The sun hot and the air dry.

  Everything inside her felt more alive as she became Anne, and left Pearl and Stella behind—distant figures in a life that seemed more like a dream. She rarely thought of Stella, which she knew was odd—but it was as if everything that came before had ceased to be real, even her mother. Who someone had murdered. Who? But even the urgency of that question had faded.

  The case around Stella’s murder and Pearl’s disappearance quickly went cold. It fell out of the news within a matter of weeks. Charles Finch, Stella’s lover, the bookstore manager, also missing, was a person of interest in the murder and Pearl’s disappearance. The pictures that were circulating of her and Charlie—it didn’t even look like them anymore. She felt reborn.

  About a month into their new life, Anne was online, searching for news stories, and she came across a feature article about their case. With no suspects, no sightings of the missing Pearl, local police were frustrated. A cold case investigator had been hired by the department, a man named Hunter Ross.

  “We know that Stella Behr was murdered in cold blood, strangled in her own home. Her fifteen-year-old daughter Pearl is missing. Charles Finch, Ms. Behr’s lover and the manager of her failing book store, also disappeared that night,” he was quoted as saying.

  “We have come to learn that the man known as Charles Finch was a fiction. None of the information on the job application we found is accura
te. Name, address, Social Security number were all falsified.”

  There were pictures, of Pearl, of Stella, of the storefront. They apparently only had one picture of Charlie. It must have been from Stella’s phone; he was smiling devilishly at the camera. There was a bit about Pearl—how she was a star student, but a loner with few friends. Teachers described her as polite, intelligent, always distant.

  Her heart thumped as she scrolled through the article. The pictures there looked fake; the story sounded like a catalog of lies.

  There was a timeline of the night of Stella’s murder, including a neighbor sighting of Pearl and Charlie leaving the house, bags packed, Pearl apparently acting of her own free will. Another man, not matching Charlie’s description—this one tall, muscular, with long blond hair and a full beard—had been seen arriving and leaving quickly a short time later earlier that day.

  “A woman is dead. A young girl is missing. And the man at the center of this mystery is a ghost. My guess is that Charles Finch is a con, and that he’s moved on to his next mark. Maybe Pearl is with him—likely in the thrall of whatever con he might be running on her.”

  She stared at the picture of Charlie. In the photo, he was in character, whatever character he was playing for Stella—the attentive lover. He played another character for Pearl, the caring friend. She looked deep into the eyes, and recognized something there, something from her own inner self—a vast emptiness, an icescape frozen and barren.

  “We have a couple of leads that I’ll be following up,” said Ross. “Some of these are out of state, which means that the FBI could get involved. And there are some clues as to the true identity of Charlie Finch due to tips from the photos we ran nationally. He may be the wanted perpetrator of a number of high-level cons, rip-offs, and scams across the country. So this investigation is far from over. However long it takes, we’ll find answers. We won’t stop looking for Pearl Behr.”

  The front door opened and closed with a bang, the sound moving through her like a gunshot. It hadn’t occurred to Pearl-now-Anne that Charlie-now-Pop might be running a con on her.

  She walked out of her room to greet him. Pop was whistling in the kitchen, putting away groceries. A bouquet of fresh flowers lay on the counter.

  “Hey,” he said. He stopped mid-action to give her a concerned smile. “What’s up? You look like you’ve seen a ghost.”

  “They’re still looking for us,” she said. She was shaking and she didn’t even know why. “There’s a hired cold case detective. He said that there are leads.”

  Pop nodded, went back to taking the milk from the reusable sack and putting it in the fridge. “I know.”

  He was his constant, easy self. If what she said unsettled him, he didn’t show it.

  “You said that they’d stop eventually.”

  “They will.”

  “The article said that there are leads, that the FBI is involved.”

  “They always say that,” he answered, stopping to walk over to her. He put strong hands on her shoulders.

  “In the article,” she pressed, “the detective said that they had leads on your identity, from other cons you’ve run, that they won’t stop looking.”

  He had told her some about his past, his childhood, how he lived. Not everything. But she was starting to get the picture.

  Now he bowed his head, tightened his grip on her. “Do you trust me?” he asked finally.

  She looked into his face—the kaleidoscope of his eyes, the set line of his mouth.

  “Yes,” she said. It was true and it wasn’t. You couldn’t really trust anyone, could you? Not even yourself.

  “Then don’t worry about the article, or the detective, or the FBI. They’re looking for people who don’t exist anymore. Pearl and Charlie—they’re long gone.”

  “I don’t want to go back.”

  He put a warm palm to her cheek.

  “As long as I’m alive, you’re safe. I promise you that.”

  She couldn’t find her voice, but let him pull her close. She usually shrank from physical affection, didn’t like people near, or touching her. But she could tolerate his closeness, even craved it sometimes.

  “Now, go put on something nice—you know, like, sweet. And come help me with dinner. We’re having company.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I found a job.”

  A job. The word had a very different meaning to Pop than it did to most people. He had his own language. “New friend” was someone he met who might or might not be a mark. “Girlfriend” meant he had one on the hook. “Venture” meant that it was bigger than a personal con, something that might take longer, be more complicated. “Breakup” meant that it was time to get out of town. A “job” meant that it was showtime.

  * * *

  Now, Anne looked for him in the shadows of the firelit room. But he was gone.

  “Good night, Pop,” she said. A log tumbled in the fire, sending sparks up the chimney.

  She was about to turn in for the night when her phone pinged. She expected something from Hugh, something desperate or ragey, accusations, or begging to meet—depending on whether Kate had kicked him out or not. But no.

  Well, well. How about that?

  I had a late meeting. Free for a drink?

  This is Selena, by the way.

  From the train.

  TWENTY

  Selena

  The sound of her footfalls on the pavement echoed in the rainy hush, nerve endings pulsing. What was she doing? Acting against all logic and good sense, clearly.

  After Will left her house, and she’d returned inside, she found Graham passed out on the couch, snoring. That was Graham’s escape hatch, sleep. Stressed or depressed, the guy just passed out cold. She stood over him, thought about waking him up, grilling him about his time with the police. Questioning him about Geneva, if there was more she needed to know.

  But the truth was, she couldn’t even stand the sound of his voice, didn’t want to hear all his excuses, heartfelt pleas, apologies. She didn’t believe he would ever hurt anyone, didn’t think he had anything to do with whatever had happened to Geneva. If anything had happened at all.

  But looking down at his prone form, something had switched off inside her. They’d had everything. Whatever doubts she’d had before the wedding, she’d loved her husband. They’d created a family; she’d been a faithful and loving wife. He’d set fire to everything they’d built. Not once, but three times—that she knew of. She couldn’t forgive him, not now. She wasn’t sure she even loved him anymore.

  Alone in the kitchen, she’d tried Geneva another time. No answer. “It’s Selena. Please call us,” she pleaded with the voice mail. “Let someone know that everything is okay so that we can all go on with our lives.”

  Then, she’d scrolled through the texts from Martha. The only person other than Graham and Will who knew that her husband had been sleeping with the nanny.

  One thing she knew from her work in PR was that a little preemptive damage control could go a long way. Sometimes, if you could get out in front of something, you could divert disaster altogether.

  So she sent a text.

  I had a late meeting. Free for a drink?

  Now, as she made her way up West Broadway, beneath the thrum of anxiety, wasn’t there something else? Something dark and glittering. Why did doing the wrong thing sometimes feel right? There was a tingle to breaking the rules, to doing the thing you shouldn’t do—like driving too fast, going home with a stranger, fighting when you should back down. There was an energy in that space, an electricity, an aliveness she didn’t feel when she was doing all the things she did as a good mom, a good wife, a good daughter.

  She passed a couple that leaned into each other, the woman laughing. A man sped by on his bicycle, jacket glistening with rainwater, moving too fast for the wet road. A homeles
s man sat beneath an overhang, buried under garbage bags piled against the weather. She took the five she had in her pocket and dropped it in his bucket. They locked eyes for a moment.

  “God bless you,” he said.

  “You, too.”

  Though, at the moment, she didn’t feel very blessed, and she didn’t imagine he did either. How did she wind up here? How did he? How did anyone wind up where they were?

  In Tribeca the city seemed to lower its voice. There was the mania of midtown, the quaint chic of the West Village, the too-cool grit of the Lower East Side. Every neighborhood had its energy and personality, a character in the story of the city. But this neighborhood with its stratospherically expensive lofts and artfully curated shops, dim restaurants owned by this celebrity or that, seemed apart somehow, unattainable. Selena always thought of Tribeca as a place that was keeping a secret. You only knew if you knew.

  She shook out her hair, damp from the drizzle since she didn’t have an umbrella. She was cold, chilled to her core. This was a mistake. She needed to go home and put back the pieces of her life.

  But then she found herself in front of the address she was looking for and paused at the door. Last chance to be smart, to do the right and careful thing. Go home and wait for what comes next, the solid advice from a staid and reliable friend. To be the good girl that she’d been raised to be.

  A motorcycle gunned up the street. Beneath her feet, she felt the subtle rumble of a subway train.

  Almost. She almost turned around.

  Just like she almost broke up with Graham right before their wedding. Because didn’t she know that beneath the pulse of excitement that came with doing the wrong thing, there was an abyss? Hadn’t she observed his eyes linger on other women, wondered who he was talking to on the phone with a very particular tone? There’d been a lie or two, said he was somewhere when it was later revealed he hadn’t been.

  The week before she’d married, she’d had a drink with Will. He’d been dapper, as always, put together and cool, but she could see the fatigue under his eyes, knew that he chewed on his thumbnail when he was stressed. It was bitten to the quick.