Chapter One
In the general scheme of things, I don’t exactly hate my job, but there are a million things I’d do instead, if I didn’t need to earn a living. Today was a screaming waste of time, and I alternated between wanting to swim out to sea or pour boiling oil on my boss. As I navigate the wall-to-wall traffic on my way home, I think, there must be more to life than this.
It’s Friday. The weekend beckons, and I have nothing planned to wreck it. Tomorrow I’ll have a lazy start. I might take a leisurely jog in the park with my headphones pushing out something soothing, followed by an indulgently long shower. I might read a novel. I’ll certainly shop – I’m out of the things that matter, like snacks and wine, and I’ll veg in front of a movie in the evening. By Sunday, I’ll no doubt be bored enough to look forward to going back to work. This routine has seen me through several jobs, now, and I’m wondering whether I should jump ship again.
When my cell rings in the hands-free set, I suspect it’s Janine, with an assignment that’s going to eat into my weekend. I decide not to answer. I might lack motivation, but I still need time out. Driven by a hunger for social status, she has no concept that my time isn’t owned by the firm, that I have a life beyond the office. But then, I reflect, I don’t really. I always assumed that one day I’d find something that really rocked my boat. I mean, everyone has something, don’t they? Playing computer games, sports, stamp collecting, a family…
I’ve tried out a few hobbies over the years, mainly because people I know have helpfully tried to entice me into their own leisure activities, but nothing seems to stick. My sister, ever the manipulator, was exasperated, last time we met. She’s been trying to partner me off for years. I don’t understand you, she said. I don’t understand me, either, I’d responded, truthfully. I’ve had a few relationships of course, who hasn’t? But I was never consumed by the need to slip into the family way. I’ve seen what it does to couples, all that spring-bunny love turning to frustrated drudgery and financial nightmare. I’m too lazy to battle through those murky waters.
Sometimes I don’t feel that I fit into this life, that I’ve been transplanted from another planet. Other people think that, too, especially when they hear the English vowels that slip into my conversation. As a kid, I’d I tried so hard to lose my English background, but the massive input of social data that’s impregnated in you in the first seven years of your life is not so easy to eradicate. Mom and Dad met in Leeds, UK, where she was studying nursing, and he was a young doctor. For me, that time is a distant haze. After Mom got homesick, we relocated to her native America. I spent a few years being angry about being uprooted, but when we went back to England for a visit, when Dad’s Mom was dying, it felt foreign and strange, and made me feel as though I didn’t belong anywhere.
After Mom died, Dad relocated us to Baltimore, then Lauralee got married and migrated to the west coast to become an average American Mom, while I drifted through college, then back to my teenage hangout in Baltimore because I didn’t know where else to go.
The lights change. The guy in front of me brakes hard, and I do the same, almost surprised when I’m not shunted from behind. ‘Dickhead,’ I mutter.
Then the phone starts up again. Whoever is calling, isn’t going to go away. At a stand-still, I glance at the screen, and my sister’s name flashes onto the screen. On a Friday evening, when she should be feeding kids, pampering her upmarket husband? I stab the button, vaguely concerned. ‘Laurie? Is everything okay?’
‘I’ve just landed.’
What? ‘Landed where?’
‘In Baltimore, of course.’ I’m stunned into silence, and she adds irritably, ‘I’m staying over. I said, yesterday. Don’t you check your email?’
Startled, I wonder when I had last looked, but she’s not usually so last-minute casual. Visits have to be planned when you have kids. I check the date. It’s mid-term as far as I can see. ‘What on earth are you doing here?’ I ask, finally.
‘I need to talk to you. I said, in my email.’
The one I hadn’t read. ‘Is there a problem?’
‘No. Well, yes, I don’t know.’
Well, that was nothing if not confused, but I gather there’s a problem of sorts. If she’s travelled all this way, mid-term, it’s not for a cozy catch-up. I love my sister, in the grand scheme of things, but we have different lives, in vastly different parts of a rather large continent, and we’ve never exactly been buddies. The lights change and I negotiate a right. ‘What’s the problem?’
‘I’ll explain when I get there. It’s important.’
Well, of course, it would be. Whatever crisis she’s experiencing has to be analyzed and shared. ‘I’ll get something to eat, and buy a bottle of wine,’ I say. I’ll need it, even if she doesn’t. ‘Do you need picking up?’
‘No, I’ll get a taxi. See you there.’
The line goes dead, and the traffic surges forward.
I screech into the local 7-11 and buy two bottles, a frozen stir fry and quick noodles. A family drama on a Friday night is just what I don’t need, and cooking isn’t exactly my thing. Back home, I crank up the heat and the stir-fry into a wok. Even the first seconds of the oil heating makes me realize how hungry I am.
My apartment is in what had once been a large private residence, and is now still select, meaning only professionals or criminals can afford the rent. I have a touch of imposter syndrome, as I’m neither. I don’t know my neighbors. There’s a network of tiny rooms upstairs once occupied by servants. A guy called Wayne Doring moved in up there, a few months back, when old Ted unexpectedly decided to move out. Wayne’s in his mid-thirties at a guess, and keeps himself in shape, despite being a bean counter. The elderly couple, the Smythes, in the condo opposite mine, told me Wayne’s an auditor, in one of our brief dialogues. They spend less time here than in exotic vacation locations, but somehow manage to know everything about everybody. I suspect Mr. Smythe was once a gangster, maybe still is, despite his retired status.
The two couples on the ground level, I don’t know at all, except to say hello and goodbye to at the appropriate times. But actually, I don’t want to know them. I like my own company. My sister thinks I’m inhuman, emotionless, but that’s because she’s a social animal, always visiting or being visited by a huge circle of acquaintances who dress like wannabe film stars.
I do feel alone, sometimes, but I’m not good at socializing. Like all girls, I’d once hoped to get lucky in the man-with-money department, as my sister had, but I’d discovered that partners invade my space. In fact, the longer I live, the more I realize I don’t want the money if it comes with more intimate obligations.
Fiction does a good job of serving my sexual needs, and a dog would solve the loneliness issue. My crusty humor wouldn’t upset it. It could accompany me on my morning run, keep less hairy predators at arm’s length, and live on the sandwiches I forget to eat, but residential restrictions prohibit pets. One day I’ll get my own place, make my own rules. Maybe.
By the time Lauralee arrives, the flat is less arctic, the wine chilled and the stir-fry overcooked. She lets herself in. We have keys to each other’s places, not that Tim likes the idea of me having open access to his home. He looks at me sometimes with wounded pride, as if wondering why I don’t like him, when I’m darned sure he doesn’t like me. I don’t dislike him, exactly, but what is there to like? He’s up his own patootie.
Laurie’s chic, as always. Her artfully-highlighted brown hair is done up in some kind of clever chignon. She’s wearing a designer suit that emphasizes the curves that come of having two kids. Me, I’ve never succumbed to nature’s barbed cravings for little millstones. I’ve met enough women who spent years regretting whatever hormones had prompted that desire. I took a degree in psychology, and ended up as a therapist for a while, my decision to be a psychiatrist having wavered in the face of endless years of education. The barrage of negativity was mind-blowingly depressing. I had another think, and shunted sideways into the legal profession. It still means training and more exams, but now the women I meet are not on the couch bewailing misfortune, but lining up for divorces, trying to screw as much dough as they can out of the husbands they had once sought so avidly.
‘Cool!’ I say, eyeing the heels Lauralee is kicking off, but darned if I could wear them. Practicality wins over chic every time in my world, and old-lady bunions are simply not worth the risk.
‘Nice curtains,’ she says, giving my living area a once-over that probably has it analyzed down to the last dollar. ‘It’s about time you bought something of your own for this place. You could do with an interior designer. But those carpets! And you said you were going to buy a table. God, Dee, it’s a barn.’
We exchange awkward hugs and kisses. ‘I’m comfortable with my barn,’ I admit. ‘And it’s warm. So, to what do I owe the pleasure?’
She shrugs out of the designer jacket, and yawns widely. Under the make-up, which she’s managed to retain over a seven-hour flight, she looks drawn. ‘God, what a day. Wine and food, then I’ll unload.’
‘Yippee.’
‘For once, could you not be sarcastic?’
‘Why? It’s what I do best.’
‘How on earth can you be working to help people when you’re so awful.’
‘Practice. And I don’t help them. Mostly, I help them screw their husbands over.’
I throw an olive into my mouth and set the chipped china bowl on the low table. She curls up on one of the settees that bookend the electric fire, and dips an olive into the glass of wine I’ve given her. And she thinks I’m uncouth? In the kitchen, I scrape the stir-fry into two bowls, and hand her a spoon.
‘Easier to shovel it in without dripping soy sauce on my couch,’ I explain as she grimaces.
I’d actually been looking forward to slipping into next to nothing, snuggling into my vampire-detective spoof. Secretly, I dream of an eighteenth-century vampire lover of my own; one who is immaculately groomed, well spoken, loves me to the ends of the earth, and can bite nicely on demand. I wouldn’t admit that to anyone, of course. I’d stuffed my latest book under a cushion before Lauralee arrived.
We eat in silence for a while, then I lean my head back and close my eyes. I’m not in the mood for a domestic challenge; though, if she wants a divorce, I’d be happy to oblige. Even people as wholesome and nice as Tim have dirty linen in the cupboard, and it turns out that I’m good at finding it.
When I’d chosen to study psychology, it had been with all the youthful enthusiasm of someone who was going to change the world, and just hadn’t decided how. I thought I could help people, not to mention pulling in a reasonable living at the same time. It hadn’t taken long out in the real world to discover that most psychiatrists end up as nutty as their patients, or end up wanting to silence that never-ending litany of dissatisfaction. Shunting sideways into the world of law had almost been a similar mistake, until I’d been asked to do a little delving into a case Janine was working on, as her usual private eye, Ellis, had disappeared off the face of the earth. They’ll probably find his body in some gutter, she’d said gloomily. It was inconvenient of him, whatever. That accidental assignment saved me. I discovered something I was good at, which took me out of the office. At the time I’d even been contemplating marriage as an alternative to boredom, and look back on the near miss with a faint shudder of horror.
Finally, Lauralee opens up. ‘Remember, when we were kids?’
‘Which bit, specifically?’
‘Before Dad lost his job.’
‘When we were apparently happy?’
Like all kids, I recall some and forget more, but she’s talking about before everything changed. When we were a family with a full time Mom, and a Dad who was a doctor, when we lived in our own home, with an acre of woodland. We thought Dad quit his job to nurse Mom, but we later discovered he’d been shunted out because of a baby-snatching scandal. He didn’t seem to mind too much not being a doctor any more, but Mom had wasted away with the down-turn in finances and social status. She was also dying, which was why she had wanted to come home to America. Mom’s death came as an overwhelming shock to Laurie and me. We’d been pampered children, sprouting into belligerent teenagers, who saw nothing but their own needs, and Mom had wanted it to stay that way, until her time was near. I’m not sure I would have done that, but the choices people make aren’t always the best ones.
After she died, Dad went on to build a new career as a reliable bus driver in Baltimore, half a continent away from where we’d been living. It was in Baltimore that Lauralee and I survived the teen minefield, de-flowered, but otherwise relatively unscathed. It was here that our paths diverged, wildly.
I’m drowsy with wine and warmth. It’s kind of nice having her here without Tim or the kids in tow. Lauralee is tired. I see her eyelids droop, then she flicks awake.
‘Do you recall the murders?’ she asks.
She means the kids who disappeared. ‘Not really. I remember Mom gave us bus money and told us not to walk home because there might be bad men.’
‘And we used to get the bus down to the corner, spend the money on candy, and walk home. I’ve got the cavities to prove it.’
I smile in recollection. ‘Me, too. They warned us about cavities, but didn’t tell us kids were being abducted.’
‘Raped and murdered,’ Laurie corrects.
‘You don’t know that.’
‘Nobody knows, but when kids just disappear, it’s obvious why.’
I’d been only vaguely aware of what was going on back then. It was twenty years ago, but it bothers me now, that lack of bodies. Lauralee has prodded my sleeping past awake.
‘I remember the pervert took girls and boys,’ she says.
‘Yeah, that’s strange all right.’ I know a little more about these things now. Perverts usually have a preference. Unless whomever took them was a trader, kidnapping to specific customer requirements.
She stares into some horrific distance. ‘One moment there’s a living, breathing child, the next, an empty space.’
‘Yeah, that’s harsh.’
‘Three were taken from our school,’ she adds.
I hadn’t known that. A scary thought, actually, because it suggests that the perv had had eyes on our school. Over the five years we were in Phoenix, several kids had vanished from our neighborhood, but as a kid, if you don’t know them, it’s academic. God knows what they went through. No one does, except the bastard who stole them. Everyone assumes it was a man, of course. I’m talking about serial disappearances, carried out by sexual perverts; not the odd baby-snatching by a desperate wannabe mom, like the one Dad was sacked for. As if it was his fault. I’d looked it up, just once, when I was at college, because Dad had never told me the whole story, and I hadn’t wanted to ask. That baby was never found, but it was assumed, from the professional abduction, that it went to one of the black market’s super-rich moms. Not the same thing at all, as being abducted for sex.
But Dad hadn’t suddenly come into a fortune. We never had enough money after he lost his job. He even had to sell our house after Mom died, to pay off her health care debt. I hadn’t looked up any of the other disappearances from back then; it was ancient history. I wonder why Lauralee is bringing this up, now? What I’m sure of is, we’ll never know the truth. And the missing kids’ parents will be left forever hanging in some personal purgatory.
‘What’s that got to do with now?’ I ask.
She grimaces and stares into the fire. I wait while she mentally churns over whatever it is that’s bugging her. Only something pretty unsettling would have had her jumping on a plane to see me, something she couldn’t say on the phone.
I open the second bottle and top up her glass.
‘Thing is,’ she says finally. ‘This girl from our school back then looked me up. Valerie Harold. Seems she became a reporter and wanted to ask me what I remembered about the child abductions. As if they hadn’t been done to death back then, and several times since.’
I refrain from sarcasm at her choice of words.
‘I wish she hadn’t,’ she carries on. ‘I can’t stop thinking, now, because I’ve got kids.’ Her eyes graze mine. ‘I’m scared, Dee. I’m scared I won’t be able to save them. I’m scared all the time that I’m going to turn around one day and one of them will be gone: Sammy or Liza. My sweet babies, used for sex and discarded like dirty rubbers. It’s driving me nuts.’
What can I say? Send the little monsters to karate school? If she can’t cope now, what chance is there when her precocious, spoiled brats go to school, to sleepovers, become teenagers, go clubbing. Jesus, I get it, but – ‘Laurie, that was twenty years ago. The pervert is probably long dead. We were too young to know much about it.’
‘I’m two years older than you. I remember. One of the kids who disappeared was from my class.’
‘Really?’
‘His name was Richard. We called him Dirty Dick.’
‘I can’t guess why.’
She winced. ‘It was nasty. I’d apologize now, if I could, but I was a kid. I did what all the other kids did, to fit in, you know? No one liked him. He was one of those kids who looked like a dork, with his mouth hanging open and snot running down his face. You couldn’t like him. He smelled.’
‘That wasn’t his fault.’
‘No. His family was ghastly, and after he disappeared, I felt awful for being so mean. And since I met with Valerie, I’ve had this recurring nightmare where he turns up at the playgroup, and he always looks the same, like he did then, when he went missing, except now he’d be thirty-six, like me. And the way he looks at my kids, it’s kind of like a warning. Like he’s trying to tell me something. Like my kids are going to get taken and abused, and he’s doing it to get his own back.’
‘Shades of The Ring? That’s what having kids does to you. The poor kid’s been dead for years, and no one comes back from being dead, except in films and books. So, what was she after, this Valerie person?’
‘She was doing a follow-up on Dirty Dick. Richard Ryan. She said she wanted to meet someone who had actually known him. She was the year below me. She’d never met him. Didn’t know he existed till he turned up missing.’
‘Why did she think you knew him? Just because he was in your class?’
She looks guilty. ‘There was a bit of an issue about bullying. Me and a few others got ticked off. Dad told me to be nice to him. That would be in the school records, I guess.’
‘And were you? Nice to him, I mean?’
‘Not really. I just never said really nasty things anymore. Then, afterwards, I kept thinking if I’d just been nicer, perhaps it wouldn’t have happened, that it was kind of my fault.’
‘That’s crazy.’ I stare at her over the rim of my glass. Her cheeks are vampire-pale with a single flush of red by the cheekbones. My new velour curtains (chosen for the size and price) look like a river of blood in the flickering light of the artificial fire. I feel a prickle of premonition. This isn’t some cozy, sisterly gathering. ‘Why would she look up some kid from school? As if you’d recall anything now that would make a difference. Have they found his body, or something?’
‘That’s what I wondered, but she said she was just looking for a first-hand account. I couldn’t say no, really.’
‘I would have.’
‘I’m not hard like you. And I was curious. It was strange, really, because that made me realize how all that nasty stuff with the kids was never mentioned at home. Never. Like it wasn’t going on.’
‘Grown-ups didn’t tell kids stuff like that, back then. It’s just how it was. Now they’re all taught to yell Stranger Danger when some innocent granddad stops to enjoy watching children playing. So, what did she say that’s upset you enough to fly out here?’
That, I guess, is the crux of the matter.
‘I don’t know, maybe it’s nothing.’ Self-doubt slithers visibly through her. ‘The thing is, she must have done a bit of detective work to find me, because of the way we moved around after Mom died. Then I got married, took a different name, and all. She traced me from Phoenix to Baltimore to Los Angeles. There must have been other kids in my class who were still around Phoenix, but she’d gone to a lot of trouble to trace me.’
Something with legs stalks the back of my neck. I wait. Lauralee’s instinctive mistrust is probably right. People see Mom and think stupid, but she’s not.
‘Well, I agreed to talk to her. We went out and had a couple of drinks,’ she carries on. ‘There was something a bit pushy about her.’
‘Duh, reporter.’
‘Dee, stop it. I’m not quick like you. She was asking questions about Richard, but eventually it came around to the baby that went missing from the hospital when Dad lost his job.’
‘That’s totally not the same thing.’
‘I know, but I got it, then, why it was me she targeted. It had nothing to do with Richard Ryan. It’s Dad she’s after.’
We both mulled that one over. Dad had been a pediatrician, back then. He’d been on duty in the maternity ward, doing the routine check on newborns when a woman dressed as a nurse had walked in and taken one of the babies; a classic wannabe Mom scenario. Its disappearance had only been noticed when the mother woke and wanted to feed her child. It took a few moments of frenzied searching before the alarm was sounded.
The cops said it was a professional snatch, and later suggested Dad had engineered it. The woman who had taken the baby had been caught on camera, but never identified, and there had never been any proof against Dad. The press, though, hyped it up, and also hinted that he might be the child abductor the police were seeking. Of course, there was no evidence of that. He’d lost his job, his whole career, because the hospital needed someone to blame, and shit sticks. It was all about culpability, keeping insurance costs down. They couldn’t fire him, really, but he was pushed out, all the same.
Lauralee’s right to be worried. Dad changed his name to escape the witch hunt and the hate-calls he’d been subjected to. I realized, later, that was why we moved. Eventually Dad dropped under the radar, so the last thing he needs now is for someone to go bringing it all up again, ruining the new life he’s made for himself. ‘What’s her name again?’
‘Valerie Harold. She was in the same school as us, but I don’t recall her.’
‘But was it really her?’
Laurie’s startled. ‘It never occurred to me it wasn’t.’
‘So, what made you suspicious?’
‘Well, she was spinning a line about our poor Dad, how he’d been made a scapegoat. Then she asked, very casually, where was he living now, and how was he doing, and I realized that’s what she wanted all along. She couldn’t trace him.’
Yep, Lauralee’s not dumb, for all she acts like it sometimes. ‘Did you tell her?’
‘Of course not. When I realized she was fishing, I told her he was dead. He might as well be, for all the interest he’s taken in his own grandkids.’
‘Sis! You lied!’ I say, impressed, ignoring her snip at Dad. It can’t be easy being a bus driver when you’d once been a doctor. Then I add, ‘I’ll bet a dollar she’s not Valerie Harold, though.’
‘But who would be after Dad, now?’
I shrug. ‘Cops? FBI? Maybe they think they’ve found evidence, or something.’
‘Dee, if he has to go through all that again, it’ll kill him. What are we going to do?’
Of course, she means, what am I going to do. For once I have no ready quip on the tip of my tongue. ‘I’ll look into it,’ I say.
She looks relieved: buck successfully passed. Good ol’ Sis. ‘Will you tell Dad?’
‘He should know. It’s his life.’
‘I thought that, but his cell’s not picking up.’
I get up and clear the debris into the kitchen. ‘We’ll thrash it out tomorrow. Right now, I need to sleep. The spare bed is made up.’
She takes the hint. We hug again, but later I suspect she’s lying there awake, as am I.
