“Still, people wonder. People ask.”
“I wasn’t going to. It doesn’t have anything to do with anything. Does it? Besides, I’m under the impression that he’s going to be married.”
The white eyebrows went up, ever so slightly. “Oh? Ah—you mean Meredith. Well, who knows?”
“Meredith, for one. She’s discussed it at some length with her employer.”
Wayne performed a gesture that was half a shrug, half a shake of his head. “I think it’s been discussed—it’s probably been discussed—but I don’t …”
“According to Dianna Castelli, Meredith’s boss, Meredith has used the word ‘fiancé’ in reference to your son, and has discussed wedding plans with her—in a sort of general way, I guess, since a date hasn’t yet been set.”
He frowned. “There’s some mistake. Thomas has said nothing to me about any engagement. And he would have.”
I thought about Donna Berens’s being in the dark about her daughter’s impending nuptials, but said nothing. Nothing except, “What do you think of Meredith?”
“Think of her?” he said, as if the word was unfamiliar to him. “Why—I don’t know. She seemed to be a very nice young woman, very pleasant.”
“Seems,” I corrected. “She’s not dead. As far as we know.”
Wayne smiled sheepishly. “Of course. A figure of speech …”
“When’s the last time you saw her, Mr. Wayne?”
“Oh, I don’t know …” He scratched the flesh under his chin in a lazy, backhanded manner. “A couple of weeks ago, I guess. She and Thomas had gone out but they stopped by the house on the way from somewhere to somewhere, or something. Thomas will remember. He’ll be here shortly, I’m sure.”
“A busy man, your son.”
The big man grew slightly bigger. “He’s running the place,” he said with an expansive gesture that took in the whole company. “I still have the title, but everyone knows I’m all but retired. Thomas is really moving the place forward. Development, speculation, commercial properties … far removed from the little one-man residential real-estate office I opened ten years ago in Lincoln.”
“That’s the ancestral home? Lincoln?”
He shook his white head. “No, we’ve been all over, all over the Midwest, at least. I was transferred to Lincoln from Indiana a little more than twelve years ago by the finance company I was working for. Studied for my real estate license at night, got it, sold houses part-time for a local office, then hung up my own shingle. I moved into commercial space in Lincoln, and moved here in seventy-nine to get in on the boom.” He spread his arms, indicating our current surroundings. “The rest is history.”
There were two gold-framed photographs on the desk. I noticed them for the first time. One was a professionally done portrait of a young man who I assumed was Thomas Wayne. The other was an enlarged snapshot of the same young man and the older man now seated across the desk from me. I reached across and picked up the former. “Nice picture,” I said. “Thomas?”
Wayne nodded.
The image was of a young dark-haired man, staring off into space, as commercial photographers will have it, his smile fixed and a little wooden, the backdrop the typical bluish-gray mottling that every photographer on the planet uses. His thick brown hair was parted high, just left of center, and blow-dried to artful perfection. He wore a well-trimmed brown mustache that formed an upside-down V over his thin-lipped mouth.
I set down the photograph and lifted the other one. “You and Mrs. Wayne have just the one child?”
Wayne smiled briefly. “Had just one. My wife died when Thomas was very small.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, although it was exactly the information I was shooting for; it just seemed indelicate to say, “Hey, how’s come there’s no broad in this pitcher?” I put the second photo back where it belonged.
“That’s all right,” Alexander Wayne said easily. “It was a long time ago … I sometimes wonder if that’s why Thomas hasn’t married. Perhaps I should have remarried. He was just a boy, maybe he needed a mother more than I thought he did. But I didn’t. At the time I couldn’t. And now … well, now is now.” He stood, and looked out one of the two narrow windows that flanked his desk.
At that moment the office door banged open and a man dashed into the room, the same man as in the photographs on the desk. Thomas Wayne.
“Dad, are you all right? Joanie said—” He caught sight of me, realized his father was perfectly fine, and slowed to a halt in the middle of the plush carpet. “She said it was an emergency.”
Alexander Wayne had turned away from the window. “It is, Thomas, in a way. Thomas, this gentleman is a private investigator.” I stood, introduced myself, and shook hands with the bewildered young man. I keep referring to him as a young man largely because I know he and I were about the same age.
“A private investigator?” Thomas Wayne repeated blankly, taking one of the chairs on my side of the desk. “I don’t understand. What’s wrong?”
“I’ve been hired by Donna Berens, Mr. Wayne. Your fiancée has been missing for a couple of days.”
“My fi—” Wayne fils stopped and glanced at his father, who was gazing steadily at him. The younger man took a deep breath, smoothed a hand over his impeccable hair, and said, “Meredith is not my fiancée, Mr. …”
“Nebraska. I understand she told the people at Castelli otherwise.”
“I can’t help what she—” he said vehemently.
“What’s going on here, son?” Wayne père said. He looked as perplexed as I felt.
Thomas Wayne looked at each of us in turn, then loosened his tie and sat back, slouching, into the chair.
“Meredith has the wrong idea, Dad, that’s all. We’ve been going out, we’ve had some fun, and that’s all there is to it. But somehow, in her head, she’s turned it into … something a lot more. All of a sudden she was talking wedding. I told her to forget about it—nicely, of course, as nicely as I could—but no good.”
“You mean you never were engaged to the girl?” his father pressed.
Thomas looked long at him. “Of course not, Dad. I’d have told you.”
I said, “When did you set Meredith straight, Mr. Wayne?”
“Two, three weeks ago, I guess. I explained to her that she was a great kid and I like her a lot, but that I’m not in the market for marriage, not to her or anybody.”
Almost exactly what Dianna Castelli had said.
“What was her reaction?”
“Fine, I thought. She heard me out, and then she said something like, ‘All right, let’s not talk about it anymore.’ But she didn’t mean it the way I thought she did.”
“Not, ‘Let’s forget about it,’ but rather, ‘I don’t want to hear about it’?”
“Exactly!” he said animatedly. “And when I realized that, I broke off with her.” I asked him when that was. He turned his eyes toward the ceiling, thinking, and stroked the back of his neck. “Let’s see—what’s today? Tuesday? A week ago yesterday.”
“And that’s the last you saw Meredith?”
He nodded. “But not the last I talked to her. She called me again a couple days later. She wanted to know what we were going to do that weekend. I explained to her again that we weren’t going to be seeing each other anymore. And her reaction was about the same. She said it was all right, she had things to do that weekend, and hung up before I could point out that I meant we weren’t going to be seeing each other anymore ever.”
“What did you do then?”
He looked down at the wing tips on his feet, buffed to a high gloss. “The wrong thing, I think. I didn’t know what to do, so I left it alone. And she called me again, on Friday, and we went through it all again, with about the same results. And then she called me on Sunday and said didn’t I think we had better think about setting a date, because her friends were wondering!”
“Sunday as in the day before yesterday?”
“That’s right.”
&
nbsp; The elder Wayne and I exchanged glances.
“And what happened on Sunday?”
“Well, I’m afraid I blew up. You have to understand, Mr. Nebraska. I didn’t want to hurt Meredith. I really do like her a lot. Or did, before all of this engagement nonsense came up …” He looked at me earnestly. “I think … I think there’s something wrong with her, you know …” He tapped his temple gently.
I wondered if he wasn’t right. It could put a whole new light on the disappearance. A lot of things that don’t make sense—going on vacation without any luggage, for one; not telling anyone you’re going, for another—are somewhat more understandable in light of a mental aberration. I said, “Is there anything besides the non-engagement that makes you say that?”
“No. Not really. Like I said, we had a lot of fun. In every other way, Meredith’s a great girl. Why?” He looked at his father, who met his eyes. “What’s this about Meredith being missing?”
His old man and I exchanged looks again. I didn’t know what his meant. I didn’t know what mine meant.
“She’s been missing since sometime Sunday afternoon or evening. When did you and she talk?”
“What do you mean, ‘missing’?”
“I mean, nobody seems to know where she is. Not her mother, not Dianna Castelli or anyone else at the agency, certainly not me. Do you?”
He pulled in his head as if I had taken a poke at him. “Of course not. Where could she have gone? Why didn’t she tell anyone?”
“Good questions. Here’s another good one. When did you speak to her? What time?”
Wayne massaged his forehead with an open palm. “I don’t know … One o’clock. Maybe two.”
“That early? You’re certain?”
“I didn’t write it down!” he snapped.
“Look, Mr. Nebraska,” his father butted in, “just what is it you’re getting at?”
I considered my answer, aware of young Wayne’s hot eyes on me and his father’s cooler gray ones looking at me hard. I said, “Nothing, necessarily. We know about when Meredith vanished—at least, we know about when her mother last spoke to her and when she tried to phone her again later. Meredith was around in the late afternoon, not around in the evening. It’s important to know whether anyone spoke to Meredith after the last time her mother did. It’s important to know what was said, what Meredith said, how she seemed.” I looked at Wayne the younger.
“Fine,” he said tightly. “She seemed fine. Except, of course, for the fact that she was still completely deluded about this engagement.”
“Not the least upset or distraught by your anger?”
“No. Perfectly calm. Just as before.”
I nodded. “And how did you leave things?”
“We—Well, to be honest, I exploded, I told her off, and I hung up.”
“Then you can’t really say how she took it?”
He worked his jaw muscles. “No,” he squeezed out between clenched teeth. “If it matters.”
“Does it?” Alexander Wayne.
I turned up a palm. “Could. Let’s say Meredith was upset. Understandable enough, but if she was as you say”—I nodded to Thomas Wayne—“deluded about the engagement, her emotional and mental distress could be all the greater. Although she doesn’t let on to her mother when they speak a couple of hours later. I think it’s interesting that she told the people at Castelli that she was engaged, but never seemed to mention it to her mother. She never mentioned you to her at all, for that matter. In any event, go back to Sunday. She’s upset. There’s no telling what’s going on in her mind, no telling what kind of turmoil.” And, I thought sourly, no telling what she might have done.
Alexander Wayne seemed to read my thoughts. “She wouldn’t … well, not suicide?”
I didn’t have an answer for that.
Turning back to the younger man, I said, “Did Meredith ever mention her father to you?”
“Her father? I don’t think so. I was under the impression that she hadn’t seen him in years, not since her parents’ divorce when she was a young girl. Why do you ask?”
“There’s a possibility that Meredith may have been in touch with him, on the qt. It would make life simple all the way around if Meredith, upset about what she may have seen as a broken engagement, or perhaps catching some glimpse of the delusion she had created for herself, fled to her father.”
“But she’d have told someone,” Thomas Wayne insisted. “Dianna Castelli, at least, if not her mother.”
Maybe, maybe not. If Meredith Berens wasn’t quite all together, she might not. It’s hard to say what a girl who had dreamed up a whole engagement may or may not do. And if she had suddenly woken from her dream, perhaps shocked into lucidness by Wayne’s outburst on Sunday, she may well have been so upset, or embarrassed, or scared that she wouldn’t want to face anyone, wouldn’t want anyone to know what she had done, would want simply to disappear.
Disappear how thoroughly, though? Until Alexander Wayne mentioned the word, I hadn’t thought—hadn’t allowed myself to think—in terms of suicide. It had to be considered a possibility. But what they say on all the crime shows is true. Suicides usually do leave notes, and Meredith Berens hadn’t. Not one that had been found, at any rate.
“Do you know if Meredith kept a diary?”
He shook his head. “Why?”
I wondered about the razored-out pages in the diary I had found at her place. What had she written on them and then thought better of? Had it been about Thomas, loving comments she had penned and then destroyed when her dreams were destroyed? Had it been about her father? Or something else—something completely unrelated to her disappearance?
Of course, there was another angle to be considered.
“I’ve heard your name mentioned in connection with political office, Mr. Wayne,” I said casually to the dark-haired man. “Sounds like you have quite a bright future.”
He regarded me with narrowed eyes. “Meaning what?”
“Be careful what you say here, Nebraska,” his father warned. The jovial, hail-fellow-well-met voice was taut now, almost guttural.
“I will,” I assured him, and turned back to his son. “But I’ll be frank, Mr. Wayne, because that’s how the police will be, and, unless Meredith turns up pretty quickly, the police will be involved.”
“Are you threatening me?”
“If I were, you wouldn’t have to ask. I’m just telling you how it might look. Up-and-coming young businessman, civic leader, potential politician—all that Man of the Year stuff. Nice-looking, well-heeled, and an eligible bachelor into the bargain. But then there’s a hitch: a girlfriend who’s suddenly gotten serious, very serious. Maybe she’s a little unbalanced, maybe she isn’t. It doesn’t matter that much. What matters is she’s suddenly a liability. A threat, even. If she is a bit unstable, that only makes it worse, because there’s not only a potentially embarrassing situation developing, there is also the matter of the maybe-candidate’s judgment. Guilt by association; name a political figure who hasn’t been tarred with the same brush used on a—ah—questionable friend or associate?”
“Look, you—”
“People will talk, Mr. Wayne, and this is what they’ll say: She got in the way, she caused trouble. You promised to marry her, you led her to expect marriage, or she invented the whole thing in her head—as I said, it doesn’t matter. What does matter is that she suddenly disappeared, never to be heard from again. Makes a guy think, doesn’t it?”
Apparently not—there was no time for thought between my closing my big fat mouth and Thomas Wayne leaping from his chair to help push my front teeth down my throat.
The attack was unexpected—by me, at least, which is what matters—but ineffective. The low-backed chair’s center of gravity was too low for it to tip over, and its brass casters meant that when Wayne lit into me, or tried to, the chair slid away from him before I could so much as react, leaving him on his hands and knees when I jumped from the runaway chair to defend myself. B
y then, too, the white-haired man had jumped from his own chair and circled the desk and gotten his arms around his boy, half-comforting him, half-holding him back from doing anything stupid. Anything else stupid. He looked up at me and his gray eyes were cold.
“I think you had better get out of here, Nebraska,” he said curtly.
“If you say so—it’s your joint—but the police won’t be so easy to get rid of, and I can just about guarantee they will be by.”
“So what? I don’t have anything to hide.” Young Wayne got to his feet and shook off his father’s help. Or restraint.
“I hope not. I really do, Mr. Wayne, not just for your sake but also Meredith’s. I’m sorry to have upset you two gentlemen, but it’s my job to consider possibilities and the scenario I just sketched is a possibility. You had best be prepared for it, if worse comes to worst. And I don’t mean be prepared to pop anyone who theorizes it. That sort of behavior doesn’t go a long way toward convincing someone that what he’s just said about you isn’t true.”
I went for the door.
CHAPTER SIX
Castelli and Company occupied a squat, square brick building on St. Marys, across from the Catholic bookstore. I pulled into a white-gravel lot west of the building and went in.
The building had not originally been intended as office space. I could dimly recall its having been a corner grocery or a corner barbershop, maybe both, although not simultaneously, when I was a kid. The front door opened into a main room that was set up as a bullpen: a small steel desk near the door, two ordinary steel office desks, a drawing table with a supplies cart, and another steel desk with an extra-large plastic-laminate top, the kind that juts out eight inches beyond the front of the desk.
Behind the latter desk sat Dianna Castelli. She beckoned me over before the extremely young-looking woman at the guard post could finish asking if she could help.
I took a pew opposite Dianna’s desk. The other two desks were vacant; the drawing table was propping up a thin, sandy-haired fellow with a dark beard, who looked at me as I crossed the room, smiled briefly when our eyes met, and went back to his board.
Things Invisible (A Nebraska Mystery Book 4) Page 8