“I’ll think about it.” My palms started sweating profusely again. Palmar hyperhidrosis—the clinical term for excessive, uncontrollable sweating of the hands or palms. The bane of my existence.
Trudy
“Quite a day,” the nurse said, pulling the comforter over Trudy’s chest and tucking the edge under her chin. “Quite the day, indeed.”
“They found me,” Trudy whispered, then thought, Was I lost? They wanted to know my secrets, but I locked my lips so the words wouldn’t come out. The words stayed in my mouth. They have no business being said.
The nurse settled onto the La-Z-Boy in the corner of the room. She pulled two knitting needles, a half-knitted sweater, and a ball of yarn out of the bag beside her. “That picture. That was something. Jogged your memory, huh?”
Trudy lowered the comforter just enough to free her arms. “That was me!” Trudy squeezed her eyes shut to concentrate, to remember how she dolled herself up for that ID picture for the Cuttman Hotel. Ben didn’t like the photo. “He said I looked crazed.”
The nurse quieted the knitting needles. “Who said that?”
Trudy didn’t answer. She thought about all the questions those two nice policemen had asked her. Lots of questions.
“Who said you were crazy, Trudy?”
“The man in the picture.”
For a split second, Trudy remembered what happened that summer. There and gone in a flash. Just squiggly lines and misshapen circles. There and gone in a flash.
2
Tuesday, October 23, 2018
RAY and I were two months shy of our sixth anniversary as a couple (two of those cohabiting). Before Ray there was Simon. Before Simon there was Evan. Before Evan there was Phil. A pause between each one. Phil was my high-school sweetheart. Nine months after graduation our daughter, Natalie, was born. A year later we got married. Four years later we called it quits. My one and only marriage. If you’re not good at something, why keep doing it? Being a mother, though, that I was good at. I would just think about what my mother would do in any parenting situation and do the opposite. Reverse role modeling.
“Are you going to do it?” Natalie asked, juggling a twin on each hip. Both redheads, like their mother, inherited from Phil. The ringlets and long eyelashes were my genetic contribution.
“Here. Give me one of those.” I lifted one of the boys above my head and slowly lowered him until our foreheads lightly touched. A squeal escaped and I inhaled his warm, somewhat sour breath. “I’ve got Henry, right?”
“Yes, Mom. I’ve got Charlie. So . . . what have you decided?”
“I haven’t. I’m afraid Dad will obsess over this again, and at his age, well, I don’t think he can handle the stress.” On the other hand, this might actually be a good thing for Dad, give him something to keep his mind active. But I kept that thought to myself.
“And what about you? Can you handle the stress with everything else that’s going on?”
“Natalie, I’m not one of your cuckoo patients. I got shot. I shot someone. I’m dealing with it.” I secured Henry in the swing that hung in the doorway between the kitchen and the dining room. “Besides, I told my father I would seriously think about it.”
“Mom, you almost died. And you killed someone. Maybe wait a few months. Get your sea legs back.” Natalie placed Charlie in the bouncy chair across from Henry. “So, if you were to look into the case, where would you start?” She too was not immune to the pull of this case.
“Your grandfather wants to work backwards from Lowell. Backtrack using her social security number. I would prefer to work forward from the day she failed to show up for her doctor's appointment at Monticello Hospital. Handle it like any cold case that gets resurrected. Interview people who knew her, reexamine evidence, review police reports, find inconsistencies in witness statements. We now know she wasn’t murdered. Dad had been convinced she was. That probably led him down a few wrong paths.”
“And to what end? What does it matter now?”
There was no way to explain to Natalie why this mattered. This case brought back so many memories, and not all of them good. It was just an itch I needed to scratch. Like a mosquito bite—small but irritating. The nagging feeling that knowing what happened to her would right all the wrongs from that year. But I wasn’t in the mood to get into all that.
“Your grandfather is convinced that something nefarious went down. He believes if Trudy had just run off, he would have found her. He wants to make sure justice is served.” Yeah, something like that. He also had that itch. And I was pretty sure it was bigger than mine. Jock itch, maybe.
“The Cuttman no longer exists. Monticello Hospital no longer exists. Come to think of it, very little from back then still exists.” Natalie crouched in front of Henry’s swing and planted a kiss on the top of his head, then looked back at me. “So, exactly where are you going to start looking?”
YOU CAN’T tell now, but Sullivan County was once a thriving, vibrant area. Especially in the summers. To understand this area’s ascent you have to go back to the turn of the twentieth century. Think Fiddler on the Roof: The Sequel. At the end of the show (or movie, if that’s your thing), Tevya, the dairy farmer, leaves his little village of Anatevka for America. If there was a part two, he would find himself on the teeming Lower East Side of Manhattan. He would look around, shrug, and say to himself (in Yiddish), “On the one hand, I have found myself a job in a factory so I can support my family, but on the other hand”—inflection rising—“this is no place for a dairy farmer. Where can I go to earn a living and breathe fresh air?” He learns he can borrow a bisl of money from the Jewish Agricultural Society and buy himself a farm in Sullivan County, New York—ninety miles north of the city.
Eli and Fanny Cuttman were real-life immigrants from Russia who purchased hundreds of acres of land for farming. They bought the Round Valley Farm sometime around 1910 and took in boarders, charging them seven dollars apiece (chamber pot included). When they passed away in the 1940s, their son, Sam, and daughter-in-law, Sylvia, inherited the property. I don’t know if you would call them visionary, but they (and other boardinghouse owners) saw an opportunity. Boardinghouses were torn down, and in their place, sprawling hotels were built to attract the growing population of Jews looking for respite from the sweltering summers in the city.
In the first half of the twentieth century, Jews had limited vacation options. They were barred from hotels and country clubs up and down the east coast. A gentleman’s agreement, this was called, an innocuous-sounding term that was anything but. In the second half of the century, as anti-Semitic restrictions waned, it was family tradition and nostalgia that kept them coming to this region. The hotels had a lot to offer: idyllic settings boasting indoor pools, outdoor pools, golf courses, ski hills, nightclub shows, athletic fields, dancing lessons, exercise classes, bingo, shuffleboard tournaments, bridge and mah-jongg, tennis courts, camps for kids and teens. But the biggest draw was the food. Three meals a day. All you can eat. Just a two-hour drive from steamy New York City. “The Jewish Alps,” Dad would say. Others called it the Borscht Belt.
Sam and Sylvia Cuttman had two daughters, Rachel and Deborah. The older daughter, Deborah, eloped with a bellhop and moved to New Jersey. Rachel went to Barnard College but never graduated. She returned to the hotel when she was nineteen years old to help run it when Sam became ill. She too married a bellhop, Stanley Roth. Rumor was that she had no choice. Scott was born less than nine months after their wedding. Then, in a span of eight years, Rachel gave birth to three more children: Meryl, Lori, and Joshua. When Sam and Sylvia retired in the early seventies, Stanley and Rachel seized the reins. To ensure a loyal staff, Stanley installed his own family—his brother and sister-in-law, David and Diane, several cousins, and an uncle—in various management positions.
Lori Roth and I were inseparable from kindergarten through seventh grade. At the time of Trudy Solomon’s disappearance, we were still best friends, so I spent a good chunk of my preteen y
ears at the Cuttman. The outdoor pool was the grandest among all the hotel pools: Olympic size, with three diving boards of varying degrees of difficulty. If Lori and I just wanted to hang out, we would head over to the game room and spend every quarter we had on pinball, air hockey, and the jukebox. At night we danced at the teen disco or sat at the nightclub bar drinking Shirley Temples. As the owners’ daughter, Lori was practically royalty there, and she and her siblings were treated with special deference by the staff. None of the Roth kids demanded such treatment; it was just the natural order of things. For many members of the staff, it was a way to get in good with Stanley and Rachel—especially Stanley, who was deemed by many to be a demanding, if not demeaning, boss.
By the end of eighth grade, Lori and I were no longer speaking to each other. So my days hanging out at the Cuttman dwindled with our fading friendship. You could say we drifted apart. But that would be kind. There is this moment when your family’s socioeconomic status starts to matter. Around thirteen years old—when the desire to be popular short-circuits girls’ brains—is usually that moment. Lori was the daughter of a hotel owner. I was the daughter of a cop. Her mother went to Manhattan to shop. My mother went to the local liquor store. She wore Jordache jeans. I wore Lee’s. Our bond couldn’t survive class-consciousness.
After our friendship soured, I would sneak onto the hotel grounds. Take a swim. Hit the game room. Dance at the disco. Sometimes Lori would spot me. But she kept her distance. One night I got stopped by a security guard who told me Rachel would call the cops the next time I stepped foot on their property. Claimed she didn’t want the “townies” using the facilities. I was reduced from best friend to pariah in a matter of months.
One by one, the siblings peeled off to college—none of them were interested in coming back to the area to run the hotel. In 1995, Stanley and Rachel sold the Cuttman to an Indian guru who transformed it into an ashram. According to Dad, the Roths left the area with a nice windfall to pursue other interests.
And so the demise of the Catskills area began. The Dirty Dancing days were long over. Other hotel owners were devising their own exit strategies. Vacationers were no longer flocking to the area. The now grown-up kids, the ones who had come with their parents to these hotels, were not enchanted with the run-down rooms, dated lobbies, dilapidated athletic facilities, and kosher menus. The nail was hammered into the coffin when the gambling referendums failed to pass in the early aughts. Potential buyers fled. Abandoned hotels crumbled. Weeds proliferated. Graffiti adorned building walls. Sort of like the ruins of the ancient fortress of Masada in southern Israel—without the UNESCO World Heritage Site status.
Natalie was right. The last twenty-five years had not been kind to this region. Anyone associated with the Cuttman was long gone. Trudy’s old friends were God knows where . . . or dead. I had worked cold cases before, but this one was akin to trying to locate the delicate seeds of a white dandelion after you blew them off to make a wish.
I STOPPED by Horizon Meadows on my way to the police station to give Dad the bad news. I had a litany of excuses. Suspects and witnesses left long ago. The hospital, where she was last seen, was closed. The Cuttman nonexistent. Our victim, or whatever she was, couldn’t piece together two sentences. Ray thought it was a bad idea. I had a bum leg. And, my near-death experience was messing with my head.
Dad wasn’t taking no for an answer. He pulled out the “I’ll be dead soon” card. And even though I was expecting that, it still stung. But then he offered up something unexpected.
“What if I told you I know how to get in touch with Ben Solomon? The husband.”
“You know where he is?” I asked, realizing my mistake the minute the words came tumbling out of my mouth. He’d set an ambush, and I strolled right in.
“You can say we’re like pen pals. Although these days it’s more like email pals. You know I always suspected he had something to do with her disappearance. But he insisted he was as much in the dark as anyone. He over-insisted, if you know what I mean. What’s that line from Shakespeare?”
“The lady doth protest too much?”
“Yeah, that. He made it a point to get in touch with me every so often, trying to prove his innocence. I figured it couldn’t hurt to write him back, stay close to him if he did or said something stupid. My Spidey sense always tingled when I was around him.”
Dad was the White Rabbit and I was following him down the rabbit hole. “What makes you think he’ll have a different story now that she’s been found?” I asked.
“People get spooked when a missing person reappears all of a sudden or a witness pops up out of the blue. Maybe he’s afraid she said something to someone, so he tries to cover his ass and reveals something new, something self-incriminating.”
“Talking to this one guy isn’t going to break this case open—you know that. We would need to get in touch with people who knew her from the hotel and her hometown to piece this thing together. And Lord only knows where all those folks ended up.”
“I know.”
“You know what?”
“I know where they are. They don’t call me the Computer King of Horizon Meadows for nothing. There’s a Facebook group called Summers at the Cuttman. And guess who runs it? One of the Roth kids. And get this: hundreds of staff and guests from the 1970s have joined. There’s also a Growing Up in Mill Basin, Brooklyn, 50’s and 60’s group. That’s where and when Trudy grew up. We put out a few feelers, see what we can reel in. Like throwing chum to the sharks. See who bites.”
You know that proverbial fork in the road? I was standing right in front of it. And both paths seemed shitty. Left, I tell Dad to let it go. She’s been found. End of story. He gets pissed. Right, I ask Eldridge for permission to look into the case, opening that little door to crazy Wonderland. I get sucked into the vortex of the worst days of my childhood. But, damn, I’d be lying if I didn’t admit I was somewhat curious.
3
Wednesday, October 24, 2018
HAVING NEARLY drained my glass of Bud, I signaled the bartender for a refill. If I hadn’t become a detective, I would have seriously considered bartending. Some people laughed when I confessed this offbeat occupational fantasy. And maybe it was silly. But it was the truth. I thought there was something alluring about standing behind a bar, owning a space that no one can intrude on, concocting cocktails or simply tapping a beer line, getting to know the regular clientele or hearing a story from a stranger passing through town. I would prefer a hotel-lobby bar over a local saloon. A place filled with out-of-towners, mainly business folks, married or single, male or female, who were susceptible to one-night stands. Men ordering single malt scotch, neat. Women ordering dirty martinis, dry. What’s a nice girl like you doing in a place like this? and bearing witness to other corny pickup lines. Then you go home at night without the weight of the world on your shoulders. (Well, unless a patron slipped someone a roofie or a customer who had one too many got into a car accident. Then some amount of guilt would fall on your shoulders, proving no job was fully without consequences and burden.)
Sally came up behind me, reached over the bar and pilfered a slice of lime from the fruit tray. She inserted it in her mouth, creating an illusion of big green lips, and sucked the juice out.
“Hey there, stranger.” She winced and shuddered, a delayed reflex from ingesting the tart lime. “Have you decided yet?”
“I caved. I told Dad I would ask Eldridge about reopening the case.”
“Well, I guessed wrong. Definitely thought you would take a pass.”
“I’m doing this for my father. He’s convinced there’s a criminal element to this, and with no statute of limitations for kidnapping, he could go to his grave knowing he got his man.”
“And you? What do you think?”
“I’m not sold on that theory. I’m more inclined to think she wanted to start a new life and figured out a way to erase herself. Which I find intriguing. I think it would be kinda cool to figure out what happened to
her between the time she disappeared from here and reappeared in Lowell. Give her a life story. Without it, it’s like she never existed. Alzheimer’s has robbed her of her story. Maybe we can tell it for her.”
“And if Eldridge says no, will you take a leave of absence and do it on your own?”
“I would prefer to do it officially, but I’d consider it.”
“And Ray, is he okay with this?”
“Ray is ambivalent. He tossed out that I was free to do whatever I wanted, although he thinks it’s a waste of time. Natalie thinks it’s a bad idea. But that’s the psychologist in her. She wants me to reduce the level of stress in my life, not pile it on. It would have been nice to have their full support, but I get it.” I reached for the bowl of bar nuts and scooped out a few. “If Ray told me he was going to take a leave of absence to work on a case his father couldn’t solve, I would’ve probably told him he was . . .” I gazed at the assortment of nuts in my palm. “Nuts.”
Sally waved to the bartender and yelled, “Guinness!” She pounded her fist on the bar. “I think you should do it. You’re the best detective in this precinct. Hell, probably in all of Sullivan County. If anyone can crack this case, you can.”
“Before this whole Calvin Barnes thing I might have agreed with you. But there are still some people in this community who think I should be fired, that I got off with a slap on the—”
The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon Page 2