The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon

by Marcy McCreary

  “Well, everyone’s here now. That’s all that matters. And I have to say, the setting is gorgeous.” When I turned around, Rachel was standing next to me. Stay cool.

  “Why, hello Suzie. I didn’t realize you were invited. You two catching up on old times?”

  “I was just complimenting Josh on how beautiful this place is. Such a perfect setting for a party.” I turned back to Josh. “It was so lovely seeing you again. I’m sure you have lots of guests you want to chat with.” Luckily, Josh acted on my cue and beelined it to a guest on the other side of the table. The last thing I needed was Rachel alone with Josh, asking him what we were just talking about.

  “Funny. You didn’t mention you were attending this shindig when we met last week,” Rachel said.

  I smiled warmly. “Last-minute decision to come. It’s nice to see everyone again. Now, if you’ll excuse me, Mrs. Roth, I just spotted Meryl and I haven’t said hello to her yet.”

  I eyed Ray coming toward me and, when we met on the parquet floor, I steered him toward the far side of the barn, where Meryl was standing with four guests. Meryl had aged well. Out of the four siblings, she most resembled her mother in her Rachel-like glamour. When she lifted her martini glass to her lips, she spotted me and excused herself from the group.

  “Well, as I live and breathe. Suz . . . oops . . . Susan Ford. Lori was telling me how great you look. And you do! And you must be Ray.” Before Ray could answer, she asked, “Have you seen everyone yet?”

  “Just quick conversations with Lori and Josh. But the night is young.”

  Meryl lowered her voice and leaned in. “Scott just arrived.” She pointed toward the entrance. “The gang’s all here.”

  Ray and I snapped our necks around. Scott reached for his table card, glanced at it quickly, and tucked it into his sport-jacket pocket. Behind him, his daughter Mandy. At his side, the high-heeled, pencil-skirted woman we met at his car dealership. Christie Lamont. Well, well . . . this family was full of surprises. For this occasion, Christie was dolled up in a tight black dress, her breasts swelling over the V-neck plunge.

  “To tell you the truth, I’m surprised Scott is here. He can’t stand to be in the same room with my father,” Meryl said. “It took a lot of convincing. But I think it was his fiancée who pushed him to come. I think she was curious. This family is like a car wreck. It’s hard not to rubberneck. I think she wanted to see what all the fuss was about. I’m sure Scott has given her an earful as to how insane we all are.”

  If Meryl knew I’d gone to see Scott last month, she kept that fact to herself. But Scott might have had his own reasons for not disclosing our meeting to her. Besides, her beef was with me talking to her parents—and she hadn’t mentioned that either. This family feud definitely worked in our favor. They were not all on the same page.

  Meryl turned to her right. “See that gorgeous hunk over there?” She waved at him. “The tall one. That’s my husband, Mike.”

  “Easy to spot in a crowd,” Ray said. “Six five?”

  “Six seven. He was a tight end in college. Probably could have played pro, but medicine was his calling. The cheerleader and the football jock. So cliché, huh?”

  I glanced at Ray and raised my eyebrows. He grinned. If we were by ourselves I’m sure he would have pretended to barf.

  Mike wove his way toward us, first dodging a server, then gingerly stepping around a young girl darting through the crowd, leaving defenders in the dust. For a big guy, he was pretty deft.

  “Hi, hon. Old friends?” Mike held out his beefy hand.

  After introductions, we chatted for a while. Family, careers, weather. Typical party banter. She pointed out her three daughters, who were standing together near Table 4. I asked her if Lori’s daughter was at the party, and she told me she was on her way but running late. (“Breastfeeding!” Meryl said, offering this as an explanation.) When we ran out of small talk, Meryl held up her empty martini glass and excused herself for a refill. Mike fell in line behind her as she moved toward the bar.

  “Ray, we gotta talk. Somewhere private.”

  “Follow me.”

  I followed Ray to the back of the barn, where intimate seating areas had been arranged.

  I filled Ray in on the conversation with Josh. “What do you think?”

  “Sounds like we got ourselves a new prime suspect.”

  “She certainly had a motive.”

  “Yeah . . . to stop the payments. Then she committed Trudy to a mental hospital, tying up loose ends.”

  “Before we confront Rachel, I would like to know what that blackmail money was all about. And, as Dad would have said, my Spidey sense tells me Scott knows something.”

  “What makes you think he’d be willing to talk to you this time?”

  “Something Trudy said to us that I think will get him to open up.”

  “And that is?”

  “That he was her hero. Came to her rescue. Maybe he’s willing to do it again.”

  “Good luck trying to get him alone.”

  A server, carrying a tray of pigs in blankets, appeared and asked if we would like to indulge. We each took a napkin and a toothpick, stabbed a pig and dipped it into the little bowl of mustard.

  “I have an idea,” I said, holding up my mustard-slathered mini hotdog encased in a pastry puff.

  RAY POKED four blanketed pigs with toothpicks and dipped them—generously—in the mustard. I watched him hurry over to Scott and, pretty convincingly (in a Chevy-Chase-as-Gerald-Ford kind of way), accidentally trip and smear the mustard across Scott’s sleeve. Ray apologized profusely and pointed in the direction of the bathroom. Now the two of them were heading my way. That was my cue to duck inside.

  The door to the men’s room swung open. Scott’s initial expression led me to believe he probably thought he’d walked into the ladies’ room. He glanced at the urinals. He looked at me again.

  “What the hell?” he roared.

  “You don’t want that mustard to stain.” I jutted my chin out toward the sink.

  Scott grabbed a handful of paper towels, ran them under the water, and started mopping up the mustard. “What the fuck are you doing in here? Is this another one of your ambushes?”

  “Look Scott, I only need a few minutes of your time. We went to see Trudy and she said you can help us. Like you helped her all those years ago.”

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

  He turned to leave, but when he opened the door, Ray was standing there, blocking his escape route.

  “Scott, I’m not sure who you think you are protecting,” I said. “But, the truth will come out. We have reason to believe that your mother killed Ed and committed Trudy to a mental hospital to put an end to some blackmail scheme.”

  “That can’t be. My mother had nothing—”

  I waited for him to finish the sentence, but he did not. “Go on, Scott. You were saying.”

  “Not in here. I’m parked right outside the barn.”

  Ray and I followed Scott through the barn. Guests were beginning to take their seats. He passed Christie and whispered into her ear. When we got outside, he unlocked his rented SUV. I climbed into the passenger seat, Ray sat behind me.

  “I’m not sure why you think my mother is involved in all this. The bad guy in this story is my father.”

  “Why are you protecting him?”

  “I’m not protecting him. I’m protecting my mother. He can rot in hell for all I care. I kept quiet to spare her from his atrocities. She wanted to pretend everything was hunky dory, and I gave her that.”

  “Atrocities?”

  “You want the truth? Here’s the truth . . . my father raped Trudy.”

  I heard Dad’s words in my head: Poker face. Poker face. “And you know this . . . how?”

  “I witnessed it.”

  “You witnessed your father raping Trudy?”

  “Well, not the actual rape. The aftermath.” Scott tapped on the steering wheel, thrumming a Morse c
ode-like pattern. “Trudy was on night patrol that night.”

  “Night patrol?” Ray asked.

  “It was a service for parents who wanted to go to the nightclub, but were too cheap to hire a babysitter. Trudy would walk around the hotel grounds and listen in at their doors. She wasn’t allowed to enter, but if she heard crying or something, she would alert the bellhop station. A dollar a door, so you could make good money on a busy night.”

  “Okay. Go on.”

  “It was mid-June, before the start of the summer season. I saw my father come out of a guest room—one of the Skybridge Terrace rooms—and skulk away. I figured he was fucking a guest, as usual. But then I heard sobbing. When I opened the door, I saw Trudy on the bed, disheveled and crying. She said he threatened her to keep quiet and begged me not to say anything.”

  “So that’s why you thought your father killed Trudy?” Ray said.

  “When she disappeared, I confronted my father. He swore up and down that he did not kill her. He knew she had run off with someone . . . heard it from this guy who used to work in the coffee shop. I thought, good for her. If she wanted to disappear and make a new life for herself, who was I to convince her to file a sexual-assault charge—”

  “Where people would be more likely to take Stanley’s side over Trudy’s,” I interjected. “Your father could have claimed it was consensual.”

  “Exactly. This is 1978 we’re talking about,” Ray added. “And Stanley had resources and friends in high places.”

  “Look, I need to get back to the party,” Scott said.

  “We’re not done here,” I said. “What do you say we meet after dessert?”

  Scott nodded, pulling on the door latch. “Sure.” He paused. “And you’re wrong about my mother.”

  WE MISSED the salad. As we settled into our seats at Table 14, the waiter placed a shrimp cocktail appetizer in front of us. Four enormous shrimps lounging on the lip of a glass dish with a couple tablespoons of cocktail sauce at the bottom of the bowl. I introduced myself to our table mates. To Ray’s right, Marisa and Cameron. And to my left, Carol and Mason. We learned Marisa and Carol were Meryl’s friends from the literary agency where she used to work.

  “We were hoping that whoever sat with us also had the first initials M and C,” said Carol. “That would have been funny.”

  Mason rolled his eyes.

  Once the shrimp was cleared, the waiter asked our preference for dinner: a spinach-stuffed chicken breast, filet mignon with garlic herb butter, or a vegetarian option of grilled vegetables. The men opted for the steak. The women chose the chicken. Marisa and Carol tried to include me in their conversation, asking questions about family (“Wow, twin grandsons!”), career (“Oooh, you’re a cop. How badass!”), and how I knew the Roths (“Sounds like a fun childhood”). When I told them I was friends with Lori, Marisa lamented that none of Lori’s friends came because of the distance. (“California to Vermont in the dead of winter, and right before Christmas, is probably tough to manage.”)

  I was eager for dessert. The conversation was pleasant enough, even interesting at times, but I was afraid Scott would bolt if he got the chance. Carol was mid-sentence when Meryl tapped on a microphone, yelling “Testing, testing, is this thing on?” Table by table, the buzz of conversations subsided.

  Meryl started her speech by thanking everyone for coming. She joked about the mishmash of celebrations—a birthday, a retirement, an engagement, a wedding anniversary. She mentioned a few other Roth milestones that had occurred earlier in the year—the birth of Lori’s granddaughter, her own daughter’s recent engagement, her parents’ fifty-eighth wedding anniversary. She directed guests to the back of the barn where they could view old photos of the Roth clan. She let everyone know that after dessert the DJ would be spinning tunes, and dancing was mandatory. She said there were no planned speeches—besides the one she was giving.

  A slice of cake was nimbly placed at each of our settings by stealthy servers.

  Meryl finished up by adding, “I had hoped to regale you all with the history of the Cuttman and Roth ancestors, but alas, Ancestry dot com must be extra busy these days, cuz I’m still waiting for the results. In the meantime, I built a little family tree going back to my great-grandparents, and if you’re interested in our history and the history of the hotel, you can find that among the photographs.”

  I remembered Meryl had mentioned this family-tree project, back when we first exchanged messages. Dad thought about finding long-lost relatives through one of these DNA databases, but that inclination lasted a hot second. (“I’m not thrilled with the relatives I got, so not keen on finding more Fords,” he semi-joked.)

  Ray gently kicked my shin and tilted his head to the side, signaling Scott’s movement to the door. He whispered, “That’s our cue.”

  Ray and I excused ourselves from the table just as the DJ put on a David Bowie song and yelled into his microphone, “Let’s dance!”

  THE TEMPERATURE in the car had dropped since the last time we sat in it, about an hour ago. Scott pressed the ignition button and blasted the heat.

  “Just so we are clear—I’m not going to sit on some witness stand and repeat any of this. I thought about this a whole lot since your little ambush down in Florida. I’m done with the charade. But if you want to hear my story, this is the one and only time I will tell it.”

  I had no authority to agree to his conditions, but I figured I could sort that out later.

  As though reading my mind, Ray said, “Can’t make any promises on that, but we will do what we can.”

  “You’ve already told us that Stanley raped Trudy,” I said. “Is that what the blackmail scheme was all about?”

  Scott sat silent for a few minutes, obviously weighing his options. We let him mull.

  “Yes.”

  “Was your mother in on it?”

  “Doubt it.”

  “Do you know that for sure?”

  “Pretty sure.”

  I felt like I was shaking a Magic 8 Ball, with Scott coughing up short, nebulous answers.

  “Can you just tell us what you do know?” Ray said.

  I was expecting Scott to say, “Reply hazy, try again.”

  Instead, he said, “With all the police hanging around that summer, Dad was afraid I would say something. Even though I told him I would not. Which, by the way, was mainly because I was worried about my mother getting dragged into all this. I was also concerned how it would affect hotel business. In hindsight, I might have done something different, but I was just a dumb eighteen-year-old kid then. And he swore he would stay away from Trudy.” Scott fiddled with the temperature controls on the console. “My mother actually thought I had something to do with Trudy’s disappearance. She shipped me off to my aunt’s house, afraid I would confess I did something to Trudy. Ha!”

  “So that’s why you think she didn’t know what Stanley had done, and therefore couldn’t be in on the extortion scheme.”

  “Yeah. That and the fact they lived pretty separate lives back then.”

  “Okay. So, jumping ahead to 2007. Why did you go see Ed and Trudy? How did you even know where to find them?” Ray asked.

  “My mother called me in early 2006 asking to borrow money. And I’m thinking, what the fuck? They had millions. That’s when I learned the truth about their dwindling finances, heard she’d stumbled upon the extortion, and figured out Trudy and Ed’s whereabouts. Anyway, my mother opened a secret bank account, and every month I gave her money. At the very least, it allowed her to keep up appearances, with nice clothes, some jewelry, and a tennis membership.”

  “And Stanley didn’t notice this?”

  Scott snorted. “He wouldn’t notice her if she stripped naked and pole danced.”

  One of Ray’s eyebrows arched. “Okay. So, then what? A year later you decide to take matters into your own hands and threaten Ed to stop with the extortion scheme?”

  “My mother thought I could appeal to Trudy. Explain my parents’ cur
rent financial situation. I am pretty damn sure my mother had no idea why my father was giving them money, and I think she didn’t want to know. But I had a different agenda. I wanted Trudy to expose my father. I was even willing to act as a witness. I figured my mother was better off with him behind bars.”

  “I guess you didn’t factor in Ed’s sway over Trudy,” I said.

  “He went ballistic. Said I didn’t know the whole story. And that Stanley caused a lifetime of pain and suffering for Trudy.”

  “Do you know what he meant by that?” Ray asked.

  “That she never fully recovered from the assault, I presume.”

  I looked at Ray and he nodded. “Trudy was pregnant when she fled. And if what you said is true—that your father raped her in June—she was probably carrying his babies—”

  “Babies?”

  “Twins. According to Ed’s siblings, the strain was too much for her. She was institutionalized for some time after their birth.”

  “Where are they?”

  “That’s the sixty-four-million-dollar question. They were put up for adoption. Records sealed.”

  “Holy shit. Holy fucking shit.”

  “And you’re sure Rachel knew nothing about this?” I asked. “Can you be sure that your mother didn’t take matters into her own hands, killed Ed and admitted Trudy to a mental hospital?”

  Scott pressed the ignition button. The engine quit. Without the heat humming, I could hear Scott breathing rapidly. He opened his door, stepped out into the darkness, and slammed the door behind him. He turned to look at us. For a second there, I thought he was going to lock us in the car. No click. Ray and I scrambled out of the car. We hurried back to the barn just in time to see Scott storming over to Stanley, who was going nowhere, trapped in a wheelchair near the bathrooms.