The Disappearance of Trudy Solomon

by Marcy McCreary

  “So you killed Ed and tried to pin this on me?” Stanley rocked in his wheelchair.

  “I’ve paid for your malfeasance and crimes long enough.” She dabbed at her eyes and gently blew her nose with a hankie that magically materialized from inside her cuff. “When Will and Susan started snooping around I needed to get them off my trail. And just so we’re clear here, I acted in self-defense. If we are assigning guilt, the bigger heap should fall at your feet.”

  “Wow! It’s finally happening,” Meryl said. “I never thought I’d see the day.”

  “What day?” Rachel asked.

  “The day the two of you finally realize how much you hate each other and ruined each other’s lives . . .”

  “And ours,” Lori added.

  “Can I be excused now?” Rachel said, pushing back her chair.

  No one answered.

  “Well then.” Rachel tossed her napkin on her plate, stood up and click-clacked across the hardwood floors. She swiveled her head when she got to the dining-room doorway. “I’ll be up in my room, resting.”

  “I think we can all use a rest,” Meryl said, standing abruptly.

  Josh suddenly reappeared. Probably heard his mother leave the room and decided it was safe to come back in.

  “Any chance you have a spare room, Josh?” Meryl asked.

  “Come with me.”

  Meryl and Lori exited the room with Josh. A bewildered Stanley remained, picking at his lunch.

  THE ROTHS were all upstairs in their respective guest rooms. Stanley had fallen asleep in the dining room and no one bothered to wheel him out. Dad, Ray, and I stood silently in front of the fireplace. I could only imagine what was going through the minds of the Roth kids, perhaps each one trying to come to terms with what happened in that room. In some magical way, I hoped the heat from the fire might cauterize their wounds. An unlikely possibility, for sure, but it was nice to think that there might be a way for them to feel whole again. Perhaps forgiving each other over time. I glanced over at Dad and Ray, both looking solemn, befitting the day’s dark mood, but I had a feeling if we were anywhere but here, they would be high-fiving each other.

  I elbowed Dad gently. “Well, Dad. You did it. You found out what happened to Trudy Solomon.”

  Dad turned and hugged me, tight. “We did it, Suzie-Q,” he said with a satisfied smile. “We did it.”

  39

  Saturday, December 15, 2018

  THE STATION was quiet. It always was the week or so before Christmas. We had arrived home late the night before and decided to come in early in the morning, file our reports on the Trudy Solomon case. We ended up sticking around the inn for an extra day, extracting statements from Stanley (who—surprise, surprise—insisted the sex was consensual) and Rachel (who gave us an Oscar-winning performance). As Dad predicted, Rachel played her self-defense argument to the hilt. Claimed Ed lunged at her, began choking her, and she had no choice but to reach around him for the knife. Said she didn’t intend to kill him, just nick him, but inadvertently hit an artery. It was a masterclass in femme fatale acting, on par with Lana Turner in The Postman Always Rings Twice. She also claimed she knew nothing of David’s intentions to off Renee, believing it was handled in a—as she put it—civilized manner. I called up a lawyer friend of mine who explained that baby brokering—euphemistically called private adoptions—was not criminal in the state of New York in 1976. (“Distasteful, yes,” he lamented. “But illegal, no.”)

  Eldridge slid a chair up to my desk and sat down. “What about Diane? If what she is telling you is true, then she was part of the extortion scheme that got Renee killed.”

  “She’s got terminal cancer,” I replied. “Six months, tops, according to her doctor.”

  “And she told you Rachel knew nothing of David’s plan?”

  “She couldn’t say for sure whether Rachel knew that David was willing to resort to violence to clear up this matter,” I said. “David told both Diane and Rachel that Renee took the money and left. But when Diane read the news about Renee’s murder, she was pretty sure David had lied all those years ago.”

  “Oh well.” Eldridge stood and shrugged. “Sometimes people get away with murder. This is one of those times.”

  “Yeah, well I was hoping someone would be held accountable for what happened to Jake—being sold like a piece of meat.”

  “Lenny got a couple of years, there’s that.” Eldridge patted me on the shoulder before retreating to his office.

  I actually felt sorry for Lenny. I believe he didn’t know what he was in for when Panda dragged him to Renee's that night. But nonetheless, he was an accomplice. Ray put in a good word with the district attorney about his cooperation with us. I think that helped his cause.

  Jake had called me the night before. He had seen the match on the Ancestry website and wanted to contact me before he got in touch with Meryl. Get my advice. (I should have warned him I was the last person on this planet to give advice on family matters.) I filled him in on what had transpired these last few days and told him that Meryl was eager to speak with him. Lori and Josh said they needed more time to process the events of the last few days and weren’t ready to meet him. But they were open to a future reunion . . . when the time was right. According to Meryl, Scott was in no mood to deal with his parents, let alone a newly discovered sibling. (“He threw up walls like he always did,” is what she related to me.) As for Rachel, her desire to meet her son remained a big question mark. Meryl had yet to address it with her, the wounds still too raw. But if Jake and the Roth kids managed to eke out a relationship, and Rachel wanted to repair her relationship with them, she might have no choice but to welcome Jake into the family fold. Or at the very least fake it—and she was good at that.

  Eldridge released the Barnes video Thursday afternoon knowing I’d be in Vermont, where no one could find me. I picked up a voice mail from Rhonda on Thursday night, telling me that between the video, the warehouse guy’s statement, and Marvin’s confession, the civil suit against the county was likely to be dropped. There hadn’t been any menacing windshield notes since the one placed under my wiper in early December. Perhaps Ernest Barnes did know something about that. I took his word he wasn’t the culprit, but had a feeling he knew who was and had a hand in stopping it. Rumor had it, it had been Calvin’s cousin. Ernest’s brother’s kid.

  Ray came over and sat on the edge of my desk. “What you say we get something to eat?”

  “Can’t. Told Thomas I would stop by the house.”

  Mom had jogged my memory the other day when she mentioned my penchant for sneaking around and snapping pictures. I had this fuzzy recollection of taking pictures the day I came home early and found the man and my mother chatting in the kitchen. If I had a photo or two of him, maybe Mom could tell me who he was. After seeing what secrets can do to a family, I could not let this stand between us. So I called Thomas to ask if he happened to come across any photos from the summer of 1978 when he was looking for pictures of Lori and me, and he said that indeed there were a couple of envelopes from July and August.

  I sensed Ray was mildly disappointed. He thought I was done with the past. Moved on. Said I’m picking a scab that would heal faster if I left it alone. “We can meet later, if you want,” I offered.

  Ray shrugged. “Call me when you’re done chasing ghosts.”

  “HELLO! ANYONE home?”

  “Up here, Detective Ford,” Thomas shouted. “In the attic.”

  The attic was accessible through a push door in the ceiling, located on the second floor about five feet from the landing. I climbed the pulldown ladder. Thomas stood on the far side of the attic, near the cobweb-filled, moon-shaped window, sifting through some boxes. The air was chilly but not cold enough to see your breath. Enough heat rose from the lower portion of the house to keep this room bearable. I removed my knee-length puffy coat and dropped it through the hole in the floor. It caught on the second rung.

  The floorboards creaked as I walked toward Thom
as. “What did you find?”

  “Over there,” he said, pointing to a little table pushed up against the back wall. “I also found some old letters from that summer, so they're over there as well. They were wrapped inside a scarf.”

  There were two mustard-yellow envelopes on the table. In my preteen handwriting, one was marked August 3, 1978, the other July 15, 1978. They both contained about fifteen pictures. If memory served me correctly, I usually got anywhere from twelve to sixteen pictures from a roll of 110 film. The negatives were tucked into their own narrow sleeves within the envelopes. I pulled out the July photos. This envelope contained photos taken at Old Falls and a few photos of my Uncle Donald, Mom’s brother. He would visit occasionally. I was pretty sure he was not the mysterious guy I’d seen on the porch or in the kitchen—Uncle Donald was burlier and shorter. I put the pictures back into the envelope and opened the one from August. On top, a photograph of my mother standing in the kitchen. Judging from the angle, I was pretty sure I shot this picture from the top of the stairs. The next four photographs were also of Mom, in various poses. All from that same downward angle. In pictures six through ten, the perspective changed. It appeared as though I had positioned myself in the dining room. In these photographs, Mom was seated at the kitchen table and a man’s legs were visible under the table—the rest of him out of the frame. It would have been impossible to capture the face of the man without being seen, which might explain why I couldn’t get a clear shot. In the next two photos, the angle suggested I was back on the stairs, probably about halfway up. The man was standing now, his back to the camera. A hat askew on his head. The last picture of the bunch was blurry. Fearful of being caught, I probably started to move up the staircase. But the man had turned around, enough for me to capture his profile. His bushy mustache was very distinctive. There was no doubt—I was staring at a blurry Ed Resnick. What the fuck?

  I unfolded the blue-and-white kerchief and leafed through the three letters that Thomas had found. The handwriting was compact and graceful. All brief, written on a single side of lined notepaper.

  “Did you read these?” I asked.

  “Nope. None of my business. But I saw the dates on top and figured you might want to see them. They’re from that same summer and fall.”

  I turned away from Thomas and started to read.

  “HOLY SHIT.” Clutching the letters, I reached into my back pocket for my phone. It wasn’t there. “Shit.” I frantically looked around, then realized it was in my coat pocket at the bottom of the pulldown stairs.

  “Detective Ford? Are you okay?”

  I scrambled down the ladder, and from the fourth rung reached down and grabbed my coat. I retrieved my phone and dropped the coat onto the floor below. I cradled the phone in my hand, wondering who I should call first. Ray or Dad?

  “I take it you stumbled onto something,” Thomas said, poking his head through the opening.

  “You can say that. Do you know where my mother is?”

  “She left here about fifteen minutes before you showed up. Said she had errands to run. But I think she’ll be back within the hour.”

  Fuck it. I knew what I had to do and it didn’t involve calling either of them. It was Mom who had some explaining to do.

  I SAT with my back to the kitchen entryway, so when Mom walked in, all she saw was my ponytail hoisted high on my head, not the indignant expression on my face. The three letters laid on the table in front of me, the top third and bottom third of the stationery bending up from their creases, forming three little paper boats. I fingered mom’s blue-and-white silk kerchief, trying to make sense of all this.

  “Susan?”

  I twisted around in my chair. She shifted her gaze to the table, then back to me. Was that panic in her eyes or relief? Perhaps a mixture of both.

  She lunged forward and snatched the letters off the table. “You have no business—” She folded the letters and stuffed them into the back pocket of her jeans.

  “What? Are we going to pretend like I haven't seen this?”

  She flung open a drawer and pulled out a pack of Marlboros and a red Bic lighter. “So you've seen it. Now you know.” She fumbled with the lighter. As she brought the cigarette up to her lips I noticed a minor tremor in her hands. It took three flicks of the wheel before the flame escaped and she could light up.

  “I don’t know anything. I don’t know what warped thinking it took for you to hide this from Dad. To make him feel like a failure. And worst of all, allow Stanley to get away with what he did to Trudy.”

  “How dare you judge me?” She sat down across from me and leaned over the table. “You wanna know?” she taunted. “You really wanna know?”

  Did I? I didn’t answer immediately. I let her defensive fury wash over me. I knew there would be no future relationship with her if I walked out the door right now. But that was the old Susan. The Susan who avoided confrontation. The Susan who kept her mother’s problem at arm’s length. I knew deep down that I needed to hear her side of the story.

  A loose cough rattled in her chest. “Well?”

  “Yeah, I want to know.”

  She took a long drag off her cigarette and blew a line of smoke sideways. “After Ed’s father died, his mother told him about her affair with my Dad . . . and—as you read in the letters—that I was his half sister.”

  “Naomi Resnick told me about their mom being your dad’s bookkeeper. Guess they were doing more than number crunching.”

  “You make it sound like a fling. It was not. According to Ed, she was deeply in love with my father. But when my dad moved away from Rochester, she knew the affair was over and she carried on . . . like lots of women did—and still do. Anyway, Ed rang me up soon after his mom confessed all this and we just hit it off.”

  “When was that?”

  “Oh, I would say midseventies—1974, I think. Anyway, I convinced him to move to the area and he did, in 1976.”

  “Why so secretive about it?”

  “When I confronted my father with this bit of news, he begged me to not tell anyone. Especially my mother. At first, I was none too thrilled to keep this from her. But what was I going to do? Upend their whole marriage? Even Ed’s siblings didn't know that Ed wasn’t their full brother and he wanted to keep it that way—he promised his mom he wouldn't tell them. I guess she was ashamed.” Mom tapped the long accumulated ash onto a saucer. She took a short drag, then snubbed out the nubbin. “Ed said the less people who knew, the better. On some level, I liked having this little secret. Just something shared by two people.”

  “So where does Trudy factor into all this?”

  “Trudy and Ed met at the hotel in early 1977. Ed really liked her—he was always trying to cheer her up.” She opened the lid of the cigarette pack, then closed it and pushed it away. I flashed a closed-mouth smile to let her know I was happy with her decision not to start a new one. She continued, “And then her world came crashing down on her when Stanley Roth . . . well, you know. When Ed came to me with his plan to leave the area to get away from all this, I saw myself in her situation. What I wouldn’t have given to start a new life where no one knew me and I could reinvent myself.”

  “What was so bad here? So Dad was a workaholic? You had friends. Dad said you worked part-time. And there was me.”

  “Who doesn’t think that sometimes?” Mom eyed the pack of cigarettes. “You wouldn’t understand, Susan.”

  “Try me.”

  “I got married young. You were smart enough to get out of your marriage early when you knew it wasn’t working. Maybe that's a generational thing. I was beautiful. I had some smarts. I had the whole world in front of me. I met your Dad and fell in love at twenty. Got married at twenty-one. Had you at twenty-two. But I let my dreams fall by the wayside. And I don't even know what those dreams were. To be an actress? Maybe a teacher? I started drinking. A sip here and there, until it felt good to feel numb. To not think about what could have been.” Her eyes got glassier as she spoke, her voice
raspier. She coughed up some phlegm, then choked it back down.

  I rose and walked to the kitchen counter, where I tore a piece of paper towel off the roll. I pulled my chair around closer to Mom and handed it to her. She blew her nose then tucked the paper towel into the pocket of her cardigan.

  She pulled the letters out of her back pocket, laid them on the table and smoothed them out. “I didn’t know Trudy very well. I went to her house a couple of times. We chatted. She was married to a bully of a husband who made it clear divorce wasn’t in the cards. And what if Stanley wanted another go at her? I felt compelled to help.”

  “Why not just report the rape?”

  “Oh Susan. You're not that naive.” She lowered her chin and peered over her glasses. “That’s not how it worked back then. I’m not even sure that’s how it works now.” She fiddled with the pack of cigarettes. “Who would put themselves through that shit, especially when you’re up against some powerful folks. The victim gets victimized all over again.” She snorted derisively. “Me Too wasn’t a thing yet.”

  “Well, after reading these letters from Ed, I’m not so sure her life got a whole lot better.”

  “You're wrong about that. Sure, having the twins was a low point and she had bouts of depression throughout the years. But she led a fairly content life. She wrote me once in a while, kept me up to date on their whereabouts.” She ran her fingers through her hair, dislodging a few knots. I noticed her nails were newly painted and her roots matched the rest of her hair. I guess that was the errand Thomas alluded to earlier. “She was a good person who deserved a good life. She couldn't take a real paying job because she would’ve had to file taxes and risk being found. So she volunteered at soup kitchens and such. And I bet you didn’t know she was artistic. She loved to paint and Ed would buy brushes, canvases, acrylics and she would go to town. You know that covered bridge painting in the living room? The one you like?”