“Fuck should I know?”
“Do you have her?”
“That’s a good one.”
“Are you holding her somewhere?”
“Are you crazy, lady?”
“Where is she?”
“Hey, stop yelling.”
“Where is she?” I yelled. “What have you done with her?”
“You’re gaga. I’ve done nothing . . .”
“Then why do you have her phone?”
“Found it.”
“Where?”
“On the street.”
“Where on the street?”
“Boston.”
“Where in Boston?”
“Lady, what’s with the third degree?”
“My daughter’s gone missing. This is her phone.”
“And I found the phone in the Gardens.”
“The Public Gardens?”
“You got it.”
“And did you see a woman around twenty-five, shortish brown hair, medium build . . .”
“Lady, I just found the phone. Okay?”
The line went dead. I hit redial but was connected with a busy signal. Immediately I phoned Detective Leary’s cell phone, apologizing for calling him on a Saturday. When I explained what had just happened, he said, “Give me a couple of minutes. I’m going to check in with the team.”
He called me back an hour later to say that the call had been traced to a guy who lived rough in the Boston Public Garden. He’d been picked up by a squad car and was already swearing up and down that he’d simply found Lizzie’s cell phone discarded close to where he’d been sleeping.
“If this checks out, we might get lucky and find her also using the Gardens as a dormitory. Our people are doing a sweep of the place as we speak.”
But the sweep turned up nothing, and the man they picked up was well known to the local cops. He was also considered pretty harmless, as he was ripped most of the time.
“We showed Lizzie’s photo to everybody crashing in the Gardens,” Leary told me. “No one made her . . . but the fact that her phone was recovered today means that she might have been in the vicinity during the last day or two. That’s not definitive, but I’d bet good money that she dropped the phone less than twenty-four hours ago in the Gardens. This deadbeat swears he found it under a park bench . . . and as much as I’d like to nail the son of a bitch, I think he’s telling the truth.”
The next morning, the phone rang at eight a.m. I grabbed it. It was Detective Leary.
“We caught somebody using Lizzie’s bank card,” he said.
This stopped me short.
“Who was he?” I asked.
“Actually, it was a woman—another street person. The cops who work the Common know her well. They found her withdrawing two hundred dollars on Lizzie’s card at an ATM near the Haymarket T station.”
“How did she get the card?”
“I’ve just come out of an hour-long interview with her—and she keeps swearing that Lizzie gave it to her . . .”
“You’re kidding me.”
“I wish I was. According to this woman, Lizzie was sleeping rough next to her on the Common for the last two nights—and when she complained of having nothing to eat, she alleges that your daughter gave her the cash card and even wrote down the PIN number for her. The thing is, the woman showed me the piece of paper on which Lizzie supposedly scribbled the PIN number. We had it matched with a sample of her handwriting we had in our file. It checks out.”
“Maybe she coerced her out of it.”
“That thought crossed my mind too, until a woman named Josiane Thierry—I’m sure I’m pronouncing it wrong—anyway, this French tourist got approached by a woman this morning whose description very much matched Lizzie, near South Station. She said that this woman—who looked pretty dirty and haggard—came up to her, and when she discovered that she was French, she started speaking to her in her native tongue. Lizzie does speak pretty good French, doesn’t she?”
“She spent a year studying there.”
“Well, this Thierry woman was certainly impressed with her French, especially as it came from someone she described to our translator as . . . what was the word again? A clocharde . . . that’s French for . . .”
“A vagrant, a tramp.”
“That’s it, I’m afraid. Anyway, she said this woman was pretty incoherent—and simply handed her a wallet and told her she could have everything in it. Before the French woman could say anything, she ducked into the subway station and disappeared. Anyway, the French woman was a good citizen and brought the wallet to the nearest police station. Every precinct in town has been flashed Lizzie’s picture—they all know she’s the big missing persons case right now. And the sergeant behind the desk took one look at the driver’s license in the wallet and called me.”
I fell silent, trying to take all this in.
“You still there, Mrs. Buchan?”
“Just about.”
“I know this is pretty difficult stuff, but at least we have verifiable proof that Lizzie is alive, and was in Boston this morning.”
“Yes, but if she’s giving everything away . . . couldn’t that mean she’s decided to kill herself?”
“I won’t say that’s beyond the realm of possibility. But why give away her cards and money before doing it? We do know from her work colleagues that she is impulsively generous. But the fact that she’s been sleeping rough for a while . . . we can verify at least two days . . . and seems to have been in a very preoccupied, absent state, according to the Frenchwoman, convinces me that she’s suffered some sort of breakdown. Does this mean that she’s a candidate to kill herself? Perhaps. But what I know about this sort of depressed dementia is that she probably doesn’t understand exactly what she’s doing right now . . . which makes her do wayward things like crashing in Boston Common when her apartment is only a mile away, or giving her card and PIN number to that drunk.”
I tried to imagine my Lizzie among the sad, cast-off souls who haunted the public parks. And I was worried now about what she was doing for money. Oh, Lizzie, just get to a phone, give me a call, and let us rescue you.
“There is something else you should know,” Detective Leary said.
“More bad news?”
“I’m afraid so. Much as I’ve tried to hold them off—and I gather your lawyer son has been working this angle too—I’m afraid that I just got a call from the reporter working the case for The Boston Herald. His name is Joe O’Toole, and his editor doesn’t want him to sit on the Lizzie story any longer. So they’re planning to run it tomorrow—and you should expect a call from him in the next hour. When he called me to see if there were any further developments, he said that he’d be wanting a comment from either yourself or Dr. Buchan. I asked him to let me tell you that he’d be calling . . .”
“Say I refuse to answer his questions.”
“That’s your prerogative. However, in my experience, I think it’s always best to work with the press, especially since, in this case, the fact that they’ll be publishing Lizzie’s photograph means that somebody might see her on the street. So the Herald guy does have his uses . . .”
After the call I went downstairs to the basement, where Dan had his entire vintage watch collection laid out on his desk. He was polishing each timepiece—a minor domestic chore that he was using as a way of coping with the uncopable.
“That was Detective Leary,” I said, and went on to recap what he’d just told me. Dan put his polishing cloth down and stared blankly at the flat oak veneer of his desk. All he said when I explained that a Herald journalist would be calling shortly was, “Would you mind talking to him? I’ve got to get to the hospital this afternoon.”
“Well, I don’t want to speak to him either.”
“Just answer his questions as best you can.”
“Dan, I really wish you’d deal with this.”
He looked away from me and said, “I don’t think I can handle it.”
“Ok
ay,” I said. “I’ll take the call.”
Joe O’Toole rang around half an hour later. I was expecting some fast-talking hack—maybe I’ve seen too many movies—but he turned out to be a slightly hesitant man who, despite the halting conversational style, still managed to be frighteningly direct. He didn’t commiserate with me, nor offer any solace regarding Lizzie’s absence. Instead, his first question to me was, “Do you think this is the first time your daughter had an affair with a married man?”
I felt a stab of panic, but told myself that I should simply try to answer his questions directly.
“Yes, I do think that.”
“Um . . . how can you be certain?”
“Because she was always very open with me about her private life.”
“You were good friends, then?”
“Very.”
“So you knew that she was reprimanded last year by her employers when she stalked a partner in an associate bank?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I said, and I was sure I sounded scared.
“The gentleman’s name was Kleinsdorf. Your daughter was setting up some financing deal with him. They had a brief fling—and when he ended it after around a month, she phoned him day and night, and even showed up twice at his office in New York.”
“I didn’t know . . .”
“But you . . . um . . . said that she . . . um . . . was very open with you about her private life.”
I chose my words with great care.
“My daughter obviously has some very major problems.”
“Do you . . . um . . . blame yourself for these problems?”
“Are you a parent, Mr. O’Toole?”
“Yes.”
“Well, then you know that all parents feel a certain degree of guilt if their child has psychological difficulties. Lizzie was raised in a relatively stable, happy family. But depression is a malady—and that is what my daughter is suffering from: an illness that has caused her to act obsessively and . . .”
“Terminate a pregnancy?”
“That was a decision she made with Dr. McQueen . . .”
“According to McQueen, the only reason he encouraged her to have an abortion was because he felt she wasn’t psychologically stable enough to . . . um . . . ‘withstand the demands of motherhood’ . . . and that’s a direct quote . . .”
“That’s a complete lie. McQueen didn’t want to leave his wife and children. That’s why he coerced her into having the abortion.”
“Oh, so you think coercion was involved?” he asked.
This was going very, very wrong.
“I think my daughter terminated the pregnancy because McQueen asked her to . . . with the promise that they’d have a baby together after his divorce.”
“Your daughter told you that?”
“I’m just surmising . . .” I heard myself saying.
“I see . . .”
“But I know that Lizzie so wanted to have children that she’d never just terminate a pregnancy . . .”
“But under these circumstances, do you approve of your daughter having an abortion?”
“If it was the right decision for her at the time—and if it was one she made free of outside pressure—then yes, I approve.”
“Still, she never explained to you why she was terminating the pregnancy?”
“I only found out about the abortion after her disappearance.”
“So she did . . . um . . . keep a lot of secrets from you.”
“Only since she became so ill.”
He went silent for a moment or two. I could hear him scribbling away on a pad, transcribing my words. I dreaded to think how they’d be manipulated.
“Well . . . um . . . thank you for your time, Mrs. Buchan. If I have any further questions I’ll get back to you.”
I wanted to say, “Please don’t do her any harm . . .” But I stopped myself from making such a plea—knowing it could be taken down and used against us. Anyway, before I even had a chance to answer, O’Toole had hung up.
Panic, panic, and more panic. I wanted to pick up the phone and tell Dan how badly I’d responded to O’Toole’s questions, how he’d caught me completely off guard, and how I wished that my husband hadn’t passed the buck by asking me to handle the interview. But before that, I needed to attempt a little damage control. So I phoned Leary back on his cell phone and told him just how disastrously the interview had gone.
“I don’t want to sound callous,” he said, “but like I said earlier, in a missing persons case, the more sensational the story, the better chance we’ll have of getting someone to spot the person who’s vanished . . .”
“But say Lizzie really goes off the deep end when she reads this?”
“If she reads this. The fact is, given her abnormal behavior so far, she’s probably not paying much attention to the media. That’s just a supposition, of course.”
“From the way he questioned me, I’m pretty damn certain that O’Toole is going to completely twist the story to paint Lizzie as a harridan.”
“I’m sympathetic, but despite the efforts of some of our finer Republican politicians, we still have a free press in this country, and there’s not a damn thing I can do about what O’Toole writes. More to the point, if I get on the blower and ask him how he’s angling the story, he could go to his editor, who could go to my boss and have me drawn and quartered for trying to influence the press. So let’s hope the article has the desired effect and Lizzie is found quickly and the media loses immediate interest and everything blows over.”
I so wanted to believe this—although I doubted things would turn out this way.
“Your son is coming to see me tomorrow,” Leary said. “He’s not going to be pleased with the abortion stuff, is he?”
“How did you know that?”
“I’m a detective. And I know how to Google someone. Jeffrey Buchan—chairman of the Connecticut Pro-Life Coalition, leading light in the local Evangelical Free Church, father of two, married to the former Shannon Moran, co-chairperson of the Connecticut Pro-Life Coalition and someone who was arrested and released without charge last year during a march on an abortion clinic in New London.”
“I never knew that.”
“It only made the local Connecticut papers—and it was a pretty small item.”
Still, Jeff should have said something. I knew so little about my children, whom I thought I knew so well.
“Anyway, I don’t want to interfere in a family matter, but if it would be easier for you, I’m happy to call your son up now and let him know the Herald is running the story tomorrow.”
“I would appreciate that.”
“Consider it done, then.”
“Detective, one last thing: O’Toole told me about the other harassment case. You obviously knew about this.”
“Yes.”
“Then why didn’t you tell me?”
“I figured you’ve been coping with enough difficult stuff recently . . .”
I went online after the call and emailed Margy:
Hon:
Are you around?
H xxx
As soon as I sent the email, another one ricocheted back from Margy’s server: an out-of-office reply informing all correspondents:
I will be off hiding somewhere bucolic and rural this weekend and will only be returning to the office on Tuesday morning. If it’s an absolute emergency, call my assistant, Kate Shapiro, at (212) 555-0264.
It was an absolute emergency, but I still couldn’t bring myself to hunt down her assistant and then have her disrupt Margy’s weekend away from work, chemo, and all the attendant traumas of lung cancer. Part of me wanted to call a local friend—like Alice Armstrong—and tell her the entire goddamn saga and cry on her shoulder. But though I was desperate to talk about it, another part of me simply wanted to flee—to avoid all the conversations and problems and pressures that I knew would arise as soon as the story hit tomorrow’s papers. So I got up and scribbled a note to
Dan saying I’d taken myself off for the afternoon and would probably be back in the early evening. Then, placing my cell phone on the kitchen counter (I wanted a few hours where I was completely out of contact), I picked up my car keys and the Sunday New York Times from the kitchen counter, left the house, pulled my vehicle out of the driveway, and pointed it north.
An hour later—courtesy of the coastal interstate and assorted back roads—I pulled into the parking lot for Popham Beach State Park. It was around three p.m.—and as it was a wintry day in mid-April, there were only two other cars in the big lot. I turned the collar of my jacket up against the cold and walked down the path to the beach, the sand crunching under my hiking boots. The sky was the color of light cigarette ash—a small patch of blue peering out from behind the dome of clouds. But I didn’t mind the overcast gloom. Popham Beach—three uninterrupted miles of sand fronting the Atlantic—was mine. I was alone, and I had two and a half hours of daylight left for a long, mind-emptying ramble. The tide was out and, thanks to the low temperatures, the sand was hard enough to walk right down by the water’s edge. So I turned left and started heading northeast. The air was tangy with salt, there was a breeze at my back, the horizon, though dark, seemed limitless. Mom always used to say that water was the best psychiatrist going. Whenever she was depressed or simply suffering from the everyday blues (which, in Mom’s case, was, at best, a thrice-weekly event), she’d take herself down to the banks of Lake Champlain and stare out at its watery expanse until she felt calmer. I remember one Christmas Eve, a few years ago, she got into one of her black moods while chopping onions for the turkey stuffing. I’d arrived the day before. Dan was due that evening. Ditto our kids, and Dad was off hiding in his office on campus—so Mom and I were alone in the house. Suddenly her chopping became manic—and increased at such a staccato rate that I said, “Hey, take it easy there.”
Without warning, she shoved the chopping board off the kitchen counter. The diced onion went everywhere.
“Don’t you fucking tell me to take it easy. Don’t you—”
She broke off and stiffened, then seemed to have a moment of mental absence accompanied by a rapid twitching of the head. It only lasted a couple of seconds, and when it ended, it took her a moment or two to figure out where she was. The episode over, she looked at me like someone still reeling from an out-of-nowhere slap and said, “What did I just say?”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 146