by Jason Pinter
"That's right."
"That's why you called me."
Henry stayed silent, looked at Amanda, his eyes full of remorse. It was genuine. "I've been an asshole. I'm not apologizing again, we both know that's over and done with. But this is important. It's a boy's life,
Amanda, and I didn't know who else I could turn to or trust. I still trust you."
"I don't know if I trust you."
"I'm not asking you to trust me. I'm asking you to help me for the sake of someone else."
Amanda was struck by the tone of his voice, the sense of coldness. But she knew it wasn't meant to hurt her. In a way it was meant to protect her.
"I'm not asking you to take me back, or anything like that. I know you don't want to. I'm asking you to help because you're the only person I know who can do this, who has access to those records. The only person who would do this. Something is wrong with this story, and I need to know what." He added, "For Danny Linwood's sake."
Amanda sat for a moment. A cool breeze whipped through the park. She watched a smiling couple holding hands, eating sandwiches just a few feet from them, as though their whole lives existed in this small world where problems were as light as the leaves. She thought about her life, what it was like before and after Henry. How there didn't seem to be enough of it lived.
"I can get you those records," she said. "But that's all
I'll do. I'll help you with whatever information you need in regard to this Oliveira girl, but I'm not going to ask for anything in return. And I don't even want you to offer."
"I won't," he said, though the words seemed hard for him to say.
Amanda stood up. Smoothed out her skirt. Henry stood as well.
"Michelle Oliveira?" Henry nodded. Amanda clutched her purse, felt the sharp edges of her keys. "I'll call you later when I get the files. One thing, I'll only give them to you in person. I could get in deep doo-doo if my supervisor knows I'm doing this, so I'll contact you discreetly.
Don't send me any e-mails, don't call or text message. I don't even want to see a carrier pigeon. You might trust me, but I sure as hell don't trust Verizon."
"That's a deal."
"Then I'll call you," she said. Amanda turned around to leave.
"Hey, Amanda," Henry said.
"Yeah?"
"It was good to see you."
"I'll call you," she said, glad the smile on her face couldn't be seen as she walked away.
12
Sometimes all you can do is wait. That's what I did back at the office while waiting to hear from Amanda. I went over the Daniel Linwood transcript half a dozen times, word by word, line by line, to make sure I hadn't missed anything else. I listened to the tape, tried to hear the cadences in his voice, catch a sense of apprehension, a feeling that he was holding back. And though I strained hard to hear it to the point where I tried to convince myself, it simply wasn't there. Daniel Linwood had laid it all out.
At least the way he remembered it. Or didn't remember.
Those words stuck in my head. Brothers. Such a small thing, Danny himself hadn't even noticed it. When a person misspeaks, they often correct themselves. If not, they won't make the mistake again. Not Danny Linwood.
At about five o'clock, when I was beginning to think it wasn't coming, that tomorrow would be a repeat of today,
I got an e-mail. The subject heading read "Marion Crane."
Right away I knew who it was. It was tough to hold back a smile.
When I'd been on the run for my life a few years ago,
Amanda and I had stopped at a hole-in-the-wall hotel to plan our next move. She signed the ledger using the same name, Marion Crane. The Janet Leigh role from Hitchcock's Psycho. Marion Crane, the girl who would have done anything, including stealing thousands of dollars, just for a better life.
The e-mail was brief.
Battery Park City. Starbucks. Bring money to buy me a double latte and maybe a scone if I'm feeling adventurous.
I wondered why the hell she had to pick Battery Park
City of all places. Battery Park was at the southernmost tip of NewYork City, but was barely in NewYork City. I'd been there a few times, reporting on a new housing development that was alleged to be one of the city's first "green" buildings, but a little digging turned up that the solar panels alleged to power thirty percent of the building's generator were nothing more than fancy aluminum, and the developer had pocketed a few hundred grand from snookered tenants.
Since I wasn't calling the shots, I hopped on the 4 train and rode it to the Bowling Green stop. When I got off, I immediately saw two Starbucks (or was it Starbuckses?
Starbucksi?) across the street from each other. I walked into the first one, didn't see Amanda, and sheepishly left.
Battery Park had a stunning view of the Hudson River, the grand Statue of Liberty easily visible from the shore.
Because of its proximity to the ocean, the temperature in
Battery Park was ten to fifteen degrees cooler than the rest of Manhattan, so in August it was still a brisk sixty-five.
I was glad I'd decided to wear a sport jacket.
The second Starbucks thankfully was the right one, though if I came up empty I didn't doubt there was another one right around the corner, or even inside the restroom.
Amanda was sitting by a back table reading a discarded copy of the Dispatch. Next to her purse was a small tote bag.
Inside it I could see a thick folder with stark white printouts spilling out. She saw me coming and put down the paper. I pulled out the chair to sit down, but Amanda shook her head.
"Uh-uh." I stood there, confused. "Double latte. One sugar."
"Scone?"
"Nope. Gotta watch my girlish figure."
I wanted to tell her she needed to watch her figure like
Britney needed another mouth to feed, but decided against it.
I nodded, bought the drink, fixed it to her specifications, set it down on the table and sat down.
"The Dispatch? " I said, gesturing to the discarded paper. "Really?"
"It's for show, stupid. I'm here incognito."
"Right. So that's it? The Oliveira file?" I said, gesturing to the tote bag. She sipped her drink, nodded.
"I feel like we're investigating Watergate or something," she replied. "Passing folders under the table."
"If that were the case, I could think of a few places a little less conspicuous than Starbucks."
"That why we're in Battery Park. You think either of us knows a soul down here? Besides, I thought you loved the
Woodward and Bernstein stuff."
"I do, but Robert Redford is a little too old and leathery to play me. And Dustin Hoffman's too short for you."
Amanda looked around exaggeratedly. She eyed the barista, squinted her eyes. I had no idea what in the hell she was doing. It was as if she was expecting a rogue team of FBI agents to come out of nowhere and load her in the back of a van. Sadly, it wasn't even two years ago when two FBI agents did break into her house and shoot someone in her bedroom.
Maybe that's what made it funnier.
She pressed her foot up against the tote bag underneath the table. Then she kicked it toward me. Then she gestured at the bag before taking a long, slow sip of her latte.
"Oh, is that for me?"
She eyed me contemptuously. "Oh, for Christ's sake, open the damn thing."
I picked up the tote and pulled out the folder. The top sheet was Michelle Oliveira's birth certificate. She was born on November 15, 1991. That would make her sixteen today. Michelle Oliveira's parents were Carlos and
Jennifer Oliveira. At the time of the abduction, the family resided in Meriden, Connecticut. According to tax records,
Carlos worked as a housepainter, and Jennifer had worked in a variety of temp jobs over the years. Secretary to an orthodontist. Court stenographer. Doctor's office receptionist. Telemarketer.
Together, the Oliveiras' income never exceeded thirtyfour-thousand dollars
a year. They had two other children, a boy, Juan, now fourteen, and a girl, Josephine, twelve.
Juan was a high school freshman, Josephine was just about to begin the seventh grade. Their sister Michelle was kidnapped on March 23, 1997, not yet six years old. She returned on February 16, 2001, nearly four years later.
According to the report, Michelle had spent that afternoon at the home of Patrick and Lynette Lowe. Michelle was in grade school with their daughter Iris, and according to interviews with the Lowes, and confirmed by the
Oliveiras, Michelle often went to the Lowes' home after school to play. She would often stay at the Lowes' from approximately three-thirty to six, at which time she would come home to get ready for dinner. As the Lowes lived just four houses down on the same block as the Oliveiras, the families admitted she walked home on most occasions unsupervised. On March 23 she left the Lowes' home at approximately a quarter to six. At six-fifteen Jennifer
Oliveira called Lynette Lowe to ask when Michelle would be home. When Lynette Lowe informed Jennifer that
Michelle had left half an hour earlier, and Josephine could not find Michelle on their block, she called the police.
The Meriden PD found no trace of Michelle Oliveira.
They compared tire tracks found on Warren Street to all vehicles registered to inhabitants of the block. All vehicles checked out. Nobody had seen Michelle after she left the
Lowes. No neighbor glimpsed the girl. Nobody came forward. Michelle Oliveira had simply vanished.
The next page contained her social security number, employment records, known addresses. And her parents'.
I looked at Amanda. She was absently sipping her coffee while eyeing me.
"Did you read this already?" I asked. She nodded.
I continued reading. In 2003, two years after Michelle's reappearance, the Oliveiras moved from Meriden to
Westport. Westport, I knew, was a much more affluent part of Connecticut. Records indicated that the Oliveiras were able to sell their home in Meriden for nearly
$800,000, nearly triple what they'd paid for it ten years earlier. That was quite a profit for a family who couldn't afford to do much refurbishing.
"What are you thinking?" Amanda asked.
"I'm thinking I'm throwing away money by renting my apartment."
"Seriously," she said. "As soon as I can afford it, I'm leaving Darcy and buying a studio."
"Good luck coming up with half a million dollars," I replied.
"No way."
"You want three hundred and fifty square feet in Manhattan? Damn right you'll need half a mil." Amanda shook her head, obviously realizing that living for free with
Darcy wasn't so bad.
"One thing's for sure," I said. "The Oliveiras couldn't wait to get the heck out of Meriden after Michelle turned up."
"Can you really blame them? I mean, their daughter disappears, do you really want to hang around and subject her to those memories? Subject your other children to that? I'd want to start my life over, that's for sure."
"I guess you're right," I said "God, that has to be every parent's worst nightmare come true."
I thumbed through the papers and the rest of the police reports, paying particular attention to the reports from the day Michelle disappeared and the day she returned. The police work had been thorough. More than thirty neighbors and friends had been interviewed, as well as all of
Michelle's classmates, teachers and her private music instructor, which the Oliveiras admitted cost nearly a hundred dollars a session. In the report, Carlos and
Jennifer acknowledged the expense, stating their daughter was a gifted violinist and they simply wanted to give her the best chance to "make it."
"Michelle's currently enrolled at Juilliard," Amanda said. "Full scholarship."
"You don't say. I guess Michelle did make it. That's called beating the odds."
I found an interview the police had conducted with
Michelle's violin teacher, a Ms. Delilah Lancaster. Ms. Lancaster was scheduled for her weekly lesson with
Michelle the evening she disappeared. At eight o'clock she showed up, unaware of the situation. According to the report, Ms. Lancaster had seen the police, got spooked, tried to run away, which led to her questioning and being a part of the police report. Delilah had confirmed their relationship, mentioning that Michelle had recently begun working through a book called Solo Pieces for the Inter- mediate Violinist. They had just begun lessons on George
Frideric Handel's "Air," from the Water Music. She had just completed works by Vivaldi and Mendelssohn.
Four years later, when Michelle returned, the first person she asked to speak to was Delilah Lancaster. According to the Oliveiras, nobody was closer to Michelle than Delilah Lancaster. The police ran a cursory investigation into the woman on the chance they'd find some sort of impropriety. They uncovered dozens of e-mail correspondences between the two and many phone calls to and from each other's homes, but they seemed to be more of the gifted student/dedicated teacher variety. Lancaster taught Michelle Bach and Mozart and Vivaldi, fingerboards and upper bouts. She was clearly a gifted student, but nothing seemed out of the ordinary.
Carlos Oliveira remarked to the Meriden Record-
Journal after Michelle's reappearance that socially, his daughter seemed to have withdrawn. She was unsure of herself, timid.
"She spends hours, I mean, hours a day locked in that room of hers, fiddling with the violin as if it's all she's got in the world. We try to push her to go outside, play like a normal girl, but all she cares about are those strings. She used to have so many friends. She was such a popular girl.
At least she's safe now, that's what matters most."
"The music teacher," I said. "I think I'll give Ms.
Delilah a ring. It seems like she was the closest person to
Michelle Oliveira, and spoke to her the most after she came back. All Michelle had left was her violin. If anybody knows anything it might be the music teacher."
I held up the folder. "Can I keep these?"
"Sure," Amanda said. "But I swear, Henry, my career is on the line."
"No worries. I'll take good care of this."
She looked at me, as if debating whether I could be trusted. Finally Amanda stood up. She downed the rest of her coffee, flung it at the garbage. It rattled around and fell in.
"Keep me in the loop, will you? It sickens me to think this has happened to more than one child. That it even happened to one is just…God, horrible."
"You know I will. I know what this means to you. I hope you know what it means to me. And not just from a professional perspective."
"I know." Amanda gathered her purse and began to walk out of the store.
"That's it?"
She looked at me, her eyes a mixture of hurt and confusion.
"That's it," she said. "For now, that's all I can take."
Then Amanda left.
I watched her until the door had closed and Amanda had rounded the corner. It took a moment to regain focus.
I decided the next step was to call Delilah Lancaster. It was clear she and Michelle were very close, to the point where Delilah was contacted before any of Michelle's school friends. I figured there was a reason for that. If the violin was all Michelle had left, I needed to speak to the person who probably influenced her more than any.
I sat in the store for another few minutes, then gathered up the folder and left. I hoped that somewhere, Daniel
Linwood and Michelle Oliveira knew two people were going to fight for them.
13
The next morning I went to Penn Station first thing and bought a ticket on the 148 regional Amtrak en route to
Meriden, Connecticut. Delilah Lancaster was scheduled to meet me. I'd spent the previous night going over her comments, trying to gain a better understanding of her relationship with Michelle Oliveira.
I took a copy of the file on Michelle Oliveira, a copy of that morning's Gazette and a large
iced coffee that promptly spilled all over my linen jacket when a kind man with a Prada briefcase elbowed me in the head. I went to the bathroom compartment on the train to clean it, and though I was able to avoid stepping in the unidentified brown goop on the floor, I left with a softball-size blotch on my chest. I debated finding Prada man and throwing him onto the tracks, but I needed my composure. Not to mention I needed to stay out of jail.
When the train pulled out of the station, I cracked open the Gazette and read the story Jack had written for this edition. The piece focused on the looming gentrification of Harlem, how real estate prices were soaring, speculative investors, many of them foreign, were snapping up town houses and condos like they were Junior Mints. The average two-bedroom had nearly doubled in price over the past decade. Foreign investors, emboldened by the weak dollar, were monopolizing the market. The prices Jack quoted quickly confirmed that if I ever desired to buy in
New York rather than rent, I'd either have to win the lottery or find a sugar mama.
The reporting was solid, one of Jack's better recent efforts. Too many of his recent articles felt slapped together, rushed, pieces he forced past Evelyn and the copy editors simply because he was the man. Had the stories been written by a younger reporter who hadn't yet cut his teeth, won major awards and written a shelfful of bestsellers, many of them would have been spiked. The old man needed an intervention. The ink of the newsroom was still the blood that pumped through his veins, but he was a train slowly careening off the tracks. Without some straightening out, the impending crash would permanently derail his career.
The train took about an hour and forty-five minutes to reach Meriden. I finished the Gazette and spent a good twenty minutes staring at an advertisement featuring a man quizzically holding an empty bottle of water before realizing it was hawking Viagra. When the train came to a stop, I noticed a man with a friar's patch of baldness jotting down the ad's
Web site before hustling off the train. One new customer.
I disembarked the train and took in the city of Meriden.
I hadn't spent much time in Connecticut, only having traveled here once to interview a fast-food worker who'd witnessed a murder while on vacation in NYC. A lot of