by Harlan Coben
She did not reply.
“Claire?”
“Do you remember that time we met up at Little Park by the circle?”
Myron waited a beat. “We met up there a lot, Claire.”
“At the playground. Aimee was three years old. The Good Humor truck came along. You bought her a Toasted Almond Fudge.”
“Which she hated.”
Claire smiled. “You remember?”
“I do.”
“Do you remember what I was like that day?”
He thought about it. “I don’t know what you’re trying to get at.”
“Aimee didn’t know her limits. She would try everything. She wanted to go on that high slide. There was a big ladder. She was too young for it. Or at least that’s what I thought. She was my first child. I was so afraid all the time. But I couldn’t stop her. So I let her climb the ladder, but I would stay right behind her, remember? You made a crack about it.”
He nodded.
“Before she was born, I swore I’d never be one of those overprotective parents. Swore it. But Aimee is climbing up this ladder and I’m right behind her, my hands poised behind her butt. Just in case. Just in case she slipped because wherever you are, even someplace as innocent as a playground, all a parent imagines is the worst. I kept picturing her tiny foot missing a step. I kept seeing her fingers slipping off those rails and her little body tipping back and then she’d land on her head wrong and her neck would be at a bad angle . . .”
Her voice faded away.
“So I stayed behind her. And I was ready for anything.”
Claire stopped and stared at him.
“I’d never hurt her,” Myron said.
“I know,” she said softly.
He should have felt relief at that. He didn’t. There was something in her tone, something that kept him on the hook.
“You wouldn’t harm her, I know that.” Her eyes flared up. “But you’re not blameless either.”
He had no idea what to say to that.
“Why aren’t you married?” she asked.
“What the hell does that have to do with anything?”
“You’re one of the nicest, sweetest men I know. You love kids. You’re straight. So why aren’t you married yet?”
Myron held back. Claire was in shock, he told himself. Her daughter was missing. She was just lashing out.
“I think it’s because you bring destruction, Myron. Wherever you go, people get hurt. I think that’s why you’ve never been married.”
“You think—what?—that I’m cursed?”
“No, nothing like that. But my little girl is gone.” Her voice was slow now, one weighted word at a time. “You were the last to see her. You promised that you would protect her.”
He just stood there.
“You could have told me,” she said.
“I promised—”
“Don’t,” she said, holding up her hand. “That’s no excuse. Aimee wouldn’t have ever known. You could have pulled me aside and said, ‘Look, I told Aimee that she could call me if she had a problem.’ I’d have understood that. I’d have even liked it, because then I would have still been there for her, like with the ladder. I would have been able to protect her because that’s what a parent does. A parent, Myron, not a family friend.”
He wanted to defend himself, but the arguments wouldn’t come.
“But you didn’t do that,” she went on, her words raining down on him. “Instead you promised that you wouldn’t tell her parents. Then you drove her somewhere and dropped her off, but you didn’t watch out for her like I would have. Do you understand that? You didn’t take care of my baby. And now she’s gone.”
He said nothing.
“What are you going to do about that?” she asked.
“What?”
“I asked you what you’re going to do about it.”
He opened his mouth, closed it, tried again. “I don’t know.”
“Yeah, you do.” Suddenly Claire’s eyes seemed focused and clear. “The police are going to do one of two things. I can see it already. They’re backing away. Aimee took money out of an ATM machine before she called you. So they’re either going to dismiss her as a runaway or they’re going to think you were involved. Or both. You helped her run maybe. You’re her boyfriend. Either way, she’s eighteen. They’re not going to look hard. They’re not going to find her. They’ll have other priorities.”
“What do you want me to do?”
“Find her.”
“I don’t save people. You yourself pointed that out.”
“Then you better start now. My daughter is gone because of you. I hold you accountable.”
Myron shook his head. But she was having none of it.
“You made her promise. Right here in this house. You made her promise. Now you do the same, dammit. Promise me you’ll find my baby. Promise me you’ll bring her home.”
And a moment later—the truly final what-if?—Myron did.
CHAPTER 19
Ali Wilder had finally stopped thinking long enough about Myron’s impending visit to call her editor, a man she generously referred to as Caligula.
“I just don’t get this paragraph, Ali.”
She bit back a sigh. “What about it, Craig?” Craig was the name her editor used when he introduced himself, but Ali was sure his real name was Caligula.
Before 9/11, Ali had a solid job with a major magazine in the city. After Kevin’s death, there was no way she could keep it. Erin and Jack needed her home. She took a sabbatical and then became a freelance journalist, mostly writing for magazines. At first, everyone offered her jobs. She refused them out of what she now saw as stupid pride. She hated getting the “pity” assignments. She felt above it. She now regretted that.
Caligula cleared his throat, making a production about it, and read her paragraph out loud: “The closest town is Pahrump. Picture Pahrump, rhymes with dump, as what’s left on the road if a buzzard ate Las Vegas and spit out the bad parts. Tackiness as art form. A bordello is made to look like a White Castle restaurant, which seems like a bad pun. Signs with giant cowboys compete with signs for fireworks stores, casinos, trailer parks, and beef jerky. All the cheese is American singles.”
After a meaningful pause, Caligula said, “Let’s start with the last line.”
“Uh-huh.”
“You say that the only cheese in the town is American singles?”
“Yes,” Ali said.
“Are you sure?”
“Pardon me?”
“I mean, did you go to the supermarket?”
“No.” Ali started gnawing on a fingernail. “It’s not a statement of fact. I’m trying to give you a feel for the town.”
“By writing untruths?”
Ali knew where this was going. She waited. Caligula did not disappoint.
“How do you know, Ali, they don’t have some other kind of cheese in this town? Did you check all the supermarket shelves? And even if you did, did you consider the fact that maybe someone shops in a neighboring town and brings other cheese into Pahrump? Or that maybe they order by mail service? Do you understand what I’m saying?”
Ali closed her eyes.
“We print that, about the American singles being the only cheese in town, and suddenly we get a call from the mayor and he says, ‘Hey, that’s not true. We have tons of varieties here. We have Gouda and Swiss and cheddar and provolone—’ ”
“I get the point, Craig.”
“ ‘And Roquefort and blue and mozzarella—’ ”
“Craig . . .”
“—and heck, what about cream?”
“Cream?”
“Cream cheese, for crying out loud. That’s a kind of cheese, right? Cream cheese. Even a hickville place would have cream cheese. You see?”
“Right, uh-huh.” More gnawing on the nail. “I see.”
“So that line has to go.” She could hear his pen go through it. “Now let’s talk about the line before that, the on
e about trailer parks and beef jerky.”
Caligula was short. Ali hated short editors. She used to joke about it with Kevin. Kevin had always been her first reader. His job was to tell her that whatever she had scribbled out was brilliant. Ali, like most writers, was insecure. She needed to hear his praise. Any criticism while she wrote paralyzed her. Kevin understood. So he would rave. And when she battled with her editors, especially those short of sight and stature like Caligula, Kevin always took her side.
She wondered if Myron would like her writing.
He had asked to see some of her pieces, but she’d been putting it off. The man had dated Jessica Culver, one of the top novelists in the country. Jessica Culver had been reviewed on the front page of The New York Times Book Review. Her books had been short-listed for every major literary award. And as if that weren’t enough, as if Jessica Culver didn’t have it all over Ali Wilder professionally, the woman was ridiculously gorgeous.
How could Ali possibly stack up against that?
The doorbell rang. She checked her watch. Too early for Myron.
“Craig, can I call you back?
Caligula sighed. “Fine, okay. In the meantime I’ll just tweak this a bit.”
She winced when he said that. There was an old joke about being left on a deserted island with an editor. You are starving. All you have left is a glass of orange juice. Days pass. You are near death. You are about to drink the juice when the editor grabs the glass from your hand and pees into it. You look at him, stunned. “There,” the editor says, handing you the glass. “It just needed a little tweaking.”
The bell rang again. Erin galloped down the stairs and yelled, “I’ll get it.”
Ali hung up. Erin opened the door. Ali saw her go rigid. She hurried her step.
There were two men at the door. They both held police badges.
“May I help you?” Ali said.
“Are you Ali and Erin Wilder?”
Ali’s legs went rubbery. No, this wasn’t a flashback of how she learned about Kevin. But there was still some sort of déjà vu here. She turned to her daughter. Erin’s face was white.
“I’m Livingston police detective Lance Banner. This is Kasselton detective John Greenhall.”
“What’s this about?”
“We’d like to ask you both a few questions, if we might.”
“What about?”
“Can we come in?”
“I’d like to know why you’re here first.”
Banner said. “We’d like to ask a few questions about Myron Bolitar.”
Ali nodded, trying to figure this through. She turned to her daughter. “Erin, head upstairs for a little while and let me talk to the officers, okay?”
“Actually, uh, ma’am?”
It was Banner.
“Yes?”
“The questions we want to ask,” he said, stepping through the door and motioning with his head toward Erin. “They’re for your daughter, not you.”
Myron stood in Aimee’s bedroom.
The Biel house was walking distance from his. Claire and Erik had driven ahead of him. Myron talked to Win a few minutes, asked him if he could help track down whatever the police had on both Katie Rochester and Aimee. Then he followed on foot.
When Myron entered the house, Erik was already gone.
“He’s driving around,” Claire said, leading him down the corridor. “Erik thinks if he goes to where she hangs out, he can find her.”
They stopped in front of Aimee’s door. Claire opened it.
“What are you looking for?” she asked.
“Damned if I know,” Myron said. “Did Aimee know a girl named Katie Rochester?”
“That’s the other missing girl, right?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t think so. In fact, I asked her about it, you know, when she was on the news?”
“Right.”
“Aimee said she’d seen her around but she didn’t know her. Katie went to middle school at Mount Pleasant. Aimee went to Heritage. You remember how it is.”
He did. By the time they both got to high school, their cliques were solidified.
“Do you want me to call around and ask her friends?”
“That might be helpful.”
Neither of them moved for a moment.
Claire asked, “Should I leave you alone in here?”
“For now, yeah.”
She did. She closed the door behind her. Myron looked around. He had told the truth—he didn’t have a clue what he was looking for here—but he figured that it would be a good first step. This was a teenage girl. She had to keep secrets in her room, right?
It also felt right, being here. From the moment he’d made the promise to Claire, his entire perspective began to shift. His senses felt strangely attuned. It had been a while since he’d done this—investigate—but the memory muscle jumped in and took effect. Being in the girl’s room brought it all back to him. In basketball, you need to get into the zone to do your best. Doing this kind of thing, there was a similar feel. Being here, in the victim’s room, did that. Put him in the zone.
There were two guitars in the room. Myron didn’t know anything about instruments, but one was clearly electric, the other acoustic. There was a poster of Jimi Hendrix on the wall. Guitar picks were encased in Lucite blocks. Myron read through them. They were collector’s picks. One belonged to Keith Richards—others to Nils Lofgren, Eric Clapton, Buck Dharma.
Myron almost smiled. The girl had good taste.
The computer was already on, a screen saver of a fish tank rolling by. Myron wasn’t a computer expert, but he knew enough to get started. Claire had given him Aimee’s password and told him about Erik going through the e-mail. He checked it anyway. He brought up AOL and signed on.
Yep, all the e-mail had been deleted.
He hit Windows Explorer and put her files in date order, to see what she had worked on most recently. Aimee had been writing songs. He thought about that, about this creative young woman, about where she was now. He scanned through the most recent word processing documents. Nothing special. He tried checking her downloads. There were some recent photographs. He opened them. Aimee with a bunch of school pals, he guessed. Nothing obviously special about them either, but maybe he’d have Claire take a look.
Teens, he knew, were huge with instant messaging online. From the relative calm of their computers, they had conversations with dozens of people sometimes at the same time. Myron knew plenty of parents who whined about this, but in his day, they’d spent hours tying up the phone gossiping with one another. Was IMing any worse?
He brought up her buddy list. There were at least fifty screen names like SpazaManiacJack11, MSGWatkins, and YoungThangBlaine742. Myron printed them out. He’d let Claire and Erik go through them with one of Aimee’s friends, see if there was a name that didn’t belong, that none of them knew about. It was a long shot, but it would keep them busy.
He let go of the computer mouse and started to search the old-fashioned way. The desk came first. He went through her drawers. Pens, papers, note cards, spare batteries, a smattering of computer software CDs. Nothing personal. There were several receipts from a place called Planet Music. Myron checked the guitars. They had Planet Music stickers on the back.
Big wow.
He moved to the next drawer. More nothing.
In the third drawer, Myron saw something that made him stop. He reached down and gently lifted it into view. He smiled. Protected in a plastic sleeve . . . it was Myron’s rookie basketball card. He stared at his younger self. Myron remembered the photo shoot. He had done several dumb poses—taking a jump shot, pretending to pass, the old-fashioned triple-threat position—but they’d settled for one of him bending down and dribbling. The background was an empty arena. In the picture he wore his green Boston Celtics jersey—one of maybe five times he got to wear it in his entire life. The card company had printed up several thousand before his injury. They were collector’s items now.
It was nice to know Aimee had one, though he wondered what the police might make of it.
He put it back in the drawer. His fingerprints would be on it now, but then again they would be all over the room. Didn’t matter. He pressed on. He wanted to find a diary. That was what you always saw in the movies. The girl writes a diary, and it talks about her secret boyfriend and double life and all that. That worked in fiction. It wasn’t happening for him in reality.
He hit an undergarments drawer. He felt yucky but he persevered. If she was going to hide anything, this could be the place. But there was nothing. Her tastes seemed on the wholesome side for a teenage girl. Tank tops were as bad as it got. Near the bottom, however, he found something particularly racy. He pulled it into view. There was a tag on it from a mall lingerie store called Bedroom Rendezvous. It was white, sheer, and looked like something out of a nurse fantasy. He frowned and wondered what to make of it.
There was a smattering of bobble-head dolls. An iPod with white earbuds was lounged out on the bed. He checked the tunes. She had Aimee Mann on there. He took that as a small victory. He’d given her Aimee Mann’s Lost in Space a few years back, thinking the first name might pique her interest. Now he could see that she had five of Aimee Mann’s CDs. He liked that.
There were photographs stuck onto a mirror. They were all group pictures—Aimee with a slew of girlfriends. There were two of the volleyball team, one in classic team pose, another a celebration shot taken after they’d won the counties. There were several pictures of her high school rock band, Aimee playing lead guitar. He looked at her face while she played. Her smile was heartbreaking, but what girl that age doesn’t have a heartbreaking smile?
He found her yearbook. He started paging through it. Yearbooks had come a long way since he’d graduated. For one thing, they included a DVD. Myron would watch it, he guessed, if he had the time. He looked up Katie Rochester’s entry. He’d seen that photograph before, on the news. He read about her. She’d miss hanging with Betsy and Craig and Saturday nights at the Ritz Diner. Nothing significant. He turned to Aimee Biel’s page. Aimee mentioned a whole bunch of her friends; her favorite teachers, Miss Korty and Mr. D; her volleyball coach, Mr. Grady; and all the girls on the team. She ended with, “Randy, you’ve made the past two years so special. I know we’ll be together always.”