Three Harlan Coben Novels

by Harlan Coben

  “What the—let go of me!”

  No. I got some leverage and pulled her toward me. It was still too dark, but my eyes were beginning to adjust. I gave another tug. She rolled onto her back. We were close enough now. I was finally able to see her face.

  It took a few moments to register. The memory was an old one, for one thing. The face, or what I could see of it, had changed. She looked different. What gave it away, what helped me recognize her, was the way her hair had fallen in front of her face during our tussle. That was almost more familiar than the features—the vulnerability of the pose, the way she now avoided eye contact. And of course, living in that house, that house I had always so closely associated with her, had kept her image in the forefront of my memory banks.

  The woman pushed her hair to the side and looked up at me. I fell back to school days, the brick building barely two hundred yards from where we now lay. Now maybe it made some sort of sense. The mystery woman had been standing in front of the house where she used to live.

  The mystery woman was Dina Levinsky.

  chapter 11

  We sat atthe kitchen table. I made tea, a Tazo blend of Chinese green I’d bought at Starbucks. It was supposed to soothe. We’d see. I handed Dina a cup.

  “Thank you, Marc.”

  I nodded and sat across from her. I had known Dina my whole life. I knew her in the way only a kid can know another kid, the way only elementary-school classmates know each other, even—bear with me here—even though I don’t think we ever really spoke to one another.

  We all have a Dina Levinsky in our past. She was the class victim, the girl so much an outcast, so often teased and abused, you wonder how she stayed sane. I never picked on her, but I stood on the sidelines plenty of times. Even if I didn’t reside in her childhood home, Dina Levinsky would still live in me. She lives in you too. Quick: Who was the most picked-on kid in your elementary school? Right, exactly, you remember. You remember their first and last name and what they looked like. You remember watching them walk home alone or sitting in the cafeteria in silence. Whatever, you remember. Dina Levinsky stays with you.

  “I hear you’re a doctor now,” Dina said to me.

  “Yes. And you?”

  “A graphic designer and artist. I have a show in the Village next month.”

  “Paintings?”

  She hesitated. “Yes.”

  “You were always a good artist,” I said.

  She cocked her head, surprised. “You noticed?”

  There was a brief pause. Then I found myself saying, “I should have done something.”

  Dina smiled. “No, I should have.”

  She looked good. No, she had not grown into a beauty like those ugly-duckling-swans you see in the movies. First off, Dina had never been ugly. She had been plain. Maybe she still was. Her features were still too narrow, but they worked better on an adult face. Her hair, so drippy in her youth, had body now.

  “Do you remember Cindy McGovern?” she asked me.

  “Sure.”

  “She tortured me more than anyone.”

  “I remember.”

  “Well, this is funny. I had an exhibit a few years back at a gallery in midtown—and Cindy shows up. She comes up to me and gives me a big hug and kiss. She wants to talk about old times, you know, like ‘Remember how dorky Mr. Lewis was?’ She’s all smiles and I swear, Marc, she didn’t remember what she’d been like. She wasn’t pretending either. She just totally blocked out how she’d treated me. I find that sometimes.”

  “Find what?”

  Dina raised the cup with two hands. “No one remembers being the bully.” She hunched over, her eyes darted about the room. I wondered about my own remembrance. Had I just been on the sidelines—or was that, too, some sort of revisionist history?

  “This is so messed up,” Dina said.

  “Being back in this house?”

  “Yeah.” She put down the cup. “I guess you want an explanation.”

  I waited.

  Her eyes started darting again. “You want to hear something bizarre?”

  “Sure.”

  “This is where I used to sit. I mean, when I was a kid. We had a rectangular table too. I always sat in the same spot. When I came in here now, I don’t know, I just naturally gravitated to this chair. I guess—I guess that’s part of the reason why I was here tonight.”

  “I’m not sure I understand.”

  “This house,” she said. “It still has a pull on me. A hold.” She leaned forward. Her eyes met mine for the first time. “You’ve heard the rumors, haven’t you? About my father and what happened here.”

  “Yes.”

  “They’re true,” she said.

  I forced myself not to wince. I had no idea what to say. I thought about the hell of school. I tried to add on to that the hell of this house. It was unfathomable.

  “He’s dead now. My father, I mean. He died six years ago.”

  I blinked and looked away.

  “I’m okay, Marc. Really. I was in therapy—well, I mean, I still am. Do you know Dr. Radio?”

  “No.”

  “That’s his real name. Stanley Radio. He’s pretty famous for the Radio Technique. I’ve been with him for years. I’m much better. I’m over the self-destructive tendencies. I’m past feeling worthless. It’s funny though. I got over it. No, I mean it. Most victims of abuse have commitment and sex issues. I never did. I’m able to be intimate, no problem. I’m married now. My husband is a great guy. It’s not happily-ever-after, but it’s pretty damn good.”

  “I’m glad,” I said, because I had no idea what else to say.

  She smiled again. “Are you superstitious, Marc?”

  “No.”

  “Me neither. Except, I don’t know, when I read about your wife and daughter, I started to wonder. About this house. Bad karma and all that. Your wife was so lovely.”

  “You knew Monica?”

  “We’d met.”

  “When?”

  Dina did not reply right away. “Are you familiar with the termtrigger ?”

  I remembered it from my medical school rotations. “You mean, in terms of psychiatry?”

  “Yes. You see, when I read about what happened here, it was a trigger. Like with an alcoholic or anorexic. You’re never fully cured. Something happens—a trigger—and you fall back into bad patterns. I started biting my nails. I started doing physical harm to myself. It was like—it was like I had to face down this house. I had to confront the past in order to defeat it.”

  “And that’s what you were doing tonight?”

  “Yes.”

  “And when I spotted you eighteen months ago?”

  “Same thing.”

  I sat back. “How often do you stop by?”

  “Once every couple of months, I guess. I park at the school lot and come through the Zucker path. But there’s more to it than that.”

  “More to what?”

  “My visits. See, this house still holds my secrets. I mean that literally.”

  “I’m not following.”

  “I keep trying to work up the courage to knock on the door again, but I can’t do it. And now I’m inside, in this kitchen, and I’m okay.” She tried to smile, as if to prove the point. “But I still don’t know if I can do it.”

  “Do what?” I asked.

  “I’m babbling.” Dina started scratching the back of her hand, hard and fast, digging her nails in and nearly breaking skin. I wanted to reach out to her, but it felt too forced. “I wrote it all down. In a journal. What happened to me. It’s still here.”

  “In the house?”

  She nodded. “I hid it.”

  “The police went through here after the murder. They searched this place pretty good.”

  “They didn’t find it,” she said. “I’m sure of it. And even if they did, it’s just an old journal. There’d be no reason for them to disturb it. Part of me wants it to stay put. It’s over and done with it, you know what I mean? Let sleepin
g dogs lie. But another part wants to let it out into the light. Like it’s a vampire and the sunshine will kill it.”

  “Where is it?” I asked.

  “In the basement. You have to stand on the dryer to get to it. It’s behind one of the ducts in the crawl space.” She glanced at the clock. She looked at me and hugged herself. “It’s getting late.”

  “Are you okay?”

  The eyes were darting again. Her breathing was suddenly uneven. “I don’t know how much longer I can stay here.”

  “Do you want to look for your journal?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Do you want me to get it for you?”

  She shook her head hard. “No.” She stood, gulping air now. “I better go now.”

  “You can always come back, Dina. Anytime you want.”

  But she wasn’t listening. She was in full panic mode and heading for the door.

  “Dina?”

  She suddenly spun toward me. “Did you love her?”

  “What?”

  “Monica. Did you love her? Or was there someone else?”

  “What are you talking about?”

  Her face drained of color. She stared at me now, backing away, petrified. “You know who shot you, don’t you, Marc?”

  I opened my mouth, but nothing came out. By the time I found my voice, Dina had turned away.

  “I’m sorry, I have to go.”

  “Wait.”

  She flung the door open and ran out. I stood by the window and watched her scurry back up toward Phelps Road. This time, I chose not to follow.

  Instead, I turned and with her words—“You know who shot you, don’t you, Marc?”—still reverberating in my ears, I sprinted to the basement door.

  All right, let me explain something here. I was not going down into the dingy, unfinished subdwelling to invade Dina’s privacy. I did not pretend to know what was best for her, what might salve her horrendous pain. Many of my psychiatry colleagues would disagree, but sometimes I wonder if the past is better left buried. I don’t have the answer, of course, and as my psychiatry colleagues would remind me, I don’t ask them for their take on the best way to handle a cleft palate. So in the end, all I know for certain is that it is not my place to decide for Dina.

  And I was not going in the basement out of curiosity about her past either. I had no interest in reading the details of Dina’s torment. In fact, I actively did not want to know them. To speak selfishly, I was creeped out plenty just knowing such horrors had occurred in the place I call home. It was already enough in my face, thank you very much. I needed to hear or read no more.

  So what exactly was I after?

  I hit the light switch. A bare bulb came on. I was putting the pieces together even as I started to descend. Dina had said several curious things. Putting aside the most dramatic for a moment, I was starting to pick up on the more subtle ones. It was a night of spontaneous behavior on my part. I decided to let the trend continue.

  First off, I remembered how Dina, when she was still the mystery woman on the sidewalk, had taken a step toward the door. I know now, as Dina herself had told me, that she’d been “trying to work up the courage to knock on the door again.”

  Again.

  Knock on the dooragain .

  The obvious implication was that Dina had, on at least one other occasion, worked up the courage to knock on my door.

  Second, Dina had told me that she had “met” Monica. I could not imagine how. Yes, Monica, too, had grown up in this town, but from all I knew of her, she might as well have grown up in a different, more opulent era. The Portman estate was on the opposite end of our rather sprawling suburb. Monica had started boarding school at a young age. No one in town knew her. I remember seeing her once at the Colony movie theater over the summer of my sophomore year in high school. I had stared. She had studiously ignored me. Monica had that whole remote-beauty thing down pat by then. When I met her years later—she actually coming on to me—the flattery turned my head. Monica had seemed so fabulous at a distance.

  So how, I wondered now, had my wealthy, remote, beautiful wife met poor, drab Dina Levinsky? The most likely answer, when you consider the “again” comment, was that Dina had knocked on the door and Monica had answered. They met then. They probably talked. Dina probably told Monica about the hidden journal.

  “You know who shot you, don’t you, Marc?”

  No, Dina. But I plan on finding out.

  I had reached the cement floor. Boxes that I would never throw away and never open were piled everywhere. I noticed, perhaps for the first time, that there were paint splatters on the floor. A large variety of hues. They’d probably been here since Dina’s time, a reminder of her sole escape.

  The washer and dryer were in the corner on the left. I moved slowly toward them in the shadowy light. I tiptoed, actually, as though I were afraid of waking Dina’s sleeping dogs. Stupid really. As I said before, I am not superstitious and even if I were, even if I believed in evil spirits and the like, there was no reason to fear angering them. My wife was dead and my daughter was missing—what else could they do to me? In fact, I should disturb them, make them act, hope they let me know what really happened to my family, to Tara.

  There it was again. Tara. Everything circled back to her eventually. I don’t know how she fitted into all this. I don’t know how her kidnapping was connected to Dina Levinsky. It probably wasn’t. But I was not turning back.

  You see, Monica never mentioned meeting Dina Levinsky.

  I found that odd. True, I am building this ridiculous theory on pure foam. But if Dina had indeed knocked on the door, if Monica had indeed opened it, you would think that my wife would have mentioned it to me at some point. She knew that Dina Levinsky had gone to school with me. Why keep her visit—or the fact that they had met—a secret?

  I hopped up on the dryer. I had to both crouch and look above me. Dust city. Spider webs were everywhere. I saw the duct and reached up. I felt around. It was difficult. There was a web of pipes, and my arm was having trouble fitting between them. It would have been much easier for a young girl with thin arms.

  Eventually I worked my hand through the copper. I slid my fingertips to the right and pushed up. Nothing. My hand crawled a few more inches over and pushed again. Something gave way.

  I pulled up my sleeve and twisted my arm in another inch or two. Two pipes pressed against my skin, but they gave enough. I was able to reach into the crawl space. I felt around, found something, pulled it into view.

  The journal.

  It was a classic school notebook with the familiar black marble cover. I opened and paged through it. The handwriting was minuscule. It reminded me of that guy in the mall who writes names on a grain of rice. Dina’s immaculate penmanship—belying, no doubt, the content—started at the very top of the sheet and ran all the way to the bottom. There were no left or right margins. Dina had used both sides of every sheet.

  I did not read it. Again that was not what I had come down for. I reached back up and put the journal back in its place. I don’t know how this would set me with the gods—if just touching it would unleash a King Tut–like curse—but again I didn’t care very much either.

  I felt around again. I knew. I don’t know how, but I just knew. Eventually my hand hit something else. My heart thumped. It felt smooth. Leather. I pulled it into view. Some dust followed. I blinked the particles out of my eyes.

  It was Monica’s DayRunner.

  I remembered when she bought it at some chic boutique in New York. Something to organize her life, she’d told me. It’d had the customary calendar and datebook. When had we bought it? I wasn’t sure. Maybe eight, nine months before she died. I tried to remember the last time I’d seen it. Nothing came to me.

  I jammed the leather planner between my knees and put the ceiling panel back in place. I grabbed the datebook and climbed down from the dryer. I considered waiting until I got upstairs into better light, but, uh-uh, no way. The datebook had
a zipper. Despite the dust it opened smoothly.

  A CD fell out and landed on the floor.

  It glittered in the low light like a jewel. I picked it up by the edges. There was no label on it. Memorex had manufactured it. “CD-R,” it said, “80 Minutes.”

  What the hell is this?

  One way to find out. I hurried upstairs and booted up my computer.

  chapter 12

  When I putthe disk into the CD drive, the following screen appeared:

  Password: _ _ _ _ _ _

  MVD

  Newark, NJ

  Six-digit password. I typed in her birthday. No go. I tried Tara’s birthday. No go. I put in our anniversary and then my birthday. I tried the code for our ATM. Nothing worked.

  I sat back. So now what?

  I debated calling Detective Regan. By now it was closing in on midnight, and even if I could reach him, what exactly would I say? “Hi, I found a CD hidden in my basement, rush over”? No. Hysterics would not work here. Better to show calm, to feign rationality. Patience was key. Think it through. I could call Regan in the morning. Nothing he could or would do tonight anyway. Sleep on it.

  Fine, but I was not about to give up quite yet. I logged on to the Internet and brought up a search engine. I typed in MVD in Newark. A listing popped up.

  “MVD—Most Valuable Detection.”

  Detection?

  There was a link to a Web site. I clicked it, and the MVD Web site came up. My eyes did a quick scan. MVD was a “group of professional private investigators” who “provided confidential services.” They offered online background checks for less than a hundred dollars. Their ads exclaimed, “Find out if that new boyfriend has a criminal record!” and “Where is your old sweetheart? Maybe she’s still pining for you!” Stuff like that. They also did more “intense, discreet investigations” for those who required such things. They were, per the top banner, a “full-service investigative entity.”

  So, I asked myself, what had Monica needed investigated?

  I picked up the phone and dialed MVD’s 800 number. A machine picked up—no surprise considering the hour—and told me how much they appreciated my call and that their office opened at nine in the morning. Okay. I’d call back then.