Missing Brandy (A Fina Fitzgibbons Brooklyn Mystery Book 2)

by Susan Russo Anderson

  Chapter 14

  Henry. That Morning, The Farmhouse

  Coming into his farmhouse after the grueling drive, Henry Gruber hunched his shoulders, looking at the familiar carpet. He pulled on his nose, glad the ordeal was over. As he went from room to room checking everything on the first floor, he caught sight of himself in the dining room mirror with its heavy gilt frame. It hung over the mahogany buffet and had done since his childhood. His curls fell dangerously close to his collar. He’d have to get a haircut soon. He felt dirty from the drive, unworthy to be in his grandfather’s house. After he got the girl into her room, he’d take a shower, but the haircut would have to wait until the girl was off his hands.

  Ben came into the dining room, rubbing his hands. “Show me the roof. You keep telling me you’ll take me up there, but you don’t.”

  It was as if nothing had happened between them, no abduction, no arguments, no girl in the trunk. Ben Small was full of energy and delight, as if he were a tourist in a new world. Still … Ben’s enthusiasm gave Henry new determination.

  The farmhouse was built in the 1880s. It was set fairly close to the highway, an ominous presence people could see as they drove by. It was a white clapboard Victorian monstrosity, big and square, with a round turret in the front projecting from the third floor and a widow’s walk on the roof. Inside, the rooms were large and square with high ceilings and crown molding and narrow passageways leading to the kitchen and the back of the house. There were two stairwells, one in the back, which led to the attic and small garret where Henry planned to keep the girl. The main staircase of dark carved wood stood lofty and imposing off the grand entryway. It wound up to the second floor and to the large study and library his father built on the third floor.

  Henry pictured the lawyer sleepless and alone, in agony, pitchforks from hell pricking her conscience over her daughter. After she paid up, after she’d suffered enough—not like he’d suffered—he’d give her back her daughter, but he’d take his time. He knew how to do it. He wanted the ordeal to haunt her for the rest of her life. He knew he had to inflict deep pain, almost to the point of killing her daughter, but not quite. He wasn’t a beast, after all. He had a plan, and so far, it was working, smooth and trouble free, except for Ben. He’d do something about Ben after he settled the girl, should have done so on the scow, but there’d be another time, a better moment, one he’d carefully orchestrate, just like he’d done with the capture. He’d sit in the library and look out over the land. He felt safe in the house, his mind back to normal, wrapped in the presence of his father. He knew he could do no wrong. He knew his father would guide him.

  When he came to this country in the 1930s, Henry’s grandfather settled in Central New Jersey. He bought the house and two barns. He farmed the land and raised four children. Henry met him once, or maybe it was just his imagination. An old-world figure, his grandfather’s portrait hung in the dining room, a three-quarter pose in burnt umber and black. In a sense, the old man never left Switzerland. The likeness sat in Henry’s mind, a picture of his deepest sense of self-worth. Three of his grandfather’s children died, as did his wife, but Henry’s father carried the name and the tradition and the icy temperament forward, and he passed them on to his son.

  Ben’s bald spot gleamed in the dim light of the shut interior. “Are you going to stand there forever? Help me get her upstairs.”

  He followed Ben outside to the Audi and lifted the tarpaulin and carried the bundle through the house to the back stairwell, the only way to the fourth floor.

  Henry grunted with the load. “She’s not moving.”

  “I gave her another shot. She’ll be quiet for a while.”

  “I said no more drugs.”

  They set the girl down on the bed. Henry examined the room, small but clean with a four-poster bed between two boarded-up windows. There was a closet on one side and another door leading to a bathroom. She’d be locked in here, and he’d have to bind her, but he’d see that she was fed. When she woke up, he’d show her around the room.

  “I want to see the widow’s walk. You said we could go up there today.”

  Henry sighed. Ben was like a child, really. After pushing the canvas away from the girl’s face, he locked the room and crossed the landing.

  There, he opened another door to the attic. The room was bare and smelled of generations. Dust and cobwebs covered everything, just like his childhood spent mostly in Switzerland, here in the summertime. On one wall was an old trunk. It held his Swiss Army uniform where he’d learned discipline and a love of guns and their power. There he’d become a sharpshooter, preferring pistols to assault rifles.

  Discarded furniture covered much of the floor space, but there was a path through the middle of the room, leading to a rickety ladder and a trap door.

  “It’s up here,” Henry said. Ben followed him up the ladder, and Henry unlatched the door and pushed it open. Henry heaved himself up the last few steps and watched Ben navigate behind him. He thought again of getting rid of Ben. One swift kick to his balls, Ben would fall backward, the railing would break, and he’d plunge to his death. It would look like an accident.

  The wind was strong on the roof, but the fresh air pleasant. Henry felt it blowing through his curls and remembered pleasant times with his father on the widow’s walk, a decorative lookout on the top of the house built, his father said, as an afterthought. “On clear days, you can see the bridge in Trenton.”

  The walk was big enough to hold four or five people and had a waist-high rail on all four sides. There was a sheer drop to a steeply pitched roof below. A fall from it meant certain death. He pictured Ben’s body lying in a heap.

  Henry shook himself. He couldn’t do it, he wouldn’t. Again, the moment passed.

  That day he could see for miles, horse farms and potato farms, newly planted cornfields. But Ben wasn’t interested in scenery. The look on Ben’s face was frightening as he strode to the rail and pushed on it. It bowed and creaked.

  “That’s enough. You could plunge to your death.”

  Ben got a look on his face. “So could you.”

  Chapter 15

  Fina. Evening One, The Slipper

  After I read most of Brandy’s diary, I still couldn’t sleep, so I decided to take a walk around Packer Collegiate where the girl was last seen near the entrance.

  The dark around the building seemed different, somehow more buoyant, as if a tugboat were towing it around, and I heard the sound of wind flapping shirttails—my imagination running away, I know. I gazed up at the banner and told myself I’d come here to see if I could pick up what? Maybe I expected Brandy to emerge from the shadows; I could take her by the hand and lead her back to Trisha. I imagined Jane’s face as she realized she was trumped again. Okay, I’ll admit it, I was trying for Wonder Woman.

  As I stood there, a homeless guy emerged from someplace and wobbled on the corner of Court and Joralemon. He walked closer to me and grinned, but when I smiled back, it spooked him. I guess he didn’t understand me, and he kept backing away, shaking his head like it was a gourd filled with Mexican jumping beans.

  So it was past midnight when I got home. Denny was reading in bed, and I could tell he was into the book—something about tai chi—so I gave him a kiss, told him I had some thinking to do, and I’d be in later.

  A vague sense of urgency gathered in the pit of my stomach. It didn’t disappear even when I went down to the kitchen and fixed myself a bowl of tutti-frutti ice cream doused with maple syrup, my favorite midnight snack. But after a few bites, I stuck the bowl and spoon into the freezer. My taste buds had taken a powder. I felt the outlines of Brandy’s diary in my pocket, anxious to finish reading it, but willing myself to save it for later. I knew it would send me into a ruminative spin from which I couldn’t set myself free long enough to plan, and this I needed to do before anything else. Where was Cookie when I needed her?

  Maybe it was the maple syrup, but I couldn’t sit still, not even in my stud
y. It’s on the top floor of the Greek Revival Denny and I bought together in Vinegar Hill, a place I go when all else fails, one of those spots that holds a piece of all the great people I’ve known or the places I’ve traveled to or have lived in, real or imaginary. It’s the room I think of as home.

  I began to rearrange the books on my shelves, a sure sign that something was up. I took some Nancy Drews and shoved them in between American Lit anthologies and yearbooks, grabbed my Hilary Mantel books and stuffed them next to T.S. Eliot. As I did so, I thought I felt the bookshelf rumble beneath my fingers. I took James Joyce and squirreled him next to two years’ worth of Denny’s National Geographic magazines—that ought to shut him up for a while—and skimmed over all the other books Mom willed me.

  Tired of the book rearranging, I texted Cookie again, doubting that she’d still be up. “Got a new case …” A few minutes passed with no reply. Nothing for it but to plan.

  Tomorrow I needed to speak with Heather and Brandy’s other friends as well as Betty in the Packer Collegiate office.

  I looked at my watch. In less than seven hours, Brandy would be missing for a whole day, unless she’d been returned by then, and the chance of that happening was close to a cipher. I won’t dredge up the scary statistics of whether we’d find her alive after forty-eight hours, but luckily, NYPD’s detectives and the FBI were also involved, not just me. I hoped I wasn’t in a race with them to discover the first significant fact, something that would break the case, but what if I were? Sure, I knew a gross chunk of me wanted to shine. Was it jealousy or competitiveness? Who knows, but I hoped I was being a team player. After all, a teen’s life was at stake.

  I rearranged more books and stared at the sliver of Brooklyn Bridge visible from my window, along with the tops of trees and soffits gleaming in the gibbous moon, and don’t let me forget a few blinking stars. Did Brandy run away? Did she have help, or was she abducted, and if so, why? If she was taken, I hoped it was a kidnap for money. If her abduction was another instance of human trafficking, then she’d be very hard to trace. I felt the blood leave my extremities and rush into my stomach. In any case, Brandy was in a great deal of discomfort, and that was probably the best-case scenario. I was saved from darker thoughts by the trill of my phone.

  It was Cookie, my oldest friend. If I squeezed my lids tight enough, I could see her sitting on the rug at Packer Collegiate when we were in kindergarten together. Yes, that was right; Brandy Liam’s school and our alma mater were the same. But beyond Packer, Cookie and I had been through a lifetime already—Dad’s disappearance, 9/11, Cookie’s recent brush with death in our last case together, Mom’s death, and the trial that absolved her of all culpability in the Heights Federal fraud and bank closure.

  I told Cookie about Brandy’s disappearance, and right away she was on it, familiar like me with the territory. Cookie studies at Columbia’s school of journalism and is a freelance journalist for the local papers, so she has contacts galore. After I told her what I knew, she was going to call her friends at the Eagle and the Times and ask them to run articles about Brandy’s disappearance and probable abduction, offering a reward for information leading to her safe and sound return. She told me the Eagle would be on it immediately with an online homepage post. I told her I wanted to talk to Brandy’s friends myself, but asked if she could cover the neighborhood and the school office and suggested we meet at Teresa’s tomorrow for a late breakfast.

  Then I pulled Brandy’s diary out, thumbed through a few pages, hoping for a more thorough read. No sooner had I settled in than I felt the familiar thud of Mr. Baggins, part British shorthair and all nose, as he jumped into my lap. He purred along as I turned the pages, mauling Brandy’s diary with one paw placed directly over the words I happened to be reading. He looked up at me, and I swear he was grinning, but then he’s a Cheshire straight from Alice’s world.

  “What is it, Mr. B?”

  He pawed the diary again, this time pummeling it from my hands. It fell with a thud to the floor. I won’t say I’m superstitious, but someone was trying to tell me something. So I grabbed my purse and ran down the stairs, closing the door softly behind me.

  I drove back to the Heights and turned onto Joralemon, looking for a hydrant, the only decent place to park near Packer Collegiate. There was Jumping Bean shaking his head outside the corner deli as I locked the car. Best when I’m like this to let my body lead me, so I did. I walked back and forth on the street past Brandy’s school, looking around. Nothing. I walked around Hicks and back to Joralemon. Nothing. But my brain was yelling at me, and my toes and fingers were tingling.

  When I got close to the homeless guy, I stepped off the curb to avoid spooking him. My shoes rocked back and forth a little on the sewer grill. One foot had landed on something soft. Pulling on a pair of latex gloves, I bent down and retrieved a sheepskin slipper, the kind teens wear twenty-four seven. This one had tire marks across the top and other street grime caked on the sole—I shuddered to be more specific than that—but I was grateful to the local rat for not slinking away with it.

  With the slipper sitting on the passenger seat and lending its peculiar street odor to the faint scent of Mom’s perfume, I turned her old Beretta around and headed back to Columbia Heights.

  “Sorry for bothering you,” I said to a squinting Trisha Liam, who opened the door after a few knocks.

  “Not sleeping anyway.” She gestured me inside.

  I showed her the slipper.

  “Where did you find that? It’s Brandy’s, I know it is.” She reached out for it, eyes tearing up, but I told her I couldn’t let her have it.

  “Just let me touch it.”

  “Afraid not.” I explained about the NYPD investigator in charge of the case and how she’d have my head. All the same, I was feeling bad for Trisha, really bad, so I handed it to her, figuring her prints would be on anything belonging to her daughter anyway. I watched as she held it to her heart.

  “Do you think anything … has happened to her? Will we find her? Please, will we find her?”

  “Of course we will. We’re all working hard, and a good angel or somebody made sure I wouldn’t sleep until I found Brandy’s slipper. Forensics guys are fantastic. You’d be surprised what they’ll pick up. We’ll find her all right.” I’m such a liar.

  “They call them slip-ons. They all wear them,” she said. “Brandy’s got to be just like her friends.”

  “Of course.”

  “She’s already in a size six, and to tell you the truth, I haven’t a clue what she was wearing this morning.”

  “Yesterday morning,” I reminded her and bit my lip hard for being such a crass piece of humanity.

  We were standing in the hallway, and Trisha snapped on the chandelier. It took my eyes a second or so to adjust. I could feel them like raw orbs straining against the light as if I’d been swimming in a chlorine pool and suddenly come up for air. I peered inside the slipper and nodded at a label with the size. “U.S. 6.”

  We looked in Brandy’s closet, underneath the bed, and around the room, but there were no slippers. I asked Trisha to loan me a brush or comb belonging to her daughter and a plastic bag. “You plan on working today?”

  She nodded. “I’ve got to. It might not look that way, but I’m a single mom. I’m all Brandy’s got, and I’m summing up a three-week court case. The client wouldn’t understand if I no-showed.”

  “And your housekeeper, what time will she arrive?”

  “She’s usually here by seven. Helps get Brandy’s lunch …” She stopped talking and clutched her chest.

  “I’ll be here then. I want to talk with her.”

  “But I’ll be preparing.”

  “Of course.”

  What kind of a mother was Trisha Liam? Her daughter was missing almost twenty-four hours, and she thought of work. Then I wondered how far I’d fallen from understanding. I looked at the Liam house. Whatever she might be worth, however comfortable her husband left her and her daughter, s
till, she had all the expenses and the weight of Brandy’s future on her shoulders.

  I texted Jane, and per her return text instructions, dropped Brandy’s slipper and comb off at the precinct’s front desk. I’d just started for home when my phone rang.

  “How the hell did you find it? I’ve had my whole team scouring the streets around the school, and they came up with nothing. Nothing. You’re not making us look good.”

  “How many cases you working right now?” I asked.

  “Five. I take your point, but whatever possessed you?”

  “Long story,” I said. “I was about to reread Brandy’s diary when—”

  “Where did you get that?”

  “Found it in her room.”

  “And you took it upon yourself to lift it from the scene.”

  “What scene? Listen, Templeton, calm down. I can’t help it if I’m good. Besides, if there are rules I don’t know about, how can I keep them? Tell you what, when I’m done with it, you can have it.”

  My phone blanked. Dropped call? I love it when she gets angry.

  Chapter 16

  Fina. Evening One, In Bed

  It was after three o’clock when I finally opened the window on my side and crawled into bed. The night was cool, and the breeze from the ocean felt good against my cheeks. The fog had begun to lift. I felt Denny’s tight body next to mine. It too had begun to lift. He stirred, hiked up on his elbow, and I felt his eyes on me, his warm hands stroking my temples. He planted a slow kiss on my ear and whispered, “How was it?”