Come and Find Me

by Hallie Ephron

  “There!” Diana pointed to a pair of figures walking out of the square, the only two in motion. She froze the video.

  From overhead, it was impossible to see their faces, and the man’s body shielded the other figure from view. It was hard to make out details, but it looked like a man wearing a baseball cap with his arm around someone smaller.

  Diana started the video again in slow motion and they watched as the couple neared the sidewalk.

  “Noooo!” Diana howled when the camera cut away for a close-up of the dummy, impaled on the needle-nose spire of the information kiosk. The glitch was the perfect cover.

  It felt like forever until the dummy was tugged free and at last there was finally another long shot across Copley Square. But by then, the man and his companion were gone. Time stamp: 6:26:15.

  “Where the hell did they go?” Pam whispered.

  By then it was afternoon and Eddie needed the video editing suite back. After extracting a promise that Diana and Pam wouldn’t make copies or post clips from the videos, he gave them a DVD with the footage from all six cameras. If only Diana could combine all the snippets of information into a single stream and project Ashley’s likely trajectory out of there.

  But how? The answer didn’t come to her until she was rushing to keep up with Pam’s wheelchair as it sped back across the plaza’s brickwork to her van. First she had to find a version of Copley Square in OtherWorld that was rendered approximately to scale.

  As soon as they got back to Pam’s apartment, Diana logged onto OtherWorld and began to look for a reasonably accurate version of that area of downtown Boston. Meanwhile Pam loaded the digital video files from the improv event onto her server.

  Diana entered the coordinates of a virtual Copley Square that had drawn the most visitors and had the fewest complaints about griefers. The new location rezzed around Nadia. Diana angled the view—it included all the landmarks she needed, from Trinity Church to the Copley Plaza Hotel to the Boston Public Library. Even the subway station just past the library on Boylston was there. But was it to scale?

  She angled the view up, pulling higher and higher until she could see everything on a single screen. From that far away the image was reduced to a schematic. Nadia was the single yellow dot on a rectangle that was Copley Square.

  Diana compared the shape and size of the virtual square to a Google map of the actual area. They were close enough for what she needed.

  Pam rolled her wheelchair over and stopped beside Diana, holding the little handwritten map that Diana had put together of Ashley sightings.

  “Okay. Move Nadia here”—Pam pointed to a spot in the virtual Copley Square that was about a hundred feet in front of the center entrance to Trinity Church where Ashley had stood, cell phone raised—“and set the time to 6:21:15.”

  Diana tapped at the arrow keys. She watched the yellow dot move to the location. Then she froze the image and set the clock to 6:21:15. She and Pam continued, placing Nadia in each of the places Ashley had been spotted in the Virtual Copley Square. When they were done, Diana had marked five locations and five times.

  “Okay, let’s see what we’ve got,” she said. “Connect the dots.”

  Diana ran the clock, and Nadia’s yellow dot moved from spot to spot as the seconds ticked. First the yellow dot appeared in the middle of Copley. A dashed line crept out to what would have been about fifty feet away. The second dot appeared, followed by another dashed line that continued as far as the sidewalk where a third dot appeared. At 6:25:05 the line stopped.

  “And less than a minute later, she’s vanished,” Pam said.

  “Let’s project her trajectory. How far could she have gotten?” Diana drew a circle around the final point on the sidewalk where they’d seen Ashley. “And if she started to run—” She drew a second wider circle around the first. She groaned when she saw how much territory that took in. Ashley could have gotten as far as the entrance to the T, or gone into the library.

  “Let’s assume for the moment that she didn’t tear ass out of there,” Pam said. “And she sure as hell didn’t levitate. So her most likely path would have been to continue this way . . .” She traced her finger across what would have been sidewalk to the curb. She tapped the spot. “So what was going on over here?”

  On her laptop screen, she brought up the video footage that had been taken from the office window. She froze it on a 6:21 view and pointed to the row of vehicles pulled up at the curb near that exact spot. There were two light-colored vans, one behind the other, then a police cruiser, behind that a light-colored compact car, and behind that a much larger black sedan.

  She fast-forwarded to 6:26, when Ashley vanished. The same vehicles were still parked there.

  “Can you come in closer on that black one,” Diana said.

  “You’re not going to try and read those plates,” Pam said as she zoomed in. “There’s no technology in the world that will do that.”

  “I know, I know. But”—Diana pointed to the black sedan—“back up, just a little bit. Good, good. Now zoom in even closer right here and run it very slow.”

  Images blurred as Pam ran the video back, then forward at about half speed. Two figures crept toward the black car. The rear door opened. One person got in and the other crouched by the open door. Because of the camera angle and distance, it was impossible to make out much detail.

  “We’re just assuming your sister is in the backseat,” Pam said. “But you really can’t see squat.”

  “What about that?” Diana said, pointing to a misshapen object lying on the sidewalk by the open car door.

  Pam squinted at it, then rolled her eyes at Diana. “A shadow? A puddle?”

  “It’s my hat. I know it is.”

  Chapter Twenty-One

  The printer under the table churned as, dot by dot, the freeze-frame image of the person crouched beside the black car took shape. When it was finally finished, Diana pulled the image off and stared at the dark blur on the ground.

  “I can’t believe she’d get into a car with someone she didn’t know.” Diana pinned the printout to the bulletin board over Pam’s desk and stood back. “Well, whoever he is, he didn’t come out of nowhere. Where was he before this?”

  Pam queued up videos from the four camcorders that had focused on crowd reaction and tiled the windows across her laptop screen. She ran them simultaneously at half speed, starting moments before Ashley disappeared.

  The cameras moved through the crowd, showing individuals as they watched Superman’s flight. But Diana was focusing past them.

  “There!” she and Pam said simultaneously, spotting a figure in the background, on the move. The brim of a baseball cap completely obscured his face. He wore a jacket zipped up over his chin. He seemed oblivious to the drama going on behind him as he crossed the square, moving steadily in Ashley’s direction with a sense of purpose, a shark cutting through the still crowd.

  Then he glanced up. Sunglasses obscured his eyes, but for a split second the lower part of his face was visible and Diana could just make out a mustache and beard.

  “You recognize him, don’t you?” Pam said.

  “I don’t know if I do.” Diana brought up Aaron Pritchard’s Facebook page. “What do you think?”

  Diana called Officer Gruder. She paced up and back as she explained that she’d been combing through the Spontaneous Combustion video. She paused long enough to e-mail him stills—one of the man crouched alongside the black car and the other of the man moving through the crowd toward Ashley—and then went back to pacing as she waited while he opened the files.

  “And you think your sister is inside that car, and this man—”

  “His name is Aaron Pritchard. And he’s—”

  “You recognize him from these?” he said, his voice without affect.

  Diana stared at the pictures. Neither one of them showed enough
detail to identify anyone. “He told me he was there. And she’d just dumped him, humiliated him in a bar full of patrons. He grabbed her, then he tried to make it look like she’d come back to her apartment. Did you get the surveillance video from my sister’s apartment building? Did you look at it? Did you—”

  “I examined the surveillance video,” Gruder said.

  Diana stopped pacing.

  “I can tell you this,” he went on. “Your sister drove back to her apartment on Monday and she left about twenty minutes later, right before I got there.”

  Diana dropped into a chair, and the room receded around her. “You’re sure?”

  “We matched the plate numbers.”

  “And you saw her coming into the building and leaving?” she asked.

  He didn’t say anything for a moment. “Not exactly.”

  “What do you mean, not exactly?”

  “There’s a gap.”

  Diana stood up. “A what?”

  Gruder cleared his throat. “A gap in the footage. A power surge knocked it off-line for about thirty minutes. But we see her car pulling in. And when the power comes back, the car is gone.”

  “How convenient,” Diana said. “Do you have any idea how easy it is to alter surveillance video?”

  “The outage affected several buildings in that area,” he added.

  “So all you really know is her car came back. But that doesn’t mean she was in it.”

  “What else could it mean? And it’s not just that. Her mail was picked up. She changed clothes. There’s no evidence of a crime.”

  “And that’s it? You’re done?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “Well, I’m not.” She hung up the phone.

  Pam rolled over to the bookshelves and grabbed a bottle and two glasses. She steadied the bottle of bourbon between her legs, pulled out the cork, and poured an inch of rich brown liquid into one of the glasses. She handed it to Diana.

  Diana knocked back the contents. It seared her throat, cauterizing a residue of self-pity.

  Pam refilled Diana’s glass and then filled her own. She sipped thoughtfully as Diana told her what she’d learned from Officer Gruder.

  “So you’re thinking that this man, whoever he was, has Ashley’s car, drove it over to her apartment, and tried to make it look as if she came home?”

  “I know it sounds improbable. But at least that would account for all the facts, and it explains why she hasn’t called me or returned a single one of my goddamned messages.” Diana choked up and her eyes misted over.

  Pam laid a hand on Diana’s arm. “We should eat something. Okay if I order a pizza? Salad too? Oil-and-vinegar dressing on the side? After dinner, we’ll go over everything, step-by-step, one more time.”

  Diana nodded, swallowing the hard lump in her throat.

  “Can you shut everything down for me?” Pam said, shifting her laptop to the table. She put the liquor bottle on the coffee table and rolled off toward the kitchen end of the loft.

  Diana drank the bourbon in her glass and shuddered. One by one, she closed the video windows. There was nothing more to see.

  “Pizza delivery in fifteen minutes,” Pam called out.

  Diana corked the bottle. Two shots on an empty stomach and she was already feeling it.

  Her OtherWorld session remained open. Nadia still stood frozen in the middle of Copley Square. Steady as a rock. Diana flinched when a message popped up.

  GROB: Hey? U OK? How’s your sister?

  She had no idea how to answer those two simple questions. Knowing it was pointless, she found her cell phone in her jacket pocket and, once again, called Ashley. By now she had her on speed dial.

  The line rang once. Twice. Another message popped up in OtherWorld.

  GROB: Let me know if I can help.

  The phone stopped ringing in the middle of the third ring. There was silence on the line. Had she lost the signal? She took the phone from her ear and looked at the screen. Still connected.

  Pam rolled over toward her, giving her a questioning look. She mouthed, “Your sister?”

  Diana nodded and put the phone back to her ear and her hand over her other ear to block out sounds around her. For a moment, she thought she heard something—or was that just static? Then: “Mmmm. I . . .”

  “Ashley?” Diana focused on the voice on the other end.

  “He . . . uh . . .” Then: “Ooof.” And labored breathing. “Shit.”

  “Ashley! Are you there? Are you okay?”

  “This better be ’portant,” Ashley said. She said something else, slurred and indecipherable. Then: “Whosis?”

  “It’s Diana,” Diana practically shouted into the mouthpiece as relief coursed through her. “Your sister. Remember me? Where are you?”

  No answer.

  “Ashley?” Diana shouted. “Can you hear me?”

  “Shhhhh.”

  “Do you know where you are?”

  “Looks like . . .” There was a grunt, like Ashley was trying to lift her head and look around. “. . . home.”

  “Can you wiggle your fingers?” Diana asked.

  She heard a tap-tap, like Ashley was tapping on the mouthpiece of the phone with a fingernail.

  “I’ll take that for a yes. Do you know how long you’ve been there?”

  “So freakin’ tired,” Ashley said.

  “How long have you been there?”

  “Mmmm . . . Home.”

  “Right. You’re in your apartment.”

  “Bing!”

  “Do you know what day it is?”

  “Bzzzz.” Then a longish pause. Finally, a bunch of syllables that sounded like “Saturday.”

  “Honey, it’s Tuesday.”

  “No. Uh-uh.” Ashley cleared her throat. “No way in hell.” Her voice was back. “Can’t be. What happened?”

  “You met that guy Aaron at a bar? You remember breaking up with him?”

  “I did? I did.”

  “Yeah, you did, sweetie. Then you went to an improv event. Remember Superman streaking across the sky over Copley Square?” Diana wiped away a tear. She was so relieved.

  “And Batman. ’N Lone Ranger.”

  “And probably Tinker Bell.” Diana laughed, feeling giddy.

  Ashley started to laugh too. “Ow, that hurts.”

  “And what happened after that?” Diana said. “That was four days ago.”

  “I . . .” Dead silence.

  “Ash?”

  A hiccup and a sniffle. Ashley was crying.

  “I’m on my way over there right now. I’ll be there as soon as I can. Twenty minutes, max. Do—not—go—anywhere. You got that?”

  Ashley didn’t respond.

  “You’re going to wait until I get there, right?”

  Finally Ashley mumbled something and Diana disconnected the call.

  Pam rolled over. Piled in her lap were Diana’s jacket, her laptop, backpack, and the driftwood walking stick. “Let me know what happens. Here’s my phone number.” She indicated a Post-it note that she’d stuck to the laptop case. “Or just show up. Anytime. Day or night. And if there’s anything I can do . . .”

  “Thanks. I’ll probably take you up on that.”

  “And I hope you don’t mind, but I checked your computer. Made sure that there weren’t more programs broadcasting your whereabouts. I found a key logger and trashed it too.”

  Key logger? That meant someone had been spying on her, capturing her every keystroke.

  “There might be more, but I ran out of time. Someone’s really been messing with you.”

  “Tell me about it,” Diana said. She kissed Pam on the cheek, grabbed her things, and flew out of the apartment.

  She’s back. She’s back. She’s back. Diana repeated the words,
trying to make herself believe it as she sprinted down the stairs, not bothering to wait for the elevator. She passed the pizza deliveryman on the way in. Opened the Hummer with the remote and jumped in. Started it up with a roar and peeled out onto the street.

  Unleashed by bourbon and Xanax, Diana did everything she detested in other drivers. Tailgated and flashed her lights at cars poking along in front of her. Passed on the right. Revved her engine and leaned on the horn when the car in front of her failed to accelerate the instant a light turned green. Barreled through lights that had just turned red. Earned herself more than a few emphatic honks and expressive fingers.

  Hey, bad behavior was rewarded—despite afternoon rush-hour traffic, she made what would normally have been a thirty-minute trip from the South End to the Wharf View apartments in under twenty.

  Diana screeched to a halt in a visitors’ space in front of Ashley’s apartment building and got out of the Hummer. Between the old-fashioned street lamps, the high-beam spotlights mounted on the building, and a huge yellow moon that seemed to be rising right out of the Neponset River, the parking lot felt lit up like a stage set.

  Parked right next to her was Ashley’s Mini Cooper. The side window had been left open. Diana peered in. Ashley was damned lucky that no one else had noticed the huge white purse, sitting there on the backseat in broad view, asking to be appropriated. Diana reached in and grabbed it before hurrying into the building.

  The wait for the elevator seemed longer than the drive over. On the ride up, Diana shifted Ashley’s purse to her other shoulder. What was she carrying around in there? Cinder blocks? She peered inside. A copy of Vogue accounted for some of the weight. Also a quart-size container of hand sanitizer.

  The elevator door opened and Diana trotted up the hall. She was about to knock on the apartment door when she realized that it was ajar.