by Lisa Unger
“Christian Luna was born in the Bronx in 1941,” said Jake, looking at some notes he’d written in a small black book. “He went to high school in Yonkers, graduated in 1960, and joined the army. He received an honorable discharge after eighteen months. No further information on that yet. He moved to Hackettstown, New Jersey, in 1962 and worked in various locations as a millwright. Never married. One daughter, Jessie Amelia Stone. He was arrested in 1968 for DUI; did three hundred hours of community service. In 1970 he was taken into custody three times after domestic disturbance calls. He was never charged. In September of 1972, Teresa Stone took out a restraining order against him. But that’s it. After her murder, he drops off the face of the earth. Driver’s license expired in 1974; it’s never been renewed. No voter registration, no employment records, no further arrests. He doesn’t profile as someone smart or connected enough to change his identity, so either he left the country—probably Canada or Mexico, since he doesn’t have a passport on record—or he’s dead somewhere and no one ever found him.”
“What does that have to do with anything?” I asked ridiculously, still angry, still copping an attitude. Jake shrugged with a patient half-smile, oblivious to or very understanding of my shit mood.
“Look,” he said, standing and coming over to the table. He dragged a chair in front of me and straddled it, facing me. “Either you want to do this or you don’t. Did you ask me to look into this for you?”
I nodded, feeling a headache make its debut behind my left eye. He put a hand on my arm.
“Are you still sure you want to know what this means?” he said, nodding toward the papers on the table. “Because if you don’t, we can work on protecting you, work on stopping the harassment, as opposed to finding the root cause. That’s your choice, Ridley. This is your life; it’s up to you if you want to risk turning it upside down. I don’t think it’s too late to forget this ever happened.”
He was calm and level. But there was something glowing in his eyes. He was giving me a last chance to keep my illusions intact, and I think he was hoping for my sake that I would choose denial, even though it wasn’t what he wanted. Who was it who said that once the mind glimpses enlightenment, it can never go dark again?
“I want to know what’s happening. I do.”
“Okay,” he said slowly, looking at me hard. I noticed only when he released me that his grip on my arm had grown tense. “So if we’re trying to figure out who might have sent you the notes and photograph, we have to look at what we’ve got. We have this article. We have this name, Christian Luna.”
“And we have this number,” I said, picking up the note.
More silence, Jake’s face unreadable.
“Do you think it’s him?” I asked. “Do you think it’s Christian Luna doing this?”
Jake shrugged. “Well, at this point, that would be assuming a lot.”
“But you think it’s possible?”
“He seems like a likely suspect. But there are some big questions.”
“Like?”
“Like, for starters, where’s he been for the last thirty years? And what happened to Jessie? If Christian Luna killed Teresa Stone, and I’m not saying that he did, wouldn’t he know what happened to the little girl? But if he didn’t kill Teresa Stone and he didn’t kidnap Jessie…who did?”
“What about this number? Isn’t there like a reverse directory or something?”
Jake nodded. “There is a reverse directory. I plugged the number in.”
He walked over to his computer and jiggled the mouse. The black screen bloomed to life and Jake logged on to a site called netcop.com. He plugged the number into one of the fields. A name and address, along with a map, popped up. Amelia Mira, 6061½Broadway, Bronx, New York.
“Whoever is doing this to you is not a professional,” said Jake, “and not computer savvy, or we never would have been able to find this so quickly.”
“Wasn’t Jessie’s middle name Amelia?” I asked.
Jake smiled. “You’re pretty quick. Sure you never did this before?”
“Yeah. Ridley Jones, writer by day, PI by night,” I said without levity. I wasn’t in the mood for jokes. “Okay. So who is she?”
“I don’t know. I haven’t been able to come up with any information on her.”
I sighed, stood up to walk the length of the room and back again. I looked at Jake and noticed again those hands, big and square, how the bulk of his muscles strained the cuffs of his shirt. Something else was bothering me, too.
“Jake,” I said. “I don’t understand how you got all this information. How you seem to know so much about this.”
“I told you,” he said.
“Yeah, but you just seem really comfortable with it, like you’ve done it before.”
He smiled. “I always secretly wanted to be a detective. And I know a lot of cops. You hang around those guys enough, it starts to rub off.” He gave a shrug and pointed toward his notes. “Besides, this isn’t me. My buddy got all the info for you.”
Distantly something was jangling, something I didn’t want to acknowledge. I’d felt his tenderness, his kindness, I’d trusted him with this secret part of myself, felt safe enough to share my body with him. But there was something about him, even about his apartment, that made him seem transient, as though he could walk away from everything in the room, including me, and never look back. I looked around the apartment for something that grounded him, something that made him seem more real, more permanent. A photograph, an address book, anything that made him attached to the space. But it was bare, void of the detritus that makes a place home.
I remembered him saying, There are things you need to know about me. He’d said it last night and I’d quieted him and then we’d fucked each other into oblivion. We fucked away each of our pasts, the present. My body, fully electrified by lust and whatever else, was unconcerned about a future. Today again, I’d let desire wrestle all my questions to the floor.
“Ridley,” he said, walking toward me, snapping me back to the moment.
He put his hands on my shoulders and looked into my eyes. I saw it there, the thing about him that made me trust him. He put those arms around me and placed a kiss on the top of my head. And then the scent of him unleashed a chemical reaction in my brain. The Japanese believe in a fifth taste sense called Umami. When it is ignited by certain foods, it unleashes intense cravings, causing you to eat long after hunger has been sated. I was experiencing the emotional equivalent of that phenomenon. I didn’t ask him what he had meant last night.
“So…what now?” I said, moving away from him. I sank into his couch, which was about as comfortable as granite.
“Well, the way I see it, you’ve got two choices. Call the number and see who answers, see how they play it and decide how to proceed based on that. Or maybe I go up to the Bronx and hang out around this address. See what I can turn up. You give away a lot of power if you call. You let them know that they got to you, that you’re scared, curious, whatever. They have the upper hand.”
Here a kind of mental paralysis set in. To me it felt like choosing how you wanted to commit suicide. Jump off the Brooklyn Bridge or shoot yourself in the head? Slit your wrists in the tub or take a bottle of sleeping pills? Each method had its pros and cons, but in the end you still wound up dead.
“Why you?” I said after a minute. I was suddenly so exhausted it was an effort to voice the question.
He shrugged. “Why not me?”
“Do you have any experience with this kind of thing?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Do you?”
I lay down on my back and looked at him briefly, then covered my eyes with my forearm. It was my “woe is me” position.
“Just forget it,” I said, standing up suddenly. “Just forget the whole thing.” I left him sitting there and slammed the door as I left.
fourteen
I know what you’re thinking: What a baby! Here’s this beautiful man who went out of his way to hel
p me, though we barely knew each other, who was willing to go up to the Bronx (the Bronx!) to try to figure out what was happening to me. He cared about me; I could feel that he cared about me in a very real and rare way. So, naturally, I acted like a brat and stormed out of his apartment. My behavior wouldn’t have surprised anyone who knew me—just ask Zack. All I can say is that I was scared and confused and suffered some kind of core meltdown, some kind of flight response. “Get away! Get away!” my brain (or was it my heart?) commanded and I obeyed.
How many people can you claim truly care about you? I mean, not just the people in your life who are fun to hang out with, not just the people who you love and trust. But people who feel good when you are happy and successful, feel bad when you are hurt or going through a hard time, people who would walk away from their lives for a little while to help you with yours. Not many. I felt that from Jake and I wasn’t sure how to handle it. Because there’s another side to it, you know. When someone is invested in your well-being, like your parents, for example, you become responsible for them in a way. Anything you do to hurt yourself hurts them. I already felt responsible for too many people that way. You’re not really free when people care about you; not if you care about them.
I fumbled at the lock on my door and heard Jake come down the stairs. He sat on one and looked at me through the slats of the banister.
“Hey,” he said. There was a smile in his voice that told me he found me amusing. “Take it easy.”
I leaned my head against the door and smiled to myself.
“You want to go somewhere with me?” I asked him.
“Sure.”
Long before I married New York City, I had a passionate love affair with the place. I don’t remember ever wanting to live anywhere else. The gleaming buildings, the traffic music, the glamorous Manhattanites—everything about it said grown-up to me. I always imagined myself walking its streets, wildly successful and impossibly cool. My uncle Max’s apartment was the embodiment of everything I loved about New York, every dream I ever had of the city. The penthouse at the top of the Fifty-seventh Street high-rise that he’d developed. Sleek lines, crisply dressed doormen, marble floors, mirrored elevators, plush carpeted hallways. Naturally, at the time I had no concept of what such a place might cost. I figured everyone in Manhattan had a sprawling penthouse with panoramic views of the city.
I pushed through the doorway and was greeted with a solemn nod from Dutch, the doorman. He moved as if to get up to push the elevator button for me, but I lifted a friendly hand, tossed him a smile. He looked over a pair of bifocal lenses, the flat gray eyes of the retired police officer. Cool. Level. Missing nothing.
“Good evening, Miss Jones. You have your key?” He gave a long glance at Jake.
“Yes, Dutch. Thanks,” I said, my voice bouncing off the black marble floors, the cavernous ceiling.
“Your father was here earlier,” he said, looking back down at a paper laid out before him on the tall desk.
“Was he?”
I wasn’t surprised, really. We all came here at different times for our different reasons. We visited Max’s apartment like some people visit a grave, just to feel close. He’d asked that his ashes be scattered from the Brooklyn Bridge and we’d done that, all of us feeling that a terrible mistake had been made once all that was left of him floated on the air and then into the water below. It was as if we’d given him back, without keeping anything for ourselves. But it was just a moment. We can’t hold on to anyone or anything, you know. We lose everything except that which we carry within us.
Max’s lawyer kept reminding my father how much Max’s apartment was worth, how much the maintenance alone was costing him. But nearly two years after Max’s death, it sat just as he’d left it.
“Sweet digs,” said Jake as we entered the door and I punched in the alarm code: 5-6-8-3. It spelled love on a touchtone keypad; it was his code for most everything—everything that I had access to, anyway.
All you could see upon entering was a panoramic view of the city. We were on the forty-fifth floor, facing west from First Avenue. You could see to New Jersey. At night the city was a blanket of stars.
“Where are we?” asked Jake.
“This is my uncle Max’s place,” I said, flipping on the lights that low-lit the art and illuminated the shelves.
“Why are we here?”
I shrugged. “I’m not sure.”
I went into Max’s office and Jake trailed behind, looking at the gallery of photos hanging on the walls. Pictures of me, Ace, my mom and dad, my grandparents. I barely noticed them as I moved to his desk, flipped on the halogen light, and opened one of the drawers. It was empty of the files I knew were once there. I flipped open two more drawers and found them empty as well. I spun in the chair and looked at the long line of low oak drawers below towering rows of shelves filled with books and some items from Africa and the Orient that my uncle had collected on his travels, as well as more pictures of us. I could see from where I sat that one of the drawers was open just a hair. I walked over and pulled it open slowly. Empty. One by one, I checked the rest of the drawers and found that they were all empty.
I sunk into a thick brown suede couch. Where were the files?
“What’s wrong?” asked Jake, sitting beside me.
“His files are all gone,” I said.
He frowned. “Since when?”
I shook my head. I didn’t know. In all the times I’d come here before and since he died, I’d never had reason to look through his files. I’d just come to lie on his couch, smell the clothes hanging in his closet, look at all the pictures of us together. Same as my mother and father did. Same as Esme had as well. Rumor was that once upon a time they’d had a white-hot love affair, Esme and Max.
“I finally wised up,” she told me. “You can’t squeeze blood from a stone. You can try, but you do all the bleeding.”
She didn’t know I knew she was talking about Max. “I’d have done anything for that man,” she’d said. She’d told me this when I asked her if she’d ever been in love with anyone but Zack’s father, a lawyer who’d died young from a heart attack when Zack was nine.
“Once,” she said. “A lifetime ago.”
My mother said that Esme would have married Max. “But your uncle couldn’t love anyone that way. Not really. He was too…” She paused, searching for the right word. “Damaged,” she said finally. “And he was smart enough to know it. Her heart was broken but eventually she met and married Russ instead. They had Zack. It was for the best. Or it would have been, if he hadn’t died so young. Tragedy. Poor Esme.”
Poor Esme. Poor Zack. Me and my uncle Max…the heartbreakers.
“Would your father have taken them?” asked Jake. It took a second before his words made it to my brain; I was deep in thought about Esme and Max.
I looked at him. “The files? Why?”
“The doorman said he was here earlier. Didn’t you talk to him this afternoon?”
I thought about this for a second. I’d had that conversation with my father and then he’d come over here and confiscated all of Max’s files? No. More likely I’d got him thinking about Max and he just came here to sit and be with his stuff, just to visit. Besides, there were drawers and drawers of files; he’d need boxes and a dolly. I told this to Jake.
“His lawyer probably took everything, then,” said Jake.
“Yeah,” I said, realizing that was probably true. “Of course.”
“Where were you just now?” he asked, dropping an arm around my shoulder.
“I was just thinking about Max. I wish you could have met him.”
A flicker of something crossed his face here and then it was gone. I wished I hadn’t said it. It gave away too much. But he made it all right a second later.
“Yeah,” he said, kissing my forehead. “Me, too.” Then: “He must have loved you a lot, Ridley.”
I looked at him and smiled. “Why do you say that?”
“Look at this
place. It’s a shrine to you.”
“Not to me,” I said with a little laugh. “To us, to our family.”
“Sure, yeah. There are pictures of all of you. But you’re clearly the focus.”
“No,” I said. My eyes fell on the picture on his desk. It was me at three or four, riding on his shoulders, my arms wrapped around his forehead, my own head thrown back in delight. I stood and walked into the hallway and looked at the gallery of pictures there. I’d walked that hallway so many times, seen the pictures all my life. I’d stopped seeing them, stopped looking. They were beautiful prints, some black and white, some color, all professionally matted and framed in thick gold-or silver-painted wood. Looking at them now, I saw myself at virtually every stage of my life. In the bathtub as a little girl with my mom washing my hair. My first day on a bicycle, at the beach, in the snow, prom, graduation. Certainly, in many of them my family was all around me: Ace and me on Santa’s lap, my father and me on the teacups at Disney, all of us at my school play. But Jake was right. I’d never seen it.
You two had a special connection, my father had said. I knew it was true, of course. But I’d just taken it for granted, like so many things about my life. It just was.
“No wonder Ace was jealous,” I said aloud.
“Was he?” Jake asked, coming up behind me.
“Well,” I said with a sigh, looking at the picture of Ace and me going down a pool slide together, his arms around my waist. I remembered that a second after that picture was taken we knocked heads as we splashed into the water. I wailed as Ace pulled me to the edge of the pool. “It’s okay, Ridley. I’m sorry,” he told me. “Don’t cry. They’ll make us go inside.” A few seconds later, Uncle Max lifted me out of the pool. I made his blue shirt damp with my bathing suit and dripping arms and legs as he carried me inside.
“Don’t play so rough with her, champ,” he said to my brother, not harshly, not with anger. “She’s just a little girl.”