by Lisa Unger
“Good question,” she said.
She looked at the clock on the wall. “Okay, champ, time to brush your teeth and get your coat on. We gotta get you to school.”
She cleared his bowl and her own off the round beechwood table and brought them over to the sink, rinsed them and stuck them in the dishwasher. The sky outside was a sad gray, contemplating snow. She placed the milk in the refrigerator, which was so totally papered with Benji’s drawings and cards and reports that she could almost forget its hideous avocado color. With her toe, she pressed down a piece of one of the Formica tiles that was peeling up. The place needed serious work but she lacked the time and the inclination to take care of it. That was the only thing she missed about her marriage to Dylan: a live-in handyman who didn’t charge. Well, that and the regular sex.
“Mom? Are you going to let me take the bus ever?” asked Benji, draining the last of his orange juice. “Dad says I should start taking the bus.”
“We’ll see. Let’s just get through today.”
“That’s what you always say.”
She patted him on the butt. “Teeth. Coat. Five minutes.” He marched off like a good little soldier.
That was the big battle. The school bus. She wasn’t ready for that. The bullies, the unsupervised time at the bus stop. The fact that he’d have to take a different bus to get to her mother’s place on the days she couldn’t be home for him. She liked to drive him, have those last twenty minutes with him in the car and the peace of mind of seeing him enter the double wooden doors. She knew he was safe for the day, or at least as safe as she could make him. If he took the bus, all day she’d have to wonder. After all, they lived in New York City, lots of variables. Too many for the mind of a mother and a cop. Paranoid, that’s what Dylan called it. He could think what he wanted.
From their apartment on the Upper West Side, it only took about fifteen minutes without traffic to get to Riverdale where Benjamin attended a private academy that cost Jesamyn a small fortune. But because of her grandfathered apartment, a three-bedroom that cost only an unheard of $850 a month, some help from her mother, and child support from Dylan, she was able to swing it. It was the one thing on which she and Dylan were able to agree, that Benjamin should have the very best education no matter what other sacrifices they all had to make. And he was thriving there; he loved it. That was priceless to her.
She wound up Riverside Drive and eventually merged onto the Henry Hudson, getting off at the Fieldston exit. She passed through oak-lined streets with multimillion-dollar homes nestled on perfectly manicured lawns. The leaves were turning and the sun, which had decided to shine on Riverdale at least, created a brilliant light show of amber, rust, and green.
“My friend Stone lives in that house,” said Benji. “He has a pool and a hot tub.”
“Wow,” said Jesamyn. Stone, she thought. What kind of name was that for a kid? The house looked like a monastery to her with a stone façade and a large varnished wooden door with a wrought iron knocker in its center, a barrel-tiled roof. Two million, at least. At least.
“Is he nice?” she asked, having a hard time imagining that Stone was not a spoiled brat. But that was just her bias. “That’s more important than the things he has, I think.”
“I know, Mom,” said Ben, rolling his eyes. He’d heard the lecture a hundred times before. “Yes, he’s nice. Very nice. He also has a bed shaped like a race car.”
When she pulled up the winding drive toward the large brick buildings, through the expansive grounds, past the soccer field and the giant library, she was, as always, washed with gratitude that she had been able to give that to her son. She felt like he could go on to be anything he wanted from this place.
“Okay, see ya,” said Ben, undoing his seat belt and grabbing his Lord of the Rings backpack from the floor in front of him.
“Don’t forget, Grandma will pick you up after soccer and I’ll see you for dinner.”
“I won’t forget,” he said as she hugged him and kissed his face.
“I love you, Benji,” she said.
“I love you,” he said with a wide smile.
She watched as he met up with a couple of other kids on the steps and ran into the school. She caught sight of another mom, standing on the sidewalk gazing after a little girl wistfully. They exchanged a look and knew each other’s hearts too well.
The traffic was bumper to bumper down the Henry Hudson and it took her nearly an hour to make it to the precinct where Mount was waiting for her by the Caprice. She parked her car in the lot. Some of the guys were playing a pick-up game of basketball in the playground next door. They mock catcalled and whistled at her as she waited to cross the street. She gave them the finger, smiled at their whooping response, and jogged over to Mount. He looked annoyed, like he’d been waiting.
“What?” she said. “Did you sleep here?”
“Actually, I did.”
She shook her head and patted him on the elbow. “You really need to get a life,” she said. “Or at least a date every now and then. You live like a monk.”
“Tell me about it.”
Mount was kind of cute in spite of his size. He had thick dark hair, with equally dark eyes that communicated his kindness and depth. But there was sadness there, too. She would call him intense, smoldering even. But he was just so awkward; she figured women might find it kind of a turn-off. Maybe if he were a basketball player making millions, he’d have more luck with women. But he was a cop. A really big cop.
“You just need to find the right kind of woman,” she advised as he bounced her around the Caprice trying to get himself in.
“And what kind of woman is that precisely? Someone who can see beyond my physical deformities? Is that what you mean?”
“Oh, stop feeling sorry for yourself. You’re not deformed. You’re tall. There’s a difference. You should go on the Internet. Maybe there’s a website, like ‘I dig tall guys dot com.’ ”
“That’s very funny. And I mean hilarious.”
“Can we stop at Starbucks?”
He sighed heavily. “This is New York City and you want to stop at a chain. Support the independents. Resist the homogenization of America.”
“Can you pull over, please?”
He pulled in front of Veselka, a neighborhood Ukrainian restaurant that had become an East Village institution, and she popped in for coffee for both of them, as was their ritual when they worked mornings. She had only brought up Starbucks to aggravate him.
The downtown offices of Lily’s bank were all oak paneling and navy blue carpets, ecru walls. Everything about it said staid, reliable, and discreet. The phones rang constantly in a low electronic hum, the receptionist answering in a mellow, barely audible voice. The lighting was pleasant, having a slightly pinkish hue-not the harsh white typical of fluorescents.
“I should have been a banker,” said Jesamyn, flipping through the pages of Money magazine. She sat on a soft leather chair so deep her feet barely touched the floor. Matt sat on a love seat near her, taking up the entire thing.
“Why’s that?”
“I don’t know. Less stress. More money.”
“Yeah, but you’d have to be nice.”
“Hmm. That would be hard.”
They both looked up as they heard a door push open and a fit-looking young man entered the room.
“Detectives Breslow and Stenopolis?” he said. “I’m Brian Davis, head of branch security.”
Jesamyn smiled to see the young man’s eyes go wide as Matt stood to his full height.
“Whoa,” Davis said. “Wow. I hope you play basketball.”
Matt shook his hand. “Only when I’m not rescuing kittens from trees.”
“Sorry,” he answered with an embarrassed smile. “You must get stupid comments like that all the time.”
Davis shook Jesamyn’s hand and held onto it a second longer than he needed to. Jesamyn found herself forced to look into a set of warm blue eyes set in relief against ink blac
k hair and paper pale skin. In a millisecond, she’d processed the expensive cut of his charcoal suit, the lack of a wedding ring on his left hand, the scent of his cologne. Cute, she thought, and smiled.
“No offense,” said Matt, which was usually what he said right before he offended someone. “You look a little young to be the head of branch security.”
“Well, thanks, I guess,” he said, seemingly unperturbed. “I came to the bank after a few years in the FBI small-business investigation division. So I guess I skipped some rungs on the ladder.”
Jesamyn found herself wondering how old that meant he was but couldn’t ask without it sounding like she was flirting so she kept her mouth shut. Davis escorted them through a door, down a long gray hallway, and finally to a conference room. More oak wainscoting and navy carpets. The lights in the room were a dim orange. A flat-screen monitor hung on the far wall and the highly varnished table was surrounded by very ergonomic-looking black chairs. Very posh and high tech at the same time.
“Have a seat,” he said. “Can I get you anything?”
“No, thanks,” said Matt. “We just really need to look at that tape. The information is going to be vital to our investigation.”
He nodded quickly and moved over to the screen without another word. He punched a few buttons on a remote and the monitor came to life.
The bank was crowded that day, a Friday afternoon. People depositing checks and getting cash for the weekend were dressed for a coldish October afternoon with light jackets, some with hats. Jesamyn was scanning the faces in the crown for the face that had become so familiar to her that she was seeing it in her dreams. A youngish face-pretty, sweet, an open honesty to it.
“Right here,” said Davis, hitting the pause button. “Naturally, our fraud department was very concerned about your suspicions.”
A young girl stepped up to the counter wearing a navy blue coat and a red beret-type hat. Her silky hair fanned out around her shoulders. They both recognized her right away. It was Lily.
“Is that why it took you so long to get us the video?” asked Matt, leaning in closer to the screen.
Davis cleared his throat. “We have very strict security protocols. Our customers expect that, of course.”
When neither Jesamyn nor Matt said anything, he continued. “This teller, Thelma Baker,” said Davis, pointing to a woman on the screen, “said that Lily entered this branch in Riverdale at about noon and requested all the cash from her accounts. She had valid ID. Any of our customers are within their rights to cash out any of their accounts at any branch, at any time. The officer who helped her tried to discourage her from closing the money market account because of penalties. But she said-and I’m quoting-‘It’s an emergency. I need it for my brother.’ Which seems strange since you mentioned over the phone, Detective Stenopolis, that her brother had recently died.”
“It is strange,” said Jesamyn. She looked at the girl on the tape. There was nothing about her to suggest she was under any pressure. She looked grave, serious, no trace of the smile Jesamyn had seen in every photograph of her. But she appeared to be alone and acting of her own free will.
He let the tape play and they watched Lily being greeted by a young man. Brian paused the video. “That’s the bank officer,” he said.
He let the tape go again. Lily shook the man’s hand and smiled politely. Then he escorted her out of the range of the camera.
“What was the amount of the withdrawal?” asked Jesamyn.
“Thirty-eight thousand, nine hundred fifty-six dollars and eighty-three cents.”
It was a significant amount but certainly not enough to disappear on for very long, not these days. She looked over at Matt who was just staring at the screen. He had a kind of moony expression on his face. It was an expression she’d seen on him a number of times when she’d caught him looking at photographs of Lily. She worried about him. No grown man should be that lonely.
“Can we have a copy of this video?” asked Matt.
Davis handed him a CD jewel case, obviously a copy of the one in the DVD player. A sticker on it read: Lily Samuels, account closing, October 22.
“Does this help you at all, Detectives?” asked Brian.
“I’m not sure yet, Mr. Davis. But we appreciate your time,” said Jesamyn, rising.
“Brian,” he said, handing her a card. “Don’t hesitate to call if there’s anything I can do for you.”
She couldn’t keep from smiling at him as he took her hand. “If you or anyone at the branch thinks of anything else, please let us know,” she said.
“In fact,” said Matt, “can we have the names of the teller and the bank officer as well as the address of the branch?”
“Sure,” said Brian, slipping another card from his shirt. “The teller I mentioned was Thelma Baker. And the bank officer was a man named Angel Rodriquez.”
He scribbled on the back of his card. “Here you go.”
“Thanks,” said Matt, shaking his hand.
Back in the car, both of them sat for a minute in silence, parked illegally by St. Patrick’s on Fifty-First Street. Fifth Avenue was a thick, noisy river of cars and the sky was still threatening snow. New Yorkers walked briskly carrying bags from Saks and Bendel, Tiffany, or briefcases, or backpacks. Tourists walked slowly, their eyes inevitably cast upward toward the tops of buildings, pausing to gawk at the cathedral. In a few more weeks, when the tree was up at Rockefeller Plaza, it would be nearly impossible to walk down the street in this neighborhood. Jesamyn reminded herself, as she did every year, to get her shopping for Benji done early. But she never did.
“Now what?” said Matt, looking dejected.
“I don’t know, Mount. Maybe we have to face facts. If we’d had this video a week and a half ago, there wouldn’t even have been much of an investigation.”
She, for one, felt a little lighter for having seen the tape. For the past two weeks, Lily Samuels was never far from her thoughts, invading her dreams. She’d imagined in detail all the thousand things that might have happened to her: stranger abduction, murder, suicide, or accident-all the myriad nightmarish things that happen to people every day. The possibility that she’d just taken her money and driven off somewhere for some time alone or maybe to make a fresh start on her life… well, it was a relief to Jesamyn.
“Maybe she walked away from her life,” she said. “Maybe temporarily. Maybe not.”
Mount just shook his head like he couldn’t accept it. “It doesn’t feel right.”
He started the engine and rolled into traffic.
“Where are we going?” she asked, though she didn’t really have to.
“Riverdale. I want to talk to the people Lily talked to.”
At first she’d been “the vic,” toward the end of the first week she was “Samuels,” now she was “Lily.” He was always lecturing Jesamyn about getting too involved, too personally invested in the outcome of a case. And here he was. She knew a schoolboy crush when she saw one.
“Mount-,” she started. He raised a hand.
“Humor me this one time will ya’, Jez,” he said a little testily. “We go up there, ask a few questions. If there’s nothing, we’re back in front of the captain by noon. We’ll tell him we’re ready to declare her voluntary missing.”
“Okay, okay,” she said, raising her palms. “Let’s go to Riverdale.”
Four
Lydia sat on the edge of the bed with the phone to her ear, zoning out as it rang. She’d noticed recently that it took her grandparents longer to get to the phone than it used to. Sometimes it rang five or six times before one of them picked it up. If anyone picked it up at all. They didn’t have an answering machine, though Lydia had purchased one for them as a Christmas gift a couple of years ago.
“It’s a trick,” said her grandfather. “A way for the phone company to make more money.”
“How’s that, Grandpa?” she’d asked.
“If people call and I don’t pick up, they know I’m not home
, they don’t get charged. If it’s important, they’ll call back. If a machine answers, they get charged for the call. And I get charged when I call them back. They get to charge for two calls instead of just one.”
Lydia had laughed. She had to give it to him; he was right.
“Oh, David. Join the living, will you?” said her grandmother. “All my life, this Depression Era thinking. It’s-well, it’s depressing. Hook up the machine.”
Lydia was thinking it was a battle that her grandmother had apparently lost or given up on as she listened to the fifth ring. She was about to hang up when she heard her grandfather’s voice.
“Hey, Grandpa,” she said.
“What’s up, kid?”
She could see his silver hair, his broad shoulders and ruddy skin. She knew he was probably wearing jeans and a flannel shirt, probably Rockports or maybe sneakers.
“Jeffrey told me about my father,” she said, pulling up her feet so that she was sitting cross-legged on the bed. She looked at the clock. 9:36 A.M. The shower was running in the bathroom, the hot water steaming it up the way she liked it. She knew the conversation with her grandparents would be short; it always was. Can’t let the phone company get too much of anyone’s money.
He was silent for a second. “So how did that hit you?”
“I don’t know,” she said, putting her hands in front of her eyes to block the bright morning sun that was streaming in the east-facing window. She got up and pulled the blind. “I’m not sure it has yet.”
“Well, the world’s a better place without him, if you ask me.” David Strong held a grudge; there was no doubt about it.
“Don’t hold back, Grandpa. Tell me how you really feel,” Lydia said.
He chuckled a little. “Well, don’t lose any sleep over it. I’ll put your grandmother on.”
She smiled to herself. What was it about that generation? They really hated the telephone; not that her grandfather was much of a communicator. Her grandmother always did most of the talking.
“How are you taking the news, dear?” asked her grandmother. Her grandmother’s voice still sounded young to Lydia’s ears. It was strong and vital, reminding her so much of her mother’s voice. It had the same pitch and cadence; their laughter was identical.