by Lisa Unger
“It’s weird,” he said, putting his cup down on the table. “Everybody just kind of moves on. Except for us. We’re stuck in this place, this black hole of loss. We can’t crawl out.”
He had the haunted look of a man who’d used up all his tears and had no way left to express his sadness. Lydia let a moment pass and then asked him to share with them the days just before Lily disappeared and they listened as he talked about the call regarding Mickey’s suicide, the parade of friends and relatives, the service. He talked about Lily’s grief, and her denial over the way he died.
“So it didn’t strike you as impossible that Mickey could have killed himself?” Lily asked.
He shook his head slowly. “The evidence was conclusive. The police had no doubt whatsoever that Mickey ended his own life. The doors to his car were all locked, there were no other fingerprints in the vehicle, on the gun, or on the bottle between his legs. He had gunshot residue on his right hand. He had a blood alcohol level nearly three times the legal limit.”
“Without the physical evidence, though, would you have considered Mickey capable of ending his own life?”
He looked over her head, as if the answer was above her somewhere. “Mickey wrestled with depression all his life. This is what we couldn’t make Lily understand.”
“She didn’t know?” asked Lydia, with a frown.
“She didn’t know the extent of his depression. No,” he said with a shake of his head. “She knew he was moody, had a tendency to go through depressive phases. But she didn’t know that he was on and off anti-depressants since he was an adolescent. And that his depression seemed to be getting harder to deal with as he got older. It was part of the reason he quit his job on Wall Street. He thought maybe the stress was making his depression worse. He thought if he could do something he really loved, it might help.”
“But they were very close,” said Jeffrey. “It seems strange that she didn’t know.”
“Yes, they were close. But Mickey was adamant that she never be told. She adored him. Like, hero-worshipped him. I think part of him was afraid he might lose that if she knew. So we respected his wishes and kept his condition private.” He released a sigh. “Maybe we were wrong to do that. But it’s too late now.”
“So you weren’t unable to accept it in the same way Lily was when you learned how Mickey died,” said Lydia.
“Well, I wouldn’t say that. We were shocked, of course. It’s not as if Mickey had made attempts on his life before. And honestly, in the months before he died, he was happier than we’d ever seen him. But I guess it had always been a fear in the back of our minds, because of his depression and because of his father’s suicide. So in the way that it was our worst fear realized, I guess it was easier for us to believe.”
Lydia knew what it was like to have your worst nightmare become reality. The horror and the disbelief were almost too much to bear; she saw that it was crushing him. His stepson was dead. Lily was missing. His wife had retreated to a drug-induced catatonia.
“You said he was happier than you’d ever seen him in the months before he died. Why was that?” she asked.
Samuels smiled a little, remembering. “He loved the coffee shop. He’d made some new friends. He had a nice place, plenty of money. He just seemed-I don’t know,” he said, searching for the right words, “at peace, I guess. For the first time in his life.”
His brow wrinkled then, his face dissolving into a grimace of sadness and confusion. He put his head in his hands. Lydia and Jeffrey were quiet while the gulls cried outside and the wind began to howl. After a moment, Samuels looked back up, seemed more composed.
“They say, I guess, that once someone has decided to kill themselves they experience a time of peace and euphoria, like they see a light at the end of the tunnel they’ve been trudging through so long,” said Samuels with a sigh. “I don’t want to think that was the reason for Mickey’s new happiness. But maybe it was.” He shook his head.
“Maybe it was,” he said again.
His eyes glazed over in the thousand-yard stare Lydia had seen often. It made her uncomfortable; she looked away. She let a few moments pass before speaking again.
“Did Mickey ever say anything to you about something called The New Day?”
It happened quickly and maybe someone less observant wouldn’t have noticed, but Samuels flinched. He shook his head slowly then.
“The New Day?” he asked, cocking his head. “What’s that?”
“Neither Mickey or Lily ever mentioned it to you, Mr. Samuels?” asked Lydia. “They never mentioned being involved or knowing anyone who was involved?”
“No,” he said, shaking his head again. “What is it?”
“As far as we can tell, it’s some kind of New Age church,” said Jeffrey. “Kind of a pan-spirituality thing.”
Samuels gave a skeptical frown. “And you think my kids were involved with them?”
“We don’t know. We have reason to believe that there might be a connection through the woman Mickey was dating. Did you or your wife ever meet Mariah?”
A slight smile tentatively turned up the corners of Samuel’s mouth.
“Mickey had more girls in a month than I’ve had in my life,” he said with a male admiration Lydia found slightly distasteful. “But Monica and I have never met anyone more than once. I don’t remember anyone by that name.”
“What about a ‘Michele’? A very pretty blonde,” said Lydia.
“Ms. Strong, they were all very pretty blondes. That was his type. Tall, willowy blondes; that’s what he liked.”
She took the picture from her pocket, as well as the license photo, and handed them both to Samuels. Something on his face seemed to freeze, but a second later he pulled his forehead into a frown.
“These are the same girl?” he said, holding one in each hand and making a point of looking back and forth.
“Yes,” said Lydia.
He pursed his lips and shook his head again. He handed both of the photographs back to Lydia. “I’ve never seen her before. I’m sure of it.”
Lydia nodded and replaced the pictures in her jacket. She was having a hard time getting a real vibe off of Tim Samuels.
“According to Jasmine, Lily wasn’t too thrilled with Mariah. She and Mickey were at odds about it.”
He rubbed his eyes. “That’s news to me. Neither of them mentioned a problem.”
He looked at them with eyes that were a little too wide for Lydia, eyebrows raised a little too high. She held his gaze and, after a second, he looked to the floor.
“I’ll tell you one thing, though,” he said. “We raised the kids to be very skeptical about religion. We didn’t raise them in the church. We taught them about God and about our spiritual beliefs, about our faith in a benevolent universe. But we were pretty down on organized religion. I’m fairly certain neither one of them would have joined up with one-even a ‘New Age’ one.”
“I’m sure you’re right,” said Lydia, though she wasn’t sure of anything. She removed the pink diamond from her pocket and held it out to him on a piece of velvet she’d wrapped it in. It glittered in her palm, shimmering with a deep fire in the light from the window.
“Did you ever see Lily wear anything like this?” asked Lydia. He glanced at it quickly and shook his head. He didn’t seem to recognize its value or to be impressed by it in any way.
“Lily isn’t much into jewelry,” he said absently. She expected him to ask where they’d found the stone but he didn’t and for some reason, she didn’t offer. Because she had the sense that he was not being entirely open with them, Lydia felt it best not to be entirely open with him. She wrapped the stone back up and put it back in her pocket. She felt disappointed and vaguely dissatisfied, as if there was something obvious she was missing or a question she needed to ask but hadn’t thought of yet.
Samuels let out a long deep breath and shifted in his seat. He seemed suddenly uncomfortable and frustrated.
“Anyway, how does any
of this help you find Lily?” he said, rubbing his eyes.
“The police have done a thorough job of tracing Lily’s steps,” said Lydia. “But I think that she was tracing Mickey’s steps. So that’s what I’m trying to do.”
He looked at her skeptically. “So are you saying that you don’t think Mickey killed himself?”
“No. I’m not saying that. But I know that Lily didn’t believe that; so I’m just doing what I would do if I were in her place. Do you see?”
“I see,” he said, leaning back and looking at her. There was something on his face now that she couldn’t read, a slight narrowing of his eyes.
“Okay. What can I do to help you?” he asked, after examining her a moment.
“You don’t by chance have records of those hotline calls, do you?”
“As a matter of fact, I do. Turns out there’s a service you can hire to monitor all the calls that come in to a particular hotline established for these purposes and provide reports that include transcripts, telephone numbers, even names and addresses if the caller dials in from a listed number. I was turning them over to the police every day but I kept copies. I’ll warn you, there are two boxes of printouts. Nothing has come of them so far.”
“You’ve been turning them over to Detective Stenopolis?”
“Yes, at first. But, like I said, nothing really came of it. They got a couple of calls on the Crime Stoppers Hotline, too. As far as I know, those turned out to be dead ends, as well. And, you know, once they got those banking records indicating that Lily had cleaned out her accounts, there was a definite falling off of urgency. I was just considering looking into hiring a private investigator when you called.”
He stood and motioned for Lydia and Jeffrey to follow. He took them into a home office, which might have been neat and organized at one point but was now cluttered with piles of postcards and flyers. A long folding table had been placed along the far wall, opposite a large oak desk that had the look of an antique. Several chairs, which looked as if they’d been taken from a dining room set, sat empty facing the phones. Two large boxes filled with files sat under the phone. There was a big blow-up of Lily’s face on a poster on the wall. Lydia could imagine the place bustling with urgency, volunteers working hard, family and friends still hopeful, phones ringing, excitement rising following a tip and then dropping lower with each disappointment. The silence in the room was the sound of despair.
“Lily Central,” he said solemnly. “For all the good it did.”
“It’s not over yet, Mr. Samuels,” said Lydia, putting a hand on his arm.
“No,” he said. It might never be over. That was what he was thinking but didn’t say. She could see it on his face.
“Did anybody you didn’t recognize come to Mickey’s funeral?” Jeffrey asked.
Samuels let out a little laugh.
“The queen of England could have showed up at Mickey’s funeral and I wouldn’t have noticed. It was a very bad day and to be honest I hardly remember it. I think, in fact, I tapped into Rebecca’s tranquilizers. I just didn’t see how else you were supposed to get through something like that. We were zombies, I’m sure. Not very present for Lily. Not as present as we clearly should have been.”
Samuels’ words echoed Jasmine’s words. Not present enough, not there for her. Lydia wondered if anybody had been present for Lily. How vulnerable she must have been, grief-stricken and alone. Any predator could have smelled the sadness on her, used it to lure her into danger. The copy from the New Day website came back to her. Perhaps you’ve suffered a tragedy, a terrible loss, and you find you just can’t move on.
“I’d like to contribute to your investigation,” said Samuels, taking a checkbook from the drawer in his desk and sinking into the leather chair behind it.
“That’s not necessary,” said Lydia, holding up a hand. “Lily’s a friend. We want to do this for her.”
Money didn’t motivate Lydia. She was drawn into investigations by something other than financial gain. She’d only had one case where there was an actual client involved and the truth of it was that she didn’t like answering to people. These days, she had the luxury of answering only to herself and her instincts. The other cases they took at the firm she’d helped to build allowed Lydia the freedom and the resources to follow her gut, her buzz, with little concern about cost.
“Thank you,” he said with that same unreadable expression she’d seen in the living room. “And I know Monica will thank you, too, when she can.”
They talked some about the lead Detective Stenopolis had discovered during his interview at the bank. Samuels didn’t recognize the vehicle description but seemed heartened by the news.
“I don’t understand why he didn’t call to let me know this,” said Samuels. “He’s been pretty good about keeping me in the loop.”
“Maybe he didn’t want to get your hopes up. There may not be anything to it,” said Lydia with a shrug.
“It’s our impression that he has pressure from above to move on,” said Jeffrey. “From a police perspective, it looks a lot like Lily just took off. They’re not going to devote resources to her disappearance much longer. He might be embarrassed. Not looking forward to giving you that news.”
Samuels nodded his understanding and looked at him eagerly. “Are you going to follow up on those hits?” he asked.
“Yes,” said Jeffrey. “We already have someone on it.”
I wish there was something more I could do,” said Samuels as he helped Jeffrey load the boxes into the Kompressor. In the gray light of the outdoors, he looked older, more tired than he had inside. Lydia saw lines on his face she hadn’t noticed in the house. She saw dark circles, two days of pale stubble on a strong jaw.
“I’m going a little crazy with my own uselessness. Mickey’s gone. I don’t know how to help Lily, or her mother. You spend your whole life thinking you have some control and then in a matter of weeks…” He let the sentence trail.
“Just know that we are going to do everything in our power to bring Lily home to you,” said Lydia. “And if you think of anything, no matter how inconsequential you think it is, anything strange, anything off, anything that made you wonder even for a moment, please call me.”
He looked down at the gravel on the drive. “Do you think she’s alive?”
It was a hard question to ask, she knew. It was harder to answer. His whole body seemed to brace for the response. Part of her wanted to reassure him, give him some hope. But she couldn’t do that, it wasn’t right.
“I don’t know,” she said putting a hand on her arm. “But have faith, Mr. Samuels. We do.”
***
They watched him in the rearview mirror as they pulled up the drive. He followed them with his eyes and then turned his back, walked with slouching shoulders, hands in his pockets, back into the house. Lydia would have paid money to see his face when he thought no one was looking.
“He held something back from us,” said Jeffrey when the house was out of sight.
Lydia nodded. “Definitely.”
“What’s your sense of him?”
She thought about it a second. “It’s hard to say. I didn’t get a good read on him.”
He looked at her out of the corner of his eye. “That’s never a good sign.”
“I know,” she said. Usually a person’s essence was clear to Lydia within seconds of the first greeting. People emitted an energy that either meshed or clashed, that attracted or repelled. They’d both learned over the years that Lydia’s impressions, more often than not, would be proved correct over time. In the few instances when she’d had trouble getting a read on someone, they’d later discovered that the person in question was deeply veiled, guarded, or hiding vital parts of himself.
“I just didn’t buy that Lily and Mickey could be so close and she not know that he’d been on and off anti-depressants all his life,” she said.
“Why would Samuels lie about that?”
“I’m not sure,” she said
with a quick shake of her head. “But it kind of makes Lily sound like she didn’t know her brother as well as she thought she did. And it makes her certainty that he didn’t kill himself seem based on ignorance of key facts.”
He nodded his agreement.
“You know how he seemed to me?” said Jeff. “He seemed insincere. That little breakdown he had?”
“No tears,” she said. “I noticed that, too.”
They pulled onto the Long Island Expressway and Lydia was glad to see that traffic into the city was lighter than it had been on the way out. But still they came to a stop as the traffic thickened. The sky outside was hopeful, with patches of blue straining through the gray cloud cover.
“I got a call yesterday,” she said, looking out the window at the trees and the sea of cars.
“From who?” he answered, glancing at her.
“A law firm on Fifty-Seventh Street, representing my father’s estate,” she said. “They say they have a box for me. Things he left me supposedly. They want me to pick it up.”
He was quiet a second, then put a hand on the back of her neck. “How do you feel about that?”
She looked into his face. Warm hazel eyes in a landscape of strong, defined features. Strong cheekbones and full, wide lips, clean-shaven jaw. There was a vein on his temple that appeared when he was angry, a muscle that worked in his jaw when he was worried or thinking hard. She knew every line and feature of his face and just the sight of it could give her comfort.
“I don’t know. I think I hate it a little. I mean, what could he possibly have wanted me to have? It seems kind of cowardly to try to make a connection after he died.”