by Lisa Unger
“What?” I asked her. “What did you say? Are you talking about Myra Lyall?”
She gave me a dark look and I swear I saw the corners of her mouth turn up in a sick smile. She closed the curtain on me then, and I heard her walk down the hall away from me. Behind the gauzy material I saw her shadow disappear through a bright doorway. I called after her a few times, pounding on the door, but she never answered. I noticed the kids on the street had stopped playing their game. Some of them were staring at me and some of them were walking off.
Finally I gave up and walked toward the train, my heart pounding, head swimming. I was so shocked by what she had said that I couldn’t even come up with any questions to ask myself. I just felt this belly full of fear, this weird sense that I was about to walk off the edge of my life…again. Everyone around me seemed full of malice; the sky had taken on a gray cast and threatened snow.
MY PARENTS LIVED only one train stop from Esme’s, so I headed that way. I knew they were gone, having left last week for a month-long Mediterranean cruise. My father had been pushed into semiretirement, so now they were “finally doing some of the traveling we’d always wanted to do,” as my mother said with a kind of forced brightness. I was happy for them (not really), but something about it galled me, too. I felt wrecked inside and they seemed to be so blithely moving on. It hurt somehow that they could move on while I couldn’t. I know that’s childish.
I walked from the train station through the precious town center, zoned to look like a picture postcard, with clapboard restaurants and shops, a general store that sold ice cream, original gas lamps still in working order. I followed the street that wound uphill, past beautifully restored Victorian homes nestled on perfectly manicured lawns. Every season had its character here; it was always lovely. But today with most of the trees shedding their autumn color, and the hour still too bright for the streetlights to come on but dark enough to be gloomy, it didn’t seem as pretty. I didn’t take much comfort in coming home these days, and especially not today.
I let myself in the front door and went directly to my father’s study. I stood in the doorway, my hand resting on the scroll handle. When Ace and I were kids, this room was strictly forbidden unless there was adult supervision, so naturally, I had always been fascinated by it. I was forever trying to finagle an invitation in, as if spending time in there with my father would signal that I had become a grown-up. But the invitation never came.
I didn’t want to sneak in like Ace did; I didn’t see the point in that then. But Ace always wanted to go where he shouldn’t. And, in fact, he was hiding behind my father’s desk the night he overheard Max and Ben discussing Project Rescue and the night Max brought me home to Ben and Grace. But I didn’t know about that for a long time.
As I got older, I started to see this room as my father’s haven, a place where he could be alone, away from the needs of his children, the criticisms of his wife; where he could smoke a cigar out the window or have a bourbon in peace. Now I just saw it as a symbol of all the secrets that had been kept from me, all the lies that had been told.
As I walked inside, the whole house seemed to hold its breath in the silence. The room seemed cluttered and dusty; it was the only place my mother left alone on her relentless cleaning regimen. It smelled lightly of stale cigar smoke. The couch and matching chair and ottoman were the same evergreen velvet pieces that had sat there since my childhood. A low, heavy coffee table of dark wood was covered with books and magazines. The fireplace contained some fresh wood and some kindling, awaiting its next lighting.
My father used to sit, transfixed by the fire, his eyes taking on a strange blankness as he looked into the flames. As a kid I always wondered what he thought about when he was alone in here. Now I wondered if he thought about the night Max brought me here, asking them to raise me as their child; about the other Project Rescue babies and what had become of them; about the night Max’s mother died. Did he know what Nick Smiley thought had happened that night? Did he worry that there was another side to Max? If he did know, why had they remained so close?
Any affection I might have had for this forbidden place was gone. Now all I wanted to do was tear through it, open drawers, pull books off of shelves. I wanted to find anything this room was hiding. I hated it for all the secrets it had kept, including some of the last moments of Max’s life. What had the two men said to each other that night after the doors closed on me?
You probably think that I am, as usual, in a state of denial about Max. You’re thinking about the photographs, the inconsistencies in the medical examiner’s report, Esme’s bizarre behavior and her threats. You’re probably already convinced that Max was still alive. But the fact of the matter was that Max, my Max, was dead. There would be no resurrections. The man I had adored was lost to me forever.
If it turned out that Max Smiley lived, by some bizarre chance or nefarious design, he would be a stranger—or worse—to me. The man I thought I knew was a fantasy, an archetype: the Good Uncle. The real man remained a mystery—a terrifying mystery I wasn’t sure I wanted to solve. But if he was alive, I was going to find him and look him in the face. I would demand to know who he was, what had happened the night I was abducted and my biological mother was murdered. I would demand to know what had happened to Jake. I would force him to answer for Project Rescue. I would force him to answer for every ounce of rage and heartbreak he had caused. Sounds like a tall order, right? You have no idea.
I sat at my father’s computer and booted it up. It was a dinosaur and took forever. In the meantime I rifled through drawers and found some pens, old rubber bands and paper clips, a bunch of files containing fascinating evidence like water, phone, and electric bills, the deed to a property they owned in New Mexico but had never built on, their marriage license and other legal documents. Finally the screen lit up and demanded a password. I didn’t have to think for long. I entered lullaby, the nickname he’d always had for me. A strain of electronic music praised my excellent deductive powers.
“What are you looking for?” I asked myself out loud.
My father had just been through a federal investigation. Anything incriminating on this computer would have been found by the authorities or deleted. Probably. I shamelessly began searching through Word files, scanning his “Household,” “Speeches,” and correspondence folders. He wasn’t a very computer-savvy guy, my father, so there weren’t many documents. It took me only about twenty minutes to go through everything and to find nothing but the most innocuous stuff: a letter to a painter who’d taken their money and left his work unfinished in the kitchen, a speech he gave on the signs of child abuse to which physicians must be vigilant (I doubt anyone’s been asking him to make that speech lately), a list including various organizing tasks around the house.
Next I scanned his e-mail. The usual slew of spam popped up when I opened his Outlook box. The cure for erectile dysfunction, hot nude girls, and an international lottery win vied for my attention. I searched through his sent mail, his recently received mail, and his recycle bin. Everything was empty, wiped clean, not one e-mail saved. I found this strange. I thought about my own e-mail box. I was compelled to save nearly everything I sent and everything I received, cataloged by person and purpose. It seemed odd that he’d save nothing; he was an even bigger pack rat than I was. Maybe that federal investigation had left him feeling skittish.
I started to feel as if I was wasting time, when I remembered something Jake had taught me. Your computer remembers every website you’ve visited. The websites you visit send a little message to your computer called a cookie and your computer saves that cookie to identify itself the next time you visit that site. There’s also a log on your computer that shows all the websites you’ve visited in the last week or few days, depending on how your computer is set.
I visited the cookies file and saw a bunch of them from places like amazon.com and Home Depot, some investment and news websites. Nothing unusual or interesting. I went to the log of visi
ted sites and, at first, nothing caught my eye there, either. Then I ran across a site that seemed a little odd, just a collection of seemingly random numbers, letter, and symbols. As I scrolled down I noticed that he’d visited the site ten times in the last week and a half. The log was set to delete any listings more than two weeks old, so past that, I didn’t know. But it seemed safe to assume he was visiting this site nearly every day.
I cut and pasted the address into the Web browser and waited for the site to pop up. When it did, it was just a blank page filling the screen with a bright red glare, so bright it actually hurt my eyes. I waited for some type of intro or log-in prompts to pop up. Nothing. Just that bright red screen with no images and no text. Something about it was unsettling. It was the color of danger.
I dragged the cursor over it and double-clicked in various places but nothing happened. After a few minutes of staring at the red blankness, I felt my chest constrict in my frustration. I knew I was looking at something important but I couldn’t figure out what it meant. My impatience blossomed into a childish anger and I fought a sudden overwhelming urge to put my fist through the screen. I gripped the edge of the desk until my inner tantrum passed. I released a breath I hadn’t even realized I was holding and wrote down the mysterious URL on a piece of scrap paper, which I shoved in my pocket. I deleted all the junk e-mails that had downloaded during my visit and turned off the computer. (I had the urge to go to the kitchen, get some Windex, and wipe down the desk, the keyboard, and anything else I had touched—but that was just me being weird.)
I took a quick walk through the house, through the empty rooms of my childhood. The family room where we’d gathered for television or games was much the same, though the furniture had been updated recently and my parents had replaced the old television with a new big-screen. My parents’ bedroom on the ground floor looked out over my mother’s garden. In the spring, she’d leave the French doors open and let the room fill with the smell of roses. I remembered watching her sit at her vanity, doing her hair and makeup, and thinking she was the most beautiful woman in the world. The room, decorated in a sort of Martha Stewart/ Victorian theme with heavy brocades and floral prints, was typically tidy with stacks of books on each of the nightstands. Upstairs, I sat on my old bed for a minute, looked at my framed diplomas, my debate trophies, and the first article I’d had published in my school paper. My bed was still made with my old Laura Ashley sheets. A place that once had seemed the happiest and safest in all the world now seemed cold and dark; the heat was down and I pulled my jacket tight around myself. I felt those fingers of despair tugging at me again, but I brushed them off as I hurriedly left the room and moved down the stairs. I left my parents’ house, locked the door behind me, and headed back into the city.
I HAVE A TREMENDOUS ability to compartmentalize my emotions. Some people call it denial, but I think it’s a skill to be able to put unpleasant things out of your head for a little while in order to accomplish something else. For the next few hours I didn’t think about Agent Grace or Myra Lyall or about my truly devastating encounter with Esme Gray. I didn’t think about Max or if those ashes I scattered off the Brooklyn Bridge were really his. I just wrote my article about Elena Jansen, proofread it carefully, and e-mailed it in to my editor at O Magazine. I had already had most of it written in my head—it was just a matter of getting it down on paper. For me the actual writing is only about ten percent of the process; ninety percent is the thinking about it. Much of that is unconscious. I guess for me all action is like that.
I felt better after writing the article. Elena Jansen’s tragedy made the drama in my life seem silly and inconsequential…for a second or two, anyway. Maybe that was why I was writing these kinds of pieces, why I was drawn to these survivors. They reminded me that my own story wasn’t so bad. That other people had endured less survivable events. They made me feel as if one day I’d find my way back to a normal, happy life. Is that selfish?
Once I’d sent in the article, though, all the other stuff started nagging at me. I took the strange website address from my pocket and plugged it into my own browser. The same red screen popped up; I stared at it, transfixed for a minute. I dragged the cursor over the whole page, clicking randomly, like I had done at my parents’ house. Nothing. It started driving me a little crazy. I knew there was something there; if the website was down, the screen would show an error message. My father had been visiting this site every day. There must be a way in.
The phone rang then.
“Hey,” said Jake when I answered. “What are you doing?”
“Just working on an article due tomorrow.”
“Want me to come over?”
“Not tonight. I’m feeling pretty wrecked. And I don’t want to blast this deadline.”
“Anything wrong?” he asked after a pause.
“No,” I lied. “Nothing.”
“How are you feeling about everything? Max and all that.”
“Honestly,” I said, “I haven’t even thought about it today.”
The long silence on the other end told me he didn’t believe me. “Okay,” he said finally. “Talk to you in the morning?”
“Definitely.”
“Well, good night, Ridley.”
“Good night, Jake.”
8
After a terrible night’s sleep, I got up in the morning and made a few phone calls. Esme’s words and the things Agent Grace had told me about Myra and Allen Lyall were smoldering in my center. I’d seen a poster of their faces on the way back into the city the night before. There was an update on the morning news, which basically consisted of a downcast detective saying that there were no new leads and asking anyone who might have seen anything to come forward.
I felt connected to Myra Lyall now. I started to wish I’d returned her phone calls when I’d had the chance. And there was something else. I wondered if she’d found something out—something about Project Rescue or about Max—that had gotten her killed. It was a terrible itch. Of course, I had to scratch it.
I knew a couple people over at the Times: an Arts & Leisure editor named Jenna Rich and a sportswriter I dated briefly, a guy named Dennis Leach (unfortunate name, I know). I didn’t reach either of them, so I left messages. I made a few more visits to the mystery website, had the same experience I’d had the night before, and hopped in the shower. As I was finishing up and pulling on some clothes, my phone rang.
“Hey, it’s Jenna,” said a youthful voice when I answered. “How are you, stranger?”
“Hey, there. Thanks for getting back to me,” I said. “Can’t complain. You?”
Jenna was a talker, which is why I’d called her. She was a one-woman corporate rumor mill. She told me how she’d married last year, been promoted, and was pregnant with her first child. I knew we were about the same age, and though I was happy for her, it made me feel somehow behind, like she was clearing the hurdles with grace and skill and I was still hovering around the starting gate. As she chatted on, I spent a moment wondering how this conversation would have gone if I’d married Zack when he’d asked two years ago, if I’d be having this conversation at all. Would I be pregnant? Would I have taken one of the many staff writing positions that had been offered to me over the years? Would I be happy in the ignorance of my past, in marrying a man I knew I’d never love but with whom I was more or less compatible? I didn’t dwell on it too long; not much point in that. We make our choices. We forge ahead. Or we curl up and wallow in regret. Both alternatives have their appeal. At the moment I was forging.
“So what’s up?” she said after the niceties had been exchanged. “You have an idea for me?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “I’m wondering what you know about Myra Lyall. I had some calls from her a few weeks ago. I suppose something to do with Project Rescue. I was thinking about returning her call but I wanted to see if you knew her first.”
She was quiet for a minute. “You didn’t hear?”
“What?” I said with concern
and interest, playing dumb.
“God,” she said with a sigh. “She and her husband disappeared a couple of weeks ago. Apparently someone accessed our servers—which, by the way, is supposed to be next to impossible—and wiped her hard drive and all her e-mail communications. People here are pretty spooked. It’s just terrible, Ridley.”
“Wow,” I said, trying to sound suitably shocked. “That’s awful. What are the police saying? Does anyone have any idea what happened?”
“There are all kinds of theories floating around,” she said, her voice dropping to a whisper. “One has to do with her landlord. She and her husband were at war with him. They lived in this rent-controlled apartment they’d been in since the seventies. The new owner had recently bought the building and wanted them out so that he could get the market rate for the apartment. Suddenly they had terrible mice and roach problems, the heat never worked. Apparently, they’d decided to put their rent in escrow until he fixed things; that sent him over the edge. Word is he has ties to the Albanian mob.”
“But that doesn’t explain how the Times server got wiped clean…or why.”
“No. It doesn’t,” she said softly.
“So…what else are people saying? I mean, what was she working on at the time?”
I thought Jenna might clam up. I could hear her breathing. She was a pretty woman with small, serious features and bright green eyes, peaches-and-cream skin. It had been a while since I’d had any face time with her, but I could imagine her frowning, tapping her pen on the desk.
“A lot of people around here think she stumbled onto something. It’s just a rumor.”
“Something to do with Project Rescue?”
“I don’t think so. She put that story to bed over a month ago. And that was more of a human-interest piece than her usual investigative work. She kind of got pushed into it by this new editor—you know, put-some-faces-on-the-crime kind of a thing. Besides, as far as news stories go, there wasn’t any new ground to cover.”