by Dete Meserve
It’s even worse for me. I’m the significant other to an immensely popular, handsome restaurant owner with a famous movie-star partner. Why would any sane woman be unhappy with someone like him? Of course I have something to gain from his disappearance. Of course I’m somehow responsible.
My email inbox has 157 unread messages from the last twenty-four hours. Many are work related, but there are dozens from our friends expressing shock at the news and offering support. They don’t want to bother me by calling, but I wonder if hearing a friendly voice on the other end of the line might actually help settle the gnawing, buzzy feeling that’s rocketing through my body.
My friend Lauren texts me, offering to coordinate anyone who wants to help. She’s setting up a Facebook page and will post updates that friends can share. She wants to prevent people from “barging in with casseroles and dessert trays and wasting your time prattling on about stupid stuff or asking prying questions.” I smile—Lauren is never coy about her feelings—then take her up on her offer by forwarding all the what-can-I-do emails to her.
When I first met Lauren at a mutual friend’s son’s bar mitzvah, we had struck up a real conversation at dinner—surprising because those events usually only encourage polite, often awkward, small talk. But Lauren ran a high-end 3-D printing firm, and I was fascinated to learn about the flexible artificial bone she was working on that could be used in place of bone grafts. So when the party DJ started blasting techno funk music and insisting that everyone get up and dance, Lauren snatched a bottle of wine from the table, grabbed me by the arm, and we ditched the boom-and-yell party room for the quieter and cooler outdoor patio where our conversation turned into a friendship.
I’m about to set my phone down when an email in my inbox catches my attention. “A secure message from Old National Bank.” At first I think it’s junk mail:
We’ve sent an important communication to your Secure Message Center, available on Old National Bank Online or on the Old National Bank Mobile app.
The subject is: Your $1,000,000.00 payment from BENJAMIN A MAYFIELD is in your available balance.
You can sign in to review this communication in your Secure Message Center.
Thank you for being a valued Old National Bank customer.
One million dollars.
After Zack was born, I’d opened the account at a bank near where my mom lived in Indiana. I’d stashed away a few thousand dollars over the years, imagining Zack using it to buy a car someday or putting it toward college.
Why had Ben deposited so much money in an account neither of us had used for more than a dozen years? Is this the money his partner claims Ben stole?
I stare at the date of the transaction on the screen. Today’s date.
I call the bank and fumble through the security questions with the customer service rep. I don’t know the account number, which triggers several other security questions including my mother’s maiden name and in what city I worked my first job. Luckily, I pass the tests and ask her if she can tell the origin of the large deposit.
“What I can see is that it was a wire transfer initiated by Benjamin Mayfield.”
“When? Today?”
I hold my breath, hoping she’ll say yes. Proof that he’s alive.
“No, not today,” she says, her words slicing through my hopes. “The request was made yesterday but came through after the wire transfer cutoff time, which is why the funds hit your account today.”
“Wire transfer cutoff?”
“If a bank receives the transfer request after the cutoff—usually six p.m. Eastern—funds are credited to the receiving account the next day.”
“So he made the request yesterday . . . Tuesday?”
“Yes, the request was received Tuesday afternoon at five.”
There’s a moment on a roller coaster ride where you’ve crested the top, you’ve hung there for the briefest of moments, and then the car plunges to the bottom.
That’s exactly where I am. My body is in free fall, and I’m terrified this ride is never going to end.
Why did Ben leave one million dollars in the bank yesterday less than an hour before he disappeared? Why did he leave behind a gun? If he knew he was in danger, why wouldn’t he call me? Or at least leave me a note.
Then my mind takes a sharp detour. Am I being framed? Is it possible that Ben had left all this evidence—the gun, the erased DVR, this money—to make it look like I am responsible for his disappearance? Maybe he had been so angry at me for suggesting divorce that he planned this whole scenario to get back at me.
That’s not the Ben I know. Whatever angry feelings he might have about our discussion, I can’t imagine he’d put me and Zack through all this.
But could he?
My sister texts me for an update and offers again to fly in from San Francisco. It would be good to have more help, but I’m hiding so many things from police—the gun and the DVR—that I don’t want her here, prying around, asking nosy questions. My sister and I are the product of school-teacher parents—my dad taught high school math and my mom was an English teacher—so we grew up following the rules. Of the two of us, Rachel is more rigid in her approach to problem solving, and I’m sure she won’t approve of the decisions I’ve made. And being three years older, she’ll act like it’s her place to set me straight.
Not yet. Will reach out when it’s the right time, I text her as the doorbell rings again. I open the door, and this time it’s Stuart Baxter returning with Christie Miller, an attorney who is to advise me on how to handle the media. Christie is tall, nearly six feet, wearing what appear to be three-inch heels, with wavy blonde hair that falls to just above her shoulders.
“Reporters are looking for any action they can hang their theories on, so be careful with every word you say,” she says as they settle into the couch in the living room. “Every expression. I’m working on an outline of a statement for you to make tomorrow. And after that, we’re going to get you on all the news channels so that you can ask for help on the airwaves.”
“Can I say that we think Ben’s disappearance is related to next week’s trial against his Aurora partners?”
“Absolutely not.” She straightens the collar on her white blouse. “The subject is off-limits for reasons we’ll get to in a moment. Your job is to let the public know that you are fully cooperating with police. And that you’re enlisting their help to find your husband.”
I don’t know much about what happens in cases like this. A few years ago, a young pregnant wife went missing in Southern California, and even after weeks of searching, her body was never found. I’d been so busy with the work we were doing on the space telescope that I missed most of the insistent media coverage, but I do remember that every time I turned on the news, her family members were pleading with viewers to help find her. Should I organize Ben’s family to talk to the media?
Christie seems to be reading my mind. “We want to avoid this turning into a media circus, so let’s keep it simple. I don’t want a lot of voices talking about Ben.”
Stuart leans forward, rests his elbows on his knees. “Now, here’s why you can’t talk about the upcoming trial. First, we don’t want to prejudice potential jury members and force a change of venue because the partners can’t get a fair trial here in LA. Separate from that, we don’t want the media to get distracted by the partners’ involvement right now. We’ve got to leverage the media to help us find Ben. And last, we’ve heard from the partners’ lawyers that if we come out and speculate that they’re somehow responsible for Ben’s disappearance, they’re going to retaliate and tell the media that it’s Ben who has been stealing millions from Aurora.”
“Richard Jenkins called me to say that very thing.”
Stuart frowns. “Richard called you? Not okay. From now on, I don’t want you taking any calls from Richard or the other partners. They all have the same agenda. They want to take the heat off themselves by claiming that Ben was stealing.”
I’m silent
for a long while, choosing my words. The only sound is the ticking of the old-fashioned clock on the mantel. A gift from Ben’s father on one of our anniversaries. “Is it possible Ben was stealing?”
Christie and Stuart look up from their papers.
I pause for a long moment, gauging how much I was really prepared to tell them. “Yesterday, Ben transferred one million dollars into an account I have at a small bank in Indiana.”
Stuart’s face falls. “What the hell is going on here?”
CHAPTER SIX
The invitation from Aaron comes to my private email account. It’s a link to a secure and encrypted server, and I have to jump through a few hoops to set up a username and password and then verify my email address and password a second time before it will let me view the email he’s sent to me:
Follow the link below to read or reply to your secure message from Jules Verne.
I smile. Aaron loves Jules Verne stories, especially Journey to the Center of the Earth, so it makes sense that he would set up a user ID with that name.
I click on the link and see that Aaron/Jules has recovered another seventeen-second clip. This one is from the camera in the family room, taken at 9:13 a.m. on Monday, the day before Ben disappeared. I immediately recognize our friend Matt Shepherd in the shot. He’s dressed as though he’s headed for the golf course, wearing neatly pressed chino shorts and a crisp white polo shirt.
“It’s used to treat Parkinson’s and some gastro disorders,” he’s saying. “Can cause all the symptoms you mentioned. Tachycardia, palpitation, dizziness. Especially given how much we found in your blood. Four times the safe dosage.”
Matt is a doctor of internal medicine at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. His son, Henry, became friends with Zack in kindergarten, sharing a mutual obsession with robots. When our boys became inseparable, Ben and I ended up hanging out with Matt and his wife, Kim, over barbecue and craft beer while our boys rode bikes, swam, and played all things robot.
From this camera angle, I can only see the back of Ben’s head, but I hear him say, “So I had food poisoning?”
“Belladonna isn’t a form of food poisoning. Someone deliberately—”
The clip stops.
Is Matt saying that Ben had been poisoned? I watch the clip several times more and blast the volume so that I don’t miss any words.
Was this why Ben was in the ER? Not for kidney stones, like his sister, Julia, had said. But for belladonna poisoning?
I look up belladonna online and see that it comes from the leaf and the root of a plant in the deadly nightshade family, and it’s a drug that blocks functions of the nervous system.
I consider sending this clip to Detective Dawson, but I’m certain it’ll make him demand to see the entire drive. And, for now, I have to assume that Ben had a good reason to erase the drive so that no one would see what’s on it.
I call Matt’s cell phone, but it goes straight to voice mail. I leave him a message.
As I watch the clip again, I wonder why Ben didn’t call to tell me he’d been poisoned. I could see why he might not want to disturb me about the intruder on the property, but the poisoning is exactly the kind of news I would’ve expected him to tell me. Yet he didn’t call or even text once.
Maybe he didn’t want me to worry, especially since there was nothing I could do from twenty-five hundred miles away.
Or maybe because I’d suggested divorce, he thought I wouldn’t care.
Matt rings back thirty minutes later.
“Sarah,” he says. “Sorry, I was with a patient when you called. I heard Ben’s missing. Any news? Tell me he’s home and that his car broke down or something simple like that.”
“He’s still missing.”
“Crap. I’m so sorry.”
“Do you think the belladonna poisoning might have something to do with his disappearance?”
“Possibly. I can’t tell police because Ben didn’t give me permission to discuss it with anyone. But I was on the phone with my attorney early this morning seeing how I could share information, now that he’s missing. Technically, I’m not supposed to be talking to you about it, either, Sarah. But given the circumstances and since you already know . . .”
“Why didn’t Ben report it to the police himself?”
“He said he had a plan to figure out how it got into his food. Didn’t say what the plan was, though. But he definitely didn’t want anyone to know about it. I think he was even going to tell his sister he had kidney stones.”
“He did. But he didn’t tell me how he came in contact with the drug. Do you know?”
“Yeah, no. It’s very strange. Because it’s not the kind of thing you accidentally ingest or that accidentally gets, you know, mixed up in your food. He said he ate lunch at a restaurant near your house, then started feeling terrible about a half hour later. Thought he was having a heart attack . . . you know, just like his dad did around his age. So once we confirmed the poisoning, the only thing I could figure was that the drug was put into what he ate at lunch.”
“So you think it was . . . deliberate?”
He pauses. I know then that what he’s going to say isn’t going to be good. “Yeah. This wasn’t accidental. I think someone was trying to poison him.”
After I hang up with Matt, I call Detective Dawson and tell him about the poisoning. As he details the places he’s going to check again—the hospitals, the emergency rooms, the morgue—I imagine Ben alone, struggling to stay alive somewhere. A wave of nausea hits me, forcing me to brace myself against the kitchen sink.
“Dad didn’t tell me anything about being poisoned,” Zack says, eyes wide with shock. “He seemed fine when I got home Sunday night after the environmental trip. He even made me his World Famous Grilled Cheese.”
“Maybe he had recovered by then . . .”
“Why wouldn’t he tell me, though?”
“He probably didn’t want to worry you.”
That answer seems to bring his anxiety down a notch because he heads into the kitchen to fix himself a snack.
I glance at my watch and my stomach knots. In a few minutes, I’ll make my statement to the press. I’ve revised the draft five times already, trying to find words that will sound natural so I don’t appear to be reading a prepared statement, even though I am.
Until then, we’re trapped in the house. Reporters are camped on the parkway, and from my living room window I can see the raised antennas of two TV news vans. I suddenly wish I’d chosen black-out curtains in the living room instead of off-white sheers because every time I pass one of the windows, I know the reporters can see movement through the drapes.
Los Angeles is a nonstop news town, so a story like this can be sensational today but utterly forgotten tomorrow. I know I need to capture viewers’ and readers’ hearts, make them feel for Ben’s situation, so they won’t just graze on the sizzle factor of this story and move on to the next sensational one. I have to convince them to help Ben. To be on the lookout for him in case he’s disoriented or sick from the poisoning. I have to believe that someone out there can help.
It’s a tall order. I’d spoken to the news media many times before, most recently about a bus-sized meteor that streaked across the sky in Moscow and blew up. That kind of interview was easy because I had facts to rely on—how fast the meteor was traveling, how big it was, how rare it was.
But here I have no facts. Ben was here. And then he wasn’t. I couldn’t tell reporters about the gun or the large deposit in my bank account. Or anything to do with the Aurora lawsuit.
I pace the hardwood floor in the living room then gaze at the Christmas tree, thinking over Detective Dawson’s question. How did someone who was about to testify in a high-profile trial find time to decorate a Christmas tree? And not just a few strings of lights and ornaments slung onto it. This was a careful production—vintage lights woven throughout, our family’s ornaments carefully placed, and tinsel artfully clinging to the branches. I touch my fingers to the San Franci
sco Trolley ornament Ben and I picked out in a tourist shop on Pier 39 when we spent our first anniversary there. Down below it hangs a surfing Santa ornament from Maui, where we went for our “babymoon” three months before Zack was born.
Ben had started the Christmas tree tradition the year we were married, spending hours scouring stores for lights, ribbon, tinsel, and ornaments. Not because they were part of his own tradition—he grew up in a Jewish household—but because they were mine. Every year he strived to replicate the classic Christmas tree of my memories: the silver tinsel, popcorn garland, candy canes, and big-bulb colorful lights.
And he succeeded. Each time we switched on those Christmas tree lights, I felt like I had stepped back in time, flooded with memories. I could smell my mother’s gingerbread cookies coming out of the oven and hear my father’s voice telling Rachel not to pull the ornaments off the tree that stood by the bay window in the living room. “Ho ho ho,” he’d say, then scoop her up in his arms and fly her away from the tree.
I always felt the fully decorated tree was his best gift to me, and here it was again. A gateway to the past. To happier times.
Why had he decorated the tree in the midst of the chaos of his trial? After being poisoned.
And while so on edge that he had bought a gun.
I’m about to make a statement to reporters when a new email from Aaron flashes across my cell phone: Follow the link below to read or reply to your secure message from Jules Verne.
I shove the phone in my jacket pocket, hoping my look of surprise hasn’t been captured by the cameras that are trained on me.
I stand on my front lawn alongside Detective Dawson in front of a bank of microphones and a sea of reporters.
Stuart and Christie stand off to the side, largely inconspicuous in the growing crowd. I haven’t engaged them to represent me not only because they’re litigators, not defense attorneys, but also because I worry what reporters will assume. In the court of public opinion, it seems to me that you are automatically guilty if you hire a defense attorney in situations like this.