Someone Like Me

by M. R. Carey

  “She still had enough money put by to hire you,” Beth observed sourly.

  Vance gave her a Mormon smile. “Actually, they’re all throwing in together. Ms. Langdon, Mrs. Kendall senior, Marc’s sister Vera. They’ve agreed to split my fee into equal thirds. That is unless you’d like to come in too, in which case you’d have full access to anything I—”

  “No.”

  “Anything I find out, I was going to say.”

  “Absolutely not. I can’t afford even a quarter of you.”

  Another smile. “No problem. I get paid either way, obviously, so it’s not an issue for me. I just thought there might be some advantage in the arrangement for you, since you’d get the services of a professional investigator at a fraction of the cost you’d normally expect to pay.”

  “The cost I’m expecting to pay is nothing,” Beth said. “Can you give me a discount on that?”

  Vance laughed heartily. “No, that’s too hard a bargain for me. You win.” He got serious suddenly, the way con artists do when they want to throw you a curveball. “I wonder if you have any ideas, though, where your ex-husband might have gone to ground? I mean, if the police are right and he’s just keeping his head down rather than face trial. Are there any places you went to together that he might have an attachment to? Or any friends I might not know about who he could be staying with?”

  “Sorry,” Beth said. “I don’t think there’s anything I can add to what you already know.”

  “No? Well, that’s a pity.” Vance finally took a sip of his coffee, drawing it out to cover the pause—which was made all the more obvious by the lack of any other conversations in their immediate vicinity. It was another con man trick, leaving a hole in the conversation in the hope that she’d feel a need to fill it. Beth just worked on her meatball sandwich until he was finally forced to start up again.

  “How did your ex-husband seem to you the last time you saw him?” he asked. “Happy? Unhappy?”

  Dead. Covered in his own blood for once, instead of mine. It looked good on him, I’ve got to say.

  “The last time I saw him was at the courthouse when I got an injunction requiring him to stay the hell away from me.”

  “Sorry, I meant to say the last time you spoke to him.”

  Had Liz and Marc talked at the courthouse? Beth didn’t think so, but she couldn’t be sure. Liz had fended her off pretty effectively that day, and she hadn’t been able to stick around for the whole show. She took a punt. “That would have been the night he attacked me,” she said. “The night he was arrested.”

  Vance’s brow furrowed just a little. “Are you sure?” he asked.

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  “Only, the reason I ask is you made a complaint to the police a few days prior to Marc’s disappearance. About a stalker. A guy who was pranking your car and turning up at your house when you weren’t there.”

  Beth gave the man a blank stare. “Yes. So?”

  “So didn’t you think that might have been your ex-husband?”

  Beth hesitated. The phone calls between Marc and Liz … those had all been on the disposable burner Marc had bought, surely? And the burner was still in the back of her closet along with Marc’s regular cell, next to their batteries which she’d taken out and dumped in a Ziploc bag. Vance was just fishing without any bait on his hook.

  “It crossed my mind,” she said.

  “What do you think now? You reckon it was him?”

  “I have no idea.”

  “Because, you know, the night he disappeared he didn’t take his car. And it was a cold night. He was going someplace that was close.”

  “Or maybe he took a cab.”

  “Maybe. But I don’t think so. No cabbie remembers taking him, and the phone records I got from his network provider don’t have him calling a cab. He would have had to hail one on the street, which, you know, in Larimer after midnight …”

  He left another pause, but Beth was done with speculating. “He didn’t come anywhere near my house,” she said.

  “That’s weird. Because he definitely set off in that direction.”

  It wasn’t hard to keep her face straight. If Vance had anything solid he would have led with it. You only threw out a teaser if you were looking to get a reaction. She didn’t give him one. “Really?” was all she said.

  “Really. We’ve got him on CCTV footage, heading east on Lincoln. That would have taken him round your neck of the woods, wouldn’t it?”

  “It would have taken him a lot of places,” Beth said. “Including the Allegheny River. It’s a pretty long road.” She took another bite out of her sandwich, dumped the rest and wiped her fingers.

  “That it is,” Vance said with a chuckle. “But we have him walking, like I said. So it’s not likely he went all that far. I’m thinking your house holds up pretty well as a possible destination.”

  “I never saw him,” Beth repeated. “Not that night. If I had, I would have told the police at the time. If he was heading my way, maybe he was trying to get a glimpse of the kids. If he was about to skip town, it would have been the last time he saw them in a while.”

  Vance mulled this one over, tilting his head one way and then the other. “I can see that,” he said. “It was pretty late, though. After midnight. Doesn’t seem likely the kids would still have been up. Were they?”

  Beth blinked. The memory of Molly standing in the bloody kitchen had just come back to her very vividly. “No. Of course not.”

  “Sorry.” The detective rotated his coffee cup idly, using just the tips of his fingers. “I wasn’t trying to imply anything about your parenting, just asking for clarity’s sake. Returning to the substantive point, if Marc had been leaving town I’d expect to see some signs of planning. Preparation. He left his toothbrush and his electric shaver behind. His phone charger. He didn’t even pack a change of underwear.”

  “I’m not an expert on the state of his underwear. You’d have to ask Jamie Langdon about that.” Beth stood. She felt she’d heard as much as she needed to. “I need to get back to work,” she said.

  “Of course.” Vance pushed the coffee cup away and got to his feet. “I’m really grateful to you for taking the time to talk to me. Can I drop by again if I turn up anything interesting?”

  Beth just wanted rid of him now. “If it’s interesting, I assume you’ll tell the police. I’ll find out through them.”

  “Are those my marching orders, Ms. Kendall?”

  Enough was enough, she suddenly decided. “Healey,” she snapped.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “I’m taking back my maiden name. Ms. Elizabeth Healey. Fuck knows, it took me long enough to get there.”

  “Touched a nerve,” Vance said, breaking out a smile that was even wider than the ones he’d displayed before. “I am genuinely sorry. Just so you know, I’m not on anyone’s side in this. Certainly not your ex-husband’s. I work to a brief, that’s all.”

  “I’m sure,” Beth said.

  “Good day to you, Ms. Healey. I can get down to the street if I just keep going straight, right? Thanks again for all your help. It’s very much appreciated.”

  And he was gone, leaving Beth with the unpleasant sense of shock you get when someone jostles you on the sidewalk and keeps on going without any apology or acknowledgment, as if you weren’t even there. The women on the surrounding tables were watching her openly now, some of them talking in low murmurs—probably discussing the highlights of what had just happened. Beth was about to say something about the matinee being over, but one of the women, Alice Folger, gave her a thumbs-up and a nod of respect. Some of them—maybe all of them—were on her side in this. The goodwill of a bunch of minimum-wagers maybe didn’t mean a whole lot, but it was better to have it than not. Especially if the Mormons came back in force.

  For the rest of her shift, she was serving chili dogs and cheese fries at one of the snack food stations. A welcome step up from cleaning, but Jesus! What did that say about h
er life? She’d had ambitions once. Now here she was about half a notch above the street, living day-to-day and hand-to-mouth and never looking even an inch over the horizon.

  What was wrong with this picture?

  Partly, she knew, the frustration was just a reaction to Vance showing up and rubbing her nose in her own mistakes. She was still brooding about it when she clocked off at the end of her shift and drove home.

  Except she didn’t go there straight away. She was suddenly filled with a sense of claustrophobia at the thought of spending another evening trapped in the same narrow space with two people who, although she had been with them every moment of their lives and knew every inch of their skin, were still total strangers to her.

  She had read online, in a not-so-idle moment, a sensationalistic article about a mental illness called Capgras delusion. Sufferers became convinced that their loved ones were impostors, that some hideous substitution had been carried out while they slept so they woke up surrounded by strangers disguised as spouses, lovers, parents, children.

  Beth had enough objectivity to self-diagnose. What she was feeling now was like Capgras except that it wasn’t a delusion—because Zac and Molly both were and weren’t her kids. She had been able to make herself believe the disconnect wouldn’t matter, that she could love them just as much as the children she had lost. But that plan had unraveled, leaving her at first indifferent to the Liz-variant Zac and the Liz-variant Molly and then, increasingly, revolted and unnerved by them.

  But she had managed to hide her ambivalence, at least most of the time. Yeah, there was that one time when she’d pushed Molly and sent her sprawling, but she’d been careful not to let that happen again. She wasn’t a violent sadist like Marc. She didn’t revel in other people’s pain and humiliation, especially if they were helpless. She just freaked out a little, sometimes, if the fake kids came too suddenly and unexpectedly into her space. And after her encounter with Vance the private dick, she really didn’t need that shit right now.

  Yielding to a sudden impulse, she took a right onto Stanton and drove up to the Full Pint Wild Side. She and Marc had drunk there a few times in their first few months at the city. Before things went bad. Beth wasn’t going for the nostalgia, though: it was just far enough from her usual haunts that she wouldn’t be recognized there. She went inside and ordered a screwdriver: a double, with Greenhook gin and freshly squeezed juice.

  She sat in a booth in a quiet corner of the room and stared at the drink for a long time while recent events replayed on a loop behind her eyes. Tense as hell, her nerves jangling like tiny bells, she set her parted lips to the glass. Tilted it up, so the alcohol washed against the tip of her tongue.

  She drank the whole thing in a couple of swallows. When the bartender brought her a bowl of peanuts, she ordered another double and drank it more slowly, pondering. Was Vance nothing, or were the chickens coming home? What was the worst that could happen here?

  If Jamie kept poking away at Marc’s disappearance, she could easily end up convincing the police there was something worth investigating. They wouldn’t find the garden plot. Nobody knew about that. All the same, Beth thought, it would be nice if she could think of a way to nip this whole thing in the bud.

  She glared at her drink, waiting for a workable idea to arrive. But to count as workable, the idea had to do two things. It had to give some weight to the theory that Marc was still alive, and it had to make Jamie lose her appetite for the chase so she called off her Mormon.

  Pretty tall order. She sat there a long time and nothing came—except for a man in a Led Zeppelin T-shirt, shaven-headed and extensively tattooed, who tried to hit on her. Another time she would have gone for it. The guy was perfectly okay for a little afternoon delight, if nothing else. When it came to really casual sex, you had to relax your standards a little: the best was the enemy of the good.

  But right then she had other things on her mind.

  “Surely a lovely lady like you isn’t drinking alone?” was Mr. Zeppelin’s opening line.

  “You see anyone else?”

  “Nope.”

  “Then your eyes are working just fine. And mine are too, so you’re out of fucking luck.”

  The man flushed red, with embarrassment or anger. “There’s no need to be like that,” he said in a tight voice. He retreated back to the bar, where he’d been sitting by himself.

  Men and their damn appetites. They just didn’t know how to turn it off.

  A thought came to her suddenly, out of nowhere—or at least the leading edge of a thought. It had the merit of simplicity, and it ought to leave Jamie with much less enthusiasm for picking up Marc’s trail. Since she insisted on leading with her chin, it would feel pretty good to smack her in the face, and it would hurt her all the more because it would seem to come out of kindness rather than cruelty.

  She had it coming.

  When Beth got home, she went to the closet and got out Marc’s phone. Not the burner, his regular phone. She attached a charger and poured herself a glass of pinot while it warmed itself up after its weeks of hibernation.

  As soon as the screen lit up, she tried Marc’s old security swipe—a capital M, starting at lower left and ending at bottom right. If he had changed it, this idea would be a non-starter and she would have to think of something else. But it worked just fine.

  She typed slowly and carefully, fortifying herself with occasional sips of the rich red wine.

  Hey, Jags. This is me. Apologizing for once in my life. I should have gotten in touch sooner, but the truth is I was kind of ashamed to. I let you down, I know, and I left you in a bad situation with the bail bond and everything. I wish I could have figured out some other way, but I couldn’t. I’ve been seeing this girl for a few months now. I met her one night when you were at your evening class. We got talking, and we were just on the same wavelength. I’m not going to tell you her name, because I don’t want you to come looking for me. You’d be wasting your time in any case. I’m a long way away from anywhere you’d be likely to look. Anyway, it seemed to me like if I didn’t leave when I did I might never leave at all. This way you don’t have to wait for me to get out of jail only to find that I’m with someone else. It’s better for both of us, I hope you see that. Goodbye and good luck, babe, and thanks for everything. I won’t forget you. Marc

  When she was finished she read it through three times from beginning to end. It read pretty well, she thought, but it wasn’t perfect. Or maybe it was, and that was the problem. She took another pass, adding in a few typos of the sort that people were liable to make when their fingers were moving quickly across a tiny virtual keyboard.

  Then she hit SEND, because there was no point in overthinking it. Jamie wasn’t a mastermind: she was a scrawny little rabbit who’d poked the wrong bear.

  There was only one way to get the Grove City visit back on the agenda. Fran had to come clean to her dad.

  She picked her moment: a Friday night after homemade chili and an episode of Stranger Things. She told him everything, or at least the portion of everything that she could actually explain. The part about trying to come to terms with her fear, first by visiting the abandoned hulk of the motel, then by reading the transcripts from Bruno Picota’s trial and now by going to see him in person. “If that’s okay, Dad. If you let me go.”

  Gil’s face went through many degrees of unhappiness while she was talking. His first questions were logistical ones. How long ago did all this start? How many times had she been back to the Perry Friendly? When had she spoken to Dr. Southern?

  She could see that what hurt him more than anything was that she hadn’t told him. That she had carried this for so long without asking him to help. Fran tried to explain that he had helped, always, just by being there and by loving her. If she hadn’t told him, that was mainly because she hadn’t felt right about demanding more from him when he had already done so much. She wouldn’t have been able to do this sprint by herself if the two of them hadn’t run a marathon
together.

  Gil made the right noises to all of this, but it was only about a half of the truth and he knew what the other half was. She hadn’t trusted him to give his consent to things that would put her in danger, and she had chosen the easiest way around that problem when she decided not to tell him.

  He didn’t say any of that, though. He didn’t reproach her by so much as a word. “If you think this will help, Frog, then I’m all for it. But I’m not sending you up to Grove City by yourself.”

  “Dr. Southern will come,” Fran told him. She assumed he would, anyway. She couldn’t see him missing out on something like this. His current patient and his former one, face-to-face: the match of the century! The insurance wouldn’t cover it but somehow she didn’t doubt that he would find a way to be there.

  “Fine. But I’m coming too,” Gil said.

  “Okay.”

  “But you’re sure, Fran? This is something you want to do? Not something Southern dreamed up to justify his fee?”

  “I’m sure, Dad. It wasn’t his idea—it was mine.”

  “Good for you,” Gil said with a sad smile. The smile said he’d raised her well and maybe wished he hadn’t. “I’m coming along,” he repeated. “No arguments.”

  Fran didn’t offer any. She emailed Dr. Southern before she went to bed to tell him that the trip was on after all. I mean, if I haven’t already missed it. If they didn’t take back the offer. She added that her dad was coming with her, and that he would need at least three days’ notice so he could get the time off work. She said she was sorry if she’d dicked him around, and she thanked him in advance for making all the arrangements.

  Remember to bring plenty of donuts, Jinx said scathingly.

  “Don’t be mean,” Fran scolded her.