The Last Friend

by Harvey Church

  “You’re not sleeping again, are you?” Eric asked.

  Donovan shook his head. Took a sip. “I had a strange visitor yesterday.”

  Eric raised an eyebrow, the lawyer’s sign language for “speak, subject.”

  “She had purple hair and said her name was Monica Russell.”

  Eric nodded. Sign language for “continue.”

  “She’s Elizabeth’s age.”

  Silence.

  “Said she was Elizabeth’s last friend.” Speaking the words out loud caused the small hairs on Donovan’s neck to stand.

  “From before the abduction?” Eric’s tone said he was already doubtful.

  Donovan shook his head. “She told me they were hostages. Together.”

  Silence.

  Donovan drank some of the cappuccino, aware that his nerves would start humming unless he kept speaking. Only he didn’t exactly know what else to say.

  “Sounds like some kind of scam,” Eric said at last. “The firm sees a lot of this stuff, elderly folks in some kind of state. Memory starts going, they get embarrassed that they don’t remember their long-lost niece who stalked them on Facebook and knows a few details about their personal lives.” He took a long, knowing gulp from his venti cup.

  “I’m not on Facebook,” Donovan said, lying because he still had access to his fake profile. He looked into his hands, trying to remember what had convinced him of Monica’s legitimacy the day before. It was the Barney’s, the butterfly cookie, the dates with Elizabeth on Saturday mornings. “And she knew stuff that nobody else could ever guess. The most obscure things.” Like the lactose intolerance.

  Eric was nodding. He’d seen this before, hadn’t he? “These people are con artists, Donovan. They find this stuff in all sorts of places.”

  “She brought me coffee from Barney’s.”

  More of that all-knowing nodding. “Just think of where this information might be. Old photos that were thrown out, a news article, another family member making a harmless post or comment.” He shrugged.

  Scratching his head, Donovan seemed to think about it.

  “You watch out for this purple-haired fairy, Donovan.” He pointed a finger at him, obviously careful to use the hand with the oversize Harvard class ring on it. “She’ll be softening you up and asking for money sooner or later.”

  Donovan allowed an understanding nod, but he hated that he’d been right about not trusting Monica. He’d been so desperate to learn more about his daughter. “I’m glad we talked, Eric.”

  “Think about it, Donovan. If she was a prisoner with Elizabeth, why is she coming to you? Why not the cops? Where’s the kidnapper?” Shrugging, he stared hard at Donovan before grabbing his big cup and drawing a long sip from it. “I haven’t seen anything in the news about an escaped kidnapping victim, have you?”

  Donovan shook his head, no.

  “Listen, I’m not a con artist,” Eric said with a slightly condescending sigh. “For all I know, there’s a database these pricks can access where they keep tabs on every little detail of a prospective victim’s life. And you, Donovan, you’ve got a rich history. There’s the abduction and all the details they ran in the Trib, and then nine years later all of that came back to the surface with my sister’s unfortunate tragedy.”

  It was a good point. All of the key defining moments in Donovan’s life had been matters of public record, indexed by search engines and available for the whole world to see. But, again, some of those details had been purposely misreported. And Monica had known the true details. Like about the cotton candy. A con artist would’ve thought ice cream; that had been the whole point of the misdirection.

  “Hey. Do you still talk to those FBI agents?” He snapped his fingers, trying to think of something. “There was that one, always showing up and lingering, even after what happened to my precious sister.” Eric had always spoken of Amelia’s suicide as if it had happened to her, like the decision to call it quits had been imposed on her rather than a product of her own broken spirit.

  “Hawthorne,” Donovan said.

  Eric frowned, looked away, and shook his head. “No, not him.”

  “Klein?”

  “Yes, that’s the one. Why not give Klein a call, let him know about this con artist Smurf showing up at your door and trying to take advantage of you.”

  Donovan nodded some more, agreeing with a passive silence even though Smurfs had blue skin, not purple hair. “Yeah. I should do that.” Except Donovan wasn’t an elder being scammed out of his life’s savings. Not yet anyway.

  “Yeah.” Then a bit of silence as they exchanged something of a moment. Eric was always the voice of reason, especially after the most difficult nights when Donovan hadn’t slept at all.

  Forcing a fake laugh, Eric leaned forward on the table. “Is she cute, at least?”

  Glancing away, Donovan couldn’t get past the hair and nose piercing. Never mind her age. Maybe he was old-fashioned that way. “Nah, not really. She just . . . she knew things, Eric. I mean, things I can’t even think about right now. But she convinced me, too, you know? It’s hard to ignore that. Hard to—”

  “Think she could be lying.” Eric fake laughed again, showing just how much he understood. “I know, man. But she’ll be asking for money, mark my words, and then you might as well pay a true entertainer. I mean, buy the book, right?” More laughter.

  Donovan fake laughed, too. “You’re right.”

  Pushing his chair back from the table, Eric stood up. Court adjourned. He pointed that fat finger on his right hand, the Harvard ring catching a ray of LED light and flashing a wink at Donovan. “Call that fed, right?”

  “I will,” Donovan lied. “I will.”

  CHAPTER 7

  At five fifty that Monday evening, the knock came again. Donovan had been trying to read the same page of a novel for the past two hours, unable to focus on account of the exhaustion and skepticism about whether Monica would drop in like she’d promised. So when her tiny knuckles rapped on the door—quieter than the previous day’s bold knocking, he noticed—Donovan jumped out of the chair and hurried to answer it.

  “You’re back,” he said, slightly out of breath from having just sprinted to the door.

  Today, Monica was wearing a work uniform, with her name tag pinned to her chest on one side and the image of a maple leaf on the other, the well-known logo for the Maple Tree discount hotel chain.

  “You work at Maple Tree?”

  Monica flicked her name tag, but Donovan figured she’d intended to flick the other side of her chest instead. “What gives it away?” She stepped past him into the house and kicked off her plain black shoes.

  While he shut the door and engaged the locks, Donovan remembered what Eric had told him earlier. She’s a con artist.

  “Do you mind if I grab a water?” she asked, stepping deeper into the house and heading down the hall toward the kitchen. “I’m dying of thirst.”

  “Sure.” He gave a wave for her to proceed, but she was already gone, pulling the refrigerator door open. He could hear her taking big swallows from the water bottle before letting out a relieved sigh.

  “I’m sorry for that, Mr. Glass,” she said before poking her head into the hallway. “Thank you for the water. I know it was rude of me to walk in like this, but I thought I was going to pass out.”

  “Don’t worry.”

  She smiled, revealing her white and seemingly perfectly aligned teeth. “Did you want anything, Mr. Glass? Another Nespresso?”

  He shook his head. “I’m good.”

  Nodding, Monica tightened the cap on the water bottle and came down the hall, headed toward him. “Then let’s get started.”

  Like the previous day, Monica wandered into the front room, but unlike her prior visit she settled onto the sofa. Donovan noticed that she didn’t wander over to the bookshelf and seek out the types of clues that Eric had suggested she would need for committing her con. Watching her ease back into the cushions of the old piece of
furniture and drop her neck back, Donovan could see she’d had a difficult day at her job.

  “Are you a housekeeper?” he asked, lowering himself onto his leather reading chair.

  Without looking at him, Monica poked at her shirt again. “They wouldn’t put someone like me at the front desk. Those girls wear white shirts that really accentuate their fake tits, blonde or brown hair, and perma-smiles.” She groaned. “I couldn’t be flaky for two bucks more an hour.”

  Donovan couldn’t help it. He chuckled, and the sound startled him as much as it seemed to get Monica’s attention. She straightened herself on the sofa, pulled down the bottom of her shirt, and then took a sip of water from the bottle before raising her stare and studying him.

  “When’s the last time you laughed, Mr. Glass?”

  “Too long.” Was she trying to soften him up? The way Eric had spoken about con artists, it would make sense that she would try to push him into lowering his guard, wouldn’t it? Not wanting to let it get that far, Donovan cleared his throat and frowned. “I have a question for you, Monica.”

  She raised her eyebrows. “Of course. Ask me anything. I don’t know where to start with all of this, so a question might help.”

  He tried not to allow the doubtful grimace to smear across his lips. “Why haven’t you gone to the cops? There haven’t exactly been a whole lot of leads in Elizabeth’s case, and I’m sure they’d love to speak with someone like you, someone who had some kind of relationship with my daughter, someone with firsthand experience who survived and escaped from whatever prison this . . .” He could feel the bitterness on his tongue, taste the bile rising, sense the itch of rage pushing its way into his cheeks and onto his face. Shaking his head, Donovan remembered his breathing exercises and sucked deep breaths into his nostrils, then released the air through his mouth. He did that a couple of times to calm himself down. Relax.

  Monica leaned forward, placing her elbows on her knees. “Are you okay, Mr. Glass?”

  Once he felt better, he nodded. “I know you’d be invaluable to the FBI, that’s all. And then maybe nobody else has to die.”

  Donovan watched as Monica stared back at him, her eyes blank. If Eric had been right and Monica was indeed a con artist, it appeared to Donovan that she hadn’t thought of a reason for not going to the authorities.

  “Like your wife, right?” she asked after that long pause, blinking hard and watching him for a reaction. “I read about her before I came out here to meet you.”

  With his first reaction being surprise, Donovan wondered why she would admit to having done any online stalking at all.

  “When I escaped,” Monica said, and it seemed to Donovan that she was backpedaling a bit, trying to justify why she might’ve looked him up, “the first thing I wanted to do was come out here and talk to you and your wife, just like I’d promised Lizzy. She was my only real friend. The day I showed up, she said you used to sing to her after nightmares.” She smiled crookedly, her eyes glassing over. “The nights she didn’t manage to stay in your bed, the ones when you would bring her back to hers, she said you’d sing things like ‘Twinkle, Twinkle’ or ‘You Are My Sunshine.’”

  “I can’t sing,” Donovan said, staring back at Monica but wondering how she would know those details if she hadn’t legitimately spent time with his daughter. And then Monica reached up and pushed the hair back from her left ear, a motion that sent a chill up Donovan’s spine because he knew where she was headed with it.

  “You’d rub her behind the left ear, she said. Always the left where her scar was, forever hiding and a permanent vulnerability after those kids poked fun of her at school.” Monica let her hair fall back into place.

  Donovan could still envision the scar behind Elizabeth’s ear. She’d burned herself with some cooking grease as an infant. It had been his fault, too, leaving the electric frying pan plugged in while trying to prepare a nice dinner for Amelia—had it been an anniversary, a birthday, the end of a semester at the college? He couldn’t remember. But Elizabeth had crawled into the kitchen, risen to her feet, and yanked on the cord, pulling down the frying pan. She’d been lucky the heavy appliance hadn’t landed on her head or that more of the grease hadn’t scarred her.

  “Fifth-degree burn,” Monica said, still watching him. “When I told her that didn’t exist, she didn’t believe me.”

  When he heard things like that, Donovan had a tough time believing Monica hadn’t spent time with his daughter. He’d told Elizabeth she’d been burned the worst way possible. Fifth degree, he’d said. And even eight years later, she had a purple scar in the shape of Florida behind her ear, a grotesque disfiguration of her otherwise smooth and clear skin.

  “You told her it was how you’d recognize her once she met her twin and the two of them decided to try and trick you, Parent Trap–style.” Monica chuckled and shook her head. “I never had a father like you, Mr. Glass. Lizzy was very lucky.”

  Swatting at the tear that had slipped down his face, Donovan allowed a grateful grin and an appreciative nod. “That’s nice of you to say.”

  “Because of you, Lizzy was able to keep me grounded. She’d rub her finger behind my ear when I couldn’t sleep. She’d sing to me to keep the nightmares at bay, and trust me there were lots of those.” She gulped and gave a big nod before frowning and getting back into character, or whatever she was up to. “So when I read about what happened to her mother, it hurt, Mr. Glass. A mother has the right to know what happens to her baby, and I feel like she . . .”—at that point, Monica formed a fist and held it to her relatively small chest—“I felt like she sensed that her daughter was gone but really didn’t know that she was gone. She obviously didn’t know how she had gone.”

  Letting out the breath he’d been holding in, Donovan nodded his agreement. “She wanted to see her again. She wanted that so badly. She wanted to hold her baby again, stare into her eyes, paint her nails, do all those things just one more time.”

  “Lizzy wanted that, too.”

  At last, Donovan couldn’t hold it. He buried his face in his hands and sobbed. The tears burned his eyes and palms. The next thing he heard was the springs in the couch when Monica stood up. Peeling a finger away so that he could take a peek at what was going on, Donovan saw that she had walked over to his chair. She was looking at her phone, as if something on it had caught her attention. He watched her slide it into her pocket and shake her head.

  “Shit, I have to get home,” Monica said. She placed a hand between his shoulders and gave him a quick circular rub. “I’ll be back tomorrow, if you want me to tell you more, Mr. Glass.”

  “I’d like that.” Donovan nodded between sobs and then felt her hand leave his back. He heard her footsteps wander back toward the front foyer, and he urged himself to get it together. He’d decided, sometime between seeing Eric that morning and this late-afternoon visit with Monica, that he would exercise a bit of focus, which seemed to be falling apart now.

  “Mr. Glass?”

  Wiping his face, he turned around in the reading chair and watched Monica kneel down to work the laces in her housekeeping shoes.

  “You wanted to know why I came to you and didn’t go to the police.”

  “Yes.” He rose out of the leather chair and joined her in the foyer.

  With something of an indecisive look twisting her face, she said, “Although I’m sure they’ll care about sitting down with me to learn about how we were tortured and how your daughter suffered, that can wait. That stuff is different than the stuff I promised Lizzy. And that, unfortunately, can’t wait the same way, Mr. Glass. I hope that makes sense.”

  “I understand.”

  Monica finished tying her second shoe and stood straight, brushing her knees and smoothing out the static wrinkles in her pants. “And, truth be told, Mr. Glass? Promises aside, I think my knowledge, even the bad stuff, is way more valuable to you than the authorities.”

  That was it, wasn’t it? The part that Eric had warned Donovan about, the
part about softening him up. She said he’d value her information more than the authorities would. In a roundabout way, Monica was asking for money, wasn’t she? She was going to sell her knowledge of Elizabeth to him now that she’d convinced him that she’d spent time with her in captivity.

  Smiling appreciatively, Donovan thanked Monica for stopping by and opened the front door for her. “I’ll see you tomorrow, then?”

  She returned the smile, and this time it seemed to say, you betcha! “Same time, only I won’t have to rush out, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  Monica stepped past him, hurried down the porch steps, and rushed to the pimped-out Mustang halfway up the street. He wondered why she had parked so far. He also wondered what the extortion amount would be. Once he heard the Mustang engine’s deep growl, Donovan closed the door, grabbed a pair of shoes, and rushed to the back of the house. Grabbing his keys, he slipped outside after locking the place up, entered the garage that backed onto the lane, and got into his old Impala, the fuel tank filled beyond the full marker after he’d stopped on his way home from coffee this morning.

  “Let’s see where you’re from, Monica Russell,” he mumbled to himself as the garage door rattled open.

  CHAPTER 8

  The traffic wasn’t as heavy as Donovan had expected it might be for a Monday evening. He found it easy to follow the Mustang, and not just because its exhaust note carried the thunder and rumble of an aircraft during takeoff, but more because Monica drove way slower on the city streets than the Mustang wanted.

  Maintaining a three- or four-vehicle distance, Donovan stayed back and followed her right-hand turn onto Cicero. Even if a red light ended up separating them, Donovan would catch up. At I-55, the Mustang took the on-ramp, and Donovan followed until they reached the congestion that veered south onto the I-90 Express, which then turned into I-94. At first, Donovan began to worry that he might end up following her out of state, and, for some reason, that felt more dangerous.