Gone for Good (2002)

by Harlan Coben

  But Katy was already crossing Livingston Avenue. I started after her.

  She picked up speed as she reached the town circle. I caught up.

  "Your parents are going to be worried," I said.

  "I told them I was staying with a friend. It's okay."

  "You want to tell me why you were drinking alone."

  Katy kept walking. Her breathing grew deeper. "I was thirsty."

  "Uh-huh. And why were you yelling about Idaho?"

  She looked at me but didn't break stride. "I think you know."

  I grabbed her arm. "What kind of game are you playing here?"

  "I'm not the one playing games here, Will."

  "What are you talking about?"

  "Idaho, Will. Your Sheila Rogers was from Idaho, right?"

  Again her words hit me like a body blow. "How did you know that?"

  "I read it."

  "In the paper?"

  She chuckled. "You really don't know?"

  I took hold of her shoulders. "What are you talking about?"

  "Where did your Sheila go to college?" she asked.

  "I don't know."

  "I thought you two were madly in love."

  "It's complicated."

  "I bet it is."

  "I still don't understand, Katy."

  "Sheila Rogers went to Haverton, Will. With Julie. They were in the same sorority."

  I stood, stunned. "That's not possible."

  "I can't believe you don't know. Sheila never told you?"

  I shook my head. "Are you sure?"

  "Sheila Rogers of Mason, Idaho. Majored in communications. It's all in the sorority booklet. I found it in an old trunk in the basement."

  "I don't get it. You remembered her name after all these years?"

  "Yeah."

  "How come? I mean, do you remember the name of everyone in Julie's sorority?"

  "No."

  "So why would you remember Sheila Rogers?"

  "Because," Katy said, "Sheila and Julie were roommates."

  Chapter Thirty-Two.

  Squares arrived at my apartment with bagels and spreads from a place cleverly christened La Bagel on 15th and First. It was ten A. M." and Katy was sleeping on the couch. Squares lit up a cigarette. I noticed that he was still wearing the same clothes from last night. This was not easy to discern it was not as though Squares was a leading figure in the haut monde community but this morning he looked extra disheveled. We sat at the stools by the kitchen counter.

  "Hey," I said, "I know you want to blend in with the street people but..."

  He took a plate out of a cabinet. "You going to keep wowing me with the funny lines, or are you going to tell me what happened?"

  "Is there a reason I can't do both?"

  He lowered his head and again looked at me over the sunglasses. "That bad?"

  "Worse," I said.

  Katy stirred on the couch. I heard her say "Ouch." I had the extra-strength Tylenol at the ready. I handed her two with a glass of water. She downed them and stumbled toward the shower. I returned to the stool.

  "How does your nose feel?" Squares asked.

  "Like my heart moved up there and is trying to thump its way out."

  He nodded and took a bite out of a bagel with lox spread. He chewed slowly. His shoulders drooped. I knew that he had not stayed home that night. I knew that something had happened between him and Wanda.

  And mostly, I knew that he did not want me to ask about it.

  "You were saying about worse?" he prompted.

  "Sheila lied to me," I said.

  "We knew that already."

  "Not like this."

  He kept chewing.

  "She knew Julie Miller. They were sorority sisters in college.

  Roommates even."

  He stopped chewing. "Come again?"

  I told him what I'd learned. The shower stayed on the whole time. I imagined that Katy would ache from the alcohol aftereflects for some time yet. Then again, the young recuperate faster than the rest of us.

  When I finished filling him in, Squares leaned back, crossed his arms, and grinned. "Styling," he said.

  "Yeah. Yeah, that's the word that came to my mind too."

  "I don't get it, man." He started spreading another bagel. "Your old girlfriend, who was murdered eleven years ago, was college roommates with your most recent girlfriend, who was also murdered."

  "Yes."

  "And your brother was blamed for the first murder."

  "Yes again."

  "Okay, yeah." Squares nodded confidently. Then: "I still don't get it."

  "It had to be a setup somehow," I said.

  "What was a setup?"

  "Sheila and me." I tried to shrug. "It must have all been a setup. A lie."

  He made a yes-and-no gesture with his head. His long hair fell onto his face. He pushed it back. "To what end?"

  "I don't know."

  "Think about it."

  "I have, "I said. "All night."

  "Okay, suppose you're right. Suppose Sheila did lie to you or, I don't know, set you up somehow. You with me?"

  "With you."

  He raised both palms. "To what end?"

  "Again I don't know."

  "Then let's go through the possibilities," Squares said. He raised his finger. "One, it could be a giant coincidence." I just looked at him.

  "Hold up, you dated Julie Miller, what, more than twelve years ago?"

  "Yes."

  "So maybe Sheila didn't remember. I mean, do you remember the name of every friend's ex? Maybe Julie never talked about you. Or maybe Sheila just forgot your name. And then years later you two meet..."

  I just looked at him some more.

  "Yeah, okay, that's pretty begging," he agreed. "Let's forget that.

  Possibility two" Squares raised another finger, paused, looked up in the air "hell, I'm lost here."

  "Right."

  We ate. He mulled it over some more. "Okay, let's assume that Sheila knew exactly who you were from the beginning."

  "Let's."

  "I still don't get it, man. What are we left with here?"

  "Styling," I replied.

  The shower stopped. I picked up a poppy-seed bagel. The seeds stuck to my hand.

  "I've been thinking about it all night," I said.

  "And?"

  "And I keep coming back to New Mexico."

  "How so?"

  "The FBI wanted to question Sheila about an unsolved double murder in Albuquerque."

  "So?"

  "Years earlier, Julie Miller was also murdered."

  "Also unsolved," Squares said, "though they suspect your brother."

  "Yes."

  "You see a connection between the two," Squares said. "There has to be."

  Squares nodded. "Okay, I see point A and I see point B. But I don't see how you get from one to the other."

  "Neither,"Isaid, "doI."

  We grew silent. Katy peeked her head through the doorway. Her face had that morning-after pallor. She groaned and said, "I just upchucked again."

  "Appreciate the update," I said.

  "Where's my clothes?"

  "The bedroom closet," I said.

  She gestured an in-pain thank-you and closed the door. I looked at the right side of the couch, the spot where Sheila liked to read. How could this be happening? The old adage "Better to have loved and lost than to never have loved at all" came to me. I wondered about that.

  But more than that, I wondered what was worse to lose the love of a lifetime or to realize that maybe she never loved you at all.

  Some choice.

  The phone rang. This time I did not wait for the machine. I lifted the receiver and said hello.

  "Will?"

  "Yes?"

  "It's Yvonne Sterno," she said. "Albuquerque's answer to Jimmy Olsen."

  "What have you got?"

  "I've been up all night working on this."

  "And?"

  "And it keeps getting weirder."<
br />
  "I'm listening."

  "Okay, I got my contact to go through the deeds and tax records. Now understand that my contact is a government employee, and I got her to go in during her off hours. You usually have a better chance of turning water into wine or having my uncle pick up a check than getting a government employee to show up "

  "Yvonne?" I interrupted.

  "Yeah?"

  "Assume that I'm already impressed by your resourcefulness. Tell me what you got."

  "Yeah, okay, you're right," she said. I heard papers being shuffled.

  "The murder-scene house was leased by a corporation called Cripco."

  "And they are?"

  "Untraceable. It's a shell. They don't seem to do anything."

  I thought about that.

  "Owen Enfield also had a car. A gray Honda Accord. Also leased by the fine folks at Cripco."

  "Maybe he worked for them."

  "Maybe. I'm trying to check that now."

  "Where'sthecarnow?"

  "That's another interesting thing," Yvonne said. "The police found it abandoned in a mall in Lacida. That's about two hundred miles east of here."

  "So where is Owen Enfield?"

  "My guess? He's dead. For all we know, he was one of the victims."

  "And the woman and little girl? Where are they?"

  "No clue. Hell, I don't even know who they are."

  "Did you talk to the neighbors?"

  "Yes. It's like I said before: No one knew much about them."

  "How about a physical description?"

  "Ah."

  "Ah what?"

  "That's what I wanted to talk to you about."

  Squares kept eating, but I could tell he was listening. Katy was still in my room, either dressing or making another offering to the porcelain gods.

  "The descriptions were pretty vague," Yvonne continued. "The woman was in her mid-thirties, attractive, and a brunette. That's about as much as any of the neighbors could tell me. No one knew the little girl's name. She was around eleven or twelve with sandy-brown hair. One neighbor described her as cute as a button, but what kid that age isn't? Mr. Enfield was described as six feet with a gray crew cut and goatee. Forty years old, more or less."

  "Then he wasn't one of the victims," I said.

  "How do you know?"

  "I saw a photo of the crime scene."

  "When?"

  "When I was questioned by the FBI about my girlfriend's whereabouts."

  "You could see the victims?"

  "Not clearly, but enough to know that neither had a crew cut."

  "Hmm. Then the whole family has up and vanished."

  "Yes."

  "There's one other thing, Will."

  "What's that?"

  "Stonepointe is a new community. Everything is fairly self-contained."

  "Meaning?"

  "Are you familiar with Quick Go the convenience store chain?"

  "Sure," I said. "We have QuickGos out here too."

  Squares took off his sunglasses and looked a question at me. I shrugged and he moved toward me.

  "Well, there's a big Quick Go at the edge of the complex," Yvonne said.

  "Almost all the residents use it."

  "So?"

  "One of the neighbors swore she saw Owen Enfield there at three o'clock on the day of the murders."

  "I'm not following you, Yvonne."

  "Well," she said, "the thing is, all the QuickGos have security cameras." She paused. "You following me now?"

  "Yeah, I think so."

  "I already checked," she went on. "They keep them for a month before they tape over them."

  "So if we can get that tape," I began, "we might be able to get a good view of Mr. Enfield."

  "Big if, though. The store manager was firm. There was no way he was going to turn anything over to me."

  "There has to be a way," I said.

  "I'm open to ideas, Will."

  Squares put his hand on my shoulder. "What?"

  I covered the mouthpiece and filled him in. "You know anybody connected to Quick Go I said.

  "Incredible as this might sound, the answer is nope."

  Damn. We mulled it over for a bit. Yvonne started humming the Quick Go jingle, one of those torturous tunes that enters through the ear canal and proceeds to ricochet around the skull in search of an escape route it will never find. I remembered the new commercial campaign, the one where they updated the old jingle by adding an electric guitar and a synthesizer and bass, and fronting the band with a big-time pop star simply known as Sonay.

  Hold the phone. Sonay. Squares looked at me. "What?"

  "I think you may be able to help after all," I said.

  Chapter Thirty-Three.

  Sheila and Julie had been members of Chi Gamma sorority. I still had the rent-a-car from my late-night sojourn to Livingston, so Katy and I decided to take the two-hour drive up to Haverton College in Connecticut and see what we could learn.

  Earlier in the day, I called the Haverton registrar's office to do a little fact-checking. I'd learned that the sorority's housemother back then had been one Rose Baker. Ms. Baker had retired three years ago and moved into a campus house directly across the street. She was to be the main target of our pseudo-investigation.

  We pulled in front of the Chi Gamma house. I remembered it from my too-infrequent visits during my Amherst College days. You could tell right off that it was a sorority house. It had that antebellum, faux Greco-Roman-columns-thing going on, all in white, and with soft ruffled edges that gave the whole edifice a feminine feel. Something about it reminded me of a wedding cake.

  Rose Baker's residence was, to speak kindly, more modest. The house had started life as a small Cape Cod, but somewhere along the way the lines had been ironed flat. The one-time red color was now a dull clay. The window lace looked cat-shredded. Shingles had flaked off as if the house had an acute case of seborrhea.

  Under normal circumstances, I would have made an appointment of some kind. On TV, they never do that. The detective shows up and the person is always home. I always found that both unrealistic and unwieldy, yet perhaps now I understood a little better. First off, the chatty lady in the registrar's office informed me that Rose Baker rarely left home, and when she did, she rarely strayed far. Second and I think, more important if I called Rose Baker and she asked me why I wanted to see her, what would I say? Hi, let's talk murder? No, better just to show up with Katy and see where that got us. If she was not in, we could always explore the archives in the library or visit the sorority house. I had no idea what good any of this would do, but hey, we were just flying blind here.

  As we approached Rose Baker's door, I could not help but feel a pang of envy for the knapsack-laden students I saw walking to and fro. I'd loved college. I loved everything about it. I loved hanging out with sloppy slacker friends. I loved living on my own, doing laundry too rarely, eating pepperoni pizza at midnight. I loved chatting with the accessible, hippie like professors. I loved debating lofty issues and harsh realities that never, ever, penetrated the green of our campus.

  When we reached the overly cheerful welcome mat, I heard a familiar song wafting through the wooden portal. I made a face and listened closer. The sound was muffled, but it sounded like Elton John more specifically, his song "Candle in the Wind" from the classic Goodbye Yellow Brick Road double album. I knocked on the door.

  A woman's voice chimed, "Just a minute."

  A few seconds later, the door opened. Rose Baker was probably in her seventies and dressed, I was surprised to see, for a funeral. Her wardrobe, from the big-brimmed hat with matching veil to the sensible shoes, was black. Her rouge looked as if it'd been liberally applied via an aerosol can. Her mouth formed a nearly perfect "O" and her eyes were big red saucers, as if her face had frozen immediately after being startled.

  "Mrs. Baker? "I said.

  She lifted the veil. "Yes?"

  "My name is Will Klein. This is Katy Miller."

  The sa
ucer eyes swiveled toward Katy and locked into position.

  "Is this a bad time?" I asked.

  She seemed surprised by the question. "Not at all."

  I said, "We'd like to speak with you, if that's okay."

  "Katy Miller," she repeated, her eyes still on her.

  "Yes, ma'am," I said.

  "Julie's sister."

  It was not a question, but Katy nodded anyway. Rose Baker pushed open the screen door. "Please come in."

  We followed her into the living room. Katy and I stopped short, taken aback by what we saw.

  It was Princess Di.

  She was everywhere. The entire room was sheathed, blanketed, overrun with Princess Di paraphernalia. There were photographs, of course, but also tea sets, commemorative plates, embroidered pillows, lamps, figurines, books, thimbles, shot glasses (how respectful), a toothbrush (eeuw!), a night-light, sunglasses, salt-'n-pepper shakers, you name it. I realized that the song I was hearing was not the original Elton John-Bernie Taupin classic, but the more recent Princess Di tribute version, the lyrics now offering a good-bye to our "English rose." I had read somewhere that the Di-tribute version was the biggest-selling single in world history. That said something, though I was not sure I wanted to know what.

  Rose Baker said, "Do you remember when Princess Diana died?"

  I looked at Katy. She looked at me. We both nodded yes.

  "Do you remember the way the world mourned?"

  She looked at us some more. And we nodded again.

  "For most people, the grief, the mourning, it was just a fad. They did it for a few days, maybe a week or two. And then" she snapped her fingers, magician style, her saucer eyes bigger than ever "it was over for them. Like she never existed at all."

  She looked at us and waited for clucks of agreement. I tried not to make a face.

  "But for some of us, Diana, Princess of Wales, well, she really was an angel. Too good for this world maybe. We won't ever forget her. We keep the light burning."

  She dabbed her eye. A sarcastic rejoinder came to my lips, but I bit it back.

  "Please," she said. "Have a seat. Would you care for. some tea?"

  Katy and I both politely declined.

  "A biscuit, then?"

  She produced a plate with cookies in the shape of, yup, Princess Diana's profile. Sprinkles formed the crown. We begged off, neither of us much in the mood to nibble on dead Di. I decided to start right in.

  "Mrs. Baker," I said, "you remember Katy's sister, Julie?"