Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I understand there’s a problem?” Jordan said once she’d handed his badge back.

  “My neighbor is missing.” Mrs. Bass raised her cane and swung it toward Addie’s darkened house, narrowly missing Jordan’s nose. “Adelaide Downs of Fourteen Crescent Drive.”

  “For how long?”

  “Since four o’clock this afternoon. Perhaps earlier. Four o’clock was when I called and got no answer on either her home phone or her cell.” Mrs. Bass swung open her door and led Jordan into a warm, cluttered, book-lined living room that looked oddly familiar. It took him a minute to place it, but finally, he realized that he’d seen the room—the red-and-white fleur-de-lis wallpaper, the heavy wood furniture—in the framed photograph in Jon Downs’s bedroom. This was where Addie and Jon had once posed in front of the Christmas tree.

  Mrs. Bass settled herself into a recliner bracketed by teetering stacks of Agatha Christie paperbacks and National Geographics, raised the footrest with a whoosh, and waved her cane at a loveseat covered in slippery-looking cat-scratched beige satin. Jordan perched on its edge, swiped at his watering eye, and pulled out his notebook. “Normally, the department requires an adult be missing for at least forty-eight hours before we can file a report.”

  “These are special circumstances. Addie is definitely missing.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Because,” she answered, “Addie is always home. I have been her next-door neighbor since her birth, and Addie is always home.”

  “She never takes vacations?” Jordan asked. “Never travels? No boyfriends?”

  Mrs. Bass shook her head. “Her brother is unwell,” she said. “She stays here in case he needs her. She goes out in the afternoons for a few hours—swimming or shopping. And she always answers her phone.”

  Jordan nodded. With a brother in Jon’s condition, he could see why she’d be attentive to her telephone ringing. “No boyfriends?” he asked again, assuring himself that he was asking out of professional curiosity. Mrs. Bass paused before she said, “None that I’ve met.” She hesitated again. “Addie was very heavy for a number of years. I always believed it would take a special man to see past that. Men of your generation are dismayingly superficial. But I always hoped…” Her voice trailed off. “She’s missing,” she finally said. “And I am concerned.”

  “Had Addie had trouble with anyone?” Jordan asked.

  Mrs. Bass frowned. “Not for years. Not since high school. There was a situation involving Addie’s friend Valerie…”

  He took notes while she gave him a version of the same story Christie Keogh had told him: a wild party senior year, Val and Dan Swansea off in the woods, Addie’s accusation, Val’s denial, and the months of harassment that had followed. Addie had gone off to college and come home weeks later, after her father died. She had stayed to take care of her mother and had been in Pleasant Ridge ever since. Addie worked from home, had no boyfriends that Mrs. Bass mentioned and no friends that Mrs. Bass was aware of, although she allowed that “perhaps Addie does her socializing online.” Either way, Addie Downs was always available to sign for a package or help shovel a driveway or unlock a frozen computer, which was why Mrs. Bass had called her in the first place.

  “I spoke to Ms. Downs this morning,” Jordan said. Mrs. Bass’s bushy gray eyebrows lifted.

  “And she seemed well?”

  “There was a high school reunion last night,” he said.

  “I doubt,” said Mrs. Bass, “that Addie would have any interest in attending.”

  “We found blood and a belt in the country club parking lot.”

  The eyebrows shot up even higher. “You can’t possibly believe that Addie was involved in a crime.”

  “We have to investigate every lead. And this morning, I saw Addie leaving Crescent Drive, in a green station wagon.”

  “Her father’s car,” Mrs. Bass murmured.

  “She was with someone. Another woman,” said Jordan, “A blonde.”

  Mrs. Bass looked thoughtful. “I wonder if it could have been Valerie,” she said in a low, musing voice. Then she surprised Jordan by lifting her big, spotted hands and clapping them together in a noisy volley of applause. “Well, good for her! Good for both of them!”

  “Except,” said Jordan, “I have a crime to solve.”

  Mrs. Bass gave a definitive shake of her head. “Addie’s a good girl.”

  “Gets the mail when you’re away,” he said. “Signs for packages. Shovels your driveway.”

  “Addie would never…”

  “… hurt a fly?” he said.

  She snapped the recliner’s bottom down and pushed herself to her feet. “Young man,” she said, “you may be an officer of the law. But, may I humbly suggest, you have a great deal to learn about human nature.”

  THIRTY-THREE

  Jordan ended up fixing Mrs. Bass’s computer—it turned out to be a simple matter of hitting “restart”—then made his way through the darkness, over the frost-crunchy lawn, to Adelaide Downs’s front door. It was locked. No one answered his knock or the doorbell. He walked around to the back of the house, where he stood on his tiptoes and shone his flashlight through the windows. Laundry room: unremarkable. Dining room: ditto. There was a light on in the kitchen, shining over the sink, and he could see the kitchen table, with a teacup and what looked like a water glass on top. A woman’s coat was draped over one chair, and on the refrigerator, stuck in the middle of what looked like coupons and shopping lists, was a laser-printed piece of paper. He squinted to make out the words: I WENT TO MEET MATTHEW SHARP ON FRIDAY, NOVEMBER 23. IF ANYTHING HAPPENED TO ME, IT’S PROBABLY HIS FAULT. There was a Pleasant Ridge address and telephone number, and a postscript: I WOULD LIKE A MILITARY FUNERAL.

  Jordan pulled out his cell phone and called the station as he walked around the house. “Hey, Holly, did we get anything on that Matthew Sharp?”

  “Didn’t you get my text?” Jordan gave a vague kind of grunt, a noise that could have meant “yes” and could have meant “no” and could have just meant “my lunch didn’t agree with me.” “He’s the one who calls the station every time there’s a full moon to complain about the alien spaceship outside his window,” Holly said. “He said he and Addie Downs left the restaurant at nine-thirty, and then he went home and was online in some psychic phenomenon chat room. There are date-stamped messages that prove it.”

  “Good work,” he said, and peered into the garage, where a silver Jaguar sat like it was preening. Addie drove a Jag? “Hey, Holly, run a plate for me, okay?” He recited the number, then waited until Holly came back on the line.

  “Car is registered to Valerie Violet Adler,” she said.

  Bingo, he thought.

  “And guess what?” said Holly, her normally alto voice high and squeaky with excitement. “She’s got a gun.”

  “What?”

  “Well, at least she’s got a permit to carry one. To carry, concealed. She got assaulted in the TV station’s parking garage… or at least she said she did, but she never called the cops, so there’s no report, but the station did a series about it last February. ‘I Walk in Fear.’ There was theme music and everything. You can get it on YouTube.”

  “How’d you find that out?”

  Holly paused minutely. “I did a Google,” she finally said. Jordan winced. One little mistake, one tiny screwup, one single reference to “doing a Google” when everyone knew you were just supposed to say you’d googled so-and-so, and his patrol-people would spend the rest of their careers treating him like he was an old dog, good for nothing but lying on a mat by the door, farting and licking the place where his balls used to be.

  “Thanks,” he said to Holly, and flipped his phone shut. Old Mrs. Bass had nailed it. Val had been here. Val was probably the other woman in the car; Val and Addie were together, and Val had a gun. And theme music to go with it. So now what?

  Pocketing his phone, he walked to the back door. He was going in. He had to. “Official business,” he said ou
t loud. “Reasonable expectation.” That was what he’d tell the D.A. if the admissibility of the fruits of this search ever came up in court. Addie was not answering her door or her telephone. Her neighbor had reported her missing. The note on the refrigerator suggested that she might have been harmed, and Valerie Adler had a gun. It was his duty, his sworn obligation, to make sure that Addie was safe. Then he reached under the welcome mat and pulled out a key. He shook his head as he unlocked the door—he always told the women who came to his Safe Home seminars that a key under the welcome mat was as good as just leaving the door open—and stepped inside. First, he trotted up the stairs, calling Addie’s name, moving quickly from room to room, opening doors and shower curtains, sticking his head into the crawl space above the closet, working his way down to the first floor. On a table just inside the front door was a painted clay bowl with pocketbook detritus—he poked around and found a nail file and a half-empty packet of cinnamon gum. He could hear the furnace rumbling in the basement, and he could smell the ghost of woodsmoke from the living room fireplace.

  The living room was to the left, the dining room to the right, a staircase straight ahead of him with the kitchen beyond that. Addie’s house was warm and cozy, just as nice as he’d remembered. It looked like it had come out of one of those decorating magazines that Patti used to read when she still read things that weren’t baby-related. She’d stick Post-its to pages about retiled bathrooms or overhauled kitchens. Maybe someday, Jordan would tell her.

  Jordan sat down on the couch and surveyed the living room again: the paintings and drawings on the walls, the flat-screen TV, the brass tub full of split wood next to the fireplace, a pile of heavy, oversized art books centered on the coffee table. He leaned back with a sigh. It was a place where a man could watch the game, have a beer, relax by the fire. It was…

  He shook his head. So Addie Downs had good taste in couches and pretty paintings on her walls. That didn’t mean anything. Get a grip, he told himself, and proceeded to the dining room. Addie had filled the windowsill with plants and set up a wooden easel in front of the window, and a tilted architect’s desk next to that. Arranged on the dining room table were a stack of creamy paper, palettes of watercolors, and three empty coffee cans stuffed full of brushes and sharpened colored pencils. A Macintosh computer with an oversized screen occupied the far end of the table. Next to it was a watercolor painting of a small white bird flying over a blue ocean against a pale-blue sky.

  He pulled on a pair of thin plastic gloves and tapped the Mac’s mousepad. The screen flared to life, and hallelujah, finally some good luck. Addie had left her e-mail in-box open. He scrolled through a month’s worth of e-mails, looking for something from Matthew Sharp or Dan Swansea, or Valerie Adler, or anyone connected with Pleasant Ridge’s class of 1992. He didn’t find anything. There was a note from an editor at Happy Hearts Greeting Cards thanking Addie for turning in something called a page proof before the holidays (“We can always count on you!”) and a solicitation from the Crossroads, asking for Addie’s continued support of the important work they did on behalf of clients living with brain damage and mental illness. Other than that, zip. No dirty jokes (Jordan could count on at least one of those in his own in-box every day, courtesy of his brother, Sam, who communicated primarily through blow-job jokes, probably because he had two kids and a functional marriage and didn’t know what to say to Jordan anymore). No all-caps e-mails about how Barack Obama was a Muslim or how your cell phone would give you cancer if the fluoride in your toothpaste didn’t give it to you first (Jordan received those on a weekly basis from his grandmother in Miami, who’d discovered the Internet at the age of ninety-two and had become a devoted conspiracy theorist).

  He walked back to the kitchen. There was a copper teapot on the stove, a blue-and-white sugar dish beside it, paintings of different flowers on the walls—he recognized irises and lilacs and couldn’t name the rest. In the sink he saw the dishes he and Addie had used, one with a few doughnut crumbs still clinging to it. On the table he found a mug of tea, half-full, ice-cold, and, across from it, an empty water glass. Jordan lifted it in a gloved hand and sniffed. Vodka. He went methodically through the cupboards, examining boxes of pasta and crackers, plates and glasses and mugs, many of them hand-painted, decorated with flowers or birds. The fridge and freezer were the inverse of his own: instead of being filled with single-guy food (Swanson and Stouffer’s frozen meals, beer, whole milk, and red meat), Addie’s were heavy into single-lady stuff, low-fat this and whole-grain that, the groceries of a person who lived alone and didn’t have to worry about anyone else’s tastes or preferences… although there was also real cheese and real butter and a six-pack of beer with two beers missing (was Addie a beer drinker? Did she have a boyfriend? Had Mrs. Bass gotten it wrong?). Hanging over the back of one of the chairs was a trench coat, Burberry, size two. Jordan squatted, knees popping, and used his pen to lift the sleeve of the garment, which was stiff with a tacky dark-brown substance that had the unmistakable look and smell of dried blood.

  He poked at the stain, then stared at it, trying to imagine the scenario: Addie is sitting at the kitchen table when Val drives up in her silver Jag, asks for a drink, and says, Guess who showed his face at the reunion, and Addie says, Let’s go get him. Or: Val arrives, shaken and bloody, and says, Guess who I just hit, or shot, or stabbed, or drove over, and Addie puts down her tea, pours her best friend a shot of vodka, and says, You’ll need some help getting rid of the body. Or: Addie can’t sleep, makes herself some tea, upgrades to vodka, cuts her leg while shaving, tries to stop the bleeding with the itty-bitty trench coat she’d bought on sale in hopes of squeezing herself into it someday (every March, Patti used to tape her bikini to the fridge as inspiration), then gets in her dad’s old car and drives off on the spur of the moment to visit Disney World or Dollywood or some fucking place he’d never think of in a million years.

  Jordan stomped back up the stairs to take a closer look, now that he was fairly certain there wasn’t a dead body in the house. There were three bedrooms. One was set up like a guest room, with a half-dozen uselessly small pillows on top of a bed that didn’t look as if it had been slept on recently, if ever. A second bedroom had been converted into a gym. There was a fold-up treadmill, and one of those ab rollers you could buy on TV sat beside it on the floor, along with a yoga mat. Hot-pink hand weights, stretchy resistance bands, and a stack of DVDs: Gentle Yoga for Beginners, Pilates for Weight Loss, and Skip Your Way to Fitness! At the end of the hall was the third bedroom. Addie’s bedroom.

  Here, for the first time, was the appearance of disorder. The king-size bed was rumpled, as if someone had lain on top of it, and one of the pillows had fallen onto the floor. Jordan picked up the pillow in its crisp cotton case. It was surprisingly heavy, dense with feathers. He set it on top of the bed. White sheets, a tan comforter, a scrolled, painted metal headboard (Brass? Iron? It was the kind of thing his ex-wife would have known). There was a table on either side of the bed, both with reading lamps, one of them stacked high with books, the other with a glass of water and a tube of hand cream (Vaseline, $7.49, from Walgreens; Jordan approved). He slid open the drawer of the nightstand closest to the unmade portion of the bed. There was a box of condoms, half of them gone, and he found himself suddenly, ridiculously, hotly jealous.

  At the foot of the bed was a padded bench, covered in the same soft fabric as the couch downstairs. A pair of flannel pajamas was tossed on top of the bench. Jordan lifted the top in his hands, then, without planning it, he lifted the fabric to his nose, inhaling the fragrance of perfume and shampoo. Jesus. There was something wrong with him. If one of the patrol-people could see him, standing in a suspect’s bedroom, sniffing her clothes, for God’s sake, with half a hard-on… Jordan dropped the offending garment back where he’d found it and turned away from the bed. More bookshelves against a wall that was lined with windows and overlooked the backyard. More paintings on the walls, wise-eyed dogs and sly, clever kittens.
A bathroom with a deep jetted tub, big enough for two. Heated tiles on the floor. Heated towel racks on the walls. Heavy, fluffy towels, pristine white, and an oversized shower stall with no fewer than half a dozen jets embedded in the glass-tiled wall. “It’s like a whorehouse in here,” he said out loud, but he thought that that wasn’t right. It wasn’t like a whorehouse, it was a place made for pleasure. He wondered whom Addie had been entertaining, who’d been enjoying the condoms in the drawer and the beer in the fridge.

  He closed the closet door and walked downstairs, turning off lights, locking the door. He bent down and tucked the key back under the welcome mat, where he’d found it, and cut back across the crackling lawn to his car.

  THIRTY-FOUR

  I was never sure who started the graffiti. On the third day of my sophomore year, almost two years after Jon’s accident, I’d gone to use the bathroom and found it carved into the paint in a bathroom stall. Addie Downs stinks. My heart started thundering in my chest, and I felt nauseous, like invisible hands were squeezing my guts. I looked around, which was silly—I was obviously alone. The door was locked, and besides, there wasn’t room in here for anyone but me. Tentatively, I lifted one arm over my head and sniffed. Nothing but Secret spring fresh deodorant, which I’d applied that morning. I swallowed hard, then bent my head and sniffed between my legs. At first I didn’t smell anything besides the Downy my mother used to wash our clothes, but when I inhaled as deeply as I could, I smelled—or thought I did—a faint whiff of something dank and fleshy.