Best Friends Forever

by Jennifer Weiner

  “I’m going to give you a warning,” said Jordan. “No ticket this time. Just slow down.” He handed the papers back through the window, with Greg practically weeping in gratitude, promising that if Jordan ever needed anything… if he could ever be of service to the department…

  Jordan had called on him twice in the last three years, in cases where he needed financial information and didn’t have—or couldn’t get—a warrant. The first time Greg had been eager to help. The second time, he’d pursed his lips until they looked like the knot at the bottom of a big white balloon. Now it looked like he was prepared to dig in his heels—his high heels, Jordan thought, and smiled to himself. “You look good,” Jordan offered, helping himself to a second miniature candy cane from the bowl on the desk. “You lose a few pounds?”

  Greg puffed out his lips. “Look, it’s not that I don’t appreciate what you did for me, but this… I just can’t…”

  “Or maybe it’s your shirt,” said Jordan, eyeing the other man’s button-down. “I think blue is your color.”

  “Fine.” Greg leaned forward and worked his thick fingers over the keyboard. “Valerie Adler. I got nothing. She must bank somewhere else.” Jordan sat back, silent, waiting. “Adelaide Downs, Fourteen Crescent Drive. Recent activity: we’ve got an eighty-seven dollar payment to FreshDirect. Nineteen dollars to Netflix.” Greg waved his fingers, jazz-hands style. “Ooh, suspicious.”

  “Keep going,” Jordan said.

  “Visa, three hundred and nineteen dollars. Lakeshore Athletic Club, a hundred and ninety-nine. That’s a recurring payment. Um.” Greg leaned forward and closed his mouth. “She took out ten thousand dollars in cash yesterday.”

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Jordan repeated.

  “Not here, though. Branch number 1119…” He leaned closer to his computer, tapping away. “That’s in St. Louis.”

  “She just went in and took out ten thousand dollars in cash?”

  “She had plenty in her account. She’s got, like, sixty thousand bucks in checking, another forty in savings…” Greg shut his mouth, perhaps realizing he’d said too much.

  “Ten thousand dollars,” Jordan repeated.

  “And there’s one more charge. A gas station in…” He paused, squinting. “Nashville.”

  Heading south, thought Jordan, writing it down. “You should go now,” said Greg.

  “I’m gone,” Jordan said, getting to his feet. “You have the thanks of a grateful nation.”

  Greg looked surprised. “This is a national matter?”

  “International,” said Jordan. “Extremely important. Very hush-hush.”

  “You’re welcome. Oh, and congratulations,” Greg said.

  Jordan paused, his hand on the door. “What’s that?”

  “Your little girl. I saw your wife at the Whole Foods…” He must have also seen something in Jordan’s expression, because he shut his mouth fast.

  “We’ve been divorced for a year and a half,” Jordan said. “Patti’s remarried.”

  “Oh,” said Greg. “Oh, I’m sorry.”

  Little girl? “Stay safe,” said Jordan, pushing the new information to the back of his mind.

  “Will do,” said Greg. “Hey, I’m sorry…”

  “It’s fine,” said Jordan, and then repeated the words, as if he was trying to convince himself. “It’s fine.”

  FORTY-TWO

  Jordan drove back to the station, fighting the impulse to call Patti, or her mother, or her sister, or Rob Fine, DDS, or just turn the car around and drive to their house and get to the bottom of this. Had Patti finally had a baby? Had they adopted? Hired a surrogate?

  Never mind, he thought, swinging into his parking spot, feeling the new knowledge settling in like an infection. Focus. Gary Ryderdahl was at his desk. “What’ve you got, chief?” Gary called.

  “Maybe something.” Jordan sat down in Holly’s chair and wheeled it to the room’s far wall, where he paused, pulling himself back and forth with his toes.

  Gary’s face lit up. “Do it,” he said.

  “You’re a bad influence,” said Jordan.

  “Aw, c’mon, Chief, nobody’s gonna see.”

  Jordan shrugged. Maybe it would cheer him up. He looked left, then right, then pushed off from the wall and spun down the length of the room, rolling to a neat stop in front of Gary’s desk.

  Gary high-fived him. “How do you do it? Every time I try I hit the wall.”

  “Years of practice,” Jordan said, forcing himself to sound casual. “Listen. Adelaide Downs took out ten thousand dollars in cash in St. Louis. There was a gas station charge in Nashville. What does that tell you?”

  Gary rubbed his hair. “Um. She’s gone country?”

  Jordan waited patiently. When Gary looked blank, he said, “Tell me what we know for sure.”

  “That she has money. That she was in St. Louis and Nashville.”

  “She had money,” Jordan corrected. “It could be gone, and she could be anywhere by now. Why don’t you start calling hotels in Nashville? See if any of them have two women registered as Valerie Adler and Addie Downs, or two women who sound like they fit the description.”

  Gary thought this over and finally asked, “What’s the description?”

  “Early thirties,” said Jordan. “Blond hair. No southern accents. Maybe driving an old station wagon with Illinois plates. You can find Val’s picture on her station’s website.”

  Gary nodded. “One more thing,” he said. “Holly and I were doing a…” Jordan looked at him sternly. Gary flinched and swallowed. “We were searching on the Internet, and every year, Addie Downs donates a painting to this auction that raises money for cancer research.”

  Jordan shrugged. That didn’t mean much, other than that his suspect was charity-minded.

  “I had a hunch,” Gary continued. “Holly called the doctor who runs the auction. Dr. Elizabeth Shoup. She’s an oncologist. Holly said she was Adelaide Downs’s assistant and that she was calling to confirm her next appointment.” Gary was so flushed with pleasure that he was practically glowing. “And guess what?”

  “She’s got an appointment?”

  Gary’s face fell. “Next Thursday. How’d you know?”

  “Lucky guess,” said Jordan, and patted the other man’s shoulder.

  “I’ll get started on the hotels.”

  “Sounds good,” said Jordan. He walked into his office and closed the door behind him, savoring the quiet. Holly was off interviewing the half-dozen salespeople and suppliers Dan had tangled with during his tenure at Swansea Toyota, including the garbageman whose throat Dan had threatened to slit with a box cutter if his crew kept leaving empty soda cans on the curb, and the Parts and Repairs receptionist who’d told Holly confidentially that Dan had gotten fresh with her at the dealership’s Christmas party last year. The police station, which occupied the ground floor of Pleasant Ridge’s municipal building (Parks and Rec had the second floor) was too warm, as usual, and filled with the smell of coffee and the ghost of a departed meatball sub. Through his window, Jordan could see Gary hunched over his desk, poking at his keyboard as if it were the corpse of an animal he wasn’t entirely sure was dead.

  Jordan checked his notes, lifted his phone, dialed information, and was eventually connected with the Lakeshore Athletic Club, which, a mellow recorded voice informed him, was the Midwest’s premiere facility for fitness, relaxation, and rejuvenation. Jesus. Jordan hit zero until he was connected to a human being, then suffered through five minutes of wind chimes and gongs that he supposed were someone’s idea of music until he was finally put through to a manager.

  “Good afternoon,” said a man with a high, enthusiastic voice. “This is Max, how can I help you?”

  “Hi,” Jordan said to the man. “My name’s Sam Novick.” Sam, whose name Jordan borrowed occasionally, worked as an engineer specializing in adhesives, an occupation that caused follow-up questions to wither and die on the inquisitor’s lips. “I just moved to the area
. My sister-in-law Addie Downs is a member of your gym.”

  No hesitation at all. “Oh, Addie! How is she?”

  “She’s great.”

  “She looks fantastic,” the manager said. “She’s one of our biggest success stories, you know.”

  “She is something,” said Jordan. “Listen, I wanted to set up an appointment, see if I could come and maybe take a tour or something.”

  “Of course,” said the man, with visions of commissions probably dancing in his head. “Are you familiar with the facility? We have a state-of-the-art track, an Olympicsized swimming pool, a hot-yoga studio, two aerobic rooms, a basketball court, a rock-climbing wall, and a five-thousand-foot spa with three wet rooms. We offer a variety of group classes as well as individual training, in addition to yoga, Pilates, Yogalates, spinning, suspension training, coached treadmill workouts, salsa dance, strip aerobics…”

  “Any joggling?” Jordan asked.

  “Of course,” the man said again. “Have you tried it? Amazing upper-body workout.”

  “Did Addie do that?”

  “Oh, no. Addie swims. That’s all I’ve ever seen her do. I tell her she should be cross-training, you know, mixing it up a bit. But we just can’t get her out of the water. She’s here five days a week, like clockwork.”

  “Wow.” Jordan chuckled. “I don’t know if I’m going to be quite as dedicated as that.”

  “Tell you what, Sam. I can give you a week to try the club out for free. Come on down, take a few classes, see how you like it.”

  “Good deal.” Jordan thanked the man, hung up the phone, and slipped out of his office, past the little Christmas tree that Holly had bought and trimmed, and unlocked the door at the back of the room that connected the officers’ workspace to Pleasant Ridge’s three-cell jail. Two of the cells were just normal, nine-by-nine, with a metal bunk and a sink and a seatless metal toilet. The third cell was bigger, with a wider door and a lower sink. Handicapped-accessible, per federal regulations, in case any of Pleasant Ridge’s badasses used wheelchairs. Jordan unlocked the door and sat down cross-legged on the flimsy mattress, pushed the question of his ex-wife’s new daughter out of his mind, and considered Adelaide Downs.

  He thought of the photograph he’d seen in her brother’s room, a woman for whom the words “ordinary” and “regular” must once have seemed like a dream. But Addie had reinvented herself. She was normal now, a woman you wouldn’t necessarily notice or look at twice. She wasn’t huge. She wasn’t even brunette. She was possibly sick… or maybe she’d been sick and was going in for a checkup. Maybe she’d faced her own mortality and decided to change her life. Which made her capable of what, exactly?

  Jordan sat on the bunk bed, perfectly still. Addie, Addie, Addie, he thought, remembering the shape of her face, her smell of sugar and lemons, her full lips curving into a smile, her blond hair brushing her cheeks. He leaned back against the concrete wall, trying to find the place he went to in his mind, a place he thought of as a small storage shed, like the one where he and Sam had kept their bikes and sleds and skateboards when they were kids. In his mind, he entered the shed and locked the door behind him, sat down in the darkness, and conjured Adelaide Downs.

  Addie, he thought as her face floated before his eyes. What was Addie like? Fat, except she wasn’t anymore. Shy, he thought… but that wasn’t quite right. Sick? Possibly… which could mean that she’d decided she had nothing to lose. Scared, maybe. She’d been hurt when she was a teenager, picked on, laughed at, ostracized… and then, as an adult, she probably spent years unable to walk out the door without people staring or whispering. Now she had a new body; now she was a blonde, not a brunette, now she could slip into the tide of regular people and swim there, unremarkable and unremarked-upon.

  And she swam. He pictured Addie in a swimsuit—a modest black one-piece, because she would never be the bikini type, no matter how much weight she’d lost. He added a white bathing cap, a bottle of drugstore suntan lotion, and a towel. He imagined Valerie Adler by her side. Val would definitely be the bikini type, the smaller the better, with maybe those big black sunglasses that made perfectly attractive women look like giant bugs. Two girls in swimsuits. Where would they go to escape the miserable Chicago winter, where the wind blew off Lake Michigan and slipped, knife-edged, under your coat?

  “Key West,” he said out loud, remembering the inscription on the back of Valerie’s photograph. Through the wall, he heard Gary Ryderdahl let loose with a juicy string of expletives and slam his phone down. Jordan went back to his desk, turned on his computer, and called up a map of the United States, noting that St. Louis and Nashville were both on the way to Florida. Maybe they were there already, Addie and Val, the country mouse and the city mouse, sitting on the beach, each holding a frozen drink, something frothy and sweet with a wedge of pineapple perched on the rim, listening to the waves, feeling the breeze in their hair. Maybe it was a dying woman’s final wish, or maybe they’d done something terrible and decided to run. It made no difference to him. Either way, he’d do his job. He got to his feet, pulled on his heavy coat, waved goodbye to Gary, and climbed back in his car.

  FORTY-THREE

  “Key West?” said Sasha. Her eyebrows arched skeptically. Behind the open door, the house was quiet. Jordan wondered where her daughters were. Maybe at their father’s. Sasha’s hair was pulled into its usual tidy knot, but her cheeks and forehead were shiny with some kind of face cream that she wiped at with her sleeve before leading him back to her office. “You think they’re in Key West?”

  Jordan kept quiet. He’d decided, going in, that the less he said, the better. Besides, he didn’t trust his voice entirely. He worried that if he opened his mouth, what would come out would not be the right questions and answers but, instead, the words My wife and the dentist have a baby now.

  “You’re basing this on what, exactly?”

  “They went to Chicago together to find Addie’s brother. Addie took out a bunch of money in St. Louis. There was a charge at a gas station in Nashville, and I think the two of them are still together, so it…”

  “Cell phone records?” Sasha Devine interrupted, as if she hadn’t heard him. “Airline tickets? Hotel reservations? Anything?” She wiped her sleeve against her cheek again and looked at Jordan.

  “I…” said Jordan, and shut his mouth.

  “Did she speak to you?” Sasha asked. “Adelaide Downs? Did she find you in the small storage shed in your mind? Or did you go sit in the handicapped cell to think it over?”

  He swallowed hard, thinking he’d have to be a lot less chatty with any future one-night stands. This shit was embarrassing. “I know she’s down there.”

  “You’re guessing,” she shot back.

  “Look,” said Jordan, trying to sound reasonable. “I know she likes to swim. I think she went to the beach.”

  Sasha raised her eyebrows, which were the same glossy brown as her hair. “So why Florida?” she asked. “Why not Nantucket? Why not Maine?”

  “Because it’s freezing there.”

  “So?” Sasha said, shrugging. “Some people like to go to the beach when it’s cold. You bundle up, sit by the fire. Watch the waves.” The subtext was clear: If you hadn’t been such an asshole, all this could have been yours, the blanket and the fire and Sasha herself, warm and naked under the covers.

  “She’s heading south, and she likes to swim,” he repeated. Sasha was looking at him with that expression women have, like they can see exactly what you’re thinking, as if it’s a movie showing on the screen of your forehead, like she knew that the real mystery on his mind had nothing to do with Daniel Swansea’s disappearance and everything to do with his ex-wife and a baby.

  “Not a pool?” Sasha finally asked, hands on her hips, eyebrows cocked.

  “I think she wants to see the ocean.” This, too, was purest conjecture, but somehow it felt right. “And she might be sick.”

  “Might be?” Her eyebrows edged even higher. Jordan shut his
mouth and waited. Sasha stared at him, then sighed. “I’d send you if I could, but on this… I mean, it’s nothing, really. Just taking out money in one city and buying gas somewhere else doesn’t add up to Florida.”

  “It’s fine,” he forced himself to say. “I understand.” He drove back to the station. Holly was still off at Dan’s Toyota dealership. Devin was still home. Gary was still on the telephone, working his way through a list of every hotel in Nashville. It took Jordan fifteen minutes online to book a place in Key West, an efficiency with the word “Budget” in its name and a kitchenette attached. He spent another ten minutes booking a flight for the next morning. He composed an e-mail that he’d send from the airport and drove home to pack shirts and sports coats and an ancient, half-used bottle of sunblock that he suspected had been bought on his honeymoon. I am coming for you, Addie, he thought. Then he said it out loud, not a threat, more like a simple statement of his intentions. “I am coming to bring you home.”

  FORTY-FOUR

  I climbed out of the car, blinking in the sticky sunshine on Monday afternoon. White shells crunched underneath my feet. Palm fronds rustled above my head. I smelled salt in the humid air and could hear—or imagined I could—waves lapping at a nearby shore. In front of us, tucked behind a tidy garden of clipped hedges and spiky palms, was a white wooden cottage with a broad front porch and louvered windows, like an illustration from a fairy tale. shell cottages read a plaque beside the doorbell.

  “Check it out,” Val said, and led me through the French doors. There was a living room with a tiled floor and a ceiling fan paddling at the humid air. Two bedrooms down a short hall, a bathroom in between them. A bowl of mangoes and papayas and limes sat next to the kitchen sink. In the back was a small brick patio that was thick with the scents of jasmine and jacaranda and filled with spiky-leaved palms and orchids.

  Val led me to the screened-in porch and reached for a glass pitcher full of pale-green liquid. “Key limeade. The landlady leaves it for new tenants,” Val said, and poured us each a glass. I sipped mine, tentatively at first, then more deeply: I was thirsty, and this was delicious, the perfect balance between tart and sweet.