Into the Dark

by Alison Gaylin

  Brenna snapped the hair ties, hard.

  Gary was saying, “ . . . and I guess you’d call it a disorder? Your memory . . .”

  “Works for me.”

  “I found the book you’re in—Extraordinary Children. By RF Lieberman. Checked it out of the library.”

  “My childhood shrink.”

  He sighed. “I . . . I can’t even imagine what your life must be like.”

  “Most people think it’s a gift.”

  “The yentas did. ‘Perfect memory,’ one of them said. ‘If I had that, I’d never lose my keys again.’ ” He laughed—but Brenna could hear the tension in it.

  “You don’t view it as a gift, do you?”

  “No. I’m sorry . . . I don’t mean to offend.”

  “I’m not offended. Believe me, if all I remembered was where I put my keys, I’d be a whole lot happier.”

  “Good,” he said. “Good, because I wouldn’t want to . . .”

  “You didn’t.”

  “Good.”

  “Is there a lot, Mr. Freeman, that you would like to forget?”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. “You can call me Gary.”

  Okay . . . New topic. “You know,” Brenna tried, “for a book written in 1990, it’s sure been getting a lot of play lately. I’m thinking Dr. Lieberman should give me a percentage of the royalties.”

  Another laugh, easier this time. “I could work a deal for you.”

  “I’m sure you could.”

  Freeman said, “I fired Ludlow.”

  “You . . . Wait. What?”

  “That was abrupt, wasn’t it?”

  “Well . . . yes.”

  “Sorry. Force of habit. Producers, casting directors. They always want you to cut to the chase.”

  “You fired Ludlow?”

  “I gave him a nice severance payment, but to tell the truth, I don’t think missing persons cases are his strength.”

  “Yes.”

  “And . . . his voice irritated me.”

  “I definitely get that,” Brenna said. “What I’m confused about is why you hired him in the first place.”

  “I saw that endorsement from you on his Web site.”

  Brenna sighed.

  “Looking back, I guess that was a pretty dumb reason. But he did tell me that he was still in touch with you. When he said he’d signed you on, I figured, hey, may as well cut out the middle man.”

  “Why didn’t you just hire me in the first place? I’ve got a Web site, too, you know.”

  Another long pause, longer than the last. And then finally, “Ms. Spector?”

  “Brenna.”

  “I need to ask you something, Brenna.”

  “Ask away.”

  “Are you tape-recording this phone call?”

  She frowned. “That’s what you wanted to ask me?”

  “You realize that by California law, which applies whether or not you are in this state, it is illegal to tape-record another person without his permission. And if you are, in fact, recording this conversation, you are breaking the law.”

  “I’m not recording you, Gary,” said Brenna who never recorded anything—she had no need to.

  “All right,” he said finally. “I believe you.”

  You believe me? “Why wouldn’t you?”

  “I will not permit any of our conversations to be recorded, from here on in.”

  “Fine,” Brenna said. “Agreed. No recording.”

  “And you are to reveal my identity to no one.”

  “Not even my assistant?”

  “No one. As far as he’s concerned, you’re still working for Ludlow.”

  “But—”

  “And you are to be the sole point person. Your assistant reports to you and you alone. Are we clear?”

  “Yes, Gary. We are clear.”

  “Good.” Gary took a deep breath, in and out. “I know you have a Web site. I looked it up, right after that yenta show. I even wrote down the contact number.”

  “But you didn’t call it.”

  “No.”

  “Why?”

  Yet another pause. Brenna listened to him breathing again—long, slow, labored breaths—and she wondered who they were intended for, these pauses? Were they due to Gary Freeman’s discomfort, or were they intended to make Brenna uncomfortable—because they did. They made her feel as though she was hurting him with her questions—this kind-faced man with his pretty family and his charity events. They made her feel as though all she needed was a bright light and a cigarette and she could break him. And that wasn’t what Brenna wanted at all, to break him. All she wanted was to understand. “Why didn’t you call me, Gary?”

  “Because—” His voice cracked and she flashed on her own father, her blur of a father with his strong hands and his kind voice, Brenna’s father at the wheel of his car, sobbing. My God did that really happen?

  Brenna closed her eyes. “Because what?”

  “Because . . . I was ashamed.”

  It was an affair. Not a physical one, as Gary Freeman had never met Lula Belle—he’d never even seen her face—but an affair nonetheless, Gary had insisted to Brenna over the phone. An affair of the heart, the mind, the wallet.

  It had started two years ago—and at a time of weakness, as all affairs do. Money had been tight. Very tight. With more than one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars in credit card debt staring him in the face, Gary had been on the computer, paying the monthly bills—one thousand dollars for Tessa’s modeling course, fifteen hundred and fifty dollars combined for Hannah’s and Lucy’s piano lessons, and let’s not even talk about the looming orthodontist bills for the two older girls (God, why hadn’t Gary listened to his mother and gone into dentistry?). Then there were the car lease payments and the mortgages on their Pasadena house and on the second home in Santa Barbara and the yacht they hardly ever used and, of course, there was Jill—his beautiful, serene wife with her spa and salon visits and her yoga classes and all that instruction from those billionaire rabbis at the Kabbalah Center—instruction, of all things, on how to find spirituality in a materialistic world. Gary was staring at those numbers, his hands shaking over the keyboard, his thoughts darkening into bankruptcy, foreclosure, living on the street with nothing to keep his family warm and dry but the philosophy of the Kabbalah . . .

  That’s when he’d received the e-mail from her.

  It wasn’t Gary’s fault—the debt, that is. After seventeen or eighteen flush years, it had just sort of descended on him, with one client getting fired from a long-standing Disney gig when his voice changed, another bowing out of commercial work when her parents decided she should focus more on school, yet another suddenly un-hirable after getting hospitalized for an eating disorder . . . The list went on. Show business is cyclical, especially when it comes to children, and Gary had swung into a major downturn without preparing himself or his family . . .

  Okay, he supposed it was his fault.

  Anyway, he received the e-mail from Lula Belle, and he jumped on it. Make me a star, it read, and I’ll make you rich. Sounded like spam, sure, but once he’d viewed the attachment, he was sold. They worked out their deal: He created the Web site, opened a PayPal account, as well as a separate checking account, and then he put his expertise to work—the expertise Lula Belle had told him she valued because Really, Mr. Freeman, she had typed, so fragile and helpless. I don’t know where to start.

  All it took was a few strategically placed posts on certain well-traveled message boards, a cryptic Craig’s List announcement, subscribers came pouring in. Gary’s debt eased. His blood pressure went down. He couldn’t have been more grateful. “She was like a guardian angel,” he’d said, before realizing how that sounded.

  On the second of every month, he’d receive an e-mail from Lula Belle at the special e-mail address he’d created just to correspond with her. The e-mail would consist of a PO box where he would send a check for sixty percent of the Web site proceeds,
made out to cash, as well as four or five attachments, which he would screen before announcing their availability on the site.

  This was how it became an affair—Gary viewing those attachments, four or five a month for nearly two years. Gary in the dark of his home office, after his wife and kids had gone to sleep, watching that bare, backlit body, listening to those very private confessions that made his breath hitch in his chest. He could not see her face. He did not know her real name. But never, in Gary Freeman’s life, had he ever been with a woman who had made herself this vulnerable before him.

  “How do you know her stories were true?” Brenna had asked.

  “I knew.”

  Cement mixer, turn on a dime . . . “Did you know anything about her? Her family?”

  “No.”

  “Then how did you—”

  “I just knew.”

  “Because you—”

  “We had a connection.”

  Between e-mails, Gary would watch Lula Belle’s videos again and again until, at some point, she consumed him. Every morning, he’d wake up tingling, her voice slithering through his brain. It was all he could do not to quote her to his family, his clients, all he could do not to speak in her whispery accent, to close his eyes and lose himself in her world, her life, thinking of all those things she’d told the camera, told him through the camera. Not the subscribers. Him. The subscribers got sloppy seconds, but he had her first. He knew her first . . . “I know,” he’d told Brenna. “I sound like a freak.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I do. See, that’s why I thought Ludlow was perfect—he spends his whole life dealing with creepier guys than me. You, on the other hand . . .”

  “Don’t worry about it.”

  Lula Belle cleared up Gary’s debt. She got him hard. She broke his heart. And then she just left, with no explanation. She’d been gone for two months now—two months without a single e-mail. It was the only thing on his mind—the lack of her—and yet no one knew. Come on, who could he tell? “I’m afraid something may have happened to her,” he had said. “I mean . . . God . . . if she ever existed to begin with. Sometimes I feel like I’m going nuts.”

  “Have you deleted all the e-mails?”

  “I have her last one.”

  “What about the downloads?”

  Deep breath, in and out. “I have them all.”

  Brenna had asked him to forward them to her, along with the last e-mail from Lula Belle, and as many of the PO boxes as he could remember.

  “I don’t remember any of them. I’m bad with numbers.”

  Brenna sighed. “Just the locations would be fine. You can probably remember a few locations, right?”

  “Of course,” he said. “Thank you, Brenna.”

  “Gary,” she had said, finally. “Is there anything else you need to tell me?”

  “Pardon?”

  Cement mixer, turn on a dime . . . “Is there any other reason you’re hiring me—other than my missing persons expertise and yentas saying nice things about me?”

  There had been a long pause on the other end of the line. And then, “What other reason could there possibly be?”

  She was off the phone with Gary now, leaving a message for her detective friend Nick Morasco. (Was that how she thought of him now? Her detective friend? Man . . . ) Already, the secrecy of this case was getting to her. She understood, of course, why Gary Freeman wanted his name kept out of this investigation, but to ask her to lie to those closest to her . . . It made Brenna feel more alone than she usually felt—and that was really saying something. She was mad at herself for letting Maya sleep at her friend’s tonight. She didn’t want to be all by herself in this quiet apartment, nothing to keep her company but the Lula Belle downloads, the persistent stink of Trent’s cologne, and Gary Freeman’s voice in her brain . . . You are to reveal my identity to no one.

  “Wanna come over to my place after work, watch some porn?” Brenna blurted into Morasco’s voice mail. She cringed. “It’s . . . uh . . . It’s not porn actually. It’s performance art. And it’s for a case. I’ll explain when you get here. If you get here. I mean . . . You know . . . if you don’t have any other plans.” She hung up.

  “Smooth,” said Trent.

  “Shut up.”

  “No worries. Girls are cute when they sound like idiots.”

  Brenna rolled her eyes. Without saying a word, she e-mailed the folder of Lula Belle downloads to Trent.

  “Hey!” His voice pitched up like a tween girl at a Twilight premiere. “You got all of ’em?”

  “Now who sounds like an idiot?” Brenna said. “Remember, this is serious work. I want you to try and look at them frame by frame. Pay attention to shadows, the way she moves, any details you might see in the room with her that might give us some clue as to her identity and whereabouts.”

  “You call that work,” said Trent. “I call it what I’ll be doing in heaven someday.”

  “Glad I could make you happy.”

  “Actually, the props should go to Errol Ludlow,” said Trent. “He made good on his word. He isn’t such a bad guy, right?”

  Brenna winced. “You ready for your trip to the fish market?”

  “See for yourself.”

  Brenna turned. On his desk, he’d spread out a series of poster-sized versions of his cat renderings.

  She moved closer. “Wow,” she said. “You’re an artist.”

  He really was. The computerized renderings were incredibly detailed, with each version of Persephone—fat, emaciated, bedraggled, glossy and coddled—real enough to break a cat lover’s heart. If Trent was unsuccessful in his search, Brenna imagined that Annette might want to frame at least one of these pictures.

  “You think I should take all of them?” he said. “I mean, if Persie’s been living with all those fish vendors for three months, I should probably just take the fat pic, right? Oh, and I also have another one I just made—with mange . . . What are you smiling at?”

  “Persie.”

  “Yeah, well, some people don’t mind if I give them nicknames.”

  “She’s not a person,” Brenna said.

  He sighed heavily.

  “I’d take all the photos, Trent. It’s best to keep the bases covered.”

  “But they’re bulky. I don’t want to carry them all.”

  “That’s what your man purse is for.”

  “It’s called a messenger bag.”

  “Sorry.” She smiled. “I really hope you get lucky with Persephone.”

  “Me too.” No jokes about getting lucky. Not even his trademark cocked eyebrow. Trent really wanted to find this cat.

  Trent slipped the renderings into his man purse. Brenna eyed it as he slung it over his shoulder—pale desert camo, with five big, shiny general’s stars across the front and a dog-tag zipper pull. She would’ve been hard-pressed to find any item of apparel that tried half as hard as that bag did.

  “Later!”

  After he closed the door behind him, Brenna moved back to her desk and opened the forwarded e-mail—Lula Belle’s last. She looked at the date—October 6, 2009. A day after the one televised interview Brenna had done in the wake of the Neff case—on Faith’s show, Sunrise Manhattan. October 6. Tuesday . . . The clock radio is saying her name, waking her up with her own name, only it’s a morning deejay voice saying it. Mickey in the Morning—only voice obnoxious enough to get Brenna out of bed, and so she knows she’s awake, Mickey on her clock radio . . . Brenna blinks the sand out of her eyes, her the clock glowing 6:58 A.M. and her own name on the radio. Must have misheard. “Brenna Spector, that’s her name, right?” How does Mickey in the Morning know my name? Oh God, Faith’s show. He knows it from Faith’s show. “The woman who remembers everything—including, uh, the occasional performance malfunction . . . Not like Mickey ever has those . . . heh heh heh . . .” No, no, no . . . “Five years later, and she’s looking at you, thinking about that time when you . . .”

  She snapped the hair tie
s on her wrist. Get out of my head, please, October 6. You are far too embarrassing.

  Brenna focused on the screen, the opened e-mail. At the top, Gary had listed the locations he could remember for the previous PO boxes. There were only three of them, as it turned out: Atlantic City; Portsmouth, Virginia; and Louisville, Kentucky. The Louisville one, the oldest, she’d used for a few months at the start of this year. Odd, Brenna thought. Not that Gary would remember only three of the PO boxes—but that they’d be the three most recent. Brenna picked up her phone quickly, called him on the disposable cell.

  “Just a sec,” Gary Freeman said, by way of answering. Brenna heard shuffling, Gary’s muffled voice excusing himself, followed by a door closing. She let her gaze wander past the three addresses Gary had listed, to the last e-mail Lula Belle had sent him. The address she used was sweetpea81@hotmail.com. Cute. And worthless. No factual personal information was required to sign up for a Hotmail account.

  “You’re alone?” Gary whispered.

  “Just for brevity’s sake,” Brenna said. “I’ll always be alone when I call you. You don’t need to ask.”

  He exhaled. “What’s up?”

  “I’m just curious about these PO box addresses.”

  “Why?”

  “These are really the only ones you remember?”

  “I’m sorry, Ms. Spector.” He laughed a little. “We don’t all have your memory.”

  “Oh, I know that,” she said. “It’s just that, in my own experience, everyone’s most likely to remember their first time.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Your first date, your first concert, your first time hearing ‘I love you.’ The first time you met. People usually remember firsts more than, say, ninths, tenths, and elevenths.”

  “I still don’t understand.”

  “I’d think you’d remember the first PO box.”

  “Hmmm . . .” he said. “That’s a good point. I guess maybe I blocked it, but let me think . . .” Gary kept talking, but Brenna didn’t hear him. She was reading the content of Lula Belle’s final e-mail. It was, as Gary had described, just one line. No greeting, no signoff. Just PO box and a location. Brenna stared at it, her jaw going tight.