Into the Dark

by Alison Gaylin

  “My grandpa said they arrested this guy about a month ago on Columbus. Some crazy homeless guy, who was waving a gun around.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I guess some teenagers were bugging him and he went all Dirty Harry on them, and when the officers showed up and asked him where he’d gotten the gun, he said . . . Boy this is dumb.”

  “Danny, I’m not going to say it again.”

  “Sorry. The homeless guy told the Mount Temple officers that he’d gotten the gun from Steven Spielberg.”

  Morasco stared at him. “Are you serious?”

  “I knew I shouldn’t have said anything.

  “No, Danny. What you said . . . That’s a seriously great lead.” He looked into the kid’s eyes long enough so Danny could see he wasn’t being sarcastic.

  Danny beamed. “Thanks!” he said. “Really?”

  “Where is he now?”

  “Jail. He’s still awaiting trial on the illegal firearm charge.”

  “Beautiful.” He gave Danny a high five. Then he picked up the phone and called Brenna.

  Gary still hadn’t called Brenna back, and now her head was swimming with questions—the first of which was, Why the hell hasn’t Gary called back?

  To be honest, she feared the answer. Every other case she’d ever taken, Brenna had first run a thorough check on her client—not just to make sure that the client could pay, but to truly know who she was dealing with. There were few jobs that required trust as much as locating the missing. If someone had disappeared for good reason, the last thing you wanted to do was drag them back to whatever hell they’d escaped. And so you had to trust in the searchers—you had to believe that their motives were basically good.

  You had to know them.

  But Brenna didn’t know Gary Freeman. She’d never breathed the same air as him and had done no background check on him outside of the world’s simplest Google search. He was a successful agent with an attractive family and a kind face to her, but only because that’s the way he presented himself online. In reality, Brenna had no idea who or what he was.

  Worst of all, Gary had come to Brenna via Errol Ludlow, who, rest in peace, had been less trustworthy than most of the cheating husbands he went after—and for whom a background check had usually meant getting a girl’s measurements.

  But she’d taken him on—this blank slate called Gary Freeman who had definitely lied about how well he knew RJ Tannenbaum, this unknown entity who’d come to her on the recommendation of the biggest snake she’d ever known and could have lied to her about anything, about everything he’d told her.

  She’d liked him based on—what, the sound of his voice? And so she’d let him swear her to secrecy, keeping quiet about him even as so many other blank slates crept into her life—Diandra, RJ, Shane Smith . . . And all this because of some shadow, some weird-ass fetish who happened to know stories about Brenna’s family.

  What’s wrong with me?

  Was Brenna’s obsession with her sister that strong, that unhealthy? Would she risk her life—and those of her loved ones—just for the possibility that Clea might be out there on the internet with a fake Southern accent, naked and doing yoga and relentlessly fucking with Brenna’s mind?

  “You okay?” Trent said.

  She was in his hospital room with him, arranging a bouquet of flowers she’d bought at the gift shop—a paltry little thing next to the two dozen sterling roses that Annette Shelby had sent over. And still she couldn’t bring herself to break Gary’s confidence. “I’m okay,” she told Trent. “Why?”

  “Well see, for one thing, you’d never know you just got back from the happiest place on earth.”

  “Happy Endings.”

  “See? It’s even got happy in the title, but judging from the way you look, I’d guess you’d been to . . . hmmmm . . . maybe a puppy funeral where they only play Tori Amos.”

  “I like Tori Amos,” Brenna said.

  Trent sighed. “Why so sad? I’m the tragic OD here, after all.”

  “I’m not sad,” Brenna said. “I’m just . . . frustrated.”

  “Talk to me.”

  “It’s this case. Lula Belle,” she said. “I feel like every time we shed a little light on any part of it, the rest of it goes further into the dark.”

  Trent gave her a smile. He looked a lot healthier today, the color back in his face, the cuts from the car accident barely noticeable. The resilience of the young. “What do you want?” he said. “We’re looking for a shadow.”

  “I know,” Brenna said. “I guess my question is why.”

  “Well, I’ve been working on it and—”

  “Not you, Trent,” she said. “I’m asking myself. Why did I get us involved in this thing?”

  “Actually . . . it was kinda me that got us involved in this thing.”

  She looked at him.

  “Come on. I’m the one who met with Errol. I’m the one who got all into Lula Belle, and I’m the one who repeatedly jumped the bones of . . . uh . . . she whose name we dare not speak . . .”

  “True, but you’re young and naïve. I’m supposed to protect you.”

  He sighed heavily. “Falling down on the job,” he said. “Oh . . . Speaking of job.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I made a nice, clear rendering from Shane Smith’s class picture.”

  “You did?”

  He nodded. “Looks like a real person now instead of a blur with hair. Maybe we can do something with this.” He gestured at the laptop on his nightstand. Brenna handed it to him fast, and Trent flipped it open, tapping at the keyboard. “Here it is,” he said, finally. He turned the laptop toward Brenna.

  Her mouth went dry.

  “I’ve made a few other versions, too,” Trent said. “I’ve got a bald one, a beard, bleached blond . . .”

  Brenna could barely get the words out. “Show me the beard.”

  Even before Trent called it up and showed it to Brenna, and she felt the chill wind aboard the Maid of the Mist October 23, the sting of the hail and wet bench beneath her as the couple passes, the girl looking right at her, mascara streaming down her face . . .

  She wants to die . . .

  “Uh . . . Brenna?”

  She shifted her focus from the screen to Trent’s face. “It’s him.”

  “Who?”

  “Dia— she whose name we dare not speak’s boyfriend. From the Maid of the Mist.”

  “No way.”

  She swallowed hard, traveling in her mind back to Charlie Frankel’s office . . .

  Lula Belle and his buddy Shane. RJ was convinced they were business partners and lovers.

  Brenna’s phone vibrated. “Yeah,” she answered, though she was barely able to move her lips. Lula Belle, are you Diandra?

  “Where have you been?” Morasco said. “I’ve been trying to get you all morning.”

  “Working,” she said. “I never heard the phone—”

  “Okay, look. It’s not important. I think I’ve got you a lead.”

  “To Shane Smith?”

  “What? No. Better. Tannenbaum.”

  Her eyebrows went up. “You do?”

  “He doesn’t want to talk to me, though. He says he’s through trying to explain himself to cops. But I think if you were nice to him . . .”

  “Yes, fine,” she said quickly. “Where am I supposed to meet this guy?”

  “Westchester County Jail.”

  “Seriously?”

  “Yes.”

  “I’m there.” After she ended the conversation, she looked at Trent.

  “You’ve gotta go,” he said. A statement, not a question.

  Brenna hugged him good-bye and texted Maya that there was no need for her to hurry home. Then she took a cab to the garage and got the Sienna out and pulled onto the West Side Highway and within an hour and a half, she was with Morasco in the lobby of Westchester County Jail, getting processed for her visit with someone named Orion Nichols who still swore, up and down, that on a chil
ly afternoon back in early October, he’d met Steven Spielberg on Columbus Boulevard in Mount Temple.

  Chapter 21

  “Who the hell are you?” said Orion Nichols, his face less than an inch away from the thick glass, nostrils flaring, his voice booming into Brenna’s ear through the plastic receiver.

  Brenna shivered—not because of Orion himself. (Morasco had warned her he was a “little off.”) But because it was ridiculously cold in here. She wondered if prison officials kept the temperature in the visiting room so low to save money, or to ensure that visitors had no inclination to linger after the allotted hours. Brenna and Orion were alone—aside, of course, from the forty or so other visitors, including the woman to her left with the very shrill voice who kept saying, “What am I supposed to do about this?” over and over and over to the point where you wanted to scream at the prisoner on the other side of her glass to just tell her already. Morasco was waiting in the lobby. Brenna had insisted. Meeting with a cop in front of his fellow inmates wasn’t going to do Orion a shred of good—Morasco knew that as well as anybody.

  “I’m Brenna Spector.” Her teeth were actually chattering. “Is it this cold in the rest of the prison?”

  “Like a psychiatric nurse’s tit,” he said. “What’s a Brenna Spector?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure that out for thirty-nine years.”

  He broke into a smile that was not so much a smile as a baring of yellowed, broken teeth. Orion’s lips were very chapped. His dark skin looked raw at the cheeks and nose, as though someone had gone at it with a Brillo pad. What are they doing to you in there, Orion? What was he doing to himself? Jail is a bad place for those who are a “little off.” Brenna imagined that as a homeless person, Orion had been a lot dirtier and nowhere near as angry.

  “And what am I supposed to do about them?” shrilled the woman to Brenna’s left.

  “It smells in here,” Brenna said. “Like cough medicine.”

  “Yep.”

  “Tell me about Steven Spielberg.”

  Orion moved his face up to the glass again. His eyes were dark and round and opaque, like eight balls. “You making fun of me?”

  “No.”

  “Yes you are.”

  Brenna exhaled into the receiver. The woman to Brenna’s left was sobbing now. “I can’t do this alone,” she wailed. “I can’t, I can’t . . .” The medicinal smell was giving Brenna a headache, and at this point she felt chilled to the bone, her fingertips aching from it. “Orion,” she said slowly, “do you honestly think I would give up Christmas shopping in the city with my daughter, just to come here and make fun of you?

  He bit down on his crusty lower lip and glared at her. “Why do you care, then?”

  “Huh?”

  “Why does that cop care? I saw Spielberg go into that damn building three months ago, nobody believes me. Nobody believes me about the gun. They think I stole it from somebody. Now, all of a sudden, he comes here. They make me talk to him in an interrogation room. Then you come here and you want to know about Spielberg and the gun like we’re old friends. Like you heard it from somebody other than a cop. What am I supposed to think, other than you’re making fun of me?” He picked a scab on the back of his hand.

  “I’m here because I need your help.”

  “Bullshit. I don’t want to do this anymore.” He started to put the phone down.

  Brenna said, “Please help me find my sister.” It came out cracked, choked, and Brenna realized that it was the first time she’d ever put it that way, the first time she’d ever said it out loud. My sister.

  He stopped, looked at her.

  Brenna mouthed the word at him. Please.

  Slowly, he put the receiver back to his ear, and then she said it again, into the mouthpiece. “Please.”

  “You’re telling the truth.”

  It was more statement than a question, so Brenna didn’t answer. She just looked at him, her own words throbbing in her head.

  “I thought you were a psychiatrist or a lady cop,” he said. “Or a psychiatric nurse.”

  “I’m not,” she said. “I’m not any of those things.”

  “Well, I can see that now.” He took a breath. “You got emotions.”

  Brenna swallowed hard. “Yep.”

  He nodded at her. The anger was gone from his eyes, and he looked different. Almost sane. “So how the hell does Steven Spielberg know your sister?”

  Brenna closed her eyes. “Rob— Spielberg disappeared a couple of months ago. I think he was with a woman who . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “Who what?”

  “She knows stories from my childhood,” Brenna said. “If she’s not my sister, then maybe she can at least tell me what happened to her.” She looked at him, waiting.

  “Your sister an actress?”

  Brenna said, “I don’t know what she is,” she said. “All I know is she’s gone. She’s been gone since I was a kid, and I want her back.”

  “She left you,” he said. “Or did somebody take her?”

  “Both.”

  “Why do you want her back?”

  She gave him a long look, the over-air-conditioned visiting room shifting and changing in her mind until it became September 7, 1981, in the living room of her house on City Island, late summer sea air pressing through the window screens, warm and wet and thick like breath. Her mother’s voice in her ears, Clea gone and her mother hating her for it . . .

  “Get out of my house.”

  “Clea told me not to tell you, Mom. That’s why. Because Clea made me prom—”

  “Two weeks ago, Brenna. Your sister could be dead right now.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “If she is dead, it is your fault. It’s your fault she’s gone. Get out of my house.”

  Brenna dug her fingernails into her palms. The woman next to her was screaming, “Selfish pig!” at the prisoner she was visiting, and only then did Brenna realize how much that shrill voice sounded like that of her mother, twenty-eight years ago.

  “I want my sister back,” Brenna said, “because it’s my fault she disappeared.”

  “She doesn’t look like you,” Orion said. “But what do I know? I didn’t even know Spielberg was chunky.”

  Brenna’s eyes widened. “Who?”

  “Huh?”

  “Who doesn’t look like me? Who are you talking about?”

  “Your sister. The chick who was with Spielberg. She’s blonde, for one thing, and she’s built like a brick shithouse.”

  Brenna stared at him. Diandra?

  He held up a hand. “No offense. I’m just saying.”

  “You saw her.”

  “Yeah. When he was filming at the building.”

  “You saw a blonde go into a building with Steven Spielberg.”

  He shook his head. “They showed up first. He met them there. With his camera.”

  Brenna gripped the receiver. “What kind of a camera?”

  “Movie camera. Very fancy.”

  “The stacked blonde,” Brenna said. “Was she a lot younger than me?”

  “I don’t know from ages,” he said. “Spielberg looked younger than I thought he was, but that could have been all that extra chunk. Or the hat.”

  “Hat?”

  The woman next to Brenna was yelling, “Fine! Go ahead and dump me! You got some bitch in there, or what? Your bitch sweeter to you than I am?”

  Brenna put a hand up to the side of her face, as if that would be effective in drowning her out. “What kind of hat?” she said.

  “Baseball cap,” he said. “L.A. Dodgers. They wouldn’t let me keep it in here.”

  Tannenbaum. “You took his cap?”

  “No, he gave it to me.”

  “Before he went in the building, or after he left?”

  He blinked at her. “Huh?”

  “I hate you!” the woman yelled.

  Brenna squeezed her eyes shut, opened them again. She kept her voice measured, said the words as calm
ly as she possibly could. “Did Steven Spielberg give you the hat before he went in the building or—”

  “No.” Orion shook his head vigorously.

  “No?” Brenna was starting to wish she was a psychiatrist—she might get further with him that way. “I sort of gave you a multiple-choice question there, Orion. Before or after . . .”

  “He didn’t give it to me before or after.”

  “You stole the hat? Without his knowing?”

  “No!”

  “I’m outta here!” the woman screamed.

  Brenna said, “Would you please help me out here?”

  “He wasn’t the one who gave it to me. The film crew guy did, when he left with the blonde. Why can’t anybody hear me?”

  She looked at him. “They left the building separately.”

  “No.”

  The headache was much worse now. It pressed against the backs of her eyes. “Spielberg left the building on his own. The film crew guy left with the stacked blonde.”

  “No!”

  “What the hell, Orion?”

  “Spielberg never left the building!”

  Brenna froze. She could actually feel the hairs, standing up one by one, on the back of her neck. “The crew guy,” she said slowly. “What did he look like?”

  “Beard,” he said. “Light brown hair. Great teeth. Man, I wish I had teeth like that. Looked like a real winner.”

  Shane Smith.

  “ ‘You keep yourself safe,’ he said to me. And he handed me that gun and the hat. And I kept waiting for Spielberg to show up and take that hat back, but he never did.” His gaze drifted off. “Never came out of there.”

  “You sure you didn’t miss him?”

  “That was where I lived. Right across the street from that building,” he said. “I’m a light sleeper and I didn’t move from there, ever. I would have seen a world-famous director if he left that building.”

  A voice came over the PA system, announcing visiting time was over. Brenna thanked Orion. On her way out, she put fifty dollars into his account at the canteen.