And She Was

by Alison Gaylin

  “Trent,” Brenna said. “Can you contact Annette Shelby and arrange time for me to meet with her about her husband?”

  “Already did. I told you it’s tonight at seven-thirty.”

  “Well can you call her to confirm?” Brenna gave him a meaningful glare. “Then you can check the traffic on our Web site? Maybe call your mother?”

  “Oookay. Got the hint.”

  As Trent left them for his workspace, Morasco slipped a manila folder out of his canvas grocery bag and placed it on the desk. “Cupcakes, huh?” he said. “I’m a Twinkie man myself.” He looked up at her, and Brenna knew he wasn’t a Twinkie man. He probably hadn’t touched a Hostess product since he was eight. Nothing like being patronized by a guy in tweed.

  Morasco opened the folder. Inside was a series of photographs, all of the same woman—in a cream-colored suit and stiff white blouse holding a bouquet of flowers, in a red apron, carving a turkey at a church soup kitchen, on the beach, in a modest black bathing suit. “Do you remember her?” Morasco asked.

  Brenna peered at the bouquet shot—a photo from a very low-rent wedding. “No,” she said. In the picture, the woman appeared to be standing in front of an office cubicle, literally fading into the background with her cream suit and her lank sandy hair and her pale lips and skin . . . Everything about this person more or less off-white—save her eyes, which were large and silvery—not so much haunting as haunted. Brenna couldn’t stop staring at them. “Who is she?”

  She could feel Morasco’s gaze on her, and when she turned to him his eyes were narrowed, sharp. Now she understood what Trent meant by intense. “You don’t know the woman in these photos.”

  “I’ve never seen her before.”

  “You’re sure.”

  “Yes.”

  The irises were jet-hard now, the pupils like drill bits—amazing interrogation tools, those eyes of his. Good cop and bad cop, rolled into one. “Have you spoken to her on the phone? Received any e-mails from her?”

  “I don’t even know her name.”

  “Carol Wentz.” He leaned on the name, aiming it at her.

  “I don’t know anyone named Carol Wentz.”

  “She’s fifty-one years old,” Morasco said. “Married, no kids. Happy, more or less. In good health. She went missing five days ago. Her husband says before that, she hardly ever left Tarry Ridge, even. Last night we found her wallet.”

  “Detective,” said Brenna. “Why are you telling me this?”

  “In the wallet, we found a piece of paper with a name and phone number printed on it.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  Morasco watched her face for a drawn-out moment, as if he was trying to see through it to her brain. “The name and phone number on the paper,” he said. “They were yours.”

  Brenna’s eyes widened. “Maybe she’d looked me up,” she said. “Maybe she was planning on hiring me.”

  “The wallet was found by a Realtor. You know where?”

  She looked at him. “I told you I don’t know Carol Wentz. How would I know—”

  “2921 Muriel Court.”

  Brenna swallowed hard. She felt some of the color drain from her face.

  Morasco exhaled and took a step back, and Brenna knew she’d given him what he wanted. “You know the address,” he said. “You remember it.”

  She nodded.

  “Why do you know it?”

  Brenna didn’t want to answer that question, not with so many other questions running through her mind. So she turned away, cast her gaze across the room at the back of Trent’s head as he talked on the phone, oblivious. And then she said aloud what she and Morasco both knew. “That house,” she said. “The house where her wallet was found. It was Iris Neff’s house.”

  Chapter 4

  1. I remember the name of the dog I had when I was in kindergarten.

  2. I remember what I ate for lunch on my first day of junior high school.

  3. I remember my father’s favorite brand of Scotch.

  Nelson Wentz stopped typing and stared at the screen. The assignment for his online memoir-writing course was to write four things you remember, four things you don’t—but was this really enough information? Should he have typed, say, that his father liked Glenfiddich? Should Nelson have said that his dog’s name was Coco and he wasn’t allowed to keep her because his mother was allergic, or that he remembered what he’d eaten for lunch that day because it had been an egg salad sandwich and the children at his new school had teased him, telling him his locker smelled like feet? He didn’t see why some writing instructor three thousand miles away would care about these things—Nelson barely did himself. But then again, he knew that when writing memoir, all sorts of details were important—just as they were in police investigations.

  4. I remember what Carol was wearing on the day I met her.

  Nelson wasn’t sure why he’d signed up for this course. At this point, he really wasn’t sure why he’d done anything he’d done prior to five days ago, when he’d woken up in bed to find Carol gone—not in the kitchen, not in the bathroom or the living room or anywhere. When he checked the garage and saw that her car was still in it, Nelson had thought, Visiting a neighbor. An odd thing to do at 7:30 A.M., but not so very odd for Carol, who’d rush to neighbors’ houses on a moment’s notice when they called her for help with so much as a sticky jar. (“You’re the Wonder Woman of the suburbs,” Nelson had once joked. Carol hadn’t found it funny.)

  So that morning, which had been a Friday, Nelson had showered and gotten dressed like it was any other Friday morning. He had taken the train into the city and worked eight hours at the reference service Facts of Note, just as he had done for the past thirty-two years. When he got home at five-thirty and saw her car still in the garage, Nelson had fully expected Carol to be in the kitchen starting dinner. But she was not.

  The day I met her, Carol was wearing a dress with red and blue sailboats on it and the type of flat-brimmed straw hat you see in Impressionist paintings. I am now head of research at Facts of Note, but at the time, I had just started there as a junior copy editor. It was our company picnic, and I saw Carol from a distance, talking to a group of people I still hadn’t met. I learned she was the cousin of one of the women from accounts payable. She didn’t look like someone’s cousin, not in that hat. She looked as if she’d been beamed into Shepherd’s Field via time machine. I had an urge to pick flowers for her.

  Nelson started to read what he’d just typed, but he couldn’t get through it. He kept picturing that police detective—Nick Morasco—standing over his shoulder and reading the screen. Why are you doing a writing assignment when your wife is missing? the detective said in Nelson’s mind.

  Detective Nick Morasco, while nice enough, had repeatedly referred to Carol as “your wife” this afternoon—the possessive, lest Nelson forget she legally belonged to him, and here he’d gone and lost her. Has your wife been acting strangely lately? Would your wife have had any reason to visit 2921 Muriel Drive? Before her disappearance, would you have described your wife as happy?

  “Define happy.” Nelson said it out loud, even though he hadn’t intended to. He didn’t like the sound of his voice—quavering in the empty room. Manic. Was this the beginning of insanity? Had Carol’s presence in this house all these years been the only thing keeping Nelson from losing his mind? I’m just trying to help you, Mr. Wentz. You wanted to talk to me about your wife.

  “Her name is Carol!” Nelson fairly shouted it. Don’t think about him anymore.

  He started to read his paragraph again—just for the sake of doing something normal. He’d gone to work today for the same reason. Why take another personal day? He would rather be in his office than in this empty house, thinking about Carol. He’d rather be top-editing pages at Facts of Note than hearing, “Nothing new,” from that snide female desk sergeant every single time he called.

  He hadn’t been on his computer since Carol had gone away, but somehow it felt bet
ter to be in this room than in any of the others—the room Carol never ventured into, on the computer she’d never learned to use.

  A hat from an Impressionist painting . . . I wonder if Carol still has it. If she does then maybe someday we could visit Provence together and I could take pictures of her in that hat among the haystacks. Surprising we’ve never been to Provence . . . Carol loves French cooking. In fact, Provence would be the perfect place for us to retire to. Why didn’t I ever think of that before? Why didn’t I ever tell Carol, “We could retire to Provence”? If I had brought up the idea, we’d both have something to look forward to. Today we might be in the city, taking French classes at the Lycée. Afterward, we’d be drinking wine at some little bistro on the Upper East Side, practicing our French together, laughing at how bad we both were, but knowing we’d be better in time.

  When Nelson had first gone to the police station, the desk sergeant had asked, “What was Mrs. Wentz wearing when you last saw her?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Last night.”

  “Yes.”

  “When you went to bed, your wife was still wearing her street clothes?”

  “Yes, yes she was.”

  “Describe the clothes.”

  “Well . . . I . . . I don’t really . . .”

  “Is there one item of clothing you remember enough to describe? A sweater? A piece of jewelry?”

  “Jewelry?”

  “Mr. Wentz.”

  Nelson had felt as if he was flunking a test. He’d closed his eyes and opened them again, and after what seemed like an eternity, he was able to picture Carol on the couch Thursday night, reading a book. But he couldn’t remember the book’s title, or what she’d been wearing while reading it. “Her wedding ring,” he had told the desk sergeant, finally.

  “What did the ring look like?”

  Nelson pointed to his own. “Like this.”

  “Plain gold band?”

  “Yes.”

  “Okay. What is the inscription?”

  “No inscription.”

  “No inscription?”

  “We didn’t . . . We . . . No. Just blank.”

  If Nelson and Carol were to retire to Provence, they wouldn’t need a sprawling chateau. There were only two of them, after all, and they had simple tastes. All they really needed was a cottage—a one-bedroom, with a nice garden and a big, beautiful kitchen for Carol to cook in.

  We’d be better in time.

  Carol’s wallet had been found inside the old Neff house. “The wallet contained your wife’s driver’s license and one hundred dollars in cash,” Detective Morasco had said over the phone today. “No credit cards.”

  “She only has one credit card, and she keeps it in the kitchen drawer,” Nelson had said. “She is very frugal.”

  Frugal. Nelson’s voice had cracked on the word—though on the positive side his instinct had told him to use “is” to describe Carol, not “was.” She was still an “is” in his mind. That was something, wasn’t it?

  At first, Nelson had believed that Carol had left him voluntarily. He’d imagined her calling one of the neighbors—perhaps Gayle Chandler from her book club. He’d pictured Carol picking up the phone late Sunday night and asking Gayle in a whisper to drive her to the bus station in White Plains. He’d pictured his wife of fourteen years buying a one-way ticket for some distant town she’d never been to before—Phoenix or Cleveland or Memphis or Des Moines—his practical-minded wife, thrown off her head by the mother of all mid-life crises, leaving home with nothing but her wallet and the clothes on her back and some dream about starting a new life, and it infuriated him. Made him angrier than he’d ever thought he could feel, angrier than he’d ever admit to feeling.

  Driving to the police station that first evening, it had been more an act of spite than concern. This will show her, he had thought. She’ll come back to a full-blown police investigation and won’t she be embarrassed? Making it even worse, the police seemed to agree that Carol had left of her own volition—their “full-blown investigation” amounting to that desk sergeant limply filling out a report.

  Nelson had driven home hating the world. Parking in his driveway, he had glared at the garage that held Carol’s car. A one-car garage, and all these years he’d let Carol have it—let her keep her Volvo in there, protected from the elements, while his Volkswagen Golf camped out in the driveway at night and in the train station parking lot every weekday, his car a second-class citizen—a worker-drone.

  He’d glared at that Volvo through the narrow window at the side of the garage, Carol’s garage, the closed door like a giant closed mouth, smirking at him. He’d walked straight up to that door and kicked it so hard his foot bled.

  Waking up alone again the next morning, though, and again the next and the next, Nelson’s anger had quieted to loneliness, only to be replaced by gnawing dread. Carol hadn’t left him of her own accord. She would never do that, and Nelson knew her, knew her better than anyone. He had known her for twenty-five years.

  Carol’s wallet. Left at the Neff house. That had sealed it.

  No one had lived in the Neff house for two years. It was nicely kept up by Realtors, and Nelson had just heard that a developer had finally bought the property—the same one who built those expensive Waterside Condominiums at the eastern edge of town, which was good news, he supposed, for Lydia Neff, wherever she was . . . But for all intents and purposes, the house was abandoned. And Carol’s wallet found in an abandoned house—the abandoned house of a woman Carol had never liked in the first place. Carol’s wallet dropped in a house she’d never go to voluntarily. That couldn’t mean good news.

  I don’t remember the last time I kissed Carol.

  Nelson felt a tear slip down his cheek. He exited out of his assignment, then clicked on the file and dragged it into the trash folder. Only after he did it, though, did he realize that the images he described—Carol, talking to her friends at the Facts of Note picnic, Carol’s old hat with the pink satin bow—they were, for now, all he had left of her.

  He clicked on the trash icon, opened it up. The memoir file was easy to find—Nelson emptied his trash with relative frequency, so there weren’t many others. He undeleted it, amazed at how relieved that simple action made him feel. Then he shut down the computer.

  As he was getting up from his chair, though, it struck Nelson that there had been another file in trash. An unfamiliar file . . .

  Nelson booted the computer back up. The process took longer than he would have liked—he needed to do something about the spyware on his PC once and for all—but finally the computer booted up and the desktop loaded. He clicked on the trash icon again, three quarters convinced he’d hallucinated the file.

  But he hadn’t. There it was—a download, from Thursday at 10:30 P.M. Nelson knew he had been asleep by then—he always tried to get to bed before ten on work nights—and when he clicked on it, the empty feeling in his chest loosened. Carol had downloaded the file. Suddenly, the present tense fit Nelson’s wife. Carol does know how to use the computer. She does, she does.

  The file had been downloaded from the DMV Web site. Its name was “Replacing Your Missing Driver’s License.”

  Nelson wanted to laugh, but laughing while alone was for crazy people, and Nelson Wentz was not going crazy. Not anymore. Carol downloaded the file, and she did it here, at home, after losing the wallet. He opened up the DMV file and stared at it for several minutes—as if he expected it to tell him something else. Then he went online, clicked on recent history . . . and learned exactly how, as he slept, his wife had been using her computer knowledge.

  When he “died,” Larry Shelby had left his wife, Annette, more than twenty million dollars, furthering Brenna’s belief that he was far more attractive as a memory than as a man.

  Annette Shelby, however, felt otherwise. As soon as she’d heard from Brenna that he was alive, Annette had flown down to the city from her home in Great Barrington and spent a significant amount of that
inheritance on a deluxe suite at the St. Regis. “It will be the perfect spot for our reunion,” she had explained over the phone.

  Brenna had tried to talk her out of it. Odds were, a man with six new identities wouldn’t be ripe for a reunion, no matter how classy the hotel. But Annette wasn’t having it. And Brenna, who’d been going through a hell of an ordeal booking a last-minute flight to Las Vegas with a beyond-bitchy airline rep, couldn’t find the energy to argue with her.

  So now the two of them—investigator and client—were stuck in this gorgeous room with its Central Park view and its sculpted, chandeliered ceiling and its king-sized bed with the tulle canopy pouring down on it like something out of a Cocteau movie—the whole scene romantic to the point of mockery, not to mention the mix CD that Annette had brought—“Larry’s Favorite Songs”—inexplicably, sadistically playing out over the room’s stereo system. And they were doing business.

  On the plus side, it took Brenna’s mind off what Morasco had told her three hours earlier—a missing woman’s wallet, her name and number in it, found at Iris Neff’s old house. It took her mind off Morasco’s questions, too.

  But the fact remained that, for anyone with a shred of empathy, the business being done here was achingly unpleasant. Brenna had already showed Annette copies of her husband’s various IDs and now she’d gotten out the photos she’d taken at Nero’s Playground of Larry aka Gregory getting screamed at by his latest spouse, Vivica. “You don’t have to look at these, Annette,” she tried.

  “Oh yes, I do.” Annette had just polished off her fourth airplane-sized Johnnie Walker Black and was now washing it down with a handful of chocolate-covered cashews. That was one thing that could be said for this room—it had an excellent minibar.

  Brenna slid the folder across the desk as the next of Larry’s favorite songs kicked in—Elvis’s “Are You Lonesome Tonight,” of all things. Brenna managed a sip from the bottle of seltzer that Annette had insisted she take and watched her slide open the folder, wincing at its contents. She had never felt quite this uncomfortable in her life. “Should I . . . Do you want me to turn off the stereo?”