She's Not There

by P J Parrish

  He studied Megan McCall in the dim light, trying to get a read on her. Her pain about her own rape seemed real, but why was she telling him this? What was in it for her?

  “When I met you at the yacht club the other day, I got the feeling you don’t really like Amelia,” he said.

  “I don’t, especially.”

  “So why are you telling me this?”

  Again her eyes were steady on his. “No woman deserves to be a punching bag.”

  “Did Amelia ever confide in you about other things?”

  “Like what?”

  “Like being involved with another man?”

  Megan seemed mildly surprised by the question. “No. But like I said, Alex is really possessive of her, so maybe there was another guy, I don’t know. More likely, I think she just had enough and decided to get away from Alex the easiest way she could.”

  “I wouldn’t call wrecking your car in the Everglades an easy way to get away.”

  “She just wanted to leave. Why can’t you let her do that?”

  “I have a job to do, Miss McCall,” he said.

  “A job,” she said slowly. “Alex didn’t hire you, did he? My father was the one who hired you.”

  Buchanan said nothing.

  “My father is very good at getting people to do things for him, even if they don’t want to.”

  “What do you mean?” Buchanan asked.

  She gave him another hard stare. “Do you like to gamble, Mr. Buchanan?”

  Buchanan shook his head. “I don’t like giving my money away.”

  “I love to gamble,” she said. “It’s not about the money, it’s about winning. My father gambled on Alex. He took him from some little law office up in Orlando and turned him into a real lawyer, a very rich lawyer. Alex owes him big time, and you can bet my father will call in his marker someday.”

  Megan picked up her phone from the table and rose, draping her trench across her arm. “You don’t owe my father anything,” she said. “You should get out of this before you do.”

  Buchanan watched her disappear through the door and then signaled the waitress and ordered a scotch.

  Did Megan McCall know about the hit on Amelia? But it made no sense for McCall to tell his daughter something that could expose her legally if this all blew up. But she had some kind of agenda, and he didn’t think it was about Amelia.

  Was it about Alex? Was Megan protecting him from something?

  He picked up the scotch and took a long drink. Alex Tobias’s voice was there in his head now, coming in that awful pleading tone.

  Mel. Mel. My Mel . . .

  Buchanan realized he couldn’t remember Tobias ever saying his wife’s name without attaching the possessive pronoun to it. And he was thinking about his first impression of the guy that day back at the restaurant. Hadn’t this been in the back of his brain from the start?

  It was always the husband, wasn’t it? The husband was always the first suspect. The husband was always the monster.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  The first thing Alex did when he got home was go through the ground floor and turn out the lights. It had become part of his ritual since Amelia left. Coming back to the house each night and being confronted with all the whiteness and mirrors and glass made him feel exposed, like some thing that had washed up on a beach without its shell, like those deflated blue man o’ war things he used to find on Destin Beach after storms.

  The second part of the ritual was to get a glass and a bottle of vodka from the bar and go straight to his study. He never bothered to change out of his suit, just shucked off the jacket and tie and dropped into his chair.

  The first drink went down as fast as he could stomach. After that, he tried to pace himself because even in the fog of his despair, he knew he was drinking too much, forgetting to eat and do most normal things a person did.

  Alex ran his hand over his jaw. Had he shaved that morning? He couldn’t even remember. He couldn’t remember anything he had done today once he had closed the door of his office back at the firm. His secretary had left him alone. Even Owen had stopped bothering him.

  Alex folded his arms on the desk and laid his head down.

  “Mr. Tobias?”

  He raised his head and squinted toward the door. Someone had turned on the hall light but the person standing there was just a small silhouette.

  “Are you okay, Mr. Tobias?”

  He recognized Esperanza’s voice but didn’t respond.

  “It’s six thirty. I leave for the night now, okay?” she said.

  He nodded.

  “You want I bring you something? A sandwich, maybe?”

  He shook his head.

  She hesitated and then came into the office. She set a stack of mail on the desk and reached for the light switch over the credenza behind him.

  “Leave them off. Please.”

  She backed away from the desk. When she got to the door, she stopped and turned. “I sorry but I forget something.”

  “What?” he whispered.

  “The dog spa call again today. They want to know when you come get Brody.”

  The dog. The damn dog. He couldn’t even think about this right now.

  “Tell them to keep him there,” Alex said.

  “But Mr. Tobias, they say—”

  “I can’t have the dog here right now. There’s no one to take care of it.”

  “Okay, Mr. Tobias. I call them in the morning.”

  She left, leaving the door ajar to allow a shaft of hallway light to cut the darkness. For a long time, Alex just sat there, staring into the shadows. He was thinking about that picture Buchanan had showed him when they were sitting outside the house in Georgia, the picture of Mel when she had still been dancing. He was thinking about Buchanan’s big ugly hands holding her picture, thinking about how he had wanted to do something in that moment—hit the fucker or break his fingers, because he was touching her.

  But he hadn’t. He had sat there in the backseat, his feeling of impotence rising in his throat and almost choking him.

  The picture of Mel . . .

  He stared hard at the cabinet across the room, and then he rose slowly and went to it. He opened the top drawer. It was there, just as he remembered.

  He pulled out the red scrapbook, took it back to his desk and sat down. When he turned on the small halogen desk lamp, the lettering Amelia had printed in black marker on the front of the scrapbook jumped out at him.

  The Story of Us

  Years ago, when she had told him she was going to put their pictures in a scrapbook, he had kidded her about being sentimental and old-fashioned. Who bothered to paste things in a book anymore? Every photograph they had ever taken he had carefully stored in Dropbox. But Mel hated computers, hated the idea of their life “floating around in the Cloud,” so she had prints made and created the scrapbook. When she showed it to him, it had bothered him at first, seeing his life laid out on paper. But in his deepest place, in the best part of his heart, he had loved her for it: loved the stupid banality of a scrapbook, loved the idea that she loved him so much that she had taken the trouble to put it there on these pages, in a big red book, for all to see even after she—they—were gone.

  When he opened the cover, the binding made a small cracking sound.

  He stared down at their wedding photo.

  A beautiful eight-by-ten color portrait taken on their wedding day. Amelia in a white gown and him in a black suit, posed at the altar. From the first night he had seen her dance, to the moment captured in this photo, two years had passed.

  He had wanted her from the beginning. After one performance, Joanna had had invited some of the ballet company’s dancers to a party at their home on Mercedes Drive. Amelia was as mesmerizing on that crowded patio as she had been on stage, draped in a white silk dress, her hair s
parkling with tiny green stones. They began dating the next week, and two months later, he proposed. She turned him down.

  It’s too soon, Alex. I just got promoted to soloist. I love you but . . .

  He stopped asking, and they continued to see each other when they could. Lead roles came in quick succession for her, physically demanding ballets that left her exhausted and plagued with small injuries. She was always at rehearsal, taking class, or in physical therapy. On the nights she did come to stay at his home, she never got there before eleven. And the next morning, in the bathroom trash can, he would find the bloodied Band-Aids from her feet.

  Then it all changed.

  The company was on its last night of a five-week tour. He had gotten the call on his cell just as he was heading home from a long night at the office. Mel had taken a horrific fall during a performance.

  The chartered jet got him to Tampa just as she was coming out of surgery. He was there holding her hand when the orthopedic surgeon told her she had undiagnosed early-onset osteoporosis and showed them an X-ray of her pelvic bone that didn’t even look like solid bone at all but like white lace.

  She cried when the surgeon told her she wouldn’t dance again. He wanted to cry because nothing he said or did seemed to help. But the tears never surfaced because there was an ugly little whisper echoing in his head, repeating over and over, my Mel is coming back to me, my Mel is coming back to me.

  And she did. Only six months after her fall, she accepted his proposal. He was so afraid she would change her mind that he insisted on a quick wedding. There wasn’t even time to buy her a good ring.

  He turned the page of the scrapbook. First came all the photographs from the wedding ceremony and the small poolside reception at the yacht club. Then came the photographs from their honeymoon. Alex slowed as he turned these pages, the memories pouring back. They had picked up the rental car in Aix-en-Provence and driven without reservations or a set route, wending through the hills and stopping in whatever village caught their eye.

  God, the photographs . . .

  He had bought Amelia a new Nikon digital camera, and she had taken beautiful pictures. The Roman ruins in La Turbie, the ochre cliffs in Roussillon, the lavender fields in Saignon. And the view from the window of their hotel in Menton of a half-finished bottle of wine and two oranges on the sill with fishing boats beyond.

  It was in Menton, the village near the Italian border, where he had found the ring. They were in an antique shop and he saw a slender silver band. It was carved to show two interlocked hands. The shopkeeper told them it was an old fede ring and that fede meant “faith.” Alex bought the fede ring, and he slipped it on her finger right there in the shop.

  She wore it until he insisted on buying her the ten-carat diamond, then she taped the little ring in the scrapbook, next to the picture of the view from their room in Menton.

  He ran his fingers lightly over the picture, as if mere touch could bring it all back. And for a moment, it did. The silky taste of the Meursault wine, the sound of the rain, the feel of Mel’s hair brushing his chest as she moved above him.

  I never want to leave this place, Alex.

  Then we won’t.

  But they did come home, back to the place where Mel’s career had been fractured. Soon, she was on anti-depressants, still facing months of physical therapy. He and Owen were expanding the firm so quickly, sometimes he didn’t even make it home at night. Joanna McCall took Mel in hand, distracting her with shopping and travel, and got her involved in charity work and her friends at the yacht club.

  One night Alex came home to discover Mel had dyed her hair blonde and was wearing blue contacts. She surprised him again when she told him she wanted to buy a run-down mansion on Castilla Isle. And although he didn’t want to own an old house, he was glad the long renovation kept her occupied, and he was proud when Florida Design did a cover story on the house and his wife.

  Two years after she fell, Mel returned to the Miami City Ballet’s production of The Nutcracker, this time to sit by his side in the audience. He didn’t know how she felt about not being up there in the spotlight, and he sensed it was best not to ask. But he hoped that she was finally coming to terms with her career ending.

  Alex flipped the pages back to the wedding portrait.

  It had been an illusion, he knew now. It had been an elaborate act, like what happened on stage in the ballet. It was makeup, fake moonlight, and papier-mâché mansions. And Mel? Had she been playing a role, just like when she danced? And what about him?

  Alex closed the scrapbook.

  What had caused the next break between them? Was it when the doctor told Mel she had a blocked fallopian tube and could never get pregnant? Was it when, after sitting by her mother’s bedside for weeks in Iowa, she’d had to watch her die? Was it when that man in uniform came to the door to tell them about Ben?

  Joanna was the one who told him that Mel was drowning. He had been so consumed with getting the firm’s new financial and tax planning department launched that he had missed all the signs. Joanna convinced him to send her away to some place in Boca Raton that specialized in depression treatment. But even when Mel came home, he knew nothing had changed.

  She kept drifting away, withdrawing from him emotionally, bringing that damn dog and that Kindle to bed with her every night, pulling away whenever he reached for her.

  Finally, he drifted away, too. Out of their bed and into the guest room down the hall. Back into eighty-hour workweeks where he at least had the satisfaction of watching the firm thrive. Back into the numbing solace of drink and the enfolding, welcoming warmth of . . .

  “Alex?”

  He looked up. Another woman was silhouetted in the hallway light, leaning against the door frame. He stared at her for a long time and then turned the scrapbook facedown on the desk.

  “What are you doing here, Megan?” he asked softly.

  As she came into the room, he caught the faint smell of her perfume mixed with rain.

  “Why haven’t you called?” she asked.

  He shook his head slowly. He didn’t look up at her as she came closer, pausing at the side of the desk. When she reached across the desk to pick up the bottle of vodka, he focused on her sleeve, on the beads of water glistening on the tan trench coat like the diamond bracelet on her wrist.

  “How much have you had to drink tonight?” she asked.

  He didn’t answer. She picked up the glass, filled it from the bottle and took a drink. When she sat down on the edge of the desk, he finally looked up.

  “How did you get in?” he asked.

  “You gave me a key.”

  He did? He couldn’t remember. In all their times together, they had never met in his home. “You shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  “Well, where do you want me to be, Alex? How about the Ritz-Carlton? Would that make it easier? Do you want me to go back there and wait for you like a good little girl?”

  He shut his eyes, thinking back to Friday night. The night of Mel’s accident, the night he used the cover of a golf meeting with a client in Palm Beach so he could be with Megan. He had lied to Owen about being delayed in getting to the Leggett merger celebration over on Marcos Island. Owen hadn’t known where he really was that night.

  Just like Owen doesn’t know I’ve been sleeping with his daughter for six months.

  “Are you going to answer me?”

  It took every ounce of his energy to look up at Megan, and in that moment he understood that his crushing fatigue didn’t come from not sleeping or eating. He realized, with a sudden stabbing clarity, that it came from the effort of living a life of lies. Not even the large lies, but years and years of little lies that built up on him like ice until he couldn’t bear the weight anymore.

  “Megan,” he said. He looked away, down at his hands still resting on the scrapbook.

  “Don’
t talk,” she said.

  He looked up. “What?”

  “Don’t say anything right now. You’re not thinking straight. When was the last time you got any sleep?”

  “I don’t . . .” He shut his eyes and slumped back into the chair.

  “What do you want?” she whispered.

  He wanted . . .

  “What do you need, baby?”

  He heard the rustle of her trench coat and sensed her moving off the desk. When the halogen light went off, he still didn’t open his eyes. Then her hands were on his knees, gently pushing his legs apart. Her smell swirled closer in the dark as her fingers worked on his belt buckle, and when she unzipped his pants he groaned.

  The tickle of her hair on his forearm and then the wet warmth of her mouth as she took him in. He shut his eyes tighter as he reached for her head, pulling her closer.

  What do I need? Who do I need?

  “Megan . . .”

  Her fingers moved up his thighs.

  What do I want? I want to feel like I did ten years ago. I want to feel good and clean. I want to feel something, anything again. I want Mel.

  “Megan, stop.”

  But she didn’t.

  He grabbed her head and moved her away. But she clutched his thighs and lowered her head again to his penis.

  “Stop it!”

  He gave her a hard push and she spun back against the desk, then slumped to the floor. She lay there for a moment, blinking hard. He reached for her, but she jerked away.

  “What the fuck is the matter with you?” she said.

  “I’m sorry. Jesus, Megan, I’m sorry.”

  Again he reached for her, but she scrambled to her knees, wiping her mouth. She got up slowly, putting out a hand to steady herself against the desk.

  He stared at her. “This isn’t going to work. It never really worked.”

  “You made promises to me, Alex.”

  He shook his head as he zipped his pants. “I know. I did a lot of things.”

  In a flash, he could see himself again standing by a canal with Owen in the darkness, looking down at the black water.