Under Water

by Casey Barrett

  The other picture was of Madeline at a concert, her arm around a tall, skinny kid in a tank top and torn jeans. She was dressed in a short vintage plaid skirt; a ripped Runaways t-shirt showed off a flat stomach with another piercing in her belly button. The couple gave the camera a smiling scowl. Behind them were a packed floor and a stage, Bowery Ballroom from the looks of it.

  “I took that one off of her bedroom mirror at her apartment,” said Margaret. “That’s her boyfriend, or was. His name is James Fealy, a film student at NYU. He claims they broke up three weeks ago, and he hasn’t spoken to her since.”

  “When you went by her place, did you take anything else? Any journals, other photos, anything else that might give you some indication of her day-to-day life?”

  “No, there was nothing else of note. The apartment was filthy, but otherwise in order. There was ten days of mail.”

  “Okay,” I said. “So, you talked to the ex-boyfriend. What about other friends?”

  “I wish I knew. Maddie never had many close girlfriends growing up. There was one, Lucy Townes, a girl on the team. She was the only girl who ever came by our home that I can recall.”

  “Have you spoken to her?”

  Margaret McKay’s eyes began to swell. Tears dampened the edges of her mascara. She grabbed at her sunglasses and pushed them back over her face. “I just don’t know,” she said. “I know so little of my daughter’s life. I feel like we communicated every day, and I never learned a thing about her. It was always dealing with her anger, about her allowance, about missing practice, that sort of thing. I don’t know how to reach Lucy, or anyone else that she might be close to. The only way I was able to reach James was through his father. Charlie works with him. I called him the day after I received her text. Such an unpleasant boy; he was of no help.”

  She sighed the way a woman sighs when she knows a relationship is over, after all the fighting’s been done and there’s just the mess to clean up off the floor. She said, “Tell me your rate, and then please go find my daughter.”

  I told her. She didn’t flinch, just went back into the envelope and produced a wrapped stack of crisp bills about half an inch thick. “To get you started,” she said. “There’s five thousand, for expenses. I hope it goes without saying that price is not a concern.”

  “Of course,” I said. I waited a respectful five seconds before reaching for the bills. Didn’t count them.

  She pushed over the rest of the envelope. “Inside you’ll find Madeline’s personal information: her address; apartment keys; cell phone records; email accounts; bank statements. Madeline receives a generous allowance of twenty thousand dollars each month. Somehow she manages to spend every dime by the end of the fourth week. On the first of September, as usual, the funds were direct deposited. She removed three thousand dollars over the first few days of the month, but has not withdrawn anything since Labor Day. If there is any activity on her account, I’ll let you know right away. Her latest wireless statement indicates a large number of calls and texts to James Fealy. She also tried to reach Coach Marks the same day she sent me that text. He missed her call, and she left no message. After that, nothing.”

  I peered into the envelope, flipped through the documents, searched for anything she might have missed.

  “You’ll also find all of my contact information, and Charlie’s, as well. You should call him. He’ll like hearing from you. Please let me know of anything else you might need. Like I said, everything comes to me.”

  “Did you see Madeline’s passport at her place?” I asked.

  “I didn’t, no,” she said. “But I must admit, I didn’t give it the most thorough of searches. I try to respect my daughter’s privacy,” she said with a note of defense.

  “Is it possible that Madeline could have left—”

  “Left the country? No. My daughter has a phobia of travel. She is very particular. She’s only comfortable in her own bed—in the city or sometimes upstate. It makes swim meets very difficult, I can assure you. Leaving the country is out of the question. She has not traveled abroad since she was eleven years old.”

  “I assume she’s on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram? Have you checked her social media for any updates since you last heard from her?”

  “She is the rare teenage girl who isn’t, I’m afraid. Madeline has always valued her privacy. And friends, well, they never seemed to be a priority.”

  Margaret McKay looked down at her daughter’s file. The mystery of her life seemed to bring physical discomfort. She shifted in her seat, waited for the waves of pain to pass.

  We’d reached the point in the conversation that no parent of a missing child wants to hear. I waved to Manuel for another Beck’s. “Mrs. McKay, do you think your daughter could have hurt herself . . .”

  “My daughter is alive,” she said. “A mother would know.”

  “I’m sure she is. But your daughter hasn’t used her cell phone in over a week. She hasn’t touched her bank account either. And you think it’s unlikely she could be staying anywhere but her apartment or your country house, where she was last seen. With all this in mind, we have to consider the worst.”

  Margaret stiffened but did not speak.

  “Consider it only to eliminate that first,” I said without much punch. “You mentioned finding cocaine in her room when she was young. To your knowledge, is Madeline still using?”

  “I don’t know. Probably. Most likely.”

  She stood up on unsteady legs and looked down at my half-finished omelet and empty beer. The hem of her ivory dress ended just above the knee. Her toned legs vibrated with distress signals as she gathered her bag and pushed at her glasses. “I need to go. Please find her, Lawrence. It was very nice seeing you.”

  Manuel came by with another Beck’s, and together we watched her go through the window of the diner. The two pictures of Madeline stared up at me, an angry little girl lost. Her mouth, that wide, fishy swath, was her most striking feature. She wasn’t a girl forgotten in a crowd. Like her brother and her mother, she radiated a presence that people would remember. I sat there sipping my beer, looking into Margaret McKay’s water glass. It was marked with lipstick like a dried circle of blood.

  Chapter 2

  I walked the block back to my apartment, back to Elvis passed out on my side of the bed. I opened the back garden door and waited for the hound to rouse himself from his slumber. He eyed me without moving, then stretched and jumped off the bed and ambled past my knees outside. He lifted his leg over the first withered plant he saw. Some best friend. He spent some time snorting and sniffing around the perimeter of the garden and then collapsed in a sliver of sun.

  Home. A rent-controlled subterranean garden apartment on East 17th Street, 219A. Affordable thanks to a sympathetic lifelong bachelor who once worked with my father and lives in the four-story brownstone above. It has low ceilings, a bedroom without closets, a galley kitchen, and a small front room stuffed with books and little else of value. And the garden—you can’t beat the private outdoor space.

  I grabbed another beer from the fridge and joined Elvis on the patio. Then I called Cassandra Kimball.

  A hard woman’s voice answered, “The Chamber.”

  “Is Cass available?”

  “I think she’s just finishing a session; let me check.”

  I waited on hold, sat back and relished my sunken little slice of the city. I heard my landlord, old Mr. Petit, puttering in the kitchen a floor above. I knew he liked to watch me out here, with thoughts I didn’t care to consider. It was a small price to pay for this below-market patch of shade and hints of sun.

  “This is Cass.”

  “An early morning session?” I asked. “Sounds like they’re beating the door down for you.”

  “I’m the one who does the beating, darlin’. What’s going on?”

  “We have a new client. You have any time to spare?”

  “For you, always. My last session finishes at six today. I’ll come by after. Thi
nk you can stay sober that long?”

  I told her I’d try. She hung up. I looked at my beer. Number four, not yet nine a.m. Might want to slow the pace a bit.

  When she isn’t torturing kinky, pain-loving men at her day job, Cass is my sometime partner. At the Chamber, she’s known as Mistress Justine, a nod to the namesake of her profession, the Marquis de Sade. Justine was an early work by the eponymous sadist; its original title was The Misfortunes of Virtue.

  She was private about her work there and lighthearted about its requirements, but we both knew too well the dangers that could lurk behind those whips and role play. That’s how we met. Cass was one of my first clients. She was being stalked by one of her slaves. I was informed that the occasional stalking came with the territory. The owner of the dungeon, Mistress Rebecca, said it happened all the time. There were always slaves who developed obsessions for the ones that administered the pain they required. This one was an ineffectual little man named Clifford. Scaring off a whimpering masochist, I figured, how hard could it be? But I failed to remember that every man is effective when holding a handgun.

  Back then, I was a clean-living wannabe badass filled with righteousness. I’d taken my parole seriously, vowed never to go back, and wasn’t touching anything stronger than coffee. I’d devoured every piece of pulp in the prison library, envisioned myself a real life Jack Reacher. I knew what I was going to do when I got out. Who needed a licensed firearm? I got into aikido instead. Went to the dojo every day until I earned a few degrees on my black belt. Started working the fringes, finding different things for different folks, built up some nice word of mouth. Then Cass called.

  One cold winter night, it was January twelfth, just after two a.m., I approached Clifford on a Lower East Side sidewalk across from the old Motor City bar. Cass was inside partying. Cliff had been lurking outside, smoking and swearing to himself, waiting to follow his mistress wherever she went next. He would never approach, never speak to her, but he continued to move in closer. He was more nuisance than threat. A few days earlier, Cass had informed him that she wouldn’t see Clifford for sessions any longer if she caught sight of him outside the dungeon again. But he couldn’t resist. I approached, too casual, too confident in my aikido-honed instincts, a cocky character from a bad action movie. I asked him for a light, then ground out my cigarette as soon as it was sparked. Told him that I’d like to speak to him about Mistress Justine. I often consider the ways I failed in my training. This is the moment that aikido prepares you for. An attacker unveils a weapon, and he is disarmed and neutralized before his violent thought can become action. I failed. Clifford slipped a .38 from his coat pocket and fired off a shot into my side before I could reach his wrist. I turned left and took it through the spleen, which I learned later was better than turning right. That would have meant the liver and greater harm. I was able to disarm him and break his arm, but too late. I was unconscious for the rest of it.

  It was during my recovery that my living became a little less clean. I developed a taste for painkillers. The drinking became a bit of a lifestyle. On the upside, the incident increased my profile. My caseload increased, and so did my rates. Cass became a friend, fueled by that inevitable guilt. When I tried to become more than that, her denial came cruel and clean. But somewhere in there she became fascinated with my trade, and she knew I could use her help. You might think it comes with a sense of charity, but that would miss Cass’s true nature. Truth is, the woman is addicted to secrets. That’s what fuels her work at the dungeon, and that’s what thrills her about helping with my cases.

  Secrets. I wish I knew hers. She keeps them hidden better than anyone I’ve ever met.

  Time to get to work. How long had it been, five, six months? Two seasons of swimming and drinking and occasional visits to the dojo had left me feeling like the idle rich I might have been. It’s hard work to avoid making a living. I never wanted to. When I was the young, proud son of loaded Lawrence Darley, the concept never occurred to me.

  I opened the envelope and shuffled through the cell phone bills and the bank statements, the contact list and the pictures. Madeline was hiding somewhere amidst all that paperwork. But this was no way to ease into my first case off a layoff. Better to hit the pavement, poke around the quarry’s natural habitat. I grabbed Madeline’s apartment keys, slipped the contact list into the back pocket of my jeans, and splashed some water into Elvis’s bowl. The ungrateful hound ignored me on my way out.

  I found a cab heading south down Third Avenue, gave the address and told the cabbie to take 9th Street, always one of the only dependable streets to beat the crosstown traffic. We passed by NYU buildings, the dorms full of new arrivals. Young girls wearing tight purple t-shirts, young guys clad in baseball caps and flip-flops. My window was down, and at a stoplight I found myself staring at two young blondes in skirts that barely covered their tan thighs. One of them stared back; the other looked uncomfortable. The light turned green as I calculated that I was almost twice their age. They were Madeline’s peers, though the girl in those pictures looked far older.

  Between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, I admired the rows of perfect brownstones. There’s one on the south side of the street closer to Sixth that has always stirred my New Yorker’s real estate lust. The house is a classic redbrick half covered in ivy with Victorian-style double front doors of glazed glass. Through the parlor windows, floor-to-ceiling bookshelves are visible along one wall; a grand piano sits in the opposite corner. The thought of lying on a couch in that room, pulling a book at random from the shelves, and reading while a beautiful woman plays that piano . . . Goddamn, I wish I were still rich. I like to think someone brilliant and worthy lives there. A man of medicine, perhaps, a man busy curing disease, with a poet wife, and three perfect children who study history and want to work in education. But it’s probably just a finance jerk on his third marriage with four other homes in other cities that are just as beautiful. He’ll never appreciate any of them.

  Madeline lived in a seven-story, turn-of-the-century co-op at the corner of Barrow and West 4th. Apartment 7M. It was the sort of Village residence stocked with single girls living in studios and one-bedrooms, still receiving plenty of help from home. Five grand a month for six hundred square feet—but hey, it was all about the location. The doorman glanced up as I crossed the marble lobby. I gave him her name, and he took his time scanning a list beneath the desk.

  “ID,” he grunted.

  I handed it over, waited some more. A game of Texas Hold ’Em was paused on his phone next to his list. He didn’t appreciate being interrupted.

  “Good cards?” I asked.

  “Seventh floor,” he said, handing back my license. He waved me to the elevators in the back.

  I stood there watching the numbers descend above the elevator door. As the elevator reached 3, a door opened off to the right. A small sign by the buzzer read SUPER. A round Latino man wearing cargo shorts and a Hawaiian shirt stepped out and stopped in front of me.

  “Help you?”

  “Going up to a friend’s apartment,” I said. “In seven M. Name is McKay.”

  “She’s not there,” he told me.

  “I know that,” I said. “I have her keys. Her mother asked me to stop by.”

  “She hasn’t been there for a week or so. I have her mail, inside.” He motioned to his apartment behind him. “The mother, she stop by a few days ago, asked me to collect mail and to call her when she come home.”

  “That’s nice of you.”

  He shrugged, looked over at the doorman back playing poker on his phone. “Lot of ladies live here,” he said. “Lot of men stopping by. My job to keep an eye out.”

  “Any men stop by her place?”

  “Just one. Boyfriend, I think. Tall, skinny guy.”

  The elevator door opened, and I moved to get in. I said, “You want to join me?”

  He thought about it for a second, decided to trust me. He shook his head and said, “Hope everything’s okay.”
<
br />   “Me too,” I replied as the doors closed.

  The apartment was ready for an open house. Through the foyer, a bright living and dining room with high-beamed ceilings and exposed brick. The furniture was modern and comfortable, everything matching just so, from curtains to coffee table: the work of a well-paid decorator. A framed Rothko print was over the couch, another by Jasper Johns in the dining room area. A long casement window at the end of the room offered postcard views of the Empire State Building. Issues of Interview and EW and New York magazine were stacked in piles next to the couch. In the open kitchen, a single wineglass sat upside down on a drying rack next to the sink. The fridge was empty except for a Brita water filter and a few Coronas in the side door. There was a frosted bottle of Ketel One in the freezer, along with full ice trays, and little else.

  I walked into a bedroom done in tasteful earth tones. A queen bed was made crisp and plump, the work of a cleaning lady, not any teenage girl. All that was missing was the chocolate on the pillow. A print by Gauguin, Tahitian period, hung over the bed. Another by Klimt was over a bare desk in the corner. Her nightstand was devoid of any personal touches; the diary inside the drawer was full of empty pages. Along the edge of a standing full-length mirror, there was an outline in the side where Mrs. McKay must have removed the picture of Madeline with her boyfriend.

  The bathroom was freshly scrubbed and equally sparse. A toothbrush and toothpaste, a black brush tangled with black hairs, but no cosmetics or moisturizers or any of the accessories one might expect from a rich city girl. There was nothing interesting in the medicine cabinet, no orange prescription bottles to be found, only a stick of Secret deodorant. Dry swimming suits, cut for racing, were draped over the towel rack. A pair of smoked Swedish goggles hung from the doorknob. I tried the walk-in closet. More tidying by the cleaning lady, but not much to tidy: racks less than half full, with what appeared to be thrift store finds. Tattered t-shirts, moth-eaten sweaters, a beaten black leather jacket. Black combat boots and flip-flops were her only choices in footwear. Whatever it was she spent her twenty grand a month on, it wasn’t beauty or fashion.