Long Time No See

by Susan Isaacs

  Chapter Eighteen

  AT THE FOURTH real-estate office, I got the news: Yes, they had rented to Samantha Corby. But she was long gone. “God, she left ... Why do I think before Christmas? If I’m thinking of the right person. You understand this is not the field if you’re looking for long-term relationships. The rental market, I mean.” Doreen Brinkerhoff, the agent in charge of renting the furnished condos in Knob Ridge Villas in Wiggins, stood beside a file cabinet. She stuck a ruby-nailed finger through her tangle of shoulder-length black corkscrew curls and scratched her scalp. “Even if they buy. Usually it’s an investment property, so they’re hardly here.” Probably in her early forties, Doreen was firm to a fare-thee-well. Her skin was so tanned that it had the color and texture of the tobacco leaf outside a cigar. “Let me look one place more.” She shoved the drawer shut and, despite a minimal denim skirt and platform sandals, squatted down for a look in the bottom drawer. She struck me as the sort of woman to whom life has offered many reasons to be cynical, yet her hard-featured face was benevolent.

  I took out the photos of Courtney I’d gotten from the Web and from Fancy Phil and bent down to let her see them, not daring a squat on general principles, and additionally not after all those cramped hours on airplanes. I gave Doreen a choice: tennis Courtney, bridal Courtney, mommy Courtney holding baby Morgan, baker Courtney holding lattice-top pie. “Does this look anything like the woman you think could be Samantha?” I asked.

  Her turquoise eyes—the color, I suspected, not of her irises but of her contact lenses—swept over the pictures. “I ... think ... it ... could ... be. I only met her one time.” She went back to the file drawer, though it was so choked with folders I didn’t know what she could possibly find.

  “What makes you hesitate?” I asked.

  “Honestly? I don’t remember. Maybe ... Shorter hair? Younger?”

  “Samantha Corby looked younger than this woman?”

  “I think so. God, if you got to rely on me, I hate to say it ... You’re in deep you-know-what. Oh! Look! Do me a favor. You see where it says ‘2BR 99’? That’s the two-bedroom units in 1999. Pull it out for me. I just did my nails this morning.” After a fair amount of tugging I was finally able to jerk out a thick file. “Depending on how the season is going,” Doreen said, “we sometimes have to rent by the week. That makes for a real fat file.” Swiftly, she was standing and flying through the pages. “Here!

  Hallelujah! Look, Judy. Samantha rented through December thirty-first, but she left on the twenty-first.” I had long since given up correcting Judy to Judith when dealing with people who were not likely to be soul mates.

  “Does it happen to say why she was leaving early?” I asked. Doreen shook her head. “Okay, big question: Did she leave a forwarding address?”

  “Uh ... No. It says ...” She took a page from the file folder and handed it over. In schoolmarm penmanship someone had written “Will call re security deposit.” Since Doreen didn’t stop me, I turned over the page. The paper trembled. That was because my hand was shaking. On the back was a photocopy of a check from Samantha R. Corby to Wiggins Way Realty drawn on the Key Biscayne Bank & Trust—as well as a Florida driver’s license with her photograph.

  In the mountains, it was a cool, windows-open day, but I started to sweat. After I wiped my face with the tissue Doreen handed me, I took out my glasses and stared at the full face picture. I couldn’t tell if it was Courtney. A resemblance, sure, but the formerly blond hair now appeared dirty blond or light brown in the black-and-white photocopy. It was shorter, too, curling under mid-neck. The once clear brow was covered with a fringe of uneven bangs. It could have been Courtney. Or Courtney’s younger, less attractive sister, had she had one. Or someone completely unrelated. I copied down Samantha’s home address on Key Biscayne, her height, five-two, and her date of birth, 08-04-71. On the bottom of the card it indicated that Samantha, a caring soul, was an organ donor.

  “Do you want to fax it somewhere?” Doreen inquired. “You can use my fax.”

  I faxed copies of both sides to myself and also to Nancy at home, in case I needed it sent anywhere before I got back. “This is really awfully nice of you,” I told her.

  “Please. It’s been real slow and it’s exciting having a detective—”

  “Researcher.”

  “Oh, come on, Judy!”

  I accepted her knowing smile. “Well, if it is so slow, Doreen, would you mind seeing if the condo she was in is rented now?”

  “Sure. But look, after she left, maybe there were five, ten, fifteen other people between then and now.” She seemed to think I had some private-eye purpose in mind, like lifting fingerprints or searching for money under floorboards, and as I could see she was relishing the notion, I didn’t set her straight. Strolling over to her computer, she typed in an address. “Sorry. Summer people in it now. How about this? How about I show you where it is. It’s a short walk. And if you don’t say I sent you, maybe you could knock on a few doors.”

  I should have known from Doreen’s calf muscles that a nice walk for her would be at least two miles. After fifteen minutes bouncing along at an altitude over five thousand feet, I was convinced I was going to faint, or at least swoon. It wasn’t only being higher than zero feet above sea level. I felt so detached from everything and everyone I cared about. I could have been renting somebody else’s life, somebody whose job was to chase down a woman who might have called herself Samantha R. Corby.

  But the country was glorious. The cloudless sky was a shade of brilliant blue new to me. And there really were purple mountains majesty rising behind downtown Wiggins. Notwithstanding, I held back from humming a few bars because from the little I’d seen I sensed this might not only be the whitest town in America, but also one content with the distinction.

  When we got to the other side of Wiggins, Doreen said: “Listen, Judy, off-the-record? Girl Scout’s honor? With someone clean-cut like Samantha Corby whose bank says okay, the check won’t bounce, we sometimes don’t bother with references—not if we’re under the gun like we are in November when she rented.”

  “Now that you mention it,” I said, “you’re right. I didn’t see any references on the sheet you showed me.”

  “That’s because whoever first showed her the place probably didn’t ask for any. I mean, it’s not like this is New York, nothing personal.” Before we said good-bye, I wrote down my number for Doreen, although we both agreed that if Samantha hadn’t called for her deposit since December, she was unlikely to now.

  The Knob Ridge Villas were a series of flat, off-white two-story buildings with gray roofs, unremarkable in any way except, I supposed, in their ability to disappear against a backdrop of snow. In June, they simply looked wan. I could not picture the Vuitton Queen, the Land Rover Lady, the Armani Madonna living in a Knob Ridge Villa. On the other hand, if months earlier Courtney Logan had wanted to disappear without having to hide out in a trailer park in Rapid City, South Dakota, if she wanted to ski or have a first-rate martini or be just a few miles from al dente pasta and urbane men, well, this could be the place.

  It was getting late in the afternoon, and chilly. Already I was yawning. But since I hadn’t rented a car and wanted to walk back to the Wiggins Inn having made some progress, I started lifting the brass door-knockers on the villas of Knob Ridge. Most of the condos had the comatose air of a resort off-season, after the end of snowtime and just before the summer rush. Only four people answered their doors, although I surmised a few more were at home. Two of the four had only been renting since the end of April, when the ski season ended.

  H. Jurgen opened her door about three inches, keeping her hiking booted foot planted right behind it, in case I tried to smash my way inside. No, she had no idea where Samantha had gone. They’d shared a chairlift a couple of times. She hardly knew the woman. She looked at two of the Courtney photos, then back to me, shook her head, and without another word, closed the door. I heard the fall of a deadbolt.

  H.
’s neighbor, Victor Plummer, was a scrawny man in his seventies with a few tufts of white hair. He lived two condos up from where Courtney had been. While not a gent of the old school, he appeared to be marginally more courteous. He didn’t know where Samantha had gone either, but she’d been a nice girl. He’d heard Vivaldi coming from her place once, and not The Four Seasons. He looked at all my photos. “Could this woman be Samantha Corby?” I asked.

  “Can’t tell,” he said. His gaunt face was shadowed by its old handsomeness, like the photographs of FDR at Yalta, although you’d have to picture FDR with a very deep tan and a Denver Nuggets T-shirt. “Who’s she?” he asked, pointing an arthritic finger at the photographs.

  I was on the verge of finding him endearing, albeit brusque. “She’s a woman named Courtney Logan. She’s been missing since—”

  “What is this?” he demanded angrily. “I don’t have time for this kind of crap.”

  “Look, Mr. Plummer, the family is very concerned about her.” I pulled out my notepad and hurriedly wrote my name and phone number on it. “Please, if you remember anything about Samantha, or if you hear anything, I’d be grateful—and so would the family—if you’d call me collect.” He, too, closed the door in my face, but at least he grabbed the piece of paper first.

  By the time I made it back to the Wiggins Inn, I was shivering. Exhausted, too. A long day and a useless one. The inn didn’t believe in room service, so I had a bowl of pretty good mushroom soup and a roll, and called it a night.

  The mattress in my room had been shaped into a V by previous guests. I know I slept because I opened my eyes and was startled to discover it was morning, but I felt I had witnessed every second of the night. I kept thinking how stupid I’d been to spend my own money coming across country to discover that Courtney Logan was no longer in Wiggins, something I’d known before I left my house for La Guardia. Could she have moved to some other part of the Sun Valley area and was living under another name? If she’d left, where would she go from here? Back to Washington? To some other country? How much money did she have to invest in her own disappearance? And naturally, what if this whole thing came down to nothing and I’d been on Fancy Phil’s wild-goose chase?

  On the first half of the plane trip home, I finished the book on Truman I’d been reading, then slept from someplace above Sioux City, Iowa, back to New York. When I got back to the house, there were three messages. One was from Nancy: “I’m assuming you are either schussing down mountains with a dude named Chet or you are back and holed up getting your brains banged out by that cop who will inevitably break your heart, you besotted, romantic fool. In either case, I would appreciate a call just to know how things went.” That meant she was worried, especially after receiving the fax with Samantha’s name and picture on a driver’s license. I called and told her that while I might be besotted, I was not a fool, romantic or otherwise.

  “Oh please!” She heaved a vast southern sigh. “You might as well walk around in a jester’s costume. In any case, I have had a thought.”

  “‘So rare as a day in June.’ Can you remember what it was?”

  “I was thinking about how Courtney or that little mouse person died. Just because they found her in the pool, you get the image of a watery death.”

  “But in fact it was a gun,” I remarked.

  “Yes, two bullets. The more I thought about it, I remembered an offhand remark either you or I made at the time, that the second shot was for insurance. And I thought—I being a woman of constant cogitation—damn, isn’t that just like everything you’ve told me about Courtney Logan.”

  “Which is?”

  “Thorough. All the lampshade gewgaws, the bric-a-brac, everything just so. One shot in the head would do it. All right, if you were Fancy Phil or one of his associates, you might think something like: Remember in 1977, how Vinnie the Vulture got shot in the head but was still able to identify his assailant by dribbling his name in spittle. But if I were going to kill someone by shooting them in the head ... Judith, once is enough, especially if you’re going to stick them facedown in water and tie back the pool cover nice and tight.”

  “It does go with her personality,” I agreed.

  “So following up on that thought, on Newsday’s time and money, I called Summit High School in Olympia and thoroughly beguiled the assistant principal. He toddled over to the yearbook office for me and found The Apex—isn’t that clever?—for the year Courtney graduated.”

  “And?” I demanded.

  “Many, many, many activities and honors for our girl, as you can well imagine. Including a rating of Distinguished Expert in the NRA—as in National Rifle Association—Marksmanship Qualification Program. Not that it takes a Distinguished Expert to shoot someone in the head point blank.”

  “Not at all.”

  “But it does show a certain degree of comfort when it comes to pulling a trigger.”

  “Wow. Thank you. I’m really grateful that you—”

  “Judith, don’t go effusive on me. There’s more. I could get no satisfaction from the old battle-ax at Emily’s school in Oklahoma. But I called the mother—who was not America’s sweetheart. She did manage to string enough words together to tell me that Emily—and I quote—‘never messed with guns.’”

  I recalled Zee Friedman remarking how she’d overheard a one-sided conversation Courtney had a week before she disappeared, in which she’d said, “You promised.” Zee had thought she sounded desperate. Had the caller been Emily and had Emily pushed Courtney too far?

  Nancy’s message was followed by two from Nelson. “Just calling to say hi. By the way, I found out something interesting about your hometown girl. Call me at work. If I’m not there, leave a message.” In his second call, his voice gave away his concern by trying to come across as cool: “Hey, hope you’re having a good day. I’m working late, so you can beep me whenever you get in.”

  After I beeped him, I took the portable phone, placed it on the edge of the tub, then soaked in a hot bath, usually a fine place for bright ideas to bubble up. But nothing much bubbled. Oh, I’d check the Key Biscayne address to see if it was authentic and if anyone named Samantha R. Corby had lived there and left a forwarding address. And of course I’d give Nelson a copy of the fax so he could, if he wanted to, call or subpoena the Key Biscayne Bank & Trust and see if they had information on Samantha—any other checks she’d written, her balance, and so forth.

  I knew that if Courtney had executed the perfect crime, I would never have thought that the body in the pool was anyone but hers. Still, it was a damned good crime, as crimes go. Good enough, because of her thoroughness, to ensure her freedom. Deciding to delete the possibility of a wild-goose chase from my consciousness, I pumiced my feet and wondered how long she’d been planning her escape from marriage. Why couldn’t she have just said “enough” to Greg? Or simply taken a powder?

  My guess was maybe that was what she was originally planning. Being the quintessential suburban wife, the perfect mother, after all, had not worked out. Maybe after her final throw pillow there was simply nothing left to buy. Perhaps Greg, with his refusal to try to open Soup Salad Sandwiches on the West Coast, had proven unworthy of her awesome efforts. Possibly she found child-rearing not only draining, but incredibly boring—a conclusion that would inevitably be drawn by someone who could not love.

  But Courtney being Courtney, she couldn’t endure failure. Greater New York hadn’t been so great for her. First the knowledge that she’d failed at Patton Giddings, then the realization that being a housewife would bring no applause, no money. The only reward was satisfaction. How could she break free? She could resign from Patton Giddings, or wait to be asked to leave; in either case, she’d be done with them forever.

  But even if you quit as a wife, you’re still stuck with an ex-husband, a nuisance almost by definition. And the children! Be rid of them, give over custody to Greg, and you’d still be obliged to return to the scene of your failure to visit them, or worse, have them int
rude upon your new life. Not only that: You would have a legal obligation to contribute to their support.

  And people would gasp, How could she? If she went to Sun Valley or Milwaukee or Beijing as Courtney Bryce Logan, someone from her old life, hearing about her, spotting her, might say to someone in her new life: Do you know what that woman did? So she had no choice but to disappear, to be missing. Emily Chavarria could have been part of Courtney’s original scheme or an afterthought, but at some time it became clear that Emily, knowing about the insider trading and who knows what else, could not be allowed to live.

  I climbed out of the bath, enveloped in a cloud of freesia, and grabbed a towel. How well could Courtney hide? A magazine article I’d read recently said it was impossible to become a new person through plastic surgery; to some degree you would always be recognizable. Still, I’d passed by several longtime acquaintances around town within the last year or two not recognizing them after what one of them referred to as “a little work.” They’d had to tap me on the shoulder and say, “Judith, it’s me.” Karen or Linda or Jean. So who knew?

  Nelson’s call caught me in my closet as I was making the cataclysmic decision between white or beige underwear. “Where were you, for Christ’s sake?”

  Since I couldn’t come up with a clever response to show him I was very much an independent woman, I told him: “In Sun Valley.”

  I chose beige and held the phone about a foot away from my ear as he yelled “What the hell is wrong with you?” while he banged on something several times, hopefully his desk. While Bob almost never shouted, he could hold a grudge longer than the Hatfields and McCoys. If Nelson still had the temper he had years before, it would soon blow over. “What if Courtney had been there?”