Psychics were all over the city. I didn’t have to go to New Jersey for a reading by Jacinta, but that is exactly what I did. The back of her card listed aura and tarot-card readings, crystal-ball readings, past-life regressions, and dream interpretation. I used to laugh at those who believed in psychic mediums, but what I used to do had nothing to do with what I did now. Nothing.
What no one knows is that I began to visit my mother’s grave in New Jersey. I took flowers and placed them in front of her headstone. I spoke out loud and said, “Give me something to hang on to.” Before Vinni disappeared, I pushed thoughts of my mother out of my mind. Why was it now that I needed her, more than I did when I was a child drowning in macaroni and cheese and television?
JACINTA WORKED OUT of her house on a busy highway headed in the direction of the Delaware Water Gap. She explained that her great-grandfather had built it years earlier, before strip malls sprang up and took out the trees. A FOR SALE sign leaned against a wire fence enclosing a narrow side yard. The house smelled of old wood. The past lurked in every corner and floorboard.
“You were born surrounded by darkness. You’ve been fighting negativity your whole life,” she said. “We have a lot of work to do.”
“All I want to know is where I can find my daughter.” I kept my jacket on but unzipped it. I rolled my fingers around my car keys stowed in my right pocket. Years ago, the room had probably been the front parlor, with at least one velvet couch nestled against a wall, but now there was only a small, circular table with two chairs on either side covered in faded green fabric.
“You should wear a blue scarf around your neck. Blue is the color of the throat chakra. You need to clear out space in your lungs so you can breathe. This is the first thing we must do: create positive space.”
She opened a drawer and took out a silky blue scarf and draped it around my neck.
“Uh, this isn’t why I’m here.”
“You must meditate.”
“I don’t think—”
“You can pay for the scarf in three installments of sixty dollars each.”
Why were we talking about money? Hadn’t she heard me?
Jacinta lit a candle that smelled of hyacinth.
“My name means hyacinth. Did you know that?” She spoke in a thick voice that sounded as if a dollop of mashed potatoes hadn’t yet found its way down her throat. “You need to call me each morning for a week, so we can begin the removal of darkness in your life.”
“By phone?” I asked. Chakras? I’d try anything, and if that meant I had to wear a blue scarf around my throat, I’d do it.
I lasted a week. On the seventh day, Jacinta’s sister answered the phone and said she was at her church at an emergency meeting but that Jacinta wanted me to come to her house, as she had had a dream about me. I had been in a panic earlier that morning when I couldn’t find the blue scarf. I tore into everything in my top dresser drawer, although I knew that I hadn’t put it there. Jacinta had instructed me to keep it in sight at all times and to drape it over the doorknob in whatever room I was in when I wasn’t wearing it. So where was it? I opened the bottom drawer and started throwing things onto my bed. I went from bedroom to bathroom to kitchen and back again. Over and over, I slammed more drawers and flung open the bedroom closet door, until I collapsed in a fit of tears and frustration on the floor. There it was—under the bed. It was a cheap-looking thing made from a synthetic fabric that made my skin hot. I washed my face and left the apartment with the scarf folded end to end and looped once around my neck.
Detective D’Orfini called me as I headed over to Ninth Avenue to the tunnel, to leave the city for my final visit with the psychic.
“Just checking in,” he said.
I touched the blue around my neck and said in a small voice, “Does your police department ever call upon psychics?”
“Why?”
“It’s just a question. Can you give me an answer?”
“The answer is no.” He waited and said, “Are you seeing a psychic medium?”
“Of course not,” I said. I thought about the burgundy-black nail polish that Jacinta wore on her fleshy fingers. I thought about the way her nose widened at the tip and how she swirled her tongue around her top teeth before she asked me for more money.
When she showed me a catalog advertising a $5,900 gold chain and pendant claiming to protect a life from negative energy, I said, “I don’t have that kind of money.”
“Can you borrow it?” she asked coolly.
My heart sank. I’d wear a rat’s claw around my neck or a vial of blood if it meant that I’d wake up and discover that this was all a dream—a very bad dream. But I knew that a piece of jewelry wasn’t the answer.
“Do you like hyacinths?” I asked John D’Orfini.
“The flower?”
“Yes, hyacinths.”
“Uh, I don’t know. Do you?”
“Not anymore. Their smell offends me.”
If John D’Orfini suspected I’d seen a psychic, he never gave it away. The last time I saw the gypsy, I stood up in the middle of a meditation and walked out. Her eyes were closed. Mine were not.
I drove around before I headed back into the city. Somewhere on Route 46 East, I threw the scarf out the window and watched it fly away through my rearview mirror. Within seconds, I couldn’t see a hint of blue anywhere. Like magic, it was gone.
EIGHT
MEMORY DEVOURED THE SUMMER OF THE ONE-YEAR anniversary of Vinni’s disappearance. I thought about renting the house—the perfect punishment—in Spring Haven, but I knew that wasn’t the answer.
John D’Orfini kept his eye on the calendar. In the weeks leading up to the first anniversary, he called and left a voice mail: “Just checking in. D’Orfini.” His voice made me crack a grim smile. I couldn’t deny I liked that he called even when we both conceded the FBI was clearly in charge of the case. A grieving mother was supposed to wait. Hearing from John D’Orfini tided me over during the bleak days when nothing— not one damn thing—happened, unless you counted the rhododendrons blooming on schedule.
Birthdays, graduations, anniversaries, and, yes, even dates of death carry markers or celebrations. But what was I supposed to do with the approaching anniversary date of Vinni’s disappearance? With each passing day, it seemed, the sky dropped a little more and the air around me grew heavier. I walked the streets, but I stopped noticing things. Sounds fell on deaf ears. I could not believe that I had lived one whole year without Vinni. I had been back at work at the magazine full-time since January 2, but I was well aware that my two assistant editors shouldered most of the workload. People covered for me when I found it impossible to focus. Some afternoons, I slipped out of the office, went home, and hid with a bottle of chardonnay and a bag of chips. On the weekends, I hardly moved from my bedroom. I drugged myself to sleep.
Evelyn dropped off soups bought from a local artisan market, along with fresh rolls tucked inside a brown bag, outside my apartment door. She continued to encourage me to paint, inviting me to exhibits in the West Village, where she was a bona fide celebrity among the young artists, who must have wondered why this older woman dressed in reds and purples brought a drab woman dressed in browns and grays.
When she gave a demonstration on light and shadow, she insisted she needed me to help her carry a tote bag of materials that I knew she could manage herself. All the way home, she tried to engage me in conversation. “What did you think of the middle-aged man who asked me, ‘Where do your ideas come from?’”
I laughed. Finally. I laughed out loud. “And you said, ‘From outside my window’! How could you?”
“I couldn’t resist, darling.” With a dramatic swoop, she flung her sea-green shawl over her shoulder.
For a moment, I had a glimpse into what I couldn’t name, but I knew I had broken through to something only Evelyn could give me.
WHEN JOHN D’ORFINI suggested I come to his office on an afternoon in the beginning of August, I believed it would be
another routine conversation.
“I know this month is going to be a hard one for you. I thought if we reviewed a few things . . .”
“Is there something new?”
“No. Well, I don’t think so, but I like to keep in contact with those hurt on my watch.”
“So it’s a territorial thing, Detective? Have those guys in suits finally given you back your office?” I knew that the FBI had closed shop in Spring Haven after three months of checking out hundreds of leads to nowhere. What I continued to learn was how seriously John D’Orfini took any crime committed on his “watch.” Vinni’s disappearance was by far the most heinous crime he had seen in the eight years since he’d been assigned to Spring Haven. Meeting him at his office confirmed my suspicion that his interest bordered on a carefully hidden obsession.
I had no objections, but first I had a stop to make.
WHEN I PULLED up to the house where Rudy and Hilda had lived, I remained behind the wheel, feeling almost calm. Real estate prices in Spring Haven had always been high, but a three-bedroom Cape Cod with a screened-in porch facing east for the morning sun fell into the category of not being fancy enough for the rich but priced too high for the almost-rich. It was a longstanding joke that Spring Haven was called the land of the Irish Mafia. Maybe that was why this German-speaking couple kept quiet, although their neighbors referred to them as “polite” and “sweet.” Was Spring Haven the perfect place to look for a child? Or had the idea surfaced when they’d laid eyes on Vinni digging in the sand, running back and forth to the ocean with a bottle to fill with water and pour into the large holes? One comment that popped up over and over during interviews with anyone who had contact with Rudy and Hilda was that they were “intelligent.”
Oh, yes, something else stayed with me—something that John D’Orfini said was repeated in several FBI reports.
“The couple was often seen holding hands on the beach as they walked in the early morning.”
To leave Rudy’s body unclaimed. How did this make sense? I identified the body, but I did not bury him or take responsibility. I had no space to grieve for Rudy until years later, and even then it was small.
I got out of the car near noon, when the sun was at its strongest. I walked around to the back door. I tried the handle, never expecting it to turn with a smooth click. I stepped into the kitchen and stopped. Five steps to my right was a small alcove for the washer and dryer. Beyond this, a bathroom papered in a design of green ferns, whose only source of natural light was a small, hard-to-reach window, smelled stale, like mold. They were close to the beach, and the lack of air meant the smell from the ocean turned the house into an unpleasant walk-through for a prospective buyer. A dining table placed at the window faced the front of the house. I stood to the side so I wouldn’t be seen from the street and continued into the living room, decorated with two fat, gray floral love seats. I sat down and looked around at the emptiness.
The house had been “sanitized.” That’s what the FBI told me: “We’ve sanitized the house.” I took it to mean that anything personal had been bagged and brought to the station for prints. No grocery lists. No photos. No clothes in the closets. No shoes at the door. No remembrances of any life lived in the house. Everything had been swept away, except rows and rows of books shelved along one wall of the bedroom. Books on philosophy by the German philosophers Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Nietzsche. Titles like Beyond Good and Evil and Human, All Too Human jumped out, but all I allowed myself was a slight touch of their spines. There were books by Ayn Rand—someone I had read in college—and Ralph Waldo Emerson, remembrances from high school. Art books with glossy pages of prints by Max Ernst and Hermann Hesse stood straight and neat on shelves filled with philosophy and art. Other shelves held a large collection of small and large books on seeds and floral creations by designers from Kiev to New York.
Hilda deferred to Rudy in the few conversations we shared, but I do remember how once we spoke about the life expectancy of an orchid.
“With the proper care, an orchid can live longer than I expect to myself.”
Vinni and I both spoke about it later. The next day, I surprised her with a white orchid centered with purple.
“I love it! I love it! I love it!” she squealed. Then she threw her arms around me.
I KNEW LITTLE more than what I knew one year ago, when I had a daughter who sang with me to “Dancing in the Streets,” by Martha and the Vandellas, as we grooved up the Garden State Parkway.
Vinni liked the music I liked. She made no fuss that the music was old. She wasn’t that kind of girl. She was special.
This is what I want you to know.
John D’Orfini glanced at the clock on the wall as I walked into the police station on Third Avenue. “Traffic?” he said.
I skirted the lie. “Sorry I’m late.”
“Can I get you a coffee?”
“No. Thanks. Why did you want to see me?”
“I want to make sure you know where things stand now that a year has gone by and . . .” He nodded his head as if he wanted me to help him out with the rest of the line.
It wasn’t going to happen. Instead, I leaned back into my chair. My shoulders fell to protect my chest, creating a hard shell around my heart from the middle of my back.
“The case stays open, of course, but after a year, the leads get fewer. Right now, there’s very little. The FBI has a long list of missing children. This is where Spring Haven is different, because your daughter is the only missing child on my list. Do you know what I’m saying?”
John D’Orfini walked around and sat on the edge of his desk. He crossed his arms, but they looked awkward, like they didn’t belong there. He held his elbows too far away from his chest, suspended, so they made his shoulders inch toward his ears.
“I’m seeing this case through. I owe it to you and to Spring Haven.”
I don’t care about your little town, I thought.
YEAR TWO
NINE
ON THE WAY TO ST. PATRICK’S CATHEDRAL, I PASSED children dressed as bumblebees, dinosaurs, and princesses in tutus, stopping in at neighborhood bodegas for Halloween candy. I tried my hardest to ignore them as I slipped down side streets and walked north on Fifth Avenue. My idea was to drop in and light a candle. I had been doing this a lot lately. The flickering of the dozens of votive messages returned me to the image of the sun glistening on the water at the beach. I knelt down and smelled my girl, imagining the salt water was the closest I could come to inhaling her. I closed my eyes and pretended.
I was back on the street an hour later. I walked uptown without having any idea of where I was going. All I knew was that the sun—unusually warm for an afternoon on Halloween—felt good. I walked with my jacket tied around my waist. I kept going until I realized I was close to where Rudy and Hilda used to live on Riverside Drive. I headed left in the direction of the river. Apartments with high price tags in buildings maintained for the rich enjoyed breathtaking views of the George Washington Bridge and the Hudson River. Although John D’Orfini had told me that the FBI had spoken with all the residents of the building, they had come up with nothing useful for the investigation, other than learning Rudy and Hilda were participants in a longstanding monthly book club with two other couples in the building.
I walked up to the doorman and lied. As a magazine editor, I knew how to approach people to get them to talk, so I said I was working on a story about the book club that had been going on in the building for several years. “Could you see if the participants are in?” I asked. I had no names. I carried a mediumsize tote. I wore a pair of dark sunglasses. I used the professional tone of voice that had always been so reliable in the past. I smiled. I walked through the door and waited in the lobby. Within minutes, a white-haired woman wearing large, black-rimmed eyeglasses got off the elevator.
“Ms. Stewart?”
“Yes. I’m, uh, doing a story—”
It was she who interrupted before I went further.
&n
bsp; “Let’s talk upstairs. My husband is home. He began the book club over twenty years ago.”
Once inside the apartment, I dropped the charade. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know how else to . . . I was afraid . . . I’m hoping you’ll talk to me about Rudy and Hilda Haydn.”
The man stood. “Who are you?”
“I’m Maddy Stewart. The police believe Hilda kidnapped my daughter.”
He sat down next to his wife on the small brocade couch.
“Rudy died a year ago, and Hilda . . . well, she was always the more quiet of the two,” he said. “We—my wife and I—are very sorry about what’s happened.”
The woman removed her glasses. “We’ve already spoken to the FBI.” She touched the top of her husband’s hand and let her hand rest there.
My questions didn’t seem right. Even as I asked them, I sensed their awkwardness. The other couple in the book club was vacationing on one of those luxury residencies at sea for eight months. The man ended by saying, “What can we tell you other than that Rudy and Hilda were intelligent—highly intelligent—people who were loving toward one another?”
The woman continued with a hint of sadness. “I suspected they missed home. Somehow, going back there didn’t seem to be an option. I don’t know why.”
They offered me a cup of tea, but that wasn’t why I had come. When I left, I had more unanswered questions. I walked to the nearest subway stop and rode home. I knew I’d walk more the next day.
JOHN D’ORFINI HELD a ballpoint pen in a ready-to-write position. Whenever we spoke, I had the feeling he was waiting for a revelation. This time, I had something to tell.
“I walked out on my job last Wednesday,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“I was walking in the rain around lunchtime, and I just kept on walking. I didn’t go back to the office. I couldn’t. I’m tired of the pity.”
A Matter of Chance Page 5