Nowhere Girl

by Susan Strecker

  “I’m Cady Martino. Well, Cady Bernard now.”

  He shifted his keys from hand to hand. I couldn’t tell if he was nervous, late, or had no idea who I was.

  “David Martino’s sister. From Kingswood?” I knew if I’d said something about Savannah, he’d recognize me right away, but I didn’t want to talk about her. It had been 5,914 days since she’d been gone, and it was still hard to speak her name.

  “That’s right.” He looked profoundly uncomfortable. “How’re you doing?” He was holding the door handle of a baby-blue antique Ford pickup. “I was just leaving.” The prison took up the landscape behind him.

  “Yeah,” I said, checking the time on my phone. I had forty minutes to get to David’s house. “Me too. I don’t mean to hold you up, but do you work here?” It was a ridiculous question given his attire, but I was a little desperate to keep the conversation going.

  “Sure do.” He jiggled his keys. “Everything good?”

  How was I supposed to answer that? “Um, sure.” And then I got it. What he really wanted to know was who I was visiting in prison. “Oh, I’m here on business.”

  He let his eyes travel up and down my body, maybe trying to figure out what I might be pedaling.

  “I’m a writer, doing research for my next book.” I’d forgotten how startlingly blue his eyes were.

  He cracked a beautiful white-toothed smile. “I thought you called yourself a novelist.” That Brady Irons would know this shocked the hell out of me. The word writer made me think of a red-faced, sweaty reporter with a cigar hanging out of his mouth, pounding out stories for The Post about why the Jets hadn’t had a winning season in forever. But for some reason, I couldn’t say novelist to him.

  “You’re on Facebook?” I asked, thinking of the About section of my page.

  “Nope. I don’t need to know when the guy next door buys new underwear. But I’ve been following your career.” He said this shyly, ducking his head as if unsure of himself. “It’s not every day a friend from high school becomes famous.”

  Friend. If only he knew that I’d spent more than a year signing my name in cursive as Cady Irons.

  “Is your new book set in a prison?”

  “It was going to be, which is why I’m here, but I need interviews with guards and inmates. There’s only so much information the front desk clerk or the guy who runs the metal detector can give me.” I was rambling, but I couldn’t stop. Seeing Brady Irons again after all these years made me nervous. It was like the crush had come rushing back in, or the feeling had never gone away. “Are you a guard?” Please, please, please be a guard.

  “Corrections officer.” He said it with the same disdain I did when I corrected people on my job title. Right, you didn’t call them guards. But at least he wasn’t a lunch lady.

  “I really need some help.” I felt myself stepping toward him. “Can I pick your brain sometime? My agent is going to kill me if I don’t get a move on.” I was doing it again. Babbling.

  He spun his watch around on his wrist but didn’t answer.

  “Might you have time tonight? I’m going to David’s house for dinner. He’d love to see you.”

  I thought of my brother cooking Indian in the new fat clothes I’d bought him. He’d eaten his way out of his monogrammed oxfords and pleated pants since Emma had left him.

  “That sounds great, but I volunteer at Hope’s Place on Tuesday nights and sometimes Thursday, too.”

  “The women’s shelter?”

  “They have kids there too. But yes.”

  “Wow. That’s so nice of you.” Every year in December, I’d donate a couple of thousand dollars to the ASPCA when my accountants told me I needed to make some charitable contributions. I thought of how good that made me feel and imagined it was nothing compared to what Brady Irons did.

  He shrugged off the compliment. “They feel safer with me there. I teach them self-defense and give them all my cell number in case their boyfriends and husbands find them.”

  “Wow,” I said again, feeling shallow and stupid. “Can I give you my number?” As if Brady Irons, the do-gooder, were really going to call the chubby novelist from Kingswood, but I told it to him, anyway.

  He winked at me. “Okay,” he said. “How about next Tuesday? I’m off on Tuesdays.”

  * * *

  Twenty minutes later, I parked behind David’s side of the garage. Now that Emma had left him, I guessed both sides were his.

  “The cake’s here.” I stepped into the kitchen, and there were the people I loved most in the world: Gabby; David; David’s best friend, Chandler; and Chandler’s boyfriend, Odion. Chandler was standing at the stove, stirring a pot. Odion was at the sink washing what must have been a month’s worth of dishes. It smelled like curry and dirty laundry. Gabby was sitting amid piles of socks and undershirts on David’s kitchen table, pouring a thick, orangish drink into five glasses. Emma was a bitch, and I was glad she’d run home to her police chief father and overprotective mother, but she’d kept a clean house. Through the doorway, I could see my brother building one of his model cars.

  I set the cake on the counter. “Smells good,” I said.

  “Hope you like it spicy.” Chandler was wearing a half dozen rings and a chunky bracelet Odion had brought back for him from his last import trip to Cameroon.

  I picked a piece of chicken out of the hot skillet and popped it in my mouth.

  “What’s with the stupid grin?” Gabby asked, putting Chandler’s glass on the counter. She was wearing a heavy leather jacket with a fur collar, which explained the Harley sitting outside, even though it hadn’t been above freezing for weeks. She’d changed her nose ring to a silver star, and it twinkled as she brought me a drink.

  “You will never guess who I ran into at the prison.” I peeked in the living room, where David’s head was bobbing to music on his iPod, all those little Mustang parts spread out in front of him. “Is he still at it?” I asked.

  “He’s moping,” Chandler said, turning off the stove.

  “He’s heartbroken,” Odion told Chandler. “Give the poor boy a break. It was Saint Valentine’s Day yesterday, and he was alone.”

  “Did you see Emma?” Gabby guessed. “Is she an inmate?” She gave Odion his drink, and he sniffed it before taking a sip. “Chief Fisher would have a hell of a time explaining that his perfect daughter got arrested for being a cow.”

  I laughed. “No, I did not see Emma, and let me get David. He needs to hear this.”

  We walked into the dining room with our drinks. David had on dorky magnifying glasses, because everything in a model car kit was about an eighth of an inch long. I handed him his drink.

  He pulled out an earbud. “Is dinner done already?”

  “Guess who I saw at the South Jersey Pen today?”

  Even though his eyes were gigantic behind the magnifying lenses, David was handsome in that messy, absentminded professor way that sometimes made me wonder if he knew how to shower. “What the hell were you doing there?”

  I waved my hand at him. “Research for the new book, but that’s not important now.” I couldn’t wait to tell them. “Brady Irons.” I took a sip of my cocktail—which, from the taste of it, was mostly rum.

  David raised his eyebrows. “Brady Irons is in jail?”

  I balled up my napkin and threw it at him. “Of course not. He works there. Isn’t it amazing that after all these years I found him?”

  Odion disappeared into the kitchen and came back with five plates. “Who is this Brady Irons? I missed so much not going to high school with all of you.”

  Gabby took them from him and set the table as she talked. “Cady loved him in high school.”

  “You did?” Chandler and David asked at the same time. Jesus, boys were so dense.

  Gabby peered up and saw my flushed cheeks. “And apparently she still does.”

  I picked up the napkins and silver I’d brought in and followed her around the table, setting each place. “I do not.” I
could feel my face getting even hotter. “It was just really nice to see him again.”

  David finished his drink in one long gulp and then let out a loud burp. “I don’t think a married woman should be this excited about seeing an ex-boyfriend.”

  “Hardly,” I said. “I don’t think I ever spoke a word to him in high school.”

  “Just because you were too shy back then doesn’t mean you’re too shy now,” Gabby said, puckering her lips.

  David reached in his pocket and handed me his cell phone. “Call Lover Boy up,” he said. “Invite him for dinner next week. We won’t tell Greg.”

  “I’m not inviting him anywhere near here until it gets a little less sty-like.” I swept a pile of crumbs off the dining room table into my hand. “You know, sometimes I miss Emma.”

  “Fuck you,” David said pleasantly. “I’ll clean … eventually.”

  “We can argue about Cady’s crappy marriage later,” Chandler told us, bringing the chicken vindaloo in on a platter. “It’s time to eat.”

  “My marriage isn’t that crappy,” I told them. But the whole way through dinner, I couldn’t get Brady Irons out of my mind.

  CHAPTER

  3

  Tucked in a corner booth at the Westin on Village in Princeton, Deanna was sifting through my unnamed fifth book, and she still hadn’t replaced her coffee with Grey Goose. That was a good sign. Hell, it was a great one.

  Deanna liked nice hotels because she liked money. I liked them because they were potential material. All bars, especially swanky ones, were a breeding ground for fights between lovers, undercover cops pretending to be high-dollar call girls, and drunken fraternity boys acting out their Mrs. Robinson fantasies. But today, the bar was relatively empty since it was before noon on a weekday.

  Deanna held her Sharpie aloft while she read. Ten years earlier, she’d called me after reading one of my articles in Harper’s Bazaar and asked if I had an agent. When I told her I didn’t even have a book, she’d sighed into the phone as if she were already exasperated with me, even though we’d never met. “Of course you do,” she’d said impatiently. Greg and I had recently moved into a great little cape that belonged in a children’s story. It was brown with red scalloped trim and had tall, willowy flowers in the front yard. He was working sixteen-hour days as a psychiatric intern, and I was freelancing for all the Condé Nast and Meredith publications, ignoring what I knew I would someday have to write about: my sister. “If you can handle a five-thousand-word piece like this one about Mr. Right being a serial rapist, there’s a bestseller in your future.”

  And then Deanna had met me in a frantic sushi restaurant in SoHo and on the back of drink napkins showed me the architecture and scaffolding of a novel. She’d ordered sake for the table and then drank it all. And though I’d known then she was a mean drunk, I also knew she was smart, and she’d figure out how to sell my books. Still, I hated her for feeling like she was whoring out my pain to make a buck. And she hated me for not being tougher.

  Writing in small chunks, in scenes, made it manageable for me, orderly. And I liked order, but I wondered what she’d think of this book. It was all over the place, which is why I needed Brady Irons and why I kept checking my phone, hoping he was still planning to come over.

  “This is good stuff,” she finally said, flipping quickly through the pages like she always did when she was done reading.

  “I know I need to develop Susannah more,” I said, beating her to the punch. “This is only the first draft.”

  “Slow down, Zippy.” She laughed nasally. “I was going to say it could be your best work yet.”

  She poured seven sugar packets into her third refill of coffee. “So far, the writing is excellent, the voice compelling. But,” she continued, “I’m not sure where the story is going.” She put her pen down and reached for her drink. She had long nails, painted an ugly sage green. “Have you even named it yet?”

  “Not really.”

  She glanced at the manuscript, and I saw her mascara was clumpy. It made her tiny eyes appear even smaller, lost somehow in the lashes. “Hell House wants a title, Zippy.”

  Hollerly House was my publisher. Deanna had a derogatory name for everyone.

  She rose from the table and picked up her purse. “I’ll be right back.”

  I watched her teeter on ridiculously high heels to the corner restroom and disappear. In a way, music had saved my life, so I’d told Deanna when we first met that all my books would be named after songs. Alibi, my first, was a David Gray song. The main character accidentally killed her brother and spent the rest of the book trying to cover her crime. The Rising, by Bruce Springsteen, came to me after finishing Alibi. Being free of the beautiful burden of writing my first novel, I’d felt open and inspired, as if something were rising up in me. I liked the name so much I created an entire story around a cult that had named itself the Rising. Empty Corridors, about a teacher who’d had an affair with a student and then killed her, was named after a Ben Howard song. He’d contacted me after it debuted on The Times bestseller list. Since then, we’d stayed in touch, having dinner whenever we were touring near each other. I came up with Dark Roads while on tour for Empty Corridors, when I’d gotten lost taking a shortcut from Bank Square Books to my hotel in Mystic. As I drove, the streetlights went out one by one, as though a phantom killer were flipping a switch. What a perfect place to murder someone, I’d thought. “Dark Road” was an Annie Lennox song, and I figured that was close enough. But I hadn’t been able to think of even a working title for this book. I’d scrolled through all fourteen hundred songs on my iPod, flipped through atlases, and spent hours wandering the stacks at Sarandius Library, where Gabby worked, hoping for inspiration.

  When Deanna came out of the restroom, her lips were alarmingly red.

  “I thought I’d take a new route this time,” I told her when she sat down. “Maybe I’ll put a summary of the manuscript on my website and let my readers name it. You know, as long as it’s a song.”

  She set her purse firmly next to her. “Oh, Zippy.”

  She’d started calling me that after I’d written three bestselling novels in five years. I hated it.

  “Sweet Jesus.” She reached for her drink, and when she saw it was almost empty, she waved to Sunshine, the waitress, who was standing at the bar, watching us. “You have to have a plot to have a summary.”

  Sunshine arrived with a new cup of coffee for her. I wondered if there was vodka in it.

  “You know the plot,” I told Deanna. “It’s in the outline. Hopper’s kid sister drowns in the skating pond, and he’s positive she was murdered.”

  “Murdered?” she interrupted. “I thought she went skating on a warm day and fell through the ice.”

  “Yes, that’s how it started.” I was getting more excited about this book as I was talking. “But it doesn’t make sense. Susannah hated skating. She never would have gone out there alone.” I had a flash of a red scarf on the ice and Susannah’s lifeless body floating under the surface, eyes wide, mouth open as if maybe she’d been screaming. “And Hopper knows that. He’s sure something bad happened to his sister—that someone pushed her or lured her out there. So he gives up everything to find the killer and even becomes a prison guard because he thinks the murderer is a serial killer who’s already doing time. Then he plans how he’s going to kill him.”

  “Yes, darling, but you need a twist.”

  “How about he’s in love with the person who really killed her?”

  “He’s gay?”

  “No, a girl killed her.” I touched the thirty or so pages I’d written. “Isabelle, the best friend.”

  Deanna set her cup down and peered at me with those dull brown eyes. I waited for a sarcastic remark, but there was none.

  “I love it. I goddamn love it. He’s planning to kill the wrong person, and he’s in love with the murderer.”

  “Right.” I wondered if I could bend the story line to have Isabelle be the one who whacke
d Susannah. Isabelle was a little odd, with her raven hair and nails, her obsession with wild animals, and her unnatural preoccupation with bizarre ways people died.

  “When the dust settles, Chopper will realize his princess is the devil,” Deanna said.

  Hopper. I didn’t bother to correct her. “That’s it,” I said excitedly. “Devils and Dust. That’s the name of this book.”

  “Is that even a song?”

  “It’s off one of Springsteen’s solo albums.” Outside, a fountain was streaming over big stones, and now I wanted to leave. I wanted to go home and write.

  “Good work, Zippy.” She clinked her coffee mug against mine. “I talked to Roger at Hell House. He wants book five when Dark Roads is out of production and before you go on tour for it.”

  “But I’m only thirty-three pages into it.” Deanna’s news about the deadline startled me, and I fought the urge to ask Sunshine for an entire bottle of Stoli.

  Deanna reached across and patted my hand, her ultimate and only act of kindness. “I don’t call you Zippy for nothing.” She made eye contact with Sunshine. “And, yes, I know you want it to be 333 pages. You only have three hundred to go.”

  Sunshine arrived and set down a long leather billfold with the tab in it.

  Deanna licked her thin lips. “You’d better get cracking.” She reached in her purse for her wallet. “You know, word on the literary street is your attachment to the number three is some cult knockoff.” She set her credit card on the table. “Three three three, you know, is half of six six six.”

  Sunshine picked the card up, and I said, “I’ve heard the jokes. I’m a lightweight and can only handle half the Satanism.” I knocked back the rest of my coffee. “You know why I do it. I want to be different. Like that author from Roanoke who publishes one copy of each of his novels longhand.”

  “If I were you, I’d be careful.”

  “Careful?” I wanted to be in my car, heading out of Princeton.

  “Your readers might start thinking you’re the murderer if you keep up with these strange habits.”