Missing Mark

by Julie Kramer

  “Just leave it,” she said.

  “Maybe I should go.” Agent Jax stood up.

  But just then Miles arrived and Noreen brought him up to speed on the situation. Now there were three of us glaring at the FBI guy. It felt good to have him so clearly outnumbered even though he was armed with a gun and all we had were our wits. That elation died when Miles told us that Agent Jax actually had the law on his side when it came to swiping my prints.

  “Unless, of course, you think the restaurant wants to make a claim concerning the missing glass.”

  Noreen reminded Agent Jax that she still expected to hear from him when they made an arrest.

  “They already have,” I said. “That’s what I was coming back to tell you. He broke that end of the deal, too.”

  More glaring at that now tight-lipped FBI guy.

  “Toby Elness just called me from jail. He said they’re holding him as a suspect.”

  “Isn’t he that animal guy who used to own Shep? The one in last fall’s pet-cremation story?” Noreen asked. “He always seemed so gentle.”

  “Bingo. He says their group wouldn’t risk harming the other fish just to free Billy.”

  “Actually, economic sabotage is a trademark of the Animal Liberation Front,” Agent Jax said. “What’s a few busted aquariums when they’ve already destroyed lab equipment and bombed buildings?”

  “Want to say that on camera?” I asked.

  That threat settled him down some. Feds hate going on camera. He explained that it was not unusual for some of the Animal Liberation Front’s rescuees to actually perish in the rescues. Apparently a bunch of minks recently suffered that fate after being freed from a southern Minnesota fur farm.

  “And what do you think the group’s response was?” the FBI guy asked. “Better they die free than die skinned.”

  That actually sounded like something Toby might say.

  “I’d be surprised if you have a strong enough case against Mr. Elness to charge him before you have to kick him,” I said. Prosecutors must charge a suspect within thirty-six hours or release him from custody unless a judge approves an extension.

  “Maybe we have more than you know,” he said.

  “What about Toby, Noreen?” I asked. “Do we name him on air now or wait and see if charges come down?”

  This was a hard one for Noreen. Show mercy or get the scoop? “If we report there’s been an arrest but don’t name him,” she said, “one, maybe all, of our competitors will.”

  “And we’ll look stupid,” I conceded. As fond as I was of Toby, I got the feeling this could be one of those times when mercy might not be practical.

  “If we don’t report there’s been an arrest, it’ll leak out anyway.” She threw a pointed glance in the direction of Agent Jax, who once again denied being the newspaper’s anonymous source.

  “And we’ll look stupid.” I could see where this decision was headed. After all, I wasn’t stupid.

  “Try smoothing things over with Toby if you can,” Noreen said. “But we have to run his name.”

  I directed my next question to Agent Jax, making a point of remembering his name since he seemed like he was going to be a pain in my life for some time. “So what do you actually have on Toby Elness?”

  “Actually our best evidence against him is you.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “They chose you to receive the letter. So we went looking for ALF members with connections to you. And we found one.”

  “I think the animal rights group picked me just because I broke the story that Big Mouth Billy was missing.”

  One scoop often leads to another as interested parties perceive which journalist owns a particular story. Everyone likes to back a winner.

  “And who did provide you with that juicy nugget?” Agent Jax asked.

  That was Miles’s cue to act all lawyerly again. “I think we’re through here. We’re not going to be discussing news sources with the FBI.”

  Miles was right. Minnesota has perhaps the top reporter-shield law in the country, though I wasn’t sure how much protection it offered in a federal investigation. Typically the way it works is that for journalists to be compelled to name sources, the government has to prove the information is vital and cannot be obtained by any other means.

  In other words, they can’t simply go on a fishing expedition.

  hile searching through the back of a closet for a Frisbee for Shep, I found my own wedding gown. The dress was crammed against the wall in a cheap plastic garment bag. Calling it a gown was probably an exaggeration. It was bought off-the-rack, on the fly, at an open-all-night store in Vegas. My choices were that, rent a dress, or get married in my street clothes.

  But there’s something tactile and sensuous about wanting to have and to hold your own wedding gown. And there’s something about the pageantry of wearing white that I didn’t want to compromise—even if I was eloping.

  Wedding gowns were not always white. Queen Victoria started the trend in 1840. White also had nothing to do with virtue—it was all about wealth. Back then, being married in white signified that a woman could afford to buy a dress that she would never be able to wear again because white was so very difficult to clean. In fact, many brides dyed their white dresses navy after the ceremony for everyday use.

  Then, in the 1920s, Coco Chanel unveiled the first short wedding dress and that runway moment cemented white as the preferred bridal color.

  My dress was also short and white, but not high fashion. What I spent to play virgin was nothing close to what Madeline Post’s gown cost. That got me thinking about the emotional sway of her wedding dress as a prop. News directors love props, especially on the set. I’d never describe Noreen as a romantic, but even she might not be able to resist the NEVER WORN story if she saw Madeline’s wedding gown up close and personal and felt its silky magic.

  I held my own wedding dress, labeled polyester, tight against my body. Then moved over to the mirror and closed my eyes.

  MADELINE SAT AT a small corner table when I walked into Ursula’s Wine Bar, owned by a guy named Kurt who must have figured he couldn’t create an exotic atmosphere if he called it Kurt’s Wine Bar.

  I pulled out the chair across from Madeline and settled in. She handed me a wine list and made a recommendation that I couldn’t pronounce. Fine with me.

  “You’re early,” I remarked. I tried not to sound disapproving, but I like being the early one for off-site meetings. I feel like it gives me an edge.

  “I wanted to make sure we got a table,” Madeline said.

  Probably a good idea, I conceded. The place looked exclusive, yet cozy, with room to seat at most a couple of dozen people. A diner at another table apparently recognized me from the news. She casually pointed me out to her companion, but was too polite to interrupt my meal.

  Madeline was meeting me because I had told her I had some new information regarding Mark’s disappearance. And that meant I needed to come up with some new information regarding Mark’s disappearance. Because I could hardly say let’s get together so I can grill you about the night you and your fiancé got engaged. Or how about I swing by and borrow your wedding dress because my boss is unenthusiastic about your misfortune? Those are the kind of topics best broached after developing a trust relationship over alcohol. So we were off to a promising start.

  In our case we also shared an interesting cheese-and-fruit plate with crunchy bread while I shared the new information I had acquired. And yes, I actually did have new information.

  After an evening of playing cyber detective, Xiong had retrieved three interesting items from Mark’s laptop.

  The first was a nude photo that his ex-girlfriend, Sigourney Nelson, had sent to him a few days before the wedding. She thrust her breasts toward the camera, perky nipples up close. Her hands were clasped against her stomach in an understandable attempt to hide an extra ten pounds. Her pose wasn’t obscene, but it wasn’t FCC-approved material either. We could air it, as
long as we put black bars in strategic places.

  Mark hadn’t replied to her and had even tried deleting the photo, but Xiong found it anyway. I wasn’t going to share that picture with Madeline. Not yet, at least. I’d tried contacting Sigourney at her e-mail address but had heard nothing back. Either she was ignoring me, or it was a dead address.

  Xiong also discovered an e-mail from the best man, Gabe Murray, sounding a little more anxious about the two grand he loaned Mark than he admitted to me. Mark responded with a relax-I’ll-have-the-money-soon e-mail. Gabe sent a few more, asking his buddy where he went and when he was returning. The notes started out curious and grew increasingly panicky.

  Mark never replied.

  “Was Mark in any trouble financially?” I asked Madeline, trying to appear casual.

  She shook her head. “Mark didn’t have the same means I did, but he also didn’t have the same wants. So money wasn’t an issue between us.”

  I was trying to decide whether to tell her she’d been courted on borrowed money when our entrées arrived, mine a sautéed chicken breast with lime sauce, roasted Roma tomatoes and grilled asparagus, Madeline’s a penne pasta with shrimp, goat cheese, pine nuts, and red and yellow peppers.

  While we picked at our plates, I also weighed the best approach to bring up the most intriguing thing Xiong pulled from Mark’s computer. That was the real reason I’d invited Madeline to dinner, specifically so I could press her about a Web site her groom had accessed the week before he disappeared.

  Escapeartist.com—a how-to guide on restarting your life abroad.

  “Was this anything you ever discussed?” I asked Madeline.

  She shook her head. But my reporter’s gut told me she didn’t seem as surprised as she should have been under the circumstances. I expected an outcry of “What?” or a denial of “Not my fiancé!” Instead she mumbled something about how everyone fantasizes about getting away from it all.

  That’s when I explained why it’s important that journalists have the full picture during an investigation.

  “You’re not keeping anything back, are you, Madeline?” I asked.

  “What do you mean?” she replied.

  “Like who asked who to marry them?”

  “Oh that.” She apologized for her “little white lie,” explaining she hadn’t known me very well then and felt embarrassed talking about her engagement.

  I explained why journalists talk to multiple sources for a story, especially one this complicated. And when we get conflicting versions we start asking ourselves whether our source is on the level. Or whether they have hidden motives.

  “No more secrets?” I asked.

  “None,” she assured me.

  Over the next few minutes, the two of us started acting like gal pals. Because my work hours are so crazy, I don’t have a whole lot of girlfriends. So dinner with Madeline was a fun, airy kind of evening. And I think she felt the same way, even joking that if she ever got engaged again, she wanted me to be her maid of honor.

  And she’d make me wear peach.

  “Listen,” I told her, “if you’re fishing to be my maid of honor—it ain’t going to happen.”

  She misunderstood me, and offered reassurances that someday I’d meet Mr. Right, and would feel about him the same way she felt about Mark.

  So I told her how I was married once and couldn’t ever risk that pain again. She touched her fingers to her lips and gasped at the potency of my misfortune. She’d heard about my husband’s death. Most folks had. It had made the front pages coast-to-coast and had run continuously on cable news channels. After all, Hugh Boyer died a hero. Saving a politician who didn’t deserve it, and schoolchildren who did. But Madeline hadn’t realized that he had been my husband.

  Then we laughed in a very subdued way about our personal losses and parallel pain.

  And she asked me what it was like being married.

  I could tell she wanted a straight answer and wasn’t just seeking mealtime chatter.

  So I told her it had been the best two years of my life. And I had never felt anything that intense before or since.

  “Hugh was my soul mate,” I said. “When I lost him, I lost my way.” Saying it aloud sounded uncharacteristically sappy, but it was the truth. I didn’t get into my struggle with survivor’s guilt.

  “Oh, Riley, that’s how I feel about Mark. Lost without him.”

  So that’s when I pushed the girlfriend button and asked her the question that had been on my mind from the start.

  “So, Madeline, why weren’t you more freaked out when he vanished? Why weren’t you dialing 911 till your fingers bled? Or at least clutching your cell phone till the battery died?”

  That’s what the wife of Tom Burnett, a Minnesota native and hero of Flight 93 did when she could no longer reach her man on September 11. Her phone was dead, her fingers numb, before she accepted he wasn’t calling home.

  Madeline didn’t answer. She looked away, at the contemporary paintings of wine casks on the wall; I could tell she was close to tears. But if Madeline Post was too tough to cry on camera, she was certainly too tough to cry in public, in an intimate, upscale restaurant, where word might get back to her society friends.

  I signaled for the check, complimented the owner on the excellent meal, and when we got outside Ursula’s, Madeline revealed that she still had one more secret. And it was a doozy.

  “After the rehearsal dinner,” she whispered, “I saw a woman kissing Mark out in the parking lot.”

  Her observation either raised a lot of questions or answered a lot of them. “Was he kissing her back?” That seemed an important distinction.

  “I’m not sure. He said he wasn’t.”

  “So you asked him about it?”

  “I made some kind of choking sound and ran inside and he followed me and I said, ‘Who was that woman?’ And he told me she was a comedy club fan who’d been stalking him.”

  I thought of the hot chicks surrounding Chad, but Chad had looks and Mark did not. “Did you believe him?”

  “I believed him then. He told me it was an occupational hazard for entertainers, but once he was wearing a ring, they’d know he was off-limits.”

  “And you believed him?” Sometimes journalists ask the same question twice, just to see if we get the same answer.

  “Yes, I believed him.” She buried her hands in her face. “I believed him because I had sort of stalked him, too.” Subtle tears streaked her face. “But the next day when he didn’t show up for our wedding I didn’t know what to believe anymore. I thought maybe he ran off with her.”

  “What did the woman look like?”

  “I don’t know. It happened so fast.”

  “Did anyone else see her?”

  “No, most of the wedding party was gone. My family was still there, but they must have been inside.”

  “Did you tell anyone about this kiss?”

  “Not until now.”

  I motioned Madeline toward my car and opened the passenger-side door. “I have something to show you.”

  I slid into the driver’s side, turned on the dome light, and grabbed an oversized purse from the backseat. Then I pulled out the photograph of Mark’s old girlfriend that I got from his mother. In this one, she was clothed.

  “Have you ever seen this woman before?” I asked.

  “Who is she?”

  “An old friend of his.”

  Madeline stared at the picture without replying. I gave her more time, but still she said nothing. All I wanted was a simple yes or no. “Do you think she might be the parking-lot kisser?”

  Madeline remained uncomfortably silent, avoiding conversation and eye contact. At that point, I’d have settled for a hesitant maybe.

  “Madeline, talk to me.”

  But she didn’t.

  “At least look at me.”

  But she didn’t. Madeline seemed focused inward, not catatonic but eerie.

  “Let’s go back to the scene,” I suggested,
“maybe that will jog your memory.” So I drove her a half mile to the parking lot outside the White Bear Country Inn.

  “Show me where they were standing.” We got out of the car and she pointed to a spot on the ground. “Okay, that’s good,” I told her, setting my bag down to mark the place. “Now show me where you were standing.” We walked back toward the restaurant entrance until she stopped and turned around.

  “About here,” she said, trying to cooperate.

  The distance was only ten yards. It was dark, but the lot was well lit. And identification seemed plausible.

  “Work with me,” I urged her. “Does this woman seem at all familiar?” I handed her the photo.

  “I… don’t… know.”

  This was not helpful. But if she couldn’t tell, she couldn’t tell. The last thing I wanted her to do was guess just to please me.

  I was about to drive her back to her car and utter an exasperated good night, when her shoulders started trembling.

  “I can’t tell if it’s the same woman because I can’t tell.”

  “What are you talking about, Madeline? You can’t or you won’t? You’re not making any sense.”

  That’s when Madeline Post proved she was not too tough to cry in a dark parking lot where no one else could see her tears.

  And in between stifled sobs, she told me what she swore was her final secret.

  “I’m face blind.”

  It took a minute or two for me to understand what exactly she was saying. She could see my eyes, nose, and mouth. She just couldn’t put them all together and identify me. Or anyone else apparently. Much less the woman kissing her fiancé.

  “I can’t even recognize my own mother on the street,” she said.

  Now I was the speechless one.

  There was even a scientific name for face blindness, she explained, prosopagnosia.

  Please, God, I remember thinking, don’t make me ever have to pronounce that live on the air.