by Lisa Unger
“Me, too. At a certain point in your life you think that maybe you’re too old to make new friends,” said Selena. “But that’s obviously not true.”
“Aw, I love that. Thank you,” said Martha. She seemed genuinely pleased, her smile warm.
Whatever darkness Selena sensed was gone, replaced by friendliness and warmth. Was it her imagination? Her own fears? The darkness in her own life?
Now, Selena inwardly congratulated herself on a job well done. She’d sealed the relationship, made sense of their encounter on the train—they both had secrets they wanted kept—and enlisted Martha as a friend. It would have been better if Selena had never opened her mouth, of course, but at least she felt like the situation was in hand. Of course, if something had happened to Geneva, if her disappearance became a news story, would she be able to trust Martha? Probably not. She was still hoping that it wouldn’t come to that.
“Let’s do this again soon,” said Selena.
“Definitely. And, hey, you know, if you ever need to talk to someone—about anything—let me know. I’m a good listener. No judgments. I like to think of myself as a solution architect.”
“A solution architect.”
“There’s always a solution for any problem. And I like to find it.” There it was again, that sort of dark glint Selena had intuited on the train. Something slithering beneath the surface.
“That’s an important skill,” Selena said with a wink, as if she was in on the joke.
“Because problems don’t always just go away.”
“That’s very true.”
They embraced, and Martha held on just a second longer than Selena, pulling her back a little then finally releasing her. For reasons she couldn’t explain, Selena felt a rush of heat to her cheeks, a strong urge to get away.
“Well, same here,” said Selena. “Call any time.”
“I’m going to stick around for a while,” said Martha, subtly shifting her gaze to the bartender. She took her seat again.
“Oh,” said Selena. She’d almost never been single—a serious high school boyfriend, then Will, then Graham. But her friends talked about it—the excitement of random hookups, also the loneliness, the frustration of never finding the right guy, the dating apps, and failed encounters. The dangerous moments when someone got too aggressive, wouldn’t take no for an answer. The nice guys who suddenly turned creepy after too much alcohol.
The bartender was watching Martha in the reflection of the mirror behind the bar, a slight smile on his full lips. He ran a hand through his thick, dark hair, and Selena noticed a tribal tattoo on his wrist.
“Well,” she said. “Be careful, okay?”
Martha smiled sweetly, reached out to squeeze Selena’s arm. “You’re a good friend.”
* * *
On the street, instead of walking back to the parking garage in the rain, Selena caught a cab and climbed inside.
“Where to?” asked the cabbie.
She thought about it a moment. Back to the car, then the long ride home? Back to a confrontation with Graham, another sleepless night. No. She gave the cab driver Will’s address, then dropped him a text.
He answered right away: The doorman will let you up.
On the way uptown, she scrolled through the pictures in a text from her mom. The boys were asleep in their beds.
Everything is okay, her mother had written with the photographs. This too shall pass.
TWENTY-ONE
Anne
One of her gifts was following people. There was a skill to it, a craft. Most people didn’t imagine that they were being followed, so that was a built-in advantage.
Beyond that, these days, most people weren’t present at all; they weren’t paying attention. If they weren’t lost in the storm of their own inner lives, they were numbing themselves with their devices. They were either obsessed with their wants, needs, grudges, aspirations, insecurities, watching a movie of themselves on the inside of their brains, or they were playing Candy Crush, trolling through social media, sending or receiving inane texts about the minutiae of their lives.
So these days, it was easy to observe, to move unseen through the world, to sneak up behind, easier than it had ever been.
Anne let Selena leave, let the other woman think that her new slutty friend was hanging around to hook up with the bartender. Which she could, of course. She could have him, or really almost anyone. But why? He was hot enough, but what was the point? She’d had Hugh that very afternoon; she could still feel him.
She waited a beat, then gathered up her things, and followed Selena. The other woman was still on the curb, hand in the air. Anne stayed inside the door, watching. A cab pulled up and Selena ducked inside; Anne grabbed the cab that pulled up right behind.
“Follow the taxi in front of you,” she said to the driver.
He didn’t respond, which she took as an assent. His phone rang, and he started talking in a language she didn’t understand. West Slavic? Russian? Polish?
Selena’s cab raced uptown, Anne close behind.
“Where are you going?” she whispered, though she had an inkling.
Prediction. That was her other gift. Where would Selena go if she found herself suddenly free from the things that held her to her life? When things got rocky, the ground shifting, to whom would Selena turn?
Up Tenth Avenue, across town through the park via Seventy-Ninth, then up Madison. The Upper East Side. The streets were slick; had it rained?
It was so easy to infiltrate a life these days between social media and everyone’s insatiable desire to broadcast their day-to-day, the show they put on of themselves. It only took Anne a couple of hours to piece together a picture of almost anyone’s life, where they lived and worked, where they shopped, ate, partied, where their kids went to school. It had never been easier to gain private information and access. People just gave it all away now, often without even realizing it.
Of course, she’d devoted more than a few hours to Selena, much more. Their encounter on the train was anything but chance. There was very little she didn’t know about Selena Murphy. She even knew things about Selena that the other woman didn’t know about herself.
When Selena’s cab came to a stop, Anne’s driver pulled over, too. Still talking, meter running. He seemed to know to sit and wait. Anne watched as her slim and elegant friend exited the cab and quickly ducked into a fancy doorman building with a maroon awning.
Anne snapped a picture quickly with her phone.
Well, she thought, that didn’t take long.
She watched as Selena had a quick, smiling exchange with the doorman, then disappeared into the luxe lobby. The lawyer, the ex. The first and last safe place Selena had known. She should have married him.
As much as she knew about Selena Murphy, the woman she met tonight had surprised her. Anne had expected her to be frazzled, confessional, insecure. But the woman who’d sat across from her at the bar was put together, intelligent and in control. She lied, easily and with purpose. She was calculating.
She was both stronger and smarter than Anne would have imagined. Not good traits in a mark.
“This plan is flawed.” Pop. “And it’s flawed because it’s personal. I taught you better. You chose her for the wrong reasons. Pull the plug.”
“I know, I know,” she said out loud, startling at the sound of her own voice.
But the taxi driver, if he heard Anne at all, probably assumed that she, too, was talking on the phone. She felt a buzz of anxiety, which quickly turned to a simmering anger. No, it wasn’t anger. It was something darker, meaner.
“Rage,” Pop never failed to mention. “It makes us sloppy. And in our business sloppiness kills. Remember that?”
“What?” asked the driver, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. “Where to next? Just sit? The meter is running.”
She ticked through her options. She had already broken a hundred rules for Selena. Time to retreat. Regroup. Time to turn up the heat on this enterprise and make something happen.
“Grand Central,” she said.
The cab started to move, the driver still talking and talking. Who was on the other line? she wondered.
“Remember Bridget?” asked Pop beside her. She jumped. Lately, he’d been more of a shade, a shadow, fading in and out. But now he was there, flesh and bone. She reached for him, but then he was gone.
“How could I forget?” she said, looking out the window as they dipped into the park.
TWENTY-TWO
Pearl
She and Pop were on the move again. That sweet little house in Pecos was a distant memory. Since then, there had been an isolated cabin outside of Boulder, a run-down ranch in Amarillo, a two-story in Phoenix. She’d been Mary, Beth, Sarah. Pop had been Jim, Chris, Bill.
Pop was at the wheel of their used Volvo, but he had gone dark—as she liked to think of it.
When things went badly or not as he anticipated, or if something made him angry, he kind of checked out. He got this blank look, stopped talking. It was unsettling at first; once he was nearly catatonic for an afternoon, sitting on the couch, staring at the dark fireplace. She tried everything to get him to respond. Talking. Yelling. Crying. She shook him. Hit him. Finally, she just lay on the floor at his feet and waited. When he came back to himself, he didn’t remember anything about the last few hours.
“I’m sorry,” he told her. He held her that day, and she let him, though physical affection between them was rare. “It happens sometimes. Just ride it out.”
He’d come home to the Phoenix house—which she’d really liked—and started packing without a word to her. She’d followed suit without asking why. Maybe it was her years with Stella; she was accustomed to following nonverbal cues quickly and without question. All of her and Pop’s belongings fit into a roller suitcase each. They made sure to take everything. They cleaned the place vigorously, leaving no trace of themselves behind. Or, anyway, that was the plan.
That had been Phoenix—hot, flat, red. Friendly people, lots of smiling faces, a definite Southwest hipster vibe. Pop’s “girlfriend” had been a middle-aged accountant that Pop had met via a dating app—Bridget.
What did they want? That was the first thing to find out.
And they will always tell. All you have to do is watch and listen.
Maybe they won’t tell you with their words. They may not even truly know themselves. But they will tell you with the way they wear their hair, how they do their makeup, how they dress. They’ll tell you by their favorite song, book, movie. What they say about their parents, how they hold their bodies, whether they look you in the eye, whether they look at themselves in the mirror when they walk by.
An unmarried woman of a certain age—that was easy. She wanted the fairy tale, the one that had been promised all her life. She wanted that long-awaited prince, the one who made all those frogs worthwhile, if there had been any frogs at all. She ached for romance, attention, the love that made up for all those lonely nights, that closet full of bridesmaid dresses, the Christmases she spent alone. After all that time, she wanted to be able to say, I was just waiting for you.
And Pop was good. He was very, very good at giving women what they wanted.
He was loving, attentive, respectful. A listener. A doer. He was handy, someone who could fix broken things and wanted to. He cooked.
And Anne—or Mary, or Beth, or whoever she was at the time. She was the sweet icing on the cake. The latchkey child raised by her single father. The one looking for a mother, a friend—but old enough to take care of herself. Together they offered the insta-family. This might send a young woman with good prospects running. But not the woman who worried that she missed out on everything—true love, children, grandchildren. For that woman, Anne was part of the prize package.
And she played her role to perfection. Rarely she had to play the role in person; most often it all happened online—email and the occasional FaceTime conversation. She’d be shy at first, slow to warm. Eventually, she’d come around. Start calling Pop’s new lady friend of her own accord—asking for advice on this or that. She’d send a funny text or two. A meme. An adorable cat video.
“You’re a natural,” Pop said. “But don’t overdo it. Don’t reveal too much, don’t give too much. And, whatever you do, don’t fall in love.” She never did, of course. But Anne made sure they fell in love with her.
Then, after the mark—which was a cold word and didn’t convey the whole truth of it—was in love, baited and hooked, just days before they were all supposed to meet for the first time, Anne or Beth or Mary would suddenly fall ill. Usually while she and Pop were away “on vacation” ostensibly in the location, maybe, where they were all to meet. Of course, they were nowhere near that place, nor would they ever be. Or maybe they’d been robbed, Pop’s wallet stolen, his beautiful daughter clinging to life after the attack. The mark rarely hesitated to wire the money he needed. Five thousand, ten thousand, sometimes more. These were short games, usually a couple of months at most.
Once the money had been wired—or if the mark got suspicious, tried to fly in for a rescue—then poof—they disappeared. Online profiles deleted, burner phones discarded, email accounts canceled. Most women would never even report the crime. Shame kept them quiet. These were wealthy, accomplished women. How, they’d ask themselves, could they have been so easily duped?
But Bridget? Anne had sensed that she was not the typical mark—she had an edge, there was a distant coldness. She wasn’t as enamored of Anne as the others had been. Anne said something to Pop about it, but he wasn’t hearing it. She was a big fish, lots of money. But when he tried to reel it in, Bridget didn’t wire the cash. First, she offered to fly in to help. Then she offered to send a lawyer. She called and called Pop’s burner phone. Finally, she sent an email threatening to call the police. Pop had to shut everything down fast—the online profile, the email account, the Skype ID, the phone. Even though there was no way Bridget could know where they physically lived, they left the Phoenix house.
They were miles away, nearly to El Paso, when Pop finally spoke.
“How did you know?”
They were on a dark desert highway, city lights blinking off in the distance, sky rattling with stars. She watched them through the moon roof. They gave her a kind of comfort, reminding her that nothing mattered very much. There was stardust in her bones. Not so long ago, she hadn’t been here at all. One day she’d be gone for good. And she was okay with that.
“I just didn’t get the warm fuzzies. She didn’t have smiley eyes when she looked at me. I think she had trust issues.”
“I didn’t see it,” he said, gripping the wheel.
She’d noticed that his knuckles were raw, that he had a slight bruise on his cheekbone. She knew better than to ask him about it. Sometimes he went out at night, drank too much. He didn’t always remember what happened.
“You can’t win them all,” she said.
It was something Stella used to say. She should know. Anne remembered random things about her mother—the smell of her perfume—Chanel No. 5—the sandpaper of her laughter, how cold her feet and hands always were—how she’d bury her toes under Pearl as they lay on the couch together. Sometimes details like that came back, and she almost felt something then. A tugging at her heart.
“Maybe I’m losing my touch,” said Pop. “They say it happens. Your instincts dull.”
“Maybe you should retire.” It was kind of a dig. She was mad. She’d liked the Phoenix house; she’d made a friend, a boy in the neighborhood.
She thought he’d go dark again. She almost wanted him to; that way she could be mad in quiet.
“Not just yet,” he said. “I’m not ready to retire yet.”
“Can she fi
nd us?”
“No,” he said quickly. “No way. We’re ghosts.”
But he didn’t sound entirely sure. And it would turn out that he was wrong.
TWENTY-THREE
Hunter
Hunter Ross entered the diner, the little bell jingling to announce his arrival. Not that anyone would hear it over the din. The waitress at the counter waved to him, then nodded with a knowing smile over toward the rowdy group of older men in the back. Hunter issued a sigh and made his way toward them.
Retirement didn’t appeal to Hunter Ross. In fact, he had actively started to dread his Tuesday morning breakfast group, a bunch of old guys out to pasture from various gritty professions. On any given Tuesday, there might be a cop, a lawyer, a firefighter, an EMT, and an FBI agent. Men who had strongly identified with their work, and who now used all that pent-up energy to complain about the state of the nation and the world.
They were out of shape. They watched too much television. And, frankly, the way they ate—giant chili cheese omelets and piles of hash browns, sides of bacon, thick sausage links, pints of juice, gallons of coffee—made Hunter nervous.
Some Tuesday soon, one of these old guys was just going to stroke out right in front of him. Not if. When.
They called him “son.” Because Hunter was in his late fifties, and they were all pushing seventy. He wasn’t technically retired, because since leaving the job, he’d hung out a shingle and investigated cold cases for families, understaffed police departments, whoever had a case that had run short of leads, time, money, energy. Sometimes he did it for free.
The group chided him for working when he could just be taking it easy. But they were jealous, too, he could tell. When you did the kind of jobs these guys did, it was never easy to just let it go. There was always a fire, a crime, a victim, the need for a first responder. Other, younger people were running to the rescue now.