Missing Persons (16 page)

“I don’t know. I guess I’m not having the best night.”

As soon as I got out of the car, he threw his arm around my shoulder. “Let’s grab a beer. Come into the garage.” He turned to the twins, now nearly six. “Kids, go inside and tell Mom Aunt Kate is here.”

As the kids went inside, we went to the garage. Neal had fixed it up to be a sort of den. He had two overstuffed reclining chairs, a television, and a minifridge on one side, leaving just enough room for one car on the other. Or there would have been, except for a dozen or so boxes and a tarp-covered pile of more stuff they obviously didn’t want but couldn’t seem to get rid of.

He grabbed a bottle of beer from the minifridge and handed it to me. “You want a glass?”

“In these elegant surroundings”—I smiled—“I think I’ll manage without it.”

“Beats drinking a beer surrounded by stuffed bears and princess costumes,” he said, laughing. “You don’t know how lucky you are.” Then he blushed.

Frank and I had tried for three years to have kids, with no luck. It wasn’t exactly regret, especially when I saw how overwhelmed and broke our friends were, but it wasn’t exactly a choice either.

“You looked like you were having fun with the kids,” I said.

“It’s bedtime anyway. What’s going on?”

“I just wanted to see how you were doing.”

“Okay, I guess. I keep grabbing the phone to call him, and then I remember, you know.”

I nodded.

Neal smiled. “You miss him too, don’t you?”

“I’ve missed him for a long time. Months. Years.”

“It wasn’t such a bad marriage. You guys had some great times together. Like the night he proposed, and you were so drunk, instead of saying yes, you just kept hiccuping.”

“I knew he was going to propose, and I was nervous. I was just drinking to calm my nerves.” I laughed. “Poor Frank couldn’t tell I was saying yes through all those hiccups.”

“And remember when you guys first bought the house? He spent every waking moment fixing it up.”

“He did,” I admitted. “I forgot about that. He stripped all the woodwork, and he refinished the floors. He was very good with his hands.”

“And he planted the garden.”

I nodded. “Every summer he’d cut a big bunch of roses for me on my birthday. And paint me a card. He said it was a better expression of his love than buying some lame present.”

“And cheaper.” Neal laughed.

I lightly slapped his hand. “It was damn romantic. And I loved it.” I looked down at the bottle of beer in my hands. “I haven’t thought about that stuff in a long time.”

“I know he wasn’t the perfect husband, Kate, but every marriage has its bad times.”

I shook my head. “That’s kind of an understatement, Neal. Besides, I really didn’t come over for a trip down memory lane. I talked with a detective. His name is Podeski. Do you know him?”

He nodded. “He talked to me too. I wouldn’t worry about it, Kate. He’s just filling out paperwork.”

“So you don’t think he has any reason to be suspicious?”

“Of who?”

“Of me.”

He directed me to sit in one of the chairs, then he pulled up a cooler and sat on it, facing me. Our knees were inches apart, just like I conducted interviews. “Why would you have killed Frank?”

“Aside from the obvious reason?”

“But that’s crazy.”

“What did you say to Podeski?”

He turned white. “Nothing.” He took a long chug of his beer, while I waited.

“Neal, you said something. If it’s about the engagement . . .”

“You knew about that?”

“Only after he died.”

“That was something he never wanted you to find out.”

“I would have found out when they got married.”

“No.” Neal got up and started pacing. “You don’t get it. He wasn’t going to marry her. He got a little carried away. It was a mistake.”

“He told you that?”

“He wanted to come back to you.”

I could feel the blood drain from my face and my heart begin to move upward into my throat. I was going to pass out.

“Is that what you said to Detective Podeski? Because he told me you confirmed Frank’s engagement to Vera.”

He hesitated. “I didn’t say anything about what Frank told me. I didn’t know if you would want to know, and I figured, what difference did it make? But Kate, I promise you, Frank really did love you. He was even interviewing for a job teaching art at a community center. The one near you on Augusta.”

I got up and handed Neal my beer.

“You’re lying,” I said. “You think you’re helping me. You think it’s what I want to hear, but you’re lying.”

I walked out of the garage and toward my car.

“Kate, don’t go,” I heard Neal call after me. Out of the corner of my eye I saw his wife, Beth, walk out from the house.

“Kate,” I heard Beth say.

I didn’t respond. I got in my car and pulled away.

I knew I was overreacting but I couldn’t stop myself. I used to get so mad at Frank that I would storm out of the house and stay away for hours. When I’d get home, he’d be sitting on the couch, watching TV. He’d smile as if nothing had happened. I’d get angry about his indifference and we’d start the cycle all over again. I knew even as I was doing it that I was just trying to get a reaction, any reaction, trying to get him to
do
something, to fight—not just with me, but for me. It didn’t work. The angrier I got, the more he withdrew.

It made us both miserable, but at least while it was happening, I could hate him and feel certain of it. Now nothing made sense.

“K
ate, are you okay? I’ve been in a panic about you.”

It was Ellen. And she didn’t sound panicked. She sounded completely in control.

“Why were you in a panic?” I asked.

“I got a visit today from a police detective.”

I could feel myself turning red. It wasn’t just frightening anymore. It was embarrassing. “It’s fine,” I said. “He’s just asking questions.”

“Well, don’t worry. I took care of it.”

That worried me. “What did you say, Ellen?”

“I told him that you didn’t love Frank a bit and you didn’t care what happened to him. You thought of Frank as a liability, so his leaving you was a good thing,” she said. “I also told that detective that since you didn’t want him back, you didn’t have a motive to kill Frank. It’s not like you were going to inherit anything.”

“There was a two-hundred-and-fifty-thousand-dollar life insurance policy. His dad took it out.”

Silence. “Well, the point is I said you didn’t kill Frank. I think he’ll just forget about you.”

“Sure, I mean, with character references like yours, why would Podeski think I’d kill Frank?”

“Kate, honestly, it’s fine. I was very clear in saying you aren’t the killing type. And I teach seventh grade, remember. I know sociopaths when I see them. Don’t worry about it anymore and just get some sleep.”

 

 

I did not sleep. I lay in bed for about two hours, then I got up and paced. I thought I might get sick, but after ten minutes of hanging my head over a toilet, I went away a failure.

I wanted to kill Frank. An irony not lost on me since at least one person thought I had. If it was true that he was hoping to come back, why hadn’t he said anything to me? Was he afraid of what I might say? I guess that made sense, since I had no idea what I would have said. Half of me hated him and only remembered the bad times. The other half loved and missed him. I don’t have any idea which half would have won.

And it didn’t matter. Frank was gone.

It’s an odd thing about losing someone. It doesn’t hit you all at once. Obviously Frank was gone. He’d left the house four months ago, and died over a week ago, but every time I said the words, it surprised me.

“Frank is gone,” I said out loud. “He’s never coming back.”

It still felt like a punch in the gut, and I waited for the umpteenth time for tears to flow, but none came. What was wrong with me that I couldn’t let myself cry for him?

I thought about my conversations from earlier: Gray’s insider information that Frank had died from digitalis poisoning; Podeski’s insistence that I had means, motive, and opportunity to kill Frank; and Neal’s revelation about the engagement. Why did so many people know what was happening in my life and I knew so little?

I turned on my computer hoping somehow technology had the answers that I did not. I started with Vera. I searched for information on the Knutson family and its many heirs. There were the usual scandals of the very rich: a cousin of Vera’s had died of alcohol poisoning in the midnineties, several other members of the family had been through messy divorces and custody fights, and an uncle had been accused and then cleared of insider trading. But there was nothing as interesting about Vera. She attended an occasional charity event for animal welfare and was photographed at several of those dull-looking luncheons that end up being written about on the society page. She’d written a letter to the editor of the
Chicago Tribune
about education reform and had recently attended a fund-raiser for the governor. That was getting me nowhere.

I got even less information searching on Podeski’s name. Aside from a line in one article saying he was the lead detective in a homicide from 2007, there was nothing on him. Clearly he wasn’t the flashy type looking to make a name for himself. Though one line in the article caught my eye. Podeski was quoted as saying, “I’m only interested in finding the killer. And I’ll keep looking until I do.” Somehow the fact that I wasn’t a killer didn’t put my mind at ease.

Finally, I did a search on digitalis. I found out it came from foxglove, a plant with a pretty purple flower and toxic leaves. It was from those leaves that digitalis was made. According to several websites, though it was an effective and lifesaving heart medicine, a large overdose can be fatal. Even a small one can cause nausea and a jaundiced effect in the eyes. That explained Frank thinking the white sheets were yellow on the night he died. What it didn’t tell me was how Frank got it in his system or who put it there.

Whatever answers I was looking for weren’t in a search engine. I turned off the computer. But just as I was about to go back to bed, my home phone rang. No one called me at home. Anyone who knew me used my cell number because it was so much easier to reach me that way. The only calls I got on the landline were people looking to sell newspaper subscriptions or refinance my mortgage. And, as annoying as they were, telemarketers wouldn’t call at two a.m. I raced to pick it up.

“Hello?”

Breathing. Not the cliché heavy breathing of obscene phone calls. Just breathing.

“Who is this?”

Click.

The caller ID said “private number.” For my own peace of mind, I decided that meant wrong number. But the phone rang twice more, and twice more there was a breather.

I wasn’t generally one to overreact to strange phone calls, but things were starting to build up. The weird feeling I was being followed, the dead bird on the porch, and most of all, the rearranged photos. If someone was trying to unnerve me, they were doing a good job.

I called information and told the very nice operator about the calls, hoping she could get someone to trace them for me. She couldn’t. Instead she suggested I call back after nine a.m., speak with a supervisor about setting a trap on my phone for any future calls, and file a police report.

Maybe I would do that, I told myself, but probably I wouldn’t. By morning, I was sure I would feel slightly foolish about the whole thing and try to pretend it hadn’t happened. But in the meantime, sleep was out of the question.

I remembered the copy of the police report I’d gotten from the world’s worst receptionist. I’d been too busy to look at it before, but now I had nothing but time. Just as I was hoping, this copy didn’t have any black marker covering valuable information. I laid it out on the floor in the living room next to the copy with the black marker and checked for the missing information. On the first few pages, Rosenthal had blacked out an entry that said Theresa had been at the Kitty Cage two days before her disappearance. The Kitty Cage was a strip club just north of Chicago that had been in the news recently when it was raided for selling drugs as a secondary business. And on the complete copy, she had handwritten Gray’s name with a question mark next to it, blacked out on the version I’d been sent.

Then there was Theresa’s bank account. According to the complete police report, deposits had remained a fairly steady two or three hundred dollars, until six months ago when four deposits had been made, each over two thousand dollars, for a total nearing ten thousand. Then, two weeks after her disappearance all of the money had been withdrawn.

Rosenthal had specifically said that Theresa’s account hadn’t been touched since she went missing. Obviously that wasn’t the case. And there was a bigger question: where does a twenty-two-year-old unemployed nursing student get ten grand in six months? And why would she go to a strip club? Maybe, despite what Rosenthal had told me, Theresa really was living a double life.

It made the show more interesting, but I was a little disappointed. I had, in my own disinterested, exploitive sort of way, come to like Theresa. I didn’t want to have to expose her as a stripper or drug mule. I wanted her—I wanted somebody—to be exactly who they seemed to be.

Whatever the truth was, I wasn’t going to get an answer and my mind was beginning to get a little wobbly. I wanted to sleep, but the odd phone calls and the unanswered questions wouldn’t let me, so I turned on the TV.

I changed the channel about fifty times. Nothing was on. When I was a kid, before cable television, there was always something to watch. And now, with a hundred and fifty channels, pay-per-view, Internet downloads, and DVDs, I can never seem to find anything worth my time. Including—no, make that especially—the shows I work on.