Missing Persons (6 page)

There it was—the rewrite I’d been hearing variations of all evening. Just two weeks ago, Lucy had described Frank as the most pathetic waste of space she’d ever seen. It was such a harsh statement that I’d actually come to his defense. And now Frank was a great guy, and this pesky divorce was just a bump in the road that he and I would have laughed about on our fiftieth wedding anniversary.

Nearly every one of my female friends made some statement to that effect. Frank was great, and we had been great together. Always looking to be unique, Frank’s sister took a different route. She told me that in a way I was lucky. I was already used to his being gone, so his death wouldn’t be as hard on me as it would have been if we’d stayed together.

Frank’s male friends skipped the whole affair/separation issue. Instead, they were obsessed with finding out about Frank’s medical history, wondering who would be next. I told each one in turn that as far as I knew he had been healthy, but if they were looking for recent information, I wasn’t the one to ask.

About halfway through the evening, it spread around our friends that “she” was there. Everyone looked, but no one, not even Neal, went over to talk to her. If his parents had noticed her, they didn’t acknowledge it. They just stood next to me telling each mourner that Frank was a great artist and how proud they were of his talent. If Frank had been alive to hear his parents, the shock probably would have killed him.

“Which one is she?” my sister, Ellen, whispered to me, pointing a less than discreet finger toward Vera and Susan.

“The one with the short hair.”

“She’s old.”

“I don’t think so. I think she just doesn’t dye her hair.”

“You are way prettier.”

“And yet he chose to be with her,” I reminded Ellen. “I guess he wasn’t superficial.”

“I’m going to tell her to go. She’s upsetting you.”

I grabbed her arm. “Ellen, she’s sitting at the back of the room, not speaking to anyone. Leave her alone. I don’t want to draw attention to her or to this whole mess.”

“You are much nicer than I am.”

It was a typical Ellen insult. By wrapping it in a compliment, she had deniability in case I got upset. But I knew what she meant. She meant I was weak. I had let my husband walk all over me, and my in-laws, and now his mistress. I’d heard all of it from her before. She meant well, but she didn’t get it.

It wasn’t just that I didn’t want to draw attention to Vera. I also kind of respected what she was doing. She sat quietly in the back corner of the room, talking to Susan and glancing miserably toward Frank’s coffin. It had to be hard being in a room full of people who knew Frank in a way she never would. People who didn’t want to know her, who didn’t see her loss, just the makings of an awkward social situation. She wasn’t wanted and she didn’t belong. But she stayed. And probably Frank hadn’t yet screwed up, hadn’t disappointed, hadn’t lied or broken a promise or shut down emotionally. The Frank she knew was perfect, and he’d always be perfect. Looking over at her I did sort of admire her. But since I knew the real Frank, mostly I thought she was an idiot.

“Hey, there.” Andres was suddenly at my side. He hugged me tightly, and I leaned into his shoulder. “This sucks, doesn’t it?”

“I don’t know where to start.”

“Mike told me you are doing the
Missing Persons
shoot. Are you up for it?”

I shrugged. “A sudden and unexplainable tragedy. Looks like that’s becoming my specialty.”

“This probably isn’t the time, but the police called me today. They were asking where you were the day Frank died.”

“They were what?” My voice had gotten an octave higher and a tad too loud, so I pulled Andres out of the room and into a side area where people had brought food and coffee.

“It was some detective,” Andres told me as he poured me a coffee. “He said he was just looking into some concerns there were about Frank’s death. He asked me, you know, what you said about Frank since the separation.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him that we worked together sometimes. When we worked, we talked about the shoot and where we would eat lunch, that’s it. I told him I never heard you say an ill word about Frank.”

I smiled. “So you lied.”

“You said a few things, okay. But you didn’t kill the guy.”

“Did the detective say Frank was murdered?”

“No. He wouldn’t answer any of my questions, just kept asking me what I knew. A real-life
Dragnet
episode.” Andres looked around. There were two people in the room, both Frank’s cousins, but they were engaged in a serious conversation about the stock market and weren’t paying attention to us. “Do you think he was murdered?” he asked me.

“Of course not,” I said. “The doctor got this all started. The wife and the mistress were hanging out together in the emergency room. I guess we looked suspicious, a little too cozy. But the paramedics said it was a heart attack.”

“They told you that?”

“They told Vera.”

Andres nodded, deep in thought. “Man, if he was murdered, Mike’s going to want to feature it on an episode of
Caught!
”

 

 

An hour later, friends and relatives had begun to say their good-byes. Everyone offered a comforting squeeze of the hand, but no one knew what to say. Under normal circumstances it’s tough to know what words to offer a grieving widow. In my case, the not-quite-ex-wife, not-really-widow situation, few managed to look anything other than embarrassed.

Vera outlasted even Frank’s parents. Then she and Susan quietly left. As they were leaving, Susan promised me Vera would not attend the funeral and thanked me for being so understanding.

“How that guy managed to get two such wonderful women, I’ll never know,” she said. It broke my heart a little to realize that even in his new life, he wasn’t fooling anyone but the woman who loved him.

Once I was alone I did what I had managed to avoid all night. I went to the casket and saw Frank’s body lying there. It didn’t look like him. They never do. His chin was pushed into his chest, making him look far heavier than he actually was. His normally tousled hair was swept back and gelled, and he was wearing a suit. His parents must have bought it, since Frank didn’t own a suit. It looked expensive and serious, the kind a prosperous banker might wear. In death his parents finally got the control over Frank’s image they’d always wanted.

I knelt at the casket and started a prayer, but I didn’t know what to pray for. Finally I gave up.

“I hate you,” I said to Frank. “I just thought you should know that.”

He didn’t answer, which wasn’t entirely unexpected.

“Your girlfriend wasn’t what I pictured. Well, she is a little wacky but she’d have to be to fall in love with you. I would know.”

I smiled, wanting to make it clear to him, to what was left of him, that I was only kidding. I wanted to touch his hand, but I couldn’t work up the nerve.

“This is so stupid. I don’t know what you did to put yourself here. I don’t even want to think what you’ve been doing that strained your heart so much.”

I wanted to shake him or hit him, somehow wake him up. But I just knelt there and stared at his waxy face.

“Now your life is just one more thing you’ve left unfinished.”

I heard a cough. I jumped up and spun around. The director was at the door to the room.

“I’m so sorry to disturb you, Mrs. Conway, but we’re closing. Are you finished mourning for the evening?”

I smiled a little. “I guess so.”

T
he funeral went smoothly. Neal gave him a lovely eulogy that managed to avoid any mention of the last four months. My sister and parents sat beside me at the service offering their support, without the usual advice on how to handle the in-laws. Frank’s parents introduced me as their son’s widow to their friends. And as promised, Vera didn’t show up. All in all, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it would be.

As I was leaving the graveyard after the burial, I noticed a message on my phone. It might have been a little impolite to listen to it while standing among headstones, but I knew who it was, and if I didn’t get back to him, I’d get calls all day.

I texted him two words, “will call,” and headed for home.

 

 

I had barely changed out of my widow clothes and into a pair of old sweats when I dialed Jason’s number.

“Is this Jason Ryder?”

“Yeah, who’s this?”

“My name is Kate Conway. I’m working on a show called
Missing Persons
, and we’re doing an episode on Theresa Moretti.”

Doing something work related made me feel normal, which really it shouldn’t have. There’s nothing normal about talking some poor guy into looking like a killer for the sake of a television show.

“I talked to someone from your show,” Jason said. “I told him I wasn’t interested.”

“He told me. I guess I just wanted to explain . . .”

“I know what these shows are like.”

“We’re trying to help the police find Theresa.”

“No, you’re not.”

He wasn’t stupid. I went another way. “Look, the whole way these shows are set up is that we present the facts of the case and the opinions of the participants, and that sometimes leads the audience toward a possible solution.”

“Meaning you make someone like me look guilty even when we’re not.”

“It sometimes happens that way. If, for example, Theresa’s mother or her friends have bad things to say about someone from Theresa’s life, then obviously we’re going to want to include those comments.”

“But if they’re lies, then I’ll sue you.”

“We’re pretty smart about protecting ourselves from charges of slander, Jason. We will not say bad things about you in voice-over, but we may include sound bites of other people saying bad things. As long as we don’t have evidence that these people are lying, and we’ve done our best to get your side of the story, the show is in the clear.”

“But they’ll make stuff up. You don’t know those people.”

“And I don’t know you. But I want to be fair and warn you how these things work. I don’t want you to have any regrets later.” My voice was firm and ominous. I wanted to scare him, but I also wanted him to think I was on his side. “The people watching the show are going to wonder why you didn’t want to talk. They’re going to think you have something to hide. If Theresa’s family does have something to say about you, and you don’t defend yourself, well, the audience will draw their own conclusions.”

“But you’ll let me tell what happened, so people won’t think I hurt Theresa.”

“That’s what I want.”

I could hear grunting on his side of the phone. He didn’t want to do it, but he felt he had to. Whatever Theresa’s family planned to say about him had to be pretty serious.

Finally he spoke. “Okay, I guess I can do it Thursday afternoon, but I’m not going to go into a lot of personal stuff. I’ll just say we dated and we broke up, and let people see that I’m a good guy.”

“Absolutely. This is your opportunity to say whatever you want.”

And then it will be edited to say whatever Crime TV wants.

I
felt a little sleazy after the phone call. I usually do, but I also felt like I’d accomplished something. It might seem odd to take pride in being good at a profession you don’t respect, but I did.

Jason Ryder wanted to do the interview or else he wouldn’t have agreed to it. To misquote Eleanor Roosevelt, you can’t manipulate someone without their consent. He wanted to be heard. And if he really had nothing to do with Theresa’s disappearance, which he probably didn’t, then being on television might actually help him clear his name. So, in a way, I was doing a public good. Or, at the very least, I wasn’t really hurting anyone.

 

 

I still had the photos of Theresa spread out on my kitchen table, but I pushed them aside. The haunted images from the past I was interested in were from my own. I opened up the first of several photo albums I had fished out of a box in the garage and started slowly leafing through them.

They were the typical pictures: awkward teenagers in Christmas sweaters posing by the tree, prom photos with Frank making goofy faces because he hated being in a tuxedo, pictures of us in college looking lovingly at each other though we broke up every other week during that time, and finally about a dozen photos of my hand showing off a sparkling new engagement ring.

The second album was all wedding photos. The official ones were staged, with smiles that were too wide to be real. After the ceremony the photographer posed us all on the altar, my family on my side, his family on his. If we were really becoming one big family, then the photographer should have mixed us all up and put his sister next to my dad and my sister next to his younger brother. Maybe the photographer knew that despite the niceties it would never really work out that way. Just like in the photo, for the rest of our marriage, most of my family aligned with me, and most of his with him.

Still, as I looked at the photos from the reception, I saw genuine happiness. There was love in Frank’s eyes, and in mine. I’d forgotten how much in love we really were.

Once we got back to the honeymoon suite, he called me his wife for the first time, and I stared at the gold ring on his left hand. I couldn’t believe this beautiful man belonged with me for the rest of my life.