Next Time You See Me (12 page)

Mom gently touched my arm. “Call Billy. See if he’s free to come over.”

I did. He was. Twenty minutes later, he was sitting on my couch looking at Lucky’s photograph. When he looked back up at me, he shook his head decisively.

“It isn’t him.”

“How can you be so sure?” I asked.

Rosie agreed: “Look again.”

Billy took another long look. “No way. I know you two are hurting, but you can’t go on trying to bring back the dead. Everywhere you go for a while, you’re going to spot him. I’ve seen it so many times. That’s just how it works.” He stood up, looked from me to Rosie and back to me. “I’m sorry.”

Rosie and I gazed at each other, trying to will everyone else’s pessimism out of the room. But it didn’t work. As Billy headed out the door, back to his precinct, Larry looked at the picture another time.

“Yeah, I’ve got to agree with Billy. This guy sure looks like Mac, but it isn’t him.”

“Karin?” Mom said in a tone I recognized from my girlhood, when I would stubbornly refuse to relinquish a lost argument.

I looked at her and didn’t say anything. I had already made up my mind. The hot, angry feeling was rattling through me again.

All this time I had refused to believe that Mac was dead. Now, if he
was
alive, if this
was
him, if
she
was wearing the expensive necklace I had never been able to track down—then, if I found him, I would kill him myself.

Chapter 8

I
shoved the plastic key card into the slot of my hotel room lock so fast and hard that it snapped in half. Another shot of adrenaline fountained into my brain—I had been living on it since meeting Lucky Herman and seeing that photo of
Mac
and his girlfriend
. I kicked the door three times, hard. The neighboring door swung open and a man with messy brown hair looked at me.

“It’s three
A.M.
!”

“The card broke!”

“Well, don’t make the rest of us suffer!” He slammed his door shut.

I dragged my suitcase back to the elevator and down to the lobby, a masterpiece of Art Deco symmetries and sleek designs with, in the case of the Hotel Collins, dashes of signature blue glass. The middle-of-the-night hushed silence was overwhelming when I wanted so badly to make noise and trouble, to shout and scream:
Where the hell is my husband and how could he do this to me?

I dinged the bell at the front desk and in a moment the night attendant who had checked me in minutes ago appeared. Nate—according to the name tag he wore on the floral shirt that appeared to be the uniform of this South Beach hotel, as the door attendant had worn it, too—looked, by his creased, flushed face, as if he had caught a power nap in the minutes I’d been jamming my lock on the seventh floor.

“The card broke in my lock.”

“That never happens.”

“Well, it does now.”

He eked out a weary smile. I still hadn’t gotten over the sticker shock of the price of a room for a single night and felt no guilt in holding the hotel to high expectations. Like providing sturdier key cards. Or not harboring errant husbands.

“Look, can you just give me another room?”

He consulted the computer and presented me with a key card to a single room on the fourth floor. Good. I wouldn’t have to face my angry neighbor on seven. I didn’t think I could muster an iota of diplomacy.

I had to keep reminding myself that it wasn’t anyone’s fault but Mac’s if he had left me for another woman. If he had abandoned me and Ben without warning. If he had spent the family money on jewelry for
her
that was more expensive than anything he had ever given
me
. But I didn’t care about a necklace—
he had left us
.

I had to keep reminding myself that while my anger was legitimate, the only person who deserved to bear its brunt was Mac.

Not the flight attendant who had told me I couldn’t stretch out on a double seat, even if it was unoccupied, because I had paid for only one seat. How many curses had I hurled at her before reeling myself back in? “My husband left me for another woman!” I told her. She glared at me anyway.

Not the cabdriver who drove too slowly and charged too much. Whose door I had slammed really hard, and who I didn’t tip.

Or the lock that had greedily chewed my key card. Or the people on the seventh floor I had awoken.

Not front-desk Nate who couldn’t have conjured Mac out of thin air even if he’d wanted to.

No one deserved my rage but Mac. And he was going to get it. If I could only find him.

“Are you sure you don’t have a Seamus MacLeary or a Mac MacLeary registered here?” I asked Nate one more time before leaving the desk.

“Positive.”

“And you’re
sure
you’ve never seen this man.” I whipped the photograph out of my purse. So far, I had shown everyone I’d encountered: three workers at the airport, the taxi driver, the hotel’s front-door attendant, Nate.

“Positive.” He didn’t bother glancing at it this time.

I slid the photo back into my purse and rode the elevator up to the fourth floor. Carefully slid the key card in and opened the door onto my bottom-of-the-line-but-still-very-nice room.

How could Mac have done this to me? To us? Because when a husband runs away, he breaks his children’s hearts, too. And if you break a child’s heart, you
shatter
a mother’s.

I stripped off my New York winter clothes and lay on the bed in my underwear, cooling off. After flipping television channels and accepting that there was no hope I’d ever concentrate on anything, I called room service for a bottle of wine. A soft knock on the door came a few minutes later, and I answered wearing a hotel robe, deliberately avoiding eye contact, hoping to spare at least one person tonight who had the misfortune to encounter me. Shame was starting to settle in. I handed the guy a big tip and locked the door behind me, thinking that I knew what he was thinking, what they
all
were thinking:
You work the night shift, you get the crazies, it’s just part of the job.
And he was right, too.

I poured myself a first glass of wine. Drank it. Poured a second, and the stuck engine of my brain started to slow down.

What was I doing in Miami Beach in the middle of the night?

I still had no actual proof that Mac was alive. Rosie was the only one who had agreed with me that the man in the photograph was him.

I got my cell phone from my purse and lay down on my bed, thinking I should probably let someone know where I was. My mother had presumably heard the suitcase wheels rumble overhead toward the front door, the sound of me rushing out of the house—she was used to my impulsivity and knew that my training as a soldier and a cop tended to keep me safe even alone in the dark—but in my haste I hadn’t left a note or told her where I was going. My guess was that she’d figured it out. She would understand that I had to follow this through, and she knew I trusted her to watch over Ben. I poured a third glass of wine, drank half, and closed my eyes.

Next thing I knew, it was morning. I woke feeling tired and embarrassed. The dark cloud had drifted away, leaving hurt and determination but not rage.

First, I called Mom. She withheld opinions and judgments and, as I’d expected, told me she understood. Then I opened the drapes to a bright Florida day and got dressed for summer.

Downstairs in the lobby, families, couples, and a few loners floated in and out of the off-lobby Palm Restaurant that was fronted with a sign boasting the delights of its brunch. But I wasn’t hungry; I was on a quest. I started with the woman who had evidently replaced Nate at the front desk. Her name tag informed me that she was Tara.

“Excuse me, Tara.” I slid the photo across the counter. “Do you recognize this man?”

She glanced at it and shook her head. “But I haven’t worked here very long. Is he a regular?”

“I’m not really sure.”

“I’ll ask in the office. May I?”

She took the photo, disappearing through a door behind her. Although it was Sunday and quiet, it was
day
, and I felt hopeful that with more people around I might have some luck. But she returned moments later shaking her head.

“Sorry.”

Next I spoke with the Palm Restaurant’s maître d’, an older man who stood at a podium near the door and greeted guests. His name tag read
Raul
.

“Table for?”

“Just a question.” I showed him the photo. “I’m wondering if you’ve seen this man here. If you know who he is.”

Raul’s friendliness vanished and he looked at me with unveiled suspicion.

“And you are?”

“Karin. My husband went missing four months ago. I’m looking for him.”

His entire face appeared to scowl. “Do you think I remember everyone who passes through here?”

“He looks a little different in the photo,” I tried to win Raul over, get him to really look at the photo, “and there’s been disagreement in my family. They say he killed himself but without a body how can you—?”

“Table for?” Raul addressed a couple who had walked into the restaurant. I stood aside and waited.

“Two.”

Raul snapped two oversized menus out of a nearby stand and led the couple to their table. I noticed that he carried his body with stiff rectitude yet walked with a leftward tilt he appeared unable to control. When he came back he took another look at the photo.

“This was taken at the bar,” he handed back the photo, “so shouldn’t you ask
at the bar
?”

“It’s nine-thirty in the morning.”

“Your point being?”

I thanked him and crossed the lobby to a frosted glass door with words etched in jazzy lettering:

and below that

. The door was ajar and the lights were on, but the place was empty aside from a bartender who smiled the moment I walked in.

“What can I get you?”

I showed him the photograph. Went through my routine.

Bill, according to his name tag, stroked his black mustache while he carefully looked at the picture. Then he sighed. “I don’t know him, but I can tell you that this was taken after five o’clock. That’s when we dim the lighting, bring on the mood.” Smiling, he handed me back the photo. “I usually work days. Come back later and try the night shift on for size.”

“Thanks.”

I went to sit in the lobby and figure out what to do now. There was a
ding
from the elevator and a couple with their two teenage daughters passed through the lobby, dressed for the beach. I didn’t know why but something about their easygoing chatter pulled me over a hump of resistance that had made me hesitate to take the next obvious step.

If Mac wasn’t here, and he didn’t appear to be, maybe he was at his girlfriend’s. At Deidre’s. A quick Google before I’d left New York had armed me with her Florida address.

Without any more rethinking or second guessing, I got up and went to the front desk.

“Tara, can you help me rent a car?”

“Of course.”

Half an hour later, I was driving out of Miami Beach onto Route 934, on my way to the interstate and Rio Vista in Fort Lauderdale.

I
stood in front of the cream stucco house beneath dripping magenta bougainvillea and waited for someone to answer the door. It was gearing up to be a hot day, and I was grateful for the sliver of shade provided by an overhang above the entrance.

The moment I heard footsteps I started to tremble with what was becoming a familiar rush of adrenaline: a toxic mix of anger and shame. I wanted to reap vengeance and at the same time I wanted to run away, get back into the car, and return to the relative safety of the hotel.

But it was too late: The door swung open.

“Karin!”

Deidre Stein looked different: Instead of the business suits or tailored dresses she had worn to her and Mac’s office, where I had met her several times, she was barefoot in white linen shorts and braless in a blue camisole. Her mocha skin was darker than it had been in New York and she had let her hair digress into its natural full-head halo. Seeing her like this, I never would have made her out to be either a Harvard MBA or the first African-American senior executive at Quest Security. She was light-skinned—half black and half white—and except for her skin color and the bravura of her hair, with her high cheekbones, green eyes, and slender sloped nose she resembled her Eastern European grandparents, the Steins, as much as her African forebears.

“Wow! What a
surprise
.”