Nowhere Girl (4 page)

“She's behind the school, in the Wolfe Mansion,” I said.

Chief Fisher's smile revealed a cracked front tooth. “If her sister is truly missing, how would she know where she is?” he said to Tunney while he watched me.

Savannah and I had always been connected. We were conceived from the same egg, slept face-to-face in our crib, spoke our own language, and loved and sometimes hated each other in the same way you love and hate yourself. I knew what was happening the way an arthritic feels a storm coming in the ache of her knee or a junkie feels the twinge of the jones before the drug is completely out of his system. I knew because it was getting harder and harder to breathe.

“Chief,” Patrick Tunney had said. “I think she knows.”

The cop who'd arrived in Fisher's car joined them. Maybe for lack of knowing what else to do, Captain Fisher and his partner set out toward the abandoned house. Officer Tunney stayed with me. While we waited for my parents, he talked about inane things, his voice filling the silence of my missing sister. I learned that Patrick was twenty-two, fresh out of the academy, a Van Halen fan, and had three greyhounds named David, Lee, and Roth.

They say it took three minutes and forty-four seconds for the ambulance to arrive after they found my sister. In the span of that short time, we lost her.

Instead of letting that memory drown me, I'd write. I'd write to stay alive. I'd write to keep the pain out of reach. Sometimes I didn't even shower. I'd put on a pair of sweats and a hoodie, get my laptop and my car keys, and head out the door to find a place far away from the cold, gray fortress Greg had insisted we buy. I wasn't spewing words on pages as my therapy or capitalizing on a past tragedy like some people thought. I believed that if I wrote enough, did enough research, interviewed enough perps and victims, got inside the minds of murderers, went back again and again to that day, I might actually find Savannah's killer. It didn't matter to me that years of doing this yielded nothing. I would never give up.

*   *   *

When I looked at the clock, it was 9:30 in the morning, and my first thought was that Brady Irons was going to be there at noon. Greg had left hours ago, but Bach was still playing downstairs. After my shower, I wrapped myself in a towel and stood in front of the walk-in closet, trying to decide what to wear. I finally found a cashmere periwinkle turtleneck sweater and a pair of pants that sort of flattened my stomach.

Downstairs, the white walls of our house seemed to vibrate with the Brandenburg Concertos. “In the words of Dylan Thomas's Organ Morgan,” Greg had said on one of our first dates, “Bach is the best.” That was back when I didn't realize he had a habit of quoting people, as though the ability to regurgitate what others said lent credence to his opinions. I went over to the cabinet, turned off Bach, and instead set my iPod to Mary J. Blige and Bono singing “One.” Then I sat down on the couch with my thirty-three pages of
Devils and Dust
. I couldn't concentrate because I kept thinking about Brady Irons. Before I could write a whole page, I closed my laptop and went to the kitchen to make croissants.

*   *   *

He was on time. Actually, he was early. The croissants were still in the oven when I heard his truck coming up the driveway, so I shut the oven off and ran to open the front door.

“Wow, your house is so … spacious.” Brady followed me through the foyer to the kitchen and draped his jacket on a hard-as-concrete bar stool that I didn't let anyone sit on unless I hated them.

“Yeah, that would be Greg. We used to live in this great little cape down by the train tracks. And now we live”—I turned around in the mammoth house—“here.” I felt like I was borrowing it. I would have stayed in that tiny house forever. Greg and I bought it together, we made it ours together, we had loved each other in it.

Brady's boots echoed on the marble floor as he wandered from the kitchen to the great room. “How long have you been married?” He seemed somehow out of place, standing near the grand piano with the sound cabinet on his left and that stark living room in various shades of white and silver to his right. The wall of windows with the view of Stanwich's conservation lands was behind him as he studied the Underwood typewriter on the antique sewing table I'd found at the Golden Nugget Flea Market.

“Seven years.” I'd put photographs between the Underwood's keys, old black and whites from childhood and from when Greg and I were first together. Brady picked up one of Greg holding my hand on the Ocean Grove boardwalk, his sun-bleached hair pulled back in one of my elastics. Chandler had taken that picture. I'd been out of college a year, freelancing for $1.50 a word at
Glamour
and
Cosmo.
I felt self-conscious having him in my house studying my photos and asking about my life.

Brady put the picture back between the old keys. Greg hated the typewriter. He thought it didn't go with the modern décor. “It goes with me,” I'd told him. He'd answered me with a non sequitur. “You love writing more than humans.”

“Coffee?” I asked. “We have some great Kenyan.”

“Sounds good.” He was studying another photograph—Savannah and me with her horse, Bliss.

I measured the coffee and silently prayed he wouldn't ask about her. “How 'bout you? Are you married?”

He shot me a look before turning back to a picture of David, Chandler, and me smooshed together on a seesaw at Baskin Park.

“Not officially. Colette and I have been together five years.” He sounded exhausted. I dumped coffee in the filter and watched him run his hand across the shelf where I kept translations of my books.

“Not everyone needs a piece of paper to prove their love.” I wondered if Greg and I would still be together if we weren't married. I poured water in the coffeepot and watched him pull down a book, open it, and then put it back. “Colette's a pretty name. Do you have pictures?” I had no desire to see his girlfriend, but I didn't know what else to say.

“My phone's in my truck; I'll show you next time.”

Next time
, I thought, realizing how much I wanted to see him again.

“How many languages are here?” he asked.

The machine started whirring. Coffee tasted like ass to me, but if Greg was going to spend two hundred bucks a month on it, I might as well get my money's worth. “Forty-seven, I think. I can't really remember.”

He whistled low.

I pulled down two mugs and waited for the heat in my face to fade. I hated talking about my success.

“Colette's a great girl,” he said suddenly, putting his hands in his pockets and standing in front of the west-facing windows where the stark February maples lined the Autumn Hill Reservation. He was wearing jeans, tight enough to make me notice. “But she's … complicated.” His voice trailed off.

I pictured her, a woman with big eyes and very thin with bloodred lips. “Aren't we all?”

He turned quickly, his eyes suddenly confused, almost hurt. “What makes you say that?”

“Greg's a shrink.” The coffee was slowing down, and it smelled so good I wished I liked the taste. “He thinks everyone's damaged. Eight years and he's still trying to change”—I swept my hands up and down my sides—“this.” I grabbed a carton of half-and-half from the fridge.

Brady walked toward me. “What's there to change?”

“Oh, who knows?” Heat was creeping up my neck again. I didn't want to talk about relationships, especially mine. I poured the half-and-half into a creamer, grabbed a sugar bowl, put it all on one of the trays my grandmother had given me, and then headed to the couch. “I'm so happy you're here. You have no idea. I'm totally up a creek.” I set the tray down and tossed a copy of
Biological Psychiatry
on the end table.

Brady sat next to me. “What's the book called?”

“
Devils and Dust.
”

“Great title.” He watched me pour the coffee into the cups.

“That's pretty much all I've got. A title and about three dozen pages written. Oh, and a deadline.” I answered his next question before he asked. “It usually takes me six to seven months to research and write a first draft. I have 125 days.”

“Then we'd better get a move on.” He grinned a delicious bad-boy smile and ran his fingers through his hair. “Let's talk prison.”

Brady spent the next hour and a half listing average length of time served depending on the crime; the breakdown of how inmates' days were spent, provided they weren't in solitary or maximum; and the pecking order, from the armed robbers, who were kings, to the mass killers, who were exempt from social filing.

While he talked, I could smell him, a mixture of leather and smoke. I was a Princeton girl. The boys I knew held doctorates; they were M.D.s and stockbrokers. Brady was a different species, and there was something unbearably beautiful about sitting next to him, his boots, the hands that had trouble resting anywhere. The same hands that had restrained criminals, arm muscles so taut they made me feel spacey. Brady set his mug on a coaster, and I knew as he continued to chat, his sad eyes scanning the room as though memorizing it, I had no business thinking of him in any way other than as someone who was helping me with research. I was married. And plump. I'd slept with two men and kissed three others.

“And of course, there are the untouchables, the rapists,” he was saying, focusing on the middle space between us, “and pedophiles.”

An awkward silence hung over the room. It had started raining, and it pinged against the glass. I set my mug down next to his.

“This is great information,” I said. “But what I really need is to talk to an inmate and not someone in there for petty crimes. I need a murderer.”

Brady glanced at the Chopard clock by the fireplace Greg had gotten for me for Christmas. “Is that clock right?”

“Yep. Do you have to be somewhere?”

“Shit. Yes, I've got to get home before I go to Hope's Place.” He got up so fast he almost knocked over his coffee.

I cleared our mugs. I had an odd, insatiable need to know more, to follow him to the prison, to go home with him and keep up our conversation.

“We're at David's every Thursday night,” I said as I walked him to the door. “He'd love to see you if you ever wanted to come.”

“Every week?” Brady was working his hands into leather gloves.

We'd been going to David's once a week for dinner for as long as I could remember. The origin of the custom had long since escaped my memory, but we were as loyal to our dinners as wolves to their alpha, as bees to the flowers they pollinated.

“It's been a tradition for years. We almost never miss a week,” I said.

Over the years, David and I had extended the obligatory invitation to our spouses to join us for homemade beef burgundy or frozen lasagna, but Greg was always playing his bassoon or drinking a hundred-dollar bottle of scotch with his golf buddies, and Emma was busy with her sorority sisters. Eventually, we stopped asking them. I always wondered if David put out the dishes after Emma and her badly done highlights left to sip espresso with some girl named Chippie or Twinkie and discuss the new seasonal colors being introduced at J.Crew.

“That's so nice. Who goes?”

“Other than David and me, it's usually my best friend, Gabby, and sometimes her boyfriend. Also David's best friend, Chandler, and Chandler's boyfriend, Odion.” I waited for him to react to Chandler being gay. Chandler'd come out in middle school with the support of his parents and practically the entire student body. When Brady appeared not to care, I continued. “If they can't get a sitter, their daughter, Madelyn, will make a guest appearance. She's the only child any of us has, so we all adore her. You should definitely come. We love visitors.”

“I remember Chandler and Gabby from Kingswood.”

“Odion and Chandler have been together since college, so he's one of us. And Gabby's been with Duncan for a while. Just two librarians in love. You should come. It's a good time. Sometimes we're at Gabby's or Chandler's, but usually we go to David's.”

“Greg doesn't go.” It wasn't a question.

“No.” I opened our massive front door. The lawn seemed to be bathed in ice. “He doesn't like to go out on work nights. But really, my friends don't like him.”

His eyes flickered, but he didn't say anything. “And David married Emma Fisher, right?”

“Yup.” I closed the door a little. The wind was making me cold. “And now she's divorcing him.”

“She always seemed like a handful.” Brady was out the door now, his collar pulled up against the rain. “I'd love to come to one of your dinners. Maybe I can swing it. I don't have a lot of time between the shelter and tutoring at the prison.”

“Wow! You're an angel in people clothes. Tutoring? What subject?”

“All of them. I help inmates get their GEDs.”

“Well, if you ever have time, you're more than welcome to come to a dinner.”

“Thanks, but between my job, volunteering, and Colette, I stay pretty busy.”

“Bring her if you want to,” I said hurriedly, though I wasn't at all sure I wanted to meet her.

Brady made a sound that seemed like it might have wanted to be a laugh. “Colette doesn't go out very much. She, uh, has trouble with social settings.” There was something in his voice that told me not to ask. He put his hand on the door, and I stepped back. “Did they ever catch the guy?” He kept looking out at the ice spitting on the grass.

I knew exactly what he was talking about, and there was something intimate in his never mentioning Savannah's name, never referring to the actual crime. But the question baffled me. I was sure everyone knew they hadn't. “Nope,” I said, trying to sound blasé. “The fucker's still out there.”