Stay With Me (22 page)

“Your son have pierced ears?” Diane said. “Because I notice you don’t.”

Janine said nothing.

Diane turned to face her. As she slipped her hand into her coat, she glanced down at the woman’s shoes. Sensible, white shoes. Pastel nurses’ pants under the dark coat.
That’s
where she’d seen this woman before. The blue-eyed nurse who’d passed her in the corridor of the Tarry Ridge Hospital at three in the morning, the one coming toward her as she walked to Carver’s room . . .

“I know who you are.”

Janine socked her in the stomach.

Diane crumpled up, the air barreling out of her, lights flickering in front of her eyes. She tried again for her coat, for the gun in her shoulder holster, but then something crashed into the side of her head, something huge and heavy and mean. She tasted blood in her mouth, and saw a pool of it on the sidewalk, along with three tiny white stones . . . they were teeth. Her teeth.

The pain was blinding.

She went again for her coat, but Janine’s arm came up and then down, the weight of her gun connecting with Diane’s head.

No chance
, she thought.

And that earring, that poor tiny earring in the pocket of her coat as the gun landed on the top of her skull and white light flooded in and she was beyond pain, beyond thought.

18

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Brenna said.

“It wasn’t anything worth talking about,” her mother said.

“Someone broke into your house.”

“A drunken woman,” she said. “She thought my house was hers, and I called the police and she left peacefully.”

Brenna stared at her screen—an article in the
City Island Times
, not about the break-in, but about a car accident two years later, in the earliest hours of morning on August 5, 2007, one that had resulted in the death of one of the island’s oldest trees—and ultimately, in Sophia Castillo’s DUI.

“She was back in your neighborhood two years later,” Brenna said. “She killed a tree.”

“Well I didn’t know anything about that.”

“You didn’t read it in the paper?”

“If I did,” she said, “I don’t recall it.”

The newspaper article was one of the few mentions Brenna had been able to find online of a Sophia Castillo from New York state. No Facebook page, no Twitter, no languishing MySpace page. No LinkedIn or Match.com profile . . . Just a five-year-old staff listing at St. Vincent’s—she’d worked there as a nurse in the ER—and an eight-year-old White Pages entry in Katonah for Sophia and Christopher. No phone number. Just an address. It was as though she was trying to make as small an impact on the world as possible. Even the article in the paper was brief, with a picture of Sophia’s car next to the decimated tree—but no mug shot. No personal photo. Nothing at all of Sophia herself.

“Would you be able to describe the woman? Maybe pick her out of a lineup?”

“The one who broke into my house?”

“Yes.”

“
Why?
”

Brenna sighed. “Just please answer me, Mom.”

“I never saw her.”

“Seriously?”

“I locked myself in my bedroom and called 911 when I heard the window break, Brenna,” Evelyn Spector said. “Wouldn’t
you
?”

“Yes. Yes, of course I would.”

“I mean really,” she said. “Why do you even bring this up? It was years ago.”

“Mom?”

“Yes?”

Brenna tried to sound calm. “Did you . . . Did you ever hear from her again? I mean . . . a phone call . . . anything?”

“Why on earth would I hear from some crazy drunk woman?”

“No idea. Sorry. I’ve got to go.”

“Brenna, what is going on?”

“I’m on an important case. I’ll call you later.” Brenna hung up, grateful in the knowledge that her mother did not know how to work a computer, that she rarely watched TV, and so it would be a long while before she caught wind of Faith’s on-air announcement. Hopefully long enough.

“You’re not going to tell her?” Trent said.

“I am,” said Brenna. “Just not now.”
I’ll tell her once we find Maya and bring her home and everything is back to normal again
.

Brenna said, “So tell me what you found on the Families of the Missing page.”

“Umm . . .”

“Trent, I don’t have time to play twenty questions with you. If you found something, if you found
anything
, you can’t mince words. You can’t worry about the right way to say things. There’s too much at stake for that.”

“Okay,” he said. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Maya never cleared her instant message cache, so I’ve got a couple months’ worth of IM exchanges, all of them between Maya and NYCJulie.”

“Okay.”

“There are a lot.”

Brenna nodded. “NYCJulie said they were good friends.”

“I’m talking hundreds.”

“Well, with an online friend, it’s easy to rack up a lot of messages.”

Trent gave her a long look. “Brenna,” he said. “I don’t like these messages.”

She got up, moved over to his desk. He tapped the screen—an exchange dated December 23 between NYCJulie and NYCYoru, aka Maya.

NYCJulie:
Your mom’s not being responsive to your needs. You got attacked by some psycho because of her selfishness. Who does she care more about? Her dead sister or you?

NYCYoru:
She doesn’t think her sister is dead.

NYCJulie:
Wow. Way to go off topic.

NYCYoru:
LOL. She loves me, tho.

NYCJulie:
How do you know? How do you know her disorder isn’t a form of autism?

NYCYoru:
Who cares if it is?

NYCJulie:
It might make it impossible for her to focus on you in the way you need her to. She might be incapable of caring.

NYCYoru:
I don’t even get what you’re saying.

NYCJulie:
Her obsession with the past, and with finding her sister, might be the most important thing to her. More important than you.

Trent put an arm on Brenna’s shoulder. “She’s full of crap,” he said.

“Maybe.” She had a lump in her throat. “But she’s got some basis in the truth.”

The buzzer sounded.

“Can you get that?” Brenna said.

Trent got up and moved over to the door. She heard him talking to Morasco over the speaker system, buzzing him in, but she wasn’t listening to what they were saying. She read on:

NYCYoru:
Well what am I supposed to do about that? Go, “Hey Mom. How come you love your dead sister more than me?” LOL

NYCJulie:
I don’t know. Maybe talk to a shrink?

NYCYoru:
About me or her?

NYCJulie:
Both. Mostly her though.

NYCYoru:
Wait! I could go to the one she went to as a kid. I can ask him about her.

NYCJulie:
That’s a great idea, hon. But seriously? What I want you to take away from this is that it isn’t your fault. It’s never a kid’s fault. It’s always on the parents. Your mom has a lot to answer for.

Morasco put a bagel in front of Brenna, along with a cup of coffee. “Eat,” he said. “You have to, if we’re going to find her.”

“Dude, listen to him.” Normally, she would have chastised him for talking with his mouth full—a habit he should have broken at the age of seven. But there was no normal now. There was only Maya. The lack of her, and the words she’d left behind.

“I already had a kaiser roll,” Brenna said. But she did take the coffee. Her gaze stayed on the screen.

“Did you find out anything about Castillo?” Morasco said.

“An article about the DUI. It’s up on my computer. If you enlarge the picture, you can probably see the driver’s license.”

“Okay,” he said. “You talk to your mom?”

She nodded. “Nothing worthwhile.”

He kissed her on the forehead. She barely felt it. Hadn’t even looked at him since he’d come in and she knew that was unfair, but she couldn’t help it.

“How’s it going with IA?” she said, still staring at the screen.

“Pretty good,” he said. “The guy I was dealing with back in October has been very helpful.”

“You going to get your badge back soon?”

“He says forty-eight hours, tops. We’ll see how it shakes out.” Morasco moved toward Brenna’s computer.

She kept at it, scrolling through message upon message, the words “Mom” and “unfair” and “real love” flying past her eyes and then more words still, words she never knew were on her daughter’s mind, words she never expressed to Brenna, or maybe she had but they’d gone unheard . . . and thus unremembered.

So hurt . . . no cure for it . . . I just wish we could talk . . . Wish she’d talk to Dad . . . Please don’t tell anyone . . . feel so alone . . .

“You don’t need to look at all of it,” Trent said.

“Yes I do.”

Brenna saw Miles’s name at January 4, 5:30
P.M.
Brenna remembered Maya coming home from school late that day—5:20 according to the clock in the kitchen. “
I’ve got tons of homework, Mom.”

Brenna glances up from the onion she’s been dicing and sees a flash of blonde hair, the bright blue coat, Maya heading up the hall and into her bedroom.

She hears the soft creak of Maya’s door as it shuts.

“I’m making chicken and rice,” Brenna calls out. “Is that okay?”

No answer.

Brenna sighs. “It better be okay,” she says to the onion, “because that’s what we’re having.”

But now, as Brenna pinched herself back into the present and read the exchange between Maya and NYCJulie, an exchange that had taken place moments after she closed the door . . . Brenna’s chest tightened. Tears sprung into her eyes and again, she felt herself sinking.
Maya. Oh Maya. You had your first kiss. You and Miles. That day in his apartment. You kissed him.

“Oh my God,” Morasco said.

Brenna swatted at her eyes and turned to him. He was frozen, the mouse clutched in his hand. She got up and moved toward him. “What?”

He’d enlarged the picture so much that the car’s bumper filled the screen. Brenna could clearly see the New York license plate, the bumper sticker: “My Child Is an Honor Student at George Washington Elementary.”

“When I ran across the street to question Carver, I’d spoken to a woman first—a soccer mom filling up at the Lukoil station.”

“Yes?”

“We spoke to her—Cavanaugh, Cerulli, and I. Asked her a few questions, but she looked scared and confused. A waste of time—she’d obviously seen nothing, and there was Carver, right across the street, a drug addict, sweating bullets, Maya’s phone ringing away in his coat pocket.”

“Nick, why are you telling me this?”

“Because,” Nick said. “This is her bumper. This is her car.”

“
What?
”

“The woman we let go. The soccer mom. That woman was Sophia Castillo.”

The key for Sophia was to not think too hard about it. It was like so many other things that, when focused on too intently, went from second nature to impossible. You do it, you leave. You don’t let thought become a part of the process.

And so in this case, what Sophia needed to do was to take off her coat and throw it in the backseat without thinking about the bloodstains, to twist the cap off the container of gasoline without thinking about the smell, and to spill the gasoline on the coat, on the seat, on the front seat, too, and the dashboard and wherever else it would go, to do all that without thinking about the car she’d owned and loved since Robert was seven.

Don’t think. Just do
.

She stepped back from the car. The pink sweater that she held still reeked of vomit, but it had dried off by now, and when she held a match to it, the frail, fuzzy thing ignited fast. She tossed it into the backseat and ran away from the clearing and into the woods as fast as she could. She didn’t stop running until she reached the tree. Didn’t turn around until she heard the roar behind her.

Funny about cars. They’re just big hunks of metal filled with toxic chemicals, but we attach such meaning to them, it’s as though they’re members of the family. Sophia sighed. She listened to the crackling of the fire. The heat bit at her eyes, even from here.

She clicked open her purse, checked her cash supply—she still had plenty. She took out her phone, but before she turned it on again, she caught a glimpse of herself in the glass. Definitely in need of a freshening. Sophia pulled out her lipstick, twisted off the cap, and got angry, all over again. The top of the lipstick was bashed in and flecked with brown bark. She dusted it off, dotted her lips with the color, but very lightly. If she wanted to use the lipstick the way it was intended to be used, she’d need a pack of Kleenex and a razor blade.
Maya
. This had been expensive lipstick, too. What was wrong with that girl?

At least the lipstick can be saved
, she thought, watching the car, her beloved car, flames wrapped around it like a cocoon.
Some things can’t be saved, no matter how hard you hope.

Déjà vu
, Brenna thought, once she and Morasco arrived at Faith’s, where they’d all agreed to meet after exchanging information about Castillo. There they were yet again, Jim and Faith sitting at the island, only this time, instead of Plodsky, they were sitting across from a guy with salt and pepper hair; a thick, ruddy neck; and a shiny brown coat that strained against the bulk of him. A manila folder was sprawled open on the table, a stack of pictures inside.

“Hello?” Nick said.

Tight Sportcoat stood up, stuck out a beefy hand. “I’m Ray Sykes. Detective Plodsky’s partner.”

Brenna had spoken to him earlier. She recognized his voice from the phone. “Diane’s still not back from the next-of-kin call?” Brenna said.

“Traffic must be bad,” Sykes said. “We’ve gone ahead with the AMBER Alert. And we’re putting out a BOLO on the license plate, with descriptions of both Sophia Castillo and your daughter.” He glanced at Faith. “Thanks to the on-air announcement, we’ve already gotten a lot of calls on the tip line, and once it hits the news cycles, I’m sure we’ll be getting a lot more. The problem is weeding through everything. A lot of nuts call these lines.”

“Anything worthwhile?” Brenna said.

“Not unless you believe in alien abductions.”

Faith said, “Detective Sykes?”

“Yes?”

“It’s been more than thirty-six hours since Maya got into that car on the West Side Highway.”

“That’s correct, ma’am.”

“That’s a very long time.”

Brenna said, “Have you pinged Sophia’s cell phone?”

“Trying.”

Brenna didn’t say anything. She had a terrible feeling, as though she was thrashing around in deep, churning water with nothing to hang on to.

From the open folder on the table, a mug shot stared up at her. She put a hand on it.

“That’s from the 2007 DUI,” Sykes said.

She nodded, drew it to her and stared at Sophia Castillo’s pale, drawn face, the mud-brown hair, the cloudy, sunken eyes that refused to look at the camera. There was something familiar about the face. But more in the expression than the actual features—which were so different from those of the blue-eyed patrician soccer mom Morasco had described seeing at the gas station. How could they find a chameleon like that? And Maya . . . who knew where she was keeping her, what she was doing to her. Who knew what Maya looked like now?