The Hollow Girl (11 page)

Maybe it’s cultural, or maybe it’s part of the reassuring magic show we put on for those who will survive us. Even now, having gone through the horror, it’s hard to know. I still wonder about the things I said in the face of my prognosis and treatment. How, after Sarah’s wedding when I finally told everyone how ill I was, I went on about fighting and winning and beating the cancer as if I had a say in it. When I think back, I laugh at how I must have sounded like a losing coach’s halftime pep talk to an inept high school football team. Why do we so value the magic show, the putting on of brave faces? Inside, I was just like those leaves on the trees along the expressway. All I wanted to do was give in when I knew death was coming. I became impatient for it. I wanted to tap my watch crystal with my finger and say, “Come on already. I’m here. You’re late.”

I found Nancy where I thought I might, out by the pool. If I had been a swimmer, it’s where I would have been on such a false summer’s day. She was wearing a bathing suit this time, a red Speedo one-piece that accentuated the curves she had so carefully crafted. I thought back to when we’d first met, and how she would never have dreamed of wearing such a bathing suit. How, instead of her curves, it would have highlighted her weight and rolls of fat. And for the first time since we met at the El Greco, maybe for the first time since I’d seen her thirteen years ago, I gave her a break for wanting to be an object of desire. I remembered what Sarah had said about the world being tough on girls, even the pretty ones. And I recalled what Anna Carey had said about the kinds of roles offered to Siobhan: the friend, the sister, the nurse. Never the lead. What was wrong with Nancy wanting to be the lead in her own story? Maybe it hadn’t brought the happiness with it she surely hoped it would, but that wasn’t for me to judge.

Her face lit up when she noticed me, and I would be lying if I said I didn’t get a jolt from her smile. Men, even old ones like me, enjoy having an effect on women. Sometimes being old was like being invisible to women. Better to evoke pity or disgust than to evoke nothing at all. And since Pam’s death, I’d been a little dead inside myself. It felt nice to have a flutter, even a passing one. Suddenly, it didn’t seem to matter much to me how Nancy, or anyone else for that matter, had achieved their good looks. I guess I had held onto the ugly old Nancy very tightly and hadn’t been willing to relax my grip.

I grabbed her towel up from the edge of the pool. “We’ve gotta talk.”

“Sounds serious.”

“Might be.” I waved the towel at her. “Come on up outta there.”

She frowned and swam to the steps. “It
is
serious.”

I threw the towel over her shoulders. She hesitated for a second, hoping, I guess, that I might do the honors of drying her off. I was tempted. Instead, I sat down at the table near the cabana. She excused herself as she walked past me and said she’d be out in a few minutes.

Nancy returned as promised, that thick terry cloth robe cinched snug around her waist, her hair up in a towel. She stopped at the bar, poured herself a few fingers of twenty-one-year-old Glendronach.

“Want some?”

“Sure, but a short one,” I said. “What’s your e-mail address?”

Her face twisted in confusion. “Why?”

“I have to send you some photos for us to look at together, and my phone won’t do them justice.”

She put the glass down in front of me as she gave me the address. Then I forwarded the photos of the remains of Siobhan’s apartment to her e-mail. She waited to drink until I was done.

“L’chaim.” She touched the lip of her glass to mine. “To life.”

“If you say so.”

She drummed her fingers on the table. “So, you said we had to talk.”

I didn’t get directly to my point, choosing instead to update her on her daughter’s whereabouts between August 23 and September 13. I explained how I’d pieced Sloane’s travels together and how I thought I might go about filling in the holes that remained. Nancy listened with a peculiar sort of rapt disinterest: fussing with things, getting up to bring the expensive bottle of single malt back to the table with her. Yet, regardless of her practiced nonchalance, she could have repeated verbatim what I’d said; I would have bet on it. I recognized a defense mechanism when I saw one, and Nancy was displaying one writ large. God, the energy people expended on self-protection was enormous. The funny thing is that it never really works, except in the short run. And then, not always. I knew that better than most. As if to prove my point about her level of attention, Nancy interrupted.

“Did you say a motel in the Hamptons?”

“Yep. She stayed at the Stargazer Motel and Spa in Amagansett. Why?”

“Sloane always made it a point of telling me how much she detested the Hamptons. Her father has a home in East Hampton and she would never visit him there. Who knows with her? It wouldn’t be the first time my daughter did something contrary to what she said. She lives to be contrary. Maybe that bitch Millie McCumber suggested it.”

“That late bitch,” I chided.

“Don’t expect me to get all weepy over her, Moe. She was a dreadful woman who had a very bad influence on Sloane. And it was especially galling to me that she came back into Sloane’s life after I thought she’d cleansed herself of that witch. Millie had the habit of getting between us, Sloane and me.” Nancy poured herself a few more fingers and another for me.

“Hey, I’m a PI who owns a chain of wine stores with my brother. I’m no psychologist, but don’t you think that maybe your refusal to call your daughter by her name is as much responsible for this rift between you two as Millie McCumber?”

Nancy winced. Like a careless dentist, I’d apparently hit an exposed nerve. She finished off her second drink in a gulp and looked at the glass as if she’d just swallowed a mouthful of piss. She poured herself a third. “You’re right … you’re not a psychologist.”

“I talked to Siobhan’s agent, Anna—”

“Sloane! Her name is Sloane.”

“You call her what you want, but her professional name is Siobhan Bracken and I’m going with that. So I spoke to Anna Carey yesterday. She says that Siobhan could have all the work she wants, but won’t—”

“Take the parts she’s offered. I know. It’s an old story, Moe.”

“But—”

“Forget it. If you have a spare week sometime, I’ll try and explain it to you.”

No one, I thought, has a week to spare. No one. Ever. The problem is that you don’t usually realize it until it’s too late. “Sorry, fresh outta spare weeks.”

“Then c’mon in the house,” she slurred, moving toward the opening where the pool ended and the house began, bottle in hand, “and show me the photos.”

Nancy took me into an impossible room—impossible, to my mind, in a house so airy and bathed in light. The room was a dark, windowless little cubical on the second floor, just off the master bedroom. Accessible only through a door in the walk-in closet, I assumed the little room was meant to be used as additional closet space if the need arose. Of course, the walk-in closet was so cavernous to begin with that I couldn’t believe the need would ever arise. But I was wrong.
Imagine that
. It wasn’t extra space at all. Nancy told me that she had specifically had this area built as an office. She touched something on the wall and—
poof
—there was light, not a lot, but some, anyway. I could feel cool, fresh air circulating. The little room was the most interesting one in the whole joint that I could see because, unlike the rest of the house, the office looked as if a human actually used it. It was a mess. No interior designer had gotten within a mile of it. The desk and chairs didn’t match. There were photos, mostly of Nancy pre-metamorphosis, tacked to the walls. One was of Nancy in Patrick Michael Maloney’s arms. She caught me staring at it.

“You married Patrick’s older sister, didn’t you?” Nancy asked. It sounded like an accusation more than anything else. “I’m a little drunk, so I can ask.”

“Katy, yeah. We met alongside the Gowanus Canal. The cops found a floater they thought might’ve been Patrick. Katy was there to identify the body.”

She made a face. “How romantic.”

I ignored the sarcasm. “Not really. Have you ever seen a body after it’s been in the water a while? It ain’t pretty, Nancy. Seeing Millie the other day reminded me of that. She wasn’t very pretty to look at either. Why all these photos of your old self?”

“Reminders,” she said as if that somehow explained it all. I guess it did. Then she ripped the picture of her and Patrick off the wall and threw it in the trash.

“That’s what this room is too, isn’t it? A reminder. The ugly little core in the beautiful house.”

When I turned away from the photo, Nancy was standing very close to me and there was a yearning in her eyes so deep it nearly buckled my knees. And before I could take another breath, her lips were pressing against mine. She parted her lips and I parted mine. I felt my fingers burying themselves in terry cloth. Then, from the pocket of her robe, vibration and a ringtone of The Zombies’ “Time of the Season.”

I stepped back.

“Ignore it,” she said, but we both knew it was too late for that. The spell had been broken. She reached into her pocket, pulled out the phone, studied the screen. “It’s Julian. I should take this.”

“Go ahead.”

When she answered, she just listened. Then, “Calm down, Julian. Yes, he told me about Sloane’s apartment,” she lied, shaking her head at me and giving me a look angry enough to stop time. “Uh huh, yeah, I’ll have him call you. Calm down. Yes … uh huh … okay, Julian. So long.” She turned to me. “Julian says that—”

“His investigator notified him that the cops got a call about Siobhan’s apartment being trashed,” I finished her sentence. “That’s what’s in the photos I e-mailed you from my phone. Except I don’t think they represent what you and your husband will assume they represent.”

“What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”

“Boot up your computer and I’ll show you.”

Nancy was horrified as she clicked through the photos of her daughter’s apartment. It’s exactly how I expected her to react, and exactly how Julian Cantor must’ve reacted. I was not a fan of how they had raised their daughter, who, by the way, sounded just as responsible for her family’s
mishegas
as her parents. Still, it was heartening to know that, in spite of their crazy level of dysfunction, they loved each other. But it was precisely because of Nancy’s visceral reaction to the photos that I had driven here to see her and show her the photographs. What I had to say needed to be said in person.

She turned away from the screen after reviewing the photos three times. “I’m confused,” she said. “You knew about this hours ago, but didn’t bother to call me or mention it to me until after Julian called. We sat out by the pool and drank. We came up here and were this close to—”

“We kissed, Nancy. That’s all we were doing. But yes, you’re right. I didn’t tell you immediately.”

“Are you nuts? Why would you wait to tell me that Sloane’s apartment had been ransacked?”

“You know I was a New York cop for about ten years, right?”

She seemed offended, sounded bitter. “I know all about your career and even about your saving little Marina Conseco. You must tell me about her sometime, in all her incarnations. But what does your being a cop have to do with why you didn’t tell me?”

“It has everything to do with it,” I said, losing my patience. “I presume that you didn’t hire me only because you’ve been curious about being with me. That you thought I might actually find out what’s going on with Siobhan.” I didn’t wait for her to answer. “Well, it may have been a long time since I was a cop, but I haven’t lost my eye for detail or forgotten what I learned on the job.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means that someone trashed your daughter’s apartment on purpose, but not because they were looking to rob her. See there,” I pointed at Nancy’s computer screen, “her TV, her Bose system, her desktop … they’re all still there, though now in pretty rough shape. That stuff would be worth a fortune to a junky, but it wasn’t taken. I don’t know Siobhan’s apartment, but it doesn’t look like anything’s missing. Can you see anything missing that should be there?”

“No,” she said. “Not from these pictures.”

“Did Siobhan have a lot of jewelry? Did she keep cash on hand?”

“Jewelry wasn’t her thing. She had some, but most of the time she wore what little she had. Cash … no, she didn’t keep a lot in the apartment. Her bank is not thirty feet from her building’s front door. What are you getting at? Is there a point here, Moe?”

“We’re almost there. You know, beside the fact that it didn’t seem to me that anything of value was taken from the flat, there was another odd thing I found when I was there.”

“And that would be … .”

“There was not a solitary sign of forced entry at Siobhan’s place. Not one. I checked and rechecked. Whoever did this had a key, or was let in by someone who had a key.”

“What?”

“A key. It’s a little piece of metal with ridges and grooves that—”

She flushed with anger. “This isn’t funny.”

“It isn’t. I agree.”

“All right, so nothing’s missing and the person or persons that did this didn’t break in. From all that you conclude, what, exactly?”

“That what happened at Siobhan’s flat was bullshit. It was staged to look like a crime, but wasn’t a crime at all.”

“Have you lost your mind?” She was screaming at me, pointing at the screen. “Look at the damage. Thank God Sloane wasn’t there.”

“That’s the point, Nancy. I think she was.”

“She was what?”

“There.”

She looked gut-punched. “You’re joking.”

“I think Siobhan’s responsible for the damage. Maybe she had a little help. It would have been tough to wreak all that havoc by herself. And maybe I have an idea who her assistant was.”

“But why? Why would she do—”

“C’mon, Nancy. Think. Look at yourself. You and your ex-husband are probably ready to walk through concrete and chew through steel if it means keeping Siobhan safe.”

“That’s ridiculous. You don’t even know Sloane. She would never do something like this.”