The Vanishing Year (22 page)

I calculate the distance between Cash's apartment in the
Village and Bay Ridge, Brooklyn. It's not far. Twenty-five minutes by cab, maybe? My heart picks up speed.

Cash wanders into the kitchen at seven, as I'm sipping my third cup of black coffee. My eyes feel tacky behind the lids, sore and scratching.

“So, today, will you call your sister?” He opens his mouth wide, half yawning, half stretching.

“More than that—I'm going there.” I run my fingertip along the lip of the coffee cup.

He covers his surprise. “Really? When?”

“As soon as this coffee kicks in.”

“Why?”

“I haven't been entirely truthful with you.” I stand up, blow out a breath, sit back down. “When I lived in California, I got mixed up in some really terrible things. I was a mess. I did drugs, I even sold drugs.”

“I can't tell you how this blows my mind.” Cash smiles. He stands up and retrieves a plate of cinnamon rolls from the refrigerator and motions for me to take one.

“You don't seem shocked?” I tuck one foot under my leg, touch the icing with my index finger. It comes away white and sticky.

“Zoe, a
lot
of people do drugs, sell drugs, clean up their lives. Change their lives. It's really not that shocking.”

I turn this over, the idea that maybe the life I've been desperate to bury under layers of silk Chanel isn't as awful as I'd thought.

“I'm a different person, sometimes I think maybe that person didn't exist, or at least I wish she didn't. She wasn't a particularly
good
person, I don't think.”

“You're too critical. Young people do stupid things. It's the basis for every coming-of-age romantic comedy I've ever seen. It's the plot of most novels. The basis for a zillion rock songs.”

I say nothing. Being forgiven for my choices has never
been an option. I pull a piece of gooey iced roll apart and pop it in my mouth. It melts on my tongue, perfectly flaky and sweet. “Holy shit, did you make this?”

“Give me a break,” he says, his mouth twisted in a smirk. “My father was a baker. I learned from the best.”

“It's amazing.” I pull another piece and chase it with a swig of hot coffee. Sitting here, in this cozy kitchen in the dim light of morning, I feel comfortable. Accepted. “Anyway, I wasn't done. I ratted out what ended up being a high-profile sex-trafficking ring. I testified in a grand jury and was . . . threatened. Nearly killed because of it.
That's
why I ran. Changed my name, left everything behind. Left Evelyn.” The words slide out almost easily, these words that I haven't said to anyone in five years. It's surprising. Cash has a stillness about him that begets confessions, like the bulk of his body can absorb shocking words, pulling them away from the source the way a tributary shunts water. It's why I told him about Evelyn in the first place, back in the car.

“You think they're back? These men who . . . threatened you?” Cash asks softly.

“I really do. I know it sounds crazy and I can't prove it. Officer Yates was looking into it after the first break-in. I called the old detective from the case but he's retired and the case is old and things get lost.” I shrug. “But now, I'm certain of it. The careening car, the missing credit card, my ransacked apartment, and the break-in last night. It's all too coincidental. I can't shake this feeling. And all when I'm finding Caroline, too. Then she gets this threatening phone call?”

“What do you mean?”

“I don't know!” I push my palm flat and hard against the tabletop. “I can't explain it. I just feel like this is all connected somehow. I have to call Yates back today. I have to find my sister. Maybe warn Caroline. This is all on me. I've brought these people to their doorsteps. Maybe.”

“Zoe, you're being way too hard on yourself. Do you hear you? None of this is your fault. Everyone has a past. In some ways, everyone runs from them. Maybe not literally.” He gives me a gentle grin. “What could they want from you after all this time? Do you think they want revenge?”

“I'm not sure, but it's scaring me. I feel like I could jump out of my skin.” I rub my arms, trying to get warm. I stand up and fill his coffee cup, absently.

“I could get used to this. What's your fee?” Cash laughs.

“Oh, you can't afford me,” I joke lightly, then wince at the perceived truth in that. I shake my hands loose. “Did you paint the sun in your room?”

“Um, my little sister did. She said I needed some light in my life.” He scratches his cheek and leans back in his chair.

“Some light?”

“Oh, that came out more melodramatic than I wanted. It was right after Mary. I was in a permanent bad mood most days.” He smiles and sips his coffee, raising his eyebrows. “Hey, this is good!”

We sip in silence until he breaks it. “Do you want me to come with you?”

I think about it. “No, I don't think so. I think I can take a cab there.”

“If you're right, and you're a target, should you be alone?”

“What will you do?” I tease. “Carry your baseball bat around?”

“Point taken.” He raises his cup to me. “Call me right after, okay? I'll be worried.”

“And curious. You
are
a reporter.” I give him a sly smile.

“I admit. I'll be curious. But more than that,
I'll be worried.
”

“Sure, sure. But first,” I wipe my palms on my jeans, “I need to call Yates.”

•  •  •

“I don't know, Zoe.” Yates's voice huffs through the line, soft and kind, but doubtful. “It seems like a stretch. Everything you're chalking up to one person could all be coincidence, or even yawing bad luck.”

“Did you look up Michael Flannery? Jared Pritchett? Remember what they did to me?” My voice hitches higher and higher and I can feel the screech in my neck, my throat. I take two deep breaths. I'm just pissed, I want to be believed. I want
someone
to say I'm not overreacting. Someone to say it makes sense, they'll look into it, help me. That I'm not crazy. “Are you sure there was no one at the apartment?”

She sighs into the phone, a defeated heavy, empty sound. “There was no one there. No one saw anything, no one heard anything.”

“Can you dust for prints?” My thoughts spin, seeking something to latch on to.

“We didn't, Zoe.” I hear the din of the office die down and I wonder if she's taken the phone into an interview room for privacy. I'm now a call that warrants privacy. “First of all, prints are only good enough if we have someone to compare them to. That hallway has seen the building staff, repairmen, yourself, Henry. There was no evidence at that door that there was even an attempted break-in—”

“Because we ran!” I protest. Cash peeks out from the living room and mouths,
Okay?
I wave him away. “Cash was there, he'll give a statement.”

“I know, Zoe. I believe you, I do. But look, it's a resource problem. You say a man was outside your door. He didn't do anything, didn't take anything, we have no evidence that he was there. We can't send techs out to dust for prints and process them through the lab when there are
real
crimes being committed all over Manhattan. Can you see that?”

“I'm being pursued. I know it.” I dig my nails into the soft denim on my thighs until I feel the sharp tang of pain.

“Zoe, I wanted to tell you this last night, but then you called me and the attempted break-in took precedence.” Her voice lowers a register until I can barely understand her. “I looked up Michael Flannery. I don't know how to say this, but I couldn't find any record of him in the system.”

“What?” Her words make no sense, this looming untenable feeling, like I'm about to be harpooned and left as chum for circling sharks.

“Your guy, Mick.” She coughs nervously into the phone. “Zoe, he doesn't exist.”

•  •  •

I cross Fourteenth Street and hail a cab. I pull the index card out of my purse and huff the address across the divider to the cabbie. The East River is in front of me, wide and almost dark green in late morning sun. Within minutes, the cab is crossing the Brooklyn Bridge, speeding through those iconic double stone arches, surrounded by ramrod cables so thick and straight that if I squint my eyes, they look like prison bars. I think of the mysterious Mick, so elusive now, so present in my mind. Yates said she could find no record of him: in prison, in the system, now or ever. He wasn't living in San Francisco. She couldn't find a man with that name and approximate age anywhere in the United States. He was a ghost. A phantom.

Phantoms can slip in and out of your life with ease. Nothing she said was a comfort. If anything, the fear had worked its way down into my heart and my stomach flipped and gurgled. I still felt the connection between the strange events of the past two weeks, as real and tangible as though they were tied together with metal cables. But even Cash seemed skeptical. How do you convince someone of an unlikely truth, even if you know it down deep in your bones? You don't.

Mick was always less of a concern than Jared, with his
shock of black hair, his black eyes, pale skin, the bulging scar that ran from his forehead to his chin. The smell of his breath, hot and sour on my face. The feel of his hands on my arm, twisting, twisting behind my back. Rosie's pink, shining lip glistening with the word JAREd in black ink. A man who will brand a teenage girl will think nothing of tracking down the woman who put him in jail, only to kill her. Terrify her, then kill her. Mick was never a ringleader. He was a user, of both people and drugs. He was lost, like me. Did Jared kill Mick, and now he's after me?

Bay Ridge, a neighborhood in Brooklyn, sits in the loop between Gowanus and Shore Parkway, punctuated at the bottom with the Verrazano-Narrows Bridge, like a happy exclamation point.
Exit here!

I wonder how long she's lived here, if she commutes to Manhattan. If so, have we been to the same stores, the same hair salons? What would have happened if we'd seen each other? Would we have gotten the same haircut, switched places, like a Hayley Mills movie? I would be Sharon, she could be Susan. I imagine biting my nails to match hers, exchanging wardrobes.

Although we've lived mere miles apart, it might as well be a thousand. New Yorkers are shockingly local—if it's not available within a three-block radius, it simply no longer exists. We like to walk everywhere, even subway rides are inconvenient. I once overheard a man in a coffee shop refer to his girlfriend as a “long-distance relationship” because she lived on the Upper East Side and he lived in the Village. There were just too many train connections. You can forget anyone who commutes in from Jersey. Brooklyn and Manhattan are like different states.

The cab pulls on to Seventy-Seventh Street and parks in front of a tan-painted Cape Cod, almost gingerbread-like, with a brick facade and a cemented-over front yard. It looks
well cared for, surrounded by a black iron fence. I pay the cabbie and climb out, taking a deep breath at the gate.

The hedges are neatly trimmed, and the window boxes have bright, bursting flowers. Too bright for April, pinks and yellows, daisies and spring mums, it's much too early for so much bloom. In front of me, looking solemn and kind with her arms outstretched in welcome, stands a concrete bathtub Mary. She's beautiful, ensconced in a periwinkle shrine, two clamshelled cherubs at her feet. I look up and down the street—more houses with too bright flowers, more Madonna statues. The flowers, I realize too slowly, are silk.

I ring the bell and from inside calls a voice, “Hang on!” A woman opens the door. Big hair, dark skin, long nails, probably sixtyish. She visibly pales and yells into the house without taking her eyes off me. “Bernie? Bernie! You betta come here!”

She opens the door for me, wide so I can pass her, without waiting for me to speak. I scoot past her awkwardly. The front hallway is red deep-pile carpet, with a tin-covered radiator acting as a hall table. The whole house smells like meat loaf. Until this moment, I never knew I wanted to live in a house that smelled like meat loaf.

A man ambles in, sweaty and red-faced, the sort of man who people might call jolly. He sports a yellow-white ribbed tank top, tucked into plaid belted shorts. He pushes his thinning hair back and blinks at me.

“Hi, um, my name is Zoe, and I'm—”

“I know who you are.” She cuts me off and wanders into the living room, sinking into a chair. “Damn near gave me a heart attack, you did. But I know who you are.”

Bernie stares at me, his fat little fingers keep pushing that one strip of hair against his red scalp, again and again. He peers at me, blinking, with giant gray, watery eyes. “Goddamn, you look just like her.”

“I'm Joan's twin? I'm looking for Joan?” My statements
come out like questions. A fan whirls overhead, and I can hear somewhere in the kitchen the distant calls of a baseball game on television.

“Patrice, did you invite her to sit down? Get a drink of water?” Bernie tears his eyes away from mine for a second and glares at his wife. She shakes her head.

“I didn't do anything, Bern. I can hardly think. You want a glass of water, or something dear? I just made
pizzelles
. They were for Lorraine's baby shower but my God, that recipe makes so much . . .” She ambles into the kitchen and Bernie and I are left alone.

He coughs once. “I know I'm staring at you, I just can't help it. You look so much like my little girl. We've known about you, and talked for years about maybe looking you up, but Pat's had a hard time and we weren't sure, you probably had a family, who knows?”

Patrice comes back, extending a glass plate of golden snowflake cookies, dusted with powdered sugar, and she shimmies into a chair opposite mine. They both study me, and I shift uncomfortably, reaching for a cookie. They're light, flaky, and sweet, and I close my eyes. For a moment, I want this. These people, with their buttery cookies and their quiet homemade dinner in front of the Mets game and their family baby shower and church bake sales. I feel gypped.