Alexandra, Gone (7 page)

“Well then,” Elle said, pointing to Leslie’s head and moving her finger downward toward her toes, “sort yourself out.”

“I’m not that bad!” Leslie argued.

Elle agreed that she wasn’t that bad, going so far as to comment that in fact for a woman in her early forties she looked quite good.

“Thanks a lot,” Leslie said, once again wondering why she was allowing herself to be friends with a girl in her twenties.

Elle smiled at her and, after rummaging through her bag for a few minutes, took out a bent card that was covered in bag dirt. She cleaned it off and straightened it out and handed it to Leslie. “That’s my hairdresser. She’ll take care of you.”

After thinking about it for a week, Leslie had decided to get her hair done but had put it off until after Christmas to avoid the crowds. Her appointment was for later that afternoon. She halved the slice of cake and then ate half of the half because since Elle had mentioned her thickened midriff she’d become conscious of it.

“Where is Elle?” she asked after pinching some crumbs together and popping them in her mouth.

“Working,” Jane lied.

“I’m really looking forward to her exhibition in two weeks,” Leslie said. “Elle showed me some of the paintings last time we were here, and they are stunning and just a little bit frightening. Love them.”

“Yeah,” Jane said, “she’s a genius.” She said this while nodding.
Stop nodding, Jane.

“Would it be okay if I called in on her for just a moment before we leave?” Leslie asked.

“No,” Jane said, “I’m sorry. She’s just really busy with the exhibition pieces.”

“But I thought she had finished those paintings,” Tom said. “Is she working on the Missing Exhibition already? I thought you were still waiting for permission from the families.”

“No, she still has some work to do for this upcoming show—she’s a perfectionist. And we are still waiting for permission from the families, although that man missing from Clare, Joe something, his family has come back and would love to be involved.”
Oh Christ, I hope she comes home in time for the show in two weeks.

“Okay,” Leslie said, “I’ll call her later.”

“Fine,” Jane said, “but don’t be surprised if she doesn’t answer. When she’s in the zone the whole world could be collapsing around her and she wouldn’t notice.”

“Right,” Leslie said, and sensing Jane was nervous she let it go at that. “Probably better to leave her be.”

Jane nodded enthusiastically.
Stop nodding, Jane.

Tom left soon after. He had promised to go online to book the tickets and accommodation for the London gig and insisted on paying for it. Jane had then insisted that they both take home slices of carrot cake, chocolate log, and a biscuit cake she spotted in the fridge that she’d made two days previously and forgotten about.

Tom hugged both women before he left. “Thank you,” he said, “thank you. Thank you. Thank you.” He sighed and smiled, then turned and walked down the steps, leaving Leslie and Jane standing together at the door. They waved to him as he drove off.

When he was out of sight, Leslie turned to Jane. “So what’s really going on with Elle?”

For somebody who didn’t spend a lot of time with people, she was incredibly intuitive.

“You’d better come back in,” Jane said.

Jane brewed another pot of coffee and began by telling Leslie about Elle’s New Year’s Eve and Vincent’s note.

“Good God,” Leslie said. “Could she go to prison for that?”

“I have to meet that sniveling little snot Vincent next week to sort out compensation. Basically if we buy him a new car he won’t press charges, and if he doesn’t press charges hopefully the DPP won’t either.”

“
‘I want you, I need you, but let’s face it, I’m never going to love you,’
”
Leslie repeated, shaking her head in disbelief. “Just when I thought it was safe to go back in the water.”

Jane explained her sister’s inexplicable passion for the man who had mistreated her from the day they met and how, having an inexplicable passion of her own for the father of her child, she understood and sympathized with her sister’s misguided love.

“You can’t choose whom you love,” she said.

Leslie thought about it and it made her crave more cake. After that, Jane explained that whenever things got on top of Elle she would hang the
GONE FISHING
sign on her front door. This signaled that she needed peace and quiet, time away from everything and everyone, and until she was ready to face the world again she would be off the radar. Leslie was aghast that Elle would just disappear like that and couldn’t understand why Jane indulged her.

“That’s extremely selfish,” she said. “What if you need her?”

“I leave a voice message and hope she picks it up,” she admitted before dismissing Leslie’s concerns, noting she was simply happy that Elle gave her a clear indication of what she was up to so she didn’t have to worry. Although of course she did worry, but not as much as she would if Elle disappeared without warning.

It took Leslie a few minutes to realize the significance of Elle’s latest fishing trip, and it became clear only when Jane recounted the time two years earlier when she had failed to return for two months.

“Will she paint while she’s away?” Leslie asked.

“She hasn’t before,” Jane admitted.

“But the Missing Exhibition is scheduled for April!”

“She’ll be home, it’s important, she’ll get it done,” Jane said, but Leslie could tell she wasn’t convinced.

“And if she doesn’t?”

“Well, we’ll just have to find Alexandra in a club in March,” Jane said, and she knew her proposal sounded weak.

“It’s not her,” Leslie said, “and even if it was it doesn’t mean she’s going to turn up in the same place again.”

“Don’t be so negative.”

“Can’t help it—it’s my default setting,” Leslie said, and smiled.

“Elle will come home,” Jane said. “Hopefully in time to deliver twelve stunning paintings, and if not we’ll sort it out. I’ll sort it out.”

“I should warn the Jack camp.”

“No, don’t say anything, please just give it a week! Let’s get over this exhibition first and then we can worry about what happens in April.”

Leslie nodded and asked Jane how she would cope if Elle didn’t turn up for her own exhibition.

“Actually, sometimes it works out better,” Jane admitted. “In case you hadn’t noticed, my sister can be a bit of a handful.”

Leslie had noticed, and so the conversation ended there. It was too late to get her hair done, so she phoned the hairdresser to reschedule while enjoying a brisk walk through the park to negate at least some of the cake she’d inhaled at Jane’s.

Tom’s business was suffering and not just because he’d lost interest in it. His company had finished a large development in South Dublin in mid-2007, and he’d been looking for more land since then, but planning was getting tougher and, if he were to be honest, the houses in the development he’d just finished hadn’t been as quick to sell as those in the previous two. He had decided to bide his time and wait for the right project, and then Alexandra had disappeared and after that the only thing he’d been looking for was her. He’d lost most of his building staff in the second quarter of ’07, retaining only a few men for snagging. The plumbers and electricians he’d contracted had moved on to work with others, and by the time he’d gotten stuck in a lift his company had been reduced to himself and Jeanette in the office. It was quite clear that the business was dead, and Jeanette received her severance pay a week later. The risk-taking and swagger that were needed to build and preside over the successful business he’d built from nothing had left with Alexandra, and in an environment where growth rates were falling and the clouds of economic recession were gathering, Tom Kavanagh had simply lost his nerve. After ten years of blood, sweat, and tears, when the doors of his company finally closed on Christmas week, Tom walked away without even looking back once. Tom’s only focus was finding his wife. He spent hours online on his wife’s website, blogging and adding pictures just as Leslie had shown him. He looked at missing sites every day and made calls to shelters all over Ireland and the UK and sent them e-mails attached with pictures of Alexandra’s face. He ensured that Interpol had all his wife’s details and insisted on following up on every tiny piece of information the police were investigating and was so hands-on that in the end his liaison officer, Patricia Lowe, had to tell him in no uncertain terms to back off. He still handed out flyers and tacked them to mailboxes and trees.

When he wasn’t searching, he visited with Breda and told her about all the things people were doing to get Alexandra back.

“You’re a good man,” she’d say, “and we will get her back.”

Breda was sure that Alexandra was alive and well and just a little lost, and she knew this because she’d prayed to God to keep Alexandra safe and in sixty-odd years God had yet to let her down. Tom hadn’t believed in God until his wife disappeared, but afterward he found his mother-in-law’s trust and hope comforting.

“She’s not alone, Tom,” she said over and over. “She’s never alone.”

Alexandra’s father didn’t talk about God or anything at all. Instead he sat in the garden and smoked one Marlboro after another. In the evenings he went out to the pub with his friends and they talked about football and politics and the state of the world and anything but his missing daughter because every time he thought about her his guts twisted, his head ached, and his heart threatened to stop dead.

Tom always made it his business to go into the garden and say a few words to Ben, and Ben was polite but a little cold in his response.

“How are you doing?” Tom would ask.

“Fine.”

“It’s freezing out here. Are you sure you wouldn’t be better off inside?”

“I’m fine.”

“Breda seems good today.”

“She’s fine.”

“Can I do anything?”

“You’re doing all you can.”

“I’m sorry.”

Tom would end every short interlude with his father-in-law with the words “I’m sorry,” and every time Ben nodded and said nothing at all.

In the car on the way home from Jane’s, Tom wondered whether or not he should call his in-laws with the good news, but then he thought better of it. He’d wait, and maybe in March he’d be bringing his wife home. He knew in his heart that Leslie was right to be cautious, and he knew that the likelihood of finding Alexandra in a club in London was a million to one, but he didn’t care because a million to one was better odds than a million to none.

Tom had never been much of a drinker, but since his wife vanished he drank every night because he couldn’t sleep without being intoxicated, and even then he was restless, kicking and sometimes yelling out. When Tom didn’t drink, he’d lie in bed afraid to close his eyes for fear that he’d go to the dark place. The scenarios were always different and yet they were the same: his wife was hurt, she needed him, and he wasn’t there. In one Alexandra was tied up and dirty. She was facedown on the floor and her arms were twisted behind her back. Her face was streaked with dirt, blood, and tears, she had a hole in her head that was caked in blood, and she was crying out, calling his name, and over her a shadow loomed, a monster playing with a knife, and Alexandra would beg Tom to find her before the monster cut into her again. In another he’d see her in a tiny, windowless room with concrete walls and a black steel door with a tiny flap at the bottom. She was in the corner hugging the wall, and there was nothing but silence and a tray still full of slop that Alexandra couldn’t eat, and she was so thin her bones stood out, and she’d call to him and tell him that if he didn’t find her soon she’d be gone. There was the one where she was drugged and tied to a bed and men were coming and going, screwing her, and her head would roll and her red raw eyes would call to him to save her, but he couldn’t because he couldn’t see where she was. He’d claw at his face and hit the side of his head, and he’d roar and bawl and scream and rock until he was so tired that all he could do was lie so very still and stare at her smiling picture hanging on the wall. And with each night that passed, he’d live another and more twisted and painful nightmare.

Since Tom’s secretary, Jeanette, had lost her job three weeks earlier she had called on him several times on the pretext of checking up on him. The first time he was drunk and wearing what appeared to be uncomfortably snug tracksuit bottoms.

“I didn’t know you even owned a tracksuit.”

“I don’t. They’re Alexandra’s.”

“Why?”

“I wanted to walk a mile in her shoes, but they didn’t fit.”

“How drunk are you?”

“Very.”

She’d come into his house and run a bath, and when he refused to get into the bath she insisted, and her insistence and freakish upper-body strength ensured that ten minutes later he was soaking in bath oils while she ran around and cleaned his kitchen and sitting room of take-out cartons and empty bottles. He’d fallen asleep and she woke him, and when he realized that he was naked and in the bath he became embarrassed, but she made light of it and handed him a towel.