Come and Find Me (8 page)

Chapter Fourteen

T
his time she was out of the house with time to spare. The cruiser was parked not more than twenty feet away from her front door. She’d ridden in a car a million times. It would be like riding a bike, she told herself. You climbed on and it came back to you.

But as she started down the front walk the distance seemed to lengthen. She stumbled and fell, and in an instant Gruder was out of the car, coming toward her. He put his arm around her and helped her up.

“You sure you can do this?” he asked, studying her closely.

She nodded. She had to.

Gruder walked her to the cruiser, supporting her like she was old and infirm. The sight of the mesh barrier between the front and backseat forced her into reverse. She scrabbled back, feeling the same panic she’d felt when that cage had dropped over Nadia.

“Whoa,” Gruder said. “Take it easy. I know, it looks like jail in there. Freaks a lot of people out. Would you rather follow me in your own car?”

“I . . .” A car, a black limousine with dark tinted windows, accelerated past, followed by a battered red pickup truck, its muffler pipe dragging. Diana swallowed. “I don’t think I can.”

“How about this?” Gruder opened the front passenger door. “You ride up front with me.”

She leaned down and peered in. Static crackled from an oversize console installed roughly where a car radio would be. This she could manage.

Diana sat. Reassuring smells of coffee and vinyl enveloped her.

Gruder leaned down. “Okay?”

She managed to nod and swung her legs into the car.

Gently he pressed the door of the cruiser shut. Was that pine? The scent that she so associated with Daniel unnerved her, but just for a moment. Then she noticed the green cardboard pine tree silhouette swinging from the rearview mirror. Car freshener.

Gruder got in the driver’s side. The car beeped when he inserted the key. He slid her a sideways look. “Seat belt.”

She’d forgotten about seat belts. Daniel had always loved that New Hampshire held out, the last state with no seat-belt law—“live free or die” was their motto. She buckled up.

The car started to pull away from the curb. “So, have you always been like this?”

Diana couldn’t hold back a bleat of hysterical laughter. “Like what? Afraid of my own shadow?”

Gruber shrugged. “My sister-in-law gets panic attacks. That’s what it is, isn’t it?”

Diana nodded. “And no, I haven’t always been like this.”

Diana had grown up pushing past boundaries, not cowering behind them. She’d crossed streets before her mother gave her permission. Ridden her bike to places much farther away than her mother would ever have allowed her to go. She’d been eager to learn to drive, and even before she got her license she’d snuck the car and driven to Cape Cod to hear Sandra Day O’Connor speak at Barnstable High School’s graduation.

She’d been so together, or so she’d thought, and determined to become a political activist. Then her mother got sick and she’d come apart. Daniel had glued her back.

As the cruiser rode through the center of town, Diana tried to anchor her attention on what she saw, streets both familiar and not. The movie theater was shuttered. The corner coffee shop had a new name. The storefront that years earlier had been a children’s bookstore was still empty. They continued along residential streets, past a blur of houses and small apartment buildings.

Gruder turned, following a sign to the town’s boat basin at the mouth of the Neponset River. At the end of the road was the entrance to Wharf View, the massive two-tower complex where Ashley lived. Gruder turned in.

“What kind of car does your sister drive?” Gruder asked.

She told him.

“That should be easy to spot. You look right, I’ll look left.”

He started driving slowly through the outdoor parking, up one aisle and down the next. Most of the spaces were empty. It was easy to see that Ashley’s car wasn’t there.

“Her neighbor said there’s underground parking too,” Diana told him.

Gruder found the entrance and drove down the access ramp, taking them from sunlight into shadow. Diana tried not to flinch as beams passed overhead so close it looked as if they’d whack the cruiser’s roof. She pasted her attention on the occasional parked vehicle that seemed to slide past.

No gold Mini Coopers.

They emerged aboveground. Diana realized she’d been holding her breath. She let herself exhale as Gruder pulled the cruiser into the otherwise empty visitors’ parking opposite the front entrance to the complex. They both got out.

A fierce wind sliced off the river. Diana shivered and pushed through it, carrying Ashley’s laptop up the brick path toward the building entrance. Video cameras were mounted over the glass double doors. She counted up eight stories to the floor where Ashley lived. A figure stood looking out of one of the windows.

Diana broke into a trot, and Gruder caught up with her and strode past, holding open one of the doors. She stepped through, into the familiar lobby. Philodendron cascaded down a backlit wall of glass brick. A blast of warm air greeted her and she felt immediately calmer.

She started toward the elevators and paused at a bank of mailboxes. They were brass, each with a little window in it. She found 88N and peered into the dark interior. Gruder unhooked a flashlight from his belt and shined the light through the slits in the metal door, confirming Diana’s first impression. Empty. Most of the mailboxes surrounding Ashley’s looked like they had mail. Ashley had to have come back and picked up her mail, Diana assured herself.

“Elevator’s here,” Gruder called to her. He was holding the elevator door open for her.

Diana took a quick look through the mail scattered across a long, narrow hall table beneath the mailboxes. Nothing there was for Ashley Highsmith.

Feeling relieved, she started toward the elevator. But when she got there, she hesitated. The compartment was so small.

“You want to take the stairs?” Gruder asked. “We can do that. It’s seven flights up.”

Would climbing the stairs be any easier? Diana pushed herself forward and stepped into the elevator. Gruder followed. She took a step nearer to him as the doors slid shut with a sigh. If he minded her hanging on to his sleeve, he didn’t say.

The elevator rose slowly, dinging as it bypassed each floor. The doors slid open on the eighth floor and she followed Gruder out. The hallway, with its fancy gold sconces and white-on-white wallpaper, was comfortingly familiar. At the same time, a warm floaty feeling bloomed from her chest, across her shoulders, and wafted up the back of her neck—the extra medication she’d taken was kicking in.

She followed Gruder down the hall. It seemed shorter than she remembered it. He stopped in front of Ashley’s door.

“No restaurant menus,” Diana murmured. Elation pierced the haze of medication and she pushed past Gruder. “Ashley?” She knocked. Pressed the bell. “Ashley, are you in there?”

She could feel Gruder standing there, watching her as she banged on the door.

“Ashley Highsmith! You answer the door this minute!” Diana felt her face grow warm. She sounded exactly like their mother.

At the opposite end of the hall, a door opened and a man stuck his head out. He had on a loose-necked undershirt and his hair was tousled. He seemed about to yell at them when he registered Gruder, there in his police uniform. Before the man could disappear, Gruder went over to him.

Diana watched them, listening at the same time for any movement behind Ashley’s locked door.

Gruder spoke to the man. She couldn’t hear what he said, but the man just shook his head and yawned in response. Gruder asked another question. This time the man pointed toward Ashley’s door. Diana’s heart leaped. Gruder took out his pad and took a few notes.

A few moments later, the man went back inside his apartment and Gruder returned, looking perplexed.

“Did he see her?” Diana asked. “Did he see Ashley?”

“No. But he says a man was out in the hall an hour ago.”

“What was he doing here?”

Gruder took a step back. “Our friend didn’t stick around to find out. He was just throwing out his trash.”

“Young? Old?”

“Not old.” Gruder referred to his notes. “Average height. Dark hair. Jacket zipped with the collar covering the lower part of his face. He had the impression that the man was well built.”

Immediately Diana thought of Aaron, pressing his fifty-pound weights. “Well, did he talk to him? What did he say? Wouldn’t the cameras out front have caught him? Can you find out?”
Can you do it now?
Diana could hear the desperation in her voice.

“Why don’t we check her apartment, first,” Gruder said, tilting his head toward Ashley’s door.

She knew that was eminently reasonable, but she wanted to grab Ashley’s neighbor and shake him until she knew what he knew. Instead, she took out her keys. Ashley’s had a dot of hot-pink nail polish on its round head. She tried to jam the key into the lock but she couldn’t make it go.

“Here, let me,” Gruder said. He rotated the key and it slipped in. Smoothly he turned it and opened the door.

Diana pushed past his outstretched arm and burst into the apartment. She set Ashley’s laptop on the carpet just inside the threshold. Light streaming in through living-room windows seemed to bounce off the white Berber carpeting.

“Ash?”

She almost fell over the pair of red cowboy boots lying in the front hall as she raced into the spotless living room, past the pink-and-green chintz overstuffed sofa and chairs and a glass coffee table with a drift of mail on it, into the dining area with its plate rail lined with delicate Wedgwood and Royal Doulton, and around through a galley kitchen that Diana knew Ashley rarely used other than to warm leftovers.

She circled back to the cowboy boots in the entry hall. Diana picked up one of them. The toe and ankle were stained with whitish splashes. Looked like remnants of the drink Ashley had told her she’d ended up wearing when Aaron pulled the bar stool out from under her.

“Ashley had these boots on when she went to Copley Square on Friday.” She set the boot on the coffee table and began to pick through the mound of mail. Bank statement. Credit-card bill. A big envelope from Staywell Bodyscan that said
Here’s the material you requested
on the front. Flyers from a local pizza place and a Chinese restaurant were there too.

“I guess she’s back after all,” Diana said. “But I don’t understand—” She hiccuped, her voice breaking. It was so inconsiderate, so typically inconsiderate of her sister. She’d come back, long enough to change shoes and pick up her mail. Now where the hell was she?

“You want to check the rest of the apartment, just to be sure?” Gruder jerked his head toward the hallway with doors to a bedroom and bath, both closed. “Or do you want me to?”

Diana rose to her feet. She walked past Gruder to the closed bathroom door. She knocked on it. “Ashley! You in there?” She didn’t expect an answer and didn’t get one. She knocked again, then pushed the door open a crack.

The bathroom had barely space enough to turn around, and the world’s smallest bathtub. There, from a mirror over the sink, her own face gazed back at her.

It had been months since she’d seen her own reflection. Her skin was pale, and her hair—oh God, her hair—she reached up and touched it. Shapeless curls nearly to her shoulders looked like a dull cloud of frizz around her face. She pushed her hair back from her face. She didn’t remember having cheekbones, yet there they were. The dark smudges she’d always had under her dark eyes were more pronounced, making her eyes look as if they’d sunk into her skull.

Diana ran warm water in the sink and splashed her face. On the bathroom wall over the hand towel hung the Hypochondriac’s Calendar—a Christmas gift she’d given her sister. On today’s date, Ashley could have had “such a pain in my neck.” Tomorrow: “Bowlegs.”

Diana opened the medicine cabinet. A phalanx of vitamins and minerals and herbal supplements stood on its narrow shelves, sorted alphabetically. Vitamins from A to E, biloba tablets, folic acid, gingko, iron pills . . .

“Find anything?” Gruder asked.

“She’d never have left home for an extended period without her arsenal of pills and supplements,” Diana said, holding the medicine cabinet open.

Finally she checked the bedroom, not bothering to knock. Ashley’s queen-size bed was neatly made up with a white down comforter and a pile of lace-covered pillows. Along one full wall were shelves and clear Lucite drawers with meticulously folded clothing layered inside. The door to the walk-in closet stood open. Diana stepped inside.

Some clothing lay in a little heap on the closet floor. Diana lifted a crumpled T-shirt and shook it out. The fractured word
HACKER
was printed across the chest. Diana buried her head in the cotton and inhaled—picking up mostly the scent of store-bought newness and just a whiff of Ashley’s licorice.

When she looked up, Gruder stood in the doorway looking in at her. She met his gaze. “This and those cowboy boots out in the front hall are what she had on. She borrowed this outfit from me on Friday.”

Gruder’s gaze traveled across the rods along the three inside walls of the closet where Ashley’s clothes hung, sorted in orderly precision by color and season.

“My clothes she leaves jumbled up in a heap,” Diana said. “Hers get princess treatment.”

“So she came home, changed, and took off again?” Gruder asked.

“Seems like it.”

Diana carried the jeans and T-shirt that Ashley had borrowed from her into the living room. There, she carefully folded them. She picked up the red boots and laid them on top.

She found the leather jacket hanging in the coat closet by the front door. She slipped it on and slid her hands into the pockets. In one she found the sunglasses she’d lent Ashley. In the other, a slip of paper. She pulled it out. It was a cash register receipt from Bouchée on Newbury Street. Friday. 5:45
P.M.
A cosmopolitan—Ashley’s favorite—a white Russian, and an order of frites. Nearly thirty dollars before tip. The price for cutting Aaron loose?