I'll Be Seeing You (3 page)

M
ac, as Dr. Jeremy MacIntyre was known, lived with his seven-year-old son, Kyle, around the bend from the Collins family. The summers of his college years at Yale, Mac had worked as a waiter at the Drumdoe Inn.
In those summers he'd formed a lasting attachment for the area and decided that someday he'd live there.

Growing up, Mac had observed that he was the guy in the crowd the girls didn't notice. Average height, average weight, average looks. It was a reasonably accurate description, but actually Mac did not do himself justice. After they took a second look, women
did
find a challenge in the quizzical expression in his hazel eyes, an endearing boyishness in the sandy hair that always seemed wind tousled, a comforting steadiness in the authority with which he would lead them on the dance floor or tuck a hand under their elbow on an icy evening.

Mac had always known he would be a doctor someday. By the time he began his studies at NYU medical school he had begun to believe that the future of medicine was in genetics. Now thirty-six, he worked at LifeCode, a genetic research laboratory in Westport, some fifty minutes southeast of Newtown.

It was the job he wanted, and it fit into his life as a divorced, custodial father. At twenty-seven Mac had married. The marriage lasted a year and a half and produced Kyle. Then one day Mac came home from the lab to find a babysitter and a note. It read: “Mac, this isn't for me. I'm a lousy wife and a lousy mother. We both know it can't work. I've got to have a crack at a career. Take good care of Kyle. Goodbye, Ginger.”

Ginger had done pretty well for herself since then. She sang in cabarets in Vegas and on cruise ships. She'd cut a few records, and the last one had hit the charts. She sent Kyle expensive presents for his birthday and Christmas. The gifts were invariably too sophisticated or too babyish. She'd seen Kyle only three times in the seven years since she'd taken off.

Despite the fact that it had almost come as a relief, Mac still harbored residual bitterness over Ginger's desertion. Somehow, divorce had never been a part of his imagined future, and he still felt uncomfortable with it. He knew that his son missed having a mother, so he took special care and special pride in being a good, attentive father.

On Friday evenings, Mac and Kyle often had dinner at the Drumdoe Inn. They ate in the small, informal grill, where the special Friday menu included individual pizzas and fish and chips.

Catherine was always at the inn for the dinner hour. Growing up, Meg had been a fixture there too. When she was ten and Mac a nineteen-year-old busboy, she had wistfully told him that it was fun to eat at home. “Daddy and I do sometimes, when he's here.”

Since her father's disappearance, Meg spent just about every weekend at home and joined her mother at the inn for dinner. But this Friday night there was no sign of either Catherine or Meg.

Mac acknowledged that he was disappointed, but Kyle, who always looked forward especially to seeing Meg, dismissed her absence. “So she's not here. Fine.”

“Fine” was Kyle's new all-purpose word. He used it when he was enthusiastic, disgusted or being cool. Tonight, Mac wasn't quite sure what emotion he was hearing. But hey, he told himself, give the kid space. If something's really bothering him it'll come cut sooner or later, and it certainly can't have anything to do with Meghan.

Kyle finished the last of the pizza in silence. He was mad at Meghan. She always acted like she really was interested in the stuff that he did, but Wednesday afternoon, when he was outside and had just taught his dog, Jake, to stand up on his hind legs and beg, Meghan had driven past and ignored him. She'd been going real slow, too, and he'd yelled to her to stop. He knew she'd seen him, because she'd looked right at him. But then she'd speeded up the car, driven off, and hadn't even taken time to see Jake's trick. Fine.

He wouldn't tell his dad about it. Dad would say that Meghan was just upset because Mr. Collins hadn't come home for a long time and might have been one of the people whose car went into the river off the bridge. He'd say that sometimes when people were thinking about something else, they could go right past people and not
even see them. But Meg
had
seen Kyle Wednesday and hadn't even bothered to wave to him.

Fine, he thought. Just fine.

W
hen Meghan arrived home she found her mother sitting in the darkened living room, her hands folded in her lap. “Mom, are you okay?” she asked anxiously. “It's nearly seven-thirty. Aren't you going to Drumdoe?” She switched on the light and took in Catherine's blotched, tear-stained face. She sank to her knees and grabbed her mother's hands. “Oh God, did they find him? Is that it?”

“No, Meggie, that's not it.” Haltingly Catherine Collins related the visit from the insurers.

Not Dad, Meghan thought. He couldn't, wouldn't do this to Mother. Not to her. There had to be a mistake. “That's the craziest thing I ever heard,” she said firmly.

“That's what I told them. But Meg, why would Dad have borrowed so much on the insurance? That haunts me. And even if he did invest it, I don't know where. Without a death certificate, my hands are tied. I can't keep up with expenses. Phillip has been sending Dad's monthly draw from the company, but that's not fair to him. Most of the money due him in commissions has been in for some time. I know I'm conservative by nature, but I certainly wasn't when I renovated the inn. I really overdid it. Now I may have to sell Drumdoe.”

The inn. It was Friday night. Her mother should be there now, in her element, greeting guests, keeping a watchful eye on the waiters and busboys, the table set
tings, sampling the dishes in the kitchen. Every detail automatically checked and rechecked.

“Dad didn't do this to you,” Meg said flatly. “I just know that.”

Catherine Collins broke into harsh, dry sobs. “Maybe Dad used the bridge accident as a chance to get away from me. But why, Meg? I loved him so much.”

Meghan put her arms around her mother. “Listen,” she said firmly, “you were right the first time. Dad would never do this to you, and one way or the other, we're going to prove it.”

T
he Collins and Carter Executive Search office was located in Danbury, Connecticut. Edwin Collins had started the firm when he was twenty-eight, after having worked five years for a Fortune 500 company based in New York. By then he'd realized that working within the corporate structure was not for him.

Following his marriage to Catherine Kelly, he'd relocated his office to Danbury. They wanted to live in Connecticut, and the location of Edwin's office was not important since he spent much of his time traveling throughout the country, visiting clients.

Some twelve years before his disappearance, Collins had brought Phillip Carter into the business.

Carter, a Wharton graduate with the added attraction of a law degree, had previously been a client of Edwin's, having been placed by him in jobs several times. The last one before they joined forces was with a multinational firm in Maryland.

When Collins was visiting that client, he and Carter would have lunch or a drink together. Over the years they had developed a business-oriented friendship. In the early eighties, after a difficult midlife divorce, Phillip Carter finally left his job in Maryland to become Collins' partner and associate.

They were opposites in many ways. Collins was tall, classically handsome, an impeccable dresser and quietly witty, while Carter was bluff and hearty, with attractively irregular features and a thick head of graying hair. His clothes were expensive, but never looked quite put together. His tie was often pulled loose from the knot. He was a man's man, whose stories over a drink brought forth bursts of laughter, a man with an eye for the ladies, too.

The partnership had worked. For a long time Phillip Carter lived in Manhattan and did reverse commuting to Danbury, when he was not traveling for the company. His name often appeared in the columns of the New York newspapers as having attended dinner parties and benefits with various women. Eventually he bought a small house in Brookfield, ten minutes from the office, and stayed there with increasing frequency.

Now fifty-three years old, Phillip Carter was a familiar figure in the Danbury area.

He regularly worked at his desk for several hours after everyone else had left for the day because, since a number of clients and candidates were located in the Midwest and on the West Coast, early evening in the East was a good time to contact them. Since the night of the bridge tragedy, Phillip rarely left the office before eight o'clock.

When Meghan called at five of eight this evening, he was reaching for his coat. “I was afraid it was coming to this,” he said after she'd told him about the visit from the insurers. “Can you come in tomorrow around noon?”

After he hung up he sat for a long time at his desk. Then he picked up the phone and called his accountant. “I think we'd better audit the books right now,” he said quietly.

W
hen Meghan arrived at the Collins and Carter Executive Search offices at two o'clock on Saturday, she found three men working with calculators at the long table that usually held magazines and plants. She did not need Phillip Carter's explanation to confirm that they were auditors. At his suggestion, they went into her father's private office.

She had spent a sleepless night, her mind a battleground of questions, doubts and denial. Phillip closed the door and indicated one of the two chairs in front of the desk. He took the other one, a subtlety she appreciated. It would have hurt to see him behind her father's desk.

She knew Phillip would be honest with her. She asked, “Phillip, do you think it's remotely possible that my father is still alive and chose to disappear?”

The momentary pause before he spoke was answer enough. “You
do
think that?” she prodded.

“Meg, I've lived long enough to know that anything is possible. Frankly, the Thruway investigators and the insurers have been around here for quite a while asking some pretty direct questions. A couple of times I've wanted to toss them out bodily. Like everyone else, I expected Ed's car, or wreckage from it, would be recovered. It's possible that a lot of it would have been carried downstream by the tide or become lodged in the riverbed, but it doesn't help that not a trace of the car has been found. So to answer you, yes, it's possible. And no, I can't believe your father capable of a stunt like that.”

It was what she expected to hear, but that didn't make
it easier. Once when she was very little, Meghan had tried to take a burning piece of bread out of the toaster with a fork. She felt as though she was experiencing again the vivid pain of electrical current shooting through her body.

“And of course it doesn't help that Dad took the cash value out of his policies a few weeks before he disappeared.”

“No, it doesn't. I want you to know that I'm doing the audit for your mother's sake. When this becomes public knowledge, and be sure it will, I want to be able to have a certified statement that our books are in perfect order. This sort of thing starts rumors flying, as you can understand.”

Meghan looked down. She had dressed in jeans and a matching jacket. It occurred to her that this was the kind of outfit the dead woman was wearing when she was brought into Roosevelt Hospital. She pushed the thought away. “Was my father a gambler? Would that explain his need for a cash loan?”

Carter shook his head. “Your father wasn't a gambler, and I've seen enough of them, Meg.” He grimaced. “Meg, I wish I could find an answer, but I can't. Nothing in Ed's business or personal life suggested to me that he would choose to disappear. On the other hand, the lack of physical evidence from the crash is necessarily suspicious, at least to outsiders.”

Meghan looked at the desk, the executive swivel chair behind it. She could picture her father sitting there, leaning back, his eyes twinkling, his hands clasped, fingers pointing up in what her mother called “Ed's saint-and-martyr pose.”

She could see herself running into this office as a child. Her father always had candy for her, gooey chocolate bars, marshmallows, peanut brittle. Her mother had tried to keep that kind of candy from her. “Ed,” she'd protest, “don't give her that junk. You'll ruin her teeth.”

“Sweets to the sweet, Catherine.”

Daddy's girl. Always. He was the fun parent. Mother
was the one who made Meghan practice the piano and make her bed. Mother was the one who'd protested when she quit the law firm. “For heaven's sake, Meg,” she had pleaded, “give it more than six months; don't waste your education.”

Daddy had understood. “Leave her alone, love,” he'd said firmly. “Meg has a good head on her shoulders.”

Once when she was little Meghan had asked her father why he traveled so much.

“Ah, Meg,” he'd sighed. “How I wish it wasn't necessary. Maybe I was born to be a wandering minstrel.”

Because he was away so much, when he came home he always tried to make it up. He'd suggest that instead of going to the inn he'd whip up dinner for the two of them at home. “Meghan Anne,” he'd tell her, “you're my date.”