Missing Persons (11 page)

“Okay,” I said after a few minutes, “I think we’re going to go outside and get some stuff of you walking down the street.”

Julia and David jumped up. “This is fun,” Julia said. “I feel like a movie star.”

“I’m glad you feel that way,” I said. “It can be difficult to participate in a story like this, to relive all those old memories.”

Her smile faded. “I miss her. It’s been this total nightmare.”

“Is that why you moved from Bridgeport all the way up here?”

“Sort of. I guess. We got married. We wanted a fresh start.”

“And better bars,” David said.

“Can’t argue with that.” I turned back to Julia. “Do you talk to her family much?”

David slid his arm around Julia, an unmistakable sign of support. Which meant she needed support.

“Not often,” she admitted. “I think they kind of blame me.”

“Because you were supposed to meet Theresa.”

“I wasn’t. We didn’t make plans.” Her frustration was obvious. She had clearly made the same statement many, many times.

“Theresa had a lot of stuff going on in her life that her mother didn’t know about, didn’t want to know about,” David offered. “I think Theresa said she was meeting Julia so she wouldn’t have to get into it.”

“Her mother does seem overprotective.”

David glanced at Julia, seemed to get approval to speak, and turned to me. “She was crazy. She wanted Theresa to be nine years old forever. No wonder she did the things she did.”

“David,” Julia interrupted. “Theresa was a great person. She wanted her mother to be happy but she also wanted to be her own person.”

“And that led her to do what?” I asked.

Julia shrugged. “She maybe got around. It was a long time ago. I don’t know that it really matters.”

“She was dating someone else other than Wyatt?”

“I think so,” Julia said. “She never said she was but something was going on.”

“Maybe she was getting back with Jason?”

“Not a chance.”

Still by Julia’s side, David seemed to tense up at the mention of Jason’s name.

“You didn’t like him,” I said.

“No. And I don’t think Theresa was that stupid.”

Julia wavered. “I don’t know. There was something going on,” she said. “Maybe someone new.”

I wasn’t sure if any of this would get into the show. If we were painting Theresa as ripe for sainthood, we wouldn’t want to offer anything that would deter from that. On the other hand, if the network wanted to hint that Theresa somehow brought this on herself with late-night hookups and dark, dirty secrets, I could be on to something.

But for the moment, I was thinking about the photo. “I saw a couple of pictures of you in Moretti’s Bakery,” I started, looking for any indication Julia knew what the photos looked like. There wasn’t any. “They’d been defaced.”

“Asshole,” Dave whispered.

“Who?” I asked.

Julia looked at David, shaking her head, but he didn’t seem to care. “Tom. Theresa’s brother. The guy has issues.”

I was dying to ask the next logical question—could he have hurt Theresa?—but now I was sure I wanted this on camera. I’d have to wait until Friday for my answer if I wanted it to feel fresh and unrehearsed.

“We’re going to go into overtime if we hang around too much longer,” I said as my excuse to end the conversation. “Let’s just get a couple of quick shots of you walking down the street. And listen, don’t smile, don’t look too happy. We have stuff of you happy, which I will need when I talk about how you were getting married when Theresa disappeared, but I also need sad stuff. I don’t want it looking like you’ve completely forgotten Theresa.”

This time they played along, walking down the street looking as though their world had collapsed. It was exactly what I needed, but there was something artificial about it. And not just because it
was
fake. There was nothing in Julia that actually seemed sad about the disappearance of her friend. It had been a year—but is that enough time to get over the sudden and inexplicable loss of your best friend since childhood? Maybe Theresa’s brother had a good reason for mutilating Julia’s photos.

I
t’s not just thumbs that separate us from the rest of the animal kingdom, it’s the ability to compartmentalize. All day I had thought mostly of the shoot, of Theresa Moretti and the people who knew her.

Once I was home it rushed back over me and I couldn’t push it away. Frank was dead. And I still hadn’t figured out what I felt about him. My feelings, my lack of feelings, my confused and contradictory feelings—it was the sort of thing I would have indulged in when I was in my twenties. I would have called girlfriends and talked for hours. But excessively analyzing romantic relationships is like wearing a crop top. At some point, you realize you don’t have the stomach for it anymore.

Not that it mattered. When I walked into the kitchen, I knew my feelings weren’t my biggest priority. Something in the room seemed out of place. The photo albums of Frank and me that I’d left on the floor were stacked more neatly than I’d left them, and the pictures of Theresa on the table looked to be in a different order. It was just weird enough that I walked around each room holding a frying pan, a useless weapon if there really was someone in the house. Of course there wasn’t. People don’t break into other people’s houses to see what kind of photos they have.

“This is stupid,” I said. “I must have done this myself.” I was half convinced I had done it and forgotten, but just in case, I left the frying pan on the kitchen table, next to my laptop.

In a nod to Frank, and because I was out of my own stuff, I made a cup of one of the green teas he had left at the house. It was good. Maybe I’d mocked him for nothing. I sat at the table and began hunting for the answers in my own personal true-crime show.

Dr. Milton had said Frank’s death had been listed as undetermined. I looked online for what that meant and got nothing helpful. I did know a few people in the coroner’s office from past episodes of
Caught!
but none of them well enough to get a peek into Frank’s file. There was only one person who could give me more information than I already had.

Now that Detective Podeski had supplied her last name, it was surprisingly easy to find Vera’s phone number and address. She lived in the Gold Coast neighborhood, the wealthiest in the city. It seemed an odd address for someone who had dressed as simply as Vera had the night we met. I guess she could be one of those people who lived in an expensive shoe box so she could impress others with her address. Though when I thought about it, Frank would never have gone for someone like that. His mother was someone like that, and Frank despised his mother’s shallowness.

Voice mail picked up with a cheery greeting from Vera to leave a message, which I did. Nothing special. I just told her it was Frank’s wife, Kate, and I wanted to ask her some questions. What questions they would be I hadn’t yet figured out.

 

 

An hour later, the doorbell rang. I answered, assuming it was someone wanting to pray for me, sell me something, or mug me. Instead it was Vera.

“What are you doing here?”

She was holding a large box and seemed about to drop it. Out of instinct, I reached out for it, and we carried it into the living room.

“You called me,” she said.

“I didn’t ask you to stop by. How do you know where I live any way? ”

“I came here with Frank once.”

“You did?”

“I stayed in the car while he picked up some clothes.” She smiled a friendly, neighborly smile. “You have a great place. You have really nice taste. I love your couch.”

“Okay.” I stood for a moment waiting for some explanation as to why she was in my house. None came. Finally I asked, “What’s in the box?”

“Frank’s things. I thought you might want them. I thought we could go through them and maybe each pick out some mementos.” She knelt beside the box and pulled out his Bears cap. “I didn’t bring his clothes, but I figured we could decide what to do with those another day.”

“Are you drunk?”

She sat on the couch, making herself a little too comfortable for my taste. “Of course not.”

“Then you must be crazy.”

She got up and walked over to me. I was afraid she might hug me again, but thankfully she refrained. “You said you wanted to talk to me.”

“I did.”

“About Frank?”

“Yes.”

“So talk to me.”

I was chickening out. I’d asked people if they’d killed someone many times, but only in interviews. The interview subjects were usually expecting me to ask it, and there was a crew a few feet away, ensuring that the whole reaction would be on camera. Lacking the context of a television interview, the question seemed, for lack of a better word, impolite. So I stood there silently.

Vera seemed not to notice my awkwardness. “Do you have any wine?”

“Excuse me?”

“You’re hurting and I’m hurting, and I think we could just hurt separately or we could help each other get past this. And either way, I think we both need a drink.”

That was the first time she had said anything I could agree with, at least the part about needing a drink. I poured two glasses of pinot grigio and sat on my leather chair. Vera sat again on the couch she had admired, and we both drank.

“The coroner listed his cause of death as undetermined,” I said.

“Which means it could be natural causes.”

“Or someone could have killed him.”

She watched me for a moment, then turned her eyes to her wine. “Someone like me?” she asked quietly.

“Or me.”

“Well, you know
you
didn’t and I know
I
didn’t, so there must be another explanation.”

“Like?”

“I don’t know.”

“Has Detective Podeski called you?” I asked.

“He’s a very unpleasant man.”

I smiled. “He is. I feel like a criminal just being in the same room with him.”

“Then you should avoid that.” She smiled. “It’s not like either of us has done anything wrong.”

It was all I could do not to point out that she wasn’t being entirely accurate. One of us had done something wrong. Vera obviously reached the same conclusion. She brought her glass to her lips quickly and took a fast sip while I enjoyed watching her squirm.

“I
didn’t set out to have an affair with a married man, Kate. I’m really not that kind of person.”

“Except you must be, or else you wouldn’t have.”

“I just wanted to be with him so much.”

“I assume you don’t walk into someone else’s house and take a painting off a wall, no matter how much you might want it. So why is it okay to take someone else’s husband?”

Vera’s expression turned earnest and thoughtful. “A piece of art doesn’t consent, but a husband does,” she said as if we were debating ideas in ethics class. “Not only does he consent, he often instigates. If a painting flung itself out a window and into my arms, am I really stealing it?”

Touché.

Vera stared at the rug. “I was married a long time ago but it didn’t last long. I met a few men along the way. Nothing ever stuck. And then I was alone for so long, I didn’t even know how lonely I was until I met Frank.” She glanced my way, looking for my approval the way my interview subjects always do. Only this time I sat in expressionless silence. “I just fell for him so quickly that before I knew it, well, we had crossed a line. I feel so bad about it.”

“Okay, stop right there,” I said. “If you’re hoping to be forgiven and turn this into some kumbaya moment, then you might as well leave now. In fact, you probably should leave now.”

Vera didn’t move. “I’m not asking for forgiveness, Kate. I’m just explaining. I’m not the sort of person who sets out to hurt other people, but I did hurt you. The worst part is that for those months that Frank was still living here, I didn’t even feel bad about what I might be doing to you. I didn’t think about you as a real person until the night Frank died. Until I heard your voice on the phone.” She looked around the living room, as if she were studying it. “He had this whole life I never knew anything about. Those people at his funeral, who knew him and loved him. I didn’t know who any of them were.”

“Did you expect to?”

She shrugged. “I don’t know.”

“You knew Neal. He was Frank’s best friend. I know you met.”

“Only a couple of times. He seemed embarrassed around me.”

“Did you double-date with Neal and his wife?”

I don’t know why I was torturing myself, but I just had to know.

“No, nothing like that.” She paused. “I met him a few times. And not that long ago we ran into him at a restaurant. He and Frank stepped outside, and they must have exchanged some words because Frank was in a foul mood the rest of the night.”

“When was that?”

“Two or three weeks ago. Why?”

“No reason, I’ve just never known them to argue.”

She put her wineglass on the coffee table. “Do you want to go through the stuff? I know that it’s probably, legally, yours, but I was hoping you might let me keep a few things.”

“You brought it over here, hoping I’d give it back to you? If you wanted some of this stuff, why didn’t you just keep it?”

“That wouldn’t be right.”

“Now you want to do the right thing?”

“Look, Kate. We can yell at each other. We can focus on the negative. Or we can just try to be the decent people I know we both are.” Vera’s voice was shaky, so I knew she was nervous, but her gaze was steady and determined. “Frank took a lot of his stuff, maybe things that meant something to you too. You’ll want those back. I was just hoping what you don’t want, I can keep.” She reached into the box and pulled out a decorated tin.

“I almost forgot. I brought you a present.”