Next Time You See Me (7 page)

“Maybe he wasn’t in the car to begin with,” I ventured.

Jones looked at me and didn’t say anything. I wondered what her illness made her feel about death: if something as vague as a body-less car hauled out of the ocean qualified as a definitive event. I wondered if she was able to care about anyone else’s demise when she was staring right at her own.

“No sign of him in two whole weeks,” Billy said. “It doesn’t look good.”

“Billy, you don’t have to—” But before I could regret my strident tone as it sought to tamp down his pessimism, an investigator picked something up from behind the opposite side of the car and came around to us. He was holding a paper bag.

“Go ahead,” Jones told him.

He stood in front of me and opened the bag. I looked in and saw a brown leather shoe. Part of the sole had come unglued and flapped down.

I recognized it immediately. “Oh God,” I muttered, hoping no one had heard me, because if no one heard me, maybe it wouldn’t be true. Maybe I would blink my eyes and the wet shoe dangling from the man’s hand would not be Mac’s.

A hush fell, a stillness. It was as if I had screamed:
My husband is dead
. As if I had just realized something everyone already knew.

“Where was it?” I asked.

“Wedged under the driver’s seat,” Jones said.

I felt dizzy and suddenly knew I was going to faint. Billy pivoted to get both his arms around me in time to catch me. I was aware of his size and strength as he took all my weight at once, preventing me from crashing to the ground. I was not a small woman but he was able to lever me gently down and maneuver me so that the next thing I knew, I was lying with my legs outstretched in the grass and my head in Sergeant Jones’s lap. Her dry, thin hand stroked my forehead, and in my delirium I thought, actually believed, that it was death touching me. My mind wove between a dream state, in which I saw Mac waving good-bye at the end of our block, blowing a kiss, wearing the brown shoes, and reality, in which I felt the physical presences of Jones and Billy and saw the car on the sloping asphalt drive.

Mac’s shoe.

Wouldn’t have been in the car.

If Mac hadn’t been in the car, too.

When it drove into the Sound.

Sally Owen fed me some sweet tea and a brownie on her shady veranda. And then Billy loaded me back into his car and drove me home through rush hour traffic, straight into a blinding orange sunset.

“H
e didn’t kill himself.”

“Karin—” Billy glanced at Mom.

“Sweetheart,
please
.”

I pulled my hand out from under hers as soon as she touched me. “No, I can’t bring myself to believe that. I just can’t.”

“We may think we know someone,” Mom said, “but there are always surprises.”

“Anyone could have buckled under that kind of pressure.” Billy meant Aileen and Hugh’s murders. Danny’s arrest.

“
He sent me flowers that day
.
He confirmed our date
.”

They glanced at each other but otherwise kept still. Finally Mom got up from the kitchen table and topped off Billy’s coffee. She replaced the coffeepot and fussed with something at the counter before finally, reluctantly, returning to the table, where it seemed we had sat without end for two straight days and nights since I had come back home from Connecticut. If I had slept, I couldn’t remember; if I had eaten, I had no idea. There was only one thing I could think about, and that was my conviction that without a body there was no proof of death.

“Did you know Detective Pawtusky called me yesterday?” I asked Billy, staring at him hard so I wouldn’t miss an iota of reaction. Everyone was treating me like thin glass lately, trying to be strong so they could catch all my pieces when I broke. Trying to wait out my stubborn certainty that Mac was still alive. Trying to make me believe the unbelievable.

Billy sighed. “No, I didn’t know he called you.”

“Have
you
spoken with him recently?”

“A couple of times.”

“He
asked
me, he
actually
asked
me if Mac had been unfaithful. He said there was gossip in Bronxville that Mac was unfaithful to Val, that he cheated on her with me, and that he cheated on me as well.
What goes around comes around
, Pawtusky said to me. I told him that Mac was not that kind of man. I told him that Mac and I didn’t get together until well after he and Val had separated. He sounded like he didn’t believe me.”

“I’ll talk to him,” Billy said.

“It’s like Pawtusky thinks if he can prove Mac was unfaithful, he can prove I didn’t know him as well as I thought, and he can prove they’re a family of liars and cheaters and killers—
and Danny is guilty as charged
. It’s character assassination.”

“The detective does seem to be awfully insensitive,” Mom agreed.

“Like I said, I’ll talk to him.”

I could have gone on all day like that, railing against everyone, the injustice of all the false accusations against Mac—infidelity, abandonment, suicide—but Ben woke up from his nap. Mom went downstairs and returned with my groggy little boy who had his father’s eyes and smiled just like him, too. I took him on my lap, in my arms, breathed in his sweetness.

“
Mac isn’t
. . .
” I said to Mom and Billy, shaking my head in place of saying the final word,
dead
, to spare Ben’s innocent ears.

Mom and Billy traded another one of their awful, knowing glances. And then Billy stood up.

“I have to get going.”

“Will you keep looking for him?” I said. “Please?”

“Sure, Karin. I’ll keep looking for him.”

He patted my shoulder and then walked away. Mom showed him out. I heard them talking in low voices at the front door and though I couldn’t hear what they were saying, I could imagine it.
It’s just a temporary insanity.
She’ll come around.
Give it time.

T
he next morning the doorbell rang with a delivery from a messenger: a large cardboard box from Mac’s office. Even they had decided he was never coming back and had cleaned out his desk for its next occupant. He had only been senior vice president of Forensic Security at Quest for a week before his parents died, two weeks before
he
died. Every time I thought that, a lump caught in my throat; no matter how hard I tried to swallow the un-fact of his suicide it wouldn’t quite go down.

But I was trying. Going through the paces of my second widowhood. This time around was different from when I’d lost Jackson and Cece because I still had Ben. I would devote myself to him, we would live our lives day to day and just take it from there. Meanwhile I would finish school and start my new career; no more Mr. and Mrs. Forensic, as Mac had joked (a thought that made my eyes water) but Ms. Forensic, single mother. It wasn’t exactly what I’d expected but if you think life is going to turn out the way you plan it, you’re a fool. At the ripe age of thirty-seven, I knew that lesson by heart.

I carried the box to the living room, put it on the floor, sat down near Ben—who was coloring madly with washable markers on newspapers I had spread out for him—and proceeded to unpack Mac’s workaday personal belongings. There weren’t many things.

An extra charger for his personal cell phone; he had left his employer-supplied BlackBerry on his desk and presumably they had reassigned it.

A brand-new white shirt still in its packaging, a pair of clean black socks, and a small toiletry kit; he was prepared for the occasional unanticipated business trip.

A gym bag with sweatpants, an old T-shirt, white athletic socks, and battered once-white now-gray sneakers; he was ready for a lunchtime visit to the midtown branch of his gym. He had stuck by that pair of sneakers like an old school friend who no longer fit into his life, refusing to replace them. I had planned to surprise him with a new state-of-the-art pair for Christmas this year.

A worn paperback of Emile Zola’s
Germinal
; someone must have loaned it to him, knowing how much he liked to read classic novels. I hadn’t learned this about him until after we became lovers and I got to know him well: Mostly he used the library, which was why his bookshelf at home wasn’t crammed with the detritus of his reading life. Mac had not worn his true self on his sleeve; he was layered, and if you had the patience to slowly peel back his layers he only got better and better . . . and more complicated . . .
depression
. . . why hadn’t I learned about it before it led him off a cliff . . . not off a cliff but into the water . . . a drowning death . . .
how horrible
.

How had I not known?

I put the book down and removed the last thing from the cardboard box: a slip of white paper, clearly a receipt. I unfolded it, expecting it to be for the flowers Mac had sent me the last day I saw him (he always used the florist in the lobby of his office building, and he always paid in cash), but I was wrong. The receipt was from a jewelry store in midtown Manhattan for a necklace described in neat script as
Diamond and ruby cluster pendant on 18k gold chain
, costing twelve hundred dollars and dated three weeks ago. It must have been a receipt for a gift Mac planned to give me for our anniversary. Its price stunned me; we had never had the money for extravagant presents. But his promotion had come with a substantial raise. I looked again at the date on the receipt: four days after his promotion, and three days before his parents were killed. I wondered where he had put the necklace. It would have been imprudent to hide something of this value at work, but at home I might have found it. Where would he have decided was the safest place to squirrel it away? Had he planned to give it to me at our dinner on Friday night, or on our actual anniversary on Saturday? What would he have done? How would he have thought? As I considered it, nothing seemed clear or obvious—yet one more thing to feel distressed about since I had never second-guessed Mac before he vanished.

I picked up Ben, hoisted him onto my hip, and carried him downstairs to his bedroom, where I changed his diaper and took his favorite cuddly, a floppy brown bunny, out of his crib. He grabbed it to him and squealed. Then, in my room, I set him down on the floor and started searching through my husband’s things: dresser drawers, closet, jacket pockets, small secretary desk where I paid our bills, two-drawer file cabinet. I looked under the bed and even between the frame and mattress. Then the spare room, especially the closet where we kept our small locked safe that was crammed with our few things that were too valuable or dangerous to leave out: I removed the envelopes containing our birth certificates, our wills, our life insurance policies, and finally picked up the licensed gun we kept mostly out of habit—a Ruger P85 9mm handgun Mac had chosen with my blessing—and stared into the empty safe. Next I checked through Ben’s room. Upstairs, I looked everywhere in the coat closet, including inside shoes and boots. and went through every kitchen cabinet. The more I looked, the more agitated I became.
Where was it?
And then I remembered that there was a safe at Quest for expensive electronics sometimes used on security assignments.

I picked up the phone and dialed Mac’s office number from memory. His secretary, Tina, answered on the second ring.

“Sigrid Albert’s office.”

Good
, I thought:
They gave the promotion to a woman.
I had never met Sigrid Albert but Mac had spoken highly of her. She had been at Quest about as long as he had and had been Deidre Stein’s other protégé.

“Tina, it’s Karin.”

“Oh! Hi!”

“Thanks for sending over the box of Mac’s stuff.”

“You’re welcome.”

“But I have a question about something. Do you have a minute?”

“Shoot.”

“There was a receipt at the bottom.”

“The folded-up little paper? I didn’t look at it; it was in his personal drawer.”

“It was a receipt for a necklace—our anniversary was coming up—but I can’t find it anywhere.”

“I went through the whole office and I didn’t see any necklace.”

A note of tension had entered her tone but it was unnecessary; I didn’t suspect her of having taken the necklace. Her fiancé was a wealthy young man and the engagement ring on her finger had to be five times as valuable as the necklace. She wouldn’t have had any reason to steal it. Besides, she seemed like a nice young woman and it hadn’t even occurred to me.

“I just thought he might have put it in the office safe.”

“Oh
right
. Maybe he did. I’ll check and get back to you.”

While I waited, I started making lunch: a grilled cheese sandwich that Ben and I would share. Half would be enough to fill him up along with part of a banana on the side. The other half would be about all I’d be able to manage eating, as I’d lost my appetite since Mac disappeared. Before the sandwich was finished cooking, the phone rang.

“Hi Tina,” I answered.