Singer 02 - Long Time No See
Read Singer 02 - Long Time No See Online
Authors: Susan Isaacs
Susan Isaacs
To Larry Ashmead
my editor and my friend
with love
Chapter One
O
N AN UNSEASONABLY
warm Halloween night, while I was reading a snappy treatise on Wendell Willkie’s support of FDR’s war policies and handing out the occasional bag of M&M’s to a trick-or-treater, the fair-haired and dimpled Courtney Logan, age thirty-four,
magna cum laude
graduate of Princeton, erstwhile investment banker at Patton Giddings, wife of darkly handsome Greg, mother of five-year-old Morgan and eighteen-month-old Travis, canner of peach salsa, collector of vintage petit point, and ex-president of Citizens for a More Beautiful Shorehaven vanished from Long Island into thin air.
Odd. Upper-middle-class suburban women with Rolexes and biweekly lip-waxing appointments tend not to disappear. Though I had never met her, Courtney sounded especially solid. Less than a year before, there had been a page one feature in the local paper about her new business. StarBaby produced videos of baby’s first year. “I thought it would succeed because I knew in my heart of hearts there were thousands just like me!” Courtney was quoted as saying. “It all started when Greg and I were watching a video we’d made of Morgan, our oldest. Fifteen minutes of Morgan staring at the mobile in her crib! A beautiful, intelligent stare, but still ... After that, another fifteen of her sucking her thumb! Not much else. Suddenly it hit me that we’d never taken out the videocam for Travis, our second, until he was six months old!” (I’ve never been able to understand this generation’s infatuation for using last names as first names. Admittedly it’s a certain kind of name: you don’t see little Greenberg Johnsons gadding about in sailor suits.) Anyhow, Courtney went on: “I was so sad. And guilty! Look what we’d missed! That’s when I thought, it would be so great if a professional filmmaker could have shown up once a month and made a movie starring my son!”
Though not unmindful of the
Shorehaven Beacon
’s aggressively perky style, I sensed Courtney Bryce Logan was responsible for at least half those exclamation points. Clearly, she was one of those incorrigibly upbeat women I have never been able to comprehend, much less be. She’d left a thrilling, high-powered job in Manhattan. She’d traded in her brainy and hip investment-banking colleagues for two tiny people bent on exploring the wonders inside their nostrils. And? Did even a single tear of regret slide down her cheek as she watched her children watching
Sesame Street
? Was there the slightest lump in her throat as the 8:11, packed with her Dana Buchman–suited contemporaries, chugged off to the city? Nope. Apparently, for can-do dames like Courtney, being a full-time mom was full-time bliss. Ambivalence? Please! Retirement was merely a segue into a new career, motherhood, another chance to strut their stuff.
However, what I liked about her was that she spoke about Shorehaven not just with affection but with appreciation, with familiarity with its history. Well, all right, with its myths. She mentioned to the reporter that one of the scenic backgrounds StarBaby used was our town dock. She said: “Walt Whitman actually wrote his two-line poem ‘To You’ right there!” In truth, Courtney was just perpetuating a particularly dopey local folktale, but I felt grateful to her for having considered our town (and our Island-born poet) important.
I think I even said to myself, Gee, I should get to know her. Well, I’m a historian. I have inordinate warmth for anyone who invokes the past in public. My working hours are spent at St. Elizabeth’s College, mostly squandered in history department shriek-fests. I am an adjunct professor at this alleged institution of higher learning, a formerly all-female, formerly nun-run, formerly first-rate school across the county border in the New York City borough of Queens. Anyhow, for two and a half seconds I considered giving Courtney a call and saying hi. Or even Hi! My name is Judith Singer and let’s have lunch. But like most of those assertive notions, it was gone by the end of the next heartbeat.
Speaking of heartbeats ... Before I get into Courtney Logan’s stunning disappearance and the criminal doings surrounding it, I suppose a few words about my situation wouldn’t hurt. I am what the French call
une femme d’un certain âge
. In my case, the
âge
is fifty-four, a fact that usually fills me with disbelief, to say nothing of outrage. Nonetheless, although I still have the smooth olive skin, dark hair, and almond-shaped eyes of a mature extra in a Fellini movie, my dewy days are over. My children are in their twenties. Kate is a lawyer, an associate in the corporate department of Johnson, Bonadies and Eagle, a Wall Street firm whose founding partners drafted the boilerplate of the restrictive covenants designed to keep my grandparents out of their neighborhoods. Joey works in the kitchen of an upscale Italian deli in Greenwich Village making overpriced mozzarella cheese; he is also film critic for a surprisingly intelligent, near-insolvent Web ’zine called
night
.
As for me, I have been a widow for two years. My husband, Bob, the king of crudités, flat of belly and firm of thigh, a man given to barely suppressed sighs of disappointment whenever he saw me accepting a dessert menu from a waiter (which, okay, I admit I never declined), died at age fifty-five, one-half day after triumphantly finishing the New York Marathon in four hours and twelve minutes. One minute he was squeezing my hand in the emergency room, a reassuring pressure, but I could see the fear in his eyes. As I squeezed back, he slipped away. Just like that. Gone, before I could say, Don’t worry, Bob, you’ll be fine. Or, I love you, Bob.
Except when the love of your life actually isn’t the love of your life, the loss still winds up being devastating. Golden memories? No, only vague recollections of passionate graduate-school discussions and newlywed lovemaking fierce enough to pull the fitted sheet off the bed. Except those times had blurred in direct proportion to the length of the marriage, and after more than a quarter century together, Bob and I had wound up with sporadic pleasant chats and twice-a-month sex that fit neatly between the weather forecast and the opening credits of
Nightline
.
But back to Courtney Logan. “Something’s very, very wrong with this disappearance business,” I announced to my friend Nancy Miller a few days later. We were strolling around Gatsby Plaza, an upscale shopping center named, without a trace of irony, for Fitzgerald’s nouveau riche character. It was one of those places that offers the woman who longs to spend two thousand dollars for a handbag a myriad of venues; it also provides the setting in which passersby, with one discerning blink, can acknowledge not just handbag owner’s status, but her worth.
Anyway, the evening was lovely, clear, although too balmy for early November. The early stars were outshone only by the twinkly lights wrapped around the trunks and branches of the slim, pampered trees that sparkled Christmasly all year round. The air, heavy with the pungent autumnal scent of designer chrysanthemums, felt thick and humid, as though it had been shipped from the greenhouse along with the mums. Supposedly, we were on our way to a restaurant. For me, six-thirty is dinnertime. For Nancy, it’s late lunch. Naturally, we were nowhere near a grilled salmon.
She’d halted in front of a store window, transfixed by a dress, a clingy, tubular thing in white cashmere with a hood. It was displayed on one of those chichi mannequins. This one had a barbed-wire head and Ping-Pong-ball-sized breasts that, for some reason, had nipples so prominent they looked like a pair of teeny Uzis.
“You like that dress?” I demanded.
“I more than like it,” she replied. Her response came out something like “Ah mo thun lak it.” Although Nancy had rarely been back to her native Georgia in thirty years, she’d clung to its syrupy accent, convinced, correctly, that it added to her charm. “I
love
it.”
“It’s a white cylinder.”
“That is the point,” she replied, too patiently.
“It probably costs a fortune,” I warned.
“Of course it costs a fortune!”
“With that hood, you’ll look like one of your white trash Klan relatives.”
She gave one of her sighs of Christian forbearance. “You have several areas of competence, Judith. Haute couture is not among them.”
“What
do
you think about Courtney Logan just vanishing?” I persisted as she was pulling open the heavy door to the shop. It was the Thursday after the disappearance, a night the stores stayed open until nine.
“She probably had some kind of secret life,” Nancy said offhandedly. “That white dress in the window,” she murmured to a saleswoman who, naturally, had walked straight to her after passing right by me, as though my wearing a not-genuine camel’s-hair coat had rendered me invisible. The woman took Nancy’s measure in a single flutter of her eyelashes, each one of which appeared to be individually mascaraed, after which she rested her chin on the pad of her index finger. Her long, squared-off nails were the color of prunes. (I, for one, find fingernails with right angles strangely disturbing.) A true size eight, the saleswoman intoned. Nancy, who had never been able to exorcise completely her inner Southern Belle, said nothing, merely lowering her eyes with sweeter-than-molasses-pie modesty: I concur. The woman left on her mission.
“What the hell is a ‘true’ size eight?” I inquired. “As opposed to what? A false size eight? Do sixes and tens try to pass?”
“I thought you wanted to discuss that Courtney woman.”
“I do,” I quickly answered.
“There’s nothing to discuss.”
“Your arteries are hardening.”
“You do loathe reality, don’t you?” Nancy observed. “Not that I blame you. Reality is hardly ever amusing. But my guess as to what happened is, Courtney Logan, woman of mystery, ran off with her kitchen contractor.” She shook her head. “So fucking tedious. All these broads searching for meaning with anything that has eight inches.”
“First of all, there’s no indication that Courtney had anyone—”
“How do you know she didn’t?” Nancy challenged.
“I don’t. But women like her don’t just disappear into the night. If she wanted to leave, she’d confide in a friend, talk to a matrimonial lawyer ... tell her husband directly, for God’s sake. She was hardly some passive-aggressive wimpette. She’d been an investment banker. Even if she were going to run off, would she just bring her little girl home from trick or treating, drop her off, and leave without a word?”
