Singer 02 - Long Time No See (30 page)

“Nelson, over and over, people keep saying something was missing in her. At work she was this bundle of ambition but never gave it a hundred percent. StarBaby wasn’t thriving and she lost interest. She tried to get Greg to open Soup Salad Sandwiches on the West Coast, but that was too big for him and my guess is she thought of him as small potatoes. She did all the suburban lady things, but dropped out of organizations she’d been really active in. I’ll bet anything if she hadn’t been killed, 1999 would have been the year of her last pumpkin cake. Baking, interior decorating, shoe buying, Mommy and Me classes. She wanted bigger things than just that. And I’ll bet quiet, nebbishy, smart Miss New Jersey offered her a chance to satisfy some ambition that needed satisfying.”

“You’re telling me a story. ‘Once upon a time there was a little girl named Courtney who looked at her candy-bar-sale balance sheet—’”

“I’m telling you a theory. I’m telling you what I know deep down is true, and don’t say anything like ‘Oh, the DA will really be impressed.’”

“What’s New Jersey’s name?” Nelson asked. I found myself in the middle of another staring contest. I lost. “Emily Chavarria.” And I spelled it for him.

When I got home, I set my alarm for six
A.M.
I wanted to get to New Jersey early, before all the Sunday-morning beach traffic.

A
LL THE WAY
down the Turnpike, I kept pushing thoughts of Nelson out of my head. I was nervous that in the midst of some erotic reverie, I’d swerve into another lane and hit one of those interminable silver tank trucks, the ones with huge “Flammable” warnings. Instead, I sang along to a Dinah Washington CD and pondered how come New Jersey, an otherwise normal state, would elect to honor its notables by naming after them the service areas at which travelers urinate and eat suspect frankfurters.

I exited onto Route 73 and finally, despite my Internet driving directions, found The Meadows, Emily Chavarria’s town-house complex, just outside Cherry Hill. I hadn’t foreseen a gated community. How the hell was I going to get past the guard? Lowering the Jeep’s window, I felt a droplet of sweat trickling from behind my ear down my neck. My mouth went so dry I was surprised I could part my lips. In a white shirt with a gold shield that proclaimed
EVERALERT
, the private security guard scowled at me with bulging eyes, then looked away. His Adam’s apple bounced. “Yah?” Apparently he’d decided I was not an imminent threat to The Meadows.

“Hi!” I smiled. He didn’t. I cleared my throat. “Uh, did Sergeant Wilson get here yet? To the place where Emily Chavarria lived?”

“Again?
” The guard sighed with the weariness of an old hand who’s seen it all far too often. “I thought they got done with that months ago.”

“I guess not.”

“No,” he said at last, “nobody’s got here yet.”

“Oh,” I said, trying to appear deflated, a performance that was lost as he was eyeing some sort of screen in his booth. “I’m supposed to give him ...” I patted a brown paper bag on the seat beside me that contained an apple core and an empty water bottle. It made a crisp, official sound. “From the lab.”

“Name?” he mumbled, picking up a clipboard.

“Dr. Singer.” One of the boons of being a woman of a certain age is that we are often viewed as terminally lackluster and, thus, incapable of any interesting vice, including guile.

“You from the lab?”

“Yes.”

I was already looking ahead. The complex was a series of wood and fieldstone structures that looked more than substantial enough for an upwardly mobile assistant bank manager. He wrote down my name, directed “First left, first right,” raised the barrier, and even managed a one-finger salute.

Emily herself, or the new owner of 807 Squirrel Court, had set a huge stone squirrel beside the front door of the town-house to greet visitors. Despite its toothy smile, I moved on and rang the bell of the attached house next door. A woman about thirty, with purplish-red hair—the result of that rinse that makes everyone who uses it look as if their ancestors hailed from a part of the British Isles with extremely peculiar climatic conditions—answered the door.

“Good morning!” I said, in a jaunty, dropping-in-at-nine-thirty-on-a-Sunday voice. The woman tightened the belt on her pink, waffle-weave bathrobe. “I’m Judith Singer. I’ve been hired by the family to look into Emily Chavarria’s disappearance.” I didn’t say whose family, a sign of my growing skill at subterfuge. I suppose it was to my credit that I felt a pang or two of guilt.

Maybe the woman picked up my discomfort because she opened her door wide and stepped back so I could come in. “Hey,” she greeted me. “Beth Cope.” A man about the same age strolled into the hall. “Judith Singer,” she introduced us, “my husband, Roberto Anello. Hon, Judith is a detective. She’s looking into Emily’s disappearance.”

Roberto, in a corresponding bathrobe in blue, flared his nostrils, but he was only suppressing a yawn. Lacking the hair for a purplish-red rinse (or for anything else for that matter), he scratched his scalp. Then, having come to some sort of decision, he asked with considerable courtesy: “Do you have any ID?”

Oy, I thought. “Sure,” I said. I opened the latch on my handbag, took out my car keys, cell phone, and Palm Pilot and poked around in the utterly ID-free abyss.

I was saved by Beth’s “Hey, no problem” and Roberto’s silently seconding the motion, because, within seconds, I was in their kitchen. I sat across from them at a table between a red leatherette booth, the sort found in diners. As the walls were festooned with an Eskimo Pie clock and archaic signs like
PEPSI COLA’S THE DRINK FOR YOU
! and
OBERMAIER’S YUMMY PIES
, I concluded they were 1950s aficionados. Ergo, I fit right in.

“You were living here last October, when Emily supposedly left for her trip?” They nodded simultaneously. “Did she talk to you about it at all?”

“Not much,” Roberto said. “It’s like we—Beth and I—met that night after work like we always do and went grocery shopping. Friday shopping.” Beth beamed as her husband spoke. “We came in around sevenish.” She nodded vigorously in agreement. They seemed such a pleasant couple, and obviously pleasant to each other. I found myself wishing that Kate would have a relationship like that instead of with MTV Adam and his zoot suits.

“I guess we remember because we told the police all about this sometime in ... I guess back in November,” Beth added. “It was incredibly spooky. I mean, Cherry Hill is not the kind of place people vanish from.”

“So Emily’s putting a suitcase into the trunk of her car—” Roberto went on.

“Which was ... ?” I asked.

“A Toyota something,” he replied. “I think an Avalon.” I noticed, he wasn’t actually bald. A layer of pale fluff covered his scalp, the sort of near hair you often see on a newborn. “And I said, ‘Hey, Emily, need any help?’ because the suitcase was half the size of her and she looked like she was struggling. She said no thanks. Then we asked her where she was going. She said Australia and New Zealand. For three weeks. I thought, Hey, what a great trip!”

“And you know what I thought?” Beth chimed in. “Three weeks on one suitcase? She’s a better woman than I am. She only had that one suitcase in the trunk and then she closed it.”

“She was driving herself to the airport?”

“I guess,” Roberto said. “Personally, I’m not a great believer in long-term parking.”

“Did she seem excited about the trip?” I asked.

“Not that I could see,” he responded. “She had a flattish personality. Besides being quiet. I mean, she wasn’t quiet and weird or quiet and nervous. Just ... quiet. She wasn’t, what do you call it? A big talker.”

“It’s like this,” Beth added. “We were just ‘Hey, how’s it going?’ neighbors.”

“Okay,” I said. “Even if she didn’t say anything, do you have any sense how it did seem to be going for her around the time she left and didn’t come back?”

“I couldn’t tell,” Roberto answered, “but Beth has a theory.”

I looked to her. “Well,” she exhaled meaningfully. “I feel bad saying this but she was as close to being totally dull as a person can get.” I nodded. “And she looked dull. No makeup except this kind of awful frosted coral lipstick that must have been a freebie, one of those cosmetic company mistakes that become gift-with-purchase. You know what I mean. Anyway, Emily wasn’t homely or anything, but she didn’t have lots to work with. Small eyes. Hair about here”—she indicated the middle of her neck—“which is neither here nor there. Except in the last couple of months she started to look better. Much better. Not noticeable makeup, but whatever it was worked because she suddenly looked like she had some life in her face. And she let her hair grow and it was definitely, definitely highlighted. I mean, September, October, and it kept getting blonder and blonder instead of darker.”

“She still wasn’t what anyone would call a babe,” Roberto interjected.

“But I told Roberto: ‘I bet she’s someone’s babe!’”

Beth and Roberto turned out to be the best The Meadows had to offer. One woman screeched from behind her closed door: “What? What? Who? What?” I shrieked “Emily Chavarria” until my throat hurt and I began to worry that someone six town houses away would call the cops. Across Squirrel Court, another couple knew her, but not as a neighbor—only as a photo in a newspaper captioned
MISSING
. Everyone else was out praying or golfing.

Unable to figure out what to do next, I longed for guidance,
Detection for Dummies.
I drove around Cherry Hill aimlessly. Eventually, I wound up in the parking lot of a giant mall, the kind of place that has too many stores selling the sort of candles whose scent is so belligerent no packaging can contain it. I opened the car window, turned off the engine, leaned back in the seat, and closing my eyes, thought about what it takes to go to Australia besides a fondness for marsupials.

Arrangements. Had Emily bought a ticket and then simply not shown up? Were Australia and New Zealand a cover for other plans, like establishing a new identity in some far-off place? Maybe she’d bought a ticket to Lima, Peru, or Lima, Ohio, and was, at this very minute, snickering over her
rebanada
or Froot Loops as she contemplated her successful murder of Courtney Logan. Or was I being too hasty? Was Emily also a victim? Was there some evil genius preying on FIFE members or on smart women or some other category I couldn’t figure out? Were any other members of FIFE mysteriously missing or murdered? Was some rogue FIFEer running amok? Was there some connection between Greg Logan and Emily Chavarria I’d missed?

Before I finished each question, another would pop up. I opened my eyes for an instant just to make sure there were no Hannibal Lecters sauteing fava beans outside the open window of my Jeep. Safe. I tried to imagine Emily’s life. Coming to an Ivy League school from a small town in Oklahoma. Whether shy or nerdy, quiet. Living a quiet life, seemingly brightened only by coral lipstick.

Yet according to Beth and Roberto, she’d begun coming out of her shell. As the days grew shorter, her hair grew blonder. Her face brightened. To me, this Emily didn’t sound like someone singing the blues. In fact, Beth had suggested the possibility of a man. I could relate. Was it a coincidence that with the mere notion of Nelson back in the general vicinity of my life, I’d gone to the hairdresser the previous week to become a bit more intensely brunette? If I’d had blond tendencies, the way Emily apparently did, no doubt I, too, would have spent fall getting sun-streaked.

So who was the new guy? Definitely no one I could come up with on a late Sunday morning. In fact, the only man I could think of mentioned in connection with Emily was the bank client Joshua Kincaid had called Pharmaceutical Container Man. What the hell was his name? In noir whodunits, the detective calls his secretary and says, “Listen, dollface, what was so-and-so’s name?” And with two cat-claw nails, doll-face takes the chewing gum out of her mouth and says ...

Right! Richard Gray or Gray Richards. And he owned fifty-one percent of his family’s company. Could Emily have been yearning for one of those plain-girl-takes-off-her-glasses-and-rich-guy-who’d-overlooked-her-goes-hubba-hubba moments? She sounded too serious a careerist to mix business and romance, but Josh Kincaid had mentioned something about her hitting the glass ceiling, so I wasn’t going to rule it out—especially since I had nothing else.

I checked my voice mail. Four messages! To many, no big deal. To me, a wildly eventful morning: Fancy Phil reported that Greg had never heard of anyone named Emily Chavarria. My son Joey announced he’d been hired by the
New York Times’
s Arts and Leisure section to do an article on the Coen brothers. Nancy, her Georgia tones sugary as pecan pie, demanded, “Where the fuck are you?” And then Nelson, in his bland cop voice: “I’ll see you at noon today, Sunday—” I glanced at my watch. Nearly eleven. Even flying, there was no way I could make it back to Long Island. “—at Carlo’s Big Cheese Pizza, Forty-seven Donovan Street, Cherry Hill.” Cherry Hill?

If stomachs can have seizures, mine did, contracting over and over before finally solidifying into a pain-producing object north of my navel. How the hell had he known? I tried some relaxation breathing I recalled from a yoga video I’d watched two or three times: in through the nose, hold, hold, hold, out slowly through pursed lips. All right, he’d called at ten forty-two, so clearly he was in or near Cherry Hill. Either there had been a magic moment when he’d spotted me tooling around in a red Jeep with New York plates and a St. Elizabeth’s College faculty parking sticker or he, too, had gone to check out Emily’s house and discovered from Everalert or Beth and Roberto that a lady from the lab/investigator for the family had left just a short time before. From the tone of his voice, it didn’t sound as if he were planning on a fun lunch.

Being one of those drivers who needs very specific directions—“Immediately after an off-white stucco house with a cutesy mailbox decorated with little girls holding a daisy chain, bear right onto North Peanut Street ...”—I spent a good part of the next hour locating Carlo’s Big Cheese, then trying to outwit a traffic circle in order to reach it. So when I walked into the place in a state well beyond frazzled, I felt grateful that Nelson had always been one of those people for whom noon meant precisely that. I’d have time to select a table not in direct sunlight, check to see if the ladies’ room was go-able in, and lighter of bladder and spirit, sit down and breathe some more.