Buried Secrets (3 page)

She was also a “green” fanatic who had banned all foam and paper cups in the office.

Everything had to be organic, ethical, free-range, fair-trade, and cruelty-free. The coffee she ordered for the office machine was organic fair-trade ethical beans shade-grown using sustainable cultivation methods by a small co-op of indigenous peasant farmers in resistance in Chiapas, Mexico. It cost as much as Bolivian cocaine and probably would have been rejected by a death-row inmate.

“Well, aren’t you fussy,” Dorothy said. “There’s a Starbucks across the street.”

“There’s a Dunkin’ Donuts down the block,” I said.

“That better not be a hint. I don’t do coffee.”

“I know better than to ask,” I said, getting up.

The phone rang: the muted internal ringtone. Jillian’s voice came over the intercom: “A Marshall Marcus for you?”

“
The
Marshall Marcus?” Dorothy said. “As in the richest guy in Boston?” I nodded.

“You turn this one down, Nick, and I’m gonna whip your butt.”

“I doubt it’s a job,” I said. “Probably personal.” I picked up and said, “Marshall. Long time.”

“Nick,” he said. “I need your help. Alexa’s gone.”

5.

Marshall Marcus lived on the North Shore, about a forty-minute drive from Boston, in the impossibly quaint town of Manchester-by-the-Sea, once a summer colony for rich Bostonians.

His house was enormous and handsome, a rambling shingle-and-stone residence perched on a promontory above the jagged coastline. It had a wraparound porch and too many rooms to count.

There were probably rooms seen only by a maid. Marcus lived there with his fourth wife, Belinda. His only child, a daughter named Alexa, was away at boarding school, would soon be away at college, and—from what she’d once told me about her home life—wasn’t likely to be around much after that.

Even after you’d pulled off the main road and could see Marcus’s house off in the distance, it took a good ten minutes to get there, winding your way along a twisting narrow coastal lane, past immense “cottages” and modest suburban houses built in the last half-century on small lots sold off by old-money Brahmins whose fortunes had dwindled away. A few of the grand old homes remained in the hands of the shabby gentry, the descendants of proper Bostonians, but they’d mostly fallen into disrepair. Many of the big houses had been snatched up by the hedge-fund honchos and the titans of tech.

Marshall Marcus was the richest of the nouveau riche, though not the most nouveau.

He’d grown up poor on Blue Hill Avenue in Mattapan, in the old Jewish working-class enclave.

Apparently his uncle owned a casino out west and Marshall had learned to play blackjack as a kid. He figured out pretty early that the house always has an advantage, so he started coming up with all sorts of card-counting schemes. He got a full scholarship to MIT, where he taught himself Fortran on those big old IBM 704 mainframes the size of ranch houses. He came up with a clever way to use Big Iron, as they called the early computers, to improve his odds at blackjack.

According to legend, one weekend he won ten thousand bucks in Reno. It didn’t take him long to see that if he put this to use in the financial markets he could really clean up. So he opened a brokerage account with his tuition money and was a millionaire by the time he graduated, having devised some immensely complicated investment formula involving options arbitrage and derivatives. Eventually he perfected this proprietary algorithm and started a hedge fund and became a billionaire many times over.

My mother, who worked for him for years, once tried to explain it to me, but I didn’t quite get it. I was never good at math. All I needed to know about Marshall Marcus was that he was good to my mother when things were bad.

When we moved to Boston after my father disappeared—Dad had gotten tipped off that he was about to be arrested, and he chose to go fugitive instead—we had no money, no house, nothing. We had to move in with my grandmother, Mom’s mother, in Malden, outside of Boston.

Mom, desperate for money, took a job as an office manager to Marshall Marcus, who was a friend of my father’s. She ended up becoming his personal assistant. She loved working for him, and he always treated her well. He paid her a lot. Even after she retired, he continued to send her extremely generous Christmas presents.

Despite the fact that he’d been a friend of my father’s, I liked him a lot. You couldn’t help it. He was gregarious and affectionate and funny, a man of large appetites—he loved food, wine, cigars, and women, and all to excess. There was something immensely appealing about the guy.

His house looked exactly the same as the last time I’d visited: the Har-Tru tennis court, the Olympic-size swimming pool overlooking the ocean, the carriage house down the hill. The only thing new was a guard booth. A drop-arm beam barricade blocked the narrow roadway. A guard came out of the booth and asked my name, even asked to see my driver’s license.

This surprised me. Marcus, despite his enormous wealth, had never lived like a prisoner, the way a lot of very rich people do, in gated communities behind high fences with bodyguards.

Something had changed.

Once the guard let me through, I drove up to the semicircular driveway and parked right in front of the house. When I got out of the car I glanced around and spotted an array of security cameras mounted discreetly around the house and property.

I crossed the broad porch and rang the bell. A minute or so later the door opened and Marshall Marcus emerged, his short arms extended, face lit up.

“Nickeleh!” he said, his customary term of endearment for me. He bumped the screen door aside and engulfed me in a bear hug. He was even fatter, and his hair was different. When I last saw him, he was mostly bald on top and wore his gray hair down to his shirt collar. Now he was coloring it brown, with an orange tint, and the hair on the top of his head had magically grown back. I couldn’t tell if it was a toupee or very good implants.

He was wearing a navy blue robe over pajamas, and he had deep circles under his eyes.

He looked exhausted.

He released me, then pushed against my chest and leaned back to examine my face.

“Look at you—you get more and more handsome each time I see you. Enough, already! You don’t age. You make a deal with the devil, Nicky? Is there a portrait of you looking like an
alter
kaker
in your attic?”

“I live in the city,” I said. “No attic.”

He laughed. “You’re not married, are you?”

“I’ve avoided that so far.”

He put a palm on my cheek and slapped gently. “
Punim
like this, I bet you gotta beat off the girls with a stick.” He was trying valiantly to feign his customary high spirits, but I wasn’t convinced. He put a pudgy arm around my lower back. He couldn’t reach as high as my shoulders. “Thank you for coming, Nickeleh, my friend. Thank you.”

“Of course.”

“This new?” he said, jerking his head toward my car.

“I’ve had it for a while.”

I drive a Land Rover Defender 110, which is boxy and Jeep-like and virtually indestructible. Hand-cranked windows. Rock-hard seats. Not a very comfortable ride, and pretty noisy inside when you exceed thirty miles an hour. But it’s the best car I’ve ever owned.

“Love it.
Love it
. I drove one of those around the Serengeti once on safari. Ten days.

Annelise and Alexa and me. Of course, the girls hated Africa. Spent the whole time complaining about the insects, and how much the animals stank, and…” His smile disappeared abruptly, his face drooping as if worn out by the effort of keeping up the façade. “Ahhh, Nick,” he whispered, a look of pain contorting his face, “I’m scared out of my mind.”

6.

“When did you last hear from her?” I said.

We sat in the only room downstairs that looked like it got any use, a big L-shaped eat-in kitchen/sitting room, in comfortable chairs covered in slouchy off-white slipcovers. The view was spectacular: the steely gray waves of Cape Ann lapping against the rocky coastline.

“Last night she drove down to Boston—she told Belinda she’d be back later, which Belinda assumed meant, you know, midnight or something. One or two in the morning, if she was having a good time.”

“When was this—what time did she leave the house?”

“Early evening, I think. I was on my way back from work.” Marcus Capital Management had an entire floor in one of the new buildings on Rowes Wharf, which I could see from a corner of my own office. He always worked long hours when Mom was his assistant, and he probably still did. A town car would take him into Boston every morning and take him home to Manchester every night. “She was gone by the time I got home.”

“What was she doing in Boston?”

He heaved a long sigh, more like a moan. “Oh, you know, she’s always partying, that one. Always going out, to discos or what have you.”

Disco
: I couldn’t remember when I last heard that word. “She drove herself? Or did she get a ride with a friend?”

“She drove. Loves to drive. She got her permit on the day she turned sixteen.”

“Was she meeting friends? Or was this a date? Or what?”

“Meeting a friend, I think. Alexa’s not dating, thank God. Not yet, anyway. I mean, not as far as I know.”

I wondered how much Alexa told her father about her social life. Not much, I suspected.

“Did she say where she was going?”

“She just told Belinda she was meeting someone.”

“But not a guy.”

“No, not a man.” He sounded annoyed. “Friends. Or a friend. She told Belinda…” Marcus shook his head, his cheeks quivering. Then he put a hand over his eyes, squeezing hard, and gave another long sigh.

After a few seconds I asked softly, “Where’s Belinda?”

“She’s upstairs, lying down,” Marcus said, his pudgy hand still covering his eyes. “She’s just sick about it. She’s taking this really hard, Nick. She didn’t sleep all night. She’s a wreck.

She blames herself.”

“For what?”

“For letting Alexa go out. Not asking enough questions, I don’t know. It’s not Belinda’s fault. It’s not easy being the stepmother. Any time she tries to, you know, lay down the law, Alexa bites her head off. Calls her the ‘stepmonster’ and all that—it’s not fair. She cares about Alexa like she was her own, she really does. She loves that girl.” I nodded. Waited half a minute or so. Then I said, “Obviously you tried her cell.”

“A million times. I even called your mom—I figured maybe it got late and she didn’t want to drive and she didn’t want to call us, so maybe she decided to spend the night at Frankie’s. She loves Francine.” My mother’s condo was in Newton, which was a lot closer to downtown Boston than Manchester-by-the-Sea.

“Do you have reason to believe something happened to her?” I asked.

“Of
course
something happened to her. She wouldn’t just run off without telling anybody!”

“Marshall,” I said, “I can’t blame you for being scared. But don’t forget, she does have a track record for acting out.”

“That’s all behind her,” he said. “She’s a good kid now. That’s the past.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.”

7.

Some years back, as a kid, Alexa had been abducted in the Chestnut Hill Mall parking lot, right in front of her mother, Annelise, Marcus’s third wife.

She hadn’t been harmed, though. She’d been taken for a ride, driven around, and a few hours later dropped off at another parking lot across town. She insisted she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and an examination by a doctor confirmed it. She hadn’t been threatened. They hadn’t even spoken to her, she said.

So the whole thing remained a mystery. Did her abductors get scared off? Did they change their minds? It happened. Marcus was known to be very rich; maybe it had been an aborted kidnapping-for-ransom attempt. That was my assumption, anyway. Then her mother left, telling Marcus she couldn’t bear to live with him anymore. Maybe it was precipitated by her daughter’s kidnapping.

Who knows what the real reason was. She’d died of breast cancer last year, so she wasn’t around to ask. But Alexa was never the same after that, and she wasn’t exactly an easygoing, well-adjusted kid before the incident took place. She got even more rebellious, smoking at school, breaking curfew, doing whatever she could to get into trouble.

So one day a few months after it happened, my mother called me—I was working in Washington at the time, at the Defense Department—and asked me to drive up to New Hampshire and have a talk with Alexa at Exeter.

I tracked her down on the stadium field and watched her play field hockey for a while.

Even though she didn’t consider herself a jock, she moved with a sinewy grace. She played with immense concentration. She had the rare ability to completely lose herself in the flow of the game.

She wasn’t easy to talk to, but since I was Frankie Heller’s son, and she loved my mom unambivalently, and since I wasn’t her dad, eventually I broke through. She still hadn’t metabolized the terror of the abduction. I told her that was normal, and that I’d worry about her if she hadn’t been so deeply frightened by that day. I said it was great she was being so defiant.

She looked at me with disbelief, then suspicion. What kind of mind game was I playing?

I said I was serious. Defiance is great. That is how you learn to resist. I told her that fear is a tremendously useful instinct, since it’s a warning signal. Fear tells us we’re facing danger.

We have to listen to it, use it. I even gave her a book about “the gift of fear,” though I doubt she ever read it.

I told her that she was not only a girl but a beautiful girl
and
a rich girl, and that those were three strikes against her. I taught her how to look for danger signals, and then I showed her some rudimentary self-defense techniques, a few basic martial-arts moves. Nothing fancy, but enough. I’d hate to be a drunken Exeter boy who tried to push her too far.

I took her to a dojo outside Boston and introduced her to Bujinkan self-defense techniques. I knew it would be great discipline for her, instill some self-confidence, be a healthy outlet for some of the aggression that had been building up inside her. Whenever I came to Boston and she was home from school, we’d make a point of getting together and practicing.