Lost (12 page)

“I didn’t realize accountants made house calls,” Tom said slyly, extending his hand.

“Special circumstances,” Neil said genially. Then quietly, to Cindy, “Would you like me to leave?”

“No. Please stay. The police might want to ask you some more questions.”

“The police? What’s going on here?” Tom stood back to let them enter.

As if the house is still his, Cindy thought, feeling herself bristle as she sidestepped around her ex-husband’s young wife, Elvis licking at her legs. “Julia didn’t come home last night,” she reminded him, looking around for Heather. “Heather?”

“Heather’s not here,” the Cookie said.

“What do you mean, she’s not here? Who let you in?”

Tom smiled sheepishly. “I have a key,” he said, having the grace to look at least moderately embarrassed. “Look, let’s not make this into a big deal, okay?”

“What do you mean, you have a key?”

“I said, let’s not make this …”

“And I said, what do you mean, you have a key? I changed the locks seven years ago. What do you mean, you have a key?”

“Julia thought I should have one.”

“Julia gave you a key to the house?”

“The key
and
the alarm code,” the Cookie said, possible payback for Cindy’s earlier use of the word
current
. “She thought her father and me should have a key in case she ever needed something or …”

“Her father and
I,”
Cindy corrected impatiently. “And with all due respect, this really isn’t any of your business.”

“It certainly
is
my business.”

“Okay, okay,” Tom said, arms outstretched, as if trying to placate both women. He glanced over at Neil. Women, his eyes said, clearly enjoying the fuss, knowing it was about him.

“I can’t believe you came into my house when I wasn’t here.”

“Here’s your key.” Tom dropped the key into Cindy’s outstretched hand.

“I don’t understand what you’re so worked up about,” the Cookie said. “We’re the ones who should be upset. We were halfway to the cottage when Irena called, and we had to come racing back.”

“I thought you were in a meeting,” Cindy said to her
ex-husband, pointedly ignoring his young wife. “Secretary’s still lying for you, I see.”

Tom shrugged.

(Scenes from a marriage: Cindy cleans up the kitchen after getting both children ready for bed. She wraps Tom’s dinner in plastic wrap and puts it in the fridge for him to eat when he gets home, then recorks the bottle of wine. “When’s Daddy coming home?” Julia calls out from the top of the stairs.

“Soon,” Cindy assures her.

“He promised to read me a story,” Julia says an hour later, sitting up in her bed, stubbornly refusing to fall asleep.

“I’ll read to you,” Cindy offers, but Julia turns from her, covering her face with her pillow, as if she senses her father’s absence is somehow her mother’s fault.

Cindy retreats to her own room, thumbs through the latest issue of
Vanity Fair
, and watches TV until her eyes are so heavy with fatigue she can no longer focus. It’s ten o’clock. She reaches for the phone, her arm stopping in midair, falling to her side. Irena has already told her Tom is stuck in meetings and can’t be disturbed. At eleven o’clock, Cindy turns off the lights and gives in to sleep. At twenty minutes after midnight, she awakens to the sound of a key turning in the front door, and hears her husband’s guilty footsteps on the stairs.

“Daddy!” she hears Julia cry with sleepy delight as he visits her room to kiss her good night.

Cindy feigns sleep as he creeps into their room and takes off his clothes, crawling in beside her without washing up. Even though he has undoubtedly showered before coming home, she can smell another woman on
his skin. She moves to the far side of the bed, hugs her knees to her chest till morning.)

“Earth to Cindy.” A voice snapped at the silence.

Cindy turned toward the grating sound.

“My husband asked you a question,” the Cookie said.

“You called the police?” Tom asked a second time.

“Yes, I did. They should be here any minute.”

“Julia’s going to be so pissed,” the Cookie said.

“I don’t understand why you felt it necessary to involve the police.”

“What exactly is it you don’t understand?” Cindy asked her ex-husband, checking her watch. “It’s almost one o’clock. Nobody has seen or heard from Julia since yesterday morning.”

“She’s going to be so pissed.”

“Do you know where she is?”

“No,” Tom admitted. “But …”

“But what?”

“You don’t think it’s a little early to be sending in the cavalry?”

“Did you know she broke up with her boyfriend?”

“Yes, I knew that. So what? Kid’s a loser.”

“A very angry loser,” Cindy said. “So angry he wrote a really scary story about a man who kidnaps his former girlfriend and tortures her to death.”

Tom waved a dismissive hand in front of his face, as if swatting away a fly. “I think you’re overreacting.”

“Really? Well, the police don’t think so. They’ve asked me for a recent photograph of Julia.” She patted the pocket of her khaki pants, tried not to see the pictures inside it.

“I still don’t understand when exactly you spoke to the police.”

“I’ll explain,” Neil said, motioning Tom and Fiona toward the living room. “You go find the photograph,” he directed Cindy.

“And what exactly is your part in all this?” Tom was asking Neil as Cindy left the room, running up the stairs, Elvis at her heels.

Cindy stood motionless outside Julia’s bedroom for several seconds, as if waiting to be invited in, Elvis’s tail slapping happily against the door. Her daughter wouldn’t like her snooping around in her room any more than Cindy had appreciated seeing Tom on the wrong side of her front door. How dare he come inside the house, make himself at home, bring that silly twit he married into her space, rub her nose in his new life—what was the matter with him? Did he think that just because he’d once lived here that gave him some kind of residual rights?

I make the money. I make the decisions
.

Cindy took a deep breath, trying to calm herself down. What exactly was she so angry about? The fact that Tom seemed so unconcerned about their daughter’s whereabouts, or the fact that he still looked so damned good, that despite the years and everything that had happened, he still had the power to make her go weak in the knees? “It’s not fair,” she muttered, turning around in helpless circles, trying to think where Julia might have stored her most recent head shots. Probably in the same place she keeps her address book, she thought, shaking her head, aware this was the second time this morning she’d invaded her daughter’s privacy.

“She’s going to be so pissed,” she told the dog in the Cookie’s voice, as once more, she rifled through the drawers of Julia’s desk. Getting pretty good at this, Cindy
thought, counting three boxes of unused stationery, at least thirty black pens, several scraps of paper with nameless phone numbers scribbled across them, four unused key chains, two empty picture frames, a leopard-print chiffon scarf, a dozen matchbooks, and three unopened packages of Juicy Fruit gum.

No head shots.

She opened the closet, slapped at the size-two clothing dangling precariously from the wooden hangers, again rummaging through the stacks of sweaters piled carelessly on the built-in shelves, and straightening the shoes lined up across the closet floor.

No head shots.

She ransacked each drawer of her daughter’s dresser, suppressing a shudder when she came across Julia’s collection of sexy push-up bras and thong panties. Doesn’t she have any normal underwear? Cindy wondered, recalling the days of her own youth, how she hadn’t even owned a bra when she married Tom. Her sister, Leigh, who was several cup sizes larger than Cindy, used to tease her about her lack of endowment. “My breasts might be small,” Cindy had countered, “but they’re perfect.”

Now they’re just small, she thought dryly, closing the last of Julia’s dresser drawers, and looking out the front window in time to see a police cruiser pull up in front of the house.

The police had arrived at Sean’s apartment within twenty minutes of his roommate’s call. They’d listened with interest as Paul apprised them of the situation, told them that he’d asked Cindy and Neil to leave repeatedly, and that they’d refused. Cindy, in turn, patiently explained that her daughter had recently broken up with
her boyfriend, Paul’s roommate, and that she was now missing. She and Neil had come by to talk to Sean, only to find Julia’s torn picture in his wastepaper basket and this alarmingly odious little story, she said, her voice cracking, her patience evaporating, as she thrust the offending piece of paper at the two police officers, and suggested they start combing the area immediately south of the King Sideroad for any abandoned shacks. “Hey, hey, hold on a moment,” they’d said, trying to slow her down.

“Slow down,” Cindy repeated now, falling to her knees and peeking under her daughter’s bed, the dog’s nose wet against her cheek. She saw an old electric keyboard and a new acoustic guitar, both covered in dust, which wasn’t surprising since Cindy couldn’t remember the last time she’d heard Julia play either. She was about to give up in defeat, go downstairs and tell the police that Julia must have taken the head shots with her when she went to her audition, when she saw the large manila envelope peeking out from under the shaft of the guitar. “Perfectly logical place to keep them,” Cindy said, stretching to retrieve the envelope and opening it as the front doorbell rang. Elvis barked loudly in her ear, then ran from the room. “I’ll be right down,” she called over the dog’s repeated yapping.

“Hello, Officers. Please come in,” she heard Tom say, as if this were still his house.

Cindy pulled a handful of photographs out of the envelope, smiled sadly at her daughter’s beautiful face. She looks so radiant, Cindy thought, admiring the determination in her daughter’s eyes. As if nothing can stop her, as if nothing can get in her way. “Julia gives good attitude,” Tom had once remarked, and as much as Cindy hated to admit her ex-husband was right about anything,
he was right about that. Julia stared back at her mother from the black-and-white glossy, her head tilted provocatively to one side, straight blond hair cascading toward her right shoulder, her skin flawless, with just the hint of a smile on her enviously full lips.

And yet Cindy knew that beneath all the bravado lay a bundle of insecurities, wriggling like snakes inside a canvas bag. Unlike Heather, who had the confidence but not the attitude, Julia had the attitude without the confidence. It was an interesting contradiction, Cindy thought, removing several of the head shots from the top of the pile to give to the police. She thought of the pictures in her pocket. Can’t very well show these to the police, she thought, removing them from her pocket and glancing through them.

“Cindy?” Tom appeared in the doorway, as if he’d been lurking there all along, just waiting for the right moment to pop into view. Clearly a man who understood the value of good timing, who knew how to make an entrance. “What’s taking you so long? The police are waiting.”

Cindy jumped to her feet, only to stand frozen to the spot, unable to move.

“What’s going on?” Tom said. “What are you doing?” He walked to her side and removed the pictures from Cindy’s hand.

“I found them in Sean’s apartment.”

“She looks pretty good,” Tom remarked casually.

Cindy shook her head in dismay. “You’re unbelievable.”

“Come on, Cindy. Lighten up. You can’t see anything.”

“You can see she’s naked.”

“You can also see she’s enjoying herself thoroughly.”

“Which makes it all right?”

“Which makes it none of our business.”

“She’s your daughter!”

“She’s a consenting adult.”

“Do you think I should show these pictures to the police?”

“Only if you want to cloud the issue,” he warned her.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean the police are easily distracted. One look at these and they aren’t going to take your concerns too seriously. I thought the objective here was to find our daughter.”

“So suddenly I’m not overreacting?”

“Of course you’re overreacting. It’s part of your charm.”

“Don’t patronize me.”

“Don’t punish me for something that happened seven years ago.”

Cindy’s eyes widened in disbelief. “You think this is about you? About our divorce?”

“Isn’t it?”

“It’s about our daughter.”

“Our daughter who’s missing,” he reminded her, as if she didn’t know.

The air rushed from Cindy’s lungs. “You don’t think something’s happened to her, do you?”

“No, I don’t,” Tom said evenly. “I think she just decided to get away for a few days.”

“Without telling anyone?”

Tom shrugged. “It wouldn’t be the first time.”

“She’s done this before?”

“Once,” he admitted. “She was upset about my getting married, so she took off, came back a couple of days later, apologized, said she’d just needed some time to get her head clear.”

“And you didn’t tell me?”

“I didn’t want to worry you unnecessarily.” He reached over, touched her arm. “I know our daughter. She likes to stir things up a little. Like her mother,” he added with a smile.

Cindy looked toward the window. “You’re so full of shit,” she said.

“Maybe,” he conceded. “But I still think we should wait until Tuesday before dispatching the troops, or we’re going to be awfully embarrassed when Julia comes waltzing home.”

“I don’t give a rat’s ass about being embarrassed.”

“Really, Cindy, your language.…”

“Fuck you,” Cindy told her ex-husband, watched him wince.

“Well, I guess there’s a certain comfort in knowing that some things never change.” He shook his head. “Look. Your
accountant
suggested I call Michael Kinsolving to see if Julia showed up for her audition. Who knows? Maybe she mentioned something to him about her plans for the weekend.”

“Do you think that’s possible?”

“Anything’s possible. Come on, the police are waiting.” They were halfway down the stairs before Cindy realized that Tom hadn’t returned the photographs of Julia. She was about to ask for them back when one of the police officers appeared at the bottom of the stairs, staring toward them expectantly.