Vanishing Girls (11 page)

Abby and Dathi both—two girls orphaned in twenty-four hours. I didn’t know them, really, but a word from either one of them, or both of them, was suddenly high on my wish list. As a mother who had lost two daughters, I felt I stood with them at the lip of their echoing void; ours was the kind of loss that couldn’t be filled by anyone but the people who were gone. No one else would do. And you never stopped yearning.

Billy, meanwhile, was lost in his own set of preoccupations as we watched Abby, so still and quiet in her deep, deep sleep.

Chapter 10

E
arly Tuesday morning, Billy stood in the foyer, breathing puffs of cold steam into the air even with the front door shut. He had on the same gray sweatpants and battered sneakers he’d been wearing to his and Mac’s biweekly basketball games for the past two years. He marched in place to warm himself up as he waited for Mac, who was downstairs with the new assistant, Star, who had arrived late.

“Hopefully it won’t be long. She started yesterday so she’s got the basic idea . . . I think.” I leaned close to whisper: “Just between us, she seems kind of flaky.”

“Weren’t you the one who interviewed her?”

“Oops.” I shrugged. “Come in for some coffee while you wait?”

He looked at his watch. “No thanks.”

“At least come sit in the living room with me.”

He followed me into the next room, but didn’t sit. I curled up on the couch where I’d left my laptop, mid-search for a new babysitter. I still hadn’t figured out how to explain any of this to Ben without breaking his heart. I had tried telling him that Chali might not be able to come back, only to field a demand to call her up. I’d changed the subject. We would have to tell him, really tell him, soon.

“Any news from Dathi?” Billy asked me.

“Nothing.” I didn’t elaborate; he knew how worried I was.

“We’ve got a new development in the case.”

I shot to the edge of the couch. “Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Relax—I’m telling you now. Women.”

“There you go again.”

“Just kidding.” He held up a flattened palm, and flashed me a smile.

I almost laughed, and fell back into the couch. “Start talking, Billy.”

“New guy hit the radar last night: Antonio Neng. Upper East Side, personal investor. Correction:
disgruntled
personal investor. Neng’s been harassing four different bankers, including Reed Dekker. Ranting and raving in e-mails, calling Dekker a ‘fat cat banker’ who ‘ruined his life,’ yada yada yada. He was in Brooklyn that Sunday night.”

“Witnesses?”

“
Thirty
witnesses saw him. He was freezing his ass off at a Bargemusic concert on the East River, down by Brooklyn Bridge Park. We checked it out: He was alone. People who know him say he isn’t into classical music. Likes hip-hop, rap, punk.”

“You said he was a personal investor—”

“Yeah, well, that’s what he calls himself on his Facebook page. A dozen years ago he sold a dry cleaning business he built up, and spent his time since then investing the profits into a small fortune. Lost a lot of it in 2008 and had to go back to work, but this time not as an owner. Now he’s behind the counter taking in people’s dirty clothes. Guess he doesn’t like it.”

“Harassment? Or stalking, too?”

“We’re finding out. The visit to Brooklyn makes us think he was getting into stalking, early stages though, because he was still building in excuses for being somewhere off his beaten path. Still not sure. Dash is working it this morning; I’ll get back on it after the game. Where’s Mac?” He took another look at his watch.

I went to the top of the stairs and called down: “Billy’s waiting!”

“Just another minute!” Mac called back up.

“So what are you thinking?” I returned to the couch. Billy had given up on Mac, and now sat in the chair across from me. He’d even halfway unzipped his jacket. “Are you looking at this guy for Nevins Street, too? Or just the Dekkers?”

“I don’t know—seems like a stretch. Dash and I, and just about everyone else on the task force, in our guts we think it’s two cases that intersected because Abby was hit by a car in the wrong place.”

I looked at him, processing that.

“Not that anywhere is the right place. But you know what I mean.” A slash of sunlight moved along the carpet; the room suddenly brightened and Billy squinted his eye. “Man, this room lights up. You look like you just dissolved into that couch.”

“I’m still here.”

“Karin, if you weren’t, I wouldn’t know what to do with myself. And I mean that.”

I smiled. “Well, thanks. But what was that for?”

“Met with someone yesterday—a peer counselor. He got me to promise to sign up for Tai Chi, for starters; I’m supposed to do it today when I’m over at the Y.”

“It’ll be good for you.”

“Maybe, but it’ll suck more time out of my day, when already there aren’t enough hours.”

“Everyone’s busy, but you still have to give yourself time to—”

“How many people do you know who’ve got a serial killer on their to-do list?” He leaned back abruptly and slid his hands into his pockets. You could see his knuckles moving on tight fists under the thin fabric of the sweatpants.

“What I’m trying to say,” I tried, “is that time is relative. “When you have one of your attacks, and you break with what’s happening and go to wherever it is that you go . . . what happens to time then?”

“Poof.”

“In the overall equation, that’s time lost, right? So think of it as substituting planned Tai Chi sessions for unscheduled hallucinations.”

A genuine smile blossomed on his face, and you could see his hands relax in his pockets. “He also set me up with a psychiatrist who specializes in what ails me.”

“What ails you, Billy?”

“As if you don’t know.”

“I haven’t actually heard you say it yet. Maybe it would be good to practice, so you can be honest when you start therapy. Otherwise it doesn’t work.”

“You know what, Karin? You should be a therapist yourself.”

“I don’t want to be a therapist.” I sank into the couch cushions. Stared at him. Waited. “Go ahead: Say it.”

He enunciated each word awkwardly, like moving a stone around his mouth: “Post traumatic stress disorder. Satisfied?”

“Do you really think I’ll ever be satisfied?”

We burst into laughter, and just at that moment Mac walked into the living room wearing his basketball shorts and a T-shirt. His winter jacket hung open. “Ready?”

Billy stood up.

“Mac.” I followed them. “Are you seriously going outside in just your shorts?”

“No time to change, Karin.”

“You have pneumonia!”

“
Had
pneumonia.” He grabbed his keys out of the bowl by the front door.

He was much better, it was true; but still, I didn’t like it. “It’s just common sense to take it easy for a while. At least to keep warm.”

Billy laughed. Mac kissed my cheek, and they were gone.

I lowered the shades halfway to block out some of the blinding light, and settled back into the couch with my laptop. The e-mailed résumés, this time for babysitters, just kept flooding in. It was astounding. It would have been easier to have just a few replies and carefully pick among them; this deluge was overwhelming, and I feared I’d make a mistake. How could anyone replace Chali? It didn’t seem possible.

There was a crash downstairs and the sound of glass breaking.

“Oh shit!” Star shouted.

I found her standing in the downstairs hall, slumped against the gallery of Ben’s drawings. On the opposite wall, where we’d hung framed family photos, were two empty spaces. The glass in one of the frames had shattered into a spiderweb of cracks over a shot of me and Mac on our honeymoon in Greece, wearing our bathing suits; Mac in the ubiquitous T-shirt that covered his array of scars left from his near miss with a very bad criminal; I, round with pregnancy. Luckily the second frame’s glass was intact though one corner of the frame itself had broken.

“Are you all right?” I asked Star.

“I did a pirouette and I lost my balance.” Her lipstick was smudged.

“A pirouette?”

“I’m a dancer. I mean, I want to be.”

“I thought you worked at an investment bank.” For three years, as I recalled from her impressive résumé.

“Day job.” She smiled sheepishly, her short haircut curved like parentheses around her narrow face. “I’m also compulsively honest. I might as well tell you that, too.”

“Good to know.” I forced a smile. “Why don’t we clean this up?”

“I’ll do it! Just point me to the broom.”

I took her to the kitchen and, just as I was showing her where to find what she needed in the pantry closet, the house phone rang.

“I’ll answer it!”

“No! No need. Here.”

She grabbed the broom and dustpan and rushed back downstairs.

I took a calming breath, and answered on the fourth ring.

“Mrs. Schaeffer?”

“Speaking.”

“I’m calling about your reference,” a man said.

“If it’s about the job, it’s been filled.” Though I almost regretted saying that, sensing it might not stay filled for long.

“Job?”

“Are you calling about one of the ads we ran?”

“Chali Das, my tenant, she listed you as her reference when she applied for the apartment.”

I felt suddenly cold as my mind shifted gears back to last week. I could still see her body lying on the gurney. That horrifying wound.

“Yes, Chali.” I didn’t know what else to say.

“Someone’s got to come and clean out the apartment. The cops are finished here, they told me. I have to rent it out or I can’t pay the mortgage.”

The thought of going through her things made me uneasy. I pulled the phone away from my ear, pulled myself together. “How is tomorrow morning?”

“Tomorrow’s fine. Friday by the latest. I’ve got people coming to see it over the weekend.”

I hung up the phone and stood there. After taking a few deep breaths, I went to my purse, found Detective Vargas’s phone number, and called him to confirm that they were really finished with the crime scene.

“Yup,” Vargas confirmed. “We’re all done there.”

“How is the investigation going?”

“Aren’t you getting regular updates from your colleagues at the Eight-four?”

“I don’t work with them.”

“Could have fooled me.”

“So?”

“Whatever Billy and Lalala told you, that’s the way it is. We’re working together, so what they know is what I know.”

“Thank you.” I didn’t mean it, though; I thought he was presumptuous, and rude, and he made me feel useless.

“My pleasure.” He didn’t mean it, either.

We hung up at the same time.

A
toothless beggar in a Santa hat stood in front of me on the moving subway, his hand held out: a craggy map of a life of failures, pallid from addiction, brown tendrils of skin like parched rivers fading to extinction on a bloated pink palm.

“For the children,” he murmured, trying to catch my eye; but I wouldn’t look at his face. I hoped this man was lying, that he didn’t have any children. I dug into my coat pocket, found a crumpled dollar bill, and gave it to him, just so he would go away. He lurched along the train to the next cluster of riders, leaving behind a fetid smell.

Across the aisle, a young woman in a purple jacket, purple scarf, and purple hat smiled her sparkling blue eyes at me. I smiled back. At her feet were four overflowing shopping bags with two rolls of colorful wrapping paper sticking out of one. The smell and the man and the sad, sad moment evaporated.

Chali’s stop was next, and I got off.

The afternoon was sunnier and warmer than it had been in a week; the graying snowbanks left over from Sunday’s blizzard were starting to melt along Fourth Avenue. Steady dripping from awnings and scaffolding made it sound like rain, though the sky was perfectly clear. I stopped in a deli to buy a box of large, heavy-duty garbage bags. The sun, as I turned up Chali’s block, blinded me for a moment. I lifted my hand to shadow my eyes just before I would have run into a pair of young boys wearing backpacks, chattering as they showed each other illustrated cards, if they hadn’t nimbly darted out of the way just in time.

I stood a moment in the long shadow cast by Chali’s building, awed by the quiet. A woman came out from next door with a frill of layered satin hanging below the hem of her coat. She wore red patent-leather high heels, and as she passed me I saw that her lipstick and fingernails matched her shoes.

It was as if nothing had happened.

As if a murder hadn’t changed the world, right here, just a week ago.

As if Chali had never existed.

Well, it was true: She didn’t exist anymore.

I found her keys in my purse and let myself into the ammonia-clean front hall. All the way up to her apartment, I thought about how Chali had made this climb daily, and how Dathi would never see this place. That it would be up to me to describe it to her hit me suddenly—how her mother’s final home looked, how it smelled, how it sounded when she walked up the stairs and down the hall to her apartment. How many rooms she lived in. The colors of her walls. I felt a wave of desperate emotion; I
had
to talk with Dathi, to tell her all this. Hearing back from her felt as imperative as it was beginning to seem unlikely.

Chali’s door had, ironically, been left locked, as if it still mattered to try and protect what was inside. I turned the key and let myself in.

The first thing I noticed was the metallic smell of dried blood that filled the space like an olfactory fog. A glimpse into the bedroom, and through the partially open bathroom door, confirmed my guess that no one had bothered to clean up.

Shafts of sunlight from the living room windows illuminated a riot of dust kicked up by my sudden presence in the otherwise abandoned space. The cops had left the apartment a mess. But it didn’t matter. I wasn’t here to clean; I was here to excavate. I sloughed off my coat, opened the box of garbage bags, and got to work separating out the stuff that seemed worth saving. I lit a half-burned cone of incense I found in a little dish on the windowsill, and played the CD that was already in the stereo: the Beatles’
Abbey Road
. That surprised me, I’ll admit, but the more I learned about Chali’s life and her tastes, as I dug through what was left of her world, the more I realized how little I had actually known her.

She was a fledgling poet, and had been working on a manuscript, which I’d noticed when I was here last week. I read a few sheets and learned that she was as secretly heretical as she was openly religious. Her dissent appeared practical, not theoretical, and as she had written lately in English my guess was that her social views had evolved significantly since landing in America. I stopped to read “Arundathi,” because it was named for her daughter, and I was curious.