Empty Ever After (27 page)

I’m not necessarily a big believer in the truth. Katy will tell you that about me, but that’s not how I mean it. What I mean is that the truth doesn’t conform to the rules of Sunday school or sermons, to clichés or adages. The truth doesn’t always come out in the wash or in the end and it’s frequently not for the best. The truth often makes things worse, much worse. The truth can be as much poison as elixir, cancer as cure. And I knew some ugly truths about Steven Brightman that had put an end to his political career, but that gave no comfort to the dead and grieving.

I put Steven Brightman out of my head. It was an August sun falling down over the brim of the earth. The sky was a heavy shade of dusk, the stars more than vague hints of light. The darkening air was rich with the sweet scent of nicotina and lavender from the gardens—their sweetness playing nicely against the predominant smell of fresh-cut grass drifting over from the golf course next door. I pulled up to the house, my shirt
slightly damp from nervous sweat. But I was enjoying the delicate buzz of excitement and anticipation I had going. It had been a very long time.

Connie met me at the door, her blond hair swept back, her white smile and clear blue eyes sparkling. We sort of stared awkwardly across the threshold at each other, not knowing quite what to do. She reached out, taking my hand, and pulled me into the house. When I was inside, she kissed me shyly on the lips. I kissed her back as shyly. No one ran screaming. We had gotten by the first hurdle. Both of us took deep breaths.

“Hi, Moe. God, I’ve been so nervous all week. I was worried you’d cancel. A scotch?”

“Sure.”

“Come on into the den.”

I followed. She was dressed in a clingy floral print and open-toed shoes with a low heel. Her muscular calves flexed as she walked to the bar. I noticed not only what she was wearing and how she looked, but the pleasant effect it was having on me.

“I’ve been looking forward to this as well, I think even more than I knew,” I said.

“Really?” She handed me my scotch and we clinked glasses. “What’s been going on in your life?”

I thought about not answering or deflecting the question with the usual nonsense, but thought it would be a bad precedent. I told her.

“My lord,” she said, refilling my glass. “What madness. Can revenge really be such an obsession?”

“Apparently. It was so important to my father-in—to my late father-in-law, that he wanted it from his grave. Good scotch.”

“You sold it to me. Your store did, at least.”

“Listen, Connie, can we stay off the subject of graves and revenge for now? I’ve spent a little too much time in cemeteries lately.”

“Absolutely.”

Connie put her drink down, pressed herself against me, and kissed me in a way I would not describe as shyly. I returned her kiss and then some. Connie had other talents besides playing the piano. Kissing Connie didn’t come with the baggage of kissing Katy nor with the depth of feeling and darkness of kissing Carmella. It was, in any case, an amazing sensation. Other than those two weak moments I shared with Carmella and the spontaneous moment with Tina Martell, Connie was the only woman beside Katy I had kissed in the last twenty years.

“How’s your dad doing?” I changed subjects.

“I’m afraid he’s taken a bit of a bad turn. He’s in the hospital, but should be home next week some time.”

“Sorry to hear it.”

“What can one do? It’s the nature of the disease. Mom will be back by then. At least my son doesn’t have to deal with it. He’s up at football camp for the next two weeks. Come, let’s get out of here and leave these depressing things behind us. In fact,” she said, reaching into her clutch and pulling out her cell phone, “can we make a deal? How about we shut out the rest of the world for the evening and focus only on the two of us?”

“Deal,” I said, making a show of shutting off my cell phone.

She put hers down on the bar.

“I’ll drive,” I said.

“Oh, no you won’t. The car will be here in a few minutes. We’re focusing on each other, no distractions.”

My first impulse was to argue. I didn’t. It felt good to give in, to turn control of things over to someone else for a change.

“Would you like me to play for you until the driver gets here?”

“Maybe later,” I said, pulling her close. “Maybe later.”

 

I HADN’T BEEN on a date in about a quarter century, so nearly every inch of the night was a revelation. Around our second bottle of old vine Zinfandel, when it became clear that bed had gone from our possible to our inevitable destination, the rate of revelation picked up speed. The odd thing about marriage is that it lulls you into a comfortable forgetfulness. You forget that the dance you do can be nearly the same and yet be almost completely different. You forget what it’s like to discover excitement instead of relying on it. You forget that even awkwardness has its potent charms and that first times do still exist in the universe. You can know in your head that every woman has a different taste, a different scent, a different feel, but to be reawakened to the sense of it was an indescribable and unexpected shock.

Connie Geary was everything I would have wanted for my debut in the world of the recently single. She was good company, familiar enough, but not too familiar. She was comfortable with herself, at ease with me, smart, skeptical, not cynical. She was unembarrassed by her family’s wealth, but not blind or unsympathetic to the plight of the rest of the world. In bed, Connie was eager, sharing, unafraid. She was all of those things and yet I knew I would never visit her bed again.

The night had been both wonderful and hollow somehow. For all the laughs and kisses, wanting looks, flirtatious touches, and orgasms, there didn’t seem to have been an ounce of spontaneity in the entire evening. I don’t want to say it all felt staged—no man wants to think the moans
and clenches, the screams and spasms, are the result of careful rehearsal and not passion—but I couldn’t escape the sense of things having been storyboarded, that each step had been premeditated. Even when I got up at five to shower, I knew Connie Geary would follow me in a few minutes later and take me in her mouth. Knowing didn’t stop me from enjoying.

Perhaps the strangest aspect of the whole experience was the parting. We had, it seemed, used up all our awkwardness in our twelve hours together. Our farewell was almost business-like: pleasant, courteous, distant. There were no hard feelings, no angry words, no accusations. Pulling down the driveway, I could see Connie in my sideview mirror. She stood at the edge of the portico, giving me a goodbye wave so slight it was barely noticeable. The look on her face was unvarnished and predatory.

Is this, I wondered, what being alone did to you? Had Connie played out this scene over and over again with any number of men? Had they all disappointed her? Was she disappointed even before they showed up? Is that why it was, in spite of all the heat, so empty an experience? Christ, it was all so very odd. Heading back to Brooklyn, I didn’t find myself missing Katy so much as the marriage itself.

I KNEW THE
second I walked through the condo door that the world had changed when I wasn’t looking. My phone machine was flashing without pause. I’d never seen anything like it. Reflexively, I reached for my cell and remembered the deal I’d made with Connie Geary about leaving distractions behind. The second I turned it back on, it buzzed. It was an easy choice for me between answering machine and cell. I preferred hitting one button to cell message retrieval.

“Dad, it’s Sarah, listen … We’ve gotta talk. Something’s up with Mommy. I…I think she’s losing it. I think she’s seeing Uncle Patrick again. Please call me back. I’m supposed to leave for Ann Arbor tomorrow, but I don’t really want to leave with Mommy like this. Call me back as soon as you get this.”

The second and third messages were much the same only more frantic. Sarah was increasingly worried not only about Katy, but by her inability to reach me. The fourth and fifth messages were from Aaron and Carmella, respectively. Both had gotten calls from Sarah concerning my whereabouts and why I wasn’t picking up my cell phone.

“Yeah, Prager, this is Detective Feeney. We got a location on Mary White. She never made it outta the Ohio-Kentucky area. The airport cops found her in the trunk of her car in the short-term lot. The tags had been switched. Preliminary report is the old lady was strangled. Give me a call.”

There was another round of calls from Sarah and Aaron, alternating between panic and anger.

“Hey, boss, it’s Doyle. It’s weird, but no one on Manhattan Court can ever remember seeing Martello. I even showed his picture around. Nothing. But the minute I mentioned the guy with the eye patch, like ten people knew who I was talking about. And here’s the really weird thing, two or three of the neighbors remember the guy with the eye patch being there the night the kid bought it. Gimme a call. Whadaya want me to do from here?”

I picked up the phone and dialed Sarah’s cell, half listening as the messages continued playing.
One ring.
The next message was from Sheriff Vandervoort.
Second ring.
Sarah had called the sheriff’s station and was panicked.
Third ring.
When Sarah got up and went to check on Katy, she was gone: her bed unslept in. Her car still in the garage.
Fourth ring.

“Dad, where the hell have you been? Mommy is—”

“I know, kiddo, I’m listening to my messages.”

“Where have—”

“It’s a long story, Sarah. Tell me what’s going on.”

She pretty much repeated what Pete Vandervoort had described and then started losing it.

“Shhhh, Sarah, calm down, calm down. It won’t help anyone if you lose control. You said you thought Mom was seeing Uncle Patrick again. What makes you say that?”

“She was acting weird, like … like she was before she tried to—”

“Weird how?”

“She was all nervous, always looking over my shoulder when we were together. She started staying in her bedroom all the time, smoking cigarettes. I could smell them through the door. She tried to get me to stay at Robby’s or to come back to your place. Dad, I’m really scared.”

“We’ll take care of it. Your mom’ll be fine,” I said, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary. “I’ll be up there in a few hours. In the meantime, put in a call to her shrink, okay? I’m on my way.”

I stayed and listened to the remainder of the messages. They were from Aaron and Carmella, another one from Pete Vandervoort. All wondered where I was and why I still hadn’t picked up my cell. Walking to my bedroom to change, I half-listened to another message, the last message. It was mostly silence, a vague, familiar silence, a chilling silence. Then a snicker.

 

I HAVE SELDOM in my life been thankful for traffic. Being thankful for traffic is akin to joy over an exit wound, but I was thankful for it that day.

With the Belt Parkway jammed in both directions, I hadn’t even gotten out of Brooklyn. And given all that was going on, I’d’ve thought my mind would be cluttered by fear over Katy’s disappearance, worry for Sarah, the news of Mary White’s murder. Then there was the peculiar nature of what Brian Doyle had said about no one having seen Martello on the night of the kid’s murder. Never mind the call from the snickering ghost.

Yet, there in the traffic, the radio blasting “Black Coffee in Bed,” my progress measured by inches, not in miles per hour, all I could think about was Connie Geary and the expression on her face as I drove away that morning. I looked at my sideview mirror as I had earlier, trying to recreate her face with the paint of memory. Her expression was predatory, almost feral. Again, I wondered where it had come from. I wondered if she meant for me to see it. It was always the small details: Connie’s expression, the kid lying to me about his name, Katy seeing … Suddenly, I was short of breath and then the world went away.

Things became so clear to me that I hurt, I ached. I wanted to peel my skin away from my muscle, tear my muscle away from my bone, wrench all feelings away from my heart. Horns filled the air, but I could not move, could not blink, could not … All senses deserted me. I was numb and deaf, dumb and blind. The only thing I tasted was my own bile. I heard the horns again. They were angrier now, even vengeful. Beneath the blare was a distant tapping. Still, I could not move. The tapping grew more insistent.

“Hey, buddy … pal …” The tapping had a voice. “Buddy, you okay?”

The world rushed back in as I turned to see a man’s face pressed against my window. I looked ahead and the traffic had broken up.

“Yeah, I’m fine. Sorry.”

He shrugged his shoulders, hitched up his eyebrows, the corner of his mouth. He tapped the window one more time and said, “Okay, then let’s go.”

I stepped on the gas and drove blind.

 

ALTHOUGH IN MY heart I now knew who had been pulling the strings all along, I wanted some confirmation, something tangible I could show Feeney and Pete Vandervoort. Too many times in my life I had operated on whims and hunches. Not this time, because if what I suspected was true,
was
true, then Katy’s life, Sarah’s, and mine were in real danger. Everything, even the murders of Mary White, the kid, Martello—yes, Martello—had been the preliminaries, the overture and first two acts. Before I went rushing upstate, I needed to know for sure.

I called ahead to Vandervoort and Sarah and warned them I might be delayed in getting to Janus. Car trouble, I’d said. The sheriff knew
I was full of shit and Sarah believed me out of desperation and habit. I considered telling Vandervoort the truth, but changed my mind. There was too much to explain and if I was wrong, I didn’t want to risk the sheriff shifting the focus off the search for Katy. If I was right about who had her, she’d be safe for now. The last act required me as audience.