She's Not There (23 page)

It’s almost a spiritual thing. You feel each other. That’s what creates beauty.

She had loved Alex once. And he had loved her. But he was like Victor, trying so hard but never really understanding where her center of gravity was. And she had never really understood his.

“Hey in there, you okay?”

Jimmy was calling to her from the kitchen.

“Yeah, I’m fine,” she yelled back. She changed her T-shirt for a sweater, ran a brush quickly through her hair, and went out into the living room.

“I have Earl Grey, Golden Monkey, and some strange stuff I found in Japantown,” Jimmy said, craning his neck out the archway from the kitchen. “Name your poison.”

“Earl Grey.”

“Coward.”

As she waited for Jimmy to make the tea, she looked around his apartment. It was small, on the second floor of an ugly fifties cubicle-like building. But its big window overlooked a park, and through the wind-tortured cypress trees, she could see the gray-green expanse of the Pacific Ocean. The furnishings were flea-market finds, the walls were filled with messy bookcases and theater posters, and the television in the corner was dusty and unused. It was so much like his studio back in Miami Beach, she remembered, but this apartment felt more settled, more secure.

There was a silver picture frame on the desk under the window. She picked it up and smiled. It was Jimmy and Neil, dressed in suits with white boutonnieres, standing on a balcony with marble columns in the background.

Jimmy came in with a tray and set it on the coffee table.

“Where was this taken?” she asked, holding up the frame.

“City hall. Very romantic, sort of like Mussolini’s mausoleum.”

Amelia looked back at the photo and then at Jimmy again. “You got married? When?”

He stared at her. “Last year. I called you right after the ceremony, remember?”

Amelia hesitated and then turned away, setting the frame back in its place. Of course she remembered now. That was one of the reasons Jimmy and Neil had moved out here, so they could marry.

“Where is Neil?” she asked softly.

“He’s teaching a fiction workshop in Vancouver this week. We talked about this last month. I told you that with him away, this would be a great time for you to come because—”

She brought up a hand to cover her eyes.

“Amelia.”

She turned to Jimmy.

“Talk to me,” he said. “I need to know what happened to you.”

What happened? She knew he was asking about what happened since the accident. But it wasn’t just about that. What had happened to her had started long before that night in the Everglades. And it was a tangled yarn-ball, with strands that stretched all the way back to Morning Sun and the lake house, back to ballet classes in Burlington and lonely years in New York. The strands bound her up with her mother and father, Ben and The Bird—and Alex.

What happened was about feeling like she had walked out into a lake and the ground had given way, and she had been drifting down for years. That’s why she had decided to leave Alex, leave her whole life in Florida behind. She needed to feel the bottom under her feet again.

Jimmy was still waiting for his answer.

“I had a car accident. When I woke up, I couldn’t remember who I was,” she began.

“An accident?”

Slowly, she told him what had happened, retrieving the pieces that she knew, about the amnesia, her fear that someone was trying to kill her, how she fled the hospital and tried to reconstruct her past. When she got to the part about Arnolds Park, she stopped.

“I shot a man,” she said.

“What?”

“He was trying to kill me.”

“Amelia,” he said, “what the hell is going on?”

Amelia told him about Clay Buchanan, how his hands felt around his neck, how terrified and stunned she was when she saw him lying in the water. Jimmy’s expression as he listened was unnerving, like he had no trouble at all believing she was capable of shooting someone.

“Is he dead?” he asked finally.

“I don’t know. I’ve been searching for news about it for days but there has been nothing about it anywhere. But I feel like he’s still out there, watching and waiting for the right moment to try again.”

Jimmy had gone quiet, staring at the floor.

“I don’t know what I did,” she said. “I don’t know what I did to make him want to kill me. It’s the one thing I still need to remember, and I can’t.”

Jimmy rose from the sofa and came to her, wrapping his arms around her. He didn’t say anything, just cupped the back of her head and pulled her down to his shoulder.

“The memory will come back, just like all the others have. You’re here now. We’ll figure this out. You’re safe.”

She closed her eyes. It was true. All the pieces were coming back, snapping into place like that jigsaw puzzle on the table at the lake house. Except another important piece was still missing—the thing that had once defined her and given her life shape, the thing that had been her center of gravity. There was still one other question, and she realized that Jimmy might have the answer.

“I need to know why,” she said.

“Why what, love?”

“Why I quit dancing,” she said.

Jimmy pushed gently away from her. “You don’t remember?”

“I remember that I loved to dance, Jimmy,” she said. “And I was good at it. I know I was.”

“Yes, you were,” he said softly.

“So why did I give it up?”

He let out a long hard breath and turned away.

Something was wrong here. Why was he hesitating? What could be so bad that he couldn’t even look at her?

“Jimmy? I need to know,” she said.

He turned to face her. “I let go,” he said.

“What?”

“You jumped into my arms and I let go of you.”

She shook her head, not understanding.

“We were on tour in Tampa,” he said slowly. “It was the last night, the last ballet on the program, the
Tchaikovsky Pas de Deux
.
We were almost at the end, and I was so tired, my legs were gone. But you were on fire that night and when we came to the fish dive, you jumped and I . . .”

Jimmy fell silent, unable to go on.

He didn’t have to because it was coming back now. Just eight minutes, the whole ballet was only eight minutes, but it was one of the hardest in the repertoire. Its climax was the woman launching herself and diving head first toward the wings only to be snared by the man’s arms at the last moment.

Amelia closed her eyes.

A crash to the stage. The gasp of the audience. Waves of pain. The heavy red curtain coming down. Voices yelling and the rattle of metal wheels. More pain as they lifted her onto a gurney and Jimmy’s tearful face above her, his hand squeezing hers.

But he wasn’t there when she woke up after surgery. Alex was.

It was Alex who had been there at her bedside in the hospital, holding her hand when that doctor told her she would never dance again. Six months later they were married. Soon after that, Jimmy left the company and moved away.

It was almost a year before Jimmy called her, a year of painful physical therapy and depression. He told her he felt guilty and that he was sorry, not just for the accident but for not being the man she needed him to be.
You had Alex
, he told her,
you didn’t need me anymore.

At first his apologies just added to the pain, but finally she accepted them, and their friendship re-formed and grew from afar. He was the only connection to the world she had lost, and in a way the only connection to anything
real
in a life that had become so false.

“I’m so sorry,” he whispered.

She took his hand in hers. “Jimmy, it wasn’t your fault. I told you that then and I need you to believe it now. You know what I was like. I wasn’t afraid to push myself.”

And she had, she knew. She would try for just one more revolution in a pirouette because she knew his hands were around her waist. She would go off balance in a turn because she knew he would pull her back. And she would risk a blind leap into the darkness because she knew he was there.

Jimmy . . . Alex. And even Ben.

They had all been there for her, and she had depended on all of them to help her find her footing when the bottom gave away. But it hadn’t made her whole, it hadn’t made her safe. And it hadn’t made her strong, not the way The Bird said she once was.
Fearless . . . that girl wasn’t afraid of anything.

Was that girl still here?

Yes, Amelia thought. Yes, I am.

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

Amelia Tobias’s life was spread out before him on the bed.

Buchanan’s eyes swept over the contents of the Morning Sun cardboard box and then moved up over the room’s stained walls and scarred furniture, settling finally on the limp orange curtains.

He had been holed up here for two days now, waiting for his strength to return. This morning was the first time he was able to walk around without his head spinning, the first day he could think clearly enough to consider what he was going to do next.

He rose with a grimace, went to the window, and jerked on the cord to open the drapes. He stared out at the empty highway and flat white landscape.

Eight days ago he had been looking out at the ocean from his suite at the W Hotel, getting prime rib from room service and Maker’s Mark from the minibar. Now he was living on crap from the Kum & Go, watching TV until he fell into a black-hole sleep, and waking up in sweaty sheets with Amelia’s terror-dark eyes staring up at him.

Buchanan flexed his fingers, as if that could somehow release the muscle memory of his hands around her neck. He pulled the drapes closed. Picking up the pint of Jim Beam he had retrieved from the floor of the Toyota, he finished it off and tossed the empty bottle in the trash. He glanced back at the bed, and forced his brain to shift away from Amelia and back to McCall.

Buchanan knew that if he went through with his new plan to help Amelia, McCall wouldn’t stop at killing Amelia. McCall would have to kill him, too.

He rubbed his face. Somewhere in all of this, he needed to neutralize McCall, or both he and Amelia would be running for the rest of their lives.

He went to the table under the window where he had left his canvas bag, pulled out his Acer and fired it up, praying he could snag a signal in this godforsaken place.

Nothing. Dead air.

He got out his personal cell phone. He had no choice; he’d have to tether his laptop to his cell so he could go online. It would leave a trail if someone wanted to trace him, but he’d just have to take the chance. He turned on the iPhone and activated the Bluetooth setting. He did the same for the Acer, typed in his PIN and chose his PAN network. A minute later, he had Internet access.

He worked fast, not wanting to have his cell live any longer than he had to. The first Google page listed the articles and sites he had seen on his first search of McCall more than a week ago. But now he was doing a deep dive, looking for the debris and dark currents in McCall’s life. And Buchanan knew they were there. Everyone had shit floating just below the surface. Especially lawyers.

He was four pages in, way past the glowing magazine profiles, business articles, and legal stuff when the word “death” came up:

SHERIFF INVESTIGATES DUI DROWNING

DEATH OF LAW FIRM SECRETARY

The article was dated almost eighteen months ago, and was from the
South Florida
Sun-Sentinel
. It was a short piece about a woman named Mary Carpenter, an executive secretary for the McCall and Tobias firm, who had been reported missing by her sister. Two weeks later, her car was found submerged in a drainage canal in remote western Broward County. The autopsy revealed her blood alcohol content was .09, above the legally impaired limit, but not falling-down drunk, Buchanan knew.

There was a quote from a sheriff’s department spokesman saying no foul play was suspected, that such accidents were “tragically common in South Florida.” The reporter backed this up with a weather report about three days of torrential rain, and statistics from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration that an average of fifty-seven Floridians drowned in cars each year in the canals that were used to regulate the Everglades and water supply.

There was a small picture of Mary Carpenter. She was around forty, plump with short brown hair and a broad smile.

Buchanan brought up another search screen and typed in “Mary Carpenter Fort Lauderdale.” Only four hits: a brief obit, a link to the National Association for Legal Professionals, a basic profile on the background check site Intelius.com, and her Facebook page.

Buchanan clicked on Facebook. Mary Carpenter had been dead for eighteen months, but no one had taken down her Facebook page. The most recent posts were dated not long after her death, all notes of mourning and remembrance from friends. Buchanan scrolled down until he finally got to Mary Carpenter’s own last posts. He read a month’s worth but there was nothing out of the ordinary, just the normal posts about her friend’s wedding, her dog Chico, and a trip with her sister Vivian to a Fort Lauderdale tourist place called Flamingo Gardens. Buchanan was about to close the page when he paused.

He stared at the large main photo at the top of the page. Most people chose a landscape, some place that held sentimental value. Mary Carpenter’s was a vintage postcard of Hialeah Race Track in Miami with a flock of flamingos wading in the infield lagoon.

Something was itching at his brain. He clicked on the left column to bring up Mary Carpenter’s photos. Just the usual shots of friends and family, but then he stopped, staring at a picture of Mary Carpenter behind a desk, probably at her office at McCall and Tobias. She was grinning, with a phone receiver at her ear, and all around her were . . .

Buchanan bolted from the chair and went to the bed. He rummaged through the papers and memorabilia from Amelia’s cardboard box and pulled out the plastic flamingo.

It had to have been there, somewhere in the back of his brain when he first went through the box, that the plastic flamingo didn’t belong there. The cardboard box held Amelia’s best memories: of her dancing, her brother, favorite childhood books, and the T-shirt from Lake Okoboji. Nothing from Florida.

Buchanan examined the plastic flamingo. It was dirty, its pink feathers frayed, no writing on it, no clue where it had come from. It was just a cheap bobblehead. He turned it over. On the bottom was a piece of double-sided adhesive tape.

He looked up at the ceiling, but in his mind’s eye he was seeing another piece of adhesive tape stuck to the dashboard of Mary Carpenter’s car.

He held the toy under the light and turned it slowly. Under the dirt, he saw a spot of a different color, dark reddish-brown. Blood.

A dashboard trinket spotted with blood. Had it been in Mary Carpenter’s car just before she went into the canal? And if it had, how did it end up in Amelia’s box of mementos sent from Iowa?

The scenario began to play out in Buchanan’s head. Mary Carpenter had learned something about the law firm she wasn’t supposed to know, probably something to do with SEC violations or insider trading, maybe even a Ponzi scheme. The kind of thing that would have brought in the windfall of profits that rocketed Alex Tobias into Broward County’s one percent.

Or maybe the Feds, conducting a secret investigation, came to Mary Carpenter and asked her to turn on her bosses. Either way, she ended up dead, a fatality in a one-car accident out in the middle of nowhere.

Alex Tobias, for whatever damn reason, took the flamingo and kept it. Until it turned up in Amelia’s possession. She had to have known of Mary’s accident, and undoubtedly had been to her husband’s office often enough to see the flamingos on Mary’s desk.

Had she put it all together? In recent months, had an already unhappy Amelia come to realize she was married to a murderer?

Buchanan went back to his canvas bag and pulled out the police report from Amelia’s accident.

A second one-car accident, out in the middle of nowhere, during a rainstorm, meant to leave a woman dead. How had this one happened? Had someone tampered with the gullwing’s brakes? No, that left too much to chance. McCall had to be certain the car crash would be fatal.

Buchanan sifted through the police photos of the smashed gullwing Mercedes. There were several flash-lit color photos of the interior, and Buchanan focused on a close-up of the area behind the bucket seats. There was a suitcase wedged in the small space and he realized it was a duplicate of the old tan one he’d seen in the garage of the Tobias home.

He let out a long breath. How had he missed this before? When he had researched gullwings, he’d read that they had no trunks, and they came outfitted with two matched pieces of luggage. That explained why Esperanza had seen Amelia bringing the old tan suitcase back into the house—she had removed the top suitcase to make room for something.

Her own suitcase? But nothing had been found at the accident site. What had she needed the extra room for in the car?

Buchanan moved on to the other photographs, sifting through the shots of the exterior. He stopped, staring at one that showed the entire car sitting on the side of the road after it had been towed out of the saw grass.

Damn.

Something about the car had bothered him the first time he had seen the it back in the Fort Lauderdale police compound lot, but now he knew what it was. Both the gullwing doors of the wrecked Mercedes were closed. The cops would not have shut them because they needed to record the car exactly as it had been found, for insurance purposes. Amelia had sustained a concussion and wandered away from the car, so she wouldn’t have taken the time to close the doors. Which meant someone was in that car with her.

Someone who had caused the wreck.

Someone who had stuck around just long enough to make sure Amelia was dead.

But Amelia had survived, and the scheme had fallen apart.

McCall had caught a break—Amelia remembered nothing about the wreck. They had time to get her home and clean up their mess, maybe even try to kill her again.

But when she bolted from the hospital, the hunt was on. Why did she run? Was she spooked by her husband because she suspected he had something to do with Mary Carpenter’s death? Had she remembered something about her own accident? But why hadn’t she just gone to the cops? Why hadn’t she told someone?

Buchanan knew she must have confided in someone because in his experience no one kept something like this buried inside them.

Joanna McCall said they were friends, but if Amelia suspected Alex was involved in Mary’s death, there was no way Amelia would have confided in Joanna.

Who would Amelia have turned to?

He went back to the bed and sifted through the mementos. He picked up the children’s book titled
The Graveyard Book
. It looked much newer than the other books in the box, he realized now. He opened to the title page. Someone had written an inscription there—
Kiss a lover, dance a measure, find your name and buried treasure. Love, J.

There it was again—the mysterious “J” from her Day Runner. And this time Buchanan was damn sure it wasn’t Joanna.

He set the book aside and picked up the packet of letters from her brother Ben. He had gone through them before, but maybe he had missed something, just like he had missed the inscription in the children’s book. As he slowly read each one, he began to feel like an intruder into the intimacies shared between brother and sister. The letters began when Ben was in boot camp in the late 1990s and ended with his last letter from Afghanistan in summer 2011. Scribbled at the bottom of the last letter was a postscript: “I told you once to get out of Morning Sun, Mellie, don’t stay in an empty place. Now I’m telling you don’t stay in an empty marriage.”

Buchanan set the letter down.

Ben had been her confidant, the trustee of the most private of her emotions, and he knew Amelia was unhappy with Alex. But there were no hints in his letters that Amelia was suspicious of something at the law firm. Who had she confided in? Was it “J”?

Buchanan pulled Amelia’s Kindle from his bag. Whoever it was, he was still convinced the person was locked inside the pink tablet.

He turned the Kindle on. When the tiny padlock appeared, he swiped it and hit the “Give Me a Hint” button.

Hint: The Birds Nest

A week ago, it had made no sense to him, but now it did. He began to type in various new combinations with The Bird: Arnolds Park, Avis Martin, lake house, beach, amusement park, Edge of Heaven. He looked up in frustration, his eyes falling on the old souvenir T-shirt on the bed.

He typed “O-K-O-B-O-J-I.” The padlock popped open and the desktop appeared, a rainbow of covers for books Amelia had downloaded.

The Secret Life of Bees
by Sue Monk Kidd.

Lady Oracle
by Margaret Atwood.

All the Pretty Horses
by Cormac McCarthy.

Once a Dancer: An Autobiography
by Allegra Kent.

The woman who read these was not the same woman who read the bland books shelved in that cold white bedroom. There were many other books, but what Amelia read in private wasn’t what Buchanan was after now.

He clicked on the envelope icon, and her e-mails appeared. There were only five. Four of the fonts were bold, which told Buchanan Amelia had not yet read them. Once an e-mail had been read, even if the recipient saved it as “New,” the font style reverted to its normal density.

It also meant she hadn’t remembered her password or she likely would have walked into any Internet café and read her mail. What else had she still not remembered?

He shook his head slowly. The idea that she had survived this long without a good part of her memory and no one to help her took his admiration for her up a notch. The knowledge that he had actually wrapped his hands around her neck turned his stomach.

Move on, Bucky. Move on.

He switched over to the SENT e-mails, but there was nothing there, which probably meant that at some point she had deleted them all. He jumped back to her inbox. All five e-mails were from the same person—DancingKingSFB.

Buchanan clicked on the newest one, dated yesterday:

Where are you? Why aren’t you answering your cell? I’m worried. Call me. –J

The next one was from three days ago:

Are you okay? You were supposed to be here by now. –J

Then from five days ago:

Are the plans still on? –J