The Hollow Girl (24 page)

I’d been in Hallworth before, in the 1980s, and not for any good reason. The last time I’d driven there was with my late friend, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author and journalist, Yancy Whittle Fenn. Wit, as the world knew him, was a rare bird, a mix of Truman Capote, Dominick Dunne, and the devil. Wit had helped me get to the truth of what had happened to Moira Heaton, Steven Brightman’s murdered intern. Her murder was in fact rooted in another murder that had taken place decades earlier. In the course of finding Moira’s killer, I had solved the earlier crime as well. That last time I’d driven here with Wit, I’d come to reveal the truth of the first murder to the victim’s mother. The victim had been just a little boy when he was killed. When I got out of my car and saw the boy’s mother raking leaves in front of her house, I stopped, turned around, and drove away because I couldn’t bring myself to tell her the truth. I couldn’t make her relive it all over again.

I was weak that way, weak in the face of painful truths. I always had been. It had been my experience that truth wasn’t the great emancipator, not the great tonic and elixir everyone touted it to be. I’d often found the opposite was the reality, that truth could be toxic, that it sometimes made everything worse. I’d also found that the effects of truth, good or bad, had as much to do with when you told it as the truth itself. I was haunted by some truths I hadn’t told soon enough, or not at all. I still had the occasional sleepless night thinking about what would have happened had I had the strength to tell Katy the truth about her brother Patrick’s disappearance. The universe might not have changed, but our little world certainly would have.

Hallworth hadn’t changed much either in the thirty years since my last visit, nor had it changed much in the nearly sixty years since the first murder. It was the kind of beautiful, wealthy suburb where the good parts of the 1950s seemed frozen in time. The streets were tree lined, the lawns were big and green and beautifully kept. Being house-proud was a virtue, as was being quiet and being civil. The only things that had seemed to change at all were the cars in the driveways. I was fine until I drove past the block where the first victim’s mother had lived. I sped up. I didn’t stop to see if she was still there.

Valerie Biemann lived at 6 Mystic Street in a lovely Georgian style home. The gates and brick walls surrounding the house were ivy covered, but not overgrown with it. I walked past a white Range Rover in the driveway as I made my way to the front door. I used the knocker. Did anyone knock on doors anymore?

“Coming. I’ll be right there,” shouted a woman from inside the house. The door opened. “That was quick,” she said, pulling a wallet out of her Coach bag. “How much do I—” She stopped when she looked up and noticed I wasn’t who I was supposed to be.

Valerie Biemann was a very attractive woman in much the same mold as Nancy had used to remake herself. She had streaked dark blond hair, blue eyes, a button nose, a pursed mouth. She was taller than Nancy, about five ten, and a bit less curvy, but the rest of her, from perfume to simple but expensive clothing, was right out of the Nancy book of design. The thing is, she was more like Nancy-in-training than Nancy, because Valerie was about twenty-five years her junior. While I recognized her, she had no idea about me except that I wasn’t the delivery man.

I handed her a card and said, “I’m here about Sloane Cantor.”

That did the trick. She read my card, frowned, sighed. “I’ve been waiting for somebody to find me. It was only a matter of time once Sloane started this nightmare all over again for someone to come have a talk with the infamous Victoria.”

“I won’t bite, I promise. I’m not interested in spreading the word of your whereabouts. Her mother is concerned, that’s all.”

“How is Mrs. Cantor? I liked her,” Valerie asked, smiling with genuine affection.

“Sloane’s parents are divorced.”

“That’s too bad. I’m sorry to hear that.”

“But you’re even more sorry about the resurrection of the Hollow Girl.”

“I am, Mr. Prager. Dave, my husband, he doesn’t know about all that.”

“He won’t hear about it from me.”

“For some reason, I believe you,” she said.

“When you’re old, Mrs. Biemann, people believe you.”

She laughed, told me to call her Valerie, and invited me in. We walked through the house into a solarium. She got me some sparkling water with lime, and she drank water out of a square plastic bottle.

“Have you been to see Mike Dillman yet?” Valerie asked, sitting on a big rattan chair.

“Funny you should mention that.”

“
Funny
isn’t the word I would use. Sloane really fucked up Mike’s life, and it pretty much ended our relationship.”

“You and Mike were an item?”

“We were in love, Mr. Prager. You know, that sick to your stomach, top of the world, intense first love. That was us. It wouldn’t have lasted. It never does, but it really hurt for it to end the way it did. I think that’s what Sloane had in mind. She got my photo the same way she got Mike’s. I had no idea what she meant to use it for.”

“So you’re saying—”

“You know the Hollow Girl’s sad adventures didn’t just materialize out of her ass. I’m sorry, that was rude. But I find I’m angry all over again. Sloane always had a thing for Mike because of the time they spent in drama club together, and she also had a—” Valerie cleared her throat and squirmed in her chair. “She also had a thing for me.”

“Did you return her interest?”

Now Valerie was squirming up a storm. “Yes, a little. Once. I was curious and I thought it was safe with Sloane. She made it pretty obvious that she was attracted to me, so I didn’t have to worry about putting the moves on some other girl who might reject me and then tell the whole universe. I guess I got that wrong, huh? Anyway, Sloane may have not been so pretty, but there was something attractive about her. The artist thing, maybe. I don’t have an ounce of art in me, but people who do … there’s just something about them. You know?”

An image of my high school crush, Andrea Cotter, popped into my head. She had been an amazing poet. “I do. So this one time ….”

“I invited myself over to her house one night when her folks weren’t home.” Valerie blushed intense red. “And we had some beers and we went down to her basement and … we …. It was okay. It really was, all very exciting. Sloane was really, really into it. Me … I kinda liked it, but it scratched my itch, you know? I was curious about skydiving, too, but I’ve also only done that once.”

“I understand.”

“Well, Sloane didn’t. You know how high school girls can get. First, she followed me around all over, kept calling me and e-mailing. Then one time she cornered me and begged me to be with her, just once more. When I said that I’d think about it, she cried, then she got touchy. But by then I was so turned off by her puppy dog act that … I guess I was pretty mean to her afterwards. So she turned me into the Hollow Girl’s Victoria to punish me. But it didn’t screw up my life like it did Mike’s. It was the ’90s, and no one thought it was freaky for girls to experiment with other girls. But Mike was black, you know. His dad may have been rich and powerful, but Sloane played to some vicious stereotypes. It was cruel of her to do that to Mike. Some stuff just never goes away.”

“No, it gets better with time, but there are things that persist. So, have you kept in touch with Mike?”

“Not really. It’s just too painful, and I don’t want to have to explain that part of my life to Dave. I’ll hear about Mike occasionally from some old high school friend.”

“Do you think he’d carry the grudge this long? Do you think he’d hurt Sloane?”

That took her aback. “Mike? I mean, it still hurts me, what Sloane did, so I wouldn’t be surprised if Mike was unforgiving. That order of protection thing, that really went too far. Would he hurt Sloane now?” She shrugged. “He was angry enough to have strangled her then, but so was I. I’m not sure he’d be up to it now, anyway, with what’s going on in his life.”

I was confused. “How’s that? You just got done telling me that you didn’t keep in touch.”

“Patrick Millikin, he went to school with all of us and he keeps in touch with Mike. I heard from him just a few days ago.”

“What did he say?”

Valerie tensed. For the first time she was having reservations about me. “I thought you said you’d spoken to Mike.”

“I did, weeks back, in his office at Hanover Square.”

She relaxed. “Oh, I see. Did you know about the divorce?”

“Divorce? No, he didn’t mention it.” I stopped there.

“It’s terrible, a real messy divorce and a custody battle. Patrick said Mike was a basket case and things at work were … well, they weren’t great.”

I finished my sparkling water and thanked Valerie for being so helpful. She wished me well and asked me to please keep our conversation confidential. I vowed that I would. She wished me luck in my search for Sloane.

“I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forgive her for what she did. It still hurts, Mr. Prager, but I find myself thinking about her sometimes. She could be really empty sometimes, and so attractive at others. Does that make any sense?”

“More and more.”

The front doorbell rang as we headed that way.

“There’s the dry cleaning guy,” she said. “That’s who I thought you were when you knocked.”

“One more thing, Valerie, and then I’ll go.”

“Sure.”

“Did Mike’s family have a vacation home on the island, or in Connecticut?”

“Yes, on the North Fork, in Orient. A big, old white farmhouse. We made good use of it.” She blushed again.

“Do you remember the address?”

“I’m not sure I ever knew it, and it was so long ago. All I can remember was that you could see Gardiners Bay or some body of water out the bedroom windows.”

I shook her hand and left, the dry cleaner giving me a funny look as I walked past him. Hallworth may have seemed a perfect town, but it wasn’t immune from gossip. I was confident that Valerie would survive the whispers about the old guy who’d come out of her house on Monday afternoon. I wondered if she would fare so well if the gossip concerned her high school exploits.

You don’t race through a town like Hallworth, but I did. One thing a badge and a PBA card do for you is get you out of tickets. I called Devo as I drove out of town. Conversations with Devo tended not to last very long, and this one involved him saying one word (
Hello
) and me saying seven (
Dillman’s father had a house in Orient
). That was it. If I knew Devo, that would be enough information for him to get me the answer I was looking for.

It was only when I walked into the bedroom and saw her bag was missing that I became concerned about Nancy. I found the note in the bathroom. Made sense, really. When you want a man my age to find something, leave it in the bathroom. Even if he misses it the first time, don’t sweat it. He’ll be back in less than an hour.

When I returned from New Jersey, Nancy’s car was gone from the visitor’s parking spot in the condo’s lot. That didn’t necessarily raise any red flags. She’d said that she didn’t want to feel trapped in my apartment. I didn’t blame her. My condo was spacious enough for me, but I could see how Nancy might find it confining: no pool, no cabana, no sauna, only four rooms. If you included her walk-in closet, Nancy’s master suite was probably larger than my entire condo. And it wasn’t like she didn’t have a lot on her mind. I figured that she went for a drive to clear her head or to get something to eat. Eating, now, that sounded like a good idea. I’d called her cell from the parking lot, but it went straight to voicemail. I asked her to call me back if she was at a restaurant, that I was pretty hungry myself.

Upstairs, it hadn’t taken me a minute to discover the note. None of what she’d written surprised me. I can’t say that it pleased me. It just didn’t surprise. She said that she might have lasted longer had I been around to keep her from climbing the walls. She understood that I was out trying to find Sloane, to do what I’d been hired to do in the first place, but that sitting there alone just gave her too much time to think about things. That she couldn’t get last night’s post out of her head. She hoped that I wouldn’t be too angry with her. That I would understand, she just had to be at home in case Sloane needed her. I understood. I wasn’t mad. Who was I to judge her?

I never thought she would last very long at my place, anyway. It was a short-term fix that I expected to last maybe two days at best. I got it wrong by a day and a half. So what? I tried her phone a second time. Straight to voicemail again. I told her I’d gotten her note, that I wasn’t mad, that I was coming out to her house, and that I might have a lead. I washed up, threw some clean clothes in a gym bag, grabbed an energy bar, and headed back down to my car. I stopped by a gas station on Knapp Street to fill up and headed back to Long Island with the sun now at my back.

As I drove east, the Belt Parkway moving at a crawl, the events of the day came back to me in flashes. If Siobhan Bracken wasn’t doing the Hollow Girl of her own free will and somebody had her, I thought I had a pretty good idea of who that somebody was. Everything pointed to Michael Dillman. He appeared to be the poster model for MMO: Means, Motive, and Opportunity. But strangely, it wasn’t Dillman or Anna Carey or Valerie Biemann I couldn’t get out of my head. It was Giorgio Brahms. More specifically, it was the disgust he displayed over the open walls in his kitchen. Some people took stuff very personally, and he seemed to be inordinately angry about his unfinished construction. The entire time I was there, he could not take his eyes off those walls. Those walls even had him muttering to himself. Why I should be thinking of that, I couldn’t say. It’s funny what you think about sometimes. Poor Giorgio was in a tough spot. If he didn’t find a source of revenue soon, he might actually have to go to Cabo with Anna Carey.

When I hit Exit 32 on the LIE, my car announced that I had a phone call. I still hadn’t gotten used to the whole smart car, smart- phone, GPS thing. I recognized the number.