“Had you? You think this is a joke?”
“Not a joke. A trick.”
“Really? Come on, then.” I grabbed a fistful of robe at his shoulder. “I’ve got a cab waiting. We can go down and have a look at her. At least what’s left. The dogs had some of her for lunch.”
He shook me off, the robe sliding down his right shoulder and almost to his elbow. He pulled it back up with a theatrical flourish, trying to preserve his dignity, but he was too shaken.
“Dear God, dogs?” He put his hand to his mouth, like maybe he was going to be sick, but then pulled it away. “Okay, even if what you say about Hanna is true, there’s no good reason for me to trust you. I’ve got a good idea what your game is. You think by telling me about Hanna you can scare me into telling you where Claire is.”
“So she’s hiding out somewhere?”
“Not hiding. Just . . . away.”
“When’s the last time you heard from her? For Christ’s sake, Sanders. Your daughter’s best friend is dead. If Claire were my kid, I’d be getting her on the phone right now to make sure she’s okay.”
“If there’d been a problem, she’d have called . . .” He was talking more to himself than to me.
“If Claire’s in trouble, she might not be able to call.”
“No, her mother. She would call. Everything’s fine. Everything’s okay.” Sanders nodded hurriedly, looking like a bobblehead.
“Claire went to stay with her mother? In Canada?”
He put his hand over his mouth again, mumbling, as though he didn’t want me to hear him thinking out loud.
“Talk to me,” I said. “Is that where she is?”
He took the hand away. “I know Augustus Perry’s your brother-in-law. You think I don’t know he’s using you to find out where she is?”
“Are you kidding?” I said. “He just had my fucking car towed. And what’s Augie got to do with Claire?”
Sanders said nothing, but kept looking at me, wide-eyed.
“Look, I told you how I became involved in this, and it has nothing to do with the chief. Claire asked me for a ride. She and Hanna pulled off their little stunt with my help, and now Hanna’s dead. I’ll find out what’s going on with or without your help.”
“I’ve nothing to say to you,” Sanders said.
“Tell me she’s alive. Do you know that much?”
Before he could answer, lights swept past the living room from outside, casting a glow as far as the kitchen. Sanders broke away from me and ran to the window, pulling back the lace curtain for a better view of the street.
“What is it?” I said.
“There’s a car sitting out there, with the lights off. Someone’s inside.”
“It’s my taxi. I told her to wait.”
“But the lights—”
“Probably just another car driving by,” I said. “The woman next door said the police have been parked on the street lately. Like they’ve been watching your house.”
He glared at me. “You’ve been talking to my neighbors? And you’re trying to tell me you’re not in on it?”
“In on what? Why are the police watching you? Why do you think the chief’s involved in this?”
When he wouldn’t respond, I tried a more conciliatory tone. “Mr. Sanders, I swear, I’m trying to help you here. I’m trying to help Claire. If she’s running from something, tell me what it is so we can deal with it, so she can come back.”
He studied me in the dim glow of the light filtering down from the second floor. “How long you lived here, Mr. Weaver?”
“A few years. Six.”
“Happy here?”
“I used to be,” I said.
He picked up something in my voice. “Your son,” he said. “I know about your son.” He swallowed. “I’m sorry.”
I didn’t have to ask how he knew. Everyone in Griffon knew. It was a safe bet Claire had mentioned it to her father at some point.
“But before your . . . your personal tragedy . . . were you happy in Griffon?”
It was hard to think back to what our world was like before two months ago. There had been troubled times with our son for a year or more, but even through that there had been good times as well. And before Scott found comfort in substances that clouded his judgment, I suppose we were what you’d call happy. Content, maybe.
But I didn’t feel like getting into that with Bert Sanders. “I don’t see your point.”
He said, “Have you felt safe here?”
I hesitated. “I guess.”
“The Griffon cops—they do a helluva job, right?”
I thought of the petition. “Our cops are tops.”
That actually made him smile. “Have you signed?”
I shook my head.
He nodded admiringly. “That’s a surprise.”
“I don’t know what this has to do—”
“Down in the park one night, there was a kid with one of those air horns—you know, the kind that look like an aerosol can? One of Griffon’s finest went down there, held the horn right over that kid’s ear, and let it go. Kid may not get his hearing back. His parents tried to come after us, but guess what? Your brother-in-law’s got three cops who say the kid was so drunk he put the horn up to his own ear and did it himself.” Sanders gave me a withering look. “You ask just about anyone in town here whether that kid got what was coming to him, and they’ll tell you yes.”
I said nothing. He was right.
“If it’s just cops getting a little carried away once in a while, we can all look the other way and pretend it’s not happening. That’s the prevailing view in this town. Some punk gets the shit beat out of him and finds himself dumped outside the town line, who’s going to lose sleep over that? But if Augustus Perry’s storm troopers are willing to bend the rules there, what else are they capable of? What do you think happens to drugs and illicit cash they seize? If there’s no trial, there’s no need for evidence. Why do they turn a blind eye to what goes on at Patchett’s? You think Phyllis Pearce isn’t spreading a little cash around?”
“You have proof of any of that?’
He laughed. “Proof. Yeah, sure.”
I didn’t have time for this. “Mr. Sanders, just tell me where Claire is. I’ll bring her home. It’s what I do,” I said.
He wasn’t hearing me.
He said, “You think the cops are sitting out on that street watching out for me? Is that what you think?”
“Why don’t you just tell me?”
“They’re not watching out for me. They’re just watching me. Intimidating me. Trying to get me to back off.”
“I still don’t understand what—”
I stopped. I heard something—or someone—upstairs.
TWENTY-EIGHT
“What was that?” I said, looking up. It had sounded to me like someone moving around. Definitely not a squirrel running across the roof.
“I didn’t hear anything,” Sanders said.
“Then you’re deaf,” I said. “It was upstairs.”
“There’s nobody upstairs,” he said. “I’m alone.”
I studied him. “Is she here? Is Claire here now?”
He shook his head quickly again. “No.”
I raised my head to the ceiling. “Claire!” I shouted.
“Shut up!” Sanders said. “Keep your voice down!”
“Why do I have to keep my voice down if there’s no one here?”
I made my way to the stairs, shaking Sanders’ hand off my arm as he attempted to stop me.
“Get out,” he said. “You’ve got no right to search my house!”
I glanced back at him. “Maybe you should call the cops.”
He stammered something unintelligible as I ascended the stairs. I was nearly halfway up when he charged after
me. I felt arms locking around my knees, and I toppled forward. I reached out to brace my fall, but my right elbow connected with one of the hardwood steps, sending a charge up my arm.
“Shit!” I said.
“You son of a bitch!” Sanders said, grappling with my lower legs.
I managed to slip one free, then placed the bottom of my left shoe against his bare right shoulder and pushed. He flew back down the stairs and landed on his ass, the sash of his robe coming undone, exposing him. Nothing looks much more foolish, or more vulnerable, than a man with his junk hanging out for the world to see.
He scrambled to his feet, pulled the robe around himself, and retied the sash. I was half sitting, half standing on the steps, giving my elbow a gentle rub.
“We can make this easy or we can make this hard,” I told him.
“Please,” he said, in a voice that bordered on whimpering. “Just get out. What does any of this have to do with you, really? Can’t you just go?”
“Stay there,” I said, and climbed the rest of the flight. “Claire,” I called again, but not shouting this time. I didn’t want to sound threatening. “It’s Mr. Weaver, Scott’s dad. We met last night.”
At the top of the stairs I took a second to orient myself as Sanders, now halfway up the steps behind me, said, “I told you, she’s not here.”
I ignored him. There was a bathroom immediately to my right, and just beyond it a door to what looked like the largest of the three other rooms up here. This, I guessed, was Sanders’ room. A queen-sized bed, the covers thrown back. He’d clearly been under them when I’d arrived and had thrown on the robe to greet me at the door.
To the left, what had probably been a bedroom but was currently an office. A desk, bookshelves, a desktop iMac.
And straight ahead of me, the door closed, was Claire’s room. I didn’t need to be Poirot to figure that out. Stuck to the door was a miniature plastic license plate, the kind you can buy at novelty and souvenir shops, that bore the girl’s name.
“Claire?” I said hesitantly before pushing the door open and running my hand along the wall for the light switch. I flicked it on. The first, most obvious thing I noticed was that the bed was empty, and made, although it was littered with about a dozen magazines.
“I told you,” Sanders said behind me.
I stepped into the room.
There were several stuffed animals, a few dogs and two furry bunnies—a pink one and a blue one—that all looked worn with age, adorning the pillow. She’d probably had them since she was a child. The magazines were not what I might have expected. While there was one issue of Vogue, most were copies of the New Yorker, the Economist, Harper’s, and the Walrus, a Canadian magazine of news and commentary. On the bedside table were an iPad and the Steve Jobs biography that had come out a couple of years ago.
I picked up the iPad and pressed the button to see what came up. An array of icons, most of them news sites.
“You’ve got no right to look—”
I whipped my head around and snapped, “Enough.”
I tapped on the stamp icon and brought up Claire’s e-mails. I gave recent messages in the in-box, and those that had been sent, a ten-second scan. The thing was, my generation felt so advanced, communicating through e-mails, but most kids texted, having abandoned e-mail long ago. No message jumped out at me.
I looked up, caught a glimpse of myself in a mirror. When I was young, we tucked the edges of snapshots under mirror frames, but there were none displayed here. These days, hardly anyone had a picture that was on a piece of paper. Photos were shared online, posted, e-mailed, flicked across smartphone screens. Technology allowed us to share our photos with more people now than ever before, but where would these captured moments in time be in twenty years? On some outdated piece of hardware at the bottom of a landfill site? What happened to memories you couldn’t hold between your thumb and forefinger?
These thoughts running through my head prompted me to tap on the iPad’s photo icon. Up popped the kinds of shots teenagers most often took of each other. Laughing, vamping, sticking out their tongues, standing around at parties, drinks in hand.
“Those pictures are private,” Sanders said.
He was wearing me out. “Like I said, call the cops.”
There were several shots of Claire and Hanna together. Hanna kissing Claire on the cheek. Claire grabbing Hanna’s nose. The two of them in prom dresses, hands on hips.
But there were shots of Claire with boys, too. Some that, by their placement farther down the screen, were probably taken longer ago, and featured an older-looking, round-faced kid. Young man, actually.
I turned the iPad toward Sanders. “Is that Roman Ravelson?”
“Honestly, would you please get—”
“Is it?”
“Yes.”
“And what about this boy?” In the more recent pictures, Claire was snuggling, kissing, and laughing with a young, clean-shaven black man with closely cropped hair. He stood a good foot taller than Claire.
“Dennis.”
“Dennis who?”
“Dennis Mullavey. Someone she used to go out with.”
“From Griffon?”
“No, I don’t know where from. He had a summer job here. He went back home, wherever that is.”
“Was it serious?”
Sanders shook his head in exasperation. “I don’t know. It was a summer romance. You remember those? They’re all the more intense because the time seems so limited. This is a—this is a total invasion of my daughter’s privacy.”
I set the iPad down and surveyed the top of the desk. It was cluttered with what I would have expected. Some makeup, bottles of nail polish, schoolbooks. I rounded the bed to see whether anything was tucked between it and the wall—I was thinking someone could have been hiding there, but no one was—then went to the closet door and opened it.
“For God’s sake,” Sanders said.
I was greeted with a kind of congealed mass of clothing. I doubted it was possible to stuff one more thing in there. I turned, looked at Sanders standing in the doorway, trying to look imposing.
“You should go,” he said.
He moved aside to let me leave the room, but instead of heading back down the stairs, I walked into his office. Nothing much to look at here. The closet was already open, jammed with cardboard filing boxes.
I crossed the hallway and returned to Sanders’ bedroom. There was something in the air, a scent I recognized. I had a feeling I’d smelled something similar not all that long ago.
“I’m not going to tolerate this intrusion any longer,” he said, but he didn’t have an ounce of authority left in his voice.
“How long has it been since you and your wife split up?” I was looking at the mattress as I walked around it.
“What does that have to do with—”
“Hang on.”
When I got to the far side of the bed to see whether anyone was hiding, I noticed there was an en suite bathroom off the bedroom.
Sanders caught me looking at it, and his body tensed.
I moved to the doorway. A sink, a toilet, and a tub. The shower curtain was drawn across the bathtub. The fabric was too heavy to show whether there was anyone hiding behind it, but you get a sense about these things.
“Claire?” I said.
No answer.
I said, “I’m going to count to five and then I’m going to pull back the curtain. One. Two. Three. F—”
“Okay!” Bert Sanders said in defeat. “Okay.” He spoke beyond me. “You might as well come out.”
From behind the curtain, a woman said, “I’m naked.”
For a second there, I was feeling pretty proud of myself. I’d found Claire. But the feeling drifted away pretty quickly at the thought of Sanders out here, naked under his robe, and Claire in there, without a s
titch on.
What the hell was going on?
“Hang on,” Sanders said, and ran to the closet, where he grabbed a second robe. I looked discreetly away as he went into the bathroom. I heard curtain rungs sliding back on the rod.
“Here you go,” Sanders said. “Just slip that on . . .”
“I tried to be quiet,” she said.
“I know, I know.”
He preceded her out. I figured it was now safe to turn around and look at Claire for the first time since I’d seen her run into Iggy’s the night before.
She didn’t look like the Claire I remembered at all. That’s because she wasn’t Claire.
It was Annette Ravelson, wife of Kent—the couple who owned the furniture store where my son had jumped to his death.
TWENTY-NINE
“Annette,” I said as she tightened the sash on the robe.
“Cal,” she said, not able to meet my eye.
“You know each other?” Sanders asked.
“Of course I know Cal,” she said, then found the strength to look at me and asked, “You thought I was Claire? You were shouting her name all the way up the stairs.”
“I thought she might be here,” I said.
“Well, I guess it makes more sense that she might have been here than me,” Annette said.
“I can honestly say I wasn’t expecting to find you here, Annette. It’s late. Won’t Kent be creeped out, not finding you at home?”
“I told you, he’s out of town,” Annette said. “On a buying trip. It’s like a furniture wholesalers’ convention. He picks what lines he wants us to sell.” She stuck out her lower lip and managed to blow a lock of hair out of her eyes. She glanced at Bert, then back to me, and said, “I know this kind of looks bad.”
I said nothing, but peeked into the bathroom. Thrown into the dry tub were her clothes, shoes, and a handbag. She’d evidently hurriedly collected, from the bedroom, all evidence of her presence. Her purse landing in the tub was probably the noise I’d heard, and that scent I’d picked up earlier was the perfume she’d been wearing when I’d run into her earlier, before going into the town hall.