Stay With Me: A Brenna Spector Novel of Suspense Read online

  Brenna slid the book out. She knew she shouldn’t—this was her daughter’s secret, after all—but she needed something, just a few seconds of simplicity to escape Morasco, her growing suspicions. If he’d posted Clea’s picture on the Snapfish page to help her, why hadn’t he simply told her the truth? If he’d been corresponding with Alan Dufresne, pretending to be her, wouldn’t it have been easier to just explain why?

  Brenna ran her hand over the book’s cover, Maya’s name scrawled across the white space in purple Magic Marker, along with a star, a tree, a princess in a pointy hat drawn right over the caterpillar’s face . . . She recalled January 13, 2001, Maya reading to her from this book, chubby little hands on the pages, struggling over the word, Cat-a-pil-lah. She shut her eyes, coming back, smiling. Did Maya have that memory, too?

  She opened the book, knowing that if she were to see the large print on the page, the colorful Eric Carle illustrations, it would bring on the full memory—another simple one. She needed that.

  From the center of the book, four folded pieces of sketch paper dropped onto the bed. She stared at them. Were these the real secrets? The book just a hiding place?

  She should just put them back, replace the book, and either get to work on the Scarsdale case or talk to Morasco. The poor kid was right to think this room wasn’t hers if she couldn’t even hide a few pieces of paper in an old book without her mother finding out.

  But instead Brenna found herself edging one of them open, smoothing it . . . This was bad, she knew, but she couldn’t help herself. She wanted to see.

  It was a charcoaled profile of a young man, gazing out a window.

  Brenna remembered this boy, of course. The Justin Timberlake look-alike for whom Maya, a nonsinger, had joined the school chorus. The douchebag-in-training who, after chorus practice on October 1, 2009, jumped all over that older girl in the skintight jeans, right in front of everyone, as though the world were an American Pie movie and the two of them had top billing. Miles. As in, Miles to go before he grows up. Brenna had thought Maya hated him.

  Miles and Maya had been partners in art class last fall, assigned to draw portraits of each other. Brenna knew that much. She’d come home to their voices behind Maya’s closed door and, of course, overreacted.

  But why on earth had Maya kept this sketch? Brenna opened another—a close-up of Miles’s face, his eyes soulful and glistening, his lips parted, as though coming in for a kiss . . . Oh man. She does not hate him.

  And then the third one, not a school assignment at all but an all-out fantasy—Miles, dressed as a pirate, his arm around the waist of a blissful young maiden in Renaissance garb with her eyes closed and her head thrown back and a face that looked suspiciously like . . . Well, it was Maya.

  “Oh, honey,” Brenna whispered. “What are you thinking?”

  On the bright side, what her daughter lacked in judgment, she more than made up for in artistic talent. This was better than any romance novel cover Brenna had ever seen. Put these sketches back. Don’t mention them to her. Hope and pray she grows out of it. It’s all you can do.

  There was one more folded paper. No doubt more Miles, dressed as a cowboy or Prince Charming, or maybe he was wearing a tux, handing the final rose to Maya on The Bachelor.

  It wasn’t worth looking, but still she had to. Before putting the other sketches back, Brenna smoothed it open. Her breath went away.

  “Brenna?” Morasco called out from the other room. “Where did you go?”

  She couldn’t answer. You never really know anyone. Not even those people you love more than anything. They’ll never know you, you’ll never know them. Everyone has secrets. Their minds are their own. You never know anyone, not even your own child.

  The last picture—painstakingly drawn—was not of Miles. It was of Clea—an exact copy of the smiling photograph that Brenna had kept in her drawer, only with one difference. In Maya’s drawing, there was a bullet hole in Clea’s forehead, blood pouring down her face.

  Brenna didn’t tell Nick about the drawing. She’d had no right to look at it in the first place, let alone discuss it. So when she emerged from Maya’s room visibly shaken and he asked her what was wrong, she came back instead to Alan Dufresne, the e-mails from BrennaNSpector.

  “Brenna,” he said.

  “What?”

  “You still think it was me who did that?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “You know me.”

  She sighed, shook her head. “I don’t really care either way.” She realized, as she said it, that it was true. It didn’t matter. We believed about others what we wanted to. Friendship, love . . . it was all based on fiction. No one told the complete truth about anything, especially themselves—which was no wonder because when you scratched anyone’s surface, anyone’s . . . you got some degree of crazy. Look at Clea’s secret journal, look at Maya’s carefully hidden drawings, at Brenna’s father, sobbing against the steering wheel, forgetting his two young daughters in the backseat, thinking he was alone . . .

  A gift for destruction that runs through their veins, Brenna’s mother had told Nick on November 19 after too much wine. She’d been referring to both Brenna and Clea, saying they’d inherited it from their father. But she could have been talking about anyone. We all had a gift for destruction, didn’t we? We were all hurtling toward the finish line one way or another, telling ourselves stories along the way.

  Brenna said, “Do you want to see it?”

  “See what?” Nick said.

  “The bag.” She stared at the floor. “Clea’s bag.”

  “Okay.”

  She walked down the hall and into her office and he followed. Once they got there, she took the clothes out of the bag, followed by the map, the hair band, the purple Swatch, the sewing kit, and the driver’s license, which Morasco held carefully in his hands, examining the picture. “She looks a little like Maya.”

  Brenna nodded. “A lot.”

  He placed the license back down on Brenna’s desk. There was a reverence to the gesture, a gentleness that Brenna appreciated, especially now, with Maya’s drawing still in her brain. “I can put Dufresne’s father’s name through NCIC and the sex offenders registry,” he said. “See if he has any kind of a record.”

  Brenna stared at the license, at the picture, taken on Clea’s sixteenth birthday because she couldn’t wait one day, as she’d said, “to be free.” “Do you think Clea’s dead?”

  “I have no idea,” he said. “Do you?”

  “I want to say no, because that’s what I’ve been saying to everyone, ever since she disappeared. If she were dead, I’d feel it.”

  “But . . .”

  “But if the past few months have taught me anything, it’s that my intuition is crap.”

  She looked up at him, the hurt in his eyes. Not about you, she wanted to say. But she couldn’t.

  There was a knock on the door.

  “You expecting someone?”

  Brenna shook her head.

  From the other side of the door, a voice. “It’s your mother.”

  “Great,” Brenna whispered.

  She opened the door on Evelyn Spector, bundled up in a heavy black coat, cheeks flushed from the cold, pale blue eyes moving from Brenna to Nick and back. She had lost an inch or two in the past couple of years, but she was still an imposingly tall woman—reedy and beatniky and frizzy-haired, a Jules Feiffer cartoon come to life.

  That was the thing about Brenna’s mother; as much as the world turned and changed around her, she retained the same shape, the same style—as constant as the house in City Island where she still lived, the Neptune statue still watching over her from the tiny backyard, both of them preserved and as unchanging as Brenna’s memories.

  Brenna hadn’t seen her since November 19, but it might as well have been later the same day. Evelyn wore the same bla
ck turtleneck, her graying curls pulled back into the same silver barrettes, the same black liner around the light eyes, which somehow made them look accusing. “Oh good,” Evelyn said flatly. “You’re both here.”

  A memory flicked into Brenna’s mind—April 4, 1989, Brenna in the bedroom of her City Island home, four weeks before prom, slipping Clea’s black silk prom dress over her head, tying the bow at the waist, spinning around to show her friend Carly.

  “Wow, it fits you perfectly,” Carly says.

  “You think?” But she knows. The dress is so cool and light, it feels like vapor. It’s been in the back of her closet for six years, covered in a garbage bag, hidden from her mother. She stole it out of Clea’s closet when her mom was throwing out all her things and brought it into her room to keep. She still hasn’t figured out how she’ll get her mom to accept her wearing it to prom, but she figures if her mother doesn’t see her in it until the actual night, she’ll have no other choice than to say okay.

  Brenna hasn’t tried it on till now, and the way it fits, the way she feels like she looks . . . it’s almost as though Clea is here, too, as though she bought the dress six years ago with Brenna in mind, as though she wore it to her own prom only to break it in . . . “You think Graham will like it?” But Brenna knows he will. She knows.

  “Are you kidding?” Carly says. “You look amazing!”

  A knock on the door. “Brenna, what are you doing in there?”

  Brenna’s heart jumps. “Mom? I . . . I thought you were out.”

  The door opens.

  “Hi, Mrs. Spector.” Carly spits out the words like she’s just been choking on them.

  Mom doesn’t answer.

  Brenna can’t look at Mom, but still she can feel those blue eyes on her, burning. “What are you doing in that dress?”

  “I . . . uh . . .”

  “Take it off, young lady. Take it off and throw it away right now.”

  Brenna’s mother was saying, “Mrs. Dinnerstein. The woman downstairs.” The name yanked her back into the present.

  She turned to Brenna. “You were remembering, weren’t you?”

  Brenna nodded.

  “Well to keep you up to speed, I was just telling Detective Morasco that I didn’t break into your building. I was let in by your very nice downstairs neighbor.”

  “Evelyn, I never said you broke in.”

  “Well it sounded to me as though you were implying it.”

  Brenna sighed heavily. “What brings you here, Mom?”

  “You know.” She turned to Morasco. “He knows.”

  “Evelyn—”

  Brenna said, “Would you like to come in? Sit down?”

  “I can say what I need to say right here.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “I love you very much, Brenna. I always will. I may have made mistakes, but everything I’ve done, even the mistakes, all of it has been in order to make your life as easy as possible.”

  Brenna looked at her.

  “You were such a little girl. Clea was older but you still had a chance. You didn’t need to know what he was like. I wanted you to forget, and you did. What is so wrong about wanting to protect your own child?”

  Brenna stared at her. “What do you mean?”

  “See?” she said. “You don’t remember.”

  “You’re talking about Dad.”

  “Of course I am.”

  Brenna closed her eyes. “Mom. I wanted this conversation to be on my own time. Not yours. You’ve lied to me for thirty-two years. Don’t you think you could at least give me that?”

  “What did he say to you?” Evelyn said, not to Brenna. To Morasco. “What did Grady Carlson say to you about me?”

  Nick looked at her for a very long time. She returned his gaze, and something seemed to pass between them—a moment Brenna didn’t fully understand. “He said,” Nick told her, “that you were very unhappy at home.”

  Evelyn closed her eyes as though bracing for a blow. For a moment she looked so frail, so worn out, it was as though someone had lifted a veil, showing all the change in her, showing everything that had been taken away.

  “Brenna, your father was not right in the head.”

  “He was depressed, Mom.”

  She shook her head. “He was hospitalized more than once.”

  “What?”

  “Forcibly hospitalized.”

  “No . . .”

  “There was a time, when he was driving you girls home from summer camp, that he stopped in the middle of traffic. You don’t remember this, but Clea . . . Clea did, and she never got over it. He had some kind of breakdown. He was arrested . . .”

  “Arrested?”

  The image again, that hazy, pre-syndrome memory . . . Brenna’s father, his head against the steering wheel, the broad shoulders, heaving. The long, wet sobs . . . Car horns blaring. Someone yelling, Move it, asshole! Clea saying, Dad what’s wrong? Her father, getting out of the car, slamming the door . . .

  “I protected you,” Evelyn said. “I didn’t want you to know. But that was when I first met Detective Carlson.”

  Brenna said, “A gift for destruction . . .”

  “What?”

  “Nothing.” She felt Morasco’s hand on her shoulder, and a thought came to her. She looked at her mother. “How did you know?”

  “About your father?”

  “No,” Brenna said. “How did you know that I found out? How did you know about the papers? I hadn’t called you yet.”

  The pale eyes narrowed. She cast a glance at Morasco. She said nothing. But she didn’t need to. Brenna stiffened. She moved away from Morasco.

  “Brenna,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “No.” She couldn’t look at him.

  “I should leave,” said Brenna’s mother. “I have errands in the city.”

  “I’ll call you soon, Mom . . . and . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Thank you for coming.”

  Her face relaxed. “You’re welcome.” She gave her a quick, tight hug. Brenna could feel the bones in her spine.

  She opened the door, then stopped. “Oh, and also, Brenna,” she said, “you know I wouldn’t tell you how to raise your child, but did you know that Maya is staying up till all hours?”

  “Huh? Well, she was at a sleepover last night . . .”

  “Oh,” she said. “That explains it.”

  “Explains what?”

  “I got a call from her at three in the morning . . . I think she may have dialed my number by accident. We had a terrible connection and I could barely hear her. But . . . well, she sounded awfully wild.”

  “Shouldn’t she have called by now?” Faith asked Jim.

  “Who?”

  She looked at him. He was focused on the TV. “Maya.”

  “Oh,” Jim said. “She texted me earlier. Asked if she could go see a movie with Lindsay and some other girls. Said she’d be home by six. I’m sorry—I thought I told you.”

  Faith sighed. “When was the last time that girl actually spoke into a phone?”

  Jim didn’t reply. They were watching the Sunday edition of Sunrise Manhattan, which was actually called Weekend Manhattan because it aired at 4 P.M. Already, it was getting dark outside, which gave Faith the creeps—she hated winter.

  Ashley Stanley’s face filled the screen, the scar on her left cheek glimmering under the hot lights despite the makeup team’s best efforts. Offscreen, Faith said, “So, tell me, honey. You’re a smart girl . . .”

  Faith winced, right along with Ashley. Nicolai had told her he’d cut in for a close-up here, but she hadn’t realized it would be this close. She could see pores, tear ducts, as though she were looking at the poor girl under a microscope, which, when you thought about it, she was. “Honestly . . . that tight shot
. . .”

  “It is very close,” Jim said.

  Faith shook her head. “The girl is so scared, she spends a year in hiding. She disguises herself, makes no friends, barely leaves her house . . . and we respond to that by showing the whole world her damn X-ray?”

  On screen, Ashley said, “I had seen her.”

  “For what it’s worth, invasive camera work aside,” Jim said, “you are a terrific interviewer.”

  Faith moved closer to him on the couch. “You think?”

  Ashley said, “I’d seen her before, at the same movie theater. I’d seen Notting Hill and my friends were teasing me . . .”

  Jim nodded. “Sensitive, kind, patient . . .”

  “What movie?” Faith asked.

  “Huh? Notting Hill.”

  “No, hon. What movie was Maya seeing?”

  “She didn’t say.”

  Faith looked at him. “That’s weird.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, when she texts me about going to the movies, she usually tells me which one. You know, to make sure it’s appropriate. Also so I can find her.”

  Jim shrugged. “Growing up.”

  Faith flashed on Maya, typing furiously on her laptop, then slamming it shut when she caught sight of her. “I guess.”

  “I’m sure she picked a good movie,” Jim said. “She’s Maya, after all.”

  Faith knew what he meant, and he was absolutely right. Maya had a very low threshold for on-screen violence. Last year, she’d walked out on Avatar during one of the first battle scenes, dragging her friends Zoe and Larissa out with her. When Faith had met them at the theater a whole hour early, the other two girls had been understandably peeved. (“There wasn’t even any blood!” “How can you get that upset when everybody is eight feet tall and blue?”) Faith had to take them all out to Serendipity, just to make up for it.

  “You are right about that.” Faith smiled.