Into the Dark Read online

  “We’ll get the computer back to you as soon as we can,” Brenna heard herself say, as Trent finished unhooking the cables and wrapped the monitor in a clean blanket Hildy had given him.

  “Take your time,” she said. “I have no use for it.”

  Brenna forced a smile. “That’s nice of you,” she said. “But all the same, I’d rather not have Trent get too attached to it. He’s kind of weird about mechanical things.”

  “Dude. I’m right here.”

  “Brenna?”

  “Yes, Hildy?”

  “That was you and your sister? On the computer?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why would my son have that picture?”

  Brenna swallowed hard. “That’s the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question,” she said. Same thing Morasco had said on October 1, standing across from Brenna in a distraught mother’s abandoned kitchen, that musty scent in the air—old furniture, dust—Brenna thinking, It smells like ghosts. . .

  “Why just sixty-four thousand dollars?” said Trent, which brought her back into the room, nostalgic for three months ago. A simpler time, Brenna thought—which made her smile in spite of everything. Breaking into the home of a long-gone grieving mother with a man she was developing a whole bunch of complicated feelings for, yet still it was a hell of a lot simpler than this.

  “I remember that TV show,” Hildy Tannenbaum said, and Brenna had an urge to call Morasco, to rush to his apartment and show him the picture and cry into his chest like a child. I don’t understand. Please help me understand. She wouldn’t do it, though, she knew. Every time she felt compelled to do something, she had to weigh it against what would happen later—the remembering. But still . . . Still.

  I don’t understand. Please help me.

  “Inspiration,” said Trent.

  Brenna blinked at him.

  He was pointing at a picture that had been taped to the inside of Robin Tannenbaum’s closet, next to a full-length mirror—a paparazzi shot of Steven Spielberg, printed out from a computer.

  Brenna said, “He wants to be a director?”

  Trent shook his head. “He wants to look like a director. Like Spielberg. That’s why it’s next to the mirror. Mrs. Tannenbaum, when you last saw Robin, was he growing a beard?”

  She nodded. “It wasn’t a full beard yet, but he did stop shaving.”

  “When?”

  “Maybe a few days before he left?”

  “Knew it,” he said. “Can I take this picture?”

  “Of course, but why?”

  “I think if I Photoshop elements from it into the recent shots of Robin, we’ll get a pretty good likeness of what he looked like when he was last seen.”

  Hildy stared at him. “My goodness,” she said. “I never even noticed that picture.”

  Trent shrugged. “Only reason why I did is I’ve got one myself.”

  Hildy frowned at him. “You have a picture of Steven Spielberg next to your mirror?”

  He shook his head. “Vin Diesel,” he said. “Not for the shaved head. It’s the ink and the bod I want. And you know . . . the fashion sense. Actually, I’ve got a whole Diesel calendar next to my mirror.”

  “I have no idea who that is,” Hildy said.

  Brenna looked at Trent. Any other time, she would’ve had a field day with this information. At the very least, she would have asked him which exact tattoos he’d copied from Vin and what the ladies thought of the beefcake calendar next to his bedroom mirror. But she didn’t have it in her. She didn’t have anything in her, except the need to find Robin Tannenbaum—and then Lula Belle—as soon as possible. “Who sent Robin that picture, Trent?”

  “A Hotmail address.”

  “Sweetpea81?”

  He nodded, slowly.

  How does Lula Belle know so much of my life? Why does she have this picture?

  Brenna at ten, shouting for her sister: “Clee-a! Mom says dinner’s ready!” Brenna opening the door and Clea is putting something into a book. A snapshot. One her dad took. Brenna and Clea on a bike. She’s closing the book and she’s looking up, she’s looking at Brenna and she’s shoving the book in a drawer . . . It’s all so foggy. Is this a real memory—or just something I want to remember? It was impossible to say. Were everyone’s childhood recollections this murky—or just Brenna’s, made murkier when compared to all the ones that came later?

  Does it matter?

  Lula Belle had this picture now. Lula Belle knew the cement mixer song. Lula Belle was bound and determined to screw with Brenna’s brain until it broke . . . or she was family. Or she was both.

  “Are you all right, dear?” Hildy said.

  Lula Belle, are you my sister?

  “Yo, Brenna?”

  Brenna took a breath. “I haven’t seen one of my dad’s pictures in thirty-two years.”

  Hildy said, “Why not?”

  “He left us.” Brenna cleared her throat.

  “And your mother was that angry?”

  “It wasn’t anger . . .” She looked at Hildy and made herself smile. “To Mom, Dad was like that stack of Playboys you found in your husband’s closet. You know . . . only without the cute cartoons.”

  Hildy stared up at her, her eyes buglike behind her glasses, an emotion passing through them. An understanding. “Sweep him under the rug,” she said. “Act like he never existed, so he’ll never be able to hurt you again.”

  “Yes.”

  “Your mother—did she ever speak to you about your father? Tell you stories or . . .”

  “No.” Brenna’s voice trembled. “She never mentioned his name. He must have taken hundreds of photographs of us—she got rid of them all. My mom sculpted and painted—she said she didn’t trust cameras. And so all we had was school pictures, and then after Clea went away . . . my mother got rid of most of those. In my mind, Clea is always seventeen because that’s the only picture Mom kept of her—her eleventh grade class picture. The one the police used.”

  Hildy took both of Brenna’s hands in hers. Her grip was surprisingly strong, as if to pull her back into the present. It worked. Stay here.

  “I don’t want to be like that,” Hildy said. “Robbie’s hurt me plenty, but I don’t want to make him disappear. He’s my boy. I want him back.”

  “We’ll do our best for you,” said Brenna. “I promise.”

  Hildy’s eyes started to glisten. A tear slipped down her cheek, and without thinking Brenna took her in her arms and hugged her—her arthritic back hard and curled like a turtle’s shell beneath her palms, the orange wig wiry at her chin, all of Hildy so small and brittle, it broke Brenna’s heart. “I want to help you,” Brenna said. And she did, so very much. She wanted to help them both.

  The thing with Trent: He was a douchebag. But beneath that gelled-up, tatted-out, spray-tanned exterior, he was also a friend. And so as prone as he was to say the wrong thing at absolutely the worst possible time, he also knew when to shut up.

  After he’d slipped the computer into the trunk of his Ford Taurus and Brenna had gotten into the front seat and buckled up, Robin Tannenbaum’s photos and billing information, the contents of his desk, and his phone, too, in a manila envelope in her lap, along with a printout of the picture of Clea and herself, Trent turned to Brenna. “Are you okay?”

  She shook her head.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  Brenna shook her head again, and for Trent, that was enough. He turned the ignition and flipped the radio to his favorite station—some Sirius channel that played an awful lot of Justin Timberlake. For most of the ride home, he bobbed his head and tapped his hands against the steering wheel and didn’t say a word.

  The roads were reasonably clear, though with more cars going into the city than usual on a Saturday—Christmas shoppers. Brenna focused on the cars. Because of her condition, and a knowledge of automobiles she’d perfected after Clea had gotten into a blue one she couldn’t identify, Brenna tended to notice cars and keep them in her mind. She read up on
them, and could discern most makes, models, and years by sight alone. Brenna took comfort in that as Trent drove—the red 2003–2006 Honda Civic at their side, scooting along behind a beige early 2000s Cabriolet and behind them, the huge, cross-hatched grille of a black Dodge Magnum—had to be a 2005–2008 because those were the only years they made those grilles—intimidating things. They sneered into the rearview.

  Year, model, make, color . . . all of it so organized and simple and certain. So easy to identify a car as opposed to a person, who can take off all her clothes but drape herself in shadow, who can lay her soul bare—lay your soul bare—but with a phony accent and you don’t know who she is, you can’t know who she is, until . . .

  Lula Belle, are you my sister?

  “Bringing Sexy Back” sprang out of Trent’s cell phone. Ironically, it was the same song that happened to be playing on the radio. Dueling Timberlakes. “That’s a text message,” Trent said. “Can you check it for me?”

  Brenna picked up his phone, clicked on the text message icon, and looked at the screen. “It’s from Annette Shelby. Do you want me to read it to you?”

  “I’ll read it later.” Trent said it in such a way that it made her put the phone down—still she couldn’t help but see the text:

  I didn’t mean to hurt you.

  Brenna looked at Trent, the way he stared out the window, his jaw set. She took in the purplish circles under his eyes—the pallor you could see despite the spray tan—and it hit her that maybe there was something else about Trent’s appearance that was different today. Maybe he didn’t look thrashed, so much as lost. Sad. “You okay?”

  He shook his head.

  “Do you want to talk about it?”

  “Come on, Brenna.”

  “What?”

  “Duh. You’ve kinda got more important things on your mind. We’re talking possible family issues.”

  “I’d like to hear what happened,” she said. “And just so you know, Maya stopped saying ‘duh’ in the fifth grade.”

  Trent gripped the wheel.

  “Listen, I know how much Persephone means to you and—”

  “Don’t even say that name to me.”

  Brenna stared at him. “Why?”

  He exhaled hard. “I spent three hours at the fish market last night. Talked to every freakin’ fishmonger in Lower Manhattan. They really call ’em that, you know. Fishmongers. Sounds like an insult to me but whatever.”

  “No one had seen Annette’s cat?”

  “No. I showed them all the pictures, normal and poster-sized. Nada. I had to use a whole can of Axe spray, just to get the fish smell off me.”

  “Oy.”

  “Big fail.”

  “You did your best. Maybe someone took her in.”

  “No, you don’t understand.” Trent was merging into traffic on FDR Drive. “I called Mrs. Shelby.” he said. “I told her I was sorry, and I didn’t mean to let her down, but I was running out of ideas.”

  “Was she upset?”

  “I thought so.” He sighed. “She told me to come over to her place. I thought she was gonna chew me a new one.” Trent swerved into the left lane and sped up.

  Brenna clutched the arm of the seat. “Hey, take it easy,” she said.

  But Trent ignored her. “I guess I should have figured it out when I saw all the candles.” Trent sped up even more. Brenna was starting to feel nauseous.

  “Candles? At Annette’s place?”

  “I figured she must’ve blown a fuse. Jeez, suave NYC baller like me—I am so freakin’ naïve sometimes. I even asked if she wanted me to look at her box! You wanna know what she said then?”

  Brenna winced. “Not really.”

  Trent stared out the window.

  “Look. I’m sure she just misses Persephone, and—”

  “Persephone died three years ago, Brenna.”

  Brenna stared at him. “What?”

  “Natural causes. Before Annette Shelby even moved to New York.”

  “You’re not serious.”

  He swerved back into the right lane. “She used that cat as a prop. I was a gigolo. Not a player, Brenna. A gigolo. A high-priced, well-kept man ho.”

  “You’re sure that’s all she wanted? I mean . . . I understand she’s lonely. But she could have just wanted a . . . a friend . . .”

  “Candles. Everywhere. And she’s wearing this white silk thing . . . It was like a goddamn Mariah Carey video in there.”

  “Wow.”

  “She paid me all that money, just to have drinks with her every day and play detective. She didn’t hire me for my brains.” He sighed heavily. “She just wanted my tight young ass.”

  Brenna tried a smile. “Normally, you’d be bragging about that.”

  “I know.” Trent turned to Brenna—his eyes were pinkish with hurt. “I guess I don’t like being lied to.” He lurched back into the left lane, and for several moments, Brenna was in a different car—her mother’s white 1978 Buick Skylark. September 8, 1981, and Brenna’s mother is driving to the police station, Brenna in the front seat. She is trying to recall the car —the make, the license plate. Her mother has asked her and she wants to make her happy, wants to find Clea, wants everything to go back to the way it was, wants it so bad . . . But all she can see is blue metal, Clea sliding into it. And that voice, that man’s voice. “You look so pretty, Clee-bee.”

  “You’re going to tell the detective everything you remember.”

  “Yes, Mom.”

  Mom’s hands grip the steering wheel. Her fingers remind Brenna of white ropes. “I’m not mad at you anymore. I know you were lying to protect your sister, and you thought that was the right thing. But you lied to me for two weeks. Two weeks when we could have found her. I don’t want you to lie ever again, Brenna. About anything.”

  “Yes, Mom.” The vent breathes hot on Brenna’s face and neck. Outside, the sky is dead white, like an unfinished painting, like Mom’s knuckles on the wheel.

  “Do you understand me?”

  “Yes, Mom.” Brenna bit her lip and looked at Trent’s hands, gripping the wheel. She saw her mother’s hands and bit her lip harder.

  Trent said, “Did you just call me Mom?”

  “What? No. Of course not.” Brenna shut her eyes for a few seconds. Recited the Pledge in her head and then, at last, she was back.

  “So,” Brenna said, “what you told me about going to that club Bacon . . .”

  “And getting my pole waxed?”

  “That wasn’t true, huh? You were really at Annette’s.”

  “Oh no, that was true. I went to Bacon later.” Trent stared out the window. “But you know what? When Diandra and I were shaboinkin’, I kept seeing Persephone.” He sighed heavily. “Seriously, I mean, thanks to Mrs. Shelby, I can’t even shoot my load without seeing the face of that damn dead cat.” Trent pulled over to the right, got off the FDR at Fourteenth Street.

  Brenna looked at him. “Diandra?”

  “Yeah, sexy name, right?”

  September 30. Brenna’s left hand clutches the steering wheel, the cell phone pressed to the side of her head, Trent’s voice in her ear, competing with club noise. “What’s your name, gorgeous?” Trent is saying now. “Diandra. That is a name that’s made to be moaned in ecstasy.”

  Brenna said, “You knew her before last night.”

  “Uh, yeah. I met her a couple of days ago, but we didn’t hook up until she texted me and told me to meet her at Bacon.”

  “You didn’t meet her a couple of days ago.”

  “Yes I did.”

  “You met her at Bedd,” Brenna said.

  Trent frowned. “I met her in bed?”

  “No. Bedd. With two Ds. That was the club’s name.”

  “In Brooklyn? No way. That place is jank. I haven’t been there in—”

  “Two and a half months. You met her on September 30 at 10:25 P.M. I mean . . . if it’s the same Diandra. It’s a pretty unusual name.”

  “What the hell . . .�
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  “You were on the phone with me, Trent. I was driving to Tarry Ridge and I was having you describe everything you were seeing so I wouldn’t slip into . . .” Brenna bit back the memory. “It’s no big deal.”

  “It is a big deal, though. You remember stuff about my life that I don’t. And you’re my boss. You know how freakin’ scary that is?” He swerved back into the right lane, knocking Brenna into the door. “Man, I hate tailgaters.”

  “Why is it scary?”

  “Seriously, this black station wagon wants to mount me or something.”

  “Trent. Why is my memory scary to you?”

  He sighed. “If I screw something up, you’ll never forget,” he said. “I have to be my best with you, always.”

  Brenna looked at Trent, recalling April 14, 2006, the one time she had met his mother . . . “He was little Mr. New Jersey Spirit and King of the Saratoga Glitz Pageant, three years in a row. Of course, he was sometimes the only boy in the competition, but that didn’t matter to Trenton. He tried so hard. You should have seen his little face light up when he’d hear them clapping for him, it was just adorable. Did you know that he choreographed all his own dance routines? You should have seen the cowboy one!”

  Brenna had never told Trent she knew about his past as a child beauty pageant king—he’d have been mortified, and rightly so. But looking at him now, in his too-tight Western shirt, she saw that little cowboy, so eager to please. I guess I don’t like being lied to.

  “Trent.”

  “Yeah?”

  “I’m going to tell you something, but I need you to keep quiet about it, okay?”

  He looked at her. “Okay.”

  Trent swerved around a slow car—a 2004 Subaru Forester with Michigan plates. “Learn to drive, suckwad!” he yelled. Then, “What do you need me to keep quiet about?”

  “We’re not working for Errol Ludlow anymore.”

  “Huh?”

  “Ludlow got fired from the case yesterday. We’re working directly for Lula Belle’s manager.”

  “Wait. This is weird. Did Errol tell you that?”

  Brenna shook her head. “The manager did.” She looked at Trent. “I can’t tell you his name or his number, and you can’t ever talk to him. This case is . . . emotional to him, I guess. Actually, he’s incredibly paranoid. It’s annoying.” She glanced into the rearview, at the car that had been tailgating them. Her gaze stuck. It was the same black Magnum she’d noticed near the start of the ride. She could make out the first two numbers on the license plate: 61. Same numbers. Maybe he’s just going the same way. Maybe it’s a coincidence. . .