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

  “I know,” he said quietly. “But.”

  “I understand.”

  “I wasn’t thinking.”

  “Nick,” she said. “I understand.”

  He put his arms around her and she hugged him back. They stayed like that for a long time. Holding each other up.

  “I’ll stay here,” Morasco said, finally. “You go home. Danny Cavanaugh is in a squad car outside. He said he can take you.”

  “But I don’t think I can . . .”

  “If Maya comes back home, you need to be there.”

  Brenna pulled away. She looked into his eyes and touched his face. For a few seconds, she flashed on earlier today, her mother at the door. She remembered how angry she’d been at Nick, felt the anger again, running through her veins. But only the memory of it, not the reality. Why, she wondered. Why get so upset over something so small when hours later, the whole world . . .

  “We’re going to find her,” Nick said. “Or she’ll come home. Either way, she’s going to be okay.” He said it as though he knew it, as though he wasn’t just hoping.

  “Thank you.” Brenna cast a quick glance at Plodsky, writing in her notebook. She kissed Morasco softly, and slipped out the door.

  11

  Officer Danny Cavanaugh was only seven years older than Maya. Brenna had met him back in December, while working on the same case that had brought DeeDee Walsh to her home on December 21, but he was kind enough not to mention the case as they drove. Kind, or clueless. Brenna was grateful either way. She needed quiet—she’d take it any way she could get it.

  She was sitting in the back of the squad car. Every so often, her flip-book of a mind would shift back to other rides in other squad cars she’d taken while working on cases—January 12, 2008; March 29, 1999 . . . She’d touch the journal in her bag and then she’d again recall the ride earlier tonight, Officer Benoit’s clicking braids, the siren blaring, the hope . . .

  “You comfortable, Ms. Spector?” Danny said. “Do you want me to turn the heat up?”

  Danny Cavanaugh’s hair was safety-cone orange. He had a round, freckly face and wide-set eyes. In his uniform, he reminded Brenna of one of those plastic LEGO dolls, Little People. Brenna had given Maya a box of them as one of her Christmas presents back in 2002—a firefighter, a construction worker, a doctor, a nurse, a policeman . . . all so cherubic and sweet. Christmas had fallen on a Wednesday that year, but Brenna and Maya had celebrated on Thursday morning, December 26, Maya having spent Christmas Day as she always did, with Jim and Faith. First thing Maya had done after opening the box of Little People was to marry the nurse and the firefighter. I now ponounce you husband and . . .

  “I’m fine,” Brenna said.

  Which was a lie, of course. She wasn’t fine. She was confused and upset and guilty-feeling, her heart pinging around in her chest, her stomach hollow. She wanted to cry but she couldn’t. She wanted to fix things, but she couldn’t. She wanted to punch the seat until her hand broke, but instead she flipped open her phone, reread Maya’s text message, and that hurt more. Had someone forced Maya to write that text, or had she written it herself, of her own free will?

  Or had Mark Carver written it, when he was alone, after . . . Brenna shut her eyes. No . . . This was the way Brenna’s mind usually worked when she was on a case, running through all scenarios, considering every possibility. But this was Maya. Her own, only Maya. There were some possibilities she couldn’t consider.

  “Anything you need, let me know,” said Danny, who just one month earlier had saluted her outside an abandoned building in Mount Temple as they prepared to search for the body of a very nice woman’s only son.

  “Thanks Danny,” she said, then corrected herself. “Officer Cavanaugh.”

  “Ms. Spector?”

  “Yes?”

  “I just wanted to say that . . . um . . . what happened with Detective Morasco.”

  “Yes.”

  “I was there, and . . . you know . . . It was a very tense situation.”

  “I’m sure it was.”

  “I mean, I know from reckless and Detective Morasco was definitely not. That guy may not have had a gun, but he was under the influence and . . .”

  “I would have shot him,” Brenna said, “whether he had a gun or not.”

  Danny Cavanaugh nodded. He stared straight ahead. “I hope you find your daughter,” he said.

  Brenna’s phone rang. She flipped it open, looked at the screen. Faith. She’d spoken to Faith three times tonight already, but of course she understood. Everyone handled situations like this in their own way. Faith needed to talk.

  She hit send. “He’s still in surgery, Faith,” she said. “I’m on my way home. Nick’s supposed to call me with any news.”

  “Faith’s asleep. She took a pill. She had to.”

  “Jim.” First time she’d spoken on the phone with him since May 1, 2000, a Monday. The day their divorce became final. But Brenna didn’t go back to the date. Jim’s voice sounded so different now, drained and flattened.

  “She told me she was going to Lindsay’s,” he said. “She gave me Lindsay’s address and phone number. But I never called the parents. I never okayed the overnight with anyone. If I had done that . . .”

  “I know.”

  “It’s my fault.”

  “It’s not.”

  Jim breathed into the phone. Brenna kept her eyes on the back of Danny’s head, his orange hair against the dark blue of his police shirt. She looked at his chubby hands on the wheel and she stayed here in the car, her ex-husband on the phone with her, breath shaking. “I could have . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Earlier tonight, Faith had told Brenna what Lindsay had said: Maya had never showed up for a sleepover. She’d never even been invited. And even if she had . . . Lindsay’s parents weren’t even at her house, Faith had said. They’re out of town all week. Can you imagine?

  “Maya has never lied to you,” she told Jim. “When she said she was going to Lindsay’s and that her parents would be there, you had no reason not to trust her.”

  “Brenna,” he said. “I could have stopped it.”

  Such pain in his voice. Stretched thin enough to break. Brenna closed her eyes. “You didn’t know. You can’t stop things that you don’t know are happening.”

  “I should take a pill. I should try to sleep but I can’t.”

  “I know,” she said.

  “If I could trade myself for her, I would. If I could take twenty years off my life, I would, just to bring her back right now . . .”

  “I know. I would, too.”

  Jim said nothing. Brenna pressed the phone to her ear. She listened to his shaky breathing, and for a long time they stayed like that, sharing the silence as the squad car rolled along. She felt as though they were in the same dark room, standing over something dying, watching it slip away.

  Stay with me. Stay with me, please . . .

  Danny took the turnoff for the Cross County Expressway. Traffic was very light—only a few other cars on the road. They’d be in New York City in fifteen minutes at the most. “I’m sorry, Jim,” Brenna said.

  “About what?”

  “About me. My memory. I’m sorry I’ve made things so hard for you and for Maya. I’m sorry I spent so much time in the past that I was never fully there with you when we were married. I know that’s the real reason why you left me. I know it wasn’t because I did that job for Errol.”

  “Brenna—”

  “It was because you knew I’d never change, and I don’t blame you. I haven’t changed. I can’t change.”

  “Stop.”

  “I think it’s the reason why Maya left, too.”

  “No,” he said. “That’s not true. Maya loves you so much.”

  Danny’s eyes were visible in the rearview, aimed straight at the highway.
Brenna hoped he was lost in thoughts of his own. She didn’t want him to hear this.

  “She loves me,” she whispered. “But she isn’t happy with me.”

  “Brenna . . .”

  “Yes?”

  “Maya needs you. So do I.”

  Brenna swallowed hard. He’d used the present tense. For both of them. Brenna hung on to that. “Okay.”

  “Let’s not give up,” he said. “Please.”

  “I won’t,” she said, looking out the window, at the dark, empty highway, at the city lights in the distance. “We won’t.”

  There was something about the way Jim had spoken to Brenna, the hushed tone of his voice, the worry in it. It brought on a recent memory—sitting in the lobby of Lindsay’s building with Faith and him, Faith saying it, nearly under her breath.

  She’s been keeping secrets. She’s been typing on her computer, and then she hides the typing . . .

  “Have you gone through her computer?” Brenna had asked.

  “Faith and I read her e-mails,” he had said. “Nothing but homework questions and confirmations of iTunes purchases.”

  “Facebook?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “Looks the same.” Which had meant nothing worth looking at. Maya had just gotten her own Facebook page a month earlier and so far, she’d added no friends beyond Faith and Trent (Brenna and Jim weren’t on Facebook). She’d posted one status on December 12: “Here I am on Facebook!”

  “I want to look at everything, too.” Brenna had asked Jim to copy the contents of Maya’s computer onto an external hard drive, put it in an envelope, and leave it with the doorman of his building. She’d picked it up on the way home.

  Yes, the police would surely be going through that laptop tomorrow with tweezers and magnifying glasses. But Brenna hadn’t wanted to leave all of that up to the Missing Persons Unit. She’d wanted to see for herself what Maya had been typing. She’d wanted to get a jump on Plodsky and her cohorts and start finding her daughter now. Also—and probably more importantly, if she was going to be honest—she’d wanted something to occupy her mind, to stop it from churning and remembering and fearing for the worst.

  Back at her apartment, though, when Brenna took off her coat and turned the light on, the first thing she saw was the bag full of Clea’s belongings on top of her desk: Brenna’s fears staring her straight in the face—the twenty-eight-year-old clothes of someone she loved, a disappeared girl. She heard the hum of the radiator and felt the hollowness of her home and all she could think of was Maya’s empty room at the end of the hall.

  Stop. Get to work.

  She switched on her computer. Checked her bank balance. Maya had an ATM card but there had been no withdrawals since January 15, and Brenna had been the one to make it. She checked her credit card. No new charges, either.

  “Where are you, Maya?” She said it to no one, said it into thin air.

  Brenna took a breath. She checked her texts and saw one from Trent: Read your e-mail.

  Trent. He didn’t know. She hadn’t told him. She texted back:

  Maya’s gone

  She waited. No response. Probably asleep. It was late, after all. Past midnight, and tomorrow was a workday.

  She opened her e-mail. The only new one was from Trent, and it was titled “BrennaNSpector.” She stared at the name—the name of the person who had been e-mailing with Alan Dufresne—both Dufresne and those e-mail relics from another time. Souvenirs from before everything fell apart. She opened it.

  Queen Bee,

  Didn’t find out much about the Hotmail addy. The “name” listed under the account is 3434. I was able to hack in though (the password? “Password.” For real. Who does that?) Anyway, here’s what I found: Besides that correspondence with Alan Dufresne, the only e-mails to that account have been from missing persons pages, verifying the address. Turns out 3434 has been posting pictures of Clea on pages like that Snapfish one for at least two years (account is set to automatically delete e-mails over two years old) then taking them down between two and four months later. The pics never stay up longer than four months.

  But two years, Spec. Two. Years. You know what that means? (It means Nick is off the hook. Just in case you need me to spell it out for you. Which you usually do.)

  Yolo,

  TNT, aka Mack Daddy

  Brenna read the numbers: 3434. A thought passed through her mind, but then she pushed it away. It wasn’t possible. And even if it was, she didn’t care. She took the external hard drive out of the envelope, attached it to her desktop, and saw the icon come up on her screen—a folder, labeled “MAYA’S COMPUTER.”

  She choked up at the name. Her daughter’s name. She double-clicked on the icon, and Maya’s desktop appeared—a manga character, a girl with spiky purple hair and huge searching green eyes, and for the briefest of moments, Brenna slipped into a memory. February 2, 2009, curled up on the couch after dinner, Matthew Ryan on the stereo, Maya squeezed next to her, laptop open.

  Maya clicks on a folder marked “Art,” then a file marked “Untitled” and a manga-style image fills the screen—a girl with spiky purple hair and huge eyes, green and searching.

  “She’s cool,” Brenna says. “Where did you find her?”

  Maya turns to her. She smiles. “I drew her.”

  “You did?

  “Yep.”

  “That’s . . . how did you get so good?”

  Maya shrugs. “It’s not bad, I guess.”

  “You have a name for her?”

  “I’m thinking Yoru.”

  “Yoru?”

  Maya stares at the face on the screen, the light from it reflected in her sad, clear eyes.

  “It means ‘night’ in Japanese.”

  “Yoru,” Brenna whispered. There was a cluster of folders to the left of the screen. She double-clicked on the one marked “English homework.” A collection of files appeared, and she clicked on the most recent:

  “Book Report: Tess of the D’Urbervilles—January 19, 2010.”

  The due date was this coming Tuesday. She’d last worked on it yesterday morning at 10 A.M.—one hour before her visit to Dr. Lieberman. Would she have really completed a book report if she was planning on leaving?

  Brenna thought of Maya’s hands on her keyboard, typing, her green-eyed screen saver, Night. “Why Night?”

  Maya shrugs. “Because she never lets you see all of her,” she says. “She keeps you in the dark.”

  I have found new friends, a beautiful new life.

  Had Maya composed the text in her mind before writing the book report? Had she known Mark Carver? Had they been planning her getaway for weeks, just like Clea had no doubt planned hers with Bill?

  No. She wouldn’t. Would she?

  The first sentence of the book report read: A beautiful love story is at the heart of Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles. But it is a love story that is born of sorrow.

  Sorrow. The name of Tess’s ill-fated child, Brenna remembered. She wondered if Maya had been making a pun and imagined herself asking her, wishing she could. Wishing she could know all of her, some of her, any of her.

  There was a knock on her door. Brenna headed for it fast, pressed her face up against the peephole, feeling a split second of hope . . .

  Trent.

  She opened the door. He wore the same clothes he’d been wearing earlier, though he looked as though he’d just woken up from a deep sleep, his hair banged up on one side, his shirt rumpled. She tried to smile, couldn’t. “Took you long enough.”

  “I was out for a walk in the area,” he said. “Maya’s gone?”

  “Yes.”

  “Where?”

  “I don’t . . . I don’t know.”

  “Oh my God.”

  “She texted. Said she’s found so
mewhere where she’s happier.”

  “What? No, that’s impossible. Maya’s a happy kid.”

  A tear slipped down Brenna’s cheek. Then another.

  “Aw crap,” he whispered.

  Brenna had never cried in front of Trent. Even when he was in the hospital and fighting for his life, she’d saved her tears for the waiting room. He was her employee, after all, and besides that, he was Trent. And so she’d always kept her emotions in check with him.

  But right now, she couldn’t. She felt herself crumpling, caving in, each tear building on the next. She hadn’t cried all night, not with Nick or Jim. She hadn’t even cried at the sight of Maya’s ruined phone in an evidence bag. But now she was crying and she couldn’t stop.

  Trent put his arms around Brenna. “It’s okay,” he said, “It’s okay,” like the friend he was, and Brenna buried her face in her assistant’s chest, her tears becoming sobs, deep and painful and never ending.

  Morasco had never met Diane Plodsky before tonight, but after spending three hours in the ER waiting room with her, drifting in and out of sleep as she subjected him to bursts of pointless questions, he felt as though he’d known her for years, and not in a good way.

  “Does Maya approve of you?” she was saying to him now as he sat, eyes fixed on the nurse at the front desk, willing her to announce that Carver had come out of surgery. The nurse glanced up at him, then went back to her computer.

  “I have no idea,” he said. “I haven’t spent a lot of time with her. Brenna is trying to introduce us slowly.”

  “Why is that?”

  “Maybe she doesn’t want Maya to get too attached.”

  “Before you, did she have a lot of men in her life, coming and going?”

  “I don’t think so,” he said. “Of course, I never knew her before I met her.”

  He gave her a smile. She didn’t smile back.

  “Detective Plodsky, look. I’ve had a really tough night here.”

  “I know.”

  “And I understand that I’m the only witness you’ve got right now. But I’ve already told you all I know. If you want to find out more about Maya, I’d suggest you check out both her homes.”