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

  She locked eyes with Geoff. Still with the ennui. Still without the slightest hint of concern behind the spiderweb frames. “You’re not going to do that and we both know it.”

  “How do we both know it?”

  “Get some rest, lady.”

  In the real world, Brenna had long been known for her interrogation skills. Her memory had always been a plus in this area, allowing her to trip up her subjects with their own perfectly recalled words or actions while enabling Brenna to stick to the facts, to keep her own emotions at bay.

  But this wasn’t the real world. The world hadn’t been real since 6 P.M., when she’d read the first word of Maya’s text, and it had been getting less and less real ever since. Brenna wasn’t herself, and so she had no other choice than to be the broken, desperate person she’d become—to be that person, for all it was worth. Brenna kept her eyes on Geoff. She took a breath. She screamed.

  In Faith’s dream, her mother was screaming. Faith was back in her old house and she was getting her books to go to school and her mother was in the kitchen, shrieking like a scared cat.

  “What’s wrong?” Faith said.

  Her mother pointed at the door, at Maya running out of the house, into the street, an eighteen-wheeler roaring down their quiet suburban street, headed straight toward her. Faith fell to her knees as the truck sent Maya flying and Faith’s mother shrieked, “I told you not to let her out!”

  I told you!

  Faith woke up in a sweat, shaking, thinking not about her mother but of the call she’d gotten, just before her interview with Ashley Stanley. The phone call from that weird female fan.

  She reached out to touch Jim, but he wasn’t there. “Jim?” she said.

  No answer.

  She said it louder, and he said, “In here!” Faith got out of bed, followed the sound of his voice to the room he used as a home office. He was on his computer, a picture of two young girls in bandage dresses filling the screen. Faith blinked a few times before she realized one of them was Maya.

  “Where did you get that?” she asked.

  “Brenna sent it,” he said. “She sent both of us a whole series of them. They’re on Maya’s computer, taken two days before she . . . before she told me she was going on the sleepover.”

  Faith peered at the girl in the cobalt blue dress, fingers curled around Maya’s waist. She looked at the way she leaned her head into Maya’s, Maya wearing an identical dress, standing beside her in front of a three-way mirror. In the photo, the other girl’s smile was so big and friendly Faith nearly didn’t recognize her at first. But then she looked at the made-up eyes and it all came together. Lindsay. Lindsay, that trashy girl who had told Faith and Jim she barely knew Maya, that she was just a freshman . . .

  “She was invited on that sleepover,” Faith said.

  “My thoughts, too. I mean . . . whether she showed up or not is a different matter. But Maya didn’t lie to me.”

  He turned and looked at Faith. His eyes were bloodshot and full of pain.

  “Honey, you should take a pill. Try to sleep. It’s best in the long run.”

  “I know,” he said. “But I feel like if I let go for one minute . . . If I don’t sit by the phone and watch the computer and . . .”

  “I understand.” She swallowed hard, her dream in her head again. I told you not to let her out . . . “Jim?”

  “Yeah?”

  “I got a phone call when I was interviewing Ashley Stanley. Someone telling me not to let Maya out because if I did, something bad would happen.”

  Jim swung away from the computer and stared at her. “Are you serious?”

  She nodded.

  “Well . . . why didn’t you say anything earlier?”

  “I get lots of calls like that. E-mails, too. All the time.”

  “About Maya?”

  “About all of us.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I figured it was someone who knew I was interviewing Ashley, someone trying to scare me. The person said they like to watch me. I get that a lot, too.”

  “How did they get your cell phone number?”

  “I guess they called the station. Claimed to be Maya’s teacher.”

  “Was it a man or a woman?”

  “A woman,” she said. “I think.”

  “Faith.”

  “I know.”

  “Honey.”

  “I know, Jim. Let’s just . . .”

  “You get these calls all the time?”

  “Jim.”

  He closed his eyes. Faith’s phone was in the kitchen. She grabbed it, along with Detective Plodsky’s card.

  “What are you doing?” he called out.

  “I’m calling that detective.”

  She tapped Plodsky’s number into the phone. She moved back into Jim’s office before hitting send.

  The call went straight to voice mail. “She’s got her phone off. Can you believe that?”

  She hit redial. “Seriously, what if this was someone important? What the hell am I talking about, I am someone important.”

  Voice mail again. She ended the call.

  Jim looked up at her. “Call Brenna.” She shouldn’t have noticed the readiness with which he’d said Brenna’s name, the look in his eyes as he said it . . .

  Faith was messed up. Brenna being back in both their lives after all these years was made less strange by the awful situation—but it still did feel strange, incredibly so, as though someone were rearranging the foundation of a structure that had stood just fine for years . . . Should I ask Jim how he feels about that?

  She shook the thought out of her mind. She hit redial and got voice mail and left a message for Plodsky asking her to please call. “Honestly. There’s a child missing and what? She wants her beauty sleep?”

  “Are you going to call Brenna?”

  “It’s 3 A.M., Jim,” Faith said. “She’s as emotional as we are, and if she’s managed to get to sleep at all . . .”

  “I bet she’s up,” he said. “She’s a night owl. Like me.”

  “How do you know that?”

  He shrugged, looked away.

  Faith swallowed hard. “I mean, are you talking about when you were married to her? Because that was a long time ago and you were both a lot younger . . .”

  “Forget it.”

  “Okay.”

  She turned back toward the bedroom, and then Jim was up, putting his arms around her.

  He said, “It isn’t a big deal.”

  “What isn’t a big deal?”

  He exhaled. “A couple of times last year, I was up late working on one assignment or another and she was up, too, and so we . . . we instant messaged each other.”

  She pulled away from him. “You . . . what? Seriously?”

  “We talked about Maya, work . . . stuff like that.”

  She shook her head. “I thought she couldn’t talk to you without getting hit by some memory.”

  “She couldn’t. She couldn’t hear my voice or see me. But instant messaging was different.” He sighed. “Don’t look at me like that, Faith. It was just a way to catch up. And we only did it a couple of times.”

  She forced a smile. “God bless modern technology,” she said, thinking, If it wasn’t a big deal, then why didn’t either of you tell me?

  He put his arm around her, and together, they walked back to the bedroom, but they stopped at Maya’s room, her empty room. They stared into the darkness, at the moonlight pouring in through the window, resting on the neatly made bed. Maya’s bed.

  Faith rested her hand on his shoulder and closed her eyes, hot tears forming under the lids. She put her arm around his waist and held him tight. Too tight. “What will we do?” she whispered.

  He didn’t answer.

  Diane Plodsky was listening to a re
broadcast of Prairie Home Companion when—after two hours of her sitting in the parking lot, waiting—she saw Dr. Clark leaving the ER. Thank you. Even though NPR had long been Diane’s stakeout soundtrack of choice, she preferred Harry Shearer or Wait, Wait Don’t Tell Me, or even the BBC News Hour. Lake Woebegone had always worked like a tranquilizer on her, and between the car heater, Keillor’s voice, and the fact that it was past three in the morning, Diane had been thisclose to surrendering to sleep when Clark finally strode across the parking lot, got into his car, and drove off.

  “Hurry home,” she whispered, shaking off the drowsiness before stepping into the cold night.

  There was a new nurse at the front desk. A confused-looking little thing with chubby baby cheeks and granny glasses who practically fell out of her chair from shock when Diane walked through the door. Piece of cake.

  Diane smoothed her hair. She squared her shoulders and leveled her gaze at the girl in the sternest of ways, heading for the front desk without hesitation.

  “Can I help you?” the nurse said.

  Diane slipped her badge out of her jacket pocket and showed it to her. The girl’s mouth dropped open.

  “What room is Mark Carver in?” Diane asked.

  “Did you want to—”

  “C-A-R-V-E-R.”

  The nurse tapped at her computer. “Seven-oh-one East?”

  “How do I get there?”

  “Take the elevator up to the seventh floor, go all the way down to the end of the hall, and make a right.” The nurse looked at Diane as though she were a train speeding toward her and there was no time to jump off the tracks. Amazing how far a badge and a little confidence can get you at three o’clock in the morning—especially at three o’clock in the morning, when no one expects an oncoming train. For the umpteenth time in her adult life, Diane realized, her patience had paid off.

  “Thank you,” she told the terrified nurse, and headed straight for the elevator, hit floor seven, and walked down the hallway with a stride so deliberate, no one bothered to stop her—not the two doctors, going over files at the first nurses station, or the group of orderlies who came up behind her, wheeling a gurney full of medical equipment, or the blue-eyed nurse who passed her as she neared the end of the hall, her gaze just as hard as Diane’s.

  A lot of the detectives Diane knew—the ones who worked out of the precincts like she used to before she’d gotten divorced and decided her whole life needed changing, the ones investigating homicides and acts of grand larceny and all those other crimes that involved real people rather than the lack of them—those detectives tended to be condescending toward Missing Persons. They dismissed Diane and her ilk as pencil pushers who filled out the appropriate forms and went home at 5 P.M. Bureaucrats, they’d say. Not real cops.

  If they could see her now, though, those precinct detectives. If they were to get a load of the swagger and the don’t-mess-with-me glare on Diane Plodsky, moving like a champion through these hospital corridors, wide awake and all-powerful at three o’clock in the morning. If they could see her now, those detectives would surely regret every dismissive thought that had ever dared pass through their narrow little minds.

  If Bruce could see her . . . Well, Bruce probably wouldn’t be all that surprised.

  Diane caught sight of room 701. There was a uniformed guard in front of it, half asleep. She flashed her badge at him and opened the door quickly, slipping in like she belonged and then shutting it softly behind her. One fluid movement.

  Mission accomplished.

  “Hi, Mark,” she said, once the door was closed and her breathing had slowed.

  No response.

  The lights were dimmed, the room very quiet. He was sleeping, she figured. But that was fine. More waiting was fine, long as she was in the right place. She could stay awake. The stress of getting up here and looking confident doing it had shaken the sleepiness out of her and besides, this quiet, deathly though it was, was a better stimulant than Prairie Home Companion. She sat in a chair near the door, folded her hands in her lap. “You go ahead and rest, Mark,” she said. “Don’t mind me.”

  Diane sat waiting for a few more moments before that old cliché movie tagline flashed in her brain. It was quiet. Too quiet. It was too quiet. And when she looked around the room, Diane realized at last that there was a distinct reason for this: All the equipment had been turned off.

  Diane switched on a light. Carver looked very pale, very still.

  She moved toward his bed, rested her fingers against his neck . . . “Oh no,” she whispered, pressing the call button, jamming her fingers into it. “Oh no, no, no . . .” She pushed her hands into his chest, attempting CPR, but he didn’t budge, and as the door flew open and medical staff rushed in, Diane noticed the note pinned to the front of Carver’s hospital gown, pinned there with a tiny, glittering diamond stud earring.

  It read, “She’s happy now.”

  Part Three

  Mom just told me, “I don’t know you anymore.” She said it angrily, like it was my fault. I don’t get it. If Mom doesn’t know me, why am I to blame?

  From the diary of Clea Spector

  June 6, 1979

  14

  “That’s Maya’s,” Brenna said.

  It was 5:30 A.M., still dark outside. She was sitting across from Plodsky in the kitchen of Jim and Faith’s apartment. She’d been in here several times before, to pick up Maya, chat with Faith, maybe have a cup of tea—an airy room with stainless steel fixtures and a big, photo-shoot-ready island of polished wood, a granite chopping-block top she’d always coveted. But being here in this capacity, sitting around the island on tall stools with Plodsky, Jim, Faith, and Morasco, Plodsky’s briefcase placed at the center of the chopping block with the evidence bag on top . . . This was completely unfamiliar. It made her thoughts race around, especially after a night of no sleep—no rest, even—and no food other than Trent’s Red Bull. The worst night in Brenna’s life, capped off by Plodsky’s 5 A.M. phone call and then the cab ride to Jim and Faith’s, the briefcase and the evidence bag.

  It had been kind of Detective Plodsky to call. It had been very kind of her to offer to come down to Jim and Faith’s instead of making them all drive up to 147th and Frederick Douglass Boulevard, where the offices of the Missing Persons Unit were located. And the fact that Plodsky had waited it out at the hospital long enough to find Carver’s body the way she did . . . that had been heroic. This was what Brenna was trying to focus on—the good. But all she could see was the evidence bag, what was in it.

  Plodsky said, “Are you sure it’s Maya’s?”

  Brenna nodded, tears welling in her eyes, pain tearing at her. It was an earring, like thousands of others. But as seen through the thick plastic, it might as well have been a lock of hair, a severed fingertip. “Her favorites,” she said. “Her grandmother gave them to her.”

  “She wore those all the time,” Faith said. “She liked them because her ears had a tendency to get infected and the posts are twenty-four-karat gold which—” Her voice broke off. She closed her eyes. “Yes, they were her favorites.”

  Jim put a hand over hers.

  Brenna said, “Can we see the note?”

  Plodsky nodded, and Brenna noticed something strange in her expression—a softness to the eyes. Sympathy. It made her not want to look at the note. It made her want to get up and run, and she had to steel herself in order to ask again. “Please,” she said.

  Plodsky opened the briefcase, removed another bag, and slid it across the island so they could read the note inside.

  “Oh my God,” Faith whispered. She started to breathe hard and fast, Jim taking her into his arms. “It’s okay,” he said.

  “No,” she said. “No, you don’t understand . . .”

  Brenna stared at the carefully printed block letters: “She’s happy now.” It brought on a memory—February 16, 200
5, phone pressed to her ear, guilt tugging at her as she grasps for the words. “I’m so sorry, but we can’t take every case . . .”

  Nick squeezed Brenna’s hand, bringing her out of it.

  “My thought is that this is a message to you,” Plodsky was saying, her voice calm and quiet as Faith caught her breath. “It could be from someone Maya went with willingly, but considering what was done to Mr. Carver, the person is still dangerous. I’ve recommended issuing an AMBER Alert. My superiors are still considering whether that’s the best possible approach in this particular situation. In the meantime, does that phrase, ‘She’s happy now,’ or maybe the handwriting is familiar . . . is there anything about the note that feels personal?”

  Faith said, “I know who took her.”

  Brenna stared at her.

  “I got a strange phone call on Saturday, when I was interviewing Ashley Stanley,” she said. “A woman with a very deep, husky voice—someone who clearly had smoked a lot of cigarettes. She told me not to let Maya out.”

  Brenna’s eyes widened. “Why didn’t you say anything about that?”

  Plodsky said, “Do you get calls like this often, Mrs. Rappaport?”

  “Yes.”

  “And that’s why you didn’t tell us about it earlier?”

  She looked down. “Yes,” she said. “I get them all the time. They try to screen them at the studio but . . .”

  Brenna said, “Mentioning Maya?”

  “Mentioning everyone.” Faith turned to her. Her eyes looked weary and cold. “After I interviewed you in October, I got quite a few mentioning you.”

  She said it like an accusation. What is going on with you, Faith? Brenna thought. She cleared her throat. It had been a long day, a long night, a nightmare they were all still trapped in. It was natural to start bumping against each other, trying to get out.

  Brenna said, “Was the call from a restricted number?”

  “Yes.”

  “It can still be traced.”

  “Please give me your cell phone carrier information and the time of the call,” Plodsky said.