Stay With Me: A Brenna Spector Novel of Suspense Page 22

  “Hope they get a new one,” Bailey said helpfully.

  “Doorman or surveillance camera?” Brenna said. “They could use both.”

  Lindsay said, “Wait. There wasn’t any video of . . . No one saw Maya leaving?”

  Brenna shook her head. “You know the good thing about digging your own grave? You always make it just the right size.”

  Brenna scooped the pictures off the table, slipped them on top of her closely clutched notebook. “I’m going to give you these. I’d suggest pinning them up on your bedroom wall at home so you can take a good long look at the way my daughter is smiling at you girls.”

  “Can . . . can I . . . please go now?”

  “No way,” said Brenna, as Principal Bailey buzzed the receptionist, asking her to call in Nikki Webber and Annalee Lambert. “We have a lot more questions for you, and your friends.”

  It wasn’t until Brenna was blocks away from the school and nearing her apartment that Lindsay Segal’s words truly began to sink in. Maya hadn’t simply left the apartment at 8 P.M. on Saturday, January 16. She’d left the apartment in a state of extreme mortification and despair, after being plied with alcohol and filmed getting sick from it—all for the benefit of Miles, Maya’s crush (who, according to a crying, broken Lindsay, had found the whole thing “hysterical”). Maya was dehydrated, humiliated, crying, probably still very drunk. Oh and at that hour, it was also pouring freezing rain.

  She could have gone off with anyone in that state. Anyone.

  Yes, Brenna had drummed stranger danger into Maya’s head from the time she first learned how to walk on her own. Yes, Maya knew all the horror stories—from Grimm’s fairy tales to Iris Neff to Jaycee Dugard to Ashley Stanley. Yes, she knew to look both ways and stay on the alert and avoid unlit streets and keep her phone in her hands at all times. She knew to scream “Fire,” not “Help,” because “Fire” made them come running and “Help” did not, and she knew not to make eye contact with strangers, or to speak to them, no matter how friendly and helpful they seemed. And above all else she knew not to get into a stranger’s car. But no one is immune to that one dumb mistake. No one—especially a child. A poor, hurting, intoxicated child . . .

  She pulled her handbag close to her. She felt the bulk of Clea’s diary against her ribs and thought of the Boy from the Road, who had picked up her seventeen-year-old, hitchhiking sister twenty-eight years ago in Portsmouth, Virginia, after she’d run away from her “great love” Bill. The Boy from the Road of whom Clea had written, “He can save me,” but who had wound up dosing her full of drugs and leaving her for dead in a motel room and please don’t let history repeat itself. Please let Maya be alive and somewhere we can find her. Soon. Now.

  Brenna’s eyes started to well. You have an exact time when Maya left Lindsay’s. Eight P.M., Saturday, January 16. Get back to that. Work from there.

  Brenna stepped into the street, narrowly missing a speeding taxi. Its horn blared. Her heart jumped into her throat. Green light. What the hell is wrong with me? Brenna stepped back onto the curb, breathing deeply. Eight P.M., Saturday, January 16. Think.

  Brenna felt a vibration against her side. Her phone. She yanked it out of her bag, looked at the screen. Faith. Probably calling to apologize for being so curt—the last thing she needed right now. She debated letting it go to voice mail, then answered at the last minute.

  “Brenna, we don’t have much time.” Faith’s voice trembled like a child’s.

  “Huh?”

  “She called again.”

  “The woman you thought was Renee—”

  “Yes,” Faith said. “She called, and she wants to meet me. She wants to meet alone.”

  Through the phone, Brenna heard a car horn, Faith’s breath leaving her in sharp gasps, as though she were running. “Where are you?”

  “She wouldn’t let me tell anyone. She wants to meet. I’m scared. Do you think she has Maya?”

  “Faith,” said Brenna. “Where are you right now?”

  “I’m on my way to meet her at the playground at Twelfth and Hudson.”

  “I can get there in five minutes.”

  “She said to come alone.”

  “I know. I’ll keep my distance. Don’t worry.”

  “Brenna . . .”

  There was a pause at the other end of the line. Brenna could hear Faith’s breathing, rapid and tenuous. “Yes?”

  “Thank you.”

  16

  “I’ll meet you back home,” Faith told Jim after she finished the call and left the greenroom. “I need to pick something up first.” Terrible excuse, she knew, but she hadn’t either the time or the brainpower to think of a good one.

  “What are you picking up?” Jim called after her as she headed down the hall, straight for the elevator.

  Faith pretended not to hear, even though her ears were beyond perfect and Jim knew that. In the old days, the days before yesterday, he joked that in order to fart without Faith hearing it, he had to take a cab across town. But Jim was so tired now and Faith was so tired and they were both different people than they were two days ago.

  He didn’t repeat the question, or say, I know you heard me. And so Faith headed for the elevator without having to elaborate.

  Once she got outside the building, she saw that traffic wasn’t as bad as she thought it would be, so she reconsidered the subway, stuck her hand out. A cab pulled up fast. Had to be a sign.

  “Twelfth and Hudson please.” Please, please, please. “I’m in a huge hurry.” Please bring Maya. Please bring her safe and well.

  “Excuse me,” said the driver. “Aren’t you Faith Gordon-Rappaport?”

  She exhaled. “Yes.”

  The driver glanced at her in the rearview. His eyes were bottle green, beneath bushy copper brows. Faith tried to smile, but could only manage a grimace and pretended to be immersed in the TV screen on the back of the front seat, some maniacally grinning fake reporter singing the praises of the Spider-Man musical.

  The driver said, “Saw you interview the kidnapped girl yesterday.”

  Faith nodded.

  “Fascinating.”

  “Thanks.”

  The cab swung around a truck and zoomed down Broadway, hitting a long line of green lights. Faith’s heart pounded. She’d make it on time. She’d make it down to that playground and she’d see that woman and please let me see Maya. Please let her be all right.

  “I don’t get her parents, though,” the driver said. “I mean what kid just gets into some car in the middle of the night? Even if it’s a woman you had a conversation with once. What kind of kid does that?”

  “It wasn’t the middle of the night.”

  “I blame her parents for that,” he said. “She had no survival skills. You have to teach survival skills. You teach them to kids when they’re young, or else they’ll be some teenager like that girl, getting into some pervert’s car . . .”

  Faith turned back to the screen—Spider-Man gliding over an enthusiastic group of dancers, lights glinting off the wires holding him aloft.

  “It’s tragic, really. A mother with that little concern about what happens to her daughter, she can’t be bothered to teach her the basic skills. What it takes to stay alive.”

  “Her mother’s dead.”

  “I know that.”

  “She died of grief.”

  “Oh come on.”

  Faith gritted her teeth. “From what I know, she worked hard to give Ashley the best life possible. That’s the kidnapped girl’s name, you know. Ashley.”

  “Single mom. Too busy with her career to spend any time with her kid. Ashley probably went off with those two perverts because she was so damn lonely. Kids crave a family unit.”

  Faith’s face flushed. She stared at the small screen, at Spider-Man, bounding off the side of a building.

&
nbsp; “And how could she have stayed there all that time, you know what I’m saying? Ten years? That couple wasn’t around 24/7. If she was raised better, if she was taught survival skills, she would have figured out how to get out of there sooner.”

  How can wires that thin hold up such a large man?

  “When girl goes missing for that long . . . I mean. There’s something else going on, know what I’m saying?”

  “No.”

  “Well I—”

  “No, let me correct that. I do know what you’re saying. And I want you to shut the hell up.”

  “What?”

  “How dare you judge a girl you don’t know? How dare you judge her mother?”

  He cleared his throat.

  “I can get off here,” said Faith. They were on Hudson, around ten blocks away, but she didn’t care. She’d rather run in the cold than stay in this cab another minute.

  “I don’t know why you’re so miffed about this,” he said. “I’m entitled to my own opinion.”

  The driver pulled over. Faith shoved her credit card in the slot and paid the bill and flung the door open. “No you’re not.”

  She slammed the door and hurried down the sidewalk. How dare he, she kept thinking. God, she was a mess . . .

  But the more she walked, the more her thoughts shifted back to the phone call, how the woman (was it a woman?) had apologized to her, and said please and how she or he had sounded so much kinder than before. That could mean many things, both good and bad. Same with asking Faith to meet alone . . .

  Please, she thought. Please. Good news. Please. She felt like Spider-Man in that Broadway show, kept aloft by the thinnest, most breakable of wires.

  A woman shouted Faith’s name and “Love Sunrise Manhattan!” and Faith nodded at her, ducking out of pedestrian traffic for a few seconds to grab her sunglasses and scarf from her purse and put them on.

  Please, please . . .

  She pulled out her phone, stared at “Restricted Number,” the last call on the log, it all hitting her. Within twenty minutes, Faith would know. That woman from the phone would be Renee Lemaire, or she wouldn’t be. She’d either have Maya, or she wouldn’t have Maya, but either way, Faith would know what had happened to her stepdaughter. Her daughter. Her little Maya Papaya . . .

  She couldn’t do this alone.

  But she couldn’t call the police, not without risking that woman’s rage. And she certainly couldn’t tell Jim, who wouldn’t be able to handle this any better than Faith could . . . Her heart pounded. Strange how a turn of events like this one could shuffle the contents of your mind, how it could make you push aside all other feelings, especially the petty ones. Because they were petty, weren’t they, her feelings of this morning? Why should Faith even care about Jim and Brenna instant messaging each other? Why should she care about that when her daughter was out there, Jim’s daughter, Brenna’s daughter, and her own little Maya Papaya? Maya, who, unable to pronounce THs as a toddler, used to call her Mama Fate . . .

  She stared at the clock on her phone, time ticking away. She tapped out the number, waited for her to pick up. And when Faith heard her voice—the voice of a friend, a dear friend, after all—she knew she’d made the right choice. “Brenna,” she said. “We don’t have much time.”

  Brenna fell into a throng on Tenth and Fifth—a thick swarm of slow-walking building gapers who would not, could not move. She wanted to mow them all down.

  Five minutes. That’s all she had to meet Faith and the woman who had called her—a woman who might or might not have stolen Maya. A woman with a cigarette voice and a warning to meet her alone, meet me alone or else . . . God, that didn’t sound good. Brenna wove her way around the slow walkers, pushing into one—an elderly man who spun around with surprising speed. “Watch where you’re going!”

  She rushed across Sixth Avenue against the light, nearly sliding under an oncoming bus, but she didn’t care. Brenna didn’t care about anything other than getting her daughter back.

  Brenna saw a clear stretch of sidewalk ahead of her, and she hit it running, sneakers piling into the concrete, Maya’s face playing in her mind, her voice, her clumsy gait, the surprising heaviness of her step and the way she kept slamming the front door and leaving the refrigerator door open, no matter how many times Brenna asked her to close it softly please and please, please, please . . . please be alive, Maya. Please be well.

  Finally, she caught sight of it. The playground. Brenna barreled toward it, running with all her might, her bag bouncing against her hip, searching the area for a reedy teenager with long blonde hair, arms outstretched, running toward her . . .

  She saw Faith, sitting alone on a park bench near the wrought-iron gate in a scarf and oversized sunglasses, looking like a femme fatale escaping with the cash. Faith was alone. There weren’t even any kids at the playground—it was too cold.

  Brenna slowed her breathing. From the other side of the gate, she aimed her eyes at Faith, stared at her until she got her attention. Faith took off her big, dark glasses and gave her a nod.

  Brenna took out her phone and pretended to be checking it, moved toward the opening in the gate, her eyes scanning the sidewalk. Show yourself. The words echoed in her head. Come on . . .

  “Faith Gordon-Rappaport?”

  Brenna turned to the voice—not the cigarette-strangled voice of Faith’s woman caller but the crackly voice of a young man. He strode toward Faith, a tall boy in a dark wool coat, black cap pulled over his lowered head. Brenna moved through the gate.

  She saw Faith stand up, heard the boy say, “You made it.”

  Brenna knew the voice. And, as she neared the bench, she saw his face—the scruffy beard, the pink cheeks, the eyes like a shamed puppy.

  Her hands clenched into fists.

  “Miles?” Faith said. “You . . . You’re the one who’s been calling me?”

  “Yes, ma’am.” He took a step forward, then stumbled back when he saw Brenna. “Mrs. Spector? I never wanted this to happen, ma’am. I swear to God, I never—”

  Brenna slapped him, hard, across the face.

  Miles apologized three more times. Once before Brenna told Faith everything she’d learned from Lindsay Segal, once after. Once more after they agreed to go with him to his apartment and pick up the last footage recorded of Maya before her disappearance.

  “That’s why I called Mrs. Rappaport,” he said, in the media room of his apartment, after showing them the computer he’d called her from, using a microphone and voice-changing software to transform his voice into that of a raspy older woman. “I wanted to warn her.”

  The apartment was just a block away from the playground, and he’d let them in himself, explaining his parents were both at work and his little brother was, as he should be, in school.

  “Why do you have this software?” Faith said.

  “It’s part of a whole recording suite package. My mom and dad got it for me for Christmas,” he said. “Like I was telling Maya, I don’t just want to be a singer, I want to be a producer and . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Brenna said, “Like you were telling Maya?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  She wanted to hit him again.

  “I think you’d better give us that video now,” Faith said. “And we’ll be on our way.”

  He shut off the voice changer, and double-clicked on a folder marked “Videos.” On the screen, Faith saw a frozen image of Maya, sitting on a pink shag rug with Lindsay and the other two girls from the Forever 21 pictures.

  “It was Lindsay’s idea. I didn’t want her to. I told her . . .”

  “You knew all about this?” Brenna said. “You knew it ahead of time?”

  “I knew something bad was going to happen. I wasn’t sure what.” He looked at Faith. “That’s why I called you, it’s why I told you to keep Maya at home. I figured if
you heard it from a stranger, maybe you’d be scared enough to listen.” He looked down at his hands. “And no one would know it was me.”

  “Miles,” Faith said.

  “What?”

  “How did you know something bad was going to happen?”

  “Lindsay is a very jealous person.”

  “What does jealousy have to do with it?” Brenna said.

  He took a breath. Both women waited.

  “A few weeks ago, Maya stopped by my apartment,” he said. “She told me she had pushed the buzzer on a dare with herself.”

  “She did?”

  He smiled a little. “Maya says stuff like that a lot, which is why I like her. She’s in my art class.” He gave Brenna a nervous smile. “You know that. We were working on our portraits at your house a little while ago.”

  “I remember.” She didn’t smile back.

  “We’re also in chorus together.”

  “I remember that, too.”

  Faith said, “So she stopped by your apartment.”

  “We talked. I showed her all my sound recording equipment and the new songs I’m working on, and she told me she thought it was great. We talked . . . about teachers and classes and stuff.”

  “How long did she stay?”

  “About an hour. I mean . . . nothing happened. But I guess Nikki saw her leaving and told Lindsay and she like . . . assumed something. She said she’d get back at Maya. Before I knew it, they were hanging with Maya, they were inviting her to our lunch table . . .”

  “Maya helped her with an art project,” Faith said.

  “Yeah, that was part of it, too.”

  Faith looked at Brenna, her eyes sad. “She was so proud of that.”

  “A setup,” Brenna said. “Pretty easy to do with a kid who admires you all so much. Act like you care about her, it’s like shooting fish in a barrel.”

  Miles cringed, visibly. “I did . . . I do care about her.”

  “Play the video.”

  He did.