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

  They watched. It lasted around ten or fifteen minutes. When it was done, Brenna’s stomach burned and her face throbbed and she was filled with an awful, nagging hurt. She turned to Faith and saw the tears in her eyes, watched her lips part, unable to form words. Brenna looked at Miles. “You went along with this.”

  “No.”

  “You were on the other end of the webcam. I heard her talk to you and when I spoke to her at school this morning, she told me you thought it was, and I quote, ‘hysterical.’ ”

  “My God,” Faith spat out the words.

  Miles said, “I wasn’t in the room.”

  “What?”

  “I wasn’t watching. Once they told me she’d showed up, I left my place and I headed over to Lindsay’s. I was going to tell them to stop, but then I saw Maya leaving. I didn’t know what to do so I followed her for a bunch of blocks and when I finally yelled out to her, she freaked out,” he said. “She started running.”

  Brenna’s eyes widened. “You saw her. That night. On the street.”

  “She ran away from me,” he said. “I don’t blame her.”

  “Did you see where she went?”

  “She got into a car. They headed up the highway.”

  Both women gaped at him.

  He opened his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

  Brenna said, “What kind of car was it?”

  “I don’t know. Like . . . Maybe a Subaru or a Volvo or something. ”

  “Did you get the license plate?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you?”

  “I figured it was someone she knew.” His voice cracked. “Maybe one of you guys. Or her dad.”

  Faith got her voice back. “Why would you think that?” she said, very quietly.

  “The car pulled up. She got in so fast, like she knew them. It was raining so hard and—”

  “Jesus,” Brenna whispered.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Faith stood up. “Thank you for telling us.”

  He started up after her, but she held up a hand. “That’s okay.” She looked at Brenna. “We’ll find our own way out.”

  Brenna nodded, following.

  After they left, Miles sat at his computer, staring at the place where Maya’s mom and stepmom had been sitting—the same couch he’d been on with Maya two weeks ago when, after half an hour of talking about his new studio equipment and their art class and best and worst teachers and Maya’s decision to cut chorus this semester, he’d taken her face in his hands and he’d kissed her.

  If Miles tried, he could almost feel her in his arms again, so stiff, and then that moment of surrender, her body melting into him, but just for a few seconds. It was the most honest thing he’d ever felt from a girl. He wanted to think it was just because she was young, but there was something else in the way she’d given in. Something he couldn’t look at too hard. I’ve got to go, Maya had said, and he’d let her, with her coat buttoned wrong and her face all flushed and her eyes glowing in that way, like her whole life had changed.

  It had been her first kiss. Miles had known that without Maya’s saying anything more. He hadn’t told anybody. He never would.

  Outside Miles’s apartment, Faith turned to Brenna. “Two weeks,” she said.

  Brenna nodded.

  “Doesn’t it unnerve you a little, Brenna? I mean . . . here Maya goes and visits that boy in his apartment two weeks ago and we’d never know about it if it weren’t for . . .” She didn’t finish the sentence.

  They were facing the playground and Brenna gazed out at it, recalling a trip to a different playground—a cement monstrosity in Battery Park on October 5, 2000, with the wind easing in off the river and pushing through Brenna’s hair and the sun shining, Maya darting over the concrete, heading for the slide. “Watch me, Mama!”

  “That one’s too high for you.”

  “No Mama, watch me! Watch me!”

  “You remembering something?” Faith said.

  Brenna nodded. “Maya at three,” she said. “She was too young to have secrets.”

  “I wish she still was.” Faith stared straight out ahead. “I wish we all were.”

  Brenna looked at her.

  “It’s okay,” Faith said.

  “What’s okay?”

  “The instant messaging.”

  Brenna stepped back. She opened her mouth, closed it again.

  Faith’s sunglasses were back on. “I don’t get why neither one of you ever told me you were in contact,” she said. “But it’s okay.”

  “How did you find out?” Brenna said, which was the wrong thing to say entirely. “I . . . I mean . . .”

  Faith put a hand up. “Thank you so much for coming, Brenna. I don’t know what I would have done if you weren’t here.” She gave her a hug and started away.

  Brenna closed her eyes. “You do know you mean the whole world to Jim,” she said.

  But Faith didn’t answer. She was already at the corner, slipping into a cab, heading home.

  A few blocks away from Brenna’s apartment, she spotted a coffee cart. She bought a black coffee and a kaiser roll with butter and mainlined both—just to keep from passing out. The roll was the first solid food she’d eaten since the pasta she’d made on Saturday afternoon, and it felt strange and tiresome, the whole act of chewing and swallowing. She felt antsy, as though she could find better use for her time, and the truth was, she could.

  In her bag, she carried a flash drive, containing the video from Miles’s computer—Maya at the lowest, saddest point in her life. Brenna would get rid of the video as soon as she found Maya. She’d make sure all copies were destroyed before anyone else could see them. But she needed the video now, as it was the only record she had of what her daughter had been wearing on the night of her vanishing, of how Maya had looked just before Miles had seen her get into a colorless, makeless car for whatever reason, saw her speed up the West Side Highway to whereabouts unknown.

  Nice eyewitness account, Miles, you self-absorbed, unobservant jerk.

  Regardless, she needed to get the footage to Trent and to Plodsky so that they could send it around, maybe take a still from it—if a decent one could be found, one that showed her face . . . Tears sprang into Brenna’s eyes. She was getting used to this, these waves of emotion crashing through her unannounced, knocking her down again and again.

  Keep it together. Keep breathing.

  Brenna ran across the street to her apartment building, weaving around pedestrians, feet hitting the pavement hard, practically running over Mrs. Dinnerstein as she reached the door, Mrs. Dinnerstein standing there with her ever-present grocery cart, blocking Brenna’s way, her face hard and grim.

  “Excuse me,” Brenna said to her, but she didn’t budge. “Mrs. Dinnerstein. I need to get in, please.”

  “I heard about Maya,” she said. “I saw her father and stepmother today on the TV.”

  “Yes.”

  The old woman put a hand on Brenna’s shoulder, fear playing all over her features. “I need to talk to you,” she said.

  “Okay . . . Maybe we could . . .” Brenna was about to suggest going into Mrs. Dinnerstein’s ground floor apartment, where at least it was warm. But then she remembered the wall-climbing clutter in there, and the way Mrs. Dinnerstein had reacted to her brief glance at it all. “Maybe we could go into the foyer.”

  Mrs. Dinnerstein shook her head vigorously. “It’s better out here. Where we can see people coming.”

  “Okay,” Brenna said. “But I really am in a hurry.”

  “Do you remember all the reporters that were here back in December, after that woman broke into your house and you killed that gentleman?”

  Brenna sighed. “I didn’t kill him, Mrs. Dinnerstein. He committed suicide.”

  “However you want to
look at it,” she said. “But last December, Ms. Spector. There were dozens of reporters outside this building every day. It got so a person couldn’t leave through this door without taking her life in her hands.”

  “I’m sorry it was so bad for you, Mrs. Dinnerstein,” Brenna said. “Is that what you wanted to tell me? Because I really do have a lot of things to—”

  “No. This is important.”

  Mrs. Dinnerstein took one of Brenna’s hands in both of hers. The first time she’d touched Brenna in all the years she’d known her, and it took her aback. Her grip was unexpectedly strong. “There was one reporter in particular,” she said. “A woman. She kept talking to me.”

  “Okay . . .”

  “She kept asking questions about Maya.”

  Brenna stared at her. “What kind of questions?”

  “She wanted to know about Maya’s schedule.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Her grip tightened. “She wanted to know which days of the week Maya was at your ex-husband’s and which days she’s here. I assumed because she wanted to take pictures, but . . . well, she frightened me. There was something a little off about her. A little too intense for the questions she was asking.”

  Brenna’s palms began to sweat. She had the strangest sensation—her pulse thrumming in the ears . . . as though something irreversible was about to happen and she was trapped here, in the dead quiet before the roar of the avalanche. A woman.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” she said.

  Mrs. Dinnerstein pursed her lips. “I don’t talk to you about things like that, Ms. Spector,” she said. “In case you haven’t noticed, I really don’t talk to you about anything.”

  “Okay,” Brenna said. It was beginning to make sense, though—the way Mrs. Dinnerstein had been looking at Brenna lately—that odd mixture of fear and anger. She’d always known the woman didn’t approve of her, but this was different.

  “Ms. Spector,” she said.

  “Yes?”

  “I saw her again.”

  “The reporter?”

  She nodded.

  “When?”

  “A few days ago. She was watching our building from across the street. I know it was her. I walked out of the door and looked right at her. I started across the street to talk to her, but she left very fast. She ran.”

  Brenna’s eyes watered from the cold. She wanted to pull her coat closer, but Mrs. Dinnerstein wouldn’t let go of her hand. “It might very well be nothing other than an overzealous reporter,” she said. “But I did think I should share it with you.”

  “I’m glad you did,” she said. “I need to find my daughter. And any lead, any lead at all . . .”

  “She left her phone number with me.”

  “Who?” Brenna said. “The reporter?”

  “Yes. Back in December. She told me to call it if Maya’s schedule changed in any drastic way, or if she were to leave town for an extended period of time.” Mrs. Dinnerstein dropped her hand for a moment. She reached into her coat pocket and produced a scrap of paper with a phone number on it. “I save everything,” she said, averting her gaze. Then she pressed the scrap into Brenna’s hand.

  Brenna opened it, read it, her pulse starting to race.

  “Her name is Miss Barnes.”

  Brenna stared at the small piece of paper. “J. Barnes,” it said, in block letters similar to the note that had been pinned to Mark Carver’s body. But it wasn’t the name or the handwriting that made Brenna’s hands start to shake. It was the phone number. It belonged to Sophia Castillo.

  When Brenna opened the door to her apartment, Trent was sitting at his desk, Maya’s desktop on his computer. He started to say something, but she held a hand up, tapped Morasco’s number into her phone and hit send. She sighed heavily. “Nick, please call me whenever you get this message. I really hope you were able to do that NCIC search. Sophia Castillo has been stalking my apartment.”

  Trent’s eyes went big and confused. After Brenna hung up, he said, “The lady who called here about her son?”

  “Weird, I know,” she said. “But I’ll need you to get me everything you can on her.”

  “Okay.”

  “Did you find anything on Maya’s computer?”

  He nodded slowly. “I hacked into her Families of the Missing account,” he said. “Read a lot of private messages . . .”

  Brenna’s phone rang. She saw Morasco’s name on the screen and picked up fast.

  “Hi Nick.”

  “How do you know?”

  “How do I know . . .”

  “About Sophia Castillo stalking you.” His voice was pulled tight enough to break. “How do you know?”

  “My neighbor saw her . . . She asked her about Maya. What Maya’s schedule was, when she’d be at my place versus Faith and Jim’s. She claimed to be a reporter, but the number she gave her is the same as Sophia Castillo’s.”

  “I’m on my way. I should be there in about ten minutes.”

  “Wait. Ten minutes . . . You’re already on the road?”

  “Yes. I’m on the West Side Highway.”

  “Why? What happened?”

  “Call Plodsky. Tell her about Castillo. Tell her what you told me.”

  “What the hell is going on? Did you check NCIC? Did you find out anything?”

  “Yes.”

  “And?”

  “A DUI two years ago,” he said. “And four years ago, breaking and entering.”

  “Wait,” Brenna said. “Slow down. Why are either of those things such cause for alarm?”

  “It’s not what her crimes were that concerns me, Brenna. It’s where.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Morasco took a breath. “The DUI,” he said, “was in City Island.”

  Brenna swallowed hard. “That could be a coincidence.”

  “The breaking and entering.”

  “City Island, too?”

  “Yes.”

  “So again, it could be—”

  “Brenna, listen to me,” he said. “The house Sophia Castillo broke into.”

  “Yes?”

  “It was your mother’s house.”

  17

  When their son Robert was a little boy, Sophia Castillo and her husband, Christopher, took him up to Saratoga Springs for the weekend. Robert was just learning how to speak at the time, and whenever he figured out a new word, he’d take that word everywhere with him, tossing it around, repeating it over and over and over again until he got sick of it and a new one took its place.

  In Saratoga Springs, of course, the word was “horse.” The first morning of the trip, they’d gone to the track to look at all the Thoroughbreds before the day’s races began, and Robert had stood up in his stroller, pointing at one of the shiny muscular creatures. “What dat? What dat?”

  His father had told him, and for the rest of the trip, that had been his chosen word, whether there happened to be a horse around or not. “Hosse, hosse, hosse!”

  Sometimes, when Sophia went to sleep at night, she could still hear him, so delighted with the sound of the word, leaning on Hs and the Ss. Funny how she could remember the exact sound of Robert’s voice at that age. It wasn’t like other memories. She didn’t have to strain for it.

  But still, Sophia wasn’t sure why it had come to mind now, as she stood in the bathroom of the Quality Inn near the Mount Temple train station, waiting for Maya to wash the dye out of her hair. “Do you like horses?” she said.

  Maya didn’t answer.

  “My son used to love them when he was little.”

  Still, not a sound. Maya stayed bent over the sink, water pouring over her head, not even moving. As though she’d frozen that way.

  “You’re going to have to talk to me sometime.”

  This was
n’t going the way Sophia had hoped it would. She started to say more, but she stopped herself. She tamped back her anger. She was a good parent, after all, and good parents were patient, even with sullen teenagers who refused to say a goddamn word. She’d had Robert for only one of the teen years, and when she looked back on it, she’d felt him pulling away like this, too. It was part of nature. Kids needed to assert their independence in order to grow up.

  “You know you don’t hate me,” Sophia tried. “I’m still the same person I’ve always been. I’m the one you can talk to. I’m the one who rescued you from the storm, from that boy. Remember that. The nice things I said to you . . . The way I listened.”

  Still no answer. Fine. Sophia pressed the gun between Maya’s thin shoulder blades. “That’s enough,” she said.

  Maya lifted her head from the sink and turned off the rushing water. Sophia draped the towel over her and put her hands on it, buffing and plucking at the girl’s bowed head.

  How many times had she towel-dried Robert’s hair like this, when he was a little boy? Sophia had cut his hair until he was eight. Well, most of the time. Robert loved the barbershop at the mall because of the big basket of lollipops, and sometimes she’d relent, maybe buy herself a pair of shoes at the Payless across the way while she was waiting, and if he was a good boy, they’d go for ice cream . . . Done. She lifted away the towel.

  “Oh.” Sophia gazed at Maya’s reflection. “Look at you.”

  Shorn to just half an inch, Maya’s hair was now close to black, and in the baggy men’s sweatshirt Sophia had purchased with cash at a nearby Duane Reade along with the electric hair trimmer and the package of Garnier Nutrisse color in Deepest Mahogany, Maya looked . . . She looked . . . “You look like my son.”

  Maya stared at herself in the mirror, her blue eyes bright and glistening sad.

  “Do you miss your hair?”

  Maya nodded.

  “I’m sorry,” said Sophia. “But we had to do it. You saw the TV. Your stepmom showed your picture.”

  Maya said nothing. A tear trickled down her cheek. Sophia longed to comfort her.

  “We can make it a different color if you want. Red? Maybe a blue streak?

  She smoothed Maya’s glossy hair, watching her face in the mirror. “You’ll get used to it.”