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

  Maya had dark circles under her eyes, puffy red patches on her cheeks from crying, but that would change, wouldn’t it? It had to. Kids cried until they stopped crying. It was a fact of life.

  “I’m still the same person,” Sophia said again. “I’m still your friend.”

  Trust me, Maya. Be nice to me. It will be easier on both of us if you are.

  Sophia wanted pills, and that wasn’t helping. She wished she’d remembered this feeling last night before she’d used, or at least before she’d given all the rest of her supply to Carver.

  It wasn’t that Sophia was an addict—she’d been in recovery for a while. Last time she’d gone to a meeting, in fact, she’d had nearly two years. But that was if you didn’t count the here-and-theres. Sophia never counted the here-and-theres, though she did feel their aftermath, which was the problem now. Her head pounded, and everything was too bright—the bathroom lights, and the white countertop and the red sweatshirt she’d bought for Maya, the dark hair dye that spattered the sink, her shirt, the plastic gloves in the wastebasket.

  All these colors. It brought new meaning to assault on the senses. It would pass. It always did. It came in waves, the ache, and then the waves would subside each time they came in, just like changing tides. They’d keep receding until they disappeared, even from her memory. And then she’d be back in recovery again.

  Weeks could go by. Months. But then she’d crave again and she’d fall again and then, this feeling. The punishment. Like everything else in life, a cycle. You want. You take. You pay for it.

  Sophia’s head ached. Her eyes felt too big for their sockets. And Maya was too quiet. This morning had been a real downer, right from the sleepless start of it.

  “You look like I feel, Maya.” She moved the gun from between Maya’s shoulder blades and pressed it against her temple. She stared at the child’s face, her trembling lip. Should she just give up on this whole idea? Would Maya let go as easily as Carver had?

  Stop it. That was no way to be thinking. Not after all her hard work, her planning. She needed to give this a chance. Maya needed to eat, for one thing. She hadn’t touched her sandwich at the rest stop, and when Sophia had picked her up, she’d just been sick from alcohol—she’d said so herself.

  This was the problem: Maya and Sophia were both in need. And if something wasn’t done to feed those needs soon, things would get bad around here.

  There was a doctor Sophia knew. His office was right near the Metro-North stop at 125th Street. Down the block, there was a pharmacy, and around the corner, a good diner. Every need met, within a two-block radius.

  She looked at Maya’s reflection, tried a smile. “What do you say we get something to eat?” she said.

  To her surprise, Maya nodded.

  Sophia breathed a little easier, though she kept the gun in place. She was, as they say, cautiously optimistic. “Okay, great,” she said. “But we need to make one stop, first.”

  Diane Plodsky didn’t have a large circle of loved ones. She would be the first to admit that. Yet compared to Mark Carver, her life was a Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving painting, which didn’t make her happy. It actually made her disappointed in the world, the idea that anybody could be that much more alone in it than she was . . .

  Ostensibly, Diane was at Mark Carver’s squalid duplex in Mount Temple to notify next-of-kin, though as she soon found out, Carver had no next of kin. Both of his parents had died ten years ago in a car crash. His brother had overdosed three years ago and, being woefully short on anyone-else-who-gave-a-damn, he’d gone on to live with a succession of Craigslist-gleaned roommates in this duplex, which had been left to him by his parents (though they’d apparently never taught him how to clean it.)

  The latest roommate—a big bearded biker type who inexplicably called himself Ethel—was sitting across the kitchen table from Diane, wearing a black T-shirt advertising Mickey’s Big Mouth beer, two elaborate Chinese dragon tattoos crawling up his arms. Diane kept her elbows off the table, her hands neatly folded in her lap. Not out of politeness, but out of the knowledge that direct contact with any object in this room could easily result in staph infection.

  “So Mark kicked it, huh?” Ethel said this after an uncomfortably long pause. From anyone else, Diane might have hoped for something more profound, but it was pretty much what she’d expected out of Ethel. He flexed his muscles. The dragons shimmered. Diane was pretty sure he thought that was impressive.

  “Did Mark have a job?”

  “You mean besides selling oxy online?”

  “Uh. Yeah.”

  “Nope.”

  Diane slipped Maya Rappaport’s picture out of the folder she was carrying and showed it to him. “Have you ever seen this girl?”

  He squinted at it. “Nope.”

  “How about a woman? Someone you might mistake for that girl’s mother.”

  “Never saw any ladies come by here . . . except today.” He grinned at her. He had a silver front tooth with a gold skull inlay that dared you not to look at it. She tried to accept that dare.

  “He never mentioned anybody?”

  “Nope.”

  Diane sighed. “Oookay.” With the right type of witness—i.e., one with the potential for having actual information or, at the very least, an IQ higher than that of a piece of paper—Diane was a questioner of infinite patience. But Ethel wasn’t that type of witness. Ethel wins.

  “Okay,” Diane said. “I’m going to get out of your hair, but if you don’t mind, I’m going to have a look around. I’ll need to take a few of Mr. Carver’s personal items for our investigation.”

  “Personal items?” He said it like it was the punch line in a dirty joke.

  Diane sighed heavily. “His computer. Cell phone.”

  “Oh that other lady already took his computer.”

  She blinked at him. “What?”

  “The other lady cop. Left just a couple of minutes ago. I figured she came with you.”

  “Excuse me, please . . .”

  Diane headed out of the house, onto the street. She scanned the area surrounding the house and then ran up the sidewalk, cursing Ethel in her mind for taking so goddamn long to say absolutely nothing. The sidewalk was empty and lined with parked cars. Her own car was double parked; one of the perks of being a cop—but the other woman wouldn’t have had that luxury no matter what lie she’d told . . .

  She ran past dozens of town houses and duplexes, all of them nearly as neglected as Carver’s, tarry snow remnants pushed up against them, dotting brown, weed-choked lawns. She ran all the way to the very end of the three very long, sad blocks, and that’s when she finally saw her—a good forty feet away. A woman getting into a parked blue car, a laptop bag thrown over her shoulder.

  “Wait!” Diane hollered.

  She opened her door.

  She held her badge in the air. “Police.”

  The woman turned. She stopped and stared at Diane, alarm all over her face.

  Diane kept running until she reached her.

  “Is something wrong?” the woman said. She wore a long dark coat, her hair pulled back from her face.

  Diane squinted at her. She didn’t know her. She was sure of that. Yet there was something about this woman’s face that seemed familiar.

  “Were you just at the home of Mark Carver?”

  “Who?” The woman’s face flushed. She grasped the laptop tighter.

  “Mark Carver.” Diane saw an ID tag on the case and pinched it toward her. On it, she saw Mark Carver’s name and address. She showed it to her. “See?”

  “Oh . . . right.” She exhaled hard. “Listen, I’m sorry. I’m Ethel’s sister. He owes me a ton of money. He gave me this laptop to partially pay it off.”

  She looked at her. “Ethel told me you said you were with the police.”

  She rolled her eyes. “
Ethel’s a jackass.”

  Diane had to agree with her there.

  “We had a big fight,” she said. “I guess you’re his way of getting in the last word.”

  “I’m honored,” she said. “But is Ethel really the type of person who would give away his roommate’s laptop without even knowing he was dead?”

  “His roommate’s dead?”

  “Yes,” she said. “But he didn’t know that until I told him.”

  She sighed. “What a tool. His real name is Edward, by the way.” She stuck out her hand. “I’m Janine.”

  Diane shook it. “Okay Janine, well I’m sorry. But I’m going to have to take that laptop.”

  “Okay, sure.” She handed it to her. Her forehead was shiny with sweat. Odd, considering how cold it was outside and the way she looked otherwise, so neat and put-together and . . . she really did look familiar.

  Diane said, “Can I take a quick look in your car?”

  “Sure,” she said. “But do you mind if I ask what’s going on?”

  “We’re looking for a missing girl,” Diane said.

  “Seriously?” she said. “I mean . . . I can tell you right now, I’m a mom myself and I would never—”

  “I’m sure of it. But you know . . .”

  “No stone unturned.”

  Diane smiled a little. “Yes.”

  The woman met her gaze. Her eyes were bloodshot. “You . . . You don’t suppose Ethel . . .”

  “No, ma’am. It’s his roommate we were interested in.”

  She nodded. “Okay, whew,” she said. “Sure. Look in my car.”

  She unlocked it.

  Diane opened the front door, and looked inside, then the back. All the seats looked relatively clean, though she did notice three empty water bottles strewn across the backseat. “Yep. You’re definitely a mom.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “The water bottles. My partner has four kids. The backseat of his family car looks like a recycling bin.”

  “I forgot those were even back there.”

  Diane said, “How old are your kids?”

  “I have just one,” she said. “He’s . . . um . . . thirteen. Listen. Can I ask you a favor?”

  “Uh-huh?”

  “I mean . . . would it be that big a deal if I kept the laptop?”

  Diane frowned at the car floor. “Why?”

  “I really need one. And I’m so low on cash on account of Ethel.”

  Diane pulled herself out of the car, straightened her back. “I can see about getting it to you once we’re done going through it,” she said.

  “But . . .”

  “Now if you could just pop the trunk for me, too, I’ll take a quick look and be on my way.” She started to close the car door, then stopped. On the floor she saw something, a small glittering thing. She pulled a Kleenex out of her pocket and plucked it up, careful not to touch it, her pulse racing.

  “Your son have pierced ears?” Diane said. “Because I notice you don’t.”

  Janine said nothing.

  Diane turned to face her. As she slipped her hand into her coat, she glanced down at the woman’s shoes. Sensible, white shoes. Pastel nurses’ pants under the dark coat. That’s where she’d seen this woman before. The blue-eyed nurse who’d passed her in the corridor of the Tarry Ridge Hospital at three in the morning, the one coming toward her as she walked to Carver’s room . . .

  “I know who you are.”

  Janine socked her in the stomach.

  Diane crumpled up, the air barreling out of her, lights flickering in front of her eyes. She tried again for her coat, for the gun in her shoulder holster, but then something crashed into the side of her head, something huge and heavy and mean. She tasted blood in her mouth, and saw a pool of it on the sidewalk, along with three tiny white stones . . . they were teeth. Her teeth.

  The pain was blinding.

  She went again for her coat, but Janine’s arm came up and then down, the weight of her gun connecting with Diane’s head.

  No chance, she thought.

  And that earring, that poor tiny earring in the pocket of her coat as the gun landed on the top of her skull and white light flooded in and she was beyond pain, beyond thought.

  18

  “Why didn’t you tell me?” Brenna said.

  “It wasn’t anything worth talking about,” her mother said.

  “Someone broke into your house.”

  “A drunken woman,” she said. “She thought my house was hers, and I called the police and she left peacefully.”

  Brenna stared at her screen—an article in the City Island Times, not about the break-in, but about a car accident two years later, in the earliest hours of morning on August 5, 2007, one that had resulted in the death of one of the island’s oldest trees—and ultimately, in Sophia Castillo’s DUI.

  “She was back in your neighborhood two years later,” Brenna said. “She killed a tree.”

  “Well I didn’t know anything about that.”

  “You didn’t read it in the paper?”

  “If I did,” she said, “I don’t recall it.”

  The newspaper article was one of the few mentions Brenna had been able to find online of a Sophia Castillo from New York state. No Facebook page, no Twitter, no languishing MySpace page. No LinkedIn or Match.com profile . . . Just a five-year-old staff listing at St. Vincent’s—she’d worked there as a nurse in the ER—and an eight-year-old White Pages entry in Katonah for Sophia and Christopher. No phone number. Just an address. It was as though she was trying to make as small an impact on the world as possible. Even the article in the paper was brief, with a picture of Sophia’s car next to the decimated tree—but no mug shot. No personal photo. Nothing at all of Sophia herself.

  “Would you be able to describe the woman? Maybe pick her out of a lineup?”

  “The one who broke into my house?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  Brenna sighed. “Just please answer me, Mom.”

  “I never saw her.”

  “Seriously?”

  “I locked myself in my bedroom and called 911 when I heard the window break, Brenna,” Evelyn Spector said. “Wouldn’t you?”

  “Yes. Yes, of course I would.”

  “I mean really,” she said. “Why do you even bring this up? It was years ago.”

  “Mom?”

  “Yes?”

  Brenna tried to sound calm. “Did you . . . Did you ever hear from her again? I mean . . . a phone call . . . anything?”

  “Why on earth would I hear from some crazy drunk woman?”

  “No idea. Sorry. I’ve got to go.”

  “Brenna, what is going on?”

  “I’m on an important case. I’ll call you later.” Brenna hung up, grateful in the knowledge that her mother did not know how to work a computer, that she rarely watched TV, and so it would be a long while before she caught wind of Faith’s on-air announcement. Hopefully long enough.

  “You’re not going to tell her?” Trent said.

  “I am,” said Brenna. “Just not now.” I’ll tell her once we find Maya and bring her home and everything is back to normal again.

  Brenna said, “So tell me what you found on the Families of the Missing page.”

  “Umm . . .”

  “Trent, I don’t have time to play twenty questions with you. If you found something, if you found anything, you can’t mince words. You can’t worry about the right way to say things. There’s too much at stake for that.”

  “Okay,” he said. “Sorry.” He cleared his throat. “Maya never cleared her instant message cache, so I’ve got a couple months’ worth of IM exchanges, all of them between Maya and NYCJulie.”

  “Okay.”

  “There are a lot.”r />
  Brenna nodded. “NYCJulie said they were good friends.”

  “I’m talking hundreds.”

  “Well, with an online friend, it’s easy to rack up a lot of messages.”

  Trent gave her a long look. “Brenna,” he said. “I don’t like these messages.”

  She got up, moved over to his desk. He tapped the screen—an exchange dated December 23 between NYCJulie and NYCYoru, aka Maya.

  NYCJulie: Your mom’s not being responsive to your needs. You got attacked by some psycho because of her selfishness. Who does she care more about? Her dead sister or you?

  NYCYoru: She doesn’t think her sister is dead.

  NYCJulie: Wow. Way to go off topic.

  NYCYoru: LOL. She loves me, tho.

  NYCJulie: How do you know? How do you know her disorder isn’t a form of autism?

  NYCYoru: Who cares if it is?

  NYCJulie: It might make it impossible for her to focus on you in the way you need her to. She might be incapable of caring.

  NYCYoru: I don’t even get what you’re saying.

  NYCJulie: Her obsession with the past, and with finding her sister, might be the most important thing to her. More important than you.

  Trent put an arm on Brenna’s shoulder. “She’s full of crap,” he said.

  “Maybe.” She had a lump in her throat. “But she’s got some basis in the truth.”

  The buzzer sounded.

  “Can you get that?” Brenna said.

  Trent got up and moved over to the door. She heard him talking to Morasco over the speaker system, buzzing him in, but she wasn’t listening to what they were saying. She read on:

  NYCYoru: Well what am I supposed to do about that? Go, “Hey Mom. How come you love your dead sister more than me?” LOL

  NYCJulie: I don’t know. Maybe talk to a shrink?

  NYCYoru: About me or her?

  NYCJulie: Both. Mostly her though.

  NYCYoru: Wait! I could go to the one she went to as a kid. I can ask him about her.

  NYCJulie: That’s a great idea, hon. But seriously? What I want you to take away from this is that it isn’t your fault. It’s never a kid’s fault. It’s always on the parents. Your mom has a lot to answer for.