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

  To get to the computer room, you had to walk through the children’s section and make a right. It was a sunny, airy place, welcoming despite its relative newness. There was rarely anyone in here except when a class was in session. She supposed it was because most people owned their own computers, and that suited her fine. Evelyn was no longer young and stupid. She valued her privacy. She had secrets that were her own now, not her husband’s.

  Evelyn’s computer was in the back row to the far left. She checked her e-mail first. She had three different accounts, and so she went through the first two quickly—deleted the spam and newsletters. When she logged in to Hotmail, though, her heart fluttered, all the more when she saw a new e-mail from Alan Dufresne. She would miss him, she knew that. But she couldn’t risk talking to him any longer. After reading his e-mail, she hit reply and typed:

  Dear Alan,

  Thanks so much for your concern. Things are fine, now. If you could put the contents of the bag into a packing box and send them to the following address, I would be happy to reimburse you for your troubles.

  Sincerely,

  Brenna

  Evelyn listed the P.O. box she maintained at JFK Airport, sent the e-mail, then quickly shifted over to the Snapfish page and deleted all of Clea’s information. It had been two months, and if Evelyn’s secret search had taught her anything, it was that, like it or not, it was sometimes essential to cut all ties and move on.

  She went back to the Hotmail account. Before doing anything else, she clicked on the sent e-mails, and reread all the correspondence between Alan and herself, from beginning to end.

  Yes, she would miss him very much.

  Strange, and sad, too, that in Alan she’d found a kindred spirit—someone who, like her, had been forced to face the truth: You can love someone with all your heart without knowing them at all.

  A great father and a good man, he had typed, and she’d known exactly why he’d typed it, exactly how he’d felt. Alan Dufresne was clinging to a lie as hard as he could, just as she had done for so many years. You believe that lie and if you believe hard enough, it becomes . . . well, if not the truth, then something close enough. Something you can live with. Something to keep you from falling apart.

  My father kept secrets, too, Evelyn had typed, confiding the truth in this stranger as she’d confided in no one else. Confiding, though, while masquerading as her own daughter. The irony wasn’t lost on Evelyn.

  Lies upon lies upon hiding upon more lies. That was what Evelyn’s life had become. That was what it had always been, she knew now, even back in the good old days. Even if back then, she’d only been lying to herself.

  Evelyn deleted all the e-mails, then closed the account. In a few weeks, she’d find another missing persons Web site. She’d start again, and in her new posting, she’d include the name Roland Dufresne. She’d get closer to this truth, if nothing else.

  Once she left Hotmail, Evelyn’s homepage came up—MSNBC News. She was about to turn off the computer and walk home when she saw the headline “AMBER Alert for Missing NY Teen.” She clicked on it. She saw the picture.

  It wasn’t until Ruth came rushing in that Evelyn realized how loud she’d screamed.

  About twenty minutes after Brenna and Nick Morasco left, Trent was in the bathroom spraying himself with Axe when the office phone rang. He was so startled he dropped the container and set it clattering across the tile floor, having forgotten for few seconds that this wasn’t just the home of his friend’s missing daughter, it was an actual place of business, his place of business.

  He grabbed his spare set of clothes out of his messenger bag, threw them on fast, and ran out to answer the phone.

  Trent checked caller ID. The number looked familiar but couldn’t place it right away. He cleared his throat, put on his professional voice. “Brenna Spector Investigations.”

  “TNT?”

  He let out a shaky sigh. “Stephanie.” All this stuff going on, Trent had almost forgotten about the DNA test . . . Almost. He crossed his fingers, though at this point he wasn’t sure what he was hoping for. “Is there . . . um . . .”

  “I don’t have any news, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “I . . . I probably won’t for a while.”

  “How come? I thought it takes just two business days.”

  “Yeah, it does.”

  “But?”

  “I chickened out on the amnio. The doctor says it’s optional, and so I figure, you know . . . why not wait to do the DNA test till the baby is born? It’ll be easier, no needles . . .”

  Trent shuddered. He hated needles so much that hearing the word “needles” made him feel like he was going to throw up. “I get it.” His gaze moved to his computer screen, where before his shower, he’d been exchanging instant messages with a girl he’d met at an identity theft seminar last year. Actually more of a lady than a girl. A lady named Camille Rogers (who had a nice rack, okay? And he’d noticed it. Being a potential father didn’t make him dead.) Camille had promised she’d get him whatever info she could on Sophia Castillo—whose full maiden name, he’d learned, had been Sophia Belyn Liptak. Nothing yet, though.

  As Stephanie kept talking, Trent shifted screens, back to Maya’s desktop, the messages she’d exchanged with NYCJulie taking shape again in front of his eyes, so different from the quick back-and-forth he’d just had with Camille. So personal, so sad.

  NYCYoru: Sometimes I get the weirdest feeling, Julie—like someone is out there, watching me. Someone I can’t see. And they don’t know me, but they’re thinking bad things about me. There’s nothing I can do and that scares me . . . Why didn’t she tell her mom these things? Why didn’t she tell me? Why did she find it easier to trust some random woman in a chat room where nobody gave their real names?

  Trent’s thoughts were so loud in his head, it took him a few seconds to remember that the mother of his possible child was talking to him on the phone.

  “. . . and anyway,” Stephanie was saying, “I’ve decided it doesn’t matter.”

  “What doesn’t matter?”

  “Are you even listening?”

  “What kind of a douche do you think I am? Of course I’m listening.”

  “I was saying”—Stephanie sighed—“I’m a big girl.”

  “Well, uh . . . heh . . . yeah, that’s true.”

  “Jeez, Trent. Is boobs all you think about?”

  “Well . . .”

  “I mean I’m a grown-up. I’m responsible for my own pregnancy.”

  “Uh . . . Steph? I kind of had something to do with it.”

  “We used two kinds of protection,” she said. “If we took all that precaution and I still got knocked up, you shouldn’t have to take the fall.”

  Trent blinked at the phone. “The fall?”

  “I know you don’t want to be a dad.”

  “No you don’t.”

  “What?”

  “You don’t know that I don’t want to be a dad,” he heard himself say. “If I don’t know it, how can you?”

  “Hey . . .”

  “What?”

  “What are you trying to tell me here?”

  “I’m saying that if it’s my baby . . . or even if it isn’t. I want to know. And I want to help.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Hellz yeah,” he said, surprising himself. “I want to be there for the ultrasounds. I want to see the little guy move around and stuff and coach you with the breathing.”

  “You do?”

  “Yes I do. So . . . like . . . stop being all ‘it’s my baby,’ and ‘I can do it on my own.’ Because you know what, Stephanie? It’s really freakin’ insulting and annoying.”

  There was a long pause on the other end of the line. Trent stared at Maya’s words on the screen and heard his own words in his head—words he hadn’t k
nown he was going to say until they’d flown out of his stupid, flapping mouth like those doves flying out of the fake cake at his cousin Siobhan’s wedding.

  Trent thought about taking it all back, about telling Stephanie sorry, he was having a rough day, he hadn’t had enough sleep and she’d called before he’d had a chance to gel his hair and he never could think straight with his hair ungelled. Of course he wasn’t ready to be a dad. Hell, Trent’s own dad wasn’t ready to be a dad, let alone Trent, who still brought his laundry home to his mom every weekend.

  “Actually—” he said. But then he stopped. He didn’t want to take it back.

  It was a crappy world, Trent knew that much. It was a world that took sweet kids and swallowed them up, leaving nothing behind but sad words on a screen. And if nobody did the right thing, if nobody “took the fall,” it would just keep getting crappier and crappier.

  “Actually what?”

  “Actually, I only knew about one form of protection.”

  She exhaled. “You really want to help?”

  “Yes. Duh.”

  “Okay. You can, then.”

  “Whatever.”

  “So . . . like . . . I’ll call you? Like when I have my next ultrasound?”

  “You’d better.”

  “Trent?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Thank you.”

  She hung up the phone, and Trent hung up and rubbed at his tired eyes, returning his gaze to the screen, trying not to think of kids, how easy it was to fail them.

  He started up for the bathroom again so he could gel, maybe work an eyebrow check . . .

  Trent was halfway down the hall when he heard a piercing beep—his instant message signal, turned all the way up. He turned around, headed back for his computer, switched screens, where, sure enough, he saw a new message from Camille.

  Found something weird, it read. Check your e-mail.

  “Where is my daughter?” Brenna barely got the words out, winded as she was from running and panic. The phone had been pinged to a clearing in the woods behind the White Plains reservoir, and so she’d had to park her car at the bottom of a hill and run to it, following the smell of smoke, the cluster of emergency vehicles, the black cloud that still hovered in the dull white winter sky.

  She said it to the group of uniformed cops who stood in front of the crime scene tape, apart from the firefighters and EMS guarding the smoldering black heap that was still recognizable as Sophia Castillo’s 1996 Lexus ES300. They looked at each other, but none answered.

  She zeroed in on one of them—a muscular bald guy she’d met briefly at a sleazy Mount Temple nightclub called Heavenly Pleasures on September 12, 2004, when she’d been investigating the disappearance of a stripper who called herself Clarity. He’d been working security at the time and dressed to fit his job and the surroundings, his thinning hair gelled and sculpted, sunglasses at night, a glossy black goatee that matched the shiny shirt, but she didn’t flash back to it. She couldn’t get lost in a memory when the present felt like this. The air smelled of burning rubber and gasoline and smoke. Like the end of the world.

  Her gaze went to the crime scene techs milling around the car wreckage in fireproof white suits, two of them prying open the trunk with a crowbar, her heart pounding. Please, please, please . . . No, not Maya. Not Maya in the car . . .

  She made herself look away, into the eyes of the ex-security guard. “Where is she, Daryl?” she said.

  “Do I know you?”

  “My daughter is a thirteen-year-old girl—five-foot-eight-and-a-half-inches. She was with the woman who was driving this car.”

  “We haven’t seen anyone, ma’am.”

  “What was found in the car?”

  “I’m going to have to ask you to step back, please.”

  Brenna took a breath, tried to keep her voice in check, but still it came out tight, manic. “I’m a private investigator, Daryl,” she said. “I bought you a twenty-dollar pack of Corps Diplomatique cigarettes and a thirty-seven-dollar glass of wine on September 12, 2004. I sat at the bar of the crappy strip club where you worked, listening to you complain about your cheating girlfriend Rolanda for half an hour, while you gave me absolutely no worthwhile information about Clarity and tried to get me into the back room, which you referred to as the VIP lounge.” Her voice broke. She blinked away tears.

  Daryl stared at her, his face coloring. The cop next to him raised his eyebrows at him. “She knows you, all right.”

  “Shut up.”

  “I’m looking for my daughter, Daryl. It’s the least you can do.”

  He exhaled. “Okay,” he said. “Firefighters managed to put out the blaze pretty quickly. Backseat of the car, we recovered some articles of clothing and what looked like a laptop case. No sign of the driver or any passengers. They’re still working on the trunk.”

  She nodded slowly.

  “That’s all I got.”

  “Thank you.”

  He stared straight ahead, his face still red. She moved away, focused on the crime scene techs, working on the trunk. She thought she could make out the charred remains of the honor roll sticker, still clinging to the bumper.

  Brenna’s cell phone vibrated. She glanced at the screen, saw her mother’s number, hit decline. When the call went to voice mail, she texted Jim, Faith, and Nick:

  Here. No sign of anyone. Just the car.

  The phone vibrated again: Her mother, again. Brenna turned off the phone, moved around the periphery to a cluster of trees to the left of the wreckage and got a clear view. She saw Sykes on the passenger side of the car, talking to another uniformed officer, scribbling on his notepad as more techs photographed the car. She waved to him, tried to meet his gaze, but he wouldn’t look at her. Maybe it was on purpose.

  Her phone vibrated SOS. She flipped it open. A text from Morasco:

  OK. On my way to Tarry Ridge; getting q’ed by IA for the rest of the day.

  Internal Affairs. Could they waste any more time with him?

  Another text came in, from Trent:

  Important info re: Sophia Castillo.

  Call when U can.

  She started to call him, but then she heard a creaking noise, someone shouting, “Got it,” and she saw the trunk sprung open, a cloud of black dust rising out of it, hanging in the air. She held her breath.

  The techs stepped back, covering their faces. “Okay, okay,” one was saying.

  The other shouted, “We have something!” and Sykes moved around to the back of the car. He backed away, shaking his head . . .

  No . . .

  “Ma’am!” someone said, because she was running to the wrecked car, legs pumping, breath cutting through her lungs.

  “Please step back!” someone said, as she reached the car. She got a glimpse of it—fists clenched, knees bent . . .

  She screamed, and lost her footing and felt arms around her, holding her back. “Nooo . . .”

  The officer pulled her away. She heard, “Looks to be a female . . .”

  She heard, “Need some identification . . .”

  Brenna couldn’t breathe, couldn’t move. She heard Faith in her head. She’s happy now. That could mean so many things. So many terrible, unthinkable things . . .

  Her knees gave out and she felt arms around her. She saw Sykes talking to one of the techs, his face a deep red. She focused on his fists, Sykes’s meaty fists clenched like the ones in the trunk. And then blackness crowded her eyes and her head swam and for a second, she heard only the sound of her beating heart.

  Trent sent the text, waited. No response from Brenna. He stared at the article on his screen—a short one, in the Deseret News, May 2, 1970, about a car crash that killed a young family of three—the Liptaks. The daughter, age four, was named Sophia Belyn.

  Another instant message came in from Camille: Di
d you read?

  Yep.

  Weird, right?

  I don’t get it. Sophia Liptak died like forty years ago?

  Camille typed: All I can tell you is it was a lot easier to get a new identity in the eighties.

  Trent typed: Right. He wanted to come up with more words, but he couldn’t. It was hard, on this little sleep and this much stress, to put his thoughts together. Man, he needed another energy drink.

  One thing he did know though: There was no use looking for another Sophia Belyn Liptak. This one, the forty-years-dead one. This was his girl.

  Document-wise, Sophia Belyn Liptak Castillo had come alive at the age of seventeen, when she took and passed the GED. After that, Trent had been able to trace her graduating from the University of Colorado at Boulder, then from nursing school back in Albany. She’d married Christopher Castillo in a small ceremony at the age of twenty-five, and had Robert a few months later. She’d lived in Katonah and worked as an ER nurse at St. Vincent’s, right up until seven years ago, when Christopher had dumped her, taking Robert back to his native El Salvador. (Dude was clearly not into the whole visitation thing.)

  She’d gone a little cray-cray after the divorce, what with the DUI, the break-in at Brenna’s mother’s house. She’d lost her job at St. Vincent’s and worked at two different clinics in Mount Temple before getting laid off two years ago and filing for unemployment. All those ups and downs of Sophia’s life were documented, just as they were with everybody.

  What was missing, though, was the prequel. Trent had found no high school records for Sophia Belyn Liptak—no local news articles or sports awards or medical records or stints in juvy. Nothing about her at all before the age of seventeen, her childhood one giant missing puzzle piece.

  Trent had no idea what this girl’s real name was or what awful turn of events had fueled the need to steal a dead baby’s identity and start over. He wished he knew. He wished someone could tell him what sick things Sophia Belyn Liptak Castillo had witnessed—or done—when she was a kid, when she was Maya’s age. What was she capable of doing to a girl like Maya now?

  Camille typed: You okay?

  “Nope,” Trent whispered to the screen. He typed: Yep. Just confused.