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

  “Finally,” Brenna says. She pulls Jim into a kiss . . .

  Maya gave Brenna a quick, tight hug. It brought her back. “I’m heading across the street, Mom,” she said. “You can stay here.”

  Brenna nodded, feeling Jim’s gaze on her. She reached into her bag to touch the journal, rid herself of the memory. Then, without meeting that gaze, she raised her hand in a wave as Maya rushed up to greet him, greet her father, greet this man whose now grayish hair had been shorn into a buzz cut on July 9, 1997, who’d worn a deep green T-shirt that said, “Lone Star Roadhouse” on it—that tired, frayed thing that Jim refuses to throw out, a relic from a Nils Lofgren show he went to in college, and it feels like tissue under Brenna’s palm, his skin so warm beneath . . .

  Brenna ran her hand over the journal. Stop.

  She’d walk the rest of the way to her Thirteenth Street apartment. She needed the winter air and the movement and the city noise, anything to keep her from going back to that Wednesday in the park, or to February 4, 1998, or December 30, 1996 . . . any date from those years when Jim was hers and their daughter was small and the future stretched out before them, a long, open road . . .

  Once she was a safe distance away from the bakery, Brenna put her hands on her knees and bent over, breathing as deeply as she could. She breathed the rest of the memory out of her, shutting her eyes tight, thinking only of the journal, of her sister’s loopy, love-struck handwriting.

  Brenna walked the rest of the way to her apartment. The cold air burned her skin, and she welcomed it—the slap in the face she needed.

  By the time she got to her building, the near run-in with Jim was, if not forgotten (what was ever forgotten?) not that big a deal.

  She got a text from Maya:

  R U OK?

  Brenna smiled. I’m fine, she typed, which caused her daughter to reply with a colon-and-parenthesis smiley face—an inside joke. Maya knew how deeply Brenna despised colon-and-parenthesis smiley faces, and for that reason texted them to her as often as possible.

  Stop that.

  [:)]

  Brenna sighed. She scrolled back to Nick Morasco’s last text, which ironically said the exact same thing as Maya’s, only without teenage abbreviations, but so much harder to respond to.

  Are you okay?

  Brenna stared at the words, thinking back again to two nights ago, his hand at the small of her back as she read the police papers—thirty-two-year-old police papers, with her father’s name at the top.

  Morasco had given them to her, saying, “You can read them or not. Either way, the information is yours.” And for two weeks, she’d kept them in a drawer, thinking maybe she wouldn’t ever read them. If she didn’t read these papers, she’d never have anything to remember.

  But that didn’t happen. It was a Thursday and Nick had worked late that night. He’d shown up after midnight and he and Brenna had gone straight to her room and locked the door and made love for an hour and she’d felt so sated and secure after, as though nothing could ever hurt her. Brenna had gazed from her bed to her bottom dresser drawer. She’d thought about the papers inside and figured, Now’s as good a time as any . . .

  The screen of her phone blurred a little, Morasco’s text softening in front of her eyes: Are you okay? That was the question of the hour, wasn’t it? And Nick asking. Detective Nick Morasco, who’d never been anything but honest with her . . .

  Brenna typed: I don’t know.

  Morasco’s text came back fast: I’m here if you need me.

  Brenna swatted at her eyes. I’m not going to think about it.

  She took a long, jagged breath, not thinking of Morasco or of her father, not thinking of her mother and the conversation they still hadn’t had but needed to, she supposed—did they really need to?—not thinking of anything at all, other than the lock on the front door of her building, her key slipping in.

  As she pushed open the door, Brenna had so effectively blocked out her thoughts that she was unaware of the sudden rush of radiator warmth or of the cold wind at her back, or of the first floor tenant, Mrs. Dinnerstein, who was exiting the building at the same time Brenna was entering and nearly ran Brenna down with her shopping cart.

  “Careful,” chided Ina Dinnerstein, who’d long resented living downstairs from a private investigator, but particularly in the past few months. All those reporters. All those questions and camera flashes and cruel, prying eyes . . .

  That woman and her ridiculous assistant, putting the whole building in danger, not to mention that child of hers.

  “Sorry, Mrs. Dinnerstein,” Brenna said, unaware of Ina’s thoughts, or of the visitor whom Ina had turned away this morning, or of the flash of reluctant shame in the older woman’s eyes as she said it again, this time with extra meaning:

  “You need to be more careful.”

  2

  As she opened the door to her apartment, Brenna was greeted by the sound of a flushing toilet. During the days Maya wasn’t with her, Brenna lived alone, so this would have been alarming, were it not for the fact that her office was located in the front part of her floor-through, and that her assistant, Trent LaSalle, had worked the previous two Saturdays due to a backlog of recordkeeping following their recent surge in business. Still, she was annoyed. Brenna had specifically told Trent there was no need for him to come in today, and she hadn’t planned on paying him.

  “That you, Brenna?” Trent called out.

  “Yes, Trent.”

  “I’m in the can!”

  Brenna sighed. “Yeah, I’m a detective so I figured that out.”

  The bathroom door closed and then Trent was in the room with her—a vision in neon orange board shorts and a skin-tight black T-shirt that read, in red letters, “Orgasm Donor.” Brenna winced. In Trent’s twenty-seven years on this planet, no one had ever been able to teach him how to dress appropriately for either cold weather or the workplace, and she’d long ago given up trying.

  “ ’Sup?” Trent said.

  “I told you, Trent, you don’t have to work today.”

  “You did?” His gaze dropped to the floor. “Guess I forgot.”

  He moved over to his computer. Instead of leaving, though, he sat down. Trent’s chair was draped with Mardi Gras beads. (They multiplied every year, though as far as Brenna knew, he’d never been to New Orleans.) His screen saver, which always changed, was currently a rear view of Kim Kardashian in a bikini. As long as it kept him happy, Brenna supposed, for Trent was smart and organized and a true prodigy when it came to computer investigation. He’d also nearly gotten killed as a result of their last case, and yet he hadn’t complained or even spoken about it. If that meant his desk had to look like spring break in Fort Lauderdale, so be it.

  “Seriously, Trent, you can go,” Brenna said, though she was relenting a little. Brenna still had no idea what to do about Morasco’s texts and didn’t want to think about what was in the police papers, so the distraction of Trent and his overpowering cologne wasn’t entirely unwelcome. But still . . . “I am not going to pay you overtime.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “I don’t?”

  “No . . . I . . . uh . . . you mind if I just sit here? Like . . . chillax for a few?”

  “Uh, okay.” Brenna sighed. “As long as you don’t say ‘chillax’ anymore.”

  “Thank you,” he said, which for Trent was . . . weird. Not just the phrase, which he hardly ever used, but the way he said it, like a chastised schoolkid. Brenna half expected a “ma’am” after it, and it hit her that he’d been acting that way ever since she’d come through the door. Reserved, serious—and, outside of the cheesy getup, very un-Trent-like. When he’d greeted her, he had even called her Brenna—not Spec or B. Spec or Spectator Sport or any of the other stupid nicknames he assaulted her with on a daily basis. Brenna. Her actual name. “Trent, is something wrong?” />
  “No. Why do you ask?”

  Why do you ask?

  “Oh, wait. I almost forgot. You got some messages.” He tapped his mouse, and his sober-looking desktop replaced Kim Kardashian’s barely covered ass, as though it were the next thought in someone’s very strange stream-of-consciousness. He opened the message file. “Okay, first of all, you got a new client query.”

  “We can’t take any new clients for at least three months.”

  “I know,” Trent said, “but this lady seemed nice. Her son went missing seven years ago.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Sophia Castillo.”

  Brenna nodded. “I know her.”

  “She didn’t say she knew you.”

  “She doesn’t.” Just to make sure, Brenna asked for the woman’s phone number and recited it, right along with her assistant.

  “Whoa. That never doesn’t freak me out.”

  Brenna closed her eyes, the memory starting to flood her head . . . “She contacted me five years ago,” she said. “February 15, 2005. Her son had been missing two years. A boy named Robert. I did a little research and found out Sophia Castillo had been divorced two years earlier, her husband had gotten full custody and taken the boy to El Salvador, where he’s from. It’s sad, but it’s not a missing child case. I called her back. Told her I couldn’t take it.”

  Brenna could feel the phone pressed to her ear on February 16, 2005. She could hear Sophia Castillo’s sad, flat voice through the earpiece, all Xanax and loneliness. I’m sorry to hear that, Ms. Spector. Quickly, she pulled the journal out of her bag, and held it. The memory faded. Thank you, Clea.

  Trent said, “I was working for you five years ago. Where was I during all this?”

  “You were right here. You answered the phone when she called, transferred it to me. You were here when I called her back, too.”

  “I so don’t remember that.”

  “Why would you?”

  “But wouldn’t she remember?” he said. “Why didn’t she tell me that she’s already talked to you?”

  “I’m sure she doesn’t remember that day any better than you do.”

  “But it’s her son . . . Her . . . her own little kid.”

  “And I’m probably one of a dozen PIs she called. Five years ago. And I turned her down right away. Who, outside of me, would remember that?” Brenna exhaled. So often, she felt one step removed from the rest of the world, as though everyone were watching a movie, but she was the only one who could keep track of the plot.

  “Just tell Mrs. Castillo we aren’t taking any new cases right now,” Brenna said.

  “Kay-kay.”

  “What else?”

  “Huh?”

  “You said there were other messages?”

  “Oh . . . yeah. Well, Faith called.”

  “Just now?”

  “No, this morning. She said she wasn’t going to be able to pick up Maya.”

  “Yeah, right, I got that, Trent, because I already dropped Maya off and Jim was there and not Faith.”

  “Good, so you got the message.” Trent’s gaze stayed glued to his computer screen.

  Brenna stared down the back of his head. “So,” she asked him. “Did you have a nice conversation with Faith?” This was the final litmus test. Trent, the Trent LaSalle who had worked for Brenna for six years, the Trent whom she often saw seven days a week and now knew better than most all her family . . . that Trent thought Faith was “smokin’ sick hot,” and even though she’d given him no reason, he’d recently come to the realization that “on, like, a sub-atomic level,” Faith felt the same about him. That Trent couldn’t resist any opportunity to inform Brenna that her ex-husband’s wife of seven years “wanted his bod in the most cougarly of ways” and if it weren’t for her loyalty to Jim, Faith would be on him “like hot wax on an Escalade.”

  “Sure,” said Trent. “Faith was nice.”

  “Okay, what the hell is wrong with you?”

  “Huh?”

  “You’re acting weird, Trent. You’re willing to work a Saturday unpaid, and outside of chillax and kay-kay, you haven’t said one idiotic thing since I got here. Plus you’re being all polite and you’re talking in full sentences and I gotta tell you, it’s scaring the crap out of me.”

  “Brenna . . .”

  “I mean it.”

  Trent sighed. Slowly, he turned his chair around to face Brenna, but his eyes stayed downcast. “I . . . I’m scared to tell you.”

  “That’s not my problem.”

  “But—”

  “Listen, if you don’t grow a pair and tell me what’s going on, you’re out of here, do you understand me? I can’t work with you like this. It’s stressing me out.”

  “Okay, fine,” he said. “You promise you won’t judge me?”

  “Why does everybody think I’m going to judge them? I don’t judge.”

  Trent closed his eyes, and Brenna noticed, for the first time since she’d known him, a few errant hairs poking out from the bridge of his nose. He didn’t wax his eyebrows today . . .

  “Brenna,” Trent said. “I’m going to be a dad.”

  Actually, Trent didn’t know for sure if he was going to be a dad. That was why he was scheduled to take a paternity test in less than an hour.

  It had all started—as pretty much everything these days had—with the Neff case back in September. Solving the high-profile case, involving a twelve-year-old disappearance and more than one highly placed public official in the insanely wealthy Westchester County suburb of Tarry Ridge, had landed Brenna (and Trent) on all the morning news shows, making them, for a time, into local celebrities.

  Long before that, though, Trent had longed to be famous. If only he were famous, he used to say, he’d be “crushing more ass than an eighteen-wheeler on a donkey farm.” So when the opportunity to be famous finally presented itself, the outcome wasn’t hard to predict.

  In late October, he’d gone to the wedding of an acquaintance from high school—some guy named Cooper whom Trent had never liked all that much, but hey, it was a wedding and, as Trent truthfully pointed out, “No one crushes it harder than a famous guy at a wedding.”

  Proving the point, Trent had gotten hit on beyond his wildest dreams—women calling him “hot” and “dreamy,” women eyeing his moves on the dance floor and pressing into him as he got himself a drink and slipping their phone numbers into the waistband of his pants, all of them acting as though this happened to Trent all the time, sure it did, he was famous after all and this is what happened to famous guys . . .

  But of all the women hurling themselves at Trent in the Staten Island banquet hall where the reception was being held, the one that thrilled him most was Cooper’s cousin, Julia. Trent had been in love with Julia back in kindergarten, and he’d never truly gotten over her. And now, here they were, eyeing each other across the crowded room like the final scene in a Nora Ephron movie. (Yes, Trent had watched a couple of those movies with his mom and maybe cried a little, so what?)

  Julia had approached Trent. “Want to dance?”

  And Trent had said yes, their slow turn to a Bruno Mars song resulting in a moment that he would remember for the rest of his life: Julia in his arms in her blue bridesmaid’s dress, looking up into Trent’s eyes, time skidding to a halt.

  Trent, she had said. I’ve always kinda been into you.

  Recounting it now, Trent said, “I almost crapped my pants.”

  “Wow,” said Brenna. “That’s romantic.”

  But for Trent, it was. Later that night, he wound up consummating that breathtaking moment . . . not with Julia but with her friend Stephanie. (“She has a massive front porch,” he explained.) And yesterday, Stephanie had texted Trent, telling him she was three months pregnant, and adding, It’s Maury Povich time.

  “I don’
t think I’m ready to be a father,” Trent said.

  He and Brenna were in the waiting room of the paternity testing place that Stephanie had sent him to—ClarkLabs—which, as it turned out, was just five street blocks away from their office.

  It was, Brenna realized, her second waiting room of the day, and so much more bare-bones than Lieberman’s. A handful of scuffed white plastic chairs, a wiry gray rug thrown over an ancient parquet floor, a couple of magazine racks, stuffed with brochures about fetal nutrition and unplanned pregnancy and STDs. No beanbag chairs here. No glossy teen magazines or bright colors or stuffed animals staring out of baskets. This waiting room didn’t pander to its visitors; it scolded them.

  Trent’s words hung in the air. I don’t think I’m ready.

  “One step at a time,” Brenna said. “You don’t even know anything until you take the test.”

  She glanced at the only other person in the waiting room—a serious-looking guy with big shiny eyes like black coffee poured into white saucers. He was slumped in the corner, either waiting for someone to get tested or waiting to be called, Brenna wasn’t sure. He’d come in after Brenna and Trent, but she’d never noticed whether he’d signed in.

  He wasn’t all that young—closer to Brenna’s age than Trent’s, and he wore casual Friday clothes—a blue and white striped oxford shirt, khakis, loafers—as though he were coming in on his lunch break from some traditional job, even though it was Saturday. He didn’t seem like the type to be an unintentional father. But the truth was, what the man seemed like didn’t tell her anything. Anybody could be an unintentional father—that upstanding-looking, sad-eyed man or Trent or anybody in between, which proved to Brenna for the millionth time that nature was neither fair nor rational, that life didn’t give you what you wanted, or even what you deserved. It just happened, like waves crashing over rocks until they lost all their sharp edges, until they looked more like dull clay and it was pointless to keep battering them, but still those waves kept at it, turning them to sand, and for no good reason at all.