Stay With Me: A Brenna Spector Novel of Suspense Page 4

  Life just was.

  Or, as Trent was fond of saying, It is what it is. Trent, who, when it all came down to it, would probably make a much better parent than either of Brenna’s had been . . .

  “Trent LaSalle?” The receptionist’s voice cut off the memory.

  Trent stood up. “Oh boy,” he said, and for a moment, she looked past the spray tan and the “Orgasm Donor” T-shirt (not the ideal thing to wear to a paternity testing) and saw only the frightened eyes of a boy. “You’ll be fine,” she said. “No matter what happens. You can handle it.”

  Trent headed toward the waiting lab tech. A better parent, Brenna thought, her gaze on his tensed-up shoulders, because he cares.

  As soon as he was out of the room, the memory re-formed—two days ago. Brenna sitting on her bed, Nick Morasco next to her, the envelope in her lap.

  “You know what’s in here,” Brenna says. “You’ve already read it.”

  “Yes.”

  “And you think I . . .”

  “You should do whatever you want.”

  Brenna’s mouth is dry. She’s aware of the humming radiator and the itchy blanket beneath her bare legs, of Nick Morasco’s hand at the small of her back. She wants to brush it all away. She slips the papers out of the envelope, skims over her father’s name and address and her mother’s name under witness. Her eyes scan the report and settle on one word. Every muscle in her body contracts—her thighs and her chest and her neck and her stomach. Especially her stomach. It hurts like a kick and she can’t speak, she can’t breathe. All she can do is read the word.

  SUICIDE.

  Brenna reached into her bag and pulled out the journal. She could feel Mr. Friday Casual watching her from across the waiting room, his gaze on her shaking hands.

  Help me, Clea.

  Brenna’s breath came back as she opened the diary, words jumping out at her as she flipped the pages: Ecstasy . . . Dream . . . So beautiful . . . Death . . .

  There were parts of this journal Brenna wouldn’t read, parts she’d look at and slam the book shut—the parts where Clea talked about their father.

  All these years, Brenna’s mother had let her believe that their father had left them, that he’d started a new life somewhere and never called and never written because, as her mother put it, “He doesn’t care about our family.”

  This had hurt Brenna, yes. But to have been lied to. To have been lied to all these years by her own mother about something like this, something this important . . .

  Brenna could have looked into it. She was a missing persons investigator, after all. But as dogged as she was when it came to tracking down long-gone prostitutes or little girls who had wandered off from parties, as persistent as she was at finding elderly parents or billionaires who’d faked their own deaths or, for that matter, her own forever-missing sister, Brenna had never tried looking for her father. Not once.

  He doesn’t care about our family, her mother had said. And as untrustworthy as Brenna’s mother could be, Brenna had taken her at her word. He’s gone, she had thought.

  We all believe what we need to believe.

  Brenna had been just seven years old when her father had left them, and her memories of him were trapped in that fallible area of her mind from before the syndrome kicked in—everything hazier, growing more so by the year, none of it connecting at all.

  Including her father’s leaving them. Especially her father’s leaving them. She had a dimming recollection of that morning, eggs sizzling in a frying pan, her mother in her green terry-cloth robe, her hair pulled back into a ponytail. Her mother’s voice, so calm. You girls are going to stay with your grandmother for a couple of weeks.

  Brenna didn’t remember if either of them had asked why. But she did remember Clea asking to go into their father’s workshop—a room off the garage where he kept the paints and woodworking equipment. She remembered because of her mother’s reaction. Don’t you ever ask me that again, she had said.

  When Brenna and Clea had returned, every sign of their father had been disposed of—his clothes, his papers, every picture he’d been in or had taken. “He’s gone,” Brenna’s mother had said. “He’ll never be calling again.”

  And Brenna had never thought to ask, How do you know? How can you be so sure?

  She’d sounded so positive, after all. Or maybe that was just the way Brenna remembered it, knowing what she did now. The present informing the past. She couldn’t be sure of anything.

  We all believe what we need to believe . . .

  A year later, Brenna’s mother had a huge slab of marble delivered to their house. For weeks and weeks, she’d chiseled away at it, the weeks running into months, months stretching out until finally she had completed her creation: an exact replica of Ammannati’s Neptune—naked and muscular and incredibly embarrassing. “What the hell is that supposed to be?” thirteen-year-old Clea had asked.

  Their mother had replied, “A man who won’t leave.”

  Brenna’s gaze focused on the diary page in front of her—the entry from July 15, 1979. She stared at Clea’s handwriting, looping into a word: Temple.

  “You know what a temple is?” That’s what Mom asks me, like I’m five instead of fourteen. She says, “It’s that soft part of your skull, right next to your eye.” Duh, Mom.

  She says, “He took the gun. It was a .45 caliber automatic pistol. He kept it in his workshop. Your father took that gun, Clea, and he pressed it to his temple, and he pulled the trigger, Clea. Right there in his workshop.”

  She says, “You want to know so badly? That’s what happened to him.” She says it’s the truth, and that as hard as it is, I need to believe her.

  Here’s the thing, though. She said the same thing to me two years ago, back when she told us Dad had left: “It’s the truth, girls. You need to believe me.” So either way, she’s a liar.

  This is my dad, and I will never know for sure what happened to him. I don’t know who to believe or who to trust and it kills me. It tears me up inside.

  Please, Dad. Please CALL ME. Please call me and tell me you didn’t mean to leave us. Please tell me you’re alive and that you love me and show Mom for the LIAR she is.

  Brenna slammed the diary shut.

  She looked up to find Mr. Friday Casual, watching her as though she was insane. Brenna tried a smile. “Lousy book,” she said.

  The waiting room door opened, and Trent returned to her side. “Dunzo.”

  “That was quick.”

  “I know, right? They just scraped my cheek and kicked my ass out of there. I don’t get to find out results for two freakin’ days.”

  Brenna stood up. “Well at least you have two days where you don’t have to think about it.”

  “Like that’s gonna happen.”

  “Try.”

  “Hey,” Trent said. “You okay?”

  Brenna looked at him.

  “You catch something while I was in there?”

  “Uh. No.”

  “Well what happened to you?” Trent said. “Seriously, you look like hell. You’d think it was you that was going to maybe be a father.”

  The word swirled in Brenna’s mind. Father.

  Your father took that gun, Clea, and he pressed it to his temple . . . “I’m fine,” she said. “Just a little tired.”

  “Me too,” Trent said.

  “Well in your case, that’s understandable.”

  “Yep. Hey . . . Bren?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Do you think I’m an idiot?”

  “No, Trent.”

  “I mean, for getting myself into this situation.”

  “I know what you mean.”

  “Are you just saying that because you promised you wouldn’t judge?”

  Brenna sighed.

  “Don’t answer. That was an unfair q
uestion,” he said.

  “Trent,” said Brenna.

  “Yeah?”

  “You are one of the smartest people I’ve ever met.”

  Trent swallowed hard. “I’m . . . uh . . . I’m going to head home, I think. Maybe try and get a little rest. Is that okay with you?”

  She pushed open the door, and then they were back on the sidewalk, the weak sun shining down on them, the cold slapping the sides of their faces. Trent crossed his arms over his chest, Brenna’s gaze traveling to the lipstick print tattoo, just below his collarbone. God, she hated that tattoo. Smart people do make stupid choices. “It’s fine with me,” Brenna said.

  Trent pulled her into a hug. She hadn’t expected that, and for a second she was overwhelmed—not just by the sudden crush of waxed muscle and Axe spray and gelled hair spearing the side of her face, but by the very real emotion beneath.

  “Thanks,” Trent whispered.

  He pulled away and sprinted down the street without looking at her. He was at the end of the block and crossing against traffic before Brenna even found the words to answer him.

  “You’re welcome.”

  Brenna hurried back to her apartment. The cold was really getting to her now. She had a case she’d planned to work on—a three-years-missing real estate agent from Scarsdale named Debbie Minton. But right now, all she wanted to do was crawl into bed with a blank mind and an Ambien. Too much in one day, thought Brenna, as she neared her building. Too much emotion in one day.

  Too much revelation and danger.

  By the time Brenna reached her building, she couldn’t wait to sleep, to dream of something other than what her sister had written in her diary, what Brenna had seen in the police papers, her father with a gun at his temple and her mother at the kitchen stove, just hours after. Hours after she’d found him, and yet so calm, so in control . . .

  Maybe, if Brenna was lucky, she wouldn’t dream about anything at all.

  Brenna trudged up the stairs. She felt very tired. She was glad, though, for the way her breath and footsteps echoed, the way neighbors’ doors stayed closed. Brenna was going to make it all the way back to her apartment without having to speak to anyone, and that was about as good as she could ask for today.

  Once she was a few steps away from her door, though, she noticed the bag.

  Brenna sighed. Sometimes her upstairs neighbor would search for his keys on her floor, leaving personal items behind. Really, Mr. Ericson? A bag of groceries?

  She peered into the brown paper bag—not groceries. Clothes and . . . other things . . .

  Brenna slipped the clothes out of the bag—an old pair of girls’ blue jeans. Pink tennis socks. A red T-shirt—but pale and tired, as though it had been put in a time capsule that wasn’t entirely airtight.

  As she placed the T-shirt on top of the pants, Brenna saw the words on the front, the cracked black and yellow letters:

  “Elvis Costello and the Attractions. My Aim Is True.”

  Brenna’s breath caught in her chest. Her hands started to shake.

  It couldn’t be.

  Quickly, she pulled the rest of the items out of the bag: A pink and white hair band. A purple Swatch watch, a portable sewing kit, a traveler’s map of the U.S. . . .

  A faded denim jacket with black lace sewn into the sleeves. Oh my God. Brenna knew this jacket like she knew the shirt. Better than the shirt.

  Brenna had begged to borrow it for her sixth grade dance . . .

  No way, weirdo. You’ll spill punch on it, and then I’ll have to kill you.

  This was a joke. A strange, sick joke and it couldn’t be. Not after all these years. Who had put this here? Where had it come from? Brenna said it out loud. “Who put this bag here?” Her voice echoing, the walls closing in . . .

  But it could. It was. From the bottom of the bag, Brenna removed the final proof, as dull and faded as the past it came out of. “Who put this here?” said Brenna, louder this time, her voice shrill and hurt.

  In her hands, Brenna held the driver’s license of seventeen-year-old Clea Marie Spector, the expiration date: Clea’s birthday, 1991.

  3

  The grocery bag read “Alpha Beta.” Not a store that Brenna was familiar with—and, as she soon found out when she brought it into her apartment and Googled the name, not one that still existed. A West Coast chain, Alpha Beta had folded in 1995. The bag was a relic, along with everything inside it.

  Brenna needed answers. Bags of twenty-eight-year-old clothes from long-defunct grocery stores more than a thousand miles away didn’t get into locked buildings on their own. Someone had to have seen something, heard something. Someone had to have let this person in.

  Brenna hurried back down the stairs. The idea was to start at the bottom of the building, work her way up, but when she got down to Mrs. Dinnerstein’s apartment on the first floor, she found the door cracked open, the old woman peering warily out.

  “You didn’t need to shout,” said Mrs. Dinnerstein, whose first name was Ina. Brenna knew this, not because she’d ever introduced herself, but because on February 8, 2005, Brenna had accidentally received a piece of Mrs. Dinnerstein’s mail—an “urgent and personal” letter from Macy’s credit department, addressed to Ina R. Dinnerstein, that she’d slipped under her downstairs neighbor’s door without comment.

  “Honestly,” Mrs. Dinnerstein said. “It’s really inconsiderate.” Her voice was barely above a whisper, but still, there was a scolding in it.

  A dim lamplight shone behind her, weaving through her thin white hair, making it glow a little. Brenna had lived and worked in this building for nearly seven years. In that entire time, this lamplight was the most she’d ever seen of the inside of Mrs. Dinnerstein’s apartment.

  Such a dark place to live. The thought made Brenna inexplicably sad. “Excuse me, ma’am. I didn’t mean to bother you, but did you by any chance see anyone coming in with—”

  “You could have simply knocked on my door, and asked if I’d seen anyone. You didn’t need to shout it out to the entire building.”

  “I was . . . alarmed. Someone left a bag—”

  “Some people in the building might be trying to sleep.”

  Okay, this is getting annoying. “It’s two in the afternoon, Mrs. Dinnerstein.”

  “It’s the weekend. A lot of people sleep in on weekend mornings.”

  Brenna tried not to roll her eyes. “I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

  “Wait.” Mrs. Dinnerstein let out a long, rattling sigh. She was a tall woman—close to Brenna’s height, and solidly built, yet she moved and spoke as though she were small and frail. Her eyes were a pale blue-gray, the irises barely distinguishable from the whites—and never half closed, never sleepy. Frightened, really. That’s how they always looked. Or rather, it was the way they looked when her gaze fell on Brenna.

  Is she always scared, or is it me who scares her?

  Slowly, Mrs. Dinnerstein extended her hand. Between her thumb and forefinger, she clasped a three-by-five card. Her fingers were trembling. “I thought I’d left this with the bag.”

  Brenna stared at her. “What?”

  Mrs. Dinnerstein handed her the card without looking at her. “He was at the front door. He asked for you. I wouldn’t let him in. I gave him the card and he wrote down his name and where he’s staying.”

  “He?”

  “Mr. Dufresne.”

  Brenna took the card from her hand. Plain block letters in ballpoint pen: ALAN DUFRESNE, along with a hotel name: PLAZA GARDEN SUITES.

  The man’s name meant nothing, but the hotel’s did, and for a moment she felt herself slipping back into August 12, 2003—3 P.M., the air conditioner humming at the back of her neck as she taps the number into her work phone, the receptionist answering, the squeaking young voice . . .

  “Plaza Garden Suites, may I help you?”


  Brenna squeezed her eyes shut, well aware of Mrs. Dinnerstein’s gaze on her, made herself stop remembering.

  “Mrs. Dinnerstein?”

  “Yes?”

  “Why did you let me yell like that?”

  “Pardon?”

  Brenna looked at her. “Well, if you had this card, and you knew I was yelling about the bag, then why didn’t you come upstairs and give it to me . . . you know, before I woke up the whole building.”

  “I assumed you’d know who left it,” she said. “And I wouldn’t have to . . . We wouldn’t need to talk.”

  “How would I know?”

  Mrs. Dinnerstein aimed the pale blue eyes at her, hard and opaque as marbles. “Because you were expecting him.”

  “What do you mean?”

  Mrs. Dinnerstein took a step back. For the briefest of moments, Brenna saw the inside of the apartment. Her eyes widened. She couldn’t help it.

  “Mr. Dufresne . . .” The old woman started to say more, but stopped once she noticed Brenna’s gaze on her coffee table, on the stacks of yellowed newspapers and magazines, on the curling bread wrappers and empty Kleenex boxes and plastic crates full of garbage, the clutter teetering off the edges of the table, burying chairs near-completely, settling onto the floor in unmanageable drifts . . .

  Mrs. Dinnerstein’s jaw went tight. She moved forward, blocking the mess with her body.

  “Mr. Dufresne.” She spat out the name. “He said he knows you.”

  Before Brenna could ask another question, Mrs. Dinnerstein slammed the door.

  Plaza Garden Suites was on Fiftieth and Eighth—a clean, mid-sized modest hotel, frequented by theatergoing families and middle management types who’d missed the last train home. The lobby was dominated by an electric blue rug and an eighties’ modern chandelier that looked to be made of thousands of ice cubes.

  Of course, all this information had been gleaned from a seven-year-old memory—it could have easily been renovated since August 12, 2003, when Brenna had taken the 1 train there to meet a client by the name of Ellie Dunn who had wanted to find her long-lost father.

  But as she sat on the 1 train now, the paper bag from Alpha Beta sitting in her lap so very much like the shoebox of Ellie’s father’s personal effects that her new client had insisted she take with her, Brenna couldn’t help but feel the plastic seat at her back—not the one from now, but the one she’d sat on nine years ago, Brenna’s back sweaty in a yellow gauze sundress she’d bought a year earlier at the Gap on Twenty-third and Fifth, and she leans into it, feeling the damp gauze between her shoulder blades, fighting a memory of June 9, 2000, Jim’s back to her as he packed up his suitcase . . .