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

  Brenna whispered, “How does she know that?”

  “Who?” Alan said. “The credit rep from WeKeep?”

  She blinked. “No. I was talking about the person who was e-mailing you. The one pretending to be me.”

  “Oh.”

  “That stuff about her father.”

  “It’s true?”

  “It may be.” Brenna exhaled. She looked into the dark, sad eyes of the son of Clea’s . . . Lover? Abductor? Trusted friend? Killer?

  And it hit her that this man—not Nick Morasco, not Trent, not even her mother—this corporate lawyer from Sacramento, whom Brenna had met via a bag of her sister’s belongings, would be the first person she would say the words to out loud.

  “My father committed suicide when I was just seven years old,” she said. “I have the police papers.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “That isn’t the point, though. The point is, I only found out about it when I read the police papers. That was two days ago.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “My mother lied to us. I’d always believed he’d just left home.”

  He frowned at her. “So this person . . . The one who’s been writing me—”

  “Knows more about me than I do,” Brenna said. “Or at least, she’s known it for longer.”

  “Or he.”

  Brenna cleared her throat. “It could be a he. Could be anybody.”

  Alan shook his head. “It’s a brave new world we live in.”

  “Huh?”

  “Internet hacking, identity theft . . . Heck, if that person could break into that Snapfish page and change your e-mail contact info, then who’s to say they couldn’t go into the police records and find out about your dad before you were ever able to read them?”

  “Snapfish page?”

  “Um . . .”

  “What Snapfish page?”

  “You’re joking, right?”

  She leveled her gaze at him. “I haven’t joked once since I got here, Alan.”

  “I’m talking about the missing persons Snapfish page,” he said, very slowly. “The one you posted the picture of your sister on.”

  Brenna stared at him. “What?”

  Without saying any more, he logged onto Snapfish and called up the page: a collection of personal photos titled, “MISSING LOVED ONES.” He scrolled down the page, photos of tiny children and smiling brides and strapping young men, the captions slipping fast up the screen like movie credits. So personal, so full of loss. Beloved Dad . . . Missing since 2001 . . . 1995 . . . Have you seen our daughter? We think about him every day . . . Gone from our lives but not our hearts . . .

  Alan stopped scrolling at a picture of a smiling blonde girl.

  Clea.

  Brenna couldn’t speak. Her eyes stayed fixed on the screen—on the picture of Clea, aged sixteen or seventeen, standing in their kitchen back in City Island, smiling in front of their mother’s light blue cupboards. Robin’s egg, their mother had called the color. She’d always been so specific about it.

  In the photo, Clea’s long hair was in a ponytail. She wore a red T-shirt with a pink heart on it, the collar cut off. She wore her favorite denim jacket with the black lace sewed on. Brenna felt the weight of the grocery bag in her lap, the weight of that same jacket. “My God,” she whispered.

  “I never went to the police to find out who she was. I was too . . . My dad . . .”

  “I understand.”

  “But I did go online a lot, looking for missing persons pages. There are hundreds of them. When I found this one, I recognized her immediately,” Alan said. “You could just imagine my reaction, especially when I saw what she was wearing.”

  There must be an explanation, Brenna thought. Something simple I’m overlooking. There has to be, please . . .

  “Brenna?”

  “I didn’t post that picture. I’ve never seen that page before.”

  He gaped at her, saying nothing.

  Brenna just nodded. Thanks for not asking me if I’m kidding.

  “Who could have done this?”

  “I wish I knew.”

  “So strange,” Alan said. “I never let . . . that person . . . know that I was coming to New York. It was a last-minute trip—a client flew me out. I had told her I’d send her the bag, but she still hasn’t e-mailed an address.”

  “Can you give me the address once she sends it?” Brenna said.

  “Sure.”

  “And can you do me another favor?”

  “Yeah?”

  “Keep writing her. Act like nothing’s wrong.”

  “That will be hard.”

  “I know.”

  “Wish I could ask her where the hell she got that picture.”

  Makes two of us, Brenna thought, all the while slipping into August 31, 1990, lugging her heavy, dark blue vinyl suitcase to the front door of their house on her way to freshman orientation at Columbia. A car horn outside their door: Two honks, short and polite.

  Brenna says, “Must be the cab.”

  “Wait,” Mom says.

  Brenna doesn’t want to. The air-conditioning’s out again and the air in the house is slow and thick and hard to breathe, and besides, she hates the idea of saying good-bye to Mom. Not of leaving her. The actual act of looking into Mom’s eyes and telling her good-bye.

  She turns. Mom is standing closer than she thought. Brenna tenses up, and Mom pulls her into a hug.

  Brenna hugs her back. Maybe I don’t have to say it. Maybe I don’t have to say anything at all.

  Mom’s skin feels cool and sticky. She presses her cheek against Brenna’s and it’s wet. Brenna wonders whether it’s sweat or tears. In her mind, Brenna asks: Do you love me?

  “Here,” Mom whispers. She slips something into Brenna’s hand.

  Brenna pulls away to see it—a slim white envelope. She opens it up. There’s a check inside. Five hundred dollars.

  “That should get you through the first quarter.”

  “Thank you, Mom.”

  There’s something else in the envelope. A picture. Brenna sees Clea’s face in it and looks up, into Mom’s eyes.

  Mom nods.

  “I didn’t know you kept that picture.”

  “Of course I kept it,” Mom smiles. It’s a hard smile. “You took it, Brenna. I’ve saved every picture you’ve taken.”

  Alan said, “Brenna?”

  She dug her fingernails into her palms, and she was back in the present, staring at the picture, at the caption: “MISSING SINCE 1981.”

  “Had you ever seen that picture before?”

  She turned her gaze to Alan. “I was the one who took it.”

  Once she got home, Brenna tried to remember taking that picture of Clea. Like all of her memories of her older sister, though, it was dim in her mind and fading still. Clea stopping to pose in their mom’s kitchen on her way out to . . . what? A birthday party, maybe? A night out with friends?

  Clea hated to be photographed, Brenna remembered that much. Used to throw her hands in front of the camera like a movie star evading paparazzi. Of course, it could have just been Brenna’s camera she wanted to evade. In her teens, Clea had found her little sister so annoying that their mother used to scold her for it—and you could actually see it in the kitchen picture, the way she stared down the camera: the flat eyes, the too-wide, get-it-over-with-already smile. Was I too young and dumb to notice, or did I just not care?

  Brenna put the bag of Clea’s things down on her work desk, along with the business card Alan Dufresne had given her. Then she started through the kitchen, down the hallway, and into her bedroom, all the while lapsing back into a memory she knew would never fade—September 30, 2009. Just last fall, returning home and getting ready for bed after her first meeting with her then-client, Nels
on Wentz . . .

  Brenna slips her black sweater over her head, lays it on the bed and folds it, Wentz’s voice still in her brain, the insistence in it, the powerless anger.

  Carol doesn’t have anything she wants to keep from me.

  Brenna has the same thought she had an hour ago, in the Wentzes’ sad, pristine house. How hard does someone have to work to be in that type of denial?

  She yanks off her boots, unbuttons her jeans, slips them down to her stockinged ankles, and kicks them off. As she folds them, Brenna allows herself to think of the photograph on the far left side of in the slim drawer at the top of her dresser, empty save for the photo and small stack of envelopes.

  She pads over to the dresser and slips out the photograph, looks at it for the first time in eight months. Such a frail thing, this photo, dull and faded as Brenna’s memory of taking it. She runs her thumb over Clea’s face. She doesn’t look annoyed anymore. In fact, she barely looks human, the features so time-softened that she’s almost two-dimensional . . . a drawing.

  Brenna places the picture in the drawer, slides it all the way to the back, pushes it shut. Maybe I’m in denial, too, Brenna thinks. Maybe Clea isn’t alive and out there somewhere. Maybe that’s just something I tell myself, like Nelson Wentz tells himself that his wife has nothing to hide . . .

  Brenna was in her bedroom now. She dropped her handbag on the bed and slid her hand in to touch Clea’s journal, to bring herself back. Then she walked up to her dresser and opened that slender drawer for the first time since September.

  She let out a gasp.

  The thing about having a perfect memory is, you always remember where you put things. Exactly. Brenna often wished she had a dollar for every person who said, upon hearing of her disorder, “If I had your memory, I’d never misplace my keys again.” (And while we were at it, why did so many people keep misplacing something as important as their keys?) But it was true. Brenna always knew where her keys were. She always knew where everything was . . . or at least, where it was supposed to be.

  On September 30, 2009, Brenna had put the picture of Clea in the very back of the drawer. It was now at the front of it.

  “It’s Brenna,” Jim was reading off the caller ID screen, and his voice tripped over the name. Faith had just gotten home, Ashley Stanley all over her brain. She’d hugged her good-bye. Ashley hadn’t hugged back. Faith was pretty sure Ashley wasn’t a big fan of bodily contact, a sweet girl like her, so deserving of a hug. And that made her situation even sadder. Ashley had so many worse scars than the one on her face.

  Saying good-bye to Ashley, Faith had thought again of Jim and Maya, her beautiful, healthy family. For a moment, she’d flashed on the phone call she’d gotten before the interview: She’ll ask to go out. She thinks she’s old enough. She’s not . . . But she’d quickly dismissed it.

  She’d hopped into a cab and gone home without even bothering to take off her stage makeup, envisioning it all in her mind—the warmly lit apartment, her husband and stepdaughter waiting for her. She’d pictured herself rushing in and hugging them with all her might, holding them close, telling them how lucky she was to have them in her life . . .

  Only to hear that Maya had already left for her sleepover. Why didn’t anything ever look the way you’d planned it in your mind?

  “How did the interview go?” Jim had said. And then, before she could answer, the phone rang.

  “Hi Brenna.”

  “Hey, Faith. Listen, I need to talk to Maya.”

  “Get in line.”

  “Huh?”

  Faith sighed. “Nothing. Just . . . rough workday.”

  “I hope your interview went well.”

  Faith took a breath, thought about explaining but realized she couldn’t, that swirl of emotions in her head, none of it logical . . . “Brenna,” she said. “Is everything okay with Maya?”

  Brenna sighed. “Yes. Yes, I’m sure she’s fine. I didn’t mean to sound so dire. It’s just . . . something was misplaced in my apartment and I wanted to talk to her about it.”

  Faith’s turn to sigh. Nothing against Brenna. But that memory of hers . . . Honestly, when Faith was Maya’s age, she had a bottomless supply of binder paper reinforcements, an alphabetized CD collection, and a color-coded closet, but if her mother had known for a fact every time she’d misplaced something and called her on it . . . well, let’s just say there just wasn’t enough Xanax in the world . . .

  “Sorry, honey,” Faith said. “Maya’s at a sleepover at her friend Zoe’s. But if you want to call or text her, I’m sure she’ll get back to you.”

  “Okay. Sorry to bother you.”

  Faith frowned. Had she sounded curt? “You never bother me, Brenna,” she said. “And I’ll tell you what, I wish she was around, too. That girl’s been spending too much time with her friends lately.”

  “Agreed,” Brenna said. “Take care, Faith . . . and say hi to . . .” Her voice trailed off.

  “I will, honey.”

  Faith hung up.

  “What was that about?” Jim said.

  “I guess Maya misplaced something of hers.”

  “Ah.”

  “And she told me to tell you hi.”

  A look passed over Jim’s face, an emotion Faith couldn’t quite define.

  Interesting, ever since she’d married Jim, Faith had spent so much time trying to make things easier on his ex-wife. Knowing how much the sight or sound of him hurt Brenna, Faith had positioned herself as a go-between, discussing everything that needed to be discussed about Maya, dealing with the joint custody handoffs, careful to never even say Jim’s name out loud around her.

  And then, last December, Brenna and her assistant had gotten carjacked and nearly killed. Maya had found out about it and called Jim and when Brenna returned home, her ex-husband had been there, waiting for her with her daughter.

  Faith had been on assignment, but when she’d called Brenna’s place, all she could think was Oh, poor thing. To have her life threatened like that and then come back to Jim . . .

  But she hadn’t thought about how Jim had felt. What had the sight of Brenna done to him? He’d never talked about it, other than to say how relieved Maya was to see her, which, when Faith thought about it, was strange. Wasn’t it? He goes face-to-face with his ex-wife for the first time in easily seven years, and doesn’t tell his current wife one word about how it felt? Faith recalled the way his voice had cracked when he said Brenna’s name, then shook the thought out of her head. Some ideas need to be killed before they grow into anything.

  “Lindsay, not Zoe,” Jim said.

  “Huh?”

  “Maya’s plans changed at the last minute. She’s staying at her friend Lindsay’s. She left the number.”

  “The one she helped with that art project?”

  “An older girl—a junior I think. Kid’s getting so mature.”

  “I still see her as a six-year-old, though,” Faith said. “I guess I’ve got to work on that.”

  “Me too.” He smiled. “Or maybe she’ll just have to deal with it.”

  Faith looked into his eyes, the warmth. It had been Jim’s eyes that first hooked her and Jim’s eyes that had her hooked still, the way they glowed, as though someone had lit candles behind them.

  “Faith?”

  “Yes?”

  “You look kind of sad.”

  Faith took a breath. “It’s just that interview I did.”

  “The kidnapped girl?”

  She nodded.

  “It was hard?”

  Another nod.

  “You want a hug?”

  Faith smiled. She moved closer to Jim and gazed into his eyes and felt that warmth. He’s yours. He always will be. “I do,” she said. “I really do.”

  “So what do you like,” Trent said, by way of answering the phone. “Daddy?
Poppa? Pops? Mack Daddy?”

  Brenna said, “Aren’t you jumping the gun a little?”

  “Hey, my baby mama’s due in like six months.”

  “You don’t even know if you’re the father.”

  “My philosophy is, be prepared.”

  “That wasn’t your philosophy three months ago.”

  He sighed. “Haters gotta hate.”

  “Well, regardless, fathers-to-be are usually trying to think of what they’ll call their children. Not what their kids are going to call them.”

  “Oh, I already have names picked out.”

  “I’m not surprised.”

  “Do you want to hear them?”

  “No.”

  “Oh. Uh . . . you sure?”

  “Listen, Trent, sorry to bug you on your day off, but how hard is it to find out who posted something on a Snapfish page?”

  Trent took a breath. “Impossible.”

  “Damn.”

  “Kidding. Nothing’s impossible when you’re me, who happens to have a certain female Snapfish contact, who happens to think I’m USDA prime man steak.”

  “Can you get in contact with her?”

  “Affirmative.”

  “Please don’t say or do anything to make her go vegetarian.”

  He sighed. “What’s the page?”

  Brenna gave him the URL. “Scroll down close to the bottom,” she said. Then she waited.

  “What the . . .”

  “I know.”

  “So . . . uh . . . you didn’t post this.”

  “No, Trent. I didn’t post it.”

  “And do you have any idea who might have?”

  “Somebody who knows my middle name,” she said. “Someone who knows who you are and who Maya is and . . .” Someone who’s had access to both the police papers and that picture.

  “And what?”

  “Probably someone who’s been in my apartment over the past two weeks.”

  “Dude, are you saying it was me who did this? Because it so was not.”

  Brenna sighed. “No,” she said. “I’m not saying it was you.”

  After she’d finished the conversation and hung up with Trent, she texted her daughter: Honey, can we talk? Call me anytime.