Dead Time Read online

  As I followed the rest of the column back toward the front door, I still wasn’t sure why I had been invited, other than to hold Merideth’s hand because her fiancé was out of town. She had maintained that I was supposed to be able to see something significant in the place. But within ten seconds of walking inside it was apparent to me that this suite wasn’t Lisa’s home, a place where I might have been able to make some psychologically relevant appraisal of her situation. This apartment was the extended-stay equivalent of a chain motel room, and I thought it was clear to us all that whatever meager personal belongings Lisa had brought with her as luggage had departed along with her.

  It was also immediately apparent that Dewster, the detective friend-of-a-friend of Merideth’s husband-to-be, wasn’t getting any happier about the errand she’d been enlisted to run. Her walk-through of Lisa’s place took mere moments. She reminded me of a potential buyer of a new home who had decided she wasn’t interested the moment she entered the neighborhood, long before she reluctantly stepped inside the house itself. The only actual physical effort the detective put into the search—beyond walking around—was to pull back the shower curtain, open two closet doors, and drop to one knee to scan the space below the bed.

  Once Dewster convinced herself that there was no one in the place who was either already dead or requiring law-enforcement or medical assistance, she said, “We’re done.” She gave Stevie her business card and told her if she learned something new that she should contact her directly and she would walk her through the process of starting the machinery for tracking down her wayward sibling.

  “Wayward” was Dewster’s word. She hadn’t used it generously.

  Stevie held the detective’s business card the way a stranger might hold a dirty diaper handed to her by a harried mother.

  Dewster stopped near the front door of the unit. Over her shoulder she said to Stevie, “This woman—your sister—left here voluntarily. Lights off, door locked. No forced entry. No sign of struggle. I assume she had a suitcase when she arrived. It’s not here now. No purse. No phone. She packed up, and she left.”

  It wasn’t news to Stevie, who looked annoyed. And uninterested.

  Merideth said, “But—”

  Dewster interrupted her. “It’s hard to accept. For family, I mean. It is. But sometimes people walk away from their lives. You don’t know why they do it, but they do. Happens more than you think. What next? Your sister will turn up after a while. Maybe tomorrow, maybe next week, she’ll give someone a call. That’s what usually happens. She’s gone off somewhere; maybe she met some charming somebody and…When she shows up again she might be sorry. Or not. She might say she was ‘sorting things out,’ like that.” Dewster managed a wry grin. “She might admit there was a guy. And that she misread him.”

  “That’s it?” Merideth asked.

  Dewster turned to Stevie again. “If she’s anything like my relatives, you’ll hear from her when she’s out of money. My sister’s first husband? Don’t even get me started on that guy. The call we got was from someplace in Honduras. Ever try to wire money to Tegucigalpa?”

  Dewster intended it as a joke. No one laughed.

  Merideth’s eyes grew wide. “But she has my baby.”

  The detective jerked her attention toward Merideth and said, “What did you say? There’s a kid involved?” She turned her head and glared at Stevie. “Nobody said anything to me about a kid.”

  Stevie’s mouth flattened. I thought she was fighting an inclination to smile. She pulled her purse strap higher on her thin shoulder and looked at Merideth. Stevie was happy to leave the explanation of the baby issue to others.

  Merideth said nothing. It was clear that she didn’t want to go there, not with this detective friend of a friend. Her fiancé probably didn’t want her to go there. I imagined that he had specifically cautioned her about not going there.

  “So, kid?” Dewster said. “Yes or no?”

  Merideth shook her head. In a small voice she said, “I don’t have…any children.”

  Dewster didn’t press it. She wasn’t eager to discover any complications that would extend her evening. She’d done her reluctant favor and made a negative welfare check. She was eager to move on to whatever came next on her to-do list. She left us, and the apartment, with a dispirited wave of her left hand.

  She was already speed-dialing her mobile with the other.

  NINETEEN

  During Detective Dewster’s brief visit Stevie’s mood completed a quick evolution from annoyed to irritated, as though she’d been expecting all along that the outcome would be something akin to what it had turned out to be. I was left with the impression that this wasn’t the first time she had been recruited for a fool’s errand involving her older sibling.

  Stevie had been directly behind the detective while she did her cursory check of the premises, trailing her from the kitchen to the living room to the bedroom to the bathroom and back to the tiled area by the front door. As I chased behind them, I’d heard Stevie mutter, “Just typical,” at least twice.

  I turned to her after the detective had made her exit and shut the door. “What is typical, Stevie?” I asked. “I thought you said earlier that this was typical of Lisa.”

  “Did I?” She shook her head and again moved her purse strap higher on those skeletal shoulders.

  The histrionics were amateur. Does that act actually work with someone? Her husband? It was hard to imagine. I certainly didn’t feel any inclination to play along.

  I said, “I’m pretty sure you did.”

  She spread her fingers, palms up. “Who knows?” She raised her eyebrows disingenuously for punctuation.

  Her eyes told me that she recognized I wasn’t planning to give her act a glowing review. Her demeanor changed. She stopped the dramatics. She no longer expected me to believe her. And she no longer pretended to care if I did.

  Merideth had told me that Stevie was a quasi-respected fashion writer who freelanced “for some of the minor trades,” was married, and had a two-year-old child. I didn’t know Lisa’s age, but I was guessing that Stevie was in the twenty-five-to-thirty range.

  Most of the time, anyway. In those few moments after Detective Dewster’s departure she was fourteen, max.

  Siblings could have that effect. I wasn’t holding the temporary regression against Stevie—I was merely factoring it into the equation of what to expect next.

  “Has she done this before?” I asked.

  “Done what?” Stevie said.

  Her developmental age was descending like a rocket countdown. Fourteen, thirteen…Okay, we’ll play it your way, Stevie. “Taken off…disappeared, without telling anyone? Gone days without answering her cell phone? Like that?”

  “Days? Like, two? I wouldn’t know.”

  Prior to making the “that’s typical” utterances, Stevie’s petulance had been muted. Not any longer. I retuned my antennae to include the wide range of potential petulance frequencies. I said, “You and Lisa aren’t—”

  “Close? No, you can tell?”

  Her sarcasm was cloying. She spread it way too thick. She was like an elderly woman who applied too much perfume because she’d lost her sense of smell. I was beginning to feel as though I were locked in an elevator with that old woman.

  Stevie shrugged again and looked around. “For all I know this is something…she could do all the time.”

  “Does what you see here surprise you?”

  “We grew up in Southern California. Irvine? I left Orange County three months before my eighteenth birthday to go to NYU. I never went back. Lisa”—she sighed—“never left.”

  Stevie ended her brief soliloquy with a quick, audible inhale as though she wanted to underline her impression that the facts she was deigning to share should have spoken volumes and left my curiosity about her sister completely sated.

  She hadn’t answered my question, but it was something.

  Were Merideth so inclined she could have warned Stevie about
her experience with me and informed her that portion control rarely had the desired impact on my inquisitive appetite. If fact, it often had the opposite effect. Meri wasn’t inclined.

  I said nothing. I waited. Stevie filled the void, as I suspected she would.

  “Lisa stayed—well, she moved to Hollywood—and…that’s her life. She likes being in the orbit of important people. She was some sitcom actor’s personal assistant for a while. Did the surrogacy thing for Susie, our half sister. Susie is a screenwriter. That was nice. I thought it might change Lisa. It didn’t.” She glanced at Merideth and shook her head. “Lisa and I go for months without talking sometimes. I call her occasionally—don’t get me wrong. But I end up on voice mail nine times out of ten. I’m only here tonight because she”—Stevie looked at Merideth as though she thought she deserved an apology from her—“made it sound like some kind of huge emergency.”

  “And you don’t think it is?” I asked. Without any conscious intent to do so I had switched to my office voice. When I was on my game, it was a tone that was as nonjudgmental as pudding.

  Stevie cocked out one hip. “Does this look like some big nine-one-one to you? CSI couldn’t find anything worth testing in here.”

  I wondered if Stevie had been hoping for some blood spatter.

  Merideth wasn’t ready to accept Stevie’s cavalier assessment about Lisa’s behavior. She said, “But your sister left some of her things. Look.” She pointed at the mess around the sofa in the living room. A couple of paperback novels, half a dozen magazines—an odd mix of fashion, pop culture, and outdoors—an open spiral-bound book of Sudoku puzzles, and a couple of newspaper crosswords littered the area around the couch and coffee table. A significant number of dirty plates and glasses had accumulated. A pillow from the bedroom was propped on one end of the couch.

  “See? And in the bathroom? There’s shampoo, and conditioner in the shower. Real bottles. Some of her clothes are still in the closet. There’s some underwear in the drawers. She didn’t take everything. If she was moving out, she’d take everything.”

  Stevie fought off another shrug. She sighed instead. “Cheap stuff. Nothing here looks very valuable. She bought some new things, so she had to leave stuff behind. Wherever she went, she probably flew. Had to fit into a carry-on for the plane. Those big bottles wouldn’t make it past security.” Stevie did a three-sixty as she reexamined the room. “Looks to me like she got fed up with this place—though I can’t imagine why; it’s so stimulating—and she left.”

  Merideth exhaled loudly. I remembered the exasperated affectation well from our marriage. It was a sign of burgeoning frustration and usually preceded an eruption of some kind. I took two reflexive steps back and set my feet. I would let the two women go at it without getting in their way.

  “‘Fed up’?” Merideth asked with what I considered surprising restraint. “With whom?”

  The exact same “fed up?” question had taken off in my head too, but the follow-up I conceived to tag along after it was “With what?” The difference—between “with whom?” and “with what?”—was a subtle one, but since my follow-up allowed for increased degrees of freedom, I thought the distinction was important.

  I figured that Merideth had asked “With whom?” because she was assuming that she would be part of the answer and she was daring Stevie to take her on directly.

  Stevie didn’t bite. Was she experienced enough with people like Merideth that she knew better? Or did she know something specific about her sister that gave her some special insight?

  I was leaning toward believing the latter. Without moving forward, I said, “Stevie, is there someone else—your mother, maybe, another sibling, a close friend—who could help us make a judgment about how concerned Merideth should be that she can’t reach Lisa? That she’s not answering her phone? Merideth and Eric have a lot at stake here.”

  Merideth tried some diplomacy. She said, “Please forgive if I’m a little overbearing. I’m concerned about her, Stevie. I am. This doesn’t seem like Lisa to me.”

  “And you know Lisa that well?” Stevie said, a half smile on her face. I thought Stevie recognized that her sarcastic side had a tendency to go steroidal, and for that moment, at least, she was trying to rein in its excesses.

  “I thought I did,” Merideth said.

  “If you know her that well, then why the hell would you give her your baby?” The unstated tag line was “You fool.”

  Merideth’s mouth fell open about half an inch.

  Stevie pulled her keys from her purse. She said, “I am going back to Tenafly. I have my own baby to worry about. And please don’t bother my mother with any of this. She’ll be of no help—Lisa doesn’t stay in touch with her—and she doesn’t need your intrusion. I’ll handle her.” She shook her head. “I can’t believe I agreed to do this. God, I hope they’ve cleared that accident on the bridge.”

  She turned to leave so quickly that her hair whipped around her face. She had to spit it out of her mouth.

  I was about to take a seat on the sofa, in the midst of Lisa’s junk cyclone. “Stevie,” I said, “is Lisa neat?”

  She stopped, turned, and glared at me. “What?” she said.

  Her question was tinged with confusion at why I’d asked, as though I’d interrupted her retreat from the room because I desperately needed to know if her sister liked chocolate milk.

  I opened my hands, encouraging her to take in the scene around me. She reacted by opening her eyes wide. They flashed rage. If lightning had erupted from her nose at that moment, I wouldn’t have been completely surprised.

  I elaborated. “Is your sister a neat person? Compulsive, that kind of neat?”

  Stevie pointed at the debris scattered around the sofa. “See that? And that. And that. That’s Lisa. Right there. That kind of mess. I shared a room with her for half my childhood. Does that look neat to you?”

  “Thank you,” I said. “That’s what I wanted to know.”

  “It’s a metaphor for her life, by the way. I’m always cleaning up after her.”

  “Thank you,” I repeated.

  “Yeah,” she said. “Whatever.” Again she spun to leave. Again she turned back for a last word. This one, too, was directed at Merideth. “I am not filing any missing-persons report. Just so you know where I stand.”

  Merideth said, “Okay.”

  Stevie tossed the unit key onto the nearest table and tried to slam the door on her exit, but air pressure in the building absorbed the force. The intended dramatic gesture ended up having the impact of screaming into a pillow.

  “Well,” Merideth said after the door closed. “I don’t know what I did to offend her.” She shook her head as though she were eager to erase the spectacle from her memory.

  I lifted the bound book of Sudoku puzzles and flipped some pages. Lisa was good at solving the number graphs—the book was almost completed. Someone had scrawled a couple of phone numbers on the back cover of the book, along with the word “pizza,” the word HEAD in small caps, the capital letter J, the word “dessert,” and the word YOUTUBE, again in small capital letters. “Pizza” was underlined twice. YOUTUBE once. “Dessert” and HEAD had earned no additional emphasis. Lisa had also doodled some geometric forms. I looked up. “Was that all news to you, Merideth? What Stevie said?”

  She was holding a Chinese take-out menu. She looked perplexed. I knew the face she was making. Merideth hadn’t been puzzled by Stevie’s soliloquy. But she was feigning innocence about it. Someone who hadn’t lived with Merideth for years might have failed to recognize the distinction.

  I went on. “The family tension? Her sister’s appraisal of her lifestyle? Did you and Eric know all that about Lisa?”

  “No…Yes…Not exactly.” She waved the menu and made a disapproving face. “We agreed no Chinese. MSG?” She sighed. “Eric and I did our due diligence, Alan. We did a background check. All the legal things. A credit check. Internet search. I did Lexis-Nexis. We talked at length to the previous…fam
ily that she was a surrogate for. We read the psych eval.”

  Oh boy.

  “Did you interview any of her references? Talk to her family?”

  “The other family, yes,” Merideth said. “Susie? On the phone. We talked to her. She thought Lisa was great. Come on, Alan. Eric knew Lisa from before we met. They had mutual friends. Eric is…comfortable with her. The other family was thrilled with what Lisa had done. That was…good enough for me. Eric is a good judge of people.”

  Her tone was defensive. I didn’t push her on the details—she was my ex-wife, not my patient. In whose womb she and Eric had chosen to stash their blastocyst was none of my business. I changed the subject. “Do you and Eric pay for maid service here?”

  Another sigh. “Alan, where are you going with this?”

  I gave Merideth full credit for trying to keep the condescension out of her voice even though she only half succeeded. “Humor me,” I said.

  “No. We asked her if she wanted maid service. She didn’t. We only pay for cleaning at the end of her stay. You saw the washer and dryer. She can do her own sheets and towels. She doesn’t cook. Why do you ask?”

  “The bed’s made,” I said. “All of her mess is in the living room.”

  “So? Why is that important?”

  Merideth was being dismissive at the same time that she was growing more anxious. As much as she wanted my help with her missing-surrogate problem, she wasn’t totally prepared for me to actually discover something that she had missed in the quick examination of Lisa’s temporary home.

  “It may not be,” I said. I stood and walked in the direction of the bedroom door. Merideth followed me. I gestured at the bed. “Most people leave stuff near their bed. Even in a hotel. A book. A magazine. A water glass. Something. Look, the TV remote is still sitting across the room.”

  I turned. Merideth was only a foot behind me. I could see that her eyes had begun to get moist. “Yeah?” she said. “So?”