Into the Sound, page 17
And it sickened Holly that the contents reminded her so much of her mother—one pair of diamond earrings, a matching necklace—simplistic elegance. Holly’s accessories were everywhere, and they were mostly costume jewelry. Mark hated it. She tried to keep her necklaces on the jewelry tree, but they always fell. Her earrings were mostly studs, and they ended up all over the place too.
Holly’s next thought was that as much as their mother had tried to present to the public a fabulous, neat life, she’d died heinously, messily, and in vain. Holly placed her hand over her mouth, trying not to imagine Vivian going out the same way.
“Hurry,” she whispered out loud. It was weird creeping around in someone else’s house, but there was nothing in that room for her to find. She wouldn’t go through the drawers, because she was sure if there were something suspicious, Clay would’ve already found it and hidden it. He was a defense attorney, after all.
The police said they wouldn’t officially classify Vivian’s disappearance as a missing persons case until forty-eight hours had passed, but Vivian was Clay’s wife, so they couldn’t just sit on their asses. Clay was a public figure, and the press had leaked the information about his wife and her abandoned car. This only worked to Holly’s favor to get the authorities to move faster.
Vivian’s laptop had been confiscated by the police, which left Holly wondering if they’d already gotten into her Gmail account and found her Hangouts archives. That made her pause for a second. Even if the police had seen the chats, Holly could give them context—that it wasn’t like her sister to be carrying on with someone, that some of Tom’s statements were worrying.
Holly was running out of time to get any of that done, though. She ran downstairs and walked into Clay’s office.
What’re you hiding? Besides your dirty mistress?
The PO Box Vivian had mentioned to Tom added an extra layer of deceit that didn’t seem right either.
Holly rifled through the files on Clay’s desk. One was labeled with a blue Post-it and marked PERSONAL. Inside was a photo of a blonde woman coughing in a stairwell. It was Aliza Levine, the lead witness in Clay’s case who’d been murdered—and he had surveillance pictures of her before they’d even gone to trial. Holly recognized her picture from the news, but this one was dated July, and Holly knew the trial hadn’t started until August, right after they’d come back from vacation.
Holly’s fingertips lit up with flames, the shock hitting her so hard, she dropped the photograph facedown so she didn’t have to look at it anymore.
Clay had been watching her. Or he’d had someone else watch her. And Holly suspected he’d had her killed so he could secure his not-guilty verdict for his client. Did he think he was above the law now and that he could just dispose of people as he pleased?
She shoved the picture behind a legal document also in the file. Then she pulled the legal document out. It was a life insurance policy, but it was dated recently, which Holly found odd. She took a quick picture of it with her phone.
Under a stack of papers, Holly found a little notebook with bumblebees all over the front.
This doesn’t look like Clay’s.
Inside were words scrambled together, but Holly recognized the handwriting from all those years of journaling—it was her sister’s.
Her most recent entry was barely legible.
I Remember You
I remember you, but you never knew me
Tiny hands and feet
I remember you, but you’ll never know me
And we’ll never get to see all you could be
Would you have gotten your dad’s dark eyes or my gray and blue?
I remember you, but you didn’t get to stay
I’ll always regret the day
I didn’t stand up for you
Every September fifteenth, I think of you
And I still remember you
It was dated early September, nearing the anniversary of whatever traumatic memory was portrayed in her poetry. Vivian had always liked to scribble, mostly poetry, but this little book made Holly uneasy. Holly would never touch a journal again—the thought of it made her nauseous. But Vivian had been journaling or doing something very similar.
The sentiment in the poem seemed hard to miss. She knew Vivian had been in a dark place after her miscarriages, but the last had been ten or so years ago. Obviously she still carried the pain of the aftermath with her.
Then the date in the poem caught her eye again.
Had Vivian lost a third baby and not told Holly? The first miscarriage had occurred in the winter, the second in the summer. It sounded like she’d had a third and not told her. Her poor sister had been grappling with awful things—infertility, her husband’s infidelity, the paranoia that people were following her or the actual man who was.
Was Vivian in such a dark place that she took her own life, as the police seemed to suggest? Even Clay had alluded to the fact that she wasn’t well. What else could he have meant? Did he think Vivian would waltz back home after some sort of depressive episode? The closet conversation in the courthouse made it sound like he had no idea where she was, but the other broad, Frankie, was somehow sure Vivian was alive somewhere. Was Clay not frantic because he knew this, too, or because he just didn’t care—a weight off his shoulders?
It didn’t make sense.
Holly thought about what her parents might say in this scenario. Suicide was an impossibility. Perhaps Vivian had wanted it to look like she was being followed so people wouldn’t know she was deeply depressed. Maybe the story she wanted others to believe was that she’d been kidnapped and killed so she could go out peacefully without the shame they’d been taught to feel for choosing to take their own lives. Or maybe Vivian had wanted to carry out the forbidden act, ultimately defy their parents’ principles, and forever sully Clay’s reputation for bringing her so much grief.
“Ugh.” Holly put her hand over her mouth to stifle the rising sick.
Vivian’s little book was shaking in her hands. It was a book of suffering.
“If you don’t write it down, it didn’t happen,” Mother used to say.
Holly still kept her childhood journals in a storage bin in her house. Despite all the trauma they’d caused, she couldn’t bear to destroy them. It would be like annihilating her entire childhood. Vivian hadn’t felt the same. She’d asked Holly to get rid of them for her when they were cleaning out their parents’ house after they’d died. “Burn them—I don’t care!”
Vivian had basically given Holly the same instructions in preparation for their mother’s funeral—“Just cremate her; what does it matter?” As much as Holly had harbored hard feelings for Mother, too, she was still surprised at Vivian’s level of hatred. So Holly had settled on tossing Vivian’s journals in an incinerator one day and cremating her mother the next with a small ceremony to follow.
But here Vivian was journaling once again. Why?
Holly really didn’t understand the part of Vivian’s poem that said she hadn’t stood up for her baby. Did she feel guilty? What was that about?
The thing that bothered Holly the most was the handwriting. Vivian had angelic handwriting, perfectly spaced, nice strokes. But it became more erratic the further Holly paged through, so that the final entries were practically chicken scratch. She wondered if it was a sign of Vivian’s deteriorating mental state.
Holly looked at her watch again.
She had to run.
She took Vivian’s notebook. She didn’t understand why Clay had buried it under a stack of papers on his desk in the first place. Was he trying to hide it from the cops?
Maybe he thought it would be embarrassing to admit he had a wife who suffered from depression and anxiety. Lord knew he’d contributed to her breakdown, if that’s what’d happened, between the affair and the fact that he’d never been able to accept the fact that Vivian couldn’t have his children.
Vivian said that the words had never come out of his mouth, but they both knew he was thinking it, awful creep. Or maybe he was hiding Vivian’s notebook to cover up his mistress. Vivian probably wrote about her too.
Holly slunk out of the house onto the front porch, locking the door behind her. As she did, her phone buzzed in her pocket.
Mark: 911 Someone broke into our house, police are there. I have Otto, you have to pick up Tyler right now.
A home invasion? Holly’s stomach swirled at the thought. There’d been a rash of break-ins of all sorts in their neighborhood, mostly cars, mainly drug addicts looking for something to trade quickly for a hit.
The sunlight hit her eyes, and she groaned in pain. She’d been so pressed to go to the police, but it turned out they were coming to her. Holly’s email pinged, and she saw that she had a reply from Jane, the librarian.
Contact for Dr. Archibald Steiner
She glanced at the address. He lived way up on Broadway, not exactly walking distance from Handsome Avenue. Holly didn’t like that at all. Why had he been near Vivian’s house the day it was announced she’d gone missing?
She’d find out once she called him. There was a number attached to Jane’s message and a little note.
I’m not sure why you’re looking for Archie, but tell him Jane sends her regards. He was a brilliant professor; your mother was always fond of him.
Archie must’ve been a quirky old bastard if Mom had liked him. So long as he was a quirky old bastard who could tell her where she could get some more of those ginger pills, she didn’t care.
Holly carefully planted the key back in the birdcage. She really needed to hurry and pick up Tyler and get home.
“Hello there.”
Holly jumped at the voice. She looked over her shoulder and found Eve Carrington staring at her suspiciously.
“Hi, Eve. I was just checking . . .” Her voice trailed off.
“Clay’s not here.” Eve placed her hands on the hips of her black spandex pants. An athletic trainer, she rarely wore anything else, according to Vivian. Holly had never bought into the wear-your-yoga-pants-everywhere craze that so many other Long Island mommies had adopted. She could hear her mother’s criticism of them from the grave—“Women with curves should opt for A-line, always. Attention seeker. Histrionic personality disorder. Every single one of them.”
Mother would’ve lost her mind over the sorts of things people posted on social media. Holly and Vivian had exchanged an entire text thread over the summer that had lasted into the next day about that.
“Social media is the impetus of narcissistic personality disorder,” Vivian had mimicked.
“Right,” Holly said to Eve, anxious to leave. “I see that. You don’t have to tell him I was here; it’s not urgent. I have to go.” She was ready to race down the steps.
“You mean that you broke into his house,” Eve said.
Busted. Holly stopped in her tracks and glared at this woman who’d obviously been watching her. Eve had too many sparkles on her lips for an adult, her light-brown hair streaked blonde on the bottom—skunky. As she shifted her weight, Holly noted her muscled legs, the kind that could only be acquired from weekly squats. She wondered what Vivian could possibly have in common with Eve. It was then that Holly remembered the rumor about Vivian and Peter.
“I’m glad I ran into you. You know Viv is missing?” Holly asked, because Eve didn’t seem concerned. “There was talk about your husband maybe having a clue, something about Vivian thinking he might have been in her backyard—”
“Oh, no, not that bullshit again!”
Holly looked at her, startled.
Eve flipped her hair. It seemed to sparkle too. “I’m sorry, but your sister was a lunatic.”
“Excuse me?” Holly said, taking a step back. Eve’s hands were so dark, the spray tanner had stained the inside of her knuckles. “She’s so narcissistic, she paints herself a different color.” Holly’s mother’s voice was still echoing in her head.
“I told the police. She was losing her mind in the weeks before she went missing. Accusing people of following her, accusing my husband, my busy husband”—she paused for effect, which had none on Holly—“who runs multiple oral surgery practices, of following her of all people.”
“What do you mean, ‘her of all people’?” Holly crossed her arms, offended by this overly glossed, overly siliconed woman Vivian had claimed was one of her friends.
“Really? A mousy librarian? Do you think my husband would’ve married me if he liked mousy librarians?” She tutted out her chest.
Holly laughed in her face. “I don’t know who would marry you at all,” she wanted to scream. But instead, she walked away, down the stairs. “I see how concerned you are for your missing friend.”
“Friends don’t accuse other friends’ husbands of stalking them and embarrass them in front of an entire community,” Eve shouted at her as she crossed the street.
There were cop cars in the driveway when Holly arrived home with Tyler. A female detective with a cue-ball haircut stood on the porch—Nadia.
Holly staggered out of the car. Tyler followed. “I’m sorry; I’m having a migraine,” she said to Nadia. “How much was taken?”
Nadia shot Holly a cursory glance. “Nothing, actually.”
“What?” Holly asked.
“Did they take the Xbox?” Tyler asked worriedly. Holly hadn’t done a great job in the car comforting her younger son about what’d happened, only telling him that they had insurance for these types of things and that anything taken would be replaced. Not that she should make those types of promises. Mark would have to agree the lost items were worth replacing.
“No, the electronics are all here, by your dad’s account,” Nadia said.
Tyler blew out a sigh of relief, and Nadia remained unfazed.
As Holly walked in the door, she saw that all their drawers had been removed and overturned, the uneasiness twisting her guts like a dishrag. What a mess. She placed her hand over her chest, imagining someone else in her house touching her things. “Wow. What were they looking for?” Holly asked.
“Exactly.” Nadia shot her a much longer look than the last. Holly peered down at her hands.
Tyler started to cry. Holly grabbed his shoulder. Otto walked in the living room from the kitchen and took refuge under Holly’s other arm. It was good; she needed them to hold her up with her headache and the feelings of nervousness coursing through her veins.
She could hear Mark upstairs talking to someone. Holly and the boys followed Nadia to the master bedroom. Detective Rigby was standing next to Mark with a notepad, likely taking inventory of everything that had been stolen.
All her jewelry was overturned from the box, but nothing seemed to be missing. Mark was palming a gold watch given to him by his grandfather, undoubtedly, the one thing he was sure he’d lost. He looked angry, though, as he bounced it in his hands, and Holly just assumed it was because of the mess and the cost of the broken glass on the front door, where the criminal had gotten in.
“Hi, honey,” Holly said.
Mark didn’t answer. He only shot daggers at her with his eyes.
“It’s awful, isn’t it? What did they get? Did the neighbor scare them off before they could take anything?” They lived on a busy street.
Mark’s vein was pushed out in his neck, jaw clenched. He nodded at Detective Rigby.
Holly turned in the detective’s direction, and it was only then that she noticed her planner was flipped over on the bed, its pages partly ripped out. The detective was eyeing it strangely, and Holly understood why. It wasn’t something a common thief would likely go after, unless they were looking for something else. She didn’t have to examine the inside to know the computer printouts from the library, her evidence, were gone.
Then she remembered the missing page. The one from Vivian’s Google Hangouts that she couldn’t account for when she was trying to read in her car after leaving the courthouse.
The missing chat!
It was a loose end, and someone had found the page and probably tipped off the people who’d done this.
16
The house was numbingly quiet when Clay came home from the club, the only place he felt like he belonged, but Nicky hadn’t been there today, only his messengers. Ray had confirmed the fact that Clay would not be seeing Frankie and Giana anytime soon. Frankie had reneged on her promise to let him see Giana following a positive verdict in the trial because of Vivian’s disappearance, and Nicky wouldn’t show his backstabbing face because of it.
Clay’s missing wife made him a person of interest and a threat to Nicky’s cousin and her child. Nicky wanted him nowhere near Frankie and Giana.
There hadn’t been any other information about Vivian, only that Russ swore her disappearance wasn’t club related.
Clay had worked so much before that Vivian would often greet him at the door if he made it home early, take his coat for him. The sound of her high heels clicking through the foyer used to fill the downstairs.
Last night he’d woken up twice to the sound of her shoes, only to fall back asleep and wake up to the imagined laughter of a little girl, but that was all a bad dream.
A bad joke, really. And the joke was on him. Both in regard to Vivian and the men at the club he’d been pretending to call his friends for the last three and a half years.
Everything could’ve been so different if he’d known about Giana in the first place. He could’ve left Vivian like he’d planned, started over with the new family he’d always wanted. But the club didn’t like that idea at all, so they’d made Frankie go away, shamed her for being irresponsible, like it was 1920.
It was so archaic, their Rat Pack rules—“there are the wives and there are the girlfriends”—and now everyone had suffered the consequences because of them, perhaps even Vivian. He wasn’t sure anymore.
He was beginning to wonder if the club was somehow connected to his wife’s disappearance, even though Russ had made a point of telling him it wasn’t. As much as he racked his brain, he couldn’t think of a single reason why they’d want to whack his wife.
His whole life had turned into a waking nightmare, like sitting in a dark tomb, waiting for someone to close the lid.
