Vanishing Girls, page 4
I read down Reed Dekker’s bio. “It says here . . . he lives with his wife and daughter in Brooklyn Heights. That’s funny. The blogs reported that Abby Dekker lives in Boerum Hill. I wonder what’s accurate.”
“She was hit in Boerum Hill . . .” He paused to sip his water.
“In the middle of the night. So it’s probably Boerum Hill. Maybe Reed put Brooklyn Heights in his bio because it sounds swankier. And it’s not like he can’t afford the Heights.”
“I liked the guy—”
“He’s not dead, either,” I reminded Mac. Though I knew why he’d made the slip: Tragedy changes a family. The Dekkers’ only child was hit by a car and was critically injured, in a coma. It wasn’t death, but to a parent it would feel too close. And Mac was a parent; he was feeling his gym buddy’s pain.
“You’re right. Reed Dekker isn’t—” He was interrupted by a knock on our bedroom door.
“Ben?” I said. “Chali?”
“I heard you talking,” Chali’s muffled voice answered from the hall.
“Come in.” I swung my legs around to sit on the edge of the bed, switched on the lamp on my bedside table, and waited.
“Put your hand on the knob,” I heard her say in the easy tone she used with Ben. “Good boy. Now turn.”
But nothing happened. So I got up to open the door. She was standing there holding a tray with two bowls of steaming soup, her long, black hair brushed neatly back into her usual ponytail. Slight, with sparkling brown eyes, Chali wasn’t classically pretty but she shone with special vibrancy and goodwill despite the fact that, in India, she was a Harijan, the “Children of God” caste better known as untouchables. It was a cruel distinction she had escaped by migrating to the great melting pot of New York City.
Chali was the other widow in my life, though hers had been vastly different widowhood from my mother’s or mine. Only twenty-six years old, she had a twelve-yearold daughter living back in India with her own mother; Chali had given birth at the age of fourteen after being forced into marriage to a sixty-four-year-old man. I had noticed that she didn’t seem particularly aggrieved when she told the story of waking up one morning four years ago to find her husband dead of a heart attack beside her. After a year of struggling in poverty to support herself and her young daughter, Dathi, she gave up and did what so many third-world mothers do, leaving their beloved children in the hands of a family member and traveling thousands of miles to put food in their family’s mouths from afar. In this way Chali was no different from scores of other nannies and housekeepers who flee to America, the women who reluctantly leave their own children behind to support them by taking care of other people’s families; but to me she was unique. Chali had a bright, unschooled wit, she was a refreshing combination of cheerful and honest, and she was reliable to a fault. She had never once let us down and I knew she never would. The longer she worked for us—over a year now—the more like family she became.
Ben pushed the door all the way open, jumped on the bed, and snuggled under the covers with Mac.
“Daddy’s on fire!”
“Daddy is sick,” Chali said. “Let him be.”
“It’s okay,” Mac said. “I could use the hugs.”
“Here, I brought you both some lunch.”
“Chali, that is so nice of you, but I’m not sick.”
She smiled. “So much the better. Now sit and take this bowl before it spills.”
I put one of the bowls on my bedside table, and helped Chali balance the tray on Mac’s lap. Together we propped some pillows behind him so he could manage the soup. As we set him up, Chali noticed the laptop screen showing Reed Dekker’s corporate portrait. She did a double take.
“I recognize him, but I don’t know why.”
“Mac knows him from the gym,” I said. “He lives in the neighborhood; you must have seen him around.”
“Probably that’s it.” She waggled her head in the subtle way she did for emphasis. “But the name, Dekker, that sounds familiar, too.”
“His daughter was hit by a car last night. That’s partly why I slept late—Billy was at the scene and I went to meet him.”
Ben squirmed out of Mac’s arms, slid off the edge of the bed to the floor, and darted out of the room.
“Stay in bed and rest,” Chali said, as she went after Ben. “I’ll come back later for the tray.”
I heard their footsteps go up the stairs and then move around on the parlor floor above.
We finished our soup. Then, before getting into the shower, I decided to check e-mail. There was nothing important. I was about to get up when I turned to Mac, who was lying down again with the covers pulled up to his chin.
“Want me to check yours, too?” We had placed an ad on Craigslist yesterday morning, before the flu hit him, for a part-time office assistant to take over some of the paperwork that MacLeary Investigations, his flourishing business, was generating and that had swamped both of us lately. His e-mail address was the contact, and I was pretty sure he hadn’t checked it at all.
He nodded.
I ran his e-mail—and opened a floodgate.
“Look at all these résumés!” I turned the laptop so he could see it. “They just keep streaming in.”
His ad had gotten one hundred and seventeen responses . . . make that one hundred and nineteen, as two more arrived before our eyes. And then another, and another. One hundred and twenty-one people interested in a paltry part-time job. We had advertised office help, twelve hours a week, can pay up to fifteen dollars an hour.
I opened one at random. “Okay, this one is a woman who has over twenty years experience managing a Broadway theater.”
“Overqualified.”
I opened another. “Here’s someone who has a degree in landscape architecture from Harvard, and helped design city playgrounds for three years.”
“Overqualified.”
“Here’s an actor who had a leading role on Law & Order. And here’s a woman with a PhD in microbiology from the University of Pennsylvania.” I looked at Mac, who was staring at me in shock. “This is nuts. Why would these people be interested in our little job?”
“ ‘It’s the economy, stupid.’ ”
Right. The economy was in disaster mode; all these résumés from vastly overqualified people only reinforced what the news reported every day.
“Maybe your friend Reed Dekker can sprinkle a few extra millions on some of us commoners. Did you know they reported last week that Goldman Sachs is making a huge profit, and salaries and bonuses are back to prerecession amounts?”
“I read that, yup.”
I closed Mac’s e-mail account as another résumé came in. “This is going to be a project. I’ll start going through the résumés a little later, make a short list. It could be more time consuming than we thought.”
“We need an assistant to find an assistant.” Mac tried to laugh at his own joke but ended up coughing. I kissed his burning forehead, gave him another ibuprofen, and got into the shower.
Twenty minutes later I was upstairs in the sun-drenched living room, lying on the floor. Ben’s tummy was balanced on my feet and I held his hands wide in a flying angel. He loved it when I swerved my legs and dipped sideways, nearly toppling him, and then saved him at the last minute.
At the sound of the doorbell ringing, Ben tumbled down onto my stomach, giggling.
“I’ve got it!” Chali called from the kitchen, where she was checking her e-mail. She didn’t have a computer at home and sometimes borrowed mine so she could keep in touch with her daughter.
“No problem. I’m right here.” I jumped up and went to the door.
On my way, I heard Chali intercept Ben as he headed to the top of the stairs: “Hold it now, little Hadji, let’s put your blocks away together first. Unless you want to build another fortress with me?”
I looked through the peephole and there, to my surprise, was Billy.
“Morning.” He leaned through the open door to kiss my cheek; he smelled spicy clean.
“On your way someplace special?”
“Feeling like a fool about last night. Wanted to stop by and apologize.”
“No apologies necessary, Billy. You should know that. Want to come in?”
Behind him, on the sidewalk, our mail carrier stopped and reached into her cart. She came up the stoop and handed me our bundle of mail, glancing fleetingly at Billy, whose eye patch often drew attention. He ignored her.
“Thanks, Terry,” I said.
“Have a nice day.”
“You too.”
I watched her jog down the stoop and roll the cart forward. When I turned back to Billy, he was staring at the house across the street. It was a typical four-story brownstone, more or less the same as all the others on the block, except for one thing. It was on the rooftop of that very house, in a shootout with his lover, that he lost his eye. I had noticed before that when he came over he seemed to avoid even glancing across the street. This was the first time I’d seen him take such a long look, and it saddened me. I wished I could stop his hurt, all of it, give him back the sight in his right eye and undo Jasmine from having entered his life in the first place. Mac and I had even discussed moving to spare him the distress of revisiting that fateful day every time he came over to see us; but with real estate badly devalued, there was no way we could sell our co-op duplex and afford to move somewhere comparable in the neighborhood, so we’d stayed put.
“Come inside, Billy. It’s cold out there.”
I hung his jacket on a peg in the hall while Ben ran to him. Chali seemed to hesitate when she saw Billy; her face blanched just a little—reacting, I assumed, to another distraction stopping Ben from cleaning up the blocks, unless it was something else bothering her. Whatever it was, the flash of agitation was quickly replaced with her usual smile.
“Pirate Bill!”
“Ahoy, matey!” Billy fell to one knee and caught Ben in a hug. “Where’s your hat? You’re out of uniform. Do you want to walk the plank?”
Ben hurried downstairs and returned moments later wearing his black pirate’s hat with a white skull and crossbones on the front. It had been a gift from Billy last Christmas, and it put an end to our efforts to get Ben to stop pointing out Billy’s eye patch every single time he came over. Now it was a game they played without fail.
“What are my orders, Pirate Bill?”
Billy stood tall and stroked his chin in a melodramatic thinking pose. “Tie up the princess!”
“Aye aye, Bill!”
“Not again.” Chali laughed and went to the kitchen to get the ball of twine we used for recycling newspapers. She sat on a chair in the middle of the living room, and Ben got to work.
I led Billy into the kitchen and poured us both a cup of coffee, adding a splash of milk to his. I drank mine black.
“How’s Mac doing?”
I shook my head. “I hope it’s a quick flu.”
“It’s going around. Couple of people at work came down with it and stayed out a week.”
“Can we talk about last night, Billy?”
“It won’t happen again.”
“How do you know that?”
“I feel it.” But in fact there was no feeling in his voice. He sounded numb, even irritated. It was as if a force field of denial had thickened around him in the hours since we’d seen each other.
“There’s this support group called POPPA—”
“Don’t want to talk about it.”
“You can’t avoid it forever.”
“There are more important things than me and my problems, Karin. That girl who was hit by the car last night?”
The thought of her angelic face, her blue manicure, sank my heart. “Abby Dekker. I looked it up this morning, but no one’s reported much besides the basics.”
“She lives a few blocks from here but we haven’t been able to reach her parents. I told Dash I’d get over there; she was stressing because one of her kids is in a holiday show at school and she ‘can’t be in two places at once,’ blah blah blah.” But in recounting Ladasha’s words, he smiled and gently shook his head. Sometimes I thought the tension between them made work a little more interesting for him, other times I just thought she ought to stop complaining.
“Mac knows the dad—Reed Dekker. He’s a banker at Goldman Sachs.”
“Mac have any private contacts for him? His secretary says he didn’t come in today and doesn’t know where he is, and no one answers the phone at home.”
“I don’t think so. I read that Abby goes to Packer. Did you try the school secretary?”
“Won’t give us private information over the phone. All we want to do is locate the parents so they can get to the hospital.”
“Right.”
“The school secretary said she’d call the house, and mentioned that the mom’s an at-home parent. I’m going over there now.”
“I’ll join you.”
“Come on, Karin—”
“Thanks.” I stood up. “I’ll get my coat.”
“That’s not what I meant and you know it. I meant come on, you can’t go with me. It’s going to start looking unprofessional if you keep showing up when I’m on the job. Or Dash might think I don’t think she’s a good partner, which is a complication I don’t need.”
“I have some errands to run in that direction.”
“What direction?”
It was true: He hadn’t told me the Dekkers’ address. I got my coat and purse, anyway, and waited for Billy in the front hall.
“Almost done tying the princess, Pirate Bill!” Ben told Billy as he reluctantly crossed the living room in my direction.
“Good work, matey! Now . . . untie her and feed her to the sharks.”
Ben immediately complied, unraveling the twine.
“Thank you, Billy.” Chali smiled.
“I don’t think I’ve ever known anyone so cheerful in the face of adversity,” he said.
“You would be cheerful, too, if your daughter was about to arrive from India.”
“When’s the big day?”
“The first of January—New Year’s. I just received a flight update: she is now going to arrive one hour earlier. So much the better for me. I’m very excited, indeed.”
“That’s great news, Chali,” I said. She must have gotten the e-mail just now, otherwise I was sure she would have mentioned it earlier. She’d been planning this reunion with her daughter for a long time, and I suspected that she secretly planned not to send her back to her mother’s in India. The arrangement had worked well for them for the years Chali had been in the U.S. earning a living to send home to her impoverished family—enough to feed both grandmother and granddaughter, and pay tuition for Dathi at the local school—but her mother was older and not in the best health.
“You have no idea how much I miss that blessed child.”
“It’s been almost a year since they’ve seen each other,” I told Billy, as he slipped on his jacket. I opened the front door. “Back in a little while, Chali. I’m going with Billy . . . that is, I’m going to run some errands around the neighborhood.”
“You’re a sucky liar,” Billy said when we were down on the sidewalk.
“How do you know? Maybe I’m such a good liar that most of the time you can’t tell.”
We walked together along Bergen Street, back in the direction we’d been last night. When I noticed he’d stopped trying to dissuade me from coming along, I stopped pretending I wasn’t.
It turned out that the Dekkers were practically neighbors: They lived two blocks down Bergen between Hoyt and Nevins. It was just past two-thirty in the afternoon, and yet when we walked up the stoop and rang the bell, the house seemed oddly quiet. The freezing day was so bright that the windows shone like mirrors. No one answered. I rang again, and Billy leaned over to try and peek through a window but couldn’t see anything. The curtains were drawn, as if no one had gotten up that morning to let in the day.
Chapter 4
“You’re looking for the Dekkers.”
I turned to my right. A small woman with curly black hair stood on the neighboring stoop, watching us. Her front door hung open, allowing a glimpse of a polished oak floor, the curved end of a banister, a chandelier dripping glittery glass. In the living room beyond the hall was a child-sized easel with a primitive drawing of a tree. An orange cat rubbed its face against the doorway but didn’t venture out into the cold.
“We are,” Billy answered.
“Well, who are you?”
I could feel Billy’s irritation emanate like heat, and jumped in to intercept a potentially tense conversation.
“It’s about Abby.”
She nodded. “So you’re friends of theirs. I’m Gay.” She didn’t flinch saying that; she must have been used to it. I noticed she was wearing a wedding ring.
“I’m Karin Schaeffer. I live two blocks up. Do I recognize you from the playground?” A lie; I had never seen her before, but I wanted her trust. “My son, Ben, is almost four. We go there all the time.”
Gay smiled. “That’s probably it. My daughter, Sara, is five. So, what about Abby?”
“I hate to be the one to tell you, but she was hit by a car last night, and we haven’t been able to reach her parents.”
Horror and suspicion passed in waves over Gay’s expression. She appeared to wonder how it was that we knew about this while she, the Dekkers’ next-door neighbor, hadn’t heard. Billy must have also sensed we were losing her because he reached into his pocket for his wallet and brought out his police identification.
“Karin’s a friend of mine, she does live up the street, but I’m a detective with the Eight-four.”
“What’s the Eight-four?” Gay stepped closer on her stoop to get a better look at Billy’s ID.
“That’s your local precinct.”
