The Bachelorette Party, page 10
A voice floats out from inside the house. “Who’s there, Mom?”
“Some girl,” she croaks, with disdain, as if I were selling cleaning supplies.
A young man appears beside her at the doorway, in boxers and an undershirt, rubbing his arms. Shadows cover his face. “Jesus, Mom. Let her inside. She’s about to freeze to death.”
“Okay, okay,” she says, sheepish at being called out on her poor hospitality. She opens the door an inch wider, and I slip in before she can change her mind. In the small foyer, the overhead light accentuates her abundant wrinkles—superabundant wrinkles branching off into more wrinkles, unlike the Botox-smooth faces of all ages in New York City, especially in my line of work. Rheumy blue eyes stare at me.
“Thank you,” I say, stomping my feet.
“Hey,” the young man says. “I’m Noah.”
I do a double take. Now I know why the hot guy in the convenience store looked so familiar. His handsome face appears like the age-progressed image of a missing child, the adult version of the boyish young man in the book.
In truth, he looks boyish still (twenty-four years old by my calculation) with fair features, and standing at about five nine or ten at the most. And in this light, the peculiar color of his eyes shines through, hazel with flecks of gold. He looks slight next to the form of his hulking, ogreish mother.
“And this is my mom, Esther.”
“Hi,” I say, awkwardly. We don’t shake hands. “I’m sorry. I know it’s late. It’s just … I’m in a little bit of trouble here.” My eyes search the room for a phone. “I just needed to call someone if I—”
“Noah,” Esther interrupts. She points upstairs. “Go put some clothes on.”
“Oh.” He looks down at his underdressed self, abashed. “Yeah, I’ll just …” He vaguely motions upstairs and then heads up.
“You,” she says, dispensing of her next burden. “Take those wet things off.”
So I do as she says, shedding my coat, boots, mittens, and hat in the front room, hanging everything up on corroded brass hooks. Then she leads me through the vinegary-smelling kitchen and into the family room. A toasty fire crackles by the handsome brick hearth, and I catch a glance at a brass clock on the wall.
A quarter after two.
Above the hearth, a deer head stares at me accusingly, like maybe I put him there.
Esther catches my gaze. “Oh, don’t mind him,” she says, as if the deer head were performing hijinks. “My husband is a big game hunter.” She turns toward the stairs, putting her hands in her deep bathrobe pockets, with the hem frayed. “Noah,” she calls up. “Get our guest some new socks.”
“Yup,” he answers, the sound of drawers opening and closing echoing above us.
Esther looks me up and down, seeming to find me unworthy, then points to the hearth. “Sit,” she commands.
And like the family dog, I sit, pleasantly surprised by the warmth of the concrete seeping into my wet, heavy jeans. I’d love to take them off too but don’t see a way to modestly do that. But I do peel my socks and sweater off, quickly warming myself by the fire.
“All right,” she says, sitting down heavily across from me on the fabric couch, adorned with faded roses. “Now, what exactly is going on here?”
I start explaining the situation of the bachelorette party with my friends, but she stops me as soon as I mention the Vrbo.
“Hobbes Lodge?” she asks, sounding both agitated and irritated. “What are you all doing in Hobbes Lodge?”
“It was … sort of for research,” I say. “I’m doing a profile on the case for my work.” I decide whether or not to mention I actually already spoke with her, since she did refer to me as despicable. She obviously didn’t like me then and doesn’t like me now.
But maybe it would lend some credibility to my situation.
“I actually called you some months ago. Maybe you remember? Alex Conley?” I wait for some recognition but get none. “I was calling from Crimeline about the Eric Myers case?” I add.
Her suspicious countenance doesn’t alter. “No one ever called me from Crimeline,” she says, her tone accusing. “I’d sure as hell remember that.”
I blink in confusion. She actually sounds like she’s telling the truth, that she doesn’t remember it.
“Okay … it’s just …” I stammer, unsure which direction to go at this point. I decide to just plow ahead. “Anyway, as I was saying, I woke up in the shower, and my friends were gone. So …” I swallow.
She’s clearly unhappy with me for some reason and looking for any excuse to throw me out. I just have to call 911 before that happens.
“I really just need to call someone about my friends.” I gaze around the family room for a phone. They must have one somewhere. Though maybe not. I don’t pay for a landline anymore myself. “Your cell phone maybe? Do … could I borrow it?”
Instead of answering, she fixes me with a dark stare. “Okay,” she says, in a low voice, in a cut-the-crap tone. “Now, why did you really come here?”
“I’m …” But I don’t know what else to say. The question literally leaves me speechless.
“You came to see him, right?” she prods.
Again, I sit there with my mouth wide open, which she seems to take as a yes.
“Well, you can forget all about that,” she says, smirking. “Noah isn’t interested. He’s got enough to worry about without you girls chasing him all the time.”
“Um,” I say, feeling like I’m being punked here. “No, I promise. It’s not that at all.”
But she frowns and shushes me at the sound of his footsteps. He reemerges from the darkness of the stairs, wearing the same beat-up jeans from the store and clean gray T-shirt. “These should work,” he says, handing me a thick pair of white tube socks.
“Oh, thanks,” I say, holding up the socks. But …” I lower my voice, to avoid the ire of his Mrs. Bates of a mother. “Do you have a phone I could borrow?”
“Oh yeah, sorry. It’s charging.” He combs his fingers through his mussy hair with an apologetic glance up the stairs. “Shouldn’t be long though.”
I look up at the stairs too, as if that might hasten the charging. “Do you have another phone in the meantime?” I ask, wondering which phone she answered when she hung up on me.
“No landline,” Noah says. “Sorry. We gave it up. Mom has a cell phone too though.”
“I have no such thing,” she argues.
“You do, Mom,” he says, sounding perturbed. “I bought it for you, remember? With the big buttons?”
“Oh, that.” She flicks her wrist in dismissal. “Who knows where that thing is.”
Noah shakes his head in annoyance and sits down next to me while Esther glares at us. I can smell the fresh scent of detergent from his shirt, feel the warmth off his body. Glancing at him, I notice something then. Faint traces on his arms, scarred over.
I think of what Esther said when I called her, though she claims not to remember this. The anger simmering in her words. He’s finally put his life back together and you’re trying to pull him down again?
Track marks.
I glance away before he can see me looking.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
JULY
Since the Armchair Sleuths had no further insight on the Revelation question, I’m hoping my scheduled interview with Eric Myers might shed some light on the matter.
I’m in the fishbowl office again, my pinkie toe still aching from the stranger’s hiking boot. Eric Myers has a new guard today, not the beefy one. This one is skinny and tall, and sort of looks like a giraffe with tattoo sleeves.
“I wanted to talk to you about the note in Nicole White’s pocket,” I say, opening my notebook.
“No clue,” he says, before I even give any more details.
“The note about Revelation,” I say, wincing as my toe hits the garbage basket. “You know what it means, right? What the passage refers to?”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. The beast. Six, six, six.” He lets out a bored exhale. “I’ve already told you. It’s got nothing to do with me.”
I tap my pen on my pad. “How about the name Adam, then? That ring any bells?”
“No idea,” he says, yawning and stretching up his arms. “I mean, except for the stepfather, obviously.”
He was supposedly investigated but wasn’t in the court files. Though I recall him briefly mentioned on the Crimeline episode. It never made the final cut after a threat of legal action. Crimeline has high-priced lawyers, but the segment apparently wasn’t good enough for the bother.
“They say he was ruled out.”
“That’s bullshit though,” he says, with a cackle. “She was petrified of him.”
I hesitate, aware of him trying to hijack the interview again. But I take the bait anyway. “Why do you say that?”
“She told me,” he says, to my quizzical look. “Remember? On our couple dates?”
“Oh right.”
The dates. The finding of his fingerprints on her purse changed his story rapidly from not even knowing “that girl” to having just the one date and holding her purse at the movies, absolutely not realizing she was under eighteen. Of course, the fifty-seven texts skewered this rendition of dating her once almost by accident. And stalking her high school might have clued him in to her age.
Eric Myers twiddles his fingers on the table. “He was just like … really overprotective. But weirdly so. Like, he wanted her to wear a purity ring.” He puts purity in air quotes. “Promising she would remain a virgin until marriage.” His face puckers with the memory. “It was kind of gross, to be honest. So, honestly, if someone was going to be quoting the Bible, it would be him.”
“Okay,” I say. An intriguing angle, if actually true.
“He used to check up on her too … like … if she said she was going to her friend’s house, he would come by to make sure she was telling the truth.” Eric adjusts himself in his chair, the legs scraping against the tile. “That’s probably why she rebelled so much.”
Someone swears outside the office, the sound muffled. It’s Tammy, Fletcher Fox’s personal assistant, holding three half-spilled coffee cups. She looks up at the ceiling, sending prayers up and mouthing imprecations.
“Listen,” he says, just above a whisper. The tattooed-giraffe guard glances over and then back at the bars. Eric bends toward the screen as if telling me a secret. “I don’t know how to say this without sounding like an asshole but …”
I wait him out.
He throws up his hands in resignation. “No matter what, I’m going to sound like an asshole, so I’ll just say it. Nicole White wasn’t this perfect little angel that everyone thinks she was.” He gnaws on his lip though, uncomfortable with the statement. “I mean. I know that sounds bad. But I just had to get that out there.”
“Okay,” I say, leaving him plenty more rope with which to hang himself.
“She just … everyone thought she was a saint. But she had a wild side. She would get drunk, and high.” He chews on the hangnail now. “She wasn’t this blessed virgin like her stepfather thought. She had boyfriends besides me. So, if it’s always the boyfriend, then fine, but I wasn’t the boyfriend.”
I don’t recall reading about another boyfriend, but I may have missed it.
“Noah?” I ask.
He answers with a scornful laugh. “That kid? She was way out of his league.”
“Who, then?” I pick up my pen.
“Ryan Johnson,” he answers, peering into the screen again, ready to spell the name out if necessary. He leans back with a grin now, having successfully commandeered the interview again. Way to go, Alex! “He’s the one you should be questioning.”
I write the name down, figuring it to be a dead end, but worth investigating at least. I vaguely remember him making an appearance in the old Crimeline episode as well. I don’t think he made the final cut either. Maybe he could be a true suspect, a new angle that would entice Toby to invest more in the project.
“He used to live in Brookside. The trailer park,” Eric Myers adds, oh-so-helpfully. “Might still be there, I don’t know.”
Tammy marches by again, now with three new coffees and a brown stain on her blouse.
“Hey.” Eric tilts his head down. “You getting married?”
I freeze, following his gaze to the desk, with a bridal brochure lying there, and jerk the camera away from the view. “No,” I say. “It’s for a friend.”
“Uh-huh,” he says, his grin indicating that he doesn’t believe me.
I feel sick about it all the way home.
I don’t want to give Eric Myers any more information on my personal life than he already has. Jay worries about me “getting too close” with him as it is, and I haven’t disclosed my Venmo contributions to his prison fund. Mentioning I accidentally revealed our engagement definitely won’t go over well. I plan to come clean about it right when I get home.
But when I open the apartment door, I hear him on the phone.
“She doesn’t know anything, Eli,” he says. “Calm the fuck down.” He’s upstairs in our bedroom. I close the door softly, walking a few steps to hear better.
“I’m telling you,” Jay says, his voice ice cold. “I will deal with it.”
I take another step, and he stops talking.
“Wait a sec,” he says, just above a whisper.
I open the door again and slam it shut. “Hey, I’m home!” I call out, and clomp around the family room, forgetting about my toe for a second and grimacing with pain.
“Gotta go,” he whispers. “Hey, hon,” he calls back, in his sunny Aussie voice. His feet start bounding down the stairs. “How was work?”
“Fine,” I answer. Suddenly, my faux pas with Eric Myers seems trivial. “I thought I heard you on the phone up there?”
He reddens a touch. “Oh, it was just Eli. Doing some damage control. You know how he gets.”
“Uh-huh,” I say. At least he didn’t lie about that. But I also don’t think he’s telling me the whole truth.
She doesn’t know anything.
Who is she? Who is the person he is supposed to take care of? I watch him for any more clues, but his face remains closed. In Crimeline-speak, the she in texts and the phone calls always refers to the wife. Or the fiancée, in this case. Still, this is Jay, not someone from my Crimeline research. I just need to ask him. I drop my purse on the coffee table in the family room, and Jay slips his phone into his pocket.
“How was work?” he asks, leaning with one hand on the couch. “Anything new?”
“Not really,” I say.
She doesn’t know anything.
I drop onto the couch, feeling like I can barely keep myself up.
Then Jay makes a sudden, sharp sucking noise. “What happened to your foot?” he asks, wincing.
“Oh, that.” I examine the toe, which has turned an ugly purple, and on second glance looks askew. “Someone stepped on it. On the subway.”
“Yikes,” he says, affectionately. “Hate to tell you. But it looks like you broke it, darlin’.”
“You think?” I look down again. “It’s not too bad.” Though now the pinkie seems to be throbbing from the attention. “Maybe I just need some ice,” I say, starting to stand.
He motions back to the couch. “You sit. I’ll get ice. We need to tape it to the other toe. I crunched a few in my rugby days. It’ll be right as rain in no time.” He lifts a one-minute finger. “Don’t move.”
I sit there, listening to him hum and gather supplies for my toe. Maybe he’s a great actor, but he couldn’t seem less guilty if he tried. In fact, he seems quite wonderful, as usual.
She doesn’t know anything.
I just have to ask him.
CHAPTER THIRTY
NOW
Noah rubs his temples like he has a headache. “I don’t get it. Someone attacked you guys and like …” He looks up at me, squinting. “Abducted your friends?”
“Yes,” I say, without hesitation. “I know it sounds crazy, but … yes, that’s exactly what happened.” As I pull the tube socks on, the fabric sticks to my skin. My wet jeans smell of smoke, drying stiff and warm on my body.
Noah sits a foot away from me on the hearth. “And you were there just for research, you said? For Crimeline?” He sounds, not suspicious, but not fully convinced either.
“Yes,” I say, then backtrack. “Sort of. I didn’t know they were taking me there. It was … a weird surprise.”
“I’ll say,” Esther grouches.
“It’s just …” His jittery knee bounces. “Hard to believe. Like … how do you not remember?”
“I don’t know,” I admit, with embarrassment. “We were pretty drunk though.” I don’t mention the White Widow. Esther would definitely throw me back in the snow for that one.
“Eric Myers is in jail though,” he says, half to himself, blinking hard. “He couldn’t be back.”
“I agree,” I say. “But from my interviews—”
“Who are you working for?” Esther interrupts.
A long pause follows this question.
The heat from the fire pushes against me. “As I said, Crimeline. That’s why we even—”
“No, no, no,” she crows, pointing an arthritic finger at me. “Someone put you up to this. And I want to know who it is. Right now.”
Tears pop into my eyes, and I try holding them back. “Nobody. I promise you. I’m telling you the truth. It’s honestly what happened.”
“Mom,” Noah says, with a weary sigh. “Why don’t you make us some coffee?”
“Coffee?” she warbles. “What, am I your servant now?” She huffs but gets up from the couch, wincing, her huge bulk diminished somehow. With a waddling, aching gait, she walks into the kitchen.
We wait her out in an awkward silence.
Once she’s out of earshot, Noah moves to her seat on the couch across from me. “My mom has memory problems,” he explains, embarrassed. “So she’s a little … off sometimes.”
