Mask Market

“I don’t smoke,” I said.

“Gave that up when you had the plastic surgery, did you?”

I didn’t say anything.

“Your voice,” Preston said, two fingers on his chin in a smug, pedantic pose. “It’s completely distinctive. I’d know it anywhere. I couldn’t be sure at first; maybe not smoking changed it a bit. But there’s a special…timbre to it. As if every word you say is wrapped around a threat.”

“You’re the one doing all the talking,” I said, just barely loud enough to carry across the room.

“Perfect!” he said, happily vindicated. “That’s it. That’s it, exactly.”

“She always blamed me,” he said, an hour and a half later. “And she would never tell me what I’d done wrong.”

“When did that start?”

“I…don’t know, exactly. It seems it was ever since she was a little girl. It was so…bizarre. I mean, I loved her so. She had to know that. No matter what she did, I always forgave her. The way she talked to me sometimes! My wife said I should put her over my knee, for being so disrespectful, but I never did, not once.”

I didn’t like the way his face morphed when he said “my wife,” but my own face showed him nothing.

“She was in trouble all the time?” I guessed.

“All the time,” he agreed, misery and mystery swirling in his voice. “She was smart; my goodness, was she smart. Her teachers said she could be anything she wanted, but she never applied herself, not to anything.”

“She went to public school?”

“And private school. And a residential facility…for troubled teens. Nothing made a difference.”

“That time I brought her back…?”

“She just ran away again. Not from us, from that…program we sent her to. The last resort. When she ran from there, she just disappeared. Fifteen years old, you wouldn’t think she would have the wherewithal to survive on her own.”

“Why didn’t you—?”

“What? Hire a man like you again? What good would it do? Beryl made it clear that she was not going to stay with us. A lawyer told us we could have her locked up—have her declared a ‘person in need of supervision,’ I think he called it—but that would just mean a state facility instead of a private one.”

“You never saw her again?”

“Oh, certainly I did. I’ll never forget that day. It’s an easy date to remember: nine, nine, ninety. Her eighteenth birthday. She drove right up to the house—the one in Westchester. Actually, I don’t think she drove herself; I had the sense that someone gave her a ride, and was waiting for her outside.”

“Did she—?”

“I asked her how had she managed to be on her own for all that time. She laughed at me. It was a nasty laugh. I can still hear it: ‘You think I was the only one to run away that night, Daddy?’

“I didn’t know what she meant, and it must have shown in my face. She told me she ran away with one of her teachers. I hadn’t heard—nobody told me about any such thing. She thought that was hilarious. ‘She didn’t run away from school, Daddy,’ she said. ‘She ran away from her husband.’”

He sat there, his expression stunned, as if hearing Beryl’s words again.

“I couldn’t…believe it for a minute,” he finally said. “What my daughter was telling me.”

“That she was gay?”

“No! I would never have cared about such a thing. Beryl knew that. We used to have very frank discussions. I talked to her about all the things I was supposed to: sex, drugs, drinking…. It wasn’t that Beryl was gay, it was that she wasn’t, do you understand?”

“She was just using that teacher to support her while she was on the run?”

“Yes,” he said, his voice trembling at the memory. “Using her, that’s right. And Beryl was proud of it, like it was a new game she had learned, and she was already the best at it.”

“That’s all she came to tell you?”

“No. That just came out,” he said, looking down at his lap. “What she came all that way to tell me was that I was a spineless coward.”

“Because…?”

“I don’t know,” Jeremy Preston said, wretchedly. “When I asked her what she was talking about, she just laughed that nasty little laugh of hers again.”

“Why are you really looking for her?” he asked, later.

“I ran across some information—more like a rumor, actually; I can’t speak for its accuracy, considering the source—that she might be in danger. This was in the middle of another case, nothing to do with her. Or you. But I remembered her from that time when I brought her back. And I thought…I’m not sure what I thought. I guess I just wanted to be sure she was safe.”

“So why did you come here with that story of yours?”

“She’s changed her name,” I said, flatly. “There’s a lot of reasons people do that. But in my business it usually means they don’t want the family’s brand on them.”

“You mean, you thought I was the reason?”

“No way to know,” I said, shrugging my shoulders.

“I didn’t know she changed her name. What does she call herself now?”

“Peta Bellingham,” I told him, watching his face for a tell.

“What kind of name is that?” he said, almost angrily. “I mean, it doesn’t connect to…anything I know.”

“I can’t tell you. Not yet, anyway.”

“You thought I might know where she is…but that I wouldn’t want to tell you?”

“Right. I thought she might be…aware of the situation. That the rumor I’d heard had some truth to it. I thought she might be staying underground until things got straightened out. Maybe staying with you, I don’t know.”

“You wanted to help her?”

“Yeah. Yeah, I did. I still do.”

“Because…?”

“I don’t have a good answer for that one. Maybe I’m just chasing down things I did when I was young.”

“Things you did wrong?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “I couldn’t know that until I talk to her.”

“Bringing her back to me!” he said suddenly. “That’s what you thought you might have done wrong.”

I didn’t deny it.

“I don’t know where she is,” Jeremy Preston said. He stood up, paced in front of the cold fireplace for a minute, then turned to face me. “I don’t know where she is,” he repeated. “But I’ll pay you to find her.”

“Why?”

“Because I want the answer to your question, too, Mr. Burke. A lot more than you ever could.”

Preston told me he met the woman who would become his wife when he’d been a student at Harvard—“That’s right,” he interrupted himself, sharply, as if I had challenged his words. When I didn’t respond, he visibly relaxed, then went on again. All ponderous and pedantic, like a celebrity twit being interviewed.

“Those were tumultuous times. Not just Vietnam. The civil-rights movement, feminism, music…When they talk about a ‘counterculture,’ that’s very accurate. I was a senior, my wife was a sophomore. At BU, just across the river. I met her at a teach-in. Later, she told me that she wanted to marry me from the minute I stood up and… well, made a little speech, I guess.

“We had an understanding. A contract, even. We weren’t going to be dropouts, we were going to be… participants. Change-agents. Not by living on some commune, or marching in protests. It’s all very well and good to talk about the inevitable rise of the proletariat, but we knew revolutions need financing to move forward, the same