decided. “Worse yet, I wouldn’t put it past the detectives to leak it to the media deliberately. Your mother must not look as if she’s hiding from them.”
Elliott made the call and suggested gently that she head home early. By the time Mom got home on Wednesday evening, everything Elliott had predicted had come to pass. The media, like bloodhounds on a fresh scent, had effectively reopened the cases of the other three young women who had disappeared from nightclubs, and reported the fact that Mack and his college friends had been present at the Scene the night the first girl, Emily Valley, vanished. The Mother’s Day connection between Mack’s routine phone calls and Leesey Andrews’s message to her father was also headline news, of course.
Mom, Elliott’s arm around her firmly, had to fight her way past the cameras and microphones when she and Elliott arrived at Sutton Place. Her greeting to me was exactly what I expected but hoped wouldn’t happen. Circles under eyes that were swollen with weeping, for the first time looking every day of her sixty-two years, my mother said, “Carolyn, we agreed to let Mack live his own life. Now because of your meddling, my son is being hunted down like a criminal. Elliott has very kindly offered me the hospitality of his home. My bags are still in his car, and I intend to go there. In the meantime, you can contend with the mess out on the streets and make your apologies to our neighbors for destroying their privacy. Before I go I want to hear that tape.”
Quietly I retrieved the tape, then sat with her in the kitchen and played it for her. Mack’s voice, joking with his drama teacher, “Do I sound like Laurence Olivier or Tom Hanks?”-then-the dramatic change in his tone when he began to recite the Shakespeare quote.
When I turned it off, Mom’s face was pale with grief. “There was something wrong,” she whispered. “Why didn’t he come to me? Nothing could have been so bad that I wouldn’t have helped him.” Then she reached out her hand to me. “Give me the tape, Carolyn,” she said.
“Mom, I can’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a subpoena for it. You think it means Mack was in trouble. Another explanation is that he was simply reading a drama assignment. Elliott and I are meeting tomorrow morning with a criminal defense lawyer. I need to have it with me to play for him.”
Without another word, my mother turned from me. Elliott whispered, “I’ll call you later,” before he rushed down the hall after her. When they were gone, I turned on the tape again. “…I all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries-”
Mack may have been acting, or he might have been talking about himself, but with a combination of pain and bitterness, I thought that now those words were fully applicable to me. A couple of minutes later, the apartment phone rang. As I picked it up and said, “Hello,” whoever was on the other end hung up.
35
H e couldn’t get enough of the new media stories about the other three girls, Emily, Rosemarie, and Virginia. He remembered them all so clearly. Emily had been the first. The newspapers hadn’t made too much of her disappearance at the beginning. She had been a runaway, so when she once again didn’t come home to Trenton, New Jersey, even her parents conceded it was possible she had simply chosen to disappear.
But when Rosemarie went missing three years later, they began to think it was possible Emily had been abducted. Then, when Virginia vanished four years ago, the media had a field day connecting the three of them.
Of course, it didn’t last. Every so often some would-be Pulitzer Prize winner would write a feature story linking the three young women, but with nothing new to report, the public’s interest dropped to zero.
Leesey had changed all that. “Mack, where are you now?” was the question on everyone’s lips.
Dressed in a hooded running suit and wearing dark glasses, he was jogging on Sutton Place. As he expected, it was crowded with media vans. Wonderful, he thought, wonderful. He removed the small metal box from his pocket, unsnapped it, and took out Leesey’s cell phone. Now when he dialed, they’d be able to pinpoint his location as being around here. But that’s what I want, isn’t it? he asked himself with a smile, as he dialed the phone number of the apartment, waited to hear Carolyn answer the call, then disconnected. Then, quickening his pace, he disappeared into the brisk pedestrian traffic on Fifty-seventh Street.
36
B ruce Galbraith and his wife, Dr. Barbara Hanover Galbraith, had, so far as possible, avoided talking about Mack MacKenzie. But finally, on Wednesday evening, after the children were in bed and they had finished watching the ten o’clock news, Bruce knew he had to raise the subject.
They were in the library of their spacious Park Avenue apartment. Whenever Bruce was away on a business trip, the realization of how happy he was in his home and with his family hit him afresh. Barbara had changed to light green pajamas and unpinned her ash blond hair so that it fell loose on her shoulders. He had long since passed the days when he felt clumsy and awkward in her presence, but even so, the sense that he might one day wake up and find he’d been dreaming, that life as he knew it was an illusion, always lingered in his subconscious.
He had witnessed the growing tension in Barbara for the past few days since the media began linking Mack to the disappearance of Leesey Andrews, the girl from Connecticut, and then to the murder of the drama teacher.
During the broadcast, with the jealousy he had never overcome, Bruce had watched his wife’s face when pictures of Mack were flashed on the screen. After he pushed the power button on the remote and watched the screen turn dark, he knew it was time to discuss what needed to be done.
“Barb,” he said, “I was in the nightclub the night that first girl disappeared.”
“I know, but so were twenty other guys from Columbia, including Nick and Mack,” Barbara said, avoiding his eyes.
“Carolyn MacKenzie called me, but I haven’t returned her call. I’ll bet anything that she follows up on it. As the police investigation widens, it’s inevitable they’ll look me up. Nick and I were Mack’s roommates, after all.”
He watched as his wife tried to force back tears. “What are you driving at?” she asked, her voice unsteady.
“I think you and the kids should visit your father in Martha’s Vineyard. He’s had three heart attacks. No one would question it if you tell people he’s in bad shape again.”
“What about school?”
“For what we’re paying, we can arrange to get lesson plans and a private tutor. The school year is over in a few weeks’ time anyhow.”
He saw the uncertainty on his wife’s face. “Barbara, you joined a practice with two other pediatric surgeons so you’d have a measure of control over your personal life. I would say this is a time to assert that control.”
He got up, walked over to her, bent down, and kissed the top of her head. “I could kill Mack for what he did to you,” he said quietly.
“I’m over it, Bruce. I really am.”
No you’re not, he thought. But I’ve learned to live with that, and there’s no way on God’s earth I’ll let Mack hurt you again.
37
O n Wednesday evening, shortly after Mom and Elliott left, Detective Barrott phoned. I had thought that things couldn’t get much worse, but I was wrong. Barrott quietly asked if I knew that the call I had just received, that I had thought was a wrong number, had been made from Leesey Andrews’s cell phone. I was so shocked that I think it was a full minute before I said something like, “But that’s impossible.” I paused to digest the fact. “That’s
