Long Gone

misunderstanding.”

“Or maybe I’ll wind up stepping on the toes of your homicide investigators and messing something up big-time. I don’t think either one of us wants that, right?”

Not to mention that forwarding the report would be less work for you.

“You know, I shouldn’t have even called. I’m sorry to have bothered you.”

“So now you’re saying you don’t want to file a report?”

“I let my imagination get away with me.”

“No offense, lady, but I don’t want to learn next week that my failure to write down this license plate fucked up some shield’s murder case. You know the name of the detectives involved, or do I need to look it up?”

Her cell phone rang. She recognized the prefix of the incoming number as Arthur Cronin’s law firm. He was not going to like this one bit.

Hank Beckman finally made it through the knot of standstill traffic snarled at the intersection of Bowery and Canal Street. That neighborhood always brought a smile to his face. The coexistence of Chinatown dim sum restaurants, the remains of Little Italy, and emerging hipster boutiques and bars was at once bizarre and happy.

He’d been raised in Montana. After getting his undergrad degree and a CPA with the help of Uncle Sam, he’d completed the requisite years in the army and then put in for the bureau. New agents don’t have the luxury of choosing their cities of service, but he’d assumed that the demand for a spot like Montana or Idaho-working bank robberies and gun cases-would be low.

But then thanks to Brad Pitt, Robert Redford, and a little flick called A River Runs Through It, suddenly every man with a midlife crisis and a fishing rod wanted to move to the northwest corner of the country. Small populations, combined with low crime rates, meant tiny field offices with few agents. Hank wound up with a job in the bureau, but an assignment in the Big Apple.

He’d planned on getting out as fast as he could, but he’d become accustomed to it faster than he’d anticipated. He bought the apartment near Prospect Park. The city wasn’t an easy place to make friends, but Hank never really needed anyone’s company. For a while, he felt like he was friends with some of Jen’s crowd, but when she moved out, he didn’t feel comfortable staying in touch. Then after her husband’s plane crash, Ellen found herself a forty- year-old widow in Montana, living alone on a ranch. She said the sound of a new life in New York wasn’t so bad. Two years later, she had the Upper East Side apartment with a view of the park from a terrace. Then within a year, she had met and was quickly engaged to Randall Updike, or at least that was the name he’d been using at the time.

Sometimes Hank wondered what would have happened if he hadn’t run that background check on “Randall.” Ellen would have inevitably lost the bulk of her money to Larson, he suspected. She would presumably have still been saddled with the clinical depression and untreated alcoholism that had led to her death. But maybe he would have noticed his sister’s problems. If the man she loved had conned her out of her last dime, Hank would have known to watch out for her. He would have recognized the depth of the attack on her. But as it was, at the time, he had been arrogant enough to think that she should have been grateful to her little brother for saving her.

Now, as he made his way back to Brooklyn across the Manhattan Bridge, he was fairly certain that Alice Humphrey had spotted him but had not managed to follow him from the East Village. He was also fairly certain that Alice Humphrey-with her practical shoes and clumsy gait, a bit like a general stomping his way through a field-was not the same woman he had seen cruising in stiletto heels toward Travis Larson’s apartment. He was profoundly less certain, however, about what to do with that puzzling piece of information.

Chapter Forty-Two

A lice rose from damp moss beneath a towering mulberry tree, trying to shake the dirt from her ruffled skirt. She heard footsteps approaching.

“She went that way!”

It was a man’s voice. Somehow she knew he was looking for her, and that she did not want to be found. She ran through the woods in red patent saddle shoes, watching the ground beneath her, aiming for flat patches of soil between rocks and entangled roots. She saw a spot of light up ahead in the clearing.

When she emerged from the trees, she recognized the backyard of her family’s home in Bedford. The landscaped grass. Two hammocks beneath the willow tree. The swimming pool they rarely used.

She slid open the glass door on the deck and stepped inside the house. She felt taller now. Her saddle shoes and ruffled skirt had been replaced by her current-day blue jeans and all-weather boots.

“Mom? Papa? Ben?”

The kitchen was as she remembered it from her childhood: walnut cabinets, burgundy wallpaper, brass fixtures. She turned the corner expecting to find the living room, but instead she was on the set of Life with Dad. It was the pilot episode. She saw a younger version of herself on the sofa in a three-sided living room. The saddle shoes and ruffles were back.

The man who played her father delivered the setup line: “Don’t look at me. My idea of the four food groups are spaghetti, ice cream, beef jerky, and beer.” The set fell silent. “Your line, Alice.”

She wanted to whisper to her younger self: That’s what you get when your mom is a dad.

Then the line was delivered. A studio audience she couldn’t see laughed, as required. Even at ten years old, she had known the line wasn’t funny. She had known the laughter was feigned.

She heard the back door slide open behind her and moved farther into the house for a place to hide. She ran up the stairs, into her father’s study, and slipped behind the steel gray brocade curtains. She peeked out at the decor that had caused such a ruckus between her parents. It’s my office, Rose. It is my one private space. Why can’t I keep it the way I like it? For Christ’s sake, it looks like a French whorehouse vomited on a Duran Duran video. Her mother had insisted that her father get rid of the outdated wood paneling and shag carpet, replacing it with a black, white, and red color palette, glass and steel furniture, and Patrick Nagel paintings that would appear dated within a couple of years.

For some reason, Alice could not stop staring at the room. The black-and-white-striped wallpaper that her father had called schizophrenia-inducing. The sofa in the center of the room, whose red velvet grain she had run her fingers across so deliberately that day the police had come asking questions about Ben’s keg party.

Something about that room felt so familiar. She’d known it in her childhood, of course. Standing there behind the curtains, she could even smell the remnants of her father’s herbal cigarettes-the ones he’d turned to for years until he’d weaned himself for good when Alice was in college. But something about the room felt more current. She didn’t want to stop looking at it. She wanted to stay there and remember.

But she heard the footsteps and accompanying voices headed her way. Their steps were deliberate now. In sync with one another. Step. Step. Step. Step. She heard a bell that rang with each approaching stride. Step/ring. Step/ring. The door opened, and she tried to make herself smaller behind her father’s curtains. She took a deep breath and found comfort in the smell of her father’s exhaled smoke.

The footsteps stopped, but the chime of the bells continued and became more aggressive and shrill. No longer a ring, but a buzz. Buzz. Buzz. Buzz.

Her eyes darted open to blackness, near total but for the digital display of her bedside clock and a sliver of light penetrating the crack in her curtains. She heard an urgent buzzing from her security system. Some gin-brined idiot on St. Mark’s was leaning on the outside doorbell again, one of the many downsides to living in the middle of Manhattan’s go-to neighborhood for early-twenty-something binge drinking.

She closed her eyes again and willed the noise to stop. It did not.

The parquet floor felt cold beneath her bare feet as she padded to the front door and held down the intercom button. “You’re leaning on a stranger’s doorbell, asshole. Go. Home.”

She prepared herself for one of the usual retorts. “Bitch” was most common. Occasionally she got an actual apology. More than a few times she’d been invited to join the drunk for one last round. But tonight’s visitor was not the usual fare.

“It’s Jeff. Let me up.”