Beautiful Lies

right thing coming here. Your uncle Max wanted to know you’d always be taken care of, you know?”

I nodded, turned, and shook the hand he offered.

“Thanks, Mr. Harriman.”

I am not a very good driver. Partly from inexperience and partly because of the tendency of my mind to wander. I got into a bunch of accidents as a teenager. Minor stuff, always my fault, leading my father to lament, “Ridley, do you ever leave the house and not hit something?” Their insurance went up, the repair bills were not small. But I think their major concern was how much worse it could get. Every fender bender was a reminder of the frailty of my life and how my independence meant that they could no longer be on the lookout for dangers that might befall me. They represented a loss of control.

I rented a black Jeep Grand Cherokee (unbelievably expensive) in the West Village later that day and headed out of the city. I crawled up the Henry Hudson through a gauntlet of construction sites (which I swear have been under way for more than fifteen years) and I finally broke free of the snarl at the exit to the George Washington Bridge. I was headed to Jersey. Not to my parents, as I’d promised Harriman. No. I couldn’t have done that, good as it sounded. There was no going home now.

I’m no private investigator, unlike some people, but I am a writer. Which means I’ve followed up a few leads, tracked down a few people over the years. I’ve convinced a few reticent people to talk to me. After leaving Alexander Harriman, I’d returned to my place and sat on the couch with a giant cup of coffee and stared out my window at the concrete wall and dark windows that were my view. I thought about my story. And I asked myself something that I often wondered when I was writing an article or a profile: If I was reading this story, what would I want to know next? What are the big questions left unanswered so far?

I had no intention of going home to my parents or of pretending none of this had ever happened. It wasn’t an option. The point of safe return had passed when I agreed to meet Christian Luna in the park. The path back to my old life was closed completely and there was nothing to do but move forward.

I felt unbelievably calm. You’d think I’d have been a complete basket case, but I remember something a psychologist once told me, someone my parents and I saw after my uncle Max died and my father decided we all needed grief counseling. She said that grief is not linear. It’s not a slow progression forward toward healing, it’s a zigzag, a terrible back-and-forth from devastated to okay until finally there are more okay patches and fewer devastated ones. The mind can’t handle emotions like grief and terror for any sustained period of time, so it takes some downtime, she’d said. I’m not sure that I was in a state of grief, but maybe. Christian Luna, a man who believed himself to be my father, was dead. Jake was a stranger who’d lied to me. And I wasn’t sure who I was any longer. But somehow I was transcendent, able to compartmentalize my fear and think about the questions that needed answering in this, the story of my life.

I mentioned that I thought the biggest question was: Who killed Teresa Stone? Like I said, I thought the answer to that question would answer a lot of the others. The way I saw it, there were a couple other biggies. Tell me if you agree. First was: Who the hell is Jake? But I couldn’t answer that without talking to him, so the answer was going to have to wait, since PI Jake/Harley was currently MIA. The second question was: Who killed Christian Luna and why? Again, I was at the wall on this one. I had no way of knowing or even beginning to find out. Then last: Did Christian Luna tell the truth? Was I his daughter? And was he innocent of the murder of Teresa Elizabeth Stone?

I read through the article that Jake/Harley had found from the New Jersey Record. Maria Cacciatore was Teresa’s neighbor, the woman who had taken care of Jessie while Teresa worked. I booted my computer, dialed up the Internet, and went into LexisNexis. Within seconds, I had telephone numbers and addresses for three M. Cacciatores in Hackettstown, New Jersey. I also found a number for the management company of the Oak Groves apartment complex. “Clean, safe, affordable apartment living!” hailed the Web site. I’d never thought of the words clean and safe as superlatives to be used in advertising, but I guess you worked with what you had. From the pictures, the complex looked like low- income housing, which I guessed made sense, considering Teresa’s situation when she was murdered. I figured if I couldn’t locate Maria Cacciatore, maybe someone in the management company could turn me on to someone who had lived in the apartment complex back in the seventies.

You might think I would have made these calls before heading out to Jersey, but sitting around making phone calls that might or might not be successful did not seem like action to me. I know I was supposed to be careful, but I figured that since Jake/Harley had lied about his name, his profession, and who knows what else, then I was released from the promise I’d made him to be careful. So I headed to New Jersey.

I was the only person in New York City who didn’t own a cellular phone. It wasn’t really a philosophical decision. It was just that I worked from home and was pretty easy to reach. I didn’t drive usually, so it wasn’t as if it would come in handy in the event of a breakdown. Cell phones didn’t work on the subway, which was the only place I could imagine one being useful, as in “I’m stuck on the train, running late, et cetera.” And frankly, if you couldn’t reach me, it meant that I didn’t want to be reached. My friends and family bitched endlessly. Naturally (you should be getting to know me by now), that only made me want one even less. But I pulled off of Route 80 at the Rockaway Mall and picked up a phone at one of those AT&T kiosks. I could envision a need for one on this errand. I got a tiny red Nokia, barely bigger than a pack of Chiclets. I also grabbed a Cin-a-Bon and an Orange Julius while I was there, which I ate and drank in the parking lot while examining my new toy. God bless America.

I know it sounds like I was pretty solid and clear headed, if a little rash, a little reckless, and I guess I was. I was scared, still rattled from the night before, which flashed with sickeningly vivid clarity. But I felt like, maybe erroneously, I had taken control of the situation. Maria Cacciatore was my only link to a past of which until a few days ago I had been ignorant. If she was still alive and I could find her, then maybe the truth hadn’t died last night with Christian Luna. I was infused with hope and the purpose of my mission to find out who killed Teresa Stone, what had happened to Jessie, and what it meant to me.

I knew it was a long shot, but at the same time I had a feeling I was going to find her. The universe conspires to reveal the truth and to make your path easy if you have the courage to follow the signs. And I was long on courage that day. Short on foresight, maybe, but long on courage.

When I got to Hackettstown, I pulled into the parking lot of 7-Eleven and started making calls.

The first two calls didn’t go well. Maybe it was our alienated, postmodern times, maybe it was all the previous telemarketers that had been fended off before my call. Or maybe the Cacciatores were just a very unfriendly clan. Martino Cacciatore suggested that I pull my head out of my ass and stop calling people who weren’t interested in my business. I’d interrupted the game show he’d been watching and now he’d never know what the correct price bid for the Caribbean cruise had been. Margaret Cacciatore was hard of hearing and after ten minutes of our yelling back and forth to each other, she issued an angry grunt and just hung up on me and didn’t pick up when I called back. I dialed the last number.

“Hello?” came the voice of an older woman.

“Hi. I’m looking for a Maria Cacciatore,” I said tentatively.

“I’m not interested,” she said, and the line went dead. I dialed the number again.

“Hello?” she said, her voice wary and annoyed.

“Ms. Cacciatore, I’m not a telemarketer.”

“I know, I know. I’ve won a sweepstakes for a free two-night stay in Orlando, right? I’m under no obligation to buy anything, right?”

“No, ma’am. I’m really not selling or offering anything.”

“Well,” she said grudgingly. “What do you want, then?”

“Are you Maria Cacciatore?” I said.

“Yes,” she said with a sigh. “Look. What is it?”

“Did you know a Teresa Elizabeth Stone and her daughter, Jessie?”

There was a pause here and I thought maybe she’d hung up. Then I heard her breathing. “Yes,” she said finally. “A long time ago. Teresa…she died. May she rest in peace.”

“I know, Mrs. Cacciatore,” I said. “I have some questions for you about her. And about Christian Luna. Can you help me?”

“Who did you say you were?” She sounded upset, angry, as if I had forced her to recall something she would have been happier forgetting.

“My name is Ridley Jones. I’m a writer doing a story on missing children who were never found. I came