“No, but I’m working with the police.”
“The police are no good. They do nothing.” Her chin wobbled. “I am so tired of questions, and then nothing. Always nothing.”
“Could I come in?” he asked again.
“The police were just here.” She said it as if he were slow on the uptake.
Desmond cleared his throat. “When did you last hear from Max?”
Galina Brantov stared down at the tangled yard, as if the truth were buried under the weeds. “He never forgets my birthday.” Her voice was tender, almost shy. “He is a good boy.”
“He comes over on your birthday?” Desmond asked.
She shook her head.
“Does he call you?”
She played with a gold bracelet around her wrist.
“Did Max buy you that bracelet?” Desmond asked.
She looked at him, eyes wide in wonder, as if he were brilliant for figuring that out. “Yes,” she answered. A moment later, there was the sound of glass breaking inside. Mrs. Brantov turned. “You clumsy girl! What did you do now?”
There was no answer.
“I must go,” Galina Brantov said. “Come back when you have found my Maxim. Tell him I love him, no matter what. It doesn’t matter what he’s done.” Her voice choked on the last word, but she’d already closed the door in Desmond’s face.
He stood there for a moment, listening. There were voices, both female, but he couldn’t make out their words. Ashamed to be eavesdropping on the stoop, he backed away. When he got to his car, he noticed a curtain move. Someone was watching him from inside the house. He scanned the other windows but saw no movement. Was it possible that Max was in his mother’s house? Tell him I love him, no matter what. It doesn’t matter what he’s done, his mother had said. If Max was a murderer, she’d still stand by him.
He backed out of the driveway, but parked his car in the gravel next to the street in front of the evergreens. He wasn’t done yet. He walked to the neighboring house, where no one was home. Then he tried the house on the other side of the Brantovs’. A red-haired woman in her late sixties answered the door. She was wearing a woolly cardigan and fleecy track pants.
“I’m sorry to bother you,” Desmond said. “My name is Desmond Edgars. I was wondering if you know the Brantov family.”
“Yes, of course. We’ve lived here for thirty-two years. Are you a detective?”
“No, ma’am. I’m here because… well, it’s a long story. The heart of it is that my sister, Dominique Monaghan, was murdered last weekend.”
“The model?” The woman’s eyes opened wide. “I heard about that. At a house in the Poconos.”
“What you haven’t seen in the news yet is that they found Max Brantov’s blood at that same house,” Desmond said. “They matched it up with DNA they had in a database of missing children.”
The woman put her hand to her mouth. “They found poor Max!”
“No, ma’am. Not a body, just some blood, but it showed he’d been there.”
“Poor Max.” The woman shook her head. “Please come in. Harold! Turn the TV off. You have to hear this.”
A man padded out of the front room. He was bald and wore furry slippers with monster toes.
“Harold, this is, ah…”
“Desmond Edgars.” He reached out his hand to shake. The man’s hand was papery yet firm.
“He’s Dominique Monaghan’s brother.”
“Who?”
“The model they found on the weekend.” The woman was exasperated. “You never know anything that’s going on. All you do is watch stupid movies. You should be watching the news.” She looked at Desmond. “I watch the news all the time. I like to keep my brain sharp.”
Desmond smiled at her, then turned to her husband. “I was telling your wife that they found DNA evidence that Max Brantov was in that same house in the Poconos. I drove here to talk to the family, to figure out if there’s some connection between Max’s disappearance and what happened to Dominique, but Mrs. Brantov had been drinking.”
“Galina is always drinking. She’s a kindhearted woman, but she’s been a wreck since Max disappeared.”
“Does she live alone?”
“No, her daughter lives with her. Polina, that’s the girl’s name. She’s very sweet, but so shy she can barely string three words together. She walks around like she’s in a trance. Poor thing.” She lowered her voice. “Sometimes I think she might be on drugs.”
“After Max vanished, the family got really paranoid,” her husband added. “I can’t really blame them, I guess. They put that big fence up around their property. As if that were going to change anything. It’s like closing the door of the barn after the horses escape.”
Desmond frowned. “Just the girl and her mother live here?”
“The older boy, Valery, is there sometimes, but you never know when you’ll see him.”
The woman gave a little cough. “He’s a bit of a character, that one. Even when Valery was a boy, he was very aloof. He never speaks to anyone. They’re an antisocial bunch.”
“I used to wonder why they came to America, since they didn’t want to socialize with anyone,” Harold piped up.
“Except Max. He was always such a nice boy.”
“Yeah, Max was a great kid,” Harold said. “Our son was a year behind Max in school, but they used to play together all the time.”
His wife nodded at the decrepit yard and dilapidated house. “You wouldn’t know it now, but the house and the yard used to be beautiful. Now it’s just an ugly, overgrown mess. Not that we can see much, with that ugly fence they put up.”
“When Max disappeared, did you have any idea what happened? The police report said he ran away.”
She shook her head firmly. “Max would never have run away. He was a good kid, always thoughtful. But there was trouble in the house, no doubt about that. The family had a lot of problems. The parents drank and fought. I never understood what they were screaming at each other, but they threw things. Pots, pans, phones, you
