And She Was (11 page)

The quiet started to roar in Brenna’s ears, so she shut the light off. She walked back to the living room, to Trent’s desk. Even in his absence, her assistant always seemed to be around. It was the cologne. His leather chair, with all those beads and lacy garters draped across the back, tended to trap the scent and hold it, so that even on those rare occasions he took a few vacation days in a row, Brenna couldn’t walk by his desk without feeling a migraine coming on. She didn’t mind it so much now though. Pathetic as it sounded, the cologne smell felt sort of like company.

She noticed a new babe, pictured at the center of Trent’s bulletin board—a platinum blonde with huge pillowy lips and the type of body that would stand out anywhere, except for maybe an inflatable doll factory. She had to be a porn star, or perhaps a really high-end bachelor party stripper—some kind of professional at any rate, because in the picture a shirtless Trent (nipple rings gleaming) was clutching her chin and licking the side of her face as if it were a giant Creamsicle. Yet the blonde was smiling, her eyes half closed . . . almost seeming to enjoy it. Brenna shook her head.
That woman deserves an Academy Award
.

Okay, so maybe the cologne was getting to her a little. Brenna made for the linen closet in the hall. She kept a twenty-pack of Ivory Soap in there, and she grabbed one fast and unwrapped it. She held it up to her face, feeling as if she were on a foreign planet whose atmosphere was made of Trent’s cologne, and the soap was her only chance of survival.

Oh, that’s much better . . .
Brenna closed her eyes and inhaled, and without warning, she was back in her car in front of the Neff house, Nick Morasco leaning into her open window . . .

“I’m telling you, because it helps to know what you’re up against.”

He leans in and closes her door, his hand brushing hers, and for a half second, it registers that Nick Morasco smells of Ivory Soap, and that every man should smell of Ivory Soap. The skin warms at Brenna’s neck, down the length of her back. Her gaze flicks onto his shoulders, across the opening of the white cotton shirt, and she’s thinking,
While we’re on the subject of up against . . .

“Cut it
out
!” Brenna spat out the words, dissipating the memory though her skin still felt warmish from it . . .
Unbelievable
. That really had passed through her mind tonight, hadn’t it? Brenna’s memory wasn’t capable of playing tricks on her, and so there was no question.

A tweed-wearing cop who thinks I’m something out of Oliver Sacks. How hard-up can I possibly be?

Brenna headed over to her own desk and switched on her computer. She picked up the pearl-handled letter opener she kept on her desk—the only thing of her father’s she owned—and twirled it in her hands, waiting.

Brenna wanted to believe she was at her computer by happenstance. That she had no idea what had brought her into this chair, but as long as she was here and awake, well, maybe she’d get some work done: Look into Carol Wentz, check out some of her interests, that search engine she’d visited, Google her again . . . But Brenna did know why she was on her computer. She’d known that she would be on it as soon as she’d woken up from the dream. Brenna knew the reason as well as she knew her own self, and Carol Wentz had nothing to do with it.

She heard a group of drunken girls passing by her apartment, their laughter drifting up to her open window, one shouting, “Stop, I can’t breathe!” which reminded her of the dream again, of those bandages pressing against Clea’s face . . .

Brenna hated her computer for taking so long to boot up, hated herself for being so impatient. She clutched the letter opener. Put it down. Picked it up again . . . But finally, she was able to get online, to go to her e-mail, and do what she’d wanted to do so badly, ever since she’d woken up.

According to her instant messenger, Jim was online. Of course he was. Jim had always been a night owl. He used to stay up till two, three in the morning writing his articles for the
Trumpet
, and then wake up at seven for his job. Brenna had thought maybe he’d get to bed earlier now that he was an editor and didn’t have articles due—especially since Faith was a morning show host who left for work at 6
A.M.
But as it turned out, Jim still burned the midnight oil. Or so Brenna had learned.

She’d been instant messaging with her ex-husband, after his new wife went to sleep, nearly every night for the past ten months. Brenna didn’t know if that was healthy or not, but to be honest she didn’t care. Seeing Jim Rappaport in person brought on memories so vivid, she had to turn away from him, couldn’t look him in the eye or hear the timbre of his voice for fear of reliving a fight, or worse yet something tender and wonderful and still real under her skin. It was always Faith who brought Maya to her apartment, Faith she spoke to on the phone, all at Brenna’s request—and as a result, she’d gotten to missing Jim terribly.

But as words on a screen, Jim worked. They could be friends this way. They could talk, and talking with Jim soothed Brenna, the same way Maya’s breathing soothed her. It was proof he was alive, and it was something more than that.

Don’t you ever sleep????
she typed.

His response was immediate:
Takes one to know one
.

Yeah, well. I had a bad dream.

Tell me about it.

You had a bad dream, too?

No. E-mail is a pain in the ass—no inflection. I meant: Tell me about YOUR dream.

Brenna smiled. For the dozenth time, it occurred to her that if they’d forgotten about marriage counseling and tried IMing instead, she and Jim might still be together. That was a pipe dream of course. Jim was better off with Faith, and Brenna was better off with Lee the GPS.

He wrote:
You there? Instant messenger says you stopped typing.

Yeah, just a sec.

She wrote out the dream and sent it. After about thirty seconds, Jim started to type.

The words appeared:
Could mean a new beginning.

Huh?

The butterfly. Out of the cocoon. You know? A new life where Clea is concerned.

Possible, I guess,
she typed.
But I didn’t feel that way.

How did you feel?

Brenna thought for a long time. Finally, she tried:
Suffocated. Scared. Confused
. Like most people who had been through a lot of analysis, Brenna knew all about dreams. The subconscious, as it turned out, was a terrible punster. For instance, the night after Brenna signed her first big-paying client—a Wall Street trader who wanted to track down his slacker younger brother—she’d dreamed that Mr. Howell from
Gilligan’s Island
was chasing her around a haunted house.

When she’d told her then-shrink Sheila Shiner about it, Sheila had said, matter-of-factly, “Mr. Howell in a haunted house. You’re afraid of wealth.”

It was the same thing with this dream of Clea. Somewhere in that surreal scene lurked a bad pun, waiting to be groaned at.
A missing woman in bandages, wrapped up in bandages . . .

Brenna recalled Nelson Wentz last night, sitting in his office with his face in his hands.
“I was so wrapped up in my own life,” he says, his voice muffled by thick palms. “I was so wrapped up I didn’t pay enough attention.”
The room smells of Purell, and Brenna thinks,
Wrapped up in what? This?
She is not watching Nelson, though. She’s looking at the computer screen, at Carol Wentz’s search history. She is staring at the name of the search engine Carol had visited twelve times in the past week, but had never used for a search. The name of the search engine is Chrysalis.org.

Butterfly wings.
Brenna had been dreaming about the Chrysalis search engine.

Jim’s words appeared on-screen:
Do you have a new client? Could the confusion have something to do with work?

Brenna smiled.
How is it in my head? Comfortable in there? Can I get you a drink?

Great minds . . .

Brenna typed:
Any reason why you would visit a search engine if you weren’t going to search for anything?

Your missing person visited Chrysalis?

Yep. How’d you guess?

If she’d visited Yahoo, you’d have dreamed of cowboys.

Brenna had checked out Chrysalis.org on Nelson’s computer, and again on her own computer as soon as she’d gotten home, and she’d used it herself once. June 7, 2002. Google had been down for a few hours that day.

Really, she hadn’t seen anything special about it—a simple homepage that consisted mainly of the search box and a swirly logo that was a little too unicorns-walk-among-us for Brenna’s taste, but nothing to think about for more than a few seconds. To the left of the page, there had been a list of other services, all with “Chrys” as a prefix—ChrysNews, ChrysWeather, ChrysMovies . . .

Brenna went to Chrysalis, stared at the screen. It looked exactly the way she’d remembered it—of course it did. She told Jim,
I’m looking at it now. I still don’t get it
.

Jim typed:
Go to the other services, and click on the bottom icon.

It was simply a plus sign—Brenna hadn’t even noticed it before—and when she clicked on it, ChrysBlogs, ChrysForSingles, and ChrysChats popped up. Brenna typed:
Interesting . . .

Your missing person single?

No, but the chats look promising.
Carol Wentz was a woman of many hobbies, that was for sure . . . Between the French cooking and the charity work and the book club and that damn closet full of crafts, it was no wonder she never had the time of day to give her husband. Sure enough, there was a chat room on Chrysalis for practically every hobby imaginable—all mixed together with chats for women going through menopause, single-parent families, infertile couples, and even victims of violent crime, all under the insanely inclusive heading of “Living.”

Jim typed:
You’re welcome.

Sorry—Thanks! Just wading through about a million ChrysChats.
Brenna paused a moment, then typed the words and sent them.
I’m really glad you’re out there
.
Was that too much?

As well you should be.

Brenna grinned.
Jim.
So what should I try first? The French cooking chat?

Two words: Boudin noir.

In an instant, Brenna was deep inside May 30, 1994, in a Paris bistro called La Muguet, some horrifying French version of the Beatles’ greatest hits playing over the speaker system.
Brenna and Jim are four days into their honeymoon, and it’s 9:15
P.M.
Some French guy with one of those voices that sounds like he’s crying all the time is belting out “Yellow Submarine” at far too loud a volume, but it doesn’t matter because they’re on their second bottle of chateau neuf du pape, and Brenna is savoring a bite of a crispy-skinned chicken that may be the most perfect thing she’s ever tasted, trying to make it last forever. Meanwhile, Jim—who thinks it’s exciting and spontaneous to order random items he’s never heard of—is biting into a large cylindrical object the color of eggplant. He calls the waiter over. “
Qu’est ce que c’est?
”

“Boudin noir, monsieur,” the waiter says. “It is sausage, made from the blood of pigs.” A look crosses Jim’s face—much like Charlton Heston at the end of
Soylent Green
. Brenna bursts out laughing.

Jim asked:
You remember?

Brenna was laughing now, much as she’d laughed then, her eyes blurring from tears, her head thrown back. She caught her breath and wrote:
What do you think?!

Jim replied fast:
I’d type you one of those smiley face things, but you hate those smiley face things.

Brenna double-clicked on the French cooking chat, but when it asked her for a screen name and password, she wasn’t sure what she should call herself:
BoudinBetty? CrepeSuzette?
She typed at Jim:
Ever go into a hobby chat room?

Uh, no. Wait—does bondage count as a hobby?

Good one. Want to join me?

In a French cooking chat room? Are you serious?

Brenna sighed. She supposed she could call herself something simple—NYCFoodie sounded okay. But what was she supposed to do when she was in there?
Hey, sorry to bug you guys, but did you happen to see a woman named Carol in here? About fifty, dirty blonde hair, beautiful kitchen?

Jim typed:
So anyway, I’m sorry.

Sorry about what?

Why would these people talk to me about Carol, if they don’t even know me?
Brenna started looking at the chat room titles on either side of French cooking, as Jim put together his response.

Maya.

Brenna exhaled.
The sleepover
.

Jim typed,
She didn’t ask me. She asked Faith. By the time I knew about it, she was all packed and Larissa’s mother was at the door.

Brenna started to type a response, but she stopped when she noticed a series of chats titled “Families of the Missing.” They were arranged regionally, and the sixth down was titled “Families of the Missing, New York State.” Brenna stared at the name, her mind hurtling her back six hours and into Annette Shelby’s hotel room.