What Has Become of You (26 page)

“Shit,” Mrs. Cudahy said. “I left the papers in the car. Give me a second and I’ll go get them.”

While his wife was away in the parking lot, Mr. Cudahy said, “My heart can’t take all this. It’s too much, isn’t it, Tessie?” Vera inferred that Tessie was the basset hound. The dog had settled into a fat puddle at her master’s feet and had begun licking at her red, raw-looking belly. As the old man leaned toward her, scratching her neck under the collar, the dog’s grunts filled the room.

“Your stepdaughter will come home soon, Mr. Cudahy,” Vera said. “You can’t lose hope.”

“She was two years old when I married her mother. I always think of her as mine, you know . . . my own little girl. And she’s a good girl, mostly. A good girl. I never thought she’d run off like this. She knows how much it would upset her mother and I.”

Her mother and me,
Vera almost corrected him, but stopped herself just in time.

Cutler was saying something consoling to him, something Vera could not hear, when Mrs. Cudahy returned with Jensen’s writings. Vera looked through some of the pages, written in the large, generic printing that most children have before they develop the idiosyncrasies of their own penmanship. There was a story by Jensen about a little boy who rode on a magic feather bed that floated through the air. There was another story of a girl who sat on the moon, looking down at all the things on Earth below her. Vera thought that the recurring theme might not be insignificant—the idea of solitary children separated from others, looking down at others from on high. What she said out loud was, “They’re very sweet. You can definitely tell that she had writing ability even then.”

“All my kids were talented, and all of them were good people,” Linda Cudahy said.

“All talented,” Les echoed from the corner. “Every last one of ’em.”

“I have two older sons,” Mrs. Cudahy explained to Vera. “I know I should say
had
, but when anyone asks how many children I have, I say I am the mother of three. Ross was eleven years older than Jensen, and Nicholas was eight years older. The boys died together in a car accident when Jensen was only four. My daughter didn’t write anything about that?”

The surprise must have shown on Vera’s face. She managed to say, “She didn’t. I’m so sorry to hear this.” She glanced at Cutler, whose expression was placid; clearly this was not news to her.

“Les, show her that picture from your wallet,” Mrs. Cudahy said, and the elderly man took his sweet time getting it out, even pulling the photo out of its cellophane sheath to place it in Vera’s hand—this small, black-and-white portrait of two chubby little boys seated close to each other on a bench. The bigger of the two was dark-haired, looking rather like Jensen and, Vera supposed, like Linda Cudahy. “There’s Ross and Nicholas. All three of my babies were built like little Sherman tanks. Even my daughter, though you’d never know it now. Both boys were very much their own people, just like Jensen is. Ross was going to be a filmmaker—he was only fifteen, but he’d made these short films that would knock your socks off. And Ross was a writer, too, like Jensen—you could already tell. I always told my kids, ‘Be whatever you want to be when you grow up, just as long as you grow up to be a good person.’ And all my kids would have grown up to be good people—no one can ever take that from them.”

“Or from you,” Vera said.

Without asking, Vera got up and refilled the Cudahys’ coffee mugs. Detective Cutler had not touched her own coffee. “She likes you, you know,” Mrs. Cudahy said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Our daughter likes you. That’s why she wrote all that stuff in her journal. If she likes you, she’ll go on and on and on and on. Lots of words. Lots of thoughts. All written down. She said you seemed different from the other teachers.”

The corners of the woman’s mouth were starting to jerk tearfully downward again; her effort to fight against this and force a smile verged on grotesque, and Vera had to look elsewhere. “It just makes me sick to think what might have happened to her. I just can’t see her running away. A runaway is a
bad kid
, a kid who doesn’t worry about hurting her parents. At first, though, I hoped she might have gone to see her boyfriend, who’s going to school in New York City.”

“Bret Folger,” Vera said. Recalling what Paul Nimitz had said about some of Jensen’s friends being fictitious, she couldn’t help but feel a jolt of relief to know that Bret, at least, was the real deal.

“Oh, so you know Bret?”

“Only from Jensen’s journals. And even then, it’s a pretty limited portrayal, I think.”

Ignoring that last comment, Mrs. Cudahy said, “She went to New York to see him one time—with permission, of course. So I got this idea that maybe she’d gone down there again to be with him. Now bear in mind, my girl
doted
on him, hung around near the phone every Sunday night waiting for his phone call. But the police have spoken to him several times. There’s no reason to think she’s there with him, so they say. Still, I wonder.” The woman shot a defensive, almost apologetic look at Cutler. “I know there’s no reason to think that anymore. But I’d rather think that’s where she is than think—something else.”

“Wow.” Vera mulled over this for a while. The dog had lifted itself up from Les’s feet and now whined at her side. She thought of petting it, but the dog smelled sour and sharp—
like somebody’s behind,
Vera thought. “Judging by what Jensen wrote about Bret in her journals, he doesn’t sound like a very sensitive boy.”

“He is number than a pounded thumb. And spineless? Let me tell you about spineless! I wouldn’t trust him to tell the truth if she’s with him.”

Vera thought about New York City. She thought about Jensen saying, with a dreamy look on her face,
Sometimes I thought I’d go down to New York to live with Bret. I printed up this map once of all the places Holden goes in New York, thinking I might go there sometime.
It seemed a long shot; how could she have gotten there? By bus? There were coaches to Boston that ran every hour, twenty-four hours a day. Unlikely though it seemed, a blind hope began to rise in her.

“I lived there for a few years,” she told Mrs. Cudahy. “New York City, I mean—not far from Columbia University. I daresay I know Bret’s neck of the woods pretty well.”

“Hell of a place,” Les said ambiguously.

“Yes,” Vera agreed. “Hell of a place indeed.”

The conversation seemed to fizzle out. Jensen’s mother smiled at Vera—whether sincerely or insincerely, she could not tell—and Vera looked from her to her husband to the mute detective, who gave no indication whether she was paying attention to any of this, though Vera knew that she had to be. After a cumbersome silence, Jensen’s mother said she needed to excuse herself to go to the lavatory.

“It’s to the left,” Vera said, charmed by the old-fashioned word
lavatory
—a word straight out of her own mother’s vocabulary.

“I know where it is. Do you want to join me?”

Vera did not know how to respond to this invitation. She had never been the type of woman who liked an entourage when she took a restroom break, and she didn’t particularly wish to join the woman in the bathroom. Absurdly, she thought of Bret Folger inviting Jensen into his bathroom so he could kiss her. But then she told herself:
Don’t be a dummy. This is your one chance to talk to her without Cutler horning in.

“If you’d like,” she said. She got up and followed Jensen’s mother down the hall.
Take that, Cutler,
she couldn’t help thinking.

“I wasn’t sure about Jensen going to the Wallace School, to be honest,” Linda Cudahy said as soon as she’d shut the bathroom door. The bathroom had a tub in it—sometimes the volunteer committee used this tub as storage space for flyers—and Vera perched on its porcelain rim, discreetly turned away from Jensen’s mother as the woman unzipped her pants. She tried not to reflect too much on the ridiculousness of this situation; the woman’s voice rose over the resounding stream of her urine. “All those snotty people, and the teachers are the worst of them. But you really are different. I want to thank you for that.
Thank you for becoming a friend to my daughter in such a short time. Thank you for what you’ve done, and for what you’re doing.”

“You shouldn’t thank me,” Vera said. She felt humbled—a sensation she was not used to feeling. She was not used to feeling humbled by the basic goodness of people. The basset hound, loose still, was scratching outside the bathroom door to get in. Vera thought about how she used to follow her own mother into the bathroom, chatting at her while she bathed, chatting at her while she peed, barely taking note of the fact that she was using the toilet and might prefer some privacy. For some reason the thought made her sad. That kind of closeness to anyone had all been such a long time ago.

Jensen’s mother, having finished her bathroom business, gave Vera a hug, flustering her even more. Back in the workroom, Vera shook hands with Les Cudahy and even gave the dog a farewell tap on the head as she bade the Cudahys good-bye and wished them well. Cutler stayed behind, writing something down in her notepad, and Vera waited until Jensen’s parents were gone before she spoke to her.

“How do you think that went?” she asked.

“Went? I think it went fine. What did you think of them?”

Now why had Cutler asked her that? Did she think the Cudahys were suspects in their own daughter’s disappearance? Flattered that Cutler wanted to know her opinion, Vera said, “I guess they seem on the up-and-up to me.”

“Good people.”

Vera couldn’t tell if the detective was agreeing with her or simply trying to clarify what Vera had meant. “Good people,” she seconded. “So far as I can tell, anyway. What do
you
think?”

Cutler looked less now like the cat that ate the canary than like the cat who has pocketed the canary in its cheek for safekeeping. “Classified information,” she said.

 • • • 

On the Monday of her school break, the lethal boredom of Saturday and Sunday had already done its work on Vera, and she could no longer stand to stay sequestered in her studio or wander pointlessly around Dorset looking for something to do. She headed to the BRING JENSEN HOME headquarters early in the afternoon, her thoughts full of last Friday’s morning class and their further attempt to discuss
The Bell Jar
.

“Can I ask something?” Harmony had said, raising her hand near the end of class—something that she rarely bothered to do. Usually she just spoke outright, a habit that Vera had never discouraged.

“Yes?”

“When we finish up with this book, can we read something more
upbeat
afterward? All these people going off to mental hospitals is getting a little depressing.”

“I’ll see what I can come up with,” Vera had said.

“And not something about death, either.”

“I’ll make note of this,” Vera said. “No death. No psychiatric hospitals. Perhaps there’s a good story about puppies or kittens that was left out of our anthology.”

Harmony smiled an almost blissful smile—another rarity. “I
love
puppies and kittens.”

“You girls,” Vera had said, feeling a wash of affection for all of them—even Harmony, whose face was rather transformed by that smile. “Don’t forget to give me your journals before you go. And I’ll say so long but not good-bye, because we’ll be meeting again in just nine short days.”

Seven days now,
Vera thought.
And they can’t come soon enough.

At headquarters she found Amy Nimitz and Lacey Tondreau in the kitchen, stuffing themselves with homemade oatmeal cookies that Amy had brought in.

“Did you know the police have a good lead?” Amy said to her as soon as they had exchanged greetings.

“On Jensen?”

“Yup. Robin hinted as much yesterday, but I don’t know exactly what it is. Only that it’s good.”

The other two women talked so much—their subjects shifting from speculation to gossip to the latest clearance sale at J.Crew—that Vera was not able to accomplish much over the next couple of hours. When she decided to leave and take her unfinished paperwork home with her, Amy pushed a bag of leftover cookies into her hands, insisting she take them with her, and told her she would see her tomorrow.

Vera was already out the door and halfway down the front walk when the door of the copy center burst open and Amy came running out. “I forgot to tell you, you got some mail!” she said, holding an envelope out at arm’s length.

“I did?” Vera said. The envelope she took from Amy was oversized, with the stiffness and thickness of a greeting card, and bore a New York postmark. “There’s no return address. Who would write to me here, from New York City?”

“Maybe it’s something from a donor you reached out to. A thank-you for a thank-you, or something like that.”

“That’s probably it,” Vera said, tucking the envelope into her bag, She lifted her hand in a half wave and continued down the walkway, rounding the corner and crossing the street; as she neared the first set of traffic lights, a car door slammed shut, and she turned to see what she had been too preoccupied to notice before: the unmarked police cruiser slowing down beside her.

Out of the passenger seat came Detective Ferreira wearing another one of his pristine white shirts under a light jacket; Vera could just make out Cutler in the driver’s seat.

“Vera Lundy,” Ferreira said. “Just the person we’re looking for.”

She felt herself submit—a process so easy, so effortless, that she wondered why she hadn’t done it sooner. Submission, when one agreed to it, was the easiest thing in the world.

“What can I do for you?” she asked.

“I’d like to bring you down to the precinct to ask you a few questions.”

She got into the back seat of the car without a word. “Am I under arrest?”

“Now why would you ask that?”

“I don’t know.”

“If you were under arrest, I’d be reading you your rights and telling you you were under arrest.”

The submission came with a huge sense of relief that she hadn’t expected, and there was an undercurrent of something else, too—a sense of déjà vu that she couldn’t place at first. On what other occasion had she been feeling this same glad surrender, in such a similar way? Then she remembered.