What Has Become of You (30 page)

She felt a clarity of mind that she had not felt in a while—the clarity of knowing one is on the right track. There was no doubt that Jensen was continuing to reach out to her for reasons yet unknown, patiently teasing her out like a snake charmer wooing a cobra out of a basket. But if Vera had just missed her, as the note said, then what chance did she have of finding the girl? And what did “back to ME” mean? It sounded like the title of a bad 1970s song about female empowerment.

Or was it an abbreviation?
ME is the abbreviation for Maine,
Vera thought.
Back to Maine, maybe?
But that had to be a red herring. Jensen was probably still around somewhere, and wherever she was, Bret could not be far behind—Bret, who knew more than he was saying.

Leaving the library before she could be caught with stolen goods, she stopped by Jay Hall again and eyed the students going in and out of its doors. She imagined that Bret Folger would be easy to spot—an emaciated, six-foot-five, reddish-haired white boy would be noticeable on campus. She remembered Jensen writing that Bret had taken two consecutive classes with Dr. Rose, the famed Spenserian scholar; she wished she knew of a way to find out which of Dr. Rose’s classes he was enrolled in now and when it met.

She fished out her phone and gave Elliott a quick call; there was no answer, and she left a message on his voicemail. “I need you to look up something on the Internet for me,” she said. “Can you look up Dr. Louis Rose at Columbia? You should be able to find an office phone number for him. I’m not going to be home till later, but I’d like to have this number as soon as possible.”

Crossing Broadway, she walked down Riverside Drive, slowing down in front of the Salinger family’s old apartment—the building where J. D. Salinger himself had been born, just two doors away from Dr. Rose’s place. She guessed Dr. Rose lived two doors south, as that was building was nicer and grander-looking than the one to the north. Standing before its door buzzers, she saw that
ROSE, L
. was taped next to the fourth buzzer from the bottom. Vera traced the shape of the upraised button but did not press it.

She went back to the Salinger apartment building and stood there for a while, looking up at all the windows, trying to imagine which unit the Salinger family had lived in—mother, Miriam; father, Sol; older sister, Doris; and the new baby, Jerome David—and then tried to picture the people who lived there now. New York apartments had such high turnover that history mattered little. History didn’t stick. Jensen had written as much in her journal:
Even the special things in New York seem to blend in with everything else.
Yet that lack of specialness, Vera supposed, was just what made the city special, in its own paradoxical way. There was room for everyone—for the ambitious, for the hopeful, for the defeated—even, she supposed, for the depraved.

 • • • 

“Did you call old Lou Rose?” Elliott asked Vera later.

They were sitting at his round table in the corner of the living room, eating what Elliott called the “school cafeteria version” of shepherd’s pie—he had had a lot of leftover hamburger from the night before, as it turned out. To Vera, the heavily salted slop tasted like heaven. Around her mouthful of potatoes and corn, she said, “No. I chickened out because I didn’t want to bother him.”

“This is not what I would call impressive detective work,” Elliott said.

“But I haven’t told you everything yet. Not only did I feel like Jensen was in the Butler Library, but I could
sense
her there. And just when I was sure I was going to find her, I found
this
instead.” She pushed back from the table and returned to show him her purloined library copy of
The Bell Jar
.

“What does that prove?”

“I found it stuffed right underneath
The Catcher in the Rye
on the library shelf. And Jensen Willard specifically mentioned in a journal entry that she liked
The Bell Jar
better than
The Catcher in the Rye
. Circumstantial, sure, but now look at the back of the card I found inside it. She mentioned in another journal that she used to leave notes in library books all the time.”

“That’s a pretty generic message,” Elliott said, pushing his glasses up on his nose to look at the Salinger postcard more closely. “It isn’t addressed to anyone, and it could be
for
anyone. ‘Looks like we just missed each other’ could be a message between a couple of libidinous kids who’d planned a sexy assignation in the stacks.”

“But it isn’t—that’s the thing. You just don’t understand,” Vera said, “and I’m afraid it’s all too complicated for me to explain right now.”

Vera’s phone buzzed from inside her purse. She checked the number of the incoming call and saw that it was her mother—her third attempt to call since Vera had left for New York. She had no doubt that her mother had gotten wind of some of the most recent stories appearing in the
Dorset Journal
and was in a panic trying to reach her, but she couldn’t bear to talk to her just yet—not until she had better news to report. She waited until her phone trilled, letting her know that yet another message had been recorded, before sighing and saying, “I suppose I’ve got to bite the bullet and find out what my mother has to say for herself.”

“While you check your messages,” Elliott said, getting up with his plate scraped clean, “maybe I’ll give you some privacy and mosey onto the Internet and see what else they’re saying about Big Vee Lundy in the Dorset newspapers. Maybe they’re going with the idea that you’ve kidnapped Jensen Willard and made her your personal sex slave.”

“You’re extremely unfunny. And don’t you dare call me Big Vee Lundy.” Vera pushed the phone buttons to retrieve her voicemail while Elliott got on his computer; his line about “giving her some privacy” had been facetious, for his computer was only a few feet from where she was sitting. She listened to the first of her mother’s messages, which started off shrilly: “Marvita came over today to show me the paper, and your name’s in it, honey. What is that about? It says you walked that missing girl home before she disappeared? Call your mother right away.” The second message started off with an exhortation, the pitch of her mother’s voice even higher this time. “Vera! Call your mother! This is an order. I’m worried sick. Where are you? Marvita says that . . .”

Vera deleted the message before finishing it and decided to leave the remaining one unlistened to, for now. She knew it wasn’t fair to prolong her mother’s anxiety, but if she told her she was in New York City, she would become apoplectic.

“No interesting news on the Internet,” Elliott said. “How is your mother?”

“In hysterics,” Vera said. “Tomorrow I think I’m going to go back to Columbia again. I was really hoping to run into Bret without having to reach out to one of his professors. I think the poetry classes mostly meet in Philosophy Hall, so I’m hoping maybe Louis Rose will have his class there. I might go to the Metropolitan Museum and to Central Park, too, if I have time for all that.”

“Sounds like you’ve got your work cut out for you. Damn it, I just got emailed some work myself. New blog entry for a junk food site . . . a comparative look at cheese puffs this time. Considering the amount of concentration and intellectual prowess this is going to require, I’m going to have to ask you to amuse yourself for a while. Here’s a thought: Did Ivan Schlosser break out of a jail to start killing a fresh crop of prepubescent girls, the most recent being Jensen Willard? Maybe that’s a new chapter you could look into.”

“Ivan Schlosser is dead,” Vera said.

“That’s too bad,” Elliott said, already starting to type. “Imagine the scads of money you could make if you could pin it to him somehow.”

 • • • 

In Columbia’s Philosophy Hall the next day, Vera walked into the lounge on the first floor of the building and found that students were serving high tea, a precious Ivy League custom she had sometimes seen at Princeton; she backed out of the large room with the alacrity of someone who had accidentally walked into a stranger’s house. She went up and down the steep, winding, Gothic stairwell in Philosophy Hall and tiptoed past the classrooms on each level, but the classes in progress were all taught behind closed doors.

Columbia University has tens of thousands of students,
she told herself.
Admit it. You aren’t going to just run into Bret unless you somehow make it happen.
This was a discouraging thought, but not an insurmountable one.

After spending another hour in the Avery Library, where the school’s collections of art books were kept, Vera began the long, southeasterly walk to the Metropolitan Museum. She ignored the suggested admission price and gave the woman at the front desk two rumpled dollar bills, receiving a withering look in return, and went off to look at some of the exhibits.

What would Jensen Willard want to see if she were here? The Old Masters? The modern works—excluding those that were
too
modern? Charlotte Corday’s revenge in
The Death of Marat
, maybe? No, that wasn’t at the Met. That painting was somewhere in Belgium, if Vera remembered correctly.

Just as she always had on previous visits, Vera walked aimlessly from exhibit to exhibit until she grew tired. She found a cushioned bench in a quiet room of Japanese art, next to a rock outfitted with an unseen mechanical device that gurgled as though water were bubbling inside it. The rock relaxed her in a way nothing else had over the past few days. She sat and listened to it until a security guard approached her and asked her if she was all right, which she took as her cue to leave. She had been in the museum for close to two hours and had seen nothing that had made her think of Jensen Willard particularly.

Descending the stairs of the Met, Vera’s phone buzzed from inside her purse. Expecting to see her mother’s number, she saw instead that the incoming call was from Elliott. And Elliott, she knew, despised phones—using them only when necessary, and even then with obvious displeasure.

“Vee?” his voice said. “Where are you right now?”

“The Met. Why?”

“What? I can’t hear you. Oh, for Chrissakes.”

The line went dead, and Vera zipped the phone back in its compartment, rolling her eyes. Brusqueness was part of Elliott’s nature, but hanging up on her, she thought, was taking things to the extreme.

It was three o’clock in the afternoon, and she was too close to Central Park to have a good excuse for avoiding it. She remembered that Holden Caulfield, too, had not had a very charitable view of the park: “It made you depressed, and every once in a while, for no reason, you got goose flesh while you walked,” he’d said of it.

Where might Jensen go in Central Park? There was the carousel near the zoo, of course—the carousel Phoebe Caulfield had ridden near the very end of
The Catcher in the Rye
, though Vera knew that Phoebe’s particular carousel was no more; it had been destroyed in 1950 and was later replaced. Walking through the park, she noticed a sign saying that the carousel was closed for renovation.
Typical,
she thought. So much for Phoebe going around and around, nearly moving her brother to tears because she looked so nice.

The lagoon near Central Park South was an area Vera didn’t mind. Growing up in Maine around so much water made her partial to lagoons. Besides, she had always felt a secret happiness, watching ducks’ antics; ducks in New York were not so different from ducks in Maine, she thought as she settled down on a rock near the water, not minding if her skirt got a little dirty. Same sleek heads, same bumbling walks. Sometimes the ducks commingled with Canada geese, gliding along the water or hunching along the shore. As she watched one duck, presumably male, waddling intently after another duck, she remembered reading somewhere that during mating season, female ducks sometimes hid in the tall grass to avoid being chased by amorous males. But it wasn’t mating season, was it?

“Stupid ducks,” Vera murmured, not without affection, and she wondered if Holden Caulfield felt the same way about them—forgetting, just for a second, that Holden Caulfield was not a real boy.

The phone in her purse buzzed again, making Vera jump. She checked her phone and saw that Elliott was having another go of it. “Why did you cut me off last time?” she asked sharply.

“I didn’t cut you off. My battery was dying. Vera, where are you—the Met still?”

“No, Central Park. I’m over by the lake.”

“Watching the ducks à la
Holden Caulfield?”

“You got it.”

“Those damned ducks. You know what’s funny about that? Holden Caulfield wonders where the ducks go in the winter. But the ducks never go anywhere, have you noticed? Even in the winter they’re always right there.”

“Interesting observation. This is what you called to tell me?”

“No, sorry, I wanted to check in with you about something. I’ve got to go out tonight, but I’ve got to figure out a way to leave you my extra set of keys.”

“Can’t you leave them under the doormat or something?”

“My dear old sausage, you must be joking. You’ve been living out of the city too long.”

“If you aren’t leaving for a while, I’ll just come back to your neck of the woods then.”

“Any interesting finds?”

“Not a one.”

“Well, when you get back to the apartment, you ought to have a gander at the online edition of your local Maine paper. Seems like there’s some intrigue back in Dorset that you’re missing out on.”

“Is it—is it another body?” Vera asked, her heart dropping.

“Nothing quite
that
intriguing, but I’ll let you find out for yourself.”

Replacing her phone, Vera shook her head ruefully. Knowing Elliott’s perverse sense of humor, she would not have been at all surprised to find the “intrigue” he’d spoken of in Dorset was a headline about a rash of henhouse break-ins, or the Sportsman’s Club hosting a youth fishing derby. But perhaps there really was something to it, after all. Standing up and brushing the loose grasses off her rump, she thought,
What if it’s Jensen? If it isn’t a body, then what if it’s Jensen they’ve found, alive and well?
All at once she felt it imperative to get back to Elliott’s quickly.