Helen slammed on the brakes and jerked the car onto the shoulder, even though there was technically no shoulder there. Horns blared at them angrily, urgently, and headlights washed through their car. She turned in her seat to look at her daughter, who had pulled away so that the back of her head was up against the passenger-side window. Sara was trying hard to maintain her edge, but Helen could see that her chin was quivering. Helen no longer wondered, as she usually did when her daughter teed off on her, what exactly she had done wrong; she just accepted now that she had done something wrong, or many things, even if it was not given to her to know what those things were. She leaned in a little closer, over the frantic rise and fall of the horns.
“I am begging you,” Helen said.
THE NEXT MORNING Sara left for school without a word, and Helen rushed to get to Malloy fifteen or twenty minutes before everybody else. She knew she couldn’t stay in her office for long. Malloy himself would be apoplectic about her having skipped the meeting at the archdiocese the day before. His surge-protector smile was probably threatening to crack open his whole head. Part of her was tempted to ask his advice on how to proceed with Hamilton Barth, a celebrity in hiding over something that had very likely not even happened; but even if Hamilton was, however tangentially or indirectly, a Malloy client, she felt that this was less a business issue than a personal one, and the idea of enlisting the boss felt like an evasion of responsibility.
It was all she could do not to call Ben again. She wasn’t sure how often was too often to call, at what point Ben would resent it, which mattered to her only because his feeling fettered or mistrusted might be all it took to cause him to do something perverse and stupid. They were the two most unreliable men she knew, which made it hard to feel good about any plan that depended on how they acted when they were out of her sight. Still, there wasn’t much trouble they could be getting into at 8:45 in the morning, so she turned to the other problem at hand, which was trying to locate this Lauren Schmidt.
But how do you find someone? How do you prove she exists? Helen had no skills in this area whatsoever. She Googled the girl, and found the usual sludge of five thousand random mentions of a woman with that name who may or may not have been Bettina. One had just finished first in the long jump at River Oaks High School in Winnetka, Illinois. So you could eliminate that one, but how many of the other hits might be referring to that one too? There was no way to know, or else the ways, Helen thought, were opaque to someone like her. She clicked on Images and, with a sharp gasp she was glad no one was around to overhear, recognized her, the horrid bitch from the screening a week ago. She’d been photographed by Patrick McMullan at some society benefit, smiling into the camera with her tattooed arm around some other austerely proportioned girl, both of them standing the way skinny women bred a certain way always stand. She looked utterly, aggressively self-conscious, like she was daring the camera to record her in any way other than the way she wanted to be seen. Beautiful, though. She and Hamilton must have made quite a couple, must have given off a concentrated glow in that moldy, colorless setting if, God forbid, anyone had seen them there.
There were all these professional directories, and all these services that promised to track down and collate vital information about anyone whose privacy you cared to invade. It was never more than two clicks before they started asking you for money, and Helen, using her personal credit card and address, subscribed to every one of them. She tried a phone number she found attached to Bettina’s real name; it had been disconnected, though there was no knowing when. The only information she got of any substance, twenty minutes and about two hundred and sixty dollars later, was a street address, on Thirty-first Avenue in Astoria. By now she could hear other Malloy employees strolling past her closed door, and she knew she didn’t have long.
Out in the street, head down in the rain lest anyone entering the building recognize her, Helen hailed a cab and rode all the way to Queens, repeating the street and apartment numbers to herself over and over, in keeping with her resolution not to write anything down. It was a narrow walk-up building next to a fish store. All the windows were dark. Shakily, Helen pressed Lauren Schmidt’s buzzer, a total of three times, the last time backing quickly down the steps into the street to look up at the third-floor window for any sign of movement. No one was there; in fact no one other than Helen was on the sidewalk at all in the light rain in the middle of the morning, certainly not anyone who might live in one of the other apartments in Bettina’s building and be able to answer a question about when she had last been seen.
But it could have meant anything Helen wanted it to mean. People with jobs, even temp jobs, were exceptionally unlikely to be at home during the day. Whatever emotion you felt as a result was just a matter of faith, really, and she took the opportunity to remind herself of her faith in the idea that Hamilton was simply incapable of doing what he was convinced he had done. Even with drugs involved, he was not some killer. It didn’t matter that she had known him only as a child; her sense of what was and wasn’t in him was stronger and more reliable, she believed, than was his own. That’s why he had sought her out in the first place.
She couldn’t find a cab in the rain to save her life, so she wound up walking west until she found a subway stop, on the Q line. She hadn’t even known there was a Q line. She didn’t get back to the office until about lunchtime, and when the elevator door opened she was face to face with Ashok, who looked as jolted to see her as if he had been told she was dead. “Mr. Malloy has been looking for you,” he said in an unnecessary whisper. “He actually came downstairs to find you. He had somebody with him. He was not happy I didn’t know where you were.”
“I’m sorry,” Helen said. She took off her ruined shoes, and put them back on again. “I’m sorry to put you in that position.” Her own face was reddening. She struggled not to cry. “This guy he had with him,” Helen said. “Did he— It wasn’t by any chance like a cop or anything?”
Ashok looked reassuringly confused. “A cop?” he said. “No, you’re way off, actually. He was— He had the collar, like a priest or a minister or whatever.”
Suddenly it seemed like the most obvious mistake to have come back to the office at all. Big as it was, Malloy Worldwide wasn’t physically big enough to hide in. “Listen, Ashok,” she said, “I need to ask you to do something for me. I need you to tell Arturo and whoever else asks that I left you a voice mail saying I am taking a personal day. I don’t think I’ve been here long enough to be eligible for any personal days, but let’s say I didn’t realize that.”
“And why are you taking this personal day?” Ashok said, looking almost comically attentive, as he always did when strategy was being discussed.
“Let’s say”—she closed her eyes, and sighed—“let’s say that my daughter is in trouble. I mean, don’t use that phrase, but … okay, that she’s very sick.”
He nodded.
“It is a terrible thing to ask you to lie about,” Helen said. She gave in to an urge to reach out and touch his round face. “Forgive me for asking.”
“For you, Helen, anything,” said Ashok.
AT FIRST BEN WAS AFRAID to let Hamilton Barth out of his sight for more than a few minutes, because he just assumed, from the oversolicitous way Helen treated him, that he was the kind of guy who’d be inclined to make a break for it, out the window or over the roof until somebody recognized him and gave him a lift to the nearest bar. As if Ben himself, and his home, were some form of rehab. He’d seen men like Hamilton at Stages — morose, narcissistic, making a big show of their passivity — and he’d seen how closely the counselors watched them. But a day passed — a day about half of which Hamilton spent sleeping in Ben’s bed — and by the next afternoon Ben was hovering for a different reason, which was that he thought the guy was sunk so deep as to be at risk of suicide. He had no idea what signs to look for, or anything like that; it was just something he felt. And he didn’t want his house to become a shrine where some tragic, martyred movie star had breathed his last.