She still slept on the couch, and the arrangement was not discussed. Since they had only one car now, Ben drove her to the train station in the morning; though cabs were available in the early evening, once he figured out what train she usually took, he thought he might as well go down to the station and wait for her then too. Something in her balked at the hassle of renting a truck to go to New Castle, where all their old furniture was still piled in the storage unit; and in any event deliverymen kept showing up at the house with previously ordered new stuff. Then one night toward the end of June, Helen looked into Sara’s bedroom and saw a profusion of familiar items there — posters, stuffed animals, old yearbooks — so familiar, actually, that they might well have been there for a few days already without her noticing. When asked about it, Sara admitted that she and her father had driven into the city one morning, while Helen was at work, and collected a few things she said she didn’t want to be without.
Helen might have been angry with them — in particular about this new flair they seemed to have developed for deciding things together without telling her — and she resolved to have a strong word with Ben about it, but by the next day her edge was dulled, and she never did get around to it. Later that summer it occurred to her to wonder, since no one had mentioned it to her, whether perhaps Ben had enrolled Sara in school for the fall. Again, something made her disinclined to ask. She rationalized it by recalling that she had spent the last decade or more in charge of these sorts of dull domestic necessities, and that it would not have occurred to her back then to bother her spouse with them either.
One sweltering evening in August, safe in the maxed-out air-conditioning of the northbound commuter train, Helen saw her phone light up inside her bag on the seat next to her. She pulled it out in case the call was from Sara or Ben — anyone else and she would let it go to voice mail; she did not want to be one of those people shouting into their cellphones over the noise of the train — and saw that the name on the caller ID was Charles Cudahy. When she got off the train in Rensselaer Valley twenty minutes later, she held up one finger toward Ben, whom she could see waiting in the car beside the platform, and called back.
“How did you get this number?” she said.
“I know, right?” Cudahy said cheerily. “It’s like I’m a detective or something!”
“Do you know my name?” Helen said, trying not to grow frantic. Even at seven o’clock it was so hot she was already sweating again.
“Course I know your name,” Cudahy said. “Your check had the name of your bank on it, and I have friends here and there, and like this and like that. Anyway, no need to freak out, I only bothered to track you down because I have news for you.”
Helen said nothing. She looked at Ben, who smiled back patiently. Patience was itself one of those new things that threatened to make him unrecognizable to her sometimes.
“Lauren Schmidt,” Cudahy said. “I found her.”
Helen’s eyes closed. “She’s alive?” she said.
“What? Yes, of course she’s alive,” Cudahy said, his tone a little less friendly all of a sudden. “I didn’t even know that was the issue. She was in some fancy rehab center in Vermont, but here’s what made it so tough: she checked herself in under a fake name. They don’t care what you call yourself at those places. She didn’t want her family to know, was the issue, I guess. And so maybe that’s you? You’re family?”
“How did she get there?” Helen asked. “Her — I know she wasn’t driving her car.”
“Well, that was the key to the whole thing, actually. She got sprung from rehab and went looking for her car, which had been towed to some small-town police station and was just sitting there with grass growing around it. She came and showed her license to prove it was hers, and they run the registration online, and bam, she’s back on the grid again.”
“So you know where she is?” Helen said. “You’ve spoken to her?”
“Not really my business to speak to her, but yeah, I know where she is. She’s back with her parents in Laguna Beach, California. I’ve got an address, an email, a phone number, the whole schmear. You want it?”
She couldn’t imagine anything good coming of it. It was enough to know. She asked him if she owed him any more money and he said no, he’d technically made the crucial phone calls on his own time, just because unsolved cases raised his blood pressure. She hung up, walked across the parking lot, and motioned to Ben to roll down the window.
“One more call,” she said. “I don’t want to make it from home. Sorry to make you wait.”
He shrugged. “You don’t want to make it in the car? Nice and cool in here,” he said. He was wearing jeans and a polo shirt. She turned away. At rush hour trains into Rensselaer Valley ran only about twenty-five minutes apart; cars were already starting to flow into the lot again. She didn’t have much time. She dialed Hamilton’s cellphone number and listened to a recording informing her that it had been disconnected.
She’d Googled him idly once or twice over the summer, and found a fully restored flow of gossip items and trade-journal mentions linking him to this or that actress, or to this or that unproduced script. Variety had him shooting a new movie this summer in Copenhagen, playing the part of Paul Gauguin. There was no way of knowing how unmanufactured these various sightings were, but they sounded right to her.
She remembered the agent’s name, Kyle Stine, and got that number through information, dreading the call but feeling she had no choice. An assistant halfheartedly offered to take a message; “Tell him it’s the woman who knew where Hamilton Barth was,” Helen said. She felt the eyes on her as she waited — the only person out on the steaming pavement — the stares of all her neighbors inside their idling cars. Nothing new there: she and Ben were stared at everywhere they went now. “What can I do for you?” Kyle Stine said. “Holding another one of my clients hostage, maybe?”
“I need to speak to Hamilton right away,” Helen said, seeing even as she said it how this conversation was going to go. “I have some information that could save his life.”
“You don’t say,” answered the agent. “Listen, um — hold on a second — Helen Armstead, who works at Malloy Worldwide in New York, this phone call has actually made my day. And not just because it’s so funny. Because you seem not to know who I am. If you knew who I am, you would know how badly you have just fucked up by calling me on your own phone. Tomorrow, when you go to work? There’ll be someone else’s name on the door, because you won’t have a job anymore. I can make that happen and more.”
“Please,” Helen said. “It doesn’t matter. I just need to speak to Hamilton. Will you at least ask him to call me?”
“Not in this lifetime,” Kyle Stine said and hung up.
The next train’s headlight was on her, and she hurried down from the platform rather than be swallowed in the next discharge of passengers. She got into the passenger seat of the Audi, and Ben pulled out of the lot without a word. She knew every quizzical face they passed in the parking lot; she knew he did too. They had lived here forever. But they had only each other now, and she was surprised to feel a pang of something like contentment when it occurred to her that Ben was the one person in the world who could listen to the story of what had just happened to her and understand what the hell she was talking about. As for Hamilton, the more she thought about him on the ride home, the more she imagined that he was probably leading a better life now anyway, on some set somewhere waiting for his own personal judgment day, feeling, with equal parts humility and arrogance, that it was inevitable. There would be no such judgment, in the end, but knowing that felt like a burden, and thus she was happy to keep it to herself.