“So what?”
“So I think maybe it’s time I talk to her. Bambi Brewer, her daughters. Maybe revisit what everyone was doing around that time.”
“Not without me in the room, Detective.”
“Are you their lawyer?”
“I will be before you get back to your car.”
Sandy consulted the old ADC map he kept in his car-he preferred the big paper maps, which provided more context than those little Google squares, whether on phones or computers-and drove out to the home of Bambi and Felix Brewer. It was in an older section of Pikesville, probably very grand in its day. He bet, if Felix had stayed, they would have moved farther out, to something bigger, like the Gelman house in Garrison Forest. But it looked good in its own way. Sandy preferred the houses built in the 1950s and 1960s to the new monstrosities.
He wasn’t aware how long he just sat there looking at the house, but it was long enough for a woman to come down the walk, arms wrapped around her body to protect from the cool day. The woman was thin, in her thirties, and plain. One of the daughters? A maid?
“May I help you?” she said.
He held up his ID. “Lady of the house in?”
“I am the lady of the house.”
“You’re Bambi Brewer?”
“No, my husband and I bought this place from her six years ago. I think she moved to a condo downtown.”
Feeling sheepish, Sandy tried to pinpoint his mistake. He had just assumed Bambi hadn’t moved after all this time.
“She’s a nice lady,” the woman said. “I wouldn’t want anything else bad to happen to her.”
“Anything else? You mean, besides her husband leaving?”
“Isn’t that enough?”
It was enough. Leaving, leaving you broke. Leaving you, leaving you broke, and doing little to conceal to the world at large that he had another woman. A woman who might have taken your money. It was all enough to make a woman very angry, to send an emissary to ask for her money back.
And a week after that confrontation, Julie drove off on some mystery errand to Saks Fifth Avenue, passport in her purse, and never came back. Passport in her purse. Expired even then. But only by two days. There are places you can go without a passport, or were able to go at the time. Mexico. Canada.
Sandy tried to never lose sight of the fact that we tend to order things according to the reality we know, as we discover it. All life is hindsight, really, stories informed by their endings. A woman disappeared, presumed murdered as she hadn’t made the kind of arrangements one would expect of someone who planned to flee. A woman was found, murdered. Her passport was expired. And she was dead, so it wasn’t about her leaving because there was no indication that she was going anywhere.
Except maybe she was.
Saks, which didn’t even exist anymore, would have been no more than ten miles from here. The grocery store where Julie’s car was found, weeks later? Sandy propped his map book on the steering wheel. He ripped out two pages so he could see them relative to each other. Here was another triangle, a physical one. What if Felix Brewer had sent for Julie Saxony after all, telling her to leave no trail, persuading her that he would be safe only if she left everything behind? And what if Julie Saxony had stopped here, incapable of resisting the urge to tell Bambi Brewer: Guess which one of us he chose.
He was going to need a warrant. A warrant and some luck. But, no, it wouldn’t be luck. It was never luck, no matter what anyone thought. It all went back to the things that Julie Saxony had in her purse that day, those ordinary items that had been dutifully cataloged but never considered.
He was going to need two warrants.
May 15, 2006
Rachel made it exactly five minutes into the party before she said something rude to Michelle. “I can’t believe you’re having a shower.” She didn’t mean to. She had resolved not to mention the shower issue at all. The words were like toads, hopping out of her mouth in spite of her. She was like someone under a curse; she couldn’t stop saying the wrong thing.
Worse, Michelle didn’t seem to realize how hateful Rachel was being. “I know we can afford whatever we need,” she said. “But Hamish’s friends wanted to do something for us.”
“Oh, no-that wasn’t what I mean. I mean-just the tradition, you know? The evil eye. Which is nonsense, of course, but Linda observed it and I guess I just assumed we-you-would as well.”
Once you’ve said something cruel, why waste it? Might as well make sure that Michelle knows how awful I can be.
Michelle only laughed. Thirty-three years old and thirty-six weeks pregnant, she was more beautiful than ever. Rachel wanted to chalk it up to her sister eating real food for the first time in her adult life, but, no, this was something else, something beyond the clichéd glow of pregnancy. It was as if love, true love, had drained Michelle of all her petulant grudges.
“Hamish may have agreed to raise our children as Jews”-the plural gave Rachel another pang, and she bit back a caution on hubris-“but he’s not superstitious. Besides, he didn’t want to paint the nursery after we brought the baby home. Even with the new eco-friendly paints, he didn’t like the idea of all those fresh chemical smells. And he was keen to do it all himself, which will be harder once the baby is here. Did you see what he did with the closet? And the changing table-he made that, from his own design, so it can be converted to a straightforward chest of drawers once we no longer need a changing table.”
Of course he did. Hamish the handy hand doctor. Hamish the perfect. Hamish the wonderful, Rachel thought, feeling very much like the bad fairy at the christening. But maybe the bad fairy had a backstory. Maybe it wasn’t just a misplaced invitation that put her in a pique. Maybe the bad fairy had authentic heartache.
“I haven’t gone upstairs yet,” said Rachel, who had arrived late hoping to miss the obligatory nursery tour. “I haven’t even seen Hamish.”
“He’s in the outdoor kitchen,” Michelle said, motioning to the large fieldstone patio off the indoor kitchen, which was positively Brobdingnagian. She wasn’t being grand. Now that Michelle was entitled to put on airs, she never did. The patio was better equipped than the kitchen in Rachel’s first apartment-a gas-powered grill, an oven with two burners, a refrigerator, an ice-maker, and a wine refrigerator. Hamish presided over the grill, of course, surrounded by the friends he called mates. Rachel couldn’t help feeling that the wafting smoke was really just the heat of all that collective testosterone rising into the soft May evening.
Twenty months ago, Michelle had dented Hamish Macalister’s Jaguar in a downtown parking garage. Being Michelle, or the Michelle she was then, she had written a note that read only: “Sorry!,” a cover for any possible witnesses. She had not counted on the video cameras that captured her license plate or the dogged Scotsman who tracked her down on sheer principle, determined to make the girl glimpsed on the video do the right thing.
The strangest part of the story was not that they married eight months later but that Michelle actually paid for the work on Hamish’s car. Not even Michelle took for granted the appearance of a handsome Scottish hand surgeon on her doorstep.
Plus-a Jaguar, Rachel thought meanly. Michelle could assume he was rich as well. And he came with a cohort of rich friends, surgeons and entrepreneurs, weekend rugby players who had found one another in a faux Irish pub that broadcast rugby, hurling, and World Cup matches. Their wives were now Michelle’s new besties, stay-at-home moms who lived in similarly huge houses and drove similarly enormous SUVs and could afford the similarly outrageous things on Michelle’s baby registry. They also were, Rachel was realizing, extremely nice, shockingly nice. Well, why not? They were young, untested by life so far. She could not resent them or their extravagant getups, could not resent Michelle’s thirteen-thousand-square-foot house. Could not even resent Hamish, who had seemed to stride out of the pages of a romance novel and make a beeline for-Rachel had to be honest-the least-deserving of the Brewer girls.