“No, nothing.”
“You don’t know these people?”
“No.”
“That’s funny, because I would have sworn you did. Just by the way you talked to me about them the first day. Gave me their name and said look into it… As if you expected me to know who they were too.
“Anyway, Mrs. Meier went to the Garamond Shopping Plaza one afternoon. Her husband liked French bread, so she’d gone to buy a loaf at a special bakery there. According to her testimony, she left the baby carriage in front of the store, but only because there was a big plate-glass window that allowed her to see it clearly from inside. Said she’d done it many times before. There was no one else in there, so the exchange took no more than two, three minutes. She left the place, stuck the bread into a bag hanging off the side of the carriage, and wheeled it away. Now comes a very key point. She said when she left the store, she did not look into the carriage. Only slid the bread into the bag and walked to her next errand. At the door to this next place she looked down to see if the baby was okay and discovered for the first time it was gone.”
“What—” I stopped; I had to clear my throat. “What happened after that?”
“What happened? It’s all in the folder, but basically another small face went onto the milk cartons: ‘Have you seen this child?’ The boy’s been missing nine years, Mr. Fischer.
“The Meiers did everything they possibly could but turned up nothing. My sources told me they’re still spending a great amount trying to find him.
“But, you know, a lot of the time with a tragedy like this, almost worse is what happens to the parents. What I gathered was Mr. Meier suffered some sort of breakdown. Then they moved from Garamond to Missouri—”
“Fowler, Missouri?”
He looked a while through the file. “Yes—Fowler, Missouri. That’s right.”
“Where she had a car accident?”
Goff nodded, still scanning his file. “I’m not on any kind of firm ground when I say this, but I don’t think it was an accident. There’s a real feeling here she was trying to kill herself.”
“Why do you say that?”
“A hunch.”
“Can’t you be more specific?”
“Look at that last picture of her. It was taken right before they left Missouri. That’s a very tortured person. And the only description I found of her car accident makes me just as suspect.”
“I read the same article.”
“Think about it.” He put up a hand and started counting off the details on his fingers. “She admitted she was going too fast. She lost control of the car on a dead-flat interstate, although the weather was good—“
“How do you know that?”
“I checked the weather bureau’s records. Lost control of the car just when she happened to come up on one of those seven-foot-round reinforced concrete pillars that hold up an overpass? No, it’s too fishy.”
“You think she tried to do it because of the loss of her child?”
“Yes, and other reasons. A happy young woman marries her high school boyfriend, goes to a good college, graduates into safety and affluence. Has a baby fast and sets up house in the suburbs. Her husband lands a good job at the bank. It’s all a little dull, but very pleasant too in its way.
“One day this fairy-tale princess, so pretty and so safe, hops into the station wagon with her new baby and toodles down to the store to buy her man’s favorite bread. Sounds like Little Red Riding Hood going to Grandma’s house.” Goff stood up and, turning his back to me, touched the face of one of the fish mounted on the wall. “Then within what? – thirty seconds? – her entire life became incomprehensible. Like an unknown foreign language. Every word she once knew and relied on suddenly had a completely different definition. Imagine waking up one morning and discovering every word you knew yesterday has a new meaning. ‘Child’ doesn’t mean child anymore, it means terror, loss, dread. You speak yesterday’s words and phrases the way you always did, but no one understands today. Not even you, finally. ‘Where is my baby?’ now means ‘Death’s here’ or ‘God died today.’
“Most of us had trouble with foreign languages in school. What happens when in one second our own becomes Russian or Farsi? And after that second, it never ever goes back to the way we knew it before.
“Anwen Meier had had a gentle, protected life. She had no preparation for what hit, not that anyone ever does. Her baby was stolen, her husband broke down, neither of them could ever get over the loss… I can understand damned well why she’d try to kill herself.”
“From Missouri they went back to New Jersey?”
“Right. Bought an old chicken farm in the town of Somerset. That’s near New Brunswick, where Rutgers University is. They run a dog kennel out of their farm. Raise French bulldogs. Ugly little things. Ever see one? They look like potatoes. Potatoes with bug eyes.”
I sat there hungry for more, yet already overfilled at the same time. Who were these people with their beauty and tragedy? What were they doing three times in the bottom drawers and hidden corners of Lily Aaron’s life?
“Mr. Fischer? Are you okay?”
“Yes, I was just thinking about what you said.”
“I thought so. I want to tell you something I tell every client at this point in an investigation. It’s only a piece of advice but I feel compelled to tell it to you. How we proceed afterward is your decision.
“I’ve been doing this work twenty-two years. People ask me to look into things… whatever their reasons. Although it may sound contradictory, I’m not a curious man. The work interests me because it’s logical and clear-cut: gather facts, present them, let a client decide what to do with the information. Sometimes I feel like a librarian—you tell me what subject, I’ll go back into the stacks and pull out all the things we have on it.
“But now I give my little talk, free of charge.
“What I want to tell you is—stop now. I can guarantee the further you pursue this, the more it’ll upset you no matter how important you think it is. Chances are, you’re upset already. Most people are. It gets worse. People are curious, so they hire me. But once I give them a first bunch of stuff it begins to chew them up. Cheating wives, dishonest parents… there’s many good reasons to hire an investigator. But finish it now, I’m telling you. Unless it’s absolutely imperative, or doing it’ll save someone’s life, stop now. Pay me, walk out the door, and forget it. That may sound strange coming from me, but I tell ya, I’ve seen so much pain in this job… I don’t get a charge out of seeing people dissolve. I lose some customers, but there’s never any lack of them in this business.”
“You’re probably right.”
“I know I am. In fact I’m so right, I’ll bet I know exactly what you’re thinking this minute. You’re thinking: He’s right and I will stop—after I ask him to look into only one more thing. But that’s the killer. The ‘one more thing’ usually ends up breaking your soul. What a client usually has now is their first whiff of smoke. It makes them suspicious, if not downright paranoid. ‘What do you mean, you saw my wife leaving Bill’s Bar? She doesn’t drink!’ Things like that. So please listen to me, take your suspicion and try to work through it. Go back to your life as it was and leave this alone—”
I don’t know where it came from, but I was instantly furious with this man. Where did he get off condescending to me, saying in so many words he knew what was best and I should go home like a good little fella…
“Thank you for the advice, Mr. Goff. But I’ll make my own decisions. If I do choose to pursue this, and it’s too difficult for you to handle—”
“One more piece of ‘advice,’ Mr. Fischer. Don’t be an asshole when someone who knows what they’re talking about gives you a worthwhile tip. Number one—I know how to ‘handle’ this. I’m only telling you I’ve seen a thousand people walk right off the gangplank with information they asked me to gather. Number two—I don’t care what it does to you. I don’t care if it makes you happy or sad or shocked. I’m the librarian, remember. I only bring the books. You read them and most of the time they do change your life. Guaranteed. I’m only saying: be careful with these books because too often—”