“And?”
“And that was it. A moment later she was gone.”
“Gone?”
“On a subway.”
The words came easier now. Edna Skylar told Loren the whole story, how she’d been studying faces while walking in New York, how she spotted the girl despite the appearance change, how she followed her down into the subway, how she’d vanished into the dark.
Loren wrote it all down, but fact was, this figured into what she’d believed from the beginning. The kid was a runaway. As Ed Steinberg had already told Skylar, there had been an ATM withdrawal at a Citibank in midtown near the time she vanished. Loren had seen the bank video. The face had been covered by a hood, but it was probably the Rochester girl. The father had clearly been on the over-strict side. That was how it always was with the runaways. The too-liberal parents, their kids often got hooked on drugs. The too-conservative, their kids were the runaways with the sex issues. Might be a stereotype to break it down like that, but Loren had seen very few cases that broke those rules.
She asked a few more follow-up questions. There was nothing that they could really do now. The girl was eighteen. There was no reason, from this description, to suspect foul play. On TV, the feds get involved and put a team on it. That doesn’t happen in real life.
But Loren felt a niggling at the base of her brain. Some would call it intuition. She hated that. Hunches… that didn’t really work either. She wondered what Ed Steinberg, her boss, would want to do. Nothing, probably. Their office was busy working with the U.S. Attorney on two cases, one involving a possible terrorist and the other a Newark politician on the take.
With their resources so limited, should they pursue what appeared to be an obvious runaway? It was a tough call.
“Why now?” Loren asked.
“What?”
“Three weeks, you didn’t say anything. What made you change your mind?”
“Do you have children, Investigator Muse?”
“No.”
“I do.”
Loren again looked at the desk, at the credenza, at the wall. No family pictures. No sign of children or grandchildren. Skylar smiled, as if she understood what Muse was doing.
“I was a lousy mother.”
“I’m not sure I understand.”
“I was, shall we say, laissez-faire. When in doubt, I’d let it go.”
Loren waited.
“That,” Edna Skylar said, “was a huge mistake.”
“I’m still not sure I understand.”
“Neither do I. But this time…” Her voice faded away. She swallowed, looked down at her hands before turning her gaze to Loren. “Just because everything looks okay, maybe it’s not. Maybe Katie Rochester needs help. Maybe this time I should do more than just let it go.”
The promise in the basement came back to haunt Myron at exactly 2:17 a.m.
Three weeks had passed. Myron was still dating Ali. It was the day of Esperanza’s wedding. Ali came as his date. Myron gave away the bride. Tom — real name Thomas James Bidwell III — was Win’s cousin. The wedding was small. Strangely enough, the groom’s family, charter members of the Daughters of the American Revolution, was not thrilled with Tom’s marriage to a Bronx-born Latina named Esperanza Diaz. Go figure.
“Funny,” Esperanza said.
“What’s that?”
“I always thought I’d marry for money, not love.” She checked herself in the mirror. “But here I am, marrying for love and getting money.”
“Irony is not dead.”
“Good thing. You’re going to Miami to see Rex?”
Rex Storton was an aging movie star they were repping. “I’m flying down tomorrow afternoon.”
Esperanza turned away from the mirror, spread her arms, and gave him a dazzling smile. “Well?”
She was a vision. Myron said, “Wow.”
“You think?”
“I think.”
“Come on then. Let’s get me hitched.”
“Let’s.”
“One thing first.” Esperanza pulled him aside. “I want you to be happy for me.”
“I am.”
“I’m not leaving you.”
“I know.”
Esperanza looked into his face. “We’re still best friends,” she said. “You understand that? You, me, Win, Big Cyndi. Nothing has changed.”
“Sure it has,” Myron said. “Everything has changed.”
“I love you, you know.”
“And I love you.”
She smiled again. Esperanza was always so damned beautiful. She had that whole peasant-blouse fantasy thing going on. But today, in that dress, the word luminous was simply too weak. She had been so wild, such a free spirit, had insisted that she would never settle down with one person like this. But here she was, with a baby, getting married. Even Esperanza had grown up.
“You’re right,” she said. “But things change, Myron. And you’ve always hated change.”
“Don’t start with that.”
“Look at you. You lived with your parents into your mid-thirties. You own your childhood home. You still spend most of your time with your college roommate, who, let’s face it, can’t change.”
He put up his hand. “I get the point.”
“Funny though.”
“What?”
“I always thought you’d be the first to get married,” she said.
“Me too.”
“Win, well, like I said, let’s not even go there. But you always fell in love so easily, especially with that bitch, Jessica.”
“Don’t call her that.”
“Whatever. Anyway, you were the one who bought the American dream — get married, have two-point-six kids, invites friends to barbecues in the backyard, the whole thing.”
“And you never did.”
Esperanza smiled. “Weren’t you the one who taught me, Men tracht und Gott lacht”?
“Man, I love it when you shiksas speak Yiddish.”
Esperanza put her hand through the crook of his arm. “That can be a good thing, you know.”
“I know.”
She took a deep breath. “Shall we?”
“You nervous?”
Esperanza looked at him. “Not even a little.”
“Then onward.”
Myron walked her down the aisle. He thought it would be a flattering formality, standing in for her late father, but when Myron gave Esperanza’s hand to Tom, when Tom smiled and shook his hand, Myron started to well up. He stepped back and sat down in the front row.
The wedding was not so much an eclectic mix as a wonderful collision. Win was Tom’s best man while Big Cyndi was Esperanza’s maid of honor. Big Cyndi, her former tag-team wrestling partner, was six-six and comfortably north of three hundred pounds. Her fists looked like canned hams. She had not been sure what to wear — a classic peach maid of honor dress or a black leather corset. Her compromise: peach leather with a fringed hem, sleeveless so as to display arms with the relative dimensions and consistency of marble columns on a Georgian mansion. Big Cyndi’s hair was done up in a mauve Mohawk and pinned on the top was a little bride-and-groom cake decoration.
When trying on the, uh, dress, Big Cyndi had spread her arms and twirled for Myron. Ocean tides altered course, and solar systems shifted. “What do you think?” she asked.
“Mauve with peach?”
“It’s very hip, Mr. Bolitar.”
She always called him Mister; Big Cyndi liked formality.
Tom and Esperanza exchanged vows in a quaint church. White poppies lined the pews. Tom’s side of the aisle was dressed in black and white — a sea of penguins. Esperanza’s side had so many colors, Crayola sent a scout. It looked like the Halloween parade in Greenwich Village. The organ played beautiful hymns. The choir sang like angels. The setting could not have been more serene.
For the reception, however, Esperanza and Tom wanted a change of pace. They rented out an S&M nightclub near Eleventh Avenue called Leather and Lust. Big Cyndi worked there as a bouncer and sometimes, very late at night, she took to the stage for an act that boggled the imagination.