“Oh, God,” he said. “What have I done?”
Before paying Tim Samuels another visit, Lydia and Jeffrey had returned James to his parents. Lydia had called the number on the website and asked to speak to Mr. Rainer.
“Mr. Rainer,” she said when he came on the line. “My name is Lydia Strong. Do you know who I am?”
“Uh, yes,” he said. “I do. You’re the true crime writer.” She heard the mingling of hope and dread in his German-accented English. It was a tone she recognized in the families of victims. They knew her involvement would generate publicity that might well bring justice or answers. But they also knew that tentatively healing wounds would be reopened, that reignited hopes might be shattered once again.
“I want you to know that in the commission of an investigation we’ve found your son, James Rainer.”
She heard him make a sharp inhale and a long slow exhale. “Please,” he said. “This is not a joke?”
She heard a woman’s voice in the background.
“No,” she said quickly. “We have reason to believe that your son joined an organization called The New Day to help himself with some of his problems.”
“The New Day,” Mr. Rainer repeated as if in a daze. The woman’s voice in the background grew louder, more urgent.
“We infiltrated this group in the search for another missing person, a young woman. We encountered your son and removed him against his will from the premises.”
“Against his will?”
“Yes, Mr. Rainer.”
It took a while to make him understand what had happened to his son and that the road home was going to be more difficult than just arranging a place to meet. She tried to explain that he called himself Charley now and that he might not acknowledge them until he’d gotten some help, to undo the things that had been done to him at The New Day. But she wasn’t quite sure he understood her. He just seemed dazed and a little confused as he shared the news with his wife, who started to weep.
“I’ve arranged to have him accepted to a psychiatric facility in New York City,” she said when Mr. Rainer returned to the phone. “It’s the best possible place for him right now.”
“I-I can’t afford that. I’m sorry. We’ll have to help James here at home.”
She’d already anticipated that.
“I’ve taken care of the expense, Mr. Rainer,” said Lydia. “And I just want you to do one thing for me. When he’s well, if we haven’t found Lily Samuels, I’d just like to talk to him again.”
She heard him sigh on the other end. “I can’t,” he said, his voice growing strained with tears, “express my gratitude.”
Lydia had made a late-night call to Irma Fox, a child psychiatrist she had met through Ford McKirdy, a retired homicide detective whom she and Jeff had worked with on the Julian Ross case last year. Irma was unlucky enough to be the only shrink in Lydia’s Palm Pilot and Lydia recalled her having mentioned doing cult deprogramming work with adolescents and young adults in their late teens. On hearing the situation, Irma was very quick to accommodate Lydia, calling back immediately to say that a bed could be arranged for James Rainer that night at a facility on the Upper West Side. The cost was exorbitant. But Lydia figured it was the least they could do, since Jeffrey had practically killed the kid and Dax had pumped him so full of Xanax to calm him that James was nearly catatonic.
Tim Samuels wasn’t looking much better than James had when they dropped him off, beaten and drugged and about to undergo the worst few weeks of his life.
“This is what they do,” said Samuels in his living room. The beautifully appointed space was a mess. The couch was being used as a bed. Half-empty glasses and cups with congealed liquid, dirty plates crusted with dried food, and empty fast-food containers occupied most available spaces. The shades had been drawn against the view and the room had an unpleasant odor.
“Who?”
“The New Day. They ruin. What they can’t possess, they destroy.”
He put his head in his hands and started to weep. It sounded a little forced and pathetic to Lydia, but then she didn’t have a lot of patience for sobbing men.
“Where’s your wife?” she said. He looked up at her.
“She left.” He sighed and hung his head. “She can’t stand the sight of me.”
Lydia bit back an impolite comment but he must have seen it on her face.
“Yeah, imagine that. Right?” he said.
Lydia raised her eyebrows at him but said nothing.
“Time for you to come clean with us, Mr. Samuels,” said Jeffrey, sitting across from him. “For Lily’s sake. And by the looks of it, for yours too.”
“You don’t understand,” he said, looking up at them with red-rimmed eyes.
Jeffrey showed Samuels his palms. “Make me understand. Make me understand what’s happening here.”
Tim Samuels was desperately unhappy. So he had an affair with a twenty-two-year-old stripper and bought a Ferrari. When that didn’t work, he went looking for God.
“I just started getting this feeling like everything worth doing was already behind me,” he said quietly. He looked beaten as he sipped from the glass of ice water Lydia had fetched him from the kitchen.
“The kids were grown, living their lives. Much more fulfilling, exciting lives than I ever dreamed of, I might add. Monica and I, we love each other, you know. She’s my best friend. But after twenty-five years, things were not exactly hot… if you know what I mean.”
Lydia hoped he wasn’t going to go into detail and she shifted in her seat on the couch across from him. Jeffrey stood by the hearth, watching Samuels in that way that he had. Listening carefully, critically. Looking for all the cues that Lydia looked for, the shifting eyes, the tapping foot. It was the furtive gesture, the uneasy glance, the unconscious tick that told you the most about a person. Words were chosen. But the body never lied. Tim Samuels gave her the impression of someone who’d been crushed. He slumped in his chair like he didn’t even have the energy to sit upright anymore.
“When I retired a year and a half ago, sold my business, I made a killing. I mean like, more money than I ever dreamed of.”
He let out a little laugh. “It was what I had worked for my entire life… to have enough money so that I didn’t have to work. It took about a year of golfing and drinking, sleeping late, watching soaps, to realize that I didn’t know anything about myself. All my life I had always done what I was told to do, the right thing, work hard, marry well, send your children to college. I was always so busy working, or working on the house, or raising the kids, or taking care of my marriage. I’d never had any time to really think about myself, my life. Do you know how scary that is? To realize that your life is more than half over and that you are a stranger to yourself? It scared the shit out of me.”
He was looking at them both with pleading eyes. He wanted compassion, sympathy. Jeffrey nodded solemnly and sat on the hearth.
“I understand,” he said. Lydia looked at him and back to Tim Samuels. She couldn’t imagine two men more different.
It seemed like Samuels’ generation of men, men in their late fifties, early sixties, had been robbed in a way, that they’d never really been given the tools to be happy. They’d been taught to work, to provide for their families, to accrue wealth. But no one had really taught them how to love, how to reflect, how to communicate. So many of them held onto sexism, racism, elitism as crutches to make themselves feel better, feel bigger. They seemed clueless to Lydia, lost and wandering with these outdated ideas in their heads and unexpressed emotions in their chests and no idea what to do with either of them.
“So I’m embarrassed to say I started acting like a typical jackass having a midlife crisis. I bought a 575M Maranello Ferrari, started staying out late or not coming home at all. I met this young girl at a strip club in the city; she made me feel like I was twenty-one again.” A wide smile spread across his face as he thought of her. Lydia felt like smacking it off his face.