Bert dropped dead of a heart attack back in January, shoveling the driveway after a heavy snowfall. Bad enough for Tyler that he’d lost his dad. He was also carrying a lot of guilt. It was his job to clear the driveway, but he’d slept in and his dad had decided not to wake him. If Tyler had gotten his ass out of bed, his father might still be alive.
He went to live with his never-married aunt — his mom’s sister — in town, but she soon found that looking after a teenager was something she was not up to. That was when Jayne started wondering what she should do. She felt she’d never really been there for Tyler, and maybe now was the time.
She was going to end our living arrangement and move back to Providence. She and Tyler would live in the family home, which had not yet been sold. She drove up there to explore the idea, see if she could get the house off the market.
“I’m sorry,” she’d said to me on the phone one night. “I love you, but... he’s my brother.”
After we had finished talking, I spent an hour or two thinking about her situation, then finally picked up my phone and sent her a text:
Tyler can live with us.
The phone rang in my hand almost immediately. Jayne said, “No, I would never ask that of you.”
“It’s okay. Honestly. He can move in. There’s an extra room. We have the space.”
“It’s not my house,” Jayne protested. “I don’t have the right to ask that of you.”
“It is your house. It’s our home. And you’re not asking. I’m offering. You forget what I went through.” I reminded her how my own parents had both died within a year of each other. When my father died of lung cancer, I had just turned twelve. Ten months later, as though God himself wanted to show he had a cosmically dark sense of humor, my mother was killed when a drunk driver ran a red light in Stamford and T-boned her Toyota. With no extended family to take me in, I bounced around from foster home to foster home until the age of eighteen, when I struck out on my own.
“I know what it’s like to have nowhere to go,” I’d said. “I can only imagine how great it would have been to have extended family step up and take me in.”
So it was done. But Tyler was less thrilled about it than I thought I might have been in similar circumstances. He had to leave behind his school, his social circle. Leaving Providence and coming to Stratford meant starting all over again. And he wasn’t crazy about his sister taking on a pseudo-parental role. The kid was adrift, and Jayne and I believed we were doing the best we could to provide a stable environment for him.
Some days, we felt we were failing.
Later that morning, I was in the garage, trying to make some sense of the mess in there. The Keeling home had finally sold, and while much of the furniture had gone into storage or been donated, there were several dozen boxes in the garage of family keepsakes and mementos that Jayne wanted to go through. “Photos” and “tax records” and “Tyler stuff” were scribbled in marker on the boxes. I thought I could at least sort them into neater stacks along the garage walls so that we could get both Jayne’s small car and my aging Ford Explorer in here.
Seconds after I powered open the double-wide door, I heard the door that enters into the house squeak on its hinges. Jayne had a beer in each hand, and held out the bottle of Sam Adams in her left.
“A little early for this?” I said, taking the beer anyway.
“What the fuck,” she said, pushing out her lower lip and blowing a lock of hair out of her eyes. “It’s Saturday.” We clinked bottles. She was drinking something different, the label on her bottle mostly obscured by her hand.
She watched me take a swig, and frowned. “Maybe we’re not setting a good example. Drinking before noon.”
I smiled. “At least we don’t puke on the deck.”
Jayne shrugged. “Got stuff to do,” she said, and went back into the house.
I was about to take another sip when the cell phone tucked into my back pocket rang. I dug it out, saw MAX on the screen. I was surprised to see the name of my former next-door neighbor. It had been a long time since we’d spoken.
“Hello,” I said.
“Andy?”
“Hey, Max. Long time.”
“Yeah, well. It was lucky I still had your number in my phone. Not sure I would have found you otherwise, because, well, I’d heard you changed your last name and I didn’t know what it was. You’re still in Milford?”
“No,” I said. I wasn’t comfortable talking about changing my name, and didn’t volunteer my new one. “In Stratford now. You cross the Housatonic, it feels like you’re in another state.”
“So, this is going to sound crazy, and I didn’t know whether I should call or not, but I figured this is something you’d want to know about.”
“What is it, Max?’
“So I was out front, this morning, and this car pulls in to your place. Well, your old driveway. Not your old house, since they rebuilt on the lot, but—”
“I’m aware, Max.”
“Anyway, this car pulls in, and this woman gets out, and she looks at the house and she goes kind of crazy, asking what happened to her house, where did it go?”
I felt the hairs on the back of my neck start to stand up.
“You there?” Max asked.
“I’m here.”
“The girl next door, the one who lives in the house where yours used to be, she came out, told this lady it was a new house, the old one was torn down, and this woman looks kind of freaked out, gets back in the car, takes off. Didn’t even close the tailgate. Like she’d seen a ghost. Or, I don’t know. As if maybe she was the ghost.”
Max paused, as though steeling himself.
“The thing is, Andy, I mean, I know Brie’s been missing six years now, and everyone figures something bad happened, and I don’t want to get your hopes up and all, but...”
Another pause, and then:
“But I think it was her.”
I needed to be sure I understood what Max was telling me. “Say again?” I said.
“Brie,” he said. “I think it was Brie.”
Three
Detective Hardy: Mr. Underwood, what is the name of the company you work for?
Charles: Triple-A Pest Control. We’re in the book under AAA Pest Control, so we’re the first ones you’re going to find if you’ve got a problem.
Detective Hardy: And you received a call from Brie Mason when?
Charles: Saturday morning. She said she thought she’d heard something in the walls the night before and she was kind of freaked out and she left a message on the voice mail since we don’t usually take calls on the weekend. But I checked the message and she sounded pretty upset, so I said I could come over that afternoon.
Detective Hardy: And when did you arrive at her residence, at, let me just check... thirty-six Mulberry?
Charles: I guess it was around two, two-thirty. Yeah.
Detective Hardy: She met you at the door?
Charles: That’s right.
Detective Hardy: There was no one else at home?
Charles: Just her. She said her husband was out of town, but coming back any minute.