They were both off on the day when she said she wanted to take the bus to East Hampton, and she’d pointedly avoided inviting him to spend time with her until the evening. He was pissed and took it out on the Avis rental agent when he picked up the Chevy at mid-morning. A sudden impulse made him anxious to drive back upstate to where he grew up even though there were no relatives or friends still there. He just needed a break.
He took the Taconic Parkway and kept the radio on the classical music station until the hills delivered more static than music. He exited at the Hillsdale turnoff and drove around aimlessly, even past his old house, now expanded and likely modernized by the weekenders who had bought it from his father’s estate, but it was shrouded behind a cluster of blue spruce much like his own past was hidden. He ate a sandwich at the Taconic Diner and headed back. He dropped the car off about five, and then went back to shower and change for dinner.
Ten o’clock passes, yet she hasn’t come. The previous day she had told him she was taking the Hampton Jitney to East Hampton on her day off.
“Ever since I’ve been in New York people always talk about the Hamptons and the beautiful beaches out there.”
So she went on an early bus despite the chill. After he got back to his apartment he checked his cell phone for messages. He had been so upset that morning he’d forgotten to take it with him. He saw that she had called. Since that day he played it over a hundred times.
Just wanted you to know I’m out here at the beach. Actually, I’m in a house with a view of the ocean. I met this nice guy and he invited me in for a view. I might be a little late for dinner, but I should be there.
And there wasn’t anything more. He tried to call her that same day, in the early evening, probably shortly after dusk, but her phone rang until her message pickup. He tried again later but could never get through, even to her voice mail. Maybe she was out of the regular service area in one of those dead spots. She never came to the restaurant, but also didn’t show up for her shift the next day. That was more surprising, as she was always diligent about her shifts.
The next afternoon he got a call from her supervisor. There was no secret about their relationship. “Do you know where she is?”
He somehow suspects that Heidi has found another partner. Another lover. The thought tears him up, as it has before. Another mouth seeking out and gliding above the brown skin, moving a tongue into her crevices, bringing her off. Still, it is not like her. Two more days pass. He convinces her superintendent to open her apartment, but there is no evidence she has been back. A toothbrush rests on the ledge of the sink, clumps of aqua caught in bristles, just next to the strands of dark hair that float above her hairbrush. He picks up the toothbrush and sucks the stiff blades into his mouth, but it isn’t her. She’s not there, and for the first time since they met, he feels a chill, and realizes with horrific suddenness that he may never see her again. That’s when he decides to call the police.
People appear to go missing in New York with amazing frequency, yet most are found. They turn up after a few days, or weeks, either after a drug or alcohol binge, or a tryst with a secret lover. They make excuses and apologize to the authorities.
The voice on the other end of Henry’s call is reassuring.
“If she went to East Hampton for the day by bus, there will likely be a record. We’ll check it out and ask the town police to look for her. Do you happen to have a recent photo?”
He does. They’d spent a long weekend in Bermuda three months before. He’d placed the camera on a balcony table, set the timer, and then taken a number of shots. He chooses one with her silhouetted against the balcony wall. She wears a new sleeveless pink-and-white dress that shows off her tan. Her short black hair barely grazes her cheek. He uses a scissors to slice away most of his own image and delivers the photo to the appointed address that afternoon.
He tells the investigator that he thinks her parents might live in or near Vienna, but that they should seek an Austrian address through the hospital since he doesn’t have one and Heidi never spoke of them.
“No.” As far as he knows she doesn’t have any relatives that live in America.
And later, “I don’t know if she had relationships with other men.”
The last question raises an edge of angst. It wasn’t possible that they might think he had anything to do with her disappearance, yet a tiny seed of doubt rises, and makes him tremble. He doesn’t tell them about the message on his cell phone. Not then. He couldn’t admit there could be other men.
They thank him and ask that he tell them if she turns up. From past experience they expect that would happen within a few weeks at most. In the meanwhile, they will check with the Hampton Jitney and advise East Hampton P.D. to be on the lookout. They’ve done this sort of thing before. Everything they do seems so routine to Henry, yet he lives on the edge for the next several weeks.
But time does not solve the problem. Eventually he goes back to the police and plays the cell phone message she left. They seem to pass off his original failure to provide the information as jealousy, which it was. He is advised that a detective named Peter Wisdom of the East Hampton Police still has the case file unless for some reason he’d turned it over to the Suffolk County Police Department, which handles major crimes. In this case, at least so far, there is no evidence yet of anything sinister. They tell him that Detective Wisdom has interviewed all the passengers who live in East Hampton who took the same bus as Heidi that morning. They give him Wisdom’s direct number at work.
He thinks about this for a few more days and then decides to call the Hampton Jitney bus company directly rather than Wisdom. He wants to speak to the same passengers as well as the bus driver, but they deny him access to the lists. They say it’s confidential information. He calls a lawyer he knows from their undergraduate days at Yale. Judah Cohen greets his call with collegial enthusiasm and arranges for an associate to provide him with an insight into the maze of a legal system that has simultaneously become America’s strength and soft spot.
Several days later he speaks to Detective Wisdom to confirm that he can access the passenger list if he files a Freedom of Information Act request, called a FOIA. Anyone can do it. A citizen can look into reading Nixon’s Watergate notes, the background behind Lyndon Johnson’s Tonkin Gulf Resolution, aged FBI files on a relative or friend sucked into the McCarthy Senate hearings, or possibly even certain CIA communications to President Bush about potential problem weapons in Iraq.
Wisdom is forthcoming. “We prefer that private citizens not get involved, but to be honest, sometimes you people pick up things we miss. If you find out anything unusual, please let me know. Henry readily agrees to this and also offers to send Wisdom one of the photos of Heidi in the pink-and-white dress.
The process is not swift, yet moves along. In ten days he has the list of passengers, more due to Detective Wisdom’s intervention than anything else. He recognizes none of the names. People who live in the New York area. Some of them in the town of East Hampton. He makes a copy of the list. He decides to start with the driver, who lives in a small town on the eastern end of Long Island, but the results are spotty.
“I wouldn’t even have remembered her if the police hadn’t asked some questions,” the driver says. “There’s not much I can add to what I told them. I think she spoke to a few people on the bus, but that was when she was getting ready to leave.”