Invisible City (Rebekah Roberts #1)(54)

“I just hope the police find who did this—she didn’t deserve to die so young.”

Police have questioned and released the family gardener, but refused to comment on the case, citing an ongoing investigation.


I make the last bit up, figuring I’ll fill in whatever Larry finds, or doesn’t find.

I read over what I’ve written and decide it’s not bad, but it’s definitely what my professors would call a “one-source story,” which isn’t ideal. I need Miriam in here. I need somebody at 1PP. I need Baruch.

Back at the porn mom scene, Bill is sharing a cigarette with a tall woman wearing Pan-Cake makeup and an Entertainment Tonight badge around her neck.

“Where the f*ck have you been?” he asks.

“Did I miss anything?”

ET shakes her head. “Neighbors are like Nazis,” she says, blowing smoke out her nostrils. “Biddy’s on patrol, too.” I look past her into the lobby and see that, indeed, biddy is manning the door in her housecoat and snow boots. Maya is across the street, so I cross and ask her if she’s gotten anything.

“Nothing,” she says. “Total bust. I followed one woman around the corner and she started running, literally. Where’d you go?”

I shrug. “Coffee.”

“Smart. If they have me back here tomorrow, I’ll do the same.”

I call Mike and tell him the biddy has the place locked down.

“The Ledger has nothing either. Nobody does,” I say.

“All right,” he says. “You can take off.”





CHAPTER ELEVEN


I first heard about the house at Coney Island from my dad. It figured briefly in “the story of Mom.” They hatched the plan to run back to Orlando together in Coney Island. It was their hideaway. Where they could meet in private. As a child, I imagined “Coney Island” as a tiny island, like the ones that cartoon characters get marooned on. With a single palm tree in the center. Later, when I saw a picture of the boardwalk and the roller coaster, I pictured them walking hand in hand together down the shoreline. By high school, when I understood a little about sex, and experienced its connection to what I’d always been told was love, I realized that Coney Island was where my parents went to have sex. I might even have been conceived there.

But Coney Island was just one line in the story. A story that was communicated to me in pieces as I was deemed ready. Mom isn’t dead, but she’s not here, at three. She’s not here because she had to go take care of her family in New York, at five. We didn’t go with her because Mommy and Daddy were divorced, like so-and-so’s parents, at seven. Mommy and Daddy were divorced because Mommy grew up a certain way, at nine. Actually, Mommy and Daddy weren’t exactly divorced, because they never got married, at eleven. From there it started getting muddy. They weren’t ever really lies, and I can see now that it was not a story that easily lent itself to a child’s comprehension, but it always felt to me like another big secret was coming—another piece of the picture dangling above my life like a piano. Ready to drop and force me to climb over it. For years I hated my father as much as I hated my mother. And in some ways I still do, but now I also have sympathy for him. And respect for how he handled the situation. Twenty years old with a baby girl and a thoroughly appalled family can’t have been easy, and he made it work for us. He might not be as in touch with his actual emotions or, to some extent, reality, as I wish he was, but he’s a good guy. To the core. And even at twenty-two years old I know that’s rare. One parent who would protect you at all costs is more than a lot of people get. But he doesn’t want to understand who I really am inside. He thinks I’ve turned away from God. Those were his actual words. I called him to say how bad I’d been feeling sophomore year in college. I told him how I was scared all the time but I didn’t exactly know what of. Well, he said with a kind of sadness, You’ve turned away from God. His words infuriated me. I’ve never seen or heard or felt this “God,” but my life is basically a mess made by people twisting themselves into knots, trying to please him. My parents were both looking for God in a bookstore when they met. Oh wow, they must have thought. Someone I can obsess over God with who I also want to f*ck! And why did my mother leave? God. All the good I’ve ever seen in this world, all the beauty and joy, comes from people, or from the earth. An evening sky, music. Did God make it all? Maybe. But we don’t look at a Picasso and worship his father, I said to my dad. And he responded, sounding both smug and sad, But see, we have to worship something. Fuck you, I said. And f*ck God. And that was the last time we talked about it.

I get off the F train at the last stop. The track is elevated here, and I can see the Cyclone and the Wonder Wheel. I can see the icy cold Atlantic slapping the empty beach. I shuffle down what feels like fifteen flights of stairs to the street, the wind coming from everywhere at once, tiny specks of ocean water and grains of sand like needles on my exposed face. People are all around me ending their day, beginning their day, heads down, encased in wool and nylon and fur and fleece. It’s a terrible time to try to get people to talk, the winter. As bad as in the pouring rain.

Snow left over from the big storm a couple weeks ago is still taking up parking spaces, slate-colored and frozen into walls by the passing plow. The dedicated pedestrian walkway and bike lane is impassable, though it’s hard to imagine too many leisure riders rolling to the beach today. The address Sara gave me is six blocks from the station. Nathan’s hot dogs and the souvenir shops on Mermaid Avenue are closed up tight. The faded color murals remembering strong men and sword swallowers of yore look hopelessly one-dimensional. A right and a left and I’m in front of 331 Sand Street. It’s a narrow two-story house with dingy vinyl siding on a block of the same. I open the knee-high white-painted metal gate, and when I reach the base of the concrete steps the front door opens and two young women come out. They’re both within five years of my age, give or take. The older one has close-cropped brown hair and wears shoulder-grazing feather earrings. The younger one is blond, with her long hair in a ponytail. Both are in coats, but they don’t appear to be leaving. Judging by the sofa on the porch and the pint glass of butts beside it, I’d say they’re out for a smoke.