The Night Before(23)

The body of the email contained a plea from one woman to another. I met this guy online and I’m worried something’s not right about him. Did he ever contact you? Gabe left his cell number, and Rosie’s.

“One in a hundred profiles on this site is fake. Avatars—fake pictures and enticing information. It’s almost always women who do it. They use an avatar to contact the guys they’re seeing. Or sometimes their husbands, boyfriends. Then they wait to see if he responds, if he wants to meet. That confirms he’s cheating or lying. You get the idea.”

Rosie nodded, staving off panic. A plan was in place. They would wait for a reply. And while they waited, Gabe would comb through the papers in Laura’s room again, see what he could find that might help them. Rosie would start calling the people she knew from Laura’s life. There were surprisingly few, she realized, and this made her uneasy. Guilty. She had been so consumed with her own life since Mason was born.

She would start with a casual call to Laura’s work colleague named Jill. And Laura’s old roommate, Kathleen—the one she’d never met because she spent weekends in New Jersey. Gabe knew how to find their numbers. She would also get in touch with Asshole in New York City, if she could figure out who he was. She would be careful not to raise concerns in case this was nothing and Laura wanted to return to her life without having to explain why her crazy sister called in a panic looking for her.

She fixed a cup of coffee and placed it on the table next to her phone and Laura’s computer.



* * *



It was half past two when she heard the door.

“We’re home!”

Joe set Mason down and he ran to his mother. Rosie scooped him up and hugged him tight.

“How was the park, lovebug?”

She closed her eyes. Breathed him in. Tried to pull herself back from the urgency of the situation. She knew he could feel it.

He squirmed from her arms and ran to the corner where they kept his toys. That left Joe, standing with her in the kitchen, his eyes shifting from her to Mason and out to the street where Gabe’s car was parked.

“No luck?” Joe asked.

Rosie told him about Jonathan Fields and the bar where Laura’s phone had been. They had his picture and his screen name. And how there might be another woman who went on a date with him, who used a credit card. Maybe they could find her. Maybe she would know more about him.

Joe looked quickly at the clock above the sink.

“It’s almost three.”

“I know.”

“We should call.…”

Footsteps pounded the stairs. Gabe walked in, empty-handed.

“I have her social security number. That’s all I found. It was on a reimbursement form.”

Rosie got up from the table and joined them at the island.

“I think we need to call the police,” Joe said again, filling the brief silence.

But then something new came across Gabe’s face. Something she didn’t recognize. It looked like guilt, or shame maybe. And it didn’t suit him.

“I need to tell you both something. I don’t know that it matters.”

“Jesus, Gabe, what?” Rosie had her phone in her hand. Joe was right. It was time. And now this?

“Maybe it’s nothing. Maybe I’m just pulling together memories to make sense of things—I hadn’t thought about any of this for years, but it’s been playing in my head since you called this morning.”

“A memory? Of what? When we were kids? What are you talking about?” Joe asked.

Gabe closed his eyes. Hung his head. Jesus—was he trying to see it more clearly, this memory from the past, or not wanting to see them when he finally said the words? Rosie was losing patience.

“Just tell us, Gabe! What do you know?”

“It has to do with my brother.”

Joe was quick to respond. “Rick?”

“Yeah. Before he left home.”

“For the military school? But that was so long ago—Laura was, what, eleven?” Rosie remembered Gabe’s brother. Rick had been a troublemaker. Two years older than Gabe. Four years older than Laura. But he had never been their friend. Rick Wallace was the vicious dog whose house you ran past, hoping he wouldn’t see you. Joe had gotten into it with him more than once. Fists flying, even as young boys. Mrs. Wallace cried about him to their mother. How she couldn’t control him. How they had to send him away.

Joe was alarmed. “What happened with Rick?”

Gabe began the story.

“Do you remember when Laura would see Lionel Casey. In the woods?”

“Fuck, Gabe—why would you bring up Lionel Casey?” Joe was looking at Rosie when he said it. She was thinking the same thing. Of all the people, and under these circumstances … first Rick and then Lionel Casey—the homeless man who lived in the nature preserve. The man who was eventually found inside the car of Laura’s dead boyfriend, and who’d spent his life in a mental facility as a result.

“Listen,” Gabe continued. “I know it’s hard to hear the name. But do you remember when we were little, when he used to wear that cape and walk the stone wall at the end of the pond? Laura said he looked like a vampire.”

Rosie nodded reluctantly. The stories about the old hermit who lived in the deep woods of the nature preserve would have been funny now, as grown-ups, had things not ended the way they did, with Lionel Casey implicated in the death of Laura’s boyfriend.