Have You Seen Me?(65)

Though it’s breezy and crisp outside, there’s a row of tables on the sidewalk, their blue-and-white-checked tablecloths snapping in the wind. I opt to sit inside, and a waiter in white shirt and black pants leads me to a table along the wall. The room is dimly lit but in a soothing rather than gloomy way, and music’s playing in the background, a tenor singing an aria. Surprisingly there are already two other tables with diners, both groups of older women who have the look of regulars.

I take my phone from my purse and leave it on the table, so I won’t miss Mulroney returning my call, and glance quickly at the menu. I order a bowl of spaghetti alle vongole, a dish I haven’t had in ages, and a glass of Pellegrino.

There, that’s better, I think. In the years before I met Hugh, when I was single and dating very little, I often went out to dinner alone at little restaurants in my Upper East Side neighborhood. New York is one of those cities where you can do that unself-consciously, and I loved those evenings. They were a chance to think and be a little dreamy and imagine all the good things the future might hold.

It did hold good things for me. And it will again, I tell myself. It will, it will, it will. I’m going to learn where I went those two days and why, and once I have all the pieces back, I’m going to address the situation with Hugh and find a way to sort through our issues as a team.

My phone rings, and I grab it quickly. Not Mulroney calling. It’s Jennifer, the researcher.

“Hi, Ally,” she says. “I got that material for you.”

“Already?” I say.

“The library opened at nine, and there were only about twelve stories over a period of a month and a half.”

“Great,” I say, keeping my voice low.

“They had a scanner I could use, so I’ve already emailed you the file.”

“That’s fantastic, thanks. Just shoot me the invoice when you have a chance.”

“Will do. . . . God, what a horrible case. Your friend’s going to write about it?”

“My friend?”

“The author friend you’re helping out.”

“Oh, um, yeah, maybe. Thanks again, Jen.”

We sign off and I quickly go to her email, opening the file. My fingers, I notice, are trembling slightly. Besides the fact that the microfilmed pages make me feel like I’m back in the twentieth century, they’re tough to read this way. I squint, holding the phone closer to the window, and quickly scan the articles until finally I see the line I’m hunting for.

“According to Jaycee’s mother, Audrey Long, her daughter was abducted sometime Wednesday morning, possibly around eight-thirty A.M.”

Liar, I think. Because Jaycee had already been dead for hours.





25


I scroll back to the first couple of articles, looking for what was said about the cause of death. According to the coroner’s report, Jaycee died as a result of “blunt force trauma to the head,” and she’d been dead several days by the time the body was found.

From there I slowly read through the dozen or so articles and put together a timeline.

Audrey was a cocktail waitress back then, working nights while her own mother babysat for Jaycee at the house. She told reporters—and obviously the police, as well—that when she left for work Tuesday night, Jaycee was in bed sleeping and was there when she returned. She checked in on her before going to sleep herself at around 2:00 A.M.

The next morning, Audrey claimed, she was roused from bed when a friend dropped by. She went to wake up Jaycee and discovered her daughter wasn’t in bed. But she wasn’t alarmed at the time, she said. Her boyfriend, Frank Wargo, sometimes stopped by and took the girl for a car ride in the morning while Audrey slept in, and she assumed that was the case. She even remembered, she said, hearing the front door open and close around eight-thirty and the sound of Jaycee’s voice.

When Wargo didn’t show up with Jaycee later that day, Audrey said she figured he was getting back at her for an argument they’d had but she didn’t want to involve the police and thought Wargo would eventually surface with her daughter. By Friday she was worried enough—so she claimed—that she finally went to the police to report the girl missing.

Pretty pathetic.

Wargo, it turned out, had a solid alibi—at least for the second half of Tuesday and Wednesday morning. He was a professional truck driver, and on the day I found the body he was driving through the state of Georgia, having departed, he told the police, around 4:30 P.M. on Tuesday. They tracked him down in Delaware on his way home late Friday. He claimed to have been pissed at Audrey, and that’s why he hadn’t told her about the trip.

Audrey had people to back up her alibi, too. The grandmother reported she’d checked on Jaycee several times on Tuesday evening before spending the night on her daughter’s couch, and that Audrey was sleeping when she left just after eight on Wednesday morning. And the friend supported the story about showing up at nine to find Audrey in bed.

Which left Audrey practically no window of time to kill her daughter and dispose of the body between when her mother left and her friend arrived.

But none of that really mattered because Jaycee was actually dead by then.

And that means the grandmother had also lied to the cops about checking on Jaycee. Hard to fathom a grand mother doing that, but perhaps she felt desperate to protect Audrey, or she was coerced by her.