Two Girls Down(95)

Vega remembered lying in her bed in junior high and high school, falling asleep listening to Eminem or Black Flag on headphones, and then waking up long after the CD ended. How she’d hear her mother making her rounds around the house, checking doors and windows, murmuring the mantra of her neuroses: “Safe, safe, safe.”



“I’ll go, I’ll see Ashley Cahill’s mother,” she said then, so firm, so assured, you’d think she’d made the decision years ago.

—

Cap’s phone hummed and jumped with texts on the desk in front of him. He was in Traynor’s office alone. Messages were stacking up, flashing at the top of the screen from people he knew and sort of knew, friends he hadn’t talked to in a few years, and also his parents in Florida, his cousins, of course Nell, and even one from Jules, who usually only contacted him about logistics.

The texts said things like this:

“Buddy you are on CNN!!!”

“I just saw you on the news you look old”

“Please call me dad is so proud he says xoxo mom”

“U and Alice are on every network! Any closer to finding kylie?…”

“Cap, be careful.”

That last one was from Jules, and Cap smiled at her use of punctuation, even in a text. Formal and academic, except with his name. When they’d been married she called him Max, but after the split, on the rare days she actually used his name to address him, he was Cap. It sounded casual enough coming from anyone else, and from her it meant exactly that. She was anyone else now. Still, he stared at her text and felt something resembling joy.

He wrote back a restrained “Trying. Thx for checking in.”

Then he wrote to Nell, “Don’t stay up too lateral,” the autocorrect button popping up.

“I wolfs :)” came back.

Then the door opened, and it was Junior, with a couple behind him.

“Max Caplan, Toby and Erica McKenna.”

Cap shook their hands. They were both young and attractive, tan and brunette. The man, Toby, was tall with a full head of thick hair and glasses, his wife petite with a perfectly oval face. They all sat in a small circle of chairs Cap had arranged because he hadn’t felt comfortable sitting behind the chief’s desk.

“Thank you for coming,” said Cap. “Especially so late.”



“Happy to do it,” said Toby McKenna, his voice deep.

With the small circle frames on his glasses, Cap thought he was a twin for Clark Kent.

“I realize this can’t be easy.”

Neither responded to that. Both smiled politely, looked at their hands and each other. Even unnerved, their faces retained their clean beauty.

There were plenty of young parents in and around Denville—Cap found it to be a function of the suburbs. People had bigger houses, more rooms than they did in cities, so they filled them up with kids. This was not what he had experienced growing up in Sheepshead Bay. When Cap was four or five and begged his mother for a little brother, she’d said, “Where we gonna put him, Maxie? The bathtub?” He grew up with pots and pans stacked on top of one another in cupboards that could never quite close, the fan of handles jutting from the doors. Later he found out his mother’d had her tubes tied when he was a year old. We don’t have the money, and he’s just about perfect, his mother had said to his father. Why tempt fate?

But around here, you had kids and you had them young and you had a few. Even knowing that, though, Cap thought the McKennas looked awfully young to have an oldest child who was twelve years old. He put their age at about thirty, so of course it was possible that they’d had kids in high school or right after, but there was something off-center about them; he couldn’t quite pin it down.

He remembered from the file that Toby McKenna had been driving for a livery car service in Harrisburg at the time of the abduction. But Cap didn’t read that now. Not from the brown leather shoes with a black rubber outsole, tan blazer, Clark Kent build, and glasses with designer frames.

“Mr. McKenna, can I ask, are you still working for the black car service—what was the name again?” he said.

“No, not Elite Fleet, not anymore,” said McKenna, adjusting his glasses shyly, humbly dapper, Cap couldn’t help but think. “We opened, me and Erica were able to open our own service a year ago in Middletown—a few cars, a few drivers. Catering to high-end clients.”

He said it quickly, made Cap think it was something he didn’t want to dwell on.



“I see,” Cap said, smiling, friendly. “Going well I hope? Always tricky with a small business. Believe me, I know.”

“Yes, it’s going okay,” said McKenna, quick again.

“We’ve been very lucky,” added Erica McKenna. “Right place at the right time.”

She smiled then, and Cap saw a twinge cross her face. For a moment it looked as if she might cry.

“I’m pleased to hear it,” Cap said. “If anyone deserves it, it’s you folks.”

They both nodded, looked down and away. Shutting the door on pain or hiding something. Or both.

“So,” Cap said. “I’ll get right to it here so you can go back to your lives and your family.”

He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, clasping his hands to show them: this is a conversation, not an interrogation.