Miss
Me
September 23, 2001
Is there room in the refrigerator for another platter?”
Bambi, who had been in a fog all day, glanced distractedly at the middle-aged woman who had asked the question. Brown hair, dressed in a knit two-piece, which Bambi’s expert eye identified as high end, perhaps even St. John’s, a few seasons ago, although that was always fine in Baltimore. But the woman was a stranger to her. Why would someone unknown to Bambi be at Aunt Harriet’s shivah?
“Thank you—Naomi.” The name came to her in the nick of time. Naomi had been Linda’s classmate at Park. Bambi kept forgetting that her daughter, forty-one this month, was a middle-aged woman, too.
She walked Naomi’s platter back to the Gelmans’ kitchen, which had been redone a year ago and now had one of those enormous French-door Vikings, wide and deep enough to hold multiple platters from Seven Mile Market, the kosher deli, not that anyone in this crowd kept kosher. Not even Linda had gone that overboard. Bambi hoped Bert and Lorraine, who had been generous to host this shivah, would also allow her to leave much of the food behind. Oh, she would raid the platters for the cold cuts, maybe some of the cheese and fruit, but now that she was alone in the Sudbrook Park house, she had no use for all the cookies and cakes and pies. Neither did Bert nor Lorraine, with Sydney in New York and the twins at law school in Chicago, but they would find it less shameful to toss out the uneaten food. Rich people were allowed to waste things.
Returning to the living room, Bambi still couldn’t get over how many people were here. Her mother had been right, after all, to insist that they needed something bigger than her little apartment in Windsor Towers. Bambi had thought no one would come. Harriet had no spouse, no children, and she had outlived the few friends she hadn’t alienated. Yet the Gelmans’ first floor teemed with people. Bambi’s friends, Ida’s friends, even the girls’ friends had been coming and going all afternoon. Perhaps, Bambi thought, people were simply desperate to gather. But what was the point of being with other people when the conversation immediately turned back to all the horrible topics—the Towers, anthrax, Cipro, the stories of near misses, the personal connections to those who had died. No one in Bambi’s circle really knew anyone who had been affected, although Joshua, Rachel’s husband, had a college friend who had been on the upper floors of the second tower and gotten out in time.
“The body was found”—Bambi started at that bit of overheard conversation, but surely they were talking about the attacks? She continued to move through the crowd, checking on people. They would have to say a prayer at some point. Thank God they had Linda’s oldest to get them through it. Like most of her generation, Bambi read Hebrew only in transliteration and didn’t know any prayers by heart. Her family had been conservative when to be conservative was to be rather lax.
But Felix knew Hebrew. She remembered her surprise, early in their marriage, when she realized that Felix had been raised in a relatively devout home. Synagogue was not just a social network for Felix. He relaxed there, took solace in High Holiday services. It was more than a way to burnish his social standing, although he always pretended otherwise.
After he had gone, Bambi sometimes looked at the new bimah, the Chagall-inspired stained glass behind it, and felt as if she could count the Brewer dollars that had gone into it—and wished she could have every one of them back.
“I’m glad she didn’t suffer,” a woman said, clasping Bambi’s hands. Corky Mercer, the absentee owner of the Pikesville boutique where Bambi had worked for twenty years now, all the while pretending it was a lark, something to do after the older girls left home. The job had kept them all in clothes they otherwise never could have afforded.
“She?”
“Your aunt.”
Of course. Her aunt, Harriet. They were here for Harriet. “She hadn’t been well for two years, but, no, in the end, she didn’t suffer,” she said, extricating her hands. Corky meant well, but Bambi didn’t appreciate any touch that held her in place. She wondered if Corky would have done the same to a lifelong customer, as opposed to a customer who had ended up being a lifelong employee.
Aunt Harriet had died in her sleep at age ninety-five. It had been at once slow and sudden, the end of a gradual decline that began with a fall at age eighty-three. It was only a broken wrist, but it was the beginning. That was when they started hiring the aides—and when Harriet’s eccentricities became more pronounced.
Or was it simply that someone was finally there, paying attention? At any rate, the calls began twelve years ago. Even after Bambi’s mother moved into Windsor Towers, just down the hall from her older sister, Bambi still got the calls. Sometimes from Harriet, sometimes from the front desk, but mostly from the nursing aides who were subjected to Harriet’s verbal abuse. Bambi wouldn’t call her aunt racist—
I would, said the Felix who lived in Bambi’s head. Still. Still.
But Harriet was misanthropic and suspicious of almost everyone, regardless of race. She also had a bad tendency to cite people’s appearance in her tirades. So, yes, when she yelled frizzy-haired slut at the Jamaican aide, or big-mouthed idiot at the next woman, it probably seemed racist. “If you knew the things she says to my mother, her own baby sister,” Bambi said when she tried to appease the women. “I’m the only person she likes.”
They were not appeased.
Bambi really was, according to Harriet, the only person she liked. When Bambi was a child, Aunt Harriet had said: “You are my favorite niece.”
Bambi, just ten, had said: “But I’m your only niece.”
“Exactly,” Harriet said with a scary loud laugh, slapping her thigh. “So you’re my least favorite, too. When I write you out of the will, it’s so I can put you in the will.”
But as Bambi emerged as a belle, Harriet’s teasing evolved into sardonic adulation. Harriet, never married—by choice, she said—took vicarious pleasure in Bambi’s social successes. She always wanted to know if the boys were from good families, by which she meant only one thing: Were they rich? She resented Felix at first. “He nipped you in the bud,” she said. “He knew a good thing when he saw it.”
Yet Linda, Rachel, Michelle—they were of no interest to her. Even as Michelle began to resemble Bambi more and more, Harriet ignored her nieces. “You’re my only heir,” she said to Bambi time and again.
“What about Mother?”
“She has a husband.”
Bambi’s father had died less than a year after Felix disappeared, so it seemed to Bambi that she and her mother were in similar situations, even if her mother did have Social Security, life insurance, and savings to draw on. Still, in Harriet’s mind, it was different, a disappeared husband apparently being much worse than a dead one. Even as her animosity toward her sister lessened, softened by Ida’s decision to follow her to the Windsor Towers, Harriet insisted that Bambi, and Bambi alone, deserved her money.
How much was there? Enough to make a difference? She hated herself for thinking about it—yet it had been her only thought for forty-eight hours, since the last call about Aunt Harriet came, and she wished it could be her only thought now, that it could force other things from her mind.
She caught Lorraine looking at her, eyes full of pity, and she knew it was not for Aunt Harriet. Bambi wouldn’t be pitied. She checked her posture, smoothed her hair, and searched the crowd for her daughters. Here was her fortune, achieved against enormous odds. Linda, the family breadwinner and a good mother, with four terrific kids. Rachel, still trying to be a mother, while now enjoying success doing some computer work that Bambi didn’t quite understand, but it had grown out of a silly thing she had done, creating a computer program that sent out a poem every day. And Rachel had helped Michelle find a job at a start-up, although its main appeal to Michelle seemed to be the glamorous offices, created out of an old factory in the heart of Canton.
Where was Michelle? She hadn’t slipped out before the prayer, had she? That would be in very bad taste on her part. Not that anyone would remember, tomorrow.
Michelle wandered the upstairs, looking for a computer. She wanted to check her e-mail. Since September 11 she had been even more obsessive about going online. She checked her e-mail as often as possible, used random chat rooms. Everyone was checking in on each other. A few girls from Park, even Adam Gelman, who still had a crush on her. Sometimes she thought she should take him in hand and break him, like a horse. A third-year law student, he was still something of a thuggish frat boy. It would be a good deed for all womankind to tame him and put him back in the population, gentled. But he didn’t have any money to spend on her, much less time. So—no thank you.
Adam and Alec’s room was as it had been when they left for college, only clean. Their mother had tried to impose her will on the room to a certain extent—the sports and music posters were beautifully framed, not tacked up with tape or thumbtacks. The built-in desks, the bright red chairs, even the basketball hoop mounted to the wall—these were not IKEA finds, Michelle knew. She remembered an earlier version of this room, with two sets of bunk beds. Because, of course, Adam and Alec must have both options, up and down. They had never wanted to have separate rooms. They had gone to college, shared a dorm room, and now they were at DePaul together. Weird. The only profound difference between them, as far as Michelle could see, was that Adam had a crush on her and Alec couldn’t stand her.
No computers here, although there was a television set. She thought about turning it on, settling in, but it wasn’t TV she longed for. She wanted to talk—only not to the people downstairs. She wanted to talk on the computer, where people were wittier and understood her jokes and it was okay to be a little ADD. To talk past people, as opposed to talk to.
And to try, again and again, to chase her father down the rabbit holes of various search engines. She was still fond of Alta Vista, although curious about Google, which suddenly seemed everywhere. Imagine, she had been at College Park at the same time as Sergey Brin. Now there was a lost opportunity.
She checked Bert and Lorraine’s room. Lorraine didn’t even have a television set in here, much less a computer. Michelle lifted the sheets, looked for labels. Frette. Not silk, she decided, rubbing the fabric between her fingers. Cotton that felt like silk. She filed the name away as she often did with the brands she discovered at the Gelman house, adding it to a voluminous wish list.
She had been living in Rachel’s old apartment for five years now, but she yearned to move. Everyone said of her new job, “Oh, you can walk to work!” Sure, if she wanted to wear flats or put on sneakers and then change into her heels. Both options struck her as untenable. What she wanted to do was buy a condo across the street from her office, in this gorgeous building called Canton Cove, with harbor views and all sorts of amenities. But even with the new job, she wouldn’t qualify for a mortgage. And almost anyone could get a mortgage these days. You could buy a place with no money down and, by the time you signed your loan documents, you’d already have made ten, twenty thousand dollars on paper. But Michelle had credit card debt. It was Rachel’s fault, letting her have the apartment, with its relatively low rent. That had lulled Michelle into thinking she had more money than she did. She had spent what she wasn’t paying toward her rent, and then some, and now she was in debt.
She left Bert and Lorraine’s room and went down the hall to Sydney’s room. For a moment, she thought she had gotten confused. Surely, this was the old guest room? But Sydney’s room was now a home gym, a proper one—elliptical machine, treadmill, a television mounted to the wall above them. A rack of weights, serious ones. Those must be for Bert. And—wow, a sauna. Michelle opened the door and leaned in, drinking in that lovely dry-wood smell. When had Lorraine done this? After Sydney moved to New York to take a job?
Or after she had announced right before graduation that she was moving to New York to live with a thirty-five-year-old woman she had been dating secretly for two years?
Lorraine and Bert had taken it very well, everyone kept saying. Michelle and her sisters found that hilarious. As if Sydney had shamed them. Sydney was only the most disgustingly perfect person in the world, so perfect that even Rachel didn’t seem quite as shiny alongside her. (Truth be told, it pleased Michelle that Rachel was second to someone, brain-wise and perfection-wise.) Sydney was so wonderful that she had called Bambi and Ida to express her sympathy for the loss of Aunt Harriet, then explained that she would miss the funeral because she was volunteering at a soup kitchen that was providing meals for rescue workers.
No, Sydney was not the kid that Lorraine and Bert should be putting on a brave front about. But then Lorraine and Bert somehow didn’t know how awful the twins had been as teenagers. Mellowed now, presumably, but there had been the incident with the drunk girl, the video they had made of her. They hadn’t touched her. They had just filmed this poor girl stumbling, then throwing up, and then, with the logic of the inebriated, removing her clothes because they were covered with vomit. They filmed every moment, with a droll running commentary, then screened it for their friends in the Gelmans’ den. When the prank—Bert’s term—caught up with them, the boys insisted they were protecting themselves against what the girl might say later. “We were just documenting it,” Alec said. It was her house, her father’s liquor, and the twins were sober. But Michelle thought that was the truly creepy part, the twins’ self-control, their clear-eyed decision to sit back and record this girl’s humiliation.
She closed the sauna, turned, and found Bert at the door of the room. She felt guilty, thinking such mean thoughts about his sons while prowling through his house, cataloging Lorraine’s things, learning to want items she hadn’t known existed.
“Your mother’s looking for you.”
“I was hoping to lie down. I have the most ferocious headache.”
“The guest room is made up. Or you could use our bed.”
His kindness made her feel even guiltier. Too bad Bert’s sons weren’t more like him. They had his looks, but something was lacking. Bert made her feel safe.
“I’ll be okay. I’ll just throw some cold water on my face, maybe take some aspirin.”
“Okay,” he said. “You know, Michelle, for a moment—in this dim light, I thought you were your mother. You may end up being even more beautiful than she was in her prime.”
Michelle realized that Bert thought this high praise, but really. “Aren’t I in my prime right now?” she asked.
“Not quite.”
“When, then?” Said with a pretend pout. She looked up at him through her lashes, parted her lips. She suddenly wanted Bert to kiss her. And when Michelle wanted men to kiss her, they did.
But Bert said only: “I think your mother’s prime started in her midthirties or so. Maybe even forty. And she’s still in it. Find that aspirin, Michelle, then come downstairs, okay?”
He probably didn’t realize what she had offered him, old man that he was. Michelle went to the powder room, took a Tylenol she didn’t actually need and stared in the mirror, wondering how anyone could be in one’s prime at forty.
Rachel had noticed Michelle was missing, but not in the way Linda had, which was to say Rachel wasn’t furious.
“Michelle won’t stay at any party that’s not about her,” Linda sputtered. “She did the same thing at Rosh Hashanah dinner last week, went into my bedroom and watched television.”
“She had a migraine,” Rachel said.
“People with migraines need to be in dark, quiet rooms. She was watching Gilmore Girls.”
“It’s a drag for her, being the youngest. She’s the odd one out. The rest of us come in pairs.”
“Not Mama.”
“Doesn’t she? I always feel as if Papa is with her, somehow.”
“You’re such a romantic, Rachel. He’s in—Bali, with his girlfriend, the one who lived at Horizon House. I always wanted to get a good look at her, see what the attraction was.”
“They’re not in Bali.”
“Israel, then. Wasn’t that always the other rumor? That he bought a new life for himself by investing heavily in Israeli bonds?”
“I think you’ve confused Papa with Meyer Lansky.”
“Oh, Rachel, the great romantic. Do you really think Papa yearns for our mother after all these years?”
“I met her,” she said.
“You saw her. You told me, back when it happened. And it’s not as if she announced her plans to you that night. It was probably already in the works, don’t you think? And all that other stuff she did was meant to obscure it.”
Nana Ida came over to Linda and Rachel, pushed her way between them and linked arms. The sisters were not particularly tall, but they dwarfed Nana Ida.
“Harriet loved you both so much,” she said of her older sister, with whom she had not even been on speaking terms until two years ago.
Linda nodded carefully, while Rachel made a noncommittal noise. They were not fans of Harriet.
“And although she didn’t specify, I know she’d want you to have mementos. We’ll go through her jewelry box, see what’s left.”
Rachel hoped her expression stayed neutral. She knew that her mother had—with Harriet’s full consent—sold the better pieces. But everything was to be willed to her mother, Harriet’s godchild, so what did it matter? Her mother had sold off things precisely to keep the estate below certain levels in order to avoid the inheritance taxes. She wrote checks over the years, too, although never enough to pay a gift tax. Yet Harriet would never let Bambi see her financial accounts, and that was where the real money was.
“She probably would have wanted you to have a little money, too,” their grandmother said. “But we’ll have to see what’s what when the dust has settled.”
Even as Rachel was sorting out her grandmother’s syntax, Linda said sharply: “You sound as if you’re the executor.”
“Oh, no,” Nana Ida said. “That’s the lawyer. But the estate will be split between your mother and me. Well, not fifty-fifty. Your mother will get a cash gift, and I’ll get the rest. Harriet changed it six months ago. We became so close, living at the Windsor Towers. She had resented me all our lives because I was the baby, but she finally saw how silly that was. Plus, she knows now how much I helped out—tuition and such. I put you girls through Park.”
“We appreciate it,” Rachel said, as she always said when this came up, and it came up a lot.
“Does Mama know?” Linda asked.
“I told Harriet she should tell her.”
“Does Mama know?” Linda repeated. Rachel realized how quick her sister was to recognize a nonresponsive answer, given that her professional life was based on giving them.
“I couldn’t say,” Nana Ida said, looking down into her coffee cup. “It’s not so very much, I’m sure. Money shouldn’t matter in families.”
But Linda had already broken away, plunging through knots of people to reach their mother. Rachel watched her go, remembering how it was Linda, all those years ago, who told her that Julie had been just the latest girlfriend, not the only one. Linda had always known how to break bad news.
Linda tried to move quickly, but she couldn’t just plow through the well-wishers. How much money could it be, anyway? Two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand? Probably not enough to get Bambi’s head above water. Did Nana Ida have any idea how close to the bone Bambi lived, how she sweated the property taxes every year, worried over utility bills, and let repairs go as long as possible? The reason Bambi had asked the Gelmans to hold the shivah was because she couldn’t bear for people to see the house’s condition—the cracking window frames, the patchy roof. She had been able to maintain the “public” rooms, which required little more than regular paint and the occasional reupholstery job, done on the cheap with tacks. But the kitchen was stuck in the seventies, as were the bathrooms. The Sudbrook Park house was frozen in time, like something out of a fairy tale. Her father had paid it off before he left, perhaps the last decent thing he did. Bambi should have sold it immediately, downscaled. Instead, she held on to it, mortgaging it and remortgaging it. Why hadn’t she sold it?
Because, Linda knew, she expected him to come back. She still expected him to come up the walk. So she wouldn’t petition for his life insurance, or even ask for the modest veterans’ pension to which he was entitled.
And her mother had been so good to Aunt Harriet. Linda remembered an incident a few years back, before Harriet had to go to the nursing wing of Windsor Towers. One of the aides had called Bambi in alarm, and, for once, it wasn’t because of something hateful that Harriet had said. When Bambi got to the apartment, the aide showed her that the kitchen drawers were stuffed with packets of sugar and artificial sweetener, cellophane packages of soy sauce and plum sauce, mustard and mayonnaise. It boggled the mind, how Harriet had ever gathered all these things. She must have gone into restaurants and shoved them in her pockets willy-nilly. When the aide had tried to throw them away, Harriet had become enraged and thrown a tantrum like a child. Bambi had soothed her and packed up her “treasures” in marked shoeboxes. Where had Ida been then? Maybe they should contest the will. But, no, it would end up in the news. Just this past July, a reporter had called about doing a story tied to the twenty-fifth “anniversary” of Felix’s disappearance. No one in the family had cooperated, but that hadn’t stopped the reporter from doing a clip job.
Linda found her mother in the kitchen, sitting at the long, padded bench in the breakfast nook. She looked drained. Had someone else already told her about Great-Aunt Harriet’s last spiteful act?
“Drink this,” Lorraine was saying to Bambi. “It’s decaffeinated.”
“I thought you said it would be days, maybe even a week or so, Bert. But if a reporter called you here—”
“The reporter was sniffing. He doesn’t have anything solid.”
“Even if it is her,” Lorraine said, “it has nothing to do with you. Nothing.”
“But they’ll write about it soon enough. Not tomorrow perhaps, but it’s going to be written about. They’ll dredge everything up again.”
“No one’s going to pay attention, given what’s happening in the world at large,” Bert said. “It’s a blessing of sorts.”
“The attacks?”
“The discovery. Now you know. It has nothing to do with Felix. She never went to him.”
“Do I? Is that what I know, Bert? And do you think the newspaper will care about that distinction?”
Linda could hold still no longer. “What’s going on? What are you talking about?”
“Tubby got a tip from a detective this morning,” Bert told her. “They think they’ve found Julie Saxony’s body. They still have to do an official ID, and there’s no immediate determination on cause of death, but apparently some items—her driver’s license, I guess, because that would be plastic—survived. I thought the news wouldn’t get out until they had matched dental records, done an autopsy—”
“Where?” Linda asked because it was the only thing she could think to ask.
“Leakin Park.”
“And no one found her until now?”
“It’s a big place,” Bert said. “They say a dog found her on the far side, where there’s no path to walk. And they still have to make an official ID. All they have for now is a body, maybe a license. She could have left that body there herself. We don’t know for certain it’s her.”
And not even ten minutes ago, Linda thought, I imagined her in Bali, sitting next to Daddy on matching chaises, a table of drinks between them. But she didn’t want to feel sorry for Julie Saxony. She didn’t want to feel anything for her. She didn’t want her dead. She just wanted her never to have existed.
I know she’s not in Bali, Rachel had said. I met her. Linda looked at her mother. She was shaky and pale, upset. But she didn’t seem surprised. Then again, she had known about Julie, possibly all day. It was the call from the reporter that had jarred her. Linda would handle the reporter. She always did.
Michelle chose that time to enter the kitchen, oblivious as ever. She didn’t look like someone who had just weathered a migraine, or whatever excuse she had used this time.
“Do we have a minyan? Because I really need to get on the road.” Then, when everyone glared at her, “What?”
March 22, 2012
Julie’s sister, Andrea Norr, did not seem particularly surprised to see Sandy’s car bouncing up her driveway. Resigned, perhaps, like someone who knew a mistake had been made in her favor but had always believed it would catch up to her eventually. Maybe even a little relieved. She walked alongside his car the final ten yards or so, invited him in, made him more bad tea.
“So she told Susie, that little bubblehead? I thought Julie was tighter with a secret.”
Sandy felt a knee-jerk instinct to defend both women. “I think your sister chose a good confidante. Susan Borden didn’t tell the police about the missing money, or even the argument with the daughter. She sat on a significant lead, believing she was honoring Julie’s wishes, that she would put your interests ahead of hers when it came down to it.”
Andrea made a face, the kind of face Sandy wanted to make with every sip of her tea. “If that’s the case, it was out of guilt, not love.”
“Guilt over what?”
“She left me, Mr. Sanchez. We ran away from home together. It was an adventure. And she left me—in the Rexall, in our apartment on Biddle. You know what she called me, when I told her I didn’t approve of Felix? She called me the little old biddy of Biddle Street. She chose her meal ticket over her sister.”
“What I keep hearing is that she really loved him.”
“So what?” A flare of temper. “I was blood. He was some stupid married man who was never going to marry her, never. Okay—so secrets are coming out, right? Susie told my secret. Now I’ll tell Julie’s. She thought, sometimes, about going to the cops, saying that Felix didn’t run away. That he feared for his life. That Bambi had him taken out, because he was going to leave her and she didn’t think she could get by on the alimony.”
“That doesn’t sound like your sister.”
Andrea’s laughter wasn’t cruel, not exactly, but a laugh at one’s expense always feels cruel and she was definitely laughing at Sandy.
“You think you know Julie better than I do? Another man blinded by a pair of big”—she paused in a practiced way—“blue eyes.”
“I’ve learned a lot about her. Other people, her friends, thought well of her.”
“Did they? Well, here’s my tip. When you want to measure the worth of a person, ask the family first. And don’t forget that Felix, the man she loved, didn’t care for her at all. He put us both at risk, asking that we get him out of town. Yes, Tubman knew and the lawyer, Bert, he knew, too, that Felix was going. They knew the how, and they probably could guess the when. Before he left, Felix moved money around, he signed a power of attorney. Julie was too stupid to ask for anything.”
“But you weren’t.”
“I literally bought the farm! Oh, hell, not even I find that funny. Anyway, I had the discipline to wait three years before I spent what he gave me. Someone had to.”
“Wait?”
“Have discipline. That bail bondsman ran all over town, making wink-wink, nudge-nudge jokes about getting stuck with the bond. Always the jolly fat guy.”
“Your sister had discipline. She didn’t tell anyone anything for ten years, as far as we know. And Bert Gelman had discipline.”
“Well, Bert would have been disbarred, right? If he helped someone flee.” She sighed. “There’s one more piece of the story. I know you think Julie was protecting me. But it was mutual. Julie was too stupid to ask for anything. But she wasn’t too stupid not to take what was right in front of her.”
“What do you mean?”
“That night, Felix gave her a suitcase. A small one, like a cosmetic bag. He told her to take it to ‘the place.’ I don’t think she ever did. She hated Bambi that much, she wouldn’t share whatever Felix left behind.”
Sandy was jolted. It was like finding out that a woman you admired had a bad habit, or an ugly laugh, or made fun of cripples. He was disappointed in Julie, and maybe Susie, too, for not telling him this part.
“What was in the suitcase?” he asked. He was pretty sure he knew the answer.
“Money for Felix’s family.”
“You can’t put enough money in a suitcase for a family to live very long.”
“No. But I think there was information, too, about accounts, and how to access them. All I remember is that he said it would take care of everything and she should take it to the place, whatever that was. But she didn’t. I mean—it’s obvious, she didn’t, right?”
“Not to me. It’s not like your sister lived like someone who had that kind of money.” Even as he defended her, he was remembering his own random curiosity about Julie’s ability to make the leap from grubby coffee shop to showplace inn.
“No, but neither did Bambi Brewer—I knew the stable owner who got stiffed for the daughters’ lessons. And that was only six months or so after Felix disappeared. I mean, Bambi might have been reckless, but she couldn’t have run through it that fast. So you have to ask yourself where the money went. My sister didn’t care about having the money, or using it. She cared only that Bambi never have it. See, that’s my real beef with Felix Brewer. He made my sister mean. He strung her along, used her to get away, left her thinking ‘if only.’ He was yammering about being with her right up until the moment he left. You want to take someone’s life away from them, then put them in the ‘if only’ camp. My sister pinned all her hopes on Felix Brewer. When he didn’t ask her to come with him, he broke her heart. I mean, why not take her with him? All the way to—well, I don’t have to tell you that part. Where we took him. But up until the very last moment, when he said good-bye to her, she thought he was going to ask her to come along. She had a passport with her. Got it just in case. She went to Bert, asked him to help her expedite it. I guess he thought, ‘What could it hurt?’ Well, it hurt a lot. When Felix left—literally left Julie holding the bag—huh, I did it again. Another stupid joke.” She broke off, slumped back in her chair as if all that talk had left her winded.
“You were saying?”
“Felix. He broke her heart. So she lashed out. You know, that’s another reason, I think, that we ended up on the outs. Because I was there, I knew. She had a little overnight bag. On the trip up, she said to me, ‘Where do you think we’re going? South America? Oh, I hope I can learn Spanish.’ My stupid baby sister, may she rest in peace. She had never been on a plane before, either, and she was excited about that. I knew and she couldn’t bear it. That was the beginning of the end for us. She tried to play it proud on the drive back, but I wasn’t fooled.”
“Where was the place?”
“I dropped her at a diner on Route 40, where someone else was to meet her and drive her the rest of the way. That’s all I know. Really. Today, I haven’t left anything out.”
Sandy believed her.
It was a few minutes shy of 11:00 A.M. when Sandy made his way back down Andrea Norr’s driveway. He was hungry, although he shouldn’t have been. He stopped at the Chesapeake House rest stop and pushed a tray along the metal bars at Roy Rogers, feeling that it was too late for the breakfast sandwiches, which looked pretty old under the heat lamps, yet too early for the fried chicken that was just coming out. In the end, he settled on a holster of fries and a cup of coffee.
Andrea Norr had committed a felony, helping Felix escape, taking money for it. She wasn’t pure, and she had reasons to lie. About the suitcase, the money, all that. Problem was, there was a detail that had never been made public, a detail that served her version of things. When Julie Saxony’s body was found in Leakin Park, part of the reason that word traveled so fast, in advance of an official autopsy, was because cops had found two forms of ID—her driver’s license and her passport, which had survived that damp, wild place because it was in a plastic case inside a leatherette purse, the kind of thing that never decays. The passport, good for ten years, had expired on July 1, 1986. It was blank, utterly blank, not a single stamp in its pages.