I stand at my door, fishing for my keys.
“So listen.” Justin claps his hands together. “I had a great time. I had a … great time. It was a …”
“Great time?” I rise up on my toes and kiss him softly on the lips. He responds, but awkwardly, his hand touching my arm, unsure whether he should open his mouth.
Shy and clumsy.
“It was fun for me, too,” I say as we draw back. His face has lost a bit of color.
Very shy.
“Call me,” I say.
He nods, then cocks his head. “Why would I call you?”
I draw back. “Oh, I mean, if you want to … have dinner again.”
“We already had dinner. Why would we do it again?”
I stare at him, at a loss for words.
“Gotcha.” He breaks into laughter. “You should see the look on your face.”
Score one for him. He did get me. A little corny … but he got me.
“I will call you, Jenna. For sure.”
He pauses, like he’s thinking about another kiss, but he steps off the porch and heads to his car, whistling. I don’t know very many people who whistle. I don’t know anybody who whistles.
Snap assessment: nice guy, but not a lot of sparks.
Then again, that’s always been my problem. I look for chemistry right away and if I don’t feel it, I walk. Maybe that can develop over time. Maybe if I just let someone in … someone really nice …
Someone without an angle …
Justin drives away with a brief toot of his horn.
Yeah, I don’t know … maybe …
I walk inside my tornado of an apartment and fish my cell phone out of my purse.
The call was from Lauren Ricketts. I punch her up and she answers on the second ring.
“Murphy,” she says.
“Ricketts. What’s up?”
Suddenly my enjoyable Saturday night with Justin is over, and I’m slipping back into the darkness, the quagmire, slogging through evidence and driving myself crazy.
“I finished going through criminal complaints and missing-persons reports,” she says. “I went back to the eighties and got through the mid-nineties.”
“And?” I say, my heartbeat kicking up. “Did you find any criminal complaints?”
“No. Nobody ever filed a criminal charge against Holden the Sixth.”
“Shit.” I really thought that was promising. “And what about unsolveds or missing-persons bulletins?”
“No unsolveds that look interesting, not from that time period.”
“And no missing-persons reports that looked interesting?”
“Just one from 1994,” she says. “I guess it would go under the category of interesting. I wish you’d prepared me for it.”
“Prepared you for what?” I ask. “Who was the missing person?”
A pause on the other end of the line.
“You don’t know?” she asks.
“Ricketts, just freakin’ tell me,” I say. “Who went missing?”
Another pause. As if she’s debating. As if she’s thrown for a loss. And then, finally, she speaks.
She says, “You did, Murphy. You were the missing person.”
79
SUNDAY NIGHT, 7 p.m. The sun almost completely fallen now, a blanket of darkness, the air mild and pleasant.
April Fools’ Day, which feels appropriate. I was a fool ever to have returned to this place.
I pull my car into Uncle Langdon’s driveway just as Aunt Chloe is locking the house up. Some final boxes to remove, some papers to sign, before the sale of the house goes through this month.
“I was so glad you called,” she says. “We could grab a quick bite …”
She has a big smile on her face, until she gets a look at mine.
I stop short in front of her, no hug, no nothing.
“What happened to me here in 1994?” I ask. “When I was eight years old.”
Her face falls. Her mouth works, but no words come out.
“I asked Lang why my family stopped coming to the Hamptons when I was a kid,” I say. “He never told me. ‘A story for another time,’ he said. And then I asked you, and you said, ‘If you don’t know, I don’t know.’ Whatever that cryptic bullshit is supposed to mean.”
“It means just what I said.” Chloe looks me over. “I don’t know what happened. Nobody knows. Apparently, not even you.”
“I saw a missing-persons report, Chloe. From July of 1994. It ended seven hours after it began.”
Chloe slowly nods. “That’s right. ‘Seven hours of hell,’ your mother called it. You went missing. You were playing down the street, just right down this street. And then you were gone. Nobody could find you.” She places a hand at the base of her throat. “It still gives me a sickening feeling when I remember it. We looked everywhere. Lang had the entire Southampton Town Police Department searching for you. Your mother and I searched for you. Your father and Ryan searched for you. Everyone searched for you.”
“And then?”
“And then … we found you.” Her eyes shine with brimming tears. “Seven hours later. We found you on the beach. You were just … sitting there, looking peacefully out at the ocean.”