“Let me know,” she said. “What happens.”
We looked at each other for another long moment. There was a lot I wanted to say to her, but I couldn’t make myself say any of it.
Then she pulled out her keys and adjusted the strap of her handbag. “Okay. Well. Later.”
“I hope,” I said.
Catherine kissed her fingertips and reached out and pressed them against my sternum for the briefest instant. Then she turned and hurried down the sidewalk without another word. I listened to the sound of her heels clicking against the sidewalk and waited to see if she would stop and come back, but she didn’t. Then I grabbed the tart off the brick wall and got in the car.
*
Before I headed back to the gas station for another crack at the security tapes, I decided to check in with Sarah’s family in case one look at Catherine’s sketch could tell me if I was on the right track faster than days of canvassing could. Elizabeth Troyan lived on the east side of Belmont in a big colonial with white-painted bricks and black shutters and one of those little sculpted hedges surrounded by decorative pavers and a water feature. But the pond was full of dead leaves and mud and several pulpy community newspapers. I would have guessed that no one had lived here in weeks, but the curtain fluttered as I walked up the steps to the porch.
The woman who opened the door was blond, late twenties, her thin frame dwarfed in an oversize cowl-neck sweater. Her eyes were ringed in heavy black liner, lashes spidery with mascara. She frowned thoroughly at me. “Can I help you?”
“Is Elizabeth home?”
“It’s not a good time,” she said.
From somewhere in the house, a female voice slurred, “Cass, who the fuck is it now?”
The young woman in front of me winced a little. “It’s no one, Mom, go back to sleep,” she called.
Cass turned back to me. “Sorry,” she said. She didn’t sound sorry. “If this is about the car, you’ll have to come back later. Like, next week. And definitely call first. My father just ran out on her and it’s, you know, a bad situation all around.”
I wondered what had happened to the car, but I didn’t ask. “It’s not about the car,” I said. “I was hoping to talk to her about your cousin, Sarah.”
Her eyes narrowed. “No, I don’t think so.”
She started to close the door. I took a guess that the recent exodus of her father and, also, the car thing might be a cash-flow situation, so I quickly adapted an old gimmick of mine. “I work on a show about missing-persons cases in the Midwest. I was hoping it’s in our budget to get an interview on camera with Sarah’s family.” No doubt Sarah’s family had been offered money for their story at some point, but it looked like maybe they needed it now.
“A show?” Cass said. She looked interested. “A television show?”
“Yes,” I said, opening my wallet to look for a business card. I hoped I still had some of the ones that identified me as Roxane Smith, production coordinator for a PBS affiliate in Chicago. It was amazing, the things people would tell you when they thought fame or money could be involved. I found one of the cards and handed it to her while I spun through possible titles for this television show in my head.
Cass looked at the card. “You’re making a show about Sarah?”
Usually the scheme didn’t require much detail. I started to feel a little bit bad for the lie. “We’re still in pre-pro but we’re interested. I’m authorized to offer five hundred dollars per day of shooting, if we decide we want to move forward,” I said.
She glanced over her shoulder but the slurred voice was silent. Then she looked back at me. I could see her weighing the pros and cons, but finally the hint of money won out. “Here, why don’t you come in for a few minutes?”
She led me through the kitchen, which was missing the stove—a power cord abandoned in the gap it left like a dead snake. Everything in the house looked like it had been recently zapped with a shrink-ray: a small tube television on top of a footstool in the place where a large entertainment stand should have been; the telltale impression where a sectional sofa had once gone beneath a small love seat. Through the doorway, I could see that the woman sprawled on it was blond and curvy, good-looking in a mature, highly engineered kind of way that could have put her anywhere from sixty to seventy-five. But I knew from my research that Elizabeth was fifty-six. The fifteen years since she had her picture in the paper had clearly been rough ones. She appeared to be asleep now.
“Um, let’s go into the dining room,” Cass said, quickly steering me away from the spectacle of her mother. The dining room was missing a light fixture in the ceiling, but still had the table. Elizabeth’s daughter sat down and got out a pack of Parliaments. Her left hand sported an engagement ring with the world’s tiniest diamond. “So how does this work?”
“I’m just going to ask you a few questions,” I said, “to see what you might be able to offer.”
“Okay.”
“Did you know Sarah’s boyfriend, Brad?” I said.
Cass lit a cigarette. “Nope, I never met him. None of us did.”
“Were you close to your cousin?”
She nodded. “Pretty close. I mean, she was five years older than me. And we didn’t see them a ton, because my mom was such a bitch.” She looked at me as if waiting for me to be shocked, but I wasn’t. “My mom was just always in this one-sided competition with Elaine, like, about who had the nicer stuff. Then she and my dad would fight about it. It got to the point where we barely went over there. But I always liked hanging out with Sarah.”
“So they weren’t close either,” I said. “Your mom and your aunt.”
Cass shrugged. “They’d talk on the phone sometimes. But I just remember, when it happened and suddenly my mom was acting like they had been so super close all their lives. I know she was upset, we were all upset. But she was just making shit up.”
I crossed my arms. “You thought she was lying.”
“Not lying, really. You know how it is, when you’re a kid and your parents do something,” she said, “and it’s just like, whatever, but then later, when you grow up, you’re like, wait, that was actually really fucked up?”
“I sure do.”
“It’s like that, I guess. All that stuff she said at the trial about that kid, Brad?” She shrugged again. “I always thought that was so weird. But she wanted to help, which I get. And they had the guy, he had that, you know”—she lowered her voice—“knife. In his car.”
“Do you know if anyone has heard from Sarah recently?” I said, the coup de grace.
“Heard from her?” Cass said slowly. Her expression turned wary, like she suspected I might be insane.
“Yes,” I said. “So have you?”
“No.”
“Your mom?”