“Yes. Hello.” Francie regrets the nervous crack in her voice.
He drops onto the stool beside her and signals to the bartender, ordering a beer and a shot of whiskey for himself, not offering to replenish her drink. “Sorry I’m late. Something came up.” He downs the shot in one easy swallow and follows it with a sip of beer. She reaches for her glass of wine, glancing at him. She was right. He’s in his thirties, the same age Archie Andersen would now be. He takes another drink, and she sees the way his hand grips the glass, the pull of his T-shirt at his biceps. He’s much bigger than she remembers from when she watched him at the Jolly Llama. “I like your style,” he says, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand.
She raises her eyebrows. “My dress, you mean?” His gaze travels over her breasts to her neck, and then to her eyes, framed under the false eyelashes she applied an hour earlier in the bathroom of a nearby Starbucks.
“Well, yeah. That too. But I mean that you didn’t waste any time. So many girls wanna e-mail for days before meeting.”
Francie’s proud of how quickly she was able to devise this scheme, all thanks to Nell. Yesterday, after contacting Mark Hoyt had dead-ended, she e-mailed Nell at work.
I know it’s a long shot, but I found some photos of that guy Winnie was talking to at the Jolly Llama, Francie wrote. Any chance we can use these to find out something about this guy?
It took Nell seven minutes to respond. This is all I can find. I put his photo into a face recognition app. He seems nice.
Francie opened the link, and there he was: his photos and accompanying profile at a website called Sex Buddies, a dating site, of sorts. He revealed very little about himself—his height, his weight, and his preference for big-breasted women, but not his name (unless his name was really Doktor Danger).
What are you going to do with this? Nell wrote.
Nothing, Francie replied. Keep it on hand, just in case.
In reality, she spent the next hour applying makeup, taking selfies, trying to look as suggestive as possible, and generating her own dating profile at Sex Buddies. Three e-mails from the fake Gmail account she’d created was all it took to arrange this meeting. Reading through the things people had written on the site left her feeling depressed, and then utterly grateful for Lowell, for the life they have, the beautiful family they’ve created.
The guy leans toward her. “You smell amazing,” he says.
“Thank you. But first, I don’t even know your name.”
“My name? What do you want my name to be?”
“What do I want it to be?”
“Yeah.” She can smell tobacco on his breath. “Why don’t you choose my name?”
Francie pretends to mull it over for a moment. “I want your name to be Archie.”
He laughs. “Like the guy in the cartoon?” She laughs too, trying to mask her disappointment. It can’t be him. Unless he’s some sort of Oscar-winning actor, he wouldn’t have responded so cavalierly if she’d correctly guessed his name. “Archie. I like it.”
“Good,” she says. Fine, even so, she thinks. He might not be Archie Andersen, but he’s still going to be able to answer some critical questions: why he approached Winnie, what they talked about, where Winnie went that night.
“You can be my Veronica,” he says. “Now if only we had a Betty.”
He glances at something behind her and without a word takes Francie’s hand, pulling her off the stool and toward the back of the bar. She struggles to keep pace, wine spilling onto her dress, trying to balance in the heels she’s wearing. They walk down a narrow, darkened hall that reeks of urine, and then into an empty back room, with a pool table in one corner and a battered couch in the other.
He leads her to the couch and pulls her toward him, his lips on her ear. “It’s more private back here,” he mutters and then nudges her backward, until she falls awkwardly onto the couch, splashing most of her wine. He sits beside her and puts a calloused hand on her knee, moving it slowly up her thigh.
“Not quite yet,” she whispers, removing his hand. She’s filled with relief as two guys enter the room. They head toward the pool table, wearing dusty work boots and tool belts; likely on a lunch break from a nearby construction project. She can’t help the thought: what if, by some stroke of horrible luck, they know her? What if they’re colleagues of Lowell, guys he’s worked with on a building project?
“I have forty minutes before I need to go to work, Veronica,” fake Archie says. He seems annoyed. She can’t really blame him. Sex Buddies is not exactly known as a place through which people get together at a bar during the day to discuss their shared interests. And she doesn’t have much time herself. She’s told Nell she’ll meet her at the Spot at five; there’s something Nell wants to talk to her and Colette about. In the meantime, she has this plan to execute. A plan she was awake thinking about all night.
She stands up, straddling his outstretched legs, and rests her hands on his thighs, her breasts inches from his face, enveloping him in the scent of her perfume. “I’m going to get us another round.”
At the bar, Francie fights the urge to look one more time at the photo of Will at the park, feeling another wave of guilt for lying to Lowell and Barbara, telling them she’d placed a classified ad on The Village website and had been hired to shoot a nine-month-old. She carries the drinks back to the couch, doing her best to appear composed and confident as she sits down beside him.
“So. Veronica.” His mouth is back near her ear. “What do you want to talk about?”
She takes a long sip of wine and then delivers the words she practiced this morning. “I need this drink. I lost my job.”
“That sucks.” He removes his baseball cap and strokes her neck with his nose.
“Yeah. I was a waitress. At this really cool place in Brooklyn. The Jolly Llama.”
He leans back. “I go there sometimes.”
“You’re kidding.”
“Not kidding. It’s a few blocks from my apartment.”
“That’s weird.” She squints and looks at him more closely. “Oh my god, wait a minute. It’s you.”
He frowns at her. “You who?”
“You!” She sets her glass on the sticky table and turns toward him, placing her hand on his knee. “Were you at the Jolly Llama on the fourth of July?”
He thinks about it. “Yeah, actually. How did you know that?”
“You’re that guy. What are the chances?” She laughs and slaps his knee. “My coworkers are not going to believe this. We’ve all been talking about you.”
He appears stunned. “Me? Why?”
“You’re the guy who was talking to that woman. That Winnie woman.”
“What’s a Winnie woman?”
Francie is surprised at the convincing job he’s doing, pretending he doesn’t know what she’s talking about. “Gwendolyn Ross? The actress? Her kid was abducted?”
“When?”
“Really? Do you not read the newspapers? Watch television?”
“Just sports.”
She can’t believe it. He really doesn’t know. “Do you remember talking to a woman at the bar that night? Pretty? You may have disappeared with her for a little while?”
Finally, a flash of recognition. “That woman had her kid abducted?”
“Yes. Her son Midas. He was taken that night.”
“Holy shit. I have heard about this. The girls at work are always talking about it. Midas. Like the Greek god.” He puts his beer on the table and leans forward, laughing. “That is insane. Wait until I tell my friends.”
“Why?” Francie asks, conspiratorially. “What will your friends say?”
“They were the ones who dared me to do it.”
The amusement drains from her voice. “Do what?”
“Talk to her. Hit on her.” He appears dumbfounded. “There were these moms there, out back.”
“Yes, I remember them. She was with them.”