Travel lightly, and carry a small bag. Bringing less is best.
And the most important thing…
Leave all your valuables behind.
PART III
“EVERYTHING MUST GO”
To abandon: To give up absolutely; to forsake entirely; to renounce utterly; to relinquish all connection with or concern for; to desert, as a person to whom one owes allegiance or fidelity; to quit; to surrender.
Chapter One
1
And Now for Something Completely Different
Monty Python’s And Now for Something Completely Different played on cable. “This is a frightened city. Over these streets, over these houses hangs a pall of fear.” Jared turned the movie to a more manageable mute while he sat on the couch flipping the phone from hand to hand and watching the gangs of old ladies mug forty-eight-year-old men. He had put Michelangelo to bed, holding it together long enough to say good night to his children. “Where is Mommy?” said Michelangelo on this unprecedented Friday night. Jared had no answers.
He didn’t know what to think. Had her cars not been in the driveway and garage, he would have thought car accident. But the vehicles stood glumly motionless, their engines cold. Had there been a note left to the effect of, I went to visit my mother, or I went to spend the weekend at Lillypond, he would have—well, he would have known. Could she have gone to stay with Che? No—her passport was in the house, in the red manila folder where they kept all their important documents. Their marriage certificate. The children’s birth records. Social Security cards. Passports. Hers was there, next to his, acquired when they planned to fly to Paris for their fifteenth wedding anniversary but cancelled at the last minute because Asher got viral pneumonia. In two weeks, on June 15, it was going to be their nineteenth.
At eleven at night Jared called Ezra and Maggie.
“Maggie,” he said. “Sorry to call you so late. But…”
They came right over. In the quiet house the three of them sat in his kitchen while Ezra made gin and tonics and Maggie made tea. “Margaret! No one is going to drink tea with gin and tonics. Stop it!”
“I’m making it for me, okay?”
They sat around the granite island and stared at each other dumbly.
“What could’ve happened?” said Maggie. “Maybe she got into an accident?”
“Something must have happened,” said a stumbling, nodding Jared.
“Where’s her purse?”
“By the front door. And no, nothing’s missing, as far as I can tell. Her wallet, her car keys, her credit cards. Her makeup. Her script of Saint Joan. Headphones.”
“Driver’s license?” Maggie asked.
“Yes.”
Ezra leafed through Saint Joan to see if there was anything out of the ordinary highlighted, marked. Jared made an irritated gesture with his hands, a defensive wrestling stance with palms flat, sweeping away pointless details off the table. “Ezra, please. Maybe she left a note and we missed it?”
They looked. They searched the downstairs.
“Maybe she was run over by a car. Maybe she went for her constitutional and was knocked down near Summit,” Jared said.
All three went pale as they studied each other. “Knocked down?” mouthed Maggie.
“Well, what else could it be?” Jared didn’t want to tell them he’d already called Overlook Hospital, which was only a half-mile away, and was told that no white female without ID had been admitted to ER on Friday. So if she was knocked down, it couldn’t have been close to home.
“I think we have no choice,” Ezra said finally. “We have to call the police. I mean, we can’t ignore the obvious: it’s nearly midnight, and she’s not home.”
“And hasn’t been home all day.”
“Well, we don’t know. Who picked up Michelangelo from school?”
“He had a playdate with Tara’s kids. She picked him up.”
Ezra and Maggie mutely stared at each other. “So she didn’t show up for rehearsal,” said Ezra, “and arranged for Michelangelo to be picked up from school?”
“What are you saying?” said Jared. “How are those two things related?”
“Call the police,” said Maggie.
Jared dialed 911 but turned his back to his friends in case he lost his composure. He was perilously close to losing it anyway. To sit, to talk, to chat about this had a surreal quality to it, numbing like a Lidocaine needle piercing through his muscular lack of understanding.
“Sir,” the female operator voice said, “state your emergency.”
Briefly flummoxed, he recovered to say, “My wife is missing. Has gone missing.”
“How long has your wife been missing, sir?”
“Uh”—he couldn’t think straight, couldn’t do the math. Did he talk to her today? No. They hadn’t spoken. What time was it now? Midnight?—”Fourteen hours? Fifteen?”
“We do not file a missing persons report until forty-eight hours have passed. If your wife has not returned, please call back then.”
“Forty-eight hours?” Jared was horrified. Forty-eight! What if she was hit by a car? No, no. “No, I can’t wait that long. The children…”
“Are the children missing also?”
“No, but…can you send a squad car to my house? Detectives, maybe? I really need to…”
“Your address, please.”
And in less than ten minutes, two plainclothes officers were at his front door flashing badges. Detectives Finney and Cobb. They were in suits and both middle-aged; Cobb was younger and stockier, his dull eyes apathetic. Finney, broad and soft around the middle, looked like he drank. It was a Friday night, they acted as if they’d been expecting the worst, had seen the worst. What was the worst? Jared wondered as he led them down the back hallway past the washer and dryer and into his kitchen.
He offered them a drink they declined, and then the five of them stood in the dimly lit kitchen, with cream glazed wooden cabinets and soft yellow lights, glass doors, carafes and tumblers, under-the-counter lighting, black granite counter tops, everything organized and gleaming. Jared told them what he knew, which was little, and they said little as they listened. But the first thing Cobb asked was: “When did you last see your wife?”
“This morning.”
“The children saw her, too?”
“Yes. Like every morning. We got ready for our day.”
“Who takes the children to school?”
“She does.”
“And there was nothing strange?”
Jared frowned. “Like what?”
“I don’t know. That’s why I’m asking.”
“No, there was nothing. She kissed me. Told me she was going to pick up my shirts. Hurried the kids along.”
Cobb asked if Jared had called the local hospital. Had he called the area hospital? No, said Jared. They called Morristown Memorial only to learn that no unidentified women had been brought in the last twenty-four hours.
“What about identified women?” asked Ezra. Has anyone been brought in with the kinds of injuries that would have limited the patient’s ability to call home? Severed arms perhaps? Amnesia?
Jared perked up. Perhaps that was it. Perhaps his wife had been flattened by a small vehicle, unhurt, except to develop amnesia, a total loss of memory that would prevent her from calling home. She came to in an amnesiac fog. She didn’t even know it was a Friday. She didn’t know who she was, didn’t know her own name. So she got on the road and she started walking.
Cobb’s response deflated his musings. No unidentified females meant no females, not some females who had amnesia.
“But maybe she hadn’t been brought in?” he said, hopefully. (With hope?) Was he hoping she had been knocked down, not killed, and not brought in? Just an amnesiac wandering the streets of Short Hills?
“It’s unlikely, sir,” said Cobb.
“My wife not being home the entire Friday, not calling, and leaving her purse, her wallet, her car keys is also unlikely,” Jared said. ?
??What else could have happened to her?”
Cobb said she could’ve been kidnapped. Was there any sign of struggle in the house?
“Kidnapped! Struggle!” Jared’s raised voice was but a small outward indication of the turmoil inside him. “No, there was no struggle.” He hadn’t even considered it. Perhaps it was possible. She had let in—who? Who could Larissa have let into the house? “Who could have taken her? And for what?”
“People get kidnapped every day for all kinds of reasons. Ransom perhaps? Where do you work?”
“Prudential,” replied an exasperated Jared. “But if someone had taken her and kept her for ransom, wouldn’t they have called in the last fourteen hours? What kind of bogus ransom kidnapping is it if I don’t even know about it?”
Cobb and Finney agreed it was odd. Still, they weren’t dismissing the possibility, nor others by the looks of their discomfited expressions. They stood in the middle of the kitchen refusing a drink and glancing warily at each other. Jared couldn’t figure out why they were studying him.
“So what do I do now?” he asked. “Usually I know where she is at all times. She has never not been home on a Friday night. I don’t mean sometimes, or occasionally, or seldom. I mean, never not been home. Something terrible must have happened.”
The rotund Finney nodded. The apathetic Cobb didn’t. “Do you?” he pointedly asked Jared.
“Do I what?”
“Do you know where your wife is at all times?”
It took much strength for Jared not to raise his voice, not to take a linebacker step forward, not to lose his temper. “What does that mean?” he demanded. “What are you asking?”
“Don’t get upset, sir. I’m asking a simple question. You’re at work all day, while she is here.”
“She is not here,” said Jared. “If she was here, I wouldn’t be calling you.”
Finally they began to jot down information about her in their small reporter notebooks. How old she was, how tall she was. Distinguishing marks? Color hair? Attractive? Yes, said Ezra, Maggie, Jared. Attractive. What she was wearing? Jared didn’t know. It all depended on where she had been going. Going without a purse or wallet. Something she could’ve walked in, ran in? He kept coming back to that for some reason, that she had gone out for a stroll and was knocked down by a car. But then…a woman didn’t just get knocked down willy-nilly in the middle of suburban neighborhoods without someone noticing.
Maybe she went out for a brisk walk, a jog and—and what? How to complete that sentence?
—and had a heart attack and fell and died? And had a stroke and fell and died? Had a ruptured aneurysm, a cerebral hemorrhage. When morning came, Jared would go look for her in the woods near the golf course.
And then Cobb spoke, to break Jared’s reverie about Larissa falling down dead. “She could’ve been picked up by someone,” he said. “Was driven out of the local area. Driven out of Jersey. To New York? To Pennsylvania? She could’ve gotten into an accident somewhere else. Or not.” Cobb slapped closed his book. “She could be anywhere.”
Jared got stuck on the first part of Cobb’s words. All his earlier efforts had been jutting up against a blank wall of her vanishing. Now Cobb brought up something Jared had not considered. “Picked up by who?”
“I don’t know, Mr. Stark,” said Cobb. “I don’t know your wife.”
Finney coughed a little. “Was there any trouble in your marriage?”
“Any what? No! What are you guys talking about? Trouble in my marriage? What kind of trouble would make a wife vanish like this?” Jared turned to Maggie. “Maggie, is what I’m saying true?”
Maggie shook her head. “She never said a word.” She paused. “About anything.” Slightly she shifted in her chair. Jared noticed. Finney noticed. Ezra, who was looking down into his tense hands, noticed. “Recently,” Maggie said, “she seemed more distracted than usual. It wasn’t normal.”
“Distracted?” Jared said incredulously. “Maggie, what does that even mean? What does it have to do with today, with tonight?”
“I don’t know, Jared,” said Maggie. “Nothing? Everything? I’m just saying. It was out of the ordinary. That’s what the officer asked.”
“Her being distracted during your lunches doesn’t translate into her being kidnapped out of her own home, does it? Or her falling down from a cerebral accident?”
“What cerebral accident?” asked Cobb suspiciously, and it was then that Jared realized: wait, they may think I had something to do with it. They must think this. That’s why they’re looking at me like that. Like I did something to her. Oh God.
Jared retreated. Literally took a step back from them, lowered his shoulders, his spine sloped, his mouth fell mute. There was nothing more to say. Desperate, he called them for help and they were eyeing him with suspicion. The raw injustice of it burned his eyes.
“My wife is missing,” he said quietly, to no one in particular, wishing them to go, wishing they would all leave his house. “You’re here because I called you. I didn’t know what to do. I still don’t. Can you help me or not?”
Apparently they couldn’t help him yet. But they did give him their card and before leaving told him to call and file a formal report on Sunday morning if she hadn’t returned by then.
For the rest of the night, Jared sat on the sofa in the den, unable to go upstairs to their bedroom. He must have fallen asleep before dawn, though it felt as if he slept minutes before Michelangelo tumbled downstairs and, patting Riot, sleeping by Jared’s feet, said, “Dad, where is Mommy?”
It was only seven. Jared spooned some cereal into his son’s bowl, poured the milk, patted his head. After putting the boy in front of Saturday morning T V, still in yesterday’s clothes he walked down the driveway to Bellevue, made a shoehorn left along the golf course and slowly walked up the street, between the houses and the dewy glinting green golf course, looking for something, anything, that might clue him into the clueless-ness. It was a crisp May morning. It smelled of the upcoming summer. The oaks had all bloomed, the red impatiens were fluttering; it was beautiful, the silence of the street, the distant view of the mountains. What was he looking for? He walked the half-mile circle up to the main road, looked left, looked right, turned around and walked back down Bellevue. He found nothing. He walked again, slower. He walked the third time. When he got to Summit Avenue, he didn’t know which way to go. The town of Summit was to the right, but what good did the town do him? She took no money with her! She wouldn’t have walked to Summit; what would the point be? She had play rehearsal in the opposite direction. She had to get in her Jaguar and drive to where people were waiting for her. She didn’t do this. Why? Jared turned around and started his fourth walk back home. It was after eight, he’d been out an hour. Tara was walking down her driveway in her robe, to pick up the paper. They lived in the large black and white Tudor two doors from the Starks. She waved.
“Good morning, Jared. Isn’t it a nice morning?”
“Tara,” he said, coming up to her, “have you seen Larissa?”
“What do you mean? Today?”
“Yesterday.”
“I talked to her,” Tara said cheerily. “She called to confirm the play date and asked if I would mind picking Michelangelo up from school along with Jen. I said of course I didn’t mind.”
“What time was this? The phone call?”
“Early. Nine? Maybe ten.”
“Usually, would she pick him up?”
“Yes, usually. But that’s okay. She said she had scheduled some errands that might run late.”
“What kind of errands?”
“She didn’t say. Why? Is everything okay?”
“I don’t know,” Jared said. “I don’t know what to think. So you didn’t see her all day yesterday?”
“No. Wait, I did see her, briefly.”
He stopped breathing, holding Tara’s words, trying to listen.
“I was running out in the car with Jess,” said Tara, “and she was walk
ing up Bellevue. I waved to her.”
“Walking up Bellevue?”
“Yes, right here. In front of my house.” Tara pointed behind Jared, to the street lining the golf course. “Like she does many times. She looked like she was going out for a brisk walk. But without Riot.”
“Were her hands free? Was she carrying her purse?”
“Gee, I don’t remember. Why? Come to think of it, I think she was carrying something, like a dark bag, maybe a duffel. Which is why it didn’t quite seem like she was exercising, more like going somewhere.”
“What was she wearing?”
“Oh, I don’t know, Jared. I’m sorry. Jeans, maybe?”
Jared stared at Tara interminably. Tara became uncomfortable. “What’s wrong? Is something wrong?”
“Larissa didn’t come home last night,” he said in a hollow voice. “She’s still not back. I’m afraid something terrible’s happened.”
Flustered, Tara said nervously, “No, no, everything seemed normal. When she called she sounded friendly, very much herself. Oh, my goodness. You think she got into some kind of accident?”
“Possibly. What time was this, when you saw her walking?”
“Not long after our phone call. Maybe 10:30? Quarter to eleven? Yes, it was probably closer to quarter to eleven, because Jess and I were going to the doctor at eleven, and I was putting her in the car. I drove past Larissa, opened the passenger window and waved to her. She waved back. I asked if she needed a ride. She said with a smile that no, she was fine. That was all. Everything seemed—”
Staggering backward, Jared had nothing more to say, nothing else to say.
At home Emily was awake, Asher still sleeping. “Em, hold the fort, okay?” Jared said. “I’ll be right back.”
“Where are you going? You’ve just come back! I have volleyball practice at eleven.”
“I’ll be back before then.”
“Asher has his playoff game at 11:30.”
“Way before then, Em.”