He still lived with his mother in the shabby house in Jackson Heights, Queens, where he’d been born. The only times he’d been away from it were those dark, nightmarish periods when he was incarcerated. The day after his twelfth birthday he was sent to a juvenile detention center for the first of a dozen times. In his early twenties he’d spent three years in a psychiatric facility. Four years ago he was sentenced to ten months in Riker’s Island. That was when the police caught him hiding in a college student’s car. He’d been warned a dozen times to stay away from her. Funny, Bernie thought—he couldn’t even remember what she looked like now. Not her and not any of them. And they had all been so important to him at the time.
Bernie never wanted to go to jail again. The other inmates frightened him. Twice they beat him up. He had sworn to Mama that he’d never hide in shrubs and look in windows again, or follow a woman and try to kiss her. He was getting very good at controlling his temper too. He’d hated the psychiatrist who kept warning Mama that one day that vicious temper would get Bernie into trouble no one could fix. Bernie knew that nobody had to worry about him anymore.
His father had taken off when he was a baby. His embittered mother no longer ventured outside, and at home Bernie had to endure her incessant reminders of all the inequities life had inflicted on her during her seventy-three years and how much he owed her.
Well, whatever he “owed” her, Bernie managed to spend most of his money on electronic equipment. He had a radio that scanned police calls, another radio powerful enough to receive programs from all over the world, a voice-altering device.
At night he dutifully watched television with his mother. After she went to bed at ten o’clock, however, Bernie snapped off the television, rushed down to the basement, turned on the radios and began to call talk show hosts. He made up names and backgrounds to give them. He’d call a right-wing host and rant liberal values, a liberal host and sing the praises of the extreme right. In his call-in persona, he loved arguments, confrontations, trading insults.
Unknown to his mother he also had a forty-inch television and a VCR in the basement and often watched movies he had brought home from porn shops.
The police scanner inspired other ideas. He began to go through telephone books and circle numbers that were listed in women’s names. He would dial one of those numbers in the middle of the night and say he was calling from a cellular phone outside her home and was about to break in. He’d whisper that maybe he’d just pay a visit, or maybe he’d kill her. Then Bernie would sit and chuckle as he listened to the police scanners sending a squad car rushing to the address. It was almost as good as peeking in windows or following women, and he never had to worry about the headlights of a police car suddenly shining on him, or a cop on a loudspeaker yelling, “Freeze.”
The car belonging to Tom Weicker was a gold mine of information for Bernie. Weicker had an electronic address book in the glove compartment. In it he kept the names, addresses and numbers of the key staff of the station. The big shots, Bernie thought, as he copied numbers onto his own electronic pad. He’d even reached Weicker’s wife at home one night. She had begun to shriek when he told her he was at the back door and on his way in.
Afterwards, recalling her terror, he’d giggled for hours.
What was getting hard for him now was that for the first time since he was released from Riker’s Island, he had that scary feeling of not being able to get someone out of his mind. This one was a reporter. She was so pretty that when he opened the car door for her it was a struggle not to touch her.
Her name was Meghan Collins.
4
Somehow Meghan was able to accept Weicker’s offer calmly. It was a joke among the staff that if you were too gee-whiz-thanks about a promotion, Tom Weicker would ponder whether or not he’d made a good choice. He wanted ambitious, driven people who felt any recognition given them was overdue.
Trying to seem matter-of-fact, she showed him the faxed message. As he read it he raised his eyebrows. “What’s this mean?” he asked. “What’s the ‘mistake’? Who is Annie?”
“I don’t know. Tom, I was at Roosevelt Hospital when the stabbing victim was brought in last night. Has she been identified?”
“Not yet. What about her?”
“I suppose you ought to know something,” Meghan said reluctantly. “She looks like me.”
“She resembles you?”
“She could almost be my double.”
Tom’s eyes narrowed. “Are you suggesting that this fax is tied into that woman’s death?”
“It’s probably just coincidence, but I thought I should at least let you see it.”
“I’m glad you did. Let me keep it. I’ll find out who’s handling the investigation on that case and let him take a look at it.”
For Meghan, it was a distinct relief to pick up her assignments at the news desk.
It was a relatively tame day. A press conference at the mayor’s office at which he named his choice for the new police commissioner, a suspicious fire that had gutted a tenement in Washington Heights. Late in the afternoon, Meghan spoke to the medical examiner’s office. An artist’s sketch of the dead girl and her physical description had been issued by the Missing Persons Bureau. Her fingerprints were on the way to Washington to be checked against government and criminal files. She had died of a single deep stab wound in the chest. Internal bleeding had been slow but massive. Both legs and arms had been broken some years ago. If not claimed in thirty days, her body would be buried in potter’s field in a numbered grave. Another Jane Doe.
At six o’clock that evening, Meghan was just leaving work. As she’d been doing since her father’s disappearance, she was going to spend the weekend in Connecticut with her mother. On Sunday afternoon, she was assigned to cover an event at the Manning Clinic, an assisted reproduction facility located forty minutes from their home in Newtown. The clinic was having its annual reunion of children born as a result of in vitro fertilization carried out there.
The assignment editor collared her at the elevator. “Steve will handle the camera on Sunday at Manning. I told him to meet you there at three.”
“Okay.”
During the week, Meghan used a company vehicle. This morning she’d driven her own car uptown. The elevator jolted to a stop at the garage level. She smiled as Bernie spotted her and immediately began trotting to the lower parking level. He brought up her white Mustang and held the door open for her. “Any news about your dad?” he asked solicitously.
“No, but thanks for asking.”
He bent over, bringing his face close to hers. “My mother and I are praying.”
What a nice guy! Meghan thought, as she steered the car up the ramp to the exit.
5
Catherine Collins’ hair always looked as though she’d just run a hand through it. It was a short, curly mop, now tinted ash blond, that accentuated the pert prettiness of her heart-shaped face. She occasionally reminded Meghan that it was a good thing she’d inherited her own father’s determined jaw. Otherwise, now that she was fifty-three, she’d look like a fading Kewpie doll, an impression enhanced by her diminutive size. Barely five feet tall, she referred to herself as the house midget.
Meghan’s grandfather Patrick Kelly had come to the United States from Ireland at age nineteen, “with the clothes on my back and one set of underwear rolled under my arm,” as the story went. After working days as a dishwasher in the kitchen of a Fifth Avenue hotel and nights with the cleaning crew of a funeral home, he’d concluded that, while there were a lot of things people could do without, nobody could give up eating or dying. Since it was more cheerful to watch people eat than lie in a casket with carnations scattered over them, Patrick Kelly decided to put all his energies into the food business.
Twenty-five years later, he built the inn of his dreams in Newtown, Connecticut, and named it Drumdoe after the village of his birth. It had ten guest rooms and a fine restaurant that drew people from a radius of fifty miles. Pat c
ompleted the dream by renovating a charming farmhouse on the adjoining property as a home. He then chose a bride, fathered Catherine and ran his inn until his death at eighty-eight.
His daughter and granddaughter were virtually raised in that inn. Catherine now ran it with the same dedication to excellence that Patrick had instilled in her, and her work there had helped her cope with her husband’s death.
Yet, in the nine months since the bridge tragedy, she had found it impossible not to believe that someday the door would open and Ed would cheerfully call, “Where are my girls?” Sometimes she still found herself listening for the sound of her husband’s voice.
Now, in addition to all the shock and grief, her finances had become an urgent problem. Two years earlier, Catherine had closed the inn for six months, mortgaged it and completed a massive renovation and redecoration project.
The timing could not have been worse. The reopening coincided with the downward trend of the economy. The payments on the new mortgage were not being met by present income, and quarterly taxes were coming due. Her personal account had only a few thousand dollars left in it.
For weeks after the accident, Catherine had steeled herself for the call that would inform her that her husband’s body had been retrieved from the river. Now she prayed for that call to come and end the uncertainty.
There was such a total sense of incompletion. Catherine would often think that people who ignored funeral rites didn’t understand that they were necessary to the spirit. She wanted to be able to visit Ed’s grave. Pat, her father, used to talk about “a decent Christian burial.” She and Meg would joke about that. When Pat spotted the name of a friend from the past in the obituary column, she or Meg would tease, “Oh, by God, I hope he had a decent Christian burial.”
They didn’t joke about that anymore.
On Friday afternoon, Catherine was in the house, getting ready to go to the inn for the dinner hour. Talk about TGIF, she thought. Friday meant Meg would soon be home for the weekend.
The insurance people were due momentarily. If they’ll even give me a partial payout until the Thruway divers find wreckage of the car, Catherine thought as she fastened a pin on the lapel of her houndstooth jacket. I need the money. They’re just trying to wiggle out of double indemnity, but I’m willing to waive that until they have the proof they keep talking about.
But when the two somber executives arrived it was not to begin the process of payment. “Mrs. Collins,” the older of the two said, “I hope you will understand our position. We sympathize with you and understand the predicament you are in. The problem is that we cannot authorize payment on your husband’s policies without a death certificate, and that is not going to be issued.”
Catherine stared at him. “You mean it’s not going to be issued until they have absolute proof of his death? But suppose his body was carried downriver clear into the Atlantic?”
Both men looked uneasy. The younger one answered her. “Mrs. Collins, the New York Thruway Authority, as owner and operator of the Tappan Zee Bridge, has conducted exhaustive operations to retrieve both victims and wreckage from the river. Granted, the explosions meant that the vehicles were shattered. Nevertheless, heavy parts like transmissions and engines don’t disintegrate. Besides the tractor trailer and fuel tanker, six vehicles went over the side, or seven if we were to include your husband’s car. Parts from all the others have been retrieved. All the other bodies have been recovered as well. There isn’t so much as a wheel or tire or door or engine part of a Cadillac in the riverbed below the accident site.”
“Then you’re saying . . .” Catherine was finding it hard to form the words.
“We’re saying that the exhaustive report on the accident about to be released by the Thruway Authority categorically states that Edwin Collins could not have perished in the bridge tragedy that night. The experts feel that even though he may have been in the vicinity of the bridge, no one believes Edwin Collins was a victim. We believe he escaped being caught with the cars that were involved in the accident and took advantage of that propitious happening to make the disappearance he was planning. We think he reasoned he could take care of you and your daughter through the insurance and go on to whatever new life he had already planned to begin.”
6
Mac, as Dr. Jeremy MacIntyre was known, lived with his seven-year-old son, Kyle, around the bend from the Collins family. The summers of his college years at Yale, Mac had worked as a waiter at the Drumdoe Inn. In those summers he’d formed a lasting attachment for the area and decided that someday he’d live there.
Growing up, Mac had observed that he was the guy in the crowd the girls didn’t notice. Average height, average weight, average looks. It was a reasonably accurate description, but actually Mac did not do himself justice. After they took a second look, women did find a challenge in the quizzical expression in his hazel eyes, an endearing boyishness in the sandy hair that always seemed wind tousled, a comforting steadiness in the authority with which he would lead them on the dance floor or tuck a hand under their elbow on an icy evening.
Mac had always known he would be a doctor someday. By the time he began his studies at NYU medical school he had begun to believe that the future of medicine was in genetics. Now thirty-six, he worked at LifeCode, a genetic research laboratory in Westport, some fifty minutes southeast of Newtown.
It was the job he wanted, and it fit into his life as a divorced, custodial father. At twenty-seven Mac had married. The marriage lasted a year and a half and produced Kyle. Then one day Mac came home from the lab to find a babysitter and a note. It read: “Mac, this isn’t for me. I’m a lousy wife and a lousy mother. We both know it can’t work. I’ve got to have a crack at a career. Take good care of Kyle. Goodbye, Ginger.”
Ginger had done pretty well for herself since then. She sang in cabarets in Vegas and on cruise ships. She’d cut a few records, and the last one had hit the charts. She sent Kyle expensive presents for his birthday and Christmas. The gifts were invariably too sophisticated or too babyish. She’d seen Kyle only three times in the seven years since she’d taken off.
Despite the fact that it had almost come as a relief, Mac still harbored residual bitterness over Ginger’s desertion. Somehow, divorce had never been a part of his imagined future, and he still felt uncomfortable with it. He knew that his son missed having a mother, so he took special care and special pride in being a good, attentive father.
On Friday evenings, Mac and Kyle often had dinner at the Drumdoe Inn. They ate in the small, informal grill, where the special Friday menu included individual pizzas and fish and chips.
Catherine was always at the inn for the dinner hour. Growing up, Meg had been a fixture there too. When she was ten and Mac a nineteen-year-old busboy, she had wistfully told him that it was fun to eat at home. “Daddy and I do sometimes, when he’s here.”
Since her father’s disappearance, Meg spent just about every weekend at home and joined her mother at the inn for dinner. But this Friday night there was no sign of either Catherine or Meg.
Mac acknowledged that he was disappointed, but Kyle, who always looked forward especially to seeing Meg, dismissed her absence. “So she’s not here. Fine.”
“Fine” was Kyle’s new all-purpose word. He used it when he was enthusiastic, disgusted or being cool. Tonight, Mac wasn’t quite sure what emotion he was hearing. But hey, he told himself, give the kid space. If something’s really bothering him it’ll come cut sooner or later, and it certainly can’t have anything to do with Meghan.
Kyle finished the last of the pizza in silence. He was mad at Meghan. She always acted like she really was interested in the stuff that he did, but Wednesday afternoon, when he was outside and had just taught his dog, Jake, to stand up on his hind legs and beg, Meghan had driven past and ignored him. She’d been going real slow, too, and he’d yelled to her to stop. He knew she’d seen him, because she’d looked right at him. But then she’d speeded up the car, driven off, and hadn’t even
taken time to see Jake’s trick. Fine.
He wouldn’t tell his dad about it. Dad would say that Meghan was just upset because Mr. Collins hadn’t come home for a long time and might have been one of the people whose car went into the river off the bridge. He’d say that sometimes when people were thinking about something else, they could go right past people and not even see them. But Meg had seen Kyle Wednesday and hadn’t even bothered to wave to him.
Fine, he thought. Just fine.
7
When Meghan arrived home she found her mother sitting in the darkened living room, her hands folded in her lap. “Mom, are you okay?” she asked anxiously. “It’s nearly seven-thirty. Aren’t you going to Drumdoe?” She switched on the light and took in Catherine’s blotched, tear-stained face. She sank to her knees and grabbed her mother’s hands. “Oh God, did they find him? Is that it?”
“No, Meggie, that’s not it.” Haltingly Catherine Collins related the visit from the insurers.
Not Dad, Meghan thought. He couldn’t, wouldn’t do this to Mother. Not to her. There had to be a mistake. “That’s the craziest thing I ever heard,” she said firmly.
“That’s what I told them. But Meg, why would Dad have borrowed so much on the insurance? That haunts me. And even if he did invest it, I don’t know where. Without a death certificate, my hands are tied. I can’t keep up with expenses. Phillip has been sending Dad’s monthly draw from the company, but that’s not fair to him. Most of the money due him in commissions has been in for some time. I know I’m conservative by nature, but I certainly wasn’t when I renovated the inn. I really overdid it. Now I may have to sell Drumdoe.”