Stay Close
“You think Harry chooses them for their witty repartee?”
Megan shook her head. “I got a bad feeling about this.”
“We can call him again.”
“I tried. No answer.”
“I’d send a squad car by his house, but what’s the point? He goes out every night. Did you tell anyone you were going to see him?”
“No.”
“So I’m not sure I follow. What makes you think he’s in danger?”
“Nothing, I guess. The woman’s voice. I don’t know. It sounded so sickly sweet.”
“Oh,” Broome said, “well, why didn’t you say so in the first place?”
Megan frowned. “Could you be, I don’t know, a little more patronizing?”
“‘Sickly sweet’?”
“Okay, I get it.”
“No, Cassie or whatever your name is, I don’t think you do.” Broome moved a little closer. “May I be blunt?”
“Because so far you’ve been circumspect? Sure.”
“You look good. Really, really good.”
“Uh, thanks.”
“Not that way. I mean you look like the years have been a friend to you. You look healthy and happy and, most important of all, you look like you have someplace to go. Do you know what I mean?”
She said nothing.
“That’s the definition of happiness, you know. Most of the girls down here, they’ll never have that. A place to go.”
“Detective Broome?” she said.
“Yes?”
“You’re deep.”
Broome smiled at that one. “Yeah, philosopher detective. Do yourself a favor anyway. Go to that place.”
“The, uh, place to go?”
“Yeah, home or whatever. The place where you have people waiting for you.”
“You’re not listening to me, Detective.”
“No, I am. Now you need to listen to me. What are you still doing down here?”
She stayed quiet for a moment. He waited, watched her. The truth was, despite her sarcasm, Broome was scoring points.
What was she still doing here?
She thought now about her home, her “place to go”—about Kaylie and Jordan, about poor Dave, probably pacing and running his hand through his hair the way he did when he was anxious, wondering what had suddenly happened to the woman he’d slept beside for the past sixteen years.
With a weak voice, Megan said, “I thought you wanted me to stick around in case something new developed.”
“I got what I need for now. If I need more, I’ll call Harry. I made you a promise about anonymity. I plan on keeping it.”
“Thank you,” she said.
“You’re welcome. Now get out of here before the chief sees you and starts asking questions.”
She wanted to protest. This felt somehow wrong, but either way there was nothing to gain staying here. Without uttering another word, Megan headed back outside. She had parked around the corner. She slipped into the front seat and thought about what to do. The answer was obvious.
Broome was right. But for some reason, as she sat in the car, tears started brimming in her eyes. What the hell was wrong with her? She started up the car and prepared to go straight home. Forget all this. Forget La Crème and Lorraine and Rudy and Stewart Green and Harry Sutton. They had been something she’d caught a glimpse of in her rearview mirror, that’s all.
But what about Ray?
She checked the car clock. Why had she suggested that they meet at Lucy of all places? Her keys hung from the ignition slot. In all the years she’d known him Dave had never asked about that bronze, slightly rusted key. She’d always kept it with her. She doubted it would still open the door—it was close to twenty years old now—but that key was the only souvenir, the only remembrance, she had allowed herself to keep from her old life.
One key.
She touched it now and thought about the last time she’d used it. She wanted to see Ray. She didn’t want to see him.
It was one thing to play with fire—it was another thing to leap directly into the flames.
Go home, Cassie or Megan or whoever I really am. We appreciate this breaking bulletin to solve an old disappearance, but it is now time to return to our regularly scheduled life.
On the one hand, this whole crazy day still felt like a no-harm-no-foul situation. She could leave here unscathed. On the other, she kept looking over her shoulder, as though she were being followed. She felt that the world was closing in on her now, that Stewart Green was still there, smiling that horrible, awful smile, readying to pounce. Yes, her best chance, the smart move, was to go home, but now she wondered if even that would do any good, or if it was already too late.
Lucy. At eleven P.M.
Lucy was in Margate, five miles from where Megan now was. No matter how much she tried to convince herself otherwise, no matter how dangerous or volatile, she knew that there would be no peace or closure until she saw Ray. Besides, forgetting everything else, how could she come down all this way and not see Lucy?
She drove south on Atlantic Avenue until, up ahead, she saw Lucy, hovering in the dark, silhouetted by the moon. As always, no matter how many times she had seen her, Megan stared up at Lucy in childlike awe.
Lucy was a massive elephant—“massive” meaning six stories tall.
Built in 1882, Lucy the Elephant was one of the country’s greatest and oldest roadside attractions and an architectural wonder—a sixty-five-foot elephant-shaped structure that originally housed, of all things, a real-estate office. During her 130-year reign on the New Jersey shore, Lucy had also been a restaurant, a tavern (closed during Prohibition), a private beach cottage, and now a place for tourists to visit for four dollars a pop. The ninety-ton pachyderm was made up of a million pieces of wood with an outer sheath of hammered tin. You entered Lucy through either of her thick hind legs, climbed the spiral staircase into a main room of curving plaster the color of Pepto-Bismol or, so they say, of an elephant’s stomach. You could walk over to Lucy’s head and check out the ocean from her windows/eyes. There was another window in the ass area, known to those who take care of her as her “pane in the butt.” There were photographs and a video show and even a bathtub. Climb another set of stairs and you could step outside on the top of Lucy’s back for one of the great views of the Atlantic Ocean. On a clear day, boats out there could see Lucy from eight miles out.
Megan had always loved Lucy. She couldn’t say exactly why. Twenty years ago, she had taken to visiting on her day off, grabbing a burger and fries at Lucy’s outdoor café, sitting on the same bench not far from the old girl’s trunk. It was there she met and started seeing one of Lucy’s caretakers and tour guides, a sweet, though overly needy, guy named Bob Malins. The relationship didn’t last long, but before she broke up with him, Megan surreptitiously pocketed his key to Lucy, brought it to a local hardware store, and made a copy of it.