Two Girls Down Read online

  “Can we at least listen to music?” said Kylie.

  “Yes, you can. I’ll be back in five minutes.”

  Jamie got out and was about to slam the door when Bailey said, “Mom?”

  “What?”

  She looked up from her book and said, “Do you know you call a group of lions a pride, not a pack?”

  Jamie stared at her, then at Kylie, who rolled her eyes.

  “No, baby, I didn’t know that.”

  She shut the door and left them.

  Into the calm, controlled air of Kmart, pop music from ten years ago in her ears, she forced herself to stay focused. If she didn’t have a list, she had trouble concentrating in big box stores, got distracted by displays and sales. That was the point, wasn’t it, she thought, to turn you into a kid again who sees something shiny and wants it. When the girls were with her, a ten-minute trip turned into thirty minutes easily, everyone leaving with candy and gum and a tank top.

  Jamie went to the toy aisles, skimmed over the bright boxes and tubes and balls to the girls section, Make-Your-Own-Headband, Home Manicure Kit, Bead-a-Necklace—she picked that one up; it was $9.99. You got lucky today, Arianna.

  She made her way to the cards and wrapping paper, grabbed a pink gift bag with tissue paper already lined inside and a white card dangling from the handle.

  Then on her way to the checkout she stopped when she saw a sheer cowl-necked sweater on a sale rack. The tag read $21.99. Nope.

  At the register, she checked her phone (11:55). Oh who cares, she thought. It doesn’t matter if you’re late to this kind of thing; it’s an open house. Suddenly she felt relaxed, realized her hands were in fists, holding the strings of the gift bag hostage in her fingers. The day opened up in front of her. The party would eat up a couple of hours, then maybe they’d stop by her parents’ place, then she could pick up McDonald’s for dinner, and then they could waste time until Darrell came over and she could send them to her room and let them watch TV in her bed.

  It didn’t seem that bad when she thought of it that way. Just some hours to fill.

  She paid, picked up her bag, and left. Into the parking lot, back to her car, she sped up. Confused at first, she thought, This is my car. Checked the dent in the fender, the plate. No girls.

  I’m going to kill them, she thought, took a breath too quickly and coughed, started talking to them in her head. Don’t even tell me you can’t tie it in a knot till we get to the fucking party, Bailey. Or you, was this your idea? she thought, picturing Kylie’s face. You and your sweet tooth, looking for free samples.

  Jamie looked around at the stores: Reno’s Coffee, Morgan Housewares, StoneField Ice Cream. She ran to the latter, coughing like she was a smoker, entered through the doors. It was quiet and cold inside. A woman and two little boys and a baby in a car seat sat in a booth. The girl behind the counter had a ring in her lip.

  “You see two girls come in here?” said Jamie.

  “Yeah, they were just in here.”

  For a second they stared at each other.

  “So where are they?” said Jamie.

  Lip Ring shrugged.

  “How should I know? They left a few minutes ago.”

  Jamie could feel the blood rush in her chest. She started to leave, then turned back and said, “Lemme ask you something: How the fuck do you eat with that thing in your face?”

  She left and slammed the door before she could hear the answer.

  Then Reno’s Coffee—a couple, a man post-workout, everyone on his phone.

  “Did you see two girls in party dresses?” she asked the people behind the counter. “Eight and ten years old. Did they come in to use the bathroom?” Then to the couple and the man: “Did you see two girls?”

  They all said no.

  She left, looked back at her car, still empty.

  Then Morgan Housewares, Global Market, Eastern Sports. By the time she got back to Kmart it was 12:11, and the fear had become a rock in her throat.

  “I can’t find my girls,” she said to the security guard. She put her hand to her lips after she said it, like she was trying to get the words back.

  “Did you lose them in the store, ma’am?” he said. His double chin was strangled by his uniform shirt.

  “No, they were in the car. I was in here. Now they’re gone.”

  “We can page them in the store,” he said.

  “They’re not in the store. I was in the store.”

  “Maybe they came in to look for you,” he said.

  “Yeah, okay. Yes, please, page them.”

  She was standing in Customer Service with Geri the Customer Service Liaison and two other security guards when she heard the guard with the double chin’s voice say her daughters’ names: “Kylie Brandt, Bailey Brandt, please come to the Customer Service Center.”

  Jamie watched people emerge from the aisles, calm, bored. It was not their daughters’ names in the air.

  “You have bathrooms? Where are the bathrooms?” she said.

  Geri pointed to the left.

  “You can hear the loudspeaker in there too,” she said. Jamie couldn’t even see this woman; her face was a smudge with dull gray spots in the middle.

  Jamie ran now through the white aisles, hearing the sound of her own wheezing and rationalizations as she talked to herself, “She had to pee, Bailey had to pee. Maybe one of them got sick from that Reese’s.”

  She threw herself onto the door and into the bathroom, knocked on and pushed open every stall. A woman with a walker and a younger woman stood at the sinks.

  “Did you see two girls? I can’t find my girls.”

  The woman with the walker appeared not to understand. The younger woman said, “No, what did they look like?”

  “They’re wearing dresses,” Jamie said, and ran out again, to the front of the store.

  She passed the security guards and Geri, and now a small crowd of people looking and talking, to the front doors where she exited, ran into the parking lot, back to her car, which was still empty. She hit the hood with her hand and ran back to the store, where more people stood, watching her.

  The face of a man with a mustache blurred in front of her, next to the guard with the double chin.

  “Ma’am, I put out a Code Adam alert for the entire mall and called the police. Do you want to sit down?”

  Jamie didn’t understand the words he said. He held out his hand, to guide her inside to a cushioned folding chair, where someone would bring her a glass of water.

  Jamie didn’t take it. She dug her fingernails into her scalp and whispered, “My girls…my girls.”

  —

  They always think they won’t get caught, thought Cap. They want to get caught, Nell said to him once. Otherwise why do it? And Cap said, No one wants to get caught, not even the ones who feel guilty, and that is actually most of them. Not even Catholics. And you need a little bit of ego to think you’re the one who’s not going to get caught. That you’re the one guy who’ll fool his wife forever; you’re the one woman whose husband never asks too many questions. Maybe you are. Maybe you get to have it all—a sweet home life and something breathless and dramatic on the side. Maybe you deserve it, too. Maybe she’s a bitch and you never wanted to marry her in the first place. Maybe you never wanted to work this job in this trashy old town and drive this piece-of-shit car and have these screaming kids with cheese curl dust on their fingers. Maybe the only way it gets better is to have an hour with the waitress from the diner or the fresh young babysitter in a motel room or your car with the backseat folded into the trunk.

  Maybe you’re just an asshole.

  Cap had stopped flipping through the possibilities a long time ago. The truth was he didn’t care why they did it; it was just his job to catch them. A pocket-sized DVR tucked into a cigarette box, one full water bottle, and one empty, black coffee in a thermos. Beaded seat cushion like the cabbies used to have back in Brooklyn when he grew up. Sometimes reading material but not for this kind of ac
tive surveillance, which usually took place over lunchtime or a coffee break. Passion doesn’t take long.

  His phone buzzed. It was a text from Nell: “Do u have anything 4 din in the house???”

  Cap wrote back: “Let’s order Justino’s.”

  Nell wrote: “Sick of pizza. Chinese. I’ll get mu shu.”

  Cap wrote: “Great.”

  Nell wrote: “:)”

  Sideways happy face. People are going to start putting sideways happy faces on their headstones, he thought. Here lies Max Caplan: Father, Ex-husband, Private Investigator, Disgraced Cop, :). Sideways happy face.

  Definitely “Father” first on the headstone. Leave it to his daughter, Nell, he thought, to think of dinner at 5 p.m., not because she was hungry but because she knew he would have a bowl of cereal unless she took care of it. He told her not to worry because he was basically okay. He never went into how much he drank on nights when he wasn’t working or when she was at her mother’s, how he woke up in the middle of the night after passing out on the couch with the TV blaring.

  The door to room 7 opened, and Cap propped the cigarette box up on the side mirror and tapped Record on the DVR. A man and a woman came out. The man had a belly that seemed to go all the way around his waist, like a life preserver, over his belt. The woman was, unfortunately, blond and trashy-looking, tight jeans and a spray tan. You couldn’t fight the stereotype a little, lady? Cap thought as he watched it all through the screen. He zoomed in as much as he could on the couple, getting their entire bodies in the frame. You wanted to see the body language as much as the face, he’d found. Hands and hips and feet. If they didn’t kiss you wanted to see how they touched, and if they didn’t touch, if you could see every part of them, it was easier to see if they wanted to.

  These two touched. The man had his hand on her elbow, her arm was around the life preserver, both of them talking with their mouths downward, whispering, thought Cap. The man said something, and the woman laughed and then put her fingers to his lips, like she was shushing him. Playful, intimate. Then the woman got in her car and drove away, and the man watched her go. He walked across the lot to his car, and then sat in the driver’s seat for a couple of minutes. He sat, and Cap sat. Cap watched him rub his face with the heels of the hands and then the fingers. Guilty, big guy? Then the man drove away. Cap tapped Pause.

  “Oh, Mr. Svetich,” he said.

  Watching another man cheat on his wife was exhausting. Cheating was one thing Jules could never accuse him of when they were married. He worked too much, drank too much, smoked too much (which was really hardly at all, but too much for her); he was emotionally unavailable and never wanted to talk about things. He was vaguely resentful and angry at Jules for bringing him not even to Philly but to a part of Pennsylvania where he was the only Jew in the room at any given function. Then he lost his job, and there was nothing vague at all about how resentful and angry he was.

  Once he threw a beer bottle at the bathroom door when Jules was in there and wouldn’t come out. He was always too tired. He didn’t spend enough time with Nell. He snored and twitched when he slept. His pee aim was poor in the middle of the night. He had dandruff sometimes and rarely clipped his toenails. But he never cheated on her.

  Cap put the camera in his pocket and drove away, heading home, to Denville. He stopped at the beer distributors close to his house, picked up a case of Yuengling for him and club soda for Nell. In the parking lot he walked past a guy who looked familiar, but in a town of fifteen thousand everyone looked familiar. At the grocery store you ran into the guy who cut your hair and the woman who’d served you an Irish Car Bomb on the house last weekend. At your kid’s soccer game you saw the postman and the city councilman and the gal who handed out free samples in front of StoneField Ice Cream. The longer he was a cop, the more Cap thought this was not such a nice thing. He hated knowing people. The Iraq War vet who he used to shake hands with at bars eventually holed up in his house with a jug of vodka and a gun. The flirty waitress at Applebee’s who left her newborn in the garbage in the restaurant bathroom. The former high school football star who OD’d on oxy and Heineken. Keep your small towns, thought Cap. Give me a city where I don’t recognize the corpse.

  “Hey, Cap, right?” the guy in the beer distributors parking lot said.

  Place him, place him, thought Cap. You’ve known him for a while because he looks older and fatter and redder now than he used to.

  “It’s me, Chris. Chris Morris.”

  School, parent-teacher conference a few years back. His daughter was the same age as Nell.

  “Chris. How’s it going? How’s your daughter…”

  Cap paused, struggled.

  “Ruthie,” said Chris, unoffended. “Yours is Nell, right?”

  “Yeah, Nell.”

  “Mine’s giving me a heart attack. Literally. I go for a checkup last week, my blood pressure’s 140 over 90. He asks do I have more stress at work, am I eating more salt? I say no, I got a sixteen-year-old girl at home. He goes, that’s it, then.”

  Cap nodded and smiled and did the man commiseration thing. He pictured himself and Nell playing Texas Hold’em at the kitchen table last Saturday night.

  “Everything’s a fight too. Tonight she’s going to that dance, and it’s like negotiating with the goddamn UN trying to get her home at a decent time.”

  Cap stopped him, held out two calm fingers.

  “There’s a dance tonight?”

  “Yeah, over at St. Paul’s. Nell’s not going?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe she forgot to tell me.”

  “Watch that, brother. It’s very convenient what they forget.”

  Chris kept talking until Cap said he was running late. They shook hands again. Cap put the beer in his trunk and drove away. Why hadn’t Nell told him about the dance? The real question was, why wasn’t she going? The even more real question: Why didn’t she want to go?

  It wasn’t like she didn’t have friends. Sophie Kenton and Carrie Pratt were always around, and now that guy, Nick, who was definitely gay even if he wasn’t telling people yet. Why wouldn’t they all go together?

  She ran cross-country in the fall, played soccer in the spring, got mostly A’s, played tenor drum in the marching band, organized student trips to the local soup kitchen and the children’s wing of the hospital. Cap thought she was beautiful, but she had inherited Jules’s dramatic features, a long, distinguished face and nose. Jules, a Women’s Studies professor at Lehigh, said Nell resembled a young Virginia Woolf. Cap knew teenage girls did not want to look like Virginia Woolf; they wanted to look like red-carpet movie stars, all lips and breasts and curved tan backs.

  Cap was sure it was his fault, certain that the divorce four years ago had permanently damaged his daughter’s self-esteem. They’d done the right things, sent Nell to a therapist; both he and Jules were careful to tell her it wasn’t her fault, but still, always, shit got through. Cap truly believed there was nothing harder than being a kid. You were always an alien trying to learn the earth rules.

  He pulled up to the house and sighed. It still made him sigh and sometimes laugh that he had gotten the house with all the ghosts. Jules got to move to a new condo with white carpeting and vertical blinds.

  The place had come in handy when he started his business, though. He’d converted the mudroom and the den into a small office and had his clients come through the side door.

  And more important, Nell liked it—she liked the three narrow floors and the bathroom fixtures modeled after the original ones that were installed when the house was built in the ’20s, the dusty living room set and the small grave markers in the backyard for Elmer the parakeet and Nigel the goldfish. She even loved their crazy neighbor Bosch and his crazier mother, Iris. So every time Cap felt like putting his fist through the crooked kitchen doorframe and the sunken bottom stair, he thought of Nell under an old blanket, reading a book in the chair by the window while it rained outside.

  He came through the fro
nt door and saw her in the kitchen, taking the lids off takeout containers.

  “Hey,” she called.

  “Hey.”

  She examined the food with her arms crossed, reviewing the evidence.

  “They forgot duck sauce, I think,” she said.

  “Christmas is ruined,” said Cap.

  Nell chuckled. It was an old joke.

  “Got enough beer there, Dad?” she said, sitting down, picking out orange chicken bits with chopsticks.

  “I’m not drinking it all tonight, Bug.”

  He opened the fridge and heaved the case in. Took one out and opened it.

  “How’d the stakeout go?”

  “Good for me. Bad for Mr. and Mrs. Svetich.”

  “That’s sad. Isn’t it sad?”

  “Yeah, it is, of course it is,” said Cap. “Just the job, though.”

  “What about the deadbeat dad?”

  “Slippery guy. Hasn’t used a credit card or had a bank account in eight months.”

  “Dirtbag,” said Nell.

  “Generous word for it,” said Cap. “How was the parade?”

  “Drumline’s solid,” she said, making a fist. “The flutes were all over the place—whatever. Try this,” she said, sliding a foil bag across the table.

  Cap opened it and pulled out what looked like fried fish sticks.

  “Mrs. Paul’s,” he said, taking a bite. “Shrimp, right? Is it shrimp toast?”

  “Yeah, isn’t it good? I had it at Carrie’s house. Her parents are doing this pescatarian thing.”

  “Pescatarian?”

  “You know, just fish and vegetables, no meat.”

  “Sounds boring,” said Cap.

  Nell shrugged. “Who knows. They read some article.”

  He watched her eat, use the chopsticks like a professional like he taught her. Jules with all her intellect couldn’t do it, tried until she got splinters in her fingers. There was a time toward the end of the marriage when Cap showed Nell how to pick up ice cubes with chopsticks, just so Jules would feel left out. How desperate and stupid, he thought later. If he were to title the last year of their marriage, it would be “Desperate and Stupid.”