Innocent monster

FOUR

Sea Cliff is one of those tiny villages on Long Island that even most Long Islanders have never heard of. Across Hempstead Harbor from Port Washington and just south of Glen Cove on the cusp of the Gold Coast, it is a place contentedly trapped in a narrow swath of the past. And that swath was marked on the one side by the village’s rather grand and fanciful Victorians, some, like the Bluntstones’, overlooking the harbor and Long Island Sound beyond. The other edge of the swath was drawn in a line of classic ‘60s ranches and splanches. It was the kind of place where you could imagine freckle-faced boys in stiff, cuffed blue jeans and canvas sneakers, eagerly clamping baseball cards to their bikes so that they clickity-clacked along the spokes as the wheels turned. It was a place where people set their clocks to the pealing bells of the Russian churches, and those bells were ringing when I pulled up to the Bluntstone house.

The house was a Queen Anne Victorian, its design as busy as a beehive and its seven-colored paint job nearly as noisy. It must have taken a forest full of trees just to supply the stock for the spindles and gingerbread work on the wrap-around porch alone. No doubt a second forest had been sacrificed for the shakes, clapboards, fish scales, and row after row of diamond-shaped accent shingles. I more admired this kind of architecture than liked it. The house called too much attention to itself for my taste, screaming “Look at me! Look at me this instant!” It was nearly impossible not to. As I stood out of my car and beheld the behemoth before me, I couldn’t help but think that Candy had come a long way from the basement apartment in Sheepshead Bay that she shared with her long-divorced mother and two Siamese cats.

I patted the. 38 I kept holstered between the waistband of my pants and the small of my back. Nervous habit, I guess. It felt like a fifth limb. I didn’t anticipate having to use the damned thing, but I’d carried it in that same spot for many decades, initially as my off-duty piece and then as a kind of conceit. When I got my PI license, I fooled myself that it was a necessary piece of equipment for a man swimming alone in dangerous waters. Figures that the first time I really needed it-a quarter century ago in an abandoned hotel in Miami Beach-I didn’t have it on me. If I had, rather than the pea-shooter automatic I was forced to borrow from a friend, history might’ve been very different. Not world history, my history, my family’s history. With my. 38, I’d’ve killed the man who ambushed me on that long ago night. Instead, I just wounded him and he escaped. Seventeen years later, seven years ago, he helped murder my wife. These days my. 38 was a shopkeeper’s gun because, until Sarah convinced me to take this case, that’s what I’d been for the last several years, a shopkeeper.

The steps of the porch creaked slightly under my weight. Funny, the creaking added a kind of character and an air of authenticity to the place. This was an old house and all the pretty paint in the world couldn’t hide that. Somehow those creaking steps made this case real for me. This was Sashi’s home and suddenly that mattered. It mattered a lot. Candy stepped out onto the porch before I made it to the door. She didn’t say a word, but came to me and hugged me. I hugged her back. I hadn’t seen her since her wedding day. How strange, I thought. Candy had been a semi-permanent fixture at our house back in Brooklyn. Christ, I think we fed her more meals than she ever ate at home. Life is like that, though. People fall away when you’re not looking. People fall away.

“Mr. Prager. Mr. Prager,” she kept repeating. “It’s going to be all right now, isn’t it?”

“I hope so, Candy. I hope so. Let’s see.”

Candy wasn’t crying. I suppose she’d cried herself dry during the last three weeks, but I could tell her nerves were raw. She was ashen faced, her eyes flitting from place to place. When I let her go and she hooked her arm in mine to show me into the house, Candy walked as if on a high ledge. It seemed that any loud noise or unexpected movement would split her in two. I’d been to that place. It was a very lonely place, empty but for guilt and self-recrimination.

Paying a visit to someone’s home under these circumstances was an odd thing. It wasn’t entirely business and it wasn’t exactly social. I’d learned long ago that at the beginning of a case it was best to treat people like water and let them find their own level. Besides, people reveal all sorts of things if you just give them enough space and silence. Candy and her husband had no doubt gone over the story of their daughter’s initial disappearance a hundred different times with the police and the press. Problem with that was, once you’ve repeated a story several times, it takes on a life of its own beyond the facts, a life that often has a fastdiminishing connection to reality. The story becomes the reality and your mind naturally embellishes and alters it. I was interested in what really happened, not in what three weeks of anxiety, worry, and guilt had done to change the truth.

Inside, Candy took my coat and hung it on a hook in the etched glass and oak paneled vestibule. It was toasty inside, but Candy, dressed in a white cable-knit sweater, kept her arms folded around herself as if she were on the verge of chills.

“Come on, Mr. Prager, I want to show you something,” she said, leading me into the house, past the curving front staircase, and to a door that led to the basement.

“You’re gonna have to start calling me Moe.”

“That’s not going to be easy for me, Mr. Pra-Moe. I know I never said anything back when I was a kid, but I used to wish you were my dad too. I was always really jealous of Sarah that she had you.”

“That’s a lovely thing to say, Candy. I’m honored.”

“All I ever had was the assembly line of worthless boyfriends my mom slept her way through. Sarah was really lucky to have you.”

“I’m not so sure she would agree with you anymore.”

“God, I’m sorry, Mr. Pra-Moe. Moe, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to bring that up. I know that you and Sarah… I mean, since Mrs. Prager was…”

“It’s okay, Candy. Let’s not worry about my hurt feelings and let’s concentrate on finding Sashi, okay?”

“I’m just not thinking real clearly these days.”

“That’s understandable. You’re doing fine. Come on and show me what you wanted to show me.”

One steep and narrow set of stairs later we were down in Sashi’s studio. It was a brightly lit, almost sterile room. I don’t know how else to describe it. The place had a kind of movie set vibe. The walls were painted in white semi gloss and the ceiling was covered in those ubiquitous white drop-in tiles. The flooring was a kind of spongy blue material and it was only the floor-stained here and there by colorful splotches from where Sashi had dripped, drizzled, or splattered paint over the edges of her canvases-that felt broken-in or touched by human hands. Blank canvases of varying sizes were lined up in neat rows at one corner of the studio. One wall was covered with low shelves and on some of these shelves were quart-sized Chinese soup containers half-filled with myriad colored paints. Another shelf was stacked with tube after tube of acrylic paint and another shelf was for jars full of brushes. No easels here. Candy explained that Sashi preferred working on or close to the floor so that she could look down at her work. Good. This confirmed what I’d seen in the video the night before.

“This room doesn’t look familiar to me,” I said, wanting to see how Candy would react.

“So you saw the video we did?”

“Some of it.”

“And?”

“It bored the hell out of me, Candy. Sorry.”

“That’s okay. It can take Sashi weeks sometimes to finish a painting. It bores me too. She works best when we just leave her alone.”

“Like the day she disappeared.”

“Like that day, yeah,” Candy said, and began hugging herself again.

“The room,” I said, “what about the room?”

“Oh, sorry… what?”

“I didn’t recognize the room from the video.”

“We were living in a rented house then on the other side of town.”

“I’ll want to see that house,” I said.

Candy seemed not to hear me. “We bought this place three years ago and Max had this studio made just for Sashi.”

I let the thing about the old house go for the moment and I noticed there were framed photographs on another wall, but no paintings. Most of the photographs were of Sashi and a sad-eyed beagle.

“That was Cara,” Candy said, following my gaze.

“Was?”

“She died last year. She loved that dog. Cara meant everything to her.”

“Do you think Sashi could have run away?”

“Because of Cara?”

“Because of anything: Cara’s dying, the pressure of creating… anything.”

“She didn’t run away!” She was emphatic and there was more than a little anger in her tone. That was fine. I wouldn’t have liked the maybe-you’re-bad-parents implications of the question either. “Someone took her.”

I dropped it and pointed at a lone canvas on the floor. “And this…”

The entire canvas was covered in a thick, textured coat of black acrylic paint. Looking more closely, I noticed a fine mist of crimson among the textured waves and folds of the black base. It was as if Sashi had put blood-colored paint in an atomizer and sprayed the air over the canvas, the tiny droplets falling where the air currents in the room took them. Christ, it was bleak.

“That’s what Sashi was working on when Max and I came downstairs to get her for dinner. We thought she went for a walk on the beach across the way, but she didn’t come home. When she didn’t come home, we went to look for her on the beach. Then we called the police. They said she probably ran away, but they came and we looked for her. Our neighbors helped, but we couldn’t find her. There were no signs of forced entry and there were no fingerprints that didn’t belong.”

I didn’t like that. I didn’t like that at all. Candy was repeating the story verbatim. Her recitation had an eerie Manchurian Candidate feel to it. Raymond Shaw is the kindest, bravest, warmest, most wonderful human being I’ve ever known. I didn’t ascribe any specific negative judgment to it beyond my original misgivings about a frequently repeated story taking on its own reality. I didn’t, for instance, think she was lying to me, though I suppose she might have been. Candy’s canned response had an upside, though. It would serve as a reminder to me to count as fact only those things I knew to be so. There had been too many times in the past that I had trusted too quickly, believed too easily. Watching my ex-wife get murdered before my eyes cured the shit out of that problem for me. Katy had been killed as much by my easy trust as by the bullets that severed her arteries.

“Where’s your husband?” I asked as we walked back up the stairs.

“I sent him out to do some errands.”

That set off some alarm bells. “He doesn’t know about my being here, does he?”

“No,” Candy confessed as we reached the first floor. “Come on upstairs. I guess you’ll want to see Sashi’s room.”

“I do.” I followed Candy up the more grand and beautifully restored main staircase. “Why didn’t you tell Max?”

“Because we’ve already hired three other investigators and it’s costing us a fortune. Max worries about those kinds of things.”

“And…”

“And because he remembers you hated him.”

“I didn’t know him. I hated him getting you pregnant and rushing you into marriage. I hated that.”

That stopped her in her tracks. Candy turned on her heel to face me and planted herself on one of the carpeted steps.

“ He didn’t get me pregnant, Mr. Prager.”

“Come on, Candy.”

“I got me pregnant.” You could have knocked me back down the steps with a whisper. “I needed to get out, to get away from my mother, away from… I knew Max would do the right thing. He loved me. He really loved me.”

“I can’t be hearing-”

But she wasn’t finished. “He was happy, Mr. Prager. He didn’t run because he knew he could have me forever.”

“Did you love him?”

“Enough, I guess. Enough to let him get me out of there.”

“I did the math last night, Candy,” I said. “Sashi isn’t that baby.”

She hung her head. “There wasn’t a baby. I went off my birth control pills and when I had my next heavy period, I told him I miscarried. Don’t hate me, Mr. Prager.” She was crying now, finally, for a baby that never was and a lie that would live forever.

“I couldn’t hate you and believe me, I’m in no position to chastise people for their secrets. Does Sarah know?”

“Oh, God, no. Please don’t tell her.”

“Listen to me, Candy. I won’t tell her, but this is where it ends. From this point on, I won’t keep any secrets for you except if they help me find Sashi. So don’t tell me anything else that doesn’t have to do with Sashi. She’s who I’m here about. Do we understand each other?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m gonna have to talk to Max eventually, you know?”

“I know.”

“And this isn’t going to cost you anything, so you don’t have to worry about the extra money.”

“But-”

“-nothing. I have my reasons.”

“You want Sarah back,” she said.

“That’s right. You’re not the only one here who wants to bring a daughter home.”