Where Are You Now?

34

M other was scheduled to fly home from Greece on Wednesday, and my anxiety was mounting. Elliott had come over after my frantic phone call to him on Monday evening to calm me down. There was something intensely comforting to me about the way he took everything that I had to tell him, including the fact that Aaron Klein, his designated successor at Wallace and Madison, now believed that Mack was responsible for his mother’s death.

“That’s absolute nonsense,” Elliott said emphatically. “Aaron forgets he told me at the time nothing had been taken from her apartment. I remember his words clearly-‘Why would someone have killed my mother, stolen her key, and not bothered to rob the apartment?’ I told him that whoever killed her was probably a drug addict who panicked when he realized she was dead. Aaron has been fixated on trying to find someone to blame for his mother’s death for ages, but I’ll be damned if he’s going to try to pin it on Mack.”

There was nothing formal or reserved about Elliott’s heated response. Dad himself could not have been more vehement. I think that was the moment when any hesitation I felt about the growing closeness between Mom and Elliott disappeared for good. It was also the moment when I decided to drop “Uncle” and call him Elliott.

We agreed that it was inevitable I would be called in for questioning about Mack and that we had to hire a defense lawyer. “I will not allow Mack to be tried and convicted in the newspapers,” Elliott swore. “I’ll search around and get the best person I can find.”

We also agreed that we had to let Mom know what was going on. “It won’t be long before an enterprising reporter links Mack’s disappearance with that of the missing girl, because of the reference to Mother’s Day,” Elliott decided. “Worse yet, I wouldn’t put it past the detectives to leak it to the media deliberately. Your mother must not look as if she’s hiding from them.”

Elliott made the call and suggested gently that she head home early. By the time Mom got home on Wednesday evening, everything Elliott had predicted had come to pass. The media, like bloodhounds on a fresh scent, had effectively reopened the cases of the other three young women who had disappeared from nightclubs, and reported the fact that Mack and his college friends had been present at the Scene the night the first girl, Emily Valley, vanished. The Mother’s Day connection between Mack’s routine phone calls and Leesey Andrews’s message to her father was also headline news, of course.

Mom, Elliott’s arm around her firmly, had to fight her way past the cameras and microphones when she and Elliott arrived at Sutton Place. Her greeting to me was exactly what I expected but hoped wouldn’t happen. Circles under eyes that were swollen with weeping, for the first time looking every day of her sixty-two years, my mother said, “Carolyn, we agreed to let Mack live his own life. Now because of your meddling, my son is being hunted down like a criminal. Elliott has very kindly offered me the hospitality of his home. My bags are still in his car, and I intend to go there. In the meantime, you can contend with the mess out on the streets and make your apologies to our neighbors for destroying their privacy. Before I go I want to hear that tape.”

Quietly I retrieved the tape, then sat with her in the kitchen and played it for her. Mack’s voice, joking with his drama teacher, “Do I sound like Laurence Olivier or Tom Hanks?”-then-the dramatic change in his tone when he began to recite the Shakespeare quote.

When I turned it off, Mom’s face was pale with grief. “There was something wrong,” she whispered. “Why didn’t he come to me? Nothing could have been so bad that I wouldn’t have helped him.” Then she reached out her hand to me. “Give me the tape, Carolyn,” she said.

“Mom, I can’t,” I said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if we get a subpoena for it. You think it means Mack was in trouble. Another explanation is that he was simply reading a drama assignment. Elliott and I are meeting tomorrow morning with a criminal defense lawyer. I need to have it with me to play for him.”

Without another word, my mother turned from me. Elliott whispered, “I’ll call you later,” before he rushed down the hall after her. When they were gone, I turned on the tape again. “…I all alone beweep my outcast state, and trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries-”

Mack may have been acting, or he might have been talking about himself, but with a combination of pain and bitterness, I thought that now those words were fully applicable to me. A couple of minutes later, the apartment phone rang. As I picked it up and said, “Hello,” whoever was on the other end hung up.