Lisa Unger - Die For You

“You did good, Trev,” she said to comfort him. “Izzy needs our help right now, even if she doesn’t know it.”

Her son nodded uncertainly, wrapped his arms tightly around his thin middle. Emily gave Trevor a dirty look.

“Tattletale,” she hissed. “What a baby.”

“Shut up,” he said, his voice rising high and breaking. “It was your idea to check the spyware.”

“Emily, give me a break,” Linda said.

“What?” she said. “He is.”

They started yelling, speaking over each other unintelligibly. They always did this, reacted to stress by fighting with each other. The sound of it was maddening.

“That’s enough,” Linda said, raising her voice. They both stopped and stared at her, mouths in wide, surprised O’s . Emily returned to her seat and flopped herself down dramatically. Trevor went back to his corner to sulk.

“I need some quiet,” she said more softly. “Please. I have to think.”

She wanted to be angry with her sister for bolting again. But she couldn’t, the same way you couldn’t be mad at a cat for scratching furniture or a dog for chewing up your shoes. Isabel was just being Isabel.

There was an experiment Linda had read about, where people were asked to deliver electric shocks to a person seated in another room out of sight. The experiment revealed that most people would keep delivering the shocks, no matter how loud and tortured the screams from the other room became, as long as someone in authority told them to do it. Linda knew that she’d be one of those people. She’d be racked with guilt and self-doubt, but she’d keep pressing that button until someone told her it was time to stop.

Izzy would be the one who stood up and protested, who bucked authority. She’d beat the crap out of the person delivering orders and then race to rescue the injured. And in some circles, this would make her a bad seed, an undesirable.

Until her affair with Ben, Linda had never broken a rule in her life. And she’d been brutally judgmental of people who in her opinion had. She tortured Margie and Fred for years, because to her it seemed that Margie should have kept her vows to her husband, even in death. And, of course, her father had been the ultimate rule breaker. He’d defied the strictest rules of all: Don’t go. Don’t leave me. Love me forever, Daddy . And how she’d hated him for it. It took years of therapy for her to come to this realization.

Even in her art she never took risks, followed the rules of convention, the typical ideas about what comprised a beautiful image. And how she’d been praised for it, lauded and paid ridiculous sums for art and journalistic photographs that she secretly believed were common, maudlin-as Ben had reviewed her-or appealing to a base and silly chicken soup sentimentality.

Reflexively she dialed Izzy’s number and was surprised when her own husband answered.

“Hey,” he said. Even in that one word, she heard all his shame and despair. She ignored it, could not deal with his emotions or what he’d done to their life. In her mind, financial infidelity was a more egregious betrayal than a sexual one. She honestly didn’t know what the future held for them, but for the time being, she couldn’t think about it. She’d forgiven him before he’d even confessed; she’d meant it, too. But that didn’t mean she didn’t hate him at the moment.

“You found her,” she said, feeling the flood of relief. She felt both Emily’s and Trevor’s eyes on her.

“Uh, no. She left her phone. I found it on the floor of Trevor’s room.”

“Oh, God.” She shook her head at the kids, and both of them seemed to slump in disappointment. Izzy had dropped the line that connected them, gone off the grid. This terrified Linda more than anything else.

“I’ll find her. I promise,” he said. She could hear how badly he wanted to do that, to be the hero here. “She Googled someone named Camilla Novak. Do you know who that is?”

She searched the memory banks of her rattled brain. “No,” she said finally.

“There’s an address in SoHo, not far from here.”

Linda rummaged through her bag and found a capless Bic pen and a receipt from the coffee shop where she’d fucked Ben just hours before. It reminded her that they both had a lot to regret.

“Give it to me,” she said, her tone harder, less yielding than she intended. She just couldn’t help her anger, couldn’t keep from expressing it. She scribbled down the address, wondering aloud to Erik why Izzy had taken the uptown N/R.

“I don’t know. But she also looked up someone named Kristof Ragan. Ring any bells?”

“No.”

She wrote the name down. “Anything else?”

“She went to some site called Services Unlimited. It looks like an escort service masked as temp services. Weird.”

“Why would she go to a site like that?”

“No idea.”

“Anything else?”

“Just American Express. She was probably trying to track charges.”

“Is that it?”

“That’s it. Hey, are you going to give that to the detective?”

“Well, yeah.”

“Okay,” he said, then he paused and issued a sharp breath. “Just give me a head start. If I can get to her first, maybe I can convince her to turn herself in to the lawyer. We don’t want her taken into custody, right? She’s been through enough.”

The detective returned to the room then with sodas for the kids and a coffee for her. She thought he wore too much cologne; it made her sinuses ache.

“Okay,” she said. “Give me a call back when you find something.”

She ended the call and stuffed the paper in her bag. She looked at the detective, offered him a grateful smile for the coffee he handed her. “He’s checking the computer now. He’s going to call right back.”

The detective nodded. “Okay,” he said, handing her a card. “Call me on my cell if he finds anything.”

“Where are you going”?

“I have a lead I want to follow up.”

They stared at each other and in that moment it was hard to keep what she knew from him, an authority figure. He’d been open with her, told her everything he’d learned about Izzy’s husband. She felt guilty, nervous for keeping things from him, even if it was only to give Erik a head start so that he might talk some sense into her crazy sister. She was glad when he moved toward the door.

“Let me ask you something,” he said. He paused with the knob in his hand and turned back to look at her. “Did you ever suspect that your brother-in-law wasn’t who he said he was? Was there ever anything that gave you pause, something that’s coming back to you now?”

She’d thought about it since he’d told her everything, about the missing man, the stolen identity. But other than the nebulous feeling she’d had that she didn’t care for him or trust him and didn’t think he was good enough for Izzy no, there was nothing, no clue that might help them now. She told him as much.

“Just think about it. Let me know if anything comes to mind. No matter how small or inconsequential it might seem.”

Then: “Does the name Camilla Novak mean anything to you?”

She couldn’t hold his eyes, dropped her gaze to the floor. “No,” she said. “Uh-uh.”

He let a beat pass. Then: “You sure?”

She nodded and forced herself to meet his eyes with a wide, earnest gaze. “Why? Who is she?”

“Someone who might have information. We’ll see. Call me,” he said, and then left the room.

“Did you just lie?” Emily asked, incredulous. Linda considered lying again but didn’t have the heart, not with both of them staring at her like that.

“Shh,” Linda said, moving over and sitting next to her daughter, dropping an arm around her shoulders. Her little girl felt so thin, so fragile.