Richard Aleas - Little Girl Lost

I was about to close the closet when I noticed something on the floor in the back behind the sliding door. I pulled it out to get a better look at it. It was a wheeled luggage cart, lying on its back, unzipped and open, crammed full of clothing. It was too dark to see anything on the hard rubber wheels, but I had a feeling I knew what the police would find if they scraped them. Wayne Lenz’s blood.

I pawed through the clothing, but that was all the luggage contained, all the way to the bottom: T-shirts, underwear, two pairs of shoes, some costumes of the sort I’d seen on the video and in Miranda’s apartment. There was a small cosmetics bag, but it contained nothing but cosmetics. There was no sign of the money.

Not that Jocelyn would be likely to leave five hundred thousand dollars in cash lying around in the closet of a tenement apartment. I tried to guess how much space that much money would take up. About as much as two reams of typing paper, maybe three, even if you packed it tightly. I went through the luggage again, felt around the bottom of the closet, glanced under the bed.

It was disappointing, but only slightly. The money was why Murco was after her, and if it didn’t turn up he would be very unhappy, but otherwise it meant nothing to me. What I was after was Jocelyn. I wanted to hear her admit what she had done, and then And then what? I felt my hand tighten around the knife. And then I’d call the police, damn it. And then I’d have her arrested, have them test the luggage, have them clear my name and put her in jail where she belonged. There was a part of me that ached for a rawer sort of justice, the sort Murco and his son would deal out – part of me felt Miranda deserved that sort of retribution. But I was not Murco. Justice didn’t have to come at the point of a knife.

I pushed the luggage back into place and drew the closet door in front of it. I went back into the living room, searched through the small pile of mail I found on a table. A clothing catalogue, a credit card bill, a belated Christmas card, all addressed to “Jessie Masters.” I left them where they were.

There was an answering machine on the table, showing one message on its digital readout. I pressed the Play button and heard a woman’s voice. It took me a second to realize whose it was.

“Hey, beautiful,” Miranda said. “It was really good seeing you again. I know it was strange for you. For me, too. But I’d like to do it again, okay? Maybe we could watch the fireworks tomorrow. We should be able to see them from where I’m working. Maybe we can get some dinner first, before I have to go on. Give me a call, okay? Or I’ll call you, if you don’t.” Pause. “I love you, you know.” The machine clicked. A mechanical voice said, “Received Friday, December 30, at seven thirty-four p.m.”

She sounded so eager, so happy. Why? Why had Miranda been so trusting, so willing to take Jocelyn’s overtures at face value, so quick to forgive? I pictured Jocelyn getting this message and laughing, unable to believe her good luck. We should be able to see them from where I’m working. She hadn’t even had to come up with some excuse to lure Miranda to a secluded spot. New Year’s Eve meant fireworks on the Hudson, and sure, maybe you could see them from the roof at the Sin Factory – it was a short building, but it was far enough west that at least you’d see some of the show over the tops of other buildings. And how hard would it have been for Jocelyn to get behind Miranda while they were both watching the show, press the gun to the back of her head, and pull the trigger? For God’s sake, the fireworks would even have masked the sound of the shots. Jocelyn couldn’t have set it up better herself.

And where was she now? Collecting the money from wherever she’d hidden it, in preparation for leaving town? Or was she finding some horrible new way to do damage? The note she’d left at my mother’s building frightened me – who knew what she might do to carry out that threat?

With that in mind, I dialed Susan’s number on my cell phone. When she didn’t answer after four rings, I called my mother’s number.

“Hello? Who is this?” It wasn’t Susan’s voice, it was my mother’s, and she sounded unsteady, frightened.

I spoke as quietly as I could and kept an eye on the front door. “Mom, could you put Rachel on?”

“John! My God, are you okay? Are you safe?”

“Yes, I’m fine – what’s wrong?”

“Oh, my God, I was so worried about you, when Rachel said that woman was threatening to kill you-”

“She’s threatening all of us,” I said. “We all have to be careful. That’s why I asked Rachel to stay with you.”

“But she called!”

“Who called? What are you talking about?”

“She called,” my mother said again. “Just a little while ago. She told Rachel she was going to kill you-”

“Jocelyn called?”

“I didn’t talk to her, Rachel did. She said it was the same woman who left the note. John, she told Rachel she had a knife to your throat and was going to kill you.”

“Well, it wasn’t true. I’m fine. Can you just put Rachel on the phone, please?”

“She’s not here,” my mother said. “She went to find you. She tried to call you first, but there was no answer.”

My blood went cold. The call that had come in while I was being mugged. That had been Susan. And when I hadn’t answered “Mom, please think carefully, did Rachel say where she was going?”

“Yes, yes, I have it here. Hold on.” I heard papers rustling. I wanted to scream. “She wrote it down. She said she was going to Corlears Hook Park, to the bandstand. She said I should call the police if I didn’t hear from her in an hour. It hasn’t been an hour yet. Should I call them?”

“Yes,” I said.

The bandstand at Corlears Hook Park was built in the Depression and abandoned some time in the seventies. God only knows why it’s still standing. Before Stonewall, before AIDS, and before AOL chatrooms, it used to be a popular cruising spot for East Village men looking to hook up. Now it was nothing, a decrepit pile behind a chain link fence that offered some crude shelter to the homeless during a rainstorm and convenient shadows for drug dealers to hide in at noon. But the truth was you didn’t even see that many homeless or drug dealers any more – even they didn’t feel safe there.

I climbed down the fire escape as quickly as I could without breaking my neck, then ran all out down to Houston Street. I dropped the knife in the first garbage can I passed. I couldn’t afford to have the police find it on me when they arrived. I cut across Delancey, under the Williamsburg bridge, and over to Grand Street. These were long blocks, and I was badly out of breath by the time I rounded Cherry, but I kept going. My heart wasn’t beating any more, it was exploding, twice per second, against the inside of my ribs. My throat was raw from the freezing air I was taking in and my legs were burning like I’d just climbed ten flights of stairs. But I couldn’t stop, and I couldn’t slow down. I hadn’t asked my mother how long ago Susan had left – all I knew was that it hadn’t been an hour yet. But a lot can go wrong in less than an hour. I pictured Jocelyn standing behind Miranda, aiming a gun at the back of her head, pulling back gently on the trigger. A lot can go wrong in less than a second.

The park was empty. Wire fences surrounded a pair of dirt baseball diamonds. Basketball hoops with no nets stood on either end of a concrete square. In the distance, the bandstand rose behind a screen of trees, their dead branches obscuring whatever might have been going on there. But when I passed them, there was nothing to see. The bandstand was as empty as the rest of the park. I found a hole in the fence that was supposed to block access to it, and raced up to the structure. There was a pair of bathrooms on one side, but they’d been locked tight for years. I went around to the back, where a few metal doors led to storage closets or God knows what, but they were locked, too, or anyway wedged shut. The whole thing was covered with ancient graffiti and surrounded by broken bottle glass, crushed beer cans, and the droppings of the countless birds and rats that found shelter there. There was nothing else – no sign of Susan, none of Jocelyn, nothing.