Joseph Finder - Vanished

But getting up at three in the morning to get pooped on by a Black-capped Gnatcatcher? I wasn’t sure I understood the excitement.

I powered up the laptop, and while I waited, I did a quick walk around his office. He had several framed pictures of Mom and Dad together, one at home and one in a banquette at a nightclub. A photo of Dad in his office on the top floor of the Graystone Building in New York, wearing a three-piece suit, the Manhattan skyline behind him.

Built-in cherrywood file cabinets were neatly labeled-bills, taxes, investments, and so on. I pulled open a couple of drawers and saw that he kept paper copies of his phone bills, which made things easier for me.

I checked out the French doors that opened to the backyard, tried them, and was satisfied that they were securely locked. I knelt, noticed the rudimentary security system in place-the magnetic contacts wired into an alarm system, so if someone tried to force the doors open, the alarm would sound.

Something about it looked wrong, though.

But before I could give it a second look, I heard a high-pitched tone coming from Roger’s computer.

It didn’t look good. The screen was deep blue and covered with incomprehensible text-white letters and numbers, garbage that made no sense to me except for one line that I understood quite well:

A problem has been detected and Windows has been shut down to prevent damage to your computer

It was what computer geeks called the Blue Screen of Death.

Roger’s computer was dead. It had either crashed or-more likely-it had been wiped.

I had a theory how that might have happened-how someone might have gotten into his study to do it-and I went back to the French doors and knelt again.

Sure enough. One of the magnetic contacts on the doorframe looked like it had been hastily screwed into place. As if someone had unscrewed the contact switch, pulled out the connected wire, then jumpered the switch before screwing it back in-sloppily. In other words, someone had disabled the magnetic contact so the alarm wouldn’t go off when the French doors were opened.

Meaning that someone had probably already done a covert entry.

Someone had slipped into Roger and Lauren’s house. To search, perhaps. Or for some other reason.

And maybe was planning to do it again.

I spent the next forty-five minutes circling the perimeter of the house, looking for evidence of any other intrusions, using a little LED pen-light I found in the kitchen that someone had gotten at a trade show. The usual stuff: disturbances in soil patterns, broken shrubbery, jimmied locks, wood shavings, and the like. But I didn’t find anything else. No surprise there: Whoever had broken into the house through Roger’s study didn’t need any other way in. What did surprise me was how primitive the security system was. That would have to change.

I didn’t see any point in telling Lauren about the break-in. Not yet, anyway. There was no need to frighten her more.

So I went upstairs to get some sleep.

The guest room was midway between the master bedroom and Gabe’s room. It was furnished in classic WASP-grandmother style-oval braided rug, little bedside tables with tiny reading lamps. Hand-colored antique wood engravings of birds on the wall, in little gold frames. An old-fashioned white bedspread made out of that tufted, nubby fabric called chenille. I think.

On top of the toilet in the guest bathroom was a wicker basket that held a little travel-size tube of Colgate toothpaste, a shrink-wrapped travel-size toothbrush, little bottles of shampoo and conditioner, small hand soaps from Crabtree & Evelyn. I brushed my teeth, undressed, and hung my clothes up on the mahogany valet.

I got into the bed, naked. Found myself staring at some of the weirder-looking birds on the wall-the Ruffed Bustard, the Sacred ibis, the Balearic crane-and wondering if they were extinct, or found only in Madagascar or some Amazonian jungle.

I couldn’t sleep. Maybe it was the unaccustomed sounds of a strange house. Maybe it was the fifteen-hundred-thread-count Egyptian cotton sheets, or whatever they were, which I wasn’t used to. Too slippery.

More likely, though, it was because I was on alert for any noises that might indicate someone was trying to break in.

I found myself thinking about my brother. About our childhood bedrooms, which we insisted on being right next to each other’s. When, given the size of our house, we could easily have been separated by half a mile.

For most of our childhood, we were best friends. We shared almost everything. We were brought close by the weird isolation imposed upon us by my father’s money. Or maybe it’s more accurate to say, by the way my father chose to live, since I’ve known rich people who are vigilant about giving their kids a normal life. They send their kids to public schools, they conceal their wealth as best they can, they drive ordinary cars and live in ordinary houses.

But not Victor Heller. He was a brilliant wheeler-dealer who rose from a working-class background to rule Wall Street, and he wanted everyone to know it. Hence the estate in Bedford, with the horses and stables and clay tennis courts and the collection of antique roadsters. For years he commuted to and from work in his own Sikorsky helicopter, which landed on a pad in our backyard, until the town authorities took him to court to make him stop.

Mom was the prettiest girl in his small-town high school, with looks that rivaled Grace Kelly’s, and her early photos confirmed it. Victor Heller won her over by the sheer brute force of his charisma, by his indomitable will, his outsize ambition.

To the world, she seemed to be the perfect society wife, though she was anything but. She was too smart to play the role he’d assigned her-arm candy and cheerful volunteer for the charities he supported. Her chief pleasure in life was being a mother, yet Victor made sure she wasn’t around much to enjoy it. He insisted she go to all the dinner parties and balls and weekends in Verbier or Mallorca or Lake Como, though she never seemed to take pleasure in any of it.

As a result, Roger and I spent more time with our nannies and gardener and caretaker and household staff than we did with our parents. This didn’t make for a great childhood, but it did at least bring us together. Roger and I were born less than two years apart-eighteen months, a closeness in age that could have made us intensely rivalrous. Instead, we were more like fraternal twins. We did everything together.

Our personalities couldn’t have been more different, though. I was the rebel, the troublemaker, and the athlete. Roger was the intellectual, far more bookish, basically a solitary type. Yet he was also a troublemaker in his own quiet way. One of our housekeepers called him Eddie Haskell. We’d never seen that old TV show Leave It to Beaver, but years later when I saw a couple of reruns on late-night TV, I realized that our housekeeper really hadn’t liked Roger. Eddie Haskell was an unctuous, conniving brown-noser. He was the two-faced character who’d politely compliment Mrs. Cleaver on her lovely dress while instigating some evil prank that would inevitably get her son, the Beaver, in trouble.

Roger wasn’t as bad as Eddie Haskell, though, and I wasn’t the Beaver.

Still, Roger did enjoy tormenting me with magic tricks. He spent a lot of time at a magicians’ supply house in the city called Tannen’s Magic, and he was as good at sleight of hand as I was at throwing a pass. There was one trick he liked to do that I never figured out. It involved sticking his thumb through a hole that he’d cut into two blue cards stuck together, then sliding a red card between the blue cards like a guillotine, apparently slicing through his thumb. I’d beg and plead, but he’d never tell me how he did it.