Джозеф Файндер - Vanished

My brother was a skilled amateur magician, but his greatest talent was always keeping secrets.

I was lying in bed, staring at the cracks in the ceiling, when there came a soft knock at the door.

I said, “Yeah?”

“Nick?”

Lauren’s voice, hushed and tentative.

“Come on in.”

“You sure it’s okay?”

“Sure.” I sat up, pulled the covers up over my lap. The door opened slowly, squeaking on its hinges, and she looked in.

She noticed my bare chest, and said, “Oh, my God, I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Don’t worry, I won’t get out of bed.”

She entered. Now she was wearing just the oversized T-shirt, but it was long and roomy enough that it wasn’t immodest. Her hair was tousled. “I couldn’t sleep.”

“Me neither.”

She sat in the reading chair next to the bed. “How’s the bed?” she said, concerned.

“It’s great. What happened to your head bandage?”

“I don’t need it. The cut’s not bad, and it’s healing. It only looks bad.”

Her eyes dropped to my chest, for just an instant, then she quickly looked away. “I meant to leave you a set of Roger’s pajamas.”

“I usually don’t sleep in pajamas. Anyway, they probably wouldn’t fit.”

“True.” She was quiet for a few seconds. “You think Gabe’s doing all right?”

“Hard to tell,” I said. “He’s a teenager.”

“What’d he want to talk to you about?”

I shook my head. “I never rat out my nephew.”

“Gabe scares me sometimes. He sees too much.”

“You should hear what he listens to.”

“He’s always on the computer with his headphones on, listening to that horrible music.”

“Too bad he’s outgrown those video games he used to play all the time – Halo 3 and Call of Duty 4, those games where you just try to see how many people you can kill. Healthy stuff like that.”

She shook her head, gave a pensive smile. “And then there’s his notebook. That comic book he’s always working on. Which I’m not allowed to look at.”

“Graphic novel.”

She nodded. “Did he show it to you?”

“No. Not yet.”

“You know how much he admires you.”

“I don’t know why.”

“He thinks you’re cool.”

“No. He knows I’m not cool.”

“Well, he thinks you’re terrific.”

“Sure, why not? I drop by once a month or whatever, and I don’t nag him to do his homework.”

“No, it’s – it’s like you’re the kind of dad he’s always wanted to have. He once said…” She looked embarrassed, seemed to have changed her mind, decided not to say whatever she was about to say. “Don’t get me wrong – Roger is as good a stepfather to Gabe as he can be. He always treated Gabe like his own. But it can’t have been easy for him, marrying a divorced woman with a little kid. And he’s not naturally the most – you know, the warmest…”

Her voice faded, and I said, “Well, our own father might not have been the best role model. My parents’ marriage didn’t exactly inspire imitation.”

“Is that why you haven’t gotten married?”

I shrugged.

She said, “Haven’t found the right woman yet?”

“I’ve found plenty of the right women.”

“So…?”

“Marriage is great – for some people. I just don’t think it’s in my skill set.”

She seemed to be thinking hard about something. She bit her lip. Stared at her hands for a while.

“Lauren,” I said, “why does Gabe think Roger ran off with some woman?”

“What? He does? Oh God, is that what he told you?”

I nodded.

“That’s heartbreaking.”

“What makes him think so?”

“Because he has a rich fantasy life. The comic books are only the tip of the iceberg.”

I smiled, but she wasn’t joking. “I need to ask you something very personal.”

“You mean, was Roger having an affair?”

“It’s really none of my business,” I said. “Unless it has some bearing on what happened to him.”

“I understand, and no, he wasn’t.”

“You’re sure.”

“Am I a hundred percent sure he never cheated on me? Who can ever be a hundred percent sure of anything? But I sure don’t think so, and I think I’d have found out.”

“Not necessarily. He was always really good at keeping secrets.”

“I think women always know. On some level, conscious or subconscious, they just know.”

“And you’ve plumbed the depths of your subconscious.”

“Look, Nick, I know.”

I nodded. “Got it.”

But I was convinced she wasn’t telling me everything.

A car alarm woke me at around four thirty, and I decided to get up for the day and begin combing through my brother’s files for any interesting leads. I padded downstairs to the kitchen, found the lights, then spent a few moments puzzling over the coffeemaker. I’m good at mechanical things, but since I didn’t go to M.I.T. and wasn’t trained as a nuclear physicist, that one was beyond me. Eventually, I found a switch that lit up a row of green LED lights. Coffee beans started grinding. A minute or so later, coffee started trickling out of a steel tube – espresso, by the look of it. I had no idea where they hid the coffee mugs, but I found a clean one in the dishwasher. Missed the first shot of espresso but figured out how to extract more.

Soon I was sitting in Roger’s study with a large mug of espresso. Somewhere, water was running through a pipe: a toilet flushing. Lauren, I guessed. Probably a much lighter sleeper than Gabe. Particularly after her husband’s disappearance.

I was half hoping that his laptop would have healed itself overnight, but no. It still had the Blue Screen of Death, covered with those hieroglyphics.

Unfortunately, the filing-cabinet drawers I was most interested in – the ones that held Roger’s bank statements and financial records, according to their labels – were locked. They were your standard Chicago pin tumbler locks, the spring-loaded kind that pop out when they’re unlocked. Not all that complicated. A child could pick it – well, a child with unusual manual dexterity and a decent lock-pick set.

So I started with the unlocked drawers and found a long row of folders bulging with credit-card statements. All neatly placed in order by credit card (platinum American Express, various MasterCards and Visa cards) and, within each folder, by date.

I had nothing specific in mind. Mostly I was looking for patterns: recurring charges, unusual charges. Travel, restaurants, or whatever. Anything that might tell me something about my brother that I didn’t know.

Pretty quickly I learned more about Roger than I wanted to know.

Such as the fact that he colored his hair – an itemized Rite-Aid bill that listed Just For Men hair dye along with various purchases like Preparation-H hemorrhoidal suppositories and other things I wish I hadn’t seen. Nothing wrong with a man coloring his hair, of course. But Roger had always bragged that it was his regular cardiovascular activity that kept him looking so youthful.

Nope. Just For Men, Medium-Dark Brown.

And the occasional Botox treatment, I discovered. At Advanced Skin Specialists of Silver Spring. Fifteen hundred bucks a pop.

Apparently my brother was a bit more vain than he let on.

Then I found a couple of recurring charges to Verizon on one of his MasterCard statements. One was for residential landline telephone service, and it listed the phone numbers. Three other charges were to Verizon Wireless, for three different cell-phone accounts.

So I looked for his phone bills and found them pretty quickly in another drawer. Apparently he had two landlines at home. One barely got any use. That was probably the one they used to send faxes on, back in the day when people sent faxes. The other line, their primary home number, listed calls to a whole array of numbers I didn’t recognize. Most frequent were calls to Virginia Beach, where Lauren’s sister, Maura, lived. Second most frequent were calls to Charlottesville, Virginia, where Lauren’s mother lived.