Laura van den Berg: The Isle of Youth: Stories

“I want to know what’s real,” Mrs. Defonte said.

“That’s exactly what we do.” We had been served iced teas and Julia’s long fingers were wrapped around her glass. “We gather facts, evidence. We separate what’s true from what isn’t.”

Mrs. Defonte nodded. “It’s all very peculiar,” she said, almost to herself.

“It’s actually pretty common,” I said. Julia stepped on the toe of my sneaker. I had a habit of saying the wrong thing to clients. All were supposed to think their predicament was special, in need of our expertise. The Defonte case was a big opportunity for us. We’d been getting most of our work from insurance companies, which often hired private investigators to look into claims, but it was the domestic investigations that really paid.

Mrs. Defonte looked at the ceiling for a moment and sighed. She told us that sometimes she wondered if she was making it up. Once she wrote out a list of all the warning signs, all the things he’d done, but on paper it didn’t look that damning. Still she couldn’t let go of the feeling that something was wrong. It plagued her day and night.

“Maybe I just have too much time on my hands,” she said.

“You leave it to us,” Julia said. “Give us a month and we’ll know what he’s been up to.”

On our way out, I noticed a photo in a silver frame. It was Mrs. Defonte standing on a stage, a red velvet curtain hanging behind her. She wore a long bronze gown. Her hands were clasped in front her stomach, her lips parted in song.

“I sing in our community opera,” Mrs. Defonte said when she saw me looking. “That was from The Mask of Orpheus. I went to Juilliard, you know.”

“Really?” I glanced up at her. She was nearly smiling.

“It was a long time ago.” She opened the front door and watched us walk to our car, a black Explorer with tinted windows and a portable GPS affixed to the dashboard. It was a rental.

That night, back at our apartment, a minimal amount of digging turned up the name of the community opera and its rehearsal schedule. They staged their rehearsals and performances at an opera house in downtown Boca Raton. My sister and I lived in Opa-locka, ten miles north of Miami. Opa-locka came from the Indian name Opatishawokalocka, which meant “the high land north of the little river on which there is a camping place.” It was a rough neighborhood. Every night, Julia locked all our equipment — GPS, walkie-talkies, tape recorders, cameras, binoculars, laptops — in a safe in her bedroom closet. She kept the Glock 22 I was licensed for on the bedside table. Just last week our neighbor Mirabella had been robbed at knifepoint. I had tried to talk my sister into moving, citing crime statistics and reasonable rents in other neighborhoods, but she loved the two-story blue stucco building with the concrete balcony and the drained swimming pool half-filled with bottles and empty cigarette packs. For Julia, risk was like air. The good news was that we saved a bundle in rent and could afford to run ads in everything from the South Florida Sun-Sentinel to the Boca Beacon , which was how Mrs. Defonte had found us.

One night, a week into the Defonte case, I told Julia I needed to go for a drive. It took less than an hour to reach the opera house. It was on a brick street lined with palm trees, a circular building with a glass facade, so even from the parking lot, I could see the warm light inside. A crescent-shaped pool curved in front of the entrance; a trio of fountainheads shot white water into the air. After finding the rehearsal stage, I took a seat in the very back. The space was empty save for a handful of people in the front rows. They were in rehearsal for Don Giovanni . Mrs. Defonte stood on the right-hand side of the stage. She wore street clothes, black slacks and a crisp pink button-down. A long white veil was clipped to her hair. A man with a black mask over his eyes stood in the center of the stage, singing. I watched Mrs. Defonte watch the man and wondered what she was feeling. Another person came into the theater and walked down the aisle, carrying an armful of fake roses to the stage. I sank lower into my seat.

The veil Mrs. Defonte wore in her hair was not unlike the one I’d worn when I got married. I had moved in with Julia six months ago, after my divorce was finalized, and soon I’d started getting strange postcards in the mail. They were part of a set. I’d seen a similar kind of thing in a party store once; if I had all the cards they would fit together like a puzzle. So far, I’d received two swatches of sky, a cloud, a dried-out river, and a brown ledge. There was nothing on the back except my name and Julia’s address. Everything was typed, the letters large and a little smudged, as though it had been done on an old typewriter. The postmarks were from Arizona, Utah, Nevada. I had never seen my husband use a typewriter, but he had always wanted to travel west. He thought Florida was a miserable swamp. And he knew Julia’s would be the first place I’d turn. Once, I spread the cards out on the floor and tried to put them in order. I didn’t have enough pieces to make sense of what they were supposed to be.

When Mrs. Defonte began singing, my hands dropped into my lap. My chin rose, as though pulled by a string. Each note was as perfect as the crystal goblets I’d noticed on her dining room table. The other actors on stage gazed at her with the same kind of wonder. When she finished, they all applauded. One person rose from her seat. Mrs. Defonte looked around, startled, like she’d just come out of a trance. A voice like that was a weapon.

* * *

By ten o’clock, we’d been on the roof for seven hours. The darkness had brought little relief from the heat. We’d used up all the ice cubes, eaten the bologna sandwiches I’d packed, drunk a beer apiece. Over the last two weeks, we had observed Mr. Defonte entering hotels, high-end places near his office, and exiting after an hour; it was always the same days of the week, the same times. Fifteen minutes after he left, the same blond woman always emerged. From the blonde’s photo and license plate number, we located her address and tracked Mr. Defonte to her high-rise on Royal Palm Avenue. The first time we followed him to her building, it was observational; this time, we were prepared to document. Catching him going in and out of her residence was significant to our case. The hotel meetings could, with some effort, be explained away. He was a lawyer, after all. He could say he was meeting clients, that the blonde’s presence was a coincidence. Spending seven-plus hours in her building, however, would be harder to dismiss.

When it was my turn to watch the door, Julia stretched out on one of the white plastic beach chairs behind me. The chairs had mildew on them, which we hoped meant the roof deck didn’t get much use. If anyone discovered us, Julia planned to tell them we were police. Before starting Winslow & Co., we enrolled in an online detective school. We learned how to take fingerprints and write reports, how to run credit and background checks, how to do surveillance and skip tracing. I liked the school; it made everything seem official. At the end, there was a certificate. Julia was less interested, so I did most of the work for our classes. One thing we were never supposed to do was impersonate a police officer.

Around midnight, the conversation turned to our father.

“Here’s a story,” I said to Julia.

Once, my father told me a story about a business trip to Chicago with his friend Bill Keller. At a bar, Bill picked up two prostitutes. They were young, with accents and fake fur coats. They all went back to a hotel, an old grand place called the Iron Horse. My father and Bill disappeared into separate rooms, but instead of doing what one would normally do with a prostitute, of doing what Bill Keller was doing in that very same moment, my father said they lay down on his bed and he read to her.