Laura van den Berg: The Isle of Youth: Stories

“It’s your aura,” he said.

“We never stopped watching that building,” I said. We hadn’t. Not for a minute, save for when we searched for him inside. That was the one thing I was sure of.

Mrs. Defonte looked at us and then at Detective Gregerson. “I never should have hired them,” she said. “I just wanted some answers.”

“Don’t we all,” said the detective.

I didn’t think it was fair for Mrs. Defonte to blame us, but at the same time I did feel partly responsible for whatever it was that had happened to her husband, as though our mere presence had set something in motion that might have remained dormant otherwise.

“We tried our best,” I said. “We did just what you asked. We were very professional.”

“You should have seen the mess they left on the roof,” Detective Gregerson said. “Beer cans, food wrappers. Styrofoam cups, which are hell on the environment. And you shouldn’t take those caffeine pills.” He patted his chest. “Bad for the heart.”

Mrs. Defonte folded her hands on the table and sniffed.

When the police found out we’d posed as real detectives, we were charged with impersonating an officer, fined one thousand dollars, and stripped of our private investigator and gun licenses. Winslow & Co. was over. Because Julia had a prior, her probation was extended by five years. The police said that if it weren’t for overcrowding, she’d have gone right back to jail. That same week, a man was stabbed to death in the parking lot of our building in Opa-locka. Even after the body was taken away, streaks of dried blood stayed on the asphalt until it rained.

* * *

The rest of the Defonte saga unfolded on local TV. Boca Raton resident vanishes into thin air! The story got a lot of air time on Florida stations, but never went national. Still, I developed an addiction to the news. I would stay inside for days, reading and watching everything I could find. I would sleep for hours and wake up tired. Some nights I lay on the sofa and thought as hard as I could about what we’d seen, what it meant. Was his body in that building? Was Belinda Singer some kind of criminal mastermind? Had he faked his own disappearance and made off to South America? What had we missed? I didn’t come to a firm conclusion about anything.

Julia had no patience for my brooding. The Defonte case reminded us all too much of our father — not just the vanishing, but the inscrutability of it. My sister threw away our Winslow & Co. business cards and letterhead and started working with a shady, unlicensed PI outfit, whose clients were usually as culpable as the people they wanted investigated — a husband with domestic violence priors looking for his wife, a crooked businessman searching for the equally crooked partner who fleeced him. I brought this up to Julia one night, the morality of it. Who isn’t guilty , she said, and maybe she had a point. On the nights she didn’t come home at all, I would wait up on the sofa, in the glow of the TV, and worry.

New postcards arrived in the mail, another cloud and a rocky slope with scrubby bushes. I gathered all the cards and took them next door to Mirabella, who read tea leaves for a living. She was twenty-one, single, and rarely home. She took me into her bedroom. Her walls were covered with posters of tea leaves in various formations. She flopped down on her bed, spread the cards out in the shape of a rainbow, and examined them.

“This is not in Florida.” Mirabella lay on her stomach. She had acne scars on her cheeks. She picked up the river and fanned herself with the card. “I don’t know what else to tell you. It’s hard to say more without all the pieces.”

“Harder than reading tea leaves?”

Mirabella said she wasn’t charging me and so I couldn’t expect her best work. Besides, she added, pointing at one of the posters with the card, the leaves always told the whole story.

“Like I knew I was going to get robbed before it happened,” she said.

“If you knew, why didn’t you do something?”

“What could I do?” she said. “Not go home?”

I looked at the poster. The tea was a soggy, dark swirl, like wet dirt in the bottom of a white cup. Maybe I just didn’t have a knack for seeing things.

Back at the apartment, I called my husband. If he would tell me what he was sending pieces of and why, I was willing to give him the satisfaction of saying he knew working with my sister would only bring trouble. I tried calling three times, but I couldn’t get through; his cell phone had been disconnected. For a while I pretended the beep-beep-beep was my husband trying to reach me. I told myself he was using Morse code, which I had learned about in detective school. Hello , I said. I’m listening.

One afternoon, when Julia was out on a job, two things happened: Another postcard arrived. It looked like part of a gorge, the same shade of brown rock, WISH YOU typed across the back. The second thing would have been easy to miss. I was unwrapping a Hot Pocket in the kitchenette when I heard something on the news about a man in Nevada who had been arrested for defrauding senior citizens. I left the frozen Hot Pocket on the counter and went to the TV. According to the reporter, this man’s racket had been going on for two years. He had raked in hundreds of thousands. A Nevada DA said he would be punished to the fullest extent of the law. They showed the man being led up the steps of the courthouse. His hands were cuffed behind his back. A police officer gripped his elbow. He wore a gray trench coat. The wind blew his white hair across his face, revealing a toupee. He was much older, of course, but there he was.

* * *

“No fucking way,” Julia said when I told her what I had discovered. The eleven o’clock news replayed the story and she gasped when she saw him walking up the courthouse steps. I felt relieved that she’d recognized him as immediately as I had. We called the number our mother had left; her boat was docked in the Maldives and she was on an excursion to a fishing village. We told the cruise director to tell our mother it was an emergency.

For a weekend, Julia partook in my addiction to the news. We kept the TV on day and night. The Senate was considering a bill designed to safeguard the personal information of senior citizens, so our father’s story was getting national play. We read everything there was to read on the Web. Julia let her cell phone ring. When we came across more photos online of our father entering the courthouse, she held on to my arm. In one, he was looking right at the camera, his gray eyebrows raised, his lips parted. Age spots dotted his face; his skin sagged. We made fun of his toupee to keep from crying.

The facts went like this: our father, posing as a financial consultant, had convinced seventeen elderly Nevadans to give him power of attorney over their finances and then fraudulently cashed checks on the accounts. The victims had lost everything. It was Mrs. Calhoun, a ninety-six-year-old widow, who got him caught. Her daughter got suspicious of our father and called the authorities. An investigation was launched. When our father was arrested, he was getting ready to skip town. I wondered what, if anything, he would have been leaving behind.

On the first night, we printed news articles and cut out the photos of our father. We sat next to each other on the sofa, the TV blaring, and studied them under a magnifying glass. He and Julia shared the same high forehead and sharp cheekbones. I wondered if there was anything of him she saw in me.

“He looks so old,” Julia said, rubbing her thumb over the paper.

When we called our mother a second time, the cruise director was able to get her on the phone. We put Julia’s cell on speaker and told our mother everything. That we’d found our father in Nevada. That what had happened to him, where he’d been, was no longer a mystery. We were breathless, talking over each other. Once we finished, we leaned toward the phone and waited.