Long Gone

Jackpot. This was the spot. The address Drew had given her. She pressed her forehead against the front glass, cupping her hands at her temples as she peered into the empty space. The ceilings were at least fifteen feet high. Exposed heating ducts, but in a cool way. Smooth white walls, just waiting for art to be hung. She could picture herself there, wearing one of her better black dresses, gesturing toward oversize canvases that would provide the space’s only color.

She jerked backward as a tap on her shoulder startled her from her daydream. She heard a faint beep-beep as Drew Campbell pressed the clicker in his hand, activating the locks of the silver sedan he’d parked curbside.

“So this is it, huh?”

“You sound disappointed,” he said.

For some reason, people thought Alice was down even at her most enthusiastic. She had a theory that this was somehow attributable to a childhood spent with false hopes. She had been raised by parents who told her at every opportunity that she was better, she eventually realized, than she actually was. They’d had the best intentions, but their unconditional, unrealistic praise had in fact groomed her for disappointment. Having to serve as her own reality check had made Alice her own harshest critic.

Even now, she was incapable of feeling pride or excitement without immediately focusing on all the reasons she would eventually fail. She flashed back briefly to those comments she’d received periodically during her annual evaluations at the Met. Saw those signals she should have picked up on. Tried to push them into her past as Drew Campbell looked at her with impressed, expectant eyes, ready to give her a fresh start.

Drew tapped six digits into the keypad of the lockbox on the front door, and then caught the key that fell from the box. “I haven’t signed the papers yet,” he said. “Figured the gal who’s going to run the place should have final approval.”

As she watched him slip the key into the lock and push the door open, she tried not to draw the metaphorical link to a new chapter opening in her life. She tried not to get her hopes up. She told herself it still might not happen. But already she could picture herself with that same key in her hand, pushing open that very door, making a name for this still-unnamed gallery in the limitless world of art.

“What do you think?”

Admiring the polished white tile floor, Alice tried to play it cool. “It’s small,” she said, “especially if we need space for storage, but it’s intimate, which would be right for this neighborhood. I like that it’s off the beaten path of the usual Chelsea galleries. This area still has a lot of untapped potential.”

“All those fashionistas need art for their luxury apartments, right?” Drew fiddled with a Montblanc pen as he spoke.

“One would hope.”

He slipped a half-inch-thick laptop from a black leather attaché and opened it. “Let’s see if we can’t freeload off a neighbor’s wireless signal. Yep, here we go.” She watched as he maneuvered the cursor. Several windows opened simultaneously on the screen. The images flashed too quickly for her to process, but she caught black-and-white glimpses of exposed flesh, a nail, beads that made her think of a rosary.

“So I was pretty sure you’d be happy with the location, but as I warned you, there are a couple of catches.”

Alice felt herself ground back down into the roots of reality. She heard Lily’s voice—and her own running internal monologue—tugging at her once again. Too good to be true. No such thing as good luck. She tried her best to sound carefree. “So go ahead and break the news to me. There’s a brothel running out of that back room, right? Something niche? Midget transvestites. Am I close?”

“Maybe I’m overselling the negatives, but just hear me out, okay? As far as I’m concerned, there are two little hitches. And, no, that’s not a reference to two tiny cross-dressers. First”—he held up a thumb—“my client has a name for the place. The Highline Gallery.”

“Nowhere neeeaaar the hurdle I was imagining.”

“Boring, though.”

Dickerings about the name of the gallery were small-time compared to the perils she’d been imagining, but the Highline moniker was pretty white-bread, the brand for both the new aboveground park running above Ninth Avenue and an adjacent multilevel concert hall. The Highline was to the Meatpacking District as Clinton was to Hell’s Kitchen—an innocuous, sterile name created by real estate agents to whitewash the dust and blood and scars from a neighborhood’s history.

Drew continued with the disclosures. “As you’re probably wise enough to expect, the second catch is more of a doozie.”

He turned the laptop to face her and wiggled his index finger along the touchpad. The staccato flashes of black-and-white images she’d previously glimpsed reappeared on the screen. “This, Miss Humphrey, is our toupee-covered bald spot, our makeup-covered wart.”

Four separate images popped into view: a man’s hairy thigh with crucifix-shaped welts scratched into his flesh; a fifty-cent plastic doll of the Virgin Mary dangling from a hangman’s noose of cotton fiber; a metal fish—the kind she associated with evangelicals—with hot pink balls dangling from its gut; and a Bible headed into a steel shredder.

“Oh, Jesus.”

“Nice word choice,” Drew said.

“Please don’t tell me this is the work of my silent partner’s paramour.”

“I’m afraid so, dear.”

“It’s like Mapplethorpe—only without the talent.”

Drew shrugged. “Like I said, the man’s a longtime friend, but I realize the wrinkles. No pun intended. If you want to pull out, I wouldn’t blame you in the least.”

She took a second look at the images. Alice had been raised in a wholly secular existence. She could count the number of times she’d been to church on two hands, and then only on holidays and for weddings. And yet even Alice had a visceral reaction to these images. They had no beauty. They were interesting only because they provoked. They were wrong.

“And what exactly is the Highline Gallery’s loyalty to this artist?”

Drew used his index finger on the mouse to close the image files and open a Web site called www.hansschuler.com. A photograph of an attractive, early-thirtyish man with light brown curls occupied the screen. “Your first showing has to feature this idiot. Then two or three exclusive shows per year—maybe three or four weeks each—after that. In the interim, you can do whatever you want, but you’ll still have to sell the guy. He’s the weak link. All I ask is that you look before you leap. It’s one thing to tell my client now that this might not happen. Quite another to search for someone else two months from now because you bailed.”

Alice had known in her gut that something about this whole thing was too good to be true, but now she at least knew her enemy. If she took this job, Hans Schuler—artist-slash-paramour—was likely to be the constant pain in her ass for as long as she enjoyed her employment. She reminded herself that the best things in her life had come to her organically.

“Okay, I’m in.”

“Really? All right, then. I can let the leasing company know I’m ready to sign the paperwork now. You want to come with? They’re out in Hoboken, but it’s a nice day for a drive.”

Given the gallery owner’s desire to remain anonymous, Alice supposed that Drew was going to be the closest thing she had to a functional boss. After she’d been laid off from the museum, one of her former coworkers let slip that Alice, unlike her colleagues, hadn’t gone the “extra mile” by participating in activities outside the formal job. It couldn’t hurt to start putting her best foot forward at the start.

“A drive sounds good.”

CHAPTER SIX

Drew accelerated through the loop into the Holland Tunnel. She could tell he enjoyed the way the BMW handled the curves, low and tight. She felt like she should say something impressive. Something about torque or suspension or German engineering. All she came up with was, “I can’t even remember the last time I drove a car.”

Growing up, her parents had a chauffeur for the family in the city, so her only opportunities to drive had been at their house in Bedford or on an infrequent visit to her father’s place in Los Angeles. She went through the teenage ritual of obtaining a license but had never been particularly comfortable behind the wheel. Now she preferred her nondriving existence, tooling around Manhattan by foot, subway, and the occasional taxi in bad weather.

“That’s what happens when you grow up in the city.” Drew hit his fog lights as the sedan hit the tunnel. “You grow up in Tampa, Florida, and you drive. My friends say I’m crazy for keeping a car in the city, but I like the freedom to hop behind the wheel and go whenever and wherever I want.”

She didn’t recall telling Drew she’d been raised in Manhattan. He must have Googled her before offering her the job. Lord knew she’d entered her own name in search engines before, simply out of boredom-induced curiosity.

On the spectrum of Google-able names, Alice Humphrey fell somewhere between Jennifer Smith and Engelbert Humperdink. Most of the hits belonged to a scientist who had written what was apparently a politically divisive book about global warming. More recently, sixteen-year-old Alice Humphrey of Salt Lake City had been kicking butt and taking names on her high school soccer team. But this particular Alice Humphrey had her own online existence. Unfortunately, most of it was not of her own making. Sure, there was her Facebook page, as well as a couple of mentions for her work on museum events. But any marks she had made out there in the virtual world as Alice Humphrey the woman were far outweighed by mentions of Alice Humphrey, former child actress and daughter to Oscar-winning director Frank Humphrey.

She was tempted to ask Drew whether it made a difference. To ask whether she would have gotten the job if she had been just plain old boring Alice Humphrey, with, say, a schoolteacher mother and an accountant father. But to ask that would be unfair, both to Drew and to her. There was no correct answer, and no appropriate response for her to then offer in kind. She no longer wanted to take anything from her father, but she was in fact his daughter. That was never going to change. And so far, Drew hadn’t uttered one word about her family. For her to raise the issue, just because of an innocuous comment about driving, would officially make her the freaky thin-skinned girl.

“So what exactly do you do, Drew?”

“Well, I’ve got two possible responses to that question. One—the answer I might give to a woman on a first date—is that I’m an entrepreneur. Are you suitably impressed?”

“Honestly? I’m not sure I’ve ever understood entrepreneurship as a job description.”

“Which is why there’s a second option—the one my mother might give you. If my mother were here—and not mixing up her it’s-finally-noontime martini down in Tampa—she’d probably tell you I’m a spoiled kid living off his family’s money.”

Apparently she wasn’t the only person in the car with delayed-cord-cutting issues. “Well, if those two versions are your only choices, I’d stick with the first.”

“Somewhere between asshole and pathetic daddy’s boy lies the truth, which is that I live a really great life and figure out ways to make people money in the process. Like, say I go to a tiny little restaurant with a young chef who’s doing everything right; I’ll see if he’s the kind of guy with bigger dreams that might require investors. Then I try to get a deal done and take a little commission for myself in the process.”

“Why does your mom give you a hard time?”

“Because usually the people I turn to for the seed money are the same two guys I’ve been working for since I was mowing lawns for the snowbirds as a kid. And they happen to be my dad’s friends, which makes them only slightly less despicable than the AntiChrist.”

“And one of these men is my new boss?”

“To the extent you have a boss.”

Drew pulled next to a fire hydrant in front of a rehabbed town house and hit the emergency blinkers. The ground floor’s front window was lined with commercial real estate listings. He was out of the car before she’d even unbuckled her seat belt. He tossed the keys on the driver’s seat before shutting his door. “You can drive, right?” he hollered from the curb. “Just in case?”

“Yeah, sure.”

She watched through the glass as he spoke first to the receptionist, then shook hands with a leggy woman with spiky black hair. She walked to a file cabinet and returned with some paperwork. He removed a pen from his sports coat pocket and gestured toward the car. Spiky woman was looking at her now. Was Alice supposed to wave or something? She pretended to fiddle with the car stereo, then saw Drew leaving the building in her periphery with the paperwork.

He hopped back into the driver’s seat, placed the documents on the center console, and began a rapid-fire signing of pages that had been pretabbed with hot pink tape.

“Creepy in there,” he said as he scrawled. “Those girls are all way too pale and tall. I felt like a field mouse dropped into the middle of an anaconda tank.”

“So you said you find ways to make other people money. Does my new boss see the Highline Gallery as a hobby, or is it actually supposed to turn a profit?”

He snapped his Montblanc into his coat pocket and tapped the contract against the steering wheel. “Excellent question, Alice.” Stepping out of the car, he glanced back at her. “I guess we’ll find out, won’t we?”

CHAPTER SEVEN

Joann Stevenson felt a tongue between her toes and jerked her leg back, letting out a high-pitched squeal.

“Sebastian!”

Her shih tzu matched her yelp as he leaped to the floor, then back onto the bed near her head. She couldn’t help but giggle as his fluffy nine pounds bounced around her pillow.

“I thought you said we had to be quiet.”

She felt a warm mouth against the back of her neck. This time, the kisses were definitely not Sebastian’s.

“We do have to be quiet.”

“Mmm, you sure about that?”

She felt Mark’s bare skin against hers beneath the sheets. Felt his knee rub against the back of hers. She turned to face him. Saw him smile before he kissed her.

“Very sure.”

“Absolutely certain?”

She raised a finger to his lips. “Be very, very quiet.”

She fumbled for one of Sebastian’s smooshy toys from the top of the nightstand and tossed it across the room. He happily followed.

“Good dog,” Mark whispered.

She hadn’t been kidding about the need for silence. They stifled their giggles and adjusted their bodies as necessary with each squeak of the mattress, each knock of the headboard against the bedroom wall. She struggled to choke back her own sounds at that crucial moment. Bit her lip so hard she thought she might bleed.

Afterward, they shared silly, silent, sweat-soaked grins. She nestled her way into the crook of his right arm and placed her head on his chest.

“I don’t want to move.”

“Me neither.”

“You’re a scientist. Can’t you invent a machine that lets us hit pause and stay here naked for a week while the rest of the world remains still?”

“I adore you, Joann, but I don’t think either one of us would be faring very well if we kept this up for a week straight.”

“We could pause for showers and nourishment.”

“Now that sounds like a plan.”

A monotone beeping erupted beside her, and she let out a pained groan as she slapped the top of the alarm clock.

“Do I even want to know what time it is?”

She gave herself twenty minutes between snooze alerts, and the latest round of beeping marked the end of the third respite. “Eight o’clock.”

“Crap. I need to be on campus by nine. So how are we sneaking me out of here?”

After fifteen years as a single mother, Joann had never—not once, not ever—allowed a man to spend the night in her bed while Becca was home. Sleepovers in front of her kid were a strict no-no on Joann’s list of self-imposed rules. But she’d known the previous night that Becca would be out with her friends until ten. And things with Mark had heated up when she’d asked him inside after the restaurant. She’d known him for two months now. Had hit double digits in dates. And he was—well, he was different.

So she’d broken her own rules. As if she were the high-schooler and Becca the parent, Joann had sneaked Mark into her bedroom before Becca returned home. Left Becca a note in the kitchen: “Decided to hit the hay early. Knock if you need anything. Apples and really tasty cheddar in the fridge if you want a snack. Love, Mom.”

Now she had to sneak the boy out.

She climbed from bed and pulled on her dog-walking sweat suit. Sebastian hopped excitedly at her feet. She cracked open the bedroom door, listening for the usual household sounds. Becca’s sleep schedule was unpredictable. Sometimes she sprang from bed at the crack of dawn to surf the Net or to catch up on whatever TiVo’d show she wanted to gossip about with her friends at school. Other times, she was truly her mother’s daughter, hitting the snooze button until Joann had to drag her from bed.

The house was silent.

“Coast is clear,” she whispered.

She admired the leanness of Mark’s body as he pulled on the jeans and striped shirt he’d worn the previous night. Forty-five years old, but the man looked good. She waved him into the hallway, past her daughter’s room. At the top of the stairs, he took her hand and pointed to the first step. They took each step in synchronicity, walking with a single gait. She gave him a quick good-bye kiss at the door, then watched him through the living room window, making his way to the Subaru he’d parked on the street, two houses down.

She heard a low growl and looked down to see Sebastian with one of her UGG boots in tow.

“Hold your horses, little man.” She leashed him up, then paused at the bottom of the staircase, wondering whether to wake Becca before their walk. Becca could get dressed in ten minutes flat when necessary, and it was good to see the girl get some much-needed sleep.

She and Sebastian kept their usual pace on the usual route around the usual block. Most people—and dogs for that matter—would have tired of this morning routine long ago, but she liked to think that both she and Sebastian appreciated this ten-minute ritual as “their” time. Between raising a kid and working full-time as a records clerk at the hospital, life tended toward chaos. At least she and Seb could count on their walks.

Unlike too many of her mornings, Joann found her thoughts during this particular jaunt to be peaceful. In the fifteen years she’d been trying to build a life for Becca, Joann had been lonely. She had a few friends at the hospital, but they were married with younger children and didn’t have the need for friendships that extended past working hours. She had met some men along the way, but none of them ever stuck. She had a kid, after all. She had all of her rules as a result. Not many men were willing to abide. And the few who had? None had ever turned out to be worth what felt, to Joann at least, like an awful lot of effort.

Until Mark. She’d met him at the prospective-students reception she had forced Becca to attend. Becca fostered fantasies of attending design school at Parsons in New York City, but Joann certainly couldn’t afford the tuition, and the last thing she wanted for her kid was to be unemployed and saddled with debt at the age of twenty-two. She was hell-bent on getting her into a state four-year college.

Even with her single-mother status hanging out there for all to see, given the nature of the event, she’d been certain Mark was interested. He’d gone out of his way to catch up to her and Becca after the panel discussion to speak to her about the university’s physics department. Becca barely hid her indifference, but Joann feigned a deep interest in the school’s brand-new lab facilities. When she finally said good-bye, she was disappointed he didn’t ask for her number. But two days later, there he was, roaming the hallways of St. Clare’s Dover General Hospital in search of the records department.

“Are you lost?” she’d asked.

“Not any more. Call me old-fashioned, but I just couldn’t hit on you in front of your daughter. It’s okay I’m here, right? If not, if I read things wrong the other night, I can—I don’t know, awkwardly excuse myself with some ridiculous cover story?”

“As curious as I am to hear what you’d come up with, no, a cover story is definitely not necessary.”

They were two months in, and nothing about Mark had once felt like work. They talked, dined, walked, kissed, and made love effortlessly. She kept reminding herself to take it day by day, but she found herself imagining a future with him.

And it wasn’t only her love life that was falling into place. After a few rough teenage months, Becca seemed to be back to her normal self. No more skipped classes. No more missed curfews. She’d even set aside some of her more rebellious ways, hanging out with a few of the popular kids at school.

As they approached the house, Sebastian—as usual—pulled against his leash. She let go, allowing him to drag the thin brown strip of leather behind him as he ran to the door. She opened it for him and followed him inside.

“Becca,” she called out as she hung her keys on a cat-shaped hook in the entranceway. “Time to get up.”

Nothing. Sebastian beat her to the top of the stairs and scratched at Becca’s door.

“Come on, sleepy girl. I’ll drive you, but we’ve both got to get going.”

Still nothing.

She opened the bedroom door, expecting to find her daughter in that same sleeping position she’d used as a toddler—on her side at a diagonal, head rested on her forearm, one leg straight, the other bent like Superman taking flight, blankets and pillows scattered across the bed.

But the bed was empty.

She knocked on the bathroom door down the hall. Nothing. Opened the door. No one.

She walked back to the bedroom for another look at Becca’s unmade bed. Was it her imagination, or were the sheets bundled into the same knot as when she’d quickly pulled the door shut last night to hide the mess from Mark? Same with the bathroom: Becca’s paddle-shaped hairbrush was tossed on the right side of the sink counter, and the adjacent bottle of gel was capless, despite Joann’s repeated reminders about the cost of dried-out hair products.

Joann tried to convince herself she was wrong. Becca must have woken early and left for school already. Maybe she realized Mark was over and snuck out to give them privacy.

But as much as her brain tried to create a simple explanation, somehow Joann knew—truly felt the truth, at a cellular level. Her daughter had never come home last night. And the explanation wouldn’t be simple, if it ever came.

CHAPTER EIGHT

“Please tell me this is one of your practical jokes.”

It had been three weeks since Drew Campbell had signed the lease for the Highline Gallery. Now she stood, one night before the grand opening, feeling tiny beneath the eighteen-foot ceilings and next to Jeff Wilkerson’s six-foot-three frame.

Jeff’s comment was a reference to her long-standing habit of testing what she called his Indiana goodness.

“I know,” he would sometimes say, “I’m gullible.”

But gullible was not a word Alice would choose to describe Jeff. To call a person gullible was to imply he was stupid. But Jeff was no dummy. He’d been a top student at Indiana University, both as an undergraduate and then in law school, moving to New York City to work at one of the world’s largest firms. But after seven years of slaving away at billable hours, he realized that life as a big-firm partner wouldn’t bring any monumental changes, so had started his own law practice.

No, nothing about Jeff was gullible. He was well read and refined, brilliant even, as much as Alice hated the overuse of that word. But he still had that Indiana goodness. He was trusting. Earnest. Vulnerable. He wasn’t the kind of person who even contemplated the possibility that others would fabricate facts for mere entertainment. Jeff was good. And his vulnerability made him sweet. It also made him a tempting target for people like Alice.