If You Were Here: A Novel of Suspense Read online

  “You’re not going to like it, so I’m officially cashing in a chip.” She had no idea whether chips were currency in their household, or how she might have earned one, but it seemed like the right way to ask for a favor. “It’s about Bruno.”

  “Uh-huh.”

  Not mad. Not annoyed. Just processing the bad news.

  “I can’t let it go, Patrick.”

  “Yeah, I’ve been getting that impression.”

  “I keep seeing her face. Not that I can actually look at it anymore. You have to admit, it’s pretty bizarre that the original and the copy of the subway video both got wiped out yesterday.”

  “Well, if I have to admit it, then . . .”

  She smiled. That piece of banter was a staple in their repertoire. “I’m serious about cashing in a chip, Patrick.”

  “And I was serious when I told you I’ll do what I can. I already sent out an e-mail to the West Point crowd. No one’s heard anything. I got the impression they were kind of freaked out that I was even asking. It probably seemed a little out of the blue.”

  “I got an address for Gretchen.” Susan’s sister was two years older than Susan. A quick search had turned up a marriage license and an address. “She’s living out on Long Island. Nassau County,” she added quickly, distinguishing it from more distant parts of the island. “Barely past Queens. It’s only an hour by train.”

  “Gretchen’s a junkie, McKenna. We go to her, and there’s no telling what she’ll try to drag us into.”

  “I know. She’s also Susan’s only living family member.”

  She knew he didn’t want to go. She also knew he wasn’t going to fight about it. Fifteen minutes later, they had purchased their Long Island Rail Road tickets and were ready to roll.

  When the cabdriver completed the short ride from the Roslyn train stop to the address she’d given him, McKenna checked the house number against the slip of paper in her hand. “You’re sure this is it?” she asked.

  “I guess that would depend, miss, on your definition of the word ‘it.’ If what you mean is whether this house is the place you want it to be, I guess that’s for you to know and you to find out.” He was obviously amused by the choice of words. “But if what you’re asking me is whether this house is the property located at the street address that you provided upon entry into my cab, why, then, I can say definitely that yes, this is it. Now, are you going to pay the fare or keep asking me silly questions?”

  Patrick answered before McKenna readied her verbal retort. “We’re going to need you to wait,” he said.

  “As long as the meter’s running.”

  “What an ass,” McKenna said as they stepped out of the cab.

  “Suck it down, M, or we’ll end up stranded here. Can’t exactly hail a taxi on Long Island.”

  He was not happy to be here.

  They took in the house where Susan’s sister supposedly lived. Two-story brick Tudor. Manicured lawn. Volvo sedan in the driveway. Unless Gretchen was stealing this family’s mail to fund her drug habit, McKenna couldn’t imagine the connection.

  Patrick gave the heavy brass knocker on the walnut door three sturdy raps. They heard a child’s voice inside. “Mom. Moo-oooom. The dooo-oooor.”

  “Did that video game somehow bust your feet, Porter? See who it is. And if it’s those Bible thumpers again, tell them even Jesus had his limits.”

  “Mo-om. It’s not funny to make jokes about Jesus.”

  The boy who answered the door was about nine years old, give or take. He seemed frightened by the sight of a man on his porch but then softened when he saw McKenna. She spoke up first.

  “Hi, there. No Bibles here, we promise. We’re looking for a woman who used to be a friend of ours. Gretchen Hauptmann?”

  “My mom’s name is Gretchen. And her dad’s name was George Hauptmann. But now her name is Henesy, just like mine.”

  McKenna had been so thrown off by the suburban perfection that she’d forgotten that the state’s record of Gretchen’s marriage to a man named Paul Henesy had been the item that led her to this address in the first place.

  “Porter, who is it?” Gretchen was folding a towel when she arrived at the bottom of the stairs. Most people looked like a worse version of themselves after ten years. Not Gretchen. Gretchen looked the way she should have looked but couldn’t a decade earlier. Her long dark hair was tied into a loose bun at the nape of her neck. She was dressed comfortably in a pair of blue jeans and a long purple T-shirt, but she still had the trim, athletic body she’d had in common with her sister, even as she tried to destroy it with drugs.

  Patrick was the one to say it first. “You look good, Gretchen.”

  Her nod was barely perceptible. “I’ve got a phone number. E-mail. Hell, even a Facebook page.”

  “It’s about Susan,” McKenna said.

  She stepped aside to invite them in.

  CHAPTER TWENTY

  Gretchen led McKenna and Patrick into a brightly lit living room but did not take a seat or invite her guests to do so. “The house is a mess right now. If I had known you were coming—”

  McKenna had to search for any signs of imperfection. A few toys littered the floor. The throw pillows were scrunched into the corners of the sofa. Pizza crumbs were scattered across the glass coffee tabletop. An open box next to the corner bookshelf was half packed with CDs.

  What was more apparent was the care that had been put into the room. The vase on that same bookshelf was color-coordinated with the unfluffed pillows. Silk rug. Leather chairs. Nice place.

  “I can tell you want to ask,” Gretchen said, “so I’ll give you the short version. I’m clean. Have been for some time now—eleven years this December. I met Porter’s father—my husband, Paul—in a program. He was more a recreational coke guy, not the garbage can I was.”

  McKenna ran the math in her head, wondering about the age of Gretchen’s son, the timing of the pregnancy, whether it had been the thing that finally kept her clean.

  “I was sorry to hear about your father’s passing,” Patrick said.

  “Thanks, but we weren’t exactly in touch anymore. Not like you two, I guess. Even after all these years?”

  “Married,” McKenna said, holding up her ring. “Five years already.”

  “Susan always said the two of you were meant to be.” Did McKenna imagine the sarcasm?

  “I’ve been thinking about Susan a lot lately,” McKenna said. “I want to finally find out what happened to her, Gretchen. You see all these cases solved decades later. New DNA evidence. New witnesses. I want to look.”

  “You’re not exactly the FBI.”

  “No, but I still have some contacts. And I learned a lot about investigations at the DA’s office and as a reporter. Patrick will help.”

  “Will Scooby and Shaggy be there, too? Maybe get yourself a little Mystery Bus?”

  Nope. Sarcasm was not imagined.

  “McKenna’s not asking for much,” Patrick said. He was using what she referred to as his military voice. The one he used with the uniformed guards at work. The one he occasionally invoked at home if frustrated with her. Now he was using it to defend her. It was a voice that quietly projected command in the culture that he and Gretchen knew. McKenna understood that world better now than most nonmilitary people, but she would never be an insider.

  McKenna tilted her head, trying her best to appear sympathetic. “I figured you’d be the one the police would have called with any new information.”

  “Well, I haven’t heard squat. Not that I’m confident the police would even tell me.”

  “You’re her closest relative.”

  “You know what I was like back then. Not to mention whatever my father probably told them, which would’ve been even worse.”

  Susan had filled McKenna in on the Hauptmann family dynamics that night on the kitche
n floor, one hand still gripping the phone after the call from her father. The General used to joke openly that he’d wanted to name the girls George and Mercedes. George for Gretchen, because he’d wanted a namesake son over a daughter; and Mercedes for Susan, because he’d wanted a new car over a second girl.

  Their mother, Carol, had done her best to protect them from his poison, at least in the beginning. Susan had early memories of dark looks across the table, followed by screaming matches behind her parents’ closed bedroom door. But the General wasn’t a man who could be reasoned with. He listened to complaints, in the sense that he could repeat them back—word for word, usually to mock the sentiment—but he lacked the empathy to truly understand another person’s perspective.

  One summer Susan had taken to calling him General YB and refused to explain the significance. Her sister knew that YB stood for “Yes, but.” Each of the girls at various times in their lives had steeled themselves to have a true conversation with the General. They would strategize their talking points, searching for the softest possible expression of the deepest emotions. No matter how well—and how tactfully—they articulated a perspective, being careful to say nothing that might make the General feel judged, their father would always respond with a quick “Yes, but—.”

  Susan had all her reasons for wanting to go to a private liberal arts college. “Yes, but nothing prepares you for leadership like a military education.” Her sophomore year in high school, she wanted to spend a semester as an exchange student in Denmark. “Yes, but it’s the pinnacle of privileged indulgence. You should be at home, working.”

  The way Susan told the family history, for her first twelve or so years, Susan and Gretchen had been bonded by their shared experiences in the Hauptmann household. But when Gretchen hit high school, that bond began to tear. It started with the death of their mother. For whatever reason, the girls developed different ways of responding to their father’s solo parenting.

  Susan was the more rebellious one, at least initially. She was a good student but had no interest in history, world events, American exceptionalism, or any of the things that engrossed her father. She broke curfew to hang out with her friends and spent the rest of her time looking at fashion magazines and watching reruns of 1970s sit-coms.

  Gretchen, on the other hand, tried to please their father. She was one of the few girls in their high school’s JROTC, the junior version of the Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. She was at the top of her class, both academically and athletically. She took her father up on every opportunity to know his work and his colleagues, practically deposing them about the details of military life and the doors it could open for a promising young person. She was gunning for a spot at West Point, not that anyone doubted she would get it. She was the heir apparent.

  “It used to drive me crazy,” Susan had confessed the night McKenna found her in tears in their apartment. “The way Gretchen kissed up to him. When Mom died, it was supposed to be the two of us against the General. He’d have to learn how to take care of us. But then she took his side. It was like she abandoned me. And he didn’t have to try anymore with me because he had her.”

  Then the high school principal found a plastic bag of pot in the heir apparent’s locker. The General had been so convinced of his daughter’s innocence that he insisted on a fingerprint test of the bag. The lab found not only Gretchen’s prints but also cocaine residue. The drug test that the General forced on his daughter revealed not only pot and cocaine but also speed and LSD.

  A year later, the ex-boyfriend who tipped off the principal mysteriously had all of his college applications withdrawn and twelve thousand dollars of credit card debt racked up in his name.

  Revenge was probably sweet, but it hadn’t saved Gretchen from her first trip to rehab, nor had it made that trip her last.

  “I used to give Gretchen so much shit for trying to suck up to him,” Susan had told McKenna that same night. “But look what it did to her. It broke her. And the minute she was out of the picture and he set his sights on making me the golden child, what did I do?”

  Off to West Point she went.

  Though McKenna had gathered that life with General Hauptmann wasn’t easy, Susan always seemed to bring an annoyed but ultimately optimistic eye to the relationship with her father, choosing to believe that the tough, gruff, antiquated geezer had a softness that only his daughters knew. Gretchen fostered no such fantasies.

  “Did Susan tell you about my arrest?”

  McKenna could tell from Patrick’s blank expression that he hadn’t known, either.

  “Oh yeah. Got caught in Alphabet City with enough crack that they accused me of intent to distribute. I used my one phone call to ask Dad to bail me out. You know what he said? ‘I accepted a long time ago that you would wind up in jail or dead. It’s time for you to go your own way, Gretchen.’ And then he just hung up, leaving me there to get strip-searched, not to mention ogled and pawed by the guards and one of my new roommates. I remember every word of that call, because it’s the last time we spoke. But you know what? It’s true what they say—you’ve got to hit rock bottom. I was looking at ten years in prison, but I got lucky. The case kept getting pushed over for trial, and in the meantime, I cleaned up—started working a program. Finally swung a plea deal for rehab and probation at the state level. Two months before Susan—before she was gone. Guess she didn’t want you guys knowing about her jailhouse sister. Those cops who investigated her disappearance sure knew. I’d been clean nearly a year by then, but they never treated me as anything but a junkie. I guess that’s what I was.”

  The next half hour felt more like a therapy session than an unexpected drop-in from two old acquaintances as Gretchen devolved into a monologue about the dysfunction in the Hauptmann family. How her father could be kind to everyone except the wife and children he saw as nothing but an extension of himself. How his love—if you could call it that—had always been conditional. How the estrangement from him had finally been her key to getting clean.

  “Susan did everything she could to become the child he’d always wanted. It was never enough. He at least talked to her—unlike moi, the bad-seed daughter. But she could never really please him. No one could.”

  “I’m glad you’ve found a better life for yourself,” McKenna said. She gave Patrick an apologetic look. Coming here had been a mistake. Hearing the details of a broken relationship between a dead man and his daughters was the kind of psychological drama Patrick hated. Searching for a way to end the conversation, McKenna pulled a folded sheet of paper from her purse. “Do you recognize this? It’s a logo for a group called People Protecting the Planet.”

  Gretchen shook her head. “Susan wasn’t much of an environmentalist. Why?”

  “I’m not sure. Just something I’m working on.”

  In her periphery, McKenna noticed Gretchen’s son craning his neck around the corner of the hallway, eavesdropping. He tucked his head back like a surprised turtle, then poked it out again. “Mommy, is Daddy coming to see us tonight, or is he staying at his new house?”

  “We’ll talk about that later, Porter.” Gretchen offered an embarrassed smile. “Paul and I are going through some changes right now. I’m afraid I need to ask you to go. The truth is that I know nothing more about what happened to my sister today than I did ten years ago.”

  She led the way to the front door, but only Patrick stepped outside.

  “Sorry,” McKenna said, “but just one more thing. What happened to Susan’s stuff?” She immediately recognized the irony of saying “sorry, but” to a woman who had been raised by General YB.

  “What stuff?” Gretchen asked.

  “Your dad waited six months, I think, and then packed her apartment up.”

  “I don’t know. Ask Marla, his nurse. She took care of him at the end. She also got a huge inheritance, unlike, oh, his daughter. Like I said, the old man could be kind to people w
ho weren’t related to him. If anyone would know, it would be her.”

  “You were really that estranged?” McKenna asked.

  “Jesus, did you not listen to anything I just said?”

  McKenna asked for Marla’s full name and number. Gretchen didn’t hide her frustration but excused herself to the kitchen and returned with a document whose pages she was flipping through. “I was served a copy of the will as a courtesy. Nice, huh? Here you go.” McKenna jotted down the information—Marla Tompkins, a Manhattan phone number—and thanked Gretchen once again.

  Patrick was waiting for McKenna on the porch. As she joined him, she promised Gretchen she’d call if she learned anything more about Susan’s disappearance.

  “Don’t,” Gretchen blurted. “I mean, I wish you wouldn’t. I wish you wouldn’t call, but mostly I wish you wouldn’t do any of this. Just let it be.”

  “Don’t you want to know what happened to your sister?”

  “You don’t get to say that to me, McKenna. Who are you? You were roommates for, what, a year before you decided that even the good Hauptmann girl was a little too wild for your taste. You thought you were some hotshot DA when Susan disappeared, and where did that get any of us? You don’t think I know what happened to you at work? You think you can solve this like some cold case on television and try to get your career back? And, Patrick, don’t even get me started on you. I’m her only family now. I’m the one who gets to say that it’s okay to move on. And I’ve moved on.”

  Patrick was the one to speak up first. “We didn’t handle this well, Gretchen. Try to enjoy the rest of your night.”

  McKenna could tell he was speaking to her just as much as to Gretchen. She couldn’t let it lie, though. “Back then you told the police she wanted to get away from your father. To start another life. I think you were telling yourself that because you wanted to believe she was okay. If she is, don’t you want to know that? Don’t you want her to see how well you’re doing and to meet her nephew?”