“I won’t classify the news as bad or good, so let me put it this way. Do you want the weird news first or the really weird news?”
“Weird.”
“I can’t reach Gus of the small wee-wee. He won’t answer his calls. I keep getting his voice mail.”
Coldplay started singing, appropriately enough, a haunting number entitled “Shiver.” Grace kept both hands on the wheel, perfectly placed at ten and two o’clock. She stayed in the middle lane and drove exactly the speed limit. Cars flew by on both her right and left.
“And the really weird news?”
“Remember how we tried to see the calls from two nights ago? I mean, the ones Jack might have made?”
“Right.”
“Well, I called the cell phone company. I pretended I was you. I assumed you wouldn’t mind.”
“Correct assumption.”
“Right. Anyway, it didn’t matter. The only call Jack’s made in the past three days was to your cell phone yesterday.”
“The call he made when I was at the police station.”
“Right.”
“So what’s weird about that?”
“Nothing. The weird part was on your home phone.”
Silence. She stayed on the Merritt Parkway, her hands on the wheel at ten and two o’clock.
“What about it?”
“You know about the call to his sister’s office?” Cora asked.
“Yeah. I found that one by hitting redial.”
“And his sister—what’s her name again?”
“Sandra Koval.”
“Sandra Koval, right. She told you that she wasn’t there. That they never talked.”
“Yes.”
“The phone call lasted nine minutes.”
A small shudder skipped through Grace. She forced her hands to stay at two and ten. “Ergo she lied.”
“It would seem.”
“So what did Jack say to her?”
“And what did she say back?”
“And why did she lie about it?”
“Sorry to have to tell you,” Cora said.
“No, it’s good.”
“How do you figure?”
“It’s a lead. Before this, Sandra was a dead end. Now we know she’s somehow involved.”
“What are you going to do about it?”
“I don’t know,” Grace said. “Confront her, I guess.”
They said good-bye and Grace hung up. She drove a little farther, trying to run the scenarios through her head. “Trouble” came on the CD player. She pulled into an Exxon station. New Jersey didn’t have self-serve, so for a moment Grace just sat in her car, not realizing that she had to fill it up herself.
She bought a bottle of cold water at the station’s mini-mart and dropped the change into a charity can. She wanted to think this through some more, this connection to Jack’s sister, but there wasn’t time for finesse here.
Grace remembered the number of the Burton and Crimstein law firm. She took out her phone and pressed in the digits. Two rings later she asked to be connected to Sandra Koval’s line. She was surprised when Sandra herself said, “Hello?”
“You lied to me.”
There was no reply. Grace walked back toward her car.
“The call lasted nine minutes. You talked to Jack.”
More silence.
“What’s going on, Sandra?”
“I don’t know.”
“Why did Jack call you?”
“I’m going to hang up now. Please don’t try to contact me again.”
“Sandra?”
“You said he called you already.”
“Yes.”
“My advice is to wait until he calls again.”
“I don’t want your advice, Sandra. I want to know what he said to you.”
“I think you should stop.”
“Stop what?”
“You’re on a cell phone?”
“Yes.”
“Where are you?”
“I’m at gas station in Connecticut.”
“Why?”
“Sandra, I want you to listen to me.” There was a burst of static. Grace waited for it to pass. She finished filling the tank and grabbed her receipt. “You’re the last person to talk to my husband before he disappeared. You lied to me about it. You still won’t tell me what he said to you. Why should I tell you anything?”
“Fair point, Grace. Now you listen to me. I’m going to leave you with one last thought before I hang up: Go home and take care of your children.”
The line went dead. Grace was back in the car now. She hit redial and asked to be connected to Sandra’s office. Nobody answered. She tried again. Same thing. So now what? Try to show up in person again?
She pulled out of the gas station. Two miles later Grace saw a sign that said STARSHINE ASSISTED LIVING CENTER. Grace was not sure what she’d been expecting. The nursing home of her youth, she guessed, those one-level edifices of plain brick, the purest form of substance-over-style that, in a perverse way, reminded her of elementary schools. Life, alas, was cyclical. You start in one of those plain brick buildings, you end there. Turn, turn, turn.
But the Starshine Assisted Living Center was a three-story faux Victorian hotel. It had the turrets and the porches and the bright yellow of the painted ladies of old, all set against a ghastly aluminum siding. The grounds were manicured to the point where everything looked a tad too done, almost plastic. The place was aiming for cheery but it was trying too hard. The whole effect reminded Grace of Epcot Center at Disney World—a fun reproduction but you’d never mistake it for the real thing.
An old woman sat on a rocking chair on the front porch. She was reading the paper. She wished Grace a good morning and Grace did likewise. The lobby too tried to force up memories of a hotel from a bygone era. There were oil paintings in gaudy frames that looked like the kind of thing you’d buy at one of those Holiday Inn sales where everything was $19.99. It was obvious that they were reproductions of classics, even if you had never seen Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party or Hopper’s Nighthawks.
The lobby was surprisingly busy. There were elderly people, of course, lots of them, in various states of degeneration. Some walked with no assistance, some shuffled, some had canes, some had walkers, some had wheelchairs. Many seemed spry; others slept.
The lobby was clean and bright but still had that—Grace hated herself for thinking like this—old-people smell, the odor of a sofa turning moldy. They tried to cover it up with something cherry, something that reminded Grace of those dangling tree fresheners in gypsy cabs, but there are some smells that you can never mask.