The Lost Daughter Read online

  Downtown Crossing, and Alex chose the stairs over the escalator. He climbed into the dry crisp air of early fall. Around him, men who looked like him checked their cell phones. He pulled out his BlackBerry, then tucked it back. He felt a cold sweat on his belly. What if Brooke said no? What if she said, simply, “Don’t go back to Windermere”? What if she said, “Don’t go. I love you”? If she said, “If you don’t go, I love you. If you go, I love you not.” If she said any of these things, would he still take next week off, drive to central Pennsylvania, and find someone to whom he could confess a fifteen-year-old crime? The last time he went to Hartford, he had told himself it would not matter what Brooke said; she had only to know his resolution, and then he would be on his way to the authorities, whoever they were. But as soon as he saw her, he felt a pull on his resolve. And so he had brought it up—had said I did something. I killed him—but when she dismissed his guilt as just that, the phantom guilt people feel when something bad has happened, he hadn’t pressed on.

  Brooke would hold him responsible eventually. Of that he felt sure. She hadn’t escaped the past, after all, any more than he. Like a kaleidoscope her face had changed while he’d taken that phone call—from a colorless loveliness that betrayed no feelings to a collage of set-aside ambitions, sparks of intelligence, fierce passions. Everything she had chosen—everything, he realized with a strange quickness at his heart—had stemmed from the fear and shame brought on by what happened to her when she was a girl of seventeen. Her botched solution to an accidental pregnancy had led her to give up college, to take a job tending mute plants, to harbor dumb animals, to marry a man she thought she could never disappoint—in short, to bury in some remote place everything that had made Brooke Brooke. There was the daughter—but even when it came to children, Brooke wouldn’t let herself off some invisible hook. Spirit children, she’d called them, the ghosts haunting her.

  He would take her blame onto himself, he thought as he swung through the revolving doors into the Mercator building. He could at least do that. Doing what he needed to do, he would make at least one person whole.

  Meetings all day. The markets were tanking. Alex’s boss, Peter Lloyd, had a world map on his wall, with colored pushpins for the Mercator offices that offered diversified investments, the branches that handled only corporate accounts, the storefronts that presented a quirky alternative to Schwab or Fidelity. In Japan, Alex had calibrated capital and cash flow so as to package mutual funds that would rise in the Morningstar ratings. Here, he looked at the patterns on the map and calibrated strategy. Which colors meant survival, which would bring destruction? “At least,” Peter said as they wrapped up, “we stayed out of the mortgage mess.”

  “Not in Asia, we didn’t,” admitted Alex.

  “That’s why the Asian offices have gone”—Peter gestured toward the map—“from green to blue. And why you’re here.”

  He was supposed to feel grateful, Alex knew. He had salvaged what he could of the Tokyo base. But business success, right now, tasted like chalk. “I’ve got Hartford again on Monday,” he said.

  Peter Lloyd regarded him from under flaring white eyebrows. “And I expect a report on my desk,” he said, “by Wednesday.”

  “Springfield as well,” Alex said—though Wednesday was a lifetime away, and Springfield just another pushpin on a map—“That’ll be Tuesday, though. Separate trip.”

  “Going to the Sox game tonight?”

  “Buddy of mine’s got a couple of box tickets,” Alex said.

  Peter whistled. “Well, aren’t you the lucky youngster.”

  The buddy was Brian Whiting, his old high school classmate, who had been calling Alex ever since he landed in Boston. Alex hadn’t planned to get in touch with anyone from Windermere—well, Brooke, though that had been less a plan than an instinct—but Brian had heard from his family, who had heard from Alex’s mom, and there had finally been no avoiding him. The Sox, fresh off last year’s Series, were up against the Yankees, and Brian had made it clear he was offering Alex pure gold. He should be grateful, Alex thought as he packed up for the weekend. Along with Jake, who was still back in Windermere, Brian was his oldest friend. He was an attorney now in Providence, private practice, criminal defense, a success story. He wanted to get Alex settled in Beantown, find him a girlfriend, a new life.

  He dropped his briefcase at the flat he’d rented on Bay State and changed to jeans. The night was cool, breezy, leaves beginning to drift from the trees. As he exited the building, his phone rang: Charlie. “Hey, big brother,” she said.

  “Hey, kiddo. You having fun this weekend?”

  “Maybe. There’s this new guy, Pablo, he’s having a party. Or we could take off for Windermere.”

  “So soon? I thought you were talking fall break.”

  “Mom says the leaves are changing already. You want to go?”

  His stomach clenched. “Not yet,” he said.

  “Why not? Do you have to, like, prepare for a trip to Windermere?”

  She laughed, and he tried to join in. “No, I mean I’ve got stuff to do this weekend. Fall break’ll be fine. I’ll take a few days.”

  “Good, because I want to do research there. For my moral phil paper.”

  He chuckled. “What, on the moral qualities of autumn leaves?”

  “Funny man. There’s one of those big Christian groups out there, picketing Planned Parenthood. I thought I’d interview them. Hear their side. Look at their cute photos of unborn babies. I am a college student. My mind is open.”

  He had to stop. He leaned against an iron railing at the corner. Choking, he kept his voice light. “Well, just be sure it’s not so open that your brains fall out,” he said.

  Charlie, Charlie, he thought when he could let himself breathe again. He had been the upstanding one, she the pile of mischief. Yet by the time he was her age, he had already been marked, branded, guilty. What would she think of him, when she came to know? If, he tried correcting himself, but the word came back, when.

  Brian was waiting at the Cask’n Flagon, right across from Fenway. “Christ,” Alex said when he had woven his way past the Sox fans to the lean guy waving his hand. “You’re bald.”

  “Shaved,” Brian explained, running his hand over the smooth crown of his head. “I was getting this pattern baldness thing, so I figured, take it all off. But look at you.” He nicked his chin toward Alex’s full head of hair. “You’re still the dude.”

  Brian had tanned too deeply over the summer, so that his strong-boned face seemed sheathed in smooth leather. He was divorced, Alex learned in the din of the pub; no kids. Brian pushed an image of himself as a playboy, talking about summer in the Hamptons, one girl and then another. He was talking to Alex, but he could have been talking to any one of the professionals unwinding before the game. It suited Alex fine. They managed beers and hamburgers, then walked over to the stadium, the lights already gleaming. Around them the fans—Sox, mostly, but a fair contingent of New Yorkers chanting Jeter! Jeter!—bottlenecked through the doors. From a distance, in the stadium, they could hear a soprano belting out the national anthem. Brian asked Alex if he’d seen the Sox open in Tokyo, at the beginning of summer, and Alex said he had. Normally, he had little interest in baseball. Soccer was his sport because it moved, all the time. He had no patience for a sport that operated without a clock, that wasted endless minutes in discussions on the mound. But the Sox opener in Tokyo—a first for the major leagues—had been one of his last nights out with the small contingent left at the Tokyo office. He had felt a bizarre, suffocating nostalgia as the Boston team strode out under the Japanese floodlights. “I knew I was coming back, then,” he said, shaking his head. “I missed everything all at once. Tokyo, I mean, and the States, too.”

  Brian nodded and said, “Powerful,” but Alex saw he wasn’t listening—just eyeballing the crowd, navigating toward their seats.

  By the time they settled in the box, behind first base, the anthem was over and the Yankees were at b
at. They talked about Brian’s work—trial cases, mostly corporate malfeasance but a few ordinary criminals, a couple of crime families. “You know they’re guilty, right?” Alex said when they’d ordered beers.

  “What are you talking about? I presume innocence.” Brian grinned raffishly. Already in high school he had been a politician, deploying the First Amendment against the ban on tattoos and stoking rumors about an unpopular physics teacher. Alex had liked him but had never trusted him.

  “Innocence,” Alex repeated, as if trying out the word. Bottom of the first, and the Sox had struck out; the Yankees went up again. Charlie might be on her way to Windermere right now, going to ask Christian picketers why they were opposed to killing unborn babies. He could feel his guilt like a stray dog, rubbing up against his shins, refusing to leave his side. Its stink rose to his nostrils. “What if you get somebody off, and then they go murder a child or something? Doesn’t that kind of haunt your sleep?”

  “Ssh,” Brian said. He leaned forward and pointed. Derek Jeter stepped to the plate. Alex tried to pay attention. They watched Jeter line-drive a single. “The system needs to work,” Brian said when the boos and applause died down. “The system needs me to do my best. If it lets the guy off, there’s a failure somewhere else. That’s what ought to haunt someone’s sleep.”

  The beer vendor came around; Alex signaled for another. “Ever had a client volunteer his own guilt?” he said.

  Brian shrugged. “Sure. He still needs an advocate. I can try to get temporary insanity, reduced sentence, immunity if there’s more than one guy involved.” He cracked a peanut with his teeth. “You do what you can.”

  They watched the game for a while. Between at bats, Brian reminded Alex how often he’d e-mailed him, since Tomiko left, to persuade him back to the States. No way were the women of Tokyo more beautiful than the ones in Boston or New York. Now, Brian said, Alex was seeing what he’d meant. This—this box, this game, the women in crop tops waving their little pennants—was the life. For all his shaven-head cool, Brian seemed to Alex to be lonely, an upstate Pennsylvania boy putting on urban chic. “What if a guy came to you,” Alex said as the fourth inning ended, “with a tale of some crime he’d committed, only there was no record of it on the books?”

  “He wouldn’t come to me,” Brian said. “He’d go to the cops, or the DA.”

  “But they’d assign him an attorney.”

  “Hey, not this attorney.” Brian held up his hands. “I’ll never do that public defender shit. Those guys are so exploited, you would not believe.”

  “Okay, but just say.”

  “Say what?”

  “You’re doing the public defender thing. Or someone else is. And there’s this guy confessing to some crime. Let’s say…let’s say a murder of some homeless person who’s never been missed. And he can show you, I don’t know, the gravesite where he buried the bones or something. He can prove his own guilt. Society hasn’t given a shit about this crime before, because they didn’t know it happened. But now it’s the criminal himself. Bringing the case to life.”

  Brian shook his tanned head. “Never happen,” he said. “With a cold case, maybe. You give up on some burglary or other—”

  “Stick with murder. No statute of limitations on murder, right?”

  “Fine, murder. The case goes cold, then years later someone’s guilty conscience gets to them and they come forward, and they have to basically convince the jury that they did this thing, because usually by then there’s been a whole parade of crazies making the same claim.”

  Alex felt jumpy. Before them, the Sox were at bat, probably winning, but he couldn’t focus on the score, the runs. He drained his beer. “Yeah, but I don’t mean like that,” he said.

  “Why would you care, man?” Brian looked at him. They’d both been half listening to each other, making the sort of connection that feels temporarily good, like a back rub. “If nobody missed the dead person, it probably wasn’t somebody needing to be kept alive. If this hypothetical killer hasn’t done anyone else…I don’t know. We got our hands pretty full with the shit we already know about.”

  “I guess.” Alex felt Brian’s eyes still on him, neither of them watching the ball game. “Something like that happened in Japan, just before I left,” he lied. “In my neighborhood. The guy who turned himself in lived down my block. I’ve been wondering what’s happened to him.”

  “What’d he claim to do?”

  Alex felt himself too deep to stop. “Killed a baby, he said. Right when it was born, so no one ever knew.”

  “Man, that’s weird. His own kid?”

  Alex nodded. His stomach was an iron weight. “He said so.”

  “He proved it? Dug the little corpse up or whatever? Brought the wifey in to testify against him?”

  “I don’t know, man. I came over here.”

  “Well, that’s just sick. You got to feel sorry for someone like that. I mean, look at you. You lost your kid to disease. Must piss you off, a guy like that. Aah, stop thinking about it.” He slapped Alex’s cheek with the back of his hand. “You can’t get morbid. You’re young, man. Start a whole new family, now you’re stateside.”

  “But what if—”

  “I would defend him, okay? I would defend the slick little baby killer. And with any luck, the system would put him away and he’d get what he deserved from those badass punks in the prison system. Now watch the game.”

  They watched. When Brian went to take a leak, he came back with a pair of young women, who stayed and joked for two innings before they left the box. “That was an opportunity, there,” Brian said as they retreated. “The short one, Caroline? She works in my office. If you’d said something I might’ve been able to hook you up.”

  Alex smiled. “I said something.”

  “Yeah. ‘Hello.’ How long since you and Tomiko split?”

  “Eighteen months. But I’ve got a lot on my plate right now, Brian.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re just a slow mover. I remember you in high school. It was Brooke or nobody.” One of the Sox popped a fly. They watched the ball arc high in the stadium lights and land foul, in the crowd behind third base. “When she disappeared on you, I don’t think you dated all through college.” He cut a glance at Alex. “Did you?”

  “I don’t remember, man. It was a long time ago.”

  “You knocked her up, didn’t you?”

  Alex’s breath froze in his lungs. “Who told you that?”

  “Jake, I think.”

  Jake, of course. Alex’s mouth twisted knowingly. Jake had been his best friend, closer even than Brian because Jake played soccer. Unlike Alex or even Brian, Jake had never been much for school, and his ambitions never extended beyond finishing a six-pack and jumping off the highest rock in the flooded quarry. But he loved Alex like the brother neither of them had, while Brian was always pushing rivalries. Jake had stayed in Windermere, become a cop, risen to detective. Do you realize how cool it will be, Jake had asked Alex back at his dad’s funeral, to say I know Alex Frazier? To say I connect to a guy who’s working on the other side of the fucking world? More than once, Alex had imagined Jake’s face when he came to learn what Alex had done all those years ago; he saw how the bright expression would fall, how disappointment would veil Jake’s eyes.

  He drained his beer, considered another, rejected the idea. He wondered what Brooke was doing. Her daughter would be asleep. Brooke wasn’t much for TV. Maybe she was reading some historical romance. No. That was the old Brooke. She was drinking a cup of tea now, or a glass of wine, looking out the window, deciding to send him a text and call off that drink. The way she had touched her hand to his jacket, at her nursery…there had been more than nostalgia, more than pity in how it rested there, the long fingers almost stroking his chest before she pulled away.

  God knew it was not love he had come to the States looking for. Not with Brooke. Not after all these years. But he was surprised at the nub of her presence, when the space between th
em shrank to inches, as if she were the fulcrum on which he might finally turn.

  “So? Alex? It’s been years now, you can come clean. She didn’t go off somewhere and have your love child, did she? Not that it was easy to take care of that kind of thing, in that backwater.”

  “No.” Alex stood up. He couldn’t sit still. He would say he needed the men’s room. “No. Brooke had—” He couldn’t lie that way, couldn’t say an abortion. He lied a different way instead. “It was a scare, that’s all,” he said. “I told Jake about it. Son of a bitch couldn’t keep his mouth shut, I guess.”

  “Yeah, he’s still like that. Hey, if you ever go back to Windermere again, you can ask him your question.”

  “What question?”

  “About your Japanese baby killer. He’s on the police force.”

  “Yeah, he told me.”

  “So you’d think he’d have to learn to keep a few confidences, in that job.”

  Alex’s laugh was hollow. How many lies had he told in the course of a baseball game? How was he ever going to step forward with the truth when the lies came so easily?

  Chapter 15

  The weekend felt to Brooke like the point on a seesaw, suspended in the middle, before one side or the other answers the pull of gravity. On Saturday, she and Sean left Meghan across the street at Taisha’s house and went together to the Simsbury location, where they laid in the rest of the spruces and oversaw the construction of a winding walkway up to the old house that would become the garden center. Sean hummed and sweated and got a sunburn on his head for his trouble, and that night they took Meghan to a Disney Snow White remake called Enchanted. Leaving the theater, they held hands. Though Brooke would never have called her husband handsome, she had seen other women drawn to him the same way she was, not just by his voice but by his warm, slow-spreading smile and the golden eyes that flicked over her before he started up the car. But the charm of the day dwindled with the light. Sean stayed up after Brooke had gone to bed, listening to the Bach on his headphones and polishing off the six-pack Brooke found, next morning, in the recycle bin. He was still sleeping when she took Meghan to a birthday party. Meghan bounced in the car seat.