Sarah no longer knew what she was hoping for, she no longer knew what good news would be. She was stumbling through the blackness, arms outstretched, still hoping her fingertips would brush up against a discovery when Medford called three days later to say that he had met with Bill McCrory’s cousin in Daytona.
“McCrory’s alibi seems to hold up,” he told Sarah.
“Seems to?”
“It’s actually pretty solid. The cousin is a little skanky, but he gave me the timeline of their night and it checked out. I paid a visit to the bar where he said they went and the bartender remembers seeing them, as do a number of the patrons. They were there past one a.m.”
Sarah’s arms pulled back, the blackness encroaching once again. “What was McCrory doing in New Orleans?”
“Visiting an old girlfriend. A little bit of revenge romance. That checked out, too.”
“Now what?” she asked dully.
She listened quietly while Medford told her that there were no further leads. “Brook is not going to question Linda again,” he continued. “He and Linda are both still convinced that Todd is alive someplace. It looks like the voice stress test results are going to remain just another unexplained part of that night.”
There is an aperture of time after a death or disappearance when clues, evidence, tips are most likely to accumulate. If that doesn’t happen, interest begins to wane as attention and curiosity are gradually subsumed by the next case, the next story. Sarah saw that prospect looming ever closer and it terrified her.
“I’ve been getting calls,” she said.
“Calls?”
“There is someone on the other line, I can hear them breathing, but they never speak.” After the first time at Todd’s studio, there had been three similar hang-ups on her home phone. Sometimes she pictured Todd standing in a phone booth in another part of the country listening, breathing.
“I can check your phone records if you’d like.”
“Okay.” She clutched the receiver tightly. “Karl?”
“Yes?”
“You’re not going to give up, are you?”
There was a long pause. “Not yet. But Sarah, at some point you’ll have to decide whether this is worth it. There is a law of diminishing returns.”
“What do you mean?”
“Not all bodies, dead or alive, are found. I’m sorry, I know that’s not what you hired me to tell you, but I need to be honest. There are still some things I want to follow up on, but you have to consider that possible outcome. I don’t want to waste your money.”
Sarah hung up without saying another word.
This is the nature of nightmare: a downward spiral of hope, when the body of someone you love becomes your most fervent desire.
And what would happen if they did give up, what was the course of action then?
She dug out the phone number of the lawyer Lucy had given her and made an appointment.
The following morning, she sat alone in Barnett Thompson’s large, hushed midtown waiting room, staring at the perfectly dusted ficus tree by the end of the leather couch. When the ash blond receptionist looked down to answer the silently ringing telephone, Sarah reached over and touched one of the leaves to see if it was real. Caught, she quickly withdrew her hand, repeating her opening salvo in her mind: I am married to someone who may or may not exist.
“You can go in.” Her thoughts were interrupted by the receptionist staring intently at her. Sarah wondered if she had been talking out loud. Lately as she walked to work, random words would escape, causing passersby to glance over at her with curiosity and alarm.
Barnett Thompson was standing at his open door, his thick tanned hand outstretched to shake hers. He closed the door behind them and touched her back lightly as he guided her to the oversize wing chair across from his mahogany desk. Settling into his own chair he leaned forward on his elbows. He had the kind of skin that had been permanently stained a reddish brown from years of sailing and made it hard to guess his age, though Sarah took him to be in his late forties. She waited for him to speak first, blinking in the glare from the large window behind him. Mixed in with the Stanford and Harvard degrees were Chagall lithographs, a late-period Picasso drawing. Tom Paxton played softly on the stereo—a sign Thompson hadn’t given up his ideals, that he was a good guy. Sarah wondered if the music changed depending on the client.
“Lucy tells me you work at Flair,” he began.
“Yes.” Sarah was momentarily nonplussed. She couldn’t tell if this was merely a polite opening gambit designed to put her at ease or evidence of the rampant—and often prurient—interest CMH tended to elicit.
“My ex-wife used to work at CMH. Julia Reardon? Do you know her?”
“No, sorry.” Sarah refrained from saying that it seemed at times that half of Manhattan had worked at CMH and either moved on to other media companies or left so traumatized that they were convinced the only possibility for real happiness lay in owning a farm in Vermont. “I’ve heard the name,” she added, lying out of politeness.
“Crazy place,” Thompson remarked.
He seemed to be waiting for more, an anecdote, a glossily salacious tidbit that he could dine out on. CMH had that effect on even the most successful people, instilling a mixture of moral superiority and envy.
“So,” he leaned back. “Tell me what I can do for you.”
Sarah laid out the facts in a controlled monotone. She pulled the police report out of her bag and watched as Thompson read it. He grunted slightly as he turned the pages with his forefinger. Then she told him of Medford’s work.
Finally, he looked over at her. “Well, Sarah, we need to discuss two options,” he said. “Death and divorce.”
Sarah felt a cool sweat form in the back of her neck and the breath sputtering in her windpipe. She wondered what would happen if she fainted in his beautifully appointed office.
“Our first choice would clearly be a death certificate,” Thompson continued. “Was there life insurance?”
“A small amount.” Sarah and Todd had talked about increasing the policy last year but had never quite gotten around to it. They thought they had all the time in the world.
Thompson nodded. “You are pretty much at the mercy of the Florida PD. They can sign one now or they can make you wait five years.”
“Five years?”
“That’s how long it takes before the state is forced to issue one automatically. What’s this Detective Brook like?”
Sarah paused. “He doesn’t believe Todd is dead,” she admitted. She searched Thompson’s face for signs of doubt—about her story, her credibility—but did not discern any.
“Let me see what I can do. The evidence does lead one to believe that Brook should sign the certificate, but if not, you are going to have to divorce your husband.”
“Divorce him?”
“Without a body or a death certificate, your life could get very sticky very quickly.”
“It already is,” she said wryly.
Thompson’s eyebrows raised at the tinge of sarcasm. Sarah sensed a certain professional curiosity mixed in with sympathy. Though he had surely seen numerous permutations of tragedy, Sarah wondered if this was his first missing body. “You need to protect your daughter and yourself,” he said patiently. “I’ll call Brook today and see if I can get him to budge. But if not, divorce may be the only option open to you.”
There was a paternal tone in Thompson’s voice that made Sarah realize how deeply she felt the absence of a husband, a father, the subtle net of protection men provided, in feeling if not in fact. Perhaps it was as simple as a deeper voice, a larger body, a barrier, but there was an element of safety, of comfort that had been taken away. There was no one left to defend her, protect her. Guardianless, she had become the guardian.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“I’ll give you one example. In New York, you need your husband’s signature if you’d like your life insurance to go to your daughter instead of him. Without a death certificate or a divorce, that’s not possible. There are any number of forms you have to sign all the time that ask if you are married, divorced, widowed, or single. At the moment, it appears that you are almost all of them and none of them.”
“How on earth can I sue my husband for divorce?”
“Abandonment,” Thompson replied.
The conversation continued for another ten minutes before Thompson walked Sarah to the door and squeezed her shoulder reassuringly. She felt the imprint of his hand long after she had left.
“Well, you have to admit walking into an ocean certainly qualifies as abandonment,” Sarah remarked dryly to Paige later that morning. “I actually began to hyperventilate.”
“Death and divorce at the same time? That would make the Dalai Lama hyperventilate. Maybe he can talk some sense into the police.”
“I doubt it.”
Thompson called Sarah later that afternoon. “I spoke to Detective Brook,” he told her.
“And?”
“You’re right. He doesn’t believe your husband is dead. He will not sign a death certificate.”
Sarah waited, nervous that Brook had convinced him that Todd was alive and she was delusional.
That did not seem to have happened, though. “You have two options,” Thompson continued. “You can go to Florida and sue for one. But I have to warn you, there’s a good chance you’d lose. I gathered from Brook that this Linda Granger would back him up. Plus, it would be extremely time-consuming. Court dates are subject to last-minute changes. There’s the chance that you’d have to stay there for weeks.”
“I can’t do that.”
“I didn’t think so. In that case you will in all likelihood have to wait the five years until a death certificate becomes automatic. Unfortunately, you won’t be able to get the life insurance before then either. In the meantime, we should pursue a divorce.”
Sarah said nothing.
“There are the legal reasons that I outlined for you earlier.” Thompson paused. “Sarah, you may find this hard to believe now, but you will also at some point want to get on with your life.”
Sarah reluctantly gave him the go-ahead to do whatever he needed.