4
Jack will kill me when he finds out.
Gia stood before the flaking apartment door and hesitated. Against all her better judgment she’d gone back to the abductedchild.org web site and called the family number listed on Tara Portman’s page. She’d asked the man who answered if he was related to Tara Portman—he said he was her father—and told him that she was a writer who did freelance work for a number of newspapers. She was planning a series of articles about children who had been missing more than ten years and could he spare a few moments to speak to her?
His answer had been a laconic, Sure, why not? He told her she could stop by any time because he was almost always in.
So now she was standing in the hot, third-floor hallway of a rundown apartment building in the far-West Forties and afraid to take the next step. She’d dressed in a trim, businessy blue suit, the one she usually wore to meetings with art directors, and carried a pad and a tape recorder in her shoulder bag.
She wished she’d asked about Mrs. Portman—was she alive, were they still married, would she be home?
The fact that Tara had written “Mother” with no mention of her father might be significant; might say something about her relationship with her father; might even mean, as Jack had suggested, that he was involved in her disappearance.
But the fact remained that the ghost of Tara Portman had appeared to Gia and Gia alone, and that fact buzzed through her brain like a trapped wasp. She’d have no peace until she learned what Tara Portman wanted. That seemed to center on the mother she’d mentioned.
“Well, I’ve come this far,” she muttered. “Can’t stop now.”
She knocked on the door. It was opened a moment later by a man in his mid-forties. Tara’s blue eyes looked out from his jowly, unshaven face; his heavy frame was squeezed into a dingy T-shirt with yellowed armpits and coffee stains down the front, cut-off shorts, and no shoes. His longish dark blond hair stuck out in all directions.
“What?” he said.
Gia suppressed the urge to run. “I—I’m the reporter who called earlier?”
“Oh, yeah, yeah.” He stuck out his hand. “Joe Portman. Come in.”
A sour mix of old sweat and older food puckered Gia’s nostrils as she stepped through the doorway into the tiny apartment, but she stifled her reaction. Joe Portman hustled around, turning off the TV and picking up scattered clothing from the floor and a sagging couch; he rolled them into a ball and tossed them into a closet.
“Sorry. Didn’t expect you so soon.” He turned to her. “Coffee?”
“Thanks, no. I just had some.”
He dropped onto the couch and indicated the chair next to the TV for her.
“You know,” he said, “this is really strange. The other night I was sitting right here, watching the Yankees, when I suddenly thought of Tara.”
Gia seated herself carefully. “You don’t usually think of her?”
He shrugged. “For too many years she was all I thought of. Look where it got me. Now I try not to think of her. My doctor at the clinic tells me let the past be past and get on with my life. I’m learning to do that. But it’s slow. And hard.”
A thought struck Gia. “What night was it when you had this sudden thought of Tara?”
“It was more than a thought, actually. For an instant, just a fraction of a second, I thought she was in the room. Then the feeling was gone.”
“But when?”
He looked at the ceiling. “Let’s see … the Yanks were playing in Oakland so it was Friday night.”
“Late?”
“Pretty. Eleven or so, I’d guess. Why?”
“Just wondering,” Gia said, hiding the chill that swept through her.
Joe Portman had sensed his daughter’s presence during the earthquake under Menelaus Manor.
“Well, the reason I brought it up is, Friday night I get this feeling about Tara, then this morning you call wanting to do an article about her. Is that synchronicity or what?”
Synchronicity … not the kind of word Gia expected from someone who looked like Joe Portman.
“Life is strange sometimes,” Gia said.
“That it is.” He sighed, then looked at her. “Okay, reporter lady, what can I tell you?”
“Well, maybe we could start with how it happened?”
“The abduction? You can read about that in detail in all the old newspapers.”
“But I’d like to hear it from you.”
His eyes narrowed, his languid voice sharpened. “You sure you’re a writer? You’re not a cop, are you?”
“No. Not at all. Why do you ask?”
He leaned back and stared at his hands, folded in his lap. “Because I was a suspect for a while. Dot too.”
“Dot is your wife?”
“Dorothy, yeah. Well, she was. Anyway, the cops kept coming up empty and … that was the time when stories about satanic cults and ritual abuse were big in the papers … so they started looking at us, trying to see if we were into any weird shit. Thank God we weren’t or we might have been charged. It’s hard to see how things could have worked out any worse, but that definitely would’ve been worse.”
“How did it happen?”
He sighed. “I’ll give you the short version.” He glanced at her. “Aren’t you taking notes?”
How dumb! she thought, reaching into her bag for her cassette recorder.
“I’d like to record this, if that’s okay.”
“Sure. We lived in Kensington. That’s a section of Brooklyn. You know it?”
Gia shook her head. “I didn’t grow up in New York.”
“Well, it sounds ritzy, but it’s not. It’s just plain old middle class, nothing special. I worked for Chase here in the city, Dot worked out there as a secretary for the District 20 school board. We did okay. We liked Kensington because it was close to Prospect Park and Green-Wood Cemetery. Believe it or not, we saw the cemetery as a plus. It’s a pretty place.” He looked down at his hands again. “Maybe if we’d lived somewhere else, Tara would still be with us.”
“How did it happen?”
He sighed. “When Tara was eight we took her to Kensington stables up near the parade grounds. You know, so she could see the horses. One ride and she was an instant horse lover. Couldn’t keep her away. So we sprung for riding lessons and she was a natural. For a year she rode three days a week—Tuesday and Thursday afternoons, and Saturday morning. On Thursdays she’d have to wait a little while before Dot could pick her up. We told her to stay at the stables—do not under any circumstances leave the stables. And for a year it worked out fine. Then one Thursday afternoon Dot arrived to pick her up—right on time, I want you to know—and … no Tara.” His voice cracked. “We never saw or heard from her again.”
“And no witnesses, no clues?”
“Not a single one. We did learn, though, that she hadn’t listened to us. Folks at the stable said she used to leave for a few minutes on Thursdays and return with a pretzel—you know, the big kind they sell from the pushcarts. The cops found the pushcart guy who remembered her—said she came by every Thursday afternoon in her riding clothes—but he hadn’t seen anything different that day. She bought a pretzel as usual and headed back toward the stable. But she never made it.” He punched his thigh. “If only she’d listened.”
“What was she like?” Gia said. “What did she like besides horses?”
“You want to know?” he said, pushing himself out of the sofa. “That’s easy. I’ll let you see for yourself.”
He walked around the sofa and motioned Gia to follow. She found him standing over a black trunk with brass fittings. He pulled it a few feet closer to the window and opened the lid.
“There,” he said, rising. “Go ahead. Take a look. That’s all that’s left of my little girl.”
Gia knelt and looked but didn’t touch. She felt as if she were violating someone, or committing a sacrilege. She saw a stack of unframed photos and forced herself to pick it up and shuffle through them: Shots of Tara at all ages. A beautiful child, even as an infant. She stopped at one with Tara sitting atop a big chestnut mare.
“That was Rhonda, Tara’s favorite horse,” Portman said, looking over her shoulder.
But Gia was transfixed on Tara’s clothing: a red-and-white checked shirt, riding breeches, and boots. Exactly what she’d been wearing at Menelaus Manor.
“Did … did she wear riding clothes a lot?”
“That’s what she was wearing when she disappeared. In colder weather she’d wear a competition coat and cap. Made her look like the heiress to an English estate. God she loved that horse. Would you believe she’d bake cookies for it? Big thick grainy things. The horse loved them. What a kid.”
Gia glanced at Portman and saw the wistful, lost look on his face and knew then he’d had nothing to do with his daughter’s death.
She flipped further into the stack and stopped at a photo of Tara beside a trim, good-looking man in his thirties. Their hair and eyes were matching shades of blond and blue. With a start she realized it was her father.
“Yeah, that was me. I was Portman then, now I’m portly man.” He patted his gut. “It’s all the meds they’ve got me on. Name an antidepressant and I’ve tried it. Every one of them gives me these carbohydrate cravings. Plus the only exercise I get is moving around this place.” He waved his hand at the tiny apartment. “Which, as you can imagine, isn’t much.”
“You said you worked for Chase?”
“‘Worked’ is right. Not a big job, but a solid one. I made decent money. And I was planning on getting my MBA, but … things didn’t work out.”
Gia flipped to the next picture. Tara standing beside a slim, attractive brunette.
“That was Dorothy,” Portman said.
“Her mother.”
Portman shook his head. “She took Tara’s disappearance harder than I did, which is pretty hard to imagine. They were best buds, those two. Did everything together. Dot never recovered.”
Gia was almost afraid to ask. “Where is she now?”
“In a hospital room, hooked up to a feeding tube.”
“Oh, no!”
Portman seemed to go on automatic pilot as his eyes unfocused and his voice became mechanical. “Car accident. Happened in 1993, on the fifth anniversary of Tara’s disappearance. Ran into a bridge abutment on the LIE. Permanent brain damage. Because of the speed she was going, the insurance company said it was a suicide attempt. Our side said it was an accident. We met somewhere in the middle but it still didn’t come near covering her ongoing medical expenses.”
“What do you think happened?”
“I don’t know what happened, but what I think is between me and Dot. Anyway, I couldn’t afford to pay for all the care she needed—I mean I couldn’t lose the house because I had to think of Jimmy who I had to raise all by myself then.”
“Jimmy?”
“Flip ahead a few photos. There. That’s Jimmy.”
Gia saw Tara next to a dark-haired boy with a gaptoothed smile.
“He looks younger.”
“By two years. He was five there.”
“Where is he now?”
“In rehab. Booze, crack, heroin. You name it.” He shook his head. “Our fault, not his.”
“Why do you say that?”
“Jimmy was six-and-a-half when Tara disappeared. We forgot about him when that happened. Everything was Tara, Tara, Tara.”
“That’s understandable.”
“Not when you’re six. And then seven. And then eight-nine-ten, and your family life is an ongoing wake for your sister. Then at eleven he loses his mother. I’m sure he heard the suicide talk. And to him that meant his mother had abandoned him, that her grief over her dead daughter was greater than her love for her living son. He was too young to understand that maybe she hadn’t thought it through, that maybe it was the worst day of her life and some crazy impulse took control.”
Gia saw his throat working as he looked away. She couldn’t think of anything to say except, You poor man, that poor boy. But that sounded condescending, so she waited in the leaden silence.
Finally Joe Portman sniffed and said, “You know, you can keep hope alive for only so long. When we hit the five-year mark and no Tara, we had to … we had to accept the worst. Maybe if I’d been with her more that fifth anniversary day, Dot might have got past it, and she’d still be up and about today. But everything must have looked too black to go on—maybe just for a few minutes or an hour, but that was enough. So now Jimmy was motherless and his father still wasn’t paying attention to him, what with all that Dot needed.” Portman rubbed his face, as if massaging his jowls. “Jimmy’s first bust—the first of many— was at age thirteen for selling marijuana and it was all downhill from there.”
Gia felt a growing knot in her chest. The pain this man, this family had been through … no wonder he was on medication.
“Then I learned I had to divorce Dot.”
“Had to?”
“To save the house and—so I hoped at the time—to save Jimmy, I had to divorce her. That way she’d be without support and could qualify for welfare and be covered by Medicaid. The irony of it is, if I’d waited a couple of years it wouldn’t have been necessary.”
“You mean they changed the law?”
“No.” He smiled, but it was a painful grimace. “I stopped going to work. Jimmy was in a juvenile detention center at the time and I was alone in the house, and I just couldn’t get myself out of bed. And if by some miracle I did, I couldn’t leave the house. I kept the shades down and the lights off and just sat in the dark, afraid to move. Finally the bank let me go. And then I lost the house, and wound up on welfare and on Medicaid, just like Dot.”
Almost numb from the torrent of pain, Gia placed the photos back in the trunk and looked around for something that might elicit happier memories. She picked up a short stack of vinyl record albums. The cover of the first featured a close-up of a cute red-haired girl with a wistful stare.
Gia heard Joe Portman let out a short laugh, not much more than a “Heh.”
“Tiffany. Tara’s favorite. She played those records endlessly, from the moment she got home.”
Gia flipped the top one over. She remembered Tiffany, how she toured shopping malls at the start of her career. What were her hits? She did new versions of old songs. Hadn’t she redone an early Beatles tune? Gia scanned through the song list …
She gasped.
“What’s wrong?” Portman said.
“Oh, nothing.” Gia swallowed, trying to moisten her dry tongue. “It’s just that I’d forgotten that Tiffany remade ‘I Think We’re Alone Now.’”
“Oh, that song!” Portman groaned. “Tara would sing it day and night. She had a great voice, never missed a note, but how many times can you listen to the same song? Drove us crazy! But you know what?” His voice thickened. “I’d give anything in the world—my life—to hear her sing it again. Just once.”
If Gia had harbored any subconscious doubts that the entity in Menelaus Manor was Tara Portman, they’d vanished now.
She dug deeper into the trunk and came up with a plush doll she immediately recognized.
“Roger Rabbit!”
Portman reached past her and took the doll. He turned it over in his hands, staring at it with brimming eyes.
“Roger,” he whispered. “I almost forgot about you.” He gave Gia a quick glance. “I haven’t been in here in a while.” He sighed. “The movie came out the summer she disappeared. She made me take her three times, and I swear every time she laughed harder than before. Probably would have had to take her a fourth time if …”
He handed back the doll.
Gia stared at its wide blue eyes and felt tears begin to slip down her cheeks. She quickly wiped her eyes, but not quickly enough.
“I’ll be damned,” Portman said.
“What?”
“A reporter with feelings. I can’t tell you how many reporters I’ve talked to since 1988, and you’re the first who’s ever shown any real emotion.”
“Maybe they were more experienced. And maybe this hits a little too close to home for me.”
“You’ve got a daughter?”
Gia nodded. “She’s eight … and she just discovered Roger Rabbit on video. She loves him.”
The tears again. Gia willed them back but they kept flowing. What happened to Tara Portman—plucked out of a happy life and killed or worse. It was too cruel, just … too cruel.
“Don’t you let her out of your sight,” Portman was saying. “Stay on top of her every minute, because you never know … you never know.”
Terror spiked her. Vicky was far away, at camp. Why on earth had she let her go?
But she couldn’t raise Vicky in a bubble. Part of her wanted to, but it wouldn’t be fair.
Gia replaced Roger in the trunk and rose to her feet. She felt lightheaded. “I … I think I’ve got enough now.”
“You’ll send me a copy?” Portman said.
“Sure. If I sell it.”
“You’ll sell it. You’ve got heart. I can tell. I want it published. I want Tara’s name out there again. I know she’s gone. I know she’ll never come back. But I don’t want her forgotten. She’s just a statistic now. I want her to be a name again.”
“I’ll do my best,” Gia said.
She felt terrible about lying to him. There’d never be an article. Scalding guilt propelled her toward the door to escape this hot smelly box where the walls seemed to be closing in.
Portman followed her. “Do you know what Tara might have been, where she could have gone? She could sing, she could play piano, she could ride, she was smart as a whip and she loved life, every moment of it. She had two parents who loved her and a great life ahead of her. But it was all snuffed out.” He snapped his fingers. “Just like that. And not by some freak accident, but on purpose. On purpose! And what about Jimmy? Who knows what he could have been? Better than the junkie he is now. And what about me and Dot? We could have grown old together, had grand-kids. But that’s never going to happen.” His voice broke. “You let people know that whoever took my Tara didn’t kill just a little girl. He killed a whole family!”
Gia only nodded as she stepped into the hall, unable to push a word past the invisible band that had a death grip on her throat.