Natalie hadn’t read Bella’s letters in a long time, but now she dug them out and read them in search of clues. She studied the snapshots. There were three letters addressed to Natalie altogether, postmarked from Los Angeles, Chicago, and New York City. Each envelope included a Polaroid picture of Bella that seemed to prove she was okay. She didn’t appear to be intimidated or scared for her life or suicidal. In her letters, Bella insisted that she’d left town of her own free will. But there was something about them that irked Natalie to this day.
When Bella disappeared on the night of their high school graduation, both girls were on the cusp of exciting things. Natalie had gotten into Boston University, and Bella had received a generous scholarship package from the Harrington Brock Music Conservatory. But all Bella wanted to do was escape. “Let’s travel around the world and stay in youth hostels across Europe.” She’d marked up an atlas of all the places she wanted to visit. “I love the idea of Thailand, don’t you?”
During their sleepovers, Natalie and Bella would confide their deepest secrets. “I don’t want to play concertos,” Bella told her once, “I want to live them. Let’s have big bold lives, Natalie. Those old composers had the most amazing adventures. Bach played his violin in the middle of the Black Forest at midnight, and Mozart made fart jokes. Peter Warlock was into black magic, and Franz Liszt had affairs with married women. We could have affairs with Italian men. Italians are the best lovers, you know,” Bella said, as if she knew. “Avoir une bonne vie. Have a good life.”
Bella called Mr. Striver “my smother-mother daddy” and said he kept her in a box. “Not a literal box,” she explained, “but a psychological box where I can’t breathe. He’s got my whole life planned out for me, and basically I’m going to be a violin soloist, whether I like it or not.”
At the same time, Bella also stood up for her father. “He works so hard and cares so much, it makes me cry. He dreams about having this genius child, and I can’t help thinking—what if he’s right? What if I am a genius? I definitely don’t want to be average. I secretly hope I am a genius.”
“We’re all fucking geniuses,” Natalie said.
“Right.” Bella laughed. “We’re the Brilliant Misfits.”
More than once, Natalie had witnessed Mr. Striver’s overbearing attitude toward his daughter when she visited Bella at home or at Striver’s Music Shop after school. He would say inappropriate things like, “Bella’s violin costs more money than my car!” and he’d make cringeworthy jokes about the violin’s f-holes. Bella would say, “Dad, stop. You’re embarrassing yourself.” He would remind Bella to smile. “Recital face! You have to have your recital face on, darling. Remember to smile!” Behind his back, Bella made monster faces and called him her stage mom with a dick.
The day before I decided to do it, to finally run away from it all, Bella wrote in one of her letters to Natalie, Dad was in the kitchen making pancakes and listening to Prokofiev. His eyes were closed, and he was swaying to the music when I walked in. “Listen to this cadenza, Bella,” he said. He had a glass of wine in one hand and a spatula in the other. Wine for breakfast again. Uh, yeah, Dad. “We’re going to put a little meat on Bella’s bones,” he said.
He ruffled my hair, and each time he dropped another pancake on my plate, he said, “Here you go, my angel. Eat up. Put a little meat on those bones.”
I couldn’t help rolling my eyes. “Dad-dy … stop it.”
“Wha-at?”
“You’re acting weird today.”
“I’m in a good mood. What of it?” He laughed it off.
After breakfast, we practiced a Mozart concerto, and for some reason I kept flubbing it. I think it’s because I just don’t like playing duets with him anymore. He’s no good at it. Especially when he’s wasted. There is no expression in his music. It’s just mechanical and dead. Halfway through, he screamed at me, “That’s not right! Get it together! Where’s your head?”
I felt nervous and wanted to stop, because he was acting a little erratic, but he wouldn’t let me stop, and so we both had to keep playing this crappy duet over and over again. It was agony, because he kept yelling at me, when he’s the one who sucks at this. And it made me feel bad to think that way. Sometimes I hate him so much—but then I hate myself for hating him.
That night, he came into my room, sat on the edge of my bed, and said, “I’m sorry, Bella,” and I could smell the wine on his breath.
“It’s okay.”
“I’m too hard on you, sweetheart.”
“No, Dad. It’s fine.”
“But look at you, going to the conservatory on a scholarship. You’re going to be a star one day, Bella.”
“Don’t worry about it, Dad.”
He nodded, and the bed shifted under his weight from the bobbing of his head. He finally got up, and I could feel the heaviness receding, and I was so relieved. He took his smelly wine breath and all his stupid, overbearing concerns with him and left the room, leaving me in peace. All of this would’ve been too much for me, if I didn’t have a secret plan out of Dodge.
A secret plan.
Natalie reread the last sentence.
Bella had never explained in any of her letters how she’d gotten the hell out of Dodge. All she said was that she was happy now (this was twelve years ago), still playing her violin and at peace with herself. There was a hippieish tinge to her newfound freedom—I’m more “me” than I’ve ever been; I’ve found peace and I hope you do, too; there’s more to life than ambition and discipline; I’m finally embracing who I am. Bella played the violin now because she loved it, she explained, not because she had to. She was satisfied, content, and fulfilled with her life, and she wanted the same for Natalie.
Natalie rubbed her fatigued eyes, then picked up the phone and called Max.
“Yello?” came the familiar response.
“It’s Natalie. We need to talk. Do you have time?”
“Now? Sure,” he said congenially. “I’m in the neighborhood. Timothy Harrison. I keep telling him, that tree branch is going to come crashing down any minute now. It’s a liability.”
“Now’s good,” she said.
“Be right over.”
Five minutes later, the doorbell rang. Instead of flannels and jeans, tonight Max was wearing a white shirt, a bomber jacket, and black trousers. “Dude, what’s up?” he said, breezing into the house and taking a seat on the living-room sofa. He was the kind of guy who was comfortable any old where. Outside, a moonlit fog curled through the woods.
“I want your opinion,” she said, spreading out the Polaroids Bella had sent along with her letters, before they’d stopped arriving years ago.
Max picked up the Polaroid of eighteen-year-old Bella that came with the first letter. Bella was seated on the floor, leaning against a white wall and smiling at the camera. She seemed happy and relaxed, but too pale for the California sun. This was before cell phones and selfies. Bella had never mentioned who’d taken the pictures. They were all close-ups, from her shoulders to a few inches above her head, so you couldn’t see the rest of her surroundings, just the white wall behind her.
The next two Polaroids were similar—close-ups of Bella leaning against a white wall—except that in Polaroid number two, you could see a strained sadness in her eyes. In Polaroid number three, Bella’s eyes looked dead. To the contrary, her letters insisted she was perfectly happy with her vagabond life and having lots of fun adventures. She never asked Natalie about herself or the Misfits. She merely reassured her old friend that she was okay and sent Polaroids as proof of her existence. After about a year, the letters stopped coming.
“I remember at the time being satisfied that Bella was alive, although it left a kind of unease in me,” Natalie confessed. “I figured she’d embraced a druggy lifestyle or something, which would explain the change in her appearance from picture to picture. The police processed everything, but they only found Bella’s fingerprints on the envelopes and contents. She sent similar letters to her father, and it was persuasive enough that the police finally dropped the case. I let it go, too. But there’s always been something about the entire incident that irked me … beyond losing a friend. Something about these pictures—her facial expression, the tragic lines of her face, or … something.”
Max leaned over the grouping on the coffee table and studied them. Then his shoulders slumped and his stomach protruded like a beach ball underneath his button-up shirt. “She doesn’t look happy.”
“No. But I’ve been learning a lot about the violin culture lately … and it’s given me more insight into Bella’s troubled nature.” She placed her hands on the curved wooden arms of her chair and said, “She used to run away a couple of times a year, and her father would panic. She’d tell me about his demands … how many hours he expected her to practice a day, what kinds of sacrifices she needed to make, how she couldn’t ever be like the other kids. Occasionally, she’d run away just to blow off steam. I understand now what Bella was going through, what was causing her moodiness and depressions.”
Max made an absentminded movement with his hand that distracted her. “Did I ever tell you about the time Mr. Striver called my dad for an estimate on the termite damage to his house?”
“No,” she said, curious about this one-eighty.
“Well, the foundation was infested with termites, and some of the structural beams were compromised. I mean, let’s be honest. Bugs were flying out of the walls. Mr. Striver just let the whole thing go to pot. So we called in an exterminator, and my dad did some repair work to the beams, but Mr. Striver refused to pay beyond a certain point, so we abandoned it with quite a bit more work to be done. Which is crazy. My dad tried to convince him to complete the job, but Mr. Striver couldn’t see the whole picture. He might as well not have spent a dime, rather than stopping the work midstream. All those bugs just kept on reproducing.”
Natalie frowned, wondering what his point was.
“Long story short, he exposed himself as a shortsighted guy. Someone you can’t rely on for anything. Bella wasn’t looking for freedom. She was looking for consistency. For stability. For the kind of parent who’d get rid of the termites once and for all … not let them take over the house.”
“That’s a good observation,” she said.
“And after Mr. Striver died, a relative—a distant cousin or something—sold the house to an unknown buyer. It’s in a blind trust now. Whoever bought it hasn’t bothered to fix it up, either. You can hire an exterminator once a year, but the bugs come back.”
“So it’s vacant?” For the longest time, Natalie hadn’t thought about Bella’s old house, which was located across town near the old railroad tracks.
“Apparently. Like I said, a blind trust owns it. I don’t know what the owner plans on doing with the property. Maybe they’re gonna perform satanic rituals at midnight, who the hell knows? They paid a lot of money for it, too, so I hear. But there’s no evidence they want to flip it. They’re just letting it sit there.”
Tucking this bit of information away, Natalie asked Max, “What do you remember about the night she disappeared?”
He sighed and loosened his collar. “Oh God, I don’t know. Bella was this quiet, beautiful girl who spoke through her music, which was awesome. She was a sweet kid with a mischievous sense of humor. It was always a little weird to me that Nesbitt Rose, the Boo Radley of our neighborhood, had such a huge crush on her. Bobby used to call him pootard—remember? Cruel, but hey. Nesbitt scared people. He used to spy on us. Remember that? He’d skulk around town, terrifying everyone by carrying dead animals by their necks. At the time, I figured he must’ve done something to her that night.” He darkened. “That night sort of ruined my life.”
She rested her hands in her lap. “How so?”
“After Bella disappeared, I stopped practicing the piano. I figured that if something could happen to Bella, after all the hours she put in practicing, considering how hard she worked—you know? So I quit. I gave up on music. I shouldn’t have, but I was young and stupid. Eighteen. What did I know? I partied hardy in college. Majored in business. I wanted to become a millionaire by the time I was twenty-five. I thought it would be a cinch. Thought I was a genius. Wasted my time. Women liked me—I don’t know why. But I’ve never had any problems in that department. And so what did it all add up to, Natalie? I can’t even remember Moonlight sonata all the way through. You believe that?”
Natalie frowned. “Max, what do you think happened to her?”
“For real?” He wiped the sweat off his brow and leaned forward. “I never bought into the idea she went to California of her own accord. I think she would’ve told us if she was leaving that night. Challenged us. Dared us. Why keep it a secret? Also, Bella never would’ve left you hanging, Natalie. She loved you. You two were like sisters.”
Natalie nodded, but she knew that sisters could keep awful secrets from each other. “I agree it doesn’t add up.”
“Right after she disappeared, there were rumors going around that she got kidnapped by bikers. But you’re the detective, Natalie. What do you think happened?”
She chewed on her lower lip and said, “Something’s definitely ‘off’ about these Polaroids. In the beginning, she’s smiling, but by the end, she looks devastated.”
Max nodded eagerly. “Yeah, I noticed that, too.”
“Those dead eyes. And the wall behind her,” Natalie went on, “looks the same in every picture, despite the fact that each of her letters were postmarked from a different locale … almost as if it’s the same white wall in each photograph.”
“Yeah, you’re right,” Max said, studying the pictures on the coffee table. He landed his index finger on the first Polaroid. “Same white wall with the same crack in it.”
“There’s a crack?” She leaned forward and studied the images.
“Speaking as a contractor, over time, you can see the effects of gravity on the walls of a building. And it’s unique to each wall, almost like a fingerprint. The weight of the floors above it, plus people and furniture will produce a ‘turning effect,’ also called a ‘moment.’ If the moment is large enough, the wall will collapse. But if the moment is small, then the wall will resist collapsing. Right here, you can see tiny flaws and cracks in the wall, due to tension and compression forces.”
“Is it the same wall?” she asked breathlessly.
Max sat very still, studying the Polaroids. “It certainly looks that way.”
Her phone rang, jarring them both.
It was Hunter. “Natalie, I have something to show you.”