He dropped the bag onto my lap. I stared down at it. “Two million dollars?”
“The bills are not sequential, but we have a list of all the serial numbers, just in case.”
I looked at Carson and then back at Edgar. “You don’t think we should contact the FBI?”
“Not really, no.” Edgar perched himself on the lid of the desk, folding his arms across his chest. He smelled of barbershop bay rum, but I could sense something more primitive, more rancid, that lay just beneath. Up close, his eyes had the dark rings of exhaustion. “It’s your decision, Marc. You’re the father. We’ll respect whatever you do. But as you know, I have had some dealings with the federal authorities. Perhaps my views are colored by my own sense of their incompetence, or perhaps I am biased because I’ve witnessed the degree to which they are ruled by personal agendas. If it were my daughter, I’d rather trust my own judgment than theirs.”
I was not sure what to say or do. Edgar took care of that. He clapped his hands once and then gestured toward the door.
“The note says that you should go home and wait. I think it’s best if we obey.”
Chapter 3
The same driverwas there. I slid into the backseat, the Nike bag pressed against my chest. My emotions rocketed between abject fear and the strangest tinge of elation. I could get my daughter back. I could blow it all.
But first things first: Should I tell the police?
I tried to calm myself, to look at it coldly, at a distance, weigh the pros and cons. That was impossible, of course. I am a doctor. I have made life-altering decisions before. I know that the best way to do that is to remove the baggage, the ardent excess, from the equation. But my daughter’s life was at stake. My own daughter. To echo what I said in the beginning: my world.
The house Monica and I bought is literally around the corner from the house I grew up in and where my parents still reside. I am ambivalent about that. I really don’t like living so close to my parents, but I dislike the guilt of abandoning them even more. My compromise: Live near them and then travel a lot.
Lenny and Cheryl live four blocks away, near the Kasselton Mall, in the house where Cheryl’s parents had raised her. Cheryl’s parents moved to Florida six years ago. They keep a condo up here in neighboring Roseland so they can visit their grandchildren and escape the molten-lava summers of the Sunshine State.
I don’t particularly like living in Kasselton. The town has changed very little over the past thirty years. In our youth, we scoffed at our parents, their materialism, their seemingly aimless values. Now we are our parents. We have simply replaced them, pushed Mom and Dad into whatever retirement village would have them. And our children have replaced us. But Maury’s Luncheonette is still on Kasselton Avenue. The fire department is still mostly volunteer. The Little League still plays at Northland Field. The high-tension wires are still too close to my old elementary school. The woods behind the Brenners’ house on Rockmont Terrace is still a place where kids hang out and smoke. The high school still gets between five and eight national merit finalists a year, though when I was younger the list was more Jewish while today it tilts toward the Asian community.
We turned right on Monroe Avenue and drove past the split-level where I was raised. With its white paint and black shutters, with its kitchen, living room, and dining room up three steps on the left and its den and garage entrance two steps down on the right, our house, though a bit more threadbare than most, was pretty much indistinguishable from the other cookie-cutters on the block. What did make it stand out, the only thing really, was the wheelchair ramp. We put it in after my dad’s third stroke when I was twelve years old. My friends and I liked to skateboard down it. We built a jump out of plywood and cinder blocks and put it at the bottom.
The nurse’s car was in the driveway. She comes in during the days. We don’t have someone full time. My father has been confined to a wheelchair for more than two decades now. He cannot speak. His mouth has an ugly down-hook curve on the left side of it. Half his body is totally paralyzed and the other half is not that much better.
When the driver made the turn at Darby Terrace, I saw that my house—our house—looked the same as it had a few weeks before. I didn’t know what I’d expected. Yellow crime-scene tape maybe. Or a big bloodstain. But there was nothing hinting at what had occurred two weeks earlier.
When I’d bought the house, it’d been in foreclosure. For thirty-six years the Levinsky family had lived there, but no one really knew them. Mrs. Levinsky had been a seemingly sweet woman with a facial tic. Mr. Levinsky was an ogre who always yelled at her out on the lawn. He scared us. One time, we saw Mrs. Levinsky run out of the house in a nightgown, Mr. Levinsky chasing her with a shovel. Kids cut through every yard but theirs. When I was fresh out of college, rumors surfaced that he had abused his daughter Dina, a sad-eyed, stringy-haired waif I’d gone to school with since the first grade. Looking back on it, I must have been in a dozen classes with Dina Levinsky and I don’t remember ever hearing her speak above a whisper and only then when forced to by well-meaning teachers. I never reached out to Dina. I don’t know what I could have done, but I still wished that I’d tried.
Sometime during that year out of college, when the rumors of Dina’s abuse began to take root, the Levinskys had upped and moved away. No one knew where. The bank took over the house and began to rent it out. Monica and I made an offer a few weeks before Tara was born.
Months later, when we first settled in, I’d stay awake at night and listen for—I don’t know—sounds of some sort, for signs of the house’s past, of the unhappiness within. I would try to figure out which bedroom had been Dina’s and try to imagine what it’d been like for her, what it was like now, but there were no clues here. As I said earlier, a house is mortar and brick. Nothing more.
Two strange cars were parked in front of my house. My mother was standing by the front door. When I got out, she rushed me like those newscasts of returning POWs. She hugged me hard, and I got a whiff of too much perfume. I was still holding the Nike bag with the money, so it was hard for me to reciprocate.
Over my mother’s shoulder, Detective Bob Regan stepped out of my house. Next to him stood a large black man with a gleaming shaved head and designer sunglasses. My mother whispered, “They’ve been waiting for you.”
I nodded and moved toward them. Regan cupped a hand over his eyes, but only for effect. The sun was not that strong. The black man remained stonelike.