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CHAPTER NINE

The first PowerPoint slide reads: The Kidnapping of Victoria Belmond .

The Pink Panthers start us off. We are in our public-bath classroom. The lights are out. Golfer Gary brought some kind of fancy projector in, and the three Pink Panthers are using it now against the grayish white of the concrete wall.

The head Pink Panther is an exceedingly tall, thin woman named Polly. She sports a Ticonderoga-yellow pantsuit. Match that up with her short-n-spiky gray hair colored pink, and the overall effect is that Polly looks something like a giant Number Two pencil. Pink Panther Polly could be Pencil Polly.

I’m big on thinking in terms of nicknames.

Polly has a good, clear speaking voice. My guess is, she has done a lot of presentations in the past. “Victoria Belmond, daughter of the Belmond fortune, was a seventeen-year-old high school senior when she vanished from a New Year’s Eve party on December thirty-first, 1999. She and a bunch of high school friends rented out a space above McCabe’s Pub in the East Village.”

Lenny interrupts: “Hey, I threw up in that place once.”

“Me too,” Gary says. “Freshman year. Projectile vomit. Hit the jukebox.”

“Guys,” I say.

Polly is unfazed by the interruption. “The last time Victoria was seen was on a CCTV camera leaving the bar at 11:17 p.m.”

One of the other Pink Panthers—I don’t remember her name—clicks the mouse. We all have our eyes on the concrete wall as a blurry black-n-white still comes up. The angle, like seemingly all CCTV images, is from way above her head.

“Pretty bad quality,” Golfer Gary says.

“The technology used was old,” Polly says. “This image was taken from a VCR security tape. Some theorize it may not be her at all.”

“Can’t see the face,” Lenny says.

“No,” Polly says, “but that’s what she was wearing. That’s her hairstyle. That’s the right height. Her friends identified her, so the police seem pretty certain that this is the last sighting of Victoria Belmond before she vanished.”

Golfer Gary raises his hand as though waiting to be called on. I frown in his direction, and he puts his hand down. “This bothers me,” Gary said.

“What bothers you?” I ask.

“Okay, first off, it’s not just a New Year’s Eve party—it’s a New Millennium’s Eve party.”

“Right, so?”

“Do you remember what that night was like?”

The young influencers look at us blankly, as if we are discussing the Eisenhower presidency.

“I mean, it was such a big deal,” Gary continues. “The end of the 1900s. The end of the 1000s, really. The start of not only a new century but a whole new millennium. Y2K and all that. Like Prince sang, we’re gonna party like it’s 1999. The buildup was huge. Everyone was ready for the party of a lifetime.”

“So?” I say to get us back on track.

“So,” Gary continues, “Victoria Belmond and her rich friends—most of them probably underage—rent out a space above a bar so they can party their brains out and watch the ball drop in a once-every-thousand-years event. And what does Victoria do?” Gary points to the projected image. “Forty-three minutes before the big countdown, she just leaves on her own. Doesn’t anyone else find that weird?”

Murmurs of agreement.

“Good point,” I say. I turn back to Polly and nod for her to continue.

“That’s the last image we have of Victoria Belmond,” she says. “No credible source remembers seeing her after this moment. Maybe she grabbed a taxi. Maybe she took a train or hitchhiked. Or maybe someone grabbed her right then and there. Nobody knows. Even now. Even today. There were no ATM withdrawals, no credit card transactions, nothing. It’s like Victoria Belmond was just swallowed whole.”

The room falls into silence for a moment.

Lenny breaks it. “When was Victoria first reported missing?”

“That was part of the problem,” Polly says. “No one realized she was missing at first. Her mother and father traveled that night to Chicago for a few days. Victoria has one brother—Thomas, age twenty-three at the time. He ended up at his girlfriend’s. The staff had the night off. In short, no one checked in on Victoria, so no one even knows if she came home that night or what. Same with the next day. And the next. No one was around. When the staff came back, they figured Victoria was staying with one of her high school friends. Even when her parents came back from Chicago, they wondered where she was but, given her independent streak, nobody was overly worried. Her friends had rented a few ski homes in Cornwall to welcome in the new year. Her family figured she was at one of the other ones.”

“So when were the police first contacted?”

“The night of January fifth. And even then, it wasn’t all that urgent. The father, Archie Belmond, seemed somewhat concerned, but the mother, her name is Talia, thought Victoria was probably hiding from them on purpose. They’d had a fight before she left for the party.”

“About?”

“College. Victoria had made Tufts University her early decision, mostly because her parents both went there and gave a ton of dough. Victoria wanted to travel instead, she said. Maybe not go to college at all. Her mother threw a fit, according to what we know.”

“Routine family argument,” Gary says.

“Which was the problem. No one was really worried about her. If there were clues, they were vanishing day by day. The other thing that made it all seem okay is that the family received texts from Victoria’s phone, purportedly from Victoria. The texts were vague.” The slide changes, and Polly reads the texts out loud. “One says, ‘Happy New Year.’ Another says, ‘I’m fine, I’ll be back soon.’ Another read, ‘With C’—like the letter—‘on a last sec trip, back in a week.’”

“Who’s C?” Lenny asks.

“Yet another part of the problem,” Polly replies. “No one knew for sure who C was. Victoria had two friends named Chloe, one Caroline, one Cora. It was Christmas break, and in these wealthy circles, I don’t know, I guess it didn’t ring any alarm bells.”

“Or the parents were negligent,” Gary adds.

“Right, could be,” Polly says. “I’m trying not to be judgmental right now. I’m just giving the facts as we have them.”

“And doing a good job,” I add, giving her a thumbs-up.

“Thank you.”

“Victoria didn’t send those messages,” Lenny says. “Her kidnapper did.”

“That’s now the most likely theory, yes. But the texts help add to the delay and confusion. In many ways, the kidnapping was the perfect crime. Everyone is distracted by the big celebration and the worry about Y2K. Her parents are away. Her brother is with his girlfriend. School is out, so no teacher would miss her. All in all, it took five days to report Victoria missing—and even then, for all the reasons we’ve gone over already, very few people took it seriously. But as the days turned to weeks, everyone grew more and more worried until—”

Polly nods. The other Pink Panther clicks the remote and a blank slide comes up.

“—there was nothing.”

Polly pauses for effect, letting us stare at the blank screen. Then she starts speaking again. “No clues. No sighting. No witnesses. No leads. Not a trace of Victoria Belmond. Days turn to weeks. Then months. The legend grows. A true-crime documentary called Vanishing Victoria became a big hit. 48 Hours did a two-hour special on the rich-girl Y2K vanishing. 20/20 . The ID network. Whenever something new aired, there’d be a lot of excitement and someone would claim that they saw Victoria in an airport or on a beach or something, but it never went anywhere. Time passes.”

They click to a slide reading: One Year .

Click to the next slide: Five Years .

Click to the next slide: Ten Years .

The Pink Panthers have a flair for the dramatic, but the effect is pretty devastating. The room falls into respectful silence. Polly stands there and watches our reactions.

Golfer Gary shakes his head. “I have daughters,” he says.

Lenny: “Can you imagine?”

Debbie: “That poor family.”

“Everyone gave up hope,” Polly says. “The pain became too much. The family withdrew from public life. At first they’d had a lot of support, but as time went by, people started making awful accusations.”

“What kind of awful accusations?” Debbie asks.

“That the family was involved in what happened to Victoria.”

“What?”

“The Belmond Corporation got entangled in some ugly business scandals. There were those who wondered out loud about that, claiming that Victoria wanted to blow the whistle.”

“Blow the whistle on her family?”

“Yes,” Polly says. “Suddenly rumors started to take root and spread. Her parents’ trip to Chicago was last-minute. Maybe they took it so they’d have an alibi. Her brother, Thomas, had a bit of a checkered past—school suspension, dropped assault charges, too many DUIs. He also dropped her off in the city that night, so some wondered whether he had something to do with it. Victoria had a boyfriend whose father worked for the Belmonds. How come he didn’t notice she was missing from the party? Victoria lived in this wealthy community and knew all their rich-people secrets, so maybe someone in town had to silence her. From what we can see, the police didn’t take any of these too seriously. They were the stuff of tabloids.”

“What other theories were out there?” Gary asks.

“The usual. I think after a few weeks, the police believed Victoria was dead. That she’d been murdered right away and her body dumped in the river or buried in the woods. Or maybe she was still being held by a kidnapper somewhere belowground. Stuff like that. Others believed that Victoria was behind it all. She had this fight with her mother, so she ran away.”

I stand up. “That’s a lot of theorizing,” I say. “Does anyone remember our Sherlock quote on theorizing?”

Debbie raises her hand and without hesitation says, “‘It is a capital mistake to theorize before one has data. Insensibly one begins to twist facts to suit theories, instead of theories to suit facts.’”

We all look at her, stunned by her memory.

“Very good, Debbie,” I say. “So let’s not fall into that trap. Let’s get some more facts.” I look at Polly. “What happened next?”

Polly nods again toward the other Pink Panther. I wish I could remember her name. The next slide comes up. It’s a photograph of a diner straight out of a painting by Norman Rockwell by way of Edward Hopper. “This is the Nesbitt Station Diner located in Briggs, Maine. There’s nothing much in Briggs other than a maximum-security penitentiary. On March eighteenth, 2011, eleven years and nearly four months after Victoria Belmond vanished from McCabe’s Pub in Manhattan, someone claiming to be a waitress at the diner called the FBI and said that a woman sitting in the corner booth reminded her of the missing Victoria Belmond. The FBI didn’t take it too seriously, but they did call the local police. Two cops happened to be eating there anyway, so they checked on the woman eating alone in the corner booth. They asked her who she was and if they could see some ID. But the young woman either couldn’t or wouldn’t talk. Her head was shaved. They gently asked her to empty her pockets. She only had one thing in them…”

Polly swallows and nods. The slide changes.

“This.”

It is a yellowing three-row library checkout card, the kind of thing they used when I was a little kid, though they were dated even then. You’d bring your book to the library desk. The librarian would stamp the due date in the column on the left. She’d remind you that it would be a dime for every day you brought it back after that. Then you’d write your name in the center column. When you brought the book back, the librarian would stamp the return date in the right column.

On the top of this card, the one on the slide, where it reads Author, someone had typed:

Belmond, Victoria

Next line was the book title:

Captive

Under that, there are, as I mentioned before, three columns.

On the far left was the Date Due. Someone had stamped in:

Jan 31, 2000

Back in those days, you kept the book out for one month. This date, January 31, 2000, would be exactly one month after Victoria had vanished.

The middle area, where you put the Borrower’s Name, someone had scrawled:

THE LIbrARIAN.

And then the final column, Date Returned:

March 18th, 2011

That day’s date, more than eleven years after Victoria had vanished.

Under that, scrawled in script: I know I owe a heavy late fine, but I really enjoyed the book. My apologies for being tardy.

More silence. The room’s temperature has dropped at least ten degrees.

Someone finally mutters, “My god.”

Then Lenny says, “Man, that’s pretty psycho stuff.”

Polly continues, her voice properly somber now. “The police call in the parents. Victoria Belmond was seventeen when she left. If this is Victoria, she would be twenty-eight now. But the woman still won’t speak. She’s nearly catatonic. But when she sees her parents and brother, she starts sobbing uncontrollably. No one can console her. No one can get her to talk. When doctors run a full physical on her, they find signs of trauma and abuse, but they don’t release anything specific. She’s fifteen pounds thinner, but that’s not a huge surprise. At first, some officials are even suspicious of the woman.”

“In what way?” Lenny asks.

“Like maybe the girl is a fake, a con artist. Rich family, missing girl suddenly home. To be fair, it’s happened before.”

“I remember a case like that in Texas,” Gary says.

“Nicholas Barclay, right,” Polly answers. “And that boy was only missing three years. Victoria had been gone for eleven years, and even her own family isn’t sure it’s her at first. The father has doubts, I guess. The mother doesn’t.”

“Why didn’t they run a DNA test?”

“They did,” Polly said. “That’s why I said ‘at first.’ Back in those days DNA tests took a few days, so there are a few rocky days, but eventually the test confirms that the young woman found in the Nesbitt Station Diner is indeed Victoria Belmond.”

Silence.

Gary turns to me. “I don’t get something,” he says.

“Go ahead,” I reply.

“It’d been eleven years. Her head was shaved. She’s thinner. Her own family barely recognizes her. And yet some random waitress spots her and calls it in?”

“That’s a good point,” Polly says. “Did anyone else catch that?”

“We did,” one of the young influencers says, the first time they’ve said a word. “No waitress admitted making the call. We think it was probably the kidnapper.”

“Except the record shows it was a woman’s voice.”

“So maybe the Librarian is a woman?”

“Or maybe a woman who works with the Librarian. Or the caller could have used a voice changer. Even back then the technology was good enough to make the deepest male bass sound like a little girl.”

I try to get them back on track. “What happened next, Polly?”

“We don’t really know much. Eventually Victoria Belmond was able to talk, but it’s like the previous eleven years didn’t exist. She has no idea where she’d been or who took her or anything about a kidnapping.”

“Correction,” Gary says. “She claims to have no idea.”

“Maybe,” Polly says. “All we know is that Victoria started being treated by the best psychiatrists money can buy. But we really don’t know much more. The family asked for privacy, which makes sense, and they had the resources to make that happen.”

“But Victoria Belmond was found, what, fourteen years ago,” Gary says.

“Correct.”

“So where has she been in all that time?”

“That’s a mystery,” Polly says. “Victoria has never spoken publicly or given interviews. According to the public record, the case remains unsolved. No one knows who kidnapped her. No one knows where she was for those eleven years. The family is superrich and has residences in several states and at least two out of the country. She could be holed up in any of them or none of them. No one knows.”

“Almost twenty-five years since the crime initially took place,” Golfer Gary says with a shake of his head. “This case isn’t cold, Kierce. It’s frozen in ice.”

They all turn to me.

“Come on,” I say, spreading my arms. “Don’t you want a challenge?”

“A challenge, sure. But there hasn’t been a new development in years.”

I lean back in my chair. “Oh, I wouldn’t say that.”