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CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

I’m hesitant to talk about Spain without Victoria present, but Archie Belmond explains: “Vic didn’t ask you because she’s not sure she wants to hear yet.”

So I start to tell him. I do the meeting at the Discoteca Palmeras, the Lax Bros, all of that. I obviously don’t go into lurid details about the nights spent in her apartment. I realize that may sound tame in comparison to the rest of what had happened, but this man is her father and so why go there? I keep emphasizing, perhaps to ease his way, that Victoria/Anna never seemed in distress. We had fun, I tell him. I fell hard for her and I thought she fell for me, but we were just kids on the European equivalent of spring break.

“So how did it end?” Archie Belmond asks.

And here is where I make a decision that surprises me. I had figured that I would come clean. The man is paying me good money. He has as much to lose here as I do. We are working together with the same aim—to find out what really happened to his daughter and jointly what happened to me that morning in Spain. But something inside my brain—something old and instinctive and primitive—tells me that confessing to waking up with a bloody knife in my hand next to what I’d thought was the murdered corpse of his then-missing daughter would be unwise.

And what would be the point?

I had learned as a cop that you don’t just toss out information willy-nilly. You hold as much back as you can. My father puts it better: You can always say something later, but you can’t “unsay” something. I instead tell Archie Belmond what could generously be described as a partial truth. I tell him that I was conned—robbed—by his daughter and her partner, Buzz, that I woke up and my money was gone, and that we never saw one another again.

“Until she came to your class,” Archie says to me as I finish.

“Yes.”

“You’re saying she robbed you.”

“Or Buzz did. Or both.”

Archie Belmond rubs his chin. “One thing I don’t get.”

I wait.

“When Vic came to your class, you knew who she was right away.”

No reply from me.

“You haven’t seen her in a quarter century. Her hair is changed. She’s aged. She looks pretty different, I imagine. Yet you saw her across the room and immediately knew that this woman in her forties was the girl you knew in Spain. How?”

“It’s a fair question,” I say.

I had wondered this myself, except that I’m not telling him the full story, am I? I’m giving him a sanitized version. You might not remember a girl you dated or who rolled you. You definitely remember a girl who convinced you she’d been murdered, perhaps by you in some violent, drug-n-drunk haze. But I give him another answer that is probably true too.

“Maybe because she ran when I saw her,” I say. “I don’t think I knew right away. But when she ran, yeah, something clicked.”

There are so many half-truths in the room already, even I’m not sure anymore how much bearing this had on anything.

“So what’s your first step?” he asks me.

“I’d like to speak with your wife.”

I find Talia Belmond in tennis whites heading to the court. I ask her whether we can talk before she starts playing. She looks at her watch a few beats longer than necessary. Still staring at the watch, she says, “May I ask you a question, Mr. Kierce?”

“Of course.”

“Are we being stupid?”

“I’m not following,” I say, though perhaps I am.

“This pursuit. Digging up the past.”

“You want to know what happened to your daughter,” I say. “That’s natural.”

“We are in a good place right now,” Talia Belmond tells me. “As a family. All of us. Including Victoria. So shouldn’t we just let sleeping dogs lie?”

“Is that a rhetorical question?” I ask.

“I’d like to hear your thoughts.”

“It may sound self-serving with the money you’re paying me,” I say. “But no, you shouldn’t let sleeping dogs lie. If you don’t mind me mixing metaphors, I’ve seen a lot of people try to bury the past. It works for a little while. But whatever is buried, it eventually claws its way out of the ground.”

She nods. “That’s how I feel,” she says. “Like whatever happened is still here, still with us, hiding in the closet or, yes, buried in the ground, and if we don’t dig it up ourselves, it’ll attack us by surprise.”

“That makes sense.”

“But I worry,” she says. “Because there’s trauma here. A lot of it.”

“You know I used to be a cop.”

“Yes, of course,” she says.

“Cops do this a lot—dig up people’s personal trauma for answers. It hurts. You have to be careful and do it slowly. Like one of those archeological digs where everything is fragile and so you use brushes instead of shovels or whatever. But do you know what I’ve learned from doing this a lot?”

“Tell me.”

“Nothing heals trauma better than resolution and closure.”

Talia Belmond studies my face. “Including your own?”

I don’t say anything.

“Come now, Mr. Kierce. You don’t think I know that you have some personal stakes in finding the answers?”

“No, I do,” I admit. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe I’m the one who needs closure and resolution.”

“Sounds like we both do,” she says. “So go ahead. Ask your questions.”

I dive straight into the deep end of the pool. “You weren’t home on that New Year’s Eve.”

“That’s right.”

“Can you tell me where you were?”

“I was in Chicago. My father had just gone into hospice, and I wanted to spend some time with him.”

“Your husband didn’t travel with you?”

“No, he stayed home.”

“Did he go to any parties?”

“He stayed in.”

“It was the end of the millennium. Nineteen ninety-nine and all that. I’m sure there were a lot of party invitations. Before your father went into hospice, had you been planning on attending one?”

“Why does that matter?” Before I can explain that I’m wondering whether anyone would think that the house might be empty, she holds a hand up to stop me. “Archie and I, we aren’t New Year’s Eve people. We never go out on New Year’s Eve. We sort of take pride in that. Most years, we are asleep by midnight. But that year in particular? Archie was a little worried about Y2K. You remember all that?”

I nod. “That when the computers went from 1999 to 2000, no one was sure what would happen.”

“Right. That computer systems wouldn’t be able to distinguish between 1900 and 2000 and there would be chaos and power outages, stuff like that. We didn’t stockpile like some people did, but Archie stayed home, just in case, so if something went wrong, he would be near the kids. Once we knew everything was okay with Y2K, Archie took our plane and flew up to meet me.”

“Do you remember what time he arrived?”

“No, sorry. Very late. Probably three or four in the morning? I know I woke up next to him.”

“Where were you staying?”

“At the Four Seasons, I think,” she says, but I’m annoying her now. “Is this really important?”

It wasn’t. “You stayed a few more days?”

“Yes. But my father stabilized, so we came back home.”

I know already that her father died three weeks later. No reason to bring that up.

“Could I just quickly answer the rest of this part for you?” she asks. “No, I didn’t think anything was wrong. I was focused on my father. Not hearing from Victoria wasn’t that unusual. I also didn’t hear from Thomas. This was twenty-five years ago. I didn’t have a mobile phone. I was one of the final holdouts. I didn’t like them then, and I like them less now. As Archie probably told you, he did get a few texts from Victoria’s phone. One said ‘Happy New Year.’ He showed that one to me. Thomas got one from her too.”

“When did you start to worry?”

“That’s the thing.”

“What is?”

“I called her mobile on January third. No answer, but again, it was a different era. None of us carried our phones all the time with us. So I didn’t think that much about it. I was worried about my dad. My point is, you expect something like this to hit you all of a sudden. But my worrying about her, it wasn’t like that. It was like a slow descent. I started to feel a nagging, then a worry, then finally, a bit of a panic. Even when we went to the police, I was hesitant. Victoria could be impetuous, rebellious even. I figured she had met a guy and run off for a few days. Or she was with a friend we didn’t think about. You think a mother would know better, right? Like I should have had some kind of sixth sense. But I was oblivious. Or distracted. Or maybe there was some kind of self-defense mechanism thing going on and I subconsciously knew the truth and didn’t want to face it.”

The guilt was coming off her in waves. There is no reason to harp on this. It seems obvious now that Victoria’s kidnapper had sent those texts or had coerced her into sending them. Then at some point, the kidnapper realized that the phone’s location could be triangulated so they stopped and probably got rid of the phone. Still, those texts were clever. They kept the parental worry at bay and helped make the trail go cold.

“What?” she says.

“Would it sound weird if I just say, let’s skip ahead eleven years to the day she came home?”

She smiles. “A little.”

“Before I do, is there anything you can tell me about those eleven years that might help?”

“Nothing,” she says quickly. “Most of the days, I was just numb. It was weird. You’d wake up every day and you couldn’t believe this was your life. That you’d have to get out of bed and brush your teeth and then after, I don’t know, a year, maybe two, you actually have your appetite back and there are days you almost feel okay, like you’re living again, and then you remember that she’s still gone and now on top of your everyday pain you feel the self-hatred because for a moment you forgot about her, and that for a moment, you maybe enjoyed something or smiled and that just feels like the worst outrage.”

I say nothing.

“I imagined seeing Victoria. For real. Did Archie mention that to you?”

He had, briefly, but I didn’t want to stop her, so I gave a small headshake.

“You know those scenes in TV shows where some guy is searching for a missing girl, maybe his girlfriend or something, and the guy thinks he sees her in a bar or a club and so he runs up to her and taps her on the shoulder and then she turns around and it’s not her?”

“Sure.”

“That was my life for a while. Once every, I don’t know, three or four months I’d be in New York City and I would swear—swear—that Victoria was across the street and I could never get there in time. Or she was in a crowd at a concert at Madison Square Garden, but she would vanish before I could get to her. Once I was convinced that Victoria was a barista at a Starbucks. I ran home and dragged poor Archie back to the Starbucks with me. I made him check out every barista. He even paid the manager to show us photos of every barista who was off duty. Archie was so good to me. He tried to help me find an outlet. We started Vic’s Place. Do you know what that is?”

I nod. “A charity for girls in trouble?”

“Yes. If we could help other girls, if something good could come out of what happened to our daughter, well, isn’t there some kind of cosmic balance in that? We set up Vic’s Place. I started volunteering there. A lot. And every once in a while—you could probably guess where I’m going with this—I would see a girl there and I’d be so sure that it was Victoria. I started seeing a therapist twice a week because of this.” She stops, shakes her head. “I’m not making my point, am I?”

“I think you’re doing fine.”

“My point is, the therapist would want to dig into past trauma. That’s what psychiatrists do, of course. What were my parents like? Was I ever sexually abused when I was a kid? How about that uncle who was a bit of a letch? That kind of thing. But it was none of that. I wasn’t having mental issues—it’s just that I wanted to know where my daughter was. Was she dead? Was she buried somewhere? Did she get dumped in the sea? Was she being held in someone’s basement—or did she get hit on the head and lose her memory? Maybe she was just fine, just right around the corner, working at a Starbucks as a barista. The not-knowing was torture. So of course, of course , I imagined seeing her. And then one day, after eleven years”—tears fill her eyes now—“your baby finally comes home.”

I try to handle this as gently as possible. “Can you tell me about that?”

“I didn’t believe it. Ironic, I guess. I was always the one who imagined seeing her, but when they told me about finding a woman with her head shaven at that diner, I was too afraid to believe it. And when I first met her, I wasn’t sure she was my baby. She didn’t talk. The police asked her a ton of questions, but she wouldn’t speak. For days. We took her home. Archie insisted. Got her around-the-clock care. We ran a DNA test right away. I gave blood for it. Archie’s idea. It confirmed that she was Victoria. I sat with her twenty-four seven. I wouldn’t leave. Not for a minute. I was afraid she’d vanish if I did. Or I’d wake up and it would have been a dream, like in the past. Then on the fourth day, she spoke to me for the first time.”

“Do you remember what she said?”

“Of course. Victoria had a king-size bed in her room. She let me lie next to her. We were watching TV. The Price Is Right was on. I was holding her hand, and she said, ‘Are you my mother?’”

I tilt my head. “That’s the first thing she said?”

Talia Belmond nods. The tears come now. “It’s not what you think. She wasn’t asking me, like she didn’t know. It wasn’t a question.”

“What then?”

Talia swallows. “It was her favorite book. When she was three. I used to read it to her every night. An old picture book called Are You My Mother? by P. D. Eastman. Do you remember it?”

“I do,” I say.

“And when Victoria was little and I would tuck her in at night, she would never say, ‘Read to me,’ she would just say…”

“… ‘Are you my mother.’”

Talia blinks. “It’s when I knew. More than any blood test. Anyway, that was the start. She slowly started talking. It took some time, but she came back to us. It was the most beautiful thing I will ever know in my lifetime. There is an old expression: A parent is only as happy as their saddest child.”

I think about that. “Profound,” I say, and I mean it.

“Yes. And so I want to know what happened to Victoria, Mr. Kierce. But the thing is, my daughter is indeed happy. Happiness is always fragile. For all of us. Like a bubble.”

“And you’re afraid I’ll burst that bubble.”

“I am, yes.”

“I’ll do my best not to.”

My phone rang then. As I mentioned, I keep it on silent except for certain people. I look down and see the call is from Molly. I excuse myself and move toward the corner as I put the phone up to my ear.

“Molly?”

“Where are you?”

“Still at the Belmonds. Everything okay?”

“No,” she says. “Someone’s stalking us.”