The Missing Man's Diary

"Every mother keeps one drawer she hopes no one will ever open. The tragedy is that the police always ask for it."

Monday, 7:40 AM.

The call came from a number with a 937 prefix.

Lauren was in the car, parked outside a pharmacy on Centre Street, holding a paper bag of aspirin and a bottle of water she had no memory of buying. She looked at the screen for three rings. Then she answered, because she had stopped being able to ignore any phone that rang.

"Captain Vance?" A woman's voice, low and hoarse and flat, with the long vowels of somewhere far inland. "This is Eleanor Brody. Marcus's mother. Agent Hendricks gave me your number. He says you're the one who read my son's file to the end."

"Mrs. Brody." Lauren's throat tightened. "I'm so sorry for your loss."

"Don't." It was not unkind. "I've heard it a hundred times since last Sunday. Every one of them says it the same way, like they read it off a card." A pause, and the sound of a television somewhere behind her, turned low. "They've put me in a motel in Braintree till the Bureau finishes with the pieces. Eight days, now. I have something I didn't give them."

Lauren sat very still.

"Mrs. Brody, the agents on this case are the ones who should—"

"They asked if there was anything I wanted to tell them about my son," said Eleanor Brody. "I said no. They didn't ask the right question." A breath. "I don't think you'd ask it either. But Agent Hendricks says you were at the grave when they dug. You stood there seventy yards back, in the rain, with your hands on the tape. He says nobody told you to."

The line was silent.

"Come to Room 114," said Eleanor Brody. "Come alone."

Monday, 9:10 AM.

The motel on Route 1 smelled of carpet shampoo and old cigarettes.

Room 114 was at the end of the ground floor, past a vending machine and an ice bucket with a cracked lid. Mrs. Brody opened the door before Lauren could knock. She wore the same gray church coat as in the airport, though she had taken it off and put it on again, as if she could not decide whether she was leaving. Her eyes were swollen to slits. Her thick-wristed hands, folded in front of her, were absolutely steady.

She did not say hello. She turned and went back into the room, and Lauren followed.

Two narrow beds. A television with the sound off. A little round table by the curtains, with a plastic cup of coffee going cold and a Bible with a receipt for a bookmark. A suitcase stood open on the second bed. The clothes inside it had been folded as carefully as for a funeral.

On the table sat a round biscuit tin with a picture of a Scottish castle on the lid. Dented at one corner. Rust speckling the rim.

"It came in the mail in January," Mrs. Brody said. She remained standing. "A big cardboard box, no letter. Just his handwriting on the label. He'd come home in December for a week, and I thought it was strange, how thin he was, how quiet. Then this arrived, and I knew why. He'd packed up his things the way a person does when he thinks he's leaving." She stopped. "I put it in the hall closet. I told myself I'd look when he came home for the summer. He didn't come."

"Why didn't you show this to Hendricks?"

"I'd just got him back and he was a body. I didn't want strangers going through his pockets." Her mouth worked. "That was selfish. I know it was selfish."

"No."

"Read it first. Then you decide what to do with it. You've got more sense than they do about what's worth saying out loud."

She sat on the edge of the bed, and folded her hands, and looked at the wall.

Lauren lifted the lid.

Inside lay a stack of composition notebooks, the cheap black-and-white-marbled kind sold in school aisles, held together with a thick brown rubber band gone brittle. Seven of them. On the top cover, in a boy's careful ballpoint: M. Brody. Private. Keep out.

She slid the band off. It snapped.

The first notebook began when he was fourteen. She turned the pages slowly, with the tips of her fingers, as though they might bruise. A kid's handwriting, cramped and small. Complaints about teachers. A list of the books he had read that month. Drawings of staircases going up and down, up and down, in precise ink.

She skimmed. Notebook two. Three. The boy grew taller on the page. By nineteen he wrote in short declarative sentences. By twenty-two he had stopped describing anything he felt.

Notebook five began the winter four years ago.

January 9. R. says the boy's family will not press the complaint if the money is right. R. says it is better handled quiet. R. says they always are.

January 11. Mother is selling the back lot. I did not ask her to. She did it anyway. I should feel sorry.

January 14. The boy has withdrawn his statement. R. says the file has been closed as unfounded. I am free to go back to the office on Monday.

Lauren read it once. She read it again.

"Mrs. Brody."

"Yes."

"Who is R.?"

The woman on the bed did not turn her head.

"Four years ago," she said, "my Marcus was a supervisor at the bank. They gave him a summer intern to look after, a nineteen-year-old from Quincy, Peter something. One night, late, there was an incident in the records room." Her voice was flat, as if reading from a shopping list. "The boy said he'd been grabbed. He said he'd been locked in and told it was part of the training. He went to the police."

A truck went by on Route 1 and the window glass hummed.

"Marcus told me he was lying. I wanted to believe him." A long breath. "A detective telephoned me, from Boston. He had a lovely voice. Slow, kind. He said these things were very hard to prove, and very hard on a young man's career, and that it might be best for everyone if the family helped the boy's side reach an understanding. He said he knew how to talk to them. He called me again every month for a year, to ask after Marcus's health. He sent a Christmas card."

"What was his name?"

"Detective Miller. Raymond Miller." She said it without any hatred at all. "He was a gentle man, Captain."

The room was very silent.

Lauren put one hand flat on the table to steady it.

Leave Brody alone. The voice on the phone, pleasant and steady, the week her daughter was packing a canvas bag. What else is there to check?

"How much did you pay?"

"Fifteen thousand dollars. I sold the back lot, the one my husband left me. A man at the bank wired it for me, to an account the detective gave. I never saw the boy again. The paper said unfounded. I thought it was over." Mrs. Brody turned, finally, and looked Lauren in the face. Her eyes were red and calm. "But it wasn't the first time, was it? That's why they let him go the first time. And the second."

Lauren said, "No, ma'am. I don't think it was."

"I knew. I knew from when he was twelve. There was something in him that looked at people the way you look at furniture. I thought if I fed him well and loved him enough, it would grow out. It didn't grow out. It grew in." She laid her palm flat on the bedspread, and her hand began, very slightly, to shake. "And I'll tell you something worse, Captain. When those two agents came to my door and said he was dead, the first thing I felt, before the grief, before anything, was relief."

Lauren crossed the narrow space between the beds and sat beside her and took the hand.

Neither of them said anything for a long time.

Monday, 10:35 AM.

"The last notebook is the one I want you to read," Mrs. Brody said. "It's different from the others."

Lauren took the seventh from the bottom of the tin.

It was newer than the rest. The marbled cover was clean, the corners sharp. The handwriting inside had firmed over the years into a cold, slanting, perfectly regular script.

It was not a diary anymore. There were no days, no weather, no complaints about his mother. There were pages of initials and dates, in columns, ruled in pencil with a straightedge. Pages of numbers that meant nothing to her yet. A map drawn freehand, with a river and a cross and the word Cover. She felt the skin at the back of her neck go tight.

Then, abruptly, the columns stopped, and a single entry appeared at the top of a fresh page, dated the previous September, in the same icy hand.

Sept. 14. Have found the right subject. Nineteen years old. Quiet. Excellent memory. Alone in the city. He asks the right questions but he does not know what he is asking. I will need three months. I will need patience. Tomorrow, the first step.

Lauren read it three times, and the paper trembled very slightly in her fingers.

Nineteen years old.

She turned the page.

It was blank. She turned the next. Blank. She turned all of them, one after another, to the very end of the book, forty-one pages of white, ruled and empty.

"There's nothing after," said Mrs. Brody.

"Nothing."

"He stopped calling me that month. Every Sunday at six, for years, and then it stopped. Three Sundays, then four, then the whole autumn. I called his apartment. A machine. I called the bank, and they said he was on leave." She was looking at the dented tin. "Then on the nineteenth of December he came to my door. He was thin. He had a new haircut. He said he'd been in Chicago for work. I didn't believe him. I made him a plate of pork chops and he ate it with a fork and a knife like a gentleman, which he never did."

"Mrs. Brody—"

"After that he called every Sunday. Without fail." Her voice cracked. "Like he was paying me back for something."

Lauren shut the notebook.

She had a sheet of paper in her bag. She had carried it for weeks. It was a photocopy of Julian Frost's registrar's record, the one she had pulled on the night of the Tuesday fight with Chloe, with its neat rows of classes and credits and professors' initials.

She took it out now and laid it beside the notebook.

Fall semester, last year: Leave of absence, personal. Effective 9/17. Returned 12/17.

September seventeenth. Three days after the entry.

December seventeenth. Two days before Marcus Brody turned up on his mother's porch in a new haircut, with his plate of pork chops and his best manners.

The television flickered silently in the corner.

"What is it?" said Mrs. Brody.

Lauren looked at her. At the mother of a dead man. At the Bible with its receipt, the open suitcase, the dented tin. And she found that she had no mercy in her, only a cold lucid sorrow, like a woman reading the last page of a map.

"Mrs. Brody," she said slowly. "Did Marcus ever mention a student? A young man named Julian?"

"No."

"Did he ever bring anyone home? A friend? Someone younger?"

"Marcus had no friends." The words were bare and exact. "He had people he used."

Lauren nodded.

They had been gone the same months. The analyst and the student. Marcus Brody, whom no one had missed for ninety days in the fall, and a quiet boy with an excellent memory, who had vanished from the registrar's list on the seventeenth of September and come back on the seventeenth of December with a smile that never reached his eyes.

An apprentice, she thought. He chose him. He trained him. And at some point the pupil learned more than the teacher had meant to teach.

It fit. It fit the way a key fits a lock, which was exactly what troubled her. In her experience the truth rarely fit that well on the first try.

Monday, 1:20 PM.

She called Reyes from the parking lot.

"I need the archive," she said. "The original complaint, four years ago. Peter something, nineteen, intern, Vanguard Financial, Quincy address. Boston PD. Case number unknown. And Danny. Pull it yourself. Don't send a clerk."

"Captain, I'm in a briefing—"

"It's about Miller."

A silence on the line. She heard a door shut, footsteps, a chair.

"What about Miller?"

"I think he's the reason Marcus Brody was still walking around four years ago. I think he may be the reason a lot of things."

Reyes didn't answer for a moment. When he did, his voice had changed.

"I'll call you in an hour."

It took him forty minutes. She was sitting in the car with the biscuit tin in her lap when the burner buzzed.

Found it. Closed as UNFOUNDED. Reporting officer R. Miller. Payment memo clipped to back: $15,000 wire from B. Brody, Ohio, to an account ending 4471. Account holders R. Miller and M. Duval. That's his sister. No supervisor countersigned. Captain, he doesn't even have it hidden. It's just sitting there.

Lauren read it, and read it again.

Then she took the notebook out of the tin, laid it on the seat beside her, and sat looking at it for a long time.

Leave Brody alone. Of course he had said that. Miller had been Marcus's man for four years, bought and paid for and kindly, with his Christmas cards. And a man who has been bought once does not stop being bought when his client is dead. He simply waits to learn who the new owner is.

She picked up the phone and dialed a number she had known by heart for fifteen years.

It rang six times and went to voicemail.

"This is Ray Miller," said the pleasant, steady voice. "I'm out fishing. Leave a message, and I'll get back to you when the fish stop biting."

Lauren hung up without speaking.

She had promised Calloway one thing on Sunday. If you find a single thing, I want it. Before you act on it.

She typed with one thumb, slowly, so that every word would be right.

Ruth. Miller took Brody family money four years ago to bury an intern's complaint. Receipt in archive. Brody's last notebook dated Sept 14 last year names a "subject," 19 yrs. Julian's registrar record shows leave 9/17 to 12/17. I haven't touched Miller. Tell me how you want it handled.

She sent it. For the first time in nineteen days, she did not feel like a woman breaking a rule. She felt like a woman setting down a very heavy stone, and finding the ground beneath it more solid than she had hoped.

Outside the window, the wind came off Route 1 and rattled the cracked lid of the ice bucket outside Room 114, and went on rattling it long after her car had pulled out onto the road.