Page 40 of A Talent for Murder

“Are you Vicky?” I said.

She looked up, her eyes suspicious, and said, “Maybe.”

“Hi, sorry to jump out at you like this. My name’s Addie Logan. I’m sure you’ve never heard of me, but I used to date your brother, Ethan.”

“Oh,” she said, and I couldn’t quite read her expression. “Bully for you,” she added.

“This was a long time ago, about twenty years,” I said, putting a little desperation in my voice. “And I would really like to talk with him. Will you help me out?”

The door behind us swung open and we both moved out of the way of a woman trailing a waft of perfume, who said, “See you tomorrow, Vic,” as she passed by.

“Let’s move down the street some,” Vicky said.

I followed her as she walked, then stopped under the awning of an abandoned storefront. She had finished half her cigarette. “I haven’t heard from Ethan in over ten years,” she said, in a flat dismissive tone. “I don’t have a phone number for him or an address or anything. He didn’t come to my dad’s funeral or my mom’s. Not surprising, and frankly no one wanted him there. For all we know, he’s dead, and forgive me for saying it, but it might be for the best.”

“What did he do?” I said.

“You knew him, right? What did you think of him?”

“We dated for a little while. He was decent to me.”

Vicky took a long, cheek-imploding drag of her cigarette, and said, “Then you were the only one. Sorry I can’t help, but I don’t know where he is, and I don’t want to know. He’s just a bad seed. He made all of us miserable, and I suspect he’d make you miserable if you managed to find him. I gotta go, hon. Sorry.”

“I have a kid, and I’m pretty sure it’s his,” I said, the words just coming out of me. I knew that if I didn’t say something dramatic, I was going to lose her. Still, she didn’t immediately react, except for jutting out her lower lip as though she were thinking about what I’d just said.

“Your kid okay?”

“It’s a girl, her name is Lily and she’s great.”

“Then don’t ever introduce her to the evil fucker that is her father,” Vicky said. “And now I really got to go. Good luck to you.”

She took off down the street, flicking her cigarette away, and taking a left so that she was out of sight. I crossed quickly to my own car, sliding into the driver’s seat and starting it up. I couldn’t decide whether to stay put or to follow Vicky down the side street, but while I was figuring out what to do, I spotted a white pickup truck moving through the intersection, Vicky’s blond hair visible through the side window. I followed her, wanting to see where she lived.

We’d only gone about a mile when she pulled into the driveway of a modest single-family house on a street of similar houses. I drove past, catching the number on the mailbox. It was thirty-five, and the street was called Tenafly Avenue. I found a small park with an empty lot and sat in my car for a while. I put the address into my phone and found a listing on a real estate site that said the house had been sold to a Victoria Andrucci by a Caroline Saltz for one dollar back in 2012, which meant that this was most likely the childhood home of Ethan Saltz.

It was dark now and I got out of the car, donned the hooded fleece jacket I’d brought, and walked back along Tenafly Avenue to Vicky’s house. There was now a second car in the driveway, a beat-up-looking Dodge with a New York Yankees bumper sticker. The house itself was well lit by a streetlamp; the first story was orange brick, and the second was painted white, or more likely it was vinyl siding. The driveway culminated in a single-car garage, and there was about two feet of clearance between the garage and a thick hedge that separated the property from its neighbor. I skirted along the garage in the dark, a thorny branch from the hedge scraping along my cheek, and emerged into a small rectangular garden, fenced on three sides. It was much darker in the garden than it had been at the front of the house, but I still hid myself behind a damp stack of wood with a view through two large windows at the back of the house. I could see into a small living room dominated by a large sectional sofa, and I had a partial view into an overly lit kitchen through a sliding glass door. It was in the kitchen where I could see the back of Vicky’s head. She was talking and gesturing wildly with another blond woman, who looked mid-twenties, at least. The other woman, maybe Vicky’s daughter despite how close in age they looked, had a sour expression on her face. She was drinking from a large lime-green water bottle. They talked some more and then they both disappeared from the kitchen toward the front of the house. Five minutes later the younger woman reappeared, wearing a denim jacket now, and retrieving her water bottle. She flicked the lights off in the kitchen. I moved back down along the side of the garage, scratching my other cheek on the same hedge, and peered out in time to see Vicky and her probable daughter driving away in the white truck.

I returned to the backyard and immediately went to the back door. It was locked. I found a basement bulkhead at the edge of the house and pulled it open. It creaked as though it hadn’t been used in years. I walked down the poured concrete steps through a network of old spiderwebs. The door at the bottom was unlocked as well and I stepped into a dark basement. Using my phone’s flashlight, I found the stairs that led up to the first floor of the house.

I shouted a quick hello into the house to make sure no one was there. After not getting an answer, I moved into the living room. If this had been Ethan Saltz’s childhood home, then maybe there was something here that would be helpful. And maybe there would even be some indication that Vicky was actually in contact with her brother, although that was a stretch.

I moved fast through the house, focusing on desk drawers and closets that might be used for storage. I didn’t find anything interesting on the first floor and made my way up the stairwell. A hanging light had been left on and I looked at an array of family photographs that decorated the wall next to the stairs. Most of the pictures were of Vicky with her now-confirmed daughter. One of them showed Vicky holding a baby in which she looked to be about sixteen years old, at most. There was one wedding photograph on the wall that looked as though it were from the late sixties. The general color palette of the wedding guests assembled in the shot was brown and yellow. The couple, who I assumed were Ethan Saltz’s parents, were surrounded by older relatives. No one looked particularly happy. I wondered if anyone in that photograph was alive, and I remembered looking at my parents’ own wedding photograph, from around the same decade, and my father commenting that all wedding photographs were just pictures of dead people. (“You could say that about every photograph,” I’d said to him.) I kept moving up the stairs, looking at all the pictures. Unless I’d missed one, there were no pictures of Ethan, either as a boy or as an adult.

There were no lights on in any of the rooms upstairs, so I used my phone again. I bypassed the two bedrooms that appeared to belong to mother and daughter and found myself in a room that was partly a storage area and probably also a guest room. The walls were papered in a swirly geometric pattern of light brown and dark orange. There was a trundle bed against the far wall, and the floor was covered with old boxes that had helpfully been labeled with a black marker. Xmas Stuff. Victoria—Elementary School. Taxes 1999–2009. Et cetera. None of the boxes said anything about Ethan. Still, I kept looking through the piles, listening for the sound of a car pulling back into the driveway. If they were out to dinner, I was fine. If they were picking up takeout, I was in big trouble.

Just when I had convinced myself that Victoria had scrubbed any and all reminders of Ethan from her home, I moved two framed travel posters that had been leaning against a bookcase and spotted three Cresskill High School yearbooks crammed in between old Stephen King paperbacks and romance novels. I grabbed the 2000 yearbook, the most recent of the three, and quickly flicked through the senior photographs, and found Ethan Saltz, looking very clean-cut and handsome. I rifled through the pages and spotted a few signatures here and there, including two that contained that timeless phrase, I wish we’d known each other better. But one of the seniors, a girl named Alice Gilchrist, had written a long paragraph to Ethan, beginning with, To the Talented Mr.Saltz... I wanted to read it all but was starting to get very nervous about being caught in the house. I put the posters back over the bookshelf and left the way I had come, taking the yearbook with me.

Chapter22

After dinner I went to my bedroom and cracked the window, the air still warm for this time of year. I could hear a chorus of chirps, the spring peepers down by the marshy pond at the edge of our property, a sure sign that winter was over. I called Henry, who picked up after one ring.

“Any luck?” I said.

“Finding Ethan: not yet. But I got some information from his brother. You?”

“I didn’t find him, either. He has no contact with his sister and she called him an evil fucker.”

“Well, that’s pretty much what I found out, too.”

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