The Missing Hours Read online

  “Jesus,” muttered Gabe.

  Edie almost felt sorry for her mother. What had she told Jim? And, I’m fucking the boy’s father.

  “We texted yesterday morning,” said Michelle. “Before I saw that.”

  “How close are you?”

  Edie’s mom sighed, then leaned forward into herself, her hand on her forehead. “We’ve been in the same circles forever. It’s not love. Definitely not love.”

  Edie looked up at her mom, who was looking at her dad. Her dad was looking at the floor.

  “And the last time you saw him?” Ingrid asked.

  “It’s been almost a week.”

  “Is that typical?”

  “Typical?”

  “Do you usually see each other more often?”

  “It really depends on our schedules.”

  “He hasn’t tried to contact you about this? Feel you out?”

  “No.”

  “Okay, here’s what I’m thinking,” said Ingrid. “That video depicts a felony. Multiple felonies, actually. Sexual assault cases are absolutely the hardest cases to win in front of a jury. Worse than a murder without a body. But this video makes it a slam dunk.”

  “How?” asked Edie.

  “You heard what he said about her peeing? It can be very difficult to prove a woman didn’t consent to sex if she knows the man. Or men, in this case. Especially if she’s been intimate with either of them before, or if she agreed to go home with even one of them. In most cases like this, where alcohol or drugs are involved, everything is circumstantial. Her past and her ‘character’ come into play. Basically, it’s all going to be about her. She’s both the victim and the accuser, so she’s under a microscope. But even if she reported it the next day there’s no way to test what was in her system when the sex happened. Maybe she was incapacitated or maybe she was just tipsy. There’s a ton of reasonable doubt. Most prosecutors aren’t eager to risk their conviction rate, and lots of women stop cooperating eventually. It’s a nightmare.

  “But.” Ingrid paused dramatically. “The one almost surefire way to convince a jury that a woman was not capable of consenting to sex is if she loses control of her bodily functions. Plus, there’s a new ‘revenge porn’ law aimed at people who pass around videos like this. With the right prosecutor, the asshole filming could easily spend twenty years in prison. Ridley Drake knows that.”

  Edie and her parents took this in.

  “What are you telling us?” asked Gabe finally.

  “What do you mean?” said Ingrid.

  “Exactly what I said. What are you telling us? What should we do?”

  “I’m not here to tell you what to do,” said Ingrid.

  “Well what the fuck are you here for?”

  “I am here, Mr. Castro, because Jim told me that you are considering going to the police to report your daughter missing. If you do that, there are going to be a lot of questions and you need to be prepared for them. You say no one at her dorm has seen her in more than a week, she isn’t answering her phone, and she hasn’t been on social media. All that is concerning. But she also may or may not have checked into a hotel, and she may or may not have withdrawn a large sum of cash. Claudia is an adult. No one saw her being grabbed off the street. No one saw her get into a stranger’s car. The only reason you have to believe she might be in danger is that video. And what I’m telling you is that that video is a can of worms. Half of the NYPD hates Ridley Drake, but the other half knows he pays extremely well for investigative assistance from former cops. They know he’s got dirt on their bosses and their bosses’ bosses, and they know that getting a DA to agree to bring a case against someone he’s representing—let alone someone he’s related to—is not going to be easy.

  “Don’t get me wrong, I am not saying you should do nothing. She might be in danger. Or she might come home when she’s ready. There’s no way to know. I’m just saying you need to be prepared.” Ingrid paused again. “Take a few hours. You have my cell. I can meet you at the precinct if you want to go that way, or we can talk about hiring someone to do a bit of digging privately.”

  Jim and Ingrid showed themselves out.

  “Was that supposed to make us feel better?” Edie asked. It occurred to her that without all the money, if it was Nathan’s sister suddenly missing, they’d already be at the police station. Should they be?

  The buzzer at the garden level door trilled through the walls.

  “Did they forget something?” asked Michelle, looking around.

  Gabe got up and went to the door.

  “Hello?” Edie heard her father say.

  A male voice, tinny over the speaker: “Hi. I’m a friend of Claudia’s.”

  PART 3

  CLAUDIA

  Going back to the dorm where Jeremy and Chad lived was not an option. She ran across the street from where she’d vomited, leaving Daphne shocked and squealing, and raised her arm for a cab. “North,” she said. In Times Square she saw the big hotel with the stupid restaurant on the ground floor and told the driver to stop. The lobby was scuffed marble and smudged mirrors and people in sneakers rolling oversized suitcases. She felt confident she would not encounter anyone she knew here. When it was her turn at the check-in desk, Claudia told the clerk with the eyebrow ring that she didn’t have a reservation.

  “How many nights?” the woman asked, typing.

  Claudia had not thought of this. “Two. No. Three.”

  “I’ve got a junior suite on the fourteenth floor open for the next five nights.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  The woman took her ID and her Visa and gave her an envelope with two key cards inside.

  “Have a nice stay, Ms. Castro.”

  On the way to the elevator she saw an ATM and took out the maximum: $500.

  The room faced west, overlooking the Hudson River and toward New Jersey. Her phone was off for now. She’d already missed the baby and she wasn’t ready to handle the possibility that people would start messaging her about the video popping up somewhere. She looked at the bed and realized she didn’t have anything to sleep in. She had the antibiotics and the PrEP pills in her purse, but not a toothbrush or a hairbrush or a change of clothes. Claudia took off her pants and the bra beneath her shirt, but when she climbed under the covers the sheets were cold and she felt exposed. Like something was going to creep up from the edge of the bed. She put her pants back on, filled up a glass with water, took her pills, and turned off the light.

  In her dreams, her cell phone was too big. She couldn’t slide it into her pocket. It kept growing, flashing, the video playing too loud. The laughing and the grunts and her silence bouncing off the walls of a bathroom stall. The water from the toilet running over. And she couldn’t get the door open without putting down the phone. But the floor was filthy and now the room was lined with overflowing stalls going back into infinity.

  She woke up the next morning and ordered pancakes that she didn’t eat, then slept and stared at the television all day and all night. Twenty-four hours went by and she kept the blackout shades drawn. From the TV she learned that there had been another slashing. The fifth. So far people had been attacked on the R train, the 3 train, the sidewalk near the Astor Place station, the F train, and now a platform under the Barclays Center. The first victim was a teenage tourist from Missouri; the second a stay-at-home mom from Park Slope; the third a sophomore doing theater at Tisch. The teenager was leaving The Lion King with her parents, headed back to their Airbnb in Astoria. The mom was part of a group celebrating fortieth birthdays. The sophomore was apparently standing on the sidewalk smoking a cigarette and talking to her dad on the phone when the man appeared and ran a box cutter across her face. All but one of the victims were women and all the victims survived, but the news had all kinds of people talking about blood and screaming, and the police were still trying to get a decent description of the guy. Over and over Claudia read the word, heard the word: victim. The victim’s mother says her life will never be the
same. The victim’s husband says her children are afraid. The victim the victim the victim. The word had spikes.

  She turned off the TV but the suck of sudden silence, the loneliness, roared in her ears. She flipped it back on, lowered the volume, and lay down on the sofa, letting her eyes glaze and tear, letting herself cry. What happens next? She couldn’t see anything past her headache; her hot, wet face; her mouth wide open on that video.

  She slept through the afternoon again and awoke to see the red and orange lights of midtown glowing beneath the curtains. Claudia got off the couch and walked to the window. She looked down at the mirrored glass and the glare off the river: it was beautiful. She was ugly now; sick, infected—but the world was still full of beauty. And that made her mad.

  The bar at Bubba Gump’s was crowded but there was an open stool at the end, and she slid in between the tray of garnishes and a blonde. Claudia knew she looked young but she also knew her ID was good. She asked for a vodka and soda and a menu. The blonde smiled at her.

  “Can I ask you somethin’?”

  “Sure,” said Claudia.

  “It one hundred percent counts as catfishin’ if you fake the profile photo and the age, right?”

  “Yeah, I think so.”

  “See!” she shouted at the bartender, whose name tag read Frankie. Frankie put up his hands in mock surrender.

  “Girl, we been through this before.”

  “I don’t know the rules anymore!” The blonde turned to Claudia. “I just got out of a relationship.”

  “Your boyfriend dumped your ass at Halloween, Lesley,” said Frankie. “It’s been a while.”

  “Can I help I’m too trusting?”

  “I don’t trust anybody anymore,” said Claudia.

  “Oh, shit,” said Frankie. “You too young to be like that.”

  Lesley put her arm around Claudia.

  “She’s smart,” said Lesley. “I wish I was a little smarter sometimes.”

  Frankie set the vodka and soda in front of Claudia. “You said it, I didn’t.”

  Lesley laughed. “Cheers to smart bitches.”

  Cheers. Lesley began to talk. She was from “outside Atlanta,” worked at Hooters (“I transferred up … It’s actually a great company!”) and lived in Bay Ridge. She’d moved to New York for a guy she met online two years before. He worked “in finance” and lived in Murray Hill in a “nice” one-bedroom “with a doorman.”

  “My mom was happy about the doorman,” she said. “She was certain I was gonna get raped when I moved here. I was, like, Mom, New York is the safest big city in the country! You know that, right? It’s crazy, but it’s true. I looked it up. Anyway, he literally broke up with me on Halloween. While I was wearin’ my costume.”

  “Tell him what you were,” said Frankie.

  “I was a sexy bride.”

  Frankie howled a laugh shook. “I felt sorry for her. I did.”

  “And it’s been love ever since,” said Lesley, blowing him a kiss.

  Frankie rolled his eyes. “I said I did. I don’t have no sympathy for bitches who don’t learn.”

  Lesley told Claudia that she came here to meet her online dates because it was near her job and reminded her of home. Apparently she had a lot of online dates.

  “I gotta find somebody to pay the rent!” She laughed and Frankie, who was refilling the maraschino cherries, slapped her a high-five. As if on cue, the two exclaimed: “The rent is too damn high!”

  Claudia ordered dinner for them both and another round of drinks. Lesley was drinking Chardonnay, so Claudia switched to that. Men came up to the bar and tried to talk to them, but Lesley shooed them away.

  “We’re having a girls’ night,” she said, and turned her back.

  At midnight, Lesley announced that she had to get home.

  “No sleep till Brooklyn,” she said. “That’s how you say it, right, Frankie?”

  “Yeah, but it’s never gonna sound right coming outta your mouth.”

  Claudia signed the bill and, as casually as she could possibly manage, turned to Lesley and said, “Crash in my room. I’ve got a suite.”

  Lesley, Claudia had learned at the bar, had two online personas: one for friends and family back home, and one she used for dating. Friends and family Lesley Swaine was the thirty-one-year-old Lesley smiling in her orange Hooters shorts, drinking beer on a blanket in Central Park, posing with the bull’s balls on Wall Street. Dating Leslee Lincoln was twenty-eight, wore black dresses and crossed her legs and drank champagne. Leslee Lincoln listed her occupation as “concierge, Southern Belle,” and Leslee Lincoln agreed to swipe right on Chad’s profile when they got up to the room. Less than five minutes later he responded.

  hey Belle—lost in the big city?

  “Can I write him back?” asked Claudia.

  “Sure,” said Lesley, handing her the phone. “Is there anything in the fridge?”

  “Take whatever you want,” said Claudia. “We can call room service, too.”

  Lesley chose a mini white wine. She unscrewed the top and drained half the bottle in a single swallow.

  Claudia typed: hopelessly!

  Lesley offered the bottle to Claudia for a sip and Claudia took it. Why not? She almost felt like smiling. This was going to be so easy.

  “So, what’s the plan?” asked Lesley. “Who is this guy?”

  “We used to be friends and he got the wrong idea.”

  Lesley drank more wine and nodded her head. Claudia felt understood so she told Lesley her idea; well, most of it. The part she needed to know.

  “I know a guy who has ketamine,” Lesley said.

  It was perfect. Claudia made her offer: “I’ll give you five thousand dollars if you get him to meet you at the bar, put some in his drink, and bring him up here.”

  Lesley closed one eye and squinted at Claudia, assessing. She was drunk, but it occurred to Claudia that Lesley might be the kind of person who performed much of her life while drunk. Her mom’s cousin Allison was like that; wine with lunch and then never without a drink in her hand until bedtime. Years ago, on the Vineyard, she and Edie saw Allison throwing up in the bushes. They told their mother Cousin Allison was sick. She’s not sick, said Michelle. She’s drunk. Ali’s usually drunk. In five years she’ll be twenty years older. Her mom had been right. At barely forty-five, Allison’s face and legs were swollen. Last summer she fell in the house and sliced her arm on the broken wineglass she’d been holding. Claudia remembered Allison’s scream and the blood smeared on the floor. Nathan was the only one who had any idea what to do.

  “Five thousand dollars,” said Lesley.

  “Plus whatever the ketamine costs.”

  “What’s the time line?”

  “Soon as possible. I’ll give you half tomorrow. I’ll go to the bank first thing.”

  “What happens after I get him up here?”

  “You leave.”

  “Then what happens?”

  “I give you the rest of the money.”

  Lesley lifted the mini wine bottle.

  “I’m in, girl. Cheers.”

  TREVOR

  Trevor sent her a dozen texts, but three days after he brought her to church, Claudia had dropped out of contact. It hurt, but he got it. She was embarrassed and traumatized and she needed time alone. On Wednesday, Whitney knocked to see if he was coming to Bible study.

  “Is Claudia here?” she asked, peeking her head into the suite.

  “No.”

  “Don’t get mad. So, you’re hooking up with her now?” She pushed past him. “You owe me the truth. Don’t you think?”

  “I don’t owe you anything.”

  Whitney hadn’t expected that. She grabbed his phone.

  “Let me just check … Oh! There she is. Claudia! Claudia! Where are you?”

  She was walking backward, scrolling, her beady little eyes grabbing as much information as they could. Trevor reached for the phone but she was prepared, twisted back. He wanted to push her, hard,
right out the door. He felt it in his stomach and his hands. He wanted her to fall. He wanted her to hurt. He wanted her to hurt for being whole while Claudia was shattered. She was going to make a scene about a freshman hookup? Privileged bitch. She’d never known anything but easy her whole life. He grabbed her wrist and she dropped the phone.

  “I hate you,” she said.

  “Whitney, you don’t know what you’re talking about. I’m sorry things didn’t work out between us. I really am.”

  She was crying before she got out the door. He picked up the phone. Each time he checked his texts and Claudia hadn’t written back, Trevor hated Chad Drake more. Sending that video was an act of aggression. Chad might as well have punched him in the face and laughed. Was he supposed to just take it? Turn the other cheek?

  Trevor got up early the next morning, put on a pair of sunglasses, and stood outside their dorm on Fourteenth Street. He didn’t have to wait long: At nine forty-five Chad walked out of the building and Trevor trailed him down University and into the library. He waited across the street, on a bench outside the park, and two hours later Chad came out and hailed a cab. Trevor did the same, saying, just like in the movies, “Follow that taxi.” Trevor held on to the strap above the window and leaned forward, watching FT778 jerk and speed uptown. The driver was listening to talk radio.

  “Can you turn that down?” Trevor asked.

  “What?”

  “It’s hard to think.”

  The driver lowered the volume.

  Chad got out uptown, in front of a fancy building on Fifth Avenue. Trevor gave the driver too much cash and jumped out.

  “Chad!”

  Chad stopped. Trevor hadn’t settled on what he was going to say when he caught up with him, and when Chad saw him hesitate, he laughed.

  “Why did you send me that video?” asked Trevor.

  “What video? I didn’t send any video.” Chad’s grin was egregious.

  “I know it was you. Claudia knows it was you.”

  “Whatever. Claudia Castro’s a fucking liar.”