Love Her Madly Read online

  “Is this about Costa Rica?”

  He sat back in his seat. “Yes.”

  “Oh.” I glanced at the clock. It had been five minutes. While moments before my worry had been being left alone with a strange man, I was now concerned about Marisol, notorious water cooler gossip, overhearing our conversation and spreading my story all over the building. She’d be gone soon if she hadn’t left already.

  “I’m looking for Cyn,” he said. “I’m hoping you can help me find her.”

  I watched the words come out of his mouth, his bared teeth flashing as he spoke her name, but I still could not believe what he was suggesting. “You’re kidding, right?”

  McMurphy tilted his large head.

  “Do you have any identification I can see?” I said, feeling my face flush. I reached for the handset on my phone, suddenly quite afraid that this guy wasn’t from the State Department at all, but was instead some weirdo goon with an interest in dead girls and their friends.

  He slapped his wallet open on my desk. I stared at his photo. It was the same exact state-issued ID I’d seen countless times. He was legit.

  I eased my hand off the phone and sunk into my seat. Nothing made sense at that moment. Not even when he said, in the plainest English, “Cyn’s alive.”

  “No.” I said. She can’t be.

  “This has obviously come as a surprise to you. Forgive me.”

  “Of course it’s a surprise! She’s been alive all this time?”

  His gray eyes were fixed on me, unblinking, and I became incredibly conscious of all the strange things I’m sure my face was doing.

  “She’s really alive?” I asked, redundantly. My cheeks were aflame. I felt like I might pass out.

  “Yes. She’s very much alive, and in the city. I take it you haven’t seen her?”

  “No!” I yelled, and then laughed, loudly. Even to myself, I sounded hysterical. “I mean, I thought I had seen her, but that happens all the time. It’s never her.”

  He nodded. He was studying me intently, absorbed in the spectacle. His presence suddenly felt intrusive. I wanted a moment of privacy to absorb the news, but I also didn’t want to leave him alone in my office. He was too curious. His dispassionate observation reminded me of all those cameras surrounding me so many years ago, and I felt my shoulders tighten. But I wasn’t that frightened girl anymore. We were on my turf, and it was my turn to ask questions.

  “How do you know she’s alive, and what makes you think I’ve seen her?” I asked, doing my best to sound calm and collected, all the while a siren in my head blared, She’s Alive! She’s Alive!

  He looked over his shoulder and signaled to the door. “May I?”

  “There’s no reason for that. We’re alone.” I regretted the words even as I spoke.

  He looked down at his hat. “I know she’s alive, and I know that she’s here because I brought her here from Colombia.”

  “Colombia?”

  “Yes. You haven’t heard from her?”

  Asked and answered, I thought, but I noticed there was an edge to the question that it took me a moment to decipher. It was, I realized, hope.

  “No.”

  “What about your husband, Raj?”

  He said it casually, but it was obvious he was watching my reaction closely, as I was now watching his. I raised my eyebrows and stated, “No, my husband, Raj, has not been in contact with her either. Is she in some kind of trouble?”

  He made a face that would have been a smile had it possessed anything resembling warmth. “She’s in every kind of trouble. She is trouble.”

  I leaned back in my chair as the wind picked up, sending the blinds bouncing against the window frame. “I can’t believe she’s alive.”

  He chuckled drily and raised his wide shoulders in a small shrug.

  “How do you know her? Why is she here? What is this trouble you’re referring to?” These were the questions I asked, but all I could think was, Why the hell didn’t she let me know she’d survived?

  McMurphy leaned forward over my desk, his head craning to see my computer monitor. From closer up, I saw that he was younger than I’d thought. His gray eyes flicked toward me.

  “It appears to be almost seven thirty. Do you have time to hear this?” There was a note of challenge in his tone, as if he knew somehow that my “phone call” was bullshit. It dawned on me that he had probably done his research and knew perfectly well that Raj was not waiting for me anywhere but was instead getting in costume in his tiny dressing room several densely packed miles away.

  “I can make time for this, Mr. McMurphy.”

  “Please, call me Ryan.” He shifted in his chair, and his face relaxed into a more pleasant expression. “I’ve heard a lot about you from Cyn. It’s strange for me to be sitting here speaking to you. You’re something of a legend to me, like Elvis, or Marilyn Monroe.”

  Both dead, I mentally noted. The cigarettes caught my eye. The rain was pounding down outside, and the wind kept sucking the blinds outward. I needed a cigarette. “Do you smoke?” I began, on the verge of calling him Mr. McMurphy again. Ryan seemed far too intimate.

  “Trying to quit”—he smiled, suddenly boyish—“for about five years now.”

  I stood, feeling light-headed, and threw the window wide open. The patter of the rain infiltrated the room, softening the silence that had fallen.

  “I’m guessing your smoke detectors have also left for the weekend?” McMurphy jested, apparently unperturbed by the thought of the fire department showing up to join our meeting.

  The thought didn’t faze me either. At that moment, nothing did. Apparently, just the mention of Cyn spurred me toward reckless behavior. It was almost Pavlovian. I offered him my pack and walked behind him to close the office door and keep the fumes contained. We lit up as the wind rattled the horizontal blinds.

  “How is she?”

  McMurphy ashed into the coffee cup that I offered. “She’s troubled. She needs help. It’s important, if you see her, that you let me know. I’ve been working on her case, but last week, she went AWOL on me. Disappeared.”

  “And you haven’t seen her since?”

  “No.”

  “Why are you so certain she’d come to me?”

  He puffed and squinted toward the rain. “You were her best friend.”

  “That was years ago.”

  “Doesn’t matter. Not to Cyn.”

  “How exactly did you meet her?”

  “Five years ago. In Colombia. I was stationed at the embassy, doing visas, going crazy with boredom. Foreign service sounds glamorous, but really, it’s a desk job like any other but with shittier air conditioning. Anyway, that’s just to say the day she walked into my office was a pretty good day. She came in to talk to me about getting a passport for herself, and a visa for her husband.”

  I stubbed out my cigarette. “Husband?”

  “Some Colombian national. She said he was an engineer. She told me this extraordinary story, I don’t know how much of it was true, about being abducted by drug smugglers as a student. She told me the cartel members took her back to Colombia, and for years she had stayed because she was too ashamed to return to the United States.

  “I asked her why, and she told me to type her name into a search engine. I had been in the Philippines when she disappeared, so I’d never heard anything about her. But seeing the search results, I understood why she hadn’t wanted to hurry back and face all of that. The press really went after her, and she was practically just a kid.”

  I made a noncommittal noise, which McMurphy interpreted as a signal to catalog the things his search had found. I tuned out. I knew what the press had done, but I didn’t believe that shame alone would have kept her from fighting her way home if she wanted to return. She never cared much about what people thought. But being held captive by the cartel ma
de the picture a little clearer. Maybe that was why she hadn’t reached out to me.

  I tuned back in to McMurphy. Now that his cigarette was extinguished, he was rubbing his large hands together, creating a sandpaper sound. “I asked her to dinner that night. I was honestly very intrigued by her. She seemed so sweet and bright.”

  My eyes stayed on his hands. He wore a gold wedding band, dull with age.

  “You’re married.”

  He looked away, a hint of color enlivening his cheeks. “It wasn’t like that. I guess she just reminded me of the California girls I grew up with back home. She was this American girl who had lived out this crazy adventure, and she needed my help. I just wanted to hear more about her life.”

  With great force of will, I managed to say nothing.

  “She turned me down. She was sweet about it, of course. She said she lived out in the jungle, past the jungle, so she had several hours of rough travel ahead of her. She said something like, ‘If this was America, and I could hop onto a nice, paved highway, I would happily accept.’ ” He pressed his lips together and clutched one hand with the other as if it needed to be subdued.

  “Who is her husband?”

  “I don’t know anymore. Let’s just say that her story has not stayed consistent.”

  “How so?”

  He sighed, and wiped a palm across his face. I couldn’t be certain, but I thought I saw his chin quiver beneath his hand as it passed over. “I really don’t know what to believe about her at all, to be perfectly honest with you, Gloria. I’ve done so much for her. She’s cost me, literally, everything, and then just disappeared, as if none of my sacrifices meant anything to her.” His voice cracked, and he lowered his head so I couldn’t see his face. His shoulders trembled with a weird coiled tension that made me extremely nervous. He exhaled, and with a bashful smile asked, “Do you have anything to drink in here?”

  Jesus, I thought. What a lush.

  But in truth, I could have used a shot myself.

  “No. I’m sorry.”

  He reached a long arm down to the floor. I half expected him to produce a flask, but instead, he lifted a thin laptop case from his bag. “I realize that I may seem a little emotional, but I’m extremely worried. Cyn’s more than just another case to me. You’ve probably already figured that out.”

  “Yeah,” I said, watching as he powered up the laptop. He typed for a second, and turned the screen to face me. I couldn’t help but gasp when I saw Cyn, frozen on the brink of speech, seated in a leather chair within a room paneled with wood so dark, it appeared almost black. She was illuminated angelically in the glow of the screen, seeming to ward off the dark shadows that surrounded her by pure force of personality.

  He leaned back, watching me as I gaped at the face on the screen.

  “She never came back to my office after that first visit. I left Colombia three years ago, thinking I would never see her again. But then, a few months ago, I got an e-mail from her out of the blue saying that she was in trouble and needed to speak to me. We arranged a video conference. I taped it, just in case I needed to protect myself from any liability. Would you like to see some of it? I need your help. This may help convince you that I’m not some nut.”

  “I don’t think that.” I’d pegged him as a lot of other things, but staring at Cyn’s face on the screen in front of me, I did not think he was a nut.

  He stood and leaned over, pointing a nicotine-stained digit at the keyboard.

  “Hit that key to play it. Can you direct me to the men’s? I’d rather not . . .” He gestured toward the laptop.

  “Down the hall on the left,” I said, unable to look away from the screen. As he left, I pressed the “Play” button, and Cyn’s voice, unnaturally cheerful, chimed thinly through the laptop’s tiny speakers.

  I felt goose bumps race across my flesh and leaned in close to the screen, willing my eyes to accept it. She’d been around. For seven years. Without a call or an e-mail or a goddamn postcard. Why?

  I realized I wanted the video. I had to get it, otherwise I might begin to doubt it all the moment McMurphy walked out the door. I reached into my desk and grabbed the first flash drive that I found. I stuck it into McMurphy’s computer, opened his drive, and traced the video back to a folder named CynX. There were about twenty other files, similarly named. I held my breath, selected all, and hit “Copy.” I was amazed at myself, brazenly stealing McMurphy’s private files, but something also told me I was not getting the complete story. McMurphy’s laptop began making strange grinding noises, and I fought back a wave of panic, my nail beds pressed white against the surface of my desk as I stared at the screen. My drive showed that it was loading files, albeit at an incredibly slow pace. If McMurphy suddenly returned to find me in the middle of this betrayal, our relationship could take a very, very bad turn. For all I really knew, he was a double agent, sent to reclaim Cyn and drag her back to Colombia, or worse, end her here and toss her body in the Jersey Pine Barrens. With a sense of rising paranoia, I lifted up my office phone and dialed 9 and 1, and rested the handset on my shoulder.

  It was killing me to look at the lack of progress on the load bar, so I focused on Cyn, who was nodding encouragingly in response to McMurphy’s description of his new life in New York. She was wearing a prim, rose-colored blouse and pearls. A costume, obviously. She’d nailed McMurphy as the type to fall hard for a damsel in distress, and it was clear that she was playing her part for all she was worth. This was the Cyn I knew, with her back against the wall. Something big had to be at stake.

  I heard McMurphy’s steps coming down the hall, and my heart palpitated, the sweat now rolling down my sides. The download hovered at the brink of completion. I forced myself to breathe and told myself I would count to three, and whether the copy was finished or not, I would eject the drive.

  One. His footfalls were three doors away, just past the water cooler. Two. The status bar still read “working . . .” Three. The download completed, and I yanked the flash drive from the laptop, letting it fall soundlessly into my lap. When McMurphy walked in, I was holding his laptop in both hands, awkwardly. I hung up the phone, as casually as possible.

  “Trying to find the volume toggle,” I lied.

  He took the laptop and turned it up, just as Cyn was laughing. He grimaced. “I take it you believe me?”

  “Yes, I believe you.”

  He stopped the video and closed the laptop. “I know she’s very brave and very independent, but she needs help. Coming back home to the States was a lot for her to handle.” He paused, gently caressing the laptop resting on his thighs. When he began speaking again, his tone was soft and confiding. “We had a disagreement. I overreacted a little. I want her to know that I’m not angry. There’s nothing more important to me than her safety.”

  His eyes had gone dewy, and he hunched in his seat like a defeated giant.

  “Can I ask you a personal question, Mr. McMurphy?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Are you still married?”

  His right hand swept across his left, grazing his wedding band. “Separated. Things had been rocky for a while but . . . she didn’t want me to have anything to do with Cyn. When she found out I was helping her come to the United States, she left me. Took our two kids.” He said it flatly, as if all of the emotions he had were reserved for Cyn. “She served me the divorce papers last week, the same day Cyn vanished from our hotel room. So, you see, considering everything, if anything happened to her, I don’t know what I’d do.”

  “What makes you think something might happen to her?”

  “I’m not the only one looking for her.” He picked up his laptop, and while attempting to resettle it in its case, dropped it onto my handbag on the desk. My bag fell against the cup with the spoiled coffee and the cigarette butts, tipping it over.

  “Excuse me,” he said, lifting my bag quickly away fro
m the spill. “That was so clumsy.”

  I looked up and saw his hands were shaking. I took my bag from his grasp and wiped up the spill. “Don’t worry about it,” I said. There was a tickling in my head. Something that I wanted to ask, but it eluded me.

  McMurphy stood, packing up his laptop. “I should be going. She might be back at the hotel for all I know.” He pulled a business card from his pocket and scrawled a number on the back. “Obviously, I’m not in the office, so when you see her, please call my cell.”

  “You mean, if I see her.”

  He pulled on his coat, the movement rousing its acrid funk. “No, I mean when. She’s coming for you. Try to keep her in one place, if you can. And take my advice: be careful and don’t trust her.”

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  Raj

  I heard the train coming as I rushed down the slick stairs into the station. I made it into the car just as the doors closed and collapsed into an empty seat. In just a few minutes, less than half an hour, we would meet. The idea simultaneously thrilled me and left me cold with apprehension.

  I checked out my reflection in the dark glass of the train window opposite me, beneath which a bone-thin Asian woman sat staring into space, a red plastic bag of groceries balanced on either thigh. I looked passable. Slightly frazzled, certainly damp. I suspected that I still carried the lingering sourness of flop sweat in my sweater, but my scarf, when I tested it, smelled only of the cologne that Glo had bought me for Christmas.

  I realized with a sudden pang that I hadn’t called Glo after my show like I normally did. In truth, I hadn’t been in a big hurry to tell her about my onstage blackout, or the death knell of a conversation I’d had with Marshall. Then I’d seen the theater door. Glo would probably perceive my not calling as neglect, or a cold war continuation of our argument from the night before. Things were already too rocky between us for me to let that idea stand. I vowed to text her just as soon as I got off the train, and tell her an unexpected meeting had arisen. The astonishing details could wait until I got home and could deliver them face-to-face. She’d probably be a little miffed that Cyn had wanted to see me first, but considering the miraculous improbability of it all, she’d get over it fast.