Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

left, was she wearing a bra?”
    “The police never asked me that,” he said.
    “I’m sorry, Leon. You must have figured out before you hired me that this wouldn’t be easy. I can’t be polite when there’s something I need to know and you’re the only person who can tell it to me.”
    “You’re thinking...“
    “I’m not thinking anything,” I told him, not wanting to tell him what I had in mind until I tried it.
    “No bra,” he said. “She almost never wore one.”
    “I’ll be in touch,” I told him, wondering if you could be arrested for a hit-and-run when you’d done it verbally. Something I needed to know, I’d told Leon, as if that made it okay.
    I went back to the computer to check my mail before I turned it off. There were eleven spam messages, which I deleted, and two messages addressed to the new e-mail address I’d set up specifically for Classmates.com.

    Dear Sally,

    What a total hoot to see your name here. I don’t know if you remember me after all these years. I sat next to you in Miss Freibush’s English class. I went to Brooklyn College for two years, got married and had two kids. Me. I can’t believe it. I wanted to be a teacher but not one like Miss F with her bra strap falling down her arm and her slip showing half the time. My husband, Bob, is a chemist. We have a house in Paramus, New Jersey. I can’t believe I’m writing this. It seems like five minutes ago when we were in school. Please write and tell me all about yourself. Maybe we could even meet, have lunch or something one day.

    Barbara Tannenbaum Greene

    I wrote Barbara back and said I’d like to get together. Or maybe talk on the phone. “Send your number. There’s too much news for e-mail,” I wrote, hoping for a face-to-face.

    Dear Sally,

    I wondered where you went you disappeared so fast. Did you move or what? And where are you now?

    Jim

    Jim didn’t bother with a last name. I wrote him back and asked if we could get together for a cup of coffee—“too much news for e-mail,” I wrote again, hoping it would get me what I wanted. Jim didn’t say where he was, but if there was a chance of learning something about Sally, I was willing to travel.
    It was almost time to travel now, on foot, back to Sally’s block. I put on a pair of faded jeans and dug my old work boots out of the back of the closet. I was already wearing a white T-shirt so I unhooked my bra, pulled my arms out of the sleeves and dropped the bra on the bed. I twisted up my hair and fastened it to the back of my head with a big barrette.
    I checked my watch, then took it off. Sally hadn’t been wearing one the night she’d disappeared and neither would I. I didn’t have a white jacket with a hood. I wasn’t Sally and Dashiell was no Border collie, but all I could do is work with what I had.

CHAPTER 10

    I got to Sally’s block around nine and sat on the stoop for what seemed like ten minutes, fully aware as I sat there waiting that no matter what I did that mimicked Sally’s behavior that night, I wasn’t a twenty-three-year-old gorgeous blonde, that Dashiell carried very different baggage than a Border collie and that this was now and not then in dozens and dozens of ways I couldn’t begin to name. I knew that even if I were Sally, what happened this night might not reflect at all on what had happened five years earlier; you can’t step into the same river twice. Despite that, I was going to give it my best shot.
    If Sally had no money, maybe just a ten or twenty stuffed into her pocket along with the pickup bags, no credit cards and a medium-sized dog, how did she disappear? Was it even reasonable to think she hadn’t been abducted, raped, murdered and dumped? Was there a remote possibility that her story didn’t end with Sally’s body weighed down with a concrete block and dropped into the Hudson or buried somewhere in New Jersey, but with Sally in Flint, Michigan, say, alive and well and living a different life under another name?
    There was only one scenario I could think of that might have gotten Sally out of town. I walked downtown first, stopping whenever I saw a car, standing off the curb and sticking my thumb out, smiling hopefully. I tried Greenwich Street, where Sally lived, then walked a block over to Washington, which went in the opposite direction. I even tried hitching alongside the West Side Highway, although picking up passengers there would be dangerous and probably against the law. It was possible