Despite the fact that he’d been a friend of my father’s, I liked him a lot. You couldn’t help it. He was gregarious and affectionate and funny, a man of large appetites-he loved food, wine, cigars, and women, and all to excess. There was something immensely appealing about the guy.
His house looked exactly the same as the last time I’d visited: the Har-Tru tennis court, the Olympic-size swimming pool overlooking the ocean, the carriage house down the hill. The only thing new was a guard booth. A drop-arm beam barricade blocked the narrow roadway. A guard came out of the booth and asked my name, even asked to see my driver’s license.
This surprised me. Marcus, despite his enormous wealth, had never lived like a prisoner, the way a lot of very rich people do, in gated communities behind high fences with bodyguards. Something had changed.
Once the guard let me through, I drove up to the semicircular driveway and parked right in front of the house. When I got out of the car I glanced around and spotted an array of security cameras mounted discreetly around the house and property.
I crossed the broad porch and rang the bell. A minute or so later the door opened and Marshall Marcus emerged, his short arms extended, face lit up.
“Nickeleh!” he said, his customary term of endearment for me. He bumped the screen door aside and engulfed me in a bear hug. He was even fatter, and his hair was different. When I last saw him, he was mostly bald on top and wore his gray hair down to his shirt collar. Now he was coloring it brown, with an orange tint, and the hair on the top of his head had magically grown back. I couldn’t tell if it was a toupee or very good implants.
He was wearing a navy blue robe over pajamas, and he had deep circles under his eyes. He looked exhausted.
He released me, then pushed against my chest and leaned back to examine my face. “Look at you-you get more and more handsome each time I see you. Enough, already! You don’t age. You make a deal with the devil, Nicky? Is there a portrait of you looking like an alter kaker in your attic?”
“I live in the city,” I said. “No attic.”
He laughed. “You’re not married, are you?”
“I’ve avoided that so far.”
He put a palm on my cheek and slapped gently. “Punim like this, I bet you gotta beat off the girls with a stick.” He was trying valiantly to feign his customary high spirits, but I wasn’t convinced. He put a pudgy arm around my lower back. He couldn’t reach as high as my shoulders. “Thank you for coming, Nickeleh, my friend. Thank you.”
“Of course.”
“This new?” he said, jerking his head toward my car.
“I’ve had it for a while.”
I drive a Land Rover Defender 110, which is boxy and Jeep-like and virtually indestructible. Hand-cranked windows. Rock-hard seats. Not a very comfortable ride, and pretty noisy inside when you exceed thirty miles an hour. But it’s the best car I’ve ever owned.
“Love it. Love it. I drove one of those around the Serengeti once on safari. Ten days. Annelise and Alexa and me. Of course, the girls hated Africa. Spent the whole time complaining about the insects, and how much the animals stank, and…” His smile disappeared abruptly, his face drooping as if worn out by the effort of keeping up the façade. “Ahhh, Nick,” he whispered, a look of pain contorting his face, “I’m scared out of my mind.”
6.
“When did you last hear from her?” I said.
We sat in the only room downstairs that looked like it got any use, a big L-shaped eat-in kitchen/sitting room, in comfortable chairs covered in slouchy off-white slipcovers. The view was spectacular: the steely gray waves of Cape Ann lapping against the rocky coastline.
“Last night she drove down to Boston-she told Belinda she’d be back later, which Belinda assumed meant, you know, midnight or something. One or two in the morning, if she was having a good time.”
“When was this-what time did she leave the house?”
“Early evening, I think. I was on my way back from work.” Marcus Capital Management had an entire floor in one of the new buildings on Rowes Wharf, which I could see from a corner of my own office. He always worked long hours when Mom was his assistant, and he probably still did. A town car would take him into Boston every morning and take him home to Manchester every night. “She was gone by the time I got home.”
“What was she doing in Boston?”
He heaved a long sigh, more like a moan. “Oh, you know, she’s always partying, that one. Always going out, to discos or what have you.”
Disco: I couldn’t remember when I last heard that word. “She drove herself? Or did she get a ride with a friend?”
“She drove. Loves to drive. She got her permit on the day she turned sixteen.”
“Was she meeting friends? Or was this a date? Or what?”
“Meeting a friend, I think. Alexa’s not dating, thank God. Not yet, anyway. I mean, not as far as I know.”
I wondered how much Alexa told her father about her social life. Not much, I suspected. “Did she say where she was going?”
“She just told Belinda she was meeting someone.”
“But not a guy.”
“No, not a man.” He sounded annoyed. “Friends. Or a friend. She told Belinda…” Marcus shook his head, his cheeks quivering. Then he put a hand over his eyes, squeezing hard, and gave another long sigh.
After a few seconds I asked softly, “Where’s Belinda?”
“She’s upstairs, lying down,” Marcus said, his pudgy hand still covering his eyes. “She’s just sick about it. She’s taking this really hard, Nick. She didn’t sleep all night. She’s a wreck. She blames herself.”
“For what?”
“For letting Alexa go out. Not asking enough questions, I don’t know. It’s not Belinda’s fault. It’s not easy being the stepmother. Any time she tries to, you know, lay down the law, Alexa bites her head off. Calls her the ‘stepmonster’ and all that-it’s not fair. She cares about Alexa like she was her own, she really does. She loves that girl.”
I nodded. Waited half a minute or so. Then I said, “Obviously you tried her cell.”
“A million times. I even called your mom-I figured maybe it got late and she didn’t want to drive and she didn’t want to call us, so maybe she decided to spend the night at Frankie’s. She loves Francine.” My mother’s condo was in Newton, which was a lot closer to downtown Boston than Manchester-by-the-Sea.
“Do you have reason to believe something happened to her?” I asked.
“Of course something happened to her. She wouldn’t just run off without telling anybody!”
“Marshall,” I said, “I can’t blame you for being scared. But don’t forget, she does have a track record for acting out.”
“That’s all behind her,” he said. “She’s a good kid now. That’s the past.”
“Maybe,” I said. “But maybe not.”
7.
Some years back, as a kid, Alexa had been abducted in the Chestnut Hill Mall parking lot, right in front of her mother, Annelise, Marcus’s third wife.
She hadn’t been harmed, though. She’d been taken for a ride, driven around, and a few hours later dropped off at another parking lot across town. She insisted she hadn’t been sexually assaulted, and an examination by a doctor confirmed it. She hadn’t been threatened. They hadn’t even spoken to her, she said.
So the whole thing remained a mystery. Did her abductors get scared off? Did they change their minds? It happened. Marcus was known to be very rich; maybe it had been an aborted kidnapping-for-ransom attempt. That was my assumption, anyway. Then her mother left, telling Marcus she couldn’t bear to live with him anymore. Maybe it was precipitated by her daughter’s kidnapping.