Chapter 23

I got to Queens at ten thirty and found a parking space half a block from the storefront where Alice Gilchrist worked. The studio was called Fledgling Ink, and I'd studied their website a little before leaving Shepaug that morning. I had no real interest in tattoos, but I'd scrolled through the designs and decided that I liked them.

Alice and I were meeting at a coffee shop just next door to the shop. We'd emailed a little bit back and forth and I'd told her that I wasn't a client, that I was interested in learning about Ethan Saltz. She'd immediately emailed back, Jesus, that's a name from the past. What did he do?

I told her I was just looking for information that might help me find him. She said she had no idea but that she'd be happy to meet up.

As I entered the small, packed coffee shop, I spotted Alice right away. She had white-dyed hair cut to shoulder-length, a nose ring, and was wearing baggy overalls. I was looking at the top of her head because she was bent over a sketchbook, but she must have sensed me looking, because she glanced up, her face a flat plane, wide, with smooth, shiny skin and pale brown eyes. I asked her if she needed another coffee and she said, "No, I'm good," so I grabbed myself a tea and joined her.

"Thank you for meeting me," I said.

"My shop is right next door, so it wasn't too much trouble. I know I asked you on email, but what did he do?"

"Ethan?"

"Yes." She smiled, revealing perfectly straight teeth. There was something disconcerting about her appearance, but I couldn't quite put a finger on it.

"I don't know what he did. All I know is that he's very hard to find." I'd identified myself to Alice as Addie Logan, journalist, having sent my email through my alternative Gmail account. I'd also told her that a friend of mine had asked me to find Ethan as a favor.

"I just assumed he was in some kind of trouble. Legally," Alice said.

"He might be, for all I know. When was the last time you saw him?"

"About five years after high school, and it was by accident. We were at the same gallery in New York. I don't even remember where it was, but he was there, and he looked exactly like he did in school. A preppy serial killer."

"You were friends in high school?"

"We were. Kind of. I thought he was funny."

"How did you two meet?"

She thought for a moment, taking a sip of her cappuccino. "We were in Art Club together, but that's not where we met. It's where we became friends, though. It turned out that the teacher who started Art Club would basically leave us alone in the room and let us do whatever we wanted. There were no activities or anything, except for the one time we all went into New York to go to MoMA. I think that's why most of us signed up in the first place, because of that trip, and because Art Club was something to put on our college applications. We kind of bonded on the trip to New York, I guess. I mean, we didn't bond, but we talked. We were looking at all these modern pieces of art and he was going on about how brilliant they were, how the art world was the greatest scam in the whole world, and that his dream was to make a fortune selling fake art. And I was like, good luck with that. I mean, he was full of shit, but he was very entertaining. He told me once that he was a sociopath."

"He did?"

"Yeah, but not on that trip, I think. It was when we knew each other better. There were two weeks in there when we were kind of best friends, inseparable, and then it just kind of ended. Or faded away. Or whatever you want to call it."

"Which one of you ended the friendship?"

"I think it was him, to be honest. One day he just seemed to lose interest in me. I was hurt, I guess, but it was fucking high school. We weren't married or anything."

"Do you remember what you wrote in his yearbook?"

"Oh," she said, looking surprised.

"That's how I knew you were friends with him, your inscription in his yearbook."

Her eyebrows rose a fraction as she tried to remember, and then I saw the memory pass across her features. "I kind of remember," she said. "Only because it was a joke that I was signing it in the first place. I mean, Ethan wasn't the type to go around getting his friends to sign his yearbook. He didn't really have friends. And even when I signed it, we weren't super-close. I think I ran into him after we'd all gotten our yearbooks and he was carrying his and I insisted that I get to sign it. I think I wrote something about how I'd one day see him on television when he was the subject of a manhunt. Something like that."

I hadn't brought the yearbook with me, but I'd photocopied the inscription, and I handed her a copy now. She laughed while she read it.

"I was a pretentious little shit."

"Why did you call him theTalented Mr. Saltz?"

"Oh, from that Matt Damon movie about the guy who kills his friend and takes over his life. We'd both seen it—not together, I think—but Ethan told me how much he loved it, and how it was probably something he'd do himself one day. He was always saying things like that. In a jokey way. Like, ‘If I haven't buried someone alive by the age of thirty, then I'll be incredibly disappointed.' That kind of thing." She was still looking at the photocopy. "That's why I made that joke here about the Art Club picture. After it was taken, he said that in fifty years the picture would be in the middle of some book about his life of horrible crime, his face circled, and I would just be some anonymous student next to him. I thought it was funny, clearly, because I remembered him saying that. But you're here now, probably because he is some genuine psychopath and he wasn't actually making jokes at the time."

"I don't know about that," I said. "He does seem to have disappeared, which makes me think that maybe he is living under an assumed name. Did you ever talk about that?"

"You mean other than him saying that thing about killing a friend and taking over his life?"

"Yeah. Like, did he ever mention what name he would use as a pseudonym? Did he ever make a joke about that?"

She spun the pen in her hand while she thought. I looked down at her still-open sketchbook and saw that she had been drawing quick sketches of owls. "Not really. Nothing jumps to mind."

"Why did you sign the yearbook as the unnamed narrator?"

"Yeah, I was wondering that myself. Just being pretentious, I guess. I was a fan of Rebecca when I was in high school, the book Rebecca, and the narrator didn't have a name. So maybe it was that. I'm sorry I'm not being more helpful. I've always been curious about what happened with Ethan. It was a brief and platonic relationship, but it left a mark."

"Was it platonic for a reason?" I said. "I mean, did you ever wonder if the relationship would turn romantic?"

She looked at the dregs of her coffee and said, "I remember thinking it was strange he wasn't trying to get into my pants, only because he was a teenage boy, but he told me once that if he slept with me then he'd have to kill me. Like I mentioned already, it was the type of thing he was always saying. Also, I wasn't calling myself a lesbian back then, exactly, but the writing was on the wall. I never really thought of him that way."

I finished my tea, thinking about what other questions I had. Even though Alice didn't know where Ethan was, she still might help in coming up with what name he might have picked for an alias. "You said you both liked that movie The Talented Mr.Ripley. Did he have any other favorite films or books that you remember?"

"Strangely, I kind of remember he had lowbrow tastes. His favorite film was Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Like, by far."

"What about books?"

Alice thought. "Sorry, I can't remember ever talking about books."

"Celebrities he loved? Historical figures? If he's changed his name, then maybe he changed it to something that has meaning for him."

Alice was shaking her head. "Sorry. All I remember was that he liked Ferris Bueller and he liked talking about himself."

I stood, thanking her and putting my coat back on, then I realized what it was that was strange about her appearance.

"Hey," I said. "You don't have any tattoos."

She smiled up at me. "That you can see."

"Right," I said. "That I can see."

"Actually, you're right. I have zero tattoos."

"That's strange, probably, for a tattoo artist. Don't you think?"

"Probably," she said. "I'm not against tattoos, obviously. I think I just have commitment issues."

When I got back to Shepaug, I went onto my computer and looked up Ferris Bueller's Day Off, a film I had never seen despite knowing a fair amount about it. I could picture scenes, Ferris at a parade in a city, and some teacher droning out the names of his students. Even knowing just that much, it seemed to me to be an odd choice as Ethan Saltz's favorite film of all time. The Talented Mr.Ripley made more sense, but I stayed on the Ferris Bueller page. Because I had nothing much better to do, I opened my notebook and wrote down all the character names from Ferris Bueller, then systematically I searched for all the names, adding words like "artist" or "forger" or "scam." It was a long shot at best, but one thing I'd learned definitively about Ethan from Henry's conversation with the brother was that he'd been fascinated by art, and particularly the commerce of it. It wasn't an enormous stretch to think that those enthusiasms would have lasted into adulthood.

Nothing really jumped out at me online. There were no Sloane Peterson galleries involved in forgery scandals, no notorious art world figures named Cameron Frye. I went back to the IMDb page and read the trivia associated with the film. One of the tidbits was that the Charlie Sheen character—apparently a druggy in the police station who flirts with Ferris's sister, Jeanie—was given a name in the shooting script, although it isn't mentioned in the film. That name was Garth Volbeck.

I entered "Garth Volbeck" and "artist" into my search engine and the first item that came up was a listing from the Charnock Gallery in Philadelphia. Two abstract paintings for sale by an artist named Gareth Vollbeck. I felt something in my chest as I clicked on the link. It brought me to the Charnock Gallery website, a very minimal site, but in a way that made me think the gallery didn't need the website as opposed to its being a gallery that couldn't afford a good site. Besides a few pages that showed available art pieces, there was just the landing page, which provided the name of the gallery and its address. There were no hours, since viewings were only available by appointment. And there was no photograph of the gallery owner, Robert Charnock.

I searched under that name and didn't find any photographs cropping up on other parts of the web except for one group photograph from a fundraiser in Philadelphia. The man who was identified as Robert Charnock was looking away from the camera. He had short dark hair and wide shoulders. I wasn't sure, but it could possibly be Ethan Saltz.

I did searches for the artist named Gareth Vollbeck, and hardly anything came up, the only mentions being ones associated with the Charnock Gallery. The whole thing seemed off. Actually, it didn't seem off. It felt as though I'd possibly found Ethan Saltz. I called Henry, and he picked up right away. I told him what I'd found out, and he said he'd start to investigate right away. I could tell from his voice that he was as excited by the possibility as I was.

It was afternoon and the weather was still good, and I decided to go for a thinking walk. When I was a young kid I used to call them daydreaming walks, knowing that if I went into the woods and began to wander, pretty soon my mind would wander, too, and I'd enter strange daytime fantasies, usually a scenario in which I could speak to animals and they'd tell me all their secrets. I'd given up on that particular childhood dream, but I did know that I did my best thinking on walks, so I found my mother and told her I was walking into town and asked if she needed anything. She said we needed more of the granola that they sold at the Carrot Seed.

From Monk's House you could reach Shepaug Center either through the woods or along Woodbury Road. The trail through Brigham Woods was faster, but I decided to set out along the road, make myself more visible rather than less. There were daffodils and tulips blooming in the front gardens of the houses on Woodbury Road, along with the occasional patch of wild crocuses. A few trees were beginning to show leaves in that soft green color that only happens in springtime.

In town I went straight to the Carrot Seed, our local organic grocery store, for the granola, picking up a hot tea as well that I didn't really need. I sat on the bench outside of the store, and it was there that I realized I hadn't brought my phone with me. I rarely did when I was out walking, but this time it meant that if Henry wanted to reach me, he couldn't right away. Just having that thought made me feel strange, like I was now uncomfortably part of the modern world. I sipped at my tea, alone with my thoughts, but not for long. Since I had grown up in Shepaug, coming into the town center meant that I would meet someone I knew and have to talk to them, and I suffered through two of those interactions that afternoon. The first was with my old math teacher, Mrs. Corrigan, who told me, for the second time, how the Shepaug regional school system was possibly going to have to merge with the Washington School system. "No one's having kids anymore," she said, and I thought I saw her eyes cast down in sadness in the direction of my empty womb. I also talked briefly with one of my mother's friends, Ginny Adams, who had just picked up the new Louise Penny book at Stone's Throw. Over the past year Ginny had begun to stoop, her body curling inward like an overcooked shrimp. She stopped by my bench and we caught up, her head cocked toward me in a way that reminded me of a turtle, and as Ginny talked, her voice now cracked with age, I had a vivid childhood memory of seeing her emerge naked out of our pool at one of the numerous parties at Monk's House, my father there to greet her with a towel and a drink.

After finishing my tea I began the walk home, leaving town along River Street, and passing the commons. I was aware that my thinking walk had not produced any significant thinking, but it had produced something else. A prickly sense of unease. I didn't believe that people knew when they were being watched any more than I believed in love curses, but it was what I was feeling at that moment, a palpable disquiet, a surety that there were eyes on me. When I reached Woodbury Road, clouds had moved into the sky and it was suddenly cold. I walked faster, staying to the left as I'd been taught. Two cars passed me going in the opposite direction, then the road was quiet for a while. I heard a car approaching from behind and squeezed up along the narrow shoulder that separated the road from an old stone wall and the dense woods. I must have heard something in the car's engine, because I knew it was slowing down, and I turned just as a shiny white sedan pulled dangerously close to me, its driver's-side window rolled down.

Ethan Saltz, with surprising speed, swung open the door and stepped out, holding a pistol down near his waist. Something went over me, a wash of disbelief that it was all about to end, but then Ethan said, "I can shoot you right now or you can get into the trunk. Five seconds to decide."

"Trunk," I said.

He grasped my shoulder with his left hand and moved me around to the back of the vehicle. The trunk was already cracked open and he used his foot to open it all the way. I felt stupid being caught this way, but it also felt inevitable. Maybe I'd wanted it to happen.