Free And She Was by Alison Gaylin Page A

rearview. The jaw’s a little swollen, but the bruise is still hidden under all the makeup she put on at 5 A.M. , before going back to sleep.
    Thank God.
    Jim didn’t notice the bruises this morning, but how long is that going to last? He’s a journalist—a good one. How long before he figures out that last night, Brenna got chased ten blocks by a cheating husband after he caught her taking his picture, that the husband had yanked her into an alley, thrown her against a brick wall, grabbed her by the neck, punched her in the stomach? How long before he sees the cuts on her knuckles and figures out that instead of giving up her camera, instead of running, Brenna had fought back, hard? How long before he puts two and two together and it hits him that last night, his wife broke the one promise he’d ever asked her to make? “Stop.” Brenna said the word out loud, followed by the first three lines of the Pledge of Allegiance. She needed to remember one moment, not the whole day. Why did her memory work this way? Why was Brenna’s own mind so completely beyond her control?
    She jammed her eyes shut. The fountain. The goddamn fountain at the goddamn Waterside Condominiums complex. Late morning. October 23, 1998. That. Just that . . .
    T he Waterside complex isn’t as big as she’d thought it would be. Right next to the visitors’ parking lot is the club area, with fenced-in tennis courts, meeting house, pool, gym, and then a dozen or so evenly spaced condos on either side of a wide empty road that stretches out to the west, overlooking the Hudson River, all of them so new you can practically still smell the paint.
    Brenna gets out of the car. Her muscles ache when she stands, and the cuts on her hands sting from the cold.
    She likes it here, though. She likes the quiet, the calm. No wonder Lydia Neff comes here every morning to “meditate.” Brenna had thought it so strange when Lydia’s neighbor told her that. Meditation among the mini-mansions. But now she gets it.
    I’d do the same.
    Brenna hears a distant lawnmower, then a staticky sound. Running water. The fountain. She moves toward the sound—past the club area to a marble sign that reads “Garden” in gold letters. It marks a path, running through a row of maple trees shading dwarfish, just-planted bushes.
    Brenna heads up the path. She follows it until it widens into a circle, bordered by trimmed-down rose bushes, potted ficus, and Asian maples.
    At the center of the circle is the fountain—made of a smooth white stone that makes Brenna think of sculptures and then, for the briefest moment, of her mother, sculpting.
    Four wrought-iron benches stand evenly around the fountain. Everything so perfectly placed. So balanced, except . . .
    A slender, black-haired woman sits alone on the farthest of the benches, her head down. She wears a long black coat. Her hands are folded in her lap.
    Brenna moves closer.
    On the back of the woman’s right wrist is a tattoo: a dragonfly with a red body and blue and green wings.
    When she looks up, Brenna recognizes the high cheekbones, the dark eyes, the downturned mouth, laugh lines like faint parentheses . . . She recognizes Lydia Neff’s face from an interview she saw on Good Morning New York , three days after Iris’s disappearance. And for a moment, Brenna has the strangest feeling, an almost starstruck feeling, and the question she’s planned to ask this woman, the one she’s rehearsed in her head and used on half a dozen other people, the one about Iris getting into a blue car, couched in the explanation that Brenna was an investigator, helping out with one small part of the case . . . those carefully organized sentences crumble and scatter, and instead Brenna hears herself say, “I know how you feel.”
    Lydia stares at her.
    Brenna clears her throat. She looks into the black eyes. “My sister got into a car. The car drove away. I didn’t know who was driving that car, or why she got in, but it drove away, and