Page 16 of Hard to Pretend
“I’m not saying it’s likely,” I say, “and it’s a really long story and I’ll tell you about it later, but in the meantime can you look into the file?”
“No promises.”
“I didn’t ask for promises, did I?”
“No. No, you didn’t.”
The footsteps stop at my door. Leisure Suit Lenny leans in as I click off. Golfer Gary is with him.
“Got a second?” Lenny asks.
“Sure.”
Lenny hitches up his pants. He does that a lot, I notice. I can’t tell if the waist is too big or the bulge in his belly pushes the pants too low or why I’m wondering weird stuff like this. But it’s distracting. He hitches them up and steps into the room. Gary follows him.
Gary starts it off. “We are here on behalf of the class.”
Oh, this is going to be interesting. I lean back in my chair and throw up my feet. “Okay.”
“We’d like to know,” Gary continues, “why you are so interested in the Victoria Belmond case.”
“Does it matter?”
“I guess not.”
“It’ll be a fun class exercise,” I say, trying to keep my voice light. “Research. Investigation. Surveillance.”
Gary folds his arms across the golf shirt with a logo that looks like a red basket on top of a stick. Golfers are weird. “But,” he says, “there’s more to it, right?”
I don’t reply.
Now it’s Lenny’s turn. “The woman who crashed our class last night. The one you followed. I don’t mean to pry, but that tracker goes to my phone too. You just asked us to run surveillance near Greenwich, Connecticut, in the exact same spot where the batteries on my GPS tracker died.”
Man, I am getting sloppy.
“In conclusion,” Gary says, sounding like a TV detective who has finally gathered all of the suspects in the drawing room for our denouement, “you saw a woman enter our class.”
“A woman,” Lenny adds, “who would be the approximate age of Victoria Belmond.”
Back to Gary: “That woman ran off.”
Lenny: “You followed her using a GPS tracker.”
“Right to the spot where you now want us to surveil for a possible Victoria Belmond sighting.”
They both stop and look at me. I nod in appreciation.
“I’m some teacher, right? I’m going to have to up the class fee.”
Lenny hitches up his pants again. “So the woman who was here last night, the one who came to our class. You think there’s a chance that—”
“—that she’s Victoria Belmond?” I finish for them.
It is an interesting question. You’d think I would know for sure, right? There are photographs, of course, of Victoria Belmond online. Not as many as you would think. But enough. In most she is a teenager, which would be when I knew Anna. There are far fewer—almostnone—since her return. The parents asked the press to leave their traumatized daughter alone and had the resources to make that a reality. But when I look at the photos of seventeen-year-old Victoria, I can’t tell you for certain it’s the Anna I met in Spain—but I think it is. If it’s not, the resemblance is uncanny. The reason I can’t say for absolute sure it’s Anna is an odd one. I try to think back to what Anna looked like and when I do, I can describe her to you, I guess—but I can’t actuallyseeher anymore. Quick: Think about an old love, one from all those years ago, one you knew only a week. Really really picture them. Do you have the specifics? Like a photograph? Yeah, I didn’t think so. Memory doesn’t work that way. Memory doesn’t take photographs. Memory is about trying to fill in the blanks, and while I see similarities, my memory won’t let me make a definitive match.
So the mystery deepens.
I was also not the most perceptive of boys back then. Don’t hate on me for this, but I don’t remember Anna’s eye color, for example. Anna’s hair was different, a different color and longer than Victoria’s, but that doesn’t mean much. Plus Victoria wears glasses. Anna did not.
