“Do you know anything?” Sharon asked, her voice low and slow.

“No, not yet, that’s why I’m here. I’m trying to help her husband find her. We thought you might have some information. How often did she come in?”

“Every Friday morning. Sometimes on Saturday if they were going somewhere important.”

“What did she have done?”

“A blow-dry, a cut once a month, Diane did her nails every week.”

“Was that it?”

“Well, a touch-up every once in a while.”

“She colored her hair?”

“Oh yeah.” She said it as though I really should have known without asking.

“What color was her natural hair?”

“Well, she was getting some gray, you know, and the natural brown was like losing its luster, you know what I mean?”

“Yes,” I said, wondering for the first time in my life if my hair was losing something it had always had. “Was there a lot of gray?”

“There was quite a bit. Not like an old woman, but yeah, it was happening to her. Some people just get gray prematurely.”

“Can you show me what the color of her natural hair was? I mean the brown.”

“Sure thing. Come with me.” She got up and I followed her to a place on the wall where there were more hair colors than I’d ever seen in my life. Sharon ran her hand across a stretch of brown hair samples and stopped at one. “Kinda like this, but not as bright.”

“Could you give me something like that to take with me?”

“I’ve got some in the back.”

“And what about the color you dyed her hair?”

“That’s this one. Glowing Auburn. It’s nice, doesn’t look too red. It’s very natural. You want this one, too?”

“If I could.”

“I’ll be right back.”

—

It was a long drive back to Oakwood, and we talked intermittently.

“Did you know Natalie dyed her hair?” I asked after a while.

“All women dye their hair. My first wife tried every shade of blond in the book and finally decided on the worst of them. She thought it made her look young; I thought it made her look old. I never asked Natalie whether she used color. Her hair looked very natural, and I suspect it was the color she was born with. I’ve known a lot of people who had red hair as kids, and I watched it turn brown as they got older.”

What he said had merit and I had to agree both with him and with Natalie’s hairdresser, that her hair looked very natural, at least from the pictures I had seen.

I didn’t ask anything else. As we turned in to Pine Brook Road I said, “I don’t know where I’m going from here, Sandy. I’ve given my name and phone number to a lot of people out there, but if I don’t hear from them with new information, I’m really at a loss.”

“Something will happen. You’re doing all the right things. And I’m happy with your work. You’ll know what to do. You’ve got the right instincts.”

He turned up the driveway and we said good-bye. I had no idea my luck was about to change.

15

Over the next day there was a kind of explosion of information, just about all of it unexpected. It started as I put my things down in the house and went to check the answering machine. I have to say I feel uncomfortable having an answering machine in my home, but it came with my husband and I think of it as his, although messages are often left on it for me, as was the case today. I saw the blinking light and pressed the PLAY button.

“This message is for Miss Christine Bennett,” a slow, careful elderly female voice said. “My name is Mabel Bernstein, B-E-R-N-S-T-E-I-N, and I spoke with Miss Bennett this morning. I have some information for her, but she’ll have to call me back today because I won’t be available tomorrow.” She recited her number, added, “Please give her the message,” and hung up.

The confusion was caused by Jack’s security-conscious temperament. He refuses to identify us by name and has a rather grim-sounding order to leave a message at the tone. I dialed Mrs. Bernstein’s number as fast as I could.

“Oh, Miss Bennett,” she said happily, “I wasn’t sure I’d reached the right number.”

“That was my husband’s voice. Tell me what your information is.”

“I just remembered the name of the moving company Natalie used. They’re Annie’s Angels and they move people all over the Village.”

“Annie? A woman’s name?”

“We’re a pretty independent lot down here. Anyone can do anything. And does.”

“That’s really terrific, Mrs. Bernstein.”

“Well, I hope it gives you something to work on. You said I was the end of the line. At least now someone else is.”

“I’m sure this is going to help. Thank you very much and have a wonderful vacation.”

Before I got off the phone, she had given me Annie’s Angels’ phone number. I called immediately and got an answering machine. I supposed Annie was out doing her thing.

—

“He let us out early,” Jack said, walking in half an hour before I expected him.

“Does he take a cut in pay for that?”

“He gets a round of applause.”

“Coffee?”

“You bet.” He followed me into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator, eventually taking out an apple. “How was your trip to the Village?”

“Profitable, but not until late this afternoon. And I got to see Sandy Gordon’s house in New Jersey.”

“Sounds like a busy day.”

I told him.

“I’m hearing a few interesting inconsistencies,” Jack said as I finished. He had taken a sheet of plain white paper and folded it in quarters as he does to take notes. Along the shorter fold he noted a few things as I spoke. “The landlady, or landlord as she prefers to be called, said Natalie was new in town, but Mrs. B. on the fourth floor, who knew Natalie a hell of a lot better than the landlord, says she used a local mover to move her stuff. Doesn’t sound like it came from Indiana.”

“Right. So she’d been living in New York before she moved to Greenwich Avenue. And Wormy said she had references, one of which she checked. So Natalie had held at least two jobs in New York before coming to H and J.”

“So we’ve got a lady who tailors her story to suit her purposes.”

“But why?”

“Maybe she stiffed a landlord in New York, you know, moved out without paying the last month’s rent or left the apartment in such a mess, she would have owed a lot of money.”

“She didn’t do that on Greenwich Avenue.”

“She had a husband by then and she wanted him to think she was the greatest.”

“That’s possible.” I looked over my own notes to see if I’d left anything out. “Oh yes. They were planning a vacation and Natalie had bought a lot of clothes for it, which she never wore. They all still had price tags hanging from them. Sandy has a passport. It’s a few years old and I didn’t look inside to see where he’d gone with it. But Natalie doesn’t have one. They were going to St. John, which is an American possession, so she didn’t need one.”

“Her idea or his?”

“I asked him. He said they’d made the decision together. Sounds reasonable.” I poured the coffee and put out some cookies.

“Can I say something?”

“When did you ever have to ask?”

He gave me the little smile that hinted something was coming. “Suppose you’re talking to somebody and you mention you were married last summer and the person asks where. You say St. Stephen’s Convent upstate and this woman says, ‘What an interesting place to get married. Whose idea was that?’ And you say, ‘My husband and I picked it because I spent fifteen years there as a nun.’ ”

“Is that wrong?” I said, getting an odd feeling.

“Not wrong at all, just slanted. If I’d married any other woman in the United States, would I have gotten married at St. Stephen’s?”