Disappeared

by Lucienne Diver

“Um—”

  Mrs. Kapoor put a hand to his arm. “Jared, you don’t have to answer any of their questions, you know that, right? And if you wish, you can ask for a lawyer to be present.”

  “I’m sure Jared wants to help with our investigation. Right, Jared? You’d like to help us clear things up?”

  Jared’s gaze jerked away from Mrs. Kapoor toward the cop. “Clear what up? What do you think this is?”

  “I’m waiting for you to tell me.”

  Crap, crap, crap. How did he tell the truth without making trouble for Emily? Without making things look bad for himself? What else did the detective have in that bag?

  “Emily cut herself accidentally,” he said, gambling that it was nothing, hoping he didn’t sound as guilty as he felt. “And it bled kind of a lot. She didn’t want to upset Dad, who’s going through enough, so I helped her clean it up. And then I threw it in the neighbor’s can so Dad wouldn’t find it.”

  Diaz was still staring. It was disconcerting. No doubt it was meant to be.

  “Your sister cut herself?”

  “Yes.” Keep it short. Don’t volunteer information. Wasn’t that what the lawyers always said in the cop shows?

  “Accidentally?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you were disposing of this for your sister?”

  Crap, what was he implying?

  “She didn’t ask me to. I just did it.”

  “And she’ll corroborate all of this?”

  “Yes, talk to her.”

  “We will. What made you feel the need to conceal this from your father?”

  “Why are you making a big deal of it? This isn’t—Wait, you don’t think that’s Mom’s blood, do you? Test it! You’ll see.”

  His heart was pounding now. The police couldn’t actually think this was evidence! Yet the detective acted like this was about far more than a bloody bag. He acted as though he thought Jared had done something to Mom.

  “Why are you getting so defensive?”

  “Detective,” Mrs. Kapoor jumped in, “what are you driving at?”

  He didn’t look away from Jared. “I’m trying to get the big picture. A young man disposes of a bloody towel the night before a woman’s body is found in the park. It seems suspicious at the very least.”

  “Talk to Emily, she’s right outside.” Only, he wished he could talk to Emily first, so she’d know what story he told. She had to know he hadn’t given away her secret, that he’d protected her. Or else, she might give it away. If the detective thought she was a danger to herself or others … cops were mandatory reporters, weren’t they? Child Protective Services were most definitely. The last thing Emily needed right now was to be locked up in some hospital, away from her family.

  “In a minute. You never answered my question—why would you keep this from your father?”

  “I told you, he’s got enough going on.”

  “But he never believed your mother had come to harm. He told us she’d left by choice. To tell the truth, he never seemed that concerned.”

  Jared had known that Detective Anderson wasn’t the only one on the case and that she had to be in touch with someone in their local PD. He guessed Detective Diaz was that contact. He wondered which detective Dad had talked to during his earlier questioning. And how he’d done.

  Jared had no idea how he was doing. Or what to say next. Did he tell Detective Diaz that Dad had had to deal with him getting almost arrested at Mom’s place? Did he know about that already?

  “Just because he didn’t seem concerned doesn’t mean he wasn’t. If nothing else, he had to worry about me and Emily. We were upset.”

  “But he wasn’t,” Detective Diaz said again.

  Jared sat back in his chair and crossed his arms. He wasn’t going to get baited.

  When Jared didn’t answer what he figured wasn’t a question to begin with, Detective Diaz moved on. “You said you heard something the night your mother disappeared—a crash and a muffled cry, maybe coming from the garage?”

  Oh hell, was this about him or about Dad? Who did they suspect? Was the plan to keep him off balance—make him feel targeted so he’d point the finger at others? What the hell was he supposed to do?

  And what had happened to Mom?

  Emily sat on that bench in the middle of the station and did her best not to think. The bench was hard and bolted to the floor. As wrung out as she was from the migraine and the vomiting, as much as she wanted to sleep and wake to find this was all a bad dream, there was no way on God’s green hellhole that was going to happen.

  For a while she stared off in the direction Jared had gone, as if she might suddenly gain the ability to see and hear beyond closed doors.

  But her imagination kept drawing her to the morgue with her father. And the image of a woman’s body, hidden under a sheet but for the feet sticking out at the bottom—sickly gray-blue, mottled, very clearly dead flesh. She’d seen enough television that the vision came unbidden, as much as she tried to push it away. The sight of the medical examiner, whose image remained fuzzy, pulling back the sheet. Her father looking …

  That was where the vision fell apart. She couldn’t imagine the look on his face. She couldn’t—wouldn’t—imagine the rest of her mother’s body on that slab. It would be too early for the autopsy, so she wouldn’t have that horrible Y-incision. Surely she’d have been cleaned up, though. There wouldn’t be blood or dirt and leaves caking the body. Would her face show the horror of her death? Would peace have stolen over her at the end?

  There were tears pouring down her face, and one of the officers passing by noticed, stopped.

  “Are you okay?” he asked. “Are you with someone? Should I get them for you?”

  Emily shook her head, and started wiping the tears away with her fingers. “They took my brother in for questioning. I guess I’m next. My father’s at the morgue.”

  The officer’s face immediately changed, from slightly detached sympathy to real feeling. “You’re with the woman they brought in this morning?” he said, but it wasn’t really a question. More a confirmation to himself, so she didn’t answer. That’s what she was here to find out, anyway. Maybe the police had made a mistake. Maybe she wasn’t “with the woman they brought in.”

  “Let me get you some tissues,” he added. “Do you need someone to sit with you? I’m sure they wouldn’t have left you on your own if they planned to be long.”

  “Tissues would be good,” she said. The new tears were stopping up her nose and kicking up the pressure in her head. “But I don’t need anyone.”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  She didn’t watch him walk away, looking back instead toward the interview rooms, hoping Jared would emerge and they could go home. Only they wouldn’t be going home. It would be her turn next.

  What she saw instead was a tall man with silver hair parting ways with a woman in a white button-up shirt with a badge clipped to her belt. A detective or plain-clothed cop. One she didn’t recognize. But she recognized the man, at least from his picture.

  The officer who’d stopped to talk to her returned with the tissues. She took them and thanked him quickly, hoping he’d leave the same way. She didn’t want him to be there when Richard Travis walked by.

  Luckily, the officer didn’t linger, and Emily rose from the bench as Richard Travis approached, headed toward the door, hurrying to intercept him.

  “Richard Travis?” she asked, standing right in his way.

  He stopped dead in his tracks, staring down at her. “Do I—Emily?” he asked, stunning her. “Are you Diane’s daughter?”

  Her mother’s name from his lips hurt, but it was just one more droplet in the pool of pain. “Yes,” she answered, barely a whisper of sound. She cleared her throat and said, “Can we talk?”

  She indicated the bench she’d been sitting on, and Richard looked quickly toward the exit, as though bidding good-bye to his chance to escape the cop shop. But then he nodded and led the way, sitting far enough t
oward the center that she could regain her seat at the end without being too close. As if he’d seen her there.

  He waited for her to begin with whatever she had to say. It was hard to think through the headache, but this was maybe her only chance to question him, and she couldn’t let it go. She studied him for a second. Nice face. Tanned, like he was an outdoorsy type person, or at least worked outside. Gray eyes, that silver hair, a full head of it. Plain black long-sleeved T-shirt with a logo over the pocket that said Lush Landscaping, the words curved around the silhouette of a blooming tree. So she was right about him working outdoors. Or he was just a big fan of landscaping.

  “You wanted to talk?” he prompted.

  “You knew my mother,” she stated unnecessarily.

  He nodded.

  “How well?” That was abrupt. She hadn’t even thought of the question before it was out of her mouth. Apparently, her subconscious was guiding this interview.

  There was something in his eyes. More than sadness. Loss. She felt answering tears starting up again and grabbed angrily for one of the tissues the cop had brought, dabbing her eyes and offering the box to Richard Travis, who shook his head to refuse. Of course not. Real men don’t cry.

  “We’re friends,” he said. “Nothing more. Not that I didn’t—don’t—really like your mother.” He’d used the past tense and then corrected himself. Did that mean he knew she was dead or that he’d already accepted that it was likely? “But she was married, and not in any head-space to move on.”

  “What does that mean?” she asked. Because it sounded like he’d have been perfectly willing to have an affair with her if she’d been into it.

  “It means … look, I don’t know if I should be talking to you about this.” He looked around to see whether anyone was paying them any attention. “I should go.”

  Emily snapped out her hand to grab his arm. “Don’t,” she pleaded. “I need to know. I have to make sense of all of this. Please. Nothing you can say is any worse than what’s going on in my head.” He had no idea.

  Richard gave her a sad smile and patted her hand. “Okay,” he said. “You can ask your questions. I don’t know that I’ll answer them all, but I’ll do my best.”

  “What did you mean before?”

  He sighed. “I meant that your mother and father did not have the best relationship. Even if she’d been clear of the marriage, I’m not sure she’d have been ready to move on to another relationship.”

  “You’re being careful,” Emily accused. “You’re choosing your words, which I get. I mean, to you I must seem like a kid, right? Well, I’m no kid. And even if I was, these last few weeks … Well, there’s nothing like the sheer horror of losing your mother to grow you right up. So whatever you’ve got, I can take it.”

  He studied her the way she’d studied him when he first sat down. She straightened her spine and stared back at him.

  “Okay,” he said again, this time like he meant it. “No sugar coating. Your father was awful to your mother. You have to know that. And she had to get out. She was torn up about leaving you kids, but she wasn’t planning on that being long term. She just had to get out and get established before she could do anything, so she could show a court that she was a good bet for custody, so that he couldn’t use you to manipulate her or suck her back in.”

  Her head was going to explode, and not just from the pressure.

  “Dad said she left us. And she did, for two weeks. I guess while she got set up, but that’s a long time to stay away from us, so when he said she left for good …”

  Richard worked his jaw, as though chewing on it. His face said it didn’t taste right at all. “She’d never have done that.”

  Stupid tears. She wiped them away, the tissue abrasive, her eyes stinging.

  “I didn’t think so,” she said. “I never did.” But she realized as she said it that she was lying. She had believed it, at least a bit. And on some level she hadn’t even acknowledged, she’d been angry at her mom for leaving them for so long. Jared had been a lot more honest with himself about that.

  Richard leaned toward her then, just a little, and it made her lean in as well. “I don’t understand why your dad did everything he could to hold on,” he said. “He had someone else. Your mother knew it. I don’t know why he wouldn’t let her go.”

  Emily reeled back. “Someone else?”

  “Crap, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Forget I mentioned it.”

  “Who?” she asked. No way could she forget it or let it go.

  He looked pained, but he answered. It was too late to take the words back, and he knew it.

  “She never said. But she once found a hair band in their bed that wasn’t hers. Or yours. And there was other evidence.”

  Emily’s eyes widened. She thought of that red scrunchy she’d found in the kitchen, the one that didn’t belong to her mother, that she’d borrowed anyway. Was that the one? She shuddered at the thought of having worn the hair band belonging to the other woman. And her father having left it right there on the counter. Could he have intended Mom to see it that Friday night? That wouldn’t make any kind of sense. Not if he wanted to reconcile, like he’d said.

  “Why were you talking to the police?” she asked.

  He shifted on the bench like he was uncomfortable, either at the hard wood or the questioning. “I imagine they’re talking to everyone who knew your Mom.”

  “That’s not an answer.”

  “Yes,” he said. “It is. I’m sorry, but I really do have to go. I have to pick up my little girl from the sitter’s.”

  “You have a little girl?” she asked.

  Now his eyes softened. His whole face lit up. “I do. Her name is Jessica. She’s five years old.”

  He rose from the bench, but almost as an afterthought, he stopped and dug his wallet out of his jeans pocket. Emily had no idea what he was doing at first, and then he pulled out a business card for his landscaping company with the same logo as on his shirt. It had his name, a phone number, and a website.

  “Here,” he said, handing it over. “This is my number. If you or your brother need anything … well, I don’t know what I can do, but I’ll try to help however I can. I really cared for your mother.”

  Again, the past tense. It was like a stab to her heart, although it was her brain that throbbed with it.

  She whispered her thanks, and he was gone. It was only after he vanished that she wondered what had happened to him and Jessica’s mother. Were they divorced? Had she died? And if so, how?

  She was looking down at the card when a shadow fell across it. She looked up into the face of the same cop Richard Travis had been shaking hands with, the woman in the white button up shirt with the belt badge. Her dark hair was back in a tight, low ponytail, which seemed to be the default hairstyle of all the women cops she’d seen, despite what television would have her think about always-flowing hair. Her eyes, a surprising shade of brown that was almost amber, looked understanding rather than hard, although undoubtedly that could change depending on the situation.

  “Emily Graham?” she asked. When Emily nodded, she said, “I’m Detective Elizabeth Wong. Your brother is talking to Detective Diaz, but they should be done any moment. Would you like to come with me?”

  If she said no?

  But she didn’t. She nodded again, starting to feel like a bobblehead, and followed Detective Wong down the hallway, almost surely to the interview room she’d been in with Richard Travis.

  She left the door open and leaned against the wall, motioning Emily to a seat. “Your advocate should be here in just a second and we can start then. I saw you talking with Richard Travis?”

  It wasn’t phrased as a question, but she heard the rise at the end, clearly indicating that it was.

  She shrugged. “That all right?”

  “Of course. I didn’t know you knew each other.”

  “We didn’t.” Why did it feel like the interrogation had already begun? “I recognized
him from his Facebook picture.”

  “Ah, you’re on Facebook? I thought the kids had all abandoned that for other things.”

  Was there a trap here somewhere? She didn’t have anything to hide, but still, Detective Wong was making her nervous.

  “No, I’m not, but Jared and I checked Mom’s page after she left us. We were looking for clues about where she’d gone.”

  “Did you find any?” she asked.

  “No, we’d have told the police right away. Or Dad.”

  “Did you read her messages?”

  There was the trap.

  “No.” That had mostly been Jared, and she wasn’t ratting him out.

  “Delete any of them?”

  Emily stared? “Why would we do that?”

  The detective smiled, as though to put her at ease. Emily didn’t trust it. “You love your mother, don’t you?”

  Present tense. Emily’s heart leapt. The seesaw of hope and despair was going to kill her.

  “Of course.”

  “So you’d want to protect her, say if there was evidence of an affair and you thought your father might find out?”

  Her head was definitely going to explode. Despite the meds, her vision was starting to tunnel again. Richard had said there was no affair. Was he lying? Was Detective Wong just fishing? Or was there someone else?

  “I didn’t think you could question me without my advocate.”

  “We’re just making conversation.”

  The door pushed open, and in walked another woman, significantly shorter and more colorful than the detective. Her skirt, anyway, which was warning flag red.

  “I want to go home,” Emily said to the new woman immediately, standing up to leave. “If no one is going to tell me what happened to my mother, then all I want to do is go home and lie down. I have a blinding headache, and it feels as though it’s going to explode at any moment.”

  “Do you need medical attention?” the new woman asked.

  “I need my mother.”

  The new lady, her advocate, she presumed, looked infinitely sad. “I’m so sorry. I don’t know whether the detective has told you yet. Probably she was waiting for me. We’ve just received word that your father made a positive ID. The woman found in the park this morning was your mother.”