by Tish Cohen
Maybe he deserved this lightning bolt from hell.
A crowd had started to gather as neighbors wandered over to see what was wrong. He and Elise were the flaming wreck on the side of the highway.
One of the cops turned to him as he stood up again, her mouth moving. She was tiny. A child looking for a child. Her short hair was dyed deep red and she wore stud earrings.
“Sir, I’m asking you what other vehicles you saw.”
He searched his memory for details of that morning; it was all so blurred, like looking through a rainy windshield. “The guys were on the roof,” he heard himself say. “Then Paulie, the guy from the gas station, he was here to take away the raccoon. There were tourists—there are always tourists.” A boat pulled up out back, police radio chatter echoing from the water. The wail of sirens grew increasingly intense. “When I left . . . to go to the hardware store . . . I passed a small car. Dark. Dusty.”
This morning, this—he looked at her badge—this Investigator Meghan Moody got up, showered, swiped on eyeliner and red lipstick to complement her hair. Pulled on the ironed gray uniform, pushed her earrings into pierced lobes, thinking they looked pretty. Tiny gold horseshoes, but one had tilted sideways. Matt wanted to tell her that horseshoes should be upright like the letter U. Otherwise, the luck runs out.
“You notice anything else—the plates, the driver?”
Maybe she had a kid of her own. And when she got home that night, she’d remove the horseshoes and do what everyone who wasn’t Matt or Elise would do. Thank the heavens their child wasn’t the one who’d gone missing. He’d never been so fucking jealous in his life.
“I didn’t think to look.”
Cass’s mother stood watching them. Ruth. The reason they’d already lost so many hours. Why hadn’t he said something to Elise about Ruth’s dementia? Seeing Cass’s mother across the street had given Elise a false sense of security.
Images of the day flashed through his mind, distorted and hazy. The black raccoon. Elise in the garden. The swinging FOR SALE sign. The camp kids singing. “I didn’t know to look.”
His wife, fragile and pale, stood staring at it all, weirdly detached with the buttercup still in her hair. It was drooping now. Even her musculature seemed to have gone slack. Her eyes were too big for her face all of a sudden. Her cheeks had caved in. Her fingers fluttered around her mouth like baby birds before they’d learned how to fly. “I’m so sorry. It was just a few seconds. . . .”
This new Elise scared the living shit out of him.
She attached herself to him now, slid hands as fragile as dry leaves up his back. If she was going to go faint and watery at the one time he needed her to don a cape, could she not at least weep? Was it too much to want to be visibly soaked in her grief?
“I don’t know what to do.” She kept repeating this to everyone and no one as she held him tighter. “I don’t know what to do.”
Neither did he know what to fucking do. What he did know was that before she came back, he and Gracie were fine. Until Elise decided that Gracie should go to camp, all was good.
He couldn’t be in his wife’s grasp, not for another second. He ducked out of her embrace and walked off into the shadows.
* * *
IN THE KITCHEN, Sergeant Trenton Dorsey introduced himself as the troop commander. He stood well over six feet, and the silver in his tightly curled hair, the worn-leather-and-clean-soap scent of his cologne, the intelligence on his weathered face, were calming, fatherly, even. Elise thought he appeared daunted by nothing. Certainly he would’ve seen everything before. He would have seen worse. He could fix this . . . he could find Gracie.
She paced the floor while Matt sat at the table with Dorsey, who explained how they worked cases of missing children. He described the initial work as a “rigorous process of elimination, beginning with the immediate family members and spanning outward.”
He explained that, the next day, friends, family, and anyone in the physical periphery of the disappearance would be interviewed. The faster that could be accomplished, the more quickly the police would be able to move forward.
“For now, we’re looking at registered sex offenders in the area.” Dorsey flipped through his pad, pausing here and there to make notes. “For a pretty little ski town, we have more than our fair share. Four in and around the area, all risk levels two or three.”
Elise scraped hair off her face. “What does that mean?”
“These boys are registered for life, and we keep watch on them. They’re already being checked for alibis, recent movements.”
“We should have sold this place from New Jersey. Made a quick phone call to an agent,” Elise said. She couldn’t be still. She leaned against the counter and rocked herself. “We never should have come.”
They learned that Ken, Ruth, Garth, and Cass had been deemed unlikelies, though they were not fully cleared at the moment. Andy and Lyman, too, were probably in the clear, because they’d been on the back roof when it happened.
“She wouldn’t get into a strange car voluntarily. There would have been a struggle. I was gone about sixty seconds—I would have known. Gracie would have fought like hell. I mean, there’ll be evidence on the road, right?”
Dorsey said, “We’d like you to look at these photos, Mrs. Sorenson.”
She lowered herself into the chair beside Matt. Spread out were photos of Gracie that Cass had taken and printed. Gracie and River squealing around the campfire. Gracie, with crutches, making her way across the darkened backyard.
“These are all taken at night,” said Dorsey, picking through the pile. “Your husband has shared a few photos taken in the past month. Do you have a recent shot? Taken during the day? Even on your phone is fine.”
She pulled her phone from her pocket, opened the photo library, and scanned through it . . . they were almost all of Indie. The barn. A change room selfie at Saks in Palm Beach, where she had been trying on a sheer nightie for Matt. But the credit card hadn’t gone through, so she hadn’t bought it. She scrolled through the photos more quickly until she came to one of Gracie. It was taken at Christmas in Palm Beach. Oh god. What did that say about her? She hadn’t taken a single recent photo of her own daughter. “I’ve only been back a couple of days. . . .”
“Can you give us a description? Full name, height, weight?”
“Gracie Jo Sorenson,” Elise said, feeling faint. “Her birthday is October twenty-eighth, she’s eight years old. She’s four feet exactly and weighs . . .”
She realized she had no idea. She didn’t know this simple fact about her own child. Her hand immediately went to her belly. The baby. She knew nothing about this one, either.
“Four-foot-one now, actually,” Matt said. “And fifty-seven pounds. Her hair is wavy. Blond.” He motioned toward the photos. “Obviously cut to the chin. Skin a bit olive in tone, freckles. Light gray eyes.”
Elise said, “She has a pale brown, opal-shaped birthmark on her right arm, at the elbow.”
“We have her clothing here in the shot Matt gave us from the kitchen this morning,” Dorsey said. “Denim shorts. I can see that her T-shirt is cobalt blue with white writing, but the words are obscured.”
“It said something like . . . um . . . I can’t think . . .” Elise said. “ ‘No one’s in control’ . . .”
“ ‘Don’t worry, nothing is under control.’ ” Cass appeared at the table, with Garth. “Hi, Trent,” she said to Dorsey, before laying on the table a daytime photo of Gracie so staggeringly beautiful Elise gasped. Their daughter, sitting on the dock, dangling her feet over the edge. Someone must have called to her, because she was looking back over her shoulder, sunlight behind her curved like a halo, a grin on her face so joyful Elise nearly dropped to the floor.
“Hey, Cass.” Dorsey nodded in greeting—clearly they knew each other—and picked up the photo. “Mama’s little girl, eh?”
“She can’t run, it’s important to know.” Matt’s voice was hoarse. “She’s ab
out the easiest-to-identify eight-year-old you could possibly find in this town, because she’s unsteady on her feet. She uses turquoise crutches.” Matt pointed at Dorsey’s notepad. “Put that down. She can’t walk on her own.”
“Well, she can,” said Elise.
“No. She can’t.”
Elise looked at Dorsey. “Without her crutches, her walk is uneven.”
“This is all good,” said Dorsey. “Helps us enormously that she’s so distinguishable.”
“I still don’t understand how you didn’t hear a vehicle come to a stop out front,” Matt said to Elise. “If you were gone that short a time? Like you said, it would have taken some effort to coax Gracie into a vehicle. She’s no pushover. How the hell did you not hear anything?”
“None of this makes sense.”
“May I say something?” They all turned to look at Cass, who was sitting on the counter now. “I had the joy—the privilege—of spending a few moments alone with Grace yesterday. She won’t be hard to find; she glows like the sun.”
Elise studied Cass, willing her out of their lives. “It’s Gracie. Not Grace.” She turned to face the window. Police were everywhere, some in uniform, some plainclothes. Lights flashed in the fading dusk. Police radios buzzed. They’d brought in teams from all over the state.
Cass walked across the room. She wrapped her arms around Elise and held her, one hand stroking the back of her head. “We’re going to find her. I can feel it in my bones.”
Forensics people, gloved, suited, capped, bootied, were down on hands and knees on the road and the lawn. Samples went into Ziploc bags, which were labeled in black Sharpie.
“I refuse to let you blame yourself,” Cass whispered into her hair. “It’s not your fault.”
– CHAPTER 17 –
It was Monday. A wholly separate day from the one when his child disappeared. Matt had meant to lie down on Gracie’s bed for only a moment, but had clearly passed out. He struggled to sit up now, his head weighing fifty pounds. After those first panicked searches, so stupidly hopeful his daughter would be within arm’s reach after being gone all day, his body had become heavy and wooden, his joints as flexible as timber. He was no longer flesh and blood. He was a fallen oak.
He forced himself to stand. The sun would be up soon. They’d be able to see.
The buttery glow of the antler light met him as he made his way downstairs. Elise was staring at something on the hall table and looked up. Invited him over without saying a word. She had metal travel mugs waiting—coffee, he could smell it—but it was a framed photo that had her attention. He crossed the room.
It was that sweet baby picture of Gracie covered in yogurt and Cheerios, about nine months old, with dimpled hands in the air. In Elise’s other hand, unframed, was the sequel. When Gracie was older. In that one, Nate’s papery face smiled beside his granddaughter’s and the blurry smudge of Christmas tree lights lay behind them.
* * *
IT WOULD HAVE been 2011. The week before New Year’s, and they were all at the cabin, heavy snow falling day after day. Gracie had just turned five that fall and Nate, Matt, and Elise had showered her with, among a good many toys and books for Christmas, batteries of all sizes in her stocking. You couldn’t imagine a happier kid. She’d opened her gifts from Santa and left them all beneath the tree to revive toys she hadn’t played with in years. A baby doll that cooed when you pushed a bottle in her mouth and cried when you took it out. A cheap plastic dog that yapped and did backflips and drove everyone crazy, especially Gunner, who would’ve silenced the junky imposter in one chomp in his younger days. Her old crib mobile now clipped to her headboard that played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” over and over. And over.
Battery Christmas was one of unequivocal regression. But it was Nate who said, “Go with it. In about three days, she’ll be grown up, forgetting her own kid’s batteries all year.”
Early one morning, Gracie had gotten out of bed in her footsie pajamas to wake her dad and be piggybacked downstairs. She wanted Matt to drag her old high chair out of the shed. He did so with great reluctance—it was so cold out, the windows had all but frosted over. But Elise was in bed with the flu, and Nate was ninety-five. Both deserved a little quiet. As Matt dragged the chair through the snow and inside, Gunner trudged dutifully behind, his movements stiff and arthritic, his black face grizzled with white hairs.
Wrangling a long-limbed child into the high chair had been a challenge, as the tray’s metal sliders were caked with food and grime. Once in, Gracie banged her feet noisily against the lower rungs while Gunner looked on, invigorated by the fuss but too tired to get involved. Above the dog, as ever, the old Ski New York poster and Matt’s grandmother’s crisscrossed skis.
“Now I need baby food,” Gracie, the imp, said.
“Shh. Mom’s sleeping. How about some eggs? Or toast?”
Gracie rattled the tray in its grimy tracks and whined, “Real baby food.”
Gunner woofed his support.
“Okay, guys. We’re going to seriously take it down a notch.”
Footsteps in the living room, then Nate appeared, shaved and shod and dressed in a button-down shirt and sweater and crisply ironed trousers. Gunner, of course, swept across the room to greet his master. “Take it down a notch?” Nate swatted Matt out of the way. “Don’t listen to your father, sweetheart. He’s turning into an old man.”
“He said I can’t have baby food.”
Now a red-nosed Elise shuffled into the room, slippered and robed and clutching a wad of tissue, spinning away from Gunner as he went to greet her. “No, no. Go see . . . anybody else.”
Matt took the dog by the collar so Elise could sit at the table. “Sorry, babe. I wanted you to sleep in.”
“Don’t worry.” She motioned to her puffy face and coughed into the nook of her arm. “Sleep wasn’t happening.”
Nate observed from across the room, a half-grin on his lined face. “But contagion might be.”
Elise’s gaze snapped to Matt, as usual, wanting confirmation that Nate had insulted, accused, or otherwise maligned her. She always took his grandfather so seriously . . . clearly the man was joking.
Matt tried to lighten the moment. “I took a bullet for all of us, absorbing the virus all night long.”
“Mommy, we have a baby food problem,” said Gracie, flopping on her tray.
Elise smiled. “I’ll bet, Little Miss Bigger-Than-Her-High-Chair.”
“Baby food problem?” Nate said, leaving the room. “Baby food emergency, is more like it.” He returned to set a framed photo on his great-granddaughter’s tray. Infant Gracie in the same high chair. Yogurt and Cheerio madness. “You see that kid in the picture?”
Matt handed Elise a cup of coffee. Kissed her forehead and slid a hand over her shoulders as they both looked on.
“Yes.”
“That kid a baby?”
Gracie nodded.
“That stuff all over her hands and face. Is that food?”
“Duh.”
“Gracie,” Elise warned. “Don’t be saucy.”
Nate didn’t react. He glanced at Matt a moment, then back to his great-granddaughter. “ ‘Duh’ means yes?”
A dramatic nod.
“I give you . . .” The old man made his way to the fridge and cupboard and came back with a tub of yogurt and a box of Cheerios. He poured about a cup of cereal onto the tray, then spooned three dollops of yogurt onto it. “ . . . baby food. Go to town, sweetheart. Eat it, roll in it. Throw it in the air if that works for you.”
Gracie’s eyes doubled in size and she glanced at her parents in silent question. Was it really okay to make a mess? Matt and Elise laughed, told her to respect her great-grandfather’s wishes.
The rest—who snapped the photo when Nate leaned down to kiss her yogurt-slathered cheek, how they got Gracie’s slimy limbs out of the chair, how much of the slop Gunner ate, who cleaned it all up—none of it mattered.
* * *
MATT TURNED AWAY from the photo. “That was such a perfect morning.” His voice was a hoarse whisper. “She could do no wrong in Nate’s eyes.” He took a mug and shuffled to the front door, logs for feet, barely able to see through his tears.
At the door, Elise handed Matt a jacket and baseball cap. “It’s supposed to rain.” As he pulled them on, she added, “Dorsey texted. They want us in for polygraphs.”
“What the hell?” He squinted at his wife. “We’re suspects too?”
She pulled on her coat, tugged on a hat. “It’s standard. Booked for seven o’clock.”
“And what if we refuse?”
“Why would we refuse?”
He looked at her as if she’d lost her mind. “How about because we had nothing to do with whatever the fuck has happened to her and don’t want them wasting their time?”
“The faster they clear away the wrong directions, the faster they move in the right one.”
“But what if we don’t pass? What if, say, it registers our panic? We’re under the worst stress imaginable. . . .”
“They know that. And don’t forget, the search party is gathering at six. Starting from the fire station—”
“I know about the search party.” He couldn’t help being gruff. Search and rescue dogs were being brought in to work off-leash. What they were trained to find, Matt couldn’t contemplate. He’d overheard one cop on the driveway tell someone on his radio to bring cadaver dogs. “Jesus Christ. I was there when they said it.”
She zipped up her coat in silence.
His laces were undone and he kneeled down stiffly to tie them, double-knotting hard, like Nate had taught him. He stood to find his wife staring at him.
He kept waiting for this to turn out to have been a terrible mistake. A prank. His wife would laugh, tease him, and there Gracie would be. None of this was really happening.
But it was.
