The Summer We Lost Her

by Tish Cohen

  Elise’s eyes bored into the metal siding as if she might be able to see through to the interior.

  Dorsey typed something into the computer and an aerial view of the street popped up.

  “Why are we just sitting here?” Elise asked.

  “Few more officers about to arrive.”

  “Shouldn’t we wait someplace less visible?” Elise said.

  Matt’s leg jiggled up and down with nerves. “Elise . . .”

  “Here they come.”

  A local police cruiser pulled up and parked just ahead of them. The two cops from the first night nodded to Dorsey and got out, walked around the side of the house.

  Dorsey started out of the car. “You folks sit tight here.”

  “But I want to see her,” said Elise.

  “If it’s her, you’ll see her.”

  An undercover car pulled up, and Dorsey walked over to lean in the window. There was too much action on the street. Anyone inside only had to glance toward a window.

  “I don’t like this,” said Elise, fingers on the door handle. “Why are they all just hanging around?”

  “Let them do their thing,” said Matt.

  An explosion of barking came from behind the wooden fence. A voice came from inside, a woman’s, shouting at the dog.

  “Great. Now she knows her property’s crawling with cops.”

  “They know what they’re doing, Elise.”

  “They’re small-town, Matt. An abduction would happen, like, never.”

  Elise opened her door and Matt grabbed her arm. “Stay here like he said!”

  Dorsey and one of the undercover cops started up the driveway. Elise shook Matt off and bolted across the grass to join them. The sound of a television grew louder and louder. Cartoon voices.

  Dorsey, halfway up the sagging steps, turned. “Back into the car. Please.”

  “I can’t.” She shot past him to the door. Through a dirty diamond-shaped window, Elise could see the backs of two heads. An old woman and a young girl sat there watching cartoons. Only the very top of the girl’s head was visible. Elise couldn’t breathe. The light was dim in the room, to be sure, but the child’s hair—that beigey undertone with streaks of white.

  Matt too was out of the car, standing beside her now. He took her hand, balled it into a tiny fist, and wrapped his fingers around it in the way she adored.

  “I think it’s Gracie,” she whispered.

  He peered inside and nodded, less certain.

  Elise could have put her fingers around his neck and squeezed the last breath out of him for not being as sure. If they didn’t believe in equal measure, if they both weren’t dead certain, it wouldn’t be her.

  One of the younger cops waved them down to the grass, but Dorsey held up a hand, gave Matt and Elise a look that said “stay cool” and knocked.

  The television went silent. The floor creaked as the woman got up, but they could only see her in silhouette. Short hair, stiff as a brush. Hunched body, thickest in the middle. They heard a series of fumbled clicks. Then a chain lock.

  Dorsey’s fingers tapped against his holster. His other hand rested on the door. In the periphery, the other police officers waited.

  The door swung open, revealing a dark, paneled room with a tartan armchair, gold carpeting, and an old TV. A naked doll on the floor. The woman squinted at them, the whites of her eyes yellowed toward a short nose. “Can I help you?”

  Elise strained to see past her. The hair. The girl started to stand on the sofa. Swung herself around until she was fully facing them. A sound escaped Matt. A groan, like an animal in a trap. He broke away and marched toward the road. She heard the pound of his fist on the hood of the police car.

  Dorsey nodded to the woman. “Wrong house. Sorry to bother you folks.”

  – CHAPTER 22 –

  They hadn’t spoken much to each other since Dorsey dropped them off at the cabin. Matt couldn’t think of anything to say. Nor, it seemed, could his wife. Coming so close—in their minds—to having their daughter back and having it not be Gracie had all but flattened them. They’d spent the rest of the evening uselessly driving up and down every street in and around the village, up 86 to the northeast and back down River Road. They got out and walked in a few spots—a sleepy cul-de-sac, the low-lying airport buildings, an abandoned real estate office with a wraparound deck. They gave a miss to the recycle center. Let the police handle that one.

  Matt had dropped onto the sofa on the back porch and pulled an old quilt over himself. He must have slept deeply—the last time he’d looked at his phone, it had been before five a.m., and now the sun was fairly high in the sky.

  Cass tapped on the back screen door and came inside—a welcome haze of tanned skin, wild curls, and fresh soap—when she saw him lying there. She knelt on the braided rug beside him and covered his hands with hers. “Hey. How are you doing?”

  The ticking clock from the kitchen caught his attention and he rose up onto an elbow. “It’s Tuesday, right?”

  “It is.”

  “What’s the time?”

  She plucked something off his chest. He looked down to see he was still in his Kostick T-shirt. “Time for you to change your clothes. Listen, I’m making fresh coffee and muffins for you over at my place. I want you and Elise—”

  “Where’s my phone? I need to know the time.”

  She reached for it atop the magazines on the painted end table. “It is . . . eight eleven.”

  Tuesday morning. He dropped back onto the cushion and did the calculation. In about twenty minutes, they’d pass the forty-eight-hour mark with no credible leads at all. “Fifty percent.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  He shook his head, unable to speak.

  Cass stood up and took the quilt off his body, pulled him up to sitting. “Go splash some water on your face. Change that crusty shirt. Get your wife and meet me out front. I have an idea.”

  * * *

  “THE THING IS, sometimes she does remember.” Cass led the way up and onto her mother’s stone veranda and waved them over to the wicker love seat and chairs, where coffee and fresh muffins waited with slices of banana and oranges on a low table. “I thought, if we re-create Sunday morning from her vantage point, there’s a slight chance something twigs, you know? Sometimes that’s how it works with her these days. Wait here and I’ll get her. We want her to see the bus go past, because you never know.”

  Matt sat down and looked around the porch: red geraniums dying in one pot, spiky grasses thriving in another. An old ceramic gnome beneath them, his face faded away to almost nothing. He remembered that gnome from the days when he still had features. Elise sat on the crushed floral cushions beside him. They had little choice but to stare at the police tape unraveling from the split rail fence and the canoe bus shelter across the road.

  What struck him from this vantage was how truly sequestered the canoe was from the cabin. From the end of the driveway, you could see the Sorenson house, but the bus shelter was a good fifty feet to the right, with a thick wall of cedars dividing the two. If a person wanted to nab a child sitting there, it was impossible to see from the front door, the garage. The spot where Elise had been gardening had a partial view. But to go out back at a time when there’d been a fair bit of activity out front? Cass was bang on about that.

  Was Elise thinking the same thing?

  His wife pulled her cardigan closer around herself. “A couple from San Francisco e-mailed me this morning. Mary Anesko, I think was the woman’s name. Their newborn son was taken from the maternity ward in Minneapolis and they got him back. Eight days later. She said if it happened for her, it can happen for us.”

  “How on earth did they find you?”

  “Online, she said. Some blog post where I was interviewed once.”

  “I guess this is what we do now.”

  “What?”

  “Before your child goes missing, you hear about a baby going missing in Minneapolis and you tel
l yourselves it’s faraway and rare. The odds are overwhelming that it will never happen to you. Now, we look at the even more unlikely event that these parents got their child back from a stranger with no good intentions, and we soothe ourselves with it. This time, if it can happen to them, it can happen to us.”

  Elise shifted away from him and reached for a slice of banana. Her bare legs were a map of blackfly and mosquito bites. “This is a ridiculous exercise. Alzheimer’s hits the short-term memory.”

  “Not a hundred percent. And she might remember some weird detail that will turn out to matter.”

  Elise looked at him, brows raised. “I guess this is what we do now.”

  Touché, he didn’t say.

  The door opened and Cass led her frail mother out in her pale green housecoat. When Ruth saw Matt and Elise, she stopped, smoothed her collar, hands ribboned with veins. An inch or so of white roots haloed her scalp before the abrupt edge of dyed black hair. “Oh dear. I didn’t know we had guests out here.” She turned to go back inside. “I’d better go put my face on.”

  “Not guests, Mom. That’s Matty. Nate Sorenson’s son.”

  Her head wobbled. “Who?”

  “Nate from across the street.”

  A rumble from up the road announced the Camp Imagine bus. The vehicle’s grille appeared in the shadows, then the smiley faces and rainbows and cartoon flowers burst cruelly into the bright sunlight. Cass said, over the din, “Does it make you remember anything, Mom—about the other morning? Do you remember a blond girl sitting across the street waiting for the bus? Inside the canoe shelter?” The vehicle bounced along, windows dotted with morose faces, and roared on past. “Did you see anything happen that day, Mom? Did you see anyone approach that little girl?”

  Ruth stood taller, a flash of recognition in eyes hazy with glaucoma. She seemed to be thinking hard and, slowly, began to nod. “You know, I did see something. There was someone.” A shaky hand pointed across the road, but she went silent.

  Matt and Elise’s need for her to continue nearly lifted the stone cottage from the ground. Elise couldn’t hold back. “Did you see a car or . . . or a truck?”

  Matt touched his wife’s arm. “Don’t rush her.”

  “It was a man.” Ruth turned to Cass’s veranda—a classic covered porch complete with porch swings on either side of the screen door. “He was sitting on the swing just there on the left. Keeping to himself, I thought. Something about him made me curious, and so I went across to see. Wasn’t till I got up close I could see his chin was slumped onto his chest. The man was dead.”

  A slow sigh escaped Cass. “Mom, that wasn’t this week. That happened ten years ago. You’re talking about Dad. Your husband. Edward.”

  Disappointment stretched across the entire streetscape, beyond the lake, to cover the sharp peaks of the mountains like plastic wrap. From the underside, it was difficult to breathe. Matt leaned over the porch rail. Elise ran down the steps.

  Cass led her mother back inside. “I’m so sorry, guys. I thought maybe there was a chance.”

  * * *

  IT WAS 2012. Darkness always falls sooner than anyone is ready for on the day the clocks turn back, Elise thought as she arranged a pile of clean laundry in her daughter’s dresser at the cabin. It wasn’t even five o’clock and the pines edging the lake had formed a jagged black line against the sky.

  Nate, still able-bodied in his advanced years, was out on the lawn, raking before the snow fell. Gracie, wearing a knit hat, a jacket, and thick tights that sagged around the knees, was playing in the leaves. She looked up at her mother in the window and waved, her cheeks chafed and red, her nose scrunched up enough to show a perfect row of tiny Chiclets teeth. She’d just turned six a few days before.

  Elise waved back.

  Gunner watched from the dock, tail thumping contentedly against the old wood as he watched Gracie play.

  As usual, the child’s dresser drawers at Nate’s place were sticking. It was overstuffed, this junky piece Elise had picked up at a charity shop in Keene years before and painted pink. She’d been eyeing Matt’s childhood bedroom set for their daughter’s room over the years. It was medium-toned mahogany with dove-tailed corners and a gorgeous patina. More to the point, there was a roomy armoire that would be a godsend for a girl with no closet. Keeping Matt’s Lake Placid bedroom as a shrine to his twelve-year-old self wasn’t practical in any way. In fact, it bordered on creepy.

  The idea had cleared the Gracie test. She’d been bouncing with excitement. Matt was fine with the prospect as well. And, because the Giants were playing the Steelers, Matt was fine with Elise doing the asking.

  She pulled on a coat and gloves and stepped outside. The sharp, metallic essence of snow charged the air with promise, though not a single flake had fallen yet. It had been a terribly hot summer—the sun incessant, the air gooey and thick. It had clogged the transition from day to night. Dusk had an easier time now that the seasons had changed.

  “Mom, look what I can do.” Gracie’s red woolen hat tipped drunkenly to one side, shaggy with oak leaves. With crutches and a rake to contend with, she’d had far more success doing backward free falls into leaf piles than raking them up. Elise laughed.

  In his ancient wool jacket, Nate squinted up at the sky, his face red and creased in the cold, then looked at Elise. “It’s going to come down any minute.”

  “I’ll help.”

  Elise grabbed a rake and started filling a thick brown paper bag. A gust of wind skimmed the leaves off the top and back onto the grass. From the tree above, a crow shrieked its indignation. Gracie cawed back. She grabbed a handful of leaves and halfheartedly threw them at her mother, laughing when they drifted back to her feet.

  “You heard your great-grandpa. We’ve got to get serious. Stop fooling around,” Elise said.

  “I’m too tired to stop fooling around.” Gracie went wild, thrashing her arms and legs. The closest bag split at the seam, tipped over, and dumped its contents.

  “Now look what you’ve done,” said Nate.

  “I’ll get a new one from the shed,” said Elise. When she returned, she went straight to Nate. “I was wondering, now that Gracie is older, what would you think of letting her use Matt’s old bedroom set? It’s so beautiful and I’d love to see her grow up with nice pieces that really have a history. And she could use the armoire space to hang her dresses. We could just swap out dressers, nightstand, and cupboard. Wouldn’t take long.”

  Nate took the bag from Elise and examined it. It was rotten along one edge—moldy and torn. “We can’t use this.”

  “It was the last one.”

  He trudged up the side of the cabin and disappeared. From the back could be heard sounds of boxes being dragged about in the garage. Cupboard doors opening and closing. The clash of a metal lid falling onto the concrete floor and spinning to a stop. He returned with a newer bag and shook it open. Together he and Elise started filling it with leaves.

  She checked to make sure Gracie wasn’t within earshot. “So did you give it any thought—the furniture swap?”

  He leaned down for an armful of leaves and didn’t look up as he pushed it to the bottom of the deep paper bag. “I did.”

  “And . . . ?”

  “I think you want for your daughter what you never had.”

  Elise was confused. “Of course. As parents, we all want the best for our children.”

  “Sure. And the rest of us earn it.”

  Elise paused. “The furniture is just sitting there. Gracie would be using it in her room; that’s the only difference.”

  “It doesn’t work like that—getting something for nothing.”

  This was about money? “We’ll pay for it, then. I just really want her to grow up with Matt’s furniture.”

  Her grandfather-in-law glared at her in the near dark. His words came out in a hiss. “You, Elise, can’t pay me what that set’s worth.” He dragged the overflowing bag away and headed for the garage. From the backyard, sh
e heard the thump of the front door.

  “Mommy.” Gracie’s eyes were huge. “Do I get the bedroom set?”

  Elise ruffled her leafy hat. “You know what? I think we’ll have more fun hunting around for more pieces—you and me. We can paint them any way you want.”

  Matt came out the back door just then in sweater and wool cap, big work boots. “My grandfather’s making his stew in there. Head down and chopping like a madman.”

  Madman is right. Elise said nothing.

  “Look,” Gracie said, pointing to the sky.

  It was always magic, the silent earthward spiral of the season’s first snowflakes. Faster and faster they fell, the ground beginning to vanish beneath the sugary whiteness.

  With hardly a dusting of snow on the grass, Gracie dropped down to make a barely there snow angel. They watched as their daughter’s arms and legs swiped up and down like sticky windshield wipers.

  Matt nudged his wife. “How’d it go—the big ask? You get what you want?”

  She looked at him, hat covered with snow, grin on his face because here they were—the four of them plus Gunner—at his favorite place on earth. She reached up to squeeze his ruddy cheek. “I already have what I want.”

  * * *

  ELISE WAS STARING at the very spot where Gracie had made her invisible snow angel that night when an unmarked police car pulled into the driveway. It wasn’t a scheduled visit. In fact, she’d texted Dorsey when she woke, but he hadn’t replied. She couldn’t help it—she broke into a run, with the vision of Gracie bouncing her feet in the backseat. Matt came through the front door just as Dorsey climbed out of the car, a plastic file folder in his hand.

  Cass sauntered over from her driveway. Were they never to have another important moment without this woman pushing herself in their lives?

  “These were found at the side of Highway Seventy-Three, just before Upper Cascade Lake, this morning. So, not far off.” Dorsey held out an eight-by-ten photograph of Gracie’s sticker-covered crutches against a white backdrop, tiny notes pointing to various markings. “I can’t give them to you physically, not just yet. Just want to confirm they’re your daughter’s.”