by Wendy Walker
I feel apprehension now. I won’t call it fear. I can’t.
“Can we go, then? To town?”
My voice is firm. He can’t keep me here. He can’t make me stay one second longer. He can’t just take my clothes, and she can’t just crawl into my bed while I’m sleeping. They can’t …
“I can go to town,” he says now. “But I really need you to stay here with Alice. It’s not safe without the phone working or the power. Lots of trees still weak. Some are close to the house.”
No, I think. I am going to town! I am going home!
I shake now, head to toe. It’s in my cheeks and on my tongue as I try to shape words in my mouth.
“We can bring Alice with us. Like last night…”
“She has allergies, remember?” He says this like I should feel ashamed. Like I have been inconsiderate of this poor little girl. “She gets sick when she goes outside. I had to bring her last night because no one was here to be with her and I needed to fill the tanks and get the water. There’s no need to take the risk today.”
I struggle with this information. It comes at me fast. I cannot get my clothes. I cannot leave this house. I cannot call my family. Disbelief bleeds into acceptance and acceptance triggers fight or flight, adrenaline. I feel my skin flush and burn. My vision is unclear, muddled now with floating white circles. I breathe.
I breathe.
He turns to leave and Alice steps into me, clinging to my waist. She looks up at me with that smile and those wide eyes.
“You can make me breakfast!” she says cheerfully.
My hand reaches out before I can stop it and grabs the man’s shirt. I look at him, pleading.
He pulls away and walks to the dead phone. There’s a notepad next to it, and a pen on the counter. He grabs them both and brings them to me.
“Here,” he says. His tone is now cheerful, just like Alice’s.
“Write down the names and numbers of everyone you want me to call.”
Yes!
I write furiously—names and numbers. John. Nicole. Evan. A few close friends from my grief support group. I rip the paper from the pad and give it back to him.
He looks it over. “Can you write your name?”
“It’s just Molly,” I say. “They’ll know.”
“Write it anyway,” he insists. “Just in case. I forget things sometimes.”
I write my full name. Molly Clarke. I hand back the paper.
“Can you call them as soon as you get a signal? Tell them where to come get me? That I’m safe?”
The man’s face softens. It melts into a smile that is friendly and warm.
“Of course! It’s going to be just fine. I promise.”
I feel like crying now.
“And maybe you can check on my car? Let the police know?”
I think about my phone in the car, how it must be sending out a signal. How John will know how to find it online. We share an account.
Maybe they are already on the way!
Something about this thought feels strange. I don’t want it to feel strange and I fight against it.
They will come, won’t they?
Oh God … how it feels strange, a sudden alarm as I wonder about the log on the fire, and Nicole’s words and Evan’s behavior.
The man folds the paper carefully into the pocket of his flannel shirt.
“Sure thing!” he says with enthusiasm.
I feel relief, though it rests on shaky ground.
I talk myself through it. The man will go to town and call my family. He will check on my car and tell the police where I am. Maybe later today when he feels better about the trees we can leave Alice and he will drive me to town to get my car and fill it with gas from his tanks. Maybe I can drive home myself.
Alice pulls a chair up to a cupboard.
“Do you like tea?” she asks me.
It takes me a moment to process her question. I am still adjusting to this new situation—not going to town. Not calling my family.
“Yes,” I say, finally.
“Look at all the kinds we have!” she says, opening the cupboard to reveal several canisters of loose leaf tea.
“Come here and pick one!” she demands.
And I obey.
“You can heat the water with the stove. The generator should have it working,” the man says.
I smell coffee so it must be his dead wife who liked tea. He wants me to have some now. Maybe he wants to put my mind at ease—because there is no need to worry. He will contact my family. They will come for me.
As he turns to leave the kitchen, a thought rushes in and I call after him.
“My purse!” I say. “Is it with my clothes?”
He shrugs. Ponders.
“I think you left it in the truck. I didn’t see it last night in the house.”
I can’t remember either, but it’s unlike me to leave my purse. I carried it with me into the storm.
“Can you bring it inside? Before you go?”
“Sure thing,” he says.
He leaves the room. Alice and I make tea. I listen for the door, for the man to return with my purse.
But the next sound I hear is the truck driving away.
6
Day thirteen
Roger Booth owned the Hastings Inn, the diner next door, and the fifty acres of land that sat behind them. The businesses shared a parking lot of cracked, potted asphalt. The painted white lines had all but faded. A parking free-for-all.
The inn was rarely occupied, as Nic had learned the last time she’d been here. It was mostly the diner that kept the business afloat. Booth lived in an apartment on the first floor.
He owned it all free and clear, a parting gift from his father who had been an executive at the pharmaceutical company before it closed. Booth Senior had managed to get out before the crash, retiring to Florida with his wife of thirty-two years. There was a sister, as well, though she had married and moved to Buffalo. Booth was left with the family’s properties and was the unofficial mayor of Hastings because of it.
None of this was information Nic had intended to gather. But one of the waitresses liked to talk. So did the bartender across the street. The Booth family are the Kennedys of Hastings. That depiction had been dead on.
Nic parked in front of the entrance to the inn. It was a pristine, fabricated white farmhouse with a wraparound porch, one of the few with that style of architecture that sat along the road. Most of the original farmhouses lined Route 7. The Booths’ inn was sadly out of place.
The diner, however, was true to form—a rectangle with a silver roof. Black smoke billowing from a chimney. Big windows. Neon sign.
The two structures sat side by side, a small row of shrubs and about twenty feet between them.
Nic reached for the car door, opened it, but then pulled it shut. She stared at the inn with its white porch and red shutters. Four days she’d spent here with her father. Four days that had just been the start of the dismantling of the life they’d hobbled together after Annie died. The cornerstone of that new, disfigured life was her mother soaking up whatever abuse they handed out. She could see that now. Nic had been cruel to her. She’d paraded her bad behavior with fantastic fanfare, and massacred any attempts her mother made to help with harsh vulgarities.
You’re not your mother, her father had texted. You don’t owe your life to Annie’s death.
But he had no idea. He hadn’t been there the day Annie died. He didn’t know what Nic owed her death. Owed to her.
He wasn’t the one who’d seen Annie running away from the house, hair flying around her face. Then looking back with a mischievous smile. Running. Smiling. Reaching the end of the driveway. He hadn’t been the first to see the car. To know what was about to happen. Annie!
Her mother had been racing home from work because Nic hadn’t answered the phone. She’d been in charge of them, Annie and Evan. And at sixteen, she’d had things to do—serious things back then when she still cared about
her life. It wasn’t as though they were babies. But Annie was so precocious. She never listened.
She’d wanted ice cream. She’d heard the truck. And she’d run.
Her father hadn’t been there. He hadn’t heard Nic screaming for her to stop. Too far away to reach her. The screeching tires on the asphalt. Annie lying in a pool of blood. Lying dead in the road. And her mother behind the wheel, driving the car that had struck her. There were no words to describe it.
Maybe Nic wasn’t her mother. But they were bound together by their actions that day, the bow and stern of a sinking ship.
She let Annie recede back into her place of hiding. Hair flying. Smile pulled clear across her face.
She grabbed her duffel, then made her way up the steps to the front door.
Inside, the air smelled stagnant as it had before. Nic walked to the reception desk, and set her mother’s key down on the lace runner which lay unevenly across the counter. There were small bowls with soft mints, toothpicks, business cards, a guest register where people could write things about their stay before leaving. And a silver bell, which Nic rang.
Footsteps, creaking wood, a door closing. Booth emerged from his apartment in the back, startled.
“Miss Clarke?” He said her name like it was a question, like he couldn’t believe she was here again.
“One and the same,” Nic said.
Booth looked sleepy, as though she’d disturbed him from an afternoon nap, but he was also freshly groomed. She could smell the aftershave. She remembered that about him now, the way he wore his part in this town, gave it reverence with his appearance. Khaki pants. Button-down shirt. Clean shave. He was fit, though slender. He’d mentioned something about cycling. He was lean like a cycler. And his hair was short. Neat.
That was how she’d come to think of him. Neat. Tidy. And completely unaware that his royalty status ended at the crossing of Route 7.
He walked behind the counter.
“What brings you back here?”
Nic took a moment to consider how much to tell him.
“Following up on some things. A new lead. Probably nothing, but I have to be sure.”
Booth nodded. Thinking. But, oddly, he didn’t ask for details.
“You here alone?” he asked instead. He sounded concerned. Or maybe curious. Either way, his face lit up a little.
“For now,” she said. “Can I get a room for the night?”
He busied himself then, looking at a handwritten ledger, finding a key—an actual key on a large wooden ring.
“You want 2A again?”
“Sure.”
She threw a credit card on the counter. He handed her the key on the wooden ring, the number 2A carved into it and painted gold.
Booth slid the card across a manual imprint machine, then gave her the slip to sign.
“Have you been doing okay?” he asked.
Nic signed. Handed back the slip.
“Sure, you know. Given everything.”
The wheels were turning now. She could see it on his face, the way he scrunched his eyes and cocked his head to the side, slightly askew.
“No word from her?”
“No. Nothing.”
He shrugged, held his palm up to the sky. “Strangest thing. How easy it is to disappear in this day and age.”
Only it wasn’t, Nic thought. It wasn’t easy at all. A person needed money and a place to stay and food. All of those things forced a person out into the open, into systems of data that could be traced.
What was strange was how easy it was for everyone to believe Molly Clarke had just left. Just disappeared. Including herself.
A response was on her tongue, but she said nothing. Booth seemed like a decent man. Well meaning. He’d told them before that he hadn’t seen Molly Clarke the night of the storm. He’d boarded up both places, the inn and diner, well before she could have made it to town from Evan’s school. Said he was in his apartment, in the back, all night. Reading with a lantern. Having some tea. Listening to the radio until the storm had passed. And then trying to get to sleep with the wind still roaring and the worry that the plywood wouldn’t hold.
“Well, I’m happy to help any way I can.”
He winked at her then, and Nic smiled in response.
“I need to rest if you don’t mind,” she said.
Booth waved toward the stairs.
“Of course.”
* * *
The room was the same. Old. Frilly, as though that’s what guests at a quaint Connecticut inn would expect. Grandma décor. And Booth kept the heat running—she remembered this all too well. The crackling radiator, the hot, dry air. It was stifling.
She tossed her phone on the nightstand, her bag on the small chair in the corner by the window. She pulled the shades and drew the curtains. It was nearly six, dusk, gray skies.
She ran water in the scalloped sink, splashed her face.
Back to the bed. She changed into pajama pants and a T-shirt, pulled up the covers and climbed beneath them. The sheets were stiff, but cool. She lay her head on the pillow.
It offered little comfort. The mattress had hardened unevenly over time. The pillow turned soft. Blood rushed into her head, making it pound harder, right into her eardrums. It wanted a drink.
She reached for her phone on the nightstand. There was a text from her brother.
WTF? Hastings?
She started to text back, but the phone rang in her hand.
“Finally!” her father said when she picked up. “What’s going on there? What’s happening?”
Nic winced. Everything felt worse now, lying down. She got up and walked to the window, opening it a crack to let in the cool air. The grounds behind the inn were nothing but bare, scattered trees with stubborn patches of dead leaves clinging to the branches.
“Nicole!” Her father was in a panic.
“I’m fine,” she said. “I’m at the inn. I got a room.”
He let out a moan.
“It’s not like last time.”
“I don’t like any of this. I should come back.”
It occurred to her then—how he would have insisted on coming if he thought there was any real danger. From Edith Moore or someone in this town. Or the town itself. He still believed that his wife had walked away on her own, even after seeing the handwriting analysis.
“No, Dad,” Nic said. “One of the cops is coming with me tomorrow to meet Edith Moore. I won’t leave the inn until then. Maybe to the diner next door, but that’s all.”
Now a sigh and another moan.
“She just wants a chance at the money, Nicole. She waited almost two weeks to come forward and that doesn’t make any sense. How did she even get your number? You can’t hold on to false hope that this is more than what it is.”
Words flew from her mouth before she could stop them.
“Is that why you lied to me—about the note?”
“Oh, Nic…”
She hung her head, the phone still pressed to her ear. “I remember, you know. That last day of the search, when they found it.”
“So do I.”
“We went to the diner to talk about it and you ordered a sandwich, Dad. And fries and a soda and you … you ate it … all of it!”
He knew what she was implying. She could tell from the silence. For the first three days, neither of them had been able to get down any real food. They’d gotten by on coffee and a few bites of toast, crackers. Walking through cornfields with strangers, hoping to find her mother, then hoping not to as the hours turned to days, making it more likely that if she was found, she would be found dead.
The credit card charge had come through on day four—taking two days to post. The note and clothing were found next. And her father’s appetite suddenly returned, like magic. Fear had transformed into resignation. And then acceptance.
“I have to find her, Dad. Even if she wrote that note and doesn’t want to be found. Even if that note was forged and…”
“S
top! I know what you’re thinking. That’s why I didn’t tell you about the report. I knew you’d go down that road and it’s wrong, Nic. Think about what the note said. How would anyone know those things about her? She wasn’t herself, Nicole. She was upset and nervous, but the words—that was how she felt. Only she could know that.”
“Then I’ll find her safe and sound and make her come home. Maybe the truck…”
He wouldn’t let her finish.
“I just can’t stop thinking about how you used to be. When you were a little girl, full of spitfire, and then a big girl and then a young woman with everything in front of her…”
Nic felt tears coming. Not now.
“Dad—stop!”
But he didn’t stop. “And you loved your life. You loved school and running and your friends…” He was crying and laughing now, at the same time. “I used to get so worried about all you girls, meeting up with boys at the mall, and now … Oh God, Nic … now I would give anything to be worried about you having fun with your friends. I would give anything to see you go to college, or just to see you smile again, not back in Hastings chasing after dead ends.”
He was full-on now, crying into the phone, making her cry.
“Dad…” She didn’t know what to say to him. How to make this better for him. It was hard enough to get through each day herself. She couldn’t carry her father’s anguish as well.
“I know I’m not supposed to say these things to you,” he said, catching his breath. “They told me not to, that it would make you feel worse. I’m sorry, sweetheart. I just need you to know that even if you don’t remember what it felt like when you were happy, that I do. I do! And I will hold those memories until you’re ready to take them back. Until you’re done running away—and that’s all this is, looking for your mother when she doesn’t want to be found.”
The therapy speak was unbearable. She recognized every theme—the holding of memories, the holding of feelings, the running away. Each of them was another layer of mental sedation, wrapped around her and Evan and their father, keeping them from crashing into one another. Keeping them cocooned and preserved, until—what, exactly?
“I’m not running away…”
