Don't Look for Me

by Wendy Walker

  “I just have to get something,” I say. “From the kitchen. Some water…”

  My voice shakes as I walk. She is right behind me. I have to get away from her. Away from this house.

  They followed me. They took me. They knew I was coming.

  I search the drawers.

  “What are you looking for?” Alice asks.

  I don’t answer. I find a pair of scissors. I take them, and a knife, from a butcher block. I fold them into a dish towel and then set them aside, hoping she doesn’t notice as I get a glass of water and drink it down. My throat is tight. My mouth bone dry as I try to swallow.

  I look at her and focus now. I can do this. I can outsmart a nine-year-old girl.

  “You know how you have allergies to the outside?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “Well, I have something similar. I have allergies to the insides of houses. I have to go outside every day for a few minutes or I start to get sick.”

  She looks at me, curiously. “Really?” she asks.

  “Yes. I am feeling sick now. It happened suddenly when we were playing. I’m sorry if I scared you. The water helped. But I need to get outside. Can I go for a little walk?”

  She shrugs. “I guess. I think there’s a lot of woods. What if you get lost?”

  “I won’t go far. Maybe just to the end of the driveway and then right back. I can’t get lost doing that.”

  She nods. “That might work. When you come back, maybe you should wear the mask.”

  “Oh! That would be wonderful,” I say. “Can I borrow it?”

  “Sure!” Alice is thrilled to help me.

  “Do you know where it is?” I ask.

  She nods.

  “Can you get it for me and we’ll meet by the front door? That way I’ll have it as soon as I come back.”

  She smiles and bounces out of the room. I hear her skipping down the hall. I move quickly, grabbing the towel with the scissors and the knife, rushing to the living room. I open the front door and place them outside. I close the door just in time.

  Alice is there now, the mask in one hand. In the other hand, she carries a pair of rain boots.

  “You can’t go outside in bare feet, silly,” she says.

  I look at my feet. They are bare. My shoes disappeared along with my clothes last night while I slept. I would walk with bare feet across broken glass to get out of here but I shake my head and feign self-deprecation.

  “Oh, my! I am silly, aren’t I?”

  I take the boots. I can’t tell if they belong to a man or woman. They are big and my feet swim inside them. But I can walk and that’s all that matters.

  I smile at Alice. I force myself to pull her close to me. She nuzzles her face into my chest.

  “Thank you, Alice. You are a very sweet girl.”

  I release her now.

  “I’ll be back really soon and I’m sure I’ll feel better. Will you be all right for a few minutes?”

  She nods. “I stay here alone all the time.”

  “Okay.” I kiss her forehead and open the door. She steps back from it so she doesn’t have to breathe the air from the outside.

  My heart dances with the hope of freedom. It is near euphoric.

  As I step outside, I hear Alice call after me.

  “Be careful,” she says. “Don’t get lost in the woods.”

  I look back. And she tells me, “That’s how my first mommy died.”

  8

  Day fourteen

  An hour passed. Then another, and another, until Nic stopped watching the time—until a mild form of unconsciousness had shut down her mind, mercifully.

  She came to in the middle of the night. Head still pounding, sheets tangled around her body. Wondering how late it was, and if the bar across the street would still be open.

  Where was it coming from, this craving? She scanned her body, looking for the culprit. Her head was the obvious suspect, but that was just a red herring. A clever misdirection.

  She thought back to the first time she’d had a drink and felt the relief. It was the fall of her senior year—two years after Annie died. She’d managed the fallout with punishment. Schoolwork and running. She’d gotten a job at a local clothing store to fill the bits and pieces of spare time. She’d lost fifteen pounds because she’d deprived herself of every indulgence.

  It was Columbus Day weekend. Three days off from school. No cross-country meets or tests to study for. Her parents had both been gone—her father to a conference and her mother to visit Evan. Saturday she’d woken up and run ten miles. She’d worked her shift at the store, then come home to an empty house. A quiet house. She’d tried to read but her mind had been tired and refusing to cooperate. She’d turned on the television but nothing had been able to pull her in.

  That was the first time she’d felt them—the hollow spaces. The emptiness that would not fill up. Not with anything.

  She’d gone for another run, at night, until her body had shut down and she’d been able to sleep. But then morning had come and her legs wouldn’t move and her mind wouldn’t focus. The store was closed. She’d run out of distractions.

  She would come to understand that the hollow spaces had been carved out by the grief, and the guilt, and the self-hatred—the fallout from Annie’s death. But on that Sunday, they had felt like a wild beast writhing with hunger. For the first time in her life, she’d understood why people jumped from bridges, and when she’d found herself thinking about the bridge over the river downtown, she’d gone to the liquor cabinet and poured a glass of vodka.

  Within minutes, she was crying. And then laughing. And then bingeing some inane show on her laptop. She’d woken up Monday morning still in her clothes, the laptop dead beside her.

  And she’d thought—thank you, God. Thank you for vodka.

  By the end of senior year, she’d been caught four times with alcohol at school. Expelled. Her college acceptance revoked.

  And still, she thought—thank you, God. Thank you for vodka.

  As she lay in the bed now with her pounding head, she muscled back the craving, the hunger of the hollow spaces, and let herself go down the path that she had to consider. If her mother hadn’t walked away, and two weeks had now passed, she was likely dead. Dead in a field that they didn’t search. Or dead at the hand of a stranger.

  Maybe that’s why her father was so eager to believe the note was real. Maybe he couldn’t bear to lose her this other way. It would be hard to hold another woman with this thought in his head.

  Vodka … the bar across the street …

  Nic grabbed her phone to check the time. Shit. It was just past four. The bar closed at two.

  There was a red dot above her email. A message from her father. She sat down on the edge of the bed.

  The email had an attachment, a document that included clips of things her mother had written in her correspondence. He had been the one to read through them when she first disappeared. Her password was stored on the key chain of a computer they shared.

  The message now said only FYI—thought you should know.

  A new hour followed, then another, reading her mother’s words, but then going into the account herself and reading them firsthand and for the first time. Every word her mother had written going back in time, month by month.

  Most of it was insubstantial. Small talk, planning for lunch dates and holiday gatherings. But some of it was more than that. Like after the days she had sessions with her shrink or meetings with her grief support group. Those people had a way of teasing things out of her, keeping her immersed in her self-analysis. Lost in the past. Drowning in it.

  You have to feel it all before it goes away. They said this repeatedly—Nic knew firsthand because her counselor had said it to her.

  But does it? Does it ever go away? her mother had asked. One of them had given an honest reply. It goes away enough.

  She wrote things about Annie, and the depth of her grief. The depth of her torturous guilt. Then abou
t her husband and the extent of her love but also her inability to embrace that love. She felt unworthy. I killed his child, our child. I can’t stand for him to hold me … I would sooner he punch me in the face.

  Nic had to read that twice.

  Then there were things about Nic and her behavior. They had all given it a name—survivor’s guilt, they called it. She can’t enjoy her life because it feels wrong. Her mother was terrified about the path she was on.

  Sound advice was given. Maybe your husband is right, tell her she has to leave if she doesn’t go to college … cut off the money … tough love … but what if it pushes her too far?

  Fuck them. Fuck all of them and their therapy shit.

  Nic didn’t feel guilty about being alive. She felt guilty about the role she’d played in Annie being dead. Some things just were what they were.

  At the end of that particular exchange was the summation of her mother’s terror.

  I can’t lose another child.

  She would never be able to unsee those words.

  Those words were never going to leave her head.

  * * *

  Officer Jared Reyes was waiting for her in the diner at nine-thirty—as promised. He looked at her with familiarity, like an old friend, though Nic hardly recognized him.

  “Hey!” he said with a smile.

  “Hi,” she said back. She was too exhausted to wonder if she knew him better than she was remembering. Those four days had been brutal.

  “Thanks for meeting me.”

  He touched her shoulder, gave it a squeeze. It felt good. Good enough to make her worry.

  “Yeah, no problem. Want to grab a coffee?”

  “Do I look like I need one?”

  He smiled again and Nic found herself smiling back. It was a reflex with attractive men, and Reyes was attractive. She couldn’t decide what it was about him, but it was there. His face was average. Height, average. Not overweight. Some muscle tone, or just bulk, filling out the uniform in all the right places. No ring.

  There was something between him and the waitress, a past maybe. Or anticipation about a future. She seemed irritated when Nic walked in and drew his attention.

  Nic got a coffee to go. Reyes waited.

  Outside, the officer stopped as they walked to the squad car—his eyes catching the blue Audi parked by the inn.

  “I’m driving it now,” Nic said. “It’s nicer than mine.” But that was not the reason she’d been driving her mother’s car, which still smelled of her mother’s perfume and held her mother’s lipstick in the console.

  Reyes nodded as though he got it—her need to be near any small part of her mother.

  They turned right out of the diner and drove along Hastings Pass toward Route 7 and the Gas n’ Go. Reyes studied the fields on both sides. Brow furrowed. Eyes pensive.

  “I’ve been up and down this road,” he said, glancing at the cornfields. “Must be a hundred times since your mother went missing. Every time, thinking about what we might have missed.”

  Nic was surprised.

  “I thought the investigation was closed.”

  Reyes shrugged. “A woman is missing. Gone. I never met her. I barely know you or your family. But, I mean, what the hell? If a woman vanishes and it’s your job to find her—how does that not keep you up at night? Make you want to do something the next day? She can still be found, even if she doesn’t want to be. Those four days, everyone running around like chickens with their heads cut off—how can it hurt to slow down and do a more methodical search? She has to be somewhere. And just because we don’t know where that is doesn’t make it unknowable.”

  Reyes shifted in his seat, like he had felt a sudden wave of something uncomfortable inside him. Something he wanted to get out because it was hard to sit with. It shot through the air like electricity, and Nic suspected this was the very thing that drew people to him. The waitress. An old couple in the diner whose eyes followed him out the door. Even the car they passed back in town, a woman driving, waving at him. Big smile that she was hoping he would see.

  Nic had come to know men, the things they found to lure women. There were those who didn’t have to try. Who couldn’t stop it if they wanted to. That was the attraction of Officer Jared Reyes.

  Men like Reyes were almost as good as vodka.

  They drove to the Gas n’ Go. Reyes pulled the car over and turned off the ignition.

  “Is that her?” he asked.

  A small white sedan was parked on the other side.

  “I don’t know.”

  “It’s got New York plates,” Reyes said. “Come on.”

  They walked to meet Edith Moore as she stepped outside her car. She was in her late thirties, it seemed. Slacks, sweater, loafers. Short brown hair. Glasses. Her face wore the appropriate expression of empathy and eagerness.

  “You must be Nicole,” she said, extending her hand. “Edith Moore. Nice to meet you.”

  Her eyes moved quickly to Officer Reyes. Her expression changing. Nic hadn’t told her she was coming with the police.

  “Jared Reyes,” he said with a nod. “Hastings PD.”

  Edith Moore nodded as well. “I’m glad you came. I hope I can be helpful.”

  “Well, let’s see,” Reyes said. “Take us through it. The night of the storm.”

  They drove in the Chevy. Reyes in the front with Edith Moore. Nic in the back, dead center and leaning forward as far as she could to see through the windshield. They drove toward town on Hastings Pass for a mile and a quarter, then made a U-turn, driving slowly toward the intersection.

  “This is about how fast I was going. It was all I could manage with the rain. I couldn’t see a thing beyond the headlights.”

  “But you saw Molly Clarke somehow,” Reyes said.

  “My lights caught her. The road is narrow. I could see both sides of it.”

  When they were just before the mile marker Edith thought she remembered seeing, she pulled the car to the side. “It was right about here that I saw her, and then the truck coming from the other direction, heading into town.”

  Nic went through the rest of it with her. The things she’d already said on the phone, about her mother and how she’d waved them down. And the purse with the three letters. Nothing they asked now brought forth any more detail—not about the truck or the driver.

  “Can you be any more specific? The color, license plate, symbols, bumper stickers—anything?” Reyes asked.

  Edith thought carefully. “It was dark in color, like I said. It might have been black, a very dark gray. Charcoal. But not a light gray … maybe dark brown, I can’t remember much else about it. The rain was coming so hard…”

  But then another thought seemed to come over her as she was trying to recall the truck.

  “You know,” she said. “Now that I’m here—there is something else. But I can’t be sure.”

  Nic looked at her with urgency. “What is it?”

  She paused, squinted her eyes, lifted her arm and pointed at the road.

  “When I saw it drive off with your mother and it passed me, I looked at it through my rearview mirror. I’m not sure I saw two taillights. I think one might have been out. At the time I thought it was just a distortion from the rain. It was so heavy it was like looking through a pool of water. So I thought the two lights had just looked like one.”

  Reyes studied her face. “And now?”

  “Now,” she said. “I think it’s possible there was just one taillight.”

  “Which one was out?”

  Edith Moore shook her head. She didn’t know. “I’m so sorry that I didn’t get the plate number or the make and model. It wasn’t on my mind that I would need those things.”

  Reyes was uncomfortably silent as he stared at Edith Moore. He seemed irritated, shifting into a more hostile stance.

  “Let me ask you something else,” he said.

  “Okay.”

  “Are you sure you were coming back from New York City?”


  There was a long pause.

  “Yes. Of course I’m sure.”

  “I see you have an E-ZPass. Did you leave on the east side or the west side? The east side would take you over the Triborough Bridge. There’s a toll scanner on that bridge.”

  Edith Moore’s eyes lit up. “No—I definitely didn’t go that way. I went on the west side.”

  Something wasn’t right about her answer. Nic could hear it in her voice and see it in the creases of Officer Reyes’s eyes. A little smile.

  “The thing is,” Reyes said, going in for the kill, “your E-ZPass has no record of you entering or leaving New York City in the past sixty days. You can’t get into the city on the west side without passing under a scanner.”

  Shit.

  If she was lying about this, what else was she lying about?

  “Well, maybe I was wrong. Maybe I went on the east side. Maybe that other bridge without a toll. On Willis Avenue.”

  Reyes let this bone go. But he moved on quickly to other parts of her story. And her life. She was a nurse practitioner in Schenectady. Lived with her boyfriend. No kids. She had three cats. No, she was not in any financial trouble, and why are you asking me that? The reward money, of course. That wasn’t why I came forward.

  Where did she go when she left the scene, left Molly Clarke to disappear on Hastings Pass? Did anyone see her when she got home? Did she stop along the way? What time did she go to work the next morning? And, the last question—are you sure you weren’t with someone in Hastings and not New York City?

  What was he saying? That she was conspiring with someone in the town to fabricate a story about her mother?

  “No!” she said defensively. “Why would you ask me that?”

  Reyes backed off then.

  “Just dotting my i’s and crossing my t’s.”

  They drove back to the Gas n’ Go, got out of the car and stood in an awkward silence. But Reyes wasn’t through.

  “Do you have time to come to the station—maybe look at models of trucks? It would help to narrow things down. You’d be surprised how different they can be,” he said.