Then he set the broom aside, dropping it onto the floor, where it made a banging sound against the worn wood. He went into the kitchen. He managed to get one load started in the dishwasher, and then he began the washer and dryer. He was exceptionally pleased with himself that he was able to measure out detergent, put it in the proper receptacle, and then punch the right series of buttons to start the washing machines.
It was extraordinarily mundane, irrepressibly lonely work.
This was all unfair, he argued with himself. He needed them and they weren’t here.
And then, as the washing machine began its pocketa-pocketa noises, filling with water and suds and cleaning his clothes, he realized they were.
He was never alone.
All the people he loved and cared about were beside him.
In that second, he understood that hearing them wasn’t about them, it was about himself. He turned around sharply, pivoting as if he’d been surprised by a noise. Cassie was behind him. He broke into a wide smile; it was the young Cassie. She was wearing a loose-fitting summer dress, and he saw that she was pregnant—far along, maybe only days, or minutes, from Tommy’s announcement that he was arriving in their world. She stood next to the wall, leaning up against the door of the kitchen. She smiled at him, and when he eagerly took a step forward, reaching out for her, she shook her head and wordlessly pointed to the side.
“Cassie,” he said. “I need you. You’ve got to be here with me to help me remember . . .”
She smiled again. She continued to gesture to the side. Adrian didn’t quite understand what she was pointing at, and he moved closer, reaching out with his hands widespread.
“I know it wasn’t always perfect. I know there were arguments and sad times and frustrations and you used to complain about being stuck in a little college town where nothing ever happened and that you deserved to be a prominent city artist and that I held you back. I know all that. And I remember it was hard, especially when Tommy had his rebellious times and we fought about him and what to do. But now all I want to remember is what was great and wonderful and ideal . . .”
She pointed again to her side, and he could see exasperation in her eyes, as if his long self-serving speech wasn’t important. She flashed with demand. Black eyes, he saw, that could resonate like thunder when she wanted.
“What is it?” he asked.
She smiled and tossed back her head again, shaking her long hair as if he were a child that couldn’t quite grasp something pathetically simple in a classroom, like two plus two or the shape of the state of Massachusetts.
“What,” he started, and then he saw what she was pointing at. The telephone attached to the kitchen wall.
Adrian listened carefully and, slowly, like the volume on a stereo being adjusted, he heard a distant ringing becoming louder and louder. He seized the receiver and held it to his ear.
“Hello?”
“So, professor, been waiting for me to call? You want to get together? I’ve made some progress.”
It was the sex offender. Unmistakable tone of voice. Like thick oil bubbling up out of the earth, he thought.
“Mister Wolfe.”
“Who’d you expect?”
“Did you find her?”
“Not exactly. But.”
“Well, what is it?”
Adrian thought his voice had a no-compromise toughness to it. He wondered where that came from.
“I think, professor, you might want to help out now. I’ve found a few . . .” He stopped. Wolfe hesitated. “Well, I’ve found some things worth seeing,” he said. “And I’m thinking you might be the person who needs to see ’em.”
Adrian looked over at his wife. She was stroking her enlarged stomach, her hand making round circles across the swollen belly. She looked up at him and nodded eagerly.
She did not need to say Go, Adrian.
“All right,” he said. “I will come over.”
He hung up the telephone. He wanted to embrace his wife, but she made a gesture toward the door. “Hurry,” she finally said in her singsong voice. He was overjoyed to hear her speak. The silence had scared him. “Always hurry, Audie.”
He looked over at her stomach. What he remembered were the last days before their only son was born. She was hot, uncomfortable, but all the things that should have made her short-tempered and impatient seemed to be shunted away into some hidden box. She sweated in the summer heat and waited. He would bring her ice water and help her when she launched herself from her chair. He would lie beside her at night pretending to sleep, listening to her roll and shift trying to find a comfortable position. There was no way to express sympathy back then, because there really was nothing to be sympathetic about and it would just have made her angry. She was already working overtime to keep her emotions in check.
Adrian took a step forward.
“You can’t just remember the good things,” Cassie said. “There were lots of troubles too. Like when Brian died. That was bad. You were drinking heavily for weeks, and blaming yourself. And then, when Tommy . . .”
She stopped.
“Why did you . . .” He started to ask her the question that had lingered over the last weeks of her life but he could not. He saw that Cassie had dropped her eyes to her waist, as if she could see everything that was to come, and it made her both joyful and irrepressibly sad all at once. And then, Adrian thought, that must be what he felt, every second of every day, both in his sanity and in his madness.
He thought that he had been wrong to go on with life after Tommy and Cassie died. That had been his time. He should have followed them immediately, without any hesitation. Living had been the coward’s way out.
When he looked back at Cassie, she was shaking her head.
“What I did was wrong,” she said slowly. “But it was right too.”
This made no sense at the same time that it made perfect sense. As a psychologist, he understood how grief could trigger a near-psychotic, suicidal state. There was significant literature in his field on this subject. But when he looked across the room at his wife and she seemed so young, so beautiful, and she reflected all the possibility that they had in their lives together, all the clinical studies in the world didn’t help him to understand why she had done what she did.
Adrian squeezed his eyes tight. He wanted to ask her why she had left him alone, and then he thought he must have spoken the words, because her voice penetrated past his reverie. “When Tommy died, I became a shadow,” she said. “I knew you were strong enough to see something left to living. But I was weak. I couldn’t be in a house where there was so much pain and memory. Everything reminded me of him. Even you, Audie. Especially you. I looked at you and saw him and it was like something was torn from inside me. So I drove the car too fast one night. It seemed right.”
“It was never right,” Adrian said. He slowly opened his eyes, drinking in the vision of his young wife. “It could never be right. I would have helped. We would have found something together.”
Cassie touched her stomach. She smiled.
“I forgive you,” Adrian blurted loudly. He wanted to cry. “Oh, Possum, I forgive you.”
“Of course you do,” Cassie replied, matter-of-factly. “But you cannot waste these moments on me. You have a more important job. Don’t you think there is another mother somewhere, Jennifer’s mother, who feels like I did?”
“But,” he started.
“Get cleaned up. You can’t go out looking like this,” Cassie said.
Adrian shrugged and went into the bathroom, lathered his face and grabbed his razor. He brushed his teeth and washed his face. Then he hurried into their bedroom. He rummaged through drawers until he came up with a clean pair of corduroys, fresh underwear, and a pullover that passed a quick nose test. He pulled on the clothes rapidly, knowing that
Cassie was watching him.
“I’m hurrying,” he said.
He could sense her laugh. “Adrian, moving quickly was never your forte,” she said.
“All right, all right,” he replied, a little exasperated. “The man makes me feel dirty, Cassie. It’s hard to hurry to go see him.”
“Yes, but he’s the closest thing you have to an answer. Who knows better how to start a fire, Audie, the arsonist or the fireman? Who’s the better killer, the detective or the assassin?”
“Your point,” Adrian said, as he grunted, tying his shoelace, “is well taken.”
“Puzzles. Mazes. Games. Brainteasers. Mental twisters. Adrian, see it all the way you saw everything. Pieces that add together and tell you something. Work hard, Audie. Make your imagination work for you.”
Adrian thought his wife was clearly right. He sighed, wishing to stay longer, get more answers to all the questions that he already knew the answers to, instead of heading off into the night to try and find answers that were hidden. He trudged to his door, pulling on a tweed jacket, and exited into bright midmorning sunshine, momentarily surprised that the midnight darkness he’d expected seemed to have been strangely misplaced.
It was against departmental policy but it was the sort of rule that was frequently broken and rarely enforced. Terri Collins had brought the Jennifer Riggins case file home for the weekend, hoping that an examination of all the disparate details accumulated on various pages might lead her in some positive direction. She sat with it all collected on her lap while her children played outside with friends, making an acceptable racket, background banging and shouting, and, so far, she thought blissfully, no tears of conflict.
Her own frustration had redoubled. The technicians at the state police had managed to enhance the security video just enough so that some facial details were recognizable, but only in the most limited way. If she knew the man’s name, it might prove helpful in a court of law. It possibly might have allowed her to ask some hard questions, if she had the man in a seat across from her. But so far as identifying who he was and what he was actually doing in the bus station and whether it had some real connection to Jennifer’s disappearance was relatively impossible. Maybe if she had access to sophisticated antiterrorist software and banks of computers, it might have meant something. But she did not.
She recognized the classic cop’s dilemma. If something else has provided a suspect, with a name and a link to a crime, backtracking into accumulating evidence was a tricky, though manageable, process.
But stare at a fuzzy, barely focused still frame ripped from a security video and try to guess if this anonymous individual had anything to do with a disappearance in another part of the state, and who it might be, and why he was there . . .
Terri stopped staring at the picture and shoved it aside.
Impossible, she thought.
She looked down at her file.
Dead ends and unlikely connections.
There was little enough to go on, and what little she had made little sense. She shook her head and wished that she had the professor’s single-mindedness.
Terri thought, He might be right but it’s still impossible.
Serial killers in Britain in the sixties. A couple in a panel truck on a suburban street. And then an impossible crime. A random nightmare. A milk carton disappearance.
She imagined that her career was about to be as dead as Jennifer Riggins. This was a terrible thing to predict—equating her paycheck with a sixteen-year-old’s life—but it still rose into her imagination.
Maybe the professor’s right about everything, she told herself. But it still doesn’t mean I can do anything about it.
For a second she was angry. She wished she had never heard of Jennifer Riggins. She wished she hadn’t responded to the teenager’s first attempts to run away from home so that her name was linked to the official record of the teenager’s misadventures. She wished she had refused to take the dispatcher’s summons calling her to the scene of the latest flight. She wished she’d had nothing to do with the family that was about to undergo all the terrible uncertainties that the modern world can deliver.
Closure is a word that gets bandied about, she told herself, as if it somehow puts things right. We learn what happened to our child, we understand a disease, we comprehend the flag-draped coffin coming back from Iraq or Afghanistan. Someone says we have closure and that’s like a get-out-of-jail-free card—except it isn’t. Nothing is ever quite that compact and simple.
Terri clenched her hand into a fist. She discovered that she was staring at the Missing Jennifer flyer.
She abruptly dropped the file to the floor and almost kicked at it. Absolutely no leads to follow up, she thought. No telltale indicators of one thing or another. No obvious path to follow. No subtle trail to examine.
She sighed and stood up. She went to the window and stared out, idly watching the children at play. Everything, she believed, was utterly normal for a weekend morning.
She guessed that the same could not be said for the Riggins household. She breathed in deeply and understood that it was soon to be her job to take Mary Riggins aside and say that until some concrete piece of evidence surfaced they were at a standstill. This was not a conversation she looked forward to having. Police are well versed in the ability to deliver bad news. It is something of an art, expressing the details of the overdose or the accident or the murder, giving out information yet not overwhelming the victim’s family with the capriciousness of life. The emotional content of these conversations was better left to priests and therapists. Still, it would fall to her to tell Mary Riggins that she was at a dead end, which probably meant that Jennifer, if she still lived, was also at a dead end.
It seemed unfair to her.
So many tragedies in life were preventable, Terri thought. But people are passive. They let things accumulate into disaster. She watched her own children. She wasn’t like that, she told herself. She had taken steps to avoid everything that could go wrong.
This was reassuring to think, although she knew it was only partially true.
We like to tell ourselves lies, she admitted to herself.
She collected all the material and decided she would see Mary Riggins and Scott West that day. She would update them with nothing, and let them begin to see what Terri thought was the inevitable vision to come: Jennifer was gone.
She did not like to use the word forever. No policeman does. So she did not allow that word into the vocabulary of what she intended to say.
33
Jennifer was daydreaming about home before her father died, fantasizing about food and drink—what she wanted more than anything was a cold Diet Coke and a sandwich made with peanut butter, avocado, and sprouts—when she heard the sudden explosion of a distant door being slammed and voices rising in an argument. As when she’d heard the baby crying, and then the sounds of children playing, she craned her head toward the disembodied racket, trying to make out exactly what was being said, but spoken words were elusive in the torrents of noise, though the emotions were not. Someone was very angry.
Two someones, she told herself. The man and the woman. It had to be.
She stiffened, turning her head right and left, muscles tensed. She was only peripherally aware that she might be the cause of the argument. She listened and she heard high-pitched anger fading in and out of her ability to understand, and she felt herself clawing at every noise, trying to decipher what was happening.
She could make out obscenities: Fuck you! Motherfucker! Cunt! Each jagged-edged word sliced at her. She grasped at overheard phrases: I told you so! Why would anyone listen to you! You think you know everything but you don’t! But it was like leaping into the midst of a story, the ending uncertain and the beginning long disappeared.
She stayed frozen on the bed, alert, Mister Brown Fur in her a
rms. The pitch of the argument seemed to increase, then decrease, ratchet up, then down, until she abruptly heard the sound of a glass shattering.
Her mind’s eye pictured a tumbler being thrown across a room, smashing against a wall, pieces flying in all directions.
This was followed rapidly by a thudding sound, and then a near scream.
He hit her, she thought.
Then she doubted that. Maybe she hit him.
She grasped at any certainty that might penetrate the walls of her prison, but none arrived, except that whatever was happening outside her darkness was violent and intense. It was as if somewhere beyond her things were erupting, the earth shaking and the ceiling threatening to cave in. She barely realized it when she swung her legs over the bed and stood beside the nearest wall. She pushed her ear up against the board, but that seemed to make the noises fade farther away. She stepped in different directions, trying to gain some sort of purchase on the sounds, but like every other game of blind man’s bluff she’d played since she arrived in the room they remained outside her grasp.
Jennifer made calculations in her head.
A baby cries.
School yard sounds of play.
A vicious argument.
All this had to add up into something. All of it had to be parts of a portrait that would maybe tell her where she was and what might happen to her. Everything was a piece of an answer. She staggered about the room, to the limit of the chain, trying to find something in the air in front of her she could touch that would steer her into some sort of understanding.
She desperately wanted to lift the edge of the mask and look around, as if by being able to see she would be able to comprehend. But she was too scared. Every other time she had snuck a view—seeing the camera that relentlessly eyed her, seeing her clothes folded on a table, seeing the parameters of her cell—it had been a quick, surreptitious glance. Every other time, she had tried to conceal what she was doing so that the man and the woman wouldn’t know and wouldn’t punish her. But this time her desire was framed by the intensity of the argument that echoed somewhere right outside her reach. There was something unsettling, something deeply frightening about the fight. Another sound of something breaking filled the room—a chair? A table? Did someone smash dishes?
What Comes Next Page 31
