The Glittering World

by Robert Levy

  “Unfortunately, no.” The officer removed his black leather gloves and blew across the surface of his coffee, a little whistle of air before he sipped at it, catlike, with a slight dart of the tongue. “Obviously we haven’t had the resources to recanvass on foot, but we are still searching by air.”

  “So I’ve heard.” Every day the cove was buzzed by a low-flying prop plane of the North by Northwest variety. It wasn’t solely for their benefit, however: the authorities were also searching for a missing group of hikers and on high alert due to the fires still blazing up on the mountain. “I appreciate that.”

  “Anything we can do.” Jessed uncrossed and recrossed his legs, ankle over knee. Upon his last drive-by, he had implied that Blue and Elisa would owe the department one hell of an explanation if this turned out to be a misunderstanding. Search and Rescue was having enough trouble with the forest fires as it was.

  The detective produced one of the flyers Jason and Gabe had been distributing, the word Missing in red boldface above enlargements of Blue’s and Elisa’s passport photos. “I see you’ve been conducting your own canvass.”

  “Yes, well, we thought it might be useful.”

  “You should coordinate with our office. More efficient that way.” Jessed placed the flyer facedown on the table without taking his black eyes off Jason. Though he probably had a couple of years on the detective, Jason couldn’t help but feel patronized. “I’d like to ask you again about what happened that night when you got back from the pharmacy,” Jessed said, “if that’s okay by you. Standard procedure and all that.”

  “Please.” Jason smiled and considered opening his palms but decided the pose was too pious. “I completely understand.”

  “Now, you said the downstairs lights were on when you pulled up. Did you see any other lights anywhere?”

  Jason thought about the moment he’d cut the ignition and opened the driver’s side door, the sound of Gabe crunching gravel beneath his sneakers, the paper drugstore bag as it crinkled in the boy’s hand. They went up the porch and it was dark, but not terribly so; he pictured smoke wisping beneath the light. But that was an inserted memory: he hadn’t seen or smelled the not-so-distant forest fires until much later that night, closer to dawn.

  “Just the porch light,” Jason said, though he wondered as to its importance.

  “Okay. Now, you came up the front, is that right? Not through the side and the door there, where your car’s parked now. Why is that?”

  “I parked near the front of the house that night. Normally I would’ve pulled the car around, but because my wife wasn’t well I felt more of a sense of urgency.”

  “But Mr. Peck had the bag with the EpiPen in it. Not you.”

  “That’s right.” The pharmacist had handed over a clipboard with a signature sheet that Gabe scooped up and signed before taking the bag, which sat on the dash during the drive. That goddamned EpiPen. She hadn’t even wanted it.

  “And you came right home, without stopping. Is that right?”

  “Yes. We were worried.”

  “Both of you.”

  “Well, no,” he said, thinking back. “Actually, Gabe was fairly blasé. Though that might have been because he was trying not to alarm me. You’d have to ask him.”

  “And Mr. Peck is . . .” Jessed leaned over in his chair to take in the staircase.

  “Still in bed.” Jason shifted in his seat. “This hasn’t been very easy for him. For either of us.”

  “Understandably.” Jessed nodded slowly, his gaze penetrating. Jason understood that he was—at least in part—being interrogated. Although who could blame them? Jason had seen countless television shows, police procedurals and docudramas, all of which played the same refrain: when an adult woman goes missing, look to her personal life, especially her significant other. And here they were, hundreds of miles from home . . . What other explanation was there? But there was one, and it had to be found.

  “So tell me,” the detective said. “What happened next?”

  Jason told him once more how they’d come through the door, and the first thing he’d felt was an immeasurable vacuum of stillness and silence. It was as if the entire house had become a hermetically sealed vault, with the flat, long-buried smell of a subterranean tomb. He told Jessed about the cinders flaring in the woodstove, and the pan overheating on the range beneath a swelling crest of bubbling red foam, the evaporating remains of tomato sauce. The unmanned rudder of a wooden spoon had fallen over the burner, dangerously close to the flame.

  In front of the oven, a toppled bag of flour was spilled across the terra-cotta tiles, a topography of whitecaps upon a shellacked orange sea. Through the spray of powder, a set of shoeprints shuffled toward the sink and continued in the direction of the door. Blue’s boot prints, obviously. Whose else’s would they be?

  At the time, Jason hadn’t allowed himself to believe anything could be very much wrong. Not even the most likely scenario: that Elisa’s condition had worsened, and that Blue—lacking the rental car Jason and Gabe had taken to Baddeck—had called an ambulance, or maybe commandeered Maureen’s Toyota. Jason’s only thought was that Blue must be tending to Elisa upstairs. The two of them laughing about God knows what, most likely yet another inscrutable tale of wild clubland nights that made his own youthful follies seem banal by comparison.

  It was then that he had felt Gabe bristle behind him, frozen by the front door as if sensing some unspeakable presence. Jason avoided turning to him. There had to be some kind of mistake. There couldn’t be anything wrong with Elisa, not really. He denied the very possibility.

  Upstairs, the bathroom door was closed. He knocked, said her name, called it louder. He knocked harder, until the door relented and the latch sprung open. One last look at the bottom of the stairs, at Gabe and his saucer-wide eyes, before Jason pushed open the door.

  The sweet smell of bath products filled his nostrils. That and also something heavier, a damp earthy scent. The lights were on, everything still save a film of soap bubbles floating on the surface of the bathwater like the boiled-over pan on the range downstairs. Beside the tub was Elisa’s camera, hung by its strap from the post of a ladder-back chair, a dry towel across the seat.

  He ducked into their bedroom, then Blue’s, and finally Gabe’s, the yellow and slant-roofed one with the twin beds and pine crib. He turned on every light, threw open one door after the next, searched the cellar by flashlight: the house was barren of life. The certainty of her absence was immediate and profound, white space heavy around her missing form, like the perforated border of a paper doll cutout. She was gone. And so was Blue.

  “Tell me what happened next,” the officer said, his voice low and patient. And what was a detective but its own kind of therapist, with a more pointed version of the talking cure? Jessed didn’t seem to care that he’d heard it all before.

  “By then, I knew something was really wrong,” Jason said. “I just knew. I ran down the hill to find out if they’d been there. I thought maybe Elisa had decided to go to the hospital. But they were nowhere to be found. Maureen had put Donald to bed and was straightening up in the kitchen. She could tell how panicked I was.”

  “And then she decided to put the call in.”

  “That’s right. You were here, I don’t know, maybe three hours later?” He tried to say it without bitterness, but of course he’d spent that time cursing the police, screaming Elisa’s and Blue’s names into the woods until his throat was ragged, pacing up and down the hill in case the police had gotten the address wrong and driven past. He’d called the police himself a half hour later. The dispatcher politely but firmly stated that according to Jason, his wife and friend had only “just gone out” not two hours earlier, and no one could officially be reported missing for twenty-four hours. But still he knew. He knew. And he’d been right.

  “You called very quickly after coming home.”

  “That’s right.” How long should I have waited?

  “And you didn’t think
that they might have gone off on a little adventure?” Jessed said, not for the first time. “Just on impulse, on a whim.”

  “She wasn’t feeling well. And as you know, their money and credit cards were left behind. It doesn’t seem like they were going very far to me.”

  “The cashier’s check from the house sale, though, they took that with them. And Mr. Whitley’s credit cards were maxed out as it was. Were you aware of the fact that he was heavily in debt?”

  “That was the point of selling the house. So he could keep his restaurant afloat.” Jason left out the fact that it was his own idea that Blue drive up to Cape Breton and actually view the property before authorizing the sale. Now look where that had gotten them.

  “Mr. Peck reported that the restaurant was recently cleaned out.”

  “It was robbed, yes.” Gabe had placed a call to another restaurant around the corner from Cyan, only to learn that the storefront had been broken into and ransacked. The burners, the cash register, the dishware and silverware, the tables and chairs, all of it taken in the night. No one claimed to have seen anything. “Blue owed some not-so-nice people a not-so-small sum of money.”

  “So it seems. If that does prove to be the case, it’s certainly a possibility that he ‘took the money and ran,’ you might say.”

  “What about my wife, then?”

  “They liked having a good time, am I right? Out partying all night . . .”

  Jason tried not to grimace. “They’re not those people anymore.”

  “But based on the history of their relationship.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “That they’re very . . . close.” The officer let the last word hang in the air so heavily it could have brought down a clothesline.

  “I don’t know whether you’re inferring anything—”

  “Not at all.”

  “—but Blue and Elisa were friends. They only have history as friends. Close friends, yes, but nothing more.” Where had he gotten the impression otherwise?

  Jessed slid a manila folder across the table. Inside were a series of Elisa’s photographs from the vacation; the police had come back for her camera and undeveloped rolls of film a few days after she and Blue went missing. Jason flipped through the stack: shots of the trail behind the house, the cove at night, a close-up of a bee alighting on a pink peony with a blurry Donald in the background as he tended garden down the hill. Why she refused to so much as try the digital camera he had bought her last year, Jason still couldn’t fathom.

  The next few pictures were of the upstairs bathroom, all taken from what looked like the vantage point of the bathtub, the tub’s heavy lip visible in some of the shots. Then, a photograph of a man’s face, obscured. Jason’s heart skipped, and he quickly turned to the next photo. It was only Blue, a towel wrapped around his head like a turban, his lips pulled back in a leering parody of a smile. He could immediately tell Elisa had taken the picture; no one but her could make him smile like that. It was an effect Jason knew all too well.

  A few more shots of Blue—the stack was thicker than he’d figured, exactly how many were there?—and suddenly there she was. His wife. His girl, which is what he called her though she was most certainly a woman. Her angular, exquisite face smeared in bath bubbles, slender neck jutting from the foamy water. Her breasts. Her stomach. Jesus Christ, her pelvis, her fingers, her wrists . . . Every part of her was achingly familiar and yet, viewed separately, rendered alien and obscene.

  A seizure of memory: the sound of water running, back in their New York apartment. Elisa in the shower, the early-morning light of late June filtering through the rectangular bank of bedroom windows. Her flip phone jangles on the nightstand, and Jason rolls over to see who’s calling at this hour, but when he opens the phone to check, the call is put through. It’s her OB/GYN’s office, confirming her appointment for the next day.

  “Will you be coming too?” the cheery receptionist asks.

  “No. Why, should I?”

  Silence. “Just make sure Mrs. Howard gets back to us.”

  “Uh . . . Okay.” After he hangs up he tries to put the call out of his mind. He couldn’t have possibly heard properly. Hadn’t woken up really, still susceptible to all manner of misunderstanding. The receptionist probably misspoke. Surely she wasn’t implying Elisa is pregnant. That isn’t possible, after all.

  Is it?

  He never mentioned the call to Elisa. Now, many weeks later, the shadow fell across his mind again, the one that reminded him that he and Elisa hadn’t slept together in months. Not since his birthday in January, when she deigned to let him do more than kiss her. She claimed it was her antidepressants, that they were screwing with her libido, but really he knew it must be him. The only answer was that he repulsed her.

  Blue, he thought. Fucking Blue.

  Before he could stop himself, he exhaled loudly, his even-keeled composure cracked like an eggshell. Well played, Detective. Because of course he’d harbored suspicions about them. How could he not, when Elisa was on the phone with Blue until all hours, when they’d had a whole life together before Jason had stepped on the scene? And then that phone call from her doctor’s office, the one he tried to blot out of his memory, but which still haunted the dark corners of his consciousness.

  But what could he have done, confront her? Divorce her without any substantiation? He couldn’t have prevented what had happened, if she was in fact pregnant with Blue’s child. The unspoken deal between Jason and Elisa was that Blue was part of the package: Jason had to take Blue, or leave her. So he went along with it, told himself all the while that Blue was a certified mess, a closet case, no real threat to their relationship. He told himself such things with greater frequency after they married and Elisa became depressed, when she and Jason stopped having sex and she turned to the aid of an uptown psychopharmacologist, referred by Jason himself. It was too easy for him to see all of this as his own fault.

  “Mr. Howard, forgive us,” Jessed said. “We need to explore every avenue.”

  “I understand.” Jason smiled tightly, returning the pictures to the folder. “But these don’t mean anything. I mean, look at them. They’re joking around here. Hey, you don’t know them, they’re a funny pair. When they get together, they’re like a couple of kids. There’s nothing more to it than that.” He said the words, but he didn’t feel them, his mouth cotton dry; he was helping to prove Jessed’s theory. Jason had always known that Blue held an unshakeable power over his wife, that they shared a connection that could never be undone; it was only a matter of time before it bit him in the ass.

  After the interview was over and he walked Jessed to the door, Jason inquired if the police might be returning Elisa’s camera anytime soon. “When we spoke with Ms. Weintraub’s mother, she told us to keep it as long as we needed,” the detective said, using Elisa’s maiden name. “It shouldn’t be much longer.”

  “You mean when she came up last week?” They hadn’t even asked for the camera until after Elisa’s mother had departed.

  “She came by the station yesterday.”

  “In North Sydney?” He knew Diane was planning on returning to Cape Breton, but to do so without telling him? That wasn’t like her. “Is she still in town?”

  “It was only a day trip. We had a few more questions. Administrative issues, mostly.” Jessed paused. “She did mention that her daughter was on antidepressants. Is that right?”

  “Zoloft. Yes. Half of New York is.”

  “And you would say your marriage is a happy one.”

  “I would. Absolutely.”

  “I have to ask.” Jessed smiled weakly. “Thank you, Mr. Howard. We’ll be in touch.”

  Jason stayed on the porch to watch the cruiser disappear down the hill. Had Elisa’s mother said something to the police about the state of their marriage? It was bad enough when Diane had showed up last week, lost and frazzled and as understandably bereft as any mother whose daughter had gone missing. Jason had driven her from the
airport to the police station himself. Upon leaving her interview with the police, however, she was distant and distracted, the change borne out during subsequent conversations in which she seemed unwilling to discuss Elisa or her whereabouts. They must have told her something, information they were withholding from him that had reassured her of her daughter’s well-being. Either that or they’d instructed her not to speak to Jason.

  It was the only answer he could come up with. Diane hadn’t returned his calls the past few days; he’d managed to catch her on her cellphone only the day before, a blip of a conversation that ended abruptly when she pleaded a migraine and begged off the line. Had she in fact been mere miles away when he’d reached her? And why did Jessed so purposefully fail to conceal this from him? It was hard not to feel suspicious, though he tried with all his might, certain as ever that paranoia would be his eventual undoing. Which was, as it had always been, completely unacceptable.

  The early-morning mist was already burning off the cove. If Jason stared at the landscape long enough, the idyllic scenery turned menacing, swirling waters and murky shadows surfacing like dark creatures risen from the deep. He looked for Maureen and Donald puttering outside their house, but then remembered that they’d headed down to their flat in Halifax for a series of Donald-related appointments. Maureen had implored Jason to call her if he needed anything, as if she didn’t already have enough to manage. “You can stay on as long as you want,” she’d said the day before as she rubbed his shoulders on the porch swing, a gesture so warm and unexpected he found it uncomfortably sexual. “Until they come back. Until you find them.”

  He went back inside the house, through the kitchen to the stairs. And there was Gabe, seated in shadow on the top step; he was draped in a light cotton patchwork quilt, a little boy who’d snuck out of his room to eavesdrop on his parents downstairs. The effect was aided by his too-large T-shirt and sweatpants, the cuffs of which were rolled into thick rings below his knees: he’d taken to wearing Blue’s clothes, culled from the closet in the tartan room.