by P. J. Vernon
“So this is more than a missing car,” Nina stated. I knew what her next words were going to be. I braced myself. “Mr. Godfrey is also missing?”
“Not missing,” I corrected. “We just can’t account for him at the moment. I understand that could be misconstrued as missing, but really. We had an argument last night.”
Nina stopped me. “If you don’t mind?” She pulled a tiny recorder from her book bag, switched it on, and sat it on the coffee table.
“Another Palmer with a tape recorder,” Mamma whispered. She couldn’t help herself. If Nina heard, she maintained a strong poker face and didn’t respond.
“You were saying you had an argument?”
As I scratched my throat, my jaw tensed, craving for a drink. “Yes, there was a misunderstanding at the bar last night. Ruby’s. He got angry with me.”
“Angry?” Nina leaned forward. “About what?”
“Jealous, actually. He was jealous of a guy at the bar. Jacob Wilcox. You remember him?” I strained a smile.
Nina’s face remained devoid. “I know him. What happened next?”
“I don’t know.” I picked at the fresh wound in the corner of my thumbnail. “I don’t recall. I was intoxicated.”
“Lord, Gray. Really?” Mamma scoffed. Charlotte gave her a stern look, and Mamma rolled her eyes.
“Even if the details are fuzzy,” Nina asked, “was there a confrontation? Anything to suggest one might’ve gone down?”
I scoured my memories, but the further back I traveled, the tighter the invisible fists beating my temples pounded. The dance floor, Jacob, Paul. “I can’t say if there was or not.”
“And then you left?”
“I don’t know—”
“And now your husband is gone?”
“I guess—”
“And how much did you have to drink?”
Three. Say three. Three could account for embarrassing behavior but didn’t sound quite like binge drinking. I looked down to my lap, then back at Nina. I wouldn’t lie. At least, not this time. Not if the truth was what I needed. “I can’t say for sure. I’d had some earlier on the plane. The bartender had a loose pour at Ruby’s, too. At least six or seven.” Ten? Eleven? Even now, I couldn’t not lie.
I girded for Nina’s judgement, but she moved on, “An abandoned vehicle paired with an unaccounted-for person is a serious matter. And you’ve had no luck tracking down anything? A reservation? Even a gas station purchase?”
“No,” Charlotte answered for me. “But he did call on the way home, upset. So, we know he brought Gray here.”
“Upset with regards to the argument? Jacob?”
“Yes,” Charlotte said.
“I see. And his luggage?”
“Still here,” Charlotte replied. “Upstairs in Gray’s room.”
My mind felt submerged. Soaked and waterlogged and not working when I needed it to most. The lights in the room stretched into long rays. I’d only taken two pills, at least, I thought I’d only taken two. I ripped more skin from my nail bed.
“Where did you find the car?” Mamma asked, stiffening her spine against the upholstered chair.
“Paul Revere Highway. An empty stretch, but not a bad walk from here,” Sammie answered, brushing his pants with his palms.
“I don’t want to alarm the family, especially you, Gray,” Nina began, “but I’d like to consider this a missing persons case. Only as a precaution, and just for the time being.”
A missing persons case? Jesus.
Eyes wide as saucers, Mamma looked aghast. “Why on Earth would this be a missing persons case?”
“Because, Mamma, a person is missing,” Charlotte retorted.
“It’s just a precaution, Mrs. King.” Nina looked at me. “It’ll get the ball rolling on protocols. Put ears to the ground. Notify police in D.C. to look out for him, too. I’m sure this will turn into nothing, but the formality increases the likelihood it turns into nothing sooner.”
“But he’s hardly been gone a day. Not even twenty-four hours,” Mamma argued. She appeared unimpressed with Nina’s reasoning. “Isn’t there an elapsed time to be reached before a person can be called missing? Legally speaking?”
“No,” Nina answered. “A common misconception, but no. To the contrary, when circumstances prove unusual—like an abandoned rental car, for example—we encourage friends and family to file the report quickly.”
Despite the panic pulling my chest into a Gordian knot, Nina’s response struck me as odd. She and Sammie had discovered the car early this morning. “Why are we only learning this now?” I asked.
Nina hesitated, seemed unsure for the first time. “I expected a call from you, to be honest.”
Whether she intended to or not, she redirected blame to me. If I hadn’t drank so much, these questions wouldn’t matter. I would’ve known exactly what happened last night. I’d know where Paul had gone. If I could at least remember the argument we must’ve had when we returned home, before he stormed off—
The rattling of porcelain scattered my thoughts like cockroaches. Cora sat a coffee cup on the table before me. “Gray, sweetheart,” she whispered, leaning down. “Your finger’s bleeding.”
My thumb. Crimson smeared across the nail as blood oozed from my wound. I stood, thrusting my bleeding hand into my pocket.
“Excuse me, for a moment,” I announced and walked through the dining room into the kitchen. As soon as the door shut behind me, I shattered like a hammer taken to glass.
Paul wasn’t missing. Paul was angry. Paul was jealous. Paul was not …
The pendulum in my head swung. I had a handful of pills left, but I had to save them for later tonight. If I took them now, I’d never sleep. Not after this. The thought of not sleeping, of what that’d do to me tomorrow, made me shudder. I began to open cabinets. One after another. Open. Shut. Open. Shut.
When I spied the baking shelf, I froze. Vanilla extract stared from behind a box of cornstarch. I recalled being younger, throwing parties when Mamma and Daddy had gone to the lake house upstate. My friends and I had poured vanilla extract in our diet cokes, and it might as well have been rum. Retrieving the tiny opaque bottle, I read the label. Thirty-five percent ethyl alcohol. I swallowed all of its contents in two gulps before gagging on the brutal bitterness.
When I’d finished, I tossed it in the waste bin beneath the sink and held my mouth under the faucet. The awful taste drowned out whatever buzz the vanilla might have given. Drinking it made me feel silly more than anything.
Voices from the salon carried over the running tap. As everyone went on without me, I bandaged my thumb. When I was finished, I reclaimed my seat next to Charlotte.
Nina looked at me again. Worry etched across her face. “I was telling everyone, I’d like for you to come down to the station first thing in the morning, Gray. Fill out paperwork and give a formal statement. Would you be able to do that?”
Lingering vanilla residue stuck to the inside of my cheeks, and they felt pasty and dry. “Yes.”
Charlotte began to speak, but Mamma cut her off. “I’ll take you, Hummingbird.” She glanced at my sister. “Those boys have hardly seen their mother as is. Cora will drive us in, won’t you dear?”
“Of course, Joanna,” Cora replied as she collected our saucers.
* * *
After bidding goodnight to Nina and Sammie through a half-hearted “Merry Christmas,” I went up to my room. I locked my door, swallowed the rest of Mamma’s Valium, and paced from one wall to another while I waited for them to kick in.
A torrent of rain now lashed against my window, and I recalled Paul’s words from the drive in. No white Christmas this year, he’d said, eyes on his phone. Who had he always been messaging?
This thing, this vanishing, seemed to choke me, pressing on my sternum. Tomorrow the liquor store would reopen.
Minutes marched by, and I grew calmer as the drugs began to slow time. I tried to reason things through the best I could. I’d screwe
d up. Really screwed up. Enough to send Paul off, but he was no missing person. That was insane. He’d call. Of course, he’d call.
He’ll call. My pulse spiked. My phone!
I leapt to my nightstand. Why the hell did I keep leaving my phone behind? On today of all days?
I pressed the home button, and the screen lit up. I had a missed call. And a voicemail. Though, the number had been blocked. I couldn’t key in my PIN quick enough.
As the message played, my sudden elation deflated. A woman’s voice. Not Paul’s. And not one I recognized.
“Hi, Gray,” she said in the recording. Almost stuttering. “I’m sorry for the late call. You don’t know me. My name’s Annie. I’m calling—” The woman—Annie—paused. “I need to talk to you about Paul. I’ll be back in touch so keep your phone close.”
I held my breath.
“Something else—” A second, longer hesitation. “There’s something going on here you don’t know.”
10
Gray
No callback number. Nothing. Only the brief voicemail. A handful of words from a stranger. Hushed like she’d held her hand over her mouth while she spoke them.
“Who the hell is Annie?” Mamma asked. She rarely swore. Hearing it shook me.
“I’m not sure. I don’t know anyone named Annie.” I sat next to her in the rigid backseat of the family Jag on the way to the police station the next morning. The seatbelt pulled tight against my chest and throat.
“Neither do I. Does Paul?”
“I don’t think so. I asked the firm to check his contacts.”
“They called?” Mamma demanded. Of course, they’d finally called. Nearly two full days of radio silence from Paul might as well be the disappearance of the pope by the way they behaved on the phone.
“Yes, but I didn’t tell them anything,” I assured her. “I said I misplaced the number for our decorator, Annie, and asked that they check his contacts. Told them undercooked Christmas ham had given Paul food poisoning, and he could barely speak.”
“You lie with such ease, Gray,” Mamma half whispered, shaking her head. “Hardly have to stop and think about it, do you?”
The question was rhetorical, but who the hell did she think I’d inherited the talent from? Besides, I’d kept the extent of the situation from Paul’s bosses for fear of what he might say when he returned. There was still no reason for them to know. Paul was fine. He had to be fine. There wasn’t any other way for him to be except fine.
Mamma’s fear came from a different place. To her, until a thing’s been talked about openly, it hasn’t yet happened. I turned in time to catch a fleeting glimpse of Matthew’s billboard downtown. As far as Mamma was concerned, what he did, what my cousin did, never happened. Her silence had rendered it unmentionable.
She sighed. “That’s good. The Palmer woman said not to worry. She said all this is nothing more than a precaution.”
“Her name is Nina,” I corrected. Mamma’s casual slight irked me, and I couldn’t stop it from leaking into my voice. “Nina Palmer.”
She rifled through her clutch, producing a pack of Virginia Slims. Her sterling lighter sparked alive like an expensive firecracker.
“Jesus, Mamma,” I said. “In the car?”
She scoffed. “You’re going to speak to me about vices? And don’t take the Lord’s name in vain. I raised you better than to talk like that. D.C. has been nothing but bad for you. It’s a blessing we never moved there years ago.”
“Put the window down for Cora’s sake, at least.” I motioned towards the driver’s seat. Cora said nothing as she hung a left onto Marion Avenue. Mamma cracked her window a reluctant sliver.
“None of this makes sense,” she said, pulling in a long, glowing drag. “Why would Paul not come home two nights in a row? What happened on Christmas Eve?”
“I told you I don’t remember.” I tugged at the seatbelt, but the harder I pulled, the less it gave. A constricting safety mechanism.
“This has to stop, Gray.” Her eyes remained turned to the window as tendrils of smoke danced around her silver hair. “The drinking has got to stop.”
I stifled a chuckle from somewhere deep down. Didn’t she realize I knew that? Didn’t she know I traced every trouble that found me to drinking? In the rare instances it wasn’t the cause, it was always a contributor.
My job at the National Museum of Natural History. I’d studied anthropology in college before dropping out senior year to follow Paul to D.C. It had been a part-time post giving guided tours.
Had been.
My coworker—a geriatric woman who made small talk a difficult chore—had taken a healthy swallow from my water thermos. We used the same brand, and she’d mistaken it for hers. The notion that Vodka could possibly be tasteless was a lie.
“We can’t have someone under the influence around children,” the chief curator had told me, before leaning in to whisper, “Don’t worry, Mr. Godfrey urged discretion, and we intend to leave it alone. But you need to go.”
Even when I was careful, when I really tried, drinking caught up to me. Now Paul was missing. Or gone, rather.
Where could he be? I swallowed a knot in the back of my throat. Is he safe?
Outside my window, the brick courthouse whirled by. Then a park with a derelict gazebo followed by a strip of boutiques and specialty shops all trying too hard to be something they weren’t. An overcast sky sagged low to the ground. It had rained every night since I’d arrived. Today looked like it would be no different.
The pills had gotten me to sleep last night, but I didn’t remember dreaming. When I’d awoken, I was relieved I’d made it to five forty-five AM. But that relief vanished as Paul’s absence flooded back into my mind.
Still, I’d greeted the morning with a clear head. I hadn’t had a drop of alcohol the day before—if I didn’t count the vanilla extract, which I didn’t. Mornings without a hangover were usually easy for me. The itching wouldn’t show up until the afternoon.
“And this woman. Annie. She didn’t leave a number?” Mamma asked.
I shook my head. We’d been through this earlier in the morning. I’d been through it with Charlotte the night before nearly as soon as I’d set my phone down.
Mamma prodded. “You don’t think Paul would ever be unfaith—”
“No.”
Cora parked the car and picked up a pile of clothes wrapped in plastic from the front passenger seat. “I’ll be at the dry cleaners,” she announced. “Phone as soon as you’re finished, and I’ll be back to collect you.”
“Thank you, dear,” Mamma replied as she stepped out of the car. I followed suit, and together we walked up to the sheriff’s office.
“We need to have Cora sign a nondisclosure agreement,” she said as she outed her cigarette in the ashtray out front. “I’ll have one drafted this afternoon.”
Mamma’s obsession with privacy was nothing new, but the lengths she’d go to keep secrets always jarred me. Together, we crossed the threshold into the station.
“Have a seat,” the receptionist—an officer—told us. We retreated to a row of hard plastic chairs against a far wall.
“Uncomfortable,” Mamma said, shifting in her seat.
My pulse raced. No word from Paul for two days, and now I sat in a police station. No matter what Charlotte or Nina or anyone else said, events seemed to be marching closer and closer to some worst-case scenario, one I’d been imagining since Christmas morning in the library. It wasn’t yet a fleshed-out-nightmare situation, but something more nebulous. A faceless, nameless dread. But so long as the dread wasn’t made real, so long as no one spoke it or named it, it lived only in the shadows of my mind—and I intended to keep it there, trapped. I wasn’t so different from Mamma in that regard.
Nina greeted us. “Gray, Joanna.” She held a folder under one arm and wore fitted jeans and a light cardigan. Mamma had insisted the two of us dress up. “Sunday clothes, Gray,” she’d said when I first came downstairs in a p
air of slacks and a loose button-down blouse. Standing before a casually dressed Nina, I now felt awkward. A trip to the police station isn’t an occasion, and it was stupid of Mamma to make me change.
“Follow me,” Nina instructed. We traced her steps through a maze of cubicles. The space smelled like any other office. Coffee. The hum made by low chatter and typing bounced off thin walls.
We passed officers and admins. Some in blues. Others in plainclothes like Nina. I recognized a handful of faces from school and growing up. Mamma must have as well, from the way she smiled at folks. Sammie walked by on his way to the restroom or the water fountain. It didn’t seem like he planned to join us. Would he be on the far side of some two-way mirror? Was Nina going to play games the way police on TV did? My arms goose-bumped. I am the last person seen with Paul.
“In here.” Nina motioned to a glassed-in conference room. No two-way mirrors. “We call it the Fish Bowl.” She smiled. Three sides looked into the station, one faced the dreary outside. We took our seats around a long, lacquered table.
“Can I get you anything? Coffee? Juice?” she asked, pulling back a roller chair.
“We’re fine,” Mamma answered. “We just want to get this done and over with.”
“I understand,” she replied, taking a seat at the table head and opening her folder. She began to pass me printed forms. “I’ll need signatures on these papers to file the missing persons case on your behalf.”
My palms dampened. Mamma, my sister—they couldn’t come up with simple excuses for Paul’s vanishing anymore. Now police were involved. A couple pen strokes and everything becomes brutally real. Fingers shaking, I signed them hastily. Nina watched my hands as I scrawled, so I signed faster than I otherwise would’ve, a series of slapdash lines. Illegible.
“Thank you.” She took the papers back. “Now, I’ll need to conduct a formal interview. Let’s start with the basics. Date and time of last contact, age, height, weight, eye color. That sort of thing.”
She noted my answers as I gave them. I couldn’t tell her Paul’s driver’s license number. Who knows that offhand? The questions quickly grew more complex.
