The Glittering World (12 page)

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.

“Are they gone?” Gabe said.

“It was Jessed, by himself this time. He left a few minutes ago.”

“I take it he’s not exactly pursuing all leads?”

“Taken correctly.” Jason cleared the dining room table and set out paper and pens, while Gabe shuffled over inside his papoose of a quilt. “Well, then. Want to get started on today’s business?”

They gathered the castoff materials that had accumulated over the past week—color-coded aerial photos, topographic maps, land surveys—and arranged them in order of proximity to the house. The rest of the morning was spent as usual: writing up detailed notes on the previous day’s canvass. They’d started their own search four days prior, when it became clear the authorities’ attention had drifted toward the missing hikers. The police had covered the neighboring woods and fields, as well as the mountain base and the marsh shallows of the bay. But there were many more doors to knock on, a seemingly infinite amount of ground to cover, and Jason came to accept that a
proper search would fall to them. Realistically, this could only succeed if one of the locals had seen something, anything that might give them a starting point.