When She Was Gone (16 page)

“And of course I called the police—”

“Pardon?” asked Abigail.

“I assumed you knew, because I called the police about it. Yesterday.”

Nothing, they told her nothing. She envisioned Martin Wooster, tipping back his chair at his big metal desk, eating a sandwich, writing “sweatshirt” on a pad. Then letting mustard spot the note. No, he wasn't incompetent. She was just desperate.

“Oh, so you already called about it? Oh. They didn't tell me—”

“Hmm. I'm surprised they didn't tell you. I walk near that woods spot quite a lot. I even saw Linsey there—”

“You SAW Linsey?”

“Oh, honey, early this summer. She took my Johnny for a woods walk. She's a good girl, isn't she?”

Something in her tone told Abigail she was asking, not being rhetorical. Always them, she thought, and us. But Reeva was here for her now—maybe there was something about this queen bee she could rely on. Or maybe she was just being lulled by the honey and the wing beats.

“Yes,” said Abigail. “You have a daughter? Nina?”

“Tina is much younger than Linsey. Just a freshman.” She
seemed to reconsider after she said this. “I guess that's not all that much younger.”

“You are changing diapers and then you are applying to college. It's that fast.”

Reeva laughed, almost honestly. “Is Linsey still seeing that Timmy? He was such an athlete. I hear his house is up for sale. Someone said some people had already put in an offer. Maybe they were
Korean
?” She whispered this last word. Hissed it. “Do you know? I don't mind Japanese, but the Koreans always keep to themselves—”

“No. I mean, they broke up. I don't know who's buying the house. People, just people.” Abigail looked at her clipboard. She was going to call now.

“Oh, that's hard, first love. Have you asked him if he knows anything?”

“He's moving to California,” she said, thinking,
I have to GO.

“Oh, and have you checked with his parents?”

“Thank you, Reeva,” said Abigail, getting up.

“Oh,” said Reeva. “Glad to be of help.”

Now Abigail felt nauseated, the smell of the chocolate apricots lingering in her nose.
She's a good girl, isn't she? They always keep to themselves.
Why must there always be an
other
? She was just as
other
in her acquired Jewishness. She didn't like Reeva Sentry. Gossipmonger. Sure, she'd been hospitable, but she probably inspected all the neighbors' recycling to find out who drank cheap wine and who ate frozen entrees. Abigail felt guilty for thinking it—Reeva had not
been unkind, just chattery. She had said something about the sweatshirt; no one else had contributed a thing. It was noticing something; it was paying attention.

On the sidewalk, she dialed Barq's number. She got voice mail. “Do you know about the sweatshirt?” she asked. “Did you know Reeva Sentry saw Mr. Leonard with a sweatshirt that looked like Linsey's? Is that something? She said she called Wooster—or the cops, anyway—call me.”

Then the police. Martin Wooster was at his desk.
Why aren't you out finding my daughter?
“Did you get a call about a sweatshirt?” she asked.

“Oh, yes, hello, Mrs. Stein.” He took much too long to breathe.

“We did. We investigated. It was a dead lead, so we didn't want to get you overexcited.”

“A dead lead?”

“Your neighbor buried a bird in a pink handkerchief. Somehow someone thought he had Linsey's shirt. He didn't.”

“Oh,” said Abigail. “Are you sure?”

“Sure,” said Martin Wooster.

He mumbled something like be in touch and was already gone as Abigail was apologizing, explaining.

A dead lead. A dead bird.

She made her way down the cul-de-sac, her chest compressed. A dead lead. Maybe someone had a live lead, electrical, a current to jolt this cold hunt to life. She rang at three houses with no answer, then the Whitebreads. She hardly knew them now, but when she'd moved in, Mrs. Whitebread,
Jane, had brought her banana bread and a jar of honey with a plaid ribbon. She'd sat on the front step with Jane, beginning the process of friend making. But somehow they never became friends, even though their boys saw each other at school, somehow they had children and built the hives of their families and woes in their separate lots and only waved half the time their cars passed.

“Mrs. Whitebread?” she asked, when Jane answered the door.

“Abigail,” said Jane. “I heard about Linsey, I'm so sorry.” She reached her arm around Abigail and ushered her into the room. Her son was on the floor, playing the game where you scooped rocks along a board—an African game of some kind, she thought, blushing, because the son was black. He looked up at her, and she thought he narrowed his eyes, making him feline, long lashed, angry. That was awful, how could she think he was angry? She smiled at him, but his glance was already cast back at the game.

She'd heard rumors that he was the result of a mix-up with the markings on sperm donations, and also that Mrs. Whitebread had had a black lover, but she didn't believe the latter, and the former, well, that was their business. Maybe he was adopted. Who cared? She wanted to like the son, though she didn't remember his name. He played at the back of the yard, near theirs, making little nests with detritus from the recycling bins. Toby said he was always making movies and taking photographs. He was so quiet, sometimes she wondered if something was wrong with him. She also wondered
why her sons didn't befriend him, if perhaps they should, if she should encourage them, but she let them be when it came to friends, caring mostly about safety and car pools to soccer.

Jane sat on the couch beside a nest of laundry. The basket was on the floor. She gestured that Abigail should sit down on the chair, but Abigail was afraid to settle anywhere. She asked her questions.

“No,” said Jane. “I haven't heard anything. I did know your daughter's boyfriend—Timmy? He volunteered a few years ago for this little drama class Geo was in? He was a nice young man.”

What odd words, thought Abigail, coming from someone so much more colorful than
nice young man
.

“They broke up.”

“Oh, I'm sorry,” said Jane. She began to fold the laundry, her daughter's long-limbed fall T-shirts, Geo's socks; she was trying to match the shades of white before she paired them from the masses.

“Any rumors, perhaps, in town?”

“Hmm. Well, I have to admit, I did see some kids looking at one of the posters—” She glanced at her son, and without looking up at her, he left the room. Abigail listened to his heavy steps up the uncarpeted staircase. A door sighed open and whined shut.

“I heard someone saying something about drugs, Abigail. I feel horrible telling you this, but it was something about you catching your daughter with pot—I'm so sorry—I feel awful saying it—”

“No, that's okay, this was something we went through—it wasn't a big deal, though at first I thought it was.” She shivered, though the windows were open and the afternoon was warm. She felt naked there, spilling out the contents of her house, of her family history, for this woman she hardly knew. “But thank you for telling me. Who was talking about it?”

“Some teenager, and some young man who works at Starbucks? I think he lives in the carriage house behind the Hopsmiths'. They didn't say her name, just gestured toward the poster? Is there anything I can do to help?”

“Just let me know if you hear anything else,” said Abigail, moving slowly toward the door. Her daughter's face was all over town, and her daughter's business was all over town, and her daughter was missing, wasn't this enough? Couldn't she just come home now? Abigail looked through the window—she could see the fence and her own backyard from here. Frank's car was pulling in. Maybe she should leave.

“I will, I will,” said Jane. She was worrying a linty piece of folded paper from the laundry in her hand.

•   •   •

Abigail didn't know the contents of these houses. She knew their faces: brick and mortar, lights on the flanks of the red front doors, aluminum siding, stained wood, one a yellow as pale as a goldfinch's belly feather, she'd seen it painted three times since she'd lived there, the trucks and ladders; the tarps; and the sharp, sour paint smell as she'd driven past with her windows open.

The cell phone rang, and Abigail leapt off the sidewalk, lifting with adrenaline.

“Abby,” said Margaret. “I have a new list of possibilities for you. And I have this amazing new crème from Shiseido—how are you, babe?”

“I'm—” She stood, unable to say it.
Looking for my lost daughter. A wreck. Help
. “Okay,” she finished.

“You'll be better once you start brainstorming with me. Cupcake Café is looking for kitchen prep help—I know that's really not your thing, and it wouldn't be for long. Probably would cost more than it brings in given the commute but, honey, you could learn so much for your own café. What do you think of cupcakes?”

“I . . . I don't think cupcakes are right?”
I'm going door-to-door asking for leads. My Linsey is missing.
If she told Margaret, it would be too real to bear. She should. She couldn't.

“Okay, don't worry, some of this is closer to home. There's even real estate. I know that's a stretch for you, too—”

Abigail laughed, a fake laugh. “No way, not real estate, that's not me,” she said, letting this be about her, letting herself be important to her friend. She was crying as quietly as she could.

“Okay, gotta go, but I'm e-mailing you this list. Don't pooh-pooh everything, open mind, my dear, open mind.”

“Okay.”

“Are you okay? You sound stressed?” Margaret had to go, she would let her go. It would be in all the papers soon, and then there'd be no choice but to talk with everyone
about it. All the time. Until Linsey came home. And probably after.

Margaret signed off and Abigail tried to swallow the lump in her throat. It was like lying, but she couldn't tell her friend that Linsey was gone. Then Abigail stared at her phone again, wondering whether Linsey had ever really talked with Margaret, whether she would have confided—no, Margaret couldn't be so blithe if she knew anything. It was awful—everyone suddenly seemed suspicious. Abigail was walking, faster and faster, feeling her body move, the muscles stretched with unaccustomed effort. How long had it been since she abandoned her car, how long had it been since she'd walked long and far in this neighborhood, past the houses she knew, into the storybook realm of unknown neighbors' lives? The last time she remembered walking here, it was with the baby, one week old, and Linsey, just four. She'd let her daughter push the stroller; the baby had been hard asleep, his eyes winched shut against the world. It had been summer, late summer, like this, and she'd never expected what had come next, only had watched her daughter peel a Band-Aid off her finger and tighten her mouth in concentration as she pushed the carriage, a heavy thing from Joe's mother, with shock-absorbing springs and its own mattress. Linsey had to reach overhead to grip the bar.

She jogged down the path into the woods, as if she might find something there. The trees stood like sentries on the riverbank, and she walked faster, faster, peering into the water. They should drag the river, she thought, horrifying herself by
imagining her daughter's bloated face, a severed limb. No, no, no. There was occasional litter on the path, a half-flattened beer can, the glitter of crushed glass. A flyer for a new Japanese restaurant in town. A note about band practice. But mostly, just the lobed leaves of jewelweed, shiny poison ivy swaddling the shrubbery, oaks and maples and sycamores casting long shadows across the path. What did she expect to find in here, she wondered—a tree house, a shack, a secret tunnel? Three times she'd come down here, looking in the little strip of woods. Once alone, once with her husband, once with Barq, who kicked over stones as if her daughter might be hiding with pill bugs and earthworms. She had read that more than half of runaways stay close to home, that some abducted teens were held within a mile of the place from which they'd been taken.

Abigail stopped; someone was coming. Her heart kept up its work, though she wasn't breathing. Then an elderly man passed, his basset hound on a leash, his ears pink and his cheeks bristly, her ears dragging the path like a net. The path ended, and Abigail was back on the street in the gloaming. She started running. Her legs felt good, that ache. The leaves leaving the early maples, yellowed, with green still gripping their veins, tumbled into the street. It was windy now, as if the ending day was full of breath. The leaves ran away from her, fast down the street, and then Abigail was running, too, stretching her legs long, remembering what it felt like to be a dancer in high school—her mother had wanted her to be a dancer, had sat through lessons when mothers were long
since gone during the instruction, had hoped for Clara in the annual
Nutcracker,
though Abigail was once the nutcracker itself, because she was limber, fast, could jump high, and was never going to be tall. She had a good body for comedy, her teacher had said. Not drama. Why hadn't God listened to that? Where was the comedy in her life right now? Only Frank, only her husband, who joked about the detective's funny eyebrows to keep her from weeping. She was running hard now, and had left the sidewalk for the street, running past the turnoff for town, toward the reservoir path, wearing her sensible, nonthreatening clothes for interviewing neighbors. The blouse buttons strained as she swayed her arms, her khakis were ridiculous for running, but she had to keep going. On the path, she passed a man from her neighborhood, Reeva's husband, Mr. Sentry. He looked at her, the quick passing-jogger glance, then nodded his head to the music attached to his ears. He wore embarrassing Lycra shorts and a tank top—tank tops on middle-aged men seemed like such a desperate thing, she thought, though Frank wore tank-top undershirts, but he'd never wear them around the backyard like a Jewish mafioso. He'd never jog, either, though just before they married he joined a gym for two months, worked out, and returned home wearing zipper-front sweatshirts and looking proud. He should work out, she realized, he needed to be in better shape if he was going to live long enough for her. Everyone left her, everyone. She took the cutoff from the reservoir, the one that linked to the Long Path, which linked to the rails-to-trails project that followed
the highway up to the New York border. She kept running. Her legs burned and her lungs hurt. She couldn't stop, so she shoved the few notes from her clipboard in her pocket and threw away the board itself and the pen, childlike in her pride as she dunked them into a trash can without stopping. She would make it to New York, she would keep running, she would run through states and across the surface of lakes and into Canada and across oceans until she found her daughter. Then her leg cramped. A fist of muscle. She couldn't keep running. She stopped and leaned on a spindly birch limb, breathing and breathing, her lungs burning, rubbing her ridiculous calf.