“What?” she asked.
“I found something else. On your father’s credit card statements.”
“Just tell me.” Nic braced herself for what she knew was coming.
“There are some hotel charges. Local ones, in your town.”
Nic stared out the window, feeling the traces of hope leave her. “I knew, but I still didn’t believe it. Not completely.”
“There’s one other charge that I can’t explain. At a gas station near West Cornwall.”
“That’s just south of here. When was that?”
Reyes didn’t answer. And then he didn’t need to.
“The same day. The day she disappeared,” Nic said.
“Look, maybe it was her—the charges are on the same statement.”
“But then she wouldn’t have run out of gas,” Nic said. “If she’d filled up in West Cornwall, she would have made it well past Hastings coming home.”
Reyes was silent again. He’d come to the same conclusion.
“This can’t be right,” Nic said.
“I can call them, find out the exact time of the charge.”
Nic closed her eyes, hard. This couldn’t be happening. Her father couldn’t be involved.
“Do you want me to call?” Reyes asked.
Slowly, but with conviction, Nic nodded.
Yes.
29
Day fifteen
We lie on the floor. I am on my side of the bars. Alice is on the other. She wanted to sleep near me even though we are not allowed to sleep together anymore, so I told her to get some blankets and cushions from the sofa. I showed her how to make a pillow bed and she liked it very much. Of course she did. My kids used to love pillow beds. When we would go to a hotel, all of us, as a family—oh, that was another life—we would share a room. Me and John in one bed. Two kids in the other. And the third on a cozy bed between them, made from cushions or extra pillows—whatever we could find in the room.
The trick is to tuck a sheet tightly beneath them so they don’t come apart.
Evan usually chose the pillow bed. Even as he grew too big for anything we could make, he would sleep on the bound pillows, arms and legs hanging off the sides. He didn’t want to sleep with one of his sisters. Girls wereyuck.Thankfully, I wasn’t recognized as being a girl. These memories flow now, freely and with the semblances of joy. Leaning over to kiss him goodnight, he would pullme to him with both arms and hug me tight. Still a little boy inside, but with the strong arms of a big boy. He needed me. And it was blissful. Even as the memory retreats to the other side of the line, the joy lingers. But it does not last. This night has ended in disaster.
Alice sleeps soundly in her pillow bed, even though I have untangled her arms from my waist and moved beyond her reach.
It is not far enough.
I let the feeling flow through me, still and silent, because Alice has left the hallway light on for Mick and now Dolly can see my face.
It is probably for the best. I don’t know what I might do if these feelings are set free.
We waited for Mick for a long time. We waited until we had watched all of her shows on the iPad and grown bored and tired.
“I want my Jell-O,” she’d said then.
I told her it was okay. She could bring us our Jell-O but she should leave the one for Mick, the lime Jell-O, in a place where he would see it. Maybe he would want dessert when he finally came home.
