I’m halfway to my car parked on the other side of the street when my cell phone rings. I pull it from my bag and answer the call. “Mrs. Foust?” the caller asks. Not everyone knows that I’m a doctor.
“Yes,” I say. “This is she.”
The woman on the other end of the line informs me that she’s calling from the high school. My mind goes instinctively to Otto. I think of our short exchange as we drove to the dock this morning. Something was bothering him but he wouldn’t say what. Was he trying to tell me something?
“I tried calling your husband first,” the woman tells me, “but I got his voice mail.” I look at my watch. Will is in the middle of a lecture. “I wanted to check on Imogen. Her teachers marked her absent today. Did someone forget to call her in?” this woman asks, and—feeling relieved the call isn’t about Otto—I sigh and tell her no, that Imogen must be playing hooky. I won’t bother myself with making up lies for Imogen’s absence.
Her tone isn’t kind. She explains to me that Imogen is required to be in school and that she is quickly closing in on the number of unexcused absences allowed in a school year.
“It’s your responsibility, Mrs. Foust, to make sure Imogen is in school,” she says. A meeting will be scheduled with Will and me, Imogen, teachers and administrators. An intervention of sorts. If that fails, the school will be forced to follow legal protocol.
I end the call and climb into my car. Before I pull out, I send Imogen a text.Where are you?I ask. I don’t expect a reply. And yet one comes.Find me,it reads.
Imogen is playing games with me.
A series of photos comes next. Headstones, a bleak landscape, a bottle of prescription pills. They’re Alice’s old pills, used to manage fibromyalgia pain. An antidepressant that doubles as a nerve blocker. Her name is on the label.
I have to get to Imogen before she does something stupid with them, before she makes a careless decision she can’t take back. I speed away, forcing the legal documents I found in Courtney’s home out of my mind for now. Finding Morgan’s killer will have to wait.
MOUSE
Fake Mom didn’t give Mouse any dinner that night, but Mouse heard her down in the kitchen, making something for herself. She smelled the scent of it coming up to the second floor through the floor vents, slipping under the crack of Mouse’s bedroom door. Mouse didn’t know what it was, but the smell of it got her tummy rumbling in a good way. She wanted to eat. But she couldn’t because Fake Mom never offered to share.
By bedtime, Mouse was hungry. But she knew better than to ask about dinner because Fake Mom told her explicitly that she did not want to see her until she said it was okay. And Fake Mom never said it was okay.
As the sun set and the sky went dark, Mouse tried to ignore the hunger pangs. She heard Fake Mom moving about downstairs for a long time after she had finished eating, doing the dishes, watching TV.
But then the house got quiet.
A door closed, and Fake Mom, Mouse thought, had gone to bed.
Mouse pulled her own door open an inch. She stood just behind the door, holding her breath, making sure that the house stayed quiet. That Fake Mom hadn’t only gone in the bedroom to come right back out again. That Fake Mom wasn’t trying to trick her into coming down.
Mouse knew she should go to sleep. She tried going to sleep. She wanted to go to sleep.
But she was hungry.
And, even worse than that, she had to use the bathroom, which was downstairs. Mouse had to go really badly. She’d been holding it for a long time, and didn’t think she could hold it much longer. She certainly couldn’t hold it the whole night. But she also didn’t want to have an accident in her bedroom because she was six years old, too old to have accidents in her bedroom.
But Mouse wasn’t allowed to leave her bedroom until Fake Mom said she could. So she pressed her legs together real tight and willed the pee to stay inside of her. She used her hand, too, squeezing it into her crotch like a cork, thinking that might hold the pee in.
But in time her stomach hurt too much, because she was both hungry and had to pee.
Mouse coaxed herself into going downstairs. It wasn’t easy to do. Mouse wasn’t the kind of girl who liked breaking rules. Mouse was the kind of girl who liked to obey the rules, to never get in trouble.
But, she remembered, Fake Mom didn’t tell her she had to go to her bedroom. Mouse had decided to do that. What Fake Mom had said wasGo somewhere I can’t see you. If Fake Mom was asleep, Mouse decided, then she wouldn’t see Mouse on the first floor, not unless she could see with her eyes closed. In which case, Mouse wasn’t breaking any rules.
Mouse opened her bedroom door all the way. It groaned as she did and Mouse felt her insides freeze, wondering if that would be enough to rouse Fake Mom from sleep. She counted to fifty in her head, and then, when the house stayed quiet, no sign of Fake Mom waking up, she went.
Mouse crept down the steps. Across the living room. She tiptoed toward the kitchen. Just shy of the kitchen was a hallway that veered off and toward the room Fake Mom was in. Mouse peeked around the corner, trying to get a glimpse of the door, grateful to find it all the way closed.
Mouse had to pee more than she was hungry. She went toward the bathroom first. But the bathroom was just a few feet away from her father and Fake Mom’s room, and that made Mouse scared as heck. She skated her socks to that bathroom door, trying hard not to lift her feet from the floor.
The house was darkish. Not entirely dark, but Mouse had to feel the walls with her fingertips so as not to run into anything. Mouse wasn’t afraid of the dark. She was the kind of kid who wasn’t afraid of much of anything because she had always felt safe in her home. Or at least she had before Fake Mom arrived. Now she no longer felt safe, though the darkness was the least of her concerns.
Mouse made it to the bathroom.
Inside, she gently closed the door. She left the light switch off, so that it was pitch black in the bathroom. There was no window there, no scant amount of moonlight sneaking in through glass, no night-light.
