“Elliott, this is Detective Evans. Detective Evans, my husband, Elliott.”
Elliott nods. He brings his gaze back to me, asking, “If there was no note and no ransom demand, then how do you know someone took her?”
“Because if someone didn’t take her,” I say, “where else could she be?”
Elliott pulls back. He takes in my words, his mind veering in a different direction all of a sudden. He says nothing, but he holds my eye, a silent conversation happening between us, and I know we’re both thinking the same thing.
I hate you. I wish you’d die.
Reese didn’t kill them.
That’s what I tell myself as I sit on the edge of the bathtubwith my knees spread apart and my head between my knees, trying not to puke though I already have, the vomit swirling like Bran Flakes in the toilet water, the smell repulsive.
She didn’t kill them. I know she didn’t. There is a killer out there somewhere, but it’s not her. She wouldn’t do this. Shecouldn’tdo this. I think of the slaughter next door, of the bloodshed inside that cottage. She’s a victim, just like they are. Someone has her.
“Are you okay? Do you need anything?” Elliott asks through the bathroom door, gently rapping his knuckles on it. I don’t know how long I’ve been in here, but long enough that Elliott has gotten worried and come looking for me.
I sit up and wipe my mouth with the sleeve of my robe. “I’ll be right out,” I say.
It takes effort to stand. I’m exhausted. All I want to do is climb into bed, pull the covers over my head and sleep. I want to pretend this isn’t happening, that this isn’t real, but I can’t. Detective Evans is in the cottage with us. He’s waiting for me to come and sit with Wyatt and Mae so that he can ask them questions. We can’t do it later; we have to do it now, though I don’t know that I have it in me. Still, I have no choice. I have to do it for Nolan and Emily. If the situation were reversed—if I was the one who was dead and they were alive—they’d do it for me. They’d help the police find my killer, and they’d find my missing child and bring her home.
I flush the toilet, and then I stand at the bathroom sink, staring at my face in the mirror’s reflection. I hardly recognize myself. I’m a wreck. My face is blotchy, my eyes and cheeks swollen and red. I haven’t brushed my hair today and it’s knotty, though I don’t bother brushing it because I don’t care what I look like, and I don’t have the capacity to even drag a brush through my hair right now. Emily and Nolan are dead. What difference does it make what my hair looks like? I still have on the same clothesI’ve worn all day—my robe over my pajamas—though there is vomit on the collar and sleeve, and blood on the cuff.
I lean over and take a sip of water directly from the tap, swirl it around in my mouth and spit it out, seeing traces of vomit in the sink.
I open the bathroom door and breeze past Elliott in the doorway, our elbows bumping. “Where are you going?” he asks, reaching for me, though I steal my arm from his grasp, walking away.
“I just need to change my clothes. I’ll be out as soon as I can. Can you tell the detective please?” I ask, going into the bedroom and closing the door without giving him a chance to reply. In the bedroom, I sit on the edge of the unmade bed, fighting a headache, hating the detective for putting these small seeds of doubt in my mind, no matter how inadvertent.
So your husband may have left before five o’clock?
I think again to last night. I try to take myself back in time, to remember if Elliott was here at 3:00 a.m. after I climbed up into the loft, turned the girls’ TV off and came back to bed. I close my eyes, imagining the feel of the soft mattress sinking beneath me, trying to feel Elliott curl around me from behind, his warm hand slipping onto my hip, the heat from his body or the sound of his shallow breathing as he slept. I can’t, but that doesn’t mean anything, I tell myself, because I was half asleep and I don’t remember the absence of him either, I don’t remember coming back to a cold and empty bed alone.
Elliott was here. Of course he was here.
I change into a pair of jeans and a t-shirt. I take a breath, steeling myself for what comes next.
I step out of the bedroom to find Elliott upstairs now and not waiting in the hall for me as I imagined. He’s in the loft with Cass, sitting with her so that the detective can speak to Wyatt, Mae and me alone.
In the living room, Wyatt slumps on a saggy chair, staring down at his phone. He might have internet connection or he might not. He might just be playing some game offline because cell service is fickle; it comes and goes as it wants. The pillow lines have disappeared from his face, and I think of what he must have gone through this morning. I picture him sound asleep in his bed, maybe lost in a peaceful dream before waking up to the sound of police clearing rooms. They wouldn’t have knocked on his bedroom door when they came to it; they would have let themselves in, and I envision that: the police violently throwing open the door so hard it ricocheted off the opposite wall, finding Wyatt in bed, drawing and aiming their guns at him, screaming for him to freeze as if he’s a suspect, as if he’s the one who killed them. He must have been confused, scared out of his mind. I wonder what happened next, if the police told him his parents were dead. They must have, because they would have had to prepare him to leave the bedroom and to walk past Nolan’s body in the hall. I wonder if Wyatt cried. If he was afraid. If the police comforted him.
Wyatt and Mae haven’t had a second to grieve. I wonder if they’ve begun to process the fact that their parents are dead, or if they’re in denial, harboring false hope that this isn’t real, that Nolan and Emily might walk through the door any minute. They’ve had nothing in their life to prepare them for death. They’ve never had a pet die. Emily’s father died, but he had Alzheimer’s for years and so they were never close to him before his death. They didn’t mourn him, not like they will Emily and Nolan.
I set a hand on Wyatt’s shoulder. He looks up, and when he does, I see so much of Nolan in him, it takes my breath away. It isn’t so much in the hair or body shape—because Wyatt, though tall, has yet to fill out—but in the facial features like the dark brown eyes, the round face, full cheeks and ears thatstick slightly out. Wyatt has a scar just above his right eye. He’s had it for years as a result of a baseball injury. I remember when it happened, the night he took a hit to the eye, because Emily called from the emergency room to see if I could come pick up Reese and Mae. The bleeding was profuse, both externally and inside the eye. They were worried he might lose some of his vision, which he didn’t, thank God, but still, he had an impressive black eye for weeks and now the scar.
“Do you need anything?” I ask.
Wyatt shakes his head, his mop of dark, coarse hair falling in his eyes, hiding them.
“Okay,” I say. “Let me know if you do.”
I take a seat on the sofa. Mae shuffles over and sits beside me, pressing a leg close to mine, her face vacant, her eyes red. I wrap an arm around her shoulder, feeling her collapse against me as Detective Evans lowers himself to a chair across from us, and I watch him, taking in his height, his athletic build, his red hair, his freckles. I went to high school with a redhead who was ruthlessly teased because kids can be mean. Detective Evans, on the other hand, seems to embrace his redheadedness. He sits confident on the chair, his legs spread wide, taking up space, and I doubt that he’s ever been teased or had an issue with getting girls to like him.
“What are you doing to find my niece?” I ask, worried that the police aren’t doing anything and that they don’t see Reese as a victim but as a suspect.
“We are looking for her, Mrs. Gray,” Detective Evans says. “We’ve issued an AMBER Alert and have entered her into the NCIC Missing Person File. We’ve set up roadblocks to try to apprehend her or anyone who may have her. We’re doing everything we can.” He looks to Wyatt then, who’s on his phone. “How about you put that away for a little bit,” he says.
But Wyatt doesn’t put his phone away. Instead, he hesitates,looking from the detective to me, wondering, I think, if he has to. “What if I don’t want to?” he finally asks, testing Detective Evans’s patience, looking him right in the face. Detective Evans doesn’t balk, though I’m sure he’s not used to being told no, least of all not by someone Wyatt’s age.
