“It’s a group for seniors with dementia. They come from a local home twice a week. Studies show that the socialization is good for them, even if they don’t really engage in conversations. Greta and Teresa are mostly nonverbal now. But it gives them purpose, to work on something like this. And a lot of times their hands remember how to use the needles. Not as well as they used to. But it comes back.”
She has to force herself to focus on the conversation, to try to keep things easy and light. “And you lead the group?”
“I facilitate it. Lead is a strong word. Mostly they don’t need me. Their bodies take over and they’re doing all the work. Do you know someone who might be a good fit?”
“Me? Oh, no. I mean, maybe. I’d have to think about it. How did you learn to knit?”
“My mother,” Iris says. She turns away from Callie, watches the women working. “I learned when I was a girl.”
“Are you close?” Callie regrets it as soon as she asks. It’s a nudge too far. Too personal, too pointed. Not the question of an impartial stranger.
Iris shakes her head.
“She died a long time ago.” An interesting lie. As far as Callie could tell from the records, Vera Riley was alive—no death certificate on file. Vera is another cipher, another woman who disappeared herself without a trace. Callie expects Iris to make an excuse, to look away again. So she is startled to find Iris has turned toward her instead. Her whole body a question. Her face neutral save for the eyes, narrowed, in a way the reminds Callie of Sabrina’s yearbook photo. For a second, Callie feels as though Iris sees right through her. That she must.
Then one of the women mewls for help. She has to go to the bathroom.
Callie uses this as an opportunity to leave. She’s flustered, hot under her coat. An alarm blares on her way out, makes her jump, and she realizes she still has the book under her arm, the one whose jacket she was reading as a prop.
“Shit,” she swears, lunges to the nearest shelf, shoves it between two doorstop fantasy novels.
She sits in her car for a moment after she starts it. That wasn’t how it was supposed to go. She didn’t have a precise plan for this day when she came here to watch Iris, but she’s fumbled it. She can’t help but feel dirty, dirtier than she used to after going undercover to buy drugs, or pretend to solicit a man for sex. What is she doing, trailing this woman through her life? There are ways to go about interviewing Iris about Sabrina, but this isn’t it. Her head feels cloudy, her body wrung out.
The body remembers, Iris had said. Her body is feeling all of it: Jane, Damien, Jenna, Wren, the mess of this case.
A tap at the window makes her jump.
Iris again.
She rolls it down, waits for Iris to speak first. She looks different than she had in the library, among the knitters.
She looks afraid.
It takes her a minute to speak, and the silence is charged. Something has been laid bare between them.
“Did she send you?” Iris asks finally, her words slow and measured. Nothing of the amiable tone she took with Callie among the stacks of books.
“Who?” Callie says, finding she means it two ways. Who are you talking about, and who are you?
She takes a breath, as though it pains her, like someone whose ribs are bruised. “Sabrina. Please tell me Sabrina sent you.” Callie feels her mouth gape open a little bit. Iris continues. “You’re a PI, right? She’s hired you?”
Iris has been holding out. Hoping. All this time. Callie can see itin her face, in the tight clench of her fists. What she’s suspected, what she’s worried about and the stories she’s been telling herself, over the many long years she must have been waiting. That Sabrina would find a way back to her. That they’d be together again.
“Let’s go somewhere we can talk more openly,” Callie says.
Iris nods. “My house. No one is home. You can follow me. Or do you… you might already know the address?”
Callie nods, flushing hot with shame.
ANNABELLE
“It’s perfect,” Sabrina says, holding up the note the Coyote pinned to the front door, a time and a place scrawled in blocky print. “I’ll meet him, like I always do. But then I’ll tell him he’s got to pay up.”
“It seems… weird,” you say. Sabrina had started leaving him voicemails from the payphone in front of the convenience store, cryptic and bitter. Your phone lines had been cut off, finally, after months of the phone company sending increasingly strident warnings. Envelopes markedURGENTin red ink.
“Stop worrying,” she says, putting her coat on, zipping it to her chin. She’s wearing the gold star charm after keeping it on her dresser all these weeks. You wonder what it means.
At the window you watch her pale hair recede into the dark. To your surprise, she turns once at the end of the driveway, gives you a smile and a wave, turns back again. Sets her shoulders and disappears from view.
