One More Day (8 page)

The detectives swarming her house, taking it over like they owned it again, reminded Carrie of real estate open houses, of her mother trying to sell their house after her father left. Her childhood home had been more of a cottage, all windows and porch, but the real estate agent had called it a bungalow, trying to make it sound bigger, more exciting. When Carrie had read the ad written for her own house, she'd been surprised by how beautiful and expansive they'd made something small and sunlit and old seem. But “old” was part of the Main Line's charm; everyone wanted to live in a house that looked like it had always been there.

You weren't supposed to be home during the open houses, but Carrie hated studying at the library, so she'd stayed in her room with her dog, Jinx. He lay in a circle of sun, and she lay next to him, playing with his soft ear with one hand while she turned the pages of a textbook with the other. That was all there was: studying, working, and debate practice. There used to be soccer and tennis, but they couldn't afford it anymore: the cleats, the rackets, the lessons. She held on to cheerleading for a while, then stopped. She didn't care. Just thought about books, scholarships, college. No distractions between chapters but petting her dog. Her room was the smallest room, farthest from the bathroom, a room no one had any interest in anyway, with her posters and her mix tapes and the beads hanging in the doorway, beads her mother thought they should take down for the sake of the sale but allowed at the last minute. She stayed there and listened to people taking over downstairs, talking about the wainscoting and the ceiling height and whether the mantelpiece was original as if she wasn't there. She hated the intrusion but made a point of being pleasant and smiling, as her mother had coached her. She knew they had to sell the house, that they needed the money, that she had to do her part. Do her part and not say anything to them about the muddy footprints they'd left on the clean stair runner that she and her mother had scrubbed by hand with a brush, because they hadn't been able to afford to rent the shampooer at the grocery store.

Now, watching these men with their dirty shoes traipse through her and John's house, a house she had nothing to do with except keep clean, brought up those feelings all over again.
Be nice. Keep the peace. Stay on their good side.
She could almost hear her mother coaching her again. She stood at the kitchen island, sipping her tea, trying to stay out of the way.
Oh, what Dr. Kenney would do with this connection!
she thought. How he'd dig gently, picking at the scab of her mother and her childhood. How badly he wanted to know everything about her, as if that would explain. Sometimes Carrie thought he already knew everything and was just waiting for her to spill it all, to cry and to wail. To
caterwaul
, as her grandmother would have said. She'd allowed John to make her an appointment with Dr. Kenney for the following day, and she started to wish she'd indulged him and taken it today, just to get away from these people in her house.

John was talking to the fingerprint technicians with a fervor that made her cringe. Like he was interested in their line of work, of changing jobs. But that was how he was: he was just curious. He'd always been like that—his mother said it had been written all over his report cards. Curiosity. The last defense of someone who wasn't naturally sensitive, who wasn't tuned in. If he hadn't been curious, he would never know anything.

She was suddenly seized with the desire to go play tennis, to smash a ball. She wanted to tear up cardboard boxes at the church, break them down.

“John,” she called up to him, her voice so sharp everyone looked, not just John. “I'm going for a walk.”

“Okay,” he said, looking at Nolan somewhat nervously. Nolan nodded his head slightly, and she wanted to murder them both. She didn't need permission to leave her own house!

John lowered his eyes with guilt. Did Carrie know that Nolan had been quizzing him again about her daily habits, asking him strange questions like whether she had friends over during the week, if he'd noticed extra dishes in the sink—wineglasses maybe? And mentioning again the presence of a pair of knitted gloves in her glove compartment. Did Carrie ever wear gloves to drive, even when it wasn't cold?
Jesus
, John had wanted to scream.
That's why they call it a glove compartment! So you can keep gloves in there in case your hands get cold!

In the foyer, Carrie slipped into her low boots, pulled on a light quilted jacket. Still warm enough in Pennsylvania in early October, but you never knew. She walked down the stepping stones that led through the backyard and down to the walking path. They'd been laid to match a woman's gait or a child's; John took them two at a time. When they'd first looked at this house, the smallest model the developer had built, the curving dotted path from front to back had seemed strange to them. Carrie imagined that, if glimpsed from Google Earth, the gray swirl would look like punctuation, a question mark. The stones were only placed there because they had no back entrance, windows but no French doors, no patio. Those were upgrades, and Carrie and John had planned to make those changes someday. Carrie secretly thought that since John never took a walk around the community unless Carrie asked him to, access to the back simply wasn't a priority to him.

“Where you headed?” Forrester asked, and she jumped. Her hand went up to her throat.

“Sorry,” she said. “I, uh—”

“You look like you've seen a ghost.” He said it quietly, seriously.

He stood beneath the living room window. She searched his eyes for the meaning behind those words, searched them as thoroughly as he was looking through her property for evidence. He was wearing latex gloves, had something in his hand, but of course he hadn't found anything important. She wished she could tell him, the one who was nice to her, not to bother. To give him a tip for a change. Still, they had to look. Of course they did; why wouldn't they look? His eyes were dark but large, kind. His skin after such a long, warm summer was a golden color that always looked more right on women than men. His hair was blond at the tips, and so was his trim goatee. Carrie supposed being pleasant-looking was also useful in his line of work. Especially against the gruffness of Nolan. The yin and yang.

She shrugged. “Just a walk.”

“No destination, huh?”

She shook her head.

“Perambulating?”

She blinked. Maybe Forrester was like her grandmother—maybe he was the kind of guy who never said
home
when he could pull out
abode
. Maybe Forrester was more interesting too than Nolan. He definitely had a larger vocabulary.

“I guess you could call it that,” she said. “But the path goes in a circle. You end up in the same place you began.”

He nodded. “Well, I guess that keeps people from getting lost.”

She smiled.

“Your husband ever walk on the path?”

She blinked. “Well, of course. We go sometimes, after dinner.”

“I mean, ever just take off and go for a walk, clear his head, like guys do?”

“I don't know,” she said, and he nodded as if he did know.

“You're more of the walker in the family, huh?”

“I suppose.”

She wondered if they knew everything about her: the hikes she took in college, the ones she did with her family at Peterson Nature Preserve. Hell, they probably knew the size of her footprint and the pattern of her menstrual cycles.

“He just…watches you from a happy distance?”

She felt his words along her spine. She looked up, met his eyes for just a moment—brown, long-lashed, puppy-innocent. How on earth could he know about that? Had they tracked down Tracie or Chelsea and interviewed them? Or Dr. Kenney? Good God, had they talked to Dr. Kenney?

“I guess I'll see you later,” she said awkwardly.

“Enjoy yourself,” he said, a combination of words that could be an invitation or a kind of harbinger, a curse.

Was that why she didn't say “I will” before she turned and headed off toward the pond? She was unsettled by his questions about John—as if John had more secrets, as if he wasn't always where you expected him to be.

The community was built around the manufactured pond but designed to look as if it wasn't. You couldn't just plop a development in the middle of gentlemen farms and houses that had been built in the 1940s and expect the zoning to be passed. No, you had to be sneakier than that. You had to make things look accidental. The houses were all different, although some of the differences were slight—angles, colors, reversing of floor plans. The land was parceled in unusual shapes to look like it had been created over time, not all at once. Her mother, who had ended up getting her real estate license after she sold the bungalow, after she saw how easy it was and how bad other people were at it, had explained the whole theory behind Carrie's development when she'd visited. When she'd come up and tried to cover her own grief while tending to Carrie's. Losing a grandchild was hard too, Carrie knew. Growing older, missing your chances. Carrie could always have another baby, but her mother, at sixty-four, could drop dead.
Old people die every day
, she'd said wistfully to Carrie when she'd called her at school and told her Gran had died, as if she'd been preparing herself for it, a negative kind of pep talk.

Carrie headed down to the entrance of the walking path, the wood chips leading to the gravel that ringed the pond. One-point-two-mile circumference. They'd thought of that too, her mother had told her. One mile would be too perfect, too planned. When they'd closed on the house, the pond had looked like it had been cookie-cut out of the earth, too circular, its edges too sharp, the water too clear. When Ben first went missing, the police had set up down here with divers, circling the shallow water, which made no sense to Carrie or to John. He hadn't been taken at home; the man they'd seen at the Y wasn't connected to anyone who lived around the pond. Nolan had told John they were working “off a theory” but wouldn't tell him what it was, which drove John nuts. He'd pace the house, trying to come up with his own theories, then wonder aloud if Nolan had just said that to do this very thing: to make him angry, to rile him up.

With the passage of time, the pond had become murkier, loamy. The circle of water had fanned out, slowly swamping the sedges and rushes, carving a more irregular shape. Even the small birch trees around the perimeter had the first tendrils of moss at their base. Carrie walked slowly, listening to squirrels rustling in the tall, damp grass, water gurgling in the low cattails. It smelled like rain all the time, cold in her nostrils, but the rain didn't come, and the leaves didn't change.

A woman ahead of her on the path moved quickly, like she was power walking, even though she wasn't wearing the clothes for it. A dog ran toward her, and the woman froze, unsure of its intent. But it was wagging its tail, butt wiggling, like it was happy to see the woman. Carrie was seized again by how much she wanted a dog, how that was the next piece of the puzzle, to watch her son enjoy what she'd had, a loving pet. The dog stopped to sniff the woman, and Carrie watched with alarm as the woman kicked it away.

“Hey!” she yelled involuntarily. “He's just sniffing you!”

The woman turned back with a scowl, then broke into a run, heading off the path. Carrie watched as she passed through a small stand of lindens to the west, toward the trestle over the old turnpike. Where people ran alone. She wished she was closer, wished she could speak to her, educate her, or yes, tell her off. Who the hell kicked at a friendly dog?

The dog paused to watch the woman go, head slightly bowed, haunches lowering. Carrie could almost feel the outline of regret. Then it turned and trotted back toward the pond, tags jingling. It stopped and sniffed the air. Carrie couldn't tell the precise breed at this distance, but it looked like its fur had been rolled in the dirt—a pale dog, but a muddy one. It stood at the edge of the pond, then crouched, head down. Started barking frantically. As she grew closer, Carrie thought she heard the trill of a toad.

As she came around the curve, the dog glanced back at her, then lunged at a splash in the water. Ah, a frog. Or a fish? Did they stock the pond? She looked up at the metallic sky, unbroken by ducks or geese, clouds gradated from silver to granite. As she got closer, even the dog's coat looked cinereous—no hopeful tufts of yellow. He looked and barked. Barked and looked. As she came closer, something about the tilt of the dog's head made her pick up her pace. It seemed to be speaking to her directly, and she knew exactly what he wanted.

Yes, the silvery brown coat of mud and dust had thrown her off, but there it was—the telltale tinder of dry yellow under the chin.

“Jinx,” she whispered.

She called his name louder, hurried to him, nearly galloping herself, and he ran to her, frenzied and leaping, licking her face.

“Oh, Jinxie,” she cried, sobbing into his fur, not caring he was grimy. She sniffed his salty head, ran her hands across his velvety, wet ears, and he turned more golden, more himself, with each caress of her hands. The only comfort she had had for years, and it had been exactly enough. Exactly. She buried her face in the side of his coat and smelled something both sweet and woodsy, like moss.

She held him at arm's length, paused to wipe her eyes against her sleeve. She'd been sure, but she needed to be doubly sure. She put her hands under his jaw and lifted his strong, wide head, and there it was, carved into the yellow field clear as a crop circle: the scar where he'd tangled with a cat, the small scaly
V
where his fur never grew back. She ran her hands over him, rememorizing his contours. His expressive eyebrows, the rabbit-fast rhythm of his heartbeat, the thin, strong legs, the velvet pads of his paws.