The Best American Mystery Stories 2014 (4 page)

He looked all over the house, his chest pounding. He thought he must be dreaming, calling out her name, both their names.

He found her in the backyard, a lithe shadow in the middle of the yard.

She was sitting on the grass, her phone lighting her face.

“I feel closer to her out here,” she said. “I found this.”

He could barely see, but moving closer saw the smallest of earrings, an enamel butterfly, caught between her fingers.

They had had a big fight when she came home with Shelby, her ears pierced, thick gold posts plugged in such tiny lobes. Her ears red, her face red, her eyes soft with tears.

“Where did she go, babe?” Lorie said to him now. “Where did she go?”

He was soaked with sweat and was pulling his T-shirt from his chest.

“Look, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you’ve cooperated with us fully. I get that. But understand our position. No one can confirm her story. The employee who saw your wife spill her coffee remembers seeing her leave with Shelby. She doesn’t remember another woman at all.”

“How many people were in there? Did you talk to all of them?”

“There’s something else too, Mr. Ferguson.”

“What?”

“One of the other employees said Lorie was really mad about the coffee spill. She told Shelby it was her fault. That everything was her fault. And that Lorie then grabbed your daughter by the arm and shook her.”

“That’s not true,” he said. He’d never seen Lorie touch Shelby roughly. Sometimes it seemed she barely knew she was there.

“Mr. Ferguson, I need to ask you: Has your wife had a history of emotional problems?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“It’s a standard question in cases like this,” the detective said. “And we’ve had some reports.”

“Are you talking about the local news?”

“No, Mr. Ferguson. We don’t collect evidence from TV.”

“Collecting evidence? What kind of evidence would you need to collect about Lorie? It’s Shelby who’s missing. Aren’t you—”

“Mr. Ferguson, did you know your wife spent three hours at Your Place Lounge on Charlevoix yesterday afternoon?”

“Are you following her?”

“Several patrons and one of the bartenders contacted us. They were concerned.”

“Concerned? Is that what they were?” His head was throbbing.

“Shouldn’t they be concerned, Mr. Ferguson? This is a woman whose baby is missing.”

“If they were so concerned, why didn’t they call me?”

“One of them asked Lorie if he could call you for her. Apparently she told him not to.”

He looked at the detective. “She didn’t want to worry me.”

The detective looked back at him. “Okay.”

“You can’t tell how people are going to act when something like this happens to you,” he said, feeling his head dipping. Suddenly his shoulders felt very heavy and he had these pictures of Lorie in his head, at the far corner of the long black lacquered bar, eyes heavy with makeup and filled with dark feelings. Feelings he could never touch. Never once did he feel sure he knew what she was thinking. That was part of it. Part of the throb in his chest, the longing there that never left.

“No,” he said suddenly.

“What?” the detective asked, leaning forward.

“She has no history of emotional problems. My wife.”

It was the fourth week, the fourth week of false leads and crying and sleeping pills and night terrors. And he had to go back to work or they wouldn’t make the mortgage payment. They’d talked about Lorie returning to her part-time job at the candle store, but somebody needed to be home, to be waiting.

(Though what, really, were they waiting for? Did toddlers suddenly toddle home after twenty-seven days? That’s what he could tell the cops were thinking.)

“I guess I’ll call the office tomorrow,” he said. “And make a plan.”

“And I’ll be here,” she said. “You’ll be there and I’ll be here.”

It was a terrible conversation, like a lot of those conversations couples have in dark bedrooms, late into the night, when you know the decisions you’ve been avoiding all day won’t wait anymore.

After they talked, she took four big pills and pushed her face into her pillow.

He couldn’t sleep and went into Shelby’s room, which he only ever did at night. He leaned over the crib, which was too small for her but Lorie wouldn’t use the bed yet, said it wasn’t time, not nearly.

He put his fingers on the soft baby bumpers, festooned with bright yellow fish. He remembered telling Shelby they were goldfish, but she kept saying
Nana, nana
, which was what she called bananas.

Her hands were always covered with the pearly slime of bananas, holding on to the front of Lorie’s shirt.

One night, sliding his hand under Lorie’s bra clasp, between her breasts, he felt a daub of banana even there.

“It’s everywhere,” Lorie had sighed. “It’s like she’s made of bananas.”

He loved that smell, and his daughter’s forever-glazed hands.

At some point, remembering this, he started crying, but then he stopped and sat in the rocking chair until he fell asleep.

In part, he was relieved to go back to work, all those days with neighbors and families and friends huddling in the house, trading Internet rumors, organizing vigils and searches. But now there were fewer family members, only a couple friends who had no other place to go, and no neighbors left at all.

The woman from the corner house came late one evening and asked for her casserole dish back.

“I didn’t know you’d keep it so long,” she said, eyes narrowing.

She seemed to be trying to look over his shoulder, into the living room. Lorie was watching a show, loudly, about a group of blond women with tight lacquered faces and angry mouths. She watched it all the time; it seemed to be the only show on TV anymore.

“I didn’t know,” the woman said, taking her dish, inspecting it, “how things were going to turn out.”

you sexy, sexy boy
, Lorie’s text said.
i want your hands on me. come home and handle me, rough as u like. rough me up
.

He swiveled at his desk chair hard, almost like he needed to cover the phone, cover his act of reading the text.

He left the office right away, driving as fast as he could. Telling himself that something was wrong with her. That this had to be some side effect of the pills the doctor had given her, or the way sorrow and longing could twist in her complicated little body.

But that wasn’t really why he was driving so fast, or why he nearly tripped on the dangling seat belt as he hurried from the car.

Or why he felt, when he saw her lying on the bed, flat on her stomach and head turned, smiling, that he’d burst in two if he didn’t have her. If he didn’t have her then and there, the bed moaning beneath them and she not making a sound but, the blinds pulled down, her white teeth shining, shining from her open mouth.

It felt wrong but he wasn’t sure why. He knew her, but he didn’t. This was her, but a Lorie from long ago. Except different.

The reporters called all the time. And there were two that never seemed to leave their block. They had been there right at the start, but then seemed to go away, to move on to other stories.

They came back when the footage of Lorie coming out of Magnum Tattoo Parlor began appearing. Someone shot it with their cell phone.

Lorie was wearing those red cowboy boots again, and red lipstick, and she walked right up to the camera.

They ran photos of it in the newspaper, with the headline “A Mother’s Grief?”

He looked at the tattoo.

The words
Mirame quemar
written in script, wrapping itself around her hip.

It covered just the spot where a stretch mark had been, the one she always covered with her fingers when she stood before him naked.

He looked at the tattoo in the dark bedroom, a band of light coming from the hallway. She turned her hip, kept turning it, spinning her torso so he could feel it, all of it.

“I needed it,” she said. “I needed something. Something to put my fingers on. To remind me of me. Do you like it?” she asked, her breath in his ear. The ink looked like it was moving.

“I like it,” he said, putting his fingers there. Feeling a little sick. He did like it. He liked it very much.

Late, late into that night, her voice shook him from a deep sleep.

“I never knew she was coming and then she was here,” she was saying, her face pressed in her pillow. “And I never knew she was going and now she’s gone.”

He looked at her, her eyes shut, dappled with old makeup.

“But,” she said, her voice grittier, strained, “she was always doing whatever she wanted.”

That’s what he thought she said. But she was sleeping, and didn’t make any sense at all.

“You liked it until you thought about it,” she said. “Until you looked close at it and then you decided you didn’t want it anymore. Or didn’t want to be the guy who wants it.”

He was wearing the new shirt she had bought for him the day before. It was a deep, deep purple and beautiful and he felt good in it, like the unit manager who all the women in the office talked about. They talked about his shoes and he always wondered where people got shoes like that.

“No,” he said. “I love it. But it’s just . . . expensive.”

That wasn’t it, though. It didn’t seem right buying things, buying anything, right now. But it was also how colorful the shirt was, the sheen on it. The bright hard beauty of it. A shirt for going out, for nightclubs, for dancing. For those things they did when they still did things: vodka and pounding music and frenzied sex in her car.

The kind of drunken sex so messy and crazy that you were almost shy around each other after, driving home, screwed sober, feeling like you’d showed something very private and very bad.

Once, years ago, she did something to him no one had ever done and he couldn’t look at her afterward at all. The next time he did something to her. For a while, it felt like it would never stop.

“I think someone should tell you about your wife,” the e-mail said. That was the subject line. He didn’t recognize the address, a series of letters and digits, and there was no text in the body of the e-mail. There was only a photo of a girl dancing in a bright green halter top, the ties loose and dangling.

It was Lorie, and he knew it must be an old picture. Weeks ago, the newspapers had gotten their hands on some snapshots of Lorie from her late teens, dancing on tabletops, kissing her girlfriends. Things girls did when they were drinking and someone had a camera.

In those shots, Lorie was always posing, vamping, trying to look like a model, a celebrity. It was a Lorie before he really knew her, a Lorie from what she called her “wild girl days.”

But in this picture she didn’t seem to be aware of the camera at all, seemed to be lost in the thrall of whatever music was playing, whatever sounds she was hearing in her crowded head. Her eyes were shut tight, her head thrown back, her neck long and brown and beautiful.

She looked happier than he had ever seen her.

A Lorie from long ago, or never.

But when he scrolled further down, he saw the halter top riding up her body, saw the pop of a hip bone. Saw the elegant script letters:
Mirame quemar
.

That night he remembered a story she had told him long ago. It seemed impossible he’d forgotten it. Or maybe it just seemed different now, making it seem like something new. Something uncovered, an old sunken box you find in the basement smelling strong and you’re afraid to open it.

It was back when they were dating, when her roommate was always around and they had no place to be alone. They would have thrilling bouts in his car, and she loved to crawl into the back seat and lie back, hoisting a leg high over the headrest and begging him for it.

It was after the first or second time, back when it was all so crazy and confusing and his head pounding and starbursting, that Lorie curled against him and talked and talked about her life, and the time she stole four Revlon eyeslicks from CVS and how she had slept with a soggy-eared stuffed animal named Ears until she was twelve. She said she felt she could tell him anything.

Somewhere in the blur of those nights—nights when he too told her private things, stories about babysitter crushes and shoplifting Matchbox cars—that she told him the story.

How, when she was seven, her baby brother was born and she became so jealous.

“My mom spent all her time with him, and left me alone all day,” she said. “So I hated him. Every night I would pray that he would be taken away. That something awful would happen to him. At night I’d sneak over to his crib and stare at him through the little bars. I think maybe I figured I could think it into happening. If I stared at him long enough and hard enough, it might happen.”

He had nodded, because this is how kids could be, he guessed. He was the youngest and wondered if his older sister thought things like this about him. Once she smashed his finger under a cymbal and said it was an accident.

But she wasn’t done with her story and she snuggled closer to him and he could smell her powdery body and he thought of all its little corners and arcs, how he liked to find them with his hands, all the soft, hot places on her. Sometimes it felt like her body was never the same body, like it changed under his hands.
I’m a witch, a witch
.

“So one night,” she said, her voice low and sneaky, “I was watching him through the crib bars and he was making this funny noise.”

Her eyes glittered in the dark of the car.

“I leaned across, sticking my hands through the rails,” she said, snaking her hand toward him. “And that’s when I saw this piece of string dangling on his chin, from his pull toy. I starting pulling it, and pulling it.”

He watched her tugging the imaginary string, her eyes getting bigger and bigger.

“Then he let out this gasp,” she said, “and started breathing again.”

She paused, her tongue clicking.

“My mom came in at just that moment. She said I saved his life,” she said. “Everyone did. She bought me a new jumper and the hot-pink shoes I wanted. Everyone loved me.”