The Good Girl (12 page)

Gabe
Before

I’m driving down the world’s most perfect, tree-lined street. Red maple and yellow aspen trees canopy over the narrow street, their leaves raining down. It’s too early for trick-or-treaters, the little misfits still in school for an hour or two. But the million-dollar homes wait for them, tucked behind impeccable landscaping and lawns that actually necessitate a riding lawn mower...though no one around here dares mow their own lawn. They’re all decked out with hay bales and corn stalks and perfectly round pumpkins with the unblemished stalks.

The mailman is closing in on the Dennetts’ mailbox when I pull into the brick drive. I settle my piece-of-shit car beside Mrs. Dennett’s sedan and wave a friendly hello as though I might just live here. I make my way to the brick mailbox, more spacious than my own john.

“Afternoon,” I say as I thrust out a hand for today’s mail.

“Afternoon,” he replies as he sets a stack of mail into my hand.

It’s cold out here. And gray. It always is, every single Halloween that I can ever remember. The gray clouds descend to the earth’s surface until you can no longer tell the difference between land and sky. I tuck the mail under an arm and plunge my hands into my pockets as I make my way up the drive.

Mrs. Dennett has this way of thrusting open the front door every time I arrive. There’s a great gusto about it, her face awash with enthusiasm until she sees me. The smile disappears. Her wide eyes vanish. Sometimes there’s a sigh.

I don’t take it personally.

“Oh,” she says. “Detective.”

Every time the doorbell rings, she’s sure it’s Mia.

She’s wearing an apron the color of mustard over a whole yoga ensemble.

“You’re cooking?” I ask, trying not to choke on the smell. She’s either cooking or a small animal has crept into the basement and died.

“Trying.” She’s already walking away from me, leaving the front door hanging open. There’s a nervous laugh as I follow her into the kitchen. “Lasagna,” she says, slicing a mound of mozzarella cheese. “Ever make lasagna before?”

“I specialize in frozen pizza,” I say, setting the mail on the island. “Thought I’d save you the trip.”

“Oh, thank you,” she says, dropping the cheese slicer and reaching for an “explanation of benefits” from the insurance company. She wanders off in search of a letter opener while, on the stove, Italian sausage begins to burn.

I do know a thing or two about lasagna. I watched my mother cook it about a million times as a kid. She’d trip over me in our tiny kitchen, while I hounded her—
Is it ready yet? Is it ready
yet?
—while playing with my Matchbox cars on the kitchen floor.

I find a wooden spoon in the drawer and give it a whirl.

“What was I...” she asks mindlessly as she returns to the kitchen. “Oh, Detective, you don’t have to,” she says, but I tell her that I don’t mind. I set the spoon beside the skillet. She’s sorting the mail.

“Have you ever seen so much junk?” she asks me. “Catalogs. Bills. Everyone wants our money. Have you ever even heard of—” she holds up the envelope for a closer look at the name of the charity “—Mowat-Wilson syndrome?”

“Mowat-Wilson syndrome,” I repeat. “Can’t say that I have.”

“Mowat-Wilson syndrome,” she says again, settling the envelope on a pile of mail that eventually works its way into a fancy-schmancy organizer on the wall. I would have thought for sure the Mowat-Wilsons were going to be recycled; turns out they just might get a check. “Judge Dennett must have done something special to deserve lasagna,” I say. My mother cooks lasagna all the time. There’s nothing special about it. But for someone like Eve Dennett, I gather that a home-cooked meal, one like this, is a rare treat. Depending, of course, on if ones lives through the meal; based on the looks of this, I’m rather happy I haven’t been invited to stay. I’m an expert at stereotypes, sure that Mrs. Dennett is a one-trick pony in the kitchen. She’s probably got a chicken recipe and chances are she can boil water. But that’s all.

“It’s not for James,” Mrs. Dennett says as she moves behind me to the stove. The sleeve of a black spandex top grazes my back. I’m sure she doesn’t notice. But I do. I can still feel it, seconds after she’s gone. The woman tosses a pile of onions into the skillet. They hiss.

I know that it’s Mia’s birthday.

“Mrs. Dennett?” I ask.

“I’m not going to do this,” she vows, completely absorbed in cooking the charred meat, quite a turn of events for someone who, two seconds earlier, didn’t give a shit. “I’m not going to cry.”

And then I notice the balloons, a whole slew of them covering the house, all in lime-green and magenta. Apparently a favorite.

“It’s for
her,
” she says. “Mia loves lasagna. Any kind of pasta. She’s the only one I could always count on to eat what I’d cooked. It’s not that I expect her to show up. I know that won’t happen. But I couldn’t...” And she lets her voice trail off. From behind, I see her shoulders quake, and watch as the Italian sausage absorbs her tears. She could blame the onions, but she doesn’t. I don’t stare. I lose myself in the mozzarella cheese. She finds a clove of garlic and begins to smash the damn thing with the palm of her hand. I didn’t know Mrs. Dennett had it in her. Seems to be amazingly therapeutic. Into the skillet the garlic goes, and she yanks jars of seasoning—basil and fennel, salt and pepper—from a cabinet and slams them to the granite countertop. The acrylic salt shaker misses the edge of the countertop and tumbles to the hardwood floor. It doesn’t break, but the salt spills. We stare at the collection of white crystals on the floor, thinking the same thing: bad luck. Is it seven years? I don’t know. Regardless, I insist, “Left shoulder.”

“Are you sure it isn’t the right?” she asks. There’s a panic to her voice, as if this little salt incident might very well determine whether or not Mia will come home.

“Left,” I respond, knowing I’m right, but then to pacify her, I say, “Oh, what the heck, why not toss a little over both. Then you know you’re covered.”

She does, then wipes her hands on the front of the apron. I stoop to pick up the salt shaker, and she lowers herself to collect the remaining salt in the palm of her hand. It happens in an instant and before we know it, we clunk heads. She presses a hand to her wound. I find myself reaching out to her. I ask if she’s okay, then say I’m sorry. We rise to our feet and for the first time, Mrs. Dennett begins to laugh.

God, she’s gorgeous, though the laughter is uneasy, like she might just burst into tears at any moment. I dated a girl once who was bipolar. Manic highs one minute, so that she wanted to conquer the world, so depressed the next she could hardly get out of bed.

I wonder if Judge Dennett has once—just one time since this all happened—put his arms around the woman and told her that it was going to be okay.

When she settles I say to her, “Can you imagine if Mia did come home? Tonight. If she just showed up at that door and there was
nothing
.”

She’s shaking her head. She can’t imagine.

“Why did you become a detective?” she asks me.

There is nothing profound about this. It’s embarrassing almost. “I was appointed this position because, apparently, I was a good cop. But I became a cop because I had a friend in college that was headed to the academy. I had nothing better to do than follow.”

“But you like your job?”

“I like my job.”

“Isn’t it depressing? I can hardly watch the news at night.”

“It has its bad days,” I say, but then I go on to list as many good things as I can possibly come up with. Putting down a meth lab. Finding a lost dog. Catching some kid who’d gone to school with a pocketknife in his bag. “Finding Mia,” I conclude and though I don’t say it aloud, I think to myself: if I could find Mia and bring her back home, if I could wake Mrs. Dennett from this horrible nightmare she’s trapped in, that would make it worth it. That would override all the open, unsolved cases, all the wrongdoing that goes on in our world every day.

She returns to her lasagna. I tell her that I wanted to ask her a few questions about Mia. I watch as she spreads the noodles and the cheese and meat into a pan, and we talk about a girl of whom photographs magically appear, scattered in more abundance every time I come through the door.

Mia on the first day of school, smiling though half her teeth are gone.

Mia with a goose-egg bump on her head.

Mia with scrawny little legs hanging out of a one-piece bathing suit, floaties on her arms.

Mia preparing for the high school prom.

Two weeks ago one might not have known that Grace Dennett had a younger sister. Now it’s as if she’s the only presence in this home.

Colin
Before

I have the advantage of a watch with the date on it. Without it we’d both be lost.

I don’t do it first thing in the morning. She hasn’t spoken to me in over twenty-four hours. She’s pissed that I pried, but even more pissed that she talked. She doesn’t want me to know a damn thing about her, but I know enough.

I wait until after we’ve eaten breakfast. I wait until after lunch. I let her be mad and sulk. She mopes around the cabin feeling sorry for herself. She pouts. It never crosses her mind that there are a million places I’d rather be than here, but this is her misfortune and hers alone. Or so she thinks.

I’m not one for grand displays. I wait until she’s done cleaning the dishes from lunch. She’s drying her hands on a terry-cloth towel when I more or less drop it on the counter beside her.

“It’s for you.”

She glances at the notebook on the counter. A sketch book. And ten mechanical pencils.

“That’s all the lead there is. Don’t use it all at once.”

“What’s this?” she asks stupidly. She knows what it is.

“Something to pass the time.”

“But—” she begins. She doesn’t finish right away. She takes the notebook into her hands and runs a hand across the front of it. She flips through the blank pages. “But...” she stammers. She doesn’t know what to say. I wish she wouldn’t say anything. We don’t need to say anything. “But...why?”

“It’s Halloween,” I say for lack of a better answer.

“Halloween.” She mutters it under her breath. She knows it’s more than that. It isn’t every day you turn twenty-five. “How did you know?”

I show her my secret, the tiny 31 on a watch I stole from some schmuck.

“How did you know it was my birthday?”

Time spent on the internet before I took her, that’s the honest answer. But I don’t want to tell her that. She doesn’t need to know how I tracked her for days before the abduction, following her to and from work, watching her through her bedroom window. “Research.”

“Research.”

She doesn’t say thanks. Words like that—
please, thank you, I’m sorry
—are signs of peace and we’re not there yet. Maybe we’ll never be. She holds the notebook close to her. I don’t know why I did it. I was sick of watching her stare out the damn window, so I spent five dollars on paper and pencils and it seems to have made her fucking day. They don’t sell sketch pads at the local outfitters, so I had to drive all the way back to Grand Marais, to some bookstore while I kept her tied to the bathroom sink.

Eve
Before

I plan a party for her birthday, just in case. I invite James and Grace and my in-laws: James’s parents, and his brothers with their wives and children. I make a trip to the mall and buy gifts I know she would adore: clothes mostly, those peasant blouses she likes and a cowl-neck sweater, and the big bulky jewelry the girls are wearing these days. Now that Mia has been on the television news, I can barely leave home without everyone wanting to know. In the grocery store, women stare. They whisper behind my back. Strangers are better than friends and neighbors, those who want to
talk
about it. I can’t talk about Mia without being reduced to tears. I hurry through the parking lot to avoid news vans that have begun to stalk us. At the mall, the saleslady looks at my credit card and wonders if
Dennett
is one and the same with the girl on TV. I lie, feign ignorance because I can’t explain without coming unglued.

I wrap the gifts in Happy Birthday paper and stack the boxes with a big red ribbon. I make three pans of lasagna and buy loaves of Italian bread to make garlic bread. I make a salad and pick up a cake from the bakery, with chocolate buttercream icing, Mia’s favorite. I get twenty-five latex balloons from the grocery store and dribble them around the house. I hang an infamous Happy Birthday banner we’ve hung on to since the girls were kids and fill the CD player with relaxing jazz.

No one comes. Grace claims to have a date with the son of some partner, but I don’t believe it. Though she wouldn’t dare admit it, she is on pins and needles these days, knowing that what she swore was only a ploy for attention is likely something more. But Grace being Grace disengages herself from the situation rather than acknowledging it. She puts on a casual display, as if unaffected by Mia’s situation, but I can tell, by the sound of her voice when we speak, when Mia’s name slips from her tongue—and she lingers there, appreciating it—that she is truly afflicted by her sister’s disappearance.

James insists that I can’t plan a party when the guest of honor isn’t here. And so, without my knowledge, he called his parents and Brian and Marty and told them the whole thing was a farce, there was no party. But he didn’t tell me, not until eight o’clock, at least, when he finally strolled in from work and asked, “Why in the hell is there so much lasagna in here?” while staring at the display on the kitchen island.

“The party,” I say naively. Perhaps they’re only late.

“There is no party, Eve,” he says.

He makes himself a nightcap as he always does, but before retreating to his office for the night, he stops suddenly and looks at me. It’s rare that he does, actually look at me. The look on his face is unmistakable: the rueful eyes, the pleats of his skin, the taut mouth. It’s in the sound of his voice, in the secretive, sedate speech.

“Do you remember Mia’s sixth birthday?” he asks and I do. I had sat down earlier today and looked through photographs: all those birthday parties that came and went in the blink of an eye.

But what surprises me is that James remembers.

I nod. “Yes,” I say. “That was the year Mia wanted a dog.” A Tibetan mastiff, to be exact, a loyal guard dog with an abundance of thick, shedding fur that ordinarily weighed well over a hundred pounds. There would be no dog. James made that clear. Not that birthday; not ever. Mia replied with tears and hysterics and James, who typically would have ignored the rant, spent a fortune on a plush Tibetan mastiff, which had to be special ordered from a toy store in New York City.

“I don’t think I’ve ever seen her so happy,” he says, recalling the way little Mia’s arms wrapped around that 36-inch stuffed animal, her hands like a padlock at the other end, and I begin to understand: he’s worried. For the first time, James is worried about our child.

“She still has that dog,” I remind him. “Upstairs. In her room,” I say, and he says that he knows.

“I can still see her,” he admits. “I can still see the
elation
when I came into the room with that dog, tucked behind my back.”

“She loved it,” I say, and with that, he walks to his office and solemnly closes the door.

I forgot altogether to buy Halloween candy for the neighborhood kids. The doorbell rings all night and, stupidly hoping to see my in-laws on the other side, I throw it open every time. Initially I’m the crazy lady passing out change from a piggy bank, but by the end of the night I’m slicing the birthday cake and giving it away. Parents who don’t know give me dirty looks, and those who do examine me with pity.

“Any news?” asks a neighbor, Rosemary Southerland, who trick-or-treats with tiny grandchildren, too small to ring the doorbell alone.

“No news,” I say, with tears in my eyes.

“We’re praying for you,” she offers, helping Winnie the Pooh and Tigger down the front step.

“Thank you” is what I say, but what I’m thinking is
Fat lot of good it’s doing
.