The Missing Place (14 page)

SHAY GRABBED THEIR
cart and headed in the other direction. “So, let's find your boots,” she said loudly.

“He was so skittish,” Colleen said as soon as they were out of
earshot of the other customers. “I can't believe it's really that risky. I mean, just to
talk
to us?”

“Hunter-Cole isn't fucking around. Think of how they've been treating us, right? You said the minute you explained what you wanted, they shut you down.”

“They talked to Andy . . .” Colleen said uncertainly. “I should get the name of the guy. He told Andy that he should call with any questions, that he would serve as a liaison to the company's own investigation.”

“Right.” Shay's tone was grim. “The investigation they only said they were starting
after
you talked to them, right? And your husband told them he's an attorney?”

“Well, yes, but he does intellectual property law, which isn't . . . but how would they even know?”

Shay rolled her eyes. “What you got to realize is, this isn't a company run by a bunch of redneck wildcatters. Sure, the guys on the ground drive trucks and chew tobacco, but you got to believe there's a bunch of guys in suits running the numbers and doing damage control. You know what I found out about Hunter-Cole?”

“No . . .”

“They've had twenty-seven OSHA citations in the last two years, and six fatalities in the last fourteen months. It's all in the public record, but how much of that got in the news? Hardly
any
of it, all because they spend a fortune on legal fees and buying off the victims' families. They're serious about this shit. Okay? And don't think they haven't looked us both up. At this point, if they consider you a threat, you can bet they know everything about you, from your bra size to what brand of toaster waffles you buy. And since they know I'm here, they've got all my dirty laundry too. Now, there's nothing we can do about that.”

“There's nothing interesting to know about me,” Colleen said. She wasn't good with computers, didn't really know what was possible to discover online. “Nothing anyone would care about.”

“Yeah, well, that's our culture now, so you better be sure. I mean, look what kind of shit we know about celebrities' private lives. So it's no wonder this guy Roland is scared. But we just have to hope he calls. Okay. Look at that, just what we need. Temperature-rated to minus forty for twenty-seven bucks, I'd say that'll work. Size?”

Shay had led her to the racks of shoes at the back of the store. On the end of the row was a display of women's rubber-soled snow boots, their black nylon uppers topped by a cuff of fake fur.

Until today, Colleen wouldn't have been caught dead in them. “Eight and a half,” she said.

“Nope. Whole sizes only. So you're a nine.” Shay dug through the stack of boxes, many of them open and torn, until she found the pair she was looking for. “What kind of socks do you have on?”

Colleen unzipped her right boot and slipped it off. “Um, just these wool-blend ones . . .”

“Hang on. I'll be right back.”

Colleen stood, holding on to the cart for balance while she stood on one foot. The floor looked clean, and after a moment she put her shoeless foot on the floor. The smell of synthetic leather was strong.

Nearby, a woman with a little boy was forcing his foot into a boot decorated with some sort of cartoon warrior. The boy was beginning to cry, protesting as his mother tried to wriggle the boot onto his foot. The problem seemed to be that the Velcro straps were stiff and unyielding and didn't leave enough room for his foot to slip into the boot; the harder the mother tried, the more the little boy protested.

Abruptly the woman yanked the boot off and threw it at the shelf, where it knocked a box onto the floor. “All right, all right, all
right
!”
she burst out, shocking her son into silence. A second later, as he began to wail in earnest, she pulled him into her arms and said, “I'm sorry. Goddamn it. I'm sorry.” She stood up with her son in her arms and hurried away, leaving the boots and boxes in disarray on the floor.

Colleen's heart went out to the woman. How well she knew that moment. She had never yelled in public, had never thrown anything. But there had been so many times, when Paul was little, that she yelled at him in private, at home. When she dug her fingers into his arm so hard that her nails left little crescent moon marks. When she wished for a fraction of a second that she'd never had him at all, then suffered for the rest of the day with the guilt.

Long before Paul was ever diagnosed with ADHD and—for want of anything that precisely fit the diagnostic criteria and, she suspected, because she and Andy had spent a hell of a lot of money on a battery of tests and weren't about to walk out the door without a diagnosis—with oppositional defiant disorder. Long before she had accepted that it wasn't just a rough-and-tumble preadolescence that Paul would outgrow, she had privately admitted to herself that she wasn't the mother she'd anticipated being and her son wasn't the child she'd expected. When a couple of years of trying went by without another pregnancy, she and Andy decided—in a brief conversation where she suspected neither admitted the real reasons—that they would be content with just one child. If Andy had suspected what she was really thinking, that she couldn't handle another one like Paul, years of sleepless nights and screaming tantrums that nothing would quiet, he never condemned her for it. Quite possibly he felt the same.

But now. Oh, now. To go back to when he was the age of that little boy—three, maybe four—knowing what she knew now. She'd do everything differently. Because what she had done hadn't worked, had it?—even though she'd tried everything, paid every specialist,
consulted every physician, tried every medication, every special camp, every education expert—had practically bought Paul's way into Syracuse with that shockingly expensive “admissions consultant” who essentially wrote his essay for him.

If she were given the opportunity to start over, Colleen would give away all her breakable things—her crystal and china and art and good furniture and every single knickknack in the house—and pad the walls and put an extra lock on the door, for safety, and then she'd let him run as wild as he needed to and never complain. She'd sit down and learn to play that zombie video game with him, she'd let him play lacrosse despite the potential for injury, she'd throw rocks into the duck pond with him all day long and ignore the posted rules. She'd move to some other community—somewhere like where Shay came from, maybe—where no one expected kids to sit still and take conversational Mandarin and join the debate team and score in the top percentile on standardized tests. She would have let Paul break a few bones and wreck a car and get into fights when he was in elementary school, before years of chafing at the restraints imposed by his overprotective parents made him do something so much worse.

“You okay?” Shay was standing in front of her, waving a hand in front of her eyes. “You zone out or something?”

“Sorry.” Colleen forced a smile and turned her mind away, something she had taught herself to do when the churning of her thoughts proved too much to bear.

Shay held up a pair of socks, thick gray with a stripe of pink. “Here. Try these.”

“You mean, open them right now? Before we pay for them?”

“Yeah, who's going to care?” Shay yanked off the cardboard band, tossing it into the cart.

Colleen put on the socks and boots. They were stiff, a little low
on the instep, but otherwise fine. Already she could feel her feet warming up.

“Might as well put the other one on and wear them out of the store,” Shay said. “Parking lot's only going to have got worse.”

Colleen hesitated only for a moment. She rolled her old socks and tucked them in her leather boots and put them in the box. Her pants broke awkwardly over the top of the new boots, so she tucked the cuffs into them. She was certain she looked absurd.

With Shay's help she picked a pair of heavily padded nylon gloves in a shade of deep pink, and a matching synthetic scarf and knit hat that were surprisingly soft. In the checkout line, Shay tossed in a couple of tabloid magazines, gum, and mints. Colleen maneuvered herself in front of the cart and, handing over her credit card, pushed away Shay's fistful of bills. “It's all my stuff,” she protested.

“Not the magazines and the—” Her phone went off and Shay pulled it out of her pocket, stepping out of the line. “Hello? Yes. Thanks so much for . . . okay . . . no, but I can remember . . . yeah, that's fine. And thanks, really.”

“Ma'am?” The checker was trying to get Colleen's attention. The belt was rolling, the customer in front of her pushing his cart toward the exit, and Colleen had failed to notice.

“I'm sorry.” She piled her purchases on the belt, explaining about the boots and socks; the checker accepted the box and wrapper without comment.

“Roland gave me an address,” Shay said. “Here, I'm texting you so I don't forget. He said he'd be there at nine. So that gives us almost an hour. Let's head next door.”

“Next door where?” Colleen said, signing the credit card slip.

“You didn't see when we came in? Liquor department has a separate entrance.”

Colleen hadn't noticed, and she didn't really want to brave another gauntlet of lonely, horny men with their appraising eyes. But maybe it wouldn't be as bad in the liquor section: perhaps the men would feel chastened by the nature of their purchases, like kids caught reading comic books in Sunday school, and they'd keep their comments and gazes to themselves.

The Walmart liquor department was easily as large as the Tip-Top Liquor store back home in Sudbury, but in place of the wood-crate and plastic grapevine décor at the Tip-Top, the hand-lettered “staff picks” cards with the
Wine Spectator
ratings, there were shelves stacked with enormous bottles of spirits and cases of beer. More beer in the refrigerators lining the wall; the wine was limited to a paltry selection of cheap California labels.

Shay picked up a twelve-pack of Coors Light. “What about you?” she asked. “You want anything?”

Colleen debated for a moment. “I'll get a bottle of wine.”

She made her way over to the refrigerator and scanned the bottles. The only labels she recognized were the cheap table wines, the Glen Ellen chardonnay and Beringer chenin blanc.

“What a nice change of pace,” a man next to her said. “A woman with a little class. Don't see enough of that around here.”

Colleen was about to turn her back and leave without picking a bottle when she noticed that the man was nothing like the others she'd seen in the store: for one thing, he was freshly shaved, with a conservative haircut. For another, he was wearing a suit and a cashmere overcoat, the effect only mildly spoiled by lug-soled boots.

“Sorry,” the man immediately amended. “Forgive me. You spend a few days here and you completely lose track of your manners. Jesus. I feel like a jerk. You just don't look like . . . well, like Lawton material.”

“It's no problem,” Colleen murmured, and stepped politely aside to give him access to the case. She was about to head back to the front of the store when a thought occurred to her.

The suit. Clearly not from here. Who wore suits in Lawton? Executives, that's who. Oil company executives. And safety compliance inspectors. And lawyers.

A riffle of revulsion mixed with fury kept her rooted to the spot. And then . . . an idea so bold and so unlike her that she threw herself into it before she could hesitate.

She curved her lips into a smile and turned back toward the man. “Allen . . . right?”

Confusion passed over his face. “No, I'm Scott. Scott Cohen, White Norris?”

“Oh, I'm so sorry!” Colleen laughed as though embarrassed. “I thought—but no. I see it now. Not much resemblance at all. It's been a long day. I'm Vicki. Vicki Wilson, Slocum Systems.”

Immediately she regretted using her best friend's name; she felt like she was dragging Vicki into something sordid. But it was the only thing that came to mind. Colleen really had worked for Slocum Systems once, during a college internship. She offered her hand; Scott had a nice handshake, firm but not crushing.

“Nice to meet you. Even under questionable circumstances.” He smiled, circling a finger in the air to take in the Muzak, the heat blasting from ceiling vents, the depressing lighting and industrial shelving.

“Oh, I know. I wouldn't dream of coming here, but the hotel where I'm staying doesn't carry anything decent.”

Scott laughed. “What a coincidence. I'm at the Hyatt—best hotel in town, and the nicest thing on the shelves in their bar is a bottle of Cutty Sark. Stuck here another few days. And there's only so much bad pinot a man can stand—you know?”