The Missing Place (23 page)

HAVE YOU SEEN US?
the sign read, in large, stark lettering. Below,
Andy's phone number was prominently displayed, along with the number for the Lawton Police Department.
Missing since January 15
, it read in italics at the bottom.

Shay had managed to pull into a handicapped spot at the end of the block. Colleen didn't hurry on her way back to the car. She wasn't in a rush to share the poster, but when she got in the Explorer, Shay leaned across and took it from her hands. She stared at it, frowning, for a long time.

Then she set it gently on the dash. Neither woman said anything. Around them, a few pedestrians shuffled, heads down against the wind and drifting snow, taking care not to fall. Lawton didn't have the sort of downtown that invited casual shopping and dining, unlike, say, the affluent enclaves of Waban or Newton, in which Sur La Tables and Anthropologies rubbed elbows with yarn stores and artisanal cheese shops, and the movie theaters had been restored to show art films. In Lawton, there were two blocks—plus a few side-street enterprises clinging to the center commerce like barnacles on a sinking ship—of no-nonsense restaurants and clothing stores, dotted with shuttered and empty businesses.

“Your husband did a good job,” Shay finally said. She cleared her throat. “Paul is a nice-looking kid.”

“Vicki made it. All Andy did was—”
Pay for it
, she was going to say, but of course that wasn't true. Andy did what he knew how to do, marshaling all the resources in his reach, dispatching and delegating for the greatest possible efficiency. Because that's all it was with Vicki, wasn't it? An efficient use of resources.

Her phone buzzed with a text.
Drink sounds great, will try to get away ASAP. Stuck in meeting! Yrs, Scott

“I guess that's our cue,” Colleen said shakily, but Shay was already pulling away from the curb.

They saw half a dozen more of the posters on the way to the restaurant. Most unsettling, there were six of them framing the double wood doors of the place, affixed with what looked like packing tape. Someone had made little yellow bows out of cheap ribbon and taped them on each of the posters.

“Look at that,” Shay said. She reached for the poster, touching her son's image gently with her fingertips before going inside. It reminded Colleen of her mother dipping her fingers into holy water, all the Sunday mornings of her childhood, until the church renovated and removed the old marble fonts.

She waited until Shay went inside, holding back until the door had almost shut behind her. Then she traced a cross on Paul's forehead with her thumb and made a quick, covert sign of the cross on her own forehead, chest, and shoulders, something she had sworn she would never do again after declaring herself agnostic at the age of nineteen. “God,” she whispered. Behind her there was a conversation going on in the parking lot, two men trying to settle some sort of bet. The snow landed on her bare neck, since she hadn't bothered to pull her hood up. Inside was her next best hope, and it didn't seem like much at all. “God,” she whispered again. “I need you. For real this time.”

Then she went inside.

Shay was hanging her coat on a long row of hooks along the entry wall. Colleen did the same, and then they approached the hostess.

“Good evening,” the girl said. She had the look that Colleen was beginning to identify with Lawton girls: young and far more fresh-scrubbed than their East Coast counterparts, favoring pastels and a lot of hair spray. “Will you be dining with us tonight?”

“No, we're just going to the bar,” Shay said.

“I thought you said you were hungry—”

“Bar's fine, come on, Colleen.” She grabbed Colleen's arm and pulled her toward the bar area, which looked to Colleen like a TGI Fridays with a slightly different theme—hard hats and old, rusted pieces of metal equipment shared wall space with antlers and ball caps and license plates. Every seat at the bar was taken, and as more men arrived, the bar tables were beginning to fill up too. Shay grabbed one of the last tables and sat down, and picked up the table tent advertising a variety of fried appetizers and cocktails.

“Listen, Shay. If Scott comes, I was thinking . . . I told him I was with work people.”

“Uh-huh. Oh.” Shay glanced at Colleen and then away, her jaw set. The waiter picked that moment to come over, and she muttered without looking at him, “Bourbon and soda, lots of ice.”

Colleen ordered a glass of wine and waited until he left.

“Are you hungry?” she asked. “You said you were, earlier . . . do you want to order something? Maybe calamari?”

“Let me just make sure I understand,” Shay said tersely. “To be sure. You're worried I don't look like we could work together. In, in a job where you . . . fly places.”

“It's just, you know.” Colleen didn't know what to say. She rested her hand near her neckline. She was wearing a ribbon-trimmed crew sweater over a white pinpoint cotton shirt. Not business wear, by any stretch, but certainly more formal than anything anyone else was wearing in the bar.

Shay, on the other hand, was wearing a V-neck cotton top with a woven-lace inset. Colleen could see her bra through the lace. Her earrings dangled amethyst drops almost to her shoulders, and her wild pale hair was escaping its clip, which was the only way Colleen had seen it so far, which made her wonder if the effect was deliberate.
Shay's eyeliner was smudged, and had been since she got slugged at the rig. Remarkably, she'd escaped a shiner or any evidence that she'd been hit. She looked amazing for a fortyish woman, it was true, but also like she worked behind a bar herself.

“Look. You can say I'm your secretary. Or assistant, or whatever you want to call it. And when he comes, I'll make my excuses and go. I'll say you gave me a ton of work to finish by tomorrow.”

“I really feel uncomfortable—”

“What, lying?” Shay's eyes flashed angrily. “Why, because you're
really
a corporate executive? Come on, none of that matters anyway. We're doing this for the
boys.
”

The waiter returned with their drinks. Colleen felt her face burning with embarrassment. “We'll take the calamari,” she said. “And bruschetta and . . . and I guess that's it for now.”

“Yes, ma'am. The boys over there picked up your drinks.”

Startled, Colleen looked where he was pointing; at the end of the bar, a pair of middle-aged men in work clothes raised their beers in a toast. Shay gave them a little wave. She probably had drinks sent to her all the time, Colleen thought, staring into her glass.

“It's okay, you can drink it,” Shay said after the waiter walked away and she had taken a sip of her own drink. “You don't owe them anything.”

“I know that.” Colleen picked up her glass and sipped. The wine, in theory a chardonnay, tasted thin and moldy. “I
know
that,” she repeated, setting it down.

“I'm just saying, you need to loosen up if you're going to be convincing.”

Neither of them said anything. Someone turned the lights down a few notches and turned up the music. At least with the pounding
bass, it felt less awkward not to talk; conversation would have been difficult.

More men had poured into the bar, and now there wasn't an empty seat in the place. So Shay really wouldn't have any option besides leaving. Of course, then Colleen would have to find her own ride home. Or call Shay to come pick her up.

Or accept a ride from Scott.

She was getting ahead of herself. The prospect of speaking to him made her nervous, and when a second round of drinks came—unordered, and this time when the bartender pointed to their benefactors, Colleen didn't even bother to look—she drank quickly.

“I have to make some notes,” she announced abruptly. But when she looked up, Shay wasn't there. Maybe she'd gone to the ladies' room.

Colleen dug in her purse for her little notebook. The folded sheet of Paul's texts fell out and she felt unmoored, discovered. She pressed it fleetingly to her cheek, thinking,
I love you, baby, I'm doing this for you
, and then slipped the pages into one of the zippered compartments inside her purse.

Then she wrote, pausing after each line to think.

Leases—Indian, which companies?

Legislation/lawsuits? Pending? Dropped?

Bribery?

Police involvement, FBI?

Injuries, which company worst record

Fatalities, same

Colleen looked down at what she'd written. “
Oh
,” she breathed, the word staring back at her.
Fatality.
Death. An accident, a moment of inattention, a small neglect that snowballed into a major error—
and some boy or man didn't go back to his family. His wife. His kids. His
mother.
She groped at the table for her glass, unable to tear her eyes away from the words she had written. To her surprise the glass was full again. She must have been so intent on her list that the waiter didn't even bother to announce himself this time. A fresh bourbon and soda sat across the table, but Shay hadn't returned.

“Excuse me,” a man's voice said. Colleen steeled herself for Scott, pasting a fake smile on her face, before she turned. But it wasn't Scott. It was a man with a beard, a biker beard, his ponytail silver and a wide web of wrinkles around his eyes.

“I'm meeting someone,” she said quickly, letting the smile drop.

“Well, ain't that a shame, but it's no surprise, a beautiful lady like you,” he said, bowing before he turned and walked away.

When he was gone, Colleen checked her phone: nine fourteen. No text. She'd been stood up. She slid her stool back from the table. Apparently, all their drinks had been bought for them, but just in case, she peeled off a couple of twenties and left them in the middle of the table.

The bar crowd now spilled over into the restaurant. The music had switched to country, and a drunk-looking couple shuffled in a circle in the corner. There were three bartenders working behind the bar now, and they were having a hard time keeping up, judging from the way they rushed back and forth between the bottles and taps and the customers. The air smelled of smoke, even though Colleen didn't see anyone smoking. She was suddenly desperate to get outside, to get away from here.

But she didn't see Shay anywhere. The few women present—half a dozen, maybe ten—were all younger, girls with their hair in ponytails, at least half of them wearing the same sort of work clothes as the men. Colleen decided to check the bathroom, but as she passed
the couple dancing in the corner, the woman moved under one of the light fixtures and Colleen saw the bright, pale hair.

It was Shay. She'd taken off her top and now she wore only a camisole. She had her arms draped over the shoulders of a man a good ten years younger than she was. He was trying to tell her something, it looked like he was yelling right into her ear, but she moved lazily with her eyes closed and a half smile on her face.

Colleen shoved her way through the crowd, not caring who she ran into. She grabbed Shay's arm and pulled her away from the man.

“Hey!” he said, looking more startled than angry.

“Oh, hi,” Shay said, her smile crumpling. “Scott ever show? Is he here now?”

“
No
, he never came.” Colleen realized she had yelled it. Too late, it occurred to her that she didn't know why she was angry, exactly. “I want to go.”

Shay raised her eyebrows and put a hand on her friend's shoulder. “This is McCall. That's his first name. That's kind of cool, isn't it? What did you say your last name is?”

“Whittaker.” He was looking at Colleen like a boy who's dropped his ice cream cone down the storm drain. He and Shay both had that look, in fact, of having something taken away from them.

“Yeah, that's right. McCall Whittaker. He's from South Bend, Indiana.”

“I don't— I don't
care
where he's from.” The wine had rushed to Colleen's head all of a sudden, and she felt overheated and dizzy. “I'm sorry. I didn't mean it like that. But Shay . . . we have that, ah, meeting tomorrow, that I asked you to prepare for . . .”

“She's my boss,” Shay said. “She's right. I have a shit ton to do before tomorrow. But it was nice to meet you.”

Colleen turned and started wading back toward the entrance,
which was all the way at the other end. There were no men in suits here. She wondered if Scott had ever intended to meet her at all, if he was just toying with her. If, somehow, he had divined her true purpose, read the madness on her face that was the sole domain of the desperate mother.

She kept going until she was standing outside. Her breath made clouds in the air. The parking lot was nearly full. What day of the week was it? Colleen had to think for a moment before determining it was still Sunday. But it almost didn't matter. These men, here on twenty-day hitches, she bet they lost track of the days too, since they had no days off, no weekends. Instead of counting Monday through Thursday, they probably had a week that began day one and ended when they got on the plane. A twenty-day week, so that maybe day seventeen was like Thursday night, when freedom is so close you can almost taste it.

Shay was taking her time. Colleen stamped her feet on the ground and waited, trying to control her impatience. She was doing everything she could think of, and it wasn't enough.

COLLEEN DIDN'T STOP
to think about about how much Shay had had to drink until she destroyed Brenda's front yard.

When they got back to the motor home, there was a new padlock on the door, and half a dozen white plastic garbage bags were stacked on top of their suitcases in a pile on the driveway. Snow had drifted onto the bags, giving them an eerie, sculptural effect. A piece of paper had been taped to the door above the padlock. The lettering had run a little. It read
FOUND YOUR
POT
I WILL NOT HAVE
DRUGGIES
IN MY HOME YOU ARE
EVICTED.