Cemetery Girl

Chapter One

Somehow, the dog knew he wasn’t coming back.

I picked up Frosty’s leash and jiggled it while walking to the door, but he didn’t follow. Ordinarily, that sound made him jump and run, his nails clacking against our hardwood floors, but this time he slinked away, head down, eyes averted. I called his name, but he ignored me. So I went to him.

Frosty was a big dog, a yellow Lab, gentle and friendly and smart enough to recognize something unusual in my voice, something that told him this wasn’t going to be a normal walk.

I made a grab for his collar. Frosty tucked his head down against his shoulder so I couldn’t attach the leash. Up close, I smelled the rich scent of his fur, felt his hot breath against my hand.

“Frosty, no.”

My frustration grew, and I gritted my teeth, felt the molars grind against one another in the back of my mouth. Frosty ducked even more. Without thinking, I brought my free hand up and gave him a little swat on the snout. He surprised me by yelping, and I immediately felt like a jerk, an indefensible son of a bitch. I’d never hit him before, not even during training.

He cowered even more, but when I reached out again, he lifted his head, allowing me to attach the leash to his collar.

I straightened up, took a deep breath. I felt utterly ineffectual.

“What’s going on?”

I turned. Abby stood in the kitchen doorway. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and her eyes were wide as she considered me. Even though it was Saturday, she wore a black skirt and striped blouse. Her feet were bare. She used to dress down on weekends, but now she dressed the same every day, as though she were about to rush off to church because she probably was.

“Nothing,” I said.

“I thought I heard the dog squeal.”

“He did. I hit him.”

Her eyes narrowed.

“I’m getting rid of him,” I said. “Taking him to the pound.”

“Oh,” she said. She raised her hand and placed it against her chest.

“Isn’t that what you want? You’ve been after me to do it for almost a year.”

“Yes, I do want that,” she said. “I thought you didn’t.”

Frosty sat at my feet, head down. Defeated. The refrigerator cycled, made a low humming noise and then shut off. I shrugged.

“You keep saying we have to move on with our lives. Right? Turn the page?”

She nodded, a little uncertain. Over the past couple of years, Abby’s face had rarely shown uncertainty. Her involvement with the church made her seem certain all the time, as though nothing were ever in doubt. Except for me. I knew she harbored doubts about me. As a last resort, I was sacrificing the dog. A show of good faith on my part. But I didn’t think she’d let me go through with it. I thought once she saw Frosty on his leash, ready to be led out the door and to the pound, she’d stop me.

Tears stood in her eyes, and she took a deep breath.

“I think we do need to do that, Tom.” She sighed. “With the memorial service coming up, I think we can move on.” She sighed again, and it sounded more like a hiccup, almost a cry. “I used to love Frosty, but every time I look at him now, I think of Caitlin. And I can’t. I don’t want to do it anymore.”

“You’re sure, Abby? Really? He’s such a good dog.”

She shook her head, tapped her foot against the floor. “I’m sure, Tom.”

“Fine.” I tugged the leash, harder than I needed to, and Frosty jerked to his feet. His paws clattered against the floor, slow and methodical. Dead dog walking. “Will you be here when I get back?”

“I have a meeting at church.”

I nodded, my hand on the doorknob of the back door.

“It’s funny,” I said.

“What is, Tom? What’s funny?”

“You say you can’t stand to see Frosty because he reminds you of Caitlin. I love having Frosty around for the same reason.”

“Tom. Don’t.”

“I won’t.” I opened the door and stepped outside, leading the only known witness to my daughter’s abduction to his demise.

I didn’t go straight to the pound. My guilt got the better of me—guilt over Frosty’s impending doom, guilt over the slap on the nose, guilt over who knows how many things—so I drove a short distance and stopped at the park. When I pulled into the lot, Frosty perked up. His ears rose, his tail thumped against the backseat, and he started panting, filling the enclosed car with his musky dog breath. I found a spot in the shade and climbed out, then opened the back door for Frosty. He jumped down, nose to the ground, sniffing every square inch he came across, stopping only to pee against a small tree. I took that opportunity to attach the leash again and let Frosty lead me through the park.

Since it was a Saturday and late summer, the park was full of activity. At the baseball diamond near the road, a boys team practiced, their aluminum bats pinging with every contact. Joggers and speed walkers traced the running track, and I followed along in their wakes, letting Frosty pull me off to the side every ten feet while he inspected a fallen branch or a curious scent. I tried to tell myself I was there for the dog, that he deserved to spend his final moments on this earth doing the things he loved the most: romping through the park, chasing butterflies, or charging after squirrels. But it was a lie. Caitlin had disappeared from that park four years ago, while walking Frosty, and I found myself returning there, alone, again and again.

The park occupied nearly two hundred acres just two blocks from our house. To the east and south, new subdivisions with streets named after variations on deer-Running Fawn, Leaping Hart-dotted the landscape. The bricks of the houses were new and gleaming, the streets smooth and unstained. As we walked, Frosty continued to huff at the end of his leash, his tail bobbing like a metronome. Forgiveness came quickly to him. My earlier transgression was apparently forgotten, and I didn’t have time to think about it anyway. I knew that Frosty was leading me toward the edge of the park where it bordered Oak Ridge, the oldest operational cemetery inside the town’s limits and the site of Caitlin’s upcoming memorial service and “burial,” which was scheduled for later in the week.

The neat rows of headstones and cleanly cropped grass came into view. I must have slowed, because Frosty turned his head back to look at me, one eyebrow cocked. I hadn’t been to the park or the cemetery in the weeks since Abby decided to hold the memorial service and place a headstone in Caitlin’s honor. She had been receiving “counseling” from the pastor of her church—Pastor Chris—and he apparently felt that four years was enough time to grieve for a lost child. He’d managed to convince Abby it was time to move on.

I used to take some measure of comfort from cemeteries, even after Caitlin disappeared. They assured me that even death could be beautiful, that even after we are gone, some memory, some monument to our lives could still exist and endure.

My cell phone buzzed in my pocket.

I jumped a little when the vibration started. Frosty turned his head around, his tongue hanging out of his mouth.

I dug the phone out of my pocket, expecting it to be Abby checking in. I might have ignored it if it had been her, but the caller ID told a different story. It was my brother. Actually, my half brother, Buster. His given name is William, but he acquired his nickname as a child when he managed to break everything he touched.

I answered just before voice mail kicked in.

“What’s up, boss?” he asked.

His voice possessed its usual hail-fellow-well-met cheer. Talking to him on the phone was like conversing with a particularly convincing telemarketer, one who could almost make you believe your ship had come in and you’d be a fool to pass up the current offer. Buster maintained this tone even though we hadn’t spoken to each other in close to six months. He’d moved an hour away the year before, and our communication, which had always been sporadic, slowed to a drip. We shared a mother-dead five years earlier-but had different fathers. My dad died when I was four. My mom remarried and had Buster.

I told him I was walking the dog.

“Good, good.” He cleared his throat. I heard someone talk in the background on his end of the line. It sounded like a woman. “I wanted to tell you I’m coming to town this week.”

“What for?”

“For the funeral,” he said. “Or whatever the hell it is that Abby’s doing. I know you didn’t invite me, and you might not even want me to come, but Abby called. She said she wanted all of the family there, and since you don’t have much-I mean, I’m pretty much it these days. Right?”

“It’s not that I didn’t want you to come,” I said. Frosty and I stood alongside the cemetery and I could see the area where Caitlin’s marker would go up in a few days. “I just thought you wouldn’t want to come because-”

“Because it’s so fucked-up.”

I hesitated. “Yeah, because of that.”

“What’s she going to do, bury an empty coffin? How do you have a funeral for someone who might not be dead?”

“We didn’t buy a coffin.”

“But you bought a plot and a headstone?”

Frosty tugged on the leash, indicating he wanted to move on.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Jesus. Is this because of that wackadoodle church she belongs to? What’s it called?”

I regretted ever answering the phone. “Christ’s Community Church.”

“That’s original,” he said. “Aren’t they all Christ’s churches? Remember when people belonged to actual churches? You know, Baptists, Methodists, Presbyterians. I hate hearing about these anything-goes religions, you know? Just put up a warehouse and a coffee bar and let them come in and feel good about themselves.”

“I didn’t know you were so easily offended.”

“Stupidity pisses me off. That herd mentality. How much is it costing you to buy this cenotaph and plot? A couple thousand bucks?”

Frosty pulled against the leash again, and I tugged back, trying to keep him still.

“Buy what?” I asked.

“A cenotaph. That’s what they call it when you put up a marker and there’s no body under it. A cenotaph. You’re not the only one who knows the big words, professor.”

“Look, I have to go. The dog’s done his business.”

“I’ll call you when I get to town. Okay?”

“Sure. But don’t feel obligated-”

“I do feel obligated,” he said. His voice dripped with sincerity, and I wanted to believe him. I really did. “For you, anything. Just let me know. I’ll be by your side.”

Frosty and I faced the choice of going around the track again, something we almost never did, or getting in the car and completing my mission. Frosty pulled a little in the direction of the car, but I pulled harder, and we entered the cemetery together.

I knew they didn’t want pets in there, digging up flowers and shitting and pissing on the graves. But Frosty’s tank was pretty well emptied, and I preferred to face the prospect of an accident in the cemetery over delivering him to the pound.

We walked down the road that cut through the center of the cemetery, then turned right and headed toward the back. I recognized the names on the larger headstones, the same names that adorned the buildings and parks throughout town. Potter. Hard-castle. Greenwood. Cooper. They didn’t skimp on death, these founding families and innovative educators, these city councilmen and spiritual leaders. Not only did they have elaborate headstones, beautifully engraved and clean as the day they were cut, but they paid for life-sized guardians to watch over the graves. Vigilant Virgin Marys and winged angels, Christ with his eyes cast to heaven as though begging for intercession. While the stone we’d picked out for Caitlin didn’t approach those lofty heights, it wasn’t cheap either. Buster was right-we’d spent too much money.

I read the signs posted at knee level and found section B; then I worked my way up until I came to the number. Despite the presence of the sleeping and buried dead, it was a beautiful day. The temperature climbed toward eighty, and only a few high, puffy clouds disrupted the blue of the sky. In the distance, somewhere, a lawn mower engine churned, but I couldn’t see where it was, and when I looked around the cemetery, I found myself alone. The walkers and joggers kept up their work in the park, so I just listened to Frosty’s panting breath and rattling collar.

“It’s just a little detour, boy.”

Most of the cemetery was full, the stones nestled close together so that it didn’t appear there was any room left for new burials. I kept my eyes peeled for a small open place, a last remaining plot that we purchased only to-hopefully-never fill. My eyes wandered over husbands buried with their wives, the headstones a monument to eternal love and union. I saw children buried near their parents. Veterans of wars, their stones decorated with small, fluttering flags. And then I thought I saw Caitlin’s name.

It was a brief glimpse, something caught out of the corner of my eye, and I just as quickly dismissed it, assuming that my eyes and mind, in their haste to find a closer connection to my daughter, simply imagined her name. But as I came closer, I saw it again, chiseled into a large rectangular headstone. It was really there. CAITLIN ANN STUART. DAUGHTER. FRIEND. ANGEL. 1992–2004.

The stone didn’t belong there.

Abby had told me it wouldn’t be placed until days after the service, that when we stood at the grave on Wednesday for the memorial, we’d just be facing a small area of green grass. No earth would be churned, no stone in place. And I took comfort in that scenario because it seemed less permanent somehow, less final than what Abby had intended. I convinced myself that the ceremony would bear no real relation to my daughter, that we were there remembering some other kid or maybe even some person I never knew. A stranger, the faceless, nameless victim of a distant tragedy.

I stared at the slab. Frosty walked away, pulling the leash taut, and sniffed at a nearby stone while a chorus of cicadas rose and fell in the trees above, their chittering eventually winding down like a worn-out clock. I often tried to imagine what had happened to Caitlin. Try as I might, a coherent, sensible narrative concerning the events that had taken place just yards from where I stood in the cemetery never formed in my mind. But I did hear the sound track in my head. Often.

I lay in my bed at night, the lights from passing cars dancing on the ceiling and walls, and I heard Caitlin’s screams, the sound of her voice rising in terror and growing hoarse. Did she cry? Was her face soaked with tears and snot? Did she suffer? How long did she call for me?

I pounded the mattress in frustration, buried my face in the pillows until it felt like my head would explode.

I knew the statistics. After forty-eight hours, the odds of a child being found alive were next to none. But I managed to ignore the numbers and pretend they didn’t apply to me. Not then. Not ever. I still stopped at the front door every night, flipped on the porch light, and made sure the spare key-the one Caitlin occasionally used to let herself in after school-lay under the same flowerpot, right where she could find it.

But it was difficult to argue with a headstone.

Frosty came back and nudged at my calf with his snout. I could tell he was growing impatient and wanted to move on. He didn’t like to stand still when there were sticks to fetch and trees to mark. I shooed him away, lost in my own thoughts. I resented Abby for the ease with which she chose to move on, to accept that our lives would go forward without any hope of seeing our daughter again. I’d crusaded on behalf of my daughter’s memory, and for what? To find out that life progressed without me as well as Caitlin?

“Frosty. Come here.”

He wandered back, happy, tail wagging. I crouched in the grass and placed my hands on either side of his head. He opened his eyes wide but didn’t resist, perhaps remembering the swat he’d received earlier. I felt his hot, stinking breath in my face, saw the stains on his long teeth. I asked the dog a question I had asked him several times before, ever since that day he came home from the park trailing his leash with Caitlin nowhere in sight.

“Frosty? What did you see that day? What happened?”

He stared back at me, his panting increasing. He didn’t like the way I was holding him, and he squirmed.

“What did you see?”

He started to slip away, so I pulled him back. He shook his head as though trying to knock the feeling of my hands off his body. I stood up.

“Fuck you,” I said. “Fuck you for not being able to talk.”

I looked at the headstone once more, letting the image of my daughter’s name and possible-likely-date of death burn into my brain, before giving the leash another tug.

“Come on, Frosty,” I said. “We’ve got someplace to go.”

Chapter Two

Buster came to the memorial service late.

I’d assumed he wasn’t coming at all. He liked to promise to do something-come hell or high water-and then not follow through. His appearance surprised me, but not his tardiness.

As I stood in the back of the church, feeling constrained by my coat and tie, a whirl of emotions stewed within me. Every person who passed by, every hand I shook or hug I received, brought me closer to tears and bitterness. I associated a memory, a fleeting glimpse of Caitlin, in so many of the faces I saw. A girl who’d gone to school with Caitlin, for example, looked grown-up and every one of her sixteen years. Did Caitlin reach that age somewhere in the world away from us? Did she ever become a young woman? When I saw a former neighbor, an elderly woman who used to babysit for us when Caitlin was a child, I wondered: Why was she allowed to live, approaching eighty, while Caitlin might be dead?

My throat felt full of cotton, and I choked back against the crying and the anger until my jaw ached. I did this not because I didn’t feel the tears or anger were heartfelt, but because I feared that giving in to them would validate the entire ceremony, making real what I still refused to accept.

By the time Buster came in-late and apologizing-my feelings toward him shifted a little, and I welcomed the distraction his appearance provided. Most everyone else was seated, and all that remained was for us-the funeral party-to walk down the aisle.

“I’m sorry,” Buster said. “My car. And then the traffic. .”

To his credit, he wore a suit. It looked like he’d borrowed it from a midget, but still, it was a suit. The pant legs rode up above the tops of his shoes, revealing white socks, and I doubt he could have buttoned the jacket. He wore a pair of cheap sunglasses that hung loose on his face and kept sliding down the bridge of his nose. He pushed them up with the knuckle of his right index finger every few seconds.

No one said anything for a long moment. We-Abby, Buster, Pastor Chris, and I-stood in an awkward little circle, waiting for someone to speak.

Finally, Pastor Chris smiled and said, “We’re glad you’re here.”

Abby remembered her manners before I did. “This is Tom’s stepbrother-”

“Half brother,” Buster said.

“Half brother, William,” Abby said.

Buster shook hands with Pastor Chris, then leaned in and gave Abby an awkward peck on the cheek. She averted her eyes like a child receiving an inoculation. She’d never liked Buster, which is why I was so surprised that she’d gone to the trouble of inviting him. She’d meant it as a gesture of goodwill, something she was willing to sacrifice for me, I’m sure. So I clung to whatever faint hope remained for us-between Frosty’s departure and the memorial service, she and I might be able to dig our way back toward common ground. I never imagined Caitlin’s homecoming without imagining the three of us reuniting as a family. I couldn’t think of it any other way, even though I knew there had been cracks in our marriage even before Caitlin disappeared.

“Quite a church,” Buster said.

And it was. A former warehouse purchased by Christ’s Church eight years earlier and converted. It sat two thousand people and included a workout center and coffee bar in the back. Plans were in the works to buy a large video projection system so that Pastor Chris could be seen up close and personal by everyone. More than once, Abby mentioned donating money toward that cause.

“We should begin,” Pastor Chris said, looking at his watch and then the settling crowd. “Is that okay with all of you?”

Abby nodded silently, and so did I. She reached out and took my hand. The gesture surprised me. Her hand felt unfamiliar in mine, the hand of a stranger, but the good kind of strangeness that comes when two people have just met and are beginning to get to know each other. My heart sped up a little; I squeezed her hand in mine and she squeezed back. Like two scared children, we followed Pastor Chris down the aisle to the front of the church with Buster trailing behind.

Pastor Chris was like a celebrity on the altar. His straight white teeth gleamed, and despite his slightly thinning, slightly graying hair, he still looked youthful and vibrant. At forty-five, a couple of years older than Abby and me, he ran obsessively, even competed in the occasional marathon, and his body was trim and sleek under his perfectly fitted suit. He believed that God rewarded those who maintained their bodies and that exercise kept the spirit sharp, so it was no surprise that the addition of the workout facility to the church complex had been his idea.

Buster and I grew up Catholic, trundled off to Mass every Sunday morning by my overbearing stepfather, who believed that to miss one Sunday was a sin of the worst kind. While I no longer practiced or believed much of anything, I found it difficult to attend a new church, especially one that seemed so different from the religion I knew. Christ’s Community Church felt too touchy-feely, too positive for me. Pastor Chris offered nothing but encouragement to his congregation, as well as the sense that heaven could be attained through the application of a series of steps found in a self-help book. I expected my spiritual leaders to be removed and slightly dogmatic, wrapped in their colorful vestments and staring down at me, and I didn’t respond well when one of them wanted to be my friend. I also couldn’t fully understand the nature of Abby’s relationship with Pastor Chris. I understood the spiritual side of it-Abby was looking for guidance and community and found it in the church. But in recent months she’d grown even closer to Pastor Chris, going out to lunch with him on weekdays and referring to him as her “best friend.” Never in the eighteen years of our marriage had I suspected Abby of infidelity, but the “friendship” with Pastor Chris-as well as the perilous state of our own marriage-made me wonder.

Abby and I continued to hold hands through the beginning of the service as Pastor Chris led the congregation through a series of prayers and readings from scripture, including the one in which Jesus raises Lazarus from the dead. Buster sat to my right, holding his sunglasses in his left hand and bouncing them against his thigh. He seemed older. The crow’s-feet at the corners of his eyes looked more permanent, the gray in his hair more visible. But he appeared to be paying attention, his eyes focused on the altar, and my initial instinct turned out to be wrong: I was glad to have him there. My brother. My closest blood relation.

Pastor Chris started his sermon-which I still thought of as a homily-by thanking all the friends and community members in attendance. But they were Abby’s friends and people from the church. Her family was a small one. Her father had died when Caitlin was little, and her mother had retired to Florida. She and Abby had not been close over the years, and while Abby had extended an invitation to the service, her mother had apparently chosen not to come. For my part, I didn’t invite any of my colleagues from the university to attend. It was a sabbatical year for me, one I’d reluctantly decided to take in an effort to complete another book, and I knew my colleagues would not mix well with the evangelical crowd.

Pastor Chris continued, his voice a little high and reedy, almost like an adolescent’s on the brink of changing. “While we’re here as the result of a tragedy, the loss of a young life, we are also here to support one another as well as to take comfort from Christ’s eternal pledge to us. And what is that pledge? The pledge is that those who die having been redeemed by Christ’s eternal love shall not die, but rather have eternal life in Christ’s glory.”

Voices through the church muttered, “Amen,” including Abby’s. I studied her face in profile. Somewhere in there, I told myself, a vestige of the person I fell in love with nearly twenty years ago still remained. It must. But it was increasingly difficult for me to find it, to see her, and as I watched her mutter, “Amens,” under her breath and stare at Pastor Chris like he himself incarnated the Second Coming, I wondered if what I knew of her, or thought I knew of her, was gone forever, just like Caitlin.

“I was blessed to speak with Tom and Abby last night.” At the sound of my name, I turned back to Pastor Chris. It took me a moment to process his words. He said he’d spoken to us-to me the night before-but he hadn’t. I hadn’t seen the man. “And while they are understandably devastated by the loss of their dear Caitlin, they both told me, Tom as well as Abby, that they took comfort from the fact that Caitlin is now in heaven, reunited with Christ and basking in his divine love.”

I looked at Abby again, but she still stared forward, muttering her “Amens.” Buster leaned in to me on the other side. His breath smelled like cough drops.

“You were really shoveling it last night.”

“I didn’t say that,” I whispered.

I removed my hand from Abby’s. She didn’t seem to notice.

After the last prayer and the final song, we filed out. Abby, Buster, and I went first with Pastor Chris; then we stood around at the back of the church while people headed to their cars. Abby and I stood side by side, still not touching.

“I’m going to ride with Buster,” I said.

“You don’t want to ride with us?” Abby asked.

“Buster doesn’t know his way.”

“It’s a procession,” she said. “He can ride with us.”

“I need to talk to him,” I said, breaking off eye contact with her. “It’s fine.”

“But you’re going to the cemetery, right, Tom? You’ll be there?”

I didn’t answer. I put my hand on Buster’s arm and guided him toward the parking lot.

We stopped in Shaggy’s, a bar near campus. Students occupied most of the tables. Guys were trying hard to impress the girls, and the girls sat back, absorbing the boys’ attentions, encouraging more. We ordered sandwiches and then Buster asked for a pitcher of beer. When the waitress left, I asked him if he was drinking again.

“Just beer,” he said as nonchalantly as a man waiting for a bus. He’d been in rehab twice and then was arrested for drinking and driving. He’d also been arrested for indecent exposure, a fact that had caught the attention of the detectives investigating Caitlin’s disappearance. Buster claimed he’d been drunk and lost his clothes, but at some point he’d run past a group of children in a park and was initially charged with the more serious crime of child enticement and lewd and lascivious behavior. He’d spent two days in jail and served a thousand hours of community service. “You sure you don’t want to go to the boneyard? We can still make it.”

I shook my head. “Forget it.”

“Abby’s going to be pissed.”

I shrugged. He was right, of course. But when I heard Pastor Chris ascribing beliefs to me, actual words even, that clearly weren’t mine, something gave way. I tried to go along, to appease, but I’d reached my limit. Someone-maybe Pastor Chris, maybe Abby-decided to lie, to misrepresent my beliefs in public. I couldn’t stand being part of it, being lumped in with the flock of blind sheep.

The beer came and Buster poured it into the disposable plastic cups they provided. One of the drawbacks of living in a college town-restaurants and bars don’t invest in glassware. I took a sip and it felt good. And then another. That was all it took to start a buzz at the base of my skull.

My phone buzzed in my pocket. A text.

Need to see you. Four p.m.

“What’s that about?” Buster asked. “Abby?”

“No. Liann Stipes.”

“Who?”

“She’s a lawyer here in town. She handles the everyday stuff-mortgages, wills. Small-time criminal cases.”

“What does she want with you?” Buster asked. “You making a will?”

“Her daughter was murdered about ten years ago. She was just sixteen. They caught the guy and convicted him.”

“They fry him?” Buster asked.

“Life in prison. No parole. Are you sure you didn’t meet Liann right after Caitlin disappeared? She was at our house a lot.”

“I wasn’t around much then,” he said.

I studied his face for a moment. He took a long drink of his beer and ignored my interest. “Anyway,” I said, “she really tried to help us out. She’s become something of a crusader and an advocate on behalf of missing or murdered children and their families. She likes to see that the bad guys get punished. She doesn’t handle the prosecutions, of course, but she advises the families, sort of an informal legal counselor. That’s what she’s been doing for us. She tries her best to help victims’ families sort through all the mess of their cases. Dealing with the cops, dealing with the media. She tries to keep our spirits up. And she believes in justice.”

“A lawyer.” Buster made a gagging face.

“She’s not really a lawyer to me. She’s more of a friend. Like I said, an advocate.”

He kept making the face, so I ignored him. I wrote back and asked where she wanted to meet.

The Fantasy Club.

“Hmm.” I stared at the screen. “She wants to meet me in a strip joint.”

“Interesting place to meet a missing-children’s advocate.”

“Who knows? She meets a lot of interesting people in these cases. She gets to know the victims and their families pretty well. She seems to know everything and everybody. I just wish I knew what she wanted to tell me. She can be so fucking secretive sometimes, like she’s in the CIA. Jesus.”

“Drink up. It’ll help pass the time.” Buster drained half his cup on the first try, then polished off the rest and poured more. He nodded, encouraging me. “Tell me why we’re bailing on the graveside service.”

“I didn’t say any of that stuff at the church, that stuff about heaven. That idiot, Pastor Chris, made it up. Or Abby did. But it’s not just the stuff from church,” I said.

“Yeah?”

The beer tasted good. Real good. I felt myself reaching my limit. My stepfather-Buster’s father-drank. He drank and he raged at us and he usually passed out on the couch. I never acquired the habit, but Buster did.

“I knew Abby was going to buy the headstone,” I said. “Hell, I knew how much it cost. But she promised me it wouldn’t be up yet. She promised me. And it was there the other day when I went to the cemetery, the day I talked to you on the phone while I was walking Frosty.” Just saying his name caused a spasm of guilt in my chest. Where was Frosty? In an abusive home? Sitting in his own filth, waiting for the gas chamber? “The headstone has her name on it. My little girl. And it says she died four years ago. It’s a big fucking thing, too. You can’t miss it. Can you believe that?”

“Which part?”

“Any of it.”

Someone put coins in the jukebox, and a country song came on too loud. The steel guitar whined and someone else shouted in protest. The bartender bent down behind the bar and, mercifully, the volume dropped.

Buster put down his cup and steepled his fingers in front of his face. He looked thoughtful, sincere. “Have you ever thought-? And I’m only saying this because I do care about you. I really do. I mean, I know I can be a royal screwup. I know Abby can’t stand me and all that. Hell, maybe you can’t stand me either. I wouldn’t blame you.”

“I can stand you. Most of the time.”

He smiled. “Thanks.”

“And I think I know where you’re going with this. .”

“You know the odds,” Buster said. “But it’s probably true. There was never a ransom demand. She probably did die that day. There’s been no evidence to the contrary.”

I closed my eyes. Even in the noisy bar, I could imagine the screams. Caitlin’s voice. High. Cracking. Stretched to its limit. Daddy!

“I don’t like to think we lost her that day,” I said.

“That’s fine. I understand. What are the cops saying?” He reached behind him, to an empty table, and grabbed a bowl of peanuts.

“Very little. When we do hear from them, it’s the same stuff. They have one detective on it. The feds have pulled out. They call it an active case, but what does that mean? I know they have other things. Newer cases.”

“They still think she ran away?”

“It makes it easier on them, right? If she ran away, there’s no crime. She’d be sixteen now. .” I paused.

“We can drop it if you want,” Buster said.

I nodded.

Our food came. Buster salted his fries and started eating. I stared at my plate, my appetite uncertain.

“I stopped by your house on the way to that crazy church,” he said. “I thought I might catch you. I knocked and knocked, but nothing.”

“We were at the church already.”

“I know that. But Frosty didn’t bark.”

I shook my head. “He’s gone.”

“But you were just walking him the other day. He died? What happened?”

I shrugged. “I took him to the shelter. He’s an older dog, set in his ways. They said there’s a chance someone will adopt him, but if not, well, they euthanize the dogs eventually.”

“Did he get sick?”

I shook my head.

Recognition spread across his face. “Abby wanted him gone?”

I didn’t respond. I picked up a french fry and popped it in my mouth.

“And you did it? You took him to the pound?”

“I did it for Abby. And for me. He was Caitlin’s dog. He was a reminder of what we lost. If it helps us to turn the page. .”

“Jesus. That’s cold.”

“The dog who knew too much. Except how to tell us what he knew.” I emptied my cup and poured more beer for Buster and myself.

“How are things with you and Abby?”

I started eating my lukewarm food. “The same.”

“That good?”

“We’re fine.”

“Let me ask you something, and if I’m crossing a line here, just let me know.”

I laughed. “Would that stop you?”

“No.” He signaled the waitress for another pitcher. “But I’m just wondering. . do you two still do it? I mean, do you sleep in the same bed? Do you fuck?”

The pitcher came. “Put that on my brother’s tab,” I said.

“You can put it all on my tab. My treat.” He winked at me. “I guess I owe you a few.” He didn’t refill his cup. “Well?”

“I know you’re trying to provoke me now. It always ends up this way with you.”

“You don’t fuck? Ever?” He shook his head. “I don’t know how anyone could live that way. I just have to get something, you know? I can’t live without it.” He kept shaking his head. “See, I’m really just trying to find out why you stay married to someone who you don’t have anything going on with. She’s at that freaky church; you’re a college professor. She wants to do this whole funeral thing. You don’t. She thinks Caitlin’s dead. .”

“She hasn’t worked for a long time. She gave up teaching when Caitlin was born.”

“ S o? ”

“Our lives are intertwined. It’s not as easy as you make it sound.”

“Isn’t it?” He pushed away his plate and drank more. He let out a hissing burp. “I think it is easy. Easy for me to see anyway. The dog’s gone. The headstone’s been laid. People are moving on. Remember when Dad died? My dad? Remember how you cried at the funeral?”

“I didn’t cry.”

“You did.”

“Not for him, I didn’t.”

Buster sighed. “He raised you.”

“If you want to call it that.”

Buster leaned back. He brought his hand up and scratched his jaw. I could tell he was angry. Whenever we talked about my stepfather, one or both of us ended up full of anger. But Buster managed to swallow his this time. When he spoke again, his voice was even.

“Here’s my point-it wasn’t long after the old man died that you went off to grad school. You started a new life, a new career. You met Abby. You had a baby. It was like his death liberated you in a way. You know, they say we don’t fully become ourselves until our parents die. Maybe that’s why I’m something of a late bloomer.” He spoke the last sentence without a trace of irony. “Maybe you have the chance for a new life here. Now. If you just. . accept things. .”

I stared at him across our dirty, cluttered table. I thought about walking out-hell, I thought about punching him. But instead, I just signaled for the waitress, who brought the check.

“Give it to him,” I said. “We’re finished here.”

Chapter Three

“Do you mind making a stop?”

“Where?” Buster asked.

When Buster saw the animal shelter, he sighed. “You’re kidding, right? He’s dead.”

“Just give me a minute.”

In the lobby, I smelled the accumulated odors of hundreds of caged animals. Their fur, their waste, their food. Their fear and desperation. The door at the back, the one that led to the cages, muffled the sounds, but I could still hear a faint chorus of barks and yelps. I asked the woman working at the counter about Frosty, and she seemed immediately confused by my request.

“He’s your dog?” she asked.

“Yes.”

“And he was lost?”

“No, I brought him here. He’s a yellow Lab. Frosty’s his name. I wanted to get rid of him, but now I want him back.”

She pursed her lips like the nuns from my grade school.

“Well, I’ll see,” she said. “But this doesn’t happen often.” She stopped at the door to the cages and looked back at me. “You’ll have to pay the adoption donation even if he is your dog.”

I nodded my assent. While she was gone, I looked around the lobby. The faces of dogs and cats in need of homes stared back at me from one bulletin board, and next to that another one held flyers advertising missing pets. We didn’t make a new flyer for Caitlin this year. The police created an age progression image, one showing Caitlin at age fifteen, and it was so warped and distorted-the eyes too large, the hair artificial-I couldn’t bear to look at it. I thought it belonged in a mortician’s textbook, an example of what not to do to preserve the image of a loved one. But the police distributed it anyway, and from time to time I came across a faded, wrinkling copy in the corner of a coffee shop or stuck to a community bulletin board downtown.

The woman reappeared so quickly I knew she bore bad news.

“He’s gone,” she said matter-of-factly, as though talking about a housefly.

“I thought you kept them for a week-”

“He’s been adopted,” she said. “Someone got him yesterday.”

“Okay, can you just tell me who it is? I need him back.”

She shook her head, the lips pursed again. “We can’t do that, sir.”

“But he’s my dog.”

“You brought him in here. You gave him away.”

“It was a mistake. A misunderstanding.” I leaned against the counter, letting it support most of my weight. I felt drained by the day. And guilty. I’d hoped having Frosty back would lift me.

“We can’t give out that information. It’s private.”

“I know, but-”

“We can’t just have people coming in here and getting personal information about our clients.”

“Okay, okay. I get it.”

“We have plenty of other dogs here,” she said. “Good dogs.” She seemed suddenly cheery and upbeat. “Is this for a family? Are you looking for a dog for your children?”

“No, just for me, I guess. And I only wanted that dog.” There was nothing more to say, so I turned and left.

When I climbed back into the car, Buster didn’t say anything. He dropped it into gear and drove me home, the voice of the talk radio host our only companion. Buster stopped at the curb in front of the house, but neither one of us got out.

“Thanks for coming today,” I said. “I’m glad you made it.” I extended my hand, which he shook.

“That’s what brothers do for each other,” he said.

“I didn’t even ask what you’re doing these days.”

He shrugged. “A cell phone company. Sales. It pays the bills. Look, I know why you’re asking about that-”

“No-”

“I plan on paying you back. All of it, all five thousand.”

“I don’t care.”

“Abby?”

I paused. “She cares about it. But she’s also given up on you. She tells me she’s written off that money, like it was a business expense.”

He started tapping his right hand against the rim of the steering wheel. “The price of being related to me.”

“Something like that.”

“How about you? What are you doing with your time off? Writing a book? Who’s it about this time? Melville? Moby Dick? Dicky Moe?”

“Hawthorne. His short fiction. You know, it sounded like there was a woman with you when I talked to you on the phone the other day. Are you dating someone?”

“Why the sudden interest?”

“I just don’t want us to be pissed at each other. I know the stuff with your dad is tough. For both of us maybe, but certainly for me. I still dream about him, about him coming into our room at night, drunk and angry. The way he’d come after us, swinging at us. I see his figure there in the dark. Sort of a hulking presence. I can’t forget it.”

“We’re not going to solve all this sitting here in the car.”

“Do you remember the same things?” I asked. “At least tell me that.”

He didn’t hesitate. “No, Tom. I don’t remember it that way at all. Sorry.”

“We used to huddle together in the dark,” I said. “Hell, you used to try to protect me. You’d lay on top of me and keep me safe. Are you going to tell me you don’t remember? You’re really going to stick to that? Really?”

“I’m not sticking to anything,” he said. “It’s a fact.” He looked at the console clock. “I have to get back home, okay?” I opened the door, and before I was out he added, “But, Young Goodman Tom, if you do decide to change your life-really change your life-give me a call. You have my number.”

Chapter Four

In the weeks and months after Caitlin disappeared, rumors had started to spread. New Cambridge, Ohio, is a small college town of about fifty thousand people, mostly middle class, mostly quiet and pleasant. It was primarily populated by professors and their families and students who came and went based on the academic calendar. Bad things didn’t happen in New Cambridge, at least not bad things that people knew or talked about.

But even if friends tried to insulate us from the gossip, we still heard what people said: Caitlin was pregnant, and we’d sent her away. Caitlin met a lover over the Internet and ran off with him. Caitlin fell victim to an online predator who’d kidnapped her. Or Caitlin simply ran away. Tired of the boring life in a small college town, she’d taken matters into her own hands and run off for greener pastures. California or New York. Seattle or Miami.

The police, of course, interviewed all of our friends and family, and they talked to a handful of my students and examined police records, but they found nothing. In those first days and weeks after Caitlin didn’t come home from her walk, the police treated us with the due deference owed to the parents of a missing and possibly murdered child. They spoke to us in soothing tones, they offered us platitudinal encouragement-which actually felt wonderful to hear-and they answered our calls and questions promptly. But it didn’t take long for cracks to appear.

It began with Buster and his indecent exposure rap. He lived an hour away in Columbus and wasn’t in New Cambridge the day Caitlin disappeared-as far as we knew-but he couldn’t provide a rock-solid alibi. He said he was at his house. An ex-girlfriend claimed to have spoken to him on his cell phone an hour before the disappearance, but she didn’t know where he was while they talked. For a while, Buster became something of a suspect, even though the police refused to call him that to either Abby or me. He endured some heated questioning, and some not so subtle threats in the interview room. While he never requested a lawyer or offered anything close to a confession, and while no evidence linked him to the commission of a crime, word leaked to the newspaper that Caitlin’s uncle-unnamed-was a person of interest in the case.

I never offered a particularly strong defense of my brother. Not to Abby and not to the police. I did tell them I didn’t believe he would harm Caitlin. In fact, he was a surprisingly doting uncle to Caitlin, one who often sent birthday gifts and, on the rare occasions when he visited us, went out of his way to talk to Caitlin as though she were more adult than child.

“But that’s just it, Tom,” Abby said to me on one of the days Buster was going a few rounds with the cops. “He paid so much attention to Caitlin. Didn’t it seem out of character to you?”

It did. It really did. And I allowed the suspicions of the police and Abby’s doubts to become my own to such an extent that they never fully went away, even when the police finished with him and let him go. I still found myself returning to those questions again and again: Where was he that day? Why did he seem to care about Caitlin so much? Was his indecent exposure charge really just a drunken misunderstanding?

But if my doubts about Buster remained alive, even in the back of my mind, the police-absent any conclusive proof of his involvement-moved on to other things. They examined every scrap of mail, every phone call, every bill and financial statement we possessed, and none of it led anywhere-except for the computer we’d purchased for Caitlin, the one she used in her room. There were no unusual e-mails, no evidence that she made contact with a man who might have lured her away or taken her. But Caitlin had been searching the Web the day she disappeared, and in the hours before she walked out the door with Frosty, she’d visited Web sites for Seattle, horses, Amtrak, the U.S. presidency. I didn’t see anything nefarious or unusual in this list. A curious child surfed the Internet, following her train of thought wherever it might go. I do the same thing every day.

But the police jumped on two items from the list-Seattle and Amtrak-and decided there was a decent chance that Caitlin had run away. They questioned us about it, placing special emphasis on whether or not there were difficulties in the home. They asked her friends, her teachers, our neighbors, and many of them said that, while they didn’t believe anything was wrong, they did think Caitlin was something of a distant child, one who kept to herself, one who really didn’t allow others to know what she was thinking. All true, and all things Abby and I had told the police from the very beginning. We didn’t always know what Caitlin was thinking, but what parents of a twelve-year-old do?

From that point on, a slight rift grew between the police and us. They slowly drew down their resources-the SBI removed their consulting agent from the case, the New Cambridge PD cut back to one detective-and we sensed, both Abby and I, that the authorities were no longer taking us seriously, that we were being moved to the back burner as long as no new information came forward to propel the case along.

Did I really believe that Caitlin had run away? I like to tell myself I never did. But I have to admit there were nights-lying in bed, staring at the ceiling-when the results of those Internet searches cycled through my brain like trains themselves. And I had to ask myself, there in the dark: What was Caitlin really thinking or doing? Did anybody-even me-really know?

Chapter Five

The Fantasy Club was removed from all the respectable businesses, a small, sturdily built structure with a gravel parking lot and a blinking sign that promised ADULT ENTERTAINMENT-COUPLES WELCOME.

The lot was almost empty when I parked, my tires crunching over the gravel and kicking up a puff of white dust. The lack of windows made the place look a little like a fortress, a distant entertainment outpost. When I walked in, my eyes struggled to adjust to the gloom; no one tended the door or asked me to pay a cover charge. The stage was empty, the music off. The lone bartender and his only customer stood watch over a newspaper and a TV playing a daytime talk show. The bartender managed to pry his eyes away from the paper.

“Help you?”

My head was still buzzing a little from the beer I’d drunk with Buster, so I ordered a club soda. The corner of the bartender’s mouth curled a little.

“You want a lime with that? I’m all out of limes.”

“No lime.”

He sprayed the soda into a plastic cup and placed it on the bar. “We’re between shows,” he said, “so I won’t charge you for the drink.”

“That’s fine.” I dug around in my pocket and found a dollar bill, which I placed on the counter as a tip and a peace offering.

The bartender raised his eyebrows but didn’t pick it up. “Thanks,” he said.

I took a seat at the end of the bar. I drummed my fingers on the bar top and swallowed the club soda in less than a minute. I jabbed at the ice with my little red cocktail straw, tried to focus on the argument raging on the TV, then asked for a refill. The bartender provided it without looking up from his paper.

“Tonight we’re having a lingerie show,” he said. “You ought to stick around.”

“I have to face my wife at some point today.”

The bartender looked up and winked at me. “Hell, bring her. Didn’t you see the sign? Couples welcome.”

“You haven’t met my wife.”

The bartender and his customer both laughed at my joke, and for a moment I entered their masculine circle.

“Can I ask you guys a question?” I asked.

Their laughter broke off. The sound of the TV filled the space, the tinny voice of an acne-faced kid who stood accused of fathering two children by two different high school girls. He was protesting to the host, his voice rising like a siren.

I reached into my wallet and brought out the picture of Caitlin I always carried with me. Her last school portrait, the one the police circulated to the media in the wake of her disappearance. I held it up in the space between me and the two men. I tried to make my voice casual.

“Have you ever seen this girl in here?” I asked.

The customer, an older man with a deeply lined, sagging face, looked away, deferring responsibility for dealing with me to the bartender.

“You a cop?” he asked.

“No.”

“Private investigator?”

“I’m her father.”

A hint of sympathy flickered across the bartender’s eyes. He leaned in a couple of inches and looked at the photo, his brow furrowing.

“Yeah, I’ve seen her,” he said. He flipped the newspaper closed and tapped his index finger against the front page. It was the New Cambridge Herald. “Right here.” It wasn’t above-the-fold news, but it had made the front near the bottom, tucked next to the weather forecast. A picture of Caitlin along with the story-the same photo I held in my hand. “But I haven’t seen her in here. We don’t allow underage kids in. No, sir.”

“Did you really take a look at the picture?” I asked.

He sighed a little, then looked again. He studied the picture longer than before, even going so far as to tilt his head back and to the side to get a better angle.

“No,” he said. “She’s just a little girl. I’ve never seen her.”

“She’d be sixteen now.”

“Sixteen? How old is she in the picture?”

“Twelve.”

“Do you know how much a kid changes between twelve and sixteen?”

I put the photo back in my wallet.

“I wish I did,” I said. “I really wish I did.”

Chapter Six

The woman with Liann looked young, college-age young, and she wore a T-shirt, short cutoff denim shorts, and flip-flops. She carried a blue and red gym bag, and when they came abreast of the bar, the bartender, the same one who’d served me, grunted.

“You’re late, Tracy.”

“Did someone die and put you in charge, Pete?” she asked.

Liann looked as out of place in the Fantasy Club as I felt. She wore a no-nonsense brown business suit, and her brown hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. Liann was older than me-she was approaching fifty-but she maintained a rail-thin figure through a combination of jogging and biking. She looked strong and determined as she brought the young woman toward me, a motherly hand resting on the girl’s arm. Her presence comforted me as it had ever since she’d shown at our house the day after Caitlin disappeared.

I stood up as they approached my table-one in the corner and out of the way-and I shook the woman’s hand as Liann introduced us.

Up close, in the glow from the stage lights and neon beer signs on the wall, I saw that while my initial assessment was correct-the girl named Tracy was only about twenty years old-the years didn’t look like easy ones. Her hair looked thin and brittle from repeated bleachings, and lines were already forming at the corners of her mouth and eyes. She was thin but not in a healthy, youthful way. Instead she appeared tired and worn, like someone who didn’t sleep or eat right.

I offered to get everyone a drink, but Liann shook her head. They both sat down.

“We should get started,” Liann said. “Tracy has to work.”

I took my seat, my hands folded on the table.

“Okay, Tracy,” Liann said. “Go ahead.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “How do you two know each other?”

Tracy looked down at the tabletop. Liann turned to me and said, “We’re short on time here, Tom.”

“I understand that,” I said. “But I want to know where this information is coming from. Liann, you work with women and families who have been affected by violent crime. And you’re a lawyer. I want to know which role you met Tracy in.”

“Tom, Tracy has had some issues-”

“I got busted, okay?” Tracy said, raising her head to look at me. “I got busted for drugs, and Liann was my lawyer. She kept me out of jail.”

I nodded. “Okay, I get it.”

“It’s not really relevant,” Liann said. “Tell him what you saw, Tracy.”

Tracy took her time getting started. She reached into the gym bag and brought out a pack of cigarettes-Marlboro Lights-and a lighter. Once the cigarette was burning, she let a stream of smoke go up toward the ceiling, then waved her hand around out of consideration for Liann and me. The ceremony completed, Tracy fixed on me with a level gaze.

“I’ve seen you before,” she said. “I used to dance at the Love Shack, and you would come in there showing that picture of your little girl around. You showed it to me one night.” She took another drag, exhaled. “I have a little girl, too. She’s almost five. Cassie. She stays with my aunt while I work, but I see her sometimes.”

She wanted a response, so I provided one. “That must be tough,” I said.

Tracy nodded as though my words carried some eternal truth. “It is. It sure as hell is.”

Most of the twenty-year-olds I interacted with at the university came from privileged backgrounds and were often more worldly and widely traveled than I was. Tracy didn’t have that life. She didn’t spend her winters in Vail or her summers in Can-cun. More likely, she spent her whole life in the counties surrounding New Cambridge, and she’d carry the rough features and country accent common among locals with her the rest of her life, markers of who she was.

“What’s your little girl like?” Tracy asked.

“Tracy-”

“I want to know, Liann, that’s all. I’m curious.”

“It’s okay,” I said to Liann. “I don’t mind.”

But then I felt stuck. Four years of interviews with cops and reporters, four years of encapsulating Caitlin for flyers and Web sites. I never felt able to adequately sum her up so someone who didn’t know my daughter would recognize her. And I couldn’t help but wonder: would the picture I created of the twelve-year-old who walked out the door that day bear any resemblance to the sixteen-year-old young woman I hoped she lived to become?

“She’s smart,” I said. “Really smart.”

“You’re a professor at the college, right?”

“Yes.”

“Figures she’d be smart then.”

“She’s kind of quiet, too. She kept to herself a lot.”

“Is she pretty?”

“Yes. She has blond hair, very blond. And her eyes were-are-blue. Bluer than yours even.”

Tracy smiled, and I couldn’t help but think I was looking into the face of some older version of Caitlin, the one who never came home.

The bartender, Pete, came by carrying two cases of beer. His biceps pressed against his shirt like cannonballs.

“You’re almost on shift, Tracy.”

“Fuck off, Pete.”

Pete sighed and kept walking.

Tracy waited until he was gone, then leaned in and stubbed out her cigarette.

“I saw your little girl once. At the Love Shack.”

Despite the club soda, my mouth felt dry. I didn’t say anything; I didn’t move, not wanting to create a vibration that might prevent her from telling me what I needed to know. Instead, I sat perfectly still while an icy sensation grew beneath my shirt collar and spread down my back. I waited.

Tracy dug into her pack and lit another cigarette.

“This was about six months ago, about six months after you came in there showing that picture around. Do you still have that picture with you?”

“Tracy, tell him the story, just like you told me,” Liann said.

Tracy glanced at Liann and nodded, looking a little like a chastened teenager. She flicked her ash onto the floor.

“It was a regular night, just any old night. I don’t remember what day of the week it was. Probably not a weekend since we weren’t that crowded. This guy came up to me and said he wanted to buy a lap dance. I told him, ‘Twenty dollars,’ and he said, ‘Sure,’ like it was no problem with the price. Some of them come in there and try to get the price down, or else they’re real careful how they ask because they’re hoping they’re going to get something more than a lap dance. They say, ‘Twenty dollars to go back there with you,’ you know, because they’re thinking if they don’t specify we might go back there and do something besides the lap dance. Something extra.” She shook her head. “They didn’t let us do that at the Love Shack. No way.

“At the Love Shack they have little rooms off to the side, three of them. That’s where we went for the lap dances. They weren’t much bigger than closets really, but there were those vinyl bench seats built into the wall, and usually another chair just sitting there in the room. Sometimes we got guys who came in who were shy, and they’d sit in the chair for a while, waiting. We’d let them do that for a little bit, but not too long. If they didn’t hurry up, they needed to go. There was money to be made.”

Tracy stared at the table and picked at a chip in the Formica. “Anyway, I went behind the curtain and into room number three to wait for the guy. I got kind of a bad vibe from him, just the way he talked and handed over the money.”

“What kind of bad vibe?” I asked.

She looked away. “I don’t know. Some guys I can tell are just going to be relaxed and easygoing. Regular guys who are just doing this for fun.” She kind of smiled, as though thinking of a distant but pleasant memory. But the smile passed quickly, and she looked back at me. “But there are other types. I know all about them. They have something else on their mind. Do you know what that is?”

She seemed to be waiting for an answer, so I provided one.

“Sex?” I asked.

She shook her head. “I wish.” She shook her head again. “No, these guys want to hurt somebody. Girls, mainly. They want to control a girl or clamp down on her. They want to use her for something, overpower them.”

“Did this man hurt you?” I asked.

“He came into room three,” she said, “where I was waiting. He was older, in his fifties probably. His hair was kind of long and greasy, and it was going gray. He was ugly. His nose was wide and fat, his skin was kind of puffy. He looked right at me and came over to the bench, and I almost just gave him his money back right there and told him to forget it. We have bouncers and everything. They listen for trouble, and they’re good, but being in the room with that guy made my skin crawl.” She shivered just thinking about it, and I assumed her feeling was a cousin to the icy sensation that still possessed my body. “Then I saw the girl behind him.”

“Caitlin?” I asked.

She nodded.

Liann reached over and placed her hand on top of mine. She didn’t say anything, and while her touch felt warm, it brought no real comfort.

“I’ve danced for couples before,” Tracy said. “Plenty of times. It wasn’t that weird. But I’d never danced for a couple like that. At first I thought maybe they were father and daughter. Hell, maybe he was her grandfather. But then he reached out and took her hand and pulled her close, and I got it. I understood what was going on between them two. They were a couple.”

“Tom?” Liann asked. “Are you okay? Are you going to be sick?”

I didn’t know. I didn’t answer. But I did feel like I was coming down with something. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if I was going to keep everything down, if the beer and greasy food was going to come pouring back out of me in a hot, messy rush.

Liann was up and almost immediately came back with another cup of club soda. The sickness eased; my temperature regulated.

“Do you want to stop, Tom?” Liann asked. “We can do this another day.”

I shook my head.

“I know it’s hard to hear,” Tracy said, although she didn’t sound all that sympathetic.

“Why didn’t you tell this to the police back then?” I asked. “Why are you telling us this now?”

Liann stepped in. “Tracy didn’t make the connection until she saw the stories and the picture in the paper this week, the stories about Caitlin’s service. When she saw them, she called me. Like Tracy said, I’ve helped her out before when she’s had a little trouble. And some other members of her family as well. It was no big deal, just kid stuff. She’s over that now, though.” Liann reached out and placed that comforting, motherly hand on Tracy’s arm again. “She trusts me.”

“You remembered Caitlin all that time later?” I asked Tracy. “You recognized her picture in the paper?”

“I’d seen you before,” she said. “And then. .” Her voice trailed off.

I looked from her to Liann, waiting for the rest. “And?” I asked.

“Go on, Tracy,” Liann said. “Tell him.”

I wanted to tell her to stop. I wanted to say, No more. It felt like the muscle fiber in my heart was rending, tearing apart.

But I couldn’t stop listening.

“He went and sat down, the guy. And the girl-” She paused. “Your daughter sat in the chair across from him. You know what a lap dance is, right?”

I’d been to enough bachelor parties to get the picture, and Liann nodded, too. “They make us do it reverse cowgirl style,” Tracy said. “They want us to face away from the guy, so only our butt touches his lap. And we’re dressed, of course. That’s the law. And with us facing away, I guess they figure it’s less likely the guy’s going to get all handsy or something. I don’t know why they think that. If a guy’s going to get handsy, he’ll do it no matter what, right? But when this guy asked me to face him, I felt nervous. I mean, he was already creeping me out and everything, and then he brought the girl with him, your girl, and I just didn’t feel right.” She sighed. “But I didn’t feel like I could say no to him. We’re not supposed to say no unless we really feel like we’re in danger, and I couldn’t say I felt in danger. And I needed the money and the job. So I went along. And everything went fine. He didn’t lay a hand on me.”

She paused and lit another cigarette.

“But?” I asked.

“He didn’t even look at me,” Tracy said. She might have tried, but she couldn’t hide the trace of disappointment in her voice. “He looked right past me at the-your daughter. He kept his eyes locked on her the whole time I danced in his lap. She’s younger than me, I guess.” Tracy shrugged. “We only do it for one song. When the song ends, we get up. I turned around and saw the girl. She wore this blank look on her face, no emotion. Nothing. She looked kind of dead. But she was staring right at him. Her eyes were locked on his, like she was under hypnosis or something and couldn’t move without him saying so. It gave me the creeps even more, even worse than if he’d hit her or something.”

Tracy paused, and fished yet another cigarette from her bag. “I left the room first,” she said. “I stepped outside the little closet, and I’m supposed to go right back to the dance floor, you know, and start working all over again. But I didn’t. I stayed right outside the door. I didn’t have a plan or anything. I just felt like doing it. I felt like I needed to be there for some reason. Maybe I was thinking of my own little girl. Cassie. Maybe I was thinking if she were ever in that situation I’d want somebody to try to do something for her.

“But the two of them didn’t come out right away. I waited a minute, two minutes, and nothing. No sign of them. Like I said, I’d danced for couples before, and I know sometimes it gets them. . excited, you know? Some couples get off on that kind of stuff. But they’re not allowed to do anything about it, not on our property, you know? That would get us in trouble, and we’re supposed to look out for that kind of thing. So I went back in to check.”

She stopped and looked at Liann. It seemed to be some kind of sore spot between them and Tracy was silently pleading her case one last time in hopes that Liann would let her off the hook.

Liann shook her head. “We talked about this, Tracy,” she said. “You have to tell the whole story. It’s your story, and you have to own it.”

After a long pause, Tracy turned back to me. “I’m sorry,” she said.

“It’s okay,” I replied, even though I didn’t believe it was okay. In truth, I wanted to run and hide.

“When I went back in, the girl was on the floor, on her knees, facing away from me. .”

She didn’t have to complete the picture. I got it. We all did. Even if it hadn’t been Caitlin, if it had been somebody else’s daughter, I’d want that man brought to justice. I’d want him castrated and tortured. No one’s daughter should have to do that. No parent should have to hear about it. The fact that it might be my daughter, that I hoped it was my daughter, made it almost too much to bear.

“I guess they stopped when they heard me come into the room. Then they came out, and they were walking side by side. He kept his arm around her, like they were a couple, but when I looked close, I saw it was a real tight grip. His arm was around her waist, like he didn’t want to let her go.”

“Or like he was afraid she would run,” Liann said.

“Yeah,” Tracy said. “Like that. He held his head real close to hers, real close, like he was whispering something to her. . or kissing her.”

I swallowed and waited for more.

“She was on my side, the girl. It was just lucky that way. I put my hand out, real slow and gentle, and I touched her arm. I didn’t think he’d see me, but I wanted her to know I was there if she needed something or wanted to say something. The girl turned to me. She looked right at me. Her face still looked blank and all zom-bielike, but her eyes showed something else. Fear, I guess. Emotion. Like she wanted to say something to me. She really wanted to, I could tell. And the girl actually started to-she opened her mouth and looked right at me, and I thought she was going to ask me for help. And I would have done it, too, right there. I would have.”

“What did she say?” I asked, my voice getting louder.

“Nothing,” Tracy said. “Right when her mouth opened, the guy saw me there, and he must have seen my hand on her arm, because he jerked her away, pulled her right back to him the way you pull a dog on a leash, you know? He didn’t say anything to me. He didn’t have to. He just stared at me as they walked away, his eyes telling me to stay back, to butt out, to mind my own business.” Tracy seemed to have forgotten her cigarette. Its ash was growing and tipping toward the floor. “I wish I’d done something or said something. I think about it all the time.”

Her last words sounded scripted, almost insincere, but Liann reached over and gave Tracy’s hand a squeeze.

“You’re doing something now,” Liann said. “This is how you can help that girl.”

Tracy looked at me. “I saw that picture in the paper last night, and I called Liann right away.” She looked over at Liann and smiled. “I do trust her. I got busted once-”

“That’s not important, Tracy,” Liann said.

Tracy shrugged. “Whatever, right? It all came together. I want to see this man stopped. I want to see him punished.”

Her voice took on an edge that wasn’t there before, one that sounded personal. She stabbed the dying cigarette into the ashtray as if to punctuate her point. She looked away from me then, her hand near her mouth.

The crowd in the Fantasy Club picked up. Businessmen in ties sat at tables side by side with truckers and farmworkers. True democracy. There was a stirring behind the curtain on the stage, and somebody clapped. It looked like the show was about to begin.

“We need to tell the police,” I said.

Tracy’s head whipped around toward me.

“No,” she said, the same edge in her voice. She turned to Liann. “You said I didn’t have to.”

Liann gave me a quick glance, letting me know I was crossing some boundary. She leaned in toward Tracy and adopted the motherly pose again, speaking to the young woman in a gentle, comforting tone of voice.

“You said you wanted to help,” Liann said to her. “And this is the way to help. This is the way to make a difference. The only way to find this guy is to call the police. I’ll watch out for you and make sure they don’t bullshit you.”

But Tracy shook her head. She pushed back from the table and grabbed her gym bag.

“You didn’t say anything about the police, Liann. You told me no cops. You know that’s how it has to be. You know that. I trusted you.”

She stood up, a swirl of motion, and not even Liann calling her name slowed her down as she walked away. So I stood up and said her name, louder than I’d intended apparently. Tracy stopped and so did a lot of other people. They were all looking at me, their heads half cocked, their mouths partly open. Some of them smirked, and others nudged their friends as if to say, Here’s the show! Watch this guy get all crazy over a fucking stripper.

“Tracy, wait. Wait!”

She stopped in her tracks, her back to me. She didn’t turn around, didn’t encourage me, but she appeared to be waiting. Listening.

My audience listened as well.

“This is my daughter,” I said. “Like you said, you’d want someone to help your little girl if she needed it.”

Someone let out a long, sarcastic “Awwwww,” and someone else shouted, “Show us your tits!”

Tracy still didn’t move.

“Please, Tracy. You’re our only lead here.”

I couldn’t see her face. I couldn’t read what she was thinking or if my words were sinking in at all.

“I don’t like the police,” she said, her voice small and childlike.

“Liann’s right,” I said. “They have to be involved. They can help us.”

Tracy didn’t say anything else, but her head moved ever so slightly. A quick nod with her eyes squeezed shut. It looked like surrender.

“Thank you,” I said. “Thank you.”

Chapter Seven

A dark sedan entered the parking lot of the Fantasy Club and came toward the building. It was Detective Ryan. Liann and I stood next to each other while he parked and exited the car. Ryan was taller than me and thick through the middle, with a bushy mustache that more than compensated for his thinning hair. His belt buckle always hung low, beneath his gut, and Ryan frequently used his large, powerful hands to hitch his pants higher. He had come to us the day Caitlin disappeared and he led the investigation the entire time. Early on, he was a comforting presence in our house, a distant but protective father with the power to restore order.

We shook hands as he stepped into the glow from the Fantasy Club’s entrance lights. They were orange and yellow and cast Ryan in a surreal wash. I knew Ryan wouldn’t like seeing Liann there. She asked questions and second-guessed the police in a way that must have made Ryan feel like he was getting nibbled to death by ducks. But I always appreciated Liann’s efforts. I figured the more questions being asked, the more pressure being exerted, the greater the likelihood something good would result and Caitlin would be found. Ryan nodded at Liann, his lips pursed into a forced smile.

I gave Ryan a quick rundown of what had happened, with Liann filling in details when needed. He listened, not saying anything or commenting in any way. Ryan wore what I thought of as a cop mask. He kept his face impassive regardless of the circumstance and frequently began his sentences with the phrase “I don’t have a horse in this race. .” But I never failed to notice the way his eyes appraised me while I spoke, absorbing my every gesture or inflection and recording it somewhere.

When I’d told him all there was to know, he still didn’t say anything, so I pushed.

“So what do you think?”

“I think I need to talk to this woman,” he said. “If she seems credible, maybe we can get a sketch of this guy out to the media.”

At last, something. A step might be taken.

“She doesn’t want to talk to you, Ryan,” Liann said.

Ryan looked a little startled, like he’d forgotten Liann was there.

“Oh?”

“She doesn’t trust the police. She’s been in some trouble, so getting you to talk to her is going to be a tough sell.”

“Nobody likes talking to the police, Liann. Tom, do you like talking to the police?” I could tell it was a rhetorical question, and Ryan didn’t allow me to answer. “But sometimes we just don’t have a choice, do we?” he said.

“I really had to work on her just to get her to tell the story to Tom,” Liann said. “I’d like to be there when you go inside to talk to her.”

Ryan shook his head. “Negative.”

“I’m acting as her counsel,” Liann said. “She has that right.”

Ryan made a snorting noise that might have been a laugh. “Liann, make up your mind. When you want to be a lawyer, you act like a lawyer and work cases. But when you want to be a victims’ rights crusader, you put on that hat and ride herd over the police and the prosecutor’s office and everybody else.” He raised his index finger in the air. “You don’t always play well with others, and you haven’t stored up many favors with the police.” He dropped the finger. “Besides, this girl doesn’t need counsel. Not that I’m aware of anyway.”

“Let me go back,” I said.

“No.” Ryan’s voice took on an edge. “In fact, why don’t the two of you clear on out? I’ll call you when I know something.”

“Forget it,” I said. “I’ll wait here. I want to talk to you as soon as you come out.”

Ryan studied me again, then nodded. He took a step toward the door, but Liann stopped him.

“Look, Ryan,” she said. “That’s a scared girl in there. She’s lived a tough life. So none of your storm trooper bullshit, okay? She’s not a criminal; she’s a witness. She has rights.”

“Are you saying criminals don’t have rights?” the detective asked. Liann started to respond, but he held up his hand and cut her off. “I know how to do my job, Liann. I know how to handle witnesses, and I know how to handle criminals. And I do know the difference between the two, even without you on my back. And I’ll even go a step further-thank you for bringing her to our attention. I do appreciate it.”

Liann still looked like she wanted to say something, but she didn’t. I didn’t care about their back-and-forth, their little power plays and gamesmanship. I wanted to know something else, something most important to me.

“Ryan, wait,” I said. “I forgot to ask her something, that woman in there-Tracy.” I searched for the right words. “I wanted to know if she thought. . did she think Caitlin was. . I know she wasn’t okay, of course, but. . was she-is she okay?”

Ryan came over and placed his big hand on my shoulder. Beyond a handshake, I don’t think he’d ever touched me before. I felt like a little boy being comforted, and it was reassuring.

“Wait here with Liann,” he said. He gave me a couple of good pats and started back toward the door. “I’ll talk to you when I come out.”

Chapter Eight

Liann refused to sit. As soon as Ryan went inside, she started to pace back and forth. It was like some portion of my nervous energy had been transferred to her.

“I know what he’s doing in there,” she said. “It’s the way the police operate, especially male cops. He’s in there trying to knock all the supports out from under her story. He’s trying to get the whole thing to collapse. That’s his goal, Tom-make no mistake about it. He doesn’t want to believe her. He wants to doubt her.”

“I don’t think so, Liann. This is it. This is real. Once he talks to her, he’ll see it.”

She spun toward me and jabbed her finger toward the door of the Fantasy Club. “The cops are the ones pushing the possibility that Caitlin ran away. You know that, don’t you? It’s shown up in the papers, right? ‘Police department sources say. .’ Maybe it’s not Ryan himself. He may not think that. But cops like to push the runaway theory. It makes it easier on them. It gets them off the hook.” She slowed down and turned away. She seemed to be cooling off a little. “It’s what the police always do. They criminalize the victim. They blame her.”

“But could she have run away? What if what Tracy said in there. .?” I made a futile gesture behind me, toward the club. I couldn’t say it, but Liann knew what I meant.

Caitlin, on her knees in front of that man. . Doesn’t that mean she wanted to be there?

“No, Tom.” Liann came back over and sat next to me, her index finger raised like a stern schoolteacher’s. “You can never think that,” she said. “That’s the way the police think. You know your daughter. Do you think she ran away? Really?”

I shook my head. “No.”

I wished I could get the image out of my head, the picture created by Tracy’s words. But I did want to know him. I wanted to see the face of that man, the one who took Caitlin.

“You can’t waver, Tom. I’ve been telling you that from day one. That’s why you needed to hear that story in there. You can’t forget what this is about.”

“Right,” I said. “It’s about finding Caitlin.”

Liann nodded, but not as vigorously as I would have expected. It seemed like she was holding something back, some other part of the answer that I hadn’t provided. Before I could ask for clarification, my phone rang. I allowed myself to hope, for just a split second, that it was Ryan calling from inside the club, needing me to come in and participate, to hear some key piece of information he’d just uncovered. But the name on the caller ID screen made much more sense.

Abby.

I told Liann.

“Are you going to answer?”

“No.” I silenced the ringing. “She’s going to be mad.” I looked over at Liann. “I skipped out on the service at the cemetery today. I went out for a drink with my brother.”

“Jesus, Tom.”

“It’s worse. I didn’t tell her. I just didn’t show up.”

Liann shook her head. “You have your work cut out for you. Of course, you have this news to tell her. You could call her back and let her know.”

“I’ll tell her when we know more from Ryan,” I said. “Besides, I’m not even sure how much Abby will care about this. She wants to turn the page. It might interrupt her mourning.”

Liann fiddled with the large bracelet on her left wrist. “I’m not a big fan of Abby’s decision to move on, either.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I just think that closure isn’t the best thing in a case like Caitlin’s,” she said. “You don’t want anyone-not the police, not the community-to think you’re ready to move on until you really are. And I don’t think you’re ready to move on, Tom.”

“I guess it was different for you. You knew Elizabeth was really gone.”

“We had a body,” she said. “And a real funeral. Not a memorial or whatever you had today.” She raised her index finger to make the next point. “And we had a conviction. Don’t forget that. We got the guy.”

“Did that really help?” I asked.

Liann kept her finger in the air. “It didn’t hurt,” she said. “It sure as hell didn’t hurt.”

“What about your marriage?” I asked. “I don’t want to be a fucking cliche, you know? The parents of a missing child who can’t keep their marriage alive. How did you two do it?”

She lowered her hand and shook her head. “It’s a long road, Tom,” she said. “A long, long road.”

It took Ryan nearly an hour to come out. An hour, or what felt like twenty twangy thumping songs I didn’t want to hear, and by the time Ryan reemerged I was cursing the first person who’d ever banged on a drum to create music. Liann and I stood up when we saw him.

Ryan’s face was unreadable, obscure. “Tom,” he said, and made a gesture indicating he wanted me to move a little ways off and talk to him alone.

“It’s okay,” I said. “Liann can hear.”

He didn’t look at Liann. “I’d rather talk to you alone.”

“Liann is a friend,” I said. “She knows all about Caitlin’s case. She’s been there from the beginning. I’d like her to hear. I’d like the extra set of ears.”

Ryan’s expression didn’t change, but his eyes shifted so that he considered me with a sideways glance.

“Okay,” he said. “What do you want to know, Tom?”

“I want to know what you thought of her story. Do you think she saw Caitlin?”

“Well, I like to take a long view of these things,” he said. He stood with one hand in his pocket and the other rested on his belt. “I’m skeptical of stories like these-”

“Here we go,” Liann said.

Ryan took a deep breath and went on, ignoring her.

“I’m skeptical of these stories that show up in the wake of an event like Caitlin’s service today. This woman says she saw the story in the paper and remembered, but it’s just as likely the story in the paper suggested something to her that wasn’t already there. It happens all the time in these cases.”

“But she’s not talking about what’s in the paper,” I said. “She’s telling a different story, one that no one else has heard.”

Ryan nodded. “I agree. She does tell an impressive story. It’s well detailed, convincingly so.”

“You’re saying it’s just that, a story?” I asked.

“I’m saying consider the length of time that passed before she came forward. Six months.”

“She didn’t know-”

Ryan raised his hand, cutting Liann off.

“Six months later. And consider her profession. A dancer in a club like this.” He turned to Liann. “No doubt with a record?”

“Criminalization of the victim,” Liann said.

“She’s not the victim,” Ryan said. “She’s a witness.”

“She’s been a victim in the past,” Liann said.

“She has?” I asked.

“Most of these girls have been.”

“She’s a witness now,” Ryan said, “and who she is counts just as much as what she says.”

I waved my arms, cutting them off. “So you’re just going to do nothing?” I asked.

The door opened behind me, and we all turned. Two men in suits strolled out, and they turned and looked at us, almost coming to a stop. They didn’t say anything, and when Ryan gave them the stare down, they moved on, chuckling to themselves over our little show.

When I spoke again, I tried to keep my voice under control. But I couldn’t keep the desperation out of it. “This is our only hope right now, Ryan. Shit, this is the only hope we’ve ever had.” I spoke through gritted teeth. “You’ve got to do something, goddamn it! Ryan-” My voice almost broke. “This is it, you know? This has to be it.”

“She’s agreed to meet with a sketch artist from the Columbus PD,” he said. “We’ll set it up in the next day or two. We’ll get the sketch out to the media.”

“Is that all you can do?” I asked.

“The sketch should get us a lot of attention,” Ryan said. “We’ll hear things, but not necessarily the right things. It’s not a magic bullet. I don’t want you to think it is.”

“You need to get behind the sketch, Ryan,” Liann said. “You need to push it to the press like you believe in it. And no mention of Tracy’s occupation or past criminal history. It’s irrelevant.”

“Tom,” Ryan said, “I don’t want to downplay what happened here tonight. It’s a good lead, maybe the best we’ve had. We should all be glad about that, and we’ll work it as far as it will take us.” He took a deep breath. “I’m sorry, but I’ve got another case we’re wrapping up, so I have to get back, but if you or Abby”-he emphasized our names, excluding Liann-“have any questions, please call. Anytime, just call.”

I fell back onto the bench, my weight carrying me down. I let my elbows rest on the tops of my knees and watched Ryan go around and open his car door. He stopped before he climbed in.

“I’m sorry I wasn’t at the church today,” he said. “I meant to be. I try my best to attend those events, but this other case. .”

He didn’t finish the thought. He started the engine, and the tires kicked up gravel while Liann and I watched him go.

Chapter Nine

A light burned in our living room when I came home, and at the end of our driveway sat two cars-Abby’s and Pastor Chris’s. He must have driven her home after the graveside service and the potluck, and he must have stayed to keep her company while waiting for me. A knot of jealousy twisted in my gut. Buster was right-there was little or nothing left between Abby and me. In fact, for the past six months, I’d been sleeping alone in the guest room. Our hand-holding at the church felt, just hours later, like a forced gesture, one given in to out of the emotion of the moment.

I entered the kitchen through the back door. The house was quiet, the kitchen clean. The red light on the coffeemaker glowed, and the rich aroma of freshly brewed coffee hung in the air. I remembered the evenings I came home from work when Caitlin was still a toddler. The excitement I felt at just coming through the door, being with my wife and child. The comfort of having such a secure and solid home and family. I thought it would never end.

“Abby?”

I moved down the hallway to the front of the house, past a wall of framed photos. Our wedding. Caitlin through the years, including the one I carried with me at all times, the one I’d shown Pete at the Fantasy Club. But I also saw the empty spaces where Abby had removed some photos of Caitlin-her kindergarten portrait, a photo of her as a newborn, a snapshot of her soccer team. Pieces of Caitlin disappeared before my eyes as I walked down the hall.

Abby sat on the end of the couch but didn’t look up or meet my eye. Pastor Chris did. He sat legs crossed, a mug of coffee in his hand, and when he saw me he smiled, his face full of cheery judgment.

“Evening, Tom,” he said, as though he and I were old friends getting together to shoot the breeze on a fall evening.

“I need to talk to Abby,” I said.

“Of course,” he said.

“Alone.”

Abby kept her head down. She held balled-up tissues in her hand, and her cheeks looked blotchy and raw. I waited, my lips pressed tightly together.

Pastor Chris leaned in close to Abby and whispered something I couldn’t hear, even in the small room. She nodded her head in response. The intimacy, the closeness of the gesture, carried out as it was right before my eyes made me mash my lips together even tighter.

Pastor Chris set down his mug, uncrossed his legs, and stood up. He placed his hand on Abby’s shoulder.

“I’ll see you tomorrow, Abby,” he said. He nodded at me. “Tom.”

“You won’t see me tomorrow,” I said.

Pastor Chris didn’t blink or appear thrown off stride. He held his smile and considered me with the perpetual placidity of the truly certain.

“But our door is always open to you,” he said, and left the house as though he didn’t have a care in the world, leaving Abby and me alone.

“Abby?”

I settled into an overstuffed chair across from her.

“Abby, I have something to tell you. Something pretty amazing.”

“You humiliated me today, Tom.”

Her words hung between us, a thick cloud of recrimination. I knew the way Abby acted when she was angry or hurt. She was a lot like me in that regard. She seethed, quietly.

“I know, but-”

“Everybody wanted to know where you were, why you weren’t there with us. What was I supposed to tell them?”

“Tell them you lied.”

“What?”

“All that bullshit at church, all the stuff about heaven. Pastor Chris saying I believed Caitlin was in heaven.”

“I don’t have control over what Chris says.”

“Right.”

“I don’t.”

“Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I didn’t want to fight; I wanted to tell Abby about Tracy, about my conversation with Ryan, about the sketch. I forced a calm into my voice that I didn’t feel. “I felt trapped there, Abby,” I said. “It felt like I was watching a play, and I was in the play but I was also watching myself. And I felt no connection to any of it. It didn’t seem like they were talking about me anymore, about my life, so I needed to leave. I should have told you. But I found something out. That’s what I came home to tell you.”

“You left me standing alone at our daughter’s grave.”

“It’s not her grave. Don’t say that. It’s not her grave at all. That’s what I’m telling you. Someone saw her. Someone I met today. They saw Caitlin. Alive. She’s alive. The police came, Ryan came, and he took a statement, and they’re going to do a sketch and everything, and it means she’s alive.”

Abby looked at me for the first time. Really looked at me. The tip of her nose was red from where she’d rubbed it with the Kleenex. Something stirred inside me for this woman. Not as simple as pity, which I might feel for a stranger. It was something more complicated, something deeper. The thick roots of love and resentment tangled together and were almost impossible to unravel. I thought I was reaching her.

She swallowed and took a deep, phlegmy breath. She sounded mucus-choked from the tears and snot.

“I’m not sure I understand what you’re saying.”

“Someone saw Caitlin,” I said, speaking slowly, enunciating clearly. “A witness. She saw her.”

“Who saw her?”

“A dancer from a club in Russellville.”

She rolled her eyes. “A stripper.”

“Abby, don’t. Just listen.”

“You’re back to that again. .” Her voice trailed off, and full realization dawned. “You were in a strip club during our daughter’s funeral.”

“It wasn’t a funeral.”

Abby stood up and started to walk away. “I can’t hear this. I can’t do this again.”

“Wait, Abby. Wait.”

She was in the hallway, but she stopped, her back to me.

“Listen, will you? Just listen. This witness went to Liann. She knows Liann. It wasn’t me, okay?”

She still didn’t turn around, but she said, “Liann knows her?”

“Yes.”

“How does Liann know her?” Abby asked.

“Can you at least look at me while I tell you this?” I asked. “Please?”

She turned around, slowly, and when she faced me, she raised her eyebrows as if to say, Hurry up, let’s get on with this.

“Do you want to sit down? It’s not all pleasant-”

“Just tell me, Tom. How does Liann know her?”

“I guess this girl, the one who saw Caitlin, has been in some trouble before, and Liann helped her out.”

“Oh.”

“It’s not really relevant, is it?”

“Okay,” Abby said. “Just tell me what she saw. I can handle it.”

She showed no inclination to leave the hallway or return to her seat, so I plunged into the story. I didn’t tell her everything, but I told her a lot. When I reached the part about the man and the lap dance, Abby’s composure broke ever so slightly. She looked down at the floor, and the movement shook loose a strand of her hair. When she went to tuck it back behind her ear, her hand shook. I felt sick to my stomach just repeating it, so I left out the worst part. .

Caitlin on her knees, in front of the man. .

“You said this was about six months ago?”

“Yeah, about that long.”

Somewhere a clock ticked steadily, a monotonous back-and-forth sound.

“That’s a long time, Tom,” she said.

“Not that long.”

“It is in this instance. The police told us-”

“The police? You’re telling me about the police? Abby, they’re not working on the case that hard anymore. They’re on to other things.”

“The police have told us that we have a twenty-four- to forty-eight-hour window here. After that, leads grow cold. They dry up. People forget things, or else they fabricate memories. .” Her voice sounded flat. She was repeating talking points.

“Yeah, I get it.”

“And this woman’s a stripper. She’s probably on drugs. Or drunk. Is that how she knows Liann? Is Liann her lawyer? I value Liann’s advice about Caitlin’s case, but if she’s bringing this girl around with some crazy story-”

“Okay, okay, forget the witness. Forget what she said.” I moved forward and stood in front of Abby. I put my hand on her shoulder, rested it there gently, offering her support. She looked a little surprised but didn’t pull away or brush me off. “The point isn’t the witness here, okay?” I said. “What matters is that six months ago someone saw Caitlin. Our Caitlin. Alive. Not ten miles from here.”

I knew I’d reached her. When I’d said, “Our Caitlin,” she took a little breath, a quick intake of air that told me those words still meant something to her.

“We thought she’d be far away. . or we thought-”

“She’d be dead.”

“Yes. That. We thought that about our own daughter. Abby, we shouldn’t have to think that about our daughter. We shouldn’t. And now we don’t. We have hope again, Abby. Real hope. For the first time in years. .”

She looked at me, straight into my eyes, then down at my hand, where it still rested on her shoulder. She seemed to be considering me. Not the news or the witness, but me.

“But this is all dependent on this woman having really seen what she says she saw. She doesn’t know Caitlin. She saw a picture of when Caitlin was twelve, but she’d be so much older.”

“But Ryan came. He talked to her. They’re going to do a sketch and send it out.”

“Did he believe her?” she asked. “Did he say this was solid?”

“You know how Ryan is. He’s cautious. He has other cases he’s working. He doesn’t want to give us false hope.”

“Did he believe her?”

I hesitated. That told her all she wanted to know. She started to pull away, but I applied pressure on her shoulder, trying to keep her from backing up.

“Ryan wouldn’t be having the sketch done if he didn’t believe her,” I said.

“I thought you had such a low opinion of the police.”

“I know they haven’t always told us the truth. They never once told us they thought she was dead, did they? But you know damn well they were thinking it. They just string us along, make vague promises and offer platitudes. ‘We’re still working on things. . We still have leads. .’ They don’t care. Liann’s right. They can’t care as much as we do-that’s just a fact of something like this. The cops go home to their own wives and kids, and the parents of the victim have to keep carrying the flag. That’s why we have to keep her memory alive. That’s why Liann is so important. She cares like we do. She understands. Her daughter was-”

I stopped myself.

Abby didn’t say anything. Where just a few moments earlier it felt as though I had been making progress with her, slowly thawing the ice and reaching an essential part of Abby, just as quickly things turned back away. I was losing her again. I could sense a turn in the air as palpable as the arrival of a cold front.

“What?” I asked.

“We’ve never talked about it, Tom.”

“About what?” I waited. “That she might be dead?”

Abby shook her head. “That she did run away from us.”

“No, Abby. Never.”

She became more animated. “She was so moody and withdrawn. I never knew what she was thinking or feeling. She could have lived a whole life we didn’t know about. And those Internet searches. Seattle. . the trains. . She was taking the dog to the park. Maybe she met somebody there, somebody she was talking to. We wouldn’t know.”

“What are you saying?”

“And now this story about the girl in the club. If it is Caitlin, if she was doing those things. .” Abby’s lip curled as she spoke. “Maybe she wants to be gone and stay gone. Maybe. . if she was right here, so close to us and. .” She turned away, starting up the stairs to the bedrooms. “I can’t do this anymore. I can’t.”

“What?”

She stopped near the top of the stairs and looked back. “This has been difficult, Tom.”

“Of course. I know.”

“No, you don’t. I’m not talking about Caitlin’s disappearance.” She sat down on the top step. Her body weight seemed to go out of her. She almost collapsed. “I’m not talking about that. I’m talking about how difficult it’s been for me to watch you go through this over the last four years. Ryan’s going to send out this sketch, and you come home all excited. Well, Ryan doesn’t know what hope has done to this house. To this marriage. Does he?”

“Abby-”

“Every time a piece of news comes in about Caitlin. It could be just a scrap. A girl would get assaulted across town, and you’d want to know who did it. Or there’d be an abduction attempt an hour away, and you’d be on the phone to the police telling them to check it out. Ryan humors you, doesn’t he? He always takes your calls, right?”

“He came out today as soon as he could.”

“I love and miss Caitlin as much as you-”

“No one said you didn’t.”

“I know. And I do appreciate that.” She rubbed her palms together, as though scraping something off them. “You asked me once why the church meant so much to me. You acted confounded by the fact that I wanted to go and spend my time there, as though just nurturing my faith wasn’t reason enough. I know you think people who talk that way-who say things like ‘nurturing my faith’-are beneath you, but there’s nothing I can do about that. Is there?”

I didn’t respond.

“I went to the church because your unreasonable hope didn’t leave room for anything else in our life together. I was squeezed out. And while you may not have questioned my love for Caitlin, you did question how invested I was in keeping her memory alive. You thought that if I didn’t pore over every missing-persons case in the country, or if at some point I wanted to stop spending my weekends organizing search parties, that I just didn’t care enough. That I was deluded or out of touch. But that’s not the case. I just chose to go on. It’s a little selfish, I admit, but I chose to go on with my life rather than to spend all my time as the poor, unfortunate woman who lost her daughter. And the church helps me do that.”

She paused. I still didn’t say anything. But I noticed a different kind of look on her face, a newfound relief or ease. She was unburdening herself.

“I didn’t want you to get rid of Frosty because he bothered me. I know you think that, but it’s not the case. I wanted you to get rid of him for you. I thought maybe if you did it, you’d be able to move on. It was a last-ditch attempt, I guess. I thought it might have worked. The last few days seemed better, and this morning at the church-”

“What do you mean by ‘last-ditch’?”

She looked down at her hands. “Chris and I have been talking. He’s been counseling me. Ordinarily, he doesn’t encourage people to divorce-Well, I guess if we had children to consider. . But we think-I think-it would be for the best. It seems inevitable in a way. This happens to a lot of couples who lose a child.”

She looked up at me for a quick moment, her eyes full of tears. Then she stood and walked into what used to be our bedroom.

“Hold on.” I scrambled along behind her. The evidence was all over the bedroom. Two suitcases open and full of clothes. The closet door thrown wide and nearly empty.

Abby stood in the middle of the room, chewing on a fingernail.

“You’re really doing it?” I asked.

“One of us has to, Tom.”

I pointed behind me, toward the stairs and the lower level of the house. “Is there something else going on here? Is this about-?” I couldn’t say his name. It tasted like ash in my mouth. “Him?”

Abby looked at me, her eyes full of pity. “Oh, Tom. If it were only that simple.”

“If you’re fucking another man, it is simple. If you’re not the person I thought you were, the person you claim to be-”

“Don’t be crude,” she said. “Chris is helping me. There might be a job at the church, something to get me started. They have a place I can stay, in their retreat housing. It’s temporary, of course. I talked to someone at Fields, someone in the School of Ed. I think I’d like to go back to teaching. It wouldn’t take me long to get recertified here. And there are jobs. Maybe working with children again, teaching them, would fulfill me in some way my life isn’t fulfilling me right now. I wouldn’t expect you to leave this house. You’ve always liked living here, and I know you think one of us should always be here in case Caitlin. . if she ever came back.”

We were quiet then. I sat on the edge of the bed, letting my body weight sink into the mattress. Abby came over and bent down. She planted a kiss on the top of my head. I reached up and took her hand. We clasped tightly for a moment; then she slipped loose.

“I know you think this is my fault,” I said.

“It’s no one’s fault. Not really.”

“I don’t mean us,” I said. “I mean Caitlin. I know you think I let her get away with too much, that she shouldn’t have been allowed to walk the dog in the park alone. She was too young, and Frosty. . Frosty was too big. .”

“That’s all over, Tom.”

“I just wanted her to run toward life and not be afraid of it. You know, my family, growing up-it was awful, so smothering. It was like living without oxygen.”

“I know, Tom.”

But I wasn’t sure she did. Abby’s parents were frighteningly normal: upper middle class and traditional. A little repressed, a little concerned with appearances, but next to my family they looked like royalty. I don’t know if Abby ever really understood what it was like to come from a family like mine, even though she often said she did.

“I didn’t want her to be tied to us,” I said. “Like we held her back.”

“It’s late, Tom. .”

“Do you remember what it was like when Caitlin was little?” I asked. “Just the three of us in the house together. Watching TV or playing games. Hell, it didn’t matter what we were doing.”

“It was good, Tom,” she said. “Back then, it was good.”

“Back then,” I said, repeating her words, letting them hang in the air between us. “I tried to get Frosty back today. I went to the shelter and asked about him, but he was already gone.”

Abby raised her hand to her mouth. “Oh,” she said. “It happened that fast.”

I shook my head. “Not that. Somebody adopted him. Some family, I guess. They wouldn’t give me the name, even though I said I wanted to get him back.”

“He’s probably okay then. Somebody wanted him.”

“He and I could have lived here together. He was good company.”

“It’s going to take me a little while to get all my stuff out. There isn’t much room over there at the church. It’s like a dorm, I guess.”

“Hell, maybe I’ll just go get another dog.”

Abby made a noise deep in her throat. No one else would have recognized it, but I knew. She started to cry. Her tears always began that way, and then she quickly began taking deep, sobbing breaths, so it sounded like she couldn’t get enough air. Then I started crying, too, the tears stinging my cheeks and falling into my lap. I wiped my face with the back of my hand, first one side, then the other. “One dog’s pretty much the same as any other, right?”

Chapter Ten

Ryan showed up with a sketch the following week. Abby was slowly moving her things out of the house, one box at a time, so there was some disarray, which caused Ryan to raise an eyebrow. But he stepped around the mess without saying anything or making a comment. It was one of the few times he didn’t wear a tie. He wore the collar of his white shirt open, revealing a strip of T-shirt and some straggly black chest hairs.

“You’ve got it?” I asked before he took a seat.

He nodded and lowered his body into the big chair in our living room.

I couldn’t bring myself to sit. While Ryan sat calmly, patiently, almost Buddha-like in the chair, I paced back and forth among the boxes. It had taken him three days just to arrange a meeting with Tracy. First her phone was disconnected; then someone at her apartment told Ryan she was out of town. I called Liann and asked her-told her-she needed to find this girl and apply some pressure.

“We need her,” I’d said.

And that only earned me an extended lecture from Liann, one in which she explained to me how delicate it was to deal with women like Tracy, women who were living victimized lives. I wanted to be sympathetic, I did. But I wanted the goddamned sketch more. I didn’t have anything else to think about. Finally, Liann met Tracy at the Fantasy Club and brought her to the police station.

And so Ryan sat in front of me, holding the Rosetta stone.

“Can I see it?Please?”

“Abby isn’t home,” he said, more of a statement than a question.

“She’s. .” I pointed at the boxes. “This has been. .”

He nodded. He’d probably seen it a million times.

“Do you want me to call her?” I asked. “Get her over here? I really don’t want to wait. I want to see the sketch.”

“Tom, let’s talk first.”

“Jesus,” I said. “I don’t need another lecture.”

“I don’t lecture you.”

“Liann set me straight about this. Now you.”

Ryan raised a finger. “Liann doesn’t work for the police. She doesn’t speak for me. I appreciate what she did, getting this girl to meet with the artist, but she doesn’t speak for me. If I have something to say, it comes from me.”

Finally, I sat, hoping to speed things along.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “Tell me.”

He cleared his throat. “I was there the whole time she worked with the sketch artist, and then I spoke with the artist after she left. She gave the same story and approximate description she gave to me at the strip club, and apparently the same one she gave to you.”

“That’s good, isn’t it?”

Ryan’s facial features grew pinched.

“It’s not good?” I asked.

“I believe she saw the man she says she saw. Her description of him is quite detailed. It led to a very good sketch, as far as those things go. In fact, it’s very possible she knows this man. Well.”

“Did you ask her about this? Did you ask his name?”

Ryan gave me a supercilious look, the kind I use on my students. It said, Do you think I don’t know how to do my job?

“Okay, so you asked her, and she stuck to the original story. But I get the feeling you’re hinting at something larger.”

He hesitated, then shook his head. He chased the thought away or held it back.

“I have some other concerns.” He reached into his interior jacket pocket and fumbled around. I thought he was going to bring out the sketch at last, but instead he pulled out a small pocket notebook, the kind he wrote in whenever he was conducting business. He reached into another pocket and brought out a pair of half-moon reading glasses and worked them into place on the tip of his nose. He leaned back in his chair and studied the notebook. “This woman, Tracy Fairlawn, has been arrested twice for drug possession, once for prostitution, and has also been investigated by the child welfare department. These things call into question, to some extent, the reliability of whatever she says.”

“No, it doesn’t. You said you believed her story-”

Ryan raised a finger of caution. “I said I believe she knows this man.”

“But you can’t throw her story out because of these arrests. That’s-”

“Criminalization of the victim,” he said. “I know. Liann’s taught you well.” He flipped the notebook shut and put it away. He took off the glasses. “I detected something both times I spoke to Miss Fairlawn about this man. There was something underneath her words, an anger or sense of grievance lurking there, something I couldn’t quite place my finger on, but it gives me reason to stop for a moment. Tom, I want to give you the choice about something. We can go ahead and distribute this sketch, or we can hold off a few days until we know more about where this information is coming from.”

“Let me just look at the thing.”

“I think if we run with it, we risk getting a lot of information that won’t be helpful because we don’t know if we’re starting from a good place or not. We risk shooting our last good bullet here-”

“Can I see it?” I asked. “Will you just hand it over so I can see it? I don’t want to talk about it anymore. I want to see it.”

Reluctantly, he started digging into his jacket pocket. He brought out a white piece of paper, folded like a letter. He shifted his bulk, leaning forward, and the paper hovered in the air between us.

But I didn’t make a quick grab for it. My hand moved slowly, as though weights were tied to it, and the farther I extended the more I felt it shake. Ryan didn’t seem to notice. He held the paper in the air until I took it.

As I unfolded it, Ryan spoke. “Take a long look. See if it jars your memory. Coworkers, service people. The guy who cuts the grass or cleans the floors at work.”

I unfolded the paper and took it in. It was a simple drawing, black on white. I saw the wide, fat nose Tracy had described. It filled the middle of the page and made the man depicted look brutish, almost simian. His brows were thick and dark, and the eyes beneath them looked small and narrow, as though the artist had depicted the man in midsquint. I scanned the other features quickly-the hard set of the jaw, the thin lips-and absorbed a sense of menace from the simple drawing.

“I don’t think I know him,” I said.

“I would like Abby to take a look at it,” Ryan said.

I continued to stare at the drawing and tried to retrofit that face to all the images of the kidnapper that continually ran through my head. A car pulling up at the park, or a man talking to Caitlin, making a grab for her arm.

The man in the strip club, in the little booth with my daughter.

“Do you think it’s him?” I asked.

“Like I was saying before. . Tom?” He wanted me to lower the sketch, so I did. Slowly. “We need to think carefully about what we do next,” he said. “It’s been a long time since Caitlin disappeared. The public has a short attention span. Over time, people understandably forget. They move on to other things, other news stories. Their memories get muddy.”

I held up the paper. “I want to run it. I don’t want to wait. I’ve been waiting four years, and this is the best lead we have. Run it.”

Ryan rubbed his hand over his cheek as though he were tired.

“It’s my choice ultimately,” he said. “If I don’t think it’s in the best interest of the case to run it, I won’t.”

“How could this not be in the best interests of the case?” I asked.

“It is, of course,” he said. “What I said the other night is true-this is the best lead we’ve had in four years. But I’m thinking of you and Abby as well as the case.”

“What about us?” I asked.

“How well do you know your daughter, Tom?”

And there it was, just as Liann had predicted. Just as I’d suspected all along. Ryan believed his own counternarrative of Caitlin’s disappearance, and he intended to share it.

“I guess it’s hard for me to answer that since I haven’t seen her in four years.”

“Before that. Before she disappeared.”

“I knew her very well then.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yes. We were happy.”

Ryan raised his eyebrows. He glanced around the room at the boxes. “Were you?”

“What are you saying, Ryan? I’m not following you.”

“We don’t always know people the way we think we know them, do we? People change. Our lives change.”

“Therefore. .?”

“You believe this was your daughter who was seen in this club, right?”

“I do.”

He nodded. “Did the behavior described match what you think you know of Caitlin?”

“She was twelve when she disappeared. Twelve. And that man”-I tapped the paper-“this man has her. He has her against her will. Which is it, Ryan? Either you believe Tracy’s story and you think this is Caitlin, or you don’t. And if you don’t, why are we having this conversation?”

Ryan took a deep breath. “Four years have passed, Tom.”

“I know that.”

“Leaving aside the very remote chance that this is going to lead to anything positive-”

“Ryan-”

“Now, hold on,” he said. “Let’s play a little of the believing game here. Say this sketch does lead to something good. Let’s say this story is true and somehow, someway, we do find Caitlin and bring her home to you. Those four years, the time you lost with her-would you be prepared for what that would be like, Tom?”

“Will this be in the news tomorrow?” I asked, holding out the sketch.

“You didn’t answer my question,” he said.

“Ryan, will this run tomorrow?”

He looked around at the boxes again. “Tom, have you and Abby been seeking counseling of some kind? Help? It’s none of my business, of course, but this sort of thing places an enormous strain on a marriage. And on an individual. If you wanted, I could refer you to some of the resources we have available through the department.”

“You offered me that four years ago,” I said. “And every year since. And I appreciate it greatly, but I’m not interested.”

“We have a program-it’s funded by the state-where volunteers, private citizens, meet with and assist families affected by tragedy. Did I mention this to you? It’s relatively new, and it’s called Volunteer Victim Services. These people are trained, of course, but some feel it’s less pressurized than conventional therapy. It’s not as structured and it’s even more comforting in a way. Professionals sometimes get constricted by their roles.”

“Ryan-”

“You could certainly choose to seek help through more conventional channels,” he said. “There are a number of good therapists and counselors in New Cambridge. Even at the university-”

“There’s only one thing I want and need. And you know what it is.” I held the paper out in front of me. “Will this be in the paper tomorrow?”

“It will,” he said. “We’ll go public with it tomorrow. I’ll call you and let you know the details.”

Chapter Eleven

Something woke me that night, thumping. I fell asleep in the guest room earlier than usual, after flipping on the porch light and making sure the house key still remained in its hiding spot. After hearing Tracy’s story and seeing the sketch, the ritual seemed more urgent, more essential.

But Abby’s words had struck a nerve: If Caitlin were living so close to us. .? I knew what she meant, what completed the thought: Why didn’t she just come home?

Abby was gone already, sleeping at the church. Whenever she came to the house to collect more belongings, we were cordially, distantly polite to each other, and I didn’t allow the sight of her to make me think she might have reconsidered her decision to leave.

I came awake disoriented. I checked the clock on the bedside table: 10:01. Not that late. My heart rate was up, my shirt a little damp. I’d been dreaming. Not a coherent narrative, but a series of disjointed and haunting images, a parade of all my fears. Caitlin calling my name in the park. . The man from the sketch reaching for her, taking her away. .

I heard the thumping again.

I lowered my feet to the cold floor. My mind started to catch up, shaking off the dream images and focusing on the real. Someone was in the house. Downstairs.

Caitlin?

I jumped up, started out of the room. I made no effort to soften my steps. Whoever-whatever-was downstairs would hear me coming and know I knew they were there. I didn’t care. I bounded down the stairs, wearing only a T-shirt and boxer shorts. At the bottom I called out into the house:

“Caitlin? Is that you?”

Light came from both the kitchen and the living room. I turned left, toward the front of the house.

“Caitlin?”

I entered the room. Someone was sitting on the couch. She didn’t look up when I came in, but kept her eyes fixed on the paper in her hand.

Abby.

Some of the boxes were moved. More were packed.

And she held the sketch.

She stared at it, oblivious to my appearance. I didn’t speak, even though I wanted to ask why she was showing up so late. Did she want to scare the crap out of me? But I left her alone to absorb the face on the paper.

While I stood there and grew colder, Abby raised her free hand and slowly, almost gently traced the outline of the man’s face. It looked like she was trying to get a reading from it, absorb some psychic emanations. Finally, she put the sketch facedown on the table and leaned back against the couch cushions.

“Is that him?” she asked.

“It might be.”

“Ryan called me on my cell phone. He told me about the sketch being released. He said he didn’t know if we’d be talking.”

“He came by.”

“Did you tell him I’m moving out?”

I gestured toward the boxes. “He’s a detective. I think he figured it out on his own.” I entered the room and sat on the opposite end of the couch from her.

“I must have woken you up,” she said. “You said Caitlin’s name on the stairs. You used to do that all the time, back then. Do you remember?”

“I do.”

“I used to think I didn’t care as much as you because I didn’t dream about Caitlin or mutter her name in my sleep. I thought I should have been doing that too.”

“They’re just dreams. They’re not a measure of your love for her.”

“That’s nice of you to say.” She smiled a little. “You were right about something. I have. . blamed you for Caitlin’s disappearance at times. I guess it was just easier than blaming some stranger, some unknown entity. I’m working on these things with Chris. We’re trying to move on from all the things in the past and trying to get to a more positive place. Emotionally.”

“How neat and tidy.”

“Ryan told me he has doubts about the sketch and about the witness. He said if it was up to him he wouldn’t go forward with it. I told him to go ahead and do whatever you wanted to do. I think this is important for you, Tom. Important for your process of moving on. You need to know that everything that could be done has been done.”

“And you don’t need that?”

“We’re in different places in many ways,” she said. “It’s strange, though. When Ryan called and told me about the sketch, I wanted to see it. Right away I did. I told him I didn’t care to, but I really did. That’s why I’m here tonight. I told myself I was getting more stuff.”

“This late? It’s after ten.”

“Yeah.” She laughed a little. “I knew Ryan gave you a copy, and I wanted to see it. I wanted to see that face.”

“I understand.”

“You know what I was thinking about earlier today?” she asked. “That trip we took to New England when Caitlin was little.”

“What about it?”

“What a great time we had. How beautiful the scenery was. How easy it was to just be together, the three of us. I remember how you wanted to baptize Caitlin in Walden Pond. She was just three, but you took her down to the edge of the pond and splashed water on her head like you were in a church.” She smiled a little. “I thought you were crazy, of course. But I also thought it was endearing. I could tell how much you loved her. And how much you loved the idea of baptizing her in that pond.”

“As I recall, you liked the idea too. You took a picture of it.”

“That’s right.” Her mood seemed to have shifted a little. Her voice sounded a little colder, a little more distant. “I did like the idea back then. But now when I look back on it, I see the whole thing differently. I see a couple and the husband wants to baptize his daughter in a pond and the wife wants her baptized in a church.”

“She did get baptized in a church, because you wanted her to.”

Abby didn’t respond. She leaned forward and picked up the sketch of the suspect. She handed it to me, practically stuffing it into my hands, crumpling it a little.

“But I don’t want to see it anymore. Just keep it away from me if I’m around.”

I straightened the paper, smoothed out the crumples.

“I know you know some things, Tom. I could tell by the way Ryan talked to me on the phone that there were things he was keeping from me. I guess they’re the details of what happened in that strip club, what that woman saw.” She swallowed. “I don’t want to know those things, Tom. Ever. Those are just things you’re going to have to endure alone. I can’t-”

“I get it,” I said. “In fact, it’s not really anything new, is it? Me enduring these things alone.”

She let out a long sigh. “We know, Tom. You’re the saddest.” She stood up. “I was going to stay here tonight, but I think I’ll just take some of these things back to the church.”

I stood up, too. “Do you mind keeping it down while you do? I feel pretty tired.”

I went back up the stairs, sketch in hand, and didn’t wait for her to reply.

Chapter Twelve

The morning walkers and joggers still crowded the park. People went past me in waves, excusing themselves, occasionally brushing against me, and I wondered what they thought of me, a slightly disheveled man wearing jeans and a button-down shirt among their shorts and athletic shoes. Still, I welcomed their company, the push and jostle of other human beings. Aloneness without being lonely.

I knew what lay on the far side of the park-the cemetery and Caitlin’s “grave.” My reaction to it in the wake of the ceremony and the eyewitness account from Tracy seemed similar to Abby’s reaction to the sketch of the suspect. I wanted to see that grave again, if only to confirm its reality in my head. It was, for better or worse, a memorial to my daughter, a stony testament to the fact that she existed on this earth at one time.

I started to sweat under my shirt. I rolled up my sleeves to my elbows and kept walking. I thought about how we’d made it to that point, how Abby’s involvement with the church had led to that headstone in the ground. Abby had begun attending church with Pastor Chris before Caitlin disappeared, but her attendance at that time was sporadic. Once a month, maybe. Sometimes twice. Eventually, Abby announced that she wanted Caitlin to be baptized there by Pastor Chris. Caitlin was eight years old then and refused, but I took Abby’s side and told Caitlin she should do it. I chose not to attend the service, but Caitlin grudgingly agreed, scowling and dragging her feet the whole way. When they came home, I asked Caitlin how it had gone.

“Weird,” she said, crinkling her nose.

“I figured as much,” I said. “Do you buy any of it?”

“Nope.”

We laughed together, more like conspiring siblings than parent and child. Abby left the room.

“You’re both so. . hard,” she’d said. “I can’t get near either one of you.”

Her involvement with the church had increased steadily after that-a mission she undertook alone-and when Caitlin disappeared, Pastor Chris and a gang of his helpers set up shop in our living room, praying, bringing food, answering the phone. They kept a constant vigil, and when the media and police left, the church people left too, but Abby went with them and so did what remained of our marriage.

At the far side of the park, near the cemetery, I slowed my pace. More trees lined the path there, providing shade. I looked behind me and saw no one, so I wasn’t in any danger of getting run over or becoming the obstacle clogging the path. I knew Caitlin’s marker-cenotaph, as Buster would say-lay just beyond the trees, and where the foliage was thin enough I made out the rows and rows of headstones.

What if Ryan was right?

They would release the sketch, and for a time things would happen. A flurry of attention, the discovery of possibilities.

But after that? If none of the leads panned out, and the sketch proved to be a dead end. .

What would I do then?

I turned my gaze away from the cemetery, and that’s when I saw the girl on the path ahead of me.

We locked eyes for a moment. She saw me. I knew she did. And as soon as she saw me, she bolted, moving from left to right and through the small stand of trees that separated the park from the cemetery. She was blond and young and looked just like-

Caitlin!

I ran forward, my shoes slipping and sliding against the gravel track. I felt like a man running through deep water. I couldn’t move fast enough. Then I reached the spot and looked through the trees. There was a small break, a worn little path leading from the park to the cemetery.

I followed, ducking my head beneath the low branches, and came out onto the green lawn of the cemetery. I looked around. Nothing but the flat earth and the headstones. No sign of the girl.

“Caitlin!”

I moved left, out toward the main road. My breath caught in my throat, the sweat thickening beneath my arms. I crossed the small, winding road that wrapped through the cemetery.

I called out again. “Caitlin!”

No girl in sight, but in the distance a graveside service was in progress. Several heads turned toward me, considering me. I didn’t have time to think about the figure I must have been cutting. I didn’t call out again, but worked my way up through the cemetery, keeping close to the boundary it shared with the park. I looked to the left, into the trees, hoping for another glimpse of the girl or even just the sound of rustling branches and leaves.

But there was nothing. I went all the way up the boundary, all the way to the parking lot by the small limestone chapel, where the cemetery held services. The lot was full of cars, including a hearse and two gleaming black sedans, but no girl. No Caitlin. I stood there in the sun, my breath coming in short huffs. But there was no girl there, no sign of a girl at all.

Chapter Thirteen

I wandered back toward the house in something of a daze. The girl-blond, thin, fast-definitely looked like Cait-and I’d spotted her in the park where Caitlin had disappeared. She looked younger than Caitlin should have looked after four years away.

But then, if it was Caitlin, if that was my daughter, why did she run at the first sight of me? Why did she bolt when we locked eyes?

The sun was passing overhead, and the sweat under my shirt itched at my skin like millions of tiny bugs. I unbuttoned the shirt, my hands shaking and struggling, and pulled it off. I walked the rest of the way in my sticky wet T-shirt.

My phone rang. Liann. “Tom, where are you?” she asked, without even a hello.

“I just saw Caitlin in the park,” I said, also not bothering with pleasantries.

“What?”

“I saw Caitlin. I mean, it might have been Caitlin. It was a young girl, and she looked like Caitlin, but when she saw me she ran off and I couldn’t catch her.”

“We don’t have time for this now, Tom. Listen. The police, Ryan-they’re having a press conference right now. They’re releasing the sketch.”

“Now?”

“Yes. Now. You need to get down there. They need a parent, a human face, to give the story more impact.”

“Why didn’t he call me?” I looked down at my sweaty T-shirt, the dust on my shoes. No shower. I probably looked crazed. “I don’t think-”

“You need to go, Tom. I’m coming to your house now. I’ll see you in three minutes.”

I managed to mostly button my shirt by the time I slipped into Liann’s car, and I looked at myself in the mirror on the passenger side, smoothing my hair down with the aid of spit applied to my fingers. Liann was all business. She barely looked at me when I entered the vehicle, and drove across town like a New York cab-bie. “What am I supposed to do when I get there?” I asked.

“Just stand there, be a presence. Answer reporters’ questions. They need to see the toll this is taking on you. You need sympathy.”

“Should I call Abby?”

Liann made a dismissive noise deep in her throat. “You can do this alone. We don’t need her.”

“I look like shit.”

She took her eyes off the road for a second, giving me a quick glance. “Even better. You look more desperate.”

We entered the square and approached the station. My right hand clutched the door handle so hard my fingers hurt.

“How did you know about the press conference?” I asked.

“I know people in the department. I talk to people every day.”

“Why didn’t Ryan call me about it?”

“I’ve seen the police do this before,” she said. “If they think a parent is a loose cannon or too distraught.”

“He thinks that about me?”

“Please, Tom. Look at yourself.” Liann stopped the car behind a news van. I expected more. Liann undid the locks and made a shooing gesture toward me. “Go on. Go. You’re late.”

“Aren’t you coming in?”

“You’re better off without me. Go.”

“What about the girl I saw at the cemetery?”

“Our minds can play tricks on us, Tom. Now go.”

I stepped onto the sidewalk and into the sunlight. As soon as I shut the door, she drove off, leaving me alone.

The police spoke to the media in a small conference room near the back of the station that felt small and cheap. The out-of-date wood paneling needed to be replaced. The bookshelves they used as a backdrop were covered with dust. But it played well on TV. When they placed a police official-either in uniform or wearing a suit and tie-in front of that backdrop, addressing a bank of microphones, it brought instant credibility and authority. I’d stood there on more than one occasion when Caitlin had first disappeared. Abby and I were asked to step forward, blinking against the burning glow of the TV lights, and plead for Caitlin’s return. I imagined we looked like any other victims of tragedy-stunned and weary and desperate enough to make the viewers at home say to themselves, Thank God it’s not me.

I told the uniformed officer at the front desk who I was and asked to be allowed back. For a moment, he hesitated, studying me in the way only cops can, as though I were giving off a scent he recognized, some combination of fear and desperation. He reached for his phone.

“I’m sorry I’m late,” I said. “Detective Ryan told me the time, and I forgot. Ever since my daughter disappeared. .”

I tried to look helpless. I wasn’t above using my status as the parent of a missing child to get something if I needed it. This cop didn’t seem particularly moved. He picked up his phone, dialed an extension, and then spoke in a voice so low I made out only a few words.

Press conference. . father. . back there. .

He nodded and hung up.

“Someone’s coming to take you back.”

“I know the way.”

He shook his head. “Someone needs to take you.”

I drummed my fingers on his desktop. I looked around. There were hard plastic chairs and copies of Reader’s Digest to distract people. An old man waited alone, head down. A TV was mounted on a bracket in the corner. It broadcast a game show.

“Can you get the news on there?” I asked. “Are they showing the press conference?”

“Not live,” he said. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

“Can’t I just go back? I know the way-”

“Sir, you have to wait.”

“Why aren’t they showing it?”

But the cop ignored me. I looked back at the TV. The host of the show threw a bunch of money up in the air, and it fluttered to the ground while contestants grabbed handfuls. The phone on the cop’s desk rang. He listened, then nodded, looking up at me.

“Okay,” he said into the phone and hung up.

“Was that about me?”

“Someone’s coming to take you back now.”

“You said that already.”

“Sir. .”

The heavy steel door to the side of the desk opened. A uniformed female officer held the door for me and jerked her head down the hallway, indicating I should step through.

“Thanks,” I said.

“They’re wrapping up,” she said.

The door shut behind us as we walked down the hall. Fluorescents glowed overhead and watery blue paint covered the walls.

“Wrapping up? I missed it?”

“We can’t go walk in right in the middle,” she said.

I knew the way and walked ahead of the cop. I turned right and then right again and saw the conference room door. A uniformed officer stood outside, a cell phone to his ear.

“I’ll just slip in,” I said to no one in particular, but the cop with the phone held up his hand like he was directing traffic. I felt another hand on my arm.

“Just wait here,” the female officer said. To make sure I did, she kept her hand in place, and we stood there, waiting for what seemed like another eternity.

Finally the door of the conference room opened. A few people began filing out. I didn’t recognize anyone, and I tried to look over their heads and into the room.

“Can you let go now?” I asked the cop, and she did.

Just a few more people came out, and they stepped aside as I entered the room. I saw Ryan, and he saw me. He looked surprised and-maybe-a little disappointed.

I expected more. A lot of cameras, a lot of people. But I saw only one film crew and a handful of people who looked like reporters.

Someone said my name.

“Mr. Stuart? What did you think of the press conference today?”

I thought I recognized the woman. Did she work for the Daily News?

“I missed it,” I said. “I didn’t know-”

“Are you encouraged by this lead?”

“Of course.”

“How have you managed to keep your spirits up during this ordeal?”

A few more people gathered around. I hoped they were all reporters. I saw Ryan come closer, his big head and body standing out in the crowd. He looked nervous, concerned. I remembered what I looked like. Unshaven. Unshowered.

But the questions kept coming.

“How is your wife holding up?”

“She’s fine.”

“Why didn’t she come today?”

“She’s. . I don’t know. I guess she’s moved on.”

“Moved on? How so?”

“She doesn’t really think Caitlin’s coming home.”

A TV light came on, and, beneath it, a glowing red dot. They were filming. I started to sweat again. Ryan said something, but the light kept me from seeing him.

“Mr. Stuart’s had a long morning,” he said. “And I need to brief him.”

“Do you think your daughter is still alive? Do you think you’ll see her again?”

I couldn’t see who’d asked the question. The room swirled a little bit.

“Yes, I do.”

Camera shutters clicked and whirred. A flash went off. No one said anything, no more questions, so I kept going.

“In fact, I have seen her. Just this morning, I saw her in the park.”

The cameras clicked more rapidly. There were more flashes.

I felt hotter, more nervous, my clothes too tight and constraining.

“You saw her?”

“Your daughter?”

“Really?”

I felt a hand on my arm, a strong grip. Ryan. He started to lead me away.

I wanted to explain.

“I saw her-I saw a girl-in the park by the cemetery. I don’t really know if it was Caitlin-”

Ryan pulled me out of the room and down the hallway, leaving the reporters behind. He ushered me into another office, a small room with two empty desks and a filing cabinet.

“That was not a smart thing you just did back there,” he said.

“Why didn’t you tell me this was happening?”

He sighed. “Isn’t it obvious?”

“No, it’s not.”

“Look, Tom. This came together quickly. I had to get that sketch out to the newspapers. Isn’t that what you wanted? And, yes, we do like to have the families at these things, but given the strain you’ve been under and the strain in your marriage, we-I-thought it might be best to talk about this on my own.”

“I can talk about my daughter if I want. I have the right.”

“You repeated a ghost story. Now anything good that would have come from the sketch could be overshadowed by what you said in there.” He turned toward the door and opened it. He stuck his head into the hallway and looked both ways. “Get out of here. Go out to your car and get out of here. And don’t talk to any reporters. I’ll try to make this right.” He gave me the once-over. “I think they’ll believe you’re under a great deal of stress and don’t know what you’re saying.” He remained in the door, holding it open for me.

But I wasn’t ready to go.

“Ryan, can I ask you something?”

He didn’t encourage me, but he didn’t walk away either.

“What do you think I saw in the park today? What was that?”

“You saw what you wanted to see,” he said. “Nothing more, nothing less. It’s human nature to do that. This is a difficult time for you, Tom. Very difficult.”

“Is that it? It’s just an illusion?”

“The feeling is real,” he said. “The desire to see your daughter.”

I shook my head. “But it’s not enough, is it? The desire? The wish? For me, it’s just not enough.”

Chapter Fourteen

My cell phone buzzed on the nightstand. I kept my eyes closed, ignoring it, but it seemed to buzz louder, shaking and jumping against the varnished wood like a beached fish. I reached out and answered it without looking at the caller ID screen.

“Yeah?”

“What the fuck is going on up there?”

“Buster?”

“Did you see this shit in the paper? Did you really say this stuff?”

I didn’t immediately follow what he was saying. I tried, through the fog, to reconstruct the events of the previous day and evening. It came back in a rush-my morning at the park and my encounter with the reporters at the police station.

“It’s in the paper down there?” I asked.

“Are you kidding? Missing child possibly seen in strip club, in the company of an adult male, and then the father of the missing child goes on some loony riff about seeing the girl in the park-”

“I know the story,” I said. Through the window I saw a flat, gray sky. The house felt cool, as though the weather was turning. “I’m just glad it’s getting coverage.”

“Don’t worry. Everybody knows your story now.”

I pulled the blanket over my bare legs and leaned back against the soft pillows, letting them support my head and shoulders.

“I’m surprised you called,” I said. “I thought maybe I’d pissed you off.”

“You did,” he said. “But I’ve been thinking about you and how tough this is on you.”

“Really?”

“Sure. I haven’t appreciated the toll it must take on you. And I don’t mean in the obvious ways. Hell, look at you. You lost your dad when you were little. And then you lose your only child. I guess I don’t think of you losing your dad since my dad was always around, but you did. You lost your old man when you were really young. And now you’ve got this with Caitlin. It’s tragic.”

“Thanks.”

“It looks like I was wrong anyway. Shit, this is the real deal, isn’t it? Did you meet this witness?”

“I did.” I told him the story of meeting Tracy in the strip club. He listened, interjecting with occasional exclamations of amazement and surprise. Telling the story to someone who was so into it, who was eager to hear it and who had the appropriate responses, felt gratifying. I felt better just laying the facts out there. “So that’s where we stand,” I said when I was finished.

“I hope they catch this guy. Fucking dirtbag pervert. Look at his fucking face. Have you ever seen such a son of a bitch? I’d like two minutes in a room alone with him-wouldn’t you? I’d rip his fucking guts out for doing that to such a beautiful little girl.”

I didn’t feel anything quite like Buster’s anger. Other parents whose children were victims of violent crimes spoke that way, and I always felt something must have been missing in me since I couldn’t summon the same sense of rage.

When I didn’t answer his rage with my own, Buster changed the subject. “How’s Abby taking all this?”

“Oh, well, she’s the same, you know? She’s still ‘moving on.’ She doesn’t want to hear about any of this. In fact, she’s moving out. She’s leaving me.”

“Oh,” Buster said, his voice flat.

“You’re not surprised?”

“Not really. I could tell she was looking to make a break for it. I saw it in her eyes.”

I sat up straighter in the bed. “You did?”

“Sure. She looked like a caged animal. And she’s probably doing the bouncy-bouncy with that pastor guy.”

“You think that?” The twist of jealousy that knotted in my gut surprised me.

“Who knows?” he said. He sounded less certain now. He cleared his throat. “I’m just saying. . You know, you said you two weren’t exactly kicking it anymore, so why bother with her? You’re better off without her at your side. You need to know you have people there you can count on.”

“Yeah.” I stared at our ceiling. A long, narrow crack ran through the plaster, bisecting the room; it needed to be painted. “I was hoping maybe you could come up for a few days. You can crash here. I don’t know what’s going to happen next with this suspect. Like you said, it would be nice to have someone here, someone who’s on my side.”

Buster was silent. I waited.

“Well, you know,” he said, “I can’t exactly just break away at a moment’s notice. I’m working and everything.” He cleared his throat.

“Just a couple of days. .”

“Why don’t we wait and see how this plays out,” he said. “If you get big news or a break in the case, let me know. I’ll come up.” I heard someone talking in the background, a woman. Then the sound was muffled, like his hand was over the phone. I heard his voice but couldn’t make out what he was saying. Then the sound cleared, and he was back on the line. “Okay?”

“Are you dating someone?”

“Here and there,” he said, his voice low. “So we’ll keep in touch and see what happens. Right?”

“Yeah. Right. I guess I need to work on my book.”

“Right. Idle hands and all that. Did I ask you what it’s about? Is it Melville?”

“Hawthorne. Remember?”

“Cool. The Scarlet Letter. Man, I hated that book.”

I heard the voice again in the background.

“Okay, okay,” he said. I couldn’t tell if he was talking to me or someone else. “Okay, Tom, I’ve got to run.”

“Okay,” I said, but he was already off the phone.

Chapter Fifteen

I went to my office in the English department-more out of obligation than anything else-but I couldn’t concentrate on anything. When I sat down at my desk, it felt as though I were sitting behind an unrecognizable wooden block, a piece of furniture whose purpose I no longer remembered or understood. The whole room felt that way. It smelled funny-different-and the proportions and angles of the walls seemed off, as though it had been years and not weeks since I’d been there. I made a halfhearted attempt to sort through the mail. I placed it into two piles: things I knew I would throw away and things I would probably throw away.

I turned on my computer and listened to it whir and grind as it booted. Occasionally a group of students passed in the hallway, their voices sounding like the chirps and calls of exotic birds. It was a mistake to come, I decided. There was no work I could do.

I checked my e-mail. More than eighty messages waited, most of them departmental and university announcements. I scanned the subject lines: Health Fair. Estate Planning. Sandy’s Baby Shower. Spring Teaching Schedules. I didn’t bother to go through them. They’d still be there later, and if anyone needed anything important from me, they could call. I might not answer, but they could call.

I looked at my overcrowded bookshelves. At eye level sat a pile of research materials for the Hawthorne book. I rolled my chair over and picked them up. The top page was dusty, so I wiped it off with the back of my hand. ThenI flippedthrough.A couple of photocopied articles and some notes I’d made on a legal pad. I knew it was my handwriting, but the thoughts on the page didn’t mean anything to me. I couldn’t remember what I was trying to say. “Wakefield,” it read, and the word was underlined three times. “Opacity.” It was underlined three times as well.

Someone knocked on the door, quick, tentative taps. I decided to just ignore it. But they knocked again, louder and more insistent.

“Shit,” I muttered.

I put the Hawthorne notes away and opened the door.

“Yes?”

“Mr. Stuart?”

“Yes?”

Something about her face seemed vaguely familiar, and at first I assumed she was a student from a previous semester, one of the anonymous multitudes who flew under the radar in an American Lit survey, knocking out the requirement with the same joy and gusto usually reserved for doing laundry. But then I noticed the limpness of her hair, the tiredness of her eyes. It registered.

“Tracy,” I said. “I’m sorry. Out of context, I-”

“You don’t expect to see a girl like me here on campus.”

I stepped back. “Come in. Sit down.” She looked uncertain. Her eyes roamed the room as though she were across a boundary and into another world. She settled into my extra chair, the one where students usually sat. I took my seat behind the desk. “Are you a student here?”

Her laugh possessed a bitter edge. “Yeah, I’d have to rob a bank and not just take off my clothes to pay for this. I didn’t even finish high school.”

“Thank you for talking to the police and working with them on the sketch.”

She didn’t respond. Her hand was raised to her head, and her index finger twirled a strand of brittle-looking hair. Her eyes were focused on the desktop.

“It’s going to help a lot, I think. The sketch.” When she didn’t answer again, I said, “Is there a reason why you’re here? Is something wrong?”

“I guess that’s what I wanted to talk to you about, all that stuff in the papers and on TV about your daughter.”

“It’s there because of you.”

“Yeah. .” She stopped twirling her hair and looked at me. “I’m sorry about that.”

“What are you sorry for?”

“You believe my story, don’t you?” she asked.

“Is there a reason why I shouldn’t?” I asked.

She shook her head slowly, and while she did I remembered Ryan’s comments about Tracy. Well detailed. Convincingly so.

“I saw what I saw,” she said. “I did.”

“Then there shouldn’t be a problem.”

“Have you thought about what you’d do if she came back?” she asked.

“You mean Caitlin, right? Have I thought about her coming back home?” I asked. “Of course. Many times.”

In great detail. Convincingly so. Caitlin running into my arms. Caitlin saying my name. Caitlin happy and smiling, a beautiful young woman ready to resume her life.

“I hope you get to see that come true,” she said.

She smiled a little, but it didn’t possess much warmth.

“Is something wrong, Tracy? Is there something you need to tell me that you’re having a hard time getting out?”

“You’re a religious man, right?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

“Why would you ask me that?”

“I just thought since you saw that. . vision in the park yesterday.”

I squirmed a little in my chair. “I wouldn’t call it a vision.”

“But you saw something. Something you believe in. Like me at the club.”

For the moment, I followed the train of her thought. We were alike, she and I. We were both witnesses to things central to Caitlin’s case, and while others may have had their doubts, we were both certain. We believed ourselves and each other at the very least.

She started twirling her hair again. “I haven’t had an easy time of things, you know.”

“Since we met-”

“In life.”

She looked at me again, without smiling. Her eyes were hard, impermeable. Like colored glass.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

I didn’t know where our conversation was going. I thought she was looking for reassurances from me, for an understanding that I felt happy about her coming forward and telling her story to the police. But something hovered beneath the surface of her words, something slippery and elusive I couldn’t get a handle on.

“See, I want to help you,” she said. “That’s why I called Liann, even though I’d been in trouble before and I don’t really like the police.”

“I understand.”

“I’d like to help you more.” She still twirled the hair. And with her other hand, she tapped a fingernail-the polish chipped and dark-against the armrest of the chair.

“Let me show you something.” She bent down out of my sight and rustled around in her bag. She popped back up holding a business card. She brushed a loose strand of hair out of her face, then passed the business card across the desk to me. “Here. I brought this for you.”

I reached out. It was a business card for someone named Susan Goff of “Volunteer Victim Services.” A local phone number was listed under her name.

I knew my face betrayed my skepticism. “What is this?” I asked.

“She’s a lady who helps people.”

“A therapist?”

“She’s not a therapist,” Tracy said. “I don’t even know if she went to school.”

I tried to hand the card back. “I’m not really interested in that.”

“I met her through a friend,” Tracy said. “But she works with the cops too.”

The name sounded familiar to me. Volunteer Victim Services. Ryan had mentioned them to us more than once, but we never called or followed up. “The police are already working on this,” I said.

“She’s not a cop,” Tracy said. “She’s. . just someone to talk to, someone who’s willing to support you no matter what. She’s not working any angles.”

“Everybody has an angle, don’t they?” I asked.

“Susan’s nice. She’s not a lawyer or anything like that. She understands people and things.” Tracy rolled her eyes a little. “I mean, I know Liann’s trying to help me and everything, but she’s only willing to do so much, you know? She wants to help me, but she wants to help me on her terms. If I ask her for something, something outside her agenda, she shuts me down.”

“Have you been in therapy?” I asked.

“That’s all bullshit,” she said. “Therapists, social workers-you just tell them what they want to hear. They check off their little boxes on their little forms, and they pass you on to somebody else.” Tracy bent down again and brought out her cell phone. She studied the display and frowned. “I have to go in a minute. But keep that card and use it if you want. Maybe you could talk to Susan. I’ve talked to her before, and she’s really helpful, you know, with life and relationships and stuff. She listens to me. Really listens to me. You know what it’s like when someone really listens to you?”

“I know what you mean,” I said.

“Susan’s not a bullshitter. Not at all. She tells you the truth if you want to hear it. And if you don’t have a minister or a shrink or anything, you need someone to talk to. Right?”

“I don’t know. .”

“Think about it. Okay? She just. . she knows things. A lot of things. Sometimes I think she knows me better than I know myself. And she’s comfortable talking about stuff that’s tough to talk about.”

“Is this what you came to tell me?” I asked, holding the card in the air between us. “Is this all?”

She squirmed a little in the chair, shifting her weight from one side to the other as though fighting off an unpleasant itch.

“Tracy? Is there something else?”

“Remember how I said I had a daughter?”

“Yes.”

Her voice was lower. “You know how kids are expensive to raise.”

“I don’t follow.”

She squirmed some more. Side to side, rocking like a metronome.

“Are you asking me for money?”

“You see. .” She paused, let out a long breath. “I’ve been thinking about what I saw that night. Thinking and thinking. .”

“And?”

She slumped a little, her body going slack in the chair.

“Tracy?”

“I want to remember more,” she said. “I want to help more.”

She stopped short. Somewhere outside, a lawn mower engine kicked to life, making a low rumble across the campus.

“What do you know?” I asked.

She didn’t answer.

“If you think you can come in here and mess with me, toy with my emotions-”

She moved quickly and was up out of the chair, reaching for her bag and brushing her hair back out of her face. She didn’t even look at me, but turned for the door.

“Tracy, wait.”

My hand went to my back pocket. I never carried much cash. I dug around and found forty-two dollars. I held it out to her.

She turned and looked at me, looked at my hand and the money, but didn’t make a move to take it. I tossed it onto the desk.

“Take it,” I said. “I don’t care.”

She still didn’t move. Her top teeth rested on her lower lip.

“Buy diapers or something. But if you know anything else. .”

She took two steps forward and picked up the money. She looked at it for a moment, then folded the bills in half and slipped them into the front pocket of her shorts.

“That man is very bad,” she said.

“Do you know him from somewhere? Have you seen him before?”

She backed away, her eyes averted from mine.

I started around the desk. “Tracy, if you know something and you don’t tell-”

She held her hand up between us, telling me to stop. I did.

“Tell Liann,” I said.

“I told the truth already,” she said. “I told my story.”

“Is there more?”

She nodded toward my desk. It took a moment for me to understand what she meant. Then I saw it-the card. Volunteer Victim Services.

“Think about calling Susan,” she said.

Then she slipped through the door and closed it behind her almost soundlessly.

Chapter Sixteen

Abby’s car sat in the driveway. It was filled with more boxes, more clothes, the remains of what she needed from the house.

Three boxes sat on the kitchen table with clothes on hangers draped over them. The clothes were from the winter-heavy coats and sweaters. I stood beneath the overhead fluorescents, a light fixture we’d always planned to replace but never did. I ran my hand over the fabric of her sweaters. I brought the sleeve of one up to my nose and took a deep breath. I always used to enjoy Abby’s scents-the fruity shampoos, the sweet soaps, even the smell of her sweat when she exercised or worked on something around the house. But this sweater smelled musty, the product of a closed closet.

“You’re home.”

I dropped the sleeve. Abby stood in the doorway, holding a canvas bag full of clothes.

“I was in the office most of the day,” I said.

“Good.” Abby came farther into the room and put down the bag. “This is the last of it,” she said. “I’ll take it out to the car.”

“Do you want me to help?”

She shook her head. “No. It’s my stuff. I’ll take it.”

“You’ll hurt yourself.”

“I’ve got it,” she said. “It’s not that heavy.”

She picked up one of the boxes and elbowed the screen door open, letting it slam behind her. I went out into the other room and sorted through the mail. Bills mostly. A newsmagazine.I leafed through it, scanning the headlines about war and political crises. While I did that, the back door opened and closed a couple more times. I finally gave up on the magazine and tossed it onto the coffee table. I went back to the kitchen and saw just the canvas bag remaining on the floor. I looked outside and saw Abby bent into the backseat of her car, the dome light a tiny white spot in the darkening evening. She and I hadn’t even talked about the property, about the cars and the bank accounts and the credit cards we still owed money on. Friends of ours who had been down the same road spent weeks working out every detail.

But then another thought occurred to me: those people all had children. They had to plan and hash things out. Abby and I were breaking up like young marrieds, like a boyfriend and girlfriend who’d shacked up and then simply grew bored with each other.

She came back in and wiped her forehead with the back of her hand. “I need some water,” she said.

“Did you read the news stories?” I asked. “I’m just wondering.”

She took a deep breath. She stood at the sink, her back to me. “I did. I saw all the news coverage. People would have told me about it anyway.”

“You don’t believe any of it?”

She put down her glass but didn’t turn around. “Tom, I think you should see someone. A professional.”

“A shrink?”

“Yes.”

“Why?” I raised my hands in an exaggerated shrug.

She turned around. She folded her arms across her chest but didn’t answer. In the harsh light from above she looked older but still beautiful, not all that different from when we first met.

I stepped closer. “Is it because of what I said in the paper? About the girl in the cemetery?”

“That’s part of it.”

“You’re the one who has so much faith. Why don’t you believe me?”

She shook her head. “Because God doesn’t work that way.”

“How do you know? Did Pastor Chris tell you?”

“When Caitlin disappeared, I said we should go to counseling. Remember that? Not marriage counseling but counseling to help us deal with the loss. Remember?”

She wanted an answer, so I gave her one. “I remember.”

“And you said you didn’t want to go, that you didn’t need it because nothing was really lost.” She hunched her shoulders and rubbed her arms as though she were cold. “I didn’t argue about it. I didn’t push you. I thought we needed it-we both needed it-but I also knew that death meant something different to you because of your dad. When my dad died, I was older. We were married already and had Caitlin. But I know your dad’s death is a wound for you, and so when Caitlin disappeared. . I know how much it meant to you to have your own child since you were your dad’s only child. It’s complicated with Buster. He’s your half sibling. And I know there was guilt on your part. Guilt about letting her go out that day, about letting her cross the street with Frosty and go to the park. And to the extent I contributed to that, I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Do you want to sit down?”

I reached for a chair and Abby did likewise, but then she stopped and held out her hands as though the thought of sitting down disgusted her.

“No, Tom. I can’t.” She was still holding up her hands, and she was crying. She started with two deep sniffles; then her chin puckered. “I can’t.”

“Abby. .” I didn’t sit either. I reached out for her. I placed my hand on her arm. My own emotions-pity, love-crept up on me unexpectedly.

She lifted her free hand to her face and wiped at her tears.

“Come on,” I said. “Sit.”

“No, no.” She pulled back. “I can’t. Just listen.”

She backed away from me and again swiped at her face with her hands. She took a deep, sniffling inhalation of air and seemed to regain a measure of her composure. I didn’t sit or move. I waited. I knew she had more to say, more to direct at me.

“You disappeared on me, Tom.” She cleared her throat. “You wanted children more than me, remember?” Her composure slipped again. “And I’m so very glad we did it. Even now. Even after all of this. I think of our girl. . that sweet, baby girl.”

“We tried to have another one,” I said. “We could try again. I don’t think it’s too late.”

Abby shook her head and looked away. She seemed more distraught, more upset. “No,” she said. “I can’t do that anymore.” She kept shaking her head.

“You mean the toll-”

“Tom, it worked.”

“What worked?”

“I did get pregnant again, after Caitlin was gone. When we were trying. I did get pregnant, but I had a miscarriage. I didn’t tell you, and I’m sorry.”

For a moment, I couldn’t speak. The room felt closer, more contained. I became aware that my mouth was hanging open. “We had another baby?”

“A miscarriage,” Abby said.

“And you didn’t tell me?” I still wasn’t sure I understood.

“I was protecting you,” she said. “In your state of mind, with Caitlin gone, I didn’t think you could handle it.” She reached up, wiped at her nose.

“Why are you telling me now?”

“Because. . because I don’t want to walk away with you thinking I wasn’t willing to do all I could for this marriage.”

“By lying to me?”

“I have to go, Tom. I really do.” She bent down and grabbed the canvas bag, and without stopping her motion or slowing down, she breezed across the room and to the back door. “Think about what I said, Tom. About getting help. See a therapist. Or ask Ryan. He might know someone. You can work with someone about your family, about your stepfather, about the rejection you felt there. I think you need it.”

And then she was gone.