Gone

CHAPTER 84

I calmed down after another few minutes of crying. Emily had taken me over to one of the fed SUVs and sat with me in the back. I’d melted down emotionally before, but never in front of so many people. And still I hadn’t faced it yet. Hadn’t faced the unfaceable.

The FBI hazmat squad showed up in a fire truck-like vehicle, already wearing their white hooded jumpsuits. After Emily spoke to them, they allowed me to gear up as well and follow them, as long as I stayed behind them and didn’t hit anyone else.

Emily and I started up the road behind the eight-man contingent. The air filter of the full-face breathing mask had some sort of pine scent in it that made me want to throw up.

The agents halted suddenly as something moved in the distance ahead. One of the SWAT guys raised his rifle.

“Don’t shoot!” I said through the interior mike when I saw what it was.

It was one of Cody’s sheepdogs. He stopped in the road and started barking at us. Good God. Aaron. I hadn’t even thought about him. Was he dead as well? For helping us? The dog barked some more and then ran back up the road from where it had come.

We went around a slight curve in the dirt road and saw the house for the first time, up the slope. There was no light on in the windows. Not a sound. In the dull, grainy moonlight, it was like I was seeing it for the first time. Its fish-scale shingles on the gabled roof, its gingerbread trim. The Queen Anne-style Victorian looked like it should be in the Pacific Heights neighborhood of San Francisco, not out here in the middle of the high desert.

I shook my head and stared at the dormer where Mary Catherine slept.

Mary Catherine.

I pictured her.

Mary Catherine sewing a vintage lampshade she’d bought on eBay. Mary Catherine down on her knees in the hallway with the girls around a bucket of joint compound, teaching them how to spackle and sand. How to fix something. How to make a house, even a safe house, into a home.

In my heart, I’d been planning on our being together someday, I realized as I stopped walking. Now, in a few minutes, I would be making a phone call and telling her family back in Ireland that she was dead. I squeezed my hands into fists when they started shaking.

“You OK, Mike?” Emily said. “You want to go back?”

I shook my head quickly. For a second I thought I was going to throw up, but then it passed.

“Let’s keep going,” I said.

I stepped on something when we got to the front yard. It was a Wiffle ball, or what was left of one. Brian hit them so hard, he caved them in. I thought about Brian then. Watching my oldest son play his first football game back in New York, the smile that creased his face on that rainy, freezing field when the coach sent him in off the bench.

I turned and looked at the open front door as the SWAT team went inside. There was a sudden bang of another door being flung open. “Clear!” someone called. I squatted down and stared at the dirt as I listened to more bangs and more shouts of “Clear!” as the SWAT guys swept the house.

Then one of the agents appeared at the front door. It was the preppy-looking one I’d hit. He waved us up.

“Mike, you really, really don’t have to do this,” Emily said.

I lifted the crushed Wiffle ball and stared at it as I gathered myself.

“Yes, I do,” I said, standing and stepping toward the house.

“Mike,” said the agent, holding up his palm. “I don’t know what this means, but there’s no one here.”

“What do you mean?” I said, staring over his shoulder, into the foyer. “You mean they’re dead? They’re all dead?”

“No, Mike,” the agent said. “There are no bodies. There’s no anything. Your family isn’t here, Detective. The house is completely empty. Everyone is gone.”