Missing Persons

15

The phone rang later that evening while I was giving Grace her bath. Lauren spoke for a few minutes before she joined me in the bathroom and handed me the portable and a towel for my hands. “It’s Diane,” she said, and I exchanged the delights of playtime in the bathtub for the dubious pleasures of the telephone.

It struck me as not a great deal.

“Hi,” I said as I moved out of the bathroom and walked across the master bedroom to the big windows facing the mountains. The still-snowy spots on the winter landscape seemed fluorescent in the moonlight.

“I’ve been thinking,” Diane said.

“Yeah.”

“About Hannah.”

I wasn’t at all surprised. Diane and I had talked about Hannah a dozen or more times since her death. We’d do it a dozen more, and maybe a dozen more after that. My friend liked to process out loud, and Hannah’s death continued to haunt her.

“These things take time, Diane. They just do. This time of year especially, you know. The holidays make it harder.”

She sighed. “That’s not what I mean.”

I stuffed my repertoire of grief platitudes back into storage and said, “Okay.”

“What if this is why she died? Because she met with Mallory Miller. What if somebody killed Hannah because she met with the kid that one time?”

“I’m… listening.”

“Don’t use that voice. I hate that voice. You think I’m crazy? Tell me this didn’t cross your mind.”

“I can honestly say it didn’t cross my mind.” It had-briefly-but I wasn’t about to admit it and inadvertently provide monster chow for the dragons inhabiting Diane’s cave of paranoia.

“Hannah might have been murdered, right? That’s a possibility?” Diane’s tone was hoarse, slightly conspiratorial. I couldn’t figure out why.

“Are you at home?”

“Yes.”

“Why are you whispering?”

“I don’t know. This is the sort of thing people whisper about, isn’t it?”

“Okay, just wondering.”

“Now answer me.” She was still almost whispering. “It’s a possibility that Hannah was murdered, right?”

“Yeah.” The coroner’s finding on manner of death was “undetermined.” That conclusion didn’t mean Hannah had been murdered, nor did it mean that she hadn’t been murdered. We both knew Diane had her own hypothesis on the matter.

She spelled out her theory for me anyway. “Slocum hasn’t been able to identify a motive to support a conclusion of homicide, right?”

“Yeah.” I could graciously grant Diane the motive argument, fully cognizant that Slocum hadn’t been able to identify means or opportunity, either. He was 0-for-3.

“Well, what if this was the motive? Something Mallory told Hannah. Something that needed to stay secret.”

I tried to imagine some possibilities. Couldn’t. The time frame seemed wrong. Hannah had died over a week before Mallory disappeared.

“Like?” I asked.

“I don’t know. I thought you would have… an idea. This is your bailiwick, not mine.”

Bailiwick? I was hoping it wasn’t a new companion word to holy moly. Regardless, Diane was doomed to be disappointed by the sparse contents of my bailiwick. I didn’t have any theory about the secret that Mallory might have shared with Hannah.

From the bathroom Lauren called out, “Check the stove for me, sweetie. I have something cooking.”

I inhaled, and followed the tantalizing aroma of spicy hot cider all the way to the kitchen. A cinnamon stick and some cloves were floating in a steaming apple brew. Lauren had been preparing a treat for us when the phone rang. I shut off the gas to the burner but stayed close by so the steam would rise toward my face.

Diane wasn’t patient about the delay. “You still there?” she asked.

“I’m thinking.” What I was thinking about was whether I should add some good whiskey or a dollop of rum to my cup of hot cider.

“You done yet?”

I said, “Maybe if Hannah had died after Mallory disappeared, it might make some sense to wander down this road. But Hannah died first. And that was over a week before Mallory disappeared.”

“You think I’m crazy.”

It wasn’t a question. “No crazier than I thought you were before you called.”

“Funny.”

“Based on what you told me there was nothing incendiary about the session. Nothing worth killing Hannah over.”

“She said her father was ‘up to something.’ Remember?”

“But the question is what? She may have meant that he wanted her to take up the viola, or change schools, or get braces. Who knows? Hannah didn’t spell it out.”

“I expected you to be more helpful, Alan.”

No doubt because this is my bailiwick. I said, “Sorry.”

“You don’t want to do this, do you?” she asked.

Her question wasn’t an accusation. Diane was belatedly recognizing my resistance to be involved with anything that had to do with Boulder’s latest missing girl.

“No, I don’t. But I will.”

“Is it because of Grace?”

“I’m sure that’s part of it.”

“What then?”

“I’m working on that. I don’t like the parallels to eight years ago. The whole thing is creepy. I’m a father now, it’s…” I could have just admitted that I wasn’t working on it very hard, but Diane wouldn’t have let me off the hook. The truth was that I wanted the whole Mallory Miller thing to go away.

She softened. “Think about it, please. See if anything jumps out at you. Can you at least do that?”

“Sure,” I said. “I can do that.”

Grace was in fresh jammies, Lauren was swathed in soft flannel, her slender feet cushioned in sheepskin Uggs, and the mug of hot cider, with a little bourbon, was warming my hands. The three of us sat together on the couch in the living room and read bedtime stories about little girls and flowers, and dogs and friends.

Grace cackled and giggled and was delighted at the pages.

I held my daughter a little tighter than usual as Lauren’s late-day gravelly voice soothed us all.

I waited until Grace was in bed and Lauren was settled into the soothing rhythms of a game of pool in what-had we possessed a table and chairs instead of a tournament-quality pool table-should have been the dining room, before I went downstairs and climbed on the road bike that I’d set up for indoor workouts in the basement. I warmed up quickly, maybe too quickly, and soon had my spin up where I wanted.

If a girl, I wondered, a fourteen-year-old girl, had shown up in my waiting room wanting an emergency appointment, what would I have done?

Mallory had probably told Hannah it was “important,” or something similar. I didn’t know a therapist, myself included, who wouldn’t have listened to what she had to say. Why? “Important” could have meant she wanted to report abuse. And if a kid wants to report abuse, it’s the responsibility of adults, especially mental health professionals, to bend over backward to listen.

I also wondered whether Hannah had made the connection between the teenager in her office and the little girl she might have seen in her waiting room ten years or so before. Had Mallory said anything to remind her?

Remember me? I’m Mallory.

I tried to put myself in the same circumstances. Would I remember a kid so many years later? Would I even recognize that it was the same kid?

I didn’t think I would. Miller is a common name. Sometimes my friends’ kids changed so much in only a couple of years that I hardly recognized them. Adrienne’s son Jonas had grown so much in the past year that he looked like a completely different child. Sam’s son Simon had gone from little boy to man-child, it seemed, in weeks.

Even if Hannah had remembered the small child she had befriended in the waiting room, the memory wouldn’t have given her many clues. Hannah would have no reason to know anything about the details of Mary Black’s care of Rachel Miller.

But why was Mallory so vague about her concerns about her father?

That was my most troubling question: Why would a girl insist on a session with a therapist and then be vague about what was happening at home?

I made some assumptions about the session that I thought were safe.

Hannah would have asked Mallory directly about drug use, specifically about alcohol. Hannah hadn’t told Diane about any concerns with substance abuse, so apparently she felt satisfied with whatever answer she’d received from Mallory.

Given that Mallory had revealed her mother’s history of mental illness, I suspected that Hannah had directly or indirectly done some version of a mental status exam during the interview to see if what afflicted mother might also be afflicting her progeny. Had Mallory passed?

I didn’t know that. Probably. But there were plenty of unknowns.

I listened for a moment to the sharp cracks and gentle taps that punctuated Lauren’s pool playing. Returning my attention to the bike, I reminded myself that I was doing a lot of speculating.

Mallory had said her father was “up to something.”

But what had he been up to?

Was it related to Mallory’s anxiety about the holidays?

And why had Mallory chosen that day to sit in the waiting room to see Hannah? A great question.

I didn’t have a great answer, or even a good one.