Missing Persons

22

I know her. Mallory.

Interesting non sequitur. Or apparent non sequitur. He hadn’t answered my question about Doyle. Instead, he’d turned my attention back to Mallory.

Or… perhaps talking about Mallory was his way of talking about Doyle.

Patience, Alan.

“You do?” I asked. “You know her?” Despite what I’d learned about the location of the garage, and about Doyle, I wouldn’t have guessed that Bob knew Mallory. Why?

Because Bob was Bob.

“We talked. While I was working at Doyle’s. She’d come by sometimes. She was curious what we were doing. She liked the fish. And the waterfall. She said she could hear the water running from her bedroom window. I saw her up there sometimes. At her window. When Doyle wasn’t home she’d go down and sit by the pond and watch the fish.”

Bob was having trouble stringing the short sentences together. Something was aggravating his natural wariness. Was it thoughts of Mallory?

Had to be. Or maybe Bob’s admission about Mallory was diversion? Was he uncomfortable talking about Doyle and was he taking me someplace he figured I’d willingly go instead? Was Bob that cunning? I didn’t think so, but I couldn’t rule it out.

“We talked through the fence,” he added, not waiting his turn. “A few different times.”

Not waiting his turn was another sign of his discomfort. The fact that he and Mallory talked through the fence? I suspected that the physical separation of the barrier made the conversation more palatable for Bob, maybe even made the conversation possible for Bob. Metaphorically, it was elegant.

But still… “Go on,” I said.

“She’s a nice girl.”

“And you spoke with her?”

“I have, yeah. A lot of times.”

Well, Bob, was it a “few times” or “a lot of times”?

He squinted his eyes and tightened his jaw. The grimace caused his chin to retreat. It looked for a moment as though his face just melted away half an inch below his lower lip. “She’s my… friend.”

As surprising as it might sound, the fact that Bob had personally met Mallory was merely a curiosity to me, another one of those “I know someone who” anecdotes that were still swirling around Boulder about the Millers. But the fact that he’d conversed with Mallory on a personal level? And multiple times? And that he considered her a friend? That was epiphany-quality news where Bob was concerned.

From what I knew about him socially-and before that day’s session had started, I thought I knew most of what there was to know-Bob didn’t have repeated personal conversations with people with whom he wasn’t somehow compelled to relate.

He just didn’t.

“She’s your friend? You talked about…?”

“I told you. The waterfall, the pond. The fish. She loved the waterfall. Other things. She likes my car.”

“Other things?” I was reaching. I knew I was reaching.

“Yeah.”

“Such as…?”

Another grimace. Then, again, “My mother.”

I went to safer ground. I didn’t want to. But I felt I would push him farther away if I came any closer. “And you thought she was nice?”

Shortly after the words exited my mouth, I realized that my caution had come too late and that our rat-a-tat conversation was over. Silence descended on the room the way darkness follows a closing curtain. I waited. Bob had started breathing through his mouth. Each exhale was accompanied by a faint whistle.

Finally he spoke. He said, “She doesn’t look fourteen.”

My spleen spasmed. At least I think it was my spleen-something in there suddenly got twisted into a big, fat knot. I hadn’t been aware that I didn’t want to hear those specific words from Bob, but now that he’d said them I knew that I hadn’t wanted to hear them.

“Time’s up,” he said.

I looked at the clock.

He was right. Time was up.

Didn’t matter to me. I needed some magic that would encourage Bob to stay and tell me what was haunting him. Because something was haunting him. I couldn’t find any magic, so I focused on what I feared: “You don’t think she looks fourteen?”

“Do you?” he asked.

Frankly, no. In Boulder, most eleven- and twelve-year-old girls look fourteen. Fourteen-year-old girls look, well, older-sometimes a lot older. Sometimes way too much older. But I wasn’t about to tell Bob that. I suspected his comment about Mallory’s age had little to do with musings about the sociological implications of the increasingly early psychosexual maturity of adolescent girls.

I said, “Bob, look at me. Please.”

He did, holding the connection for almost two entire seconds. I asked, “Do you know something about Mallory? Where she is? How she’s doing? Had she said something to you? Has Doyle?”

Way too many questions on my part. Way too many. A rational observer would have had a hard time determining who was more flustered at that moment, doctor or patient.

“Maybe you know something you should tell the police,” I added-my way of adjusting the seasoning on a therapeutic dish I was already responsible for overcooking.

Bob did the half head-shake thing again, this time minus the “sheeesh,” before he said, “I have to go.”

I barely heard his words. The echoes of his earlier pronouncement-“She doesn’t look fourteen”-were gaining volume in my head. Silently quoting Diane, I thought, Holy moly.

“Did you talk to Mallory just before Christmas, Bob? Did you know what was going to happen?”

“I have to go.”

“I have a few extra minutes. We can go on.”

Bob didn’t acknowledge my offer. He stood, grabbed his daypack, and stepped toward the French door that led outside toward the backyard, but he didn’t ask me for permission to use it as he had on previous occasions. As he pulled the door open, air that was much colder than I expected flooded into the room, chilling my feet. He paused in the open doorway and turned his head back in my direction.

Our gazes failed to connect by about ten degrees. It was as though he were blind, wanted to find my gaze, but couldn’t quite manage to make eye contact.

He said, “Is something a secret if nobody knows you know it?”

My gut was still in knots. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“For something to be a secret, somebody else has to know it, right? Or… do they? I tell you things and you have to keep them secret. But I’ve never been…”

Been what?

I suspected that Bob’s naiveté was talking, or that he was posing a trick question-a-tree-falling-in-the-forest clone-but I couldn’t find the trap. Reluctantly I said, “A secret is a secret, I guess.”

He suddenly shifted his gaze and we locked eyes for a period of time that was about the duration of a solitary flap of a hummingbird’s wings. There, and then gone. He persisted. “If nobody knows something but the person who knows it, is it really a secret? Or is it something else? What would that be?”

“What are we talking about, Bob? Is this… something about Mallory? Is she okay? Do you know something about where she is?”

“Other people have secrets. I didn’t really know that. I mean I knew it, but I didn’t… I don’t know everything yet, but it’s not as simple as I thought at first. I’m not even sure about what I know. Does that make sense?”

No, it doesn’t.

I could feel him pulling away. He hadn’t moved an inch farther away from me, but this prolonged connection between him and me had existed at a level of intimacy that I knew Bob couldn’t tolerate for long. Now he was floating away like a helium balloon in a stiff breeze.

I tried to grab for the string that would bring him back. I said, “But you know something? You know a secret?”

I kept thinking, You know that she doesn’t look fourteen.

“You know secrets, too,” he replied. “People tell you things. I do. Therapists.”

What did that mean? Was he speaking generally or was he referring to something specific that he thought I knew?

I didn’t know.

He pursed his thin lips and shook his head, just a little, as though he was mildly disappointed with me. “The story’s not over. I have to figure stuff out, who to trust. I think I’ve already been wrong once. Doyle’s not… the guy I thought he was.”

Trust me. Please.

“Doyle’s not what? What do you mean?”

“Maybe you should read it. What I wrote.”

I opened my mouth to reply, but Bob closed the door behind him.

I was about to say, “I’d love to.” The cold air that had rushed in wasn’t the only cause of chill in the room.

I stepped outside into the frigid air. “Bob,” I called. After two more steps across the yard he stopped and turned to face me. He didn’t bother to look at me, but he faced me. I said, “Tuesday, our regular time, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“If you’d like to meet before then I can do that. Don’t worry about the money.”

He said, “Okay,” hunched his shoulders forward, dropped his poor excuse for a chin, and paced off into the night.