Perfect Nightmare

Chapter Twenty-seven

The sound of the door echoed oddly as Steve Marshall closed it behind Sergeant Grant.

Sergeant Andrew Grant, he thought as he sank back onto the sofa next to his wife. How had it happened that until tonight he’d never even thought of the cop in terms of having a first name, let alone wondered what it was?

Not that it mattered, for knowing Grant’s first name hadn’t changed a thing. Not one single thing. His beautiful, wonderful, perfect wife still looked every bit as hollowed out and ashen as she had before the policeman arrived to fill them in on his progress.

And Lindsay was still gone.

And no one — not her friends or the police or Kara, or he himself — had any better idea of what happened to her than they had on the day she vanished.

The only thing new was that he now knew Sergeant Grant’s first name.

And he and Kara were once again sitting side by side, not talking, feeling the emptiness of their home. As the silence threatened to overwhelm them both, faint echoes of Sergeant Grant’s visit seemed to whisper from the walls of their home, and Steve reached out to take Kara’s small, pale hand in his own.

“She’s not a runaway,” Kara said, as if responding to the same echo Steve had heard.

He hesitated, wishing he could offer her some scrap of evidence — anything — to share with her the same faint hope he was still clinging to that Sergeant Grant was right and at any moment the phone could ring, or the door could open, and their daughter would be with them once more. But he couldn’t. All he could do was hold her hand.

“What did he mean, there was no evidence of foul play?” Kara asked, her voice as hollow as the house had been since Lindsay vanished.

“He meant that teenage girls do things when they’re upset,” Steve said, choosing his words carefully. “You know that. Remember when you were seventeen? Remember what the girls in your class were thinking about? How many of them were constantly angry at their parents and threatening to run away? You know what he was talking about, Kara.”

It was as if she hadn’t heard him at all. “He said there was no evidence,” she whispered, almost to herself. “But she’s gone. Her blanket is gone. What kind of evidence does he want?”

“Kara—”

Finally, she looked at him. “Where would she go? With who? Oh, God, we’ve been over this a thousand times, Steve. You know as well as I do that Lindsay’s no runaway!”

“Honey, maybe he’s right,” Steve began. For the last hour, as Andrew Grant had gone over every tiny scrap of information he’d garnered about Lindsay’s disappearance — which was essentially nothing — Steve had allowed himself to hope that maybe the sergeant was right — that Lindsay had just taken off in a fit of anger, wanting to punish them the same way teenagers everywhere wanted to punish their parents. And if he could hang onto that, he could hang onto hope that when she cooled off, she would, indeed, come home.

At least it was something.

Kara pulled her hand from his. “All he really came to tell us,” she said, “was that they’re not going to do anything.”

Steve put his arm around his wife. “They are,” he told her. “They’re just doing what the police do — they’re the experts in these things. We have to be strong and have faith.”

She paid no attention to him. “They ought to call the FBI. But they won’t, because—”

“Because we don’t know it’s a kidnapping,” Steve broke in, and immediately wished he could retract his words.

“Not to them, it isn’t,” Kara flared. “But I know better.” She picked at a cuticle that was already seeping blood, and when she spoke again, her voice had hardened. “I know better.” She turned to face him. “Tomorrow I’m going to organize a group to post flyers all over Long Island. I’ve already blanketed the town, but it’s not enough. And I’m going to call the FBI myself, if Sergeant Grant isn’t going to, and then I’m going to start distributing flyers in the city. And you can—” She fell abruptly silent and her eyes searched his. “What is it?” she asked when he looked away.

Steve hesitated, then, realizing there was no point in waiting until morning to tell her, said softly, “Honey, I have to go back to the office tomorrow.”

It was as if he’d struck her. “Your office? Tomorrow?”

He reached out to her. “I have to. There are so many things no one else can take care of, and—”

“You believe him,” Kara said, her voice suddenly flat. “You believe Sergeant Grant.” Her voice rose. “You think that if we don’t do anything, Lindsay will just come home!”

“No,” Steve whispered, but even as he said it, he knew it wasn’t quite the truth. He pulled her close, and though at first she resisted, her exhaustion and grief and terror for their daughter overcame her and she folded into him as she used to before Lindsay vanished and their lives had fallen to pieces around them.

He rocked her gently, and slowly felt the anger drain out of her body. “I’ll call you,” he promised. “I’ll call you every hour if you want, and you can call me as often as you want to.”

She nodded.

“And I’ll be home every night — I can promise you I’ll never stay in the city again.”

She sniffed.

“She’s my daughter, too,” Steve whispered, drawing her even closer. And then they were clinging together with an intimacy they hadn’t felt for years, an intimacy he knew she had been missing as much as he.

If only it could have come in some other way.