The Best American Mystery Stories 2014

My Heart Is Either Broken by Megan Abbott

FROM Dangerous Women

HE WAITED IN THE CAR. He had parked under one of the big banks of lights. No one else wanted to park there. He could guess why. Three vehicles over, he saw a woman’s back pressed against a window, her hair shaking. Once, she turned her head and he almost saw her face, the blue of her teeth as she smiled.

Fifteen minutes went by before Lorie came stumbling across the parking lot, heels clacking.

He had been working late and didn’t even know she wasn’t home until he got there. When she finally picked up her cell, she told him where she was, a bar he’d never heard of, a part of town he didn’t know.

“I just wanted some noise and people,” she had explained. “I didn’t mean anything.”

He asked if she wanted him to come get her.

“Okay,” she said.

On the ride home, she was doing the laughing-crying thing she’d been doing lately. He wanted to help her but didn’t know how. It reminded him of the kinds of girls he used to date in high school. The ones who wrote in ink all over their hands and cut themselves in the bathroom stalls at school.

“I hadn’t been dancing in so long, and if I shut my eyes no one could see,” she was saying, looking out the window, her head tilted against the window. “No one there knew me until someone did. A woman I didn’t know. She kept shouting at me. Then she followed me into the bathroom and said she was glad my little girl couldn’t see me now.”

He knew what people would say. That she was out dancing at a grimy pickup bar. They wouldn’t say she cried all the way home, that she didn’t know what to do with herself, that no one knows how they’ll act when something like this happens to them. Which it probably won’t.

But he also wanted to hide, wanted to find a bathroom stall himself, in another city, another state, and never see anyone he knew again, especially his mother or his sister, who spent all day on the Internet trying to spread the word about Shelby, collecting tips for the police.

Shelby’s hands-well, people always talk about babies’ hands, don’t they?-but they were like tight little flowers and he loved to put his palm over them. He never knew he’d feel like that. Never knew he’d be the kind of guy-that there even were kinds of guys-who would catch the milky scent of his daughter’s baby blanket and feel warm inside. Even, sometimes, press his face against it.

It took him a long time to tug off the dark red cowboy boots she was wearing, ones he did not recognize.

When he pulled off her jeans, he didn’t recognize her underwear either. The front was a black butterfly, its wings fluttering against her thighs with each tug.

He looked at her and a memory came to him of when they first dated, Lorie taking his hand and running it along her belly, her thighs. Telling him she once thought she’d be a dancer, that maybe she could be. And that if she ever had a baby she’d have a C-section because everyone knew what happened to women’s stomachs after, not to mention what it does down there, she’d said, laughing, and put his hand there next.

He’d forgotten all this, and other things too, but now the things kept coming back and making him crazy.

He poured a tall glass of water for her and made her drink it. Then he refilled it and set it beside her.

She didn’t sleep like a drunk person but like a child, her lids twitching dreamily and a faint smile tugging at her mouth.

The moonlight coming in, it felt like he watched her all night, but at some point he must have fallen asleep.

When he woke, she had her head on his belly, was rubbing him drowsily.

“I was dreaming I was pregnant again,” she murmured. “It was like Shelby all over again. Maybe we could adopt. There are so many babies out there that need love.”

They had met six years ago. He was working for his mother, who owned a small apartment building on the north side of town.

Lorie lived on the first floor, where the window was high and you could see people walking on the sidewalk. His mother called it a “sunken garden apartment.”

She lived with another girl and sometimes they came in very late, laughing and pressing up against each other in the way young girls do, whispering things, their legs bare and shiny in short skirts. He wondered what they said.

He was still in school then and would work evenings and weekends, changing washers on leaky faucets, taking out the trash.

Once, he was in front of the building, hosing down the garbage cans with bleach, and she rushed past him, her tiny coat bunched around her face. She was talking on the phone and she moved so quickly he almost didn’t see her, almost splashed her with the hose. For a second, he saw her eyes, smeary and wet.

“I wasn’t lying,” she was saying into the phone as she pushed her key into the front door, as she heaved her shoulders against it. “I’m not the liar here.”

One evening not long after, he came home and there was a note under the door. It read:

My heart is either broken or I haven’t paid the bill.

Thx, Lorie, #1-A

He’d read it four times before he figured it out.

She smiled when she opened the door, the security chain across her forehead.

He held up his pipe wrench.

“You’re just in time,” she said, pointing to the radiator.

No one ever thinks anything will ever happen to their baby girl. That’s what Lorie kept saying. She’d been saying that to reporters, the police, for every day of the three weeks since it happened.

He watched her with the detectives. It was just like on TV except nothing like on TV. He wondered why nothing was ever like you thought it would be and then he realized it was because you never thought this would be you.

She couldn’t sit still, her fingers twirling through the edges of her hair. Sometimes, at a traffic signal, she would pull nail scissors from her purse and trim the split ends. When the car began moving she would wave her hand out the window, scattering the clippings into the wind.

It was the kind of careless, odd thing that made her so different from any girl he ever knew. Especially that she would do it in front of him.

He was surprised how much he had liked it.

But now all of it seemed different and he could see the detectives watching her, looking at her like she was a girl in a short skirt, twirling on a bar stool and tossing her hair at men.

“We’re gonna need you to start from the beginning again,” the male one said, and that part was like on TV. “Everything you remember.”

“She’s gone over it so many times,” he said, putting his hand over hers and looking at the detective wearily.

“I meant you, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, looking at him. “Just you.”

They took Lorie to the outer office and he could see her through the window, pouring long gulps of creamer into her coffee, licking her lips.

He knew how that looked too. The newspapers had just run a picture of her at a smoothie place. The caption was, “What about Shelby?” They must have taken it through the front window. She was ordering something at the counter, and she was smiling. They always got her when she was smiling. They didn’t understand that she smiled when she was sad. Sometimes she cried when she was happy, like at their wedding, when she cried all day, her face pink and gleaming, shuddering against his chest.

I never thought you would, she had said. I never thought I would. That any of this could happen.

He didn’t know what she meant, but he loved feeling her huddled against him, her hips grinding against him like they did when she couldn’t hold herself together and seemed to be grabbing on to him to keep from flying off the earth itself.

“So, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you came home from work and there was no one home?”

“Right,” he said. “Call me Tom.”

“Tom,” the detective started again, but the name seemed to fumble in his mouth like he’d rather not say it. Last week he’d called him Tom. “Was it unusual to find them gone at that time of day?”

“No,” he said. “She liked to keep busy.”

It was true, because Lorie never stayed put and sometimes would strap Shelby into the car seat and drive for hours, putting 100 or 200 miles on the car.

She would take her to Mineral Pointe and take photos of them in front of the water. He would get them on his phone at work and they always made him grin. He liked how she was never one of these women who stayed at home and watched court shows or the shopping channels.

She worked fifteen hours a week at the Y while his mother stayed with Shelby. Every morning she ran 5 miles, putting Shelby in the jogging stroller. She made dinner every night and sometimes even mowed the lawn when he was too busy. She never ever stopped moving.

This is what the newspapers and the TV people loved. They loved to take pictures of her jogging in her short shorts and talking on the phone in her car and looking at fashion magazines in line at the grocery store.

“What about Shelby?” the captions always read.

They never understood her at all. He was the only one.

“So,” the detective asked him, rousing him from his thoughts, “what did you do when you found the house empty?”

“I called her cell.” He had. She hadn’t answered, but that wasn’t unusual either. He didn’t bother to tell them that. That he’d called four or five times and the phone went straight to voicemail and it wasn’t until the last time she picked up.

Her voice had been strange, small, like she might be in the doctor’s office, or the ladies’ room. Like she was trying to make herself quiet and small.

“Lorie? Are you okay? Where are you guys?”

There had been a long pause and the thought came that she had crashed the car. For a crazy second he thought she might be in the hospital, both of them broken and battered. Lorie was a careless driver, always sending him texts from the car. Bad pictures came into his head. He’d dated a girl once who had a baby shoe that hung on her rearview mirror. She said it was to remind her to drive carefully, all the time. No one ever told you that after you were sixteen.

“Lorie, just tell me.” He had tried to make his voice firm but kind.

“Something happened.”

“Lorie,” he tried again, like after a fight with her brother or her boss, “just take a breath and tell me.”

“Where did she go?” her voice came. “And how is she going to find me? She’s a little girl. She doesn’t know anything. They should put dog tags on them like they did when we were kids, remember that?”

He didn’t remember that at all, and there was a whir in his head that was making it hard for him to hear.

“Lorie, you need to tell me what’s going on.”

So she did.

She said she’d been driving around all morning, looking at lawn mowers she’d found for sale on Craigslist. She was tired, decided to stop for coffee at the expensive place.

She saw the woman there all the time. They talked about how expensive the coffee was but how they couldn’t help it. And what was an Americano, anyway? And, yeah, they talked about their kids. She was pretty sure the woman said she had kids. Two, she thought. And it was only going to be two minutes, five at the most.

“What was going to be five minutes?” he had asked her.

“I don’t know how it happened,” she said, “but I spilled my coffee, and it was everywhere. All over my new white coat. The one you got me for Christmas.”

He had remembered her opening the box, tissue paper flying. She had said he was the only person who’d ever bought her clothes that came in boxes, with tissue paper in gold seals.

She’d spun around in the coat and said, Oh, how it sparkles.

Crawling onto his lap, she’d smiled and said only a man would give the mother of a toddler a white coat.

“The coat was soaking,” she said now. “I asked the woman if she could watch Shelby while I was in the restroom. It took a little while because I had to get the key. One of those heavy keys they give you.”

When she came out of the restroom, the woman was gone, and so was Shelby.

He didn’t remember ever feeling the story didn’t make sense. It was what happened. It was what happened to them, and it was part of the whole impossible run of events that led to this. That led to Shelby being gone and no one knowing where.

But it seemed clear almost from the very start that the police didn’t feel they were getting all the information, or that the information made sense.

“They don’t like me,” Lorie said. And he told her that wasn’t true and had nothing to do with anything anyway, but maybe it did.

He wished they could have seen Lorie when she had pushed through the front door that day, her purse unzipped, her white coat still damp from the spilled coffee, her mouth open so wide, all he could see was the red inside her, raw and torn.

Hours later, their family around them, her body shuddering against him as her brother talked endlessly about Amber Alerts and Megan’s Law and his criminal justice class and his cop buddies from the gym, he felt her pressing into him and saw the feathery curl tucked in her sweater collar, a strand of Shelby’s angel-white hair.

By the end of the second week, the police hadn’t found anything, or if they did they weren’t telling. Something seemed to have shifted, or gotten worse.

“Anybody would do it,” Lorie said. “People do it all the time.”

He watched the detective watch her. This was the woman detective, the one with the severe ponytail who was always squinting at Lorie.

“Do what?” the woman detective asked.

“Ask someone to watch their kid, for just a minute,” Lorie said, her back stiffening. “Not a guy. I wouldn’t have left her with a man. I wouldn’t have left her with some homeless woman waving a hairbrush at me. This was a woman I saw in there every day.”

“Named?” They had asked her for the woman’s name many times. They knew she didn’t know it.

Lorie looked at the detective, and he could see those faint blue veins showing under her eyes. He wanted to put his arm around her, to make her feel him there, to calm her. But before he could do anything, she started talking again.

“Mrs. Caterpillar,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “Mrs. Linguini. Madame Lafarge.”

The detective stared at her, not saying anything.

“Let’s try looking her up on the Internet,” Lorie said, her chin jutting and a kind of hard glint to her eyes. All the meds and the odd hours they were keeping, all the sleeping pills and sedatives and Lorie walking through the house all night, talking about nothing but afraid to lie still.

“Lorie,” he said. “Don’t-”

“Everything always happens to me,” she said, her voice suddenly soft and strangely liquid, her body sinking. “It’s so unfair.”

He could see it happening, her limbs going limp, and he made a grab for her.

She nearly slipped from him, her eyes rolling back in her head.

“She’s fainting,” he said, grabbing her, her arms cold like frozen pipes. “Get someone.”

The detective was watching.

“I can’t talk about it because I’m still coping with it,” Lorie told the reporters who were waiting outside the police station. “It’s too hard to talk about.”

He held her arm tightly and tried to move her through the crowd, bunched so tightly, like the knot in his throat.

“Is it true you’re hiring an attorney?” one of the reporters asked.

Lorie looked at them. He could see her mouth open and there was no time to stop her.

“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, a hapless grin on her face. As if she had knocked someone’s grocery cart with her own.

He looked at her. He knew what she meant-she meant leaving Shelby for that moment, that scattered moment. But he also knew how it sounded, and how she looked, that panicky smile she couldn’t stop.

That was the only time he let her speak to reporters.

Later, at home, she saw herself on the nightly news.

Walking slowly to the TV, she kneeled in front of it, her jeans skidding on the carpet, and did the oddest thing.

She put her arms around it, like it was a teddy bear, a child.

“Where is she?” she whispered. “Where is she?”

And he wished the reporters could see this, the mystifying way grief was settling into her like a fever.

But he was also glad they couldn’t.

It was the middle of the night, close to dawn, and she wasn’t next to him.

He looked all over the house, his chest pounding. He thought he must be dreaming, calling out her name, both their names.

He found her in the backyard, a lithe shadow in the middle of the yard.

She was sitting on the grass, her phone lighting her face.

“I feel closer to her out here,” she said. “I found this.”

He could barely see, but moving closer saw the smallest of earrings, an enamel butterfly, caught between her fingers.

They had had a big fight when she came home with Shelby, her ears pierced, thick gold posts plugged in such tiny lobes. Her ears red, her face red, her eyes soft with tears.

“Where did she go, babe?” Lorie said to him now. “Where did she go?”

He was soaked with sweat and was pulling his T-shirt from his chest.

“Look, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you’ve cooperated with us fully. I get that. But understand our position. No one can confirm her story. The employee who saw your wife spill her coffee remembers seeing her leave with Shelby. She doesn’t remember another woman at all.”

“How many people were in there? Did you talk to all of them?”

“There’s something else too, Mr. Ferguson.”

“What?”

“One of the other employees said Lorie was really mad about the coffee spill. She told Shelby it was her fault. That everything was her fault. And that Lorie then grabbed your daughter by the arm and shook her.”

“That’s not true,” he said. He’d never seen Lorie touch Shelby roughly. Sometimes it seemed she barely knew she was there.

“Mr. Ferguson, I need to ask you: Has your wife had a history of emotional problems?”

“What kind of question is that?”

“It’s a standard question in cases like this,” the detective said. “And we’ve had some reports.”

“Are you talking about the local news?”

“No, Mr. Ferguson. We don’t collect evidence from TV.”

“Collecting evidence? What kind of evidence would you need to collect about Lorie? It’s Shelby who’s missing. Aren’t you-”

“Mr. Ferguson, did you know your wife spent three hours at Your Place Lounge on Charlevoix yesterday afternoon?”

“Are you following her?”

“Several patrons and one of the bartenders contacted us. They were concerned.”

“Concerned? Is that what they were?” His head was throbbing.

“Shouldn’t they be concerned, Mr. Ferguson? This is a woman whose baby is missing.”

“If they were so concerned, why didn’t they call me?”

“One of them asked Lorie if he could call you for her. Apparently she told him not to.”

He looked at the detective. “She didn’t want to worry me.”

The detective looked back at him. “Okay.”

“You can’t tell how people are going to act when something like this happens to you,” he said, feeling his head dipping. Suddenly his shoulders felt very heavy and he had these pictures of Lorie in his head, at the far corner of the long black lacquered bar, eyes heavy with makeup and filled with dark feelings. Feelings he could never touch. Never once did he feel sure he knew what she was thinking. That was part of it. Part of the throb in his chest, the longing there that never left.

“No,” he said suddenly.

“What?” the detective asked, leaning forward.

“She has no history of emotional problems. My wife.”

It was the fourth week, the fourth week of false leads and crying and sleeping pills and night terrors. And he had to go back to work or they wouldn’t make the mortgage payment. They’d talked about Lorie returning to her part-time job at the candle store, but somebody needed to be home, to be waiting.

(Though what, really, were they waiting for? Did toddlers suddenly toddle home after twenty-seven days? That’s what he could tell the cops were thinking.)

“I guess I’ll call the office tomorrow,” he said. “And make a plan.”

“And I’ll be here,” she said. “You’ll be there and I’ll be here.”

It was a terrible conversation, like a lot of those conversations couples have in dark bedrooms, late into the night, when you know the decisions you’ve been avoiding all day won’t wait anymore.

After they talked, she took four big pills and pushed her face into her pillow.

He couldn’t sleep and went into Shelby’s room, which he only ever did at night. He leaned over the crib, which was too small for her but Lorie wouldn’t use the bed yet, said it wasn’t time, not nearly.

He put his fingers on the soft baby bumpers, festooned with bright yellow fish. He remembered telling Shelby they were goldfish, but she kept saying Nana, nana, which was what she called bananas.

Her hands were always covered with the pearly slime of bananas, holding on to the front of Lorie’s shirt.

One night, sliding his hand under Lorie’s bra clasp, between her breasts, he felt a daub of banana even there.

“It’s everywhere,” Lorie had sighed. “It’s like she’s made of bananas.”

He loved that smell, and his daughter’s forever-glazed hands.

At some point, remembering this, he started crying, but then he stopped and sat in the rocking chair until he fell asleep.

In part, he was relieved to go back to work, all those days with neighbors and families and friends huddling in the house, trading Internet rumors, organizing vigils and searches. But now there were fewer family members, only a couple friends who had no other place to go, and no neighbors left at all.

The woman from the corner house came late one evening and asked for her casserole dish back.

“I didn’t know you’d keep it so long,” she said, eyes narrowing.

She seemed to be trying to look over his shoulder, into the living room. Lorie was watching a show, loudly, about a group of blond women with tight lacquered faces and angry mouths. She watched it all the time; it seemed to be the only show on TV anymore.

“I didn’t know,” the woman said, taking her dish, inspecting it, “how things were going to turn out.”

you sexy, sexy boy, Lorie’s text said. i want your hands on me. come home and handle me, rough as u like. rough me up.

He swiveled at his desk chair hard, almost like he needed to cover the phone, cover his act of reading the text.

He left the office right away, driving as fast as he could. Telling himself that something was wrong with her. That this had to be some side effect of the pills the doctor had given her, or the way sorrow and longing could twist in her complicated little body.

But that wasn’t really why he was driving so fast, or why he nearly tripped on the dangling seat belt as he hurried from the car.

Or why he felt, when he saw her lying on the bed, flat on her stomach and head turned, smiling, that he’d burst in two if he didn’t have her. If he didn’t have her then and there, the bed moaning beneath them and she not making a sound but, the blinds pulled down, her white teeth shining, shining from her open mouth.

It felt wrong but he wasn’t sure why. He knew her, but he didn’t. This was her, but a Lorie from long ago. Except different.

The reporters called all the time. And there were two that never seemed to leave their block. They had been there right at the start, but then seemed to go away, to move on to other stories.

They came back when the footage of Lorie coming out of Magnum Tattoo Parlor began appearing. Someone shot it with their cell phone.

Lorie was wearing those red cowboy boots again, and red lipstick, and she walked right up to the camera.

They ran photos of it in the newspaper, with the headline “A Mother’s Grief?”

He looked at the tattoo.

The words Mirame quemar written in script, wrapping itself around her hip.

It covered just the spot where a stretch mark had been, the one she always covered with her fingers when she stood before him naked.

He looked at the tattoo in the dark bedroom, a band of light coming from the hallway. She turned her hip, kept turning it, spinning her torso so he could feel it, all of it.

“I needed it,” she said. “I needed something. Something to put my fingers on. To remind me of me. Do you like it?” she asked, her breath in his ear. The ink looked like it was moving.

“I like it,” he said, putting his fingers there. Feeling a little sick. He did like it. He liked it very much.

Late, late into that night, her voice shook him from a deep sleep.

“I never knew she was coming and then she was here,” she was saying, her face pressed in her pillow. “And I never knew she was going and now she’s gone.”

He looked at her, her eyes shut, dappled with old makeup.

“But,” she said, her voice grittier, strained, “she was always doing whatever she wanted.”

That’s what he thought she said. But she was sleeping, and didn’t make any sense at all.

“You liked it until you thought about it,” she said. “Until you looked close at it and then you decided you didn’t want it anymore. Or didn’t want to be the guy who wants it.”

He was wearing the new shirt she had bought for him the day before. It was a deep, deep purple and beautiful and he felt good in it, like the unit manager who all the women in the office talked about. They talked about his shoes and he always wondered where people got shoes like that.

“No,” he said. “I love it. But it’s just… expensive.”

That wasn’t it, though. It didn’t seem right buying things, buying anything, right now. But it was also how colorful the shirt was, the sheen on it. The bright hard beauty of it. A shirt for going out, for nightclubs, for dancing. For those things they did when they still did things: vodka and pounding music and frenzied sex in her car.

The kind of drunken sex so messy and crazy that you were almost shy around each other after, driving home, screwed sober, feeling like you’d showed something very private and very bad.

Once, years ago, she did something to him no one had ever done and he couldn’t look at her afterward at all. The next time he did something to her. For a while, it felt like it would never stop.

“I think someone should tell you about your wife,” the e-mail said. That was the subject line. He didn’t recognize the address, a series of letters and digits, and there was no text in the body of the e-mail. There was only a photo of a girl dancing in a bright green halter top, the ties loose and dangling.

It was Lorie, and he knew it must be an old picture. Weeks ago, the newspapers had gotten their hands on some snapshots of Lorie from her late teens, dancing on tabletops, kissing her girlfriends. Things girls did when they were drinking and someone had a camera.

In those shots, Lorie was always posing, vamping, trying to look like a model, a celebrity. It was a Lorie before he really knew her, a Lorie from what she called her “wild girl days.”

But in this picture she didn’t seem to be aware of the camera at all, seemed to be lost in the thrall of whatever music was playing, whatever sounds she was hearing in her crowded head. Her eyes were shut tight, her head thrown back, her neck long and brown and beautiful.

She looked happier than he had ever seen her.

A Lorie from long ago, or never.

But when he scrolled further down, he saw the halter top riding up her body, saw the pop of a hip bone. Saw the elegant script letters: Mirame quemar.

That night he remembered a story she had told him long ago. It seemed impossible he’d forgotten it. Or maybe it just seemed different now, making it seem like something new. Something uncovered, an old sunken box you find in the basement smelling strong and you’re afraid to open it.

It was back when they were dating, when her roommate was always around and they had no place to be alone. They would have thrilling bouts in his car, and she loved to crawl into the back seat and lie back, hoisting a leg high over the headrest and begging him for it.

It was after the first or second time, back when it was all so crazy and confusing and his head pounding and starbursting, that Lorie curled against him and talked and talked about her life, and the time she stole four Revlon eyeslicks from CVS and how she had slept with a soggy-eared stuffed animal named Ears until she was twelve. She said she felt she could tell him anything.

Somewhere in the blur of those nights-nights when he too told her private things, stories about babysitter crushes and shoplifting Matchbox cars-that she told him the story.

How, when she was seven, her baby brother was born and she became so jealous.

“My mom spent all her time with him, and left me alone all day,” she said. “So I hated him. Every night I would pray that he would be taken away. That something awful would happen to him. At night I’d sneak over to his crib and stare at him through the little bars. I think maybe I figured I could think it into happening. If I stared at him long enough and hard enough, it might happen.”

He had nodded, because this is how kids could be, he guessed. He was the youngest and wondered if his older sister thought things like this about him. Once she smashed his finger under a cymbal and said it was an accident.

But she wasn’t done with her story and she snuggled closer to him and he could smell her powdery body and he thought of all its little corners and arcs, how he liked to find them with his hands, all the soft, hot places on her. Sometimes it felt like her body was never the same body, like it changed under his hands. I’m a witch, a witch.

“So one night,” she said, her voice low and sneaky, “I was watching him through the crib bars and he was making this funny noise.”

Her eyes glittered in the dark of the car.

“I leaned across, sticking my hands through the rails,” she said, snaking her hand toward him. “And that’s when I saw this piece of string dangling on his chin, from his pull toy. I starting pulling it, and pulling it.”

He watched her tugging the imaginary string, her eyes getting bigger and bigger.

“Then he let out this gasp,” she said, “and started breathing again.”

She paused, her tongue clicking.

“My mom came in at just that moment. She said I saved his life,” she said. “Everyone did. She bought me a new jumper and the hot-pink shoes I wanted. Everyone loved me.”

A pair of headlights flashed across them and he saw her eyes, bright and brilliant.

“So no one ever knew the real story,” she said. “I’ve never told anyone.”

She smiled, pushing herself against him.

“But now I’m telling you,” she said. “Now I have someone to tell.”

“Mr. Ferguson, you told us, and your cell phone records confirm, that you began calling your wife at 5:50 P.M. on the day of your daughter’s disappearance. Finally, you reached her at 6:45. Is that right?”

“I don’t know,” he said, this the eighth, ninth, tenth time they’d called him in. “You would know better than me.”

“Your wife said she was at the coffee place at around five. But we tracked down a record of your wife’s transaction. It was at 3:45.”

“I don’t know,” he said, rubbing at the back of his neck, the prickling there. He realized he had no idea what they might tell him. No idea what might be coming.

“So what do you think your wife was doing for three hours?”

“Looking for this woman. Trying to find her.”

“She did make some other calls during that time. Not to the police, of course. Or even you. She made a call to a man named Leonard Drake. Another one named Jason Patrini.”

One sounded like an old boyfriend-Lenny someone-the other he didn’t even know. He felt something hollow out inside him. He didn’t know who they were even talking about anymore, but it had nothing to do with him.

The female detective walked in, giving her partner a look.

“Since she was making all these calls, we could track her movements. She went to the Harbor View Mall.”

“Would you like to see her on the security camera footage there?” the female detective asked. “We have it now. Did you know she bought a tank top?”

He felt nothing.

“She also went to the quickie mart. The cashier just IDed her. She used the bathroom. He said she was in there a long time, and when she came out, she had changed clothing. Would you like to see the footage there? She looks like a million bucks.”

She slid a grainy photo across the desk. A young woman in a tank top and hoodie tugged low over her brow. She was smiling.

“That’s not Lorie,” he said softly. She looked too young, looked like she looked when he met her, a little elfin beauty with a flat stomach and pigtails and a pierced navel. A hoop he used to tug. He’d forgotten about that. She must have let it seal over.

“I’m sure this is tough to hear, Mr. Ferguson,” the male detective said. “I’m sorry.”

He looked up. The detective did look very sorry.

“What did you say to them?” he asked.

Lorie was sitting in the car with him, a half block from the police station.

“I don’t know if you should say anything to them anymore,” he said. “I think maybe we should call a lawyer.”

Lorie was looking straight ahead, at the strobing lights from the intersection. Slowly she lifted her hand to the edges of her hair, combing them thoughtfully.

“I explained,” she said, her face dark except for a swoop of blue from the car dealership sign, like a tadpole up her cheek. “I told them the truth.”

“What truth?” he asked. The car felt so cold. There was a smell coming from her, of someone who hasn’t eaten. A raw smell of coffee and nail polish remover.

“They don’t believe anything I say anymore,” she said. “I explained how I’d been to the coffee place twice that day. Once to get a juice for Shelby and then later for coffee for me. They said they’d look into it, but I could see how it was on their faces. I told them so. I know what they think of me.”

She turned and looked at him, the car moving fast, sending red lights streaking up her face. It reminded him of a picture he once saw in a National Geographic of an Amazon woman, her face painted crimson, a wooden peg through her lip.

“Now I know what everyone thinks of me,” she said, and turned away again.

It was late that night, his eyes wide open, that he asked her. She was sound asleep, but he said it.

“Who’s Leonard Drake? Who’s Jason whatever?”

She stirred, shifted to face him, her face flat on the sheet.

“Who’s Tom Ferguson? Who is he?”

“Is that what you do?” he asked, his voice rising. “Go around calling men.”

It was easier to ask her this than to ask her other things. To ask her if she had shaken Shelby, if she had lied about everything. Other things.

“Yes,” she said. “I call men all day long, I go to their apartments. I leave my daughter in the car, especially if it’s very hot. I sneak up their apartment stairs.”

She had her hand on her chest, was moving it there, watching him.

“You should feel how much I want them by the time they open their doors.”

Stop, he said, without saying it.

“I have my hands on their belts before they close the door behind me. I crawl onto their laps on their dirty bachelor’s sofas and do everything.”

He started shaking his head, but she wouldn’t stop.

“You have a baby, your body changes. You need something else. So I let them do anything. I’ve done everything.”

Her hand was moving, touching herself. She wouldn’t stop.

“That’s what I do while you’re at work. I wasn’t calling people on Craigslist, trying to replace your lawn mower. I wasn’t doing something for you, always for you.”

He’d forgotten about the lawn mower, forgotten that’s what she said she’d been doing that day. Trying to get a secondhand one after he’d gotten blood blisters on both hands using it the last time. That’s what she’d said she was doing.

“No,” she was saying, “I was calling men, making dates for sex. That’s what I do since I’ve had a baby and been at home. I don’t know how to do anything else. It’s amazing I haven’t been caught before. If only I hadn’t been caught.”

He covered his face with his hand. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry.”

“How could you?” she said, a strangle in her throat. She was tugging all the sheet into her hands, rolling it, pulling it off him, wringing it. “How could you?”

He dreamt of Shelby that night.

He dreamt he was wandering through the blue-dark of the house and when he got to Shelby’s room, there was no room at all and suddenly he was outside.

The yard was frost-tipped and lonely-looking and he felt a sudden sadness. He felt suddenly like he had fallen into the loneliest place in the world and the old toolshed in the middle seemed somehow the very center of that loneliness.

When they’d bought the house, they’d nearly torn it down- everyone said they should-but they decided they liked it, the “baby barn,” they’d called it, with its sloping roof and faded red paint.

But it was too small for anything but a few rakes and that push lawn mower with the sagging left wheel.

It was the only old thing about their house, the only thing left from before he was there.

By day, it was a thing he never thought about at all anymore, didn’t notice it other than the smell sometimes coming off it after rain.

But in the dream it seemed a living thing, neglected and pitiful.

It came to him suddenly that the lawn mower in the shed might still be fixed, and if it were then everything would be okay and no one would need to look for lawn mowers and the thick tug of grass under his feet would not feel so heavy and all this loneliness would end.

He put his hand on the shed’s cool, crooked handle and tugged it open.

Instead of the lawn mower, he saw a small black sack on the floor of the shed.

He thought to himself in the way you do in dreams, I must have left the cuttings in here. They must be covered with mold and that must be the smell so strong it-

Grabbing for the sack, it slipped open, and the bag itself began to come apart in his hands.

There was the sound, the feeling of something heavy dropping to the floor of the shed.

It was too dark to see what was slipping over his feet, tickling his ankles.

Too dark to be sure, but it felt like the sweet floss of his daughter’s hair.

He woke already sitting up. A voice was hissing in his head: Will you look in the shed? Will you?

And that was when he remembered there was no shed in the backyard anymore. They’d torn it down when Lorie was pregnant because she said the smell of rot was giving her headaches, making her sick.

The next day the front page of the paper had a series of articles marking the two-month anniversary of Shelby’s disappearance.

They had the picture of Lorie under the headline “What Does She Know?” There was a picture of him, head down, walking from the police station yesterday. The caption read: “More unanswered questions.”

He couldn’t read any of it, and when his mother called he didn’t pick up.

All day at work, he couldn’t concentrate. He felt everyone looking at him.

When his boss came to his desk, he could feel the careful way he was being talked to.

“Tom, if you want to leave early,” he said, “that’s fine.”

Several times he caught the administrative assistant staring at his screen saver, the snapshot of Lorie with ten-month-old Shelby in her Halloween costume, a black spider with soft spider legs.

Finally he did leave, at three o’clock.

Lorie wasn’t in the house and he was standing at the kitchen sink, drinking a glass of water, when she saw her through the window.

Though it was barely seventy degrees, she was lying on one of the summer loungers.

Headphones on, she was in a bright orange bikini with gold hoops in the straps and on either hip.

She had pushed the purple playhouse against the back fence, where it tilted under the elm tree.

He had never seen the bikini before, but he recognized the sunglasses, large ones with white frames she had bought on a trip to Mexico she had taken with an old girlfriend right before she got pregnant.

Gleaming in the center of her slicked torso was a gold belly ring.

She was smiling, singing along to whatever music was playing in her head.

That night he couldn’t bring himself to go to bed. He watched TV for hours without watching any of it. He drank four beers in a row, which he had not done since he was twenty years old.

Finally the beer pulled on him, and the Benadryl he took after, and he found himself sinking at last onto their mattress.

At some point in the middle of the night, there was a stirring next to him, her body shifting hard. It felt like something was happening.

“Kirsten,” she mumbled.

“What?” he asked. “What?”

Suddenly she half sat up, her elbows beneath her, looking straight ahead.

“Her daughter’s name was Kirsten,” she said, her voice soft and tentative. “I just remembered. Once, when we were talking, she said her daughter’s name was Kirsten. Because she liked how it sounded with Krusie.”

He felt something loosen inside him, then tighten again. What was this?

“Her last name was Krusie with a K,” she said, her face growing more animated, her voice more urgent. “I don’t know how it was spelled, but it was with a K. I can’t believe I just remembered. It was a long time ago. She said she liked the two K’s. Because she was two K’s. Katie Krusie. That’s her name.”

He looked at her and didn’t say anything.

“Katie Krusie,” she said. “The woman at the coffee place. That’s her name.”

He couldn’t seem to speak, or even move.

“Are you going to call?” she said. “The police?”

He found he couldn’t move. He was afraid somehow. So afraid he couldn’t’ breathe.

She looked at him, paused, and then reached across him, grabbing for the phone herself.

As she talked to the police, told them, her voice now clear and firm, what she’d remembered, as she told them she would come to the station, would leave in five minutes, he watched her, his hand over his own heart, feeling it beating so hard it hurt.

“We believe we have located the Krusie woman,” the female detective said. “We have officers heading there now.”

He looked at both of them. He could feel Lorie beside him, breathing hard. It had been less than a day since Lorie first called.

“What are you saying?” he said, or tried to. No words came out.

Katie-Ann Krusie had no children, but told people she did, all the time. After a long history of emotional problems, she had spent a fourteen-month stint at the state hospital following a miscarriage.

For the past eight weeks she had been living in a rental in Torring, 40 miles away, with a little blond girl she called Kirsten.

After the police released a photo of Katie-Ann Krusie on Amber Alert, a woman who worked at a coffee chain in Torring recognized her as a regular customer, always ordering extra milk for her babies.

“She sure sounded like she loved her kids,” the woman said. “Just talking about them made her so happy.”

The first time he saw Shelby again, he couldn’t speak at all.

She was wearing a shirt he’d never seen and shoes that didn’t fit and she was holding a juice box the policeman had given her.

She watched him as he ran down the hall toward her.

There was something in her face that he had never seen before, knew hadn’t been there before, and he knew in an instant he had to do everything he could to make it gone.

That was all he would do, if it took him the rest of his life to do it.

The next morning, after calling everyone, one by one, he walked into the kitchen to see Lorie sitting next to Shelby, who was eating apple slices, her pinkie finger curled out in that way she had.

He sat and watched her and Shelby asked him why he was shaking and he said because he was glad to see her.

It was hard to leave the room, even to answer the door when his mother and sister came, when everyone started coming.

Three nights later, at the big family dinner, the welcome-home dinner for Shelby, Lorie drank a lot of wine, and who could blame her, everyone was saying.

He couldn’t either, and he watched her.

As the evening carried on, as his mother brought out an ice cream cake for Shelby, as everyone huddled around Shelby, who seemed confused and shy at first and slowly burst into something beautiful that made him want to cry again-as all these things were occurring, he had one eye on Lorie, her quiet, still face. On the smile there, which never grew or receded, even when she held Shelby in her lap, Shelby nuzzling her mother’s wine-flushed neck.

At one point he found her standing in the kitchen and staring into the sink; it seemed to him she was staring down into the drain.

It was very late, or even early, and Lorie wasn’t there.

He thought she had gotten sick from all the wine, but she wasn’t in the bathroom either.

Something was turning in him, uncomfortably, as he walked into Shelby’s room.

He saw her back, naked and white from the moonlight. The plum-colored underpants she’d slept in.

She was standing over Shelby’s crib, looking down.

He felt something in his chest move.

Then, slowly, she kneeled, peeking through the crib rails, looking at Shelby.

It looked like she was waiting for something.

For a long time he stood there, 5 feet from the doorway, watching her watching their sleeping baby.

He listened close for his daughter’s high breaths, the stop and start of them.

He couldn’t see his wife’s face, only that long white back of hers, the notches of her spine. Mirame quemar etched on her hip.

He watched her watching his daughter, and knew he could not ever leave this room. That he would have to be here forever now, on guard. There was no going back to bed.