The Dispatcher

ONE

Ian Hunt is less than an hour from the end of his shift when he gets the call from his dead daughter. It’s been over seven years since he last heard her voice, and she was a different person back then, a seven-year-old girl with pudgy hands and a missing front tooth and green eyes that could break your heart if she wanted them to, so at first he doesn’t know it’s her.

But it is.

He’s sitting in the dispatch office in the Bulls Mouth, Texas, police station on Crouch Avenue, which, as usual, he’s got to himself, though he’s sure if he were to poke his head into the front room he’d see Chief Davis leaning back in his chair with his feet up on his desk and his Stetson tipped down over his eyes. An ancient swamp cooler rattles away in the window to his left, dripping water onto the moldy carpet beneath it, though the July heat doesn’t seem much intimidated by its efforts. Sweat rolls down the side of his face and he tilts his head sideways and rubs the trickle away on the shoulder of his uniform shirt. He clicks through a game of solitaire on the computer-assisted dispatch system on the desk in front of him. If folks in town knew this was how he spent ninety-five percent of his time they’d shit.

But Bulls Mouth just isn’t a big town. Three thousand people if you count everyone in the surrounding area, including the end-timers, revelators,snake-handlers,speed-cookers, dropouts, and junkies, and he supposes you have to count them. Bulls Mouth PD handles their calls.

Despite being the very definition of a small town, Bulls Mouth is the second largest city in Tonkawa County, making up a quarter of its population.

He picks up his coffee mug and takes a swallow of the cold slop within. Grimaces as it goes down, but still takes a second swallow. He must drink three pots of Folgers a day, pouring one cup after another down his throat as he clicks through his hundred games of solitaire.

He’s just setting down the cup when the call comes in from a pay phone on Main Street, just north of Flatland Avenue. Probably a prank call. In this day of cell phones, calls from pay phones almost always are. Fuck-off punk high-schoolers trying to chase away midsummer boredom with a little trouble. Growing up in Venice Beach, California, he did the same thing, so he can’t really hold it against them.

‘Nine-one-one. What is your emergency?’ he says into his headset, fingers hovering over a black keyboard, ready to punch in information.

‘Please help me!’

The voice belongs to either a girl or a woman, it’s impossible to tell which, and it is trembling with panic and out of breath. The girl/woman is gasping into the receiver, which is crackling in his ear like there’s a heavy wind, and high-pitched squeaks escape the back of her throat. If it’s a prank call the person on the other end of the line is the best pretender he’s ever dealt with.

‘Please, ma’am, try to remain calm, and tell me what the problem is.’

‘He’s coming after me. He’s-’

‘What’s your name and who’s coming after you?’

‘My name is Sarah. Wait, no. No. My name is Maggie, Maggie Hunt, and the man who’s. . I was. . he’s. . he’s-’

As soon as he hears the name, Maggie Hunt, Ian’s lips go numb, and like a low note plucked on a taut metal cord running through his middle, a strange vibration ripples through him. Nausea in F-sharp minor.

He swallows.

‘Maggie?’ He inhales through his nostrils and exhales through his mouth in a long trembling sigh. ‘Maggie,’ he says, ‘it’s Daddy.’

The funeral was in May, two months ago now. At first he didn’t want to have it. He thought it an absurd and ritualistic way of burying a past that was still, and is still, very much alive, and you don’t bury something when its heart is still beating. But finally Debbie convinced him that she needed it done. She needed closure. Her shrink, whom she drove all the way to Houston to visit, thought she did, anyway. So they had the funeral and people came and Pastor Warden stood and spoke platitudes while behind him lay a small and empty coffin.

But his words were as empty as the coffin was.

People cried and sang hymns out of tune and dropped to their knees and bowed their heads and prayed. They looked at pictures of pretty little Maggie, from age zero to age seven-up to seven but never older-sitting in a high chair with cake on her face; walking for the first time; sitting before a blue background for her second-grade yearbook photo; sitting on the front step of their house at 44 Grapevine Circle with a bloody knee, a crash helmet on her head, and a wide, mischievous Cheshire grin on her face.

If she were alive she would be turning fifteen in September.

Ian was neither among the hymn singers nor the weepers. He sat silent in the last pew throughout it all. His back was straight, his fingers laced together, his hands resting in his lap. Though Bulls Mouth Baptist was hot, even in May, he did not move to wipe the sweat from his forehead nor that trickling down the side of his face. He sat there motionless, his mind a room without any furniture in it. He only moved when people began to walk up to him and offer their condolences. He shook their hands and said thank you and when someone tried to hug him he accepted their hugs, but he simply wanted to leave. He wanted to go home and be alone.

After everyone else had come and gone Debbie walked over with Bill Finch. Bill was her new husband. He was also police, working out of the Tonkawa County Sheriff ’s Office in Bulls Mouth, just other side of the county jail from Bulls Mouth’s city police station, and a man who started many a jurisdictional argument with Chief Davis over even small issues the city always handled, which usually resulted in a yelling match between Davis and Sheriff Sizemore. Bill was one of only three county police regularly in Bulls Mouth. The main office was up in Mencken. The city PD handled most day-to-day policing on its own, and because of that all emergency calls in the area were filtered through Ian.

Debbie hugged him and thanked him for agreeing to the funeral. He and Bill nodded stiff greetings at one another, but neither offered a hand to shake. Then they went their separate ways. Debbie and Bill headed to their house and their twins, now three, and their two dogs and their backyard with its above-ground swimming pool. Ian to his apartment on College Avenue and his buzzing refrigerator and his piles of regrets.

‘Daddy?’ Maggie says.

‘I–I’m here. . I’m right here,’ he says after a moment during which speaking seems impossible. Then he realizes he has a job to do: ‘Tell me where you are. Are you on Main Street?’

Sometimes the location that comes up on the CAD system is incorrect. If someone is coming for his daughter he wants to make sure he’s sending a unit to the right place.

‘I don’t know. I need help.’

‘I know, Maggie. Help’s coming. But I need to know where you are. Do you see any street signs? Any store names?’

There is a pause. It seems to stretch on forever. Continents sink into the empty space. Then: ‘Yeah. It’s Main Street. The Main Street shopping center.’

Two months ago she was dead. Her headstone even now is planted in Hillside Cemetery just other side of Wallace Street. Row 17, plot 29. But there is no one in the earth beneath it. The person who in another world would be there is now standing in front of the Main Street shopping center with a telephone to her ear.

And she must be alive because Ian can hear her breathing.

‘Good girl. The man who kidnapped you, what does he look like?’

‘He’s. . he’s big,’ she says, ‘as big as you, maybe bigger, and he’s old. Like a grandpa. And balding. His head is shiny on top. And his nose, it’s. . it’s like all these broken veins and. . oh God, Daddy, he’s coming!’

His heart is in his throat; he swallows it back so that he can get words out.

‘What are you wearing?’

‘What? He’s coming!’

‘What are you wearing, Mags?’

‘A dress. A blue dress with pink flowers.’

‘Do you know the man’s name?’

‘It’s H-’

But that is all and that is it. That followed by a scream.

Ian can hear the phone on the other end bang against something as it swings on its cord. It bangs again and again as it swings, the space between each percussive thump longer than the one before until the final thump does not arrive and the space is infinite.

Maggie escapes only because of an open door.

If it weren’t for that door being left open she would never have tried to get out. Years of imprisonment have caused whatever hope she once felt to grow cold inside her, and now she does not feel it at all. She has not felt it for a very long time. She doesn’t know if it’s there anymore. Maybe it is: some small spark.

Days and nights she spends in this miserable concrete-walled basement. She is alive but below ground all the same. Buried. Trapped in what she has always thought of as the Nightmare World. Trapped with its moist stink. Trapped with its seemingly living shadows. Trapped with nothing but her thoughts to keep her company.

And sometimes Borden. She’d been here for several days when she first saw him. He was hiding in the shadows, a small, skinny boy in Chuck Taylors and Levis and a red button-up shirt tucked into his pants. He did not have the face of a boy, though. He had a shiny brown coat covering his face between forelock and muzzle and a black mane and shining black horse’s eyes and flaring nostrils and large square teeth. Maggie was afraid of him at first, but her loneliness was stronger than her fear. Now he is the only friend she has.

He doesn’t talk about how he got here, and Maggie is the only one who knows he’s here at all. He hides when anyone opens the door at the top of the stairs, when anyone starts making their way down the wooden steps. Maggie does not hide. It would do no good. They know she’s here. They brought her here. Here to this horrible place. It is a small place, keeping you from the rest of the world. Keeping you from the sunlight and the grass and trees and playing with friends.

The only way to remember that the rest of the world even exists is to look out a single rectangular window and see it. All you can do is look. It is too narrow for even a cat to crawl through. But the sun shines on Maggie in the morning and it is bright and warm on her skin. After noon the shadows begin to lay themselves out before her, growing long as the hour gets late. But mornings are hers.

The window is partially covered by a few thatches of weeds growing from the ground right outside, and it is splattered with dirt. Her biggest fear is that the weeds will grow so thick that she will not be able to see outside at all, or stand in the light that cuts its way into the darkness for half the day every day. Most days. If the clouds are heavy all she gets is a hollow gray illumination that for some reason reminds her of having a cold. But this is summer and the sky is clear and the light is bright.

Was bright.

It is now after noon and, though it is still daytime, the sun is on the other side of the house and sinking toward the horizon.

When the sun’s light cuts into the room she stands in it. She stands in it as long as possible, moving as the light moves across the floor, but the sun is gone so she is merely sitting on the mattress in the corner of the room with her knees drawn up and her arms wrapped around them. A book sits on the mattress beside her-sometimes Donald brings her books and even gives her lessons-but she does not feel like reading right now.

‘Borden?’ she says to the shadows, but there is no response.

So she counts. One two three four five six seven eight. She likes to count. When she is not counting all sorts of terrible thoughts enter her mind and make her stomach feel sour. Even reading cannot always keep out the thoughts. But when she counts she can keep them out by filling her mind with numbers. Not at first: the small numbers are too easy, they don’t require full concentration, and bad thoughts can still snake their way into her mind between them. But once she counts high enough, two thousand twenty-three, two thousand twenty-four, the numbers are big enough to fill her head and nothing else can squeeze in. Everything goes quiet inside her and she does not feel afraid.

She’s only up to three hundred and seventeen when Beatrice comes downstairs to collect her lunch plate. It is sitting empty on the small card table at which she usually eats her meals. Sometimes Borden will sit across from her while she eats and they’ll talk about things, though she can never really remember any of their conversations, and he has never eaten any of the food she has offered.

Three hundred and-

The door at the top of the stairs creaks open and Beatrice’s large frame fills the doorway. She flips a switch. A yellow bulb hanging from a brown wire in the middle of the basement comes to life. It chases away the shadows, filling the room with pale light. Maggie squints and watches Beatrice make her way down the stairs. First she steps down with her right foot, and then follows with her left, setting it next to the other. Once her feet are side by side again she pauses to breathe. Then she progresses once more with her right foot.

‘How are you, Sarah?’ she says once she gets to the bottom of the stairs.

‘Okay.’

‘Good.’

Maggie says nothing.

‘Do you want me to brush your hair for a while before I do the dishes?’

‘ No.’

‘Do you want to brush my hair?’

‘ No.’

‘Are you feeling okay?’

‘Yes.’

‘You sure?’

‘Yes.’

‘Okay.’

Beatrice walks to the card table and collects the empty plate. It is white with blue flowers and vines decorating its edge. Maggie hates it.

‘You ate all your food.’

‘Yes, ma’am. Thank you.’

‘I wish you wouldn’t call me ma’am.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘I wish you would call me Momma.’

‘Okay.’

‘You always say okay, but you never do it.’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Okay.’

Beatrice turns around and heads back up the stairs. When she reaches the landing she pulls open the door and turns to face Maggie again.

‘We’re having meatloaf for dinner. With lots of grated carrots, like you like.’

Then she flips off the light, steps through the door, and pulls it closed. But Maggie does not hear the click of it latching, nor does she hear the sound of the deadbolt sliding into place. She sits and waits and listens, but she hears nothing.

After a moment she gets to her feet and pads barefoot to the bottom of the stairs. She looks up to the top of them. A sliver of light cutting its way into the darkness between the door and the wall. The steps at the top are visible in the light, rounded and worn smooth by shoes sliding up and down them, a few rusty nail heads jutting up.

‘Borden,’ she says. ‘Borden, it’s open.’

Something within her shifts. A long eclipse of the sun ends and light comes into her.

Even before she knows what she’s doing, even before instinct becomes thought, her heart begins to thump and her mouth goes dry. Her hands form fists on either side of her. The fists grip the fabric of her dress tight within them. She steps up, her bare feet moving one at a time from the cold smooth concrete floor of the basement to a warmer textured surface. The grain of the wood feels good beneath her feet, alive somehow, more part of the outside world than anything else down here.

She takes another step up, gently rolling the ball of her foot onto the wood and then putting her weight upon it and pushing herself up. The step does not moan in protest as it would were Beatrice putting her weight upon it. It accepts Maggie silently. The only sounds she can hear at all: the muffled vibrations of the television coming through the walls and the rhythmic sound of her heart beating in her chest and ears and temples.

She takes another step-oh, God, don’t let it make any noise-and that is followed by yet another.

By the time she reaches the top of the stairs her palms feel itchy and her throat constricted. Her breath wheezes into and out of her through a throat like a kinked garden hose.

She swallows.

Then grabs the doorknob. It is cool to the touch and smooth. She pulls. The sliver of light cutting its way into the basement becomes a block of light splashing door-shaped against the wall to her left. The shadow of her arm in relief against the wall.

On the other side of the door she can see scarred green linoleum flooring, dark cabinets, a laminated kitchen counter piled with filthy dishes. The oven is ancient, and while it once must have been white it is now splattered with all manner of food. The window above the sink is water-spotted. The ceiling is fly-specked.

A cockroach scrambles from a stack of plates piled like porcelain pancakes and runs across the counter toward the sink, into which it disappears.

To her left she can hear the television and though she can neither see nor hear them she knows Henry and Beatrice are in there. But then she does hear them. She hears one of them.

The floor creaks just the other side of the wall.

She pulls back from the door and eases it shut but for a crack and continues to peer out to the kitchen. Her breath catches in her throat. Her eyes are wide and feel very dry, but she is afraid to blink. Beatrice enters the kitchen. Maggie’s muscles tighten and lock her motionless.

The woman scratches between her legs through the fabric of her dress as she walks to the stainless steel sink. She turns on the faucet. Pipes rattle and moan. The faucet spits a wad of rusted water, and then flows orange for a moment before going clear. Soon the water is steaming, fogging the window above the sink despite the heat outside.

Beatrice squirts orange dish soap onto a green scouring sponge, grabs a dirty plate-Maggie’s lunch plate-from a stack of them, holds it under water a moment, and then scrubs at it. Once it’s clean she rinses it and sets it into a rusty dish drainer. She grabs a second plate.

Her back is to Maggie. Maggie thinks that if she doesn’t get out now she might never get out. The door is unlocked and she’s standing at the threshold. She pulls the door open and simply stands in the doorway a moment. She is waiting to be noticed. Her heart is beating so loud Beatrice almost has to hear it. Except she doesn’t. With her back to Maggie she continues to wash dishes.

‘Get back here before she sees you.’

Maggie jumps and glances over her shoulder.

Borden stands on a step halfway up the stairs, only his horse’s head in the light, the rest of him hidden in shadows. His eyes are like great pits spooned out with an ice cream scooper. His mouth is covered with a frothy foam.

Maggie swallows. Then she shakes her head at him. No. I’m not coming back. She turns her back on him. Beatrice is still standing at the sink washing dishes.

‘Get back here.’

No.

Though she does not know the layout of the house she knows she cannot go left-the sound of the TV is coming from there-so she turns right and walks as carefully as she can, praying-God, please-that the floor does not creak beneath her feet. One step, two step, red step, blue step.

Beatrice puts another plate into the dish drainer.

Ahead of her and to her right a door opening onto a hallway. Old-timey pictures hang crooked on the wall on the other side of the door. A yellow light splashes across them from somewhere. The light is rippled with shadow and reminds her of light reflected off water. She hopes the yellow light is coming from the sun. She hopes she is that close to outside, to the daylight world.

Another glance toward Beatrice. The woman is picking up a dirty saucepan. It has dried pieces of cabbage sticking to it. Beatrice hums as she scrubs at the pan. Maggie recognizes the tune. Jesus loves me, this I know, for the Bible tells me so. Little ones to Him belong, for we are weak and He is-

A dog barks. Maggie jumps. A squeal escapes her throat. She slaps her hands-both of them-over her mouth, trying to hold it in, but it is too late. It’s out on the air where Beatrice can hear it.

She knew there was a dog up here. She has heard its nails clicking on the floor above her head for years. She even knows its name: Buckshot. But until now she has never seen it. It is standing in the doorway toward which she has been walking. It is waist high and the color of tree bark. Its tongue hangs from its mouth and its tail thumps wildly against the doorframe as it wags.

Beatrice has stopped washing dishes. She now stands looking at Maggie. Her shoulders are slumped and her mouth agape. Her hands hang empty at her sides and drip water onto the dirty green linoleum.

Buckshot growls and the growl grows slowly into a series of quick barks.

Maggie jumps again.

From the basement just other side of the doorway Borden whispers loudly to her: ‘Come back now and you won’t get into trouble.’

‘Henry!’ Beatrice says. ‘Henry, she’s got out! Sarah’s got out the basement!’

Maggie glances behind her but Henry is not there. He will be coming soon. She glances to the doorway where Buckshot stands and blocks her way, his tail thumping and thumping against the wall. He is scruffy and scars line his face and the side of his body, but he is not Henry. She runs toward him. As she runs past he licks her hand and his tail thumps against her hip, but he does not bite, nor does he bark again. She glances right and sees the hallway leading deeper into the house. To her left is a wooden door, the top half filled with yellow pebbled glass which allows the light to come in but does not allow visitors to get a good view of the interior. She grabs the door handle and thumbs down a brass paddle. She pulls.

A wall of heat greets her and bright sunlight like opening an oven door and finding an entire universe within. Wind blows against her face.

‘Sarah, get back here! She’s getting out, Henry!’

She turns back to the open door. Beatrice’s fingers at the back of her neck. She runs across the porch and leaps, arcing through the air and down onto the gravel driveway. The sharp gray stones dig into the soles of her bare feet. She almost falls, but does not. She looks around, trying to figure out where her best chance lies. To her left, a grazing pasture in which a few cows stand dumbly working their jaws. To her right, woods of hickory and oak and pine. Maybe she can disappear into them. She runs toward the trees.

Her heart thumps in her chest and her throat feels dry and scratchy, but her skin is hot from the sun, a wonderful feeling, and she is outside outside outside with a hot breeze blowing against her back as she runs, pushing her forward, pushing her toward freedom.

As she reaches the wall of trees just other side of the driveway she looks back over her shoulder and sees Henry running toward her. Running after her. An old man with his big gut swinging back and forth like the pendulum on a grandfather clock, a few strands of gray comb-over hair blowing in the wind, face a grimace, eyes cruel, bulbous red nose bursting forth like an internal hemorrhage about to rupture.

‘You better,’ he says angrily between great heaving breaths, ‘you better stop, Sarah!’ Another breath. ‘You fuckin’ stop!’

She runs into the woods.

And through them. Blades of sunlight cutting through the canopy overhead and splashing across her face and legs and arms. The sound of birds singing, then taking flight as she nears. Breeze shuffling through the summer leaves. She is outside. She has escaped. She glances back over her shoulder but sees no one. She is outside. No walls surround her.

She runs until it hurts to breathe, until the stitch in her side is unbearable, jumping over plants she thinks might be poison oak or poison ivy, ducking beneath thick mustang grape vines that are growing between the tree branches and wrapping themselves around tree trunks. She runs until she has to stop, and then she does stop.

She stands breathing hard, bending over, hands pressed against her knees. Her throat hurts but it feels good too. Clean hot summer air. Lungfuls of it. She tries to slow her breathing so she can listen. She hears nothing. She hears nothing and she sees nothing behind her.

Maybe he gave up. Maybe she really is free.

She walks to a white beam of light breaking through the canopy overhead and she stands within it. An outside observer would see a pale, fragile-looking girl seemingly glowing while everything around her was covered in the shade of trees. An outside observer would see an angel. But there are no outside observers. There is only her and the sunlight and the silence of the woods.

She allows herself a quiet moment, almost allows herself to cry, and then she pulls herself together again, and continues on. She walks at first, but the walk becomes a jog, and soon enough she is running again.

Despite the pain it feels good to run. She has spent years trapped in a place where running was impossible and it feels good to have this much space open before her.

In five minutes she comes to a sun-faded road, cracks twisting their way across its surface like rivers on a map.

She turns left for no reason she can think of and continues on, padding her way along the asphalt. It feels good on the soles of her feet. It is almost too hot, and if she slowed to a walk it would be too hot, so she does not slow to a walk. She keeps running.

Henry is watching TV and sucking at a beer like it’s mother’s milk when Beatrice calls to him from the kitchen.

‘Henry!’ she says. ‘Henry, she’s got out! Sarah’s got out the basement!’

‘Ah, fuck,’ he mumbles to himself. Then gets to his feet, finishes the Budweiser in his hand, showing the bottom of the can to the ceiling, and sets the empty on the coffee table. ‘How the hell’d she get out?’ he says.

‘Sarah, get back here!’ Bee says from the kitchen. ‘She’s getting out, Henry!’

‘I’m coming.’

He walks to the kitchen. Beatrice is on the far side of the room facing the open front door. When she hears him she turns around.

‘She’s got out.’

‘Well, goddamn it.’

‘I didn’t mean to let her.’

‘Goddamn it.’

‘I told you she was getting out.’

He ignores her and hurries to the front door. Sarah is running barefoot across the gravel driveway. She is running to the woods west of the house.

Henry jumps down the steps and runs after her, feeling sick to his stomach. He’s too old for this kind of activity. When he catches up with Sarah he’s gonna make her sorry she ran like this. He’s gonna make her sorry she made him run like this. She’ll be screaming sorrys, is what she’ll be doing. She’ll keep screaming them for a week.

As she reaches the line of trees she glances back.

‘You better,’ he says angrily between great heaving breaths, ‘you better stop, Sarah!’ Another breath. He feels like he’s gonna have a heart attack. ‘You fuckin’ stop!’

He knows she is afraid of him. He’d like it better if she didn’t have to be afraid of him. He’d like it better if she accepted the fact that she was now part of this family. She’s had a long enough time to get used to it. It would make everybody’s life easier. Including hers. He’d like that; it just ain’t the way it is. But she is afraid of him and she does what he says. So when he shouts at her to stop he fully expects her to comply.

But she doesn’t. She turns and disappears into the woods.

‘Fuck.’

He runs to the woods and into them.

He sees flashes of blue dress between the trunks of trees. He chases after that color. Branches scratch at his face and grab at his clothes. He tries to keep her in sight as he runs, but it’s an impossible task. He must pay attention to what he’s doing or he’s liable to run straight into a tree. He loses sight of her. Then another flash of blue thirty or forty yards ahead. He cuts toward her, but the heel of his boot catches on the root of a tree and he falls face first to the ground, getting a mouthful of composted leaves. He spits and picks himself up. He looks to see if she’s still in sight but she is not. He briefly considers chasing after her anyway, but doesn’t think he’ll catch her on foot. But the woods are surrounded by road, and she’ll have to come out of them eventually.

He turns back and runs toward the house.

‘Bee, I need my keys!’

A moment later Beatrice arrives at the front door.

‘Did you get her?’

‘No, goddamn it, I need my keys.’

‘Your truck keys?’

‘Of course my truck keys. All my keys are on the same fucking key ring. Come on.’

‘Okay.’

Beatrice turns from the doorway and disappears a moment. When she returns his keys are dangling from her hand. She throws them toward him, but they land in the gravel five feet shy of their intended destination. Henry curses under his breath, goddamn it, leans down, and snatches them up. He walks to his pickup, a green ’97 Ford Ranger he bought used a couple years ago from Davis Dodge-it’s got a mushy clutch, but you have to expect that kind of thing when you buy your truck used from Todd Davis, Mr Chief of Police, you just might get pulled over less with a Davis Dodge license-plate frame on your vehicle-and slides into the driver’s seat.

A few seconds later he’s slamming the thing into first and the tires are kicking up gravel as he takes the driveway north to Crouch Avenue.

He drives west along the old cratered road, squinting left into his own woods, trying to see white skin or a snatch of blue dress between the trees. On the other side of the road is Pastor Warden’s place, alive with the sound of barking dogs. It sounds to Henry like a schoolyard during recess. Pastor Warden breeds dachshunds and sells them to pet shops in Mencken and other larger towns. Maybe even to some places in Houston. The goddamn dogs never shut up. Henry doesn’t know how Warden can stand it. Then again, after a few weep sessions with troubled parishioners laying their guilt on him, maybe the sound of dogs barking ain’t so bad.

He makes it to Main Street without seeing Sarah, but that doesn’t really surprise him. She was heading west when she ran into the woods and unless she got disoriented there’d be no reason for her to come out on the north end. He makes a left and drives south, along the western edge of the woods.

The gray strip of road stretches out before him, empty of life.

A tight feeling in his chest, like his heart in a vise.

If Sarah manages to get out of the woods and comes across someone and tells them what happened, that will be the end of his long and peaceful life here in Bulls Mouth. He knows everyone in town and everyone knows him. And mostly they like him. Sure, it’s because they don’t really know him, because he’s always smiling and patting backs and saying give my regards to the missus, Dave, but who really lets the world see their guts? Guts are ugly; that’s why we have skin. Take away the skin and what remains? Nothing you’d want to have a conversation with.

As he drives south he looks left, hoping to see Sarah emerge from the trees.

‘Where are you, you little bitch?’

And then he sees her. Not in the woods but in the road up ahead, running into the Main Street shopping center. At least he thinks it’s her. From this distance it could be anybody in a blue dress, but he thinks it’s her. He shifts from second to third and gasses it.

‘It’s H-’

But that is all and that is it. That followed by a scream.

Ian can hear the phone on the other end bang against something as it swings on its cord. It bangs again and again as it swings, the space between each percussive thump longer than the one before until the final thump does not arrive and the space is infinite.

‘Maggie?’

Silence. She is gone.

‘Officer Peña, what’s your twenty? You ten-eight?’

‘Oak Street and Flatland. Good to go.’

‘You at Wal-Mart?’

‘Not even in the parking lot yet.’

‘Get over to the Main Street shopping center. Forty-one forty. Suspect is a tall white male in his sixties, gray hair, balding on top. Victim is a fourteen-year-old girl, Maggie Hunt, blond hair, green eyes, wearing a blue dress. Code three.’

‘Ten-four. I’m on it. Did you say the name of the victim was Maggie Hun-’

‘It’s my daughter,’ Ian says.

Then, before Diego can respond, he pulls the headset off and leans down over a trashcan. His entire body is shaking, vibrating like sound, and he is covered in sweat. He feels as though he may vomit, but when he opens his mouth, nothing comes out. He spits a mouthful of sour saliva into the can and stares at a wadded-up piece of paper lying inside. The paper has been torn from a yellow legal pad. There is writing on it, and he knows that it is his, but he cannot remember what it says. It doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters now is that his daughter is alive. He stares at the paper for a very long time.

She was kidnapped in the spring. Her older brother Jeffrey was supposed to be looking after her. Jeffrey is Ian’s son from his second marriage, Debbie being his third wife. Now his third ex-wife. Jeffrey’d flown down from Los Angeles to spend spring break here. He was fourteen when Maggie was kidnapped. Now he is twenty-two. He just turned twenty-two last month, in fact, on the twenty-seventh. Ian bought him neither card nor gift. For a few years after Maggie was kidnapped Ian and Jeffrey had some kind of relationship, tense though it often was, but eventually it dissolved till there was nothing left. A chess game they were playing over three years ago still sits unfinished on Ian’s coffee table. Two unsent birthday cards lie at the bottom of his sock drawer. Happy birthday, son. I love you. Ian tried to call Jeffrey just over two years ago, dialed and let the phone ring, but when his son picked up, hello, he could not get any words out. They caught like fishhooks in his throat.

Maggie was kidnapped in the spring, and, while her kidnapper cannot possibly know it, Ian lost both his children that night, though it took a few years for the second loss to be finalized. It was a slower vanishing, that’s all.

But it still began on that spring night. A Saturday with a full moon, bone-white and bloated, floating in the vast dark sea above.

Ian was behind the wheel of his partially restored 1965 Mustang, a car his father had purchased for him when he was seventeen and they were living in Venice Beach. Dad thought they could rebuild the car together. He said it would be a fun project. They’d even made a couple trips to a junkyard in Downy and found a fender they needed, and a primer-gray trunk-lid, and a taillight. Unfortunately, Dad’s suicide got between them and their plans. Three months after buying the car the old man decided to smoke a shotgun. Ian found him on the floor in his bedroom when he came home from school.

On this night, this spring night during which Maggie was kidnapped, he and Debbie were in the car with the windows down. The night air was cool and felt good blowing against his face. The radio was on and playing ‘Love Comes in Spurts’ by Richard Hell. Debbie was wearing a summer dress, and her large breasts were spilling out of the top of it. Ian reached over and stroked the inside of her thigh and she separated her knees slightly.

‘I’m glad we did this,’ he said as they drove north on Crockett Street, heading from Morton’s Steakhouse, where they’d had dinner, toward home. ‘It’s been a good night.’

Debbie put her hand over the back of his hand and slid it up the inside of her leg until it was under her dress and pressed against her panties. He could feel her heat and her coarse pubic hair poking through the panties’ fabric and a pleasant sticky humidity.

He thought of a time when he was eleven or twelve, in Venice Beach, where his dad had a surf shop, when he had headed down to the water to hang out and try to get one of the older guys to let him have a beer and he saw a girl in her twenties whose pubic hair was visible on either side of her bikini bottoms. She was wet and the fabric was molded to her body and he could see the dimpled mound between her legs. It was strange and foreign and exciting. It did things to him that he didn’t understand. He went into the water where no one would see him and he masturbated to the mental image while it was still fresh in his mind, and he shot a load into the water, and somehow that was sexy, too. Even now he is able to get excited thinking of that long-ago girl and that mysterious hint of sex he did not fully understand. He cannot remember the last name of the girl to whom he lost his virginity, Jennifer something, and he cannot picture her face, but he remembers every detail of that day on the beach four or five years earlier.

He looked up at Debbie’s face.

‘The night’s not over,’ she said smiling. ‘It’s about to get better than good.’

Ian rubbed her gently a moment before reluctantly pulling his hand from beneath her dress so he could turn right onto Crouch Avenue. Then left almost immediately onto Grapevine Circle. As he drove along he could see Bulls Mouth Reservoir to his right, reflecting the image of the fat moon and the stars like glowing fishes. Then Grapevine Circle bent sharply to the right, and as they made the turn a police car came into view. It was double-parked on the street, lights flashing in the night.

‘Is that-?’

‘Oh, shit.’

‘Stay calm,’ Debbie said. ‘It’s probably nothing.’

‘I am calm.’

But even so he screeched along the street at a dangerous speed, then hauled the car to the right and two-footed the clutch and brake simultaneously when he reached 44 Grapevine Circle and the police car already parked there. He killed the engine by pulling his foot off the clutch and stalling the fucking thing, then yanked the key from the ignition and was out of the car. Debbie stepped from the passenger’s side.

Beneath the hood the radiator hissed. The sound of traffic coming from Interstate 10. Usually you couldn’t hear it, but in the quiet night it became audible. The faint sound of Pastor Warden’s dogs barking in the west. A few neighbors were standing on their porches, looking this direction. Their mouths hung open. Ian hated each and every one of them. And himself. And Debbie.

They never should have left Maggie and Jeffrey home alone. Ian had wanted to have a night out with Debbie, and Jeffrey was fourteen, old enough to babysit, but if anything had happened Ian would never-

Jeffrey was standing on the front lawn, within the circle of the porch’s yellow light, talking to Chief Davis, who had thought whatever was happening was important enough he should crawl out of his whiskey-induced sleep and come out here himself. Davis was taking notes while Jeffrey talked. Jeffrey’s eyes were red and every so often he was wiping at his nose with the back of a wrist.

‘What happened?’ Ian said as he approached. ‘Where’s Maggie?’

Jeffrey and Davis both turned toward him, but neither said anything.

‘Where’s Maggie?’

More silence.

Ian grabbed Jeffrey by the shoulders, fingers digging into the flesh of them, and shook him. ‘Where the fuck is Maggie?’ he said.

‘Honey,’ Debbie said, ‘don’t.’

‘Ian,’ Chief Davis said and put a hand on his shoulder.

Ian turned on Davis and knocked his hand away with the swipe of an arm. The old man blinked like an owl behind his glasses and mustache but said nothing. He simply tilted his Stetson back on his head and hooked his thumbs in his pockets and rocked back on the heels of his boots and looked away. Debbie, though, did not look away.

‘Don’t touch me,’ Ian said to both of them and neither.

Then he turned back to his son.

‘Jeffrey,’ he said, ‘where is Maggie?’

Jeffrey looked up at him. Ian saw for the first time that there was something like terror in his eyes. They were alive with it. It danced in them like flame in a night window. Then, once more, he dropped his gaze to his feet. He had on a pair of slippers. They were blue corduroy, darkened by the damp grass. They were one of his Christmas presents from the year before. Deb had picked them up from a drugstore while grabbing a prescription for antibiotics and they’d tossed them into the box they mailed to California with the rest of his gifts, as well as a cordial if distant holiday card for Lisa, Jeffrey’s mother and Ian’s second wife.

‘She’s gone,’ Jeffrey said finally, staring down at those blue slippers.

‘Gone?’

Ian was expecting an injury, a broken arm, fingers burned on the stovetop, a bad cut-but gone? For a moment his mind could not even process the word.

Without looking up at him Jeffrey nodded.

‘Gone where?’

A pathetic shrug.

‘I don’t. . I put her to bed. I was watching David Letterman and. . and I heard a noise in her bedroom like she was playing around. I yelled at her to calm down and go to sleep. I yelled at her. Then it got really quiet and I started to feel bad about yelling. I went back to make sure she was okay, to say sorry if I’d hurt her feelings or. .’ A shrug. ‘But when I went to her bedroom. . she was. .’ He licked his lips. ‘She was gone.’ He glanced up once as he finished talking, but quickly looked down again.

Ian walked past Jeffrey and Chief Davis, knocking against Davis’s shoulder, and into the house. Walked straight to Maggie’s room. To what was Maggie’s room. To what is now, in this different world, like that old world but not quite the same, the twins’ room: refurnished, repainted, re-carpeted, hardly the same room at all. It was empty. He walked to the bed and put the back of his hand against the dent in her pillow. It was cold. There was no warmth left in it at all. Beneath it, a tooth. Waiting for a tooth fairy that would never come. He walked to the window. It was open and a breeze was blowing against the curtains. The screen frame was still in the window but the screen had been cut out. A few loose strings still hung from the frame. The rest of it lay on the grass just outside. When the wind blew it shifted, looking like a living shadow.

‘Ian,’ Chief Davis said behind him, ‘you really shouldn’t be in here. I got Sheriff Sizemore sending down a couple people from Mencken to pull evidence.’

Ian nodded but continued to stare out at the night. The wind blew. The screen shifted. After a few moments of silence he heard Chief Davis leave the room. And after a few more he turned away from the window and followed.

He was thirty-eight then. Now he is forty-five, though he sometimes feels older. Three marriages, one abortion, two children (a son he hasn’t spoken to in over three years and a daughter he’s feared dead for twice as long), seven broken bones (four fingers, a collar-bone, his nose, and a toe), one gunshot wound, four car accidents, three dead pets, and two dead parents: yes, sometimes he feels older than his years.

When you glance over your shoulder and look at what you’re pulling behind you in your red wagon it can be hard not to feel overwhelmed by the weight of it all.

He wakes in the morning with a neck that won’t turn and a right hand that’s already beginning to feel arthritic, with a swollen right knee that won’t bend for the first hour of the day, with a sore back and a mind he wishes he could scrub the memories from. He wakes and showers and dresses. He shaves every other day. He’s blond and can get away with that one bit of laziness concerning his appearance. He eats two soft-boiled eggs (and sometimes a piece of toast). He drinks a pot of coffee. He goes to work, where he sits for eight hours and plays solitaire and answers calls. Occasionally he goes out on calls himself if someone needs backup and it’s close by (keeps a bubble light in his glove box). He is technically a police officer and wears the uniform every day. But that is the result of the city council not approving the hire of a civilian dispatcher and not a difference of job function. Mostly Ian simply sits in the office and takes calls. Sometimes the calls are ugly: husbands collapsed while feeding the horses, or maybe kicked in the head while changing a shoe; sons who accidentally severed a thumb while sawing wood; wives who spilled two gallons of simmering lye soap down the front of their dresses. And it seems those bad calls come one after another, piling up during the course of a day. Some black luck blown into town on the wind. By the time those days are over he feels hollow as a Halloween pumpkin. He drives to the Skyline Apartments and parks his car. He locks himself inside his apartment. He watches TV. Situation comedies. After a few hours of this, during which he drinks six bottles of Guinness and, if it’s Friday, one small glass of scotch (usually Laphroaig), never more, he falls asleep on the couch.

Five or six hours later he wakes and repeats the process.

But not today. Today is different. He would normally leave at four, but today he walks out the door at three fifteen.

He gets to his feet and walks into the police station’s front room.

Chief Davis is right where Ian thought he would be, leaning back in his chair with his boots kicked up on his desk, Stetson tipped over his eyes. He has a reputation for laziness, but he’s on call twenty-four hours a day, and is often out nights dealing with drunks and wife-beaters, so he catches naps when he can. Ian himself doesn’t count that as laziness.

‘Chief,’ he says.

Chief Davis groans and wipes at a bit of drool at the corner of his mouth.

‘Chief.’

Davis sits up and tilts back his Stetson. He knuckles his eyes, pulls his glasses from his pocket, and sets them on his nose. He rubs the palm of his hand down the front of his face, then looks up at Ian, blinking.

‘Ian.’

‘I just got a call.’

‘Yeah?’

‘From Maggie.’

‘From-’ Blink, blink. ‘From your daughter?’

Ian nods.

‘You sure?’

Another nod. ‘She called from a pay phone front of Main Street shopping center. She’s alive. I sent Diego down just now, and county guys are on the way, but I’m going too. Maybe you could keep point on the phones?’

Davis shakes his head.

‘No,’ he says. ‘You know I gotta deal with Sizemore. Thompson can handle the phones.’

Steve Thompson is Bulls Mouth’s other daytime police officer. He’s good police, so far as Ian can tell, when there’s something happening, but otherwise he tends to wander off. After four o’clock, there are only two officers on duty at a time-one of the three part timers to take calls and a guy in a radio car. And of course they call Chief Davis if necessary. Four to midnight is Armando Gonzales and one of the part timers. Used to be Diego Peña, but Peña switched to days a while back. Went from part time on the phones to full time to days in quick succession. From midnight to eight is Ray Watkins.

Ian nods. ‘All right. Where’s he at?’

‘Out back washing my truck. Tell him to get on the phones and then let’s go.’

Ian nods.

‘What are you wearing?’

‘What?’ She looks over her shoulder and can see Henry’s Ford Ranger speeding toward her, and behind the glass Henry’s large frame hunched over the wheel like a bear over its prey. ‘He’s coming!’ she says.

‘What are you wearing, Mags?’

‘A dress. A blue dress with pink flowers.’

The truck pulls into the parking lot, tires screeching. Smoke wafts from burned rubber and the foul stink of it hangs in the air. The door swings open, engine still running. She can hear Henry’s footsteps behind her. She looks over her shoulder and he is making great steps toward her. He curses under his breath. His hands open and close at his sides as he walks.

Open and close, open and close, open and-

‘Do you know the man’s name?’

‘It’s H-’

But that’s all and that’s it. Henry grabs her around the waist. She screams. Henry puts his hand over her mouth. He pulls her away from the phone. She tries to hold on to it, to maintain her connection to Daddy, oh God, Daddy, please, but her hands are too sweaty and it slips away and swings down on its cord and bangs against a phone book hanging from a metal ring. She tries to scream again but to no end. The hand over her mouth keeps the sound trapped in her throat.

Henry carries her while she kicks and claws at him. She grabs his fingers and tries to pull them away from her. She tries to contort her body so that she can bite him. Nothing works.

‘You little bitch,’ he says, ‘don’t you ever run from me again.’

He throws her into the truck through the open driver’s side door. She lands lengthwise across the beige vinyl bench seat and hits her head on the passenger door. She pulls herself up to a sitting position and looks around in a daze. She is disoriented and for a moment lost. Everything feels unreal to her. Then she sees the open door and knows once more where she is and what she must do. She crawls toward escape.

Then Henry’s large frame fills the opening and he slides into the truck. He pulls the door shut behind him and releases the hand brake. The truck turns toward the street. Maggie looks out the window to the phone. It is still swinging from its cord. Daddy.

She grabs the passenger’s side door handle and pushes open the door, trying to jump out before the truck gains speed, but as the truck turns out onto the street, the momentum forces the door shut again. She has to pull her hand away so that it isn’t slammed between the door and the frame. Then Henry grabs the back of her dress and pulls her away from it. And slaps the side of her head.

‘Stop it, goddamn you! Just fucking stop it!’

Tears of pain and defeat and rage stream down her face.

‘I hate you!’ she says.

‘Shut the fuck up, Sarah.’

‘That’s not my name.’

‘I said shut-up.’ He punctuates the last word with yet another angry slap at her head.

‘No, you shut up.’

And she attacks him. She tries to claw at his stupid face. She punches at his chest and neck. He fights her off with one hand while steering with the other. He tries to grab her by the neck. She sinks her teeth into the web between his thumb and index finger. He hollers in pain and yanks his hand away. She spits out the salty taste of his sweat and blood, wipes her mouth with the back of her hand, and goes at him again. He shoves her away with great force and she flies backwards and hits her head against the window.

The truck swerves as they reach Crouch Avenue, travels another fifty yards, weaving back and forth across the two-lane asphalt, and then crashes through the fence behind which Pastor Warden keeps his dachshunds. The chain-link fence peels open where two sections were held together only by baling wire, curling in either direction like a sardine can lid, and there’s a great scratching sound. Then the brakes lock, Maggie is thrown against the dashboard, and falls down to the floorboard.

The truck slides along the ground another ten or fifteen feet before coming to a stop.

Henry puts the truck into reverse and backs out to the street. There is more metal on metal scraping, a few serious jerks as the truck rolls once more over the shoulder of the road, and then they are on asphalt again.

Maggie pulls herself off the floor and goes for Henry once more.

Henry shoves her away again, and she hits her head on the passenger’s side window for the second time. It hurts and makes her feel dizzy and sick. Her vision goes wonky and she loses her equilibrium. She thinks she might vomit. The skin is split and she feels blood trickling down the back of her head.

She is reaching back to touch the wound when she is hit again. Henry simply fists the side of her head above the ear. Just behind the temple. He likes to hit her where Beatrice won’t see the bruises. There is a strange sensation like sinking into thick liquid, and then there is no sensation at all. Everything goes dark.

Henry puts the truck into gear and gasses it. It gets rolling. He glances in his rearview mirror and sees what must be two dozen dachshunds escaping through the hole his truck punched through the fence. He figures there’s a good chance of it coming back to him. His truck is scratched all to hell. If it does come back to him he’ll just say he got a little too drunk. He’ll smile big and apologize and if it’s Chief Davis who comes knocking he’ll say, ‘You know how it is. Anyway, maybe I’ll be trading this thing in now it’s not prime no more. Maybe you’ll see me down at the dealership. Tell Pastor Warden I’m real sorry. Tell him I’ll pay for the damage. You got any good deals, any new used trucks in?’ That will, in all likelihood, take care of the situation with the fence. If it even becomes a situation. It might not.

What really worries him is witnesses at the Main Street shopping center. What happened there could not be explained away.

Horizon Video is almost surely nothing to worry about. The kids who work there do nothing but sit in the back and smoke weed and watch pornographic films unless they hear the front door’s bell chime, at which point one of them cuts through the curtain of smoke and walks to the counter and stands around while browsers browse. The barber shop is closed Sundays and Mondays, so there was no one there. That leaves the old cobbler who has a shop next to Horizon Video, the dry-cleaning place, and Bill’s Liquor. Bill’s Liquor is also, unless a customer was in, nothing to worry about. It’s possible-just-that no one saw him.

But he can’t worry about it. Either someone saw him or no one did. He’ll find out which soon enough. Fretting over it won’t change a goddamn thing.

Acid bubbles up at the back of his throat and he reaches into his shirt pocket and pulls out a roll of antacids. He picks lint off the top of the roll, peels back the foil, and thumbs two tablets into his mouth. They are chalky and flavorless. He chews them slowly.

Then glances over to Sarah. She’s unconscious, head leaning against the glass of the window, a thin smear of blood just above her, a few drops of it splashed onto the beige armrest. As he looks at her another drop of blood splashes onto the vinyl.

‘You little bitch,’ he says. ‘Don’t even think I’m finished with you.’

He tongues chalky antacid from a molar and downshifts to second. He hits his turn-signal lever-click-click, click-click-and turns right into his gravel driveway.

The tires kick small stones out into the street.

He carries Sarah into the house. Beatrice is standing over a bowl of raw hamburger, grating carrots into it. When he walks into the kitchen she looks at him, and then at Sarah draped limp in his arms. A worried grunt escapes her throat.

‘What happened?’

‘She fell.’

‘Is she bleeding?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘How’d she fall?’

‘She tripped. How else do people fall?’

Beatrice does not respond. He walks past her, kicks open the basement door, and carries Maggie down the stairs.

Ian slides into his Mustang and pulls the door shut behind him.

A three-inch plug of cigar pokes from the ashtray. He grabs it, grinds his teeth into the sloppy end, and lights it, sucking on it while watching with crossed eyes as the other end glows bright orange and smokes. He rolls down his window and exhales a thin stream of blue smoke. He spits a piece of tobacco off the end of his tongue, jabs the cigar back into his mouth, rolls it between his teeth, and starts the car.

The radio comes on, but Ian isn’t in the mood for music. He turns it off immediately. Then grabs his sunglasses from his shirt, large mirrored things-cop sunglasses, you get them when you graduate academy-and slides them onto his face.

Sweat trickles down his cheek and drips onto his shirt. The white sun overhead imbedded in the blue-glass sky. He reaches down and grabs the shifter, sliding it into reverse, and burns his hand on the knob. He pulls his hand away and shakes it. Every day he does this. You’d think he’d learn. He looks over his shoulder and backs out of his spot, handling the wheel as gently as possible, so he doesn’t get burned on it, but it’s hard to handle a car with a light touch when you don’t have power steering.

He arms sweat off his forehead, shifts, and drives out onto the street.

He’s not even sure why he’s going to the Main Street shopping center. Chief Davis heading there makes sense. He’ll have to liaise with Sheriff Sizemore. The Tonkawa County Sheriff’s Department handles any major crimes, with the city police department at its disposal. The county has access to labs, detectives, forensics guys, and can pull strings when necessary. The city has nine cops (three of them part time), three police cruisers bought from Houston when they were taken out of commission there and given an oil change and a paint job, and a police station smaller than most houses, with but a single holding cell.

And Ian hasn’t been real police in over a decade, not since he took a bullet in the knee and Debbie talked him into moving them to Bulls Mouth, her hometown, where things would be quieter and calmer than in Los Angeles, where Maggie would be safe and they could live a peaceful life, where he would not have to worry about getting shot a second time.

There will almost certainly be nothing for Ian to do when he gets there.

But that doesn’t seem to matter. He wants to stand where his daughter recently stood. He’s certain he will sense her presence, like a scent hanging in the air, despite the fact that she was GOA, gone on arrival, when Diego pulled into the lot. He has feared her dead for a very long time, and he wants to feel her presence. To know she’s alive.

He drives along Crouch Avenue till he comes to Wallace Street, where he makes a right. He drives past the post office and the firehouse and Bulls Mouth High School, shut down for the summer, and makes a left onto Hackberry. In another five minutes he is pulling into the Main Street shopping center’s parking lot, bringing his car to a stop next to Diego’s cruiser and behind a sign that marks the spot:

FOR DRY CLEANING PICK UP ONLY VIOLATORS WILL BE TOWED.

Diego Peña is simply standing in front of the pay phone rolling a cigarette. He’s a thin man, half Spanish, half Apache, with wavy black hair and sun-baked skin. He’s got a series of tight little knot-like scars running across his face as well, the results of a domestic disturbance call he took five years ago, back when he was working nights.

Jimmy Block and his wife Roberta used to share a house in the south part of town, just off Clamp Avenue. A neighbor called about a ruckus. Diego knocked on the door and Roberta answered it. The lower half of her face was a mask of blood and a purple crescent in the shape of the moon was swelling around her left eye and said eye was swimming in tears. Jimmy was sitting quietly at the dining-room table. Diego went to get him, intent on putting him in jail overnight so he couldn’t do any more wife-beating-this was his third call to the house in a month-and Jimmy grabbed a roll of barbed wire he had sitting on the table-he’d planned on fencing in the earthworm farm behind his bait shop the next day, apparently, to make it harder for kids on their way to the reservoir to snatch handfuls of them-and flung it into Diego’s face. One of the barbs came within a centimeter of taking out his left eye. Instead of overnight, Jimmy Block was in jail for the next six months.

Roberta used the time to change all the locks in the house and file for divorce.

Ian steps from his car and into the heat of the day. He taps ash off the end of his cigar and jams it back into his face. He grinds it between his teeth.

Chief Davis pulls in behind Ian and parks.

Diego squints at Ian. ‘You okay?’

‘No. Guarding the phone?’

‘Yeah. Thought it might have fingerprints or something on it and figured the sheriff would have county boys coming down from Mencken to brush it.’

‘Anyone try to use it?’

Diego shakes his head. ‘You wanna come over for dinner? Cordelia’d love to have you.’

‘No, I’m not much for socializing right now.’

‘Sure you wanna be alone tonight?’

‘Yeah.’

Chief Davis steps up beside Ian and puts a hand on his shoulder.

‘I’ll see what I can see about witnesses before Sizemore gets here and ruins them.’

‘I’ll come with you.’

He drops his cigar to the asphalt and grinds it out with his heel.

‘It’s an open invitation,’ Diego says.

‘Thanks, anyway.’

Then he glances past Diego to the phone. He has a strange urge to lift the receiver and put it to his ear and listen, as if he might be able to hear Maggie’s voice once more. She was just here today. She called him from that phone.

‘Well,’ Chief Davis says, ‘let’s ask some questions.’

They walk into the shoe repair shop first. Lining the walls are wooden racks on which rest shoes dropped off for repair but never picked up again: white leather loafers with gold buckles, snakeskin cowboy boots, resoled wingtips, resoled ropers.

There are white stickers on them with prices scrawled in blue ink.

Behind the wood counter at the back of the narrow store stands an old man with hunched shoulders and a face like an apple core left in the sun. He smiles, revealing very white unfitted dentures. His smile is open-mouthed and the top row of teeth starts to slip from his gums, and he slams his uppers and lowers together with a clack and works his jaw, getting the dentures back into place. His hands rest on the counter. Black shoe polish has stained the fine spaces between the whorls of his thumbs and built up beneath his fingernails. A polish-stained rag lies on the counter near to hand, beside a tin and a pair of buffed shoes.

He finishes working his jaw and says, ‘How can I help you gentlemen?’

As the cobbler speaks his gaze drops from their faces to their feet, to their shoes, the thing by which, it is clear, he measures all men. His frown makes it clear that neither Ian nor Chief Davis meet his minimal standards.

‘A quick polish, perhaps?’ he says.

‘You hear a ruckus out front ’bout ten-fifteen minutes ago?’ Chief Davis says.

‘Ruckus?’

‘Noise.’

‘Scuffle,’ Ian says. ‘Maybe a scream.’

The cobbler shakes his head.

‘Nothing, huh?’

‘’Fraid not.’

Ian pulls his wallet from his right hip pocket and in it finds a photograph of Maggie. The edges are torn and browned from frequent handling. He looks at it a moment himself, at his grinning daughter’s first-grade yearbook photo, and then turns it around and sets it on the counter and pushes it toward the cobbler.

‘Ever seen this girl before?’

The cobbler shakes his head without so much as a glance at the picture. His eyes remain dull and unfixed, looking toward some nothing in the middle of the room.

‘No,’ he says. ‘Ain’t seen nothing.’

‘You didn’t even hear nothing?’ Chief Davis asks again. The cobbler shakes his head, then taps the hearing aid hooked around the back of his ear. ‘Maybe the battery’s dying.’

‘Could be.’

‘You don’t seem to be having much trouble hearing us,’ Ian says.

‘Well.’

‘Look at the goddamn picture.’

‘I already told you I didn’t-’

Ian hits the counter with the flat of his palm, creating a loud clap, and the cobbler recoils like he’s been hit.

‘You haven’t even bothered to fucking look yet.’

‘Hey,’ Chief Davis says, putting a hand on Ian’s shoulder, ‘man’s got no reason to lie.’

Ian ignores this. He leans on the counter and glares at the cobbler, forcing him to meet his eye. The cobbler looks uncomfortable, but he stares back for a couple seconds before his gaze drops to Ian’s chest.

‘This is my daughter. She’s been missing for more than seven years. The picture was taken before she went missing, so she’d look different now. She’s fourteen, fifteen in September. She made a call from the pay phone out front not twenty minutes ago. Now look at the goddamn picture and tell me did you see her.’

The cobbler looks down at the photograph. After a moment of silence he reaches out and touches it with a black-stained fingertip. He touches it gently. Ian has to fight the urge to snatch it away from the man. Instead he puts his hands behind his back. The cobbler’s face softens and his eyes find focus as he looks at the picture. He scratches his cheek.

Without looking up he says, ‘I didn’t get a good look at the girl but this might’ve been her.’

‘Did you see the man she was with?’

‘The one who took her?’

‘The one who took her.’

The cobbler nods. ‘I don’t know him. But I only been in town four years and don’t meet nobody unless they come in the shop.’

‘You didn’t recognize him?’

‘Not to name,’ the cobbler says, ‘but I think I seen him at Albertsons a few times.’

‘So you’d recognize a picture?’

The cobbler nods. ‘Think so.’

‘In his sixties, gray hair, bald on top, busted capillaries in his nose, and about my size?’

‘He’s fatter’n you, but about the same height, I reckon.’ He holds his hand up to measure. ‘You know who done it?’

Ian shakes his head. ‘She told me what he looked like.’

‘Was he on foot?’ Chief Davis asks.

The cobbler pauses a moment, then says, ‘No. I heard a engine running, but I didn’t see it. Must’ve parked to one side or the other.’

‘Car or truck?’ Ian says.

‘He said he didn’t see it. He couldn’t tell you just by-’

‘Truck,’ the cobbler says, then nods to himself as if getting internal confirmation. ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘definitely a truck.’

‘Thank you,’ Ian says. ‘You’ve been a big help. Someone will probably come down with a book of arrest photos for you to look through, and maybe even ask you to Mencken to help reconstruct a picture if you don’t recognize him in the book.’

He reaches across the counter and picks up Maggie’s photograph. He slips it into his wallet, folds his wallet, and slips it back into his hip pocket.

‘And if you see him again,’ Ian says, ‘I want you to call nine-one-one.’

‘Okay,’ the man says.

When they get outside Chief Davis says, ‘Goddamn, Ian, if you ever get tired of being a dispatcher, I tell you what, I’ll give you a job down at the dealership in a second. You can just bully folks into buying cars. I’ll sell out in a week.’

‘Thanks, Chief.’

Cora Hanscomb at the dry-cleaning place next door claims to have neither seen nor heard anything. She says this without looking away from the TV upon which her gaze is fixed. She sits in a metal fold-out chair behind the counter and moves popcorn from a bag in her lap to her mouth. The backs of her fingers are glazed yellow with imitation butter and several pieces of popcorn lie on the floor around her chair and in her lap.

‘Nothing?’ Ian says again.

‘Huh-uh.’

‘Too busy watching the tube to pay attention to a kidnapping?’

‘I guess.’

‘Can’t bother even to look at the people talking to you?’

‘Huh-uh.’

‘Right,’ Ian says. ‘Thanks a fucking lot.’

‘Watch your mouth.’ She says even this without looking away from the TV, her voice a droning monotone.

‘Get fucked,’ Ian says, and pushes his way out the door.

They walk into Bill’s Liquor. Ian glances left to Donald Dean. He’s standing behind an orange Formica counter looking bored. A scruffy guy, maybe forty-five, maybe fifty, with oily brown hair and a patchy beard that makes his face look like it was mauled by a large cat. Above the beard, high on his cheeks, acne scars. He’s thin as a stick and pale, and his smile, when he smiles, looks like a grimace. Teeth crammed together like he’s got a few too many. He nods at Ian and reaches over to a tub of red vines, which is sitting between a tub of pickled pigs’ feet and a tub of beef jerky, pulls one out, and chews on it awhile.

Chief Davis walks over to him.

Ian turns right. He walks to the refrigerator at the back, scans the shelves, opens a glass door, which immediately fogs up, and pulls out a six pack of Guinness. The door swings shut behind him as he turns around and walks to where Donald and Chief Davis are standing at the counter.

‘-at all?’ Davis is saying.

‘Huh-uh.’

Davis turns to Ian and says, ‘He didn’t hear nothing either.’ ‘Maybe the battery in his hearing aid is dying too.’

‘What? I don’t-’

‘Nothing.’

Ian sets the beer on the counter.

Donald rings it up and says, ‘That all?’

Ian scans the shelves behind him, looking just below the rows of hard liquor, to several boxes of cigars and cigarettes.

After a moment he says, ‘Gimme a couple of them Camachos.’

Donald turns around and looks for them.

‘Diploma?’

‘Maduro. Bottom shelf, to your right.’

He grabs them and rings them up. Then he grabs a black plastic bag and loads Ian’s purchases into it. Ian knows the cigars will be dry and probably taste like smoking dog turds. The middle of summer and they’ve been sitting out since the spring. He doesn’t care. He’s used to smoking cigars past their prime.

While Donald loads the bag Ian pulls out his wallet and removes Maggie’s photo from it. He holds it up in front of Donald.

‘You remember my daughter?’

Donald nods. ‘’Course.’

‘You didn’t see anyone resembling her today?’

‘Huh-uh,’ he says with his mouth hanging open. Ian can see bits of red vine ground into his molars like wax fillings.

‘And you didn’t hear anything?’

He shakes his head. ‘Like I told Chief Davis.’

‘What about a guy in his sixties? Tall, gray hair, balding on top, busted capillaries in his nose. Heavy.’

Donald lets out a strange giggle and grins with his too-many teeth, but when Ian gives him a dead pan the smile vanishes, and he stares down at the counter nervously and scratches at something sticking to it, part of a price sticker looks like, with a dirty fingernail.

‘What’s funny?’

Donald shakes his head. ‘Nothing, it’s just, you know, you described damn near half the fat old alcoholics in town.’ He looks from Chief Davis to Ian and a smile grows once more on his face. ‘Hell,’ he says, ‘you just described my brother Henry.’

Chief Davis snorts once.

‘True enough,’ he says. ‘How is Henry, anyway? I haven’t said much more than hello to him since high school, I reckon.’

‘He’s okay, I guess.’

‘Still working at the community college?’

‘Uh-huh.’ Donald nods.

‘If you see anyone looks like my daughter, I want you to call. I’d rather a false alarm than to miss our chance.’

‘I will,’ Donald says. He wipes the sweat from his upper lip with a downward swipe of his palm, and then wipes his sweaty palm onto the leg of his pants. ‘I will,’ he says again.

Ian and Chief Davis step into the daylight. It seems bright even after Ian puts his sunglasses back on. An oppressive wall of heat surrounds them. Ian reaches into his bag and pulls out one of his cigars. He bites the end off, spits it to the parking lot asphalt, plugs the stick into his mouth. He lights it, looking past it to Diego. Diego standing with his arms crossed, watching one of the boys from Mencken pulling fingerprints.

Then the sheriff himself pulls up in the Ford Expedition Tonkawa County provides for him and screeches to a stop. He steps from the thing, all five feet five of him, all two hundred and sixty pounds of him. He walks toward Ian and Chief Davis, belly swinging before him like a wrecking ball.

Ian glances at his watch.

‘I’ll let you talk to the sheriff,’ he says. ‘I need to tell Deb. Call if there’s any developments.’

‘I will. And Ian,’ he says, patting him on the shoulder. ‘Stop in at Roberta’s tonight, okay? You shouldn’t be alone through this.’

‘I’ll think about it,’ Ian says, knowing he won’t.

Maggie opened her eyes and saw white white white: the ceiling. She tongued the place where her loose tooth should have been, but all that was there now was smooth wet gum and a bloody divot that tasted vaguely of metal.

Someone took it, she thought. Tooth fairy took it and didn’t pay. Stole it.

Then it occurred to her that maybe the tooth fairy had paid. She flipped over in bed and tossed the pillow aside, but the only thing beneath it was wrinkled sheet. There was no green dollar bill awaiting discovery. Not even a lousy quarter. She couldn’t believe the tooth fairy would sneak into her bedroom in the dark of night and yank her tooth from her mouth. What a butthole. She briefly considered putting a fake tooth beneath her pillow-a piece of chalk, maybe, or else a white stone if she could find one of the right size-and pretending to sleep so that when the tooth fairy came she could grab him and force him to pay for what he had taken from her.

But then she saw it on the floor. It lay half-buried in the thick carpet. She hopped from her bed and picked it up. She brushed off the dirt specks it had collected and held it up in the morning sunlight shining through her bedroom’s open window and looked at it, amazed at how big it was, at how much of it had been buried in her face. It was kind of gross and kind of neat at the same time. She tongued the gap between her teeth. There was a strange flap of skin there that she could flip back and forth. It felt weird. She ran to the mirror on her dresser and looked at herself and smiled. Then she ran into Mommy and Daddy’s room to show them.

‘Look it,’ she shouted as she shot into the room like a human bullet, door swinging open as she pushed it aside and banging against the wall. The curtains were drawn, daylight held temporarily and ineffectively at bay, and there was a strange grown-up smell in the room. It made the air feel heavy and close, like being in a zipped-up sleeping bag.

Daddy groaned and sat up. He cleared his throat. It was a funny sound. Like a monster in a Saturday morning cartoon. He rubbed his red eyes and wiped his mouth and twisted his neck left and right, sending out little hollow-sounding pops, and looked in her direction. But for a moment his face was blank.

‘Look it,’ she said again and held up the tooth for him to examine.

‘Wow,’ Daddy said after a moment. He coughed into his hand and yawned. ‘Is that a grown-up tooth? It’s huge. Have you been out stealing teeth? You know the tooth fairy doesn’t buy stolen teeth, Mags. It’s a felony.’

‘It’s not stolen. Look.’ She gripped her tooth in her right palm, folding three fingers over the top of it, and with index fingers stretched her mouth open wide so Daddy could see where the tooth used to be.

‘My God,’ Daddy said, ‘you could park a car in there.’

‘Could you two chatterboxes take it to the living room?’ Barely a mumble. ‘Mommy needs her beauty sleep.’

‘Sounds like someone’s got a case of the crankies,’ Daddy said, then winked at Maggie and got to his feet. A pair of pants lay in a pile on the floor. He picked them up and slipped into them, hiding his red boxers.

‘Come on, Mags,’ Daddy said. ‘Let’s get some breakfast.’ He looked over his shoulder at Mommy with a smirk in the corner of his mouth and said, ‘Cereal. With lots of sugar.’

They headed to the kitchen. Maggie climbed onto one of the barstools lined up before the counter that separated the kitchen from the dining room. She spun around left, catching herself on the edge of the counter, and then spun herself around right, back and forth, back and forth. She liked to go round and round in one direction, she liked the dizziness it brought, it was fun, but once she accidentally unscrewed the stool all the way and the seat fell to the floor and she sprained her wrist catching herself, so she didn’t do that anymore. While she played on the stool Daddy went digging through the cupboards.

Maggie caught herself on the counter one last time and said, ‘What does the tooth fairy need teeth for, anyway? It’s kind of a weird thing to collect.’

‘He turns them into stars.’

‘Really?’

‘Maybe.’

‘No.’

‘Maybe.’

‘Really?’

Daddy nodded, then put two bowls on the counter and poured Froot Loops into them. He put away the box and got out a half gallon of milk and poured that over the cereal. He pushed a bowl across the counter to Maggie.

‘Eat up.’

‘What about a spoon, silly?’

Daddy picked at his bellybutton and flicked a wad of gray at her.

‘What about some lint?’

Maggie dodged it, dipping her head to the left.

‘Gross. Don’t. I don’t want your smelly lint.’

‘It’s not smelly.’

‘How do you know?’

‘I’m sorry.’

‘You almost got it in my cereal.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

‘Get me a spoon before it gets soggy.’

‘Okay.’

Daddy grabbed two spoons from the silverware drawer and handed her one. Then he dipped his into his bowl and shoveled a mouthful of pink and green and orange into his face. He scratched at his blond stubble. Scooped another bite into his mouth and milk dripped down his chin and he wiped at it with his hand.

‘What do you want to do today?’

‘Petting zoo!’

‘What if they mistake you for one of the goats and fence you in?’

Maggie rolled her eyes. ‘They won’t.’

‘How do you know? You’re stubborn as a goat.’

‘I don’t even know what that means.’

‘Shouldn’t we wait till Jeffrey wakes up and weighs in?’

‘He loves the petting zoo.’

‘He’s never been.’

‘Then we should definitely go. He’s only here another two days and he needs to go before he leaves town.’

‘You have a point.’

‘See?’

‘Okay.’

‘Okay?’

Daddy nodded.

‘Okay what?’

‘Okay okay.’

‘Okay petting zoo?’

‘Yup.’

‘Really?’

‘Really really.’

‘Promise?’

‘Promise. Now eat your cereal before it gets soggy.’

‘You’re the best daddy ev-’

‘Wake up.’

A familiar voice gurgling up from swampy depths. The stench of onion on a wave of breath. The sound of swallowing.

Something small shatters in a sharp pop. A moment later the stink of ammonia fills her nostrils. Her eyes flutter open. Warm water runs down her cheeks.

Everything is dark and without form. A shadow, like a vaguely human-shaped hole scissored out of reality, before her. Behind it, bright white light making it impossible for her to see anything more than shadow. She closes her eyes and opens them again. Her pupils shrink, adjusting to the room. The shadow grows features, taking on detail and color and a third dimension. It is a man. The man has a name and she knows what it is. Henry. She blinks again and sees him clearly for the first time since waking. He simply stands before her with his arms at his sides, fists opening and closing.

Then he reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a roll of something, small white disks, and thumbs one into his mouth. He chews it, swallows.

There’s an intense pain in her wrists. She can feel blood warm and thick rolling down her arms. She looks up and sees her wrists tied together with coarse yellow rope. The rope is slung over a large metal hook which has been screwed into a wooden ceiling beam. Her hands above the rope are purple and numb, bloated fingers curled slightly, fingertips touching. She has been here before: the punishment hook. You’ve been very bad, Sarah. Very bad indeed. Looking at her fingers she thinks of a rhyme she learned in Sunday school. Here is the church and here is the steeple. Open the doors and see all the people.

Her feet dangle far above the cracked gray surface of the concrete floor.

Henry stands and stares. Fists opening and closing, opening and closing. He tongues at a molar. His breathing sounds funny. It gets heavier and thicker and faster.

‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I’m sorry.’

His breathing stops. There is silence.

Then: ‘But you’re really not, are you?’

‘I am.’

‘What are you sorry for?’

One two three four five six seven eight.

She looks around for Borden, just to know that she isn’t alone down here. Just to know that she isn’t alone with Henry. Maybe he’s standing in the shadows somewhere. She knows he cannot save her from whatever punishment Henry will be delivering, but seeing him would be a comfort still. She does not see him.

A hand across her face so hard it makes her eyes water and a bruise above her ear begins to throb. She had forgotten about it, that place where Henry punched her earlier, but now it is throbbing with the beat of her heart.

‘I said what are you sorry for?’

She looks down at her feet once more. They are filthy, black with dirt, and if she ignores the pain she can pretend she is simply floating above the floor. A crack in the concrete moves left and right beneath her as she swings by her wrists. Just pretend you’re floating: above the ground without a care in the world.

He reaches toward her. She instinctively recoils. He slaps at her cheek, a quick whip-crack of his fingertips, then grabs her chin and tilts her head up so that she is looking him in the eyes. An uncaring cruelty floats in them and nothing more: pools of bad water. She hates them.

‘You don’t know?’

‘What?’

‘You don’t know what you’re sorry for?’

‘I’m. .’ she says, and licks her lips. They are dry and cracked. ‘I’m sorry for running.’

‘You’re sorry for getting caught.’

‘No.’

‘Oh, you wanted to get caught?’

She turns her head and looks away. She can feel fresh tears welling in her eyes. She tries to blink them away. She doesn’t want to cry in front of him. She doesn’t want to be weak in front of him. He is a cruel man and weakness makes him angrier, more likely to attack.

‘You didn’t want to get caught.’

‘No.’

‘That is why you’re sorry.’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Well I do.’

With the last word he puts a fist into her stomach, punching all the air out of her. It leaves her in a single rush. If she weren’t strung up by the wrists she would curl into a fetal ball. Instead she swings and gasps for air like a fish on the end of a line.

Henry stands and watches her swing. Fists opening and closing.

‘You’ve made me very angry, Sarah.’

He has always called her Sarah. Both he and Beatrice. Another way of torturing her. Another way of confusing her. Of making her confused about who and what she is.

She is just getting her breath back when Henry grabs her by the hips and stills her swinging. He looks at her in silence.

Then: ‘What do you have to say for yourself?’

She breathes in and out, chest heaving. Her stomach is a tight, cramped knot.

‘My daddy’s coming,’ she says.

‘What?’

‘I called my daddy and told him everything. You better just let me go. If you don’t he’s going to, he’s going to get you and he’s going to-’

‘Lies!’ Violence like a large wave crashing upon a beach. She flinches away but does not break eye contact. ‘You’re lying,’ he says. ‘Tell me you’re lying.’

She shakes her head. ‘He’s going to get you,’ she says.

‘Henry?’ Beatrice’s voice stumbling down the stairs.

‘What?’

‘You’re gonna be late for work.’

He looks at his watch and curses under his breath. ‘I’ll be right up,’ he says.

He grabs Maggie by the waist and lifts her off the hook and sets her down on the cold concrete floor. Then he unties her wrists and makes four loose loops of the bloody rope.

She looks down at her wrists and sees the shape of the rope imbedded in her skin. She pushes herself backwards until she is up against the wall. She looks up at him, awaiting some final act of violence. It does not come.

He nods to the rusty sink in the corner and says, ‘Wash up before Bee brings you supper.’ Then trudges halfway up the stairs before turning around again. ‘You’ve broken Bee’s heart with your behavior. All she wants is a daughter. She loves you, you know. Even though you’re a failure as a daughter, she loves you.’ Then he heads the rest of the way up the stairs, turns off the overhead light, and closes the door. A moment later, the sound of a deadbolt sliding into place.

The only light left in the basement is the laundry-water gray of late afternoon coming in through the basement’s sole window.

Her hands begin to throb with sharp pain as the circulation returns to them. She cries silently, trying to bend her fingers. It hurts too much, and she knows from experience that it will take several minutes for the pain to recede. And she knows, too, that the tide of pain hasn’t yet even fully come in.

But she knows something else as well: she almost got away.

After years in captivity she managed to get out. Hope which she’d long thought dead throbs hot in her chest. Even now, back here in the Nightmare World, there is a new sense of possibility. The world on the other side of the window is not unreachable. She has walked upon its ground. She has run through its woods. She has heard her daddy speak into her ear.

Getting out today was a fluke, she knows that, but if she plans it she can get out again. And this time she will not be brought back.

Henry walks to the fridge and pulls it open. On the top shelf, a brown-bag meal Bee has packed for him. He grabs it and looks inside. A Tupperware bowl with a chunk of corned beef in it and a soup of cabbage and water. Every day he gets the leftovers from the day before. He’s already looking forward to tomorrow’s meatloaf sandwich. In addition to the corned beef there are two pre-packaged chocolate cupcakes. He folds the bag, grabs the five beers left in a six pack he broke into at lunch, and lets it dangle from a finger by its one empty plastic ring.

He walks out the front door and into the late afternoon daylight. Long shadows stretch out on the ground. He walks down the steps and across the gravel driveway and out to his truck, sliding onto the seat, tossing his lunch next to him, and popping one of his beers from its ring. He opens it and it foams up and spills down the side of the can before he can get the can to his mouth and suck at it. It drips down his chin and the front of his shirt and into his lap. He takes two good swallows before looking down at his Levis.

‘Goddamn it.’

Looks like he sat here and pissed hisself.

Then another swallow before resting the can between his legs. It’s a hot day and the cold feels good. The heat also means the beer he spilled will be dry by the time he arrives at work. Good thing: one of the office administrators has already complained once about him smelling of alcohol. But he supposes right now that is the least of his worries.

He feels sick about what Sarah said in the basement. That she called her daddy. That she told him everything. If she was telling the truth he will end up in prison. Not jail, where, in his youth, he spent more than one drunken night, but prison, where bad men go.

He starts the truck, puts it into gear, and gasses his way up the driveway to the street.

The first Sarah was born thirteen years ago in Mencken Regional Medical Center. They had not planned on having children. Beatrice was forty-four, and in the twenty-eight years she and Henry had been together they had never used contraceptives, so Henry didn’t even think they could have children if they wanted any. But Beatrice got pregnant and when Henry saw how it affected her he was glad. She was happier than he had ever seen her before. Henry had never heard someone sing so much in his life.

When the baby came they named her Sarah. Sarah Jasmine Dean. Weight: seven pounds three ounces. She had a cute oval face and thin blond hair that wisped up from her head in a silken hook. She smiled constantly with her mouth open and her green eyes shining. She kicked her feet and laughed and laughed and laughed.

But then she stopped laughing.

Beatrice put Sarah into the bathtub and left the room to get toys for her-a plastic duck, a ball-and when she came back Sarah was under water. Beatrice told Henry that she was only gone a second or two, but he knew it wasn’t true. She had gotten distracted looking for toys and lost track of time.

After the funeral, after they lowered that tiny coffin into the ground at Hillside Cemetery, Beatrice did nothing but sit on the couch and cry. Henry wanted to fix it, to make her happy again, but didn’t know how. Sarah was gone and she was never coming back.

But then he got an idea.

He wasn’t sure how Beatrice would react, so he held off for a long time, hoping she would manage to pull herself out of the hole in which she was wallowing. She had stood by him for twenty-eight years, through drunken arrests and holes punched in walls, through fist fights with her brother, through slaps and punches that were the cause of the fist fights with her brother, but he didn’t know if she would stand by him if he went through with this, and if he went through with it it would be for her.

Beatrice only got worse. She stopped bathing. Sometimes she would urinate or defecate without getting up from the couch. She did nothing but watch TV and eat and cry. The dishes piled up in the sink and on the counter. The house started to smell bad. He took off her clothes as she sat passively, neither assisting him nor trying to stop him, and wiped her down with washcloths, but it didn’t help much, and soon she began to develop sores-small round scabrous holes in her flesh like cigarette burns. Some of them got infected. But still she would not move.

It was horrible. He knew he had to act.

So he spent several days driving around, looking for potential Sarahs. He sat in front of a couple daycare centers in Mencken, but all the kids there were too old to be proper replacements. He tried the Mencken Regional Medical Center, but couldn’t manage to get past the front desk. Finally he got lucky at an Albertsons. He wasn’t even looking for a Sarah at the time. He was there simply to get groceries for the week. But when he saw his opportunity, a baby sitting unsupervised in a shopping cart while her mother fought with groceries in the back of a station wagon, he took it. He walked by and scooped the baby up, walked around a gray Nissan, and made his way back to his truck. He walked briskly but did not run. Running, he knew, would give him away. He glanced down at the baby as he walked. She had an oval face and blue eyes, not green, and a pink ribbon in her hair. Her eyes weren’t the right color, but they were close. He slid the baby into the seat and buckled her in and was sticking the key into the ignition when the woman started to scream. He looked up at her through his bug-spattered windshield.

She was standing outside her car with her mouth hanging open and her eyebrows cocked and her eyes wide and glistening with terror. She turned in a frantic circle and said, ‘’Becca?’Becca!’ Then she said, ‘Someone took my daughter!’ Then she put both her fists into her hair and began to pull at it. ‘Help. Someone help. My baby’s gone. Someone took my ’Becca!’

Henry put the truck into gear and pulled out of the parking lot. He watched in the rearview mirror as a store employee ran toward the woman, then he made a right onto the street and drove away and could not see her anymore.

Beatrice loved her. Her face lit up and she held her and stroked her face and loved her. She insisted that Henry get rid of all Sarah’s ‘hand-me-downs’, stuff that they did not get for her, the things she was wearing when Henry took her, so he put them in a bag to throw them away, but because he didn’t want anyone to find them, he buried them in the woods instead. Life returned to normal. Life was good, even; they were simply a happy family living a normal life.

But six months later Henry had to put her into the ground next to her clothes. Bee had forgotten to feed her. She said she’d forgotten, but Henry thought she had stopped lactating after the first Sarah died and hadn’t wanted to admit it to herself; he’d seen the baby suck at her nipple but cry still hungry fifteen minutes later. Either way the second Sarah was dead.

Bee held on to the corpse for a week, refusing to let Henry take it away from her. She held it and rocked it in her arms and tried to brush its hair, but the hair peeled away with a flap of skin and she put the flap back, pretending to herself that it hadn’t happened. Finally when Bee was asleep Henry took it out of her arms and carried it out to the woods and dug a hole. He put it into the hole and tried to say a prayer, one he’d learned in church, but couldn’t remember it, so he made something up about children being innocent and please take this innocent into Heaven, amen, and scooped dirt over its face so he wouldn’t have to look at it any longer.

Two weeks later he found their third Sarah. She lived five years before Henry spanked her too hard. He felt bad about it, it had been an accident, but she’d misbehaved and she needed to be punished, and if he punished her a bit too much, well, that was as much her fault as it was his. If she hadn’t misbehaved in the first place he never would have lost his temper. He put her into the ground beside the last Sarah and went looking for the next.

That one screamed and screamed when he grabbed her and he put his hand over her mouth to silence her. She stopped screaming, but she stopped breathing too.

Then there is this Sarah. He spent a week fruitlessly searching before he finally decided to go up to the petting zoo. It was on the north side of town, near Interstate 10, and mostly people who visited were traveling through. They saw the signs,

BULLS MOUTH PETTING ZOO PUBLIC RESTROOMS

and their kids bugged them till they agreed to stop for half an hour. Since it was Saturday there would probably be a dozen Sarahs to choose from.

It was a pleasant April day with a breeze just strong enough to make the trees whisper.

Kids were running around looking at all the animals-pot-bellied pigs and rabbits and miniature horses-and reaching through the fences to pet them. Some of them were buying celery and carrots from a woman with a vegetable cart.

Everybody else was there with kids. Henry felt very conspicuous walking alone. He felt like he must stand out, the only giant at a midget convention. But nobody seemed worried by his presence. He was in public and behaved accordingly. A sort of dumb open-mouthed smile pushed up his cheeks, his eyes wide and bright, his hands in his pockets, legs doing a going-nowhere shuffle. Just a harmless old man probably there with his granddaughter who’d run off someplace, maybe to use the restroom.

‘Would you care to buy some vegetables to feed the animals?’

‘Not today,’ he said, pulled out his pockets to display them empty, and shrugged.

‘Maybe next time,’ the woman said.

Then he saw her, the Sarah he wanted, standing just behind the woman with the vegetable cart. She was standing beside her daddy and a teenage boy, looking through a fence at an alpaca.

‘Look it, Jeffrey!’ she said as the alpaca pulled a piece of celery from her fingers.

‘I am, dorko.’

‘You’re the dorko, dorko.’

She was the one. Beatrice would love her. Her face was a bright oval, green eyes alive with joy and humor. Beatrice would absolutely love her. He knew she would.

He followed the family around from a distance, waiting for his moment, but her hand remained within her father’s as they walked. Eventually they circled the entire petting zoo and headed for the exit.

He followed them out to a dirt parking lot east of the petting zoo and watched them pile into a red ’65 Mustang with a primer-gray trunk lid. He got into his truck and followed them out to Crouch Avenue, and then left onto Grapevine Circle. They wound round Bulls Mouth Reservoir, water on their right, a bunch of trees and mustang grapevines and blackberry bushes on their left. By summertime half the houses around the reservoir would be loaded with jars of homemade preserves. They pulled the car into a driveway at 44 Grapevine Circle. Henry drove all the way around the reservoir, made a u-turn when he got to an intersection, and went back. He parked across the street and a few houses down. He had to wait for hours, till her mom and dad left without her, and later still, till the teenage boy watching her finally made her go to bed. He sat and waited, urinating into three beer cans while he did so, setting the warm beer cans just outside his truck on the asphalt, and watching the house. He hummed to himself. He nodded once at someone walking by. Once the little girl was in her bedroom Henry got out of his truck and walked the perimeter of the house. He peeked into her window and watched her change for bed. Little Sarah. He waited till she was asleep before cutting the screen away with a box cutter. He didn’t want to scare her before he was near enough to keep her silent.

It was worth it. Beatrice’s face was as joyful as he’d imagined it would be when he presented their new Sarah. It simply lit up like sunshine.

Henry hits a red light at the corner of Crockett and Hackberry and brings the truck to a stop. He finishes his beer, tilting the bottom of the can to the sky, tosses it to the floor where it falls among the other dead soldiers, and pulls a fresh one from its ring. To his right he can see one of Pastor Warden’s dachshunds digging in a flower garden in front of the Skating Palace, head down, dirt flying up from between its legs and arcing through the air before it falls to the sidewalk. He wonders when-if-someone is going to see how scratched up his truck has gotten and make the connection between that and Warden’s fence. There is probably green paint residue on the chain-link fence as well.

The light turns green and Henry’s gas-foot gets heavy.

He pulls his truck into the lot on the east side of the small college campus, parks in front of the two-storey building where all classes are held, and kills the engine. The first floor won’t clear out till ten, but until then he and Mike will be plenty busy with the second floor, which is not used for classes after four o’clock.

He finishes his second beer, grabs the three that remain, as well as his lunch, and steps from the vehicle.

When he walks into the janitor’s closet Mike is already slipping into a blue work shirt. Mike’s a permanent fixture, been here three years now, but not technically a full-time employee of the college. If he works more than a hundred and eighty days he becomes eligible for benefits, so Henry has to lay him off for a month every six so that his work cycle will start anew. He hates to do it, but he can never seem to get approval for a full-time hire.

He walks through the door and smiles. ‘Hey, Mike. Sorry I’m late.’

‘That mean you let me do classrooms tonight?’

‘I’m not that sorry.’

‘But Doug always accuses me of stealing chips from the rack.’

‘Then don’t steal chips from the rack.’

‘I make six bucks an hour, Henry.’

Henry shrugs: what are you gonna do? Then he changes into his blue work shirt. He grabs his cart and pulls it away from the wall and checks to make sure it’s properly stocked: cleaning fluids full up, plenty of trash bags, rubber gloves, paper towels, a couple fluorescent tubes in case he stumbles on any that have gone out. Once he’s sure everything is in order he rolls his cart out of there and into the hall.

From now till two o’clock in the morning his job is to get classrooms ready for tomorrow. He likes his work. There’s nothing to it but to do the same thing again and again. It’s relaxing. You find your rhythm and let the night pass you by.

He walks to the cafeteria, which is closed-it closes from four to six-unlocks the door, and walks to the chip rack. He snags a bag of Doritos and heads out, locking the door behind him. Doug will notice, of course, but it doesn’t matter. Henry can just blame Mike.

Ian pulls his car to the curb in front of the house he once called his own. It is nothing special as far as houses go, a brick building fronted by a lawn and a tree with branches like broken fingers, but once upon a time it belonged to him. Now another man sleeps beside his wife and watches baseball on his television and eats food prepared in his kitchen off his plates with silverware he and Deb got as a wedding present from his mom, two years before the lung cancer got her. Bill Finch doesn’t even know there’s a history there; as far as he’s concerned all these things came into existence the moment he got the key to the front door.

After Maggie was kidnapped he spent a long time living in a strange fog, and when Debbie finally asked him to leave the conversation was short. In his mind he supposes he was already gone. He didn’t even look away from the television commercial telling him he needed to switch toilet paper brands.

‘I want you to move out.’

A pause. Then: ‘Okay.’

‘That’s it?’

He nodded.

‘You’re not gonna get mad? You’re not gonna fight me over this?’

He shook his head. ‘No.’

‘Do you wanna know why?’

‘No.’

‘I’m sleeping with Bill Finch.’

‘I know.’

Debbie stood there for a long time. He didn’t look at her, but he could sense her in his periphery. After a while she simply said, ‘Fine,’ and walked away.

The next night he slept on Diego and Cordelia’s couch.

And a week after that he put the extra TV, some books and book cases, a couch from the garage, Maggie’s bed, and his clothes into a truck he rented from Paulson’s U-Haul and drove to his new apartment. He could have afforded a house, but did not see the point. Houses were for people with families and expanding futures. He was no longer one of those people. His future was shrinking.

The first few weeks were strange and sleepless. Not because he missed Deb-he did not exactly miss her-but because he was used to having someone sleeping beside him. Soon enough, though, he got comfortable with the absence. His body learned to spread out across the full width of the bed. He stopped sitting up at night to call Debbie’s name. He stopped believing she was merely in the next room.

Ian knocks on the front door and waits.

He scratches the top of his head where the blond hair is thinnest, then arms the sweat off his forehead. It’s still hellish out.

Debbie pulls open the front door from inside. She’s wearing beige shorts and her white work T-shirt with PINK’S SALON written in cursive across the right breast. She manages the place for Vicki Dodd-who’s the only reason the Dodd family has any money left at all, her brother Carney being useless-and must have just got home. When she sees Ian she frowns. It’s brief, and the frown is immediately followed by a polite smile, but the frown was true and the smile is false. Ian understands this. As far as Debbie is concerned he can be nothing more than a walking reminder of the biggest loss she’s ever suffered. He just looks too much like the daughter she has spent the last seven years trying to forget. She’s tried to bury her again and again. He’s from a part of her life she no longer wants to think about.

‘Ian.’

‘Deb.’

‘What is it?’

‘Have you heard from Bill or Sheriff Sizemore?’

‘No.’

‘Mind if I come in?’

‘Did something happen? Is Bill okay?’

‘Bill’s fine. I thought he might have called you.’

‘About what?’

‘I think you might want to sit down for this.’

‘What is it?’

He doesn’t answer. He simply stands there and waits.

She searches his face for clues, but he gives her none. He keeps his expression blank.

After a moment Debbie steps aside to let him in.

Ian watches Deb as she sits on the couch and looks up at him. Her shoulders are tense, the cords in her neck taut, hands clenching her knees. There was a time when Debbie touched him with those hands, when she caressed him with them. But that was long ago, and he cannot even feel her touch in his memory anymore.

‘What is it?’ she says.

‘It’s Maggie.’

Debbie sighs and the tension leaves her body and she relaxes into familiar bad posture.

‘They found her body,’ she says.

The relief in her voice, the unspoken but nearly audible ‘Thank God,’ makes Ian want to grab her shoulders and shake her and shout at her. What is wrong with you, Debbie? This is your daughter we’re talking about. Your daughter. How dare you sound relieved when discussing her death?

But he knows what’s wrong with her. She wants to move on. The funeral wasn’t enough. It didn’t provide the closure she thinks she needs. Coffins can’t contain memories and dirt cannot cover them. She wants a corpse. She doesn’t understand that even a corpse would not give her what she desires. She doesn’t understand that the dead don’t die until everyone who ever knew them and loved them dies too.

Ian shakes his head.

‘No,’ he says. ‘There’s no body to find,’ he says. ‘She’s alive,’ he says.

And she is no longer seven years old, no longer frozen in time. She is fourteen, fifteen in September, and she called for help today. Right into his ear.

He won’t let her die again.