“I know.” Half a minute later, she brought the car to a stop at the end of our driveway.
“How are you and Kent doing?” I asked.
“What do you mean?” Annette said.
“This thing you have going with Sanders — you don’t have to be a genius to figure out it means you and Kent are going through a rough patch.”
“It doesn’t have to mean that,” she said.
“So things between you are perfect?” I asked.
“No couple on this planet has a perfect relationship,” she said. “Do you?”
When I hesitated, Annette jumped in. “God, I’m sorry. With what you’ve been through, I don’t know how I could have said that.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Listen, sometime I’d like to go up on the roof again.”
“Oh, Cal.”
“I just... I’m still wrestling with this, Annette. I keep playing it in my head, how it happened.”
“Tell you what,” she said. “I’ll mention it to Kent. If you don’t hear from him, if he doesn’t call you, then you’ll know he’s not okay with it.”
I was betting I’d never hear from him.
“Thanks for the ride. Oh, and would you say hi to Roman for me?”
She cocked her head to one side. “Sure. Why?”
“We kind of ran into each other earlier tonight. Tell him I’m thinking about him.”
Donna’s car wasn’t in the driveway, so I figured she must have put it in the garage, which she didn’t do very often. I let myself into the house as quietly as I could and went to the kitchen, thinking I’d have a glass of water, then realized I’d gone through another evening without any dinner. I opened the cupboard and took out some saltines and peanut butter. Not exactly fine dining, but a few smeared crackers would keep my stomach from growling through the night.
Stealthily, I put the dirty knife and glass into the dishwasher and crept up the stairs. I tiptoed through the bedroom, but I stepped on something hard and there was a sudden cracking noise. Not all that loud, but loud enough, I feared, to wake Donna. When I didn’t hear her stir, I knelt down and patted the carpet until I found what I’d stepped on. One of her pencils. I’d snapped it in two. I picked up the pieces, noticed that the small can of spray fixative had hit the floor, too, and scooped that up, then slipped into the bathroom.
I waited until I had the door closed before turning on the light, put the broken pencil pieces in the trash basket, the spray can on the counter, and disrobed. Stripped to my boxers, I brushed my teeth, then killed the light before opening the door.
It hit me then that Donna usually left the bathroom light on for me.
My eyes were taking a while to adjust to the dark, so I made my way to the bed by instinct, pulled back the covers on my side, and slipped between the sheets.
I knew the moment I was in the bed that something was off. I blinked hurriedly until my eyes were accustomed to the absence of light — as though that might somehow help — then sat up and looked at the other side of the bed.
Donna was not there.
Thirty-one
The porch light helps her as she slides the key into the front door and turns the dead bolt. She’s surprised, when she opens the door, to see her son standing there in the front hall, having seen him only a few hours earlier.
“You scared me half to death,” she says.
“You’re not usually out this late.”
“What’s going on?”
“Things are working out,” he says. “I had to tell you. I didn’t want to wait till morning.”
“You’ve found them?”
“No, but I may have found a way to find them.”
She throws her purse on the closest chair. “Please don’t get my hopes up.”
He tells her what he’s done. He has been, she must admit, a busy boy. “That’s a lot of running around,” she says. While she remains skeptical, he does seem to have thought this through.
She likes one of his ideas in particular. “That’s a good plan, to use the detective,” she says. “I saw him earlier.”
“We put him to work for us, except he doesn’t even know it,” he says.
“It could work.”
“I feel like it’s coming together.”
“Don’t get carried away,” she snaps. “We’re a long way from being able to put this behind us. If the boy took the book, when you find him, you have to get it back. I should have cottoned to the fact that he’d given it away sooner. Usually when he fills a notebook, he asks for a new one, and I get him one. But he didn’t ask this time because it was too soon. He’d probably only filled half of it. He figured I’d get suspicious.”
“You’re worried too much about that damn book.”
“No, I’m not. You need to take this seriously.”
“Are you kidding? You think I’m not taking this seriously? Really? Look at the shit I’ve had to deal with. I’ve been thinkin’ on my feet. Like with the other girl, how I made it look like something it wasn’t. How about a little credit for that?”
“I’m going to bed. I can’t deal with this one more minute.”
“It’s your fault, anyway, you know,” he says.
That stops her on her way to the stairs. “What did you say?”
“Leaving the house while the dryer was running, not being here when the lint caught on fire. If there’d never been any smoke, none of this would have—”
Her hand moves so quickly he doesn’t have a chance to stop her from slapping him across the face.
“I will not have you speak to me that way. Who do you think all this has been for? Huh? Who’s it all been for?”
He puts a hand to his hot, red cheek. “It’s been for Dad,” he says.
“No,” she says. “It’s always been for you. All of it. I did it all for you, and so help me, God, it looks like I’m going to have to do more before we’re done.”
Thirty-two
I threw back the covers and stood up so quickly I made myself light-headed. I turned the bedside table lamp on. Donna’s side of the bed did not look slept in. It didn’t make sense that if she hadn’t been able to get to sleep, she’d have made the bed when she got up. You don’t do that when it’s eleven or twelve at night. You get up, wander around, have a glass of water, figuring that in a few minutes you’re going to get back under the covers and try again to get to sleep.
So Donna had not yet gone to bed.
I made my way down the hall, going to Scott’s room first. It never surprised me to find her under the covers there these days. But when I opened the door, allowing light to spill in from the hall, I could see the bed was empty.
Turning on lights as I went, I descended the stairs. If she had been sitting in the living room, quietly, it was possible I could have walked in and gone right past her without noticing. But she wasn’t there.
She wasn’t in the basement or the laundry room.
“Donna!” I shouted.
I unlocked the sliding glass doors that led out onto the deck and hit the floods, which were powerful enough to illuminate the entire backyard. It was way too frosty for her to be sitting outside, gazing heavenward, wondering how our boy was doing up there. Like I say, if you believed in that sort of thing.