But it seemed clear almost from the very start that the police didn’t feel they were getting all the information, or that the information made sense.
“They don’t like me,” Lorie said. And he told her that wasn’t true and had nothing to do with anything anyway, but maybe it did.
He wished they could have seen Lorie when she had pushed through the front door that day, her purse unzipped, her white coat still damp from the spilled coffee, her mouth open so wide, all he could see was the red inside her, raw and torn.
Hours later, their family around them, her body shuddering against him as her brother talked endlessly about Amber Alerts and Megan’s Law and his criminal justice class and his cop buddies from the gym, he felt her pressing into him and saw the feathery curl tucked in her sweater collar, a strand of Shelby’s angel-white hair.
By the end of the second week, the police hadn’t found anything, or if they did they weren’t telling. Something seemed to have shifted, or gotten worse.
“Anybody would do it,” Lorie said. “People do it all the time.”
He watched the detective watch her. This was the woman detective, the one with the severe ponytail who was always squinting at Lorie.
“Do what?” the woman detective asked.
“Ask someone to watch their kid, for just a minute,” Lorie said, her back stiffening. “Not a guy. I wouldn’t have left her with a man. I wouldn’t have left her with some homeless woman waving a hairbrush at me. This was a woman I saw in there every day.”
“Named?” They had asked her for the woman’s name many times. They knew she didn’t know it.
Lorie looked at the detective, and he could see those faint blue veins showing under her eyes. He wanted to put his arm around her, to make her feel him there, to calm her. But before he could do anything, she started talking again.
“Mrs. Caterpillar,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “Mrs. Linguini. Madame Lafarge.”
The detective stared at her, not saying anything.
“Let’s try looking her up on the Internet,” Lorie said, her chin jutting and a kind of hard glint to her eyes. All the meds and the odd hours they were keeping, all the sleeping pills and sedatives and Lorie walking through the house all night, talking about nothing but afraid to lie still.
“Lorie,” he said. “Don’t—”
“Everything always happens to me,” she said, her voice suddenly soft and strangely liquid, her body sinking. “It’s so unfair.”
He could see it happening, her limbs going limp, and he made a grab for her.
She nearly slipped from him, her eyes rolling back in her head.
“She’s fainting,” he said, grabbing her, her arms cold like frozen pipes. “Get someone.”
The detective was watching.
“I can’t talk about it because I’m still coping with it,” Lorie told the reporters who were waiting outside the police station. “It’s too hard to talk about.”
He held her arm tightly and tried to move her through the crowd, bunched so tightly, like the knot in his throat.
“Is it true you’re hiring at attorney?” one of the reporters asked.
Lorie looked at them. He could see her mouth open and there was no time to stop her.
“I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, a hapless grin on her face. As if she had knocked someone’s grocery cart with her own.
He looked at her. He knew what she meant—she meant leaving Shelby for that moment, that scattered moment. But he also knew how it sounded, and how she looked, that panicky smile she couldn’t stop.
That was the only time he let her speak to reporters.
Later, at home, she saw herself on the nightly news
Walking slowly to the TV, she kneeled in front of it, her jeans skidding on the carpet, and did the oddest thing.
She put her arms around it, like it was a teddy bear, a child.
“Where is she?” she whispered. “Where is she?”
And he wished the reporters could see this, the mystifying way grief was settling into her like a fever.
But he was also glad they couldn’t.
It was the middle of the night, close to dawn, and she wasn’t next to him.
He looked all over the house, his chest pounding. He thought he must be dreaming, calling out her name, both their names.
He found her in the backyard, a lithe shadow in the middle of the yard.
She was sitting on the grass, her phone lighting her face.
“I feel closer to her out here,” she said. “I found this.”
He could barely see, but moving closer saw the smallest of earrings, an enamel butterfly, caught between her fingers.
They had had a big fight when she came home with Shelby, her ears pierced, thick gold posts plugged in such tiny lobes. Her ears red, her face red, her eyes soft with tears.
“Where did she go, babe?” Lorie said to him now. “Where did she go?”
He was soaked with sweat and was pulling his T-shirt from his chest.
“Look, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you’ve cooperated with us fully. I get that. But understand our position. No one can confirm her story. The employee who saw your wife spill her coffee remembers seeing her leave with Shelby. She doesn’t remember another woman at all.”
“How many people were in there? Did you talk to all of them?”
“There’s something else too, Mr. Ferguson.”
“What?”
“One of the other employees said Lorie was really mad about the coffee spill. She told Shelby it was her fault. That everything was her fault. And that Lorie then grabbed your daughter by the arm and shook her.”
“That’s not true,” he said. He’d never seen Lorie touch Shelby roughly. Sometimes it seemed she barely knew she was there.
“Mr. Ferguson, I need to ask you: Has your wife had a history of emotional problems?”
“What kind of question is that?”
“It’s a standard question in cases like this,” the detective said. “And we’ve had some reports.”
“Are you talking about the local news?”
“No, Mr. Ferguson. We don’t collect evidence from TV.”
“Collecting evidence? What kind of evidence would you need to collect about Lorie? It’s Shelby who’s missing. Aren’t you—”
“Mr. Ferguson, did you know your wife spent three hours at Your Place Lounge on Charlevoix yesterday afternoon?”
“Are you following her?”
“Several patrons and one of the bartenders contacted us. They were concerned.”
“Concerned? Is that what they were?” His head was throbbing.
“Shouldn’t they be concerned, Mr. Ferguson? This is a woman whose baby is missing.”
“If they were so concerned, why didn’t they call me?”
“One of them asked Lorie if he could call you for her. Apparently, she told him not to.”
He looked at the detective. “She didn’t want to worry me.”
The detective looked back at him. “Okay.”
“You can’t tell how people are going to act when something like this happens to you,” he said, feeling his head dipping. Suddenly his shoulders felt very heavy and he had these pictures of Lorie in his head, at the far corner of the long black lacquered bar, eyes heavy with makeup and filled with dark feelings. Feelings he could never touch. Never once did he feel sure he knew what she was thinking. That was part of it. Part of the throb in his chest, the longing there that never left.
“No,” he said, suddenly.
“What?” the detective asked, leaning forward.
“She has no history of emotional problems. My wife.”
It was the fourth week, the fourth week of false leads and crying and sleeping pills and night terrors. And he had to go back to work or they wouldn’t make the mortgage payment. They’d talked about Lorie returning to her part-time job at the candle store, but somebody needed to be home, to be waiting.