2
Emily Kramer hurried from the elevator to the office door, staring at the hallway. She had not been in this space in at least five years, but it had not changed since the days when she and Phil had moved the agency here twenty years ago. There was a scuff mark on the right wall above the baseboard that she was sure she had seen before.
She reached the door with the raised gold letters that said KRAMER INVESTIGATIONS, tried to fit her key in the lock, and failed. Phil had not told her anything about changing locks. It was a simple, common sort of difficulty, but it had stopped her progress, and for the moment she couldn’t think of a way to move forward. People like building managers tended to show up at ten or eleven, and it was barely six thirty. She felt dazed.
The door swung open, and Dewey Burns faced her. “Emily. What are you doing?”
“Same as you.” She charged past him, as though he might shut the door on her. She took a few steps and stopped. Ray Hall and Bill Przwalski were standing together, leaning on one of the desks in the outer office.
“Ray? Billy?” she said. “I tried to call you.”
Ray Hall returned her gaze. “Dewey got through to us.” He was about forty years old, with gray, squinting eyes that seemed much older, as though he had been disappointed so many times that he was incapable of surprise. This morning he was wearing a black sport coat, a pale blue oxford shirt, and a pair of jeans.
“Phil didn’t come home last night,” she said.
“We heard,” Hall said. “I’m sorry, Emily. But I think he’ll turn up okay.”
“But you’ve worked for him for at least ten years. You know he’s never done this before. He would never just not show up.”
Ray Hall sighed and looked at the floor for a second, then raised his eyes to her. “I think he’s okay.”
“What does that mean?”
“There are two ways people disappear-involuntarily, and voluntarily. When you have a healthy man who is six feet four, has been in a few fights, and carries a gun, it’s hard to take him anyplace he doesn’t want to go.”
“You think he just took off, without saying anything to anybody?”
“That’s one possibility, but I don’t know yet.”
“And what if you’re wrong?”
“I can’t be wrong, I haven’t guessed yet,” he said. “We’ve got to stay calm and find out what we can before we draw any conclusions.”
Emily sat down at the receptionist’s desk, because she felt her knees beginning to tremble. After a second, she realized the desk and chair were the same ones she’d used twenty years ago. She gained some strength from the familiarity. She tried to ignore the dwarf plants in cup-sized pots that April Dougherty had on the desk, and the little plush monkey with magnets on its hands that clung to the desk lamp. There was white blotter paper with doodle drawings of spindly-legged girls with long hair swept across big eyes, and the name April with a heart dotting the i. Emily noticed that Bill Przwalski was watching her and looking nervous, as though he were afraid she was about to search the desk.
She wanted to. Her hands itched to pull out the drawers and look, but she resisted. She said to Ray Hall, “I called the police.”
“So did I,” Dewey Burns said.
“You did?”
He frowned. “I told you I was going to.”
“Not exactly. You said you were going to make some calls. What did they say?”
“They haven’t arrested him or taken him to a hospital. They’re checking now to see if they had any contact with him since yesterday afternoon-a traffic stop or something.”
“That’s what they told me, too.” Emily glanced at Ray Hall, but he avoided her eyes.
She stood and walked to the door of Phil’s glassed-in corner office. When she pushed open the door, she saw that the deadbolt was still extended and the woodwork was splintered. She spun around in alarm.
Ray Hall said, “That was me. He’s the only one who has a key.”
She nodded and went inside. Everything in Phil’s office looked the same as it always had. She realized that she had been expecting something different. There should have been something that stood out, something that might not be instantly visible to other people, but that Emily Kramer would see. And that would tell her what was wrong. The desk was polished and smelling of lemons, with only a set of IN and ouT boxes that held a phone directory and a hole punch. Phil was not really a neat person. His orderliness came from the military, where they had trained him to straighten and polish the surfaces that showed.
She opened the drawers and filing cabinets, looking for something that was not routine and ordinary. She found time cards and payroll documents that had been annotated in his handwriting as recently as yesterday. She found a copy of a letter he had signed requesting payment of a final bill for what looked like a divorce case. She took it out to Ray Hall. “See this letter? As of yesterday, he was still interested in having this woman pay him. If she gets the letter tomorrow and puts the check in the mail right away, he still wouldn’t get it until two days later. He was expecting to be back.”
“Marilyn Tynan,” said Hall. The three men looked at each other and said nothing. Bill Przwalski began to empty the wastebaskets into a cardboard box.
“What?” she asked.
“That’s not a new one. It’s a divorce case we did three years ago. Phil just has April send a bill to her and a few others every month with all the current ones. She’ll never pay. Did he even sign that?”
She turned it around and held it so Ray Hall could see it. “Yes.”
Hall shrugged. “Sometimes he doesn’t bother.”
Bill Przwalski’s cardboard box was full of trash. He lifted it.
“Put that down, Billy,” she said. He lowered it to his desk. “Now, one of you tell me what you think is going on.”
The others looked at Ray Hall. He took a breath, then let it out. “I don’t feel happy about telling you this, Emily. On a hunch, when I went into Phil’s office, I got the company bank-account numbers, and called them. The bank’s computer says Kramer Investigations has a hundred and fifty in one account, and two hundred in the other.”
“Dollars?” said Emily. “You’re talking about a hundred and fifty dollars?”
“Yes.”
Her eyes moved across the faces of the three men, who now stared back at her openly. She reached into her purse, took out her checkbook, stepped to the front of April’s desk, picked up the telephone, and dialed the number on her checks. The cheerful machine voice told her to give the account number and then the last four digits of her Social Security number. When she had punched in the numbers, the machine began to recite a list of choices. She pressed four for a balance. “Your account balance is … seventy-three dollars and … seventeen cents. To return to the main menu, press eight. To speak with a representative, press zero.”
Emily muttered, “Oh, my God,” then pressed the zero and waited. The voice said, “Please hold. All our representatives are busy right now, but your call is important to us.”
She kept the telephone to her ear. “The money’s gone from our account, too.” The men didn’t look surprised.
She heard the elevator doors open and close. She held the telephone and watched the office door with the others. When it swung open, she noticed that their eyes had all been focused at the level of Phil Kramer’s face, but he was not the one who stepped in. Their eyes dropped about a foot to the face of April Dougherty. As she stepped inside, Emily and the three men stood still, watching her, but nobody greeted her. She glanced at the men without surprise, then faced Emily. “Good morning.”