I didn’t call him on it. Or question him. Counterproductive; I needed him on my side. All I said was, “Come ahead,” and swung out. He was right behind me as I climbed onto the porch and used my key.
Already muggy inside the house. I left the door standing wide, went to open a couple of windows while Broxmeyer poked around the living room. Kerry’s purse was on a burl wood coffee table; he stopped when he saw it, then glanced at me.
I came close to telling him no, he couldn’t look through it. I’d have been within my rights if I had-invasion of privacy. But there was nothing in the purse he shouldn’t see, and the more cooperative I was, the sooner he’d get the hell out of here.
“Help yourself,” I said. “Just don’t make a mess.”
“Women’s purses are always a mess.” Trying to keep things friendly, but it didn’t come off. I just looked at him. “Well, my wife’s is, anyway.”
He got Kerry’s wallet out, opened it to her driver’s license, read what was on the license, and to his credit closed it again without examining any of the other contents. Her cell phone next. He turned it over a couple of times in his fingers, aimed another glance at me; I took it from him, opened up voice mail so he could listen to the string of frantic messages I’d left on it. He seemed almost embarrassed when the last of them played out. A quick sifting through the rest of the items, and he was done with the purse.
He made a fast tour through the other rooms, lingering only in the bedroom and then for just a minute or so, all without touching anything. Back in the living room, he said, “Sorry about this. But I guess you understand my reasons.”
“I’d’ve done the same in your place.”
“Situations like this…”
“Just find her, okay? That’s all that matters.”
“Do our best. Might take most of the day to cover all the timber up along the ridge. You’ll be here?”
“I don’t know where I’ll be. You’ve got my number.”
“You look pretty worn out. Better get some rest.”
“Sure. Rest.”
Broxmeyer seemed to want to say something else, chewed his lip instead, and finally turned on his heel and left me alone. I stayed put until I heard the sound of his cruiser heading down the driveway. Then I went into the kitchen, slaked my thirst with a couple of glasses of ice water from the fridge. From there into the bathroom, where I washed my hands and splashed cold water on my face. The image that stared back at me from the mirror was that of a lookalike stranger: drawn, hollow-eyed, tattooed with an assortment of nicks and scratches. A face to scare little children with.
Children. Emily.
Thank God she wasn’t here to go through what I was going through. What would I say to her if Kerry wasn’t found or wasn’t found alive? So much tragedy in her young life already. Birth father and mother both victims of violent deaths. And the time in Daly City, shortly after she’d come to live with us, when a jammed pistol was all that had saved me from a violent end… she’d been there that night, and the narrow escape had freaked her out for weeks afterward. No telling how devastating an effect losing her adoptive mother would have on her.
Yes, and there was Cybil, too. Pushing ninety, fragile health, the two of them so reliant on each other. Lose her daughter, her only child, and the shock was liable to end her life For God’s sake, what’s the matter with you? Cut out that kind of thinking!
I went back into the bedroom. The burbling ringtone on my phone brought me up short, started my heart racing. But it was only the real estate agent, Sam Budlong. He’d just heard the news, he was so sorry, was there anything he could do? I asked him if he knew of anybody who had reason to be hanging out afternoons on the old logging road off Skyview Drive; there was a little silence before he said no in a puzzled voice, but he didn’t ask why I wanted to know. Instead, he said he hoped my wife would be found safe, and paused, and added another hope-that this unfortunate incident wouldn’t change our feelings about buying a second home in Green Valley. I hung up on him. Bastard. That had been the real reason for his call, not to offer aid or express sympathy.
What I wanted to do then was to get in the car and start another canvass of area residents, this time to ask the same question I’d asked Budlong, and one more: Had anybody seen a vehicle in the vicinity of the logging road yesterday afternoon? The search party was not going to find Kerry anywhere in the woods up there. No matter how hard I tried to convince myself they would, I couldn’t make myself believe it. What I’d felt on that road was neither an irrational fear nor a figment of an overwrought imagination.
But weariness held me in the house. I was in no shape to go anywhere without some rest first.
Dark in the bedroom with the curtains closed over the windows. I stripped off torn and dirty and sweat-soiled clothing, stretched out with an arm draped over my eyes. I felt so damn alone. And plagued, too, by a feeling that Kerry and I must be the victims of some monstrous, long-term cosmic conspiracy. Paranoid reaction, but justified. How else to explain that both of us now, husband and wife, had been subjected to separate kinds of kidnap horror in the same general part of the state? Crazy coincidence? What were the odds?
Eventually, the warmth and the darkness dragged me into the kind of sleep that lies just below the surface of awareness. Kerry’s face haunted a ragged series of druglike dreams, so vivid that I once jerked awake, thinking for a few heart-pounding seconds that she’d come back, she was in the room with me. I tried to keep awake, but my eyes wouldn’t stay open. And I drifted back into the half-world of peripheral consciousness and streaming dream images.
A burning thirst and a swollen bladder pulled me out of it. Another dousing with cold water chased away the sleep fuzz. My body ached and there were itching red rashes on both arms-poison oak, probably-but I didn’t feel quite so beat. My watch told me how long I’d been down and out: more than three hours. Almost one-thirty now.
The silence in the house seemed deafening.
I checked the voice mail on my cell, even though I was sure the ringtone would have wakened me if there’d been a call. Then I put on clean clothes-I couldn’t talk to people looking like a refugee from a hobo camp-and ran a comb through my hair and hurried out into the midday heat.
For more than four hours I drove around and around and around, showing Kerry’s photograph and asking my questions. Residents of a dozen or more houses on Ridge Hill Road and Skyview Drive. Campers and RVers at the campsite. Picnickers in the park down on the valley road. Shopkeepers and customers in the stores in Six Pines. Men and women stopped at random on the sidewalks.
Nobody had anything to tell me.
Sorry, can’t help you. Sorry, sorry, sorry.
The only part of the valley I avoided was the logging road. If the search team had found anything, I’d have been notified right away. And the entire time, the phone was a silent weight in my shirt pocket.
The heat, the constant frustration finally took their toll. I drove back to the house, where I sat limp and listless on one of the chaise lounges in the porch shade, nursing a cold beer and fending off mosquitoes. Trying not to think too much, worry too much-like trying not to breathe.
Broxmeyer showed up at 6:55.
It was cooler then with a light breeze, the tops of the nearby pines gold-lit and the shadows among their trunks as black as ink. Fading sunlight threw glints like mica particles off the cruiser’s top as it turned in off Ridge Hill Road and climbed up into the parking area below. Going slow, which confirmed what the cell phone silence had already told me. The deputy’s grave expression and his first words when he joined me on the porch were an anticlimax.
“I wish I had good news,” he said, “but I’m afraid I don’t. The searchers didn’t find her.”
“Or any sign of her.”
“Not yet. I’m sorry.”