Lauren chose a table close to an overhead television so she would immediately know if there were any updates being broadcast about the missing girl in Boulder. I was silently trying to discern whether her acute interest in the case was an indication of parental empathy-or a counterintuitive way to stem the flow of understandable parental dread-or whether it was a more uncomplicated professional prosecutorial curiosity. I was trying to grant her the benefit of the doubt and not even consider the possibility that my wife’s interest might be simply voyeuristic. Unsure, I headed for the bathroom. When I returned I spied Lauren folding up her cell phone. I took a chair that left my back to the television.
Which left me facing in the general direction of Cordillera.
“Who’d you call?” I asked.
“The office.”
“Yeah, what did you learn?” I didn’t really want to know, and wasn’t sure why I’d asked. Probably the same reason that I tried the door on Mary Black’s office.
“This is my job. I could be involved later on. I need to… you know, whether… the girl…”
Not too bad, only slightly defensive. “I know,” I said. I leaned across the table and kissed her lightly on her lips, tasting the waxy gloss of a fresh application of sunblock. “So, what did you learn?”
I’d done it again; I’d once again asked a question that I didn’t really want to know the answer to. I convinced myself that my question was an act of marital generosity: Lauren needed to talk.
“They don’t know what they have. But because of what happened last time-you can imagine-they’re being extra, extra cautious. They’re treating it like a crime scene, even though no one’s really sure what it is exactly. The girl’s family is cooperating, totally. So far the crime scene techs don’t think anything’s been unduly contaminated. That’s all good, considering.”
She meant, of course, considering what a total mess the crime scene had been the last time. The time with the little blond beauty queen, the one who sang and danced into our homes over and over and over again in her little sexy cowgirl getup.
“What do the police think? Was it an abduction of some kind?”
“Some of what they’re seeing says yes, some says no.” She gazed around to see if anyone in the crowded cafeteria was paying attention to our conversation, and she prophylactically lowered her already hushed voice a few additional decibels. “There hadn’t been any threats, and they didn’t find a note or anything like that. Nobody’s called the family about ransom. There’s no evidence of forced entry at the house. But there is some blood.”
“A lot?”
“More than a couple of drops. I’m just telling you what I heard from the office. It’s thirdhand, or fourth.”
“Could she have run?”
“It’s a possibility, apparently. The cops are trying to track down all her friends, to see what they know. Since the schools are on break, it’s complicated. Some of her best friends are out of town.”
“But her family thinks it’s possible?”
“I guess. Apparently, the family situation is complicated. The girl has had some emotional issues in the past. I don’t have those details.”
I couldn’t look my wife in the eye when I asked the next question. With the edge of my hand I moved salt that had been spilled on the table by an earlier diner into one long sodium mogul and pushed it to the side. “And they checked all the little rooms in the basement that nobody ever goes into?”
That’s where the other girl’s body had been found eight years before. In a rarely used room in a dingy basement. Her tiny body had been discovered by her distraught father, who had carried it up the stairs for all to see.
“Yeah, twice at least. It’s different this time. The circumstances. It sounds like it’s a nice house, but it’s not huge and fancy like the other one. And it only has a small basement, a partial, like ours; underneath it’s mostly crawl space. They checked.”
“Twice?”
“Three times.” She smiled sadly.
“Who’s on it?”
“From my office? Andy.”
“From the cops?”
“It’s a big team for now. And, yes, it includes Sam and Lucy.”
“Sam won’t be happy. It was one of his claims to fame that he never had a thing to do with the other one.”
“I doubt if any of them are happy,” Lauren said. “There’re so many reporters chasing everyone around that they’ve had to block off the street. You know that all the detectives will be under a microscope.”
Or a microphone. “Is Jaris Slocum on it?”
She slapped my wrist to shush me. “Babe, we’re on vacation. Let’s not go back there.” She held up her cell. “I want to call and see how Grace is doing in ski school. Am I crazy?”
“You’re a mother. You get special dispensation.”
She made the call. Grace, it turned out, was enjoying ski school. I wasn’t surprised. As she aged and I got a chance to experience the wonder of really beginning to know her, I was learning that my daughter rolled well with the punches.
Lauren closed up the phone. I asked, “How’s your energy?” That’s as close as I would get to finding a safe way to inquire about the current state of Lauren’s multiple sclerosis. I knew from experience that on rare good days a couple of hours of skiing was often all that she could manage before her legs began to feel like overcooked asparagus. We’d already done a long drive up to the mountains and spent a couple of energetic hours cutting powder.
For Lauren, that was an awful lot of activity.
“Good, I’m fine. I’ll wriggle out of these boots and put my feet up over lunch. That will help.”
Was I convinced? Hardly. “We can go down the hill and eat if you want. We have all day tomorrow to ski, you know. And Tuesday morning, too. No need to press it today.”
“I’m good, Alan. I want to do the top of Bachelor’s Gulch before all the powder is skied off. I love it up there.”
Arguing with her was an option. Prevailing was not. Across the room, the food-court lines were long. I stood. “You rest, I’ll go get you something to eat. What would you like for lunch?”
We drove down the hill to Boulder after a late breakfast two days later, on Tuesday.
The skiing had been a joy, Lauren’s atypical stamina on the slopes was a holiday gift, and by late Monday in ski school tiny Grace had managed-for about eleven horizontal feet of a two percent grade-to comport her stubby little legs into something resembling a snowplow. Lauren and I gladly forked over $24.95 for a DVD that proved our daughter had accomplished the dubious feat.
Midday mountain traffic wasn’t bad over Vail Pass, and the Eisenhower Tunnel approach was merely aggravating, not paralyzing. On the eastern side of the Divide I kept my eyes peeled on my rearview mirror for out-of-control big-rig truckers who had already fried the air brakes on their rigs on the highest stretches of the seven percent grades.
Grace and Lauren both slept all the way from Copper Mountain to Golden.
For the forty-eight hours plus we’d been up skiing I had managed to avoid-almost completely-the media saturation coverage about the girl who had disappeared on Christmas night. Lauren had told me a few new things, but with concerted effort on my part I knew almost nothing about what had transpired while we were gone.
And I was proud of it.
But as I-70 bent to follow the final contours of the Front Range, and as the beige winter haze of the Denver metropolitan area became visible in the distance, it was clear that my brief holiday was coming to an end, and I decided, reluctantly, to reenter the real world. I killed the Otis Redding CD and tuned to KOA, a Denver AM station with enough brash watt-power to push its often dubious signal up into the crevices of the Front Range foothills. I didn’t have to listen long to hear an update-“the absolute latest on the tragedy in Boulder”-that informed me that the girl, Mallory Miller, was still missing and that the Boulder Police continued to refer to the event as a “disappearance,” not a “kidnapping.”