“Why Chicago?” she asked.
“Had some work here in the city anyway. Seemed convenient with you in St. Louis.”
“What kind of work?”
“Politics.”
“Like for a candidate? An issue?”
“Something a bit different.”
He wouldn’t say more, and this worried her. She had not found him via the standard routes, striking out with both Facebook and Google searches. He was a ghost online. She’d called his mother five months earlier, trying to track him down. Unenthused, even vacant, Joni Ashcraft simply said she had no idea where her son was. It didn’t sound like she much cared either. Other avenues proved fruitless, and she thought she might give up. Then a month ago, she’d received an e-mail that looked like junk mail. Bizarrely, it requested that she create an anonymous, encrypted e-mail address. Thus began her correspondence with Bill. They finally agreed on a date, a time, and a bar in a specific city. She and Maddy had only recently moved to St. Louis, where Maddy had a job offer after sticking it out in Michigan for the duration of Stacey’s doctoral work. She’d lied to Maddy about where she was going and who she was seeing this week.
“This is Fitz. He’s two.” She showed him her phone. A picture of her son with his bowl haircut, slim eyes, and gaping alligator-sized smile. Bill flipped through a few and handed it back.
“Fitz?”
“For Fitzwilliam. You know, Mr. Darcy?”
“Oof. That’s gonna be miserable for him in about seven years.”
“Half the reason we did it. If he decides he’s gender fluid, he can switch to Darcy.”
“Why’d you do it? Have a kid I mean. World’s on its way out.”
She gave him an unpleasant look and cupped her phone as if this could protect her son.
“My brother Patrick, he calls it ‘God,’ I call it ‘energy’—but just learning to direct your heart somewhere where it can do some honest good, Bill.”
He nodded, uninterested in hearing about Patrick: her years of tense phone calls and avoidance on holidays, her mother’s tearful attempts to reconcile them, her father’s cancer diagnosis, and her angry confrontation with Patrick in the hospital following their dad’s surgery. How Patrick was still not all right with Maddy, and likely never would be, even though he’d promised to bury it. How she loved him all the same.
The bartender brought their drinks, a light beer for him and a vodka and soda water for her.
“What did you tell her? Your wife.”
She crossed one panted leg over the other and played with her ring finger tattoo as though it were a real wedding band. The Latin: manibus. To grasp hands. “I told her I was going to see an old friend.”
“So pretty much true.”
“In Ohio.”
He nodded carefully. “Thank you for agreeing to that.”
“Can I ask then? Why we’re meeting like spies.”
He still had that calm, cold gaze beneath dangerous black eyebrows. There was less playfulness in his face now. The beard made him look like a killer. Finally, he said, “I was surprised by how good it was to hear from you. I haven’t spoken to anyone from New Canaan in what feels like millennia.” Not for a beat did he take his eyes off her. “Still. Maybe we start with why you’re here.”
Her eyes went sideways to the couple and the handsome silver-haired bartender. He smirked at something the couple said to him, grabbed a stack of dirty glasses, and disappeared into the back. It was a nice joint: polished oak walls with pictures of the city throughout its history. There were the stockyards at the turn of the century, State Street teeming with horses in the growth years after the Civil War, the first Model Ts rattling along streets still lit by gas lamp, speakeasies crowded with flirting men and women during Al Capone’s reign. Lights with the dim authority of candles lined the walls, and the stools at the bar were bolted down with a nice metal bar on which to rest one’s tired, soaking feet. She recognized the music playing softly in the background: Miles Davis, Kind of Blue.
He watched as she reached into her handbag and withdrew a battered spiral-bound notebook with a large coffee stain melting through the lower right-hand corner of every page. She opened it to a place marked with a paper clip. The edges of the paper curled from too much flipping. She set it on the wood, clasped her hands.
“I came all this way because you’re one of the last people who might be able to help me.” She took a breath. “A while back—years ago now—I decided to track down Lisa.”
And she told him the story of what had happened between her and Lisa Han. They’d fallen in love, she claimed. Bill searched his memory of his high school girlfriend to decide if he’d seen this in her but came up empty. Then again, he had never anticipated she’d leave home the way she did. No one could know anyone that young.
“Bill, when was the last time you saw her?”
“I was in Cambodia actually. This must’ve been 2010 or so. I got in touch with her so we could meet up. Not for anything hanky-panky-like,” he quickly added. “I just wanted to catch up. We couldn’t make it work out, though.”
“You talked to her while you were there?”
“Yeah.”
“You sure?”
“Of course.”
“I mean did you hear her voice?”
“No. We traded Facebook messages.”
Stacey sat back, her eyes hot and knowing. “When I decided to try to find her again, it was the summer of 2013. We e-mailed back and forth for a few months, and then suddenly she stopped replying. All her social media accounts went idle. She hasn’t used them since. So almost a whole year goes by, and I go see her mother because she’s the one who asked me to help find her in the first place. And she shows me the postcards Lisa’s sent her over the years. And I’m looking at these postcards, and I don’t know—they bothered me.”
She pulled a postcard, paper-clipped onto a page, and set it in front of him.
Bill used the opportunity to look past this simple tourist’s communication and steal a glance at Stacey’s notebook: honey-yellow paper scrawled full with dates and locations (“New Canaan,” “Hanoi,” “Alliance, Ohio”) in messy but cordoned chunks.
“It took forever—and I’ll be totally up-front with you: I got a little obsessed. Here I am getting married, working my ass off on my doctorate, and beginning the process of Maddy getting pregnant with Fitz, and I basically have another fucking life I’m living, Bill. I’m lying to everybody because I think there’s something wrong about all of it.”
“Wrong about what?”
The bartender returned with a crate of clean glasses, which he put in a stack next to the sink, and glanced at them. Bill noticed his gaze. Ever since he realized what it was he’d carried north four years ago, he now noticed everyone who noticed him. The rain’s fury surely covered their conversation.
“Bethany told me that when Lisa left home, she wrote a note. Bethany doesn’t have it anymore, but she remembered the note saying that I drove her to the airport, that I helped her pack and leave.”
“Did you?”
“No.”
Bill pressed forward in the booth, staring at the postcard and its looping cursive.
“Did you follow the sentencing for those guys from New Canaan? The ones who killed that little girl.”
He continued to stare at the postcard, and Stacey read only five percent of what went through him at that question. It was why he’d risked meeting her at alclass="underline" to find out what she knew. After all, she too had been home the night of his return.