“Yeah. Ten or so. What’s wrong?”
“She’s not home. She’s always home when I get here. I went by the restaurant again and they said she left at ten-thirty — half an hour early. She’s not here. So I thought—”
“Maybe she’s at the Locker, maybe she took a walk,” grumbled Jim, his stomach in revolt. Raymond was always worried too much about something. He seemed to need it.
“A two-hour walk around the peninsula in that outfit they make her wear? The fog’s in, too. I’ll try the Locker.”
“I don’t know, Ray.” What Weir did know is that the first time Becky Flynn had not come home to him, she was out with another man. She had actually gone on, after the breakup, to marry this third party, but Weir could never figure out whether that was a consolation or not. Jim said nothing, silently cursing himself for projecting his own romantic disappointments onto his sister and friend.
But there was a moment of silence when he sensed that Raymond was doing it, too. “Well, she’s never done this before.”
“Try the Locker, Ray.” Jim had always thought Raymond tried to keep too tight a leash on things, Annie included. It was typically cop, and understandable.
“Sorry. Get some sleep.”
“Night, Ray.”
Raymond called back an hour later, at 2:05 A.M. “Jim, she’s still not here. Not at the Locker, either. Her car’s gone. You sure she’s not with Virginia or something?”
Weir had been dreaming of his Zihuatanejo jail cell. He was so deep into it, he could smell the rotting walls, feel the roaches scratching across his feet. “Lemme check downstairs.”
Ann’s old room was empty. So was the living room, the den, Jake’s old room. Virginia slept heavily in the master, a rectangle of soft light from the streetlamp lying upon the floor. For a brief moment, he thought back to the old days, when Jake and his father were alive and the house always seemed so busy and disheveled and stuffed with life.
He even looked in the garage, but all he saw were his pickup truck, Virginia’s old VW, her collection of clutter. His stomach rumbled as he walked back upstairs to his room. “No. Not here.”
“It’s after two, Jim.”
“You call patrol?”
“Yes, nothing. I might cruise myself.”
“Just stay by the phone. She knows where you are, Ray; she’ll call.”
“I got a bad feeling.”
The same feeling lapped at Weir, then retreated. “Don’t feed it. She’ll be back.”
“Sorry.”
Weir couldn’t sleep. At 3:25, the phone rang again. “Still not here, Jim.”
“I’ll be over in five minutes.”
Jim dressed in the darkness and went downstairs. His mother was sitting in her favorite living room chair, both arms extended along the rests, her back straight, head erect. She looked like Lincoln. She asked Jim what was wrong and Weir told her Ann wasn’t home yet.
“Call the Whale’s Tale and the Locker,” she said.
“Ray did.”
“Try Sherry, from the restaurant.”
“She’d call if she was with a girlfriend.”
“Then call the watch commander.”
“He did that, too.”
Virginia was quiet a moment. “I don’t like this. It’s something your father would have done. Annie got more of Poon than you or Jake did, so if I taught her one thing, it was how to take care of herself.”
“That doesn’t make her home, Mom.”
“Go ahead. I’ll try Becky’s.”
Jim closed the door quietly behind him and walked north along the bayfront. He was passing Ann’s Kids when he saw that the door was cracked open. Weir stopped and looked at his watch: it was 3:37 A.M., Tuesday, May 16. He tried the gate, which was locked, then climbed the fence and landed heavily on the other side. The chain link chimed briefly, then settled. Six steps to the door, boot heels on concrete, no lights on. He poked the door with his finger and it swung easily on quiet hinges.
Weir stepped into the house and flipped on a light. This was the playroom, with clean hardwood floors and all manner of toys — plastic buckets and shovels, dolls and doll-houses, big blocks with letters on them — arranged along one wall. A rocking horse waited on its springs, frozen in gallop. A low case filled with picture books stood along another wall. There was a trash basket filled with tops, yo-yos and jump ropes, and a larger one that contained those big red balls that smell of rubber and ping beautifully when you bounce them.
The second room was for quiet time and videos. The kitchen was clean. Jim nudged open the door to Ann’s office with his toe: desk, three folding chairs, a typewriter, telephone, answering machine. An empty flower vase, half-filled with water, sat beside the phone. He smelled it — the water was fresh.
Looking out a window to the backyard, he saw the dark outlines of a playhouse, a rabbit cage, a sandbox.
He switched off the lights, locked the front door, and pulled it shut behind him. Climbing back over the fence, he wondered why the door had been left open and why there was a flower vase on Ann’s desk half-filled with clean water, but no flowers.
Four houses down the sidewalk, he went through a wrought-iron gate, up a short walkway, then onto a wooden deck that gave humidly beneath his feet. Ray opened the door before he knocked.
“The preschool door was open, Ray.”
“I know. I went there first, looked around, left it the way it was. Did you lock it?”
Jim nodded.
Raymond looked at him sharply. His forehead was shiny with sweat and the hair around his ears looked damp. “I hope you didn’t contaminate it.”
Jim understood now just how panicked Raymond really was. “It’s not a crime scene.”
“Something’s wrong. I can feel it. When you’re married for twenty years and something’s wrong, you know.”
Jim stood in the living room while Ray poured coffee. The house was a small two-bedroom, with low ceilings and knotty pine walls that seemed dark as walnut. They’d been renting it for ten years, and it was a step up from their old apartment. They both wanted to stay in the neighborhood, and rent wasn’t cheap anymore. The second room was the study, where Raymond labored over his books. Jim could see in the dim lamplight thick volumes stacked on a table, a legal pad lying beside them, a dozen pencil tops emerging from a green coffee can. Ray had been going to law school part-time since Jim had quit the Sheriffs, two years back. He had told Weir that compared to studying law, the streets were a vacation — he was more comfortable with crooks than books. To Jim, Ann and Ray seemed like a lot of other people from the neighborhood: blue-collar, hardworking, and not much to show for it. Ray’s JD was his ticket on the upward express. Virginia paid the tuition.
Weir understood Raymond’s struggle to break out — his own ticket was in his hand. The fact that he had quit a detective’s job to hunt treasure was something that everyone in the neighborhood seemed to approve, but Weir had always sensed a bit of contempt mixed with it, the insinuation — trailing along just behind the good wishes — that he had sold out. In one sense, he knew that he had, but it wasn’t the money he wanted, it was the liberty. No more cops, no time clocks, no oppressive county bureaucrats, no endless hours waiting in courthouse halls to put away the same people for the same dreary, vicious, stupid crimes. There had to be more than that.
Raymond understood. Raymond always had, although this was the least of what bound Weir to him. Deeper than this yearning for something more were layers of friendship that had endured nearly thirty years, trust that only time can build, years of competition and loyalty, years of honest confession and minor deceit, years of being boys together and men apart, years of Ann as the shared hypotenuse of their lives. Jim had long understood — with awe — that if Raymond had to, he would offer his life for him. Weir had first attributed it to the partnership in a job that can get people killed; later, to something sacrificial in the very blood that coursed through Raymond Cruz’s veins. Finally, he had seen it for what it was: a simple product of love. Weir believed that if the moment came to offer the same gift he would be able to give it in return, knowing, too, that it is not a question that can be answered ahead of time