"You look awfully picturesque on each other's arms. That's a good start."
"Or a good finish."
"Evan, am I slurring?"
"A little."
"I'm sorry. Jesus."
"I'm used to it. Being unhappily married isn't the most original tragedy. Or the most serious."
"No, I mean, the mess on the beach. Betsy Schmidt."
"I shouldn't reward you for such bad behavior, but it was funny."
"Sorry about your marriage, too. Is it blanc?"
"Is it what?"
"Marriage blanc. White. Virginal. No sex. I think the French specialize in that."
"Very blanc."
"How long?"
"Two years."
"So you must have someone else."
"Until last night. That's why I missed the six o'clock flight and ended up on the ten with you. She told me she was getting married. When I got to the island last night, she called again."
"So that was all the chaos last night?"
"That was some of it."
"And Mavis has a friend too?"
"She has a number of them. Or did. We don't swap stories like girlfriends."
"Good sports, the two of you. Will and I didn't do that."
"It's not something I recommend."
As he turned onto the dirt road leading to his house, I thought of how often I'd banged over this pocked road in the last twenty-four hours and of all I'd learned between rides. "Was it Heraclitus who said you never drive over the same dirt road twice?"
"I think so," Evan said.
"How old is she, the woman who's getting married?"
"Twenty-five."
I turned to him in the darkness of the wooded road, the greenish glow of the dash a kind of intimacy between us, as if we were under a blanket with a flashlight. "I am not exactly speaking from the highest moral ground at the moment, but I was hoping you'd be more original than that."
"That wasn't my intention, Sophy-originality. The heart wants what it wants."
"Isn't that what Woody Allen said about Soon-Yi?"
"I'm sorry you disapprove."
He drove onto the shrubbed path that led to the gardens and the circular drive. It was like coming on a boarding school or a country inn, an impersonal place with a sinister soundtrack, the rhythmic roar and crash of the ocean, the wind rustling acres of leafy trees as hard as the tides drove the water. And this fresh chill between Evan and me. What was I thinking, to criticize his girlfriend's age?
I started to apologize as we entered the foyer, but Flossie barked and prodded. Evan brushed his hand against a bank of light switches as he slipped away in the direction of his study, and lights all over the first floor came on with the flair of a Broadway musical. Flossie galumphed behind him, and I drifted into the kitchen, wondering-no, it was more acute, more desperate than wondering-if I'd seen an open bottle of white wine in the fridge. You see, when you're in the vortex of it, there is no reason involved or etiquette, and certainly no common sense. It's closer to the tides or the course of a fever or the brick, with nothing under it. I opened the refrigerator, pretending that I wanted juice, in order to see what was there, and as I gripped the handle of a glass pitcher filled with something purple, I heard Evan's voice behind me. "There's a message for you from Daniel Jacobs. Call him even if it's late."
He was out of the kitchen by the time I turned around, holding the pitcher aloft, and said-to myself, it turned out-"Thought I'd just pour myself a glass of grape juice."
"Do you realize you're the only person in the world who knows what was really going on when the police called yesterday?" I lay on the bed in the guest room in the back of the second floor, and by the time I called Daniel, I'd had a little more to drink, even brought a glass with me upstairs. I was angry at myself and didn't want to tell him what a mess I'd made of everything; what a mess everything was. So I opened with a distraction, a divertimento.
"I'm sure I am the only person, but there's something I need to-"
"You know, yesterday, before that phone call, it was so intense that I don't know what would have become of me if-"
"You sound rather in your cups, Sophy, though I'm inferring, never having witnessed you that way."
"A little."
"I don't bloody believe it," he said. "You're not supposed to-"
"Of course I'm not, but-"
"No, I mean you. You're such a good little scout; you're such an advertisement for the whole bloody thing. The slogans and the meetings and the God business; you're such a noble soldier. But Sophy, listen, there's something I must-"
"I've had a bad day, Daniel. A wretched day. All day. So I had a little something to drink. Are you going to report me to the AA police? Are you going to send me to a rehab?" I'd opened a window, and there was a breeze and the hokey, movie-soundtrack crashing of the ocean, which made me feel sorry for myself. From Here to Eternity, I must have been thinking, or something even cornier. "I just got back from this clambake on the beach. The blinking beach with the blinking aristocracy of Swansea. Everyone is furious with me because-"
"Sophy, listen to me. My daughter is gone."
"What?"
"My daughter is missing. I called you hours ago, right after I spoke to the police. Vicki. No one has seen her since one o'clock this afternoon. She was in her room and then she wasn't."
I was silent, saying to myself, Concentrate, remember, sit up, what day is it? "But that was yesterday and I took her home. I saw her go in the front door. She was fine."
"What are you talking about?"
"She came to see me yesterday, I think it was yesterday. To my apartment. Before you came over. I took her home in a cab. I watched her go through the door."
"Why didn't you tell me?"
"I was going to." Why hadn't I? There was a reason, but I couldn't make it come back to me, and that was such a long time ago. "But then the police called when we were-and then everything got so-"
"What was she doing there?"
"She wanted to talk to me."
"About?"
I remembered this part. The card. The message. I even remembered the message. The vote. Jesus, the vote. The elaborate story she'd made up. "Her mother," I said. "In Vietnam." Did I have to tell him the truth, the whole truth? Concentrate, Sophy, put the drink down.
"That's all she said?"
"That was one of the things. What did the police do?"
"They've been over every inch of the house. They've issued alerts at every-I don't know where. They're not supposed to do anything until someone's been gone for two days, but I rang the mayor's office. He's a great admirer of Blair's work, and his wife is her friend from college, so he got the police to make an exception, and they've begun a-"
"If she'd gone back to my apartment to look for me, the doorman would have told her that I'm away. How much money did she have?"
"Thirty-seven dollars. It's gone."
"She was reading The Secret Garden yesterday. I wonder if it influenced her. There's a girl about her age-"
"For God's sake, Sophy, don't read things into every little-"
"Does she know I'm on Swansea?"
"I told her the name of the place, though I doubt she knows where it is on the map."
"Does she know why I'm here?"
"I told them your husband was sick."
"She has enough money to take the train to Blair's nursing home on Long Island. Tell the police to check the nursing home and all the transportation that leads to it. And tell them there's a Greyhound bus that leaves the Port Authority twice a day for the ferry that comes to Swansea. If she had enough money, she might have got on that bus."
"If I don't know about the bloody bus, how would she know?"