"I'll make some calls while you pack up."
"You're game."
"You forget I could be drinking water three meals a day at a Swiss fat farm. By myself."
"I did forget that." I was going over what I needed to do, a list taking shape in my addled brain. Find Vicki. Find Henry. Be kind to my stepdaughters. Quit putting myself and my suppurating wounds at the center of every encounter. Ask Henderson for help. Do whatever he says.
"Sophy, are you all right? I mean, I know you're miserable, but at this moment is there something newly awful that-"
"The great mad joy is over."
"It always ends, you know. You think maybe this time it won't, but it always surprises you and goes up in a puff of smoke."
Take Will's computer with me. Dream his dreams. His nightmares. His passwords. Ghost-write the last days of his life. Now that he is a ghost himself. I crossed the room to pick up the laptop when I heard a loud knock at the front door. Evan was still sequestered in the study, so I went into the foyer and swung open the door. It was Swansea, and you never hesitate. But I didn't expect what I saw.
"We're looking for Sophy Chase."
"I'm Sophy."
They were two large men wearing dark gray suits and white shirts, like funeral directors, and for a moment, until they simultaneously flicked open their wallets and flashed gold badges at me and said, "New York Police Department," I thought they were.
Do you invite them in? Do they take you somewhere? It didn't occur to me to ask how they'd found me, but I was about to tell them that I needed to leave here, needed to be gone before Mavis returned, when I heard Evan say, "Who is it? Who's there?" and felt him come up beside me. One frightening thought tripped another, and I got it into my head that Vicki was dead and they were here because I was guilty of I-knew-not-what in connection with it, which prompted me to say something I never imagined I would have to say. I said it in case it became necessary, said it without even knowing why the cops were there, said it in the event they intended to whisk me off and rough me up-and yes, I was overreacting, but only because I was terrified. I held out my arm to Evan and said to these men, with their gold badges and their pasty, pockmarked, "Dragnet" faces, "This is Evan Lambert. My attorney."
"You won't need a lawyer," one said. "We just need to ask you a few questions."
"I don't think we've been introduced," Evan said to him, "formally."
They took out their wallets and badges again and said, "NYPD"-only the letters this time-and Evan, in his lavender shorts and Boston Red Sox T-shirt, underwent a split-second transformation. "Why don't you gentlemen come in?" He extended his arm and led them through the foyer and into the big room. "Will you be comfortable here?" Upturned palm to the armchairs that overlooked the deck, the pond, the sky still bluer than robins' eggs.
"This is fine," one of them said.
"Yeah, fine," said the other, trying to pretend nonchalance.
"Flossie, lie down. Right there." Master to dog, another minor power play, keeping her from their big feet, their highly polished black shoes.
I looked around for Henderson and saw him through the open door in Evan's study, head down, talking on the phone with the island phone directory in front of him. He must have known to make himself scarce. As Evan knew to make himself into the maitre d', even though he had no idea why these men were here.
"Can I get you a cup of coffee?" he said.
"We don't want to take up much of your time. Why don't we just get started?"
Evan held out his arm to me and pointed gracefully toward a third chair. I sat down and understood his ballet as a series of gestures to disarm the police, and understood that when confronted with loyalty to lawyering versus loyalty to his wife's desire that I leave-I had my eye on the clock, expecting to see an angry Mavis any minute-there was no contest as to which would prevail. Evan stood back with his arms crossed, affecting the most casual demeanor, as if he were waiting for a tennis court to free up. Every so often he'd scratch the side of his chin or use the fleshy part of his thumb to brush an imaginary crumb from his lower lip, something left over from breakfast. One of the cops-they were detectives, hence the suits-ran through the facts of Vicki's disappearance, and Evan pretended it was not the first time he had heard them.
"Mr. Jacobs called us late last night and said he'd just learned the girl had visited you the day before in your apartment. Is that correct?"
"Yes."
"Had she ever done that before?"
"No."
"What was the reason for her visit?"
"I don't think it's fair to ask Ms. Chase to interpret the motives of a child," Evan said. "Or anyone else's, for that matter."
"Why did she say she was there?"
It took me a moment to know how to answer, and in that silence the police must have imagined I was inventing or choosing among inventions or trying to conceal a truth that implicated me in her disappearance. "She invited me-" I started over: "She presented me with a card she had made expressing her desire that I live with her and her family."
"What was your answer?"
Again, I paused. I had no choice: the disparity between what I had felt and what was permissible for me to say to her was so vast, it made me nearly dizzy, then and now. "I said that her father's life and my life were too complicated for that right now."
"Then what happened?"
"I talked to her for a little while and took her back to her house in a cab."
"We understand you saw her father later that day?"
"Yes."
"But you didn't tell him she'd come to your apartment."
"I intended to."
"But?"
"The police called-the police here-and told me my husband was dead. We're separated. I came almost immediately, so I never had the chance to-"
"Mr. Jacobs said that you didn't tell him because she'd asked you not to. Suggesting that you didn't intend to tell him."
"She did ask me not to, because she was embarrassed."
"About what?"
"She was telling me-through this card she'd made-how much she cared about me, and I guess she was embarrassed that-"
"I'm uncomfortable discussing what any of us guesses this child's feelings were at the time," Evan said with more delicacy than I'd have imagined.
"All we want to do is find the child. Did you make any plans with her?"
"No."
"Did you promise her anything?"
"No."
"Did she tell you anything that would suggest where she might have run away to?"
"She came to my apartment to see me. It occurred to me that after she found out I was here, she might also try to come to Swansea. But I imagine people's inner lives all the time-something of an occupational hazard-and I don't always get them right."
"You are Mr. Jacobs's girlfriend?"
Was I required to tell them that I was and that I wasn't, that I wanted to be and that I knew well enough not to want to be, but that I would marry him in a minute to have the children in my life? Was I required to tell the NYPD that I had never told Vicki that I loved her and now I wished I had? "I guess you'd say I'm his girlfriend."
"You are having a sexual relationship with him, aren't you?"
"I don't believe the details of Ms. Chase's private life are relevant to this matter," Evan said.
"I am," I said. I wasn't sure the details were relevant either, but it was a relief, finally, to give a straightforward answer, one that was more true than any of the others. And answering it seemed a good-faith gesture, to let them know I was not evasive out of a desire to conceal; that all I wanted to hide was my vulnerability. "It is most definitely a sexual relationship."
None of us said anything for ten or fifteen seconds. Then one of the detectives said, "So we have to assume the girl has some understanding of this surrogate-mother-type situation."
Henderson suddenly appeared at the study door. "Excuse me, Sophy, you have a phone call. It's your mother."