All during his conversation with the detectives, Sean said, he felt as if they were following instructions from a textbook: Interview with Husband of Missing Wife 101. Still, it had been grueling. They’d asked him the same questions over and over. Did he know where Emily might have gone? Was their marriage happy? Any arguments? Any reason she might have been dissatisfied? Any possibility that she might have been having an affair? Any history of alcoholism or substance abuse?
“I said she’d experimented with drugs, briefly. Like we all did, in our twenties. I smiled at them, like an idiot. But the joke was on me. They weren’t smiling back. No fooling around in their twenties for them. It went on for hours. The dreary interrogation room. They’d go away, then come back. Just like all those BBC detective procedurals I always liked and Emily didn’t. And yet . . . I never felt as if they really suspected me of anything. Quite honestly, Stephanie, I felt as if they didn’t really believe that Emily is in trouble. I don’t know why, how they dared to presume they knew anything about us. About my marriage. But I got the impression they thought that Emily just picked up and left. Ran away. They kept saying, ‘In the absence of a body, in the absence of any sign of foul play . . .’
“And I kept wanting to shout at them: What about Emily’s absence?!”
“What about it?” I’d been hanging on Sean’s every word and at the same time thinking that his remark about Emily not liking the detective procedurals was the first complaint I’d ever heard him make about her. She’d had plenty of complaints about him. He didn’t listen to her. He made her feel stupid. Every wife in our town could have said the same about her husband. I could have said it about Davis.
A few days later, Detective Meany phoned. I was glad Sean warned me about her name, so I didn’t snicker or say something stupid when she introduced herself. She said I could come to their office any time that was convenient for me. They would work around my schedule. That was nice. But was I imagining the slightly contemptuous, ironic note in her voice when she said schedule?
I drove to the Canton station house after I dropped Miles at school. I’ll confess I was nervous. It seemed to me that everyone looked at me as if I’d done something wrong.
Detective Meany and the much younger Detective Fortas asked me some of the same questions they’d asked Sean. They mainly wanted to know if Emily had been unhappy. All the time I was talking, Detective Fortas kept checking his phone, and twice he sent a text that I knew had nothing to do with me.
I said, “She loved her life. She would never do this. A devoted wife and mom has gone missing, and you guys are doing nothing!” Why was I the only one standing up for my friend? Why hadn’t her husband said what I was saying? Maybe because Sean was British. He was too polite. Or maybe he felt that this wasn’t his country. This one was on me.
“All right.” Detective Fortas sounded as if he was doing me a big favor. “We’ll see what we can find out.”
That weekend, the detectives showed up at Sean and Emily’s house and asked if they could look around. Fortunately, Nicky was with me—playing with Miles—so Sean let them in. He said their search was tentative, cursory. He almost felt as if they were real estate agents, or house hunters thinking of buying the place.
They asked for pictures of Emily. Sean collected some snapshots that he handed over. Luckily, he called me first, and I suggested that he not give them any photos with Nicky in them. He agreed that was a good idea.
Between the two of us, we gave the detectives a complete description—the tattoo on her wrist, her hair, her diamond and sapphire ring. Sean cried when he told them about the ring. I had to keep myself from mentioning her perfume. It didn’t seem like something you’d say to a detective on the trail of a missing person. Lilacs? Lilies? Italian nuns? Thanks for your help, ma’am. We’ll call you if we need you.
Finally Emily’s company woke up from its deep fashionista slumber. Their silence wasn’t surprising. She was the public voice of Dennis Nylon Inc., and without her, nobody there knew how to speak.
Dennis Nylon was her boss’s seventies club-kid name. He’d risen from punk street fashion to become one of the world’s most chic and expensive designers. Wearing his signature skinny black suit, the Dennis Nylon unisex suit, he appeared on the six o’clock news to say that his company was fully cooperating and supporting the efforts of the detectives to find Emily Nelson, their beloved employee and cherished friend. He wore a tie with the company logo, which (to me) was tacky. But maybe no one else noticed.
Actually, what he said was “to find out what happened to Emily Nelson.” That he seemed so sure that something had happened to her gave me the chills. At the bottom of the screen was a number to call if you had any information. It looked like an infomercial with a number to call if you wanted to order the tie. Still, his TV appearance did get the case more attention, at least for a while. I heard, from the detectives, that the company made a sizable contribution to the police department—to help inspire the detectives to go that extra mile.
Dennis Nylon Inc. volunteered to make flyers and put them up around the area. The company sent up a busload of fashion interns, and for an entire day, our town was swarming with underweight androgynous young people, all with asymmetrical haircuts and skinny suits, carrying armloads of flyers, staple guns for the telephone poles, and double-sided tape for shop windows. have you seen this woman? I wasn’t sure I had, because the glam head shot of Emily—full makeup, blown-out hair, the little birthmark photoshopped out of existence—looked so little like my friend that I’m not sure I would have recognized her. Seeing the photos everywhere upset and comforted me at the same time—they were a constant, distressing reminder of our loss, along with a small consolation: at least someone was doing something.
Anyway, something or someone got Detectives Meany and Fortas off their asses long enough to consult the geeks who monitor CCTV footage. They followed Emily’s trail to JFK, where she kissed Sean goodbye outside the terminal. But she never checked in for the San Francisco flight on which she was booked. Neither Sean nor I had any idea that she was planning to go out West.
It had been Sean’s impression that she was on her way into Manhattan, that she’d caught a ride to JFK with his car service so she could keep him company and say goodbye. After that, he thought, she was going to work and then away on business. The people at Dennis Nylon knew nothing about a business trip to the West Coast.
The security cameras caught her leaving the terminal, then showing up at a rental car agency, where she leased a full-size four-door sedan. She took the first thing they offered, a white Kia. The cops questioned the rental agent, but he didn’t remember anything except that Emily seemed very definite about not wanting a GPS. That hadn’t seemed unusual. Lots of people don’t want to pay extra for a navigational system when they already have one on their phones.
That sounded right to me. Emily has a great sense of direction. Whenever we went anywhere, even just to the town pool, I drove, and she mapped our route on her phone. She knew how to figure out if there was traffic, though there never was any traffic in our town, unless you were going to the train station at rush hour. Which I never am—and she was, five days a week.
Where was she going in that car? Why didn’t she text or call me?
Good news: The genius detectives discovered that the car rental company had a corporate E-ZPass, and they tracked it to a toll station about two hundred miles west of Manhattan on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Bad news: That’s where they lost her. Emily seems to have left the thruway and taken smaller roads—and dumped her phone and vanished off the map. Into the dead zone.
Sean and I asked the detectives to alert the local and state police near where she was last seen, but they’d already done that. If she’d run away, she could be anywhere. There were endless dead zones on the smaller roads. They would have to see what new leads came in.
Dead zones. Just the words gave me the creeps.