Every month, he seemed to ponder my question and answer it slightly differently. If nothing else, it gave me the illusion of progress.
“I’m starting to seriously consider the possibility he might be dead.” He had always leaned more toward that theory than I did.
“If he died, then how would we not know it? Where is his body?”
“Oh, the possibilities are endless there. A victim of murder could be buried or thrown in the river, and we might never know.”
It hit me how blasé the discussion was when we were talking about my possibly dead husband. I tried to force myself to feel something, but came up empty.
“The inheritance supports this,” he continued. “It’s a lot of money to leave behind.”
“Unless he has a significant amount more, and that was a red herring,” I suggested, playing devil’s advocate. It all seemed farfetched for me, too, especially for the Greg I thought I knew. He was so conventional.
“Well, we looked into that. We subpoenaed his bank records from 2001 and 2002, as well as his mother’s from when she was alive. The figure is about fifty thousand dollars short, but after her funeral—plus it looked like she donated some to charity—it came pretty close to the mark. There’s a few thousand bucks we can’t find. But that was eight years ago. Things get lost, you know?” He reached out and put his hand on mine. “We’re still going to look for him, Claire. I know how badly you need closure.”
I felt tears brim my eyelids. “Thanks, Matt. I hope you eventually figure it out.” I wiped the tears away before Hannah or Leah could come bounding in from the living room and see them.
He leaned back again. “I want to. There are definitely some cases that get to you more than others. I want peace for you and your family. Unfortunately, a death in absentia ruling takes at least seven years.”
“What does that mean?”
“If Greg is still missing six years from now, we can petition the courts to issue a death certificate without evidence of death.”
“Six more years seems a lifetime from now. What will that do? A death certificate, I mean.”
“For starters, you could file for life insurance.” He stared at me intently. Gauging my reaction?
“I… I hadn’t even thought about that. In fact,” I said, feeling instantly stupid, “I have no idea how much Greg’s life insurance policy is. Why don’t I know that? Isn’t that something a wife knows about her husband?”
He shrugged. “The strangest part to me is that we’ve had no reported sightings of Greg. We’ve had missing posters up around here and in Rochester for over six months now and nothing. Not one person has called to say they’ve seen him. It makes no sense. It’s part of the reason I think he has to be dead. Men cannot change their appearance that easily.”
Matt stood and put his cup in the sink. “I should head back to the station. I have another meeting in a bit. Are you going to be okay?”
“Thanks, Matt. Yes, I’ll be fine. It’s just something to think about. That’s all.” I walked him to the door, then went back to clean up and throw away the temptation of the two remaining doughnuts. The girls didn’t need the sugar any more than I needed the extra calories.
I called Mom to fill her in on the monthly meeting. She offered to take the girls for a few hours so I could do some of the yardwork. The week before, we’d had a storm that brought down part of a tree. I needed to break up the tree limbs as much as I could, then Dad planned to take a chainsaw to the rest. In addition, the physical exercise would help me clear my head.
Mom came to pick up the kids, and I got dressed in an old T-shirt and jeans. I put on my iPod and was a quarter way through the mess when I caught a flash of movement. When I looked up, I nearly fainted. Bounding toward me, as if no time at all had passed, was Cody. His coat looked different, longer than we’d ever let it get, and he had a blue bandana around his neck.
“Oh, my God.” I pulled off my headphones and knelt on the ground. Cody tackled me, licking my face. He smelled like dog shampoo and potpourri.
I grabbed him by the collar. “Seriously, you’ve been gone for eight months! Are you trying to kill me?” I wrapped my arms around his neck, something I had always done before. I rubbed his belly and began to think.
After a minute, I realized that I had grabbed him by the collar. We were terrible at keeping a collar on him. His head and neck were close enough in size to make a collar virtually impossible to keep on him. Instead of fighting it, I would typically leave his collar lying on the counter or on top of the fridge until we wanted to walk him, which was almost never because he had the run of the yard. I couldn’t be sure, but I thought it likely the collar was still on top of the fridge. Then, what was this collar? I checked the tag. Cody’s name was “Walter,” and he apparently lived at an address about ten miles from our house. What a completely terrible name for a dog, was all I could think. And then it occurred to me. Cody had a new home, a new family.