Liam nodded at the people he knew—which was most of them—as he crossed the black-and-white squares of the old linoleum floor, avoiding the missing tile by table number six out of mindless habit.
“Hey, Belinda,” he said. “Hey, Mr. and Mrs. Ivanov. How are you all doing?” He knew how they were doing, of course. Belinda’s parents looked liked they’d aged twenty years in the last six days. They doted on their late-in-life daughter, and even more on their only grandchild, especially after her drunken fool of a father took off and never looked back. Mrs. Ivanov’s gentle face was pale and bewildered, her wrinkles falling in on themselves as though they’d given up trying to hold on to any expression other than sorrow.
Belinda was in her uniform; she’d insisting on working, but when she wasn’t actually on the search, she spent most of her time giving out tickets to people who stepped the tiniest bit over the line. Masses of tickets were accumulating on his desk for people parking an inch into a crosswalk, jaywalking when there was no traffic, or walking their dogs without leashes. Hardly anyone complained. The locals all brought the tickets to him to deal with, and the few tourists just shrugged and paid the insignificant fines, figuring that’s what they got for not knowing the rules. He didn’t know what else to do, so he let her keep working. If that’s what she needed to stay sane, who was he to take that away from her?
Of course, the county board didn’t see it that way; four different members had called to question his judgment in the matter, although he could hear Clive’s voice behind them all. He didn’t care. Either they trusted him to do his job or they didn’t. Unfortunately, it was starting to look like they didn’t.
“Is there news?” Mariska Ivanov asked eagerly. Her hands knotted together under the tabletop as if weaving arcane symbols of hope.
“No, I’m sorry, nothing,” he said. “We’ve had a number of calls to the 800 number, but none of them have panned out so far.” He patted her on the shoulder. “I’m sure something will turn up soon.” He wished he felt as confident as he sounded. The truth was, there was such an absence of evidence, even the state police, who had shown up after the second disappearance, reluctantly concluded that there were no leads to follow up on. They showed up periodically, looking over his shoulder and criticizing his lack of progress, but didn’t have the men to spare for a case with no suspects and nothing to definitively tie the three disappearances together.
“Sure, sure. Soon,” Mariska’s husband said, not believing it any more than Liam did. “You sit with us, yes? Eat some lunch. I hear you were out searching all morning, you must be hungry.” Belinda’s parents had Russian accents too, much stronger than the slight lilt he’d detected in the herbalist’s voice. They’d defected during the cold war; scientists, both of them, although from what he’d gathered, they’d given up their life’s work, rather than hand it over to any government, and taken up farming instead. After all they’d survived, he knew they would survive this too. But he wasn’t sure they’d want to.
“I was out by Miller’s Meadow, checking the river,” Liam said, pulling out a faded blue wobbly-legged chair and sitting down reluctantly. “I know it is really too far from the house; five miles or more, but kids love that stretch of water, so I thought I’d have a look. Anything to avoid the paperwork on my desk, you know.” He smiled at them and they all smiled back, none of them very convincingly.
“Did you find anything?” Belinda asked. She looked like she always did, mouse-brown hair in a short, tidy French braid, pale pink lipstick, tiny gold studs in her ears. Only her red and swollen eyes gave her away, and the dark circles underneath them. “At the river?”
Liam shook his head. “No, nothing. Sorry.”
Lucy, a comfortably middle-aged waitress whose plump form was a walking advertisement for Bertie’s food, appeared at his shoulder to offer him the choice between meatloaf and fried chicken, and save him from apologizing again. Not that any amount of I’m sorrys could make up for his not finding Belinda’s child. Or anyone’s child.
“Any news, Sheriff?” Lucy asked, chewing on the end of her ballpoint pen. She drew a picture of a chicken on her pad, her idea of shorthand, and stuck the pen into her fluffy blond tornado of hair. “You know, I can’t believe that a local would have anything to do with these disappearances. It must be one of them tourists. You just can’t trust those people. They never shoulda opened that bed-and-breakfast in West Dunville.”