“Yes.”
“She lives alone?”
“No, with her boyfriend. But he’s gone too. I don’t have his number.”
She breathes, mind racing. “There are maggots.”
A pause on the other end of the line. “I’ve just sent Randy to call the Justice Department. Someone from the FBI field office in Austin should be there within the hour.”
Relief, warm and overflowing, fills her. “Thank you.”
“Given the circumstances, should I put your flight on hold?”
She looks at Remy, who has been listening. He shakes his head, mouths, Go.
“I don’t know,” she says.
“I understand, and no one will fault you if you think you should wait until you know what happened to your daughter, but this thing is moving. And there’s no pause button I can hit. So—”
Remy squeezes her shoulder. “Go,” he says. “I’ll find her.”
She nods, her eyes watering of their own accord, looks to her son.
“We got this,” he says.
She nods. “No,” she says, “I’m still coming. Just tell me where and when.”
“Give me your daughter’s address. Someone from the field office will take you to the airfield.”
“The airfield.”
“It’s important we keep things quiet for now. The press knows the justice is thinking about retiring. They’ll be watching the airports.”
“What time is the flight?”
“Whatever time you show up. The plane’s en route.”
“Oh,” she says. “I don’t have—I need something to wear to meet the president. I don’t have—I packed for barbecue.”
“I can do that for you. I’ll have someone reach out to your office.”
“Thank you—I—you’re kind.”
“Well, thanks, but the fact is—you’re my choice, and I want you to win. So not a complete altruist.”
“Fair enough.”
“But, Margot?”
“Yes,” she hears herself say.
“I’ll be praying for you and your family.”
She hangs up. “I need some water,” she says, “or to sit down.”
Remy goes into the kitchen, gets her a glass, fills it from the tap. When he comes back, she’s gone. Hadrian points.
“Bedroom.”
Remy doesn’t know where that is exactly, but he moves down the hall, finds her standing in a south-facing room that looks into a fenced backyard. Margot is going through the dresser.
“Her underwear is gone.”
She closes the top drawer, goes to the closet. Inside are mostly bare hangers.
She remembers rushing her daughter to the hospital that day, her vitals all over the map, electrolytes nonexistent, suffering from severe dehydration. An hour later Story was on a feeding tube, her hands strapped down so she couldn’t struggle. A void. Where her child had been there was now a void.
That was the beginning of a journey that lasted five years, what Margot now calls the silliness, because calling it what it really was is to admit how close she’d come to failure as a parent. To death.
“So she packed all her clothes,” says Margot, “but then why leave her bags in the house?”
“Did you check if her car is here?”
Margot’s eyes widen. She pushes past him, moves down the hall and out the front door. Story drives a blue Camry, a hand-me-down from her uncle. Margot searches the street but doesn’t see it. Remy follows her out onto the lawn, still carrying the glass of water.
“Tell me the boyfriend’s name again?”
“Felix,” she says. “Moor. I think. The last name.”
“I saw a desk. I’ll go through it, but it’s all phones anymore.”
“The FBI will know.”
Neither of them states the obvious; which is that all around the country children are disappearing permanently. That the next step for them is to call the hospital or a morgue. Instinctually they agree to think of this crisis in terms of solvability. Gone X number of hours, last seen headed in Y direction. A mystery. What they’re facing is a mystery, nothing more.
Remy feels weak in the knees suddenly. The heat maybe. He’s not used to this much humidity. He reaches out and leans against a pecan tree. Margot notices.
“Are you okay?” she asks.
“I’m fine. It’s just—a lot.”
She nods.
“Promise me you’ll find her,” she says.
“I’ll find her,” he says as a black sedan pulls up to the curb, parks. A man climbs out of the passenger seat. A woman from the driver’s, both in suits. The FBI, as promised, has arrived.
That July the forests of Alaska caught fire. Black smoke ringed the Pacific Northwest like a smoldering halo. Bigfoot sightings in the Rocky Mountains rose by 58 percent. In a six-day period, more than ten million people watched a YouTube video of a lumbering giant moving furtively between evergreens outside Boulder, Colorado. Still the suicides rose. Funeral homes couldn’t keep up with demand. Around the country people woke hearing footsteps that had no source, strange knocking sounds in the walls. Rooms, normally heated evenly, developed unexplained pockets of cold air.
Massachusetts, West Virginia, Utah.
Google searches for “ghosts” and “apparitions” rose nationally by 352 percent. Experts wrote it off to delusions of grief, but the phenomenon was not restricted to homes that had suffered a loss.
Wyoming, Oregon, Texas.
Evangelical preachers claimed these were signs of the rapture, as laid out in the Book of Revelation. The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were on the move. But still the stock market rose. Plastic goods from China steamed across the Pacific on their way to the rec rooms of the Midwest. Starbucks’ website introduced a countdown clock—not to the end of the world, but to the return of the Pumpkin Spice Latte.