“Can you do something? Contact Amtrak? See if you can get a destination from her ticket?”
“If she used her real name, I think so, Mike. That’s assuming she didn’t somehow acquire a fake ID. Then we’ll really be at a loss. Any idea where she might want to go by train?” Kennett asked.
“No,” he said. “I’m thinking about friends she might have gone to stay with.”
“Okay. Well, listen. I doubled-checked the laws. You may have a case of parental interference here. Did you file a missing persons report with your local police?”
“No. I’m going to do that soon,” Michael said in a quiet voice just shy of despair.
“Okay, Mike. Let me know if you need help there. I’ll be in touch if we learn anything. What are your plans?”
Michael looked around the room, the emptiness caving in on him. He rushed to his suitcase. Grabbed the clothes he’d taken off earlier and tossed them inside. He did up the zipper.
“I’m going home,” he said. “Right now. I’m leaving here.”
“Whatcha gonna do there, Mike?” Kennett asked. There was noticeably more warmth, a little more compassion in his voice this time.
“I’m going to pull apart my wife’s life bit by bit,” he answered, “and hope to hell the pieces tell me where she’s gone.”
CHAPTER 9
NATALIE
BEFORE SHE DISAPPEARED
Buckley’s was the perfect spot to have lunch with Audrey. The restaurant had a nice selection of soups, always a good choice on a cold, blustery day. March was a sneaky month in New England. There were signs of spring here and there—birds that returned early from their southern journeys, muddy grass freed from layers of ice and snow—but really March was winter, and Natalie was never a big fan of the gray gloomy season. Sure, she’d make an effort to get outside as much as possible, encourage the kids to go skiing and snowshoeing, but really what she wanted the most during those long, cold months was hot cocoa and Netflix.
And sleep. God, how she wanted sleep.
Last night, she’d awoken at two thirty in the morning, her eyes snapping open like she’d been startled from a dream. At first she blamed Michael’s snoring, but then realized he was quiet as could be, still as a stone, lying with his back to her. That was how they slept these days. Same bed, backs to each other, as if they occupied different rooms in the house.
What had woken her? Over the last few months she’d become something of a sleep detective. She ran through a series of questions she’d grown accustomed to asking herself. What was she feeling that day? Emotional tuning was what her therapist called it. Give the emotion a simple label—I feel sad, I feel happy, I feel lonely—and it helps to lessen the impact. That day she had no label, just the usual: I feel utterly exhausted and depleted.
Had she been extra upset about her husband and perhaps not realized it? No, she was living in a steady state of unease as far as that situation was concerned. All she had on Michael were her suspicions along with the anonymous note that proved nothing. She knew showing Michael the note would get his vigorous denials and cause a big fight, perhaps even a put up (ask for a divorce) or shut up ultimatum from him. To blow up her life, Natalie needed more than intuition to go on.
Tina’s negative views of Michael might have tipped the scales toward ending things, but Natalie felt her friend’s opinions needed to be tempered somewhat. Those two had never gotten along, probably because they were so damn alike. Headstrong. Opinionated. Driven. Ambitious.
Audrey sipped from her squash soup. No longer a stickler about cutting caffeine, which didn’t seem to affect her sleep one way or another, Natalie got an espresso to go with her lunch selection—a bowl of minestrone soup. Audrey ordered hot water with lemon. Probably a consistent choice of hers, Natalie mused. No way would those pearly whites sparkle like they did if coffee or tea graced her lips.
While the two women sat sipping and chatting, butterflies flittered about Natalie’s stomach as she contemplated how to broach the subject of Michael. More specifically, she wondered if she should reveal her plan. Tina’s words came back to her, hard. This wasn’t Audrey’s problem to solve, but Natalie had reached a new level of desperation.
Maybe once she uncovered the truth, when she knew for certain that Michael was the player she suspected him to be, she’d be able to sleep again. That’s all she really wanted. More than a stable relationship at home and a fantasy sex life, she wanted one damn night’s sleep when she didn’t wake up to darkness outside. It amazed her how slowly time could move, especially between the early morning hours of three and six thirty when the kids normally woke up. She felt every excruciating minute pass like the loud tick of a clock rumbling inside her head.
Natalie gave an involuntary yawn. She caught a slight grimace creep up on Audrey’s face, as if she were the cause of her companion’s boredom. They’d been doing the small talk—office stuff, project work, nothing of consequence, but it wasn’t exactly riveting conversation.
“Sorry, it’s not you,” Natalie said by way of an apology. “I don’t sleep well.”
“Insomnia?” Audrey asked.
Natalie gave a nod.
“My mother had it. It’s awful. She’s had trouble sleeping since I was a young girl. She went through a lot back then.”
Audrey trailed off.
Here it comes, thought Natalie as she forced her eyes to keep from rolling, the litany of advice … all of it well-meaning, of course. Natalie did her damnedest never to mention her troubles because she’d come to loathe the standard list of responses she’d get.
She knew the medicine aisle at CVS like a beloved childhood storybook, and drank enough NyQuil to turn herself green. None of it was a long-term solution, and to compound the problem, she’d quickly developed a tolerance to the natural, homeopathic cures.
She took every path, all the advice, always without success. Meditation. Check. No electronics at night. Check. Hot showers. Muscle relaxers. Reading before bed. Check, check, and check. There was her cannabis phase, which Michael couldn’t partake in because his company drug tested. The weed helped her to sleep better, but it made her perpetually sluggish. She even tried counting sheep. One night she got to a thousand little ewes vaulting an imaginary fence in a verdant field before she envisioned impaling the annoying creatures with arrows.
After all the effort and energy expended, she’d resigned herself to a life of perpetual fatigue. Sandpaper-behind-her-eyes kind of exhaustion. It was as if nature had decided to make her the butt of a cruel joke. She was tired all the time, but not able to get a single restful night’s sleep.
“You know what she did, my super religious, super straight, super strict mom, to cure it?”
Natalie took a sip of her espresso while giving Audrey an eager stare. In her head she was thinking: essential oils.
“Masturbation,” Audrey said, delivering her reveal with a straight face.