Evidence of Life

Chapter 16



Abby had her house key in her hand, ready to unlock the back door, but as she came up the steps she saw that the door was already open, ajar by maybe three inches. She paused, and her first thought was Jake, that he was home. But his car wasn’t in the driveway. She nudged the door, widening the gap. The floor was tracked with grit, not a lot. What would come in on your shoes, Abby thought, if you didn’t wipe your feet. Had to be Jake. She stepped over the threshold and stood in the mudroom, but rather than shouting out his name, she pulled her cell phone from her purse and called him. “Are you home?” she asked when he answered.

“Home?” He echoed in a voice that said she must be nuts. “I’m at school. Why?”

Abby told him, her eye tracking the trail of grit. Maybe she’d dragged it in herself the last time she was here, but when she said that to Jake, he said, “No, Mom, get out of there. Call 911. Somebody’s broken in.”

“Who would—?” Abby was already backing out onto the porch, and although she told Jake she would call the police, she didn’t. She called her neighbor Charlie instead.

“Don’t go back inside,” he told her. “Wait for me. I’ll be right there.”

When he came, he examined the door, running his gaze and then his big-knuckled, work-worn hands over the lock mechanism, the frame. “Doesn’t look as if it was forced.”

“Maybe I forgot to lock it when I left and the wind blew it.” In her state of mind, Abby thought, anything was possible.

“Does anyone else besides you or Jake have a key?”

Abby shook her head. “Not that I remember. Maybe my mother does, but she hasn’t been here.”

“Well, let’s go in and have a look around, or maybe you’d rather wait out here?”

“No,” she said over her growing sense of unease. She was grateful that Charlie seemed so calm, so frankly undisturbed. She remembered a summer day a few years ago when Jake fell out of a tree. He’d bitten through his lower lip, and she hadn’t been able to stop the bleeding. Charlie had come to help her then, too. He’d scooped Jake up, carried him swiftly to his truck, Abby jostling alongside, holding the towel to Jake’s mouth, and he’d driven them into town to the emergency room with such an economy of motion. He had talked the whole way. Abby hadn’t heard the words, but the quiet rumble of his voice had comforted her just the same. She followed him inside now. Nothing appeared disturbed in the kitchen or in any of the rooms downstairs.

Charlie started up the stairs.

Abby was behind him when the sound of scuffling and then a tiny cry pierced the silence.

Charlie turned to her. “Why don’t you wait here?”

She nodded, watching him go the rest of the way, thinking he should have a weapon, a baseball bat, a gun. She might be able to find a bat somewhere, but she and Nick had never owned a gun. Her heart whisked lightly against her ribs. She had her cell phone still, and she was thinking she would call 911 now when he reappeared holding a furry, squirming bundle of orange fur.

“One of the kittens,” he said. “Her mama had a litter of six in the barn a few weeks back. This one must have found the door open before we did and decided to go exploring.”

Abby laughed in relief. At least that explained the noises they’d heard. “Spooked by a kitten,” she said, making fun of herself. She took the fussing, little bundle into her hands, holding it aloft inches from her face, noting the tawny eyes, the white blaze that led to a pale pink nose. “She’s adorable. Aren’t you adorable?”

Abby walked with Charlie back outside, and handing over the kitten, she thanked him for checking things out. Her gaze lingered on the tiny furry face, and the kitten looked back at Abby, then promptly climbed Charlie’s shirt to his shoulder, where he grasped her. She dug her nails into his flesh, and he grimaced.

“I don’t think the wind blew the door open, Abby. I’d call the police, let them come and have a look around. And I’d have the locks changed, too, if I were you,” he said. “I can do it for you, if you want.”

Abby looked off into the distance, remembering a car she’d seen parked not far from the house when she’d turned onto her street just now, a dark blue sedan. She told Charlie about it. “It was pulled pretty far off the road, near the north end of the pasture by the utility easement. Why would anyone stop there?” Although there were probably any of a half dozen reasons, it struck Abby as odd, now that she thought of it.

“Do you know the make and model?”

“Ford Taurus, maybe? I don’t know cars very well.” Abby thought it was the same car Nadine Betts drove, though she couldn’t be sure. She hadn’t really paid attention, but now she was spooked. There was something about seeing that car, then finding the door unlocked...and those times when Nadine had followed her around, followed Jake around, when she’d called Louise, pestering them with her endless questions. And there had been the night, at the Riverbend Lodge, Abby had seen a dark blue sedan then, too, leaving the parking lot. She supposed it could all be a coincidence, but somehow she didn’t think so.

Charlie said he didn’t know of anyone local who drove a Taurus. “You have someone in mind? Who’s giving you trouble, I mean?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.” Abby made a dismissive gesture with her hand. “Never mind. I’m sure it’s nothing.” She wondered what she was thinking, to bring up the reporter as if Nadine was—what? Stalking her? So desperate for a story she would break into Abby’s house to hunt for clues? Abby met Charlie’s gaze. “I’ll get locks when I go to the hardware store, if you’re sure you don’t mind installing them.”

He nodded. “Just call me. Anytime.”

She thanked him and squeezed his forearm and said she didn’t know what she’d do without him. Her gratitude was so deep she felt the pull of tears.

“It’s what neighbors are for,” he said.

“You need to let me pay you.”

He grinned. “All right. I’d love a slice of your coconut cream pie then.”

That made her laugh, made her happy. “It’s a deal,” she said and watched him go before turning back to the house. She stood outside the backdoor a moment, studying it. It worried her, finding the door open, the idea that some stranger had a key and had been inside the house. It wouldn’t hurt anything to change the locks, as Charlie suggested, but she couldn’t see calling the police. What would she tell them? That she couldn’t remember whether she’d shut the door tightly and locked it in the first place? That someone broke in for no apparent reason? They’d think she was a fool.

Inside the house she swept the grit from the floor into the dustpan and flung it out the door. She went to the refrigerator and briskly gathered the old, desiccated class schedules and other scraps of her family’s life off the front of the refrigerator and put them in a desk drawer, then she pulled the fax from her pocket and, smoothing it, pinned it in their place.

The handwriting was neat for a man, a precise series of even loops and firm strokes. My wife Sondra has been missing for nearly a year…. What did missing mean in this case? Kidnapped? Had someone abducted Hank Kilmer’s wife? Abby judged the script too neat to belong to a doctor or a lawyer. It might be the handwriting of a CPA or an architect. Someone who admired order, someone for whom control and precision were characteristic. A man with glasses and grooves of worry carved into his face. He would be thin, she thought, with hair as white as chalk.

It would be pointless for her to call him, she thought. He would be looking for a new shoulder to cry on. They would meet for coffee or a glass of wine and speculate about why Nick would have written Sondra’s fax number inside a book of matches, and when that exercise ended in futility, they would go on to exchange stories about their missing mates. They would tell each other things they would never say to anyone else because they shared an understanding no one else could. Hank Kilmer would come to rely on Abby to help him keep useless hope alive.

In hindsight, her actions would strike her as ridiculous, even appalling, that she could have thought so little of her own intuition. That she would simply accept the advice of her family and her friends and Dennis over the agitated voice of her own heart. But that was her problem; she was emotionally overwrought. Paranoid. She thought her closest friends, even her own son, were lying to her and that a reporter had broken into her house. Clearly she was certifiable and couldn’t separate reality from delusion. She was letting her feelings, her suspicion, override her good judgment, and if she ended up in a straitjacket, it would be her own fault.

She filled the CD player with music: Pavarotti, Bocelli, the Righteous Brothers, Roy Orbison, turning it up so it would fill the house. She opened windows, heedless of the chill. Gathering cleaning supplies and rags in a bucket, Abby headed swiftly upstairs. She scoured the bathrooms, changed the sheets and dusted the children’s rooms. The thought that at some point something would have to be done with Lindsey and Nick’s belongings poked at her brain, but she finished in each room and left it without looking back.

She was in the laundry room, considering whether she could salvage the moldy contents of the laundry basket, when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was her mother, sounding anxious.

Abby felt awful. “Oh, Mama, I’m sorry. I keep doing this to you.”

“Are you all right? What are you doing?”

“I’m fine. I’m cleaning. I just finished upstairs.”

“Do you want me to come?”

“No, it’s dark.”

“Abby, I’m not feeble. I still know how to drive in the dark.”

“It’s just—” Abby stopped. She would not mention finding the back door open. It would only scare her mother, and the more Abby thought about it, the more she felt there was some logical explanation. “You don’t need to come,” she said. “I’m fine, really.”

“You left Kate’s in a terrible hurry.”

“She told you about the fax.” Abby closed her eyes. Maybe next Kate would take out an ad.

“How important can it be when someone jots down a phone number inside a book of matches?”

“You don’t think it means anything.”

“Honey, I think if it were something important, a number Nick intended to use, he’d have written it someplace less casual.”

Casual. Abby held the word in her mind. As in casual acquaintance? Casual affair? “Mama, did Kate tell you she saw Nick in Bandera last Christmas?”

“Honey, I’m inclined to believe her when she says she didn’t remember.”

Abby didn’t say anything.

“He’d asked her to keep it secret, you know? And then it was the holidays. In all the rush, you can imagine, can’t you, that she might forget? It really wasn’t important until April.”

“I guess.” Abby thought how she was always complaining she had too much to keep up with: Nick’s schedule, Jake’s schedule, Lindsey’s schedule. There were days when her brain felt like a basket stuffed full of everyone else’s business. There had been days when she’d forgotten things, important things. But that was BTF, before the flood. It would be different now. She would have more room, a bigger mental space to put everything in. Something else she’d wished for that she didn’t want.

Her mother said, “Abby, sweet, I think a person can take any combination of circumstances and make them into something.”

“I’m letting my imagination run away with me.” Here it was again, Abby thought, more proof she was losing it.

“Your mind wants to fill in the blanks. It wants a logical explanation for this terrible accident that has happened, and there isn’t one.”

Abby didn’t answer.

“Kate thinks you’re angry at her.”

“I’m not angry.” It was only partly a lie. “I just realized I needed to be here.”

“Are you thinking of contacting that man?”

“No. Even if there was a connection, what difference does it make now? If they’re dead, I mean, if Nick and Lindsey are dead?” Abby made herself say it. “I’m thinking it’s time I faced the fact that they’re gone, lost in one of those canyons or in the river or who knows?”

“But you don’t have to face it alone and not all at once.”

Abby sat at the table. She drew doodles in the dust. “I’ve been thinking, Mama, about teaching again.”

“That’s a wonderful idea, honey.”

“I’m going to call Hap Albright.” Hap was the principal and Abby’s former boss. She’d read that he was assistant superintendent of the district now.

“He’s the one who thought so much of you, right?

“Nick always thought it was too much. But he’s harmless.”

“Well, it can’t hurt if someone in administration favors you a little.”

“I just hope there’s an opening, that he’ll consider me, but if nothing else, maybe I can substitute somewhere.”

“Working will help you, Abby.”

“Distract me, you mean.”

“A little distraction can be a good thing sometimes. It can get you through the worst of the ordeal. Then one day, you’ll wake up and the pain won’t be quite as sharp. You’ll find you’re breathing a little easier.”

Abby glanced at the fax from Hank Kilmer pinned to the refrigerator. He had four months on her, but she didn’t think it had gotten any easier for him.

* * *

When she finished mopping the kitchen floor, her back ached and her sorrow seemed wedged permanently at the base of her throat again. But it was late, and she didn’t have the energy to cry. Standing at the kitchen sink, she made herself eat, tiny new peas from the can, applesauce from a batch she’d made last fall. She washed her few dishes and climbed the stairs. She changed the sheets on the bed she’d shared with Nick and hung fresh towels in their bathroom, but then she couldn’t stay there. She thought the sofa downstairs might become her permanent bed. Maybe she’d buy a pullout.

She showered in Lindsey’s bathroom, and it was there, with the warm steam rising around her, that she cried.

* * *

It was near midnight when she wakened. She gathered the quilt around her and padded barefoot into the kitchen. In the dark, she went to the refrigerator, took down Hank Kilmer’s fax and wadding it into a ball, she tossed it into the kitchen wastebasket.

There is a time when you have to be through with grieving, when you have to accept your fate. Pick up the threads of existence. Go on. There is a time when you have to let go of faith. When it’s just flat-out insane to keep on believing.