Debbie continued to stand.
There was a family room on the other side of the bar. It also had French doors that opened out onto the garden. Judging by the drafting table and wall of tacked-up sketches, Debbie used the room as a home office. But the floor was strewn with toys. Debbie noticed Susan looking at the sketches and smiled sheepishly. “I’m designing a yoga shoe,” she explained.
“Aren’t you supposed to do yoga barefoot?”
Debbie grinned. “Let’s just say that it’s an untapped market.”
“Is that what you design mostly? Shoes?”
“Not the structural stuff. I just take what the lab guys give me and try to make it look pretty. I read your story today. It was interesting. Well written.”
“Thanks,” Susan said, embarrassed. “It was just laying the groundwork. I want to go a little deeper in the next few. Do you want to sit down?”
Debbie put a tentative hand on a chair but then hesitated and removed it. She looked in the family room. At the toys on the carpet. “I should pick up after the kids,” she said. She walked behind Susan around the bar into the family room and bent over to pick up a stuffed gorilla. “So what do you want to know?” she asked.
Susan produced a small digital recorder from her purse. “Do you mind if I record this? It’s easier than having to take notes.”
“Go ahead,” said Debbie. She continued with her task, plucking up a stuffed cat, a rabbit, a panda.
“So,” Susan said. Dive right in. Full speed ahead. “It must have been hard.”
Debbie stood up, her arms teeming with plush animals, and sighed. “When he was missing? Yes.” She walked over to a small red table with two child-size red chairs and began placing the stuffed animals on top of it one by one. “He called me, you know, right before he went in to see her. Then he didn’t come home.” She paused and looked at the gorilla still in her arms. It was the size of a baby. She spoke carefully. “I thought it was traffic at first. It’s close to Nike out here, but the commute on Twenty-six can be murder. I called his cell phone about a hundred times, but he wasn’t picking up.” She looked up at Susan and forced a smile. “This was not entirely unusual. I thought they might have found another body. But then…” She paused and took a breath that caught for a moment in her throat. “Finally, I called Henry. Henry went to her house. They found Archie’s car out front, but the house was empty. That’s when it all started to fall apart.” She looked at the gorilla for another moment and then slowly placed it on the table, positioning it snugly between the panda and the cat. “They didn’t know what had happened, of course. That it had anything to do with Gretchen Lowell. But they were able to piece it together.” Her voice grew tight. “But they couldn’t find him.”
“Ten days is a long time.”
Debbie sat down cross-legged on the carpet and pulled a large wooden puzzle toward her. “They thought he was dead,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Did you?”
She took two evenly measured inhalations. Then twisted her face as she said, “Yes.”
Susan surreptitiously slid the digital recorder an inch closer to Debbie. “Where were you when you heard that he’d been found?”
Debbie started putting the puzzle together with pieces that lay scattered around her. “I was here,” she said, looking around. “Right here.” She laughed sadly. “In the family room.” Each piece of the puzzle was a different sort of vehicle, and she picked up a fire truck and placed it in the puzzle. “There was a couch. Coffee. So many cops. Claire Masland.” She froze, a puzzle piece still in her hand. “And flowers. People had started leaving flowers. They showed our house on the news. And people came from all over to lay these bouquets in our yard.” She looked up at Susan, her face helpless and distraught and bemused all at the same time. “Stuffed animals. Ribbons. Sad notes.” She glanced down at the puzzle piece still in her hand: a police car. “And flowers. The entire front of the house was just thick with wilting flowers.” Her hand tightened around the puzzle piece and her forehead tensed. “All these fucking condolences scrawled on scrap paper and bereavement cards. ‘Sorry for your loss.’ ‘Our deepest sympathies.’ I remember looking out the front window into this field of funeral arrangements. I could smell them from inside, that stink of rotting foliage.” She laid the police car in the puzzle and lifted her hand away and looked at it. “And I knew that he was dead.”
She glanced back up at Susan. “They say you’re supposed to feel it, you know? When someone you love that much dies? I felt it. His absence. I knew that it was over. I knew, in my body, that Archie was dead. Then Henry called. They had found him. And he was alive. Everyone cheered. Claire drove me to Emanuel. And I didn’t leave the hospital for five days.”