I’m standing in the doorway, dressed in the same clothes I’ve worn for nearly a week.
She’s staring at me with panic in her distended eyes, her eyebrows raised and mouth hanging open. She looks at me like I’m a monster, a cannibal waiting to eat her for breakfast.
“What do you want?” she cries.
“It’s time to eat.”
She swallows hard. “I’m not hungry,” she says.
“Too bad.”
I tell her she doesn’t have a choice.
She follows me into the other room and watches as I pour what are called eggs—but look and smell like shit from a box—into the skillet. I watch them brown. The smell is enough to make me gag.
She hates everything about me. I know it. I see it in her eyes. She hates the way I stand. She hates my dirty hair and the stubble that now coats my chin. She hates my hands, watching the way they stir the eggs in the skillet. She hates the way I look at her. She hates the tone of my voice and the way my mouth forms the words.
Most of all, she hates seeing the gun in my pocket. All the time, making sure she behaves.
I tell her she’s not allowed in the bedroom anymore. Only to sleep. That’s it. The rest of the day she has to stay out here where I can keep an eye on her. Make sure she eats, drinks, pees. It’s like I’m caring for a damn infant.
She eats about as much as a baby—a couple bites here, a couple bites there. She says that she’s not hungry, but she eats enough to survive. That’s all that matters.
I keep an eye on her so she doesn’t try to run, like last time. When we go to sleep, I slide a heavier table in front of the door so that I’ll hear if she tries to escape. I’m a light sleeper. I sleep with the gun nestled beside me. I ransacked the kitchen drawers and made sure there were no knives. Just my own pocketknife that I carry all the time.
She doesn’t have a damn thing to say to me, and I don’t try. Why bother? I can’t stay here forever. In the spring there will be tourists. Soon we need to go. Screw the girl, I think. Soon I need to go. Ditch the girl and get on a plane and go. Before the cops find me. Before Dalmar finds me. I need to go.
But of course there’s something holding me back, something that stops me from getting on that plane and going.
Gabe
Before
I’m standing in the midst of the Dennetts’ kitchen. Mrs. Dennett hovers over the sink, scraping away the remains of a pork dinner. I see the judge’s plate licked clean, and hers still sports a tenderloin and a pile of peas. The woman is wasting away before my very eyes. The water runs hot, steam spewing forth into the room, though her hands are immersed in it and seem blind to the heat. She scrubs at the china with a ferocity I’ve never seen in a woman washing dishes.
We stand before the island in the center of the kitchen. No one offers me a seat. It’s a swank kitchen with walnut cabinets and granite countertops. The appliances are all stainless steel, including two ovens for which my Italian mother would give an arm and a leg. I imagine Thanksgiving without the drama of how to keep everything warm until dinnertime, no tears when my dad mentioned the potatoes were a tad bit cold.
There’s an image of a man set on the island before the judge and me. It’s a forensic sketch, one that our artist down at the station constructed with the help of that waitress.
“So this is the man? This is the man who has my daughter?” Eve Dennett had cried as I slipped the sketch from a manila folder. Already she was in tears. She turned her back on the conversation and tried to lose herself in washing the dishes, crying quietly over the sound of running water.
“Mia was seen last Tuesday night with this man,” I respond, though by that time her back is facing my direction. The image before us is one of a rough man. His appearance makes him seem lowbred, but it’s not as though he resembles the masked men in horror films. He’s just not of Dennett stature. Neither am I.
“And?” Judge Dennett implores.
“And we think he might be involved in her disappearance.”
He stands on the opposite side of the island, sporting a suit equal in value to two or three months’ worth my salary. His tie is undone and tossed over a shoulder. “Is there any proof Mia didn’t go willingly with this man?”
“Well,” I say, “no.”
The judge is drinking already. Tonight’s drink of choice: scotch on the rocks. I think he might be drunk. There’s a slight slur in his speech and he has the hiccups.
“Suppose Mia is just off monkeying around with him. What then?”
He talks to me like I’m an idiot. But I remind myself that I’m the one in charge. I’m the one with the shiny badge. I’m leading this investigation. Not him.