I watch Annie talking on the phone inside her car. Poor girl, alone on her anniversary. She and Sam celebrate every week. I know because I have Sam’s appointment book filed away in my library—“Annie, anniversary drinks” jotted down each Tuesday—and I’ve been imagining how cute they looked, clinking glasses of overpriced alcohol.
“You want a table?” A young woman is eyeing me from behind the podium. She’s got tattoos up and down her arms, getting back at her parents, most likely, by defiling her own body.
“No, thank you,” I say, watching Annie pull away from the curb. “I just remembered. I have somewhere to be.”
My own car is parked illegally in the bank parking lot. I start the engine but don’t move.
I feel terrible for her.
I know that I can’t, but I wish I could tell her what a mess Sam was at happy hour yesterday. He barely seemed to be listening when I told him about my one experience playing football. It was not easy to talk about. I was seven years old and begged my mother to talk my father out of forcing me to play, but she refused. I stood in a line on the field, someone handed me the football, and the next thing I knew, a boy from my school three times my size threw me to the ground. I couldn’t breathe, and was so sure I was dying that when I did finally catch my breath, I burst into tears, right there on Sanders Field, in front of my father and half of the men of Wayne, Indiana. And what did Sam say when I finished telling him? Nothing. He just stared at the wall, looking dazed, and then, out of nowhere, he started to talk about Annie, telling me how much he loves her, and how worried he is that she’s not okay.
But she looks okay to me. A little too skinny, maybe, and those bags under her eyes suggest she might not be sleeping as well as she should—but she’s well enough to get dolled up and take herself out for a drink. That’s good news.
I pat the bag holding three cans of condensed onion soup on the passenger seat beside me and put the car into drive. Salisbury steak will cheer Sam up.
The rain winks on and off in my headlights as I follow a truck with a plumbing logo down Main Street and along the train tracks, the guy going so slow I assume he gets paid by the hour. I crack my window an inch, taking in the heady scent of wood smoke and Democrats, and turn on to Cherry Lane. Nearly every light is on at the Pigeon’s house; I’m assuming she’s lost her interest in climate change, burning all those fossil fuels. I’m approaching the bridge when I spot something in the road and slam on my brakes.
No. Please, my god, no.
I kill my engine, reach for the shopping bag on the passenger seat, and step out of the car into the cold, sharp rain. It’s Sam. In the middle of the street, his face streaked with mud, the sleeves of the sweatshirt I lent him—Smith College, one of my favorites—filthy and torn. “No, Albert,” he says, and I see that he’s crying. “Please. I’m so close.”
“Sam?” I tighten my grip on the bag as I walk toward him. “Where are you off to, Sam?”
“Home, Albert,” he says, his sobs lost to the drumming of the rain. “Please, I just want to go home.”
“Home?” I lift the bag over my head, my head spinning and my vision clouding. “But you are home, Sam.” The crack of three cans of condensed onion soup making contact with that strong, perfectly chiseled jaw is louder than I expected. “Come on,” I say as he collapses at my feet. “Let’s go have some steak.”
Chapter 44
Franklin Sheehy is waiting for Annie in his cruiser when she arrives at the police station. “Jump in,” he says. “Let’s take a ride.”
She hesitates and then gets in. They stay quiet as Sheehy heads out of town on the desolate road along the railroad tracks. Three silent minutes later, they pull into the parking lot of Stor-Mor Storage. “With all the extra space, you’d think they’d have room for two extra e’s,” Annie said to Sam on her first visit to town, when they sat in this parking lot in the front seat of his mother’s Corolla, making out like schoolkids. Over lunch, she had begged him for a tour of all the places her once-virile young husband convinced the naive teen girls of Chestnut Hill to let him into their pants.
He happily complied, taking her to the abandoned drive-in theater; the strip mall, behind Payless ShoeSource; and then here, to Stor-Mor Storage, where he and Annie fooled around in the front seat and where, earlier this afternoon, the police discovered Sam’s nice new Lexus parked inside one of the units, in perfect condition.
“He dropped it off about six p.m. the night he disappeared,” Sheehy informs her as they stand in front of unit 12, watching a technician in the front seat dust for prints.
“Why would he do that?” she asks, numb.
“To keep the cops busy looking for something they’re not going to find.”