NIGHT HAD FALLEN by the time we got back. Mr. Vargas had opened all the curtains and had the lights on in every room except Mimi’s office, where we’d covered the broken-in glass wall with a tarp. We could see him in the display case that was the living room, wearing an apron over his suit and watching for us. He couldn’t see us hiking up the driveway in the dark because the light inside had turned all the windows into one-way mirrors.
When we unlocked the front door Frank brushed past me, calling “Mama” in that weird monotone of his, repeating it like a squeeze-me talking baby doll left under a rocking chair. I waited in the foyer, not wanting to get in the way of any reunions. The hall carpet looked good as new and the mirrors all around me were free of fingerprints and delicious smells came from the kitchen. I had made none of this happen. I can’t tell you what a relief that was. Until now I’d prided myself on being so responsible, but a life without responsibilities was starting to sound pretty great to me. I was starting to think Xander wasn’t a deadbeat. He was a genius.
Mr. Vargas came to meet us, pulling the apron over his head, smoothing his hair and straightening his tie. Came to meet me, really, since I was the only one there. “You surprised me, Alice,” he said. “I called to find out where on earth you were and heard your phone ringing in the kitchen. Howling, actually. Is the coyote ringtone a West Coast thing? Where’s Mimi?”
ONCE FRANK HAD searched every room and under every bed and inside every drawer and closet and felt inside a pair of Mimi’s shoes and even peered into the vacuum cleaner hose and bag, he went out in the yard and returned with his yellow plastic bat. He took the cake box out of the refrigerator and removed his gorgeous, forlorn, untouched birthday cake. He put the cake on the counter and proceeded to beat it to chocolate smithereens. Then he pushed its remains through the kitchen colander and pawed through the crumbs before proclaiming, “Well, that’s that. Not here, either.”
After Mr. Vargas regained his capacity for speech, he wondered aloud if Mimi had been home at all, since he’d only been at the store for an hour at most. Frank said Mimi had absolutely been there, probably while Mr. Vargas was at the grocery or when he’d been vacuuming in one of the bedrooms. “What makes you think that?” Mr. Vargas asked.
Young Sherlock Holmes pointed out the clues: The vacuum cleaner bag filled with the powdery residue of carpet shampoo, evidence of the recent cleanup of the firefighters’ muddy footprints that might have made sufficient racket to allow Mimi to slip in and out undetected by anybody who might ask awkward questions like, “Say, Mimi, where’s that manuscript you promised me?” The shoes I’d sent to Mimi in the hospital, still damp inside from being worn home sockless. A suitcase gone from under her bed, her blue and black and gray cardigans missing, plus seven T-shirts and two pairs of jeans, one an embroidered pair she’d inherited from Julian that she only wore on special occasions. Also the watercolor portrait of Frank over the mantelpiece that I couldn’t believe I hadn’t missed. A nightgown was MIA, and a pair of slippers. Two pairs of shoes I gathered Mimi preferred to the ones I’d picked for her. Seven pairs of socks, something I’d forgotten to include in her care package. Her toothbrush. “Her hairbrush is here,” Frank mused, “but her hair is still short enough to do without it.” Her purse was gone and her glasses, but not her cell phone. “Either she doesn’t want to talk to anybody,” he said, “or she knows her computer could pinpoint its location and, by extension, hers.” My money was on “doesn’t want to talk to anybody.”
He ended by showing us an ancient copy of The Little Prince, now resting on his pillow. “I know I wasn’t reading it last night because I don’t understand much French. Although sometimes my mother and I like to pretend we speak it.”
That was the difference between Frank and me. I’d recognized the cover art but hadn’t gotten past it to the letters spelling out Le Petit Prince. “Why do you have it in French, then?” I asked.
“My mother’s very fond of this book because it belonged to my Uncle Julian in high school. She had to translate it for him for his French class the way she has to translate it for me.” He turned to the flyleaf and showed us “Julian Gillespie” there, printed awkwardly enough to embarrass a second-grader. Seeing Julian’s lousy handwriting gave me gooseflesh. Frank’s psychiatrist says it runs in families.
“If she liked it so much, why didn’t she get you a copy in English?” Mr. Vargas asked.
“She’s fond of it because it belonged to Uncle Julian. She says the illustrations are the best thing about it anyway. Her capsule review of the story is ‘Waiting for Godot, le Junior Edition. Snore.’ She says the word snore because sometimes loud noises like actual snores can startle me.”
“I’ll try to remember that when I go to sleep tonight,” Mr. Vargas said.