“Well, we’re either worried or we’re not. You tell me.”
There was a long pause, while Maggie thought it through—during which time she also made a snack for Rachel who was biting at her ankles.
“Babe?”
“Yeah,” she said, “it’s weird. You should call.”
Three hours later, she was sitting across from the local sheriff, Jim Peabody, whose face looked like the last piece of jerky in the jar.
“Maybe I’m just being silly,” she said, “but she’s usually so responsible.”
“Don’t do that to yourself, Mrs. Bateman. Take your power away. You know this girl and you had an instinct. You gotta trust that.”
“Thank you. I—thank you.”
Jim turned to his deputy—female, heavyset, about thirty.
“We’ll visit the theater, talk to Sam, see if he remembers her. Grace’ll go by the pub. Maybe she stopped in there. You said your husband was calling her people?”
“Yes. He phoned some friends and some of her family—nobody’s heard from her.”
Rachel was coloring—mostly on the paper—at a small round kid’s table Maggie had picked up at a flea market, the kind that came with two adorable little folding chairs. Maggie was amazed the girl hadn’t bothered them once during the entire visit, as if she understood the importance of what was happening. But then she had always been a sensitive and serious child, so much so that Maggie sometimes worried she was depressed. She’d read an article about it in the Times—children with depression—and now it hung in the back of her mind, a Big Idea that could tie all the little ideas together—the poor sleeping, the shyness—or maybe she was just allergic to wheat.
This is what motherhood was, one fear eclipsed by another.
“She’s not depressed,” David would say. “She’s just focused.”
But he was a boy, and a Republican to boot. What did he know about the intricacies of female psychology?
When there was still no word by sundown, David put the rest of the week’s activities on hold and drove out. In the minutes after he arrived, Maggie felt like a balloon deflating: The strong business-as-usual facade she had put on disappeared. She poured herself (and him) a stiff drink.
“Rachel asleep?” he asked.
“Yes. I put her in her room. Do you think that’s a mistake? Should I have put her in ours?”
He shrugged. It made no real-world difference, he thought. It was just an issue in his wife’s head.
“I called the sheriff on the way in,” he told her when they were sitting in the living room. The ocean roared in through the screens, invisible in the black night air. “He said she definitely went to the movie. People remembered her—a pretty girl dressed like the city—but nothing from the bar. So whatever happened, it happened on her way home.”
“I mean, what could have happened?”
He shrugged, sipped his drink.
“They checked the local hospitals.”
Halfway through her drink, Maggie grimaced.
“Shit. I should have done that. Why didn’t I—”
“It’s not your job. You were busy with Rachel. But they checked the hospitals and no one fitting her description came in last night. No Jane Does or anything.”
“David, is she dead? Like lying in a ditch or something?”
“No. I don’t think so. I mean, the longer this goes the less positive I’m gonna spin it, but right now it could just be—I don’t know—a bender.”
But they both knew Frankie wasn’t the bender type.
That night Maggie slept fitfully. She had a dream that the Montauk Monster had come to life and was slithering out of the lagoon and across the road, moving inevitably toward their house, leaving a slug trail of gore behind. She stirred and rolled, imagining it surging up the siding to the second-floor window—Rachel’s window. Had she left the window open? It was a warm night, stuffy. She usually closed it, but this time—given her absent brain, her distraction over Frankie—had she left it open?
Maggie woke with her feet already on the floor, a mother’s panic moving her down the short hall to her daughter’s room. The first thing that struck her was that the door was closed. Maggie knew she hadn’t closed it. In fact, she always put a doorstop in front of it to keep it from closing in the wind. She hit the door almost at a run, and the knob wouldn’t turn. Her shoulder hit the door hard, making a loud bang.
Behind her she heard David stir, but from inside the room she heard nothing. She tried the knob again. It was locked.
“David!” she yelled, then again, her voice taking on a tinge of hysteria.
Then he was behind her, moving fast but still sluggish, some part of his sleeping brain left behind.
“It’s locked,” she said.
“Move,” he told her.
She did, flattening herself against the wall to let him get in there. He grabbed the knob in his big hand and tried to turn it.