“Kid?” whispered Finley. “Really?”
She and Eloise laughed a little. With a last look at her grandmother, Finley followed Jones out of the kitchen.
*
“Not too late to wait in the car,” said Jones now at the porch steps. He had this energy about him that he knew best and was waiting for her to come to her senses. It was pretty annoying.
“I won’t embarrass you, if that’s what you’re worried about,” she said.
“And if you pass out like you did earlier?”
But he was already ringing the bell, so she didn’t have a chance to answer. Anyway, she didn’t have an answer. Finley experienced a raw moment of self-doubt. What was she doing exactly? Why was she acting like a private detective, as if she wanted to be doing this?
She lingered, allowed herself to be aware that there was none of the usual restlessness she felt—in class, when she was studying, when she was trying to quiet the voices, keep her visitors at bay. Jones inspected a loose dowel on the porch railing as they waited. She half expected him to pull out some kind of tool and try to fix it. That’s what he wanted, to fix every broken thing. He caught her staring at him, and she looked away, sat on a porch swing that hung to the right of the door. It squeaked as she swung it gently.
“Got an oil can in your pocket?” she asked Jones when he glanced over at her.
He gave her a flat expression. “I have one in my car.”
“Of course you do.”
All the running away and acting out she did when she was trying to deny what she was, maybe all of it was just a reaction to that feeling, the one that was suddenly gone because she was here with Jones. Eloise was so big on advising her to follow her instincts. But Finley had never been quite sure what that meant. How did you know when you were following your instincts, versus your fears or your desires? Were they ever the same? Was the choice that scared you silly sometimes the right one? Did the thing you wanted more than anything sometimes lead you down the wrong path? Her grandmother always seemed to think that Finley would know when she was doing “what was right.” Finley understood, maybe for the first time, what that felt like tonight.
Jones rang the bell a second time. She rose and came to stand beside him again. Jones looked at his watch and seemed about to ring again when the door opened and a small woman stood behind the screen. She was younger than Finley expected. The pictures she’d seen of Betty Fitzpatrick had been grainy and taken on the worst days of her life. Finley just hadn’t expected someone so dewy and fresh, looking like she’d just finished a workout.
“Betty?” said Jones. The woman nodded.
“I just got in from my run,” she said apologetically, pushing a damp fringe of hair away from her eyes. She opened the door, and they walked into a pretty foyer, fresh flowers on the console table by the door. Jones introduced them, and she shook Finley’s hand with a cool but strong grip.
“Eliza loves tulips,” she said, following Finley’s eyes. Eliza, her missing daughter.
Finley nodded and looked into a living room where a fire blazed and a wall-mounted flat screen was on mute, tuned to CNN. The picture of the missing developer was there; the news story was heating up. Cell phone signal dead. No calls out in several days. No credit card usage. No big withdrawals of cash or debt or anything untoward. Car still missing.
“Can I get you anything?” Betty asked.
They both declined and took seats on the couch, with her sitting across in a big wingback chair. On the mantel, piano, and every surface were pictures of a white-blonde, freckled girl and a towheaded boy who was unmistakably her older brother.
Though lovely, there was an emptiness to the space, to the woman. Something gone that had left a dark, cold hollow. Finley felt Betty’s sadness, her anguish leaking into her own heart. It hurt.
“My husband came to take the kids for the day,” she began when Jones prompted her. “They were just going to town to get ice cream, then for a hike. Everything was normal.”
“But you were in a custody battle at the time?” asked Jones.
“Well,” said Betty. “The media made it sound worse than it was. He wanted the kids every other week with him in Manhattan. And I thought that was destabilizing for them, so we were working on it. Would he move here? Would we move back to the city? It wasn’t fun, but it wasn’t necessarily acrimonious. Our marriage had ceased to be a good and healthy thing, but we didn’t hate each other. He wouldn’t have done this. He wasn’t a controller or an abuser. He wouldn’t have taken them, or hurt them.”