“They don’t know,” he said. “They thought—”
Wait . . . there she was. Meredith, her eyes closed, breathed a sigh of relief. She could see it all clearly, as if she were standing right outside a glass door, just like the one she’d looked through before going into the Deli Barn. There was Lisa Bellow, sitting on a tattered brown couch in the living room of a small apartment, holding a little white dog on her lap. It was a very little dog, like a Chihuahua but not quite, and its name was Annie. It had a stubby tail and pointy ears and a thin red collar, no bigger than a bracelet. Lisa was scratching Annie behind the ears, and Annie was twisting her head back happily the way dogs do when you scratch them in just the right place. Lisa’s face was still stained from all the makeup she’d cried off, and Meredith thought she looked a little bit like a child who had tried to make herself up like a circus clown.
The man with the too-long gray hoodie came into the room where Lisa and Annie sat, but he wasn’t wearing his hoodie anymore. Of course, he wasn’t wearing his black ski mask either, because this was his apartment, but Meredith knew it was the same man because of his dark eyes and his blond eyebrows. Behind him Meredith could see a little kitchen. There was a silver trash can with a foot pedal. There was a blender on the counter. There were photos magneted onto the refrigerator, and there were people in the photos, but because she was outside the door, Meredith couldn’t make out any of the faces. The man wore jeans and a navy-blue T-shirt. He had a mustache she had not seen before, and a face with a lot of little dents and grooves. He looked at the girl on the couch.
“That’s my dog,” he said. Meredith could hear him clearly, and she looked and realized the glass door was open a few inches, though she’d heard no bells to announce her arrival. “That’s Annie.”
“She’s sweet,” Lisa said quietly.
Something had already transpired between them, Meredith realized, some information exchanged or understanding reached, because Lisa wasn’t trying to run for the door or scream for help or even ask the man what was happening. Lisa didn’t even seem all that upset. She seemed content to be petting the dog, and the dog was content being petted, and Meredith was content because, of all the terrible things that might have happened to Lisa Bellow, here she was sitting on a couch petting a cute little dog, and maybe it wasn’t so bad after all, what had happened to Lisa.
Someone touched her arm and Meredith turned from the glass door and there was a man she didn’t recognize, a handsome young man with black hair. He wore a blue button-down shirt and a white jacket.
“How’re you feeling?” the man asked.
Meredith turned around to see Lisa again, but there was nowhere to turn. She was on her back. She was in a bed. The sheets were itchy on her bare shins. She was in the hospital and the man with the black hair and the white coat was, well . . . duh.
“Okay,” she said. “Fine.”
“The police need to talk with you,” the handsome doctor said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes, but the police need to speak with you now.”
The doctor looked exactly like a doctor on a soap opera her grandmother watched. Was he real? Again she tried to turn to catch a glimpse of Lisa. Which part of this was real? Now there were other people she had never seen before, a black woman with round glasses and a tall bald man, the woman seated beside her on her right side and the man standing at the end of the bed.
“Where’s Evan?” she asked.
“He’ll be back soon.” This from yet another voice, another woman seated beside her, on the left, with her hand resting on Meredith’s shoulder. She turned to look at this woman. This woman was her mother.
?
It was important, the black woman said, it was imperative to get her story as soon as possible, so that they would have the best chance of finding Lisa safe and sound. That’s what the woman—the police detective—said: “safe and sound.” The detective spoke slowly. She chose her words carefully, it seemed to Meredith. Her name was Detective Waller. She was a small compact woman, young, maybe thirty, with efficient hair and mannerisms. She spent a lot of time adjusting her glasses. The other detective, a tall bald man with a black mustache, stood at the end of the bed and wrote things down in a notepad. Her mother sat on the opposite side of the bed from Detective Waller and remained completely still as Meredith relayed the story of what had happened in the Deli Barn.
She told them about the Christmas bells. She told them about the gunman calling the sandwich artist a fat ass. She described the man (the kidnapper, she thought, but she could not quite form this word) as best she could—his too-long hoodie and his ski mask and his hiking boots and his pale eyebrows and about how tall he was and about how much he might have weighed. She guessed he was about the same weight as her father and the detectives’ heads swiveled in unison toward where her father sat on the stiff couch, as if he might be the black-masked bandit. She told them how the kidnapper’s boots thunked and that his voice was not deep and that he had said that Lisa had to go with him and so Lisa did.
She did not tell them quite everything. She did not tell them what Lisa had said in that moment when she, Meredith, had lost all hope. She did not tell them that Lisa had told her it was going to be okay. It didn’t make any difference to the investigation, she was sure, and somehow this thing that Lisa had said to her was like a coin already deep, deep in her pocket and she did not want to dig it out and hand it over. She wanted it in her pocket—she didn’t even want it to see the light of day—because once it was out it would not really belong to her anymore.
She asked the detectives about the sandwich farmer. He’d been hit in the head, they said, but he would be fine. They had already talked to him and gotten his statement, and now that they had hers they had a better chance of finding the perpetrator.
“But you were there the whole time,” Detective Waller said. “So your story is very important. Most important. Because you were there when they left.”
“Yeah,” Meredith said. “But I didn’t see his car or anything.”
“Do you have any idea how long you were there after they left, before Mr. Fulton found you?”
“Mr. Fulton? The custodian?”
“That’s right,” Detective Waller said. “He’s the man who came in and found you and called the police.”