“No. Lucy is our only child.”
Slovak looked up from his pad. “Have you contacted her friends? Chances are she’s with one of them and just forgot to call home.”
“Of course we’ve called her friends. It’s the first thing we did.” I fought to keep irritation from my tone, but Jesus, did they think that we hadn’t already thought of that?
“What we’d like to do is search the house,” Gordon said.
“Why?”
“To make sure she isn’t here.”
The thought of them going through our home was so invasive I couldn’t conceal my reluctance. “We’ve already done that. I’m telling you, she isn’t here.”
A swift glance passed between the men. “We understand,” Gordon said. “But it’s standard procedure. We’d just like to check to make sure.”
“You’d be surprised,” Slovak added. “Sometimes a kid will fall asleep in the basement. Or curled up in a closet while talking on her cell. Or texting.”
“I’m telling you, it’s a waste of time. Lucy isn’t here.” My voice rose, tightened. Sophie touched my arm, silencing me.
“We’ll just check. Like we said. Standard procedure.”
“Where is her room?” Slovak asked. “We’ll start there.”
“I’ll show you,” Sophie said.
“That’s okay. We can find it,” Gordon said.
“If you don’t mind, we prefer to do this alone,” Slovak said.
And if I do mind?, I thought.
“It’s upstairs,” Sophie said. “On the second floor. Third door down the hall on the left.” We waited in the kitchen, listening to doors open and close as the two men made their way through the house. I closed my eyes, imagining them in Lucy’s room, remembered seeing her pink panties tossed atop the laundry basket when I’d checked the room earlier, and I felt helpless that I was unable to protect our daughter from this violation. I stared through the kitchen windows, out at Lucy’s swing. The sky was turning from dusk to dark.
“Where do you think she can be?” Sophie asked.
I didn’t want to give voice to my fears but wondered if she was having them too. An accident? Some kid in school who’d offered her a ride. Use your seat belt, Lucy. Always use your seat belt. Seat belts save lives. The promise we had extracted from her that she wouldn’t drive with Jared Phillips, that boy who had been driving the car that had killed a classmate, a girl, the year before. I pictured a mangled mass of steel, a tree.
“I asked them all—Rain and Christy and Jeannie and the rest—to start a phone chain,” Sophie said. “To check with everyone they could think of.”
“Good. That’s good thinking.”
“Upperclassmen, too,” she said. “Everyone with a car.”
Again I thought of the Phillips kid, imagined a wreck. Darker, more atavistic fears I didn’t contemplate. Back then, before I knew better, when I was still protected by a glorious ignorance, it was incomprehensible, unthinkable, to imagine that those kinds of things could possibly happen to people like us. The sound of doors closing grew distant, and I realized the men had reached the top floor. I waited. Narrow bands tightened across my skull, signs of a headache onset. I thought about going for aspirin but stayed seated, reluctant to leave Sophie waiting alone in the kitchen.
“Do you want some coffee?” she asked.
“No. Thanks.”
A minute passed, and then she got up anyway and measured out grounds, started the machine. I understood her need to do something, anything. Twice she tilted her head, said she thought she heard a car in the drive and, before I could move, went to check only to return and shake her head. The waiting stretched on. We heard the men as they descended the stairs, went down into the basement, wasting time. Lucy was somewhere out in the night.
Eventually, the men returned.
“She’s not in the house,” Gordon said.
“We already told you that.”
“Are there any other buildings on the property? A shed or garage?”
“There’s a garden shed in the backyard.”
And so more minutes passed as they went to check the shed. It hadn’t occurred to either Sophie or me to look there. Why would we? Lucy had no reason to go there, a small structure crammed with all the gear for outside maintenance. A lawn mower, emptied of gas, serviced and retired for the past season, two ladders, tools, a couple of snow shovels, a five-pound bag of salt left over from the previous winter, all manner of odds and ends. Within minutes the men returned, the futility of their search plain on their faces. I rolled my head from side to side, trying to reduce the tension. The pain was settling in, the pressure mounting behind my eyes, and I rubbed my temples.
“You all right there?” Gordon said. “You look kinda pale.”
Was I all right? Jesus, what the hell should I have looked like? Our daughter was missing. I don’t think I realized how even that first evening, even while they were maintaining that Lucy was probably out with friends, that seeds of suspicion were already taking root.
Uninvited, Slovak took a seat at the table while his partner went out to the patrol car, returning moments later with a laptop that he set on the table and flipped open. “We’ll start by getting her info in the system,” he said. “It will go out to other stations in the area. And to hospitals.”
Hospitals. Sophie reached over and took my hand. I could feel her tremble. Our once-safe kitchen, the hub of our domestic life, had been converted to something alien and cold.
“We’ll need a physical description. Color of eyes and hair. Height. Weight. Distinguishing marks.”
I answered for both of us.
“What was she wearing when she left home this morning?”
I could picture Lucy clearly. I described the sweater, the short skirt.
“That’s good,” Gordon said. “You’d be surprised how many parents can’t describe what their kids wear.”
How many times had the police had to ask parents these questions? What kind of parents didn’t pay attention to their kids?
“But she would have changed for hockey,” Sophie said. “Blue sweat shorts and a white tee. And maybe her gray Boston College sweatshirt.”
Gordon took down the info.
“Except—” Sophie paused.
“Except what?” Gordon said.
“We checked with the coach, and she didn’t go to hockey. She didn’t even see him about getting excused from the scrimmage. So maybe she hasn’t changed clothes.”
Unable to sit any longer, I crossed to the counter and got out some mugs. The lamb tagine, long forgotten, lay cold and congealed in the pot. The memory of that afternoon—of chopping vegetables, preparing dinner—seemed far distant. It belonged to Before.