“She felt stuck,” I said, and he nodded.
“She started using drugs again right after Shel was born, started staying out all night.” He finished his beer and set the empty bottle on an end table next to a Wendy’s cup. “I knew she was sleeping around, but I didn’t know who. I was barely keeping it together though, between work and being here by myself with Shelby every night. So we never really had the conversations we should have had. The last time I saw her, we had this stupid fight about the dishes, of all things. She never did the dishes, and I mean, never. And I snapped at her about it, I told her, I’m supporting you, can’t you even wash your own fucking dishes?” Joshua shook his head. “It was not me at my best.”
I felt for him, having to live with the fact that Mallory left the house that night because of a fight that he started. “What happened then?” I said.
“Well, she told me to fuck off and said she was leaving and never coming back. But that was nothing new, really. The difference that time was that she really didn’t come back. I started calling her friends, but nobody’d seen her. So that’s when I reported her missing.” He clenched and unclenched his jaw for a few beats. “Shit, I still get so worked up, thinking about it. Sorry.”
“No, no, it’s okay,” I said. “I understand.”
“I kept thinking that she’d come back, she had to come back. She was just blowing off steam somewhere. But it turned into months,” he continued, “and I convinced myself that she just ran out on us and that was all. I had so much rage inside me, I think that’s how I kept it together. And when the police—when your dad came to tell me, that they found her? I fell apart hard. She had a good heart, under all her attitude. She had a good heart, and she was so beautiful.” He stood up, roughly pressing the heel of his hand against his eye. “Here, I got some pictures.”
He crossed the small, messy room and took a photo album down from a shelf stacked high with VHS tapes and random knickknacks. He smiled faintly. “This one. This is right after Shelby was born.”
I took the album from him. Mallory, looking exhausted but happy in a hospital gown, clutching a pink-faced, sleeping infant to her chest. She had a big, crooked smile and long blond hair cut into blunt bangs across her forehead.
Just like Sarah Cook.
Then I turned the page and drew in a breath as I saw a snapshot of a younger, thinner Joshua Evans posing with a crossbow in the woods, a camo ball cap perched on his head. I jerked my hand away like the page was hot. “Are you a big hunter?” I said.
“What? Oh, no,” Joshua said. He glanced down at the album. “I used to go out with my brother, but I’d really just watch. Not my thing.”
I nodded with relief, realizing that even if he’d said yes, it didn’t make any sense to think Joshua was my camo-coated visitor. He had no visible piercings, for one, and for another, he didn’t know I existed until thirty minutes ago.
“Can I look through the rest of this?” I said.
“Oh, sure, yeah,” Joshua said. “I’m going to change clothes before Shelby gets home, she should be here soon.”
He left me to page through the rest of the album. Mallory looked progressively unhappier as time went on; she got dangerously skinny and her eyes grew dark hollows beneath them. I wondered if my father had looked through this same album, and I wondered if it had imparted secrets to him that it wasn’t sharing with me. I set it down on the end table when I heard a key in the lock behind me.
The front door opened and two laughing teenage girls stepped inside. “I can’t believe you didn’t even get cookies and punch,” the blond one was saying, hefting half a dozen plastic grocery bags onto the floor, “isn’t that the whole point of those things?”
Her friend said, “It wasn’t even a ceremony. We just had to fill out a stupid survey.” Her hair was dyed a reddish-violet color that seemed to glow. “Like On a scale of one to ten, how frequently did he ogle all the girls in class?”
Their animated conversation expired when they saw me.
“Um,” the blond girl said. Her hair was pulled up into a messy ponytail, and she wore a Batman T-shirt under a faded green military jacket. Her friend was tall and willowy and she was dressed thrift-store glamorous: a mahogany-colored leather trench with a patchy ermine collar and a lacy black dress over jeans. The two of them exchanged glances.
Joshua came back into the room. “Hey, Shel.” He gave the blond girl a squeeze around the shoulders. “Uh, this is Roxane?” he said, sounding a little nervous. “She’s a private investigator. Her dad, uh, her dad was one of the detectives who worked on your mom’s case way back when.”
Shelby looked from her father to her friend to me. It was clear from her expression that she found this explanation very weird, which I guessed it was. But she gamely smiled and held up a hand in greeting. “Hi,” she said. Then she glanced over her shoulder at her friend, almost cracking up. “This is Veronica.”
“That’s a cool name. One ‘n’ or two?” Veronica said.
I laughed. “One,” I said.
She nodded approvingly. “I like it with one.”
Shelby locked the door and grabbed the groceries. “Come on,” she said, “we need to get this going if we want to eat before two in the morning.”
“Shel’s quite the little cook,” Joshua said, “aren’t you?”
Shelby restrained an eye roll and started carrying the bags through the living room and into the kitchen. Veronica shrugged and followed her.
“She just started working at the Olive Garden, over by the mall,” Joshua said. “Four nights a week. She’s a hostess for now, but I’m telling you, she’s going to be the head cook in no time, right, girl?”
“Maybe,” Shelby said. She smiled from behind the pass-through, the kind of smile that said she had no intention of ever being a cook at an Olive Garden. “Vee, can you start pressing the tofu?”
“Veronica doesn’t eat meat,” Joshua told me. “And Shel’s worried about my cholesterol. So she makes a lot of veggies, a lot of that tofu stuff. It’s pretty good, actually. You ever had it?”
“Tofu? Yes,” I said, and the girls in the kitchen giggled.
“Dad, literally everyone has had tofu,” Shelby said.
Joshua waved her off. “Quit eavesdropping, brat,” he said. Then he turned back to me. “I got real lucky with Shelby,” he said, his voice lower. “She’s a good kid, she’s never been anything but. And it’s always been just me on my own, after Mal left. I’ve done my best but it’s not like I had a good example for a dad or anything. Shelby’s great, though. Good grades, real responsible.”
I thought it was interesting that he still said left, rather than died.