Our father had called home the moment he had landed in Burlington, asking for news—which I had, a story in a scrap of a nightshirt—and telling me that he would be here in an hour. I guessed he would be home any minute now, well under an hour, because most likely he was speeding. In my mind, I saw him passing the slow-moving tractors and manure spreaders that congested the two-lane roads between the dairy farms in Starksboro and Hinesburg, and roaring past the pickups and sedans that were flirting with the speed limit. No doubt he was racing near seventy-five in the fifty-mile zones, and topping fifty where he was supposed to be traveling along at thirty-five. Inside our house, detectives were combing my parents’ bedroom and had set up a command center of sorts in the kitchen. I imagined them writing down my mother’s prescriptions from the bottles in the medicine chest in the master bathroom; perhaps they were even confiscating the bottles for analysis.
I saw Donnie Hempstead trudging from the woods across the street. He was among the first responders my father had asked me to call. He was wearing jeans and a white T-shirt that was filthy from the woods and his sweat. He had a radio on his belt. He saw my sister and me and paused before us. “We’ll find her, girls,” he said, running one of his hands through the trim brown beard that followed the line of his jaw. “Any minute now. Hang in there, okay?” We nodded; we hadn’t a choice. Then he continued on into our house.
A moment later, Paige and I heard a dog barking somewhere near the river. We looked at each other and my sister spoke first. “That sounds like one of those dogs the police brought,” she said.
“Maybe,” I said. I wasn’t convinced. About an hour earlier, the K-9 team had arrived, a pair of German shepherds and two handlers. They had gotten there moments after the piece of my mother’s nightshirt had been discovered. I had overheard the troopers discussing the animals’ deployment, and the plan was to bring one dog to that spot. The other had set off from our house’s front yard. The dogs were named Tucker and Max. The names of the handlers hadn’t registered with either Paige or me. Before the dogs had started off, I had had to give their handlers a piece of clothing my mother had worn. Originally I had brought down a pair of her summer shirts to choose from, but they were clean. The handlers had asked for dirty clothes, items that would be rich with the scent of Annalee Ahlberg. And so I had gone to the clothes hamper in my parents’ bathroom and retrieved the black sweatpants and maroon sports bra she had worn to the gym the day before. It had felt like a violation, but I did it. “Of course, it could be Dandelion,” I added, referring to our neighbor’s yellow lab. Dandelion barked at almost anything that moved: Squirrels. Cats. Extra-large butterflies.
Paige shook her head. “I don’t think so. I think it’s Max.” Max had sniffed at our mother’s sports bra from the front steps and then yanked his handler across the yard and off toward the woods by the Gale.
I tried to imagine what would cause the animal to bark now. Would another scrap of clothing do that? Or would it demand a body? My mind had just begun down that especially menacing track when Paige and I saw our father’s car approaching. We hopped off the swing simultaneously and ran to the spot on the driveway where we knew he would glide to stop.
I could see that my father was being emotionally drawn and quartered, pulled in more directions than any one body could handle. He was having a conversation with the state police, and though I could tell that while they believed they were asking him questions, my father—ever the professor—had the upper hand and mostly was interrogating them. But he was also trying to field phone calls from my aunt—my mother’s sister in Manhattan—and from his father-in-law in Massachusetts. Paige was on the couch beside him, half in his lap, her head against his chest. I feared that my kid sister, disarmingly mature most of the time, was now such a wreck that she was a snippet of bad news away from sucking her thumb. Already she was chewing on her lower lip.
And then there was the guilt our father seemed to be shouldering. I, too, was feeling its weight. He had gone away; I hadn’t awoken. He should have stayed; I should have slept on his side of the bed. We both had let Annalee Ahlberg down. Our guilt coated the house like pollen. I told myself it was my imagination, but the more the state police learned, the more I felt judged.
I listened to the conversations until I couldn’t bear it and then went back outside. I heard a helicopter nearing and was surprised for only a second: of course there was a helicopter. I was confident that soon there would be a second and a third. I watched it hover over the village on the far side of the river and then continue on its way in the direction of the elementary school and, eventually, the forest. I noticed the sun on the maples at the edge of our driveway—the light almost like honey—and saw that a few of the leaves were already starting to turn. A state police truck rumbled by the house with a pair of Zodiac rubber boats on a trailer behind it. There were two state police cruisers in our driveway now, as well as the mobile crime lab—a long green-and-white van with logos and shields for the State of Vermont—parked on the street.
I turned and saw a fellow in a gray tweed blazer and a silver-and-black-striped necktie emerging from the barn where we parked our cars. I hadn’t spotted him earlier, and wondered if he was a reporter nosing around our property. I guessed he was in his early to midthirties, trim, thin yellow hair just starting to roll back. He had a leather attaché slung over his shoulder. When he reached me, I saw that his eyes were hazel, a kaleidoscopic (and rare) spatter of brown and green. I thought he was cute, and then felt guilty for noticing.