“My dad is not real religious,” I snapped, cutting her off and surprising us both with my vehemence. But the idea of a memorial service irritated me. The word closure annoyed me.
“No, he’s not,” she agreed, responding to my pique with unflappability. “I believe he was thinking about the community. About her friends. About your grandparents. Your aunt. About you and Paige. He was thinking about how none of you have been allowed to grieve.”
“She hasn’t been gone all that long. It’s been a month and three days.”
“You’re right. And I didn’t mean to suggest that your dad had given up hope. All hope. I probably shouldn’t have said anything. He just wanted to start a…a dialogue about when it might be time. You need to mourn. You deserve to mourn. You need to heal.” The woman was saying more, trying to explain what she was thinking and what my father might have been thinking, but I was no longer listening. I looked out the kitchen window at the trees behind our house. It was only the twenty-fifth of September, and already this year a few were as bare as the middle of winter. I wondered if it was because we’d had so little rain.
An idea had begun to form in my mind when the minister had alluded to the rumors and innuendo that had followed my mother into the night: I needed a gossip. I needed someone who, unlike the pastor, lacked any sort of filter—someone who talked to a lot of people and would have no reluctance to share with me the hearsay that Katherine wouldn’t. And that person existed behind the deli case at the Bartlett General Store, the woman who had made for my family all those Mexican wraps that autumn. Her name was Peggy and she had a son in the marines and a daughter in the navy, and she absolutely loved to chat. She wasn’t mean-spirited, but neither was she especially circumspect.
She was, as I hoped, alone behind the deli counter making sandwiches and wraps when I stopped by the store later that morning. The owner, a woman my grandmother’s age who had bought the store with her husband well before I was born and still showed no signs of slowing down, was behind the front register, laughing with a pair of linemen for the power company.
“I don’t think I’ve ever seen you this early in the day,” Peggy said, smiling, when she saw me.
“A first, right?” I agreed.
She was slicing tomatoes and stopped to ask if I wanted the usual. I said sure and watched her go to work on the wraps. As she did, she asked if I’d had a nice weekend and how my father and Paige were doing. I said they were hanging in there and then volunteered that I had gone to Montreal to see a magic show.
“With your sister?” she asked.
“No. I was with a friend from school.”
“Boy?” she asked hopefully.
“No. Just a friend.”
She looked disappointed and it seemed this was my moment. I leaned in and said conspiratorially—lowering my voice—“Can I ask you something?”
“Why, yes.”
“Have you heard any stories about my mom in the last month or so?”
“Like what?”
“You see people. You know people. People talk to you,” I said, hoping to flatter her.
“They do. People will say anything here some days.”
“I’ll bet they do,” I agreed.
“They always ask me if we have any news about your mom. You know, because we have a police scanner.” I nodded. Of course they did. The store was the communications hub for the village. Prior to cell phones and the digital age, we would actually leave messages for each other at the front register. Even now, in the year 2000, if you had to leave town in a hurry and needed someone to milk your three-hundred-pound llama, you dropped by the store. If you simply had to know why the fire engines just left the station, you gave the store a ring. And if you wanted the very latest on that missing Annalee Ahlberg, here was the source.
“Things like sightings?” I asked.
“Oh, sure. And everyone who was out looking for her that first day wants to know if we’ve heard something. Anything. They feel sort of an investment. Especially Donnie.”
“Donnie Hempstead?” I asked. “Why Donnie?” I recalled that he was among the first people my father had asked me to call after I’d told him that my mother was missing.
She looked around uneasily. “I don’t really want to go there, Lianna.”
“Why?”
“No.”
“Please?”
“You really don’t know?”
I waited. Finally she shook her head, self-conscious, and fiddled with the tie of her apron. “There are stories—none true, I am quite sure—that your mother was meeting him.”
I was stunned but tried not to show it. “You mean the night she disappeared?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Because people think the two of them were having an affair?”