The story of the missing girl has already played twice.
By the seven-thirty segment, she has a name: Alicia Ann Nowell. Jay reaches for the volume. Ellie has her books in her lap. She reaches for the door handle but doesn’t move right away, pulled in by the story as well. According to the radio, the girl, a Houston native, did not come home Tuesday night. Early reports indicate she was last seen in the neighborhood of Pleasantville, at the corner of Ledwicke and Guinevere, a few miles from her home in Sunnyside. At the mention of Pleasantville, Ellie turns and looks at her dad. Jay is tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, his brow creasing deeply. The story ends with an emotional plea from the family for information. Jay can hardly make out the mother’s words, so choked and garbled are they with panic and tears. It’s already been two days. “My name is Maxine Robicheaux. Alicia Nowell is my daughter. Please, please, if you have seen my child, please call your local police station, tell somebody something, please.” The news reporter goes on to describe Alicia as eighteen and black. She was last seen in a long-sleeved T-shirt, blue. Her ears are triple pierced on both sides. “I have to go,” Ellie says, opening the car door.
Jay turns off the radio, watching as she starts toward the school.
She stops suddenly and runs back to the car, her hair springing loose from the collar of her jacket. She favors Evelyn, Bernie’s sister, more than her mother, but more than anyone else she looks like Jay’s sister, Penny, who lives in Dallas. Ellie is fairer than either of her parents, redbone they used to call it in the country. She has freckles across her nose and forehead, and her eyes are the very color of her aunt’s nickname, copper and full of fire when she laughs or sings, which she does when she thinks no one is listening. It’s Ben who is the spitting image of his mother, down to the dimple in his left cheek. Jay rolls down the passenger-side window so Ellie can lean in and tell him, “Ms. Hilliard wants to see you.”
“Which one is that?”
“The principal.”
“What’s that about?”
She shrugs and then waves, saying she’ll get a ride home with Lori’s mom, adding that Mrs. King said she could pick up Ben too. “Bye, Daddy.”
“Elena,” he calls after her. But she’s already gone, swallowed up by the crowd of teenagers moving across the street. It’s mild outside, but bright and sunny. Across Westheimer Road, Jay can hear the snap of the halyard against the school’s metal flagpole. He traces his daughter’s movements as long as he can, but eventually loses sight of her in the crush of students, at least a dozen of them wearing nearly identical puffy Starter jackets, girls tucked inside their private cocoons, trapped somewhere between childhood and the coming chrysalis. Jay can still remember the day Ellie was born, can still remember holding Bernie’s father, Reverend Boykins, who wept openly in the hospital parking lot, Jay saving his own tears for the moment he brought his daughter home, a fall day like this one.
Officers Young and McFee keep their three-thirty appointment, stopping by Jay’s office at the tail end of their shift. They’re day cops usually, seven to four. Tuesday night they’d been picking up overtime. By sunlight, McFee looks a little older than Jay originally thought, and she’s Latina, no matter the last name. She has her hair slicked back into the same tight little bun. In the entryway to Jay’s office, she hovers, barely filling half the door frame. She’s letting her partner take the lead. Young, to Jay’s dismay, hasn’t written down a single word. He’s holding a notepad and is clicking the top of his ink pen.
“He was in the room where my files are kept,” Jay says. “Wouldn’t figure a kid like that to be interested in anything he couldn’t trade or pawn before the sun came up.”
Young nods, a gesture more of appeasement than agreement. “But you said yourself that nothing was actually stolen from the property.”
“The case files up there go back more than ten years,” Jay says. “It would take nearly that long to go through every photograph and sheet of paper to know if any of it is missing.” The phone on Jay’s desk rings. From down the hall, Eddie Mae hollers his name. Since her eldest grandson installed their phone system, she’s learned to forward calls to his office, but she won’t fool with the intercom, not when it’s just the two of them in the office half the time.
“Mrs. Delyvan is on the phone for you.”
Jay sighs.
He has to take this call.
“Did you see him take anything?”
“Well, no.”
“He have anything in his hands?”
Looking back, Jay can see only one thing: the smile on the kid’s face, a split second before he leaped out the second-floor window. Of course he didn’t see if the kid had any stolen goods in his hands; he was looking for a gun. “If you hadn’t walked out of here without doing a proper search, you might have actually found the kid upstairs, had a chance to pat him down yourself.”
“One more time, Mr. Porter,” Young says, his thick jaw bricklike and unyielding. “There was no one upstairs. I checked the place myself.”
“I didn’t see any sign of a suspect downstairs either,” McFee says.
A suspect, Jay thinks, not the.
Suddenly, the very existence of a perpetrator is under suspicion, as if Jay imagined the whole thing, or made it up, or maybe broke into the office himself, which for all he knows is what the cops are really thinking, the two of them on the verge of opening a separate investigation into a potential insurance scam. He resents the two cops for making him feel crazy, for making him feel that he can’t trust his own eyes.
The phone on Jay’s desk rings again.