by Mark Lukens
CHAPTER TWO
My heart skipped a beat. I stared at the old woman who was nodding and still smiling.
“You saw her leave with a man?” I asked.
The woman’s husband grabbed her hand, shushing her. He looked at me with apologetic eyes. “Sometimes she rambles,” he told me.
“When?” I asked the old woman, keeping my eyes right on her. “When did you see her leave?”
She shrugged. “Maybe fifteen or twenty minutes ago.”
“Where did she go? Who was this man she was with?”
The woman nodded at the glass doors beyond the lobby. “She left out those doors. She was walking with the man and they left.”
“Was she being forced to leave?” I asked. My breaths were shorter than ever now, coming quickly.
The woman shook her head no, her eyes telling me that I had it all wrong. “It didn’t look like he was forcing her to do anything. They both seemed happy to me. They were smiling. I didn’t really think anything about it until now.”
“What did this man look like?” I asked. I could hear my heartbeat rushing in my ears. Even my eyeballs felt like they were pulsating. I felt shaky and a little nauseous.
“He was about your height,” the woman said. “Your build. Brown hair like you. He looked a little bit like you. He wore dark pants and a button-down shirt. White shirt, I think, but I can’t be sure.”
“And she wasn’t . . . she wasn’t distressed at all?” I asked.
“No,” the woman said. “Not that I could see.”
I looked at the woman’s husband. “I didn’t see anything,” he said before I could bombard him with questions.
“You sure?” I asked, moving closer to him.
The old man shrunk back like I was going to hit him.
“Sir, that’s enough,” the manager said from behind me, butting in between me and the table, pushing me back.
I backed up and stared at the manager. Everything in my peripheral vision seemed to blur into a white haze, everything else fading away. I felt numb and dizzy. “I’m trying to find my wife.”
“I understand that, sir.”
I wished like hell he would quit calling me sir.
“The police are on their way here,” the manager informed me. “I can’t have you harassing our customers.”
“The lady saw my wife leave with some . . . some guy.” I looked around for security cameras. “You have cameras here?”
“Sir . . .”
“I need to see the film on those cameras.”
“Sir . . .”
God, if he said sir one more time . . .
*
The police got to the restaurant five minutes later. The manager had refused to show me the footage on the security cameras, but I was sure the cops would make him do it; I even told him that the cops were going to make him play the footage back, like they did on the TV cop shows.
The police officer who showed up was in his late thirties, wearing a vague expression of disappointment, like he had hoped for something a little more exciting than this, or maybe something that demanded a little less work. His name was Officer Crowell. He asked me questions, jotting notes down on a little notepad he had flipped open.
A few moments later, Officer Crowell interviewed the older couple; the elderly woman was the only customer who had seen my wife leave the restaurant.
Then the cop was back to me, and a moment later we were outside on the little walkway under the entryway roof. The elderly couple walked out a few minutes later, the husband trying to hurry his wife to their car and away from me.
“You got her statement?” I asked Officer Crowell, gesturing at the couple.
“Yeah,” he said as he watched them walk away, waiting until they were well out of earshot. “He told me she’s a little senile,” he whispered to me.
“She saw my wife leave with a man.”
The cop grew serious. “Mr. Hughes, were you and your wife arguing tonight?”
“No.”
“Arguing in the last few weeks?”
“No. She didn’t leave me. Someone took her.”
The cop just nodded. “The witness,” he jerked his thumb back to a silver Cadillac leaving the parking lot, “she didn’t seem to think your wife was being forced to leave.”
“He could’ve had a gun on her. Maybe it was in his pocket. He could have threatened her, told her to act naturally.”
The cop shrugged like it could be a possibility—but hell, his expression said, anything could be a possibility.
“She left her purse behind,” I said, looking down at the purse still gripped in my hand. “Why would she leave her purse behind? It’s got her wallet in here. Her money. Her keys to the house. Her driver’s license.”
He sighed heavily.
“Can you get the manager to check the security footage?” I asked. “I want to see the man she was leaving with. I want to see how she was acting.”
“We don’t know she left with a man,” Officer Crowell said. “I just told you that our witness may be a little unreliable.”
“I want to see the security footage.”
“I need authorization to do that.”
“Well, get some.”
The cop bristled like I’d just slapped him. Any trace of patience was gone now. “Look, Mr. Hughes, sometimes wives leave.”
It was my turn to feel like I’d just been slapped. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing.
“Happens all the time,” he said. “Most guys never see it coming.”
“She didn’t leave me. She was taken by a man.”
“The best thing you can do is go home and wait for her. She might come back. She might call.”
“She can’t call me because her phone’s in her purse,” I said through gritted teeth, lifting up the purse and shaking it. “She wouldn’t have gone anywhere without her phone. Her credit cards. Her bank card. Her keys to her car and the house.”
He sighed heavily again, like a parent forced to tell a child that the Easter Bunny wasn’t real. “Sometimes they run off to start a whole new life and leave everything else behind.”
“So you’re not going to do anything?”
“Of course. But we can’t declare an adult missing until they’ve been gone for more than forty-eight hours. Just go home. Call her friends and family. See if you can find out why she left.”
I wasn’t moving.
“Sir, I’m going to need you to go home now.” There was no mistaking the warning in the officer’s tone now; he was tired of playing around with this. “You can’t stay here. You need to be home when she calls or comes back.”
“Comes back? Someone took her.”
The cop exhaled a long breath of irritation. “If she hasn’t come back in forty-eight hours, then come down to the station and we’ll fill out a report.”
That was it. That was all the help I was going to get.
I walked away from the cop, walking on numb legs to my company pickup truck with the bright green grass painted along the bottom. I was holding Michelle’s purse straps so hard my fingernails were digging into my palms. I felt like I was in some kind of nightmare; nothing seemed real anymore, and everything seemed possible.
CHAPTER THREE
I was in a fog as I drove home, driving on autopilot as my mind wandered.
Officer Crowell seemed to believe that Michelle had left me.
Had she?
But why would she choose to do it now, at a busy restaurant on a Friday night? I worked eleven to twelve hours a day five days a week. If she wanted to leave me, she could have done it during one of those days. She could have come home from her job at the nursing home and packed up her stuff and left—she would have had all day to do it. She could have left a note. And she certainly would have taken her purse and her cell phone.
To start a whole new life, the officer had said. Leaving everything else behind. Maybe the person she had left with had asked her to leave all remnants of her old life behin
d. I could imagine some wealthy man entering Michelle’s life, promising to sweep her away from the doldrums of her life and her marriage to a pest control manager, promising to take her to his yacht or private jet so they could travel to exotic islands, lie on the beach, drinking and making love all day.
It was possible that someone had swept her away, but it still didn’t make a lot of sense. Michelle was a beautiful woman, that was for sure. But I wasn’t exactly ugly. And even though I wasn’t wealthy, we weren’t struggling for money.
Another picture entered my mind: Michelle tied up in the back of a van, strips of duct tape pasted over her mouth and eyes. She would be shaking with terror, not knowing where her abductor was taking her, what he was going to do with her, how long she had to live.
Stop it!
I almost had to pull the truck over to the side of the road and throw up. But I held it down and got home. I didn’t really remember the drive much, and then it seemed like a moment later I was pulling into the driveway in front of our home, parking behind my 2008 F-150 and right beside Michelle’s car, a Kia Optima. I had almost expected to see her car gone, thinking she had hurried home, packed a bag and took her car.
But her car was here, and she was still gone.
I sat there for a moment with the headlights shining on the tailgate of my truck in the twilight; I was still numb, still struggling to believe what had just happened. I shut off my headlights, then the engine, then I got out.
The street was quiet. We were tucked away at the far end of our rural neighborhood that backed up to a few square miles of woods. There were a few houses down the street, a large stand of trees blocking my property from theirs, and a house farther down the street in the other direction around a sharp bend in the road, but none of them could be seen from my driveway. If it wasn’t for the empty house almost directly across the street, it would feel like we were the only ones on this road.
The house across the street had been vacant for the four years Michelle and I had lived in this house. There were empty lots of wild grasses and weeds on either side of the house, and the beginning of the woods beyond the fenced-in back yard of the home.
I walked from my truck to the front porch, the shadows already growing long at this late hour and shrouding the front porch in darkness. I wondered what to expect. Did I think I was going to come home and find Michelle waiting inside for me, apologizing for some big misunderstanding? Did I think I was going to come home and catch her in the middle of packing her bags?
No, she wasn’t going to be inside the house; deep down inside I already knew that. She hadn’t left me. She had been taken. Michelle and I were happy. We hadn’t had an argument in months. She was my dream woman, even if I might not be her dream man. But I knew she loved me; I could tell. I could feel it.
She had been taken. Maybe it hadn’t looked like she’d been forced to leave the restaurant, but her abductor had gotten her to leave somehow. Maybe the person who took her was someone Michelle knew, maybe someone from work, a friend of a friend, some psychopath who’d had his eye on her for a while now, watching her, waiting for the right time to take her. Maybe he’d told her that her friend was in the parking lot. Maybe he’d told her that a friend of hers was in distress, crying or hurt.
But she would have come and gotten me, wouldn’t she have? She would have told me that she needed to go outside, or maybe even asked me to go with her.
Maybe the man who had taken her had jabbed the point of a knife or the barrel of a gun against her side and whispered at her to be cool or her life would end in an instant.
My stomach felt sick again, and maybe if I had eaten something the food would have come up by now. I was driving myself crazy trying to think of what had happened to her. I unlocked the front door and stepped inside. I closed the door and locked it. I set the keys in the little dish at the end of the counter. I set Michelle’s purse down right next to the dish. And then I searched through the house.
Michelle wasn’t there. Her closet hadn’t been ransacked like she’d come back and packed a bag. Everything was just how we’d left it before driving to the restaurant.
Officer Crowell had told me to reach out to Michelle’s family and friends. Michelle didn’t have much family. Her parents were dead, just like mine were. My parents had died when I was twenty-one years old, killed in a car crash, both of their lives snuffed out in an instant. Michelle’s father had died when she was a child and her mother had died when Michelle had turned eighteen years old. The loss we both shared was one of the things that had brought us together when we met in college. I had no siblings and Michelle had an older sister, Brenda, who she barely ever spoke to. She lived in Ohio, where Michelle was from. Or maybe Brenda lived in another state up north; I wasn’t exactly sure.
Friends. I couldn’t think of any of Michelle’s friends right off the top of my head. It wasn’t like she invited any of them home to hang out with her. I’d had Stan over a lot when we were both lawn techs to play video games, but not so much since I’d become a manager and his boss. I couldn’t really remember Michelle ever going out with her friends. She’d always been kind of a homebody; she’d rather curl up with a good book or watch a movie with me.
I collapsed down into a chair at the small table in the kitchen. I had taken Michelle’s cell phone out of her purse without really remembering it. I scrolled through her contacts and was surprised to find so few of them. I found Kendra’s name, and I remembered Michelle talking about her from the nursing home, a nurse she worked with. And there was another nurse or CNA named Denise that I remembered Michelle mentioning a few times. I think Susan was Michelle’s supervisor at the nursing home. And then I saw her sister’s name—Brenda. There were a few other names on the contact list, including my name and cell number, my work number, our house number.
Before calling, I scrolled through her recent calls. Mostly from me or to me. I scrolled through her text messages. Mostly the same thing, but only from a few weeks back. She must have deleted anything older than that.
I dialed the first number on the contact list and cleared my throat. I wished I had grabbed a bottle of water out of the refrigerator. This person was Denise. After four rings, Denise’s recorded voice asked me to leave a message.
I did.
“Hey, Denise. This is Zach, Michelle’s husband. I was just wondering if Michelle had contacted you tonight. She took off and hasn’t come back yet. Just a little worried. Please call me back at this number if you hear from her. Thanks.”
I hung up.
I dialed Michelle’s sister next. The number was disconnected.
Great.
I left a message with Kendra and Susan.
Two of the other phone numbers just rang and rang, and one was answered by a woman who was sure I had dialed the wrong number.
And that was it; that was the extent of my search by phone.
I just sat there in the kitchen as the room darkened little by little. Eventually I got up and turned on the light over the stove. I finally heated up a frozen dinner in the microwave and wolfed the food down, barely tasting it, chasing it with a can of soda. I turned on the TV in the living room and the TV in the bedroom just to have some noise in the background, anything to block out the voices in my mind for a little while.
Wandering through the house like a zombie, I finally sat down in front of my computer in the spare bedroom just down from our bedroom. We had turned this room into an office, and the other smaller bedroom had a treadmill and a rack of dumbbells against a wall. Our plan was to turn one of these two rooms into a nursery eventually. We’d been trying for the last three years to have a child, but we hadn’t been lucky. I wanted to go see a doctor about it, maybe have my sperm count checked, but Michelle wasn’t ready for that; she was content to keep trying.
I checked my emails on the computer, praying that Michelle had sent a message to me. I had my cell phone with me, constantly checking it for text messages.
There were no messages from
her.
Hours later I took my anxiety pills (which I really needed at that moment) and the sleep-aid Dr. Valentine had prescribed for me two years ago when I’d started seeing her regularly at Michelle’s request. I’d suffered through severe panic attacks and depression after my parents were killed in the car crash, and those demons came back in full force a few years ago. One of Michelle’s friends had recommended a great therapist, and I started seeing Dr. Valentine. There wasn’t a lot of therapy from the doctor, more of just handing out pills. But at least the pills worked somewhat.
I left the light on in the hallway and in our master bathroom. I lay down on the bed, kicking my sneakers off and letting them thump down onto the tiled floor. Our bed was in the middle of the room with an antique dresser and mirror directly across from the foot of the bed. There were two narrow windows on either side of the bed. The two closets and our bathroom were just off of the bedroom. It was murky in the room, but the bathroom light provided enough light for me to see well enough. I didn’t feel like I was going to be able to sleep, maybe never sleep again. I would just lay there all night staring up at the lazily turning ceiling fan, worrying about Michelle, but I drifted off to sleep without remembering it.
CHAPTER FOUR
I woke up to the sound of someone pounding on my front door. I jumped up, swung my feet over, the bottom of my sneakers hitting the floor. I sat bolt-upright on the edge of the bed.
For just a second I didn’t know where I was. Everything seemed strange, and it almost felt like I was still dreaming. I knew I had been having a strange dream, and this felt like the tail end of that dream before I came fully awake. I stared down at the sneakers on my feet, wondering when I had put my shoes on. I listened to the pounding at the door, wondering if it was Michelle. Had she been locked out?
Then it all came back to me in a rush. Michelle wasn’t home. She’d left the restaurant last night with some man.