by S. F. Kosa
“It’ll let you track her movements?”
She grimaces, almost apologetic. “This isn’t Boston, cell tower on every block, practically. It may tell us if she’s still in Provincetown or not, but that’s about it.”
“What about surveillance cameras in the area?” I feel like I’m always seeing viral videos of crazy incidents.
“Like I said, this isn’t Boston. There’s really nothing nearby.”
“‘Nearby’?” I roll my eyes. “How nearby are we talking? Which streets? Any businesses with cameras that might capture images of the road? Did you even try?”
She spends a full ten seconds watching me. “We can get a search warrant for the credit card records as well. Unless they’re all joint?”
“No.”
“You guys didn’t share finances?”
I’m reconsidering the scotch. “We’ve only been married for a few months.”
“How’s married life been treating you?”
“We’re fine,” I tell her. “We’re happy.”
“It can be quite an adjustment, am I right?”
I recall reading somewhere that the husband is always a suspect when a wife disappears. “Of course.” I open my mouth to say more, but any words are crushed by the realization of being here, in Mina’s cottage, speaking to a detective while her car sits abandoned. While police are looking for her body in the woods. It’s fucking obvious they don’t expect to find her alive.
“Jesus.” I stand up and head for the window, nausea churning in my gut. “This can’t be happening.”
“We’re doing all we can.”
“You keep saying that,” I mutter from between clenched teeth.
“It would be helpful to understand anything that’s been stressing her out lately.”
She’s looking for evidence that confirms her suicide theory. “Mina wasn’t depressed. She wouldn’t hurt herself. But she’s a well-known romance author. How do you know some sick fan wasn’t stalking her?”
I glance over and see Mina’s wedding and engagement rings in the bowl. For all I know, she’s run off with that fan. Our conversation about the damn bus-driving pigeon takes on a whole new, horrifying meaning.
“I’ve got someone combing her public social media for any threats,” says the detective. “If you have access to her account, then I can—”
“I don’t, okay? I don’t have any of that.” And I’m sweating now. Probably bright red in the face. “What about the news media? Are they on this?”
“I’m not sure you want a lot of public attention, Mr. Zarabian. If it’s what we think—”
“And if it’s not?” I know I shouldn’t be raising my voice, but this is too much. “Are you guys hoping no one will pay attention while you do as little as possible to find her?”
The floor creaks as the detective shifts her weight. “I’ll be going, Mr. Zarabian. I appreciate you talking to me, and we’ll be in touch as soon as we know anything at all.”
I turn to face her. “You’ve got to look at the car.”
“I’ve requested a state mobile forensic unit. And if you happen to come across any of her passwords, in a file, maybe, or—”
“Sure thing.” I see the detective to the door, and when she’s gone, I barely make it to the couch before my legs give out. Mina’s gone, the police think she’s dead, and the whole world is humming along as if that doesn’t matter.
I have no fucking idea what I’m supposed to do, but I have to do something. If I stay still for another minute, I’m going to go insane. I head back over to Mina’s desk. Her laptop could hold the answers to everything, if I can figure out how to get past the lock screen.
I think back to all the times I’ve seen Mina type in her password to access the machine. It’s not a long one—I’m almost sure it has six characters or less. I recall her fingers dancing over the keyboard, unlocking the device in the space of a second. I never asked her what it was. Why would I? It’s always seemed very much hers and no one else’s, and she’s always got it with her. In fact, I remember teasing her recently when she mentioned that she’d let Devon use it to play a game… Holy shit.
My heart is rattling my entire body as I reach for the phone and call Caitlin. When she answers, she tells me that my daughter is right there, and they’ve gotten takeout sushi, and on a normal day, that would probably send a twinge through me because sushi is my thing with Devon, but today, I’m just glad to have reached them. “Can I talk to Devon?”
“She’s in the middle of dinner—”
“Put her on the phone, Caitlin.”
“If this is news about Mina, then you should tell me first,” she says quietly.
She assumes the fucking worst of me, every time. “If I had news, I would tell you. Put my daughter on the phone.”
“Daddy!”
My voice instantly morphs into the lilting and playful tone that only my little girl can pull from my mouth. “Hi, silly girl. You’re eating sushi?”
“From Genki Ya! I got the salmon roll.”
She always gets the salmon roll. “I wish Mina and I had been able to take you out.”
“I made a drawing for Mina.”
“Mommy told me. I bet she’s going to love it.” I consider for a moment, trying to figure out my approach. “Baby, you like to play with Mina, don’t you?”
“We like to play games.”
“What kind of games?”
“Lots of kinds. But not board games!”
“Oh, I know all about that.” Mina refuses to play board games of any kind. And for some reason, she particularly hates chess, which happens to be my favorite. Too much strategery for my poor brain, she said, brushing me off with a laugh. I can tell just by looking at the board. “You play other games with her, though!”
“Plants vs. Zombies!” She sounds so adorably excited that it makes my eyes burn. “Mina thought it was scary, but I think it’s funny!”
I can hear Caitlin muttering in the background and suddenly wonder if she’s thinking Mina’s a bad influence or something. “I love that game,” I tell her. “You played it on Mina’s computer?”
“Mm-hmm,” my daughter says. Now she sounds distracted.
“Baby, I need your listening ears. Did Mina let you unlock her computer?”
“Unlock?”
“Did she let you type in her password?”
“Mm-hmm. I had to type in the magic word. I spelled it wrong, and then she told me the right way.”
“The magic word,” I say slowly. The fingers of my left hand tap on the keys of my wife’s laptop. P-L-E-A-S-E. Nope. “What’s the magic word, Devon?”
She giggles. “She said it was a secret. I’m not supposed to tell anyone.”
I speak slowly, keeping my voice level. “Mina needs you to tell me her password, honey. It’s important.”
“Did she forget it?”
“Yes!” Out of the mouths of babes—the kid has given me an innocent explanation. “Yes. She forgot it, and she needs you to tell me what it is so that I can give it to her.”
Devon seems to ponder this for a moment, and then she says, very solemnly, “She told me the password is magic, Daddy.”
“I know, I know. Mina loves magic. So what is it? The magic word?”
“I have to go. Mommy wants me to take a bath.”
“Devon,” I snap. “I—” The call cuts out. My thumb jerks over my screen, about to jab the number and redial, when it hits me. Magic. Mina loves magic.
What the hell. I type it in. M-A-G-I-C.
And I’m in.
Chapter Five
The sky overhead was a cheerful and cloudless blue. She stared up at it while her ears throbbed and buzzed.
“Did someone call 911?” Sound returned, the shield of white noise pierced by a man’s shouted plea. He hunched
over her, blocking her view of the sky. “You ran right out in front of me!”
Her lips moved, but she couldn’t get enough air to speak.
“Stay awake, okay? Don’t pass out.” The man jerked up to his knees. “Are any of you doctors?”
She slowly turned her head. She was lying next to a road, at the mouth of a parking lot. A large beige car was parked at a diagonal only feet away. Exhaust puffed from its tailpipe.
“Should I be letting her turn her head?” Beads of sweat sparkled on the dome of his bald head. It was almost pretty. “Should I keep her from moving?” His voice cracked with strain.
She turned her head to the other side and saw who the man was speaking to. A small crowd had gathered, coming out of what looked like a restaurant behind them. They were speaking urgently. Gesturing at her and then at something several feet away. She shifted her gaze, struggling against the balding man who was now trying to turn her face to the sky again. Just before he succeeded, she caught sight of two men on top of a third guy, a young man with black hair who was struggling and shouting. The two men holding him down—one in an apron and hairnet and the other with tattoos down both his muscular arms—looked tense and angry. The tattooed guy had his knee planted in the black-haired guy’s back and was pressing the young man’s anguished face to the gravel.
“The ambulance’ll be here in a few minutes,” said a man with a Spanish sort of accent. She couldn’t turn her head to see who was speaking exactly. “Police, too. Can you guys keep hold of him?”
“No problem” came the gruff reply.
“I don’t know what… I don’t know…” she whispered. Confusion was smothering her; she could barely breathe. Her legs and arms were moving on their own, aimless but determined. Like they wanted to run away and leave her behind. Somewhere in the distance, sirens wailed. She was lost in it, lost in the noise and the pain and the light and the faces all around her, not a one of them familiar.
Another stranger leaned over her, this one in a uniform. EMT, she guessed. “Hey there. Keep still for me,” the guy said as he braced her head and strapped rigid plastic around her neck, chin to shoulders. “What’s your name?”
Her name. That was the one thing she did know. “Maggie,” she whispered.
The EMT smiled. “You’re gonna be fine, Maggie. I’m gonna make sure of it.”
As the ambulance turned onto Route 6, the EMT sat next to her gurney. “Quite a day, huh?”
“Someone needs to call my mom,” she said, her voice rasping. “She was expecting me.”
“We’ll do that as soon as we get to the hospital,” he told her as he wiped an alcohol swab over the crook of her elbow. “What’s your last name, sweetheart?”
“Wallace.”
“And how old are you?”
“Twenty.”
“Your birth date?”
“December 4.”
“Great. Any medical problems we need to know about? You on any medications?”
“No.”
“You know where you are right now?”
“In hell?” She glanced around the ambulance. “Sorry.”
He chuckled. “No, that’s great. Humor. Perfect. Where were you born?”
“Boston. My mom lives in Yarmouth.”
“Nearby, then. That’s great. And your dad?”
It felt like someone was strangling her. She closed her eyes and sucked in a tight, squeaky breath.
“Just relax. The IV pinches a little going in.” He thought he understood. “You know what day it is?”
“No,” she whispered. Then she thought about it. “Wednesday?”
“That’s okay. No worries.” But his brow was furrowed when she opened her eyes to look. “Do you know what happened to you?”
“Hit by a car?”
“The guy who hit you said you were running.” He chewed at the inside of his cheek. “Because someone was chasing you. You remember that?”
Maggie blinked. “Who was chasing me?”
“You got a bump on the head,” the EMT said as he hung the IV bag from its pole. “Probably a concussion. That can interfere with memory for sure. What’s the last thing you remember before getting hit?”
Maggie searched the earnest lines of his face as if they held the answer. She shifted her gaze to the small back window of the ambulance, through which she could see a slice of blue sky. Then she pondered her bare feet poking out from under the thin blanket, wobbling with every bump in the road. “I remember…I remember getting in my car. In the parking lot.”
“Which parking lot?”
“Student lot. A, I think.”
“Okay,” he said slowly. “And when was that?”
“After my last exam.”
He tilted his head. “Where do you go to school?”
“UMass.”
“Boston?”
“No, Amherst…” She paused when she saw the concern flicker in his eyes. “That’s not where we are?”
“When was your exam, kiddo?” His voice was light, but there was something coiled inside each word, a snake preparing to strike. “You’re in summer school?”
“No. Why?”
He smiled and patted her hand. “We’ll be at the hospital soon. You’re going to be fine, sweetheart. Just fine.”
Maggie stared at the side of his face as he busied himself typing notes. He was an absolutely terrible liar.
They drew blood. They took X-rays. They called her mom. They took off the plastic collar, but then they put her in a noisy tube and told her to stay still so they could take pictures of her brain. They asked her question after question after question. The whole time, they were cheery and sweet and positive.
Maggie did as she was told, and she didn’t ask questions. She took the pills, Tylenol or something, for the headache. She let them probe and prod everywhere. She put her feet in stirrups and closed her eyes and forced her mind away and away and away. Fatigue lay over her like a weighted blanket, and the things they did to her body couldn’t lift it. Only the questions threatened to strip it off.
She remembered getting into her car. She remembered looking at the gas gauge and thinking she needed to fill up before she hit the road for the three-hour drive back to Yarmouth. And now she was in the hospital in Hyannis. She’d seen a sign as the ambulance pulled up—Cape Cod Hospital. Only a few miles from her mom’s house. She’d ended up back on the Cape, but she had no idea how.
No worries, the nurses said. No worries, the technicians said. It’ll all sort itself out. Mild concussion. Memory issues. Now she lay on the gurney in a little room, door closed, lights low, trying to sleep. They were going to admit her for overnight observation, and all she needed to do was wait until someone came to wheel her upstairs. The doctor would come and speak to her soon, to let her know the results of the MRI. No worries, no worries.
Her mom would be here soon. A familiar feeling gripped her, a jittery and uneasy mixture of dread and need, of craving and the desire to run fast and far. A squirmy feeling, but also comforting in a weird way.
It was familiar when nothing else was.
“Ms. Wallace?” She turned to see an Indian man in a lab coat come through the door, a friendly smile on his bespectacled face. “I’m Dr. Mehta.” He reached her bedside and offered his hand. She shook it gingerly. “We’re going to be transferring you up to another floor here in a minute, and your mom is going to meet you up there.”
“You talked to her?”
“I told her that you’re going to be fine and that you’ll be able to talk to her yourself in a little bit.”
She watched his face. “Was she mad?”
He looked a bit perplexed. “She’s worried, like any mother would be.” He pushed his glasses up the bridge of his nose. “You don’t have any fractures or spinal injuries. And as far as we can tell, you don’t have a
ny neurological injuries. No brain damage.”
“I know what neurological means.”
He smiled. “You’re a student at Amherst?”
“UMass Amherst. I just finished my sophomore year.”
“Your MRI revealed no swelling, no hemorrhages. It’s possible you have a mild concussion, and I’ve been told you’re having some issues with memory.”
“I don’t know how I got to the Cape.” She bit her lip. “And it’s not May anymore, is it?”
He shook his head. “It’s July 31.”
A rushing sound filled her ears. “Two months?”
“Your mother said she expected you to arrive home from school in May, but you never did. She began a search and talked to some friends of yours, and I guess they told her you’d had a rough end of the year. Do you remember telling your roommate that you were dreading going home?”
“Mom thinks I ran away or something?” The rushing sound had enveloped her in a kind of auditory fog, dimming the sound of his voice. “I think I did well on my finals. My grades are good. Everything was fine.”
“You have no sense of where you’ve been all this time? Who you’ve been with?”
A shaky breath escaped her, though it couldn’t quite expel the horror of her thoughts. “I was told someone was chasing me,” she whispered. “In that parking lot where I got hit.”
“There was a police officer here. He told us the suspect is being questioned.”
“Do they think he abducted me? What…you think he’s had me tied up in a basement somewhere? Why don’t I remember?”
“I’m in no position to speculate right now, Ms. Wallace. But our consulting neurologist—you remember the lady who came in here and asked you all those questions? She and the radiologist took a look at your scans and confirmed that there’s nothing physically wrong with your brain. So what I can tell you is that you’re generally in very good health, though a bit undernourished. Your bloodwork seems to suggest that you’re not under the influence of alcohol or opioids.” He met her eyes. “And you don’t have any obvious injuries apart from a few contusions. Your HIV status is negative. We’re still waiting on other blood tests, though, just to make sure.”