The Next Time You See Me

by Holly Goddard Jones

  Susanna was lightheaded. She stopped at the door, rubbing her tongue against the roof of her mouth and patting her warm cheeks with her cool palms. She was still holding the receipt, she realized, so she tucked it into her purse, then fumbled for her keys. Abby clung to her leg. Susanna reached down, pulled her daughter up by the armpits and rested her on her hip, then shut Ronnie’s house up behind her.

  2.

  Back at home she called the sewing factory only to learn—and she hadn’t convinced herself to hope otherwise—that Ronnie had indeed missed the last week of work. No notice. No explanation. “And didn’t you think that was strange?” Susanna asked the shift supervisor, unable to keep the edge out of her voice, and the woman’s response was equally flinty: “Not really. She already had twelve points against her for the year. Clocked in late couple of times a week, claimed sick at least one Monday a month. I put a pink slip in the mail to her just yesterday.”

  “Well, I have real cause to be concerned about her,” Susanna had said.

  The supervisor huffed. “I’ll bet she’s just fine. I hope she is. But tell her when you see her that she isn’t getting back on out here. I’ve had my fill.”

  So Susanna shouldn’t have been surprised by the reaction she got an hour later from the on-duty cop at the local station. “I’m here to report a missing person,” she said, shaking so much with nervousness that she could barely hold Abby up on her hip—Abby was too big for such nonsense, but she cried when Susanna put her down—and the officer, rather than dashing to his CB and calling an all-points bulletin, leaned back lazily in his chair, arms propped behind his head as though sunbathing, and frowned at her.

  “How old?”

  “Thirty-two,” she said.

  “Man? Woman?”

  “Woman. She’s my sister.” He wasn’t writing anything down.

  “What’s her name?”

  “Veronica Eastman.”

  The desk cop smiled. “Ronnie? You’re Ronnie’s sister?” He shook his head, still grinning. “Ronnie Eastman. You’re trying to tell me Ronnie Eastman’s gone missing?”

  Susanna shifted Abby to her other hip. “This isn’t a joke,” she said, blinking against tears. “I’m really worried about her.”

  The cop waved her to the empty chair across from him, conciliatory, and did Susanna the favor of at least lowering his arms from behind his head and mugging seriousness. “All right,” he said, reaching for a pen. He yanked a sheet of paper out of the pile beside an electric typewriter and paused in what Susanna recognized was an exaggerated imitation of professionalism, as though he’d gotten his cop cues from the movies. “Tell me what’s worrying you.” The smirk, restrained but not hidden, twitched at the corners of his mouth.

  “I went to her place today to check on her, because I hadn’t heard from her in a while. She usually calls at least once a week. So I went over there, and nobody answered the door.” Susanna pressed Abby’s ear to her chest, covered the other ear with her hand. She lowered her voice. “I used her spare key to let myself in, and you—you could just tell, you know—the place was abandoned. There was food rotting on the kitchen table.”

  “Maybe she went on a trip,” the cop said. SERGEANT PENDLETON, his badge read. He could have been thirty or fifty, too unlined to seem properly middle-aged, too much gray in his hair to look young. Everything about him drooped: the corners of his mustache, his eyelids—saggy, even sickly—the fold of loose skin under his chin. As though he’d been expanded, then deflated. Maybe he was one of those morbidly obese men who went on a low-fat diet or bought a treadmill. Susanna had seen them on TV, newly svelte and active but suddenly older, as though they’d endured famine rather than Sweatin’ to the Oldies.

  “No,” Susanna said. “She didn’t go on a—” Abby put her hand on her mouth before she could say anything further, tweezing her lips together.

  “Mommy, I’m hungry.”

  Susanna brushed her hand away. “Hold on, baby. Mommy’s doing something important.”

  Abby grunted, went limp, slid onto the floor. She started to whine. “Anyway,” Susanna said, trying to ignore the feather touch of her daughter’s fingers on her calves, then the squeezing, the outright yanking. “Wait,” she said breathlessly. “What was I saying?”

  “Something about how your sister couldn’t have been on a trip?”

  “Right.” She paused, ordering her thoughts. Abby’s whining, high and nasal, had given way to a lower, more experimental sound. She was playing now. It was an odd, tinny popping, emerging from deep within her throat like a cricket’s chirp. “Hush,” Susanna hissed down toward her feet. She felt hot and stupid, incapable of saying what she meant. “For—for one thing, she doesn’t have the money,” she said finally. “And nothing was packed up. Her car was in the driveway. Her medicine—her birth control—was still beside the bed. And she wouldn’t have gone off and left the food out that way. It smelled awful.”

  “People do strange things in a hurry,” Pendleton said.

  Susanna slapped her palm on the officer’s desk, making Abby jump and Pendleton scowl. “You’re not hearing me,” she said hotly. “What’s going on here? I’m telling you that something is wrong. Ronnie hasn’t shown up to work this whole last week. She isn’t on a goddamned vacation.”

  Pendleton stabbed a finger toward her. “That’s enough of that,” he said, scolding her with the same tone of voice that Susanna used on her disruptive students. “I’m doing my job here, and I expect you to speak to me respectfully.” His mustache quivered. “And you ought to be more careful about what kind of language you use in front of your little girl.”

  She bit her lips shut, burning with anger. Her right leg started jogging, hard enough that the lamp on Pendleton’s desk rattled. She crossed the out-of-control leg over the other, pinning both tightly against the leg of her seat, her whole body clenched and throbbing.

  “I can see you’re upset,” Pendleton continued. “And maybe you’ve got a right to be. We’ll do what we can here, but your sister’s an adult, and there’s no real evidence to suggest that she didn’t just take off for a few days.” Susanna started to argue then, but he shushed her. “I heard you before: car in the driveway, old food on the table. I’ve got it. But that’s not enough.”

  “What would be enough?”

  “Blood, for one thing,” he said. “Or signs that her house had got broke into.”

  Susanna stared at him, mute. Abby had wandered over to Pendleton’s bookshelf, which, Susanna noted with an automatic smugness, was mostly bookless: one Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, one copy of The Kentucky Criminal Code. Otherwise, there was evenly spaced junk: a model police car, which Abby was now halfheartedly wheeling back and forth; a figurine of a police officer leaning over to help a boy and his dog, rendered with the blandness and sincerity of a Norman Rockwell illustration; a stuffed Smokey the Bear; and what looked to be a framed wedding portrait, depicting—Susanna had been right—a heavier Pendleton and an equally chubby bride with bangs sprayed several inches high. She realized, now fighting despair, that she was at the mercy of this man, of all people. That this man controlled her sister’s fate.

  “Okay,” Susanna said. “What can we do?”

  “There’s a missing-persons database run by the state police that I can put her name into, but you’ll need to bring me a current photo and fill out a form. I can do that today if you’ll get me the picture right away.” He leaned back in his chair again and lifted the page on a wall calendar. “It looks like Tony won’t be back in town until Wednesday.”

  “Who’s Tony?”

  “The detective.” Pendleton pulled a memo pad out from a desk drawer and wrote a few lines. “And what’s your name and number?”

  Susanna gave them to him.

  “All right,” he said, punctuating the note he’d written and tearing the sheet off with a flourish. “This’ll be on Tony’s desk when he gets back. You should get a call on Wednesday or Thursday.”

  “W
ednesday or Thursday? Can’t he come in sooner if it’s an emergency?”

  Pendleton was looking sour again. “He’s at EKU right now finishing up an accident reconstruction course. We can’t just pull him out of that early.” He frowned a little at Abby, who was now rolling the toy police cruiser around on the carpet, imitating the rev of a car engine. “And at the risk of speaking out of turn, I’m not so sure this is an emergency, Mrs. Mitchell. I know Ronnie from way back. She was a freshman when I was a senior in high school.” He shrugged. “She got around. She got around then, and all I’ve heard tells me she gets around these days, too. She’s been busted twice on DUI since I’ve worked here, and that don’t count all the times me or some other guy let her off easy with a warning.”

  “So you’re saying someone like Ronnie doesn’t deserve the help of the police,” Susanna said. She was leaking tears now, and she tried to wipe her face dry before Abby could see. Pendleton seemed to soften a little, which only made Susanna madder. What a typical man he was. What a typical woman she probably seemed to him.

  “I’m not saying that at all,” he told her. “I wouldn’t have let Ronnie slide all those times if I didn’t like her. So I’ll do what I can for her. But really, Mrs. Mitchell—” He stopped.

  “Well, what is it?” she said.

  “It’s only been a week. She’s probably just off somewhere. Wouldn’t that be like her?”

  Susanna opened her mouth to protest but stopped short. Was it possible that she was overreacting? She’d been so keyed up lately, so vulnerable, so spiritually wrung out. That discussion yesterday with Christopher Shelton’s mother had been only the latest sore spot in, well, weeks. Weeks and weeks of sore spots. Fighting with Dale. Shouldering most of the parenting burden while Dale, as he always did between the months of July and October, spent every free moment practicing with the marching band. Dealing with bullshit handed down by the state, worrying that she’d lose her job if she didn’t get her students’ test scores higher.

  And there was Ronnie herself. Of course there was. Susanna twisted her hands together, popped a knuckle, aware that Pendleton was watching her, assessing her. She wanted to tell him about the four $500 savings bonds Ronnie had bought for Abby, about the patent leather Mary Janes. She wanted to tell him about her and Ronnie’s father, the kind of drunk he’d been, and how Ronnie had found it in her heart to forgive him while Susanna, embittered and superior, had fled to Dale’s house and never had another thing to do with him, and now never could have anything to do with him. She wanted to tell him about the copy of A Separate Peace on Ronnie’s bedside table, how she’d been only a chapter away from finishing it. But he wouldn’t understand that, would he? Pendleton, with his dictionary and his book of criminal codes and his shelf full of stupid knickknacks: How could he understand that love, that faith, was sometimes present in an act as simple as placing a receipt between two chapters?

  That was her sister. But there was also the Ronnie from that day so many years ago, the Ronnie who’d tried to coax Susanna, browbeat her, into that van with those men. She’d looked then much like she looked now: dark blond hair worn cropped, almost like a man’s; shorts and T-shirt cinched tight around her narrow middle and her large chest, the legs emerging from her cutoffs muscled but thick, almost stocky. She hadn’t been much on makeup in those days: just mascara, and perhaps too much of it, making her appear elfin, with that short hair and the short legs and those wide, startled eyes. Childlike. She’d always smelled of cigarettes and Red perfume, her splurge, that and her French-manicured press-on nails her only shows of uninhibited femininity. It was ironic, that question she’d posed: Are you a dyke? The way she’d taunted Susanna, the hoarse laugh, the way the men had echoed her laughter. Looking back, Susanna knew that Ronnie had needed her, or thought she did; and Susanna knew, too, what would have happened to her—what Ronnie would have let happen—if she’d gone along on that ride. Are you a dyke? Ronnie had asked, looking herself like Peter Pan hitchhiking with the Lost Boys, and Susanna had backed away and turned tail and run home hard as she could, betrayed and betrayer, choosing herself just as Ronnie would have.

  “I’ll go get that photograph,” Susanna said finally. She couldn’t meet Pendleton’s gaze.

  “All right then.” He was almost kind. “I’ll be here till five.”

  She reached down for Abby, the both of them grunting as she pulled to a stand—Susanna with the effort, Abby at the indignity of Susanna’s hard fingers in her armpits—and they were most of the way to the car when Susanna realized that her daughter was still clutching Pendleton’s toy cruiser. “Keep it,” she muttered, fumbling one-handed in her purse for her keys.

  Chapter Four

  1.

  Wyatt Powell’s morning routine had been more or less the same for thirty-two years, since the day when he took a promotion—he guessed you could call it that, though there hadn’t been an accompanying bump in pay—and moved from seconds at the factory to first shift:

  Awaken at five A.M. He’d needed an alarm the first several months, especially while he was still retraining his body for the new schedule, but never again since then; he couldn’t sleep past five A.M. now even if he wanted to, even if he went to bed after midnight.

  Coffee. Back then his mother had used an old aluminum kettle, brewing it stovetop, but now he owned a Mr. Coffee automatic drip with a digital clock and a timer: he needed only to scoop out his Folgers before bed and pour in a pot of water, and the coffee would be brewed and steaming at 5:10, which was always just enough time for Wyatt to rise, urinate, and let Boss out back for his own pee. Of course there’d been no Boss in those early days, but there’d always been some dog to tend to, though not always an inside dog. Wyatt hadn’t started sharing his house with an animal until it had become clear, sometime in his forties, that he was never going to find the right woman for the job.

  Breakfast. For himself and for the dog. Today, as on most Mondays, Wyatt opened a new package of sausage from the groceries he’d purchased yesterday, peeling back the plastic sleeve and slicing off three thick pieces smelling of cold fat and sage. These he plopped into his cast-iron skillet, which was still sitting out, wiped but unwashed, from yesterday’s use. As the sausages were cooking, the air redolent with smoke and the tang of red pepper, Wyatt spread margarine on two slices of white bread, popped them into the toaster, and poured his first cup of coffee. Here, too, his habit was many years fixed: one spoon of sugar and one spoon of powdered creamer, the sugar and creamer stored in little containers made of amber carnival glass, each with a divot between the lip and the lid where the stem of a spoon could extend. The set had been his mother’s. It had been on the kitchen table all through his growing up.

  He crumbled a sausage into Boss’s food bowl, stirred in a cup of Ol’ Roy kibble, and poured off the rendered fat from his cast-iron skillet. Boss, old enough now that he sometimes couldn’t even bring himself to eat standing up—he’d sit and lean into the bowl, only getting his hind legs into the motion when he needed to stretch for some last bits in the back—was already grinding away before Wyatt could seat himself. They were a couple of old boys, old bachelors, and Wyatt had examined his face in the bathroom mirror enough times to reach the conclusion that there was more than a little bloodhound in his own features these days: the rheumy, sagging eyes and loose jowls; his hair graying just as quickly as the fur on Boss’s muzzle was going to white. Boss paused, as he often did, and looked over his shoulder at Wyatt. “Go on, boy,” Wyatt said, tucking into his own breakfast, smearing blackberry jam on one of the pieces of toast and folding the other one around the first sausage. He sipped coffee between bites, wiped crumbs off the paunch of his stomach before they could grease-stain his undershirt. All of these acts were familiar and comforting.

  He dressed after breakfast, buttoning the collar on his work shirt to hide a scratch on his neck and examining his reflection carefully in the harsh fluorescent light framing his bathroom mirror. Then he slipped into his quilt
ed flannel jacket and called for Boss, accompanying the dog outside this time for round two. He had to watch, confirm, or else Boss would get indoors and have an accident while Wyatt was at work. Sometimes it happened anyway. The dog wandered around the yard, sniffing well-known landmarks like the picnic table and an ancient garden gnome, probably picking up on the scent of the neighbor’s cat. At last his steps became shorter and faster, and then he was walking his back legs forward and hiking up his bottom end, watching Wyatt over his shoulder again suspiciously—the look had always struck Wyatt as suspicious, anyway, and made him laugh, but not lately, not since last week—and then the dog was finished, coming back to the house without being called and giving Wyatt a wide berth as he entered.

  The dog was balled up on the couch, chin resting on a pillow, when Wyatt came through the living room with his travel mug of coffee and sweet roll, fuel for the ten-minute drive. This was when he’d usually sit and rest a moment, catch a few minutes of the Channel 5 news out of Nashville, give Boss a good scratch behind the ears, a good belly rub to hold him over until nighttime. But Boss wasn’t having it: not sleeping at the foot of Wyatt’s bed, not greeting Wyatt at the door with his tail wagging, not taking treats directly from his master’s hand. If Wyatt were to sit at his usual place on the couch now, Boss would hop down heavily, cross to the opposite side of the room, and lie with his back against the wall, chin on his forepaws.

  “Don’t move on my account,” Wyatt said to the dog. He sipped his coffee, checked the clock: 6:20, too early to be heading out unless he felt like sitting for half an hour in the break room, waiting to punch in. He didn’t know what would be worse: biding time in his own home under Boss’s wary eye or trying to hide from the young guys at the plant, the eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds who called him Tubs and then tried to play it off like they were joking, laughing with him instead of at him. Aw, Tubs, stop pouting. You know we love you, man. When’re you gonna come out for a beer with us? When you gonna let us get you drunk?