by Lisa Unger
Thinking about her standing there on the street, looking uneasily around her, caused him to remember Lily and that ugly, frightening time in his life. The memories were so vivid, so powerful-the smell of her skin, the sound of her voice, the fear, the dread, that indescribable unknowing. The sadness came on him so forcefully that he had to pull over on the shoulder of the highway and rest his head against the wheel. It was so many years ago, and there was still so much pain.
His phone rang then, startling him, and he answered it quickly.
“Hello.”
“Charlie?”
“Wanda.”
“Are you all right?”
“Yes,” he said, forcing brightness into his tone. “I’m just on my way. Sorry about that.”
“I’ll put the chicken in.”
There was something sweet, comforting about that sentence. Something that smacked of a domesticity he had craved without even realizing it. He let the feeling wash over him, rinse away the memories that had come back to call. He’d do what he’d planned, pick up some wine and some flowers and spend the evening with a beautiful woman who seemed to really like him. He’d tell her what he saw, ask her what she thought. Maybe he’d even tell her about Lily, a girl he’d loved a lifetime ago who haunted him still.
14
When his mother died, Jones had used all the emotions that rocketed through him to put on a powerful display of grief. What he felt, in fact, was a shuddering relief, as if at the easing of unbearable pain. He felt rage. He felt strangely unmoored, as though he’d been tied to his life only by the obligation he felt to care for his mother. But he did not feel grief. He would not miss her. Still, he might have been found weeping at her bedside in the hospital or at her graveside during the funeral. It wasn’t an act.
Poor Jones. He was so good to her. He spent his whole life caring for her.
He knew that’s what they all thought. It wasn’t true. He’d spent his whole life tending to her, appeasing her, pandering to her. These things were very different. Very different.
When his mother was buried and all the proceedings were finished and he was left alone for the first time in his life, the silence almost deafened him. It filled the house and washed over him. While Abigail had lived, there was never quiet. There was always her constant talking-gossiping, complaining, explaining, reprimanding, directing. And then there was the television, on morning, noon, and night, quiet only when he went into her room at night and turned it off after she fell asleep. Sometimes she’d wake up and turn it back on. He’d hear it when he got up in the night to use the toilet-the melodramatic strains of music from old movies, tinny laugh tracks.
He’d wondered if there was something wrong with him, not to feel grief for his mother. Maybe there had always been something wrong with him, maybe he lacked some human capacity to feel. Like now, for instance, as Melody Murray sat weeping (again) in his office, he felt nothing but a low-grade annoyance. She had the same aura about her as Abigail had, that self-dramatizing near hysteria, always seeking comfort and pity from those around her, giving nothing. Charlene had it, too, that willingness to cause any amount of discord and pain as long as it drew attention to herself. He’d wanted to explain it to Ricky, to tell him why he didn’t like the girl, but he found he didn’t have the words for it. Anyway, Ricky wouldn’t have listened. That kid had never listened to a word Jones had to say.
He’d watched as Maggie spent the day comforting and cajoling, trying to gently draw information from Charlene’s friends, their son, Melody, anyone who had any connection to Charlene. He’d felt relief that she was around for this. She could be all the things he was not-yielding, comforting, encouraging. Watching her, he had been reminded that Maggie was the one who’d saved him. If she hadn’t returned to The Hollows when she did-shortly after Abigail’s passing-if she hadn’t seen something in him to love, he wasn’t sure what would have happened to him.
His wife couldn’t have been more different from his mother; Mags was sensible, practical, giving, loving, understanding. Though Maggie would have hated to hear him say so, in those ways she was truly Elizabeth Monroe’s daughter. Although Maggie also possessed the soft gentility of her father, lacked Elizabeth’s hard edges and sharp tongue.
“Where’s Graham, Melody?” asked Jones. “Have you been able to reach him?”
She looked up at him sullenly. “No.”
There were a number of things bothering Jones. The fact that Graham was nowhere to be found was chief among them. The whole hunting thing just didn’t ring true, especially since none of the morons Graham usually hung around with had gone with him. Graham wasn’t the type to go off by himself in the woods and get meditative, to hunt and reflect. He was the type to go off into the woods with his buddies under the pretense of hunting and get drunk, pass out in the blind, never fire off a round.
Other things were bothering Jones, too. According to Charlene’s phone records, she hadn’t used her cell phone since late afternoon yesterday. Admittedly, the modern teenager was a bit of a mystery to Jones. But he did know one thing: they were wired together like the Borg, constantly calling, e-mailing, texting, social-networking. If Charlene was involved in some kind of drama that led her to run away, she’d have called or sent text messages to everyone.
Then he’d discovered that the credit card attached to Charlene’s mobile account was in Graham’s name. Graham had purchased that phone for her, paid the bill every month, even though her mother didn’t know and hadn’t wanted her to have one. But Charlene had told everyone who’d listen that she was afraid of him, that he was “inappropriate” with her. It was a word all her friends and even Ricky had used independently of one another, as if she’d told them each precisely the same thing, using the same phrasing. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t true. He could see the potential in Graham, especially as Charlene grew older, her beauty eclipsing Melody’s completely. Still, if it was true, and Graham was using gifts to manipulate his relationship with Charlene, and now they were both missing, what did it mean?
“You still haven’t told us what you fought about,” said Jones. Melody responded with a sigh, her weeping subsiding. She was all dressed up in a neat red sweater and black skirt, pumps. She’d put her face on and done her hair for the local afternoon news.
“Char,” she’d said, playing the role of good mother for the camera. “Just come home, honey, we’ll work it all out. I promise. And if anyone knows anything or has seen my girl, please call the hotline.” He had to hand it to her. She pulled it out when the cameras started to roll. He remembered that about her.
“The truth is,” she said, making a show of rubbing her temples, “I don’t even remember what started it. Something about what she was wearing. It exposed her navel, and I told her to change her shirt. I told her she looked like a tramp. Things just got all crazy from there. The next thing I knew, she’d packed a bag and was walking out the door. Not the first time. I figured she’d be back in an hour. Or call and we’d make up. That’s how it is with us.”
Chuck stood in the corner of the office. He’d been silent for about fifteen minutes, staring out the window. But Jones knew he was present, listening. They’d set it up this way, eliminated all the people she was leaning on-Maggie, Char’s friends and their mothers. Sent them all home one by one. They didn’t want it to seem immediately like an interrogation.
“We have a few questions, Ms. Murray,” said Chuck, walking from his place by the window and sitting in the chair beside Melody, across from Jones’s desk. Melody didn’t look up at him, kept rubbing at her temples, her eyes closed.
“Mel, that phone of Charlene’s?” said Jones. “Looks like Graham got it for her.”
Melody opened her eyes and looked at Jones. “No.”
“It’s his credit card on the account.”
Melody didn’t say anything, looked down at her cuticles.
“It might be nothing,” said Chuck. “But the last charge on his card was late yesterday afternoon. Twent
y-three dollars and change at the Safeway. Around the same time as Charlene’s last call. When did you say he left for his hunting trip?”
The pale white of Melody’s skin, the lines around her eyes, the sagging of her jowls got Jones to thinking about his mother again. It was the stroke that finally did Abigail in. After decades of threatening to become an invalid, a lifetime of imagined illness, and pointless trips to doctors in an ever-widening radius around town, he’d come home from work one night to find her on the bathroom floor, stinking of urine. For a moment, he thought it was an act.
“Mother. Mom?” he said from the doorway. She’d been complaining about terrible headaches for days, but he’d paid her no mind.
Take an aspirin, Mom.
That’s what I love about you, Jones. You’re the soul of compassion.
No doubt she would have loved the idea of him carrying her around, bathing her, changing her diapers like an infant. But even he had his limits.
“Graham and I… haven’t been getting along,” said Melody softly. “I mean, he hasn’t been coming home every night for a while now.”
“So, he didn’t go hunting?” asked Chuck.
“He said he might go hunting. But I haven’t been able to reach him.”
“Where might he go hunting if that’s what he did?”
“How should I know?” she snapped. She sat up suddenly from the grief-stricken slouch she’d been in. “What do I know about hunting?”
Chuck gave her an empathetic nod, and Jones was grateful he was there. He liked the other man’s big-city cool, an aura that he’d seen and heard it all, was surprised by nothing. Jones wanted to throttle Melody, could feel the itch in his hands, though he’d never struck a woman in his life. He tilted back in his chair, feeling it tip, finding his balance. He kept his eyes on Melody, who was getting squirmy and agitated. Outside his office, Jones heard someone laughing, smelled something vile cooking in the microwave.
“I think you ought to be out there looking for my daughter instead of sitting around here talking to me.”
“I hear you, Mrs. Murray,” said Chuck. “And I assure you we haven’t lost our focus. But there are some things that concern us. We’ve heard from several people that Charlene was afraid of Graham. What do you make of that?”
Melody blew out a disdainful breath. “That’s bullshit. That’s Charlene making a show of herself. Trying to get people to feel sorry for her.”
“But he hit her,” said Jones. “Several people saw her black eye. She told my son and Britney that he hit her.”
“It was an accident,” she said, looking away. “She got involved in a fight between me and Graham. He was swinging at me.”
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then, “I’m not saying it was right. I’m just saying he didn’t mean to do it. After that, I asked him to leave. That’s why he hasn’t been sleeping at home much.”
“So how would you characterize their relationship, then? Why would he buy her a cell phone and keep that from you?”
“Charlene has a way of getting what she wants,” she said with more than a shade of resentment. She let out a little laugh. “It’s funny, all those girls saying that Graham made these subtle advances. But it was Charlene who was always half flirting, wearing revealing pajamas when he was around, batting her eyelashes. Graham is a lot of things. Subtle is not one of them.”
“So you think she could have convinced him to get her that phone?”
Melody nodded. “Or she could have lifted his card. Graham wasn’t good with money. He might not have noticed for a while.”
Jones and Chuck exchanged a look, both picking up on her use of the past tense. Not that it meant anything necessarily. It could just mean that she considered their relationship over.
“Could she have convinced him to go away with her, Melody?”
Jones saw something flash across her face, he couldn’t say what. Was it calculating? She wasn’t a stupid woman, though he was tempted-had always been tempted-to think of her as such. She’d been a mediocre student, gone to community college, like he had. She held a good job doing something administrative at the big oil company that had some offices in a town nearby. She wasn’t an intellectual. She had what he thought of as survival smarts. She’d be what she needed to be to get by.
“Is that what you think?” she asked, a shrillness creeping into her voice. She gripped the arms of the chair. “That they ran off together?”
Chuck lifted a hand. “Nobody’s saying anything yet. But no one seems to know where either of them is at the moment. Could just be a coincidence.”
“Graham didn’t show up for work today,” said Jones.
“What else is new?” said Melody with a snort. “He’s had four jobs this year alone.”
Jones saw it then. Melody Murray hated her husband. Nothing so unusual about that. Hateful feelings could crop up in a marriage, like weeds pushing their way through concrete. If you weren’t vigilant, they took over quickly, like kudzu, depriving love of light and air until it withered and died. It was a slow, silent death, impossible to imagine in the heat of new love.
She rose from her seat, and neither of them moved to stop her. She walked over to the couch behind her and picked up her jacket and purse, moving slowly.
“I don’t know what you two think you’re getting at,” she said, pulling on her coat. “But Charlene did not run off with Graham. She hates him.”
“But that might not have stopped her from using him for a ride. In which case, Graham is in a lot of trouble.”
“I don’t give a shit about Graham,” she yelled suddenly. “You get that? Just help me find my girl.”
Chuck stood, put up two placating palms. “There are detectives at your house right now, going through Charlene’s room, looking at her computer, trying to figure out where she might have gone.”
Melody looked confused for a minute. “At my house? I didn’t give permission for that.”
“When we realized that Graham was missing, that the credit card on Charlene’s account belonged to him, that her friends seemed to feel she was afraid of him, we obtained a warrant from a judge. We don’t need your permission, Melody,” Jones said.
He might have handled someone else differently. Someone he liked, trusted, respected. Someone he didn’t know as well as he knew Melody Murray. He might have asked her permission before obtaining a warrant. Most parents of runaways would throw open their doors. But he didn’t ask. Whether he’d acted on instinct or bias, he couldn’t be sure.
He felt her eyes on him, and he looked back at her, daring her to open her mouth in front of Chuck, who was looking back and forth between them. Chuck was too smart, too canny, not to be picking up on the subtext. But Melody didn’t say anything else; she just turned and stormed out, slamming the door hard enough to rattle the thin walls.
Jones got up after a beat and pulled on his jacket. He’d follow her home, see what the other detectives had found there.
“Lots of history in this town, huh?” said Chuck, trailing behind.
Jones didn’t feel inclined to answer.
15
She wouldn’t write that, Mom.”
“Then who did?”
“I don’t know. But think about it. ‘Charlene is large and in charge’? She would never use such clichéd language.”
But Charlene was a cliché, a living cliché, though Ricky and Charlene herself were both too young to realize it. Maggie didn’t say as much, of course. And he was right; it didn’t really sound like Charlene. She didn’t say that, either. The day was starting to take its toll. She had a low-grade ache behind her eyes, a fatigue-induced nausea.
“Ricky,” she said, sitting down at the kitchen table. It was a small banquette, tucked into a window seat. Behind them outside, leaves fell in streamers of red, orange, gold, and brown. They’d sat together at this table since he was a baby, first in a high chair, then in a booster seat, then beside her. She remembered all the milled vegetables she used to make-pea
s, carrots, squash. Then it was grilled cheese, peanut butter and jelly, macaroni and cheese-the happy, clean, innocent foods of childhood.
Now he sat across from her, watching her with the same intensity he’d had since he was a child. When he wanted something from her, he was relentless. Right now, he wanted her to tell him that Charlene had not broken up with him and run away to some imaginary life in New York City without so much as a backward glance. At the moment, he wanted to believe that something had happened to take her away. Even though Maggie was certain he didn’t understand the ramifications of wishing such a thing. He didn’t really know what that would mean.
“The best thing we can do right now is avoid jumping to conclusions. We need to keep the lines of communication open for Charlene so when she does reach out-and I believe she will-we’re here for her.” With her thumbnail, she chipped away at some dried piece of food on the wood surface of the table. It was only the three of them. Why was it so hard to keep things clean?
“But what if she can’t reach out? I mean, everyone has assumed that she ran away, but what if something else happened to her?”
He seemed to have forgotten altogether about the message she’d written him. Maggie thought about reminding him, but then decided against it. She reached across the table and put her hand on his. Her eyes drifted to the tattoo. It still looked red and inflamed. She looked away and tried to catch his eye.
“Your father and the rest of the department are looking for her. They’re not just blowing her off as a runaway. They’re investigating the disappearance. We have to trust them to do their jobs well.” She stopped short, too, of telling him about Graham’s being missing as well, about the credit card on Charlene’s cell phone account. It wasn’t yet public knowledge anyway, and it would only hurt or frighten him further.
He started kicking the bottom of the banquette with his heel. It made a hollow knocking noise. He’d always done this absently, when he was reading or thinking. It drove Jones crazy.