by Darcey Bell
I wondered how close Sean and Emily’s marriage could have been if she’d said the family cabin was haunted and he never asked what she meant.
“She told me that her parents were very cold, controlling, rejecting people, and that the tough times she went through in her early twenties were a reaction to what she’d endured in a loveless home. I always thought that was one of the things we had in common. Our childhoods were a mess.”
Emily’s disappearance and, I guess, the bourbon had enabled Sean—normally so British and reserved—to speak more freely than I’d ever heard him speak. Actually, before this, we’d never exchanged more than a few words, so maybe I mean more freely than I’d imagined him speaking. I wanted to say that my childhood had also been a mess. But a different kind of mess. It seemed neat and orderly when I was growing up. It was only later that I learned how messy it had been.
But I didn’t say any of that. Not only because there were things about me that Sean didn’t need to know, but also because I was afraid of seeming as if I was competing with him and Emily for who had the messiest childhood.
One afternoon, not long after, Sean called and asked if I’d pick up Nicky after school. The detectives had asked him to come into the station house in Canton. He was leaving work to get there, but he didn’t know how soon he would get home.
It was six by the time he arrived at my house. He’d been questioned by two detectives, again by a man and a woman, Detectives Meany (Could I believe that was her name?) and Fortas. He said they seemed only marginally more competent than the troopers who had come to my house that night.
At least they’d taken the trouble to contact the police in Detroit, who’d visited Emily’s mother and gotten the same response Sean did. No, Mrs. Nelson hadn’t seen her. No, Mrs. Nelson had no idea where her daughter was. Actually, they’d mostly spoken with her caretaker. Mrs. Nelson was having one of her “bad days” and could hardly remember her daughter’s name.
All during his conversation with the detectives, Sean said, he felt as if they were following instructions from a textbook: Interview with Husband of Missing Wife 101. Still, it had been grueling. They’d asked him the same questions over and over. Did he know where Emily might have gone? Was their marriage happy? Any arguments? Any reason she might have been dissatisfied? Any possibility that she might have been having an affair? Any history of alcoholism or substance abuse?
“I said she’d experimented with drugs, briefly. Like we all did, in our twenties. I smiled at them, like an idiot. But the joke was on me. They weren’t smiling back. No fooling around in their twenties for them. It went on for hours. The dreary interrogation room. They’d go away, then come back. Just like all those BBC detective procedurals I always liked and Emily didn’t. And yet . . . I never felt as if they really suspected me of anything. Quite honestly, Stephanie, I felt as if they didn’t really believe that Emily is in trouble. I don’t know why, how they dared to presume they knew anything about us. About my marriage. But I got the impression they thought that Emily just picked up and left. Ran away. They kept saying, ‘In the absence of a body, in the absence of any sign of foul play . . .’
“And I kept wanting to shout at them: What about Emily’s absence?!”
“What about it?” I’d been hanging on Sean’s every word and at the same time thinking that his remark about Emily not liking the detective procedurals was the first complaint I’d ever heard him make about her. She’d had plenty of complaints about him. He didn’t listen to her. He made her feel stupid. Every wife in our town could have said the same about her husband. I could have said it about Davis.
A few days later, Detective Meany phoned. I was glad Sean warned me about her name, so I didn’t snicker or say something stupid when she introduced herself. She said I could come to their office any time that was convenient for me. They would work around my schedule. That was nice. But was I imagining the slightly contemptuous, ironic note in her voice when she said schedule?
I drove to the Canton station house after I dropped Miles at school. I’ll confess I was nervous. It seemed to me that everyone looked at me as if I’d done something wrong.
Detective Meany and the much younger Detective Fortas asked me some of the same questions they’d asked Sean. They mainly wanted to know if Emily had been unhappy. All the time I was talking, Detective Fortas kept checking his phone, and twice he sent a text that I knew had nothing to do with me.
I said, “She loved her life. She would never do this. A devoted wife and mom has gone missing, and you guys are doing nothing!” Why was I the only one standing up for my friend? Why hadn’t her husband said what I was saying? Maybe because Sean was British. He was too polite. Or maybe he felt that this wasn’t his country. This one was on me.
“All right.” Detective Fortas sounded as if he was doing me a big favor. “We’ll see what we can find out.”
That weekend, the detectives showed up at Sean and Emily’s house and asked if they could look around. Fortunately, Nicky was with me—playing with Miles—so Sean let them in. He said their search was tentative, cursory. He almost felt as if they were real estate agents, or house hunters thinking of buying the place.
They asked for pictures of Emily. Sean collected some snapshots that he handed over. Luckily, he called me first, and I suggested that he not give them any photos with Nicky in them. He agreed that was a good idea.
Between the two of us, we gave the detectives a complete description—the tattoo on her wrist, her hair, her diamond and sapphire ring. Sean cried when he told them about the ring. I had to keep myself from mentioning her perfume. It didn’t seem like something you’d say to a detective on the trail of a missing person. Lilacs? Lilies? Italian nuns? Thanks for your help, ma’am. We’ll call you if we need you.
Finally Emily’s company woke up from its deep fashionista slumber. Their silence wasn’t surprising. She was the public voice of Dennis Nylon Inc., and without her, nobody there knew how to speak.
Dennis Nylon was her boss’s seventies club-kid name. He’d risen from punk street fashion to become one of the world’s most chic and expensive designers. Wearing his signature skinny black suit, the Dennis Nylon unisex suit, he appeared on the six o’clock news to say that his company was fully cooperating and supporting the efforts of the detectives to find Emily Nelson, their beloved employee and cherished friend. He wore a tie with the company logo, which (to me) was tacky. But maybe no one else noticed.
Actually, what he said was “to find out what happened to Emily Nelson.” That he seemed so sure that something had happened to her gave me the chills. At the bottom of the screen was a number to call if you had any information. It looked like an infomercial with a number to call if you wanted to order the tie. Still, his TV appearance did get the case more attention, at least for a while. I heard, from the detectives, that the company made a sizable contribution to the police department—to help inspire the detectives to go that extra mile.
Dennis Nylon Inc. volunteered to make flyers and put them up around the area. The company sent up a busload of fashion interns, and for an entire day, our town was swarming with underweight androgynous young people, all with asymmetrical haircuts and skinny suits, carrying armloads of flyers, staple guns for the telephone poles, and double-sided tape for shop windows. have you seen this woman? I wasn’t sure I had, because the glam head shot of Emily—full makeup, blown-out hair, the little birthmark photoshopped out of existence—looked so little like my friend that I’m not sure I would have recognized her. Seeing the photos everywhere upset and comforted me at the same time—they were a constant, distressing reminder of our loss, along with a small consolation: at least someone was doing something.
Anyway, something or someone got Detectives Meany and Fortas off their asses long enough to consult the geeks who monitor CCTV footage. They followed Emily’s trail to JFK, where she kissed Sean goodbye outside the terminal. But she never checked in for the San Francisco flight on which she was booked. Neither Se
an nor I had any idea that she was planning to go out West.
It had been Sean’s impression that she was on her way into Manhattan, that she’d caught a ride to JFK with his car service so she could keep him company and say goodbye. After that, he thought, she was going to work and then away on business. The people at Dennis Nylon knew nothing about a business trip to the West Coast.
The security cameras caught her leaving the terminal, then showing up at a rental car agency, where she leased a full-size four-door sedan. She took the first thing they offered, a white Kia. The cops questioned the rental agent, but he didn’t remember anything except that Emily seemed very definite about not wanting a GPS. That hadn’t seemed unusual. Lots of people don’t want to pay extra for a navigational system when they already have one on their phones.
That sounded right to me. Emily has a great sense of direction. Whenever we went anywhere, even just to the town pool, I drove, and she mapped our route on her phone. She knew how to figure out if there was traffic, though there never was any traffic in our town, unless you were going to the train station at rush hour. Which I never am—and she was, five days a week.
Where was she going in that car? Why didn’t she text or call me?
Good news: The genius detectives discovered that the car rental company had a corporate E-ZPass, and they tracked it to a toll station about two hundred miles west of Manhattan on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. Bad news: That’s where they lost her. Emily seems to have left the thruway and taken smaller roads—and dumped her phone and vanished off the map. Into the dead zone.
Sean and I asked the detectives to alert the local and state police near where she was last seen, but they’d already done that. If she’d run away, she could be anywhere. There were endless dead zones on the smaller roads. They would have to see what new leads came in.
Dead zones. Just the words gave me the creeps.
The next surprise was that Emily had withdrawn two thousand dollars in cash from the bank. That certainly suggested that she was planning some sort of trip.
You can’t get that much from an ATM, at least not in our town. The police said that the closed-circuit camera footage from the bank showed her at the teller’s window—alone. On several successive days. It seemed possible (to paranoid me) that a criminal or carjacker was waiting for her outside, threatening to hurt her or her family if she signaled for help. I could never understand why the cops never seemed to take this scenario seriously. Didn’t they watch the news? Innocent moms were being abducted from mall parking lots practically every day.
Sean told his company that he couldn’t travel until his wife was found. He offered to go on unpaid leave. But they understood, and they put him on half-time. He’d be assigned to a local project so that he could work from home with only occasional trips from Connecticut into the city.
Sean was so there for Nicky. So caring and so fully present that it was beautiful to see. He brought Nicky to school every morning and picked him up every afternoon. He had frequent conferences with Mrs. Kerry, in part to keep her updated on the progress of the investigation, though probably she already knew everything—or at least a lot—about it.
At first there was some publicity, thanks (I think mostly) to Dennis Nylon. Connecticut mom disappears! Sean, the brave, anguished husband, went on TV and asked anyone who might have seen Emily to please contact the authorities. He was entirely convincing, and I’m sure everyone believed him. But it was only the local news, and already our story had stepped down from the attention-grabbing segment starring Dennis Nylon.
When the detectives found out that Emily had rented a car and made a sizable bank withdrawal, the case seemed even more like a story about a runaway wife. The media interest gradually leaked away, and the reporters moved on. The husband’s alibi checked out. There were no new clues, no leads, no evidence, and Emily was still missing.
If Nicky hasn’t fallen apart, it’s because of us. Sean and I work together. Nicky and Miles have lots of playdates. I gave Sean the name of the therapist to whom I took Miles after his dad and uncle died, when Miles was constantly hiding from me in public places so I couldn’t find him, and then laughing when I went crazy with worry. The therapist had said that lots of children played that game. He said children are always testing us. That’s how they learn. I shouldn’t blame it on the tragic loss of Miles’s dad and uncle, though obviously that had been extremely traumatic.
The doctor said that I should calmly ask Miles to stop hiding, and he would. He said that Miles had a conscience. I liked hearing that, just as I like the feeling I have now: that Sean and I are doing everything we can to make this as easy as possible on Nicky. Not that it could ever be easy.
Miles had stopped hiding, and now I tell myself that Nicky will stay strong. We’ll get through this together.
We’ve kept Nicky away from the reporters. His photo never appeared with the pictures of Emily and Sean. He stayed at my house during those first days when his dad had interviews with media people and meetings with the detectives.
The rental car was never located. Sean had to fill out a ton of paperwork to get Emily declared a missing person, which voided the rental agreement. I think he got help from the lawyers at his firm.
Sean and I are a team. Nicky is our project. We have long talks when Sean brings Nicky to play with Miles, and when we meet outside school in the afternoon. I give Sean support and encouragement for insisting that the police keep searching for Emily. We both agree that it’s way too early to tell Nicky that his mother might be dead—or even to suggest it. Nicky will ask when he wants to know, and we will tell him that there is still hope.
Until there isn’t.
Before Emily disappeared, I hadn’t spent any time with Sean. Maybe if Davis had lived, we might have been couple-friends. We might have invited them over for dinner. But Davis had been dead for two years by the time I met Emily. Sean always seemed to be at work or traveling for business, so Emily and I had a pure mom friendship.
Though it’s hard for me to believe now, I hadn’t much liked Sean. I guess I saw him as a snobby upper-class British frat boy, a wannabe master of the universe. Tall, handsome, entitled, self-assured—totally not my type. He works in the international real estate department of a major Wall Street investment firm. Though I’m still not entirely sure what his job involves.
It’s always a blessing when you find out that someone is a much nicer person than you’d thought. I wish I could have found that out about Sean without Emily having had to disappear.
Emily used to complain about him. She said he was never home, he left all the childcare to her, he didn’t respect her intelligence, he criticized her, he made her feel flaky and irresponsible, he didn’t appreciate how much she did, he undervalued her contribution to the family, not only in terms of childcare but financially too. He had no respect for what she did at her job. He thought the fashion industry was nothing more than a lucrative bit of fluff. She liked books, and he liked TV. Sometimes (and Emily would only say this after the second glass of wine) she thought that Sean wasn’t nearly as smart as he thought he was. Not nearly as smart as she thought he was when they met.
She did say that sex with Sean was great. Life-changingly great. She said that the sex made everything else seem less important. Life-changing sex was another thing that I tried not to envy about my best friend’s perfect life.
Anyway, Emily said Sean wasn’t cheating on her or drinking or gambling or being violent or doing any of the things that really terrible husbands do. The truth is, I liked it when Emily grumbled about her marriage. I loved Davis with all my heart and soul. I still miss him every day. But it wasn’t as if we hadn’t had issues. Every marriage does, and the pressures and demands of raising a small child certainly don’t help.
Davis often made me feel stupid, even when I was sure, or almost sure, that he didn’t mean to. He knew so much about architecture and design, and he had so many opinions. It got to the point where, when we went into a store,
I was afraid to say I liked this or didn’t like that for fear of the withering look he’d give me (unconsciously, I knew) when he didn’t agree. Which was almost always. It got to be sort of a bore.
But as I’ve blogged about so many times, being a widow means that unless you are in a support group—which I never have been, though I understand why so many women find them helpful—none of the married women I meet will even mention her husband, not even to complain. I guess they’re afraid of making me feel worse because I don’t have a husband to complain about. As if I needed to hear a woman gripe about her husband’s snoring to make me miss Davis.
I hadn’t liked my phone conversation with Sean when I’d reached him in England early on, when Emily hadn’t come to get Nicky. He’d sounded not only sleepy but annoyed. Well, sorry if your wife has disappeared. Sorry I woke you. He didn’t seem to know who I was, though he pretended in that phony-polite British way. Oh, Stephanie, yes, of course.
I got the feeling that Sean didn’t remember meeting me, which was not very flattering. I’ve blogged about how many people (mostly, but not only, men) can’t tell one mom from another, maybe because the only thing they see is the stroller. When Sean said that Emily had planned to be away for a few days on business, he’d made it sound as if I was the flaky one.
Sean didn’t take Emily’s disappearance seriously until he got home from England and she wasn’t there. And that’s when he drove right over. I’ve blogged about how seeing him and Nicky in my house made Emily’s absence finally seem real.
But I definitely did not blog about how Sean was so much taller and better looking and more attractive than I remembered. To be honest, I felt disloyal for even noticing.
He said he’d thought she’d been in Minnesota, but now he wondered if she’d said she was going to Milwaukee.
“I’m sorry, I’m English,” Sean said. Meaning he couldn’t be expected to tell one Midwestern location starting with an M from another? I got the sense that he pulled that “Sorry, I’m English” routine whenever he hadn’t been paying attention. His wife was in some Midwestern “M” place, but he didn’t know which one.