by Mike Knowles
“Occupational hazard,” Jones said.
“Nope. The occupational hazard is eating too many cookies.”
“Did you just bake cookies, Cheryl?”
Cheryl nodded. “Madeleines.”
“I will take one when they come out of the oven,” Norah said.
“Sure.” Cheryl looked at Jones. “You too?”
Jones shook his head. “Just a cup of coffee.”
Cheryl let Jones know how she felt about his pass on the cookie with a sigh. “What kind?”
Jones glanced at the jars on display. “The Ethiopian.”
She liked his choice and seemed to forgive him for turning down the cookie. Cheryl prepared the food and placed everything on a large wooden tray that Norah expertly transported to a corner table with a view of the street. She put the tray down and threw herself into the seat while Jones took his cup to the corner of the room to add cream and sugar. When he got back to the table, Norah was forcefully shrugging her way out of her coat, the way Houdini got out of a straitjacket. The sandwich came with a sliced apple and Norah ate a piece while Jones took off his coat. She saw his arm and took a moment to look at it before focusing on the food again.
Norah arranged the teapot and the bone china cup before she said, “They brought Lauren to me after she had run from another foster. This isn’t exactly a big town, and Lauren already had a reputation at thirteen. She had run before, but this time was different—this time, she wouldn’t go home. Something had happened.” Norah slowly finished chewing and swallowed the apple in her mouth. “Something that had happened too many times before.” The unpleasant memory took a minute to pass; then, Norah smiled wide as a new memory took its place. “So here is this Children’s Aid worker I know at my door, with this wet cat. That’s what she looked like—a wet cat. God, she was a nasty piece of work back then. She had an eye on the door every second of the day. Those first couple of weeks, I’d drop her at school and spend the night looking for her. Sometimes, I’d find her. Other times, my little wet cat would find her way home on her own. She’d just walk in the door and head straight for the stairs.” Norah ate another slice of apple that had already started to brown. Jones used the moment of silence to try the coffee; it was excellent. “She learned early to skip over the first step because it squeaked the loudest, but she was never really good at being quiet. I’d hear her foot on that second step from the kitchen and I’d say, ‘Here kitty kitty.’ As soon as she knew she was caught, she’d come into the kitchen and I’d get her dinner out of the fridge. She’d pick at the plate and I’d ask her where she’d been, and do you know what?”
Jones put down his cup. “What?”
“She’d tell me. She’d tell me everything. At first, she was just trying to shock me. She wanted to make me sorry for asking.” Norah laughed at the memory and tried a bite of the sandwich. She spoke over Jones’ head with her mouth full. “So good, Cheryl.”
Cheryl called out from the kitchen. “Wait ’till you try the cookie.”
“Lauren didn’t know me. I don’t shock easy. She only surprised me once.” Norah put down the sandwich. “I thought for sure she would come back.”
After a minute or two of silence, Norah sniffed and picked the sandwich back up. “She eventually stopped trying to punish me. She stopped telling me things and we started to talk about things. It wasn’t long after that that she started going to school. Like every day. Then she started singing. God, that kid could sing.” Norah took a bite and when she put the sandwich down, Jones mimed wiping his nose. Norah swiped at her face with her thumb and licked off the vegan mayonnaise that had been on the tip of her nose.
“She won competitions. She was that good. I helped her get gigs, actual gigs, at some of the bars that played live music on the patio in the summer. She was just so fucking good.” Norah pointed at Jones with a slice of apple before she shoved it into her mouth. “I wish she hadn’t been.” She saw the look of confusion on Jones’ face. “She wanted to be a star. She thought she was good enough. A lot of people told her she could make it and she believed them.”
She took another bite of the sandwich, this one smaller, and managed to get veganaise only on the corner of her mouth. Her tongue found it before Jones had to point it out. “I told her to wait until she finished high school. I wanted her to finish.” She gestured toward herself with the sandwich. “I didn’t finish high school and look how I ended up.”
“You seem to be doing alright.”
“I’m still here,” she said, “but I could be somewhere better.”
Jones looked around the restaurant. “Seems like a nice place.”
“You’ve seen the burger place, the church, and here,” Norah said.
“And all of them were nice.”
“They better be, because there isn’t much else.” Norah picked up a chickpea that had fallen out of the sandwich and popped it in her mouth. “I understand how Lauren felt. I really do. I get wanting to get out of this place, but you can’t just walk away. You have to be prepared to leave, and the first thing you need is an education.”
“She disagreed?”
Norah spoke as she chewed. “Oh, she most definitely disagreed. It was the one thing we fought about. A few times, she got so mad about hearing me say the same thing again and again that she ran. The first time, she was gone for days. I was a fucking wreck.” Norah paused to pose. “Nothing like the totally together vision you see before you.” She laughed at herself and ate the last slice of apple. “People knew that Lauren was gone because they had seen me all over town looking for her. It’s hard to stay hidden in a small town. Word travels fast. I imagine everyone already knows about the one-armed man who ate lunch twice today. So, I’d get these calls from people telling me that they’d seen Lauren here or there, and I’d get in the car and drive out to wherever she was last seen, and every time I got there she would be gone.”
Jones watched Norah take a more measured bite of her sandwich so that she could keep talking. She was fighting a smile that was working its way onto her face.
“You know what I did?”
Jones shook his head.
“I put up posters.” Norah leaned across the table and spread her hands in the space between creating an invisible poster in between them. “Lost kitten. Answers to Lauren.” Norah laughed hard enough to send some of the food in her mouth onto the table. She used a napkin to wipe it and balled it up afterward without a hint of embarrassment; she was too interested in finishing the story. “I plastered the posters all over town. Everywhere. She saw one and came home to yell at me. We had one hell of a fight, but when it was over she stayed put.”
Jones smiled. He liked Norah. She was not what he expected, and he guessed that he was not the first person to feel that way. Norah lost her smile a second after she finished telling her story. Jones watched her lip as she slowly ran her tongue over her teeth. She had laughed and enjoyed her meal and now part of her was regretting it.
“The next time she ran, she ran farther. See, the first time was an impulse. She was mad at me for telling her what she couldn’t do, so she ran to prove she could. The second time wasn’t a reaction—it was a plan. She had saved money and made arrangements. I never saw it coming. She was just here one day and gone the next. I knew something was different that time because no one was calling me to tell me that they had seen her around town. I called the police that time, but all they did was file a report and tell me to be patient.” She shook her head. “Fucking cops tell me to be patient when my kid is missing.”
Norah stopped talking for a while and Jones made no effort to change that. Part of detective work is knowing that when people are telling you a story, you ought to get out of the way and let them tell it their way.
A tear fell down Norah’s cheek and she said, “She came back a month later. Wherever she had been, something happened to her there. She wouldn’t talk a
bout it. I didn’t push her to. I thought she would tell me when she was ready, but she never did.”
Norah took a small bite of the cookie, immediately regretted it, and put it down before she started to chew it.
“It was my fault. I knew something had happened and I handled it wrong. I was afraid to push her because I thought she would run again. I was selfish. I had her back and I was so happy—I didn’t want to lose that.”
Norah cried into her hands.
“I was so happy she was home, but she wasn’t happy.”
“Ever?” The question was a buoy to keep Norah from sinking into her grief. She took it.
She considered the question and remembered something that wasn’t dark. “She was happy at first, but something was different—there was an anger there that I hadn’t seen before. Something she couldn’t get past.”
“How long did she stay?”
“Longer than before, but I knew she would go again. I noticed her saving every penny she could, and she stopped telling me things. We still talked, but I could tell she was keeping things from me. And then one day,” Norah held her hand in front of her and mimed an explosion. “Poof, she was gone. I remember checking her room and finding it bare. If it had value and would fit in a backpack, she took it with her. It was like she had never even been there at all. That time, I knew she wouldn’t be coming back.” She gestured at Jones’ phone with her chin. “And I was right.”
15
Jones had listened to Norah’s story; on the walk back to the church, she answered his questions.
“When is her birthday?”
“October eleventh. She’s seventeen.”
“Does she have any family?”
“Lauren was born on a reserve not far from here. She was made a ward of the Crown when she was four and they took her away from her family. It was the wrong thing to do. She told me that before she came to live with me she had tried to go home. She thought that part of her was missing and that she would find it where she came from. She said she went back and felt there was community there. She said you could feel it the second you put your feet on the pavement.” Norah kicked a rock and watched it tilt off course. “She said she never felt so alone as she did right then. There was no home for her there. It was taken from her. She didn’t stay a single day. She said it was too hard being so close to something she felt like she couldn’t be a part of.”
“Did she have friends?”
“Sure. I can get you some numbers and email addresses.”
“I need a picture. The most recent one you have.”
“I’ll send one as soon as I get home.”
“She a lefty?”
Norah stopped walking and squinted at Jones. “How did you know that?”
Jones smiled. “I wouldn’t be much of a private detective if I told.”
Norah thought about it for a second. “The writing was smudged.”
Jones nodded. “Bingo.”
Norah smiled, but hers was sad. “Her hands were always covered in ink.”
When they got back to the church, Norah said, “You still haven’t told me why you’re doing this. You don’t know a thing about Lauren. Why do you care?”
Jones looked at the tree growing in front of the church. The tree looked like it was as old as the building. It had endured years in the same spot; maybe that was the trick—taking root. Jones looked at his feet and thought about how far he was from where he started and wondered what it meant for him.
“It’s a long story.”
“I got time.”
Jones shook his head. “Your lunch break is almost over.”
Norah laughed. “I’m working the phones at a church on a Wednesday afternoon. All I got is fucking time.”
“Does the priest know you swear this much?”
Norah smiled. “He knows. He also knows that no one else is interested in answering his phone for what he pays, so he puts up with it. He used to complain, but after the swear jar he put next to my desk paid for a new coffee maker, he shut up.”
“Six years ago—”
“This is a long story.”
“I warned you.”
“You did.” Norah leaned against the tree and wrapped her arms around herself to keep warm. “Well?”
“Six years ago, a woman came to me. I didn’t know it at the time, but she had been famous once. She had a lot of money, but that wasn’t why people knew her. She had been all over the papers about ten years before, when her son went missing. The story was everywhere. At first, the whole country was focused on the search for the eight-year-old boy, but as it dragged on, the country’s collective attention turned to her and began to question how her son could have gone missing from her own home in the middle of the day without her knowledge.”
Norah bit the inside of her cheek as she listened. Her mouth formed a small O when the story registered with something she remembered. “I think I know who you are talking about.”
“Maybe. The case was all over the media and got a lot of attention. The cops had dug into everything and the press picked the bones of whatever turned up. The story was front page material for months, A-section for a year, and then it pretty much disappeared from the papers. My client had the kind of influence that came with wealth and she spent that currency looking for her son. She hounded the police, persuaded the press to keep the story alive, but without leads, and without scandal, there was no traction. She kept trying, but eventually she only had enough influence left to get lip service and empty promises. Skip forward a few years, and she calls me.”
“Why?”
“Why me?”
“You said she was super rich, so why did she pick you? Do you work for rich people?”
Jones shrugged. “That was never the plan, but it’s how things worked out.”
“Another story?”
Jones nodded.
“Well?”
“It’s not important,” Jones said. “Anyway this woman comes across my name at a party and she has me brought to her home so that she can tell me a story about a little boy who was there one moment and gone the next. She asked me to find her son and offered to pay me very well to do it. I said no.”
“What?”
“We were talking about a high-profile case that had been in the news for a year. There was nothing I could do for her that the police hadn’t already done. They have more resources and are, despite what people might think, very good at their job.”
“What did she say?”
Jones smiled. “She called me an idiot. She said, ‘If they’re so good, where is my son?’”
Norah smiled. “I like her.”
“I did too. She offered me more money.”
“And you took the case.”
Jones shook his head. “I told her no again.”
“Why?”
“It was a cold case that had been worked by good investigators. I wasn’t going to take her money for something I couldn’t do.”
“Did she offer you more money?”
Jones shook his head. “She said, ‘He is out there and no one is looking.’” He paused for a moment and thought about the words; then, he held up his arm. “I had been out there once, and the only reason I came back was because there were people who didn’t give up on looking for me.”
“So you started looking.”
“I started working the case. We talked about the difficulties of a cold case like this, and I explained that it would not be the only investigation I was working. She understood and we agreed to meet once a month to talk about what I had found out. We have met seventy-three times.”
“You’ve been looking for six years?”
“And one month,” Jones said.
“Poor thing.”
“She’s the strongest broken thing I have ever come across.”
“Understand what?”
“Hope.” There was no light in Norah’s eyes when she said the word. “Hope is the worst kind of torture. Hope goes on forever. Hope won’t let you die.”
“There’s something worse,” Jones said and Norah let go of his elbow. “Knowing is worse than hope.”
16
“You found him?” Norah took a step back. “Was he . . . ?”
“No.”
Norah began to cry.
“The lost live in your head,” Jones said. “Hope feeds them and keeps them alive. Like any living thing, they grow bigger and bigger as time goes on. It gets harder and harder to carry the lost. You think you can’t do it anymore, but somehow you just keep carrying the weight day after day. Putting it down should be a relief, but it’s not. Somehow, it’s worse.”
Norah wiped away her tears with the back of her hand. “You’re not here for her. You’re here for you.”
“Yes,” Jones said.
“You’re here for hope.”
Jones nodded.
Norah took two fists of his coat. “I don’t care if you’re not here for her. Do you hear me? I don’t care because you think you can bring her back. She’s still out there and you think you can bring her back. Please—please bring her back to me.”
“I’ll try.”
“Do better than that. Promise me.”
Jones gently took hold of Norah’s hands and pulled her fists away from his chest. “This world hates promises. All I can do it try.”
Norah left Jones under the tree. He watched her close the door and then he walked back to the Jeep, thinking about what he had accomplished. He had a name and by tonight, after Norah got off work, he would have a picture. He got behind the wheel and took a second to cue up a playlist of rock music that had come out of Nashville that he planned to play loud enough to hurt his ears and kill his thoughts. Kings of Leon hit the speakers just as Jones noticed that he had a voicemail. He touched the phone and the music went quiet to make room for the message.