“Very funny,” Nadine said. “What have you heard from your husband, Mrs. Bennett?”
“Leave me and my family alone, and that includes my mother-in-law.” Abby brushed by the reporter and got into the car. Kate did the same.
“Will she ever give up?” Abby looked in the rearview as she drove away. Nadine was still there, standing inside the open door of her car, watching them.
“She just wants a story, a headline. Her ticket to the big leagues, I guess.”
“Maybe.” Abby said, but she thought there was more to it, that Nadine’s interest was more personal, and it scared her.
* * *
On what turned out to be Abby’s last afternoon at Kate’s, Dennis dropped by. Kate saw him and Abby into the living room, and after she had served coffee, she excused herself and left them sitting on opposite ends of her cream-colored leather sectional. Abby was nervous. She didn’t know what to say.
After a moment, Dennis sat forward. His hands were strong, long-fingered and graceful, and he held them in a loose clasp between his knees. He was dressed in jeans and a blue work shirt with the sleeves rolled to his elbows.
She said, “I’ve never seen you out of uniform.”
“I was ordered to take the day off,” he said.
“My daughter and my husband have been missing nearly a month,” she said.
Dennis’s gaze was intent, gentle. “It’s possible we’ll never find them.”
Abby pressed her lips together, feeling heat gather in the front of her skull.
“It was some thirty-plus inches of rain in two days. We lost nearly all the crossings and a lot of the bridges on most of the major roads. There’s a lot of wild country, a lot of canyons and gorges. There were rock slides, places where the entire cliff face came down. We’ve got secondary roads buried under rubble or torn up by the water from one end of a three-county area to the other. Every river flowed out of its banks, and when you get that kind of water raging that way, it gets a hold on things—cars, houses, trees, what-have-you—and it takes them wherever it wants.”
Dennis spoke of the water as if it were conscious, as if it had mind and will, a brain. “There’s a lot of ground to cover, miles and miles crisscrossed by rivers and streams and creeks, and frankly, there’s just a whole lot of it that’s not accessible at all, not even on a good day.”
Abby studied the pattern of veins on the backs of Dennis’s hands, the cording of blue that traced the pale flesh inside one wrist and disappeared into the crook of an elbow, a sprinkling of freckles on his forearms. She looked at his kind face, his hazel eyes. The delicate netting of lines at the corners suggested exposure to sun and laughter. He didn’t like having to tell her these things, having to prepare her for the worst. He hadn’t liked questioning her in the first hours after her arrival here. She was sorry for him.
He pushed his untouched mug of coffee a little farther toward the center of the coffee table and continued. “Let’s say they were on Highway 46 like the attendant at the Shell station said, but they got off for some reason, took one of the ranch roads, by accident maybe, and we don’t know that, but if they did, then— Well, there’s no telling. Now there are still crews out, clearing and repairing, and so forth. They’ll be at it for weeks so it’s possible they could come across something, you know?”
She nodded.
“I just don’t want to give you false hope.”
She thought of saying she would settle for any kind of hope, false or otherwise.
He shifted his elbows off his knees and straightened, looking uncomfortable, and as if he could read her anxiety, he spoke quickly. “It’s like I’ve said before, it would be really helpful if I knew what your husband had in mind coming out here, or where he was headed after he left Boerne, assuming that was your Cherokee the kid saw leaving the gas station.”
It would be helpful if you knew? The retort rose like acid. It brought Abby to her feet. She went to the wall of glass and looked out, seeking relief in the view. The scene was as still, as quiet and lovely as a painting. Even the water was undisturbed by all but the faintest tracing of ripples. It was impossible to imagine that it had ever flung itself over its banks and run amok across ground that wasn’t its own. Nature was so full of cruel tricks.
She wondered how she could take on the mystery that the water had left behind, the one Dennis seemed to think she should be able to resolve. He kept asking her questions, all manner of questions, to which she had no answers. What must he think of a wife who didn’t know her husband’s destination, a mother who would let her daughter leave home without knowing exactly where her father was taking her? You can make a lot of mistakes in your life trying to figure out what matters. Nick’s line to Jake passed through Abby’s mind. What mistakes?
She turned to face Dennis. “We’ve been over this a dozen times.”
“I know, but it’s always possible you’ll remember something new. So, you mentioned that you and your husband had talked of retiring out here. Could he have been looking at land?”
“No. We couldn’t possibly afford to buy property right now.” Abby thrust up her hands. “We have two children, one in college, another one on her way there. There’s the mortgage, car payments. Nick just bought a new BMW. He’s crazy about cars, so is my son.”
“He was worried about finances, then.”
“I’ve told you, not more than the average husband and father.” Exasperated, Abby crossed her arms. “Did you talk to Joe Drexler, Nick’s law partner? Did he tell you how unfounded those allegations are about the settlement money?”
“He confirmed what you said. Helix Belle’s legal team is trying to muddy the water, which is what I figured. It’s just—” Dennis stopped as if to consider.
“Just what?” Abby prompted.
Dennis met her glance. “Can you think of anyone who might have had a reason to follow your husband? Maybe an associate or one of your husband’s clients? Someone who could have had a grudge or just wanted to talk with him? Outside the office, so to speak.”
“Why are you asking me that? The firm does mostly civil litigation. Even Nick would say it’s boring, not that it doesn’t get stressful at times. Some clients can be very—” Abby broke off, looking at the tag end of a memory...a discussion from a few weeks ago, a heated discussion she’d had with Nick about his hours. He’d brought up a client then, a woman who was being difficult about some real-estate matter Nick hadn’t adequately represented her interests in or something. Abby hadn’t listened really. She frowned now, hunting in her mind for a place where Nick might have mentioned the woman again, not finding it. Why hadn’t she paid closer attention? It seemed as if she’d let so many things, little telling details, slip by her.
“You remember something?” Dennis asked.
Abby shook her head. Why go into it? She had no facts, not even a name. “Nick’s had his share of difficult clients, but nothing out of the ordinary. He would have told me. We don’t keep secrets from each other.” That I know of...
The words hung unspoken.
* * *
The morning following Dennis’s visit, Abby showered and dressed in her own clothes, the ones she’d arrived in. She stowed her toothbrush and the assorted toiletries and underwear she’d purchased in a grocery sack, then changed the sheets on the guest-room bed. She was folding back the coverlet when Kate appeared in the doorway.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“I have to go,” Abby said, gathering the bed linen and the small pile of dirty clothes she’d borrowed from Kate into her arms.
“Go where?” Kate followed Abby through the kitchen into the laundry room.
“Home,” Abby answered.
“You can’t stay by yourself,” George said from where he was sitting in the kitchen having toast and reading the morning newspaper. Abby not
iced the headline concerned the cost of the flood damage. Three quarters of a billion dollars so far, it read. Did that figure include the loss of her family, she wondered. Could a dollar amount be put on that?
“It’s too soon,” Kate said. “We want you here, where we can keep an eye on you.”
“I have to go home sometime,” Abby said. “I don’t like leaving Mama on her own for so long, and there are the horses. My neighbor, Charlie Wister, has been looking after them for me, but I can’t expect him to keep feeding them forever.”
George and Kate eyed her worriedly.
“Come on, guys. I’ll be fine.” She made herself smile. “I’m ready. As ready as I’ll ever be.”
It wasn’t true. In fact, she was afraid of going home, of being alone. For the rest of your life? asked a horrified voice in her mind. But there was another voice in her mind, too, a louder one, that kept asking questions, such as what if Nick and Lindsey had amnesia and somehow recovered and went home, and no one was there? What if they didn’t remember her cell number and called the home number and no one answered? What if they were already there and Abby was the one missing?
She was convinced, and rationality had nothing to do with it, that if only she were home everything would fall into place. Nick and Lindsey would arrive there, too. Their survival would make headline news. Someone from Primetime or 48 Hours would call to do the story. Even Nadine Betts would say it was a miracle.
But when Abby returned, her house was deserted, the same as the day she’d left it, and Kate was right. It was too soon. Abby wouldn’t last a month on her own.
Chapter 5
Ordinarily Abby loved coming home, especially in the spring. Every curve of asphalt that led to the house was lavishly dressed in frilled masses of azaleas and camellias under a higher canopy of dogwood and redbud trees. There were drifts of daffodils, too, mixed with oxalis and wild sweet violets. She and Nick had planned the approach to the house deliberately in a way that would cause a driver to slow and take time to admire the view, but turning onto her street now, her stomach was in knots even as her head filled with ruthless, foolish hope.
But the moment she caught sight of the driveway, her heart collapsed into despair. It was a mess, buried under layers of debris, the obvious effects of a storm. She went slowly toward the house, wincing at the sound as the tires crunched over downed thickets of leaf-clotted limbs. Who was going to clean it up? Who was here but her? And what about the rest of it? There were three acres to mind, plus the house, plus the horses and the barn.
Abby set her foot on the brake. She studied the house, noting the pale square of light that glowed from the dining room, and above that, on the second floor, the window that looked into her and Nick’s bedroom was cracked open. She didn’t recall leaving a light on or a window open when she’d left for the Hill Country, but she must have. No one else had been here since the flood. Not even Jake. When she parked around back and got out, a horse nickered softly. Miss Havisham? Abby’s throat closed. She wanted to leave but pushed herself across the driveway toward the back porch, noting the loosened handrail lying where she’d left it on the steps and her Wellies, caked with manure, sitting in the corner where she’d discarded them. She opened the door, and the acrid stench of mildew hit her—from the load of jeans she’d tossed into the washer on Saturday in the half hour before she’d sat down to look at the seed catalogue. In the waning moments of her ordinary life.
The phone rang, breaking the silence, startling her, and she ran to answer it, grabbing it up as if it were her lifeline. “Hello!?”
“Abby?”
“Katie!” Of course it wasn’t Lindsey or Nick.
“Are you okay? Is it okay, being there?”
“It’s weird.”
“Weird, how?”
Abby looked around, unsure how to answer. She passed her glance over the familiar surroundings that no longer felt familiar, that somehow seemed to accuse her: Lindsey’s basketball game schedule and Jake’s class schedule pinned to the refrigerator, the dish towel hanging askew on the oven door handle. Her dishes in the sink, the seed catalogue open on the table. She looked at the Texas Highways calendar over her desk. The picture was of bluebonnets, the month showing was April.
Last month. BTF, she thought.
“Abby?” Kate prompted.
“It’s fine. I’m fine.” She hugged herself, suppressing a shiver.
“Louise called here looking for you. She said you aren’t answering your cell.”
“She keeps pressing me about having a memorial service.” Abby let her fingertips fall onto the pages of her notebook open on the desktop, where she sometimes wrote her to-do list, or her thoughts, or perhaps a bit of silly poetry. There was a line written there from last month: The first bluebonnets have opened, she had jotted. The ground under the oak trees in back is saturated in blue. A pool of blue.
“Abby?”
“She thinks I’m not handling the situation properly, that I’m not facing facts.” Abby closed the notebook.
“You need time, that’s all. Listen, I had to tell her you were on your way home.”
“Well, she was bound to know sooner or later.”
“Just so you know, she told me if you don’t answer her calls pretty soon, she’s coming there.”
Abby closed her eyes and thought how calamity changed everything, how it shifted an entire landscape, a whole solar system that had once been orderly and well-loved, into something that was dark and cold and even sinister. And she realized she was angry about this, and the anger was foreign to her and it filled her with foreboding.
“Abby? I’m here if you need me. You call me day or night. I don’t care what time it is.”
“Okay,” Abby said. “Thank you,” she added and clenched her jaw to stop the wretched tears.
“Remember to eat.”
“I will.”
“Promise me.”
“I promise.”
“I don’t want to let you go, chickie.” Kate sounded forlorn.
“Well, you have to. I have mildewy jeans in the washer and I’m going to pass out from the smell.”
“Vinegar,” Kate said. “Wash them in vinegar and then hang them in the sun to dry.”
The sun, Abby thought. She hated the sun almost as much as she hated the rain.
But she washed the jeans using vinegar as Kate instructed and hung them outside to dry. She called Charlie next door and thanked him for tending the horses and mowing the grass. She checked on her mother. There was more of everything she could have done, but she couldn’t focus, couldn’t organize herself, couldn’t think of anything other than Nick and Lindsey. That they weren’t home, with her. How could it be? Her bones, her teeth, the sockets of her eyes ached with her need for them, her need to know they were safe.
The following afternoon she went upstairs intending to tidy up, gather the rest of the laundry, but then she didn’t get any farther than the doorway of Lindsey’s bedroom. Her pink-and-white eyelet bedroom. Too pink, Lindsey had said not long ago. She had wanted to paint it. Yellow? Abby seemed to recall something about yellow. And sunflowers; Lindsey had mentioned sunflowers, but when she’d asked her dad, he had said they didn’t have money to redecorate a room she’d be leaving in just a couple of years when she went off to college. Abby had been surprised. Nick almost never said no to Lindsey. He was easier on her than on Jake. Abby had worried about it. It had been a sore subject between her and Nick, one they had argued about on a regular basis.
It seemed to Abby now, in retrospect, that they had argued more frequently in the weeks leading up to the flood. There had been that night in March or maybe early April...he’d had a dinner meeting in Houston with a client and he’d come home late, been wound up and irritable. She’d been in the laundry room folding a load of clothes from the dryer, and he’d
come to the doorway to greet her. She saw him there in her mind’s eye, staring in at her, gripping his briefcase, looking rumpled and worn out in his suit, tie hanging askew.
“What’s wrong?” It had been the first thing out of her mouth. But what other question do you ask when your husband comes home from work looking wrecked?
“Nothing,” he’d said. Abby remembered his kiss, dry as an afterthought.
She should have let it go; instead she’d made the mistake of saying it was the third night in a week he’d missed dinner. She hadn’t meant anything other than she missed him, missed sitting down to dinner together, but he’d treated it like an attack.
“Do you think I like working my ass off?” he’d demanded. “How else do you think we’re going to pay for all of this?” He’d gone on, enumerating their expenses, lumping in the prospect of Lindsey’s college tuition.
“She could get a scholarship to play basketball somewhere. Everyone seems to think she’ll only get better,” Abby had said, following him into their bathroom.
He had yanked off his tie.
Abby leaned against the door frame of Lindsey’s bedroom now, seeing it, the way Nick had yanked his tie as if it were a noose around his neck. She remembered the sinking feeling it had given her. He’d looked so tired that night. So—defeated. The word rose in her mind. The way he’d looked had made her want to go to him and say, Please, can we drop this? Can we just go to bed? Just lie down and hold each other? But she hadn’t said anything. She didn’t know why. She remembered that she’d finished cleaning her face, gone to the wastebasket, dropped in the used cotton pad and paused there, hardly listening to the rest of Nick’s rant, somehow losing herself in a dream of smoothing the soft skin beneath his eyes, trailing her fingertips over his lips, watching his mouth curl in that slow, sweet smile.
She’d been thinking of the dimple in his left cheek when he’d said her name—
“Abby!”
Evidence of Life Page 5