Evidence of Life

by Barbara Taylor Sissel

  He thumbs them away, then cups her cheek in his hand.

  She covers it with her own and when he softly tells her, “I didn’t mean to scare you,” she believes him.

  Chapter 8

  Abby answered her mother’s phone, heard Dennis Henderson’s voice and froze.

  He apologized. “I keep scaring you, and it’s the last thing I want to do.”

  “How did you know where I was?”

  “Jake. I called him when I couldn’t get you on your cell phone or at your home number. He said he’s working a landscaping job near A&M, that he’s staying there for the summer.”

  Abby’s “Umm,” was noncommittal. Their living arrangements were her business.

  “Well, I have no special reason for calling. I thought I’d stay in touch, if it’s all right with you.”

  “It’s a free country,” Abby said, and she didn’t really care how Dennis took it.

  But he wasn’t put off as Abby imagined he might be. He continued to call almost weekly, and after a while, she found she looked forward to their conversations. She learned that he was forty-five and that he’d once been married for twelve years to his high school sweetheart. There were no children.

  “She liked the city life in Austin too much to leave it,” Dennis said about his ex-wife one afternoon.

  Abby thought about it and realized she couldn’t picture Dennis in a city. She stirred lemon into her glass of iced tea. “Kate told me you’re neighbors.”

  “We are, but my place isn’t near as big. It’s just enough to mess around on. I run a few head of cattle, grow a few things.”

  Abby wondered what he grew, thinking it would be feed corn, something practical.

  But he said, “Orchids,” when she asked. Someone had given him a phalaenopsis and when it bloomed, he was hooked. He’d built a greenhouse, experimented with hybridization. “It’s a hobby, nothing special.”

  She said she didn’t know much about growing orchids, that she’d always been too scared of them to try. “I love to garden, though. Mostly vegetables. It’s my therapy.”

  He laughed. “Cheaper than drugs.”

  She said she wasn’t sure about that, her habit was pretty bad, and when Dennis laughed again, Abby did, too. He had a nice laugh, warm and comfortable. Falling asleep that night, she thought he had a way of making her feel safe; she thought she could trust him.

  * * *

  They didn’t talk about the flood. Abby wanted to, and yet she was afraid. She didn’t know why Dennis didn’t bring it up. Maybe he was sick of it. Maybe he thought it would remind her, as if it wasn’t always there in the forefront of her mind. Whatever the reason was for their mutual silence on the subject, the sense of it hung in the off-stage shadows of every conversation, a bad actor awaiting an opening cue. And then one warm evening in late July, after they had talked a few minutes, Abby carried her cell phone outside. She didn’t want her mother to overhear. She’d only worry, and Abby was tired of that, of being the source of it. She was worn out from trying to pretend she was okay, that she was moving on. She was sick of the mystery, of being left, marooned in this weird place with no answers. She perched on the edge of a wrought-iron garden chair and asked Dennis about the other survivors, because as little as she wanted to hear their stories, there was something else inside her that needed to know whether there were other people like her who were suffering the same terrible uncertainty. As perverse as it was, she wanted company in her misery.

  But Dennis couldn’t help her. It didn’t matter how reluctant he was to answer or that when he did his voice was filled with regret. The fact was that her husband and daughter were the only victims whose bodies had not been recovered. And when he added, “at least not so far,” Abby thought it was out of kindness to her, not out of any real hope that they would ever be located. She wanted to leave the awful subject, but now that she had opened it up, she couldn’t. “I heard you mention a woman once,” she said, “Patsy something? She left home when the roads were washing out to go to the grocery store and after the water went down, you found her truck, but you didn’t find her.”

  “Oh, you mean Patsy Doggett.”

  Dennis’s voice carried measures of relief, even the lilt of joy, which could only mean the story had a happy ending. Abby clenched her teeth.

  “She got to her sister’s place somehow after her truck flooded out,” Dennis said. “It was pretty amazing. She’s eighty something, did you know? She and her husband Lloyd are coming up on fifty-four years together.”

  Abby stared into the welling darkness, and she was silent so long that Dennis finally asked if he’d upset her. “No, it’s fine,” she said. “Amazing, like you said. A miracle, right?”

  “More like a fluke. Abby? You shouldn’t—”

  “I’m not assuming anything, Dennis. Honestly,” she added.

  * * *

  Outside of Dennis and Louise, who called weekly, Abby had almost no contact with anyone. She had thought she wanted to be left alone, and it surprised her how much it hurt. She could understand why her neighbors didn’t make the drive into Houston to see her, but they could have picked up the phone, couldn’t they? And then there were Nick’s law partners. Only Joe Drexler, the most senior partner in the firm, had called, and one or two of the other partners’ wives had made the effort, but the conversations were brief, perfunctory, and gave Abby a bad feeling. As the summer wore on, their avoidance of her began to feel deliberate, somehow ominous. Her mother excused it. She said they didn’t know what to do or say. They were waiting for a sign from her.

  To accept what was obvious, Abby thought.

  Louise put it bluntly one day at the end of August. “We need to move on, dear,” she said. “It’s what Nick and Lindsey would want us to do. They would want us to get on with our lives.”

  “Why do people always say that?” Abby asked. “As if they know what the dead would want.”

  “Well, surely you don’t think they want us to grieve forever, do you? I mean, I know we will, always, on some level. It’s difficult, but it isn’t as if you’re alone, dear. Neither of us is.”

  “What do you propose, then? What is your advice for how I should get on with it? I don’t play golf or bridge.” Abby referenced Louise’s two favorite pastimes, and she regretted her sarcasm; she hadn’t really meant to be flippant. In fact she was glad Louise had these routine distractions to occupy her time; they kept her in Dallas. Otherwise she might have been here, driving Abby crazy.

  Louise had fallen silent; something she almost never did, and Abby slid from her mother’s kitchen stool, sensing trouble, disapproval, an argument, she didn’t know what. A knot of rebellion tightened beneath her breastbone. She put her knuckled fist there. “Louise?” she prompted.

  “I’ve been talking to Joe, Abby, and he thinks we should plan a memorial service. Now I know what you’re going to say—”

  “No.” Abby paced to her mother’s kitchen door and looked out.

  “But, dear, think of Nick’s clients, his associates, they would like to pay their respects. We need to give them a way to do that.”

  “Why? What do we owe them?”

  “It’s what people do, what they expect. It’s what convention calls for.” Louise’s voice quavered with her conviction, her belief that this was so.

  “You’re worried about what people will think, your church friends. But I don’t care what they think, Louise, and I don’t intend to give my family up for dead simply to satisfy someone’s notion of what’s acceptable.”

  “It isn’t only about you, Abby. I want to lay my son and my sweet granddaughter to rest. I want to see them in heaven with God. Please, will you consider it?” Louise’s voice broke.

  But Abby said, “No,” and she might have felt a sharper pang of remorse for how hard she was on Louise, if she
had not been so furious at Joe Drexler.

  Abby didn’t bother calling him. She didn’t want to give him the opportunity to refuse to speak to her. Instead, she went that afternoon unannounced to the office, determined to make him talk. Even though she knew neither he nor the other partners would appreciate her barging into their domain; they wouldn’t expect it from her. Sweet, quiet, amenable Abby. That was how they viewed her, how everyone saw her. She was compliant. Soft. A creampuff. She hadn’t minded before, but it was different now. Everything was different. She’d lost her family, lost herself.

  She stepped off the elevator, and her head went swimmy; she felt faintly nauseated. From anxiety, she guessed. The half-panicked state she seemed to live in these days. She pushed open the glass doors to the reception area. Deserted. She found her way to Joe’s office, and ignoring his assistant’s squeal of protest, she flung open his door.

  He had his feet on the desk and his nose in some file, and when he looked up, Abby watched his surprise morph into consternation. “Abby!” He took his feet down and straightened himself.

  “I couldn’t stop her,” the assistant said from behind Abby.

  “It’s all right, Jessica.” To Abby, he said, “I’m glad you came. I’ve been meaning to call you. Do you want something to drink? Coffee? Iced tea? Jessica, do we have iced tea made?”

  “I don’t want any iced tea,” Abby said. “I want you to explain why you would discuss holding a memorial service for my husband and daughter with my mother-in-law without a word to me.”

  Joe dismissed Jessica, asking her to close the door. He asked Abby to have a seat and she did. She wanted to appear cooperative so that he would tell her what he knew. Because he knew something; he was hiding something from her. She was convinced of it.

  He spent some time apologizing. He should have been in touch with her, checked up on her.

  Abby interrupted him. “Why did Nick go there? Why did he go to the Hill Country in April?”

  “What do you mean? I suppose he went to relax, to spend time with Lindsey.”

  “It’s too late for secrets.”

  “Secrets?” Joe seemed perplexed, but Abby didn’t trust him.

  She persisted. “You know about the surveillance tape; Dennis—Sheriff Henderson told me you saw it. So did I. It’s not Nick; it couldn’t be.”

  When Joe didn’t answer immediately, Abby’s heart paused. “You don’t think it was him, do you?”

  “I couldn’t say. The film quality was—”

  “But Nick was here in his office working that day. He couldn’t have been in San Antonio, too.”

  “I remember he was here that morning, but after that, I don’t know.”

  “You’re saying Nick didn’t come back from lunch that afternoon?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Well, he was home at the usual time that evening.” Abby said this as if it were carved somewhere in stone, as if her memory of that day were photographic, unimpeachable, but, like Joe, she wasn’t sure.

  He brought up Adam, as if that might distract Abby, saying it was a mystery to him why the authorities had released Adam on bail. “I heard they didn’t even bother taking his passport.”

  Abby spoke over Joe. “You suspect Nick, don’t you? That’s why you haven’t called, because you couldn’t face me!” She could scarcely hear her own voice over the frightened thumping of her heart.

  Joe denied it. He said his oversight had nothing to do with who was or wasn’t on the surveillance tape. He was annoyed at her now, and while she could see that he pitied her, too, he was struggling to maintain his composure. Abby had worked here once; she could read the signs; she knew patience wasn’t his strong suit.

  He said, “Look, I told the San Antonio D.A. when he questioned me that Nick was cleared of all suspicion back in December when the business about the missing funds was exposed and Adam was arrested.”

  “And?” Abby prompted.

  “And nothing,” Joe said shortly. “But the whole thing with the surveillance tape is up in the air. Even the ID of Adam Sandoval is shaky. Until he’s caught or other evidence comes to light, any discussion of who is on the tape and what they’re up to is pure speculation.”

  A taut silence fell.

  Abby broke it. “Nick was supposed to testify for the prosecution when Adam was brought to trial.”

  “Nick and a half dozen others who work here. This isn’t about taking out witnesses. You’ve watched too many movies.”

  “But who’s to say—?”

  “There’s nothing there, Abby. Trust me.”

  But Abby didn’t. She couldn’t, and she looked through the window behind Joe, taking a moment to gather herself.

  He said, “I remember when Nick first talked about bringing the suit against Helix Belle. He’d heard from those folks, the Rileys. Friends of your family, aren’t they?”

  “We knew them, but only slightly. We met them when Jake played Little League.”

  “I didn’t want anything to do with that case.” Joe fiddled with his pen, keeping his eye on it. “There wasn’t an attorney in town who wanted to touch it. It still surprises me that Nick took the risk. I didn’t think we’d see a dime. I remember asking him where he intended to work once he drove us into bankruptcy over it.”

  Abby didn’t like the bitter edge in Joe’s voice, but she understood it. She’d been unhappy with Nick, too. But who could have known how complicated it would all get? On that Sunday afternoon two years ago when Doug and Wendy Riley had first appeared on her doorstep with their huge, heartrending story, they hadn’t wanted anything more than a referral to an attorney who would be willing to take on a corporate giant like Helix Belle on a contingency basis. By then, their son Casey’s medical difficulties had sapped most of their financial resources, and they, along with the rest of the affected families, had been turned away by a number of other law firms. Nick had been their last resort. Abby would never forget how stunned she was, as astonished as Wendy and Doug, as Joe himself, when Nick had offered his services and those of his firm. Somebody needs to show these guys they can’t hurt little kids and walk away, Nick had said. Somebody needs to hold their feet to the fire. He had paced and raised his voice. Abby had been a bit embarrassed by his fervor. She had wondered where it came from.

  Wendy had cried, she’d been so relieved to have Nick’s legal counsel; Doug had been almost incoherent in his gratitude. But Abby had been disturbed. “Can you really afford to represent them?” she had asked Nick later. “You’re always telling me cases like this can take years. You could lose everything.”

  Jesus Christ, Abby, does it always have to be about the money? Nick’s reply skittered down the corridor of Abby’s memory. She watched him, in her mind’s eye, as he dropped to the edge of the sofa. “Maybe I can make a difference,” she remembered him saying. “Do something good for once for people who can really use my help.”

  That poor family; their poor kid…

  Abby had felt awful for the Rileys, too, but she remembered wanting to ask Nick: What about your own family? What about your kids? We can’t afford your altruism. But in the end, she had walked away, expecting Nick to sort it out. She’d had plenty of her own issues, like a household to run on a shoestring and doses of altruism. They’d weathered the argument or whatever it had been. At least she’d thought they had, but maybe not. Nothing had ever felt quite right since that Sunday afternoon, had it?

  She looked at Joe now. “I didn’t want Nick to take on that case either.”

  “Well, no, but it’s got nothing to do with his disappearance.”

  “Something happened.”

  “Abby—”

  “You don’t have to protect me, Joe.”

  “I have no idea what you’re—”

  “Nick told me about a client he had rec
ently, a woman who accused him of not handling her interests properly in a real estate case. He said she made threats. What do you know about that?”

  Joe sat back. “Nick doesn’t handle cases involving real estate, not as a rule. What are you getting at now?”

  Joe’s annoyance was mixed with bewilderment that seemed genuine. Still, Abby pursued it. “Maybe there was other client trouble. Or maybe something was going on internally here. Dennis asked me whether I thought someone might have been following Nick. He didn’t mention the possibility to you?”

  “No, because there is nothing. No conspiracy, no—”

  “But suppose there was? And it’s somehow related to Nick’s and Lindsey’s disappearance?” Abby said disappearance because she didn’t want to say kidnapping, even though she could not get the word, or its possible ramification, out of her mind.

  Joe opened his mouth and then closed it, making a flat, disapproving line. He was through talking.

  And that was fine, Abby thought. At least he wouldn’t toss the idea of holding a memorial service at her. Her visit had accomplished that much. She drew her purse over her shoulder, keeping Joe’s gaze as she stood up. “Even Sheriff Henderson asked me to go over certain details with him several times because he said sometimes we will remember something new that can be helpful.”

  “If I were to remember anything, Abby, of course, I would let the authorities know.”

  Abby thanked him. Joe said he’d walk her out, that he had to be in court, but she said, no, she was going to the ladies’ room. She couldn’t stand another moment in his company.

  * * *

  Abby was grateful to find the restroom deserted. Bending over the basin, she washed her hands and patted her cheeks with her damp palms in an effort to cool down, to calm herself, and when she thought she had given Joe enough time to leave the building, she went to Nick’s office. The door was open, but she stopped short of crossing the threshold, for a moment convinced she had made a mistake. It was so neat. Even Nick’s desk, which was usually buried under a litter of paper, was eerily sterile, design-photo clean. Behind it, the assortment of family pictures he kept on the credenza appeared untouched, and the pair of framed, signed Leroy Neiman lithographs that Abby had bought for him when he’d made partner still hung on the wall. But the clutter that was uniquely his own filing system was gone, as if since he’d vanished someone couldn’t wait to tidy up. Abby felt a renewed jolt of alarm like a punch to her solar plexus. Her earlier aggravation freshened its heat. The nerve, that was one thing she thought as she walked behind the desk, but it was tangled with a colder panic, a more distraught sense that despite Joe’s reassurances, something awful was happening or had happened that affected her and her family, and she was deliberately being kept in the dark about it.