by Lisa Preston
“No, no, no,” he wailed, fists over his eyes.
“Greer?” Emma said. “What’s with you?”
She reached for him but he blew past his parents, who were coming down the hall, and went straight to his room, slamming the door.
“What’s going on?” Bella asked.
“I don’t know,” Emma said, pointing behind her. “He just went to pieces when Doug came in.”
Bella and Ardy looked at one another and made faces. It was too much. It had to be faced, figured out.
“Greer,” Ardy hollered, “get out here right now.”
After a quiet pause, Greer came down the hall.
“What’s the deal, buddy?” Ardy demanded.
“I pictured that!” Greer pointed an accusing finger at Doug. “In my head!”
They all looked, puzzled. Bella spoke softly. “What are you upset about?”
“I thought he’d bring trout home and he did!”
While Ardy told Greer to quit winding himself up over nothing, while Bella looked hurt when the boy shoved away from her hugs, and Doug watched it all in expressionless silence, Emma decided she didn’t want to have kids.
On her drive back to Seattle for four days of city life, Emma wished her mother would talk to her while she was on the highway. Oh, not when you’re driving, sweetie.
This meant two hours of quiet car time to mull the questionnaire she saw her mom completing in advance of taking Greer to the shrink.
No, there had been no death in the family, no, they hadn’t even lost a pet. No, the parents weren’t on the verge of divorce. There wasn’t violence in the household. No, there wasn’t a second language spoken at home, everyone was on the same page, so to speak. No, there was no history of an anxiety disorder in the family. No, he didn’t enjoy his usual activities of late. No, he didn’t get along as well as he used to with others. No, he wasn’t being bullied at school—they had asked about this six ways to Sunday. The school’s contribution was the complaint that he fell asleep in class and didn’t care about his grades anymore. No, no, no.
She knew her mom talked to the second-and fourth-grade teachers as well, in case Greer’s friends in other grades had some undiscovered calamity, but there was nothing to discover.
The post-psychiatrist-visit phone call came Monday, while Emma was chopping a mass of onions that would go into soups, stir-fry, and the next day’s quiches. Emma answered on the third ringing chime. “Oh, Mom. How’d it go?”
“He seemed disappointed in the answers to that list of questions. He wanted to do a lot of testing. He’s diagnosed schizophrenia and bipolar disorder, but not in children. He wants to refer us to another specialist.”
Emma didn’t like the sound of this. “Mom, Greer’s not crazy. He’s your basic, weirdo little Donner kid.”
Her knuckles turned white as she grasped the knife in the onslaught of her mom’s experience. The psychiatrist had covered a lot of the same ground on Greer as other medical professionals. He’d read the doctors’ charts and reports that Bella and Ardy sent ahead of the appointment. But when she pressed on about how Greer said he was fine and wouldn’t talk about anything bothering him, the doctor talked about something called selective mutism. He was intrigued and told Bella that psychotherapy might help so now they had an appointment with another doctor.
“Selective mutism?” Emma repeated.
“Yes. I’ve never heard of it before. Have you?”
“Er, no. Mutism, like, silent?” Emma scraped the chopped onions into a large steel bowl with the side of her chef’s knife, then went into the office, plopping down in the desk chair since nobody else was around.
“I didn’t really get it. It doesn’t make sense to me. Nothing about this does.”
Emma allowed herself an exasperated snort as she started clicking away on the bistro’s computer. The mountains and trees prevented a decent connection at her folks’ house, making cell service unreliable and the Internet connection ungodly slow. “Mom, go to Ben’s place and look it up online, that way you know as much as you can before you start talking to the doctor.”
“Can you look it up?”
“Yeah, I am, right now,” Emma said, squinting at the computer screen. “But it’s … I think you must have misunderstood, because Greer is anything but mute, and these articles are about, you know, really being silent. Like, kids who don’t talk.”
“It’s a kid thing? Like this happens to a lot of kids?” Bella asked.
“Well, I guess so, but this isn’t really what Greer’s deal is, is it? You need something else.”
“No, yes,” Bella said. “Anyway, the guy they referred us to doesn’t specialize in treating children. And they really recommend we take Greer someplace that treats just kids. Then he said, ‘Talk to him about his feelings, be consistent, and don’t criticize regressive behavior.’ Don’t you think advice should be helpful?”
“I do.”
“And that’s not the worst of it. Are you ready? Then the psychiatrist said that Greer shows signs of having been abused.”
“Abused?”
“Yes. That’s the thing. They think he’s been abused. This was after the guy spent time alone with Greer. That was his best guess.”
They needed help, great help. Something was wrong and getting worse. “Mom, I’ve got this. Wait for me.”
The others all promised to spend more weekends home, in a show of solidarity, keeping Greer busy enough that he had to fall deeply asleep, hopefully too tired for nightmares. In fact, the adult kids coordinated, Ben and Doug spending Greer-time during the week and making way for the nonlocals on Saturdays and Sundays so that the almost-empty nest stayed full.
“Clara, could you go home this weekend?”
“Oh, Wes would be so thrilled,” Clara said, in a tone that Emma couldn’t decipher. “Aren’t you going?”
“Can’t.” Her priorities changed. Emma prowled the city with a determined set to her jaw, glad that Frankie had no qualms about talking on the cell phone while driving. He’d talk on an airplane if he could get away with it.
“What are you looking for?” he asked again.
“A coffeehouse in the city where you played guitar years and years ago.”
“But there were so many,” he laughed.
“Figure it out. I need you to remember this one location.”
“Why?”
“It will help me find someone who can help Greer.”
“Oh.” Frankie’s voice sobered, and he prodded her back. “Was I playing with other people? Was it an open mic?”
“Your show. And you had a CD for sale.”
“And some of your cakes were for sale?”
“No, no. Way before I went to cooking school.” That’s what she always called it, not the culinary arts institute. Emma denied herself the prestige she’d earned. She was just Emma. “We were sixteen, seventeen, maybe a bit older …”
“Remember the day of the week?”
“Probably a Friday or Saturday night. Oh.” She snapped her fingers. “The night Clara first introduced Wes to us.” She remembered her awe. Clara and Wes, meeting early in college, set for life, even before they went to law school. Clara always had a plan for success. The Donner family hotshot. But Clara was willing to bring Emma along, had tried to fix her up. Her office was lousy with lawyers that Clara wanted to set Emma up with. Emma had started telling her sister no thanks, and now she really meant it. She was going to talk to the bank in her hometown about a loan that would surprise them all.
Frankie blew raspberries, working to recall. “That was forever ago. But Clara can get us close to the right date, then I can look it up on old notes, I bet.”
“Do.” She set her hopes now not just on finding this man again, but that he would have the words to restore Greer to the happy little boy he’d been not long ago.
He’d had that fall when Clipper spooked out from under him, but came home fine. Sure, he’d been a long time getting back, lost in the dark and
probably more scared than he’d admit, but he’d been lost before. Half a day once when he wandered onto the wrong trail while hiking with Ben and Ryan. Doug had probably left him unattended too long while fishing, wading far and deep. Gram had left him at a store once when she was doing errands, but Gram forgetting him in town was one of Greer’s personal favorites, a story he loved to tell and hear. How he used to laugh about that.
Her mom said Greer never laughed anymore.
Frankie came through because it was for Greer and everyone seemed to think the boy was falling over the edge. Within days, he called his sister, rattling off dates and locations of his early gigs, the unpaid ones, back when he was still in school.
Those had been fun days, he told her, before the money came.
She could not imagine his life. He wasn’t even wigged out about the Greer Thing.
He probably got his first woodie, Frankie told her.
“Honestly, Frankie.” But then she considered it, drumming her nails on her cell. “Really? Could you talk to him about it?”
“Tried. He told me to beat it. Don’t know if he was messing with me. Hey, I can go around to those coffeehouses with you. I’ll be back for a day, midweek,” he offered. Then he told her to hang on as he checked a waiting call.
“That won’t work,” Emma said when he came back. “You won’t know which place I was killing time around, outside, half a block away.”
“I don’t get it, you. What’s up?”
“Long time ago,” she said, “well, then, that night, I met someone, a counselor type. We talked just a bit, there outside—”
“You never said anything,” Frankie said.
Emma’s answer was quick, kind, and light. “Never needed to.”
He seemed to consider this. “I could still go around with you to these places, help you find what you’re looking for.”
She smiled at the thought. If it was part of the solution, if she was right and could find a particular counselor to help the kid, well, it would be grand to help her help Greer.
“You’re a good guy, Frankie.”
Emma drove through Seattle past numerous coffeehouses, thinking she was warm at two or three buildings with façades, knowing for sure when she found a garden spot along a sidewalk. The stone wall down the block gave her memories, thick ones, good ones, of a few passing minutes of her life that she’d held to her heart ever since. The wall was merely where she’d met a kind man, one who started talking to her with a hunch, then left her with the gift of clarity.
Now she stood before the cold rocks on a misty day and looked up, across a small park to office buildings beyond. Could it be this easy?
Inside were several businesses, including a counseling service run as a co-op, a married couple and two other individuals.
“Is there a male counselor here?”
“Yes,” the receptionist said. “We have two women and two male psychologists.”
“Is one of the guys called Joe?”
With the affirmative response, Emma the Conqueror went back to her parents’ house flushed with pleasure.
“I found him,” she said, thrilled, certain she carried the passport to the family’s migration back to sanity and calm and beauty. She proffered a business card: Joe MacLean, Psychologist. Bella and Ardy leaned over the card then peered at their daughter.
“And you think this guy will help? He’s better than our doctor and the shrinks the doc sent us to?” Bella leaned back, doubtful.
“I know he’ll help.” Maybe an outsider was exactly what they needed to help Greer break through.
“How do you know?” Ardy asked.
“He’s not a medical doctor, not a psychiatrist,” Bella added.
“He can help Greer,” Emma said.
They never knew, no one did. She’d never told anyone about the chance encounter way back when she was a hundred and fifty pounds bigger than she was now, back when she’d worn years of misery as a habit. No one but Emma knew how his simple words—the symptom can become the problem—had freed her from a habit of self-destruction.
CHAPTER 12
Deputy Nate Osten reread the confidential email, printed it, and considered his next move over a sack of tacos. The Virginia State Police report of a death investigation that began as a missing person/boating accident report was several years old but spoke of another life.
Harold Brayton had become a rich man when his first wife drowned on the other side of the country.
Osten had arrived at the station early to deal with the time-zone problem, hoping for gold in the computer and finding more than a few flakes. He’d been panning for a couple of weeks, ever since he’d come in for his regular swing shift patrol and a day shift deputy passed a request to him: check on a missing person report from a man who’d declined follow-up contact at work.
Standing in Harold Brayton’s living room in the early evening—after bankers’ hours—he’d eyed the desktop computer and asked if Brayton had looked at the search history. That was a screwup.
“Of course! Pinterest, Pinterest, Etsy. Woman shit.”
Osten had tried to put himself in his complainant’s frame of mind. Imagine coming home from work and the wife just isn’t there. Call her cell, text her, nothing. Ask her friends and the neighbors? Brayton said his wife didn’t really have friends, she just took care of the kid. And then he got annoyed.
“The other deputy already got all of this information.”
“Look, man, I’m just—”
“I am Mr. Brayton.”
Osten paused. “Yes, sir.”
“I am the president of the First Union Bank. The big bank at First and Washington. Do you know what I’m talking about? Are you going to find my wife?”
“We’re sure trying. That’s why I’m here. Now, do you two have an app installed for locating a lost cell phone?”
“Her cell is still either turned off or the battery is dead.”
And then Osten made the stupid suggestion of having an expert search the computer’s hard drive.
A part of him—the part with a high index of suspicion from a few years as a city cop and a solid foundation in crime stats—acknowledged that the woman might not be missing at all, that a murder may have occurred and he was talking to the perpetrator. Uxoricide had already been Brayton’s path to wealth, and Osten wondered what the current wife was worth as a dead woman.
He talked to the man about credit cards, took in the brusque wave and snapping retort that he was once again suggesting something that Brayton had already thought of, and promised they would stay on the missing person report with diligence.
Who the hell waits all weekend before reporting his wife missing?
The day shifter told him that Brayton said everybody knows you have to wait three days to report someone missing. And Brayton had not liked the one-week follow-up bringing a deputy to his work place. Since the department’s policy for missing adults not thought to be endangered was a weekly checkin with the complainant and any other follow-up that made good sense, Osten had dutifully taken a picture of the missing woman around town, including a stop at Olympic Coffee and Cake, where the now-gorgeous Emma Donner recognized the missing woman from the photo.
She came in here sometimes. And Emma told him she always charged on the same Visa, even just a cup of coffee, because her husband liked the complete accounting provided by charging everything. She used the free Wi-Fi at Olympic Coffee and Cake and recently asked if she could use Emma’s phone.
And when he told her that the husband had reported her missing, Emma asked, What’s his story?
A woman walking off on her husband wasn’t the biggest deal in the world, but it raised some eyebrows and, truth be told, raised the specter of crime until the curiosity was satisfied. But this was just one cop’s view, not the town’s. Meanwhile, the full facts remained unknown.
Just think. The woman left no word, as far as he could tell from the casual questions he’d asked of neighbors and at a few shops. A
nd he only asked when the opportunity ripened before him and he could yawn as though a casual half interest was his motivation to inquire. All he learned was that the banker’s wife hadn’t any obvious friends that she would have told of big plans to run away. And all indications were she’d run away. People did. True, she’d left no word and that was odd as balls. But a decent job of running away pretty much demands not blabbing about the plan.
Osten’s sixty-four-dollar question—What happened to Betsy Brayton?—was a parlor thinking game of sorts, a cop’s puzzle to mull.
The scuttlebutt—from one bank employee regarding another, no less—was that the husband had a mistress. Mistresses can make pretty good suspects, he knew. Modern women could kill quick as a man. The sheriff didn’t get that, but he’d been a small-town cop since forever, like his daddy before him. Nate Osten had hired on as a cop in Seattle for five years before a slot opened in his home county and he’d realized his dream to become a deputy in the town where he’d grown up. He’d dealt with crack houses and raids and drive-by shootings. Bringing his city-cop attitudes back home had been a hidden blessing that he cloaked in a country boy attitude he didn’t always feel.
When he talked to the detective and the sheriff about the possibility that the woman hadn’t run off, that the man had killed his wife, both pointed out that Osten had absolutely nothing to show foul play. He agreed and countered that early is a better time to suspect than late. They agreed and wished him good luck. He’d have to identify an unchecked piece of information, find the right witness, imagine the right scenario.
Osten tapped his fingers, thinking. To get good answers, you had to ask good questions.
Emma Donner asked a damn good question. It made him dig into the Braytons’ pasts. Now he knew they were new arrivals in this small town. Through plenty of computer searching, Osten had drawn a picture of their past, but there were holes. He knew that Harold and Betsy Brayton had only recently married. They’d only been residents of this town and of this state for a year. She was previously from Texas, he from Virginia.
And those facts did not amount to a sack of hammers. Osten still didn’t know Brayton. Then he’d found the right guy at the previous jurisdiction. Brayton was a widower and had been interviewed about his first wife’s death.