“Yeah, I guess. Why’d you call?”
“Just to say I love you.”
“Love you too. You and Dad coming to the game?”
It took a moment for my throat to clear. “I’m not sure if Dad’s going to be able to make this one.”
“But you’re coming, right?”
“I was thinking you shouldn’t go either.”
“What?” If I’d told Leo we were moving to the Congo to live with the bonobos, he would’ve reacted with less incredulity. “You’re kidding, right?”
“I was thinking that instead, you, Audrey, and I can go to dinner.”
“Why would we do that?”
“Eating dinner is actually quite common.”
He sighed, unimpressed with my attempt at levity. “But it’s Monty.” Montgomery High, Santa Rosa’s rival. “I’m not missing Monty. No way. Coach would kill me.”
I considered forcing Leo to miss the game. I was the mom. I could do that. But then I thought: just as our family might’ve already eaten our final breakfast together, tonight might be Leo’s last game. If Sam never returned, missing Monty would no longer top Leo’s list of worst things.
“I just worry about you.”
Leo caught the slight break in my voice. “Everything okay, Mom?” A pause. “Why isn’t Dad coming to the game?”
The lie came quickly. “Dad’s at a conference, and I’m fine. I think I’m still shaken up from the other night.”
“Yeah, well, if everything’s okay, I really gotta go.” The impatience returning. “Tyler and I are gonna hit the weights before school.”
“Text me later.”
“Why?”
“Because I’m your mom.”
“Yeah, and you worry about me, I know. Whatever. Tyler’s mom’s leaving so . . .”
“Go.”
“See you at the game?”
“Audrey and I will be there.”
In the kitchen, Audrey laughed again, a rumble out of place in such a small child. Her spirit had always been outsized like that. Now, it was her and Leo that steadied my legs enough to stand and provided the focus I needed to face what was likely destined to be another hellish day.
On the ride to school, Audrey’s layers had her puffed up like a campfire marshmallow. I risked a glance in the mirror to the back seat, where she wriggled to get comfortable in her booster seat.
“Mommy, next year, can we have one of those pumpkins that looks like it’s throwing up?” she asked. “You know, with the seeds and stringy parts coming out of its mouth?”
At last, a question I could answer honestly. Earlier, when Audrey had asked where her dad was, the lie had been bitter in my mouth: I told her that her dad had apologized for leaving her alone and that he had left early that morning for a teachers’ conference. The same lie I had told Leo. It had made it so much worse that they both believed it without question.
I pulled alongside the curb near Hidden Valley Elementary.
“Sure. We can have a pumpkin like that next year.”
My breath snagged on the last two words. Next year. What would that look like for our family?
“Savannah says her dad carved a pumpkin that looks like a bat, but I think a puking pumpkin would be way cooler.”
With that, Audrey grabbed her tiara and backpack, gave me a quick hug, then bounded toward a group of girls who squealed in greeting. My heart constricted. Forget next year. I didn’t even know what the next day would look like.
Earlier, I had canceled all but my most urgent appointments, referring those to another vet. With no patients or kids to tend to, I considered my next step.
A dozen calls to Sam had gone unanswered, the most recent less than thirty minutes before. For the first time in months, I almost called my father, but it had been years since we had spoken. Six years. Our last conversation had been a stilted call a month after Audrey was born. He barely knew Leo, and he didn’t know Audrey at all, so what help could he be now?
The brick facade of the high school appeared in front of me before I fully realized where I was headed. I pulled into the staff lot and looked for Sam’s blue Camry. When I didn’t find it, I parked. Audrey’s elementary started fifteen minutes after the high school, so classes were already in session. I supposed I could call the office, inquire as to whether Sam had shown up for class, but I knew the answer: he hadn’t.
I sat in my car for twenty-five minutes, until the bell signaled the end of first period. I gripped the steering wheel as I scanned the crowd, not for Sam, but for Leo. In the flood, it took me a moment to figure out which awkward, beautiful teen was mine. Then I saw him, and, as it did every time, my heart swelled. Leo walked with Tyler and another boy I recognized but couldn’t name. My son smiled, in that way he did when he was around his friends and didn’t know Mom was watching. Leo balanced on the cusp of adulthood, but he was still very much a boy who needed a father who acted responsibly.
On my phone, I typed another text to Sam, hitting send before I could second-guess myself.
As I waited for his response, I re-read the message: Give me a reason not to file a missing person report. You’ve got five minutes.
Sam needed only three: I need time.
Well, our kids need a dad.
I know.
Call me.
Several minutes passed before another text popped onto the screen: I can’t. Not yet.
Why not?
It’s complicated. And then: I’m not alone.
Despite my thought the night before that Sam might be cheating on me, what I pictured now was Sam hiding in a closet, or in the trunk of some stranger’s car. In both scenarios, he was bruised and bleeding.
Once my mind went dark, another possibility slipped in: Sam might not be the one texting me.
Who’s with you? Are you hurt?
He answered only the second question: I’ll recover.
Then call me.
When no response came, I dialed his number. It rolled into voicemail without ringing.
His text came a second later: I’m sorry.
I see you’re getting real use out of that Big Book of Clichés.
What do you want me to say?
I want you to tell me what the hell is going on.
I sat with that for a moment before summoning the courage to ask the question I didn’t really want answered. Are you having an affair?
The bubbles signifying Sam was typing lasted several minutes, but the text that came was just four words: Give me until tonight.
I pushed: You didn’t answer me.
I waited for the bubbles to appear again. Thirty seconds passed. A minute. Finally, I typed: How do I know this is really you?
The reply came quickly this time. Who else would it be?
Another nonanswer.
When Audrey and Leo were babies, Sam had slept with the monitor on his side of the bed. Even when they had started sleeping for longer stretches, Sam would check on them at least once each night. “Just in case the monitor’s not working,” he would say.
Why did you leave Audrey with that woman?
Tonight. I promise.
I don’t know if I can give you until tonight.
The bubbles again, then: The first time we met. Princess Jellybean.
I inhaled sharply. What?
You asked if this was really me.
My hands trembled when I asked the question he still hadn’t answered: Are you having an affair?
In the cold rental sedan, thick with the scent of canned pine, I waited for Sam’s response, and when the bubbles popped on the screen, my heart’s thundering grew so loud I half expected the windshield to flex. Then, for a moment, my heart stopped. My whole world stopped, because the last text I received from Sam was a single word: Yes.
12
Clouds of pulled cotton hung above the skylight in the Santa Rosa Police Department’s main lobby, midmorning sun filtering in through a stand of anemic maples. I entered the station and asked for Detective Ray Rico. He wasn’t i
n, but the police technician at the counter, a reedy man with a sharp nose, said he would get someone else to help me, leaving me to wait. I hadn’t been good at that even before Sam went missing.
The woman who came out five minutes later—five minutes that felt like an hour—was my height with a tight bun and heavily contoured cheeks. She introduced herself as Marisol Torres and ushered me into a room off the lobby. Despite the severity of her hairstyle, the officer’s manner was sympathetic, and her slight smile seemed genuine.
Then again, my marriage had seemed genuine too.
Torres gathered contact information, social media passwords, and a description of my husband. When she asked for a photo, I scrolled through half a dozen photos before I found one that worked. It was from a few years back when we had gone hiking in Annadel State Park, in an area since scorched by wildfire. The green trees and Sam’s crooked smile were both relics from another time.
“This must be difficult for you,” Torres said. “When’s the last time you saw your husband?”
“Yesterday morning, shortly before seven.”
“Six-thirty? Six-forty-five?”
“Six-forty-five.”
“Any other contact yesterday?”
“We spoke on the phone at 7:14 p.m.” This I knew exactly because I had checked my call log. Repeatedly. “When I got home just after seven, he had already left to take our daughter trick-or-treating.”
“What did your husband say the last time you spoke?”
I didn’t need to think about that. I had replayed our last conversation on a loop since Sam had disappeared. “He said he and Audrey would be home in about half an hour and that we needed to talk.”
“About what?”
“He didn’t elaborate.”
She studied me intently. Though she tried to soften her eyes, I was no longer sure Officer Torres was on my side.
“What did you do then?” she asked.
“Waited for them to come home.” I kept the fact I had fallen asleep to myself. Partially out of guilt, but mainly because of the questions it might raise: You took a nap? With your husband and child missing? What kind of person are you?
She would have phrased the questions differently, but that would be what she would be thinking. Torres didn’t need more reasons to doubt me.
I continued, “I got a call regarding a patient a few minutes after nine, and it hit me that Sam and Audrey hadn’t come home yet.”
“It didn’t hit you that they hadn’t returned until . . . what? . . . nearly two hours after talking to your husband?”
In hindsight, it may have been stupid to omit mention of the nap. Too late now. I kept my face as dispassionate as the officer’s.
“That’s right.”
“What did you do when you realized your husband hadn’t come home?”
“I went looking for him.” I told Torres about my search of the neighborhood and about finding Audrey with the two women.
“No other contact from Sam since?”
I hesitated. “There have been some texts,” I said. “But I’m not sure they’re from Sam.”
I showed them to her anyway.
Torres shifted in her seat, her pen poised above the clipboard she balanced, with practiced nonchalance, on her knee.
“Why do you doubt these texts are from your husband?” she asked.
On the drive to the station, I had considered that question at length, so my response came easily. “Have you been in a relationship, Officer Torres?”
“Everyone’s been in love.”
I shivered at the similarity to Carver Sweet’s comment two nights before. “Why do you say that?”
Torres looked at me as if I were an alien who had just asked to make earrings of her eyeballs. “Hey, it was your question.”
“Sorry. Anyway, once you’re in a relationship, people always ask how you met, right? At first, the Princess Jellybean reference threw me, but then I thought about all the times we’ve told that story. And everything else . . . it didn’t sound like him.”
“How so?”
“For one thing, he didn’t ask about the kids.”
Torres’s jaw clenched. “You don’t think there’s a chance your husband left voluntarily?”
I shook my head on reflex, but of course there was a chance. Though she kept her expression neutral, I sensed she wasn’t convinced. I couldn’t blame her. I hadn’t completely convinced myself.
“Even if the texts are from Sam, he mentions right here that he’s injured.” I tapped the screen where I had asked Sam if he had been hurt, and he had responded he would recover. “If he’s injured, you should follow up on that. And if the texts aren’t from Sam . . .” I let my voice trail away. We both knew what might have happened if Sam hadn’t sent those texts.
Torres stared for several seconds before saying, “Does Sam have any history of mental illness or substance abuse?”
“No.”
“Financial problems?”
I started to say of course not, but I hadn’t thought to check our bank balance or credit card receipts. I took care of the clinic’s finances, and Sam handled the home accounts. It had seemed a fair division, but now I realized I didn’t even know how much we paid for cable or car insurance. “I don’t think so.”
Torres paused, tapped her pen, then said, “Mrs. Larkin, I know this may be hard to hear, but you can’t discount this: two women with no apparent agenda told you they saw Sam right before he disappeared and that he looked like he was waiting for someone. That he willingly left your daughter in their care. We’ll stay open to all possibilities, but you should too.”
I didn’t like the way Torres’s perfectly tweezed brows drew together over narrowed eyes. The slight smile now seemed more pity than sympathy.
Still, my husband’s disappearance kept coming back to a single fact: “Sam wouldn’t have left Audrey alone.”
Torres’s expression remained neutral. “She wasn’t alone. Even if you didn’t know that woman, your husband did.”
Though her comment hadn’t aimed to wound, it did. Sam knew the mom in the witch costume because he was the one who dropped Audrey off at school every day. He was the one who was there. Until now, when he suddenly wasn’t.
“Why would he leave Audrey with someone else with our home only a few blocks away?” I asked. “Besides, you didn’t see Audrey last night. She was upset. Crying. If Sam had planned to be gone more than a few minutes, our daughter certainly wasn’t aware of it.”
“Do you have the numbers of these women?”
I shook my head. Another failure on my part.
Torres nodded, as if my oversight was understandable, but I sensed her judgment. Or maybe I was judging myself.
From my purse, I pulled the chocolate wrapper I had stashed there earlier. I handed it to Torres. I told her about Lester being poisoned and about finding the wrapper folded into the shape of a dog on my nightstand.
She took the wrapper from me and set it on her clipboard. “We’ll look into this, and we’ll enter the information about your husband into a national database.” I braced myself for the “but” I could hear coming. “We’ll look into this, but unless we find something to indicate your husband is at risk, there’s little we can do. Unfortunately, adults are allowed to come and go as they please.”
Torres put down her pen and leaned forward, a gesture probably meant to draw me in. Establish a connection between us.
“Most missing adults return within a few days,” she said. “Adults are more likely to have left voluntarily than to have been victims of a crime. It may not seem like it now, but that’s a good thing. Odds are Sam’s safe.”
Though the words were what I wanted to hear, I found no reassurance in them.
“We’ll look into this, but there are things you can do too: check with friends, hospitals, homeless shelters. And again, if there’s any evidence that Sam left involuntarily, we’ll investigate it as we would any other crime. Just because the odds are that isn�
�t what happened doesn’t mean we won’t consider it.”
I nodded, signaling my acceptance that the interview was over. But apparently, it wasn’t.
“One other thing. By filing this report, you’re entitled to know if we find your husband safe.”
“Meaning?”
“That’s all you have a right to know. If we find your husband, and he doesn’t want you to know where he is, we can’t share his location.”
She adjusted the clipboard in her lap and shifted gears again. “You were involved in an assault case a couple of days ago, right?”
“It’s been a hell of a week.”
She straightened, her posture suddenly as guarded as her eyes. “Cops look for patterns. The assault by itself could be bad luck, bad timing. Or good luck, if you consider it from the point of view of the woman whose life you saved. But add to that a husband who disappears almost exactly twenty-four hours later and the murder—”
When she didn’t immediately finish her sentence, I pushed, “The woman he attacked died?”
“Wednesday was a busy day for Mr. Sweet. Before he assaulted that woman, he poisoned his wife,” she said. “You’re sure you don’t know him?”
Since the attack, I couldn’t escape the memory of Carver’s face. Most of all, I remembered the scar—puckered flesh trailing his jaw like an albino snake. The mark of a predator. I wouldn’t have forgotten seeing that scar, even under ordinary circumstances.
“Never met him. But the woman he beat up—she survived?”
Torres’s gaze sharpened, and I felt color bloom in my usually pale cheeks. “Ms. Breneman was released from the hospital yesterday.”
I was usually good at reading people, and I read anticipation in the slight pause in the officer’s breathing, the way her hands clenched the clipboard.
“I’m glad to hear it,” I said.
Torres nodded, finally standing. “We’ll let you know if we hear anything. We’ll also let you know when you can pick up your van.”
I’d forgotten about that, and I nodded in thanks. “Your purse, though . . . It wasn’t in the van when we found it. He either took it with him or threw it away.” Neither option provided comfort.
Officer Marisol Torres walked away, all her original warmth replaced with an efficient brusqueness.
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