Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,14

keep the faith ourselves, that’s all.”

“You’ll call?”

“The second I hear anything.”

Jake looked off, blinking.

She took his hand, then put her arms around him. “You should get going, okay? It’s best for you.” She held him at arm’s length. “Can you imagine what your sister will say if you blow your freshman year? You’ll never hear the end of it.”

Jake scoured his eyes with the heels of his hands. “She always has to have the last word, doesn’t she?”

Abby nodded, mouth trembling.

“I’d flunk out right now just to hear her.”

“Go,” Abby said.

And Jake did. And it was only after he disappeared from view that she sank to her knees and cried.

* * *

When Louise called Abby on her cell phone the following afternoon, she was alone. Kate was gone to the grocery store, and George was out helping a road crew with repairs. In her old life before the flood—BTF—Abby might have let the call slide to her voice mail. She and Louise had never been close. Louise had seen to it. She’d made it clear from the moment Nick introduced them, that she didn’t think Abby was good enough for her son. Louise had never said it to Abby’s face, but the sense of Louise’s disdain was implicit. Abby had long ago given up on the notion that Louise would change, that they would someday be friends, but now that they shared this terrible catastrophe, Abby felt her heart reaching for Louise. They needed each other, Abby thought. They would help each other.

“Where are you?” Louise asked, and Abby was shaken at how frail she sounded.

She answered that she was still at Kate’s. “I keep thinking any day we’ll get word, something concrete.”

“Lindsey and I were supposed to go to New York this summer.” Louise’s voice caught on her tears. “I was going to get tickets for the theater. We were going to tour the museums, shop Fifth Avenue.”

“I know.” Abby went through the house onto the deck. It had aggravated her when Louise had planned the trip with Lindsey as a gift for her upcoming sixteenth birthday. Louise had done nothing so special when Jake turned sixteen. Even for high school graduation, he had only merited a small television from Nick’s mother. So many times, Abby had wanted to ask her: Do you think the children don’t notice how differently you treat them? But Nick said Louise couldn’t help herself, that she had always wanted a daughter, and Abby’s compassion for him, for the sore ground of his childhood, had kept her silent.

“How did this happen? Why did it?” Louise demanded, and she was fuming now and shrill. Abby’s heart retreated. Louise would cling to her anger, her sense of offense even in the face of these horrific circumstances. Abby murmured something that was meant to placate, to comfort.

But Louise was beyond that point. “I can’t stand it. I’m telling you, Abby, I can’t! And as if it isn’t enough that my son and granddaughter drowned in that horrible flood, poor Nick’s name is being slandered again all over the television news. You’ve heard, I know you must have heard, from that reporter, that odious Nadine Betts.”

“She’s contacted you?”

“Oh, yes. She acts as if we’re friends.” Louise huffed. “As if I would tell that woman or any one of her kind anything.”

“You haven’t—?”

“No. I might be old, but my brain still works, thank you very much.” Louise was offended, but then, she often was. “She’s determined to believe that I know Adam Sandoval. She tried to tell me that I’d met him while he and Nick were in school together, as if she could know. I don’t see what difference it makes if that were true. I told her my son would never under any circumstances have involved himself with a crook. Nicky was a good man, an honest man, God rest his soul.”

“He still is, Louise,” Abby said, and she was more curt than she intended to be, but she had so wanted Louise’s support to counter her own fear and uncertainty.

“I’ll be relieved when this is over, won’t you? When we can arrange for a proper burial.” Louise went on as if she hadn’t heard Abby. “We won’t have a moment’s peace until then, Abby. Do you know that? Those media ghouls won’t leave us alone; they won’t allow us to move on, if it’s even possible after a thing like this.”

“Move on?” Abby straightened. “From what? We don’t even know what happened, Louise. I’m not sure