Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,28

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,”