Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,36

second. You and Jake should come. A family should be together in a time like this.”

“Maybe later this fall,” Abby said, although she doubted it. “Have you ever heard Nick mention anyone named Sondra?” she asked.

“Sondra? No, I don’t believe so. Who is she?”

“No one,” Abby answered. “It’s nothing.” But if it was so nothing, why hadn’t she tossed the matchbook?

Louise smoothed the tablecloth. “Am I a bad person?”

Abby frowned. “Why would you ask that?”

“There are people on this earth who are truly evil, yet I’m the one who is punished. Like Job, I suppose.” Louise sighed.

“I don’t understand.”

“God took Philip,” she explained as if Abby were dim. “Now He’s taken Nick.”

It wasn’t true. Nick’s father wasn’t dead. Even Louise knew it. But she preferred to think of him as dead. She preferred the role of widow to that of jilted wife. It was more socially acceptable. Abby had been appalled when Nick told her the story, that his father had left on a business trip one day and never returned. Nick and his mother hadn’t known what had happened to him, and police efforts to find out had proven fruitless. Finally, seven years later, when Nick was sixteen, Louise had the man declared legally dead, clearing the way to cash in his one-million-dollar life insurance policy. She’d been living like a queen ever since. Nick had been in law school when he’d learned the truth, that his father was alive and well and living off the coast of Tampico, Mexico on a yacht with a second wife and three children. Abby could not imagine how hurt and angry Nick must have been, but he’d also felt sympathetic to Philip.

My dad had debt up to here, Nick had told Abby, slicing his hand across his neck. He had my mother on his back. “I don’t know why he didn’t take me with him,” Nick had said that, too. He’d been wistful, and Abby had felt incensed on his behalf, that his parents had treated him with so little regard. He’d mentioned the love of sailing he shared with his father. Abby had seen how saddened he was to have lost that along with everything else. She’d wanted so badly to make it up, to love sailing, too. At least that.

But she didn’t. She’d tried, but she couldn’t take the sun; she was afraid of the water. Nick had finally given up on her and sold the Blue Daze. He had said he was fine about it, but suppose he wasn’t? Suppose he had left her the way Philip had left Louise, because Abby harped on him and acted the queen and forced him to give up things he didn’t want to, like his boat.

Abby turned to Louise. “Do you think Nick is like his father? That he could have—?”

“Could have what, dear?”

But Abby shook her head and said, “Never mind.” It wasn’t possible. She wasn’t Louise and Nick wasn’t his father, and Nick’s disappearance wasn’t a matter of genetics or history repeating itself. He wouldn’t have left her, or if he had, he wouldn’t have taken Lindsey. When a man did such a thing, when he left his wife, he didn’t take his child. Like Nick’s father had done, he left his child at home.

* * *

At first Abby didn’t know what was making the noise. The sound was bleating, dissonant, and she bolted upright, gaze bouncing wall-to-wall in the night-darkened room. She couldn’t think where she was. Dreaming? She climbed out from the narrow twin bed where she’d slept all through her girlhood and crossed to the vanity stool where she’d left her purse.

She watched herself pull out her cell phone, place it against her ear. Did she speak, say hello? She wouldn’t remember anything except the static that greeted her and then out of that, a voice.

A small voice, a definitely female voice, whispered: “Mommy?”

“Lindsey?”

More words came, and Abby struggled to filter them from the background noise. Then, breathily—singing? Crying?—“You’ll never find me, find me, find me….”

The hair rose on the back of Abby’s neck, on her arms. “Lindsey, honey, please, just tell me where you are.” She pressed the phone harder to her ear.

But there was nothing. More static. That same liquid-sounding sigh as last time.

“Lindsey, talk to me! Where are you?” Abby could have sworn she was screaming loud enough to wake the dead, but no one appeared. Not Jake and not her mother. Shaking badly, she lowered herself to the side of the bed, fighting