Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,37
for composure.
“Please, Lindsey,” she said more calmly. “Is Daddy there? Can he tell me where you are? Mommy will come, I promise.”
Nothing. Breath. Abby heard breathing and the low-grade interfering static that was like the hum of insects, like fever. “Lindsey? Please, sweetheart, please, talk to me.”
But she didn’t, and just as before, after what seemed an eon had passed, but was probably only a matter of moments, there was a click, the softest click, and the connection was severed.
Abby whimpered and pressed her fingertips to her mouth; she kept the phone in place, waiting, waiting, but Lindsey didn’t come back. Abby looked at the ID. Out of Area. She hit call-back. Nothing. She went into the living room to tell Jake that his sister had called. See, Abby intended to say, I knew they were alive, but then watching Jake sleep, she couldn’t bring herself to waken him. Abby had the same reaction when she looked in at her mother.
And they were both kind the next morning when she told them, when she showed them a call had, indeed, come in at 3:42 a.m. They didn’t disagree, but Abby saw in their eyes that they didn’t believe it had been from Lindsey.
“A wrong number?” her mother ventured.
“Some crank.” Jake was more definite.
But Abby couldn’t imagine it. Who would be so cruel?
Chapter 10
Out of desperation, Abby turned to Dennis for help, but he said Abby’s conviction that it was her daughter who had called her wasn’t enough to persuade a judge to issue a warrant for the phone records. A judge would need something more concrete. Dennis regretted it; Abby knew he did. She also knew he didn’t share her conviction that it was Lindsey. Wasn’t it possible that while Abby had received the phone call—no doubt about that, no one was arguing that—she might have dreamed the rest? Out of terrible grief and longing? And as time passed, as the fall weather cooled and no more phone calls came and no further signs of any kind appeared, Abby felt her certainty slip.
Lindsey’s terrified cries echoed from the walls of Abby’s nightmares. She was in a dark corridor lined with ringing telephones, and she would run from one to the next shouting, “Hello hello?!” She would scream Lindsey’s name to no avail and eventually wake herself, heart throbbing, in a sweaty tangle of sheets. She began to dread the nights. The sight of her bed made her anxious. Days were more tolerable. At least they had settled into a pattern, proving that even catastrophe can become routine. Abby and her mother did the household chores, they washed clothes and vacuumed. They cleaned closets and manured the flowerbeds in readiness for winter. Abby ran errands. They didn’t see much of Jake. He avoided spending time with them—with her, Abby thought.
So when she came home from the grocery store one day in early October and saw his black Mustang parked in her mother’s driveway, her heart stopped. She backed her foot off the accelerator and thought: They’ve been found!
Why else would Jake have come here, in the middle of the afternoon, in the middle of the week? When he hadn’t once shown his face since the memorial service? When all she’d had from him were excuses?
Nick’s BMW crept forward, but then, all at once, a swirl of bright yellow leaves curtained Abby’s vision, scattering across the windshield, drawing her attention, and she turned, in relief, to watch them. The way they fluttered and fussed in the pale autumn light was somehow reminiscent of the pert flight of small birds. But then her view cleared and Jake’s car was still there. Dark and inevitable. She waited to feel something, panic or anger or grief, and felt nothing but an odd sense of deflation. She had imagined there would be more of a show. A phalanx of patrol cars and flashing lights bearing an entire squadron of uniformed officers. The result of too much television, she guessed. Was it possible someone—Dennis, maybe?—had just phoned with the news? Could it really end so quietly?
But it wasn’t news of their family that had brought Jake home, after all.
When Abby found him in the kitchen, her mother was there, too, and they seemed reluctant to look at her. They seemed guilty. Jake went to look out the window, and her mother set aside the makings of coffee and handed Abby an envelope.
“I should have shown this to you before,” she said.