Evidence of Life - By Barbara Taylor Sissel Page 0,61
a key and had been inside the house. It wouldn’t hurt anything to change the locks, as Charlie suggested, but she couldn’t see calling the police. What would she tell them? That she couldn’t remember whether she’d shut the door tightly and locked it in the first place? That someone broke in for no apparent reason? They’d think she was a fool.
Inside the house she swept the grit from the floor into the dustpan and flung it out the door. She went to the refrigerator and briskly gathered the old, desiccated class schedules and other scraps of her family’s life off the front of the refrigerator and put them in a desk drawer, then she pulled the fax from her pocket and, smoothing it, pinned it in their place.
The handwriting was neat for a man, a precise series of even loops and firm strokes. My wife Sondra has been missing for nearly a year…. What did missing mean in this case? Kidnapped? Had someone abducted Hank Kilmer’s wife? Abby judged the script too neat to belong to a doctor or a lawyer. It might be the handwriting of a CPA or an architect. Someone who admired order, someone for whom control and precision were characteristic. A man with glasses and grooves of worry carved into his face. He would be thin, she thought, with hair as white as chalk.
It would be pointless for her to call him, she thought. He would be looking for a new shoulder to cry on. They would meet for coffee or a glass of wine and speculate about why Nick would have written Sondra’s fax number inside a book of matches, and when that exercise ended in futility, they would go on to exchange stories about their missing mates. They would tell each other things they would never say to anyone else because they shared an understanding no one else could. Hank Kilmer would come to rely on Abby to help him keep useless hope alive.
In hindsight, her actions would strike her as ridiculous, even appalling, that she could have thought so little of her own intuition. That she would simply accept the advice of her family and her friends and Dennis over the agitated voice of her own heart. But that was her problem; she was emotionally overwrought. Paranoid. She thought her closest friends, even her own son, were lying to her and that a reporter had broken into her house. Clearly she was certifiable and couldn’t separate reality from delusion. She was letting her feelings, her suspicion, override her good judgment, and if she ended up in a straitjacket, it would be her own fault.
She filled the CD player with music: Pavarotti, Bocelli, the Righteous Brothers, Roy Orbison, turning it up so it would fill the house. She opened windows, heedless of the chill. Gathering cleaning supplies and rags in a bucket, Abby headed swiftly upstairs. She scoured the bathrooms, changed the sheets and dusted the children’s rooms. The thought that at some point something would have to be done with Lindsey and Nick’s belongings poked at her brain, but she finished in each room and left it without looking back.
She was in the laundry room, considering whether she could salvage the moldy contents of the laundry basket, when the phone rang in the kitchen. It was her mother, sounding anxious.
Abby felt awful. “Oh, Mama, I’m sorry. I keep doing this to you.”
“Are you all right? What are you doing?”
“I’m fine. I’m cleaning. I just finished upstairs.”
“Do you want me to come?”
“No, it’s dark.”
“Abby, I’m not feeble. I still know how to drive in the dark.”
“It’s just—” Abby stopped. She would not mention finding the back door open. It would only scare her mother, and the more Abby thought about it, the more she felt there was some logical explanation. “You don’t need to come,” she said. “I’m fine, really.”
“You left Kate’s in a terrible hurry.”
“She told you about the fax.” Abby closed her eyes. Maybe next Kate would take out an ad.
“How important can it be when someone jots down a phone number inside a book of matches?”
“You don’t think it means anything.”
“Honey, I think if it were something important, a number Nick intended to use, he’d have written it someplace less casual.”
Casual. Abby held the word in her mind. As in casual acquaintance? Casual affair? “Mama, did Kate tell you she saw Nick in Bandera last Christmas?”
“Honey, I’m inclined to believe her when she says she didn’t remember.”