head nodding. Jen offers a hand to Angel, who allows herself to be hoisted from the couch. The older woman wraps an arm around Angel, walks her upstairs, motioning that she’ll be right back.
“Who are these boys?”
“Billy Martin,” he says. “And two other open missing cases on my desk. Three boys missing over the last two years. All runaways, troubled. All passed through the same bus station.”
I sit across from him, surprised to notice that he is very young. With the height and the glasses, the dark of his skin, he presents as older somehow. It’s in the eyes, the softness of his face, the complete absence of any lines or wear and tear. There is too much weariness in his shoulders.
“It doesn’t mean she didn’t see him,” I say. “They all have a similar look.”
“They fit a profile, certainly,” he says. “And that bus stop? It’s right across the street from where Tom Walters works.”
“Maybe she saw more than she’s telling us,” I suggest.
“I’ve been out there twice,” he says. “They cooperated, let me look around. They’re—weird. I don’t know. Creepy people. But that’s not a crime and I didn’t see any evidence of wrongdoing.”
He goes on. “I went to the city and checked the property survey. There’s no record of that cellar she mentioned.”
He shakes his head, and I can feel his disappointment, the frustration of not quite being able to do his job. “I can’t go out there again without a warrant.”
But I can.
I wait until late. I hacked into your home cameras, by the way. And the baby monitor. I can watch from any of my devices. How, you might wonder? Ah, the labyrinth of the dark web, with all its dim passages into the lives of the unsuspecting. Devices that capture IP addresses, spyware that turns your phone into a camera, an eye always watching you, devices that easily decode logins and passwords.
If normal people only knew what was out there—what kind of people, what kind of instruction for those looking to indulge their derelictions, abnormalities, fetishes, fantasies. All the cracks and crevices that allow the wraiths to slither into your life. All you need is the box with the serial number, which you so diligently recycled in your bin down at the curb.
Greg is asleep on the couch in front of the television. He looks wrecked. Hard day? Lily is in her crib. But where are you, Rain Winter?
“Stalker,” says Tess. It’s not a new accusation. “You’re a stalker.”
I’d try to deny it, but, how can I?
“I’m protecting her.” Lame.
Tess guffaws at that one. Remember “the snorter,” that laugh of hers. Normally all you could get out of her was a polite smile, sometimes a giggle. But every once in a while, she really let it rip, snorting like a wild boar in the brush. You and I, we’d die, that sound so much funnier than whatever had amused us in the first place. She’d get mad at first, then she’d just laugh harder. I haven’t laughed like that since then. The relief of it, how the waves wash through your body. Laughter is the same release as crying, that rush of emotion roiling through, leaving you clean in its wake.
Tonight, she’s stunning. Long hair like her mother’s, a flowy peasant blouse, clinging soft jeans. She lounges on the couch in my home office, on her belly, up on her elbows, legs kicking.
“She’s called twice, hasn’t she?”
“Beth?”
She called once. I called her back. She hasn’t returned that call yet. I have found myself thinking about her—her smoky voice, the way the silk of her blouse just carelessly revealed the lacy edge of her bra, the cream of her skin. Her sapphire-blue, almond-shaped eyes, the thoughtful way she listened. She wasn’t just waiting for her turn to talk, to give her opinion or share a story. There was a pleasant fleshiness to her body. She wasn’t one of those women—starving themselves, hours at the gym, their bodies taking on that pulled-taut strain, that tension of trying too hard, fighting time and age, gravity and flab. Every morsel measured, agonized over. She had a plate of food, ate with gusto, drank two glasses of wine.
“I think this is another one of those places,” Tess says. “Another fork in the road.”
“Oh?”
Greg groans in his sleep, turns over, putting his back to the camera. Where are you, Rain?
“As I see it, you could move on from here. Move forward in a new direction.”