Dear Wife - Kimberly Belle Page 0,66
on a bright red background.
MISSING: SABINE STANFIELD HARDISON.
A chill skitters up my spine, hollowing out my stomach and my lungs. I stare at the screen as the photograph grows smaller, shifting to a lopsided square in the upper right-hand corner. A journalist’s face takes her place, and I focus on her brows like twin commas squeezed together in concern. Her shiny pink lips are moving, exaggerated, like a silent movie star. I want to search for the remote, but I can’t tear my eyes away from the screen.
All this time I’ve been hunkered down, hiding and watching the news for reports of a missing Pine Bluff woman, and now here it is, and I can’t breathe. The room spins, the words dancing in spots across my vision.
Martina steps away from the screen, pausing at the look on my face. She frowns at the TV over her shoulder. “What’s wrong? Who is that?”
“Her name’s Sabine Hardison.” My voice is high and wild. It echoes in my ears like a scream.
Martina turns to face the television, shifting so we’re side by side. She tilts her head and studies the screen. “She’s so pretty. Do you know her?”
Do I know her. I try to cough up an answer, but my lungs are hardened concrete. It’s all I can do to shake my head.
“Then why are you looking at her picture like that?”
My thoughts careen and slide around, searching for purchase, for an acceptable excuse for the silence that I’ve already let stretch far too long. “Like how?”
“Like you want to throw up or something.”
New words flash across the bottom banner: Pine Bluff, Arkansas. Martina doesn’t read them out loud, but she sees them and turns to study me. Her gaze crawls across my profile, over my wide eyes and cheeks that are burning like I’ve been in the sun too long. Martina is neither blind nor stupid, and I don’t like the way she’s looking at me, like she’s trying to solve a puzzle.
And now my breath is coming too hard, too fast. I need Martina to forget she ever saw Sabine’s face, ever saw her name and those awful words that crawled across the bottom of the screen, and the only way to do that is to keep moving and stuff my feelings down. I peel myself away from the screen, pick up my bucket and carry it into the next room, casting one last glance back at the TV. The reporter has moved on to the next subject, and Sabine’s picture has been replaced with that of a politician, some old guy with beady eyes and a smarmy smile.
Still. Just because the image of Sabine’s face has been erased from the screen doesn’t mean it’s not still burned across my vision. I won’t forget, and I’m not naive enough to think Martina will, either. One false move, one dubious answer, and she’ll start up with the questions again. Already her questions are circling the outer rings of a bull’s-eye. It’s only a matter of time before she flings one that hits dead center.
People don’t just fall off the face of the planet. They run, they hide or they are taken.
I should know, because I am one of them.
MARCUS
“Uncle Marcus!” The voice comes from somewhere behind me, a couple octaves higher than the racket of the other ten people crammed into Ma’s tiny brick house. From my niece, Annabelle, the birthday girl. She’s the reason for this get-together, and why we’ve all gathered here when normal people are supposed to be working. If Annabelle wants her birthday supper at three in the afternoon, Annabelle gets her birthday supper at three.
I scoop her up right before she tackles me at the knees. “Happy birthday, Anna-banana-Belle. How does it feel to be eight today?”
Her eyes go comically big. “I’m nine.”
“You are?” I smack myself on the forehead with a palm. “Silly me.”
Annabelle giggles. My niece may be nine, but she weighs practically nothing, the aftereffects of a scary bout with leukemia that left my sister traumatized and dropped Annabelle off the bottom of the growth charts.
I grab her by the waist, flip her upside down and carry her by her skinny ankles to the kitchen. We pass my mother on the way, and I drop a kiss on her cheek.
“Stop flinging her around like that,” Ma calls out after us. “You’re going to pop something out of its socket.”
I swing Annabelle around in the air and deposit her feetfirst onto the kitchen linoleum. Her