And she’d wake up Chelsey by mistake, which would only make things much, much worse.
He did the only thing he could think of. He punched in a number he knew by heart and had always hoped he wouldn’t need to dial.
They picked up immediately. “Nine-one-one, what’s your emergency?”
After calling the police, Bill had a while to wait by his own, in the dark house. He spent it mostly imagining endless reasons for Hen’s disappearance.
He was hard pressed to recall a time he had been more terrified in his life.
Chelsey had undergone a medical operation as a toddler, and that had been scary. But he had had Hen and Chelsey to comfort, and a doctor who’d kept telling him it was a routine operation, and nurses who kept coddling her.
Now, all he had was fear and no one to talk to.
Perhaps there’d been a train crash. Perhaps Hen had had an accident when driving back from the train station. Perhaps she’d recalled she’d forgotten something in the office, run back, and gotten hit on the way by a drunk driver and was now bleeding in a ditch somewhere.
One of the theories he concocted was that she’d managed to lock herself in the train station’s bathroom. He clung to that possibility like a drowning man in a stormy sea, imagining her crying in the bathroom stall, waiting for morning so someone could get her out. Because the beauty of that theory was that at any moment, she would step into their home, traumatized but safe. And beyond an anecdote they could laugh about in a few years, there would be no impact on their life. Chelsey would wake up in the morning, not even knowing her mother had been missing for the entire night.
When the police finally showed up, he opened the door before they knocked.
“Thanks for coming,” he said in a low voice to the officer in the doorway. “Please try to be quiet. My five-year-old daughter is sleeping.”
They were two cops in uniform. The young one was black, making Bill feel slightly more at ease. He was taller than his partner, his face serious, his eyes alert. His partner was white, chubby, and short, and seemed at least ten years older.
“Are you Mr. Fishburne?” the young cop asked.
“That’s right. Please, come in. But be quiet.” If Chelsey woke up when the cops were there, she’d be terrified.
They both stepped inside, and Bill closed the door behind them, keeping the night’s chill outside.
“I’m Officer Ellis,” the young cop said. “This is my partner, Officer Woodrow. I understand that your wife hasn’t returned home from work yet?”
“Yes,” Bill said. He blurted the entire story, doing his best to impress upon them that this was a real emergency, not a case of a silly woman who forgot to call her husband. He mentioned several times that she was a paralegal, that her phone was offline, that her associate dropped her at a train station—
“And you said his name is Jeff?” Ellis asked.
“Yeah, he’s another paralegal—”
“How well do you know him?”
“Not too well. I saw him once at a party. But he seemed like a good guy.”
“Does your wife ever mention him? Does she talk to him on the phone?”
“Uh . . . no, not that I recall.”
“Does she often stay at work late?”
It dawned on Bill that the cops were concocting theories of their own, based on their own experience. A woman who had a fling and fell asleep in her lover’s bed, not noticing the time. Or maybe a woman who went out drinking and just hadn’t returned from her late night of partying. This was probably what they mostly saw. Didn’t they always say on TV that the police didn’t investigate a missing person report until twenty-four hours had passed?
Bill felt a desperate need to convince the cops that this was not the case. Henrietta would never do any of those things. It was so out of the realm of possibility that he never entertained those thoughts.
“Henrietta would never just . . . not return, okay? She didn’t leave me. She’s not with another man. She’s not drunk in a holding cell. There’s something wrong.”
“Mr. Fishburne,” Ellis said. “I understand. We will look for your wife.”
“Maybe she locked herself in the bathroom in the train station,” Bill said helplessly. “And her battery ran out.”
“We’ll check it out,” Ellis said. “Can you give us the names and phone numbers of your wife’s associates? The ones you talked to? And the address of