The Motion of Puppets(10)

Now that she was put back together, so to speak, Kay began to feel more like her old self. Old self in a new body. She reckoned her relative size from her surroundings. She judged her height as not more than twelve inches, her weight a few ounces, perhaps half a pound. At first her smallness startled her, but, like all change, she grew accustomed to it. Her head was made of wood and the rest of her was stuffed cloth. Her senses seemed intact, and she could hear her own words in her head, not just her thoughts but the sound of sentences and paragraphs, the very music of language, remembered songs and poems, the percussive surprise of laughter. But she could not speak. Her mouth was but a slash of paint.

There were others like her in the room. After a time she became acclimated to the darkness and could see the shapes around her. A pair of feet, the perfect globe of someone else’s head. Once in a while, a stray sound broke the quiet, nothing more than a sigh from a dreamer anxious in her sleep, the drum of bored fingers, the creak of a stiff wooden joint. At regular intervals, she could smell food cooking and deduced the pattern of the days by the aromas. Eggs and coffee meant morning. Soup and cheese at midday, the richness of full dinners. She never felt the slightest hunger and was glad for the lack of appetite. Mostly the sameness of the days filled her with ennui. She longed for company, for the giants, not out of any lonesomeness but for the chance to play again, to feel the joy in movement. She was built for motion, and the stillness was the most difficult part of waiting for her life to begin again. When the overhead light came on in the middle of the night, suddenly and without warning, she felt the joy leap in the place where her heart used to be.





4

Forms, there are always many forms for these situations. The desk officer helped with the Fiche descriptive outil profil by asking Theo the questions and filling in the boxes. After the preliminaries and general description of the missing person, she moved on with the rest of the form.

“State of health? Any ongoing medical conditions?”

“She’s fine. Fit. Nothing wrong with her. That’s an odd question.”

“You would be surprised. Many missing persons cases, it’s the elderly. Alzheimer’s, dementia, they wander off from home and get themselves quickly disoriented, and there’s no bread crumb trail to follow. Their poor families find out, or the neighbor hears the cat crying through the night, they come to us to help find them. That’s a tough one.” The sergeant looked down at the form and translated the next question. “Does she go to any medical specialist or have regular treatments? Therapy?”

“No,” Theo said. “How many missing persons do you have?”

“I know of a dozen or so, outstanding, but, as I say, most are the old ones who are lost. Or runaways. Bad scene at home. Abuse. Maybe drugs. Does she take any drugs?”

Theo shook his head. Once upon a time, she had confessed to experimenting with an old boyfriend, but that was ancient history.

“When children are involved, we look at the parents. Sometimes they are split up, and Mom or Dad kidnaps the child from the other. Of course, she is no child, but perhaps a friend has heard from her? Can you give me a list of her contacts?”

Taking out his phone, he scrambled through his own lists for mutual friends, knowing that hers were different—and in her phone, wherever that may be. As he wrote them down, he asked if the missing were usually found.

“In many of the other kinds of cases, the missing aren’t missing at all, just gone for a time. Run off with a lover for the weekend. Or on a bender. Gambling. The old folks wandering away. But unless something happened to them, they turn up fairly quickly.”

“Is that why the police won’t start looking until twenty-four hours have passed?”

“Mr. Harper”—she laughed—“you watch too many American police shows. No, we decide how to proceed on a case-by-case basis. If it seems a medical emergency, a matter of life and death, we start right away. If a minor is involved, of course, we spring to action. A likely affaire de coeur, perhaps we wait a bit. Do you think your wife might be having an affair?”

He hesitated with an answer, unsure as to whether or not to share his suspicion about Reance. It was only that, only a feeling and not based on any evidence. In fact, until this afternoon he had known of the man only by reputation. And Kay had been the same as always, or at least since they had come to Québec. He had no reason to doubt her. “No,” he said at last.

“You’re sure? Do you have a list of places she frequents?”

“Just home and the theater mostly. Some days we get a bite to eat in Old Town or go window-shopping, but no place she haunts. A jog along the boardwalk. But nothing frequent, unless of course you mean the same shop windows she stops at each time we pass by.”

“We’ll skip ahead to the final section, then. Where she last was before her disappearance and the circumstances.”

Theo told her the story that he had been told. The restaurant after the circus, drinks until two, Kay heading away alone from the group on her way home. Before that, she had been in the show, of course—there were hundreds of witnesses—and before that, they had been alone together in the apartment.

“And that is the last time you saw her, Mr. Harper?”

“The last time.”

She did not miss a beat, perhaps because she was not looking at his face. “And we’ll need a photograph of her. Recent.”