The Sleepwalker(23)

“At first, it was the biggest story in Vermont. Now, it hasn’t been in the papers in days. I don’t think there’s been a mention on the TV news in over a week.”

“The news cycles move on. The media interest wanes.”

“And the police interest?”

“Sadly, that wanes, too. Human nature. Detectives lose interest when we’re getting nowhere. When we’ve exhausted every possibility. And, for better or worse, we don’t have any reason to believe this is a homicide investigation.”

“No.”

“At one point, there must have been a dozen of us working on the case. But once we’d talked to your mother’s friends and her clients, once forensics had analyzed her computer and phone, once we’d followed up on every crazy sighting”—he put his soda down on the counter and extended his hands, palms up, a universal sign for capitulation—“what’s left? So we wait for a break. We work on other things.”

“Do you still think her body is in the river?”

“If it is, the drought helps. Maybe eventually the water will get so low that we find it. We dragged part of the river, but maybe it was wedged perfectly under a rock.”

I bit my lip and looked away, hoping Gavin wouldn’t notice how the image had unnerved me. As painful as it was for me to hear the conjecture, I didn’t want him to stop.

“I said too much,” he murmured. “I’m sorry.”

“No. I need to know. Go on.”

He took a sip of his soda. “Maybe the divers stirred up just enough sediment in the water that they missed her,” he said. “It happens. Think of that poor kid from Dartmouth.”

I nodded. I recalled the story. When I’d been in elementary school, a junior there had disappeared the first Friday in February. He’d left a friend’s dorm room late at night and vanished. But no one seriously suspected foul play, because there were footprints his boot size that led to the crew team’s boathouse near the Connecticut River. He’d been a member of the team his first two years at the college, a rower in the shell’s engine room. He was no longer on the team, and apparently he grieved that loss immensely. His friend said he had been drunk when he had left that last night.

“The kid’s body wasn’t found until June,” the detective said. “But it had been in the water the whole time, in that very spot no more than a half mile from the boathouse. So tragic. So sad.”

He finished his soda and rinsed out the bottle in the sink. “But your mom? We just don’t know. We assume she’s there because of a scrap of nightshirt and because one night years ago she walked to the river—to the bridge. But there are no footprints in the snow this time.”

“Then she might be alive?”

“I didn’t say that. I wouldn’t want to get your hopes up. But, yes, without a body, we can’t rule out that possibility.”

“But she wouldn’t just leave my dad and Paige and me. You said that yourself.”

“I did, yes. I believe that.”

“So you’re thinking…what? This might not have been a sleepwalking thing? She might have been murdered?”

“At the moment, I’d say that was unlikely. But, yes, it’s a possibility. Maybe she was killed while she was sleepwalking. Maybe she was killed after she woke up—on her way home.”

“But there would still be a body.”

He nodded. “One would think so. And we certainly found no one who would seem to have any reason to want her dead. She didn’t have enemies. No one in her address book, none of her clients. None of your neighbors. You didn’t want her dead. Paige didn’t want her dead. Your dad didn’t want her dead. I mean…people loved her. All of you loved her.”

I opened the cabinet under the sink where I suspected there would be a kitchen garbage can. There was. I tossed my lemonade cup into it. Then I stood up and asked another of the hard, horrible questions that had been gnawing at me as a woman. “Okay, here’s another gruesome question: Are you investigating if she was raped? A random thing? She was outside alone at night and someone attacked her?”

“So she was raped and murdered? Yes. But so far that track hasn’t gone anywhere.”

“Have you ever had a case like this?”

“I haven’t. And I’ve been doing this twelve years.”

Instantly I did the math in my head. I supposed he was thirty-three, a dozen years my senior. My mom was forty-seven. That meant she was fourteen years older than he was. My mom had been forty-two when they met, and he had been twenty-eight.

“It’s baffling,” he was saying. “But you do this long enough, you get a case like this. Every cop does. Sometimes you solve them. And sometimes you don’t. They just grow cold.”

“God,” I murmured. “If only I’d slept on my dad’s side of the bed that night.”

“Yeah, but that still assumes you might have woken up. This isn’t your fault, Lianna. Your mom worried if something ever happened to her you’d feel this way. But she never wanted you to feel even a twinge of guilt.”

“She talked about something happening to her?”

“Of course she did. You pulled her off a bridge, for God’s sake.”

“Did she think she’d go back there?”