Dear Wife(12)

And no, I didn’t write any of them down. I couldn’t. If you’d found anything even remotely suspicious—the search parameters on my laptop, a new number on my phone log, a faraway address scribbled on the back of a receipt—you would have confronted me. That was the hardest part of this past year, staying one step ahead of you.

I’m reaching for the burner phone to start my new search when I spot a sign at the far end of the lot for a Best Buy. Best Buy means computers, banks and banks of computers. The internet at my fingers, free and with no tracking, unlike the data on this piece-of-crap prepaid phone. I crank the key and head farther up the lot.

The store is packed for a Thursday morning. People everywhere, jamming the aisles and forming lines a dozen people deep at the MacBooks display. I push past them to a lonely, unmanned Dell at the end of the counter.

I navigate to the internet and pause. Stare at the blinking cursor. Check behind me to make sure no one is watching. Old habits are hard to break.

Two seconds later, I’m typing in the address for Pine Bluff’s local news website. I hold my breath and scroll through the headlines. Arkansas man accused of killing wife for changing TV channel. State police investigate Monticello murder. Pine Bluff officer shot in “ambush” attack. Nothing about a missing woman. Nothing about me.

And yet, I’ve been gone for almost twenty-four hours now. Why is there nothing on the internet? Is the police department sitting on the story? Are they holding out on the press? Or has the media just not sniffed it out yet?

The Pine Bluff Police Department website doesn’t make me any wiser. Their home page is as generic as ever, the last item on a long list of to-dos for the department, updated almost as an afterthought. The most recent post on their newsroom page is from 2016.

On a whim, I surf to Facebook, and I’m in luck. Gary Minoff, a middle-aged man from Conyers, Georgia, forgot to sign out. No one will think anything of him nosing around on the Pine Bluff Police Department Facebook page, which is much more current than their website. I scroll down their wall, past posts about robberies, murders, a deadly hit-and-run, and the knot between my shoulder blades tightens. Maybe something happened, and you haven’t yet figured out I’m gone. Maybe I have more of a head start than I think. I can’t decide if the old adage applies here: Is no news really good news?

“Best priced laptop in the place,” a voice says from right behind me, a ginger with facial hair and a Best Buy polo. He gestures to the Dell. “Intel Pentium duel core processor, two megabyte cache, up to 2.3 gigahertz performance. All that and more for only $349.”

I have no idea what any of that means. I give him a smile that is polite but perfunctory. “I’m just looking, thanks.”

“For a few bucks more, you can upgrade. Tack on some more memory, or some cloud-based backup storage.”

“I just want to play around a little more, try things out. Maybe if you come back in ten minutes or so, I’ll be ready to decide.”

Or maybe, by the time you come back, I’ll be gone.

He wanders off to bother another customer, and I exit out of Facebook. Time to get busy.

I Google cheapest boarding houses Atlanta and take a picture of the results with my burner phone, then do the same for area hostels. Just in case, I find five hotels advertising rooms under fifty dollars a night and take a picture of those, as well. The rest of the time I use for poking around on Craigslist.

Most of the housing listings are either too expensive or too creepy. A dollar for a live-in girlfriend? Pass. I click on one of the cheapest listings, a furnished basement bedroom in a house in Collier Heights, then back out of the page when I see the field labeled “driver’s license number.” I click on the next one, “for professional ladies only.”

“My girlfriend got totally shafted on Craigslist.” It’s the ginger salesclerk again, hovering behind me even though it’s been nowhere near ten minutes. “She’d booked a room with what she thought was a nice family, but it was a scam. She gets there and some crazy dude pulls a gun on her and next thing she knows, she’s got no money, no wallet, no car, no nothing.”

“That’s...awful.”

He shoves his hands in his pockets and grins, revealing a row of neat white teeth. “I’ll say. Three months later she’s at the courthouse, declaring herself bankrupt. Bastard stole her identity, then took out all sorts of loans and credit cards in her name. By the time she figured out what was happening, he’d racked up over fifty thousand dollars of debt in her name. It’s going to take her years to get her credit back on track. Anyway, all that goes to say, you might want to be careful.”

His gaze wanders to the picture on the laptop screen, and he’s not wrong. This place is a dump. I click the X to close the screen.

He starts in on his sales pitch again, something about a LED-backlit screen and HD camera, and I’m about to tell him to back off when something occurs to me. His girlfriend’s wallet was stolen. Some asshole took her credit cards, her driver’s license, everything. Even if she went to the DMV that very same day, it would have taken her a couple of days, maybe a week, to get her new plastic.

My voice is a lot more friendly when I turn back to the salesman. “Where did your girlfriend stay in the meantime? After that guy took off with her wallet, I mean.”

“Oh. Well, she couch surfed and stayed with me for a while until she found this sweet boardinghouse over on the Westside. Most places want some kind of credit card number as a guarantee, but this boardinghouse was cool with her paying cash, especially after she told them her sob story.”