Dear Wife(46)

“What did she do?” I say. I can’t help it. Now I want to know.

Ayana folds her arms across her chest, her gaze dipping to Martina’s collarbones. “Pretty necklaces. How’d you pay for them?”

Martina’s face blooms bright purple, two matching spots on each cheek. She sputters something that would make Jesus blush, then turns and stalks up the aisle.

I look at Ayana, and she’s smiling.



JEFFREY

PDK Workforce Solutions is housed in the center of a shabby strip mall on Sheridan Road, sandwiched between a consignment shop and a serve-yourself yogurt place on the brink of bankruptcy. The parking lot is mostly empty. I’m one of the first ones here, thanks to the early bird reporters who dragged me from a dead sleep, rumbling up in their noisy vans and calling out greetings like miners punching in at the quarry. So far, they haven’t followed me here, though I figure I’ve only got another day or two before they line up on the sidewalk outside. My boss, Eric, will lose his mind.

Inside the glass door, Florence is parked behind the receptionist’s desk, slurping from a foam jug of Diet Coke she refills at the doughnut shop across the lot a couple of times a day. I have no idea what she does here. Up until a few years ago, she was more than happy being a housewife, and then her husband died and she “needed something to keep her busy.” She actually used those words on her application; I know, because I’ve seen it. Eric is such a slouch that he hired her anyway.

She sees me and her eyes go wide. “Oh, Jeffrey, you poor, poor dear. I heard about Sabine on the evening news.” She rushes around her desk to pull me into a hug.

What is the proper amount of time to stand here while a colleague holds you in her wrinkly arms? I count to three, then extricate myself.

“Thank you, Florence.” She smells like cigarettes and Oil of Olay, and now so do I. “I appreciate your concern.”

“I just can’t believe it. She’s really gone? Do the police have any leads at all?”

It’s the question I tried to ignore all weekend—from the reporters swarming outside my windows, from friends and neighbors who blew up my phone, from my boss who texted me late last night suggesting I take the week off. Every time, the questions hit me like a brick. Are there any leads? I have no fucking idea.

The search for Sabine has fizzled, the volunteers have washed the mud off their shoes and returned home to their families and their lives. For police, the investigation has morphed from find her to solve the case, though they’re holding developments tight against their Kevlar chests. If there are any leads, if Detective Durand has found so much as a hair from Sabine’s head, he’s not shared the information with me. I haven’t spoken to him since Saturday afternoon, when he stopped by the house to pick up Sabine’s computer.

Part of me wonders if he’s keeping me in the dark because I am a suspect, and the other part already knows the answer.

And so I spent the weekend on the couch, monitoring news of the search on my laptop while a constant stream of Netflix blared on the TV. Most of what I found was a rehashing of old facts or tabloid hacks spinning rumors into conjecture, into motive. That Sabine was taken. That she was killed, by a stranger or her lover or me, in a fit of jealous rage. That she made a break for it, sneaked out of town on purpose.

That last rumor was the result of my calling Amanda, of parking her on my sofa for an uncensored airing of Sabine’s dirty laundry. The reality of last year’s disappearing act was only a little less dramatic than I made it sound. Sabine really did board a bus—headed west, I later learned—but she didn’t make it very far. Halfway to the Oklahoma border, she received a call from the nursing home that her mother had suffered a fall. She was home before any of us noticed she was gone.

But the point is, she intended to leave. She tried to sneak off, and for once without telling her sister. If her mother hadn’t tripped over her own two feet, who knows how long she would have stayed gone.

So now the seed has been planted. Sabine is unstable. She has a history of running off. The husband is innocent. All I can do now is sit back and watch it grow.

I sneak a quick glance at my watch. Mandy in the Morning starts in less than an hour.

“I’m starting to think the police are not very competent,” I say to Florence, shaking my head.

She makes a face, and she swats my bicep with a crepey hand. “Well, of course they’re not. My house was broken into last year, and they did nothing. They didn’t even come by to see the busted-up door or dust for prints. I had to go all the way over to the station just to file a police report. Their excuse was that the gangs on the east side were keeping them too busy for common house thieves, but I was like, ‘well, who the hell do you think did this?’ Of course it was the gangs.”

I make a sympathetic sound, even though she’s spouting nonsense. The gangs are a problem, yes, but they’re slinging dope, not breaking into old ladies’ houses to steal their tchotchkes. But Florence has always been brilliant at this, at flipping any conversation back to her and her own piddling problems.

I mumble some excuse about a conference call and head down the hall.

The office is quiet for a Monday morning, a few minutes before opening time. No phones ringing, no clacking keyboards, no voices muffled behind cubbies and walls. Eric must not be here yet, otherwise he’d be shouting out orders from his office at the end of the hall. “Make some calls!” he’ll yell whenever the office gets too quiet, “Send out some emails!” As if selling his crappy software is as easy as making first contact, but I guess he’s right to complain. A silent sales office is not a productive one.