Dear Wife(52)

Still. Just because the image of Sabine’s face has been erased from the screen doesn’t mean it’s not still burned across my vision. I won’t forget, and I’m not naive enough to think Martina will, either. One false move, one dubious answer, and she’ll start up with the questions again. Already her questions are circling the outer rings of a bull’s-eye. It’s only a matter of time before she flings one that hits dead center.

People don’t just fall off the face of the planet. They run, they hide or they are taken.

I should know, because I am one of them.



MARCUS

“Uncle Marcus!” The voice comes from somewhere behind me, a couple octaves higher than the racket of the other ten people crammed into Ma’s tiny brick house. From my niece, Annabelle, the birthday girl. She’s the reason for this get-together, and why we’ve all gathered here when normal people are supposed to be working. If Annabelle wants her birthday supper at three in the afternoon, Annabelle gets her birthday supper at three.

I scoop her up right before she tackles me at the knees. “Happy birthday, Anna-banana-Belle. How does it feel to be eight today?”

Her eyes go comically big. “I’m nine.”

“You are?” I smack myself on the forehead with a palm. “Silly me.”

Annabelle giggles. My niece may be nine, but she weighs practically nothing, the aftereffects of a scary bout with leukemia that left my sister traumatized and dropped Annabelle off the bottom of the growth charts.

I grab her by the waist, flip her upside down and carry her by her skinny ankles to the kitchen. We pass my mother on the way, and I drop a kiss on her cheek.

“Stop flinging her around like that,” Ma calls out after us. “You’re going to pop something out of its socket.”

I swing Annabelle around in the air and deposit her feetfirst onto the kitchen linoleum. Her eyes are shining, her cheeks pink with happiness, and maybe the blood rush that comes with being flipped ass over heels. She’s smiling with her mouth closed, which is a shame because that hole where her two front teeth used to be is the cutest goddamn thing I’ve ever seen.

“Did I pop something out of its socket?”

She shakes her head, bouncing her pigtails around on either side of her ears. Annabelle’s hair used to be brown and straight as a pin. After the chemo it grew back in spiral curls the color of Flamin’ Hot Cheetos. She plants her sneakers and holds up her arms. “Again.”

I grab her by the wrists and she climbs me like a monkey, popping me in the chin as she executes a flailing back flip. I catch her before she can hit the ground and carry her under my arm like a giggling sack of potatoes.

“She has you wrapped around her little finger. You know that, right?” my sister, Camille, says watching from the other side of the breakfast bar. She’s leaning on the kitchen counter, with an ever-present glass of chardonnay in a hand—another holdover from Annabelle’s illness—even though it’s the middle of the afternoon.

“I’m the only one in this family who doesn’t treat her like a piece of glass.” I put Annabelle down and point her in the direction of the other kids, her two older brothers and their cousins, currently tearing up the den. “Kids are supposed to roughhouse, Cam. Let her be a kid.”

Camille makes a sound in the back of her throat, examining me over the rim of her glass. “You look tired.”

I am tired. Fucking exhausted, actually. A week of nonstop work on the Sabine Hardison case will do that to you. I step to the fridge and pull out a beer.

“That bad, huh?” She digs through a drawer for the bottle opener, passes it to me. “Still no leads?”

“Nothing I can tell you about.” Nothing I can tell anybody about.

Like every other person in this town, Camille knows what she’s seen on the news—that there has been no trace of Sabine since she walked out the Super1 door and disappeared into thin air. No bank transactions, no check-ins on Sabine’s Facebook or Instagram, no emails or texts. By now the media has poked enough holes in Jeffrey’s story to turn it to Swiss cheese, turning the tide of public opinion about him from sympathetic husband to primary suspect, and it doesn’t help that the guy’s an ass. Plenty of people are coming forward with tales of times he ran over their dog or reneged on a handshake deal, and together their stories have swirled into something bigger, something dark and nefarious.

And then there’s that stunt he pulled with Mandy in the Morning. What kind of tool bad-talks their missing wife on network television, then starts up an affair with the TV reporter? Neither move won him any points with the stay-at-home mom crowd—women like Camille, blue-ribbon, class-A gossips who wile away the hours their kids are at school at coffee shops and the gym, spreading rumors and stoking speculation. If Jeffrey were smart—which he’s not—he’d have kept his paws off Mandy and blubbered into her camera like that lovesick doctor has been doing on other shows, begging for whomever took Sabine to send her back home. Thanks to Trevor’s tears and Ingrid’s tenacity, the national news caught wind of the story last week.

Camille refills her glass with a bottle from the fridge door and drops in two fresh ice cubes. “I still think it’s the husband. I met him once, ages ago. Some party at the Magillicutty’s, a housewarming or birthday or I don’t remember what. But the point is, I walked into the kitchen and there they were, arguing about something. Well, he was arguing. She was mostly crying.”