Last Girl Ghosted(39)
“So.”
“But I think she’ll lead me to him just the same. And when I find him, I find Mia.”
“You’re sure.”
“I am.”
“You don’t think poor Mia is just back on drugs, holed up in a crack house somewhere.”
“I don’t.”
“Or that she took off with him, or someone, or just wanted to get away from her helicopter father.”
There were a hundred reasons why he thought not—some of it to do with her blog, her Facebook posts, the pictures he saw online, in albums in the Thorpe house, posts she left on friends’ pages. Mia was on her way to wholeness, to a full and happy life—until she met Raife Mannes. She had a pattern to her engagements, a rhythm to her life and movements. She wasn’t heading back to drugs.
When Bailey closed his eyes, and dug deep, he knew that wasn’t what happened to her. He didn’t have to explain that to Nora. She knew how it worked, the pursuit of lost people. Ten percent of it was nuts-and-bolts tracking. Ninety percent was energy—when you’d been cut off electronically anyway. When there was no cell phone, no credit card charges, no camera footage from gas stations and tollbooths, from doorbell cameras. When you had to get old school.
“I can give you a couple more days,” she said. “But without a real surge forward, I am going to have to tell Henry Thorpe that her trail is cold and stop taking his money. It’s not right to keep stringing him along, giving him false hope. That’s not what we do here.”
That was true. The first and last word at Turner and Ives was ethics.
“Okay.” He never bothered arguing with either one of them.
“Bailey, you know—” she started.
“I know, X. Sometimes lost stays lost.”
“And people need to grieve that fact.”
“Right.”
A sigh, some tapping, then, “We have other cases that could use your talents. There’s only one Bailey Kirk.”
“Just a couple more days.”
“Okay.”
“Thank you.”
“And stop calling me X.”
End of call.
He knew it too well, that sometimes lost stayed lost. He’d learned it all kinds of hard ways since the day he found his mother’s ring in the drain. He was estranged from his brother; they all were. After years of trying to reel him back from addiction, help him to manage his mental illness, they finally had to let him go. No one knew where he was. Bailey knew his mother never stopped looking. But Bailey had.
When lost wants to stay lost, sometimes you have no choice but to let it go.
He sat. He had a gift for that, sitting and breathing, being totally present, the watcher. The world came alive—he was aware of his breath, the squirrel running up the tree to his left, the glow of Wren’s lights, the light that came on and went off on her neighbor’s third floor, the man walking his little dog, talking on his phone, the man who rode by on his bike, music blaring from a speaker, the laundromat owner pulling down his gate for the night.
Then at ten minutes after midnight, he watched a slim form move hurriedly up the street and climb Wren’s front stoop. For a moment, a brief electric flash of hope, he thought he might get lucky. Adam Harper returning in the night. He checked his glove box for his gun. A 9 mm Glock sat flat and dark in the mess of napkins, and papers, a crushed pack of cigarettes, some packs of Black Jack gum. A Snickers bar, a tangled mass of headphones. Well, maybe he had not grown fastidious exactly. His mom would be mad. Bailey! Clean that up!
He looked back at the stoop.
No. It wasn’t Adam Harper—Bailey would have to think of him as that moving forward. It was the best friend, another pretty, smart, young professional woman who, from what he’d gleaned, for some reason didn’t seem to get the dangers of online dating. From her body language, he’d say she was in crisis. She let herself inside. And then everything was quiet again.
He waited. All night. Wren Greenwood was it, his last connection to Mia Thorpe.
So, when she left her town house early in the morning, the friend still inside, Bailey Kirk followed.
PART TWO
rewilding
I want to unfold.
Let no place in me hold itself closed,
For where I am closed, I am false.
Rainer Maria Rilke
eighteen
melissa
Melissa Farrow had always, always been fascinated by fire. She loved the way it danced on the air, twisting and writhing, reaching and flickering. She didn’t understand why more people didn’t seem to notice what a tiny miracle of science an open flame was. Only under the right conditions could it be made, could it survive. It was fragile; the slightest breath could extinguish it. It was a roaring destructive beast, able to fell buildings. Her father could snuff a match with a calloused thumb and forefinger. But if the flame from the stove or the fireplace found its way to your skin, to your clothes, it would devour you.
The first time her mother caught her with matches, she was trying to light a pile of dead leaves her father had raked into the corner of the yard. She was ten and she wanted so badly to see those leaves go up in a tower of flames, a bonfire like the one she’d seen on the beach during a family vacation to the Jersey Shore. A great tower of light reaching into the starry sky, roaring and crackling, but so safely contained that people moved close with marshmallows on the ends of long sticks to make s’mores. She remembered how her mother held on to the collar of her shirt as she and her father inched closer, reaching out their sticks.