Before the Fall(70)

“She’s not depressed,” David would say. “She’s just focused.”

But he was a boy, and a Republican to boot. What did he know about the intricacies of female psychology?

When there was still no word by sundown, David put the rest of the week’s activities on hold and drove out. In the minutes after he arrived, Maggie felt like a balloon deflating: The strong business-as-usual facade she had put on disappeared. She poured herself (and him) a stiff drink.

“Rachel asleep?” he asked.

“Yes. I put her in her room. Do you think that’s a mistake? Should I have put her in ours?”

He shrugged. It made no real-world difference, he thought. It was just an issue in his wife’s head.

“I called the sheriff on the way in,” he told her when they were sitting in the living room. The ocean roared in through the screens, invisible in the black night air. “He said she definitely went to the movie. People remembered her—a pretty girl dressed like the city—but nothing from the bar. So whatever happened, it happened on her way home.”

“I mean, what could have happened?”

He shrugged, sipped his drink.

“They checked the local hospitals.”

Halfway through her drink, Maggie grimaced.

“Shit. I should have done that. Why didn’t I—”

“It’s not your job. You were busy with Rachel. But they checked the hospitals and no one fitting her description came in last night. No Jane Does or anything.”

“David, is she dead? Like lying in a ditch or something?”

“No. I don’t think so. I mean, the longer this goes the less positive I’m gonna spin it, but right now it could just be—I don’t know—a bender.”

But they both knew Frankie wasn’t the bender type.

That night Maggie slept fitfully. She had a dream that the Montauk Monster had come to life and was slithering out of the lagoon and across the road, moving inevitably toward their house, leaving a slug trail of gore behind. She stirred and rolled, imagining it surging up the siding to the second-floor window—Rachel’s window. Had she left the window open? It was a warm night, stuffy. She usually closed it, but this time—given her absent brain, her distraction over Frankie—had she left it open?

Maggie woke with her feet already on the floor, a mother’s panic moving her down the short hall to her daughter’s room. The first thing that struck her was that the door was closed. Maggie knew she hadn’t closed it. In fact, she always put a doorstop in front of it to keep it from closing in the wind. She hit the door almost at a run, and the knob wouldn’t turn. Her shoulder hit the door hard, making a loud bang.

Behind her she heard David stir, but from inside the room she heard nothing. She tried the knob again. It was locked.

“David!” she yelled, then again, her voice taking on a tinge of hysteria.

Then he was behind her, moving fast but still sluggish, some part of his sleeping brain left behind.

“It’s locked,” she said.

“Move,” he told her.

She did, flattening herself against the wall to let him get in there. He grabbed the knob in his big hand and tried to turn it.

“Why isn’t she crying?” Maggie heard herself say. “She must be awake. I must have woken her up. Banging.”

He tried the knob again, then gave up, put his shoulder into it. Once, twice, three times. The door stretched the jamb but didn’t open.

“Motherf*cker,” he said, now fully awake, taken by fear. Why wasn’t his daughter crying? Instead, all that came under the door was the surge of the ocean.

He stepped back and kicked the door hard, reaching down for some primal Neanderthal strength. The jamb shattered this time, one of the hinges popping, the door flying open and bending backward, like a boxer who’s been gut-punched.

Maggie pushed past him into the room and screamed.

The window was wide open.

The crib was empty.

*



Maggie stood staring at it for a long time, as if the sight of an empty crib was a surreal impossibility. David ran to the window and looked out, first one way, then another. Then he was out of the room past her. She heard his feet thundering down the stairs, then heard the front door slam and heard his feet running through first grass, then sand, then gravel, as he made his way to the road.

He was on the phone downstairs when she found him.

“Yes,” he said. “This is life or death. I don’t care what it costs.”

A pause as he listened.

“Okay. We’ll be up.”

He hung up, eyes locked on some point in the middle distance.

“David?” she said.

“They’re sending someone.”

“Who?”

“The company.”

“What do you mean someone? Did you call the cops?”

He shook his head.

“This is my daughter. They took my daughter. We’re not using public servants.”

“What are you talking about? Who took her? She’s missing. They need to—we need to have someone, a lot of someones, out there looking for her right now.”

He stood and started turning on lights, going room to room, making the house look awake. She followed.

“David?”

But he was lost in thought, some kind of masculine scheme playing out in his head. She turned and grabbed the car keys off the hook.