Open House(9)

“I’m here to see Detective Rappaport,” she said, and she tried to smile, but she could feel her face messing it up. Why was she here? Had her father made some kind of disturbance again? Sometimes he came up with a new theory about Emma being still alive and out there somewhere, and when Haley and her mom couldn’t calm him, he’d go to the police. The cops had never been anything but good to their family, despite not solving the crime, but part of that was because they didn’t think there’d been one.

“Have a seat,” the man said, gesturing to an orange plastic chair, the kind Haley hadn’t seen in a waiting room since maybe the nineties at the pediatrician’s office. She sat and watched him disappear through a door, presumably to get Rappaport. She sniffed a few times. She did that, too, when she was nervous. They were compulsions she could mostly control, meaning she didn’t sniff or tap if she was meeting with a professor, or on a first date, or anything like that. She’d started doing the tapping in front of Dean six months or so into their relationship, but it didn’t seem to bother him too much. When Emma disappeared and Haley’s tapping compulsions started, her mom had tried to take her to a therapist, but Haley felt like she knew more than the woman (at least about herself), and it seemed silly trying to explain the OCD; at sixteen, Haley thought she’d read enough medical literature to know what she was doing. The obsessive thoughts about Emma and the tapping weren’t exactly fun, but they weren’t overtaking her life or anything, so what was the harm?

Haley glanced around the precinct’s lobby. A fern wilted in the corner next to a banged-up water dispenser. The room was too hot, too quiet. Haley couldn’t even imagine how different the life of a police officer was here than a half hour away in New York City. There had only been two major crimes in Waverly since Emma had disappeared: a robbery that went unsolved and a domestic dispute that ended with a shooting. It made Haley think about the different kind of life she had lived in New York City, which depressed her a little, so she tried to shake off the thought.

The door creaked, and Haley jolted upright. A well-built forty-something man emerged. He was wearing a worn ivory sweater and corduroy pants, and a neat part in his thick, nearly black hair. He looked more Dead Poets Society than detective. “Haley McCullough?” he asked, his voice even raspier than it had been on the phone.

Haley stood, smiling weakly. She had mentors at school: strong, indomitable female doctors who stood up and looked her in the eye when they spoke. She didn’t understand how they did it.

“That’s me,” Haley said. She tried to use the sole of her Converse to push down her leggings from where they’d crept up over her ankles, but it was useless. The detective reached out a hand for her to shake. “Hank Rappaport,” he said. He was trying to make her comfortable by leaving off the detective part. She’d seen doctors do it when she shadowed them in the hospital; they’d enter a patient’s room and say only their first and last names without the doctor prefix.

“Hello, Detective,” she said, releasing his hand first.

“Follow me,” he said, and she did. They traveled a long blue hallway to a door marked with Rappaport’s name. Haley was feeling a little numb as he opened it, wanting whatever this was to be over. Then she saw her mother seated in one of the two chairs in front of a desk. “Mom?” she blurted.

“Hi, sweetheart,” Liv said. When Emma and Haley were teenagers, they exclusively referred to their mom by her first name—not when speaking to her, but when they were in conversation together and referring to her. It had made them feel grown-up back then, and it had stuck; now it was just another way Emma had imprinted herself onto Haley’s way of thinking and existing.

“What’s going on?” Haley asked, glancing from her mom to Rappaport. She could feel blood swirling in her ears, her blood pressure ratcheting higher. All natural responses to adrenaline. You know what’s happening to you, Haley, she told herself, and tried to breathe.

Liv stood. She was usually graceful, way more so than Haley, but her hip knocked into a pencil holder on Rappaport’s desk, sending pens, pencils, and a mini stapler clanking across the wood. “I’m sorry,” Liv said, righting the container and loading Rappaport’s things while he assured her it wasn’t a problem. Haley didn’t try to help. Her throat felt so tight it was hard to breathe. Liv turned to watch her, her eyes on Haley just like always. No matter how terrible the hand Liv had been dealt, she was the one who took care of Haley, never the other way around.

“Please sit, ma’am,” the detective said. Haley wasn’t sure which one of them he was talking to, but they both sat.

Why are you here? What did he tell you?

The detective folded his long-limbed body into the chair and considered them with light brown eyes. Then he turned to Haley’s mother and said, “We believe we’ve found new evidence in your daughter’s disappearance.”

Haley could feel her mother freeze beside her, but Haley’s entire body woke up. They hadn’t found any evidence before, not ever, and Haley wondered if this was the moment she’d been waiting for, the one that would irrevocably change Emma’s story as they knew it. “Go on, tell us,” Haley said, her tone harder than she’d meant it to be, but what was he waiting for? Permission? Her heart pounded as the detective opened the top drawer of his desk. He retrieved a sealed plastic bag with a silver bracelet and placed it between Haley and her mother, and he didn’t need to tell them not to open it: they didn’t even touch the plastic. They just stared.