“And then?”
Dr. Wolf-that was Mary Ellen in the Acorns-said, “I was already on my cell phone by then, calling nine-one-one, trying to get us some help. We were terrified that the minivan was going to slide the rest of the way into the river.”
Mary Pat said, “I jumped out and ran to the riverbank. But I couldn’t see a thing, not a thing. The accident had caused Mrs. Turnbull’s headlights to go out, and it was totally black down that bank. And after I’d taken two steps from the car, I felt like I’d fallen into a swimming pool with all my clothes on. Drenched to the bone. I actually had to throw away my shoes when I got home. They were hopeless.
“Anyway, Mr. Storey appeared beside me on the bank. He said, ‘Can you see it? Is that where it went down?’ I said I thought so. And that’s when Mrs. Turnbull started screaming for help for her baby.”
“And?” I said.
“We just stood there, for”-she turned to her sister-“what would you say? A minute? A full minute?” Her sister nodded. “We were just standing there, wondering what to do. It was dark and wet and none of us had ropes, but we knew the fire department rescue people wouldn’t get there for too long a time. Finally Mr. Storey leaned over to me, and he said he was going down.”
“Those words? ‘Going down’?”
She grinned at me. “I knew you were a splitting-hairs type of man, Mr. Purdy. I knew it. I can’t honestly say that he used those exact words. But something very close to ‘I’m going down.’ ”
“And then?”
“He did. He started down the bank.”
“Not over on the other side, by the tree, where the bushes are?”
“No, down the bank. That’s when Reverend Prior drove up. He moved his car so that it gave us some light.”
It took me a minute to catch my notes up to the story. When I looked back up, I made sure that both sisters were looking at me before I continued.
“You saw Mr. Storey go into the river?”
Mary Pat said, “No. I saw him go into the dark. The river was just part of the dark.”
Mary Ellen smiled approvingly at her sister’s description. “Mary Pat puts it well, Mr. Purdy. We saw him go into the dark. Have you been out there? To that spot on the river?”
“Yes, I have.”
“Then you know that from the spot where Mr. Storey slipped and fell, it’s a straight shot into the water. And that night, the Ochlockonee was quite swollen. I mean it was as high-”
“It was way high, as the kids say,” added Mary Pat, the social worker. “Where he fell on that bank, it was just like being on an amusement park mud-slide ride straight into the river.”
“So you both believe that’s what happened? That he lost his footing and slid into that river?”
They looked at each other and nodded. Simultaneously, they said, “We do.”
“But you didn’t actually see it happen?”
This time, when they looked at each other, they both shook their heads, but they said nothing.
Mary Ellen said, “You don’t think he drowned? Is that what you’re saying? He never went into the river?”
I said, “The odds are high that he slid right on down the bank into the river. Just like you both believe. But so far I can’t find anyone who actually saw it occur. I’m thinking that maybe it didn’t happen that way. His wife is certainly hoping that maybe it didn’t happen that way.”
“Then where is he? The rescue people were at the bridge about ten minutes after he disappeared down that slope. He never called out for help. We never heard him. The rescuers had lights and boats, and they looked everywhere for him. They searched downstream for miles with dogs. They even had scuba divers out the next morning after the storm passed.” Mary Pat’s tone was slightly conspiratorial.
“And no one found anything, right? Not a trace?”
“Nothing,” Mary Ellen agreed.
I said, “It’s been my experience that occasionally people have a reason to want to disappear.”
Mary Ellen dropped her voice most of an octave. “Are you suggesting that Mr. Storey was one of those people who had a reason? Why on earth would a man like that want to disappear? An important job like he has, a wife who cares enough to send someone like you all this way.”
“Just between you and me?” I said. They nodded vigorously. “Mr. Storey is wanted for questioning about a murder.”
“Oh my,” said Mary Pat.
“So you think…?” asked her sister.
“He might have…?” Mary Pat again.
“Well,” I said, “you have to wonder.”
You do. Sometimes you have to wonder.
FORTY
Viv, our Hmong immigrant nanny, worked part time, squeezing care of our daughter and us into her crowded school schedule. She saved our parental asses on most normal days. On crisis days, and those days were crisis days, her presence in our home was an undeserved gift from the parenting gods.
It was Viv who answered the phone when I called home after Gibbs’s appointment. Lauren was busy cleaning the master bathroom. I had to picture it in my mind: One hand was on her walking stick and one hand was in a vinyl glove, clutching a rag. She was scrubbing surfaces that an obsessive microbiologist would probably have already deemed surgically sterile. By the end of the day, I knew, the motor on the vacuum cleaner would need new bearings, our entire supply of cleaning fluids would be depleted, and virtually every square inch of our home would be a whole new category of clean.
I’d seen it before in the wake of previous exacerbations. I had a name for it. I called itsteroid clean.
Steroids don’t provide virgin energy; they aren’t some gentle supercaffeine. No, steroids, especially megadose steroids, provide agitation with all the negative consequences of the word. Impatience? In spades. Irritability? God, yes. Steroids are pure rocket fuel. I knew from experience that Lauren’s management of the extra horsepower that was coursing through her veins would be relatively adaptive for about twenty-four hours-thus the steroid clean house-but after that the agitation and the resulting sleeplessness would overwhelm her coping ability, and she would take on a few of the assorted characteristics of the Seven Dwarfs on amphetamines.
Grumpy on Speed would be the dominant Dwarf. He-or in this case, she-would be around virtually the whole time, only reluctantly sharing the stage with Sleepy on Speed and with Dopey on Speed. If Sneezy on Speed showed up, we were all in a fresh mess of trouble; during a previous steroid treatment his arrival had caused my poor wife to sneeze something like thirty-seven times in a row with hardly time for an inhale in between. Emily, our Bouvier, hated human sneezing and had barked in concert with Lauren’s honking for the last dozen sneezes or so. It was a memorable duet.
Sadly, Happy on Speed would make only the briefest of cameo appearances. If history were a guide, the cameo would take place during a narrow window in the first act.
I felt a stab of self-pity. For the next couple of weeks I’d be married to a most distasteful subset of the Seven Dwarfs on methamphetamine. Fortunately, my corrosive self-pity was swiftly dissolved by the solvent of compassion: Lauren not only had to live with the meth Dwarfs for a fortnight; she had the misfortune to be possessed by them.
She broke from scrubbing the beleaguered bathroom germs long enough to tell me what time she was seeing her neurologist later in the day, then gave the phone back to Viv, who informed me that Grace’s cold was almost all better and that she’d even managed to add enough filament tape to Emily’s paw to keep the clacking sound from driving Lauren even closer to distraction.
Viv also told me not to worry; she would take good care of us.