She was in bed, the reverend told me.
“Thank God they took her off the chemotherapy,” he said. “It was killing her. This way, she’s in her own house, and when she feels strong, she can putter. And, of course, she’s supervising the search.”
He was probably right. In terms of full-time concentration on Janice Tanner, she was doing more than anyone in the state. Maybe, I thought, the man who took Janice had done more. The reverend went upstairs and I stood in the living room. There were no pictures on the walls except one of Jesus that looked famous and one of Janice that was famous for sure. It was the one with her glad eyes and sad mouth. I saw hooks where other pictures had hung. On the coffee table in front of the thin wooden settle, there were posters and newspapers. The top paper had an article about her parents’ efforts to find her. I had a metal taste in my mouth, and the saliva kept running.
Tanner was back. He gestured to me, and I followed him up the steep, narrow staircase. I could feel the thermal current of the house as cold air rose behind us. I waited for the heating system to kick in. I was worried about how cold Mrs. Tanner felt.
He gestured me to a rush-bottomed ladder-back chair beside the bed. The only light in the room came from a weak bulb in the lamp on the bedside table, which was a cracked cherry stand. The shades in the two windows were drawn and the overhead light was off. She lay on her side, curled up, her fists on the sheets, outside the layers of blanket she was under. In that dim light, even, I saw how sparse her hair was. She licked her chapped lips with her tongue. The skin of her face was the color of old oranges, and it looked like it would split and start bleeding if someone pushed against it. Her eyes, though they weren’t bright, were still smart, and they grew large as she fixed them on me.
“No,” I said. “I’m sorry. Nothing new. I just wanted to say hello, I guess. It’s only a visit.”
She raised her brows and moved her head on the pillow a little, like she was saying she understood.
I said, “And maybe look at Janice’s room. I never did that. Maybe I should do that.”
Her smile was tired but real.
“I hear the real cops do that.”
She nodded.
“So I thought I’d come and get real.”
She said, in more than a whisper, “Did you want to pray?”
I should have said yes, of course. But the thought of her God made me angry. I felt mad enough to wail like a child. I said, “No, thank you, ma’am. I can’t.”
She said, “I would pray on your behalf.”
“Thank you.”
“I have a confession.”
“You already did.”
“You’re easy to want to take care of,” she said.
“That’s what my wife once said.”
“Lucky woman,” she said.
“Isn’t she. I’ll ask your husband to take me to the room.” I leaned over and kissed her temple. She smelled like wood that’s been in pond water too long. She was coming apart inside.
The reverend said, in the hall, outside her closed door, “I didn’t know Mrs. Tanner was praying for you.”
“It’s an arrangement we have.”
“I’d be pleased to pray for you, too.”
“You’re very kind, Reverend Tanner.”
“But you ought to make the effort also.”
I nodded, but I didn’t have anything more to say because we were in the room now. I put my hand up and he looked at it, and then at my face.
“I’d like it if I could be in here by myself a minute.”
“Clues,” he said.
“Clues.”
“Randy told us about the uncertainty principle.”
“I have a lot of that.”
“The observer of a phenomenon changes it through the act of observation,” he said.
I said, “That sounds reasonable.”
“So I’ll leave you to your own uncertainty.” He smiled to be sure I understood the joke.
I nodded. I didn’t.
“I’ll be outside,” he said.
“Thank you.”
“In the hall. If you need me.”
“I’m not going to touch anything, Reverend. I understand it’s precious to you. I’ll keep my hands in my pockets.”
“Less alteration of the phenomenon observed,” he agreed.
He flipped a light switch, and he closed the door. I took my hands out of my pockets, but I did keep them to myself. I couldn’t find her here. I saw paperback books and school notebooks on a cheap maple desk. On the wall I saw pictures of her parents outside her father’s church, and I saw clipped photos in dime-store frames of people I guessed from their hair and clothes were rock singers. There was, of course, a Jesus in a wooden frame. I looked in some plastic-covered albums at pictures of junior high school kids. In the books on the shelves were some postcards. They were scrawled on in round inky writing by kids writing to Janice over a summer. There was a book called Generation X that looked a little difficult for her. There was a book called I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and one titled The Light in the Forest. I learned from them that maybe she felt trapped. But most of anything I’d ever read was about someone who was trapped, so I wasn’t making much progress.
I didn’t think I was going to find stuff taped under drawers or glued inside the covers of hardcover books, and I relied on the state police for that kind of search. I did do the obvious — look between the mattress and the box spring, feel behind the wooden headboard, lie down on the floor and move slowly in a circle, looking for something that might have slid down. Zero. What I’d expected, plus some extra sensations in the ribs. I smelled one of the little bottles of cologne on a painted metal tray on her bureau and it was sweet and sad.
But it could be anyone’s room, I thought. What made it Janice’s?
I looked at her coronet. It seemed to me to be tarnished. I held it in front of my mouth. I smelled her saliva. I put my lips where she put hers. Then I put it back and I sat on the bed. I lay on it. I turned my face to the pillow and sniffed for the smell of her hair and soap and skin. I pressed my face in and down. Then I sat back up because I didn’t want to be found like that. I smoothed away my impression on the pillowcase. I looked across at the little wooden bookcase she used. English books and history books, a book on earth science and one on physics, a clutter of photocopied sheets that I reached for and looked through: math quizzes with bad grades and handouts for English, and no invitation from a psychopath to meet after school. I opened and closed some bureau drawers.
Here’s what the great detective, the interrogator of mysteries, the famous payer of attention, came up with: Janice had been hiding while she lived here. Her parents knew the good little girl and maybe that’s what she was, but she was also someone else. The room was like a set for a high school play called Typical Girl. Of course, Rosalie had already known this. When I came into the hall, the reverend reached around in front of me and turned off her light.
He said, “Clues?”
“Sir, did you change anything in there? Add anything, take anything out? You know, after you became worried? When the police started investigating?”
“That would be Heisenberg on a huge scale!” he said.
“Yes, wouldn’t it. Did you?”
“That’s how she left it. Socks to saxophone.”
We were on the stairs. I said, “I didn’t see a saxophone.”
“My little joke. I liked the alliteration.”
But I did think of socks. They’d most of them been white, though she had some bolder colors. “Could I go back up a minute, Reverend?”
I went to her room, telling him to wait downstairs for me. I got the light on and the door closed, and then I looked through her socks. I found one pair of stockings. The drawer contained the things of a child, not a fourteen-year-old pushing to be grown. I went to the drawer beneath it, which I had already looked through, but very hastily. I wondered why. I thought, You would have been a shy father.