I moved to the city, into a partitioned square in the basement of a student rooming house that was mine if I shoveled the snow and fed the coal-fired furnace in the winter, put up the screens and cut the grass with a rusted push mower in the summer. I grabbed at it as if it were the last life preserver tossed off the Titanic.
I went to the school library every day, to comb the newspapers for any mention of Maris. Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, I called the Rivertown police. By the first of October, the desk sergeant started hanging up as soon as he recognized my voice.
Weekends, between jobs, I took the train out to Rivertown and prowled our old paths. Sometimes, if I could stand it, I’d walk to Kutz’s and go to the back of the trailer to look at the initials she’d carved there.
As November blew away the last of the leaves that had curled on the ground, I had the thought that Maris could be dead.
I never said it aloud.
And most nights, I dreamed of Maris Mays.
Twenty-nine
My cell phone began to vibrate, again, as I rewound the last of the microfilm spools. The display said it was Amanda, calling for the third time. That I’d let her calls go straight to message, unanswered, was because I was in a quiet room of the library. That I hadn’t walked outside to return any of them was because I didn’t know the answers to the questions she was going to ask.
I put back the spools and walked down the stairs, anxious now to get out of the library. I’d learned nothing new. The story had disappeared from the Tribune and the Sun-Times two days after Maris disappeared, dead from a lack of leads.
Outside, I walked underneath the elevated tracks, then north along Dearborn. I passed a store-wide patch that had been grassed over after a demolition the year before. Plans must have changed; nothing had been built on it. Now it was covered with filthy snow, dark from the splatters of the truck traffic and the trains that rumbled overhead.
I sat on a bench by the bus stop. The air smelled of oil and diesel exhaust, and it was cold, too cold to sit on a bench. I wanted that; I wanted to feel the cold, instead of the paralyzing, futile heat of an old August.
My cell phone rang again. This time, it was Patterson, calling from Iowa. I got up and moved away from the noise of the traffic on the street.
“I e-mailed you photos of the Kovacs brothers,” he said.
“I’m not at home.”
“Let me know if one of them is your security guard.” He started to say good-bye.
“Wait,” I said before he could hang up. I’d just spent a few hours searching for an investigation that had never taken place. Now I was seeing another one not happen, all over again. “Did you send them to Michigan and Florida as well?”
“Yes.”
“Is that all you’re going to do?”
“What more are you suggesting?”
“Ace police tracking,” I said. “Stay on top of Michigan and Florida, make sure those photos get shown around. Find those brothers. Force them to tell you where Carolina is.”
“You think she disappeared in Iowa?” he asked.
“Of course not.” I took a breath. “You know what I want.”
“Recognize what I can do, Mr. Elstrom: I can ask around about a couple of brothers who have absolutely no links to the bank robbery, and maybe I’ll stumble across something to interest the F.B.I. But I can’t commit major resources, because I have no justification. I can’t pursue a disappearance in Michigan, either. If you think your Carolina was taken across state lines, give me something I can take to the F.B.I.”
“Find those Kovacs brothers, you’ll find her.”
“Then get your ass to your computer and check out the photos. Tell me which Kovacs you saw in Michigan.”
I phoned Amanda. She’d called from her office. It was only a few blocks away.
She started bright. “How’s the sunshine? It’s miserable here, dark and gray and very Chicago.”
“I know. I’m back.”
“When?”
“Last night.”
“Late?”
“Too late to call.” It sounded dismissive, a greasy, quick excuse. “Listen, I just got done with some stuff at the Washington Library. I thought I’d swing by your office, use your computer to check my e-mail, then take you to lunch.”
“It’s way too late for lunch.”
“Dinner, then. I’m starved.”
“It’s too soon for dinner.”
I looked at my watch. “It is not.”
“It is, for us.”
“I’ll come over to the Art Institute, we’ll have coffee from a machine.”
“Go back to the library; use their computers to check your e-mail.”
“What the hell do you want, Amanda?”
“I’ll see you in the lobby of the Palmer House in a half hour,” she said and hung up before either of us could do more damage.
There was a Starbucks on the way, but there’s a Starbucks on the way to everyplace, except perhaps the moon. Someday, they’ll move all the Starbucks inside the Wal-Marts, next to the Oreo displays, and that will mark the last time mankind will see the sun. I don’t like Starbucks coffee; it’s too bitter, too strong, for a dishwater man like myself. I bought a small cup anyway, because I needed a prop, something to do with my mouth when it wasn’t ruining a relationship. I sipped it while I walked to the hotel.
The lobby of the Palmer House is an enormous room of cathedral ceilings, painted with scenes of bare-breasted ladies being comforted by muscular men and children playing flutes. It is a place of arched entrances, marble staircases, and second-story balconies worthy of any weeping Juliet. Its widely distanced sofas make it the kind of grand setting where a Cary Grant, impeccable in a soft gray suit and solid, unencumbered tie, would choose to meet a regal blonde in understated silk-an Eva Marie Saint or a Grace Kelly. The surrounding bustle of people going up, coming down, and traversing the ornate rugs gives almost-lovers good last cover, as they decide whether to order a drink and ponder safe, small next steps or say the hell with it, rent a room, and go up to screw their brains out.
The Palmer House lobby is also a place for soon-to-be ex-lovers to meet, because that same surrounding bustle demands civility and restrained, last good-byes.
Amanda sat at the end of one of the large sofas in the middle of the great room. I sat at the other end, turned to rest one arm along the back of the sofa, and tried to grin like a man not haunted.
“You look awful,” she said. “And you hate Starbucks.”
I set the vile brew on the low table in front of us and told her of Leo’s examination of the typewriter, told her the woman who’d named me her executor had been a girl we’d once known.
“You and Leo?” she interrupted.
“More me.”
“‘Known?’”
“We dated my last semester of high school and into the summer.” I reached for the Starbucks, saw that my hand was trembling slightly. I left the prop where it was. “Until she disappeared,” I finished.
“You never mentioned any of this when we were married.”
“I always thought I would.”
“Someday?”
“Someday.”
“Why do you have to be the one carrying this now?” It was a reasonable question, but not what she was really asking.