Streaks of pink clouds lit up the eastern sky, while half a moon lingered above the opposite horizon. The lacy forms of half-bare trees shivered in a dawn breeze. Only a few other cars were out this early, dark anonymous shapes behind their glowing headlights.
I passed the turn for Maple Street and Kay’s store. Though she’s my first cousin, a lot of people assume we’re sisters. We obviously come from the same gene pool. Our fathers were brothers, and we look more alike than they did.
During the time I lived in Seattle, I gave up on the idea of ever being a thin person, and Kay kept dieting year after year. Thirty years later we have basically the same body. I wear my hair short and she has shoulder length waves; under the warm honey color she uses it’s the same shade of ashy brown streaked with gray as mine. I'm taller by three inches, and ten months older, and when we argue she nearly always wins.
My parents took every opportunity throughout my childhood to drop me off to play with my little cousin. I always wanted her parents instead of mine. My Aunt Poppy and Uncle Bill were wonderful, cheerful and hardworking. And they adored their daughter; the three of them did everything together. Looking back, I think Kay should have been a lot more spoiled than she was, but Poppy especially didn’t let her get away with much.
My parents existed only for each other. I spent my early years hearing people sigh over their great love story, telling me how inspiring it was to see two people who were so much in love. Maybe it's just my faulty memory, but I can hardly recall anyone ever speaking of them without using the word love.
One day when I was nine or ten, I was at Kay’s house. We’d been outdoors playing and had argued over something, so I had come inside to read. I always brought along a library book, and had settled down quietly in a nook in the upstairs hall with The Mystery on the Old Island. The phone rang downstairs and my aunt answered it. “Of course,” I heard her say, “you know we love having her. Sure. All right, about 8:30.” She hung up the phone and her footsteps clicked across the wood floor of the hall, back into the living room where she’d been reading the morning paper with Uncle Bill.
“That was Eloise,” I heard her report. A crisp rustle of newsprint made me sit up straighter to listen. Eloise was my mother.
“And I suppose they want her to spend the night.”
“Of course.”
Silence hovered in the air like dust motes in a beam of light. Then my uncle said, “You know, I would buy into this great love story of theirs a lot more if they managed to divert just a little affection to their daughter.”
I sat very still in my nook with my book open on my lap, several thoughts chasing around in my head. I must be pretty unlovable if my own parents didn’t love me, but my aunt and uncle did, so I couldn’t be completely awful. But clearer than that was a feeling almost of satisfaction, that my uncle had voiced my own unspoken thoughts. Someone else had noticed what I thought only I had seen, and that meant that it was real.
The turn for Bob’s driveway brought me back to the present. The scene was completely different from the previous night: instead of darkness and fog, a wind high up blew broken clouds across the increasingly light sky. The gray stone of the little house gleamed silver in the dawn light.
I parked the car in front of the house, leaving my keys in the ignition and clutching Bob’s set. I kept Emily Ann’s leash in my hand as we walked to the house, but I didn’t bother with Jack’s. I didn’t want her to take off into the woods after some real or imagined prey, but he was unlikely leave us. This time I picked the right key for the front door the first time, and the three of us stepped into the silent house. Emily Ann went straight to the sofa and curled up on it, trailing her blue leash.
I called out a tentative, “Hello? Bob?” but I wasn’t surprised when no one answered. Everything looked the same as last night, and the light still burned in the kitchen. After only one night’s abandonment the house felt cold and unused.
Bob’s home was sparsely equipped with basic middle-American stuff: a sofa and matching chair with a coffee table between them in the living room; round maple table with four chairs in the dining room. Bob had said that he’d rented the place furnished. He had added little of a personal nature to the front part of the house, no family photos or collections or books. With the exception of some short black dog hairs on the seat of the chair, everything was tidy.
The white sheers at the big front window became see-through in the growing daylight. I stood in the living room staring blankly past them to the grassy front yard and my car parked in the drive until Jack poked me with his cold nose.
“What?” I asked him. “All right, I'm back from Lala Land.”
The voices in my head had evidently been conversing, and now the sensible one said, “Go on, look for his computer.”
The prissy one decided to be scandalized. “Invading his privacy? You still aren’t sure if he was really kidnapped.”
“Just take a look and if it's too private turn it off again. But if we find a file named ‘Open this if I'm kidnapped by a woman in a red suit’ go ahead and read it.”
The most sardonic voice said, “Just don’t erase anything.”
“Okay, okay,” I said out loud. Jack wagged in response. “Where’s the computer, boy?” He wagged again but didn’t move. Evidently I'd have to find it myself.
With Jack at my heels I started down the short hall. The first door on the left opened into a compact bathroom, tiled in a Fifties pink with gray trim. I leaned in to flip on the light. Gray towels hung neatly over a wooden bar and shaving equipment marched in a line along the edge of the sink. I was tempted by the medicine cabinet but it seemed an unlikely place for a computer. Still, maybe I'd find prescription bottles that might tell me something. I pulled open the mirrored door and looked with disappointment at bare shelves that held only a bottle of ibuprofen and a box of Band-Aids.
Further along the hall I found a small bedroom furnished with a twin bed in the corner, neatly made up with white sheets and a brown wool blanket. A faded depiction of Little Bo Peep and her peripatetic sheep decorated the pillowcase. A small brown student type desk stood in front of the window, but no computer graced its bare surface. I pulled open the single drawer. Inside was a pad of steno paper, a box of envelopes and a couple of pencils. The small closet was completely empty, not even a wire hanger dangling from the rod.
The other bedroom was equally neat and impersonal, except for a rather nice old quilt in a flying geese pattern spread over the double bed. Four pillows in plain white cotton covers rested on top of the quilt. A couple of library books—the latest by Dean Koontz and an early Dick Francis—inhabited the bedside table. I opened the closet door, and had to lean against the door frame as I took in Bob’s scent from his collected clothing. Jack touched the back of my leg with his nose.
“I'm scared, Jack,” I told him. “Do you think I was right to follow Kay’s advice last night and not call anyone else?” Another thought struck me. “Maybe Bob wouldn’t have wanted me to call the police. He could have all kinds of reasons to go off with that woman. He said he’s a writer. Maybe she’s part of a story. Or maybe he’s done something awful.” I shook my head. This was as hard for me to believe as a kidnapping.
A shelf over the closet rod was slightly too high for me to see. I gave as much of a hop as my age and body type would allow. It wasn’t much of a look but unless Bob had a computer as thin as a piece of typing paper, nothing was up there.