What could he do with that? He could have broken the code and said, “I’m not, I can’t, don’t make me,” but he stood there for a second and then retreated. “I understand,” he said first, although he didn’t.
I wanted to lift him up, like statues I’d seen in art history books. A woman lifting up a man. The rescue in reverse. Daughter to father saying, “It’s okay. You’re okay. Now I won’t let anything hurt.”
Instead, I watched him as he went to place a call to Len Fenerman.
The police in those first weeks were almost reverent. Missing dead girls were not a common occurrence in the suburbs. But with no leads coming in on where my body was or who had killed me, the police were getting nervous. There was a window of time during which physical evidence was usually found; that window grew smaller every day.
“I don’t want to sound irrational, Detective Fenerman,” my father said.
“Len, please.” Tucked in the corner of his desk blotter was the school picture Len Fenerman had taken from my mother. He had known, before anyone said the words, that I was already dead.
“I’m certain there’s a man in the neighborhood who knows something,” my father said. He was staring out the window of his upstairs den, toward the cornfield. The man who owned it had told the press he was going to let it sit fallow for now.
“Who is it, and what led you to believe this?” Len Fenerman asked. He chose a stubby, chewed pencil from the front metal lip of his desk drawer.
My father told him about the tent, about how Mr. Harvey had told him to go home, about saying my name, about how weird the neighborhood thought Mr. Harvey was with no regular job and no kids.
“I’ll check it out,” Len Fenerman said, because he had to. That was the role he played in the dance. But what my father had given him offered him little or nothing to work with. “Don’t talk to anyone and don’t approach him again,” Len warned.
When my father hung up the phone he felt strangely empty. Drained, he opened the door to his den and closed it quietly behind him. In the hallway, for the second time, he called my mother’s name: “Abigail.”
She was in the downstairs bathroom, sneaking bites from the macaroons my father’s firm always sent us for Christmas. She ate them greedily; they were like suns bursting open in her mouth. The summer she was pregnant with me, she wore one gingham maternity dress over and over, refusing to spend money on another, and ate all she wanted, rubbing her belly and saying, “Thank you, baby,” as she dribbled chocolate on her breasts.
There was a knock down low on the door.
“Momma?” She stuffed the macaroons back in the medicine cabinet, swallowing what was already in her mouth.
“Momma?” Buckley repeated. His voice was sleepy.
“Mommmmm-maaa!”
She despised the word.
When my mother opened the door, my little brother held on to her knees. Buckley pressed his face into the flesh above them.
Hearing movement, my father went to meet my mother in the kitchen. Together they took solace in attending to Buckley.
“Where’s Susie?” Buckley asked as my father spread Fluffernutter on wheat bread. He made three. One for himself, one for my mother, and one for his four-year-old son.
“Did you put away your game?” my father asked Buckley, wondering why he persisted in avoiding the topic with the one person who approached it head-on.
“What’s wrong with Mommy?” Buckley asked. Together they watched my mother, who was staring into the dry basin of the sink.
“How would you like to go to the zoo this week?” my father asked. He hated himself for it. Hated the bribe and the tease – the deceit. But how could he tell his son that, somewhere, his big sister might lie in pieces?
But Buckley heard the word zoo and all that it meant – which to him was largely Monkeys! – and he began on the rippling path to forgetting for one more day. The shadow of years was not as big on his small body. He knew I was away, but when people left they always came back.
When Len Fenerman had gone door to door in the neighborhood he had found nothing remarkable at George Harvey’s. Mr. Harvey was a single man who, it was said, had meant to move in with his wife. She had died sometime before this. He built doll-houses for specialty stores and kept to himself. That was all anyone knew. Though friendships had not exactly blossomed around him, the sympathy of the neighborhood had always been with him. Each split-level contained a narrative. To Len Fenerman especially, George Harvey’s seemed a compelling one.
No, Harvey said, he didn’t know the Salmons well. Had seen the children. Everyone knew who had children and who didn’t, he noted, his head hanging down and to the left a bit. “You can see the toys in the yard. The houses are always more lively,” he noted, his voice halting.
“I understand you had a conversation with Mr. Salmon recently,” Len said on his second trip to the dark green house.
“Yes, is there something wrong?” Mr. Harvey asked. He squinted at Len but then had to pause. “Let me get my glasses,” he said. “I was doing some close work on a Second Empire.”
“Second Empire?” Len asked.
“Now that my Christmas orders are done, I can experiment,” Mr. Harvey said. Len followed him into the back, where a dining table was pushed against a wall. Dozens of small lengths of what looked like miniature wainscoting were lined up on top of it.
A little strange, Fenerman thought, but it doesn’t make the man a murderer.
Mr. Harvey got his glasses and immediately opened up. “Yes, Mr. Salmon was on one of his walks and he helped me build the bridal tent.”
“The bridal tent?”
“Each year it’s something I do for Leah,” he said. “My wife. I’m a widower.”
Len felt he was intruding on this man’s private rituals. “So I understand,” he said.
“I feel terrible about what happened to that girl,” Mr. Harvey said. “I tried to express that to Mr. Salmon. But I know from experience that nothing makes sense at a time like this.”
“So you erect this tent every year?” Len Fenerman asked. This was something he could get confirmation on from neighbors.
“In the past, I’ve done it inside, but I tried to do it outside this year. We were married in the winter. Until the snow picked up, I thought it would work.”
“Where inside?”
“The basement. I can show you if you want. I have all of Leah’s things down there still.”
But Len did not go further.
“I’ve intruded enough,” he said. “I just wanted to sweep the neighborhood a second time.”
“How’s your investigation coming?” Mr. Harvey asked. “Are you finding anything?”
Len never liked questions like this, though he supposed they were the right of the people whose lives he was invading.
“Sometimes I think clues find their way in good time,” he said. “If they want to be found, that is.” It was cryptic, sort of a Confucius-says answer, but it worked on almost every civilian.
“Have you talked to the Ellis boy?” Mr. Harvey asked.
“We talked to the family.”
“He’s hurt some animals in the neighborhood, I hear.”
“He sounds like a bad kid, I grant you,” said Len, “but he was working in the mall at the time.”
“Witnesses?”
“Yes.”
“That’s my only idea,” Mr. Harvey said. “I wish I could do more.”
Len felt him to be sincere.
“He’s certainly a bit tweaked at an angle,” Len said when he called my father, “but I have nothing on him.”
“What did he say about the tent?”
“That he built it for Leah, his wife.”
“I remember Mrs. Stead told Abigail his wife’s name was Sophie,” my father said.
Len checked his notes. “No, Leah. I wrote it down.”