“Mom, look.” Minna gestures to the shorter man; he is still standing there, beaming, while his partner shifts impatiently. “You remember Danny To p**n ycky, don’t you?”
Caroline frowns. Minna charges on impatiently, “Toadie, Mom. We called him Toadie. My prom date?” Minna nudges Danny’s arm. “My very first boyfriend.”
“Somehow, I doubt that.” Danny laughs. “Nice to see you again, Mrs. Walker.”
“I go by my maiden name now,” Caroline says. “Bell.”
Minna looks happier than I’ve seen her in all the time she is home, except for brief moments with Amy: tickle wars and raspberry kisses, and when they lie entwined, sleeping. “I had no idea you were a cop.”
“Yeah, well, the old man was a cop,” Danny says, shrugging. “You remember he busted Richie for DUI on prom night?”
Caroline says, “Why are you here?”
Minna glares at her, then turns back to Danny. “Do you want coffee or anything?” She starts toward the pantry door. “We can sit down and catch up—”
“No!” Caroline bursts out. Everyone turns to look at her. “I—I’m sorry,” she says. “The house is a mess . . . I’m sorry. It’s embarrassing.”
“That’s all right,” Danny says. He’s stopped smiling, at least, and looks less like an overstuffed teddy bear and more like a cop. “Sorry to barge in on you like this. This is Detective Rogers, from Suffolk County.”
“Suffolk County?” Minna frowns. “In Long Island?”
“Massachusetts.” The taller man speaks for the first time. He has a voice to match his face: worn down, stretched thin.
“You’re a little far from home, aren’t you?” Minna’s eyes keep returning to Danny. But now he’s keeping his eyes on his feet, playing his part.
“I’m investigating a disappearance,” he says, and for just one second, Minna and Caroline, the greenhouse, the whole house—us, me—seem to vanish, and all I feel is that tiny pulsing presence, the new ghost, drumming like a heartbeat. “Vivian Wright. Sixteen.”
Rogers reaches into his back pocket and extracts a photocopied picture of a girl. Long blond hair, dark smears of eye makeup, rings in her lip, ears, nose. The picture quality is terrible: she is half turned away from the camera, grinning at something offscreen, her features charcoal-smudgy.
The new ghost stirs. I can sense her fumbling to see, to learn her way into the air currents, to see with her no-longer-eyes and taste with her no-longer-tongue. She does not know how to be, yet.
“It’s an awful picture,” Minna says. She leans close to Danny to look—so close her br**sts nearly end up on his elbow. But he doesn’t seem to notice. She draws back. “Don’t you have anything better?”
“We’re waiting,” he says. “The parents are on their way back from Cape Town now. Apparently they were on safari. No phone, e-mail only once in a while. It was the babysitter who filed the report. Said she showed up for the job and Vivian”—he tapped the photo—“was just gone. Vanished. At first she thought Vivian had just blown out of town for a few days, for a joke. She’d done that kind of thing before. But . . . ”
“But what?” Caroline says.
Detective Rogers blinks. “It’s been over a week,” he said.
“And you think she came all the way up here?” Minna says.
“We’re not sure,” Rogers says. “She used her credit card to buy a ticket—one way, no return—on a Greyhound heading to Buffalo. And a 7-Eleven in Milford has her on surveillance tape, buying chips and some sodas. She’s wearing a baseball hat, but it’s definitely her. The cashier remembers asking about the piercings. We’ve been hitting the towns on the line, asking around.”
“I’m just helping out with the locals,” Danny jumps in. “Disappearances aren’t our typical gig.”
Sandy mutters, “He turned out just as stupid as the rest of them.”
“You think she was alone?” Caroline is slightly calmer now, but she’s still gripping her glass. “When a young girl runs away, there’s usually somebody. Right?”
“We’re not sure she did run away,” Rogers says. He’s good. Noncommittal. “She could have been compelled to leave. Or lured up here by someone. There was no one with her on the tape, but that doesn’t mean she was alone.”
“Do you think she’s . . . ?” Minna trails off.
For a moment, there is silence. The clocks seem to pause; the pulse stops in this ticking, groaning body. Even Sandra doesn’t dare make a sound. The word, unspoken, hangs like a mist. Dead. Do you think she’s dead?
The new ghost trembles.
“We’re investigating every possibility,” Detective Rogers says, which I know means yes, he does. “She hasn’t used her card again. Hasn’t used her cell phone, either. She used to have Facebook, Twitter, all that, but her parents made her shut it down a few months ago, so no help there. Problems with an ex-boyfriend—that’s what her friends said, anyway.”
“Maybe she’s with her ex-boyfriend,” Minna suggests. She nudges Danny, smiling. “It’s always the ex, isn’t it?”
Danny glows as red as a fire poker. “I don’t know about that,” he says. He pats his shirt down over his stomach.
Rogers doesn’t smile. “It isn’t this time. The kid hasn’t spoken to her in months. He moved to Austin with his family in November.”
“Well, then what did happen to her?” Caroline’s voice is shrill.
There’s another beat of silence. This time Rogers comes out with it. “She might be hiding somewhere. She might have been kidnapped, although there’s been no ransom. And she might be dead. But we hope not.” He takes the photograph, folds it, returns it to his pocket. “Sorry for barging in. Here’s my card, and Danny will leave you his, too.”
Danny’s already working his card over with a pen. “I’m leaving you my cell, too, Min,” he says. “We should catch up while you’re here.”
Rogers looks faintly annoyed. “If you see anything suspicious, please call right away.”
“You expect us to trip over a dead body in our garden?” Minna says. No one laughs, and Caroline says, “Minna, please,” and presses one hand to her head.