Eva
They found her bucket. That bothered me tremendously, that tidbit, whispered to me by Hillary as we stood together in a line outside the Harris family’s guest cottage, serving as search party headquarters, waiting for instructions. A symbol of innocence, wrenched from her tiny hands! I shuddered. I also nosed around the guest cottage, wondering if they had two lots and would ever spin it off as a separate property or even rent with the option to buy. (That’s what Margot had told me she was searching for.) Oh, I was becoming a regular Harriet the Realtor Spy instead of focusing on the tragedy at hand. Shame on you, Eva.
I’d pictured that bucket as red plastic, light and childlike, bobbing in the overflowing creek. All that rain, rushing by. Was she swept away? The news reports said the water in Tamsen Creek was nearly ten inches higher than normal; it had spread out in a monstrous pattern, it seemed to me, pouring over rocks and moss and spent leaves that usually provided picturesque natural margins. Now it was just wet grass along the sides and gray, churning water rushing through. Uglier than I’d ever seen it, a molten, throbbing slash.
As we got through the line and entered the mudroom of the guesthouse, which probably doubled as their pool house, given its proximity, I was surprised to find it quite orderly and large. There were cubbies and benches, a stacked washer and dryer, the kind I hated, and a tiled dog bath, replete with hanging collar, leash, and chew toys.
We were handed flyers with the girl’s photo and specific information about what little Liza was wearing and carrying and where she was headed. To the creek to catch frogs was what she’d told her mother. Something she did nearly every afternoon, like clockwork. The mother said she was shy and didn’t have many friends at school or in the neighborhood but loved to explore, so she’d let her. We work so hard as parents to keep kids to a schedule, and look how it comes back to haunt us. Why, anyone in the neighborhood could have known the girl had a pattern, as regular as a snack.
In the close-up photo, she was missing two teeth in the front, showing off her checkerboard smile proudly. The photo had an informal, silly quality to it that made me wonder why the family had chosen it. I couldn’t say for certain if it was the same girl I’d glimpsed the other night; that child had seemed a good deal younger than six, with longer, wilder-looking hair. On the flyer, it said she was carrying a house key on a white lanyard, a bucket, and possibly a mug. They’d found the bucket but not the lanyard or mug. It tore at me inexplicably, on another level, when I read that the bucket was white enamel, monogrammed, and oversize, used to fill the dog’s water bowl.
They wouldn’t ordinarily tell anyone this level of detail, I was certain, except they were also looking for a matching enamel mug. The scoop for the dog’s dry food. The child would use it, I supposed, to capture frogs and ferry them to the bucket. White enamel. Black monogram. I looked around. Perhaps in these tall cabinets, there were matching black-and-white monogrammed dog towels? (The girl herself was wearing green wellies, paisley leggings, and a pink pullover with a drawstring hood. That bothered me too, the drawstring.)
I cleared my throat, projected. “Is the monogram the dog’s initials?”
The friend or relative coordinating things, the man in dark-gray leggings and black half-zip—how I hate to see a man’s scrawny limbs in leggings, so emasculating—blinked hard at me instead of answering. His mouth opened slightly, as if he had to pull in oxygen to fuel an answer. I was certain that after a few seconds, he wished he’d ignored me and not looked right at me.
Because he didn’t just say a quick yes, or I don’t know, or for God’s sake even offer a laugh. The question hung in the air a long time, long enough for the rest of the group, numbering thirty or forty, to repeat it down the line.
“I don’t think that’s relevant,” he said.
I shrugged. “You just told us to notice everything, even if it seems random.”
“In the woods, I meant. As you fan out.”
“Oh. Okay.” I rolled my eyes at Hannah and Hillary, who whispered to me to behave. These were her neighbors, their neighbors now, and it wouldn’t do for an outsider to embarrass them. Never mind that I was technically a neighbor, too, lived so close I occasionally walked over here, cutting through the gulch of another neighborhood, or did until things got so damned slippery and wet with this September rain.
There were mostly women in the group, a few teenagers, only a couple of men. Morgan and Miles had begged to come, claimed other kids were doing it (which was correct, but they were seventeen and eighteen), and the girls, with a look of horror on their faces, had said absolutely not. Under no circumstances. And Morgan’s chorus of why not, we want to help, we can look, we’re brave was met with no excuses or reasons. As it should have been. God knows I didn’t always agree with their parenting advice—I was at odds with the way Hillary overscheduled Morgan’s summers, and don’t get me started on Miles’s hair, which Hannah and Mike never forced him to cut and which always fell in his face, like a sporty British girl. Like an unkempt Princess Di, he was with that hair—horrifying. As if the boy didn’t have enough to worry about, with his slender body and bookish ways. To add feminine hair on top of the equation struck me as madness. But keeping them home today? Absolutely.
Hillary knew several of the neighbors of course and introduced us. We shook hands as we signed in and picked up our maps from the volunteer table on the patio. If you looked down the sloping property, the creek was not only visible, swollen with rain, but audible. Even over the chitchat, you could hear the water churning, almost riverine as it leapt and fell over the rocks and logs. It was inescapable; it beckoned. Oh, to a child, the magnetic sound of water, rushing, babbling, breaking against rock, seeping into tide pools of treasures. Poor child, I thought. How could she have had any other fate? The creek called, loudly, to anyone who set foot in that backyard.
One of the women, Susan, who I felt was a bit overdressed for searching crime scenes in the woods, in her turtleneck and Barbour coat and suede boots, said that Hannah should think about joining the neighborhood book club. She said they read a variety of books, and there were lots of smart women in it, as if she had to emphasize and overcompensate somehow for this new neighbor who was a writer. She said this directly to Hannah and didn’t include me in the invitation, even though I was standing right next to her, obvious as a bump on a log. Older ladies who don’t live at old lady homes don’t get invited to things much unless we offer some kind of useful skill that is becoming fetishized by the young. Pottery. Quilting. Magic loop knitting. I suppose if I start gathering plants and making my own cocktail bitters or sustainable fabric dyes, I can become popular again. Maybe Morgan could put me in one of her videos dancing to rap, and I’d rise from my early crypt and enjoy relevance once again!
Oh well, who needs ’em. Overdressed, underfed women discussing books to make themselves feel like they were back at college. Who wanted to go back to college and write papers again? Not me. Just let me enjoy the damned book!
I thought I might meet some nice retired male searchers, someone in a yellow vest and hiking boots and a sensible hat. Someone like that would be nice to have coffee with. But Tamsen Creek was the land of the stay-at-home mom. The men had important jobs, meetings in other cities, traveling even over the weekend. They’d chosen this neighborhood partly because of its proximity to the highway that zipped down to the Philadelphia airport, as well as the less obvious but unspoken nearness to the county airport where private jets took off and landed. Depending on what client Ben was serving, he utilized them both, and so, too, did many of his neighbors. Ben certainly was gone on business well over half the time. Hillary pretended she didn’t care, because she was busy and independent and did everything in the household anyway, but I knew she did. Wasn’t that why you got married, so you could share in the triumphs and tragedies of communities? Now, the husbands would hear about this hubbub not over dinner but over text message between their surgeries or presentations. They’d feel terrible, of course, remind their wives to set the alarms and not let their children wander off. How awful that I went immediately to stereotype. But if this wasn’t a stereotypical place, what was? As far as I could ascertain, none of these women held paying jobs except Hannah.
It was only later, when I asked Hillary where Ben was off to, that I would learn many of the men had stayed home, still badly hungover and exhausted from their monthly neighborhood poker game on Friday, and behind on everything else because of it. Hannah said that Mike had offered to come and help but that she’d told him no. I suppose she thought he was just trying to worm his way back into his ex-wife’s and child’s hearts, because when I commented that Mike probably would have been the only person with backcountry skills, the only useful person on the search, she’d glared at me.
“What?” I’d said. “He’s camped outdoors his whole life. He’s tracked animals, hidden from them in stands or dens or whatever you call them. I think it’s fair to say Mike would be an asset.”
And the two of them had stared at me, ganging up the way they still do, two against one, and said that anyone observant and capable of walking in the woods could be helpful! Anyone with a good eye! There was no need for tracking scat or carving a path! And I suppose I was being sexist and stereotypical. And I dared to support someone they’d already cast out.
What was I supposed to do? Just because Hannah said they’d grown apart and had nothing to say to one another, were we to pretend we didn’t like him anymore? Should I forget that Mike was kind to me and had some good qualities I wish I possessed?
As we walked for several hours, adjacent to the creek, heads bent, the sun rose steadily over my left shoulder and landed over my right, so I knew I was at least staying in a straight line. It was boring work, and I had trouble concentrating on what to look for, what was important. Weren’t all the weeds bent? Wasn’t all the earth trampled? Still, I didn’t see any cigarette butts, threads from clothing, buttons, anything remotely human. Someone in another line had a metal detector, and I guess he was looking for shotgun shells or maybe some old heiress’s jewelry, who knew.
All I could think as we continued going single file, walking within three feet of one another, as synchronized as chorus girls, was about the family. Where were they while we were searching? The mother, the father, the siblings? Was someone investigating them? Why couldn’t we be told what kind of family had lost this child?
What kind of people could own this grand and glorious house and have seen fit to give their dog a special bucket? And not their little girl?
And what kind of husband needed to stay home all weekend nursing a hangover?
Well, the answer to that I certainly knew all too well.