The house was silent when Lorna opened the door from the deck. Beside Marika’s armchair, the plastic bag of knitting was tipped on its side, blue yarn escaping from the mouth of the bag, one knitting needle flung toward the window. The tray from that morning was still on the picnic table. Coffee had spilled on what looked like an old grocery list tucked under a saucer, turning the letters into a blue smear. On the floor under the picnic table was the doughnut box, now empty.
In the kitchen she searched for a note from Adam. The clock on the stove read six thirty. Could Dennis still be out in his boat looking for her? Had he reached the island only to find her gone? Were they all out looking for her, even Marika?
An old-fashioned paddle wheel boat had come to her rescue, chartered to cruise up and down the lake. None of the girls on board for a bachelorette party asked Lorna what she had been doing on a tiny island, alone, in a thin blouse, paisley skirt, and sandals. No one seemed interested. A Solo cup of sangria was offered to her, which she declined, though she gratefully ate a bag of potato chips and drank a bottle of water.
The boat’s operator did ask where she would like to be dropped off. She didn’t know. But by tracing the shoreline from the public beach at the end of the Neck, and counting flagpoles, Lorna was able to guess the location of Marika’s dock.
In the kitchen she ate a piece of bread and two slices of cheese. Perhaps Adam hadn’t thought anything was wrong when hour after hour passed and she failed to show up. Or nothing that required calling the police. Last night she had walked out of the house with no explanation, gotten into her car and driven away, leaving him to fend for himself with a scorched table, a sink full of dishes, and two old people staring at him.
Maybe he thought she’d done it again. Gone off and left him.
When she opened the kitchen’s screen door and stepped outside, there was the shadowy hump of her car parked near the end of the driveway. Inside the car her shoulder bag was still sprawled on the front passenger seat, the keys still in the ignition. Her phone was there, too, though the battery was dead, she discovered, when she tried to turn it on.
She carried the phone into the house to plug the charger into the outlet by the kitchen sink. Adam and Marika must have left in someone else’s car. Dennis had returned in his boat, perhaps after hours of searching for her, and driven them somewhere.
Lorna walked through each room, snapping on all the lights. At the threshold of Marika’s bedroom, she paused. It was a small, narrow room with knotty pine walls, like the rest of the house, a worn braided rug on the floor. Marika’s black purse was on a chair. The single bed was neatly made, a worn white chenille spread drawn up over a hard-looking pillow. The shades were pulled and the room had a stale, biscuity smell that seemed to come from a wicker laundry hamper in one corner.
She was shivering in her damp clothes, so she opened the closet and took a brown cardigan from a hanger. As she pulled the cardigan around her shoulders, something under the bed shifted and groaned, and a moment later Freddy’s big head appeared beneath the hanging fringe of the chenille bedspread.
Lorna knelt down to embrace him as he crawled out onto the rug. “Hello there, boy.” Freddy pressed his nose into her neck. “So glad to see you.”
She was relieved that he looked unharmed after all those hours on his own, and for a few minutes gave herself over to patting him and pulling twigs and mud out of his fur, and untangling long reeds caught in his tail. He seemed all right, though he smelled slightly of skunk, and his muzzle was sticky and gritty, with what on closer inspection turned out to be sugar.
In the kitchen she filled a bowl with water and set it on the floor. He began lapping thirstily. Only then did it occur to her that the empty house, and the rush with which it had been abandoned—Marika’s purse left behind, the doughnut box knocked onto the floor, not even water set out for Freddy—must have had nothing to do with her absence.
Her phone now had enough battery charge to reveal that she had a voicemail from an unfamiliar number, left several hours earlier.
“Grootie’s in the hospital,” came Adam’s voice. “Where are you?”