GANDALF SIMON

It had been a decent-enough day. Gandalf saw the police car on the street but didn’t think much of it. She sat at her desk, obsessively reading the national news in all its revolting drama, when the doorbell rang.

Her next-door neighbor Evelyn stood on the porch.

She handed Gandalf a piece of paper with a photograph. “Iris is missing. Have you seen her this morning?”

Gandalf looked down at the photo and shook her head. The picture was poorly printed, as if the toner was low. A gray streak bisected the woman’s left eye and cheek, disappearing into her shirt. She could not remember the last time she saw Iris, but it could have been a week or two. Gandalf tended to keep to herself and stay in the house. But Iris had been the first person to welcome Jess and Gandalf to the Court when they moved in, almost five years before. She brought over a walnut-prune Bundt cake. “My mother’s recipe,” Iris had warned. “Don’t eat too much at one time. Because of the prunes.”

“She’s missing.” Evelyn waved her hand in the direction of the police car. “That’s why the cops are here. I made these leaflets so we can look for her. Will you join our search?”

Under the photo, Evelyn had added a few biographical details. Name, address, age. For some reason, Evelyn had included Iris’s birthplace: Storm Harbor, Maine. The sister island to the place where Gandalf had been imprisoned.

Those three small words—Storm Harbor, Maine—rocketed Gandalf back to Hurricane Island. To the horrible interrogation by federal security forces. To her escape, drenched and cold and lost and terrified. Walking a slippery, narrow path. Hugging a granite wall on one side with certain drowning in the quarry on the other. Needing to get away get away get away. Gandalf felt her body sway in wind and fear. A hand on her arm pulled her back to the present. She flinched.

Evelyn jerked her hand away. “Are you okay?”

Being kidnapped and imprisoned and interrogated on that wretched Maine island almost destroyed her. The fact that it was her government who did those things made it so much worse. Before that happened, she had considered herself a reasonably well-balanced and content person, confidant in her investigations and equations. She had trusted the scientific method with its beautiful logic to keep chaos at bay. After Hurricane Island she trusted no institution, no person. Except Jess, her partner, and to be honest she was not able to trust even Jess all the time. To save their relationship, Jess agreed to leave Manhattan. She got a teaching position at the nearby college and they moved to this circle of bungalows in the small New England city, dubbed Lesbianville, USA by the tabloids.

“I am fine,” she told Evelyn.

But she wasn’t fine. Not even close. From some things, people simply do not recover. Trauma, like what happened to her seven years, three months, and sixteen days earlier, changes a person at the cellular level.

“So, will you help us look for Iris?”

Gandalf nodded. Anything to get Evelyn out of her house.

Looking out the front window at the flashing cruiser lights after Evelyn left, Gandalf called Jess at the college and left a rambling voice message about the neighbor and the flyer and Hurricane Island. “Please come home,” she ended the message. “I need you.”

Gandalf leaned against the door jamb and squeezed her eyes closed. After her experience, how could she join the search for a missing woman?

How could she not?