LEXI BLUM

“What do you think happened to your mother?” Gandalf had asked in the garden.

“I think her disappearance might have something to do with my father.”

Lexi couldn’t believe she’d said that. Did she really believe that her father was somehow responsible?

The three women stood among waist-high vegetable stalks, brittle and broken. Gandalf’s face turned the pale color of the dead vegetation. She took her girlfriend’s hand and Lexi could tell Gandalf wished she were anywhere but there.

Lexi wished she could take back her accusatory words. She listened to the crisp flapping of plastic and pictured her mother huddled sick in that makeshift shelter or lying frozen next to the Mill River she loved in warmer weather.

“Don’t mind me. I’m so upset I don’t know what I’m saying,” Lexi fumbled with her hat, pulling it over her ears. She returned to the path, searching her brain for something to say to change the mood. “You know, all this used to be the kitchen garden for the state hospital to feed patients?” She looked at the blank faces of her neighbors and walked ahead. “Well, let’s finish this up.”

They returned to their careful walk-and-look, settling into an uncomfortable silence as they turned down the last path. Jess got a phone call and gestured that she had to take it. She excused herself to walk ahead and have her conversation. There wasn’t much left to investigate anyway. No more makeshift greenhouses or plastic covered structures. It felt hopeless. Lexi started thinking about what if they never found her mother, what if she just disappeared, when Gandalf spoke.

“So,” Gandalf said. “What kind of work do you do?”

Lexi wasn’t expecting chitchat from Gandalf, who had a reputation on the Court as awkward and socially stiff. Lexi’s parents didn’t gossip, but Eric next door mentioned that Gandalf had testified in some kind of big government investigation, a scandal involving Homeland Security. Whatever the reason, she and her girlfriend—both tall and thin with cropped gray hair—kept to themselves. Lexi couldn’t remember Gandalf ever speaking to her before other than a short greeting or necessary response.

“It’s okay if you would rather not talk,” Gandalf said into the silence.

Lexi smiled at her. “No, it’s fine. You just surprised me. I’m a landscape architect. I design outdoor spaces, plantings and trees. I got my graduate degree from the Conway School over on Village Hill Road. In their old place, though, before they moved here.”

Gandalf looked thoughtful. “Does your training affect how you look at these gardens, as a professional?”

Interesting woman, Lexi thought. She’d been thinking about the garden layout as they walked. “Professionally, I rarely use symmetry or grids,” she said. She realized her father had never asked her a single question about her work.

“What about you?” she asked Gandalf. “What do you do?”

“I used to conduct mathematical research into hurricane behavior, creating models and formulas to explain how they act. But I left the university and am trying to write a book.”

“About hurricanes?”

Gandalf nodded. She stopped to poke a pile of leaves and brush with a long stick.

Lexi frowned. Gandalf couldn’t possibly think Iris was in there, could she?

“What about Jess?” she asked. “What does she do?”

Gandalf looked uncomfortable. She glanced at Jess, still on her phone, and tossed the long stick into the brush pile.

“She is a literature professor at the college,” Gandalf said, and then hesitated.

Lexi imagined the woman trying to figure out what came next in an ordinary conversation.

Gandalf looked relieved when they reached the end of the row. “I guess we should go back and report to the policewoman. It doesn’t appear that your mother is in the garden.” She waved at Jess and pointed back towards the house.

Lexi hated to give up, but Gandalf was right. There was no evidence of her mother in the pale shriveled growth.

Jess finished her conversation, and the three women walked silently back to Azalea Court. Gandalf and Jess hurried to their house with a small wave and smile. Lexi imagined their relief at not having to be in the presence of catastrophe. She meandered back to Number Two, not sure what new bit of nasty family history would come tumbling out of her father’s mouth next. Detective McPhee was sitting on one of mother’s porch rockers. She stood up as Lexi climbed the steps.

“Could we talk?” McPhee asked.

Lexi nodded.

“Not here.” McPhee pointed to the Circle.

They sat side by side on the bench, both staring past the bungalows to the ridge of Mt. Tom beyond. Without looking at Lexi, McPhee asked quietly, “Why do you think your mother left?”

What could she say? What did the detective know about their family secrets? What could she know? Lexi didn’t know any of this stuff until last night.

“I don’t know,” Lexi whispered.

“Could it have something to do with your dad?”

“Where is he?”

“Inside.”

Lexi had never considered how it felt to air dirty family laundry, at least not personally. She’d known people who hid shameful information to spare themselves the pain of facing it, but Lexi had never seen her own family in that light. She wasn’t sure she was ready to now.

“I don’t know,” she said again. “Have you found out anything?”

McPhee shook her head. “No. But I’m beginning to suspect this wasn’t a situation of a confused elderly woman just wandering off. And I doubt that someone kidnapped her. I’m starting to wonder if your mother could have left on purpose, to escape something. Until we know what she needed to escape, it’ll be pretty impossible to find her. To help her.”