When the administrator at Mazy High called Jack to see if he knew where Julie was, Jack left the accident scene. He returned to their modest ranch-style home and scanned the low-maintenance yard in the front: a lawn shaped like a kidney bean, juniper bushes under the windows, several old oaks dropping leaves onto the tar-shingle roof, redbrick walls that never needed painting. Behind the windows that faced the street, the curtains were drawn, as always.
The jack-o’-lanterns that Julie’s students had carved and presented to her last month, before she took a short medical leave, were sitting on the porch, wrinkled and collapsing in on themselves, toothless old hags. Jack pulled the police cruiser he had borrowed into the driveway and made a mental note to throw them out before they liquefied. Usually his wife took care of such things, but a lot had changed since Miralee left.
The fog had thinned to a mist and floated beneath the trees.
He parked outside the closed garage, exited the car, and punched the security code into the exterior door opener. The familiar whirring hefted the panel and revealed the empty spot where Jack’s Jeep would have been if it wasn’t still in the shop. Next to this, on the left, the bay for Julie’s sedan was also empty.
He sighed, no longer expecting to find her here.
Jack walked to the rear of the garage, which led to the backyard, and began to speculate: Someone breaks into the shed, steals the scooter parked there. Julie observes from the master bedroom window, decides to follow. The theory had holes. Julie would have called the precinct. She wasn’t at the scene of the scooter disaster.
At the back of the garage, a crooked flagstone path led to the shed, which looked like an old single-car garage with barn doors padlocked shut. No forced entry. Padlock secure.
The phone inside the house was ringing. After the fourth ring the caller was sent to voice mail. Jack stepped onto the flagstones.
A quiet break-in. Julie wouldn’t have heard. She gets up, goes to work none the wiser.
She didn’t go to work, obviously.
She grabbed coffee with a girlfriend, forgot about the meeting she was supposed to attend before school. Or took a detour to put cheap gas in the car.
That was another habit she needed to change: Why on earth waste gas money by driving great distances to save a nickel? The math didn’t work. She of all people should know that.
When was the last time he’d spoken to his wife? He mentally reviewed. Usually she called him when she needed something. When he was deep in a case, checking in with her rarely occurred to him. Had she called him at all yesterday? Now that he thought of it, no. She’s angry with me about the long shift. Ignoring my calls now because she feels ignored. Julie did that once in a while. Not frequently enough for him to pay much attention to it. Still, that she was doing it now annoyed him. The circumstances were urgent. This was no time for games.
An affair. A plot to run away, start a new life. Casanova drives the scooter, she follows him out of town. Divine justice intervenes and reduces the interloper to a grease spot. She hauls his broken body into her car and—
Though such an offensive scenario might have been supported by Julie’s recently chilly behavior, her doctor had suggested she might withdraw for a time after her hysterectomy. Some hormonal side effect. Also, he didn’t need a psychiatrist to tell him that Miralee’s abandonment had devastated his wife, even though Julie refused to discuss it with him. She was having a rough time, not an affair. There was also the matter of her surgery, which would throw a wet blanket on any sexual flings, and the not-so-small matter of her not being able to lift more than ten pounds for another four weeks.
The Bofingers had been adamant that there were no other parties at the scene, though they had plenty of motivation to lie to him. Well, that wasn’t his fault, was it?
On the side of the shed, the key was hidden above the window on its protruding frame. He removed the padlock, swung the white wood door open on its tired hinges, and reached for the string that turned on the light.
Nothing had been disturbed, not even the scents of potting soils for summer window boxes, or gasoline for the mower. Organic mixed with synthetic, damp air and dry earth. Rusting metal tools on a spongy wood floor, untouched dust and spider–webs, and the clean-swept spot near the door where the blue-and-white Vespa should have been.
There was nothing wrong with this scene at all.
New theory: More than one thief, careful people who know my wife’s habits, like where she keeps this key. Stalkers? They stole both vehicles, because—
A new possibility for why Julie wasn’t answering the phone struck him, so obvious that it should have been the first to occur to him and not the last. He left the shed wide open and cursed himself as he ran back to the house, through the garage, and—the house door was locked. Julie never locked this door, though he admonished her to. His keys snagged on a thread in his pocket and tangled with each other before he got the right one into the keyhole.
His entrance into the kitchen was confused: rush to find Julie or treat the house like a crime scene?
“Julie!”
The refrigerator hummed.
“Julie, are you here?”
Three options: Julie was gone. Julie was here, clinging to life. Julie was here, dead.
The scooter accident had taken place more than three hours ago. If she was still here, she was probably not clinging to life any longer.
Procedure. Method. Don’t do anything that will make a loophole for whoever did this.
It was Jack’s house. There was no need for him to cover his hands or his shoes. Prints from both would be everywhere, and he could be easily excluded from the evidence.
The kitchen was like the shed, as it always was: the eat-in table empty except for a bowl of fruit and two placemats, though they never ate in here. The dishes cleaned and put away. The counters were tidy but still bearing crumbs from whoever had made the last sandwich. Perhaps Julie, for dinner the night before. Or him, when he packed a lunch two days earlier.
An inch of cold coffee sat in the carafe of the instant coffee-maker, as he had left it Monday afternoon.
Was Julie eating? He opened the cupboard that held the trash can. It held a clean, dry liner. Trash would have gone out yesterday.
He moved into the adjacent living room, scanning quickly for anything out of the ordinary. Carpets flat, furniture sitting squarely in carpet divots, pictures straight on the wall and organized in frames on the shelves. TV remote waiting for him on the end table, magazines in the rack. In the entryway his eyes alighted on the bench. Julie’s classwork, organized neatly in a tote bag, sat on the bench. Beside it, her planner, her teacher’s edition textbooks, a piece of lined three-ring paper bearing a note. Jack read it without picking it up: Mrs. M, Thanks for the great opportunity, but I’ve decided not to do it. Maybe Colin would? I hope you’ll understand. –L
Julie wouldn’t have left these behind if she had headed for the school. He didn’t see her purse. Jack’s pulse was louder in his ears now than his mental insistence that his wife was fine, perfectly fine.
He rushed past the guest bathroom on the left, the den that doubled as a guest room on the right, and only glanced into the bedroom at the end of the hall that was still Miralee’s, though she’d vowed never to return. His goal was the master bedroom, which was where Julie was supposed to have been when Audrey’s car demolished that bike, when Jack called and called, when the fog was far too thick for anyone to be slashing through it like some jungle adventurer.
The door was nearly closed. Through the inch-wide crack he saw the unmade bed. His fingertips pushed the door open, and it swung freely, silent onto a room deathly still.
The nightstands labeled which side was whose: by the walk-in closet, his Bible, his reading glasses, his alarm clock. He opened the small drawer. His personal firearm was still there. On the other side of the bed, by the window that overlooked the backyard, Julie’s table was nearly hidden by notes, earrings, and lotions. Miralee, frozen in a rare smile, looked out at him from a small glittering frame. A tower of novels on the floor leaned toward the wall. Three bottles of pills—antibiotics taken as a precaution to ward off the postoperative infection, a painkiller, and what Julie had said was an anti-inflammatory—stood capped next to a glass of water. Jack thought this third bottle was an antidepressant, though his wife denied it. He ought to finally look it up.
All her clothes and shoes, except for her favorite pair of walking shoes, which she wore almost daily, seemed to be in the walk-in closet. The suitcase stood in the corner. The dresser was full of pants and T-shirts.
Her makeup was spread out on the bathroom counter. The shower stall held droplets of water.
Jack returned to Julie’s nightstand, because something about it seemed off. He studied it the way he used to play memory games, which he always won, when he was a kid. It took a minute, but then he figured out what was missing: an ugly old necklace that looked like it had been made by a child, a yellowish rock surrounded by a silver donut.
A neighbor, an aging man whose wife had died recently, gave Julie the piece just a few months ago. The couple had a soft spot for her. She had claimed it was an uncut diamond, to which Jack had said if it was she should trade it up for something more attractive. Instead, she hung it from her lampshade, where the sight of it would rankle him. He understood perfectly: the necklace wasn’t even worth its sentimental value.
In the face of its absence, however, his confidence faltered. Could the rock have been a diamond after all?
There was no other sign of anything amiss except his wife’s decision—at age forty-two, after twentysome years of responsible, if unspiritual, living—to abandon responsibility and common courtesy for a day.
But this simple possibility failed to explain the scooter accident and the blood and the absence of a body. Jack rubbed his eyes and sat on the edge of the rumpled bed. There would be no rest for him yet, not until he made contact with Julie.
Where to look next?
He glanced at his Bible, the only book he had never been able to convince Julie to read. It was his sorest complaint about her: a close-mindedness to the things of God, and he prayed daily that God would confront her sins head-on. If she could understand the way the world worked, she would be less depressed from time to time. God said it plain as day: live one way and your life will be rewarded, live another way and reap the consequences. It was simple. They lived in a world governed by spiritual rules and regulations that yielded good or bad outcomes, depending on whether one was a follower or a rebel.
Because Jack had chosen the right way to live, he had great faith that one day Julie would come to church with him, sit next to him, and redeem this one mark against him as an elder of the church, namely, that his wife was stubbornly agnostic. Then they would be complete, the way a husband and wife were meant to be, and their lives would be better, because the half of it that was her responsibility would improve.
Jack stood, because if he stayed seated on the mattress a second longer he would sink into it and not wake for a day, or until Julie leaned over him, shaking him by the shoulder because the precinct needed him.
The landline rang again. The closest receiver was in Jack’s den. Neither he nor Julie saw the point of a phone in the only place they could protect their sleep. He returned to the den and answered.
“Yeah.”
“Jack, this is Ellen Stone again.”
“Hi, Ellen. She still not at school?”
“She’s not. I thought I’d check one more time before I get a substitute in.”
Jack noticed that the office window was open a few inches. His eyes lingered on the gap while he wondered if Julie would have opened this window—she preferred to work on her laptop at the dining room table, not in here—and if she had, whether she would have left it open.
He said, “I’d go ahead and do it if I were you. I’m just home from work, and all her school stuff is still here at the house.”
“Oh dear.”
“No, no, I’m sure it’s nothing. I was just about to call her doctor, see if maybe something came up suddenly, you know, with the surgery and all.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll let you know as soon as I learn something.”
“There’s a rumor going around that she was in an accident downtown—”
“Just a rumor. Someone stole her scooter, got in a mess with it in the fog. But she wasn’t involved.”
“What a relief. For Julie, I mean.”
“Thanks, Ellen.” There was nothing to be thanked, but it was a good technique for getting out of a conversation while making the other person think they’d contributed something important.
He hung up and reached for his computer’s power button.
The machine was already turned on, though he always turned it off before shifts. Julie had her own laptop. The monitor came alive after he jiggled the mouse.
A document was open on the screen, untitled and unsaved, a sheet of electronic paper, blank except for one sentence: Some crimes never see justice.
Jack lowered himself onto the chair. The proclamation was caffeine on his brain. Only a few months ago these words had come from his very own mouth. He spoke them of Geoff Bofinger, on the day he convinced the elder board that their pastor had violated his promise to be their spiritual leader and should be sent away.
The crime: the taking of a human life. When that predator Ed took advantage of Miralee and got her pregnant, it was Geoff who had given her the money for an abortion. The arrogant man abused his power, thought he could save his son’s face, avoid a scandal, send Miralee away. But those spiritual laws that governed the universe could not be denied, and Jack learned the truth the day he found Miralee sobbing on the bed in her room, days before she left Cornucopia.
Some crimes never see justice, he had said to the elders. The seduction of his only child and the murder of his grandbaby would never be prosecuted in this world’s courts. He had pointed to Geoff at the head of the table where they had gathered and said, But that doesn’t free us from our moral responsibilities.
The Bofingers were released from their duties at the church within the week.
The cursor blinked at the end of the line.
Jack reached for his keyboard, then hesitated. Whoever had typed this might have left prints. He glanced at the open window. He would dust that too. Out in the garage he had the powders and brushes he needed from an old kit.
He got up to retrieve these items, then stopped in the doorway. Procedure. What was the best way to close all the loopholes on the monster who had broken into his home and done something to his wife? Sitting here dusting his own keyboard was not it. Someone else could do that for him. He pulled out a phone and placed a call to Rutgers. Jack needed to be out there looking for Julie. Who better than he to bring her back into the safety of his leadership and spiritual shelter?
He had a pretty good idea where to start the search.