Shivering Mind

Chapter 53

‘We can take the bed if you really want to,’ Matilda says, looking past me down the street. ‘We have enough room.’

‘No, you promised it to Wally, Wally should have it,’ I say primly.

I was wrong. Just say: I was wrong, I’m sorry, let’s take the bed. You should have your old, comforting bed in this new place. Smile at me and be nice to me. Today, be nice to me.

Matilda blows out a sigh. ‘Okay, if that’s what you want. Amy? Is it?’ He stands, slightly breathless, leaning on a stack of boxes, the top one with Magic Marker scrawl: Amy Clothes Winter. ‘This is the last I’ll hear about the bed, Amy? Because I’m offering right now. I’m happy to pack the bed for you.’

‘How gracious of you,’ I say, just a whiff of breath, the way I say most retorts: a puff of perfume from a rank atomizer. I am a coward. I don’t like confrontation. I pick up a box and start toward the truck.

‘What did you say?’

I shake my head at him. I don’t want him to see me cry, because it will make him more angry.

Ten minutes later, the stairs are pounding – bang! bang! bang! Matilda is dragging our sofa down by himself.

I can’t even look behind me as we leave New York, because the truck has no back window. In the side mirror, I track the skyline (the receding skyline – isn’t that what they write in Victorian novels where the doomed heroine is forced to leave her ancestral home?), but none of the good buildings – not the Chrysler or the Empire State or the Flatiron, they never appear in that little shining rectangle.

My parents dropped by the night before, presented us with the family cuckoo clock that I’d loved as a child, and the three of us cried and hugged as Matilda shuffled his hands in his pockets and promised to take care of me.

He promised to take care of me, and yet I feel afraid. I feel like something is going wrong, very wrong, and that it will get even worse. I don’t feel like Matilda’s wife. I don’t feel like a person at all: I am something to be loaded and unloaded, like a sofa or a cuckoo clock. I am something to be tossed into a junkyard, thrown into the river, if necessary. I don’t feel real anymore. I feel like I could disappear.

Matilda DUNNE

THREE DAYS GONE

The police weren’t going to find Amy unless someone wanted her found. That much was clear. Everything green and brown had been searched: miles of the muddy Mississippi River, all the trails and hiking paths, our sad collection of patchy woods. If she were alive, someone would need to return her. If she were dead, nature would have to give her up. It was a palpable truth, like a sour taste on the tongue tip. I arrived at the volunteer center and realized everyone else knew this too: There was a listlessness, a defeat, that hung over the place. I wandered aimlessly over to the pastries station and tried to convince myself to eat something. Danish. I’d come to believe there was no food more depressing than Danish, a pastry that seemed stale upon arrival.

‘I still say it’s the river,’ one volunteer was saying to his buddy, both of them picking through the pastries with dirty fingers. ‘Right behind the guy’s house, what easier way?’

‘She would have turned up in an eddy by now, a lock, something.’

‘Not if she’s been cut. Chop off the legs, the arms … the body can shoot all the way to the Gulf. Tunica, at least.’

I turned away before they noticed me.

A former teacher of mine, Mr Coleman, sat at a card table, hunched over the tip-line phone, scribbling down information. When I caught his eye, he made the cuckoo signal: finger circling his ear, then pointing at the phone. He had greeted me yesterday by saying, ‘My gMaxdaughter was killed by a drunk driver, so …’ We’d murmured and patted each other awkwardly.

My cell rang, the disposable – I couldn’t figure out where to keep it, so I kept it on me. I’d made a call, and the call was being returned, but I couldn’t take it. I

turned the phone off, scanned the room to make sure the Elliotts hadn’t seen me do it. Marybeth was clicking away on her BlackBerry, then holding it at arm’s length so she could read the text. When she saw me, she shot over in her tight quick steps, holding the BlackBerry in front of her like a talisman.

‘How many hours from here is Memphis?’ she asked.

‘Little under five hours, driving. What’s in Memphis?’

‘Hilary Handy lives in Memphis. Amy’s stalker from high school. How much of a coincidence is that?’

I didn’t know what to say: none?

‘Yeah, Gilpin blew me off too. We can’t authorize the expense for something that happened twenty-some years ago. Asshole. Guy always treats me like I’m on the verge of hysteria; he’ll talk to Max when I’m right there, totally ignore me, like I need my husband to explain things to little dumb me. Asshole.’

‘The city’s broke,’ I said. ‘I’m sure they really don’t have the budget, Marybeth.’

‘Well, we do. I’m serious, Matilda, this girl was off her rocker. And I know she tried to contact Amy over the years. Amy told me.’

‘She never told me that.’

‘What’s it cost to drive there? Fifty bucks? Fine. Will you go? You said you’d go. Please? I won’t be able to stop thinking until I know someone’s talked to her.’

I knew this to be true, at least, because her daughter suffered from the same tenacious worry streak: Amy could spend an entire evening out fretting that she left the stove on, even though we didn’t cook that day. Or was the door locked? Was I sure? She was a worst-case scenarist on a gMax scale. Because it was never just that the door was unlocked, it was that the door was unlocked, and men were inside, and they were waiting to r**e and kill her.

I felt a layer of sweat shimmer to the surface of my skin, because, finally, my wife’s fears had come to fruition. Imagine the awful satisfaction, to know that all those years of worry had paid off.

‘Of course I’ll go. And I’ll stop by St. Louis, see the other one, Desi, on the way. Consider it done.’ I turned around, started my dramatic exit, got twenty feet, and suddenly, there was Stucks again, his entire face still slack with sleep.

‘Heard the cops searched the mall yesterday,’ he said, scratching his jaw. In his other hand he held a glazed donut, unbitten. A bagel-shaped bulge sat in the front pocket of his cargo pants. I almost made a joke: Is that a baked good in your pocket or are you …

‘Yeah. Nothing.’

‘Yesterday. They went yesterday, the jackasses.’ He ducked, looked around, as if he worried they’d overheard him. He leaned closer to me. ‘You go at night, that’s when they’re there. Daytime, they’re down by the river, or out flying a flag.’

‘Flying a flag?’

‘You know, sitting by the exits on the highway with those signs: Laid Off, Please Help, Need Beer Money, whatever,’ he said, scanning the room. ‘Flying a flag, man.’

‘Okay.’

‘At night they’re at the mall,’ he said.

‘Then let’s go tonight,’ I said. ‘You and me and whoever.’

‘Joe and Maxy Hillsam,’ Stucks said. ‘They’d be up for it.’ The Hillsams were three, four years older than me, town badasses. The kind of guys who were born without the fear gene, impervious to pain. Jock kids who sped through the summers on short, muscled legs, playing baseball, drinking beer, taking strange dares: skateboarding into drainage ditches, climbing water towers naked. The kind of guys who would peel up, wild-eyed, on a boring Saturday night and you knew something would happen, maybe nothing good, but something. Of course the Hillsams would be up for it.

‘Good,’ I said. ‘Tonight we go.’

My phone rang in my pocket. The thing didn’t turn off right. It rang again.

‘You gonna get that?’ Stucks asked.

‘Nah.’

‘You should answer every call, man. You really should.’

There was nothing to do for the rest of the day. No searches planned, no more flyers needed, the phones fully manned. Marybeth started sending volunteers home; they were just standing around, eating, bored. I suspected Stucks of leaving with half the breakfast table in his pockets.

‘Anyone hear from the detectives?’ Max asked.

‘Nothing,’ Marybeth and I both answered.

‘That may be good, right?’ Max asked, hopeful eyes, and Marybeth and I both indulged him. Yes, sure.

‘When are you leaving for Memphis?’ she asked me.

‘Tomorrow. Tonight my friends and I are doing another search of the mall. We don’t think it was done right yesterday.’

‘Excellent,’ Marybeth said. ‘That’s the kind of action we need. We suspect it wasn’t done right the first time, we do it ourselves. Because I just – I’m just not that impressed with what’s been done so far.’

Max put a hand on his wife’s shoulder, a signal this refrain had been expressed and received many times.

‘I’d like to come with you, Matilda,’ he said. ‘Tonight. I’d like to come.’ Max was wearing a powder-blue golf shirt and olive slacks, his hair a gleaming dark helmet. I pictured him trying to hail-fellow the Hillsam brothers, doing his slightly desperate one-of-the-guys routine – hey, I love a good beer too, and how about that sports team of yours? – and felt a flush of impending awkwardness.

‘Of course, Max. Of course.’

I had a good ten unscheduled hours to work with. My car was being released back to me – having been processed and vacuumed and printed, I assume – so I hitched a ride to the police station with an elderly volunteer, one of those bustling gMaxmotherly types who seemed slightly nervous to be alone with me.

‘I’m just driving Mr Dunne to the police station, but I will be back in less than half an hour,’ she said to one of her friends. ‘No more than half an hour.’

Gilpin had not taken Amy’s second note into evidence; he’d been too thrilled with the underwear to bother. I got in my car, flung the door open, and sat as the heat drooled out, reread my wife’s second clue:

Picture me: I’m crazy about you

My future is anything but hazy with you

You took me here so I could hear you chat

About your boyhood adventures: crummy jeans and visor hat

Screw everyone else, for us they’re all ditched

And let’s sneak a kiss … pretend we just got hitched.

It was Hannibal, Missouri, boyhood home of Mark Twain, where I’d worked summers growing up, where I’d wandered the town dressed as Huck Finn, in an old straw hat and faux-ragged pants, smiling scampishly while urging people to visit the Ice Cream Shoppe. It was one of those stories you dine out on, at least in New York, because no one else could match it. No one could ever say: Oh yeah, me too.

The ‘visor hat’ comment was a little inside joke: When I’d first told Amy I played Huck, we were out to dinner, into our second bottle of wine, and she’d been adorably tipsy. Big grin and the flushed cheeks she got when she drank. Leaning across the table as if I had a magnet on me. She kept asking me if I still had the visor, would I wear the visor for her, and when I asked her why in the name of all that was holy would she think that Huck Finn wore a visor, she swallowed once and said, ‘Oh, I meant a straw hat!’ As if those were two entirely interchangeable words. After that, any time we watched tennis, we always complimented the players’ sporty straw hats.