Ben Winters - Countdown City

“Okay, so, Martha, what I can do is go by the restaurant,” I say—I hear myself saying—“and ask a few questions.” And as soon as the words are out she’s across the room, hugging me around the neck, grinning into my chest, like it’s a done deal, like I’ve already brought her husband home and he’s out there on the stoop, ready to come in.

“Oh, thank you,” she says. “ Thank you , Henry.”

“Listen, wait—wait, Martha.”

I gently pry her arms from around my neck, step back and plant her in front of me, summon the stern hardheaded spirit of my grandfather, level Martha with his severe stare. “I will do what I can to find your husband, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, breathless. “You promise?”

“Yes.” I nod. “I can’t promise that I will find him, and I definitely can’t promise that I will bring him home. But I’ll do what I can.”

“Of course,” she says, “I understand,” and she’s beaming, hugging me again, my notes of caution sliding unheard off her cheeks. I can’t help it, I’m smiling, too, Martha Milano is hugging me and I’m smiling.

“I’ll pay you, of course,” she says.

“No, you won’t.”

“No, I know, not with money money, but we can figure out something…”

“Martha, no. I won’t take anything from you. Let’s have a look around, okay?”

“Okay,” she says, wiping the last of the tears from her eyes.

Martha finds me a recent picture of her husband, a nice full-body snapshot from a fishing trip a couple years back. I study him, Brett Cavatone, a short man with a broad powerful frame, standing at the bank of a stream in the classic pose, holding aloft a dripping wide-mouth bass, man and fish staring into the camera with the same skeptical and somber expression. Brett has a black beard, thick and untrimmed, but the hair on his head is neat and short, a crew cut only slightly grown out.

“Was your husband in the military, Martha?”

“No,” she says, “he was a cop. Like you. But not Concord. The state force.”

“A trooper?”

“Yes.” Martha takes the picture from me, gazes at it proudly.

“Why did he leave the force?”

“Oh, you know. Tired of it. Ready for a change. And my dad was starting this restaurant. So, I don’t know.”

She murmurs these fragments— tired of it, ready for a change —as if they require no further explanation, like the idea of leaving law enforcement voluntarily makes self-evident sense. I take the photograph back and slip it into my pocket, thinking of my own brief career: patrolman for fifteen months, detective on Adult Crimes for four months, forcibly retired along with my colleagues on March twenty-eighth of this year.

We walk around the house together. I’m peering into the closets, opening Brett’s drawers, finding nothing interesting, nothing remarkable: a flashlight, some paperbacks, a dozen ounces of gold. Brett’s closet and dresser drawers are still full of clothes, which in normal circumstances would suggest foul play rather than intentional abandonment, but there is no longer any such thing as normal circumstances. At lunch yesterday, McGully told us a story he heard, where the husband and wife were out for a walk in White Park, and the woman just runs, literally runs, leaps over a hedge and disappears into the distance.

“She said, ‘Can you hold my ice cream a sec?’” McGully said, laughing, bellowing, pounding the table. “Poor dummy standing there with two ice creams.”

The Cavatones’ bedroom furniture is handsome and sturdy and plain. On Martha’s night table is a hot-pink journal with a small brass lock, like a child’s diary, and when I lift it I get just the lightest scent of cinnamon. Perfect. I smile. On the opposite night table, Brett’s, is a miniature chess board, pieces arranged midgame; her husband, Martha tells me with another fond smile, plays against himself. Hung above the dresser is a small tasteful painting of Christ crucified. On the wall of the bathroom, next to the mirror, is a slogan in neat all-capital block letters: IF YOU ARE WHAT YOU SHOULD BE, YOU WILL SET THE WORLD ABLAZE!

“Saint Catherine,” says Martha, appearing beside me in the mirror, tracing the words with her forefinger. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

We go back downstairs and sit facing each other on a tidy brown sofa in the living room. There’s a column of dead bolts along the front door and rows of iron bars on the windows. I flip open my notebook and gather a few more details: what time her husband left for work yesterday, what time her father came by, said “have you seen Brett?” and they realized that he was gone.

“This may seem like an obvious question,” I say, when I’m done writing down her answers. “But what do you think he might be doing?”

Martha worries at the nail of her pinky. “I’ve thought about it so much, believe me. I mean, it sounds silly, but something good . He wouldn’t be off bungee jumping or shooting heroin or whatever.” My mind flashes on Peter Zell, the last poor soul I went in search of, while Martha continues. “If he really left, if he’s not…”

I nod. If he’s not dead. Because that possibility, too, hovers over us. A lot of missing people are missing because they’re dead.

“He’d be doing something, like, noble ,” Martha concludes. “Something he thought was noble.”

I smooth the edges of my mustache. Something noble. A powerful thing to think about one’s husband, especially one who’s just disappeared without explanation. A pink bead of blood has appeared at the edge of her fingernail.

“And you don’t feel it’s possible—”

“No,” says Martha. “No women. No way.” She shakes her head, adamant. “Not Brett.”

I don’t press it; I move on. She tells me that he was getting around on a black ten-speed bicycle; she tells me no, he didn’t have any regular activities outside of work and home. I ask her if there’s anything else she needs to tell me about her husband or her marriage, and she says no: He was here, they had a plan, and then he went away.

Now all that’s left is the million-dollar question. Because even if I do track him down—which I almost certainly will not be able to do—it remains the case that abandoning one’s spouse is not illegal and never has been, and of course I have no power at this point to compel anyone to do anything. I’m unsure exactly how to explain any of this to Martha Milano, and I suspect she knows it anyway, so I just go ahead and say it:

“What do you want me to do if I find him?”

She doesn’t answer at first, but leans across the sofa and stares deeply, almost romantically, into my eyes. “Tell him he has to come home. Tell him his salvation depends on it.”

“His… salvation?”

“Will you tell him that, Henry? His salvation.”

I murmur something, I don’t know what, and look down at my notebook, vaguely embarrassed. The faith and fervency are new; they weren’t an aspect of Martha Milano when we were young. It’s not just that she loves this man and misses him; she believes that he has sinned by abandoning her and will suffer for it in the world to come. Which is coming, of course, a lot sooner than it used to be.

I tell Martha I’ll be back soon if I have any news and where she can find me, in the meantime, if she needs to.

As we stand up, her expression changes.

“Jeez, I’m sorry, I’m such a—I’m sorry. Henry, how’s your sister doing?”

“I don’t know,” I say.

I’m already at the door, I’m working my way through the series of dead bolts and chains.

“You don’t know?”

“I’ll be in touch, Martha. I’ll let you know what I can find.”