Lisa Unger: Smoke

There was a sidebar about missing persons statistics in the United States. Apparently, in California alone in 2003, more than thirty thousand people had disappeared from their lives voluntarily. Meaning that they packed some things, cashed out their accounts, and without a word to anyone in their lives, just left. Five hundred eighty-five disappeared under suspicious circumstances with significant evidence of a stranger abduction. And 247 were missing, the circumstances of their disappearance totally unknown. Nationally, in 2001 more than eight hundred thousand adults and children were counted as missing by the FBI’s National Crime Information Center. Nearly a million people gone by accident, foul play, or design. Just gone.

There was also a single-page website someone had set up, probably the parents, with a picture of Lily and the word MISSING emblazoned across the top and a number to call. There was the offer of a $10,000 reward. The paragraph gave a brief description of Lily, mentioning how she was last seen by her family three days after her brother’s funeral. She left their house, supposedly to go back to her life and her job. She returned to the city, only to pack a bag and ask for some time off work. No one who loved her had seen her since that day.

Lydia leaned back in her chair and took a deep breath. She reached for her coffee cup and drank from it even though it was stone cold now. The milky gray light of morning was coming in through the tall windows and she could hear the street noise starting to rise as the city woke up for business. She liked it here in her little cocoon surrounded by floor-to-ceiling shelves of books, her leather couches and warm chenille throws. She liked the writing life; it was safe.

Her work as a true crime writer had led her to consult with Jeffrey’s firm long before he made her a partner. And though she sometimes felt more like an investigator than a writer, the word was her first love. That was the place she could put order to the chaos she found in the world. That was the place she tried to do so, anyway. But her book was finished. She would turn it in today and it would be months before her editor took a scalpel to it. She would have a little time on her hands.

A low-level anxiety started to bubble beneath the surface of her skin as she looked around her office. Over the years, Jeffrey had dubbed this feeling “The Buzz.” The feeling she got when something needed investigating or was not quite what it seemed. She had that feeling now about Lily. And then, of course, there was her thing about lost girls.

Shawna Fox, Tatiana Quinn, even Wanda Jane Felix, who was lost in another way. She carried little pieces of all of them with her, the cases from her past, the girls she couldn’t help in spite of her best efforts. When she thought of them, which was more often than she would admit, she had the feeling you might have if you dropped a diamond down a sewer. As if through your own clumsiness you lost something so precious to someplace so dark and labyrinthine that it could never be found. Of course, intellectually, Lydia knew she was in no way responsible for what had happened to her lost girls. But that didn’t help her to manage her sadness over their fate and the vague if onlys that occasionally haunted her.

Of course, Lily was not a girl. She was a woman and a writer, not so unlike Lydia. And she was a friend.

“I guess I don’t have to ask what you’re doing,” said Jeffrey, walking into her office. He placed a hot cup of coffee on her desk and took his own cup over to the couch where he reclined, throwing his feet up onto the coffee table and looking at Lydia with an expression that reminded her that he knew her better than anyone. The mystery was gone. She was an open book.

“You don’t know everything ,” she said.

“Hmm.”

She raised her coffee to him. “Thanks,” she said with a smile.

“My pleasure.” Then, “The detective said that Lily Samuels had quite a bit of cash on her.”

She knew he’d been thinking about it, too. “Yeah,” she answered with a shrug.

“So maybe she’s just taking some time out to get her head together. Her brother just killed himself, you know. Maybe she doesn’t want to be found at the moment.”

“Do you think she’d really do that to her mother, who was still reeling from Mickey’s death?”

“People do weird things when they’re grieving… especially after a suicide. It’s a painful, solitary time.”

“Still. My experience with Lily is that she is a remarkably sweet and compassionate person. It seems out of character.”

“But you really don’t know her that well, right? I mean you said yourself that it was more of a mentoring relationship than a friendship, which means that she looked up to you and probably wanted to impress you. Maybe you only saw what you wanted to see.”

“I don’t think so, Jeffrey. I really don’t.”

He stood up. “Well, I’ll have Craig copy that voicemail message and email it over to Detective Stenopolis. I’ll give Craig our login and password; he can dial in from the office.”

“Actually, can you just have him copy it onto a CD?”

He gave her a look. “Then we’d have to deliver it to the Ninth Precinct.”

She smiled sweetly. “I can take care of that.”

He shook his head and couldn’t keep himself from returning her smile. “Well, Lydia, that’s awfully considerate of you.”

“You know me. Always happy to help.”

“He’s not going to tell you anything,” warned Jeffrey.

“We’ll see.”

No matter how stressful her life became, the smell of her son’s hair could soothe her. Baby fine, silky blonde, and infused with the aroma of the Johnson’s Baby Shampoo she’d washed it with all his life. Of course, sometimes it smelled like spaghetti or Play-Doh but those were just variations on a theme.

Jesamyn Breslow tried not to stare at Benjamin as he ate his Cheerios with bananas, because she didn’t want to be one of those mothers who was always mooning, stroking, adjusting. But she just loved to watch him, his peaches-and-cream skin, his cute little feet. He wasn’t quite at the point where he was squirming away from her hugs and kisses. He still threw his arms around her and told her he loved her. But she’d seen the little boys at school, just a year or two older than Benjamin, endure their mother’s affections with stoic misery. She knew those days weren’t far away. Her nephew, her brother’s son, had been the most loving child until the third grade. Now his parents were looking around for the pod that contained their real child, eager to be rid of the alien that refused good-bye kisses and suddenly insisted that the bathroom door be closed and locked.

“What’s the matter, Mom?” Benjamin asked. She’d been zoning out, staring into her own bowl of Cheerios.

“Nothing. I’m just tired, babe,” she said, touching his head. She looked into his face. Even she knew it was a tiny mirror of her own face, with shades of his father in his mischievous eyes and irresistible smile.

“How can you be tired? You just woke up,” he said, spreading out his hands.

“Good question,” she said.

She looked at the clock on the wall. “Okay, champ, time to brush your teeth and get your coat on. We gotta get you to school.”

She cleared his bowl and her own off the round beechwood table and brought them over to the sink, rinsed them and stuck them in the dishwasher. The sky outside was a sad gray, contemplating snow. She placed the milk in the refrigerator, which was so totally papered with Benji’s drawings and cards and reports that she could almost forget its hideous avocado color. With her toe, she pressed down a piece of one of the Formica tiles that was peeling up. The place needed serious work but she lacked the time and the inclination to take care of it. That was the only thing she missed about her marriage to Dylan: a live-in handyman who didn’t charge. Well, that and the regular sex.