Jack Ketchum - Right to Life

The receptionist frowned, puzzled. “I’m sorry. She hasn’t signed in.” Sara wouldn’t do this, he thought.

Something’s not right here.

“There’s a drugstore a few doors down and a smokeshop just next door to us. Maybe she needed something. Why don’t you have a seat and wait a moment. I’m sure she’ll be right along.”

“Why would she…? Okay. I’ll be back.”

He took the elevator down.

After the cool of the overly air-conditioned office the summer sun hit him hard and he was sweating as he peered through the open door to ihe cigarette shop to see nothing but an old man buying a Lotto ticket and then into the drugstore next to that. He looked around him on either side and then scanned Broadway across the street toward the Sony complex and the shoppers in front of the Food Emporium but he didn’t see her. He walked around the picketers again and directly to the cops at the door.

“Excuse me,” he said. “Did a woman just go inside?”

The female cop was almost as tall as her partner, nearly six feet. Her hair was blonde pulled up under the cap and she stopped chewing her gum the moment he walked up to her.

“Just now? No, sir.”

“Did you see a woman, five, maybe ten minutes ago, white short-sleeve blouse, blue skirt, early forties, long dark hair?” He pointed. “She’d have been coming this way toward the building. I dropped her off over there. She has an appointment at the clinic.”

The officer glanced at her partner. So did Greg, actually noticing him for the first time. The cop looked shockingly young. He was big and trim but to Greg he looked barely out of his teens. He guessed the woman would have a good ten years on him. The cop shook his head. “Sorry, sir,” the woman said and glanced behind him.

“Is there a problem?” Greg turned and saw a much smaller woman in a brown business suit and baggy trousers. Her tailored white shirt was unbuttoned at the collar so that the tie hung slightly off to one side. She wore no makeup as far as he could tell and the medium-length hair was a frizzy red.

“I’m Lieutenant Primiano, 20th precinct.” She produced a wallet and shield. “You said something about a woman?”

“She’s disappeared.”

“How so?”

“I let her out on that corner. I went to park the car. I drove past her and around the block and parked on 67th. She had an appointment for ten forty-five and she was headed right here, walking right toward you when I left her but I went inside and the receptionist says she never showed. She suggested maybe the smokeshop or the pharmacy but I just looked in both places and she’s not there. This isn’t like her. Sara does what she says she’ll do. She should be up there.”

“You folks have any kind of fight? Quarrel over anything?”

“God, no. We’re fine.”

He felt himself flush at the use of the word. They were not fine. Not today.

But that was their own business.

The woman studied him a moment and then nodded. “Ella, keep an eye on things here a minute, will you? Dean, ask around and see if any of these people noticed her. Your name, sir?”

“Greg Glover.”

“This is Officer Kaltsas and Officer Spader. Mr. Glover, let’s go on back inside.”

She questioned the receptionist and Weller’s nurse and then the doctor himself. She was brisk and to the point. It took maybe ten minutes tops but to Greg it seemed forever. Weller volunteered the notion that it happened sometimes, that at the last minute people changed their minds. You really couldn’t blame them.

“Not Sara,” he said. “She wouldn’t do that. Not possible.”

When they were outside again she asked the young cop, Kaltsas, about the picketers.

“Nothing,” he said. “Nobody saw her. I got a small problem with one of them, though.”

“What kind of problem.”

“Maybe he’s just weirdo, I dunno. Didn’t answer me right away. Something not right, maybe.”

“Which one?”

“Bald guy with the beard in the blue windbreaker. With the sign says PRO CHOICE IS NO CHOICE. Right there.”

Greg looked at him. Middle-age man with thinning hair, parading in a rough circle between two older women.

“Okay. Talk to him again. Get his name, address, phone number. If you can, see that he sticks around a while but go easy. I’m going to take a walk with Mr. Glover, see if we can spot her on the street.”

“Will do.”

“Have you got a photo of her? Of Sara?”

He dug it out of his wallet. It was his favorite shot, taken on summer vacation a year before on the streets of Jamaica, Vermont, the Jamaica Inn’s garlanded white porch in the background. She always hated having her picture taken and was wearing a goofy smile because of that but to him both then and now she looked lovely, her long hair swirling around her face. He had snapped and snapped her that day out of pure, almost adolescent pleasure, until she practically had to scream to make him quit.

She studied the photo and handed it back to him. “She’s very pretty,” she said. “We’ll start with your car. Maybe she went looking for you for some reason. Where’d you park again?”

“Down on 67th.”

She began walking slowly downtown. He matched her pace.

“This is crazy,” he said. “People don’t vanish.”

“No, sir. They don’t,” she said. “I think we’ll find her.”

Of course they would, he thought. There had to be some normal explanation. Maybe the doctor was right. Maybe Greg didn’t know her as well as he thought he did. Maybe she was sitting in a restaurant a block or two away over coffee, wondering if she should go through with this after all, mulling it over on her own.

She never breaks appointments at the last minute and she’s never late. She’s not secretive and she’s never lied to me and she’s not a coward.

No. Something’s wrong.

You damn well know something’s wrong.

He felt the unreality of it all wash over him and for a moment he felt dizzy, almost as though he were about to faint. Twenty minutes ago he was looking for a place to park, an empty meter, pummeled by guilt at what they were about to do. Now he was walking along peering into storefronts, at people coming out of doorways, pedestrians passing, the pour and turmoil of New York. Srching for a glimpse of her. Walking at what seemed to him a crawl when what he wanted to do was run, look everywhere at once. Police in his life all of a sudden while he’d never had pvious occasion to say ten words to a cop. And this cop, this brisk and nonsense young woman like a lifeline to him now, his only potential link to Sara. He felt a sudden incredible dependency, as though his life had just spun out of his hands and landed into hers, a stranger’s.

His heart was pounding.

People don’t just vanish. Not unless they want to. Or unless somebody helps them.

Whether they wanted to or not.

Sussex, New Jersey

12:30 p.m.

She woke in dark and panic.

Her first thought was that they had buried her alive.

That she was in a coffin.

She was lying on her back against rough unfinished wood, thick wood planks to the left of her, to the right of her, so close that she could barely raise her arms to feel that — yes, there was more rough wood above, she could smell it. Pine. There was a pillow beneath her head and that was all. Panic raced through her like a breath of fire. She had never been aware of being afraid of tight spaces but she was very afraid of this one.

She balled her hands into fists and pounded. She heard the pounding echo and knew she was in a room then, in some kind of box, some kind of room and not underground — at least not buried underground thank god — because there would be no echo if that were so but the panic didn’t recede any. She could hear her own fear in the wildness of her heartbeat. She screamed for help. She pounded and kicked at the lid of the thing and side to side at firm unyielding wood and it hurt, they’d removed her shoes and stockings, she was barefoot and it was only then that she realized that her skirt and blouse were gone too, she was wearing only her slip and panties. And that fact too was terrifying.