J. Wachowski - In Plain View

“I think we should call the police,” one of the teachers suggested tentatively. “That’s the procedure at this point, isn’t it?”

I already had two of the babysitters in tears and Ainsley threatening to lock me in the car, I needed to get out there and start searching.

“I stopped at the house on my way here,” I said. “She’s not at the house.”

Ainsley interrupted, “What about friends? Could she have walked to someone else’s house?”

“Whose? There’s nobody,” I said. “Kid doesn’t have any friends.”

“One of us should wait at the house,” I told Ainsley, “and one should go out looking.”

“You want to look, right?” he answered. “I’ll go wait.”

“Thanks,” I said, stiff with gratitude. The women were conferring among themselves about what to do. “Call the police. I’m going out to look. You’ve got the right number to reach me now, yes?”

“Yes, yes,” one of them mumbled, guilty, but with an edge of evil eye.

“Good.” That made two of us.

It was maybe a mile and a half from the school to the house. There were two routes Jen and I generally took to get home, a third that the bus followed. I’d followed Ainsley back to the house, searched the backyard and wracked my brain for ideas. Nothing useful came to mind. Consequently, I was out of my mind.

Twenty minutes later, I pulled over and called Curzon.

“I need a favor.”

“My lucky day.” The shift of his attention, from work to me, was as clear as a car changing gear.

“Jenny’s gone.” It didn’t take long to explain. Curzon put me on hold twice, checking with the guys at the station about what had already been done. A car had been dispatched to the school minutes before.

“Come to the station,” Curzon ordered. “We’ll go out together in my car. I’ll have paperwork ready you can sign when you get here.”

“What paperwork?” I know I sounded irritated.

“The stuff we need to get a wider search going. Description for the radio, that kind of thing.”

“All right. Be there as soon as I can.”

The station was hustling when I arrived. I remembered the way to Curzon’s office and walked straight through. The door was open. He sat behind his computer, wearing a pair of executive style wireless-frame glasses and a white button-down that was creased and damp at the back from long hours in the big chair. Smart and hardworking looked good on him.

“You didn’t speed on the way here did you?” he asked without looking up. “I’ll be one more minute. Sit down.”

I was hoping the first thing out of his mouth would be something like, don’t worry, we’ll find her, she’s fine.

Unfortunately, Curzon was the kind of guy who didn’t do platitudes.

I didn’t sit.

From the doorway, I had an excellent view of the action in the station. There were cops going about their business with plodding intensity, and a couple of secretarial types hanging up their cardigan sweaters and putting on their jackets. Sulking against the wall were a pair of Goth-hoodlums in full-length black capes. Beside a desk, hunched an old man with a bloody head. At the farthest end of the room, four burly guys were dragging an eight-foot-high chunk of concrete up the hall on a cart.

Police stations are surrealism on testosterone.

“What’s with the road work?” I asked for distraction. “Putting in a patio out back?”

He handed me paperwork on a clipboard, pen attached. “Guy’s garage floor. Evidence.”

Translation: somebody died-bloody-on that slab of concrete.

A bolus of sick bubbled up my throat. “All this on a Monday night? Why would you ever want to leave this job?”

Curzon pointed at the paper. “Write. Give details under ‘last seen wearing.’”

There was too much pumping through my head. I had to force myself to think, to write.

Purple jacket. Jeans. White tennis shoes, pink laces.

It was impossible to believe what was happening. Less than two hours ago, I was standing in front of Tom Jost’s father, accusing him of parenting failures.

“I got a question for you.” Even to my ears, my voice shredded the words. “Do you think people have to separate to be good?”

Addresses: home, school…friends?

Had I failed Jenny already?

Curzon mumbled, “Mmduhknow.”

Names: parent or guardian. Guardian. What a terrible word for it.

A woman stuck her head in the door. Curzon stopped typing.

“Amber Alert’s been issued,” she said without looking at me.

“We’ll have the rest for you in under five.”

She walked out. Curzon went back to typing.

“I’ve always thought there’s good and bad in all of us. Everybody’s capable of going one way or another at any time.”

“Are you more capable of the ‘bad’ because you see it,” I asked him, “because it’s around you all the time?”

Without hesitation, he answered, “Yes.”

“Really?” I was unprepared for how vulnerable his honesty made me-with no camera between us. I crossed my arms over my chest and tried to argue. “I’m not so sure.”

“Yes, you are. You agree. Those Amish people agree. Pretty much everybody agrees. Same reason people move to the suburbs. It’s why we build prisons in the middle of nowhere. It’s why you live alone.”

“What?” I spluttered. “What’s my living alone got to do with anything?”

“Who’d understand what you’ve got inside your head? You said you hadn’t had a date since Sierra Leone. My guess is that’s because you can’t picture chatting your way through a meal with some guy, then going into a bedroom with him, taking off your clothes, but never being able to show,” he snorted to himself, “to talk about what’s inside.”

This conversation was rapidly deteriorating. Direct eye contact seemed dangerously inappropriate, but Curzon wouldn’t look away, so I couldn’t either.

“How would it feel to lie beside someone, go to sleep, with that innocent mind on the pillow beside you?” He turned away from me just like that, and returned to typing paperwork. His last words were not speculative at all. They were hard with personal conviction. “It’d be a sort of punishment, wouldn’t it? Hiding a part of yourself all the time. Forever.”

“Does hiding it make you more capable of wrong, bad-ness?” I floundered looking for the right word. “Evil?”

“Like I would know? I’m on the protection-clean-up detail.” He blew me off. “One thing I do know, once you realize how bad a human being can be, once you can imagine it,” he shook his head as if the rest were obvious, “you can imagine hitting back. You can imagine hurting that person sleeping next to you. You can imagine all sorts of things.”

I was imagining all sorts of bad things right now with Jenny missing.

“Aren’t you just the Philosopher King?” I tossed off after too long a silence. This conversation was not helping me worry less. Topic change. “Living alone didn’t protect Tom Jost.”

“Tom Jost didn’t want to be alone. His problem was reaching for the wrong companions. Classic mistake.” Curzon laid out his version of the facts without hesitation.

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. So says the King.” He gave me a cockeyed grin that took the edge off the certainty in his voice. “Did you bring a picture?”

“In my wallet.”

“Good.”

“Aren’t you gonna say we probably won’t need it?”

“You want me to?”

“Yeah.”

“I hope we don’t need it,” he answered carefully. “I want to know about the SUV.”

“Don’t start. It’s nothing, I’m sure.” It was my problem for now.