Tim Gautreaux: The Missing

She now pointed across the store. “We’ve looked for her for five minutes all over that side. We’ve been in the store a half hour, and honest, she was right around us all that time. She’s only three years old. A little blonde in a blue pinafore. Her name’s Lily.”

“Has she wandered off before? Does she like to play hide-and-seek?”

The mother, a blonde herself, her hair in a medium bob, shook her head.

Sam smiled at her. “Don’t worry. You two cross over to the south side of the store and look there. I’ll recheck men’s suits.” While the parents began to filter through the maze of counters, he walked over toward Lillian Clarksby in cosmetics and asked her to close her register and check the front of the store, especially the window displays on the street. Sometimes he’d found young children wandering among the mannequins as if comparing their frozen gestures and shallow eyes with those of the adults they knew.

He toured suits, then mounted the stairs to the mezzanine and stood with his back to the women’s parlor to scan the aisles, but saw no children.

Mary Lou Landry, the mezzanine attendant, came up behind him. “Lucky, what you looking for, darling?”

He caught a whiff of an expensive scent and stared at her, then remembered that she spritzed herself at the perfume counter every morning. “A little blond girl, a toddler.”

“She got herself lost? Well, stop looking and start listening. She’ll be bawling for sure if she’s still in the store.”

He watched customers wandering over the chicken-wire tile entranced by the illusion Krine’s lavished on them. Sam sometimes felt it himself, a shrinelike ambience like that of a courthouse or a church. “Do me a favor, Mary. Lillian’s checking the front doors, so will you please slip around to the Granier Street entrance and stay there for about ten minutes? She was wearing a little blue pinafore, they told me.”

“Oh, she wouldn’t wander that far.” Mary wasn’t about to take orders from a floorwalker.

He leaned into her. “Not without help.”

“Oh.” Mary clopped down the mezzanine steps briskly, her hands turned up on her wrists as if she were displaying her nails.

Sam walked down the line of elevators and put his head in each that was open, asking the same question of the operators, then stepped into the last one and told old Melvin Stine to bring him up to two.

“You checkin’ the tills, Lucky?”

“I’m looking for a three-year-old girl in a pinafore.”

“She didn’t come up in this car.” He gave Sam a look. “Lucky, how long you been lookin’?”

He glanced at his watch. “Nine minutes.”

“Don’t forget the stairwells. And Mr. Krine’s rule.”

He got out and walked through children’s clothes, then into toys, telling clerks what to look for as he went. After checking the dressing rooms he unlocked a door with his key and walked through the janitor’s area and two large, hot storerooms. Outside again, catching Melvin’s car going up, he traveled to the third floor, then the fourth, which was the discount floor, a sweltering place with tall, wide-open windows and many ceiling fans whirring overhead-a repository of returned suits, remaindered shoes, garish suspenders, celluloid collars, and what was referred to derisively as the Country Corner, a few shelves of overalls, blue jeans, straw hats, brogans, red neckerchiefs. This was the province of Hulgana Ditchovich, a blocky woman stuffed into a vertically striped dress made of what seemed to be mattress ticking.

“Mrs. Ditchovich, have you seen a little blond girl in a pinafore up here? Her parents lost sight of her downstairs.”

“Lucky, Lucky, when will the cool-air vents come to the fourth floor?”

He imagined Hulgana as a stolid child, holding a wooden bucket and feeding cows in the snow outside of St. Petersburg. “Maybe next season. About that child?”

“No children up here this morning except for some farmer boys come in for shoes.” She focused on him for the first time. “Such a big man like you can’t find a child?”

After a quick tour of the steaming storage area on her floor, he came back out and used the store phone under Hulgana’s register to call the candy counter.

“Penny Nickens, candy.”

“Penny, this is Sam.”

“Lucky!” she shouted into the receiver. He liked Penny well enough but found her too exuberant, always likely to spout like a shaken bottle of pop.

“You have a good view of the office. Is anything going on?”

After a pause she said, “There’s a worried-looking couple talking to Mr. Krine. Oh, the lady looks so sad.”

“Thin woman in a blue dress. Pretty.”

“Yes. Look, I’ve got some of those new raspberry slices you like.”

“You can’t win me with candy.”

“Oh!” she shrieked. “And you a married man!”

He imagined all the heads turning toward the candy counter, and hung up.

It had been half an hour since the little girl disappeared. Walking to the elevator, he remembered Melvin’s comment about the stairwell and changed direction. No one used the stairs, and they gave off a nose-burning essence of dusty concrete. He started down, and on the third flight something on a gray tread caught his eye, a little piece of yellow hard rubber, some junk missed by the janitor. He stepped past it and continued all the way to the bottom of the stairs, trying not to scuff his mirrory shoes. He was annoyed that he would have to deal with the parents again. By now, the girl had probably turned up.

He put his hand on the knob of the stairwell door and stopped, overcome by the feeling that he’d made some kind of mistake. The whole store’s design ghosted through his mind as he tried to think of what he might’ve missed. He looked back up the stairway and pursed his lips, letting go of the knob and rising several flights to pick up the little piece of yellow tucked against the wall in the corner of a step: a child’s barrette, a yellow bar and nickel-plated clasp with a small blue butterfly set on the topside. Suddenly, he was frightened.

Down on the first floor he met the couple, the Wellers, and when he showed them the barrette, the mother clapped her hands over her mouth.

Mr. Krine touched him on the shoulder as if he were adjusting a table lamp. “Mr. Simoneaux, if you found this, why can’t you find the child? I was sure you’d come in here leading her by the hand.”

“Now that I know the hair clip was hers, maybe I can.” He looked at Mrs. Weller. “She probably just found the stairs. Kids love stairs.”

Mr. Krine raised a marble-hard face to Sam, as though to say, “Look at me and see how serious this is.” “Search again,” he said. “And this time find her.”

The mother cried, “Why would someone try to take Lily?” and the sound of her voice made him understand that today might not be like every other day, that something terrible could be happening. Some long-dormant fear woke up in him, the mysterious taste of ash welling up on the back of his tongue.

He ran through the milling customers to the first open elevator and told the operator to take him straight to the fourth floor. A middle-aged woman in the back of the car said, “I have to get off at three,” and he considered saying something sharp, but even now he understood that most people didn’t have all the facts. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am,” he said. As soon as the doors opened he bounded into the discount section and in a moment was in the Country Corner. Mrs. Ditchovich was dozing behind the register, and he rushed past her back to the only dressing room in the store he hadn’t checked, one that was seldom used because people buying bulky triple-stitch denim clothes rarely studied how they looked in a mirror. Behind the showroom partition he entered a dim hall filled with a peculiar smell that stopped him cold. Suddenly the hospitals in France came back to him, with the memory of men returned from surgery reeking of chloroform, which was what Sam was smelling now as he stood frozen, trying to imagine what that odor was doing here. When he understood, he lunged for the door to the dressing room.