Local Woman Missing Page 52
I think of what Alice must have gone through as she climbed the three steps to her death, as she slipped her head into the knot. The ceilings of the attic are not high. Alice would have had to measure the rope in advance, to be certain that when she stepped off the stool, her feet would not touch the ground. She dropped by only a couple of inches at best. The fall was small; her neck wouldn’t have broken from the height, which means that death was painful and slow. The evidence of that is there, in the picture. The broken lamp, the claw marks, the nearly severed tongue.
“Why’d you take this?” I ask, trying to remain calm. I don’t want to give her what she wants.
She shrugs her shoulders, asks, with a blatant disregard for her mother’s life, “Why the hell not?”
I hide my shock as Imogen takes the phone and turns slowly from me. She goes back into her room, leaving me shaken. I pray that Otto, in his own room just next door, has his earbuds in. I pray that he didn’t hear that awful exchange.
I retreat to the bedroom where I change into my pajamas and stand at the window, waiting for Will to come home. I stare into the home next door. There’s a light on inside, the very same light that goes on at seven and off near midnight each night. No one lives in that home this time of year and I think of it, empty on the inside, for months on end. What’s to keep a person from letting themselves inside?
When a car pulls into the drive, I can’t help but watch. The inside of the car becomes flooded with light as the door opens. Tate and his friend are buckled in the back seat, Will in the front beside a woman who is most definitely not a toothless hag but rather a shadowy brunette whom I can’t fully see.
Tate is bubbly, bouncy, when they step inside the house. He runs up the stairs to greet me. He proudly announces, “You came to see me at school today!” as he bursts through the bedroom door in his Star Wars hoodie and a pair of knit pants. These pants, like all the others, are too short for him, exposing ankles. Will and I can’t keep up. There’s a hole in the toe of his sock.
Will, half a step behind him, turns to me and asks, “You did?”
But I shake my head at Will. “I didn’t,” I say, not knowing what Tate means by this. My eyes go to Tate’s, and I say, “I was at work today, Tate. I wasn’t at your school.”
“Yes, you were,” he says, on the verge of getting upset. I play along, only to appease him.
“Well, what was I doing?” I ask him. “What did I say?”
“You didn’t say anything,” he says, and I ask, “Don’t you think if I was at your school today, I would have said something to you?”
Tate explains that I stood on the other side of the playground fence, watching the kids at recess. I asked what I had on, and he tells me my black coat and my black hat, which is exactly what I would be wearing. It’s what he’s used to seeing me in, but there’s hardly a woman in town who doesn’t wear a black coat and hat.
“I think maybe that was someone else’s mommy, Tate,” I say, but he just stares, saying nothing.
I find the idea of any woman standing on the periphery of the playground watching kids play a bit unnerving. I wonder how secure the school is, especially when the kids are at recess. How many teachers are on recess duty? Is the fence locked, or can anyone open the gate and step right in? The school seems easy enough to contain when the kids are indoors, but outdoors is a different matter.
Will ruffles his hair, says to him, “I think it’s about time we get that vision of yours checked.”
I reroute the conversation. “What’s this you’ve got?” I ask. In his hands Tate proudly totes a mini figure he assembled himself at the library event. He shows it to me, before climbing onto the bed to kiss me good-night at Will’s request. Will ushers him to his own bedroom, where he reads Tate a story and tucks him into bed snug as a bug in a rug. On the way back to our bedroom, Will stops by Otto’s and Imogen’s bedrooms to say good-night.
“You didn’t eat the casserole,” Will says seconds later after he returns to our bedroom. He’s concerned, and I tell him I wasn’t hungry. “You feeling okay?” he asks, running a warm hand the length of my hair, and I shake my head and tell him no. I think what it would feel like to lean into him. To let his strong arms envelop me. To be vulnerable for once, to fall to pieces before him and let him pick them up.
“How safe is Tate’s elementary school?” I ask instead.
He assures me it’s safe. “It was probably just some mother dropping off a forgotten lunch,” he says. “It’s not like Tate is the most observant kid, Sadie. I’m the only dad at school pickup, and still, every day he has trouble finding me in the crowd.”
“You’re sure?” I ask, trying not to let my imagination get the best of me. Besides, there’s something less disconcerting about it because she was a woman. If she had been a man, watching kids play on a playground, I would already be perusing the internet by now, trying to determine how many registered sex offenders live on the island with us.
He tells me, “I’m sure.”
I slide the drawings I found in the attic to him. He takes a look at them and believes right away that they’re Otto’s. Unlike me, Will seems sure. “Why not Imogen?” I ask, wishing they could belong to Imogen.
“Because Otto,” he tells me unquestioningly, “is our artist. Remember Occam’s razor,” he says, reminding me of the belief that states the easiest explanation is most often right.
“But why?” I ask, meaning why would Otto draw like this.
At first he denies the gravity of the situation, saying, “It’s a form of self-expression, Sadie. This is natural for a child in pain.”
But that alone is disconcerting. Because it’s not natural for a child to be in pain.
“You think he’s being bullied?” I ask, but Will only shrugs his shoulders and says he doesn’t know. But he’ll call the school in the morning. He’ll find out.