Carthage

Carthage Joyce Carol Oates A young girl’s disappearance rocks a community and a family, in this stirring examination of grief, faith, justice and the atrocities of war, from literary legend Joyce Carol Oates.Zeno Mayfield’s daughter has disappeared into the night, gone missing in the wilds of the Adirondacks. But when the community of Carthage joins a father’s frantic search for the girl, they discover instead the unlikeliest of suspects – a decorated Iraq War veteran with close ties to the Mayfield family. As grisly evidence mounts against the troubled war hero, the family must wrestle with the possibility of having lost a daughter forever.‘Carthage’ plunges us deep into the psyche of a wounded young Corporal, haunted by unspeakable acts of wartime aggression, while unraveling the story of a disaffected young girl whose exile from her family may have come long before her disappearance.Dark and riveting, ‘Carthage’ is a powerful addition to the Joyce Carol Oates canon, one that explores the human capacity for violence, love and forgiveness, and asks it it’s ever truly possible to come home again. COPYRIGHT (#ulink_a2e81353-7e21-5c66-b4ac-2c8b7ff283ab) Fourth Estate An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London W6 8JB www.harpercollins.co.uk (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk) First published in Great Britain by Fourth Estate in 2014 FIRST EDITION Copyright © The Ontario Review 2014 Joyce Carol Oates asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work Cover design by Allison Saltzman Cover photograph © Denis Jr. Tangney/Getty images A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this ebook on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins ebooks. Find out about HarperCollins and the environment at www.harpercollins.co.uk/green (http://www.harpercollins.co.uk/green) Source ISBN: 9780007485741 Ebook Edition © January 2014 ISBN: 9780007485765 Version 2014-11-18 DEDICATION (#ulink_456ca842-a0f8-55ec-9aae-639a33911f5e) To Charlie Gross my husband and first reader ACKNOWLEDGMENTS (#ulink_0350fc82-62ce-5eec-bf67-354264c652b5) A shortened version of chapter two appeared in Fighting Words, edited by Roddy Doyle, 2011. Thanks to former Marine Mariette Kalinowski, Sergeant, USMC (ret.), and to Martin Quinn for reading this manuscript with special care as Hertog Research Fellows at Hunter College, and thanks to Greg Johnson for his continued friendship, sharp eye and ear, and impeccable literary judgment. EPIGRAPH (#ulink_1727e5f3-e524-5769-aedd-53d6f973abb0) “Go at once, this very minute, stand at the cross-roads, bow down, first kiss the earth which you have defiled and then bow down to all the world and say to all men, ‘I am a murderer!’ Then God will send you life again.” —SONIA TO RASKOLNIKOV, IN CRIME AND PUNISHMENT, FYODOR DOSTOYEVSKY I don’t feel young now. I think I am old in my heart. —AMERICAN IRAQ WAR VETERAN, 2005 CONTENTS Cover (#u70246efd-b8d7-584c-8d7a-1c6403efc6eb) Copyright (#ulink_3eaf7f9c-6a72-5ffd-814b-c38dd4e4db36) Dedication (#ulink_7950aa73-e95d-53f0-9d86-aa4c65ae92c1) Acknowledgments (#ulink_8e25f05f-af06-554d-a908-f3060ee3dfeb) Epigraph (#ulink_409d7b26-86ba-52bd-a50e-d0a6b49e83e1) Prologue (#ulink_7e302103-6736-5fdd-aa25-f2499a0afa71) Part I: Lost Girl (#ulink_6f5f6c6b-5fde-5ef9-8eb9-a248d1783f08) One - The Search (#ulink_e1621c6b-f242-512f-a815-8243aadfc9fd) Two - Bride-to-Be (#ulink_483c53ad-3812-5d46-9139-caf74fc897bf) Three - The Father (#ulink_c70ccc4a-96bb-5f6d-921d-c508b8ba8190) Four - Descending and Ascending (#ulink_2a6eed4d-b81b-5b06-813a-b63e8b24dbe8) Five (#ulink_0a581d2e-f3bb-5755-ad1e-a2dad9929ae4) Six - The Corporal in the Land of the Dead (#litres_trial_promo) Seven - The Corporal’s Confession (#litres_trial_promo) Eight - The Corporal’s Letter (#litres_trial_promo) Part II: Exile (#litres_trial_promo) Nine - Execution Chamber (#litres_trial_promo) Ten - The Betrayal (#litres_trial_promo) Eleven - The Rescue (#litres_trial_promo) Twelve - The Guilty One (#litres_trial_promo) Part III: The Return (#litres_trial_promo) Thirteen - The Long Wall (#litres_trial_promo) Fourteen - The Church of the Good Thief (#litres_trial_promo) Fifteen - The Father (#litres_trial_promo) Sixteen - The Mother (#litres_trial_promo) Seventeen - The Sister (#litres_trial_promo) Epilogue (#litres_trial_promo) About the Author (#litres_trial_promo) Novels by Joyce Carol Oates (#litres_trial_promo) Credits (#litres_trial_promo) About the Publisher PROLOGUE (#ulink_9ee0a204-48e2-54fd-9102-35a9c59f7999) July 2005 (#ulink_9ee0a204-48e2-54fd-9102-35a9c59f7999) DIDN’T LOVE ME ENOUGH. Why I vanished. Nineteen years old. Tossed my life like dice! In this vast place—wilderness—pine trees repeated to infinity, steep slopes of the Adirondacks like a brain jammed full to bursting. The Nautauga State Forest Preserve is three hundred thousand acres of mountainous, boulder-strewn and densely wooded wilderness bounded at its northern edge by the St. Lawrence River and the Canadian border and at its southern edge by the Nautauga River, Beechum County. It was believed that I was “lost” here—wandering on foot—confused, or injured—or more likely, my body had been “dumped.” Much of the Preserve is remote, uninhabitable and unreachable except by the most intrepid hikers and mountain climbers. For most of three days in midsummer heat rescue workers and volunteers were searching in ever-widening concentric circles spiraling out from the dead end of an unpaved road that followed the northern bank of the Nautauga River three miles north of Wolf’s Head Lake, in the southern part of the Preserve. This was an area approximately eleven miles from my parents’ house in Carthage, New York. This was an area contiguous with Wolf’s Head Lake where at one of the old lakeside inns I’d been last seen by “witnesses” at midnight of the previous night in the company of the suspected agent of my vanishing. It was very hot. Insect-swarming heat following torrential rains in late June. Searchers were plagued by mosquitoes, biting flies, gnats. The most persistent were the gnats. That special panic of gnats in your eyelashes, gnats in your eyes, gnats in your mouth. That panic of having to breathe inside a swarm of gnats. Yet, you can’t cease breathing. If you try, your lungs will breathe for you. Despite you. Among experienced rescue workers there was qualified expectation of finding the missing girl alive after the first full day of the search, when rescue dogs had failed to pick up the girl’s scent. Law enforcement officers had even less expectation. But the younger park rangers and those volunteer searchers who knew the Mayfields were determined to find her alive. For the Mayfields were a well-known family in Carthage. For Zeno Mayfield was a man with a public reputation in Carthage and many of his friends, acquaintances and associates turned out to search for his missing daughter scarcely known to most of them by name. None of the searchers making their way through the underbrush of the Preserve, into ravines and gullies, scrambling up rocky hillsides and climbing, at times crawling across the mottled faces of enormous boulders brushing gnats from their faces, wanted to think that in the Adirondack heat which registered in the upper 90s Fahrenheit after sunset a girl’s lifeless body, possibly an unclothed body on or in the ground, sticky with blood, would begin to decompose quickly after death. None of the searchers would have wished to utter the crude thought (second nature to seasoned rescue workers) that they might smell the girl before they discovered her. Such a remark would be uttered grimly. Out of earshot of the frantic Zeno Mayfield. Shouting himself hoarse, sweat-soaked and exhausted—“Cressida! Honey! Can you hear me? Where are you?” He’d been a hiker, once. He’d been a man who’d needed to get away into the solitude of the mountains that had seemed to him once a place of refuge, consolation. But not for a long time now. And not now. In this hot humid insect-breeding midsummer of 2005 in which Zeno Mayfield’s younger daughter vanished into the Nautauga State Forest Preserve with the seeming ease of a snake writhing out of its desiccated and torn outer skin. PART I (#ulink_fe786d2f-8ce5-5c5f-bcbd-20343062f7a9) Lost Girl (#ulink_fe786d2f-8ce5-5c5f-bcbd-20343062f7a9) ONE (#ulink_bb0de8f5-288a-56c8-86a2-1ed35df59cd1) The Search (#ulink_bb0de8f5-288a-56c8-86a2-1ed35df59cd1) July 10, 2005 (#ulink_bb0de8f5-288a-56c8-86a2-1ed35df59cd1) THAT GIRL THAT GOT lost in the Nautauga Preserve. Or, that girl that was killed somehow, and her body hid. Where Zeno Mayfield’s daughter had disappeared to, and whether there was much likelihood of her being found alive, or in any reasonable state between alive and dead, was a question to confound everyone in Beechum County. Everyone who knew the Mayfields, or even knew of them. And for those who knew the Kincaid boy—the war hero—the question was yet more confounding. Already by late morning of Sunday, July 10, news of the quickly organized search for the missing girl had been released into the rippling media-sea—“breaking news” on local Carthage radio and TV news programs, shortly then state-wide and AP syndicated news. Dozens of rescue workers, professional and volunteer, are searching for 19-year-old Cressida Mayfield of Carthage, N.Y., believed to be missing in the Nautauga State Forest Preserve since the previous night July 9. Corporal Brett Kincaid, 26, also of Carthage, identified by witnesses as having been in the company of the missing girl on the night of July 9, has been taken into custody by the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department for questioning. No arrest has been made. No official statement regarding Corporal Kincaid has been released by the Sheriff’s Department. Anyone with information regarding the whereabouts of Cressida Mayfield please contact . . . HE KNEW: she was alive. He knew: if he persevered, if he did not despair, he would find her. She was his younger child. She was the difficult child. She was the one to break his heart. There was a reason for that, he supposed. If she hated him. If she’d let herself be hurt, to hurt him. BUT HE HAD no doubt, she was alive. “I would know. I would feel it. If my daughter was gone from this earth—there would be an emptiness, unmistakably. I would feel it.” HE HATED THAT she was identified as missing. He’d insisted that she was lost. That is, probably lost. She’d wandered off, or run off. Somehow, she’d gotten lost in the Nautauga Preserve. The young man she’d been with—(this, the father didn’t understand: for the daughter had told her parents that she was going to spend the evening with other friends)—had insisted he didn’t know where she was, she’d left him. In the front seat of the young man’s Jeep Wrangler there were said to be bloodstains. A smear of blood on the inside of the windshield on the passenger’s side, as if a bleeding face, or head, had been struck against it with some force. Stray hairs, and a single clump of hair, dark in color as the hair of the missing girl, had been collected from the passenger’s seat and from the young man’s shirt. Outside the vehicle there were no footprints—the shoulder of Sandhill Road was grassy, and then rocky, declining steeply to the fast-rushing Nautauga River. The father didn’t (yet) know details. He knew that the young corporal had been taken into police custody having been found in a semiconscious alcoholic state inside his vehicle, haphazardly parked on a narrow unpaved road just inside the Nautauga Preserve, at about 8 A.M. of Sunday, July 10, 2005. Allegedly, the young corporal, Brett Kincaid, was the last person to have seen Cressida Mayfield before her “disappearance.” Kincaid was a friend of the Mayfield family, or had been. Until the previous week he’d been engaged to the missing girl’s older sister. The father had tried to see him: just to speak to him! To look the young corporal in the eye. To see how the young corporal looked at him. The father had been refused. For the time being. The young corporal was in custody. As news reports took care to note No arrests have yet been made. How disorienting all this was!—the father who’d long prided himself on being smart, shrewd, just a little quicker and a little more informed than anyone else was likely to be in his vicinity, could not comprehend what seemed to be set out before him like cards dealt by a sinister dealer. His life—his life of routine complex as the workings of an expensive watch, yet unfailingly in his control—had been so abruptly altered. Not just the surprise—the shock—of his daughter’s “disappearance” but the circumstances of the “disappearance.” It was not possible that Cressida had lied to him and to her mother—and yet, obviously, it seemed that Cressida had lied. At any rate, she’d told them less than the truth about where she’d planned to go the previous night. How out of character this was! Cressida had always scorned lying as moral weakness. It was cowardice to care so much of others’ opinions, one would stoop to lie. And that she’d met up with her sister’s ex-fianc?, at a lakeside inn—that was even more astonishing. The Mayfields had to tell police officers—they’d had to tell them all that they knew. It wasn’t police procedure to search for an adult who has been missing for such a relatively short period of time unless “foul play” is suspected. The father had to insist that he was concerned that his daughter was “lost” in the Nautauga Preserve even as he couldn’t bring himself to acknowledge the possibility that she’d been “hurt.” Or, if “hurt”—“seriously hurt.” Not wanting to think sexually abused, raped. Not wanting to think And worse . . . Cressida was nineteen but a very young nineteen. Small-boned, childlike in her demeanor, with the body of a young boy—lithe, narrow-hipped, flat-chested. The father had seen men—(not boys: men)—staring at Cressida, especially in summer when she wore baggy T-shirts, jeans or cutoffs, her striking face pale without makeup; staring at Cressida in a kind of baffled yearning as if trying to determine if she was a young girl or a young boy; and why, though they stared so avidly at her, she remained oblivious of them. So far as her parents knew, Cressida was inexperienced with boys or men. She had the puritan ferocity of one who scorns not so much sexual experience as any sort of shared and intimate physical experience. As her sister Juliet had said Oh I am sure that Cressida has never been—you know—with anyone . . . I mean . . . I’m sure that she’s a . . . Too sensitive of her sister’s feelings to say virgin. THE FATHER WAS VERY EXCITED. Adrenaline ran in his veins, his heart beat with an unnatural urgency. Telling himself This is the excitement of the search. Knowing that Cressida is near. He felt this, his daughter’s nearness. This man who never listened with any sort of sympathy to talk of such “mystical crap” as extrasensory perception had a conviction now, tramping through the Nautauga Preserve, that he could sense his daughter somewhere nearby. He could sense her thinking of him. Even as with a part of his mind he understood that, if she’d been anywhere near the entrance to the Preserve, anywhere near Sandhill Road and Sandhill Point, someone would have found her by now. For he was trained in the law, and he had by nature the lawyer’s temperament—doubt, questioning, more questioning. For he was trained to respond Yes, but—? The father thought how ironic, the daughter had never liked camping or hiking. Wilderness was boring to her, she’d said. Meaning wilderness frightened her. Wilderness did not care for her. He’d known other people like that, and all of them, perhaps by chance, women. The female is most secure in a confined space, a clearly designated space in which one’s identity is mirrored in others’ eyes: in such a place, one cannot become easily lost. The rapacity of nature, Zeno thought. You never think of it when you’re in control. And when you’re no longer in control, it’s too late. The father glanced upward, anxiously. High overhead, just visible through the dense pine boughs, a hawk—two hawks—red-shouldered hawks hunting together in long swooping arcs. Vivid against the sky then suddenly plummeting, gone. He’d seen owls swoop to the kill. An owl is a feathery killing machine and silent at such times when the only outcry is the cry of the prey. Underfoot as he pushed through briars were scuttling things—rabbits, pack rats—a family of skunks—snakes. From somewhere close by the liquidy-gobbling cries of wild turkeys. Wilderness too vast for the girl, the younger daughter. Zeno had not liked that in her: giving up too easily. Claiming she was bored, wanted to go home to her books and “art.” Needing to squeeze all that she could into her brain. And you can’t squeeze three hundred thousand acres into a brain. Cressida don’t do this to us! If you are somewhere close by let us know. The father had grown hoarse calling the daughter’s name. It was a foolish waste of energy, he knew—none of the other volunteer searchers was calling the girl’s name. From remarks made to him, and within his hearing, the father gathered that other, younger searchers were impressed with him, so far: a man of his age, much older than they, apparently an experienced hiker, in reasonably good physical condition. At the start of the search this seemed so, at least. “Mr. Mayfield? Here.” He’d drunk his water too quickly. Breathing through his mouth which isn’t recommended for a serious hiker. “Thanks, I’m OK. You’ll need it for yourself.” “Mr. Mayfield, take it. I’ve got another bottle.” The young man, sleek-muscled, lean, like a greyhound or a whippet—one of the Beechum County deputies, in T-shirt, shorts, hiking boots. The father wondered if the deputy was someone who knew his daughter—either of his daughters. He wondered if the deputy knew more about what might have happened to Cressida than he, the father, had yet been allowed to know. The father was the kind of man more comfortable overseeing others, pressing favors upon others, than accepting favors himself. The father was a man who prided himself on being strong, protective. Still, it isn’t a good idea to become dehydrated. Light-headed. Random rushes of adrenaline leave you depleted, exhausted. He took the water bottle. He drank. Initially this morning they’d searched along the banks of the Nautauga River in the area in which the young corporal’s Jeep Wrangler had been parked. This was a stretch of river where fishermen came often, both marshy and rock-strewn; there were numerous footprints amid the rocks, overlaid upon one another, filled with water since a recent rain. Rescue dogs leapt forward barking excitedly having been given articles of the girl’s clothing to smell but soon lost the trail, if there was a trail, whimpered and drifted about clueless. Miles along the river curving and twisting through the rock-strewn land and then they’d decided to alter their strategy fanning out in more or less concentric circles from the Point. Some had searched for lost hikers and children previously in the Preserve and had their particular way of searching but Beechum County law enforcement strategy was to keep close together, only a few yards apart, though it was difficult where there was underbrush and masses of trees, yet the point was not to overlook what might have fallen to the ground, torn clothing in briars, scraped against a tree, any sign that the lost girl had passed this way, a crucial sign that might save her life. The father listened to what was told to him, explained to him, with an air of calm. In any public gathering Zeno Mayfield presented himself as the most reasonable of men: a man you could trust. He’d had a career as a man who addressed others, with unfailing intelligence, enthusiasm. But now, there was no opportunity for him to give orders to others. He felt a clutch of helplessness, in the Preserve. Tramping on foot, dependent upon his physical strength, not his more customary cunning. But O God if his daughter was hurt. If his daughter had been hurt. Not wanting to think if she’d fallen somewhere, if she’d broken a leg, if she lay unconscious, unable to hear them calling her, unable to respond. Trying not to think if she was nowhere within earshot, borne away in the fast-flowing river that was elevated after heavy rainstorms the previous week, thirty miles downstream to the west where the Nautauga River emptied into Lake Ontario. Through the morning there were false alarms, false sightings. A female camper wearing a red shirt, staring at them as they approached her campsite. And her partner, another young woman, emerging from a tent, for a moment frightened, hostile. Excuse us have you seen? . . . girl of nineteen, looks younger. We think she is somewhere in the vicinity . . . IN THE SEVENTH HOUR of the first-day’s search, early Sunday afternoon the father sighted his daughter ahead, less than one hundred yards away. Jolted awake, shouting—“Cressida!” A desperate run, a heedless run, down a steep incline as other searchers stopped in their tracks to stare. Several saw what the father was seeing: on the farther bank of a narrow mountain stream where the girl had fallen or lain down exhausted to sleep. Rivulets of sweat ran into the father’s eyes burning like acid. He was running clumsily downhill, sharp pains between his shoulder blades and in his legs. A great ungainly beast on its hind legs, staggering. “Cressida!” The daughter lay motionless on the farther side of the stream, part-hidden by underbrush. One of her limbs—a leg, or an arm—lay trailing into the stream. The father was shouting hoarsely—“Cressida!” He could not believe that his daughter was injured or broken but only just sleeping, waiting for him. Others were approaching now, on the run. The father paid no heed to them, he was determined to reach his daughter first, to waken her, and lift her in his arms. “Cressida! Honey! It’s me . . . ” Zeno Mayfield was fifty-three years old. He had not run like this for years. Once he’d been an athlete—in high school a very long time ago. Now his heart was a massive fist in his chest. A sharp pain, a sequence of small sharp pains, struck between his shoulder blades. He ran on reckless, desperate, as if hoping to escape the sharp-darting pains. He was a tall deep-chested man with a broad muscled back; his hair was still thick, licorice-colored except where threaded with gray; his face that had been flushed from the exertion of hours in the Adirondack heat was now draining of blood, mottled and sickly; his heart was pounding so laboriously, it seemed to be drawing oxygen from his brain; at such a pace, he could not breathe; he could not think coherently: his thick clumsy legs could hardly keep him from falling. He was thinking She is all right. Of course, Cressida is all right. But when he reached the mountain stream he saw that the thing on the farther bank wasn’t his daughter but the carcass of a partly decomposed deer, a young doe, the still-beautiful head lacking antlers and a jagged bloody section of her chest torn away by scavengers. The father cried out, in horror. A choked animal-cry, as if he’d been kicked in the chest. The father fell to his knees. All strength drained from his limbs. He’d been searching for the daughter since ten o’clock that morning. And now he’d found his daughter asleep beside a little mountain stream like a girl in a child’s storybook and in front of his eyes his daughter had been transformed into a hideous decaying carcass. Zeno Mayfield hadn’t wept since his mother’s death twelve years before. And then, he hadn’t wept like this. His body shook with sobs. A terrible pity for the killed and part-devoured doe overcame him. His name was being called. Hands beneath his armpits, lifting. Wanting to hide from them the obvious fact that he was having difficulty breathing. Pains between his shoulder blades had coalesced into a single piercing pain like cartoon zigzag lightning. He’d insisted early that morning, he would join the search team in the Preserve. Of course, the father of the missing girl must search for her. They had him on his feet now. The wounded beast swaying. It is a terrible thing how swiftly a man’s strength can drain from him, like his pride. These were young volunteers, Zeno didn’t know their names. But they knew his name: “Mr. Mayfield . . . ” He pushed their hands from him. He was upright, and he was breathing normally again, or—almost. Would’ve insisted upon returning to the search after a few minutes’ rest, lukewarm water out of the Evian bottle and a nervous splattering urination behind a lichen-pocked boulder but blackness rose inside his skull another time, to his shame he sighed and sank into it. GOD TAKE ME instead of her. If you take anyone—take me. TWO (#ulink_240df0a5-b5ae-5059-b39b-de7eca6e0328) Bride-to-Be (#ulink_240df0a5-b5ae-5059-b39b-de7eca6e0328) July 4, 2005 (#ulink_240df0a5-b5ae-5059-b39b-de7eca6e0328) YES YOU KNOW. Know that I do. Of course—you know me. How could you doubt me. IT IS A SHOCK—of course. We are all—we are all very—sad . . . No! Sad is what I said. We are all—everyone who loves you—and me—especially. We are sad. NO, WAIT. We are very happy that you are alive, Brett, and returned to us of course. We are not sad about that, we are very happy about that. All those months we prayed. Prayed and prayed. And now, you are returned home to us. And now, you are returned to us. I KNEW YOU would return of course—I never doubted. Even when we were out of contact—when you were in combat—I did not doubt. In that terrible place—how do you pronounce it—“Diyala” . . . PLEASE BELIEVE ME, darling: I love you like always. That is why I wanted us to be engaged before you left—in case there was something that happened . . . over there. But you know me, I am . . . I am your girl. I am your fianc?e. Your bride-to-be. That will not change. EXCEPT NOW: there is so much for us to plan! Makes my head swim so much to plan . . . Your mother promised to help but now . . . . . . (should not have said promised. I did not mean promised.) But, before this, before—this . . . The surgeries, and the recovery and rehab. Before this, your mother was excited about planning the wedding, with my mother, and grandmother, and we were planning the wedding to take place as soon as you were . . . Well yes: there is a before, and there is now. OH IS IT WRONG to say before? And—now? Brett why do you look at me like that . . . Why are you angry at me . . . Why do you seem to hate me . . . . . . look at me like I am a stranger. And you are a stranger to me and I—I am frightened of you at such times. BECAUSE I LOVE YOU, Brett. I love you. I love you and so sometimes this other—it’s like this other—is staring at me out of your eyes . . . It is very frightening to me. For I don’t know what I can do, to placate this other. I PLEDGE TO YOU to be your loving wife forever & ever Amen. I pledge to you as to Jesus our Savior forever & ever Amen. I am not ashamed of loving you. Of being with you as we did . . . I would not have been ashamed if I had been pregnant (as I had worried I might be, as you know) and I think now (almost) that I am sorry that I was not. (Are you sorry?) (It would be so different now!) I feel that I am already your wife. But I feel sometimes that you are not my husband—exactly. I feel that there is Brett my darling, and there is—this other. Sometimes. HERE IS THE bridal gown design. It’s so lovely—isn’t it? Do you like it? Please tell me yes. I am so eager to hear yes. I know it doesn’t interest you—much. Of course . . . Some dresses are very expensive. This is a bargain, we found online—“Bonnie Bell Designs.” And so beautiful, I think. Ivory silk. Ivory lace. One-shoulder neckline with a sheer lace back. The pleated bodice is “fitted” and the skirt “flared.” The veil is gossamer chiffon. The train is three feet long. And these are the shoes: ivory satin pumps. Let me hold the picture to the light, maybe you can see better . . . Do you think that I will look . . . pretty . . . in this? You’d said I was your beautiful girl. Many times you’d said that, Brett. I believed you then, and I want to believe you now. Please say yes. YOU WILL WEAR your U.S. Army dress uniform. So handsome in your dress uniform with “decorations.” You will wear the dark glasses. You will wear white gloves. The dress cap, so elegant. Corporal Brett Kincaid. My husband. We will practice. We have months to practice. (YOU’D HAD A “stateside” promotion—you’d said.) (All things have a meaning in the military—you’d said. And so stateside had a meaning but what is that meaning?—we did not know.) (We know only that we are so proud of our Corporal Brett Kincaid.) YOU ARE MISTAKEN—YOU do not look wounded. You do not look “battered.” You do not look “like shit”! You are my handsome fianc?, you are not truly changed. There will be more surgeries. There must be time to heal, the surgeon has explained. There will be a “natural healing”—in time. You can’t expect a miracle to be perfect! The ears, the scalp, the forehead, the lids of the eyes. The throat beneath the jaw, on your right side. Except in bright light you would think it was an ordinary burn—burns. Oh please don’t flinch, Brett—when I kiss you. Please. It’s like a sliver of glass in the heart—when you push me from you. IF PEOPLE ARE looking at you in Carthage it is only because they know of you—your medals, your honors. They are admiring of you, for you are a war hero but they would not want to intrude. Like Daddy. He is so admiring of you, Brett!—but Daddy has a funny way about him when he’s emotional—gets very quiet—people wouldn’t believe that Zeno Mayfield is a shy man really. Well I mean—essentially. It’s hard for men to talk about—certain things. Daddy had not ever had a son, only daughters. To us, Daddy talks. We listen. And Mom talks about you all the time. When you were in Iraq, in combat, she prayed for you all the time. She worried more when we didn’t hear from you than I did, almost . . . All of my family, Brett. All of the Mayfields. Try to believe—we love you. I WISH YOU would come back to church with me, Brett. Everyone is missing you there. We have a new minister—he’s very nice. And his wife, she’s very nice. They ask after you every Sunday. They know about you of course. I mean—they know that you are returned to us safely. There are other veterans in the congregation, I think. They don’t come every week. But I think you know two of them at least—Denny Bisher and Brandon Kranach. Maybe they’d been in Iraq, or maybe Afghanistan. Denny is in a wheelchair. Denny’s younger brother wheels him in. Or his mother. How’s Brett Denny is always asking me and I tell him you’ll contact him soon . . . How’s Corporal Kincaid. How’s that cool dude. No, please! Don’t be angry with me, I am sorry. . . . I will not bring Denny up again. . . . I will not bring church up again. Don’t be angry at me, please I am sorry. JUST FIREWORKS, BRETT! Over at Palisade Park. The windows are shut. Air conditioner is on. I can turn the music higher so you won’t hear. I said honey—just fireworks. You know—Fourth of July in the park. Yes better not to go this year. I told them not to expect us—Mom and Dad. We have other things to do. WHICH TABLETS?—the white ones, or . . . I can bring you a glass of water. OK, a glass of beer. But the doctor said . . . . . . not a good idea to mix “alcohol” and “meds” . . . Don’t—please. WE WILL PRACTICE, in the church. Before the wedding rehearsal, we will practice. You do not limp. Only just—sometimes—you seem to lose your balance—you make that sudden jerking movement with your legs like in a dream. I think it is not real. It is just something in your head. HAND-EYE COORDINATION. THEY have promised. In the video, you can see how that boy improved. There are many miracles. The great miracle God has provided is, you are alive and we are together. The doctor—neurologist—says it is a matter of neuron-recircuiting. It is a matter of new brain cells learning to take over from the damaged brain cells. It is neurogenesis. Like not-sleeping. The brain “forgets” how to sleep. Like—sometimes—the brain forgets how to control “elimination.” It is no one’s fault. These reflexes will come back in time, the doctor said. WHEN THE GRENADE exploded, and the wall collapsed. It was combat. It was in action. Which is why you have been awarded a Purple Heart. And the Infantry Combat Badge which is a special badge beautiful gold-braided in the shape of a U with a miniature facsimile of a long-barreled rifle against a blue background. A badge to hold in the hand and contemplate like a gem. Like a gem that is a riddle, or a riddle that is a gem. How brave you were, from the start. Which is why you must not feel shame, that you are returned to us. You are not a traitor or a coward. You did not let your platoon down. You were injured, and you are convalescing. And you are in rehab. And you will be married. WE WILL HAVE CHILDREN, I vow. A son. I know this. This is possible! We will do it. We will surprise them. In rehab they have promised—the older doctor said, to me—If you love your future husband and will not give up but persevere a pregnancy is not impossible. Lots of disabled vets have fathered children. This is well known. The MRI did not detect any growth. The MRI did not detect any blood-clots. The MRI did not detect any “irregularities.” Whatever you see in your head like in dreams is not real. You know this! CORPORAL BRETT GRAHAM Kincaid. On the maps, we tried to follow you. Baghdad—that was the first. Diyala Province. Sadah. Where you were hurt—Kirkuk. Where the maps gave out—faded. So far from Carthage. OPERATION IRAQI FREEDOM. Very few people in Carthage know the difference—if there is a difference—between “Iraq” and “Afghanistan.” I know: for I am your fianc?e and it is necessary for me to know. But still I am confused, and there is no one to ask. For I dare not ask you. The look in your eyes, at such times!—I feel such cold, a shudder comes over me. He does not love me. He does not even know me. Reverend Doig was explaining last Sunday there is no end, there can be no end, never an end to war for there is a “seed of harm” in the human soul that can never be wholly eradicated until Jesus returns to save mankind. But when will this be?—Jesus returning to us? Like Corporal Kincaid returning. Yes I believe this! I want to believe this. Must believe that there is a way of believing it—for both of us. When Reverend Doig marries us. WHAT DID I tell them, I told them the truth—it was an accident. I slipped and fell and struck the door—so silly. At the ER they took an X-ray. My jaw is not dislocated. It’s sore, it’s hard to swallow but the bruises will fade. I know, you did not mean it. I am sorry to upset you. I am not crying, truly! We will look back on this time of trial and we will say—It was a test of our love. We did not weaken. THIS MORNING in my bed which is so lonely. Oh Brett I miss our special times together before you went away when I could come to you in your apartment and we could be alone together . . . When that happens again, we will be happy as we were. This is not a normal way for us to be, living as we are. It’s no wonder there is strain between us. But this time will pass, this time of trial. I wish your mother did not dislike me. When I am trying so hard to love her. She said to me You don’t have to pretend. You can stop pretending. Any day now, you can stop pretending. And I didn’t know how to answer her—there was such dislike in her eyes . . . And finally I said But I am not pretending anything, Mrs. Kincaid! I love Brett and want only to marry him and be his wife and take care of him as he might need me, this is all I dream of. This morning when I could not sleep after I’d wakened early—(there is a rooster somewhere behind where we live, up the hill behind the cemetery on the Post Road, I like to hear the rooster crowing but it means that the night is over and I will probably not get back to sleep)—I was remembering when we said good-bye, that last time. In the Albany airport. And there were other soldiers arriving at the security check and some of them younger than you even. And that older officer—a lieutenant. And everyone—civilians—looking at you with respect. So sad to kiss you good-bye! And everybody wanting to hug you and kiss you at the last minute and you were laughing saying But Julie is my fianc?e not you guys. There are so many of us who love you, Brett. I wish you would know this. You gave me your “special letter” then. I knew what it meant—I think I knew—I felt that I might faint—but hid it away quickly of course and never spoke of it to anyone. I will never open it now. Now you are safely returned to us. Yes, I still have it of course. Hidden in my room. My sister knows of the letter—I mean, she saw it in my hand. She has no idea what is inside it. She will not ever know. She has told me I am not worthy of you—I am “too happy”—“too shallow”—to comprehend you. In fact Cressida knows nothing of what there is between us. No one knows, except us. Those special times between us, Brett. We will have those special times again . . . Cressida is a good person in her heart!—but this is not always evident. It’s hurtful to her to observe happiness in others. Even people she loves. I think it has made a difference to her, to see you as you are now—she has been deeply affected though she would not say so. But if you speak to her of anything personal she will stare at you coldly. Excuse me. You are utterly mistaken. She has refused to be my maid of honor, she was scornful saying she hasn’t worn anything like a dress or a skirt since she’d been a baby and wasn’t going to start now. She laughed saying weddings are rituals in an extinct religion in which I don’t believe. I said to Cressida What is the religion in which you do believe? This question I put to her seriously and not sarcastically as Cressida herself speaks. For truly I wanted to know. But Cressida had no reply. Turned away from me as if she was ashamed and did not speak. I wish—I am praying for this!—that Cressida will come to church with us sometime. Or just with me, if you don’t want to come. I know that she has been wounded in some way, she has been hurt by someone or something, she would never confide in me. I feel that her heart is empty and yearning to be filled—to cross over. NO, BRETT! Not ever. You must not say such things. We could not feel more pride for you, truly. It is a feeling beyond pride—such as you would feel for any true hero, who has acted in a way few others could act, in a time of great danger. What you said at the going-away party, such simple words you said made everyone cry—I just want to serve my country, I want to be the very best soldier I know how to be. This is what you have done. Please, Brett! Have faith. The war in Iraq was the most exciting time in your life, I know. Those months you were gone from us—“deployed.” It was a dangerous time and an exciting time and (I understand) a secret time for you, we could know nothing of in Carthage. Operation Iraqi Freedom. Those words! We tried to follow in the news. On the Internet. We prayed for you. Daddy would remove from the newspaper things he didn’t want me to see. Particularly the New York Times, he gets on Sundays mostly. Photos of soldiers who have died in the war—the wars. Since 2001. I have seen some of them of course. Couldn’t help but look for women among the rows of men looking young as boys. There are not many female soldiers. But it is shocking to see them, their pictures with all the men. And always smiling. Like high school girls. In Carthage, there are some people who do not “support” the war—the wars. But they support our troops, they make that clear. Daddy has always made that clear. Daddy respects you. Daddy is just awkward now, he doesn’t know how to talk to you but that’s how some men are. He was never a soldier himself and has strong feelings about the Vietnam War which was the war when he was growing up. But Daddy does not mean anything personal. You have said It’s a toss of the dice. You have said Who gives a shit who lives, who dies. A toss of the dice. I know you don’t mean this. This is not Brett speaking but the other. You must not despair. Life is a gift. Our lives are gifts. Our love for each other. It was surprising, my mother is not very religious but while you were gone—she came to church with me, almost every Sunday. She prayed. All of the congregation prayed for you. For you and the others in the war—the wars. So many have died in the wars, it is hard for me to remember the numbers—more than one thousand? Most of them soldiers like you, not officers. And all beloved of God, you’d wish to think. For all are beloved of God. Even the enemy. Just so, we must defend ourselves. A Christian must defend himself against the enemies of Christ. This war against terror. It is a war against the enemies of Christ. I know you did not want to kill anyone. I know you, my darling Brett, and I know this—you did not want to kill the enemy, or—anyone. But you were a soldier, this was your duty. You were promoted because you were a good soldier. We were so proud of you then. Your mother is proud of you, I wish she could show it better. I wish she did not seem to blame me. I am not sure why she would wish to blame me. Maybe she thought I was—pregnant. Maybe she thought that was why we wanted to get married. And maybe she thought that was why you enlisted in the army—to get away. I wish that I could speak with your mother but I—I have tried . . . I have tried and failed. Your mother does not like me. My mother says We’ll keep trying! Mrs. Kincaid is fearful of losing her son. I know that you don’t like me to talk about your mother—I am sorry, I will try not to. Only just sometimes, I feel so hurt. I know, the war is a terrible thing for you to remember. When you start classes at Plattsburgh in September, or maybe—maybe it will be January—you will have other things to think about . . . By then, we will be married and things will be easier, in just one place. I will take courses at Plattsburgh, too. I think I will. Part-time graduate school, in the M.A. in education program. With a master’s degree I could teach high school English. I would be qualified for “administration”—Daddy thinks I should be a principal, one day. Daddy has such plans for us! Both of us. I WISH YOU would speak of it to me, dear Brett. I’ve seen documentaries on TV. I think I know what it was like—in a way. I know it was a “high” for you—I’ve heard you say to your friends. Search missions in the Iraqi homes when you didn’t know what would happen to you, or what you would do. What you’d never say to me or to your mother you would say to Rod Halifax and “Stump”—or maybe you would say it to a stranger you met in a bar. Another vet, you would speak with. Someone who didn’t know Corporal Brett Kincaid as he’d used to be. There is no “high” like that in Carthage. Tossing your life like dice. Our lives since high school—it’s like looking through the wrong end of a telescope, I guess—so small. Those sad little cardboard houses beneath a Christmas tree, houses and a church and fake snow like frosting. Small. EVEN OUR WOUNDS here are small. IN CARTHAGE, your life is waiting for you. It is not a thrilling life like the other. It is not a life to serve Democracy like the other. You said such a strange thing when you saw us waiting for you by the baggage claim, we were thrilled you were walking unassisted and this look came in your face I had not ever seen before and it was like you were afraid of us for just a moment you said Oh Christ are you all still alive? I was thinking you were all dead. I’d been to the other place, and I saw you all there. THREE (#ulink_0f00dfe3-ceb3-5710-89e7-99cfb39c1604) The Father (#ulink_0f00dfe3-ceb3-5710-89e7-99cfb39c1604) OH DADDY WHY’D YOU call me such a name—Cressida. Because it’s an unusual name, honey. And it’s a beautiful name. FIRE SHONE INTO the father’s face. His eyes were sockets of fire. He hadn’t the strength to open his eyes. Or the courage. The doe’s torso had been torn open, its bloody interior crawling with flies, maggots. Yet the eyes were still beautiful—“doe’s eyes.” He’d seen his daughter there, on the ground. He was certain. The sick-sliding sensation in his gut wasn’t unfamiliar. In that place, again. The place of dread, horror. Guilt. His fault. And how: how was it his fault? Lying on his back and his arms flung wide across the bed—(he remembered now: they’d brought him home, to his deep mortification and shame)—that sagged beneath his weight. (Last time he’d weighed himself he’d been, dear Christ, 212 pounds. Heavy and graceless as wet cement.) A memory came to him of a long-ago trampoline in a neighbor’s backyard when he’d been a child. Throwing himself down onto the coarse taut canvas that he might be sprung into the air—clumsily, thrillingly—flying up, losing his balance and falling back, flat on his back and arms sprung, the breath knocked out of him. On the trampoline, Zeno had been the most reckless of kids. Other boys had to marvel at him. Years later when his own kids were young it had become common knowledge that trampolines are dangerous for children. You can break your neck, or your back—you can fall into the springs and slice yourself. But if he’d known, as a kid, Zeno wouldn’t have cared—it was a risk worth taking. Nothing in his childhood had been so magical as springing up from the trampoline—up, up—arms outflung like the wings of a bird. Now, he’d come to earth. Hard. HE’D TOLD THEM like hell he was going to any hospital. Fucking hell he was not going to any ER. Not while his daughter was missing. Not until he’d brought her back safely home. He’d allowed them to help him. Weak-kneed and dazed by exhaustion he hadn’t any choice. Falling on his knees on sharp rocks—a God-damned stupid thing to have done. He’d been pushing himself in the search, as his wife had begged him not to do, as others, seeing his flushed face and hearing his labored breath, had urged him not to do; for by Sunday afternoon there must have been at least fifty rescue workers and volunteers spread out in the Preserve, fanning in concentric circles from the Nautauga River at Sandhill Point where it was believed the missing girl had been last seen. It was the father’s pride, he couldn’t bear to think that his daughter might be found by someone else. Cressida’s first glimpse of a rescuer’s face should be his face. Her first words—Daddy! Thank God. HE’D HAD SOME “heart pains”—(guessed that was what they were: quick darting pains like electric shocks in his chest and a clammy sensation on his skin)—a few times, nothing serious, he was sure. He hadn’t wanted to worry his wife. A woman’s love can be a burden. She is desperate to keep you alive, she values your life more than you can possibly. What he most dreaded: not being able to protect them. His wife, his daughters. Strange how when he’d been younger, he hadn’t worried much. He’d taken it for granted that he would live—well, forever! A long time, anyway. Even when he’d received death threats over the issue of Roger Cassidy—defending the “atheist” high school biology teacher when the school board had fired him. He’d laughed at the threats. He’d told Arlette it was just to scare him and he certainly wasn’t going to be scared. Just last month his doctor Rick Llewellyn had examined him pretty thoroughly in his office. And an EKG. No “imminent” problem with his heart but Zeno’s blood pressure was still high even with medication: 150 over 90. Blood pressure, cholesterol. Fact is, Zeno should lose twenty pounds at least. On the bed he’d tried to untie and kick off the heavy hiking boots but there came Arlette to pull them off for him. “Lie still. Try to rest. If you can’t sleep for Christ’s sake, Zeno—shut your eyes at least.” She was terrified of course. Fussing and fuming over him to deflect her thoughts from the other. That morning at about 4 A.M. she’d wakened him. When she’d discovered that Cressida hadn’t come home. Since that minute he’d been awake in a way he was rarely awake—all of his senses alert, to the point of pain. Stark-staring awake, as if his eyelids had been removed. A search. A search for his daughter. A search that was for a missing girl. These searches of which you hear, occasionally. Often for a lost child. A kidnapped child. Abducted. You hear, and you feel a tug of sympathy—but not much more. For your life doesn’t overlap with the lives of strangers and their terror can’t be shared with you. Was he awake? Or asleep? He saw the steeply hilly forest strewn with enormous boulders as in an ancient cataclysm and from behind one of these a girl’s uplifted hand, arm—a glimpse of a naked shoulder which he knew to be badly bruised . . . Oh Daddy where are you. Dad-dy. “Lie still. Please. If something happens to you at such a time . . . ” The voice wasn’t Cressida’s voice. Somehow, Arlette had intervened. He knew, his wife didn’t trust him. Married for more than a quarter of a century—Arlette trusted Zeno less readily than she’d done at the start. For now she knew him, to a degree. To know some men is certainly not to trust them. She was breathless, irritated. Not terrified—not so you’d see—but irritated. The house was crowded with well-intentioned relatives. There were police officers coming and going—their ugly police-radios crackling and squawking like demented geese. There were reporters for local media eager for interviews—they were not to be turned away, for they would be useful. And photos of Cressida had to be supplied, of course. Coffee? Iced tea? Grapefruit juice, pomegranate juice? With a grim sort of hostess-gaiety Arlette offered her visitors refreshments, for she knew no other way to deal with people in her house. Somehow, before she’d had a chance to call her sister Katie Hewett, Katie had come to the house. This was by 10 A.M. Katie had taken over the hostess-role and was helping Arlette answer phones—family phone, cell phones—which rang frequently and with each call, despite the evidence of the caller ID, there was the hope that the next voice they heard would be Cressida’s. Hi there! Gosh! I just saw on TV that I’m “missing”. . . Wow. Sorry. Oh God you won’t believe what happened but I’m OK now . . . Except the voice was never Cressida’s. Remarkable, how it was never Cressida’s. Years ago Arlette would have crawled beside her husband in their bed, in a crisis like this; she would not have minded that her husband had sweated through his clothes, T-shirt and khaki shorts that were now clammy-cool, and smelled of his body; she would have held the anguished man in her arms, to shield him. And Zeno would have gathered his wife in his arms, to shield her. Shivering and shuddering and dazed with exhaustion but together in this terrible time. Now, Arlette tugged at his hiking boots—so heavy! And the laces needing to be untied. Pulled the boots off his enormous feet seeing that, even in the rush of preparing to leave for the Nautauga Preserve, he’d remembered to put on a double pair of socks—white liner socks, light-woolen socks. For all his careless-seeming ways, Zeno was a meticulous man. A conscientious man. The only mayor of Carthage in recent decades who’d left office—after eight years, in the 1990s—with a considerable surplus in the city treasury, and not a gaping deficit. (Of course, it was a quasi-secret that Mayor Mayfield had written personal checks for a number of endangered projects—parks and recreation maintenance, Little League softball, the Black River Community Walk-In Clinic.) One of the few mayors in all of upstate New York who, as he’d liked to joke, hadn’t even been investigated, let alone indicted, tried and convicted, for malfeasance in office. Arlette had asked the young man who’d driven Zeno home in Zeno’s Land Rover what had happened to him in the Preserve, for she knew that Zeno would never tell her the truth. He’d said, Zeno had gotten overheated. Over-tired. Dehydrated. He’d said this was why it isn’t a good idea, a family member to be searching for someone in his family who’s been reported lost. Zeno smiled a ghastly smile. Zeno managed to speak, for Zeno must always have the last word. OK, he’d try to sleep. A nap for an hour maybe. Then, he intended to return to the Preserve. “She can’t be there a second night. We can’t—that can’t—happen.” He stumbled on the stairs. Didn’t hear Katie speak to him, and didn’t seem to register that WCTG-TV was coming to the house to do an interview with the parents of the missing girl for the Sunday 6 P.M. news, later that afternoon. Arlette had accompanied Zeno upstairs trying unobtrusively to slip her arm around his waist, but he’d pushed from her with a little snort of indignation. He’d needed to use the bathroom, he said. Needed some privacy. “I’m not going to croak in here, hon—I promise.” This was meant to be humor. Just the word croak. She’d made a sound like laughter, or the hissing rejoinder to laughter, and turned away, and left the man to his privacy. Almost, they were adversaries now. Grappling together each knowing what must be done, what should be done, annoyed with the other for being blind, stubborn. Arlette had known he’d become overheated in the Preserve, he’d had no right to rush off like that tramping through underbrush while she was alone at the house. Waiting for a call—calls. Waiting for something to happen. After a distracted hour she returned to check on Zeno: he was sprawled on the bed only partly undressed. As if he’d been too exhausted to do more than pull off his khaki shorts and let them fall to the floor. Sprawled, breathing hoarsely and wetly, through his mouth, like a beached whale might breathe. And his face slack putty-colored, you’d never have guessed had been a handsome face not so long ago. Unshaven. Wiry whiskers sprouting on his jaws. Zeno Mayfield was a man who had to be prevented from pushing himself too hard. As if he had no natural sense of restraint, of normal limits. As, when he’d been a young attorney taking on difficult cases—hopeless cases—unpopular cases; once, unforgivably, taking on a case so controversial, anonymous callers had threatened him and his family and Arlette had worried that some madman might mail a bomb, or affix a bomb to one of their cars. In the name of God think what you are doing, man—one of the anonymous notes had warned. All Zeno had done, he’d protested, was defend a high school biology teacher who’d been suspended from his job for having taught Darwinian evolutionary theory to the exclusion of “creationism.” And when he’d been mayor of Carthage, an exhausting and quixotic venture into “public service” that had paid a token salary—(fifteen hundred annually!)—he’d pushed himself beyond what even his avid supporters might have expected of him and saw his popularity plummet nonetheless. The most controversial issue of Zeno’s mayoralty had been a campaign to install recycling in Carthage—yellow barrels for bottles and cans, green barrels for paper and cardboard. You’d have thought that Zeno Mayfield was a descendant of Trotsky! His daughters had asked plaintively Why do people hate Daddy? Don’t they know how funny and nice Daddy is? Arlette hadn’t lain down beside him. She hadn’t held him tight in her arms. But she’d laid a cloth over his face, dampened with cold water, and he’d pushed it off and clutched anxiously at her hand. “Lettie—d’you think—he did something to her? And now he’s ashamed, and can’t tell us? Lettie—d’you think—oh God, Lettie . . . ” YOUR MOTHER AND I chose our daughters’ names with particular care. Because we don’t think that either of you is ordinary. So an ordinary name isn’t appropriate. He was solemn and dogged trying to explain. She was younger than the age she was now and rudely she laughed. Bullshit, Daddy. That is such bullshit. It was like Cressida to laugh in your face. Squinch up her face like a wicked little monkey. Her laughter was high-pitched like a monkey’s chittering and her small shiny-black eyes were merry with derision. They were in someplace Zeno didn’t recognize. Not in the forest now but in a place meant to be this place—the Mayfield home. Why is it, when you dream about a place meant to be “home”—or any “familiar” place—it never looks like anything you’d ever seen before? He was trying to explain to her. She was making her silly-little-girl face rolling her eyes and batting away his words as she’d have batted away badminton birdies with both her balled-up fists. Saying Bullshit Daddy, except for her face Juliet is O-R-D-I-N-A-R-Y. Zeno took exception to this. Zeno was angered when his bright unruly younger daughter mocked his sweetly-serene and beautiful elder daughter. And anyway it wasn’t true. Or it was a partial truth. For Juliet’s beauty wasn’t exclusively her face. The exchange between the father and Cressida was a dream. Yet, the exchange had taken place more or less in this way, years before. The Mayfield girls were like the daughters of a fairy-tale king. Bitterly the younger daughter resented the fact—(if it was a fact, it was unprovable)—that the father loved the elder, more beautiful daughter more than he loved her, whose twisty little heart he couldn’t master. I love both our girls. I love them for different reasons. But equally. And Arlette said I hope you do. And if you don’t, or can’t—I hope you can disguise it. All parents know: there are children who are easy to love, and children who are a challenge to love. There are radiant children like Juliet Mayfield. Guileless, shadowless, happy. There are difficult children like Cressida. Steeped in the ink of irony as if in the womb. The bright happy children are grateful for your love. The dark twisty children must test your love. Maybe Cressida was “autistic”—in grade school, the possibility had been raised. Later, in high school the fancier epithet “Asperger’s” was suggested—with no more validation. If Cressida had known she’d have said, airily—Who cares? People are such idiots. Zeno supposed that in secret, Cressida cared very much. It was clear that Cressida resented how in Carthage, among people who knew the Mayfields, she was likely to be described as the smart one while her sister Juliet was the pretty one. How much would an adolescent girl rather be pretty, than smart! For of course, Cressida was invariably judged too smart. As in too smart for her own good. As in too smart for a girl her age. When she’d first started school, she’d complained: “Nobody else is named ‘Cressida.’ ” It was a difficult name to pronounce. It was a name that fitted awkwardly in the mouth. Her parents had said of course no one else was named “Cressida” because “Cressida” was her own special name. Cressida had considered this. She did think of herself as different from other children—more restless, more impatient, more easily vexed, smarter—(at least usually)—quicker to laugh and quicker to tears. But she wasn’t sure if having a special name was a good idea, for it allowed others to know what might be better kept secret. “I hate it when people laugh at me. I hate it if they call me ‘Cress’—‘Cressie.’ ” She was one of those individuals, less frequently female than male, whose names couldn’t be appropriated—like a Richard who refuses to be diminished to “Dick,” or a Robert who will not be “Bob.” When she was older and may have felt a little (secret) pride in her unusual name, still she sometimes complained that other people asked her about it; for other people, including teachers, were likely to be over-curious, or just rude: “ ‘Cressida’ makes me feel self-conscious, sometimes.” Or, with a downward tug of her mouth, as if an invisible hook had snagged her there, “ ‘Cressida’ makes me feel accursed.” Accursed! This was not so remarkable a word for Cressida, as a girl of twelve who loved to read in the adult section of the Carthage Public Library, particularly novels designated as dark fantasy, romance. Of course, Cressida had looked up her name online. Reporting to her parents, incensed: “ ‘Cressida’—or ‘Criseyde’—isn’t nice at all. She’s ‘faithless’—that’s how people thought of her in the Middle Ages. Chaucer wrote about her, and then Shakespeare. First she was in love with a soldier named Troilus—then she was in love with another man—and when that ended, she had no one. And no one loved her, or cared about her—that was Cressida’s fate.” “Oh, honey, come on. We don’t believe in ‘fate’ in the U.S. of A. in 1996—this ain’t the Middle Ages.” It was the father’s prerogative to make jokes. The daughter twisted her mouth in a wounded little smile. The previous fall when Cressida was a freshman at St. Lawrence University in Canton, New York, she reported back that one of her professors had remarked upon her name, saying she was the “first Cressida” he’d ever encountered. He’d seemed impressed, she said. He’d asked if she’d been named for the medieval Cressida and she’d said, “Oh you’ll have to ask my father, he’s the one in our family with delusions of grandeur.” Delusions of grandeur! Zeno had laughed but the remark carelessly flung out by his young daughter had stung. AND ALL THIS while his daughter is awaiting him. His daughter with black-shining eyes. His daughter who (he believes) adores him and would never deceive him. “Maybe she’s returned to Canton. Without telling us.” “Maybe she’s hiding in the Preserve. In one of her ‘moods’ . . .” “Maybe someone got her to drink—got her drunk. Maybe she’s ashamed . . .” “Maybe it’s a game they’re playing. Cressida and Brett.” “A game?” “ . . . to make Juliet jealous. To make Juliet regret she broke the engagement.” “Canton. What on earth are you saying?” They looked at each other in dismay. Madness swirled in the air between them palpable as the electricity before a storm. “Jesus. No. Of course she hasn’t ‘returned’ to Canton—she was deeply unhappy in Canton. She doesn’t have a residence in Canton. That’s insane.” Zeno wiped his face with the damp cloth Arlette had brought him earlier, that he’d flung aside onto the bed. Arlette said: “And she and Brett wouldn’t be ‘playing a game’ together—that’s ridiculous. They scarcely know each other. And I don’t think that Juliet was the one to break the engagement.” Zeno stared at his wife. “You think it was Brett? He broke the engagement?” “If Juliet broke it, it wasn’t her choice. Not Juliet.” “Lettie, did she tell you this?” “She hasn’t told me anything.” “That son of a bitch! He broke the engagement—you think?” “He may have felt that Juliet wanted to end it. He may have felt—it was the right thing to do.” Arlette meant: the right thing to do considering that Kincaid was now a disabled person at twenty-six. Not so visibly disabled as some Iraq/Afghanistan war veterans in Carthage, except for the skin-grafts on his head and face. His brain had not been seriously injured—so it was believed. And Juliet had reported eagerly that doctors at the VA hospital in Watertown were saying that Brett’s prognosis, with rehab, was “good”—“very good.” Before dropping out impulsively, after 9/11, to enlist in the U.S. Army with several friends from high school, Brett had taken courses in finance, marketing, and business administration at the State University at Plattsburgh. Zeno had the idea that the kid hadn’t been highly motivated—as Kincaid’s prospective father-in-law, he had some interest in the practical side of his daughter’s romance, though he didn’t think he was a cynic: just a responsible dad. (Juliet would never forgive him if she’d known that Zeno had managed to see Brett Kincaid’s transcript for the single semester he’d completed at SUNY Plattsburgh: B’s, B+. Maybe it was unfair but Christ, Zeno Mayfield wanted for his beautiful daughter a man just slightly better than a B+ at Plattsburgh State.) He’d tried—hard!—not to think of Brett Kincaid making love to his daughter. His daughter. Arlette had chided him not to be ridiculous. Not to be proprietary. “Juliet isn’t ‘yours’ any more than she’s mine. Try to be grateful that she’s so happy—she’s in love.” But that was what disturbed the father—his firstborn daughter, his sweet honeybunch Juliet, was clearly in love. Not with Daddy but with a young rival. Good-looking and with the unconscious swagger of a high school athlete accustomed to success, applause. Accustomed to the adoration of his peers and to the admiration of adults. Accustomed to girls: sex. Zeno felt a wave of purely sexual jealousy. Nothing so upset him as glimpsing, by chance, his daughter and her tall handsome fianc? kissing, slipping their arms around each other’s waist, whispering, laughing together—so clearly intimate, and comfortable in their intimacy. That is, before Brett Kincaid had been shipped to Iraq. Initially Zeno had wanted to think that the kid had had too easy a time, cutting a swath through the Carthage high school world with an ease that couldn’t prepare him for the starker adult world to come. But that was unfair, maybe: Brett had worked at part-time jobs through high school—his mother was a divorc?e, with a low-paying job in County Services at the Beechum County Courthouse—and he was, as Juliet claimed, a “serious, committed Christian.” It was hard to believe that any teenaged boys in Carthage were “Christians”—yet, this seemed to be the case. When Zeno had been active in the Carthage Chamber of Commerce he’d encountered kids like these, frequently. Girls like Juliet hadn’t surprised him—you expected girls to be religious. In a girl, religious can be sexy. In a boy like Brett Kincaid it seemed like something else. Zeno wasn’t sure what. Recalling how Brett had said, at the going-away party for him and his high school friends, each enlisted in the U.S. Army and each scheduled for basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, that he wanted to be the “best soldier” he knew how to be. (His own father had “served” in the first Gulf War.) Winter/spring 2002 had been an era of patriotic fervor, following the terrorist attack at the World Trade Center the previous September; it had not been an era in which individuals were thinking clearly, still less young men like Brett Kincaid who seemed truly to want to defend their country against its enemies. How earnestly Brett had spoken, and how handsome he’d been in his U.S. Army dress uniform! Zeno had stared at the boy, and at his dear daughter Juliet in the crook of the boy’s arm. His heart had clenched in disdain and dread as he’d thought Oh Jesus. Watch out for this poor sweet dumb kid. And now recalling that poignant moment, when everyone in the room had burst into applause, and Juliet’s face had shone with tears, Zeno thought Poor bastard. It’s a cruel price you pay for being stupid. Difficult for Zeno Mayfield who’d come of age in the late, cynical years of the Vietnam War to comprehend why any intelligent young person like Brett Kincaid would willingly enlist in the military. Why, when there was no draft! It was madness. Wanting to “serve” the country—whose country? Virtually no political leaders’ sons and daughters enlisted in the armed services. No college-educated young people. Already in 2002 you could figure that the war would be fought by an American underclass, overseen by the Defense Department. Yet Zeno hadn’t spoken with Brett on this subject. He knew that Juliet didn’t want him to “intrude”—Zeno had such ideas, such plans, for everyone in his orbit, he had to make it a principle to keep clear. And he hadn’t felt close enough to the boy—there was an awkwardness between them, a shyness in Brett Kincaid as he shook hands with Zeno Mayfield, his prospective father-in-law, he’d never quite overcome. Often, Brett had called him “Mr. Mayfield”—“sir.” And Zeno had said to call him “Zeno” please—“We’re not on the army base.” Zeno had laughed, made a joke of it. But it disturbed him, essentially. His prospective son-in-law was uneasy in his presence which meant he didn’t like Zeno. Or maybe, didn’t trust Zeno. In the matter of the military, for instance. Though Zeno hadn’t tried to talk him out of enlisting, Zeno hadn’t made a point of congratulating him, either, as everyone else was doing. Serve my country. Best soldier I can be. Like my dad . . . There was a father, evidently. An absent father. A soldier-father who’d disappeared from Carthage twenty years before. Brett had been brought up some kind of Protestant Christian—Methodist, maybe. He wasn’t critical, questioning. He wasn’t skeptical. He wanted to believe, and so he wanted to serve. Chain of command: you obeyed your superior officer’s orders as he obeyed his superior officer’s orders as he obeyed his superior officer’s orders and so to the very top: the Administration that had declared war on terror and beyond that Administration, the militant Christian God. None of this was questioned. Zeno wouldn’t have wished to stir doubt. He’d defended the high school biology teacher Cassidy who’d taught Darwinian evolutionary theory to the exclusion of “creationism”—more specifically, Cassidy had ridiculed “creationism” in the classroom and deeply offended some students—and their parents—who were evangelical Christians; Zeno had defended Cassidy against the Carthage school board, and had won his case, but it had been a Pyrrhic victory, for Cassidy had no professional future in Carthage and had been soundly disliked for his “arrogant, atheistic” stance. And Zeno Mayfield had suffered a good deal of abuse, too. Except that Brett Kincaid had become engaged to his daughter Juliet, Zeno had no wish to enlighten the boy. You had to learn to live with religion, if you had a public career. You had to know when to be quiet about your own skepticism. Juliet belonged to the Carthage Congregationalist Church: she’d made a decision to join when she was in high school, drawn to the church by a close friend; after she and Brett began seeing each other, Brett accompanied her to Sunday services. No one else in the Mayfield family attended church. Arlette described herself as “a mild kind of Protestant-Christian-Democrat” and Zeno had learned to parlay questions about faith by saying he was a “Deist”—“In the hallowed tradition of our American Founding Fathers.” Zeno found serious talk of religion embarrassing: revealing what you “believed” was a kind of self-exposure not unlike stripping in public; you were likely to reveal far more than you wished. Cressida bluntly dismissed religion as a pastime for “weak-minded” people—she’d gone to church with her older sister for a few months when she’d been in middle school, and been bored silly. Strange how Cressida could be right about so much, and yet—(this was not a thought Zeno allowed himself to express aloud)—you resented her remarks, and were inclined to dislike her for making them. Juliet’s Christian faith had certainly been a great solace to her, since news had come of her fianc?’s injuries—a hurried and incoherent phone message from Brett’s mother had been the first they’d heard; she’d been grateful, and never ceased proclaiming her gratitude, that Brett hadn’t been killed; that God had “spared him.” The shock to Juliet had been so great, Zeno thought, she hadn’t altogether absorbed the fact that her fianc? was a terribly changed man—and the changes weren’t likely to be exclusively physical. Since Brett had returned to Carthage, and was living in his mother’s house about three miles from the Mayfields, Juliet had spent a good deal of time with him there; the elder Mayfields hadn’t seen much of him. When she could, Juliet accompanied Brett to the rehab clinic attached to the Carthage hospital; she attended some of his counseling sessions, as his fianc?e; eagerly she reported back to her parents that as soon as he was better able to concentrate Brett intended to re-enroll at Plattsburgh and get a degree in business and that there was talk—(how substantial, Zeno didn’t know)—of Brett being hired by a Carthage businessman who made it a point to hire veterans. See, Daddy—Brett has a future! Though I know you want me to dump him. I will not. Zeno would have protested, if Juliet had so accused him. But, of course, Juliet had not. Beautiful Juliet never accused anyone of such low thoughts. Least of all her father whom she adored. But there came impish Cressida to slip her arm through Daddy’s arm and to tug at him, to murmur in his ear in her scratchy voice, “Poor Julie! Not the ‘war hero’ she’d expected, is he.” Cruel Cressida squirming with something like stifled laughter. Zeno had said reprovingly, “Your sister loves Brett. That’s the main thing.” Cressida snorted with laughter like a mischievous little girl. “It is?” Several nights later, on the Fourth of July, Juliet had returned home early—and alone—(the most gorgeous, gaudy fireworks had just begun exploding in the sky above Palisade Park)—to inform her family that the engagement was ended. Her cheeks were tear-streaked. Her face had lost its luminosity and looked almost plain. Her voice was a hoarse whisper. “We’ve both decided. It’s for the best. We love each other, but—it’s ended.” Zeno and Arlette had been astounded. Zeno had felt a sick sinking sensation in his gut. For this was what he’d wanted—wasn’t it? His beautiful daughter spared a life with a handicapped and embittered husband? When Arlette moved to embrace her, Juliet pushed past her with a choked little sob and hurried up the stairs and shut her bedroom door. Even Cressida had been shocked. For once, her shiny black eyes hadn’t danced with derision when the subject of Juliet and Brett Kincaid came up—“Oh God! Julie will be so unhappy.” At twenty-two, Juliet was still living at home. She’d gone to college in Oneida but had wanted to return to Carthage to teach (sixth grade) at the Convent Street School a few miles away from the family home on Cumberland Avenue. Planning her wedding to Corporal Brett Kincaid—guest list, caterer, bridal gown and bridesmaids, music, flowers, wedding service at the Congregationalist Church—had been the consuming passion of her life for the past eighteen months, and now that the engagement had ended Juliet seemed scarcely capable of speech apart from the most perfunctory exchanges with her family. Though Juliet was always unfailingly courteous, and sweet. Tears welling in her eyes at which she brushed with her fingertips, as if apologetically. There’d been no reproach in her manner, when the father gazed at her searchingly, waiting for her to speak. For never had Juliet so much as hinted Are you happy, Daddy? I hope you are happy, Brett is out of our lives. Numbly Zeno said to Arlette: “She hasn’t spoken to you—yet? She hasn’t wanted to talk about it?” “No.” “What about Cressida?” “No. Juliet would never discuss Brett with her.” In the issue of the sisters, it had often been that Arlette clearly sided with the pretty one and not the smart one. “Maybe Brett wanted to talk about it with Cressida. Maybe that was why—the reason—they were together last night . . .” If truly they’d been together—alone together. Zeno had to wonder if that was true. It was totally out of character for Cressida to go to a place like the Roebuck Inn. Totally unlike Cressida, particularly on a Saturday night. Yet witnesses had told investigating officers that they were sure they’d seen Cressida there the night before, in the company of several people—mostly men; and one of them Brett Kincaid. Saturday night in midsummer, at Wolf’s Head Lake. There were a number of lakeside taverns of which the Roebuck was the oldest and the most popular, very likely the most crowded, and noisy; patrons spilled out of the inn and onto the decks overlooking the lake, and even down into the sprawling parking lot; on the deck was a local rock band, playing at a deafening volume. A drunken roar of motorboats on the lake, a drunken roar of motorcycles on Bear Valley Road. Before he’d become a settled-down husband and father of two daughters, Zeno Mayfield had spent time at Wolf’s Head Lake. He knew the Roebuck taproom. He knew the Roebuck men’s rooms. He knew the sloshing of brackish water about the mossy posts sunk into the lake, that supported the Roebuck’s outdoor deck. He knew the “scene” on a Saturday night. How puzzling, that Cressida would go to such a place, voluntarily! His sensitive daughter who flinched hearing rock music on the radio and who disdained places like the Roebuck and anyone likely to patronize them. “Most people are so crude. And so oblivious.” Such pronouncements Zeno’s younger daughter had made from an early age. Her pinched little face pinched tighter with disdain. Brett Kincaid acknowledged that he’d encountered Cressida at the lakeside inn. He’d acknowledged that she’d been in his Jeep. But he seemed to be saying that she hadn’t remained with him. His account of the previous night was incoherent and inconsistent. Asked about scratch-marks on his face and smears of blood on the front seat of his Jeep he’d given vague answers—he must have scratched his face somehow without knowing it, and the blood-smears on the seat were his. There were other items of “evidence” a deputy had found examining the vehicle that had been found with its front, right wheel in a ditch on the Sandhill Road on Sunday morning. The bloodstains would be analyzed, to determine if the blood was Kincaid’s or someone else’s. (As part of a physical examination the previous year, Cressida had had blood work done by a local Carthage doctor; these records would be provided to police.) Zeno had been told about the bloodstains in Kincaid’s Jeep that appeared to be “fresh” and “damp” and Zeno’s brain had seemed to clamp down. Arlette, too, had been told, and had gone silent. For they knew—they knew—that Juliet’s fianc?, Juliet’s ex-fianc?, who’d come very close to being their son-in-law, wasn’t capable of hurting either of their daughters. They could not believe it, and would not. As they could not believe that, at any minute, their missing daughter might not arrive home, burst into the house seeing an alarming number of vehicles parked outside—a mix of familiar faces and strangers in the living room—and cry: “What’s this? Who won the lottery?” The father wanted to think: it might happen. However unlikely, it might happen. “Oh Daddy, for God’s sake. You thought I was lost? You thought I was—killed or something?” The daughter’s shrill laughter like ice being shaken. THAT MORNING, Zeno had wanted to speak to Brett Kincaid. Zeno had been told no. Not a good idea at this time. “But just to—see him. For five minutes . . .” No. Hal Pitney who was Zeno’s friend, a high-ranking officer in the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department, told him this was not a good idea at the present time and anyway not possible, since Kincaid was being interviewed by the sheriff McManus himself. Not interrogated, which meant arrest. Only just interviewed, which meant the stage preceding a possible arrest. I need to know from him just this: Is Cressida alive? “ . . . only just to see him. Christ, he’s like one of the family—engaged to my daughter—my other daughter . . .” Zeno stammered, trying to smile. Zeno Mayfield had long cultivated a wide flash of a smile, a politician’s smile, that came now unconsciously, with a look of being forced. He was frightened at the prospect of seeing Brett Kincaid, seeing how Brett regarded him. Just tell me: is my daughter alive. Pitney said he’d pass on the word to McManus. Pitney said it “wasn’t likely” that Zeno could speak face-to-face with Kincaid for a while but—“Who knows? It might end fast.” “What? What ‘might end fast’?” Into Pitney’s face came a wary look. As if he’d said too much. “ ‘Custody.’ Him being in custody, and interviewed. It could end fast if he gives up all he knows.” A chill passed into Zeno, hearing these words. He knew, Hal Pitney had told him all he’d tell him right now. Driving east of Carthage into the hilly countryside, into the foothills of the Adirondacks and into the Nautauga Preserve to join the search team that morning, Zeno had made a succession of calls on his cell phone trying to learn if there were “developments” in the interview with Brett Kincaid. Like a compulsive cell phone user who checks for new calls in his in-box every few minutes Zeno could not shut off the flat little phone, still less could he slide it into his shirt pocket and forget it. Several times he tried to speak with Bud McManus. For Zeno knew Bud, to a degree, enough, he’d thought, to merit special consideration. (In the scrimmage of Carthage politics, he’d done McManus a favor, at least once: hadn’t he? If not, Zeno regretted it now.) Instead, he wound up speaking with another deputy named Gerry Eisner who told him (confidentially) that the interview with Brett Kincaid wasn’t going well, so far—Kincaid claimed not to remember what had happened the night before, though he seemed to know that someone whom he alternately called “Cress’da” and “the girl” had been in his Jeep; at one point he seemed to be saying that “the girl” had left him and gotten into a vehicle with someone else whom he didn’t know—but he wasn’t sure of any of this, he’d been pretty much “wasted.” Wasted. High school usage, guys boasting to one another of how sick-drunk they’d gotten on beer. Zeno trembled with indignation. During the interview, Kincaid had seemed dazed, uncertain of his surroundings. He’d smelled strongly of vomit even after he’d been allowed to wash up. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin-grafted face made him look like “something freaky” in a horror movie, Eisner said. You’d never guess, Eisner said, he’s only twenty-six years old. You’d never guess he’d been a good-looking kid not so long ago. “Jesus! A ‘war hero.’ ” In Eisner’s voice Zeno detected a tone of wonderment, part-commiseration and part-revulsion. It was pure chance that Corporal Kincaid had been apprehended that morning at approximately the time the Mayfields were making frantic calls about their missing daughter: taken into custody by a sheriff’s deputy at about 8 A.M. when he was found semiconscious, vomit- and blood-stained sprawled in the front seat of his Jeep Wrangler on Sandhill Road; the front, right wheel of the Jeep had gone off the unpaved road, that was elevated by about two feet above a marshy area. Early-morning hikers in the Preserve had called 911 on their cell phone to report the seemingly incapacitated vehicle with an “unresponding” man sprawled in the front seat and both front doors open. When the deputy shook Kincaid awake, identifying himself as a law enforcement officer, Kincaid shoved and struck at him, shouting incoherently, as if he was frightened, and had no idea where he was—the deputy had had to overpower him, cuff him and call for backup. Still, Kincaid hadn’t been arrested. Just brought to the Sheriff’s Department headquarters on Axel Road. Zeno knew, Brett Kincaid wasn’t supposed to be drinking while taking medication. According to Juliet he was taking a half-dozen prescription pills daily. Zeno knew, Brett Kincaid was “much changed” since he’d returned from Iraq. It was not a new or an uncommon situation—it should not have been, given media attention to similar disturbed, returning veterans, a surprising situation—but to those who knew Kincaid, to those who presumed to love him, it was new, it was uncommon, and it was disturbing. Eisner said it did seem that Kincaid was maybe “brain damaged” in some way. For sure, Kincaid remembered something that had happened—he remembered a “girl”—but wasn’t sure what he remembered. “You see that sometimes,” Eisner said. “In some instances.” Zeno asked, what instances? Eisner said, guardedly, “When they can’t remember.” Zeno asked, can’t remember what? Eisner was silent. In the background were men’s voices, incongruous laughter. Zeno thought He thinks that Kincaid hurt her. Hurt her, blacked out and now doesn’t remember. The father’s coolly-cruel legal mind considered: Insanity defense. Whatever he has done. Not guilty. It was the first thought any defense lawyer would think. It was the most cynical yet the most profound thought in such a situation. Yet, the father nudged himself: He was sure, his daughter had not really been hurt. He felt a flood of guilt, chagrin: Of course, his daughter had not been hurt. Sandhill Road was an unimproved dirt road that wound through the southern wedge of the Nautauga Preserve, following for much of its length the snaky curves of the Nautauga River. There were a few hiking trails here but along the river underbrush was dense, you would think impenetrable; yet there were faint paths leading down an incline to the river, that had to be at least ten feet deep at this point, fast-moving, with rippling frothy rapids amid large boulders. If a body were pushed into the river the body might be caught immediately in boulders and underbrush; or the body might be propelled rapidly downriver, leaving no trace. It was perhaps a ten-minute drive from the Roebuck Inn at Wolf’s Head Lake to the entrance of the Nautauga Preserve and another ten-minute drive to Sandhill Point. Anyone who lived in the area—a boy like Brett Kincaid, for instance—would know the roads and trails in the southern part of the Preserve. He would know Sandhill Point, a long narrow peninsula jutting into the river, no more than three feet across at its widest point. Outside the Preserve, Sandhill Road was quasi-paved and intersected with Bear Valley Road that connected, several miles to the west, with Wolf’s Head Lake and with the Roebuck Inn & Marina on the lake. Sandhill Point was approximately eleven miles from 822 Cumberland Avenue which was the address of the Mayfields’ home. Not too far, really—not too far for the daughter to make her way on foot if necessary. If for instance—(the father’s mind flew forward like wings beating frantically against the wind)—she’d been made to feel ashamed, her clothes torn and dirty. If she had not wanted to be seen. For Cressida was very self-conscious. Stricken with shyness at unpredictable times. And—always losing her cell phone! Unlike Juliet who treasured her cell phone and would go nowhere without it. Zeno was still on the phone with Eisner who was complaining about the local TV station issuing “breaking news” bulletins every half hour, putting pressure on the sheriff’s office to take time for interviews, come up with quotable quotes—“The usual bullshit. You think they’d be ashamed.” Zeno said, “Yes. Right,” not sure what he was agreeing with; he had to ask, another time, if he could speak with Brett Kincaid who’d practically been his son-in-law, the fianc? of his daughter, please for just a minute when there was a break in the interview—“Just a minute, that’s all I would need”—and Eisner said, an edge of irritation in his voice, “Sorry, Zeno. I don’t think so.” For reasons that Zeno could appreciate, Eisner explained that no one could speak with Kincaid while he was in custody—(any suspect, any possible crime, he could call an accomplice, he could ask the accomplice to take away evidence, aid and abet him at a little distance)—except if Kincaid requested a lawyer he’d have been allowed that call but Kincaid had declined to call a lawyer saying emphatically he did not need or want a lawyer. Zeno thought with relief No lawyer! Good. Zeno could not imagine any Carthage lawyer whom Kincaid might call: in other, normal circumstances, the kid would have called him. In a voice that had become grating and aggressive Zeno asked another time if he could speak with Bud McManus and Eisner said no, he did not think that Zeno could speak with Bud McManus but that, when there was news, McManus would call him personally. And Zeno said, “But when will that be? You’ve got him there, you’ve had him since, when—two hours at least—two hours you’ve had him—you can’t get him to talk, or you’re not trying to get him to talk—so when’s that going to be? I’m just asking.” And Eisner replied, words Zeno scarcely heard through the blood pounding in his ears. And Zeno said, raising his voice, fearing that the cell phone was breaking up as he approached the entrance to the Preserve, driving into the bumpy parking lot in his Land Rover, “Look, Gerry: I need to know. It’s hard for me to breathe even, without knowing. Because Kincaid must know. Kincaid might know. Kincaid would know—something. I just want to talk to Bud, or to the boy—if I could just talk to the boy, Gerry, I would know. I mean, he would tell me. If—if he has anything to tell—he would tell me. Because—I’ve tried to explain—Brett is almost one of the Mayfield family. He was almost my son. Son-in-law. Hell, that might happen yet. Engagements get broken, and engagements get made. They’re just kids. My daughter Juliet. You know—Juliet. And Cressida—her sister. If I could talk to Brett, maybe on the phone like this, not in person with other people around, at police headquarters, wherever you have him—just on the phone like this—I promise, I’d only keep him for two-three minutes—just want to hear his voice—just want to ask him—I believe he would tell me . . .” The line was dead: the little cell phone had failed. “DADDY.” It was Juliet, tugging at his shoulder. For a moment he couldn’t recall where he was—which daughter this was. Then the sliver of fear entered his heart, the other girl was missing. From Juliet’s somber manner, he understood that nothing had changed. Yet, from her somber manner, he understood that there’d been no bad news. “Sweetie. How are you.” “Not so good, Daddy. Not right now.” Juliet had roused him from a sleep like death. There was some reason for waking him, she was explaining, but through the roaring in his ears he was having difficulty hearing. That beating pulse in the ears, the surge of blood. Though his heart was beating slow now like a heavy bell rolling. The girl should have leaned over him to kiss him. Brush his cheek with her cool lips. This should have happened. “Be right down, honey. Tell your mother.” She was deeply wounded, Zeno knew. What had passed between her sister and her former fianc? was a matter of the most lurid public speculation. Inevitably her name would appear in the media. Inevitably reporters would approach her. It was 5:20 P.M. Good Christ he’d slept two and a half hours. The shame of it washed over him. His daughter missing, and Mayfield asleep. He hoped McManus and the others didn’t know. If for instance they’d tried to call him back, return his many calls, and Arlette had had to tell them her husband was sleeping in the middle of the day, exhausted. Her husband could not speak with them just now thank you. This was ridiculous. Of course they hadn’t called. He swung his legs off the bed. He pulled off his sweat-soaked T-shirt, underwear. Folds of clammy-pale flesh at his belly, thighs like hams. Steely-coppery hairs bristled on his chest and beneath his arms dense as underbrush in the Preserve. He was a big man, not fat. Not fat yet. Mischievous Cressida had had a habit of pinching her father at the waist. Uh-oh Dad-dy! What’s this. It was a running joke in the Mayfield family, among the Mayfield relatives and Zeno’s close friends, that he was vain about his appearance. That he could be embarrassed, if it were pointed out that he’d put on weight. Dad-dy better go on that Atkins diet. Raw steak and whiskey. Cressida was petite, child-sized. Except for her frizzed hair like a dark aureole about her head you might mistake her for a twelve-year-old boy. Arlette said disapprovingly: “Cressida won’t eat, because she ‘refuses’ to menstruate.” The father was so shocked hearing this, he pretended he hadn’t heard. A couple of months ago when Brett Kincaid had come to the house in loose-fitting khaki cutoffs Zeno had had a glimpse of the boy’s wasted thighs, flat stringy muscles atrophied from weeks of hospitalization. Remembering how Brett had looked a year before. It was shocking to see a young man no longer young. Therapy was rebuilding the muscles but it was a slow and painful process. Juliet helped him walk: had helped him walk. Walk, walk, walk—for miles. Juliet’s slender arm around the corporal’s waist walking in Palisade Park where there were few hills. For hills left the corporal short of breath. His arm- and shoulder-muscles were as they’d been before the injuries. When he’d been in a wheelchair at the VA hospital he’d wheeled himself everywhere he could, for exercise. His skull had not been fractured in the explosion but his brain had been traumatized—“concussed.” A hurt brain can heal. A hurt brain will heal. It will take time. And love. Juliet had said this. She was gripping her fianc?’s hand and her smile was fine and brave and without irony. And so it had been a shock—a shock, and a relief—when only a few weeks later Juliet told them the engagement had ended. Except, things don’t end so easily. The father knew. Between men and women, not so easily. Christ! Zeno smelled of his body. The sweat of anxiety, despair. Before bed that night he would change the bedclothes himself, before Arlette came into the room—Zeno had a flamboyant way with bed-changing, whipping sheets into the air so that they floated, as a magician might; tucking in the corners, tight; smoothing out the wrinkles, deft, fast, zip-zip-zip he’d made his little daughters laugh, like a cartoon character. In Boy Scout camp he’d learned all sorts of handy tasks. He’d been an Eagle Scout, of course. Zeno Mayfield at age fourteen, youngest Eagle Scout in the Adirondack region, ever. He smiled, thinking of this. Then, ceased smiling. He staggered into the bathroom. Flung on the shower, both faucets blasting. Leaning his head into the spraying water hoping to wake himself. Losing his balance and grabbing at the shower curtain but (thank God) not bringing it down. The sheer pleasure of hot, stinging water cascading down his face, his body. For a moment Zeno was almost happy. In the bathroom doorway Arlette stood—beyond the noise of the shower she was speaking to him, urgently—She’s been found! It’s over, our daughter has been found!—but when Zeno asked his wife to repeat her words she said, anxiously, “They’re here. The TV people. Come downstairs when you can.” “Do I have time to shave?” Arlette came to the shower, to peer at him. Arlette didn’t reach into the hot stinging water to draw her fingers across his stubbly jaws. “Yes. I think you’d better.” Quickly Zeno dried himself, with a massive towel. Tried to run a comb through his hair, took a hairbrush to it, hoping not to confront his reflection in the misty bathroom mirror, the bloodshot frightened eyes. “Here. Here are fresh clothes. This shirt . . .” Gratefully Zeno took the clothes from his wife. Downstairs were uplifted voices. Arlette tried to tell him who was there, who’d just arrived, which relatives, which TV reporters, but Zeno wasn’t able to concentrate. He had an unnerving sense that his front door had been flung open, anyone could now enter. The door flung open, his little girl had slipped out. Except she wasn’t a little girl any longer of course. She was nineteen years old: a woman. “How do I look? OK?” It wasn’t unusual for Zeno Mayfield—being interviewed. TV cameras just made the interview experience more edgy, the stakes higher. “Oh, Zeno. You cut yourself shaving. Didn’t you notice?” Arlette gave a little sob of exasperation. With a wadded tissue she dabbed at Zeno’s jaw. “Thanks, honey. I love you.” Bravely they descended the stairs hand in hand. Zeno saw that Arlette had tied back her hair, that seemed to have lost its glossiness overnight; she’d dabbed lipstick on her mouth and had blindly reached into her jewelry box for something to lower around her neck—a strand of inexpensive pearls no one had seen her wear in a decade. Her fingers were icy-cold; her hand was trembling. Another time Zeno said, in a whisper, “I love you,” but Arlette was distracted. And Zeno was disoriented, seeing so many people in his living room. And furniture had been moved aside in the room. TV lights were blinding. The female reporter for WCTG-TV was a woman whom Zeno knew from his mayoral days when Evvie Estes had worked in City Hall public relations in a cigarette-smoke-filled little cubicle office at the ground-floor rear of the old sandstone building. Evvie was older now, hard-eyed and hard-mouthed, heavily made-up, with an air of sincere-seeming breathless concern: “Mr. and Mrs. Mayfield—Zeno and Arlette—hello! What a terrible day this has been for you!”—thrusting the microphone at them as if her remark called for a response. Arlette was smiling tightly staring at the woman as if she’d been taken totally by surprise and Zeno frowned saying calmly and gravely, “Yes—a terribly anxious day. Our daughter Cressida is missing, we have reason to believe that she is lost in the Nautauga Preserve, or in the vicinity of the Preserve. She may be injured—otherwise she would have contacted us by now. She’s nineteen, unfortunately not an experienced hiker . . . We are hoping that someone may have seen her or have information about her.” Zeno Mayfield’s public way of addressing interviewers, gazing into TV cameras with a little frowning squint of the brow, returned to him at even this strained moment. If there was a quaver in his voice, no one would detect it. Evvie Estes, hair bleached a startling brassy-blond, asked several commonsense questions of the Mayfields. In his grave calm voice Zeno prevailed when Arlette showed no inclination to reply. Yes, their daughter had spoken with them on Saturday evening, before she’d gone out; no, they had not known that she was going to Wolf’s Head Lake—“But maybe Cressida hadn’t known she was going to the lake, when she left home. Maybe it was something that came up later.” Zeno wanted to think this, rather than that Cressida had lied to them. But he couldn’t shake off the likelihood that Cressida had lied. She’d lied by omitting the truth. Saying she was going to a friend’s house, but not that, after visiting with her friend, she had plans to turn up at Wolf’s Head Lake nine miles away. It had been established by this time that Cressida had remained with her friend Marcy until 10 P.M. at which time she’d left for “home”—as she’d led Marcy to think. Cressida hadn’t driven to her friend’s house which was less than a mile from the Mayfields’ house, but walked. It was believed by Marcy that Cressida had then walked back home—having declined an offer of a ride from Marcy. Or, it might have been that someone else, whose identity wasn’t known to Marcy, had picked Cressida up, when she’d left Marcy’s house on her way home. Not all of this made sense (yet) to Zeno. None of this Zeno cared to lay bare before a TV audience. Though he’d been thinking how ironic, when Cressida had been, as witnesses claimed, in the company of Brett Kincaid at Wolf’s Head Lake, her sister Juliet had been home with their parents; by then, Juliet had probably been in bed. That night, the Mayfields had invited old friends for dinner and Juliet had helped prepare the meal with Arlette. And Cressida had made it a point to explain that she couldn’t come to dinner with them that night because she was seeing her high school friend Marcy Meyer. Evvie Estes asked if there’d been anything to lead them to “suspect”—anything? When they’d last seen Cressida? “No. It was an ordinary night. Cressida was seeing a friend from high school and she hadn’t had to tell us, we would have known, she’d have been back home by eleven P.M. at the latest. It was just—an ordinary night.” Zeno hadn’t liked Evvie Estes pitching that word to them—“suspect.” Zeno and Arlette were seated side by side on a sofa. Zeno clasped Arlette’s hand firmly in his as if to secure her. Earlier, Juliet had helped Arlette locate photographs of Cressida to provide to police and media people, to be shown on TV and posted online through the day; Zeno assumed that these photos would be shown on the 6 P.M. news, during the interview. And he hoped that the interview, which was being taped, about fifteen minutes in length, wouldn’t be drastically cut. “All we can hope for is that Cressida will contact us soon—if she can. Or, if she’s been injured, or lost—that someone will discover her. We are praying that she is in the Preserve—that is, she hasn’t been—taken”—Zeno paused, blinking at the possibility, a sudden obstacle like an enormous boulder in his path—“taken somewhere else . . .” His old ease at public speaking was leaving him, like air leaking from a balloon. Almost, Zeno was stammering, as the interview ended: “If anyone can help us—help us find her—any information leading to her—her whereabouts—we are offering ten thousand dollars reward—for the recovery of—the return of—our daughter Cressida Mayfield.” Arlette turned to stare at him. Ten thousand dollars! This was entirely new. This had not been discussed. So far as Arlette knew, Zeno had not thought of a reward before this moment. Uttering the words “ten thousand dollars” Zeno had spoken in a strangely elated voice. And he’d smiled strangely, squinting in the TV lights. Soon then the interview ended. Zeno’s white shirt was sticking to his skin—he’d been sweating again. And now he, too, was trembling. Of course the Mayfields could afford ten thousand dollars. Much more than this, they could afford if it meant bringing their missing daughter home. “ZENO? WHERE ARE YOU GOING?” “Back to the Preserve. To the search.” “You are not! Not now.” “There’s two hours of daylight, at least. I need to be there.” “That’s ridiculous. You do not. Stay here with us . . .” Zeno hesitated. But no no no no. He had no intention of remaining in this house, where he couldn’t breathe, waiting. FOUR (#ulink_d2a2635e-6d69-58c0-95f8-9eff83ee06fb) Descending and Ascending (#ulink_d2a2635e-6d69-58c0-95f8-9eff83ee06fb) I KNEW. AS SOON AS I saw her bed wasn’t slept-in. I knew—something had happened. AT 4:08 A.M. that Sunday morning Arlette awakened with a start. The strangest sensation—that something was wrong, altered. Though in the shadowy interior of her bedroom—her and Zeno’s bedroom—here was comfort, ease. Though Zeno’s deep raspy rhythmic breathing was comfort to her, and ease. Must’ve been a dream that wakened her. A swirl of anxiety like leaves spinning in a wind tunnel. She’d been pulled along—somewhere. Waking dry-mouthed and edgy believing that something was changed in the house or in the life of the house. Or—one of her limbs was missing. That was the dream. What was the phenomenon?—“phantom limb”? In that case an actual limb is missing from the body but you feel the (painful) presence of the (absent) limb; in this case, nothing was missing from Arlette’s body, so far as she knew. It was mysterious to her, this loss. Yet it seemed unmistakable. After this hour she would not ever feel otherwise. WITHOUT WAKING ZENO she slipped from their bed. Sometimes in the night when they awakened—through a single night, each woke several times, if but for a few seconds—Arlette kissed Zeno’s mouth in playful affection, or Zeno kissed hers. These were kisses like casual greetings—they were not kisses meant to wake the other fully. How’s my sweet honey Zeno might mutter. But before Arlette could answer, Zeno would sink back into sleep. Zeno was deeply asleep now. What subtle and irrevocable seismic shifting of the life of the house Arlette had sensed, Zeno was oblivious to. Like one who has fallen onto his back he lay spread-limbed, sprawled, taking up two-thirds of the bed in his warm thrumming sleep. Arlette had learned to sleep beside her husband without being disturbed by him; whenever possible, her dreams incorporated his audible breathing in the most ingenious of ways. Zeno’s snoring might be represented, for instance, by zigzag-shapes like metallic insects flying past the dreaming wife’s face. Sometimes, Arlette was awakened by her own surprised laughter. That night, at dinner with friends, Zeno had consumed a bottle of wine himself, in the interstices of pouring wine for others. He’d been in very good spirits, telling stories, laughing loudly. He’d been tenderly solicitous of Juliet and refrained from teasing her, which was unlike the girls’ Daddy. Through their long marriage there had been episodes—there had been interludes—of Zeno drinking too much. Arlette understood, Zeno had been drinking tonight because he felt guilty: for the relief he’d expressed when Juliet’s engagement had been broken. Not to Juliet of course but to Arlette. Thank God. Now we can breathe again. Except it wasn’t so easy. It would not be so easy. For their daughter’s heart had been broken. Juliet had spent the evening with them. Instead of with her fianc?. That is, her ex-fianc?. Helping her mother prepare an elaborate meal in the kitchen, helping at the table, smiling, cheery. As if she hadn’t a life elsewhere, a life as a woman elsewhere, with a man, a lover from whom she’d been abruptly and mysteriously divided. It was a small shock, to see the engagement ring (of which Juliet had been so proud) missing from Juliet’s finger. In fact Juliet’s slender fingers were ring-less, as if in mourning. At the dinner table, three couples and the daughter. Three middle-aged couples, a twenty-two-year-old daughter. And the daughter so beautiful. And heartbroken. Of course, no one had asked Juliet about Brett. No one had brought up the subject of Brett Kincaid at all. As if Corporal Kincaid didn’t exist, and he and Juliet had never been planning to be married. It’s God-damned sad. But not our fault for Christ’s sake. What did we do? Not a fucking thing. He’d been drunk, muttering. Sitting heavily on the bed so the box springs creaked. Kicking a shoe halfway across the carpet. Juliet should talk to us about it. We’re her God-damn parents! When he was in one of his moods Arlette knew to leave him alone. She would not humor him, or placate him. She would leave him to steep in whatever mood rose in him like bile. It was an asshole decision, to enlist in the army. “Serve his country”—see where it got him. Anyway he won’t pull our daughter down with him. Arlette didn’t stoop to retrieve the shoe. But she nudged it out of the way with her foot so that neither of them would stumble over it in the night, should one of them rise to go to the bathroom. Immediately his head was lowered on the pillow, Zeno fell asleep. A harsh serrated breathing, as if briars were caught in his throat. The air-conditioning was on. A thin cool air moved through the bedroom. Arlette pulled a sheet up over her sleeping husband’s shoulders. At such moments she was overcome with a sensation of love for the man, commingled with fear, the sight of his thick-muscled shoulders, his upper arms covered in wiry hairs, the slack flesh of his jaws when he lay on his side. Inside the middle-aged man, the brash youthful Zeno Mayfield with whom Arlette had fallen in love yet resided. In a man’s sleep, his mortality is most evident. They were of an age now, and moving into a more emphatic age, when women began to lose their husbands—to become “widows.” Arlette could not allow herself to think in this way. Remembering later, of that night: their concern had been for Juliet, and for Brett Kincaid whom possibly they would not ever see again. Their thoughts were almost exclusively of Juliet. As it had been in the Mayfield household since Corporal Kincaid had returned in his disabled state. Cressida passing like a wraith in their midst. On her way out for the evening to visit with a friend from high school who lived so close, Cressida could walk instead of driving. At about 6 P.M. she must have called out a casual good-bye—in the kitchen Arlette and Juliet would scarcely have taken note. Bye! See you-all later. Possibly, they hadn’t heard. Cressida hadn’t troubled to come to the kitchen doorway, to announce that she was going. Zeno hadn’t been home. Out at the liquor store, choosing wine with the fussy particularity of a man who doesn’t know anything about wine really but would like to give the impression that he does. It shouldn’t have been anything other than an ordinary evening though it was a Saturday night in midsummer. In upstate New York in the Adirondack region, the population trebled in summer. Summer people. Campers, pickup trucks. Bikers’ gangs. In the night, on even a quiet residential street like Cumberland, you could hear the sneering roar of motorcycles in the distance. At the lakes—Wolf’s Head, Echo, Wild Forest—there were “incidents” each summer. Fights, assaults, break-ins, vandalism, arson, rapes, murders. Small local police departments with only a few officers had to call in the New York State Police, at desperate times. When Zeno had been mayor of Carthage, several Hells Angels gangs had congregated in Palisade Park. After a day and part of a night of drunken and increasingly destructive festivities local residents had so bitterly complained, Zeno sent in the Carthage City Police to “peaceably” clear the park. Just barely, a riot had been averted. Zeno had been credited with having made the right decisions, just in time. No one had been arrested. No police officers had been injured. The state troopers hadn’t had to be summoned to Carthage. The bikers’ gangs hadn’t returned to Palisade Park. But they congregated, weekends, at the lakes. Still you could sometimes hear, in the distance, at night, a window open, the sneering-defiant motorcycle-whine, mixed with a sound of nighttime insects. Arlette left the bedroom. Zeno hadn’t wakened. In a thin muslin nightgown in bare feet making her way along the carpeted corridor. Past the shut door of Juliet’s room—for she knew, Juliet was home—Juliet had been in bed for hours, like her parents—unerringly to the room in which she knew there was something wrong. By this time, past 4 A.M., Cressida would have returned from Marcy Meyer’s house. Hours ago, she’d have returned. She wouldn’t have wanted to disturb her parents but would have gone upstairs to her room as quietly as possible—it was a peculiarity of their younger daughter, since she’d been a small child, as Zeno noted she could creep like a little mousie and no one knew she was there. Even as Arlette was telling herself this, she was pushing open the door, switching on a light, to see: Cressida’s bed still made, undisturbed. This was wrong. This was very wrong. Arlette stood in the doorway, staring. Of course, the room was empty. Cressida was nowhere in sight. They’d gone to bed after their guests left and the kitchen was reasonably clean. They’d gone to bed soon after 11 P.M., Arlette and Zeno, without a thought, or not much more than a fleeting thought, about Cressida who was, after all—as they’d been led to believe—only just visiting with her high school friend Marcy Meyer less than a mile away. Maybe the girls had had dinner together. Or maybe with Marcy’s parents. Maybe a DVD afterward. Misfit girls together in solidarity Cressida had joked. In high school, Cressida and Marcy had been “best friends” by default, as Cressida said. Friendships of girls unpopular together are forged for life. (It was Cressida’s way to exaggerate. Neither she nor Marcy Meyer was “unpopular”—Arlette was certain.) Slowly Arlette came forward, to touch the comforter on Cressida’s bed. With perfect symmetry the comforter had been pulled over the bedclothes. If Arlette were to lift it she knew she would see the sheets beneath neatly smoothed, for Cressida could not tolerate wrinkles or creases in fabrics. The sheets would be tightly tucked in between the mattress and the box springs. For it was their younger daughter’s way to do things neatly. With an air of fierce disdain, dislike—yet neatly. All things that were tasks and chores—“household” things—Cressida resented having to do. Her imagination was loftier, more abstract. Yet, though she resented such tasks, she dispatched them swiftly, to get them out of the way. Can’t imagine anything more stultifying than the life of a housewife! Poor Mom. Arlette was frequently nettled by her younger daughter’s thoughtless remarks. Though she knew that Cressida loved her, at times it seemed clear that Cressida did not respect her. But if you hadn’t been up for it, Jule and I wouldn’t be here, I guess. So, thanks! Arlette wondered: was it possible that Cressida had planned to stay overnight at Marcy’s? As she’d done sometimes when the girls were in middle school together. It seemed unlikely now, but . . . For God’s sake, Mom. What an utterly brainless idea. Arlette left Cressida’s room and went downstairs. She was breathing quickly now though her heartbeat was calm. From a wall phone in the kitchen downstairs, Arlette called Cressida’s cell phone number. There came a faint ringing, but no answer. Then, a burst of electronic music, dissonant chords and computer-voice coolly instructing the caller to leave a message after the beep. Cressida? It’s Mom. I’m calling at four-ten A.M. Wondering where you are . . . If you can please call back as soon as possible . . . Arlette hung up the phone. But immediately, Arlette lifted the receiver and called again. The second time, she fumbled leaving a message. Just Mom again. We’re a little worried about you, honey. It’s pretty late . . . Give us a call, OK? Now invoking us. For Cressida did respect her father. It occurred to Arlette then that Cressida might be home: only just not in her room. From earliest childhood she’d been an unpredictable child. You might look for her in all the wrong places as she watched you through a crack in a doorway, bursting into laughter at the worried look in your face. Especially, Cressida had thought scrunched-up (adult) faces were funny. So Arlette checked the downstairs rooms of the house: the TV room in the basement, which Cressida didn’t often occupy, objecting that it was partially underground and, in very wet weather, wriggly little centipedes appeared on the (Sears, slate-colored, slightly stained) wall-to-wall carpeting to her extreme disgust; Zeno’s cluttered home-office, with floor-to-ceiling bookshelves crammed with far more than just books, and an ancient rolltop desk Zeno liked to boast had been inherited from a Revolutionary War “quasi-ancestor” when in fact he’d bought it at an estate auction: a room in which, when she’d been a moody high school student, Cressida had sometimes holed herself away in when Zeno wasn’t there; and nooks and crannies of the living room which was a long narrow room with a beamed oak ceiling, shadow-splotched even when lighted, with a gleaming black baby-grand Steinway piano which, sadly, to Arlette’s way of thinking, no one played any longer, since Cressida had abruptly quit piano lessons at the age of sixteen. But why quit, honey? You play so well . . . Sure. For Beechum County. No one. Nothing. In none of these rooms. But then, Arlette hadn’t really expected to discover Cressida sleeping anywhere except in her bed. At the rear sliding-glass door, which opened out onto a flagstone terrace in need of a vigorous weed-trimming, Arlette leaned outside to breathe in the muggy night air. Her eyes lifted to the night sky—a maze of constellations the names of which she could never recall as Cressida could even as a small child brightly reciting the names as if she’d been born knowing them: Andromeda. Gemini. Big Dipper. Little Dipper. Virgo. Pegasus. Orion . . . Arlette stepped out onto the redwood deck. Just to check the outdoor furniture—and Zeno’s sagging hammock strung between two sturdy trees—but no Cressida of course. Went to the garage, entering by a side door. Switched on the garage light—no one inside the garage of course. Barefoot, wincing, Arlette went to check each of the household vehicles—Zeno’s Land Rover, Arlette’s Toyota station wagon, Juliet’s Skylark. Of course, there was no one sleeping or hiding in any of these. Making her way then out the asphalt driveway which was a lengthy driveway to the street—Cumberland Avenue. Though Cumberland was one of Carthage’s most prestigious residential streets, in the high, hilly northern edge of town abutting the old historic cemetery of the First Episcopal Church of Carthage, Arlette might as well have been facing an abyss—there were no streetlights on and no lights in their neighbors’ houses. Only a smoldering-dull light seemed to descend from the sky as if a bright moon were trapped behind clouds. It was possible—so desperation urged the mother to think—that Cressida had made arrangements to meet someone after she’d spent the evening at Marcy’s; they might now be together, in a vehicle parked at the curb, talking together, or . . . How many times Arlette had sat with boys in their vehicles, in front of her parents’ house, talking together, kissing and touching . . . But Cressida wasn’t that kind of girl. Cressida didn’t “go out” with boys. At least not so far as her family knew. I worry that Cressida is lonely. I don’t think she’s very happy. Don’t be ridiculous! Cressida is one-of-a-kind. She doesn’t give a damn for what other girls care for, she’s special. So Zeno wished to believe. Arlette was less certain. She did guess that it was a painful thing, to be the smart one following in the trail of the pretty one. In any case there was no vehicle parked at the end of the Mayfields’ long driveway. Cressida was nowhere on the property, it was painfully obvious. With less regard for her bare feet, Arlette returned quickly to the house, to the kitchen where the overhead light shone brightly. You would not think it was 4:30 A.M.! The pumpkin-colored Formica counters were freshly wiped and the dishwasher was still warm from having been set into motion at about 10:30 P.M.; with her usual cheery efficiency Juliet had helped Arlette clean up after the dinner party. Together in the kitchen, in the aftermath of a pleasant evening with old friends, an evening that would come to acquire, in Arlette’s memory, the distinction of being the last such evening of her life, Arlette might have spoken with Juliet about Brett Kincaid—but Juliet did not seem to invite such an intimacy. Nor did either Arlette or Juliet speak of Cressida—at that time, what was there to say? Just going over to Marcy’s, Mom. I can walk. Don’t wait up for me OK? Arlette lifted the phone receiver another time and called Cressida’s cell phone number even as she prepared herself for no answer. “Maybe she lost the phone. Maybe someone stole it.” Cressida was careless with cell phones. She’d lost at least two, both gifts from Zeno who wanted his daughters to be within calling-range, if he required them. And he wanted his daughters to have cell phones in case of emergency. Was this an emergency? Arlette didn’t want to think so. She returned to Cressida’s room—walking more slowly now, as if she were suddenly very tired. No one. An empty room. And now she saw how neatly—how tightly—books were inserted into the bookcases that, by Cressida’s request, Zeno had had a carpenter build into three of the room’s walls so that it had looked—almost—as if Cressida were imprisoned by books. Some were children’s books, outsized, with colorful covers. Cressida had loved these books of her early childhood, that had helped her to read at a very young age. And there were Cressida’s notebooks—also large, from an art-supply store in Carthage—in which, as a brightly imaginative young child, she’d drawn fantastical stories with Crayolas of every hue. Initially, Cressida hadn’t objected when her parents showed her drawings to relatives, friends and neighbors who were impressed by them—or more than impressed, astonished at the little girl’s “artistic talent”—but then, abruptly at about age nine Cressida became self-conscious, and refused to allow Zeno to boast about her as he’d liked to do. It had been years since Cressida’s brightly colored fantastical-animal drawings had been tacked to a wall of her room. Arlette missed these, that revealed a childish whimsy and playfulness not always evident in the precocious little girl with whom she lived—who called her, with a curious stiffness of her mouth, as if the word were utterly incomprehensible to her—“Mom.” (No problem with Cressida saying “Daddy”—“Dad-dy”—with a radiant smile.) For the past several years there had been, on Cressida’s wall, pen-and-ink drawings on stiff white construction paper in the mode of the twentieth-century Dutch artist M. C. Escher who’d been one of Cressida’s abiding passions in high school. These drawings Arlette tried to admire—they were elaborate, ingenious, finely drawn, resembling more visual riddles than works of art meant to engage a viewer. The largest and most ambitious, titled Descending and Ascending, was mounted on cardboard, measuring about three feet by three feet: an appropriation of Escher’s famous lithograph Ascending and Descending in which monk-like figures ascended and descended never-ending staircases in a surreal structure in which there appeared to be several sources of gravity. Cressida’s drawing was of a subtly distorted family house with walls stripped away, revealing many more staircases than there were in the house, at unnatural—“orthogonal”—angles to one another; on these staircases, human figures walked “up” even as other human figures walked “down” on the underside of the same steps. Gazing at the pen-and-ink drawing, you became disoriented—dizzy. For what was up was also down, simultaneously. Cressida had worked at her Escher-drawings obsessively, for at least a year, at the age of sixteen. Mysteriously she’d said that M. C. Escher had held up a mirror to her soul. The figures in Descending and Ascending were both valiant and pathetic. Earnestly they walked “up”—earnestly they walked “down.” They appeared to be oblivious of one another, stepping on reverse steps. Cressida’s variant of the Escher drawing was more realistic than the original—the structure containing the inverted staircases was recognizable as the Mayfields’ sprawling old Colonial house, furniture and wall hangings were recognizable, and the figures were clearly the Mayfields—tall sturdy shock-haired Daddy, Mom with a placid smiling vacuous face, gorgeous Juliet with exaggerated eyes and lips and inky-frizzy-haired Cressida a fierce-frowning child with arms and legs like sticks, half the height of the other figures, a gnome in their midst. The Mayfield figures were repeated several times, with a comical effect; earnestness, repeated, suggests idiocy. Arlette never looked at Descending and Ascending and Cressida’s other Escher-drawings on the wall without a little shudder of apprehension. It was easier for Cressida to mock than to admire. Easier for Cressida to detach herself from others, than to attempt to attach herself. For she’d been hurt, Arlette had to suppose. In ninth grade when Cressida had volunteered to teach in a program called Math Literacy—(in fact, this program had been initiated by Zeno’s mayoral administration in the face of state budget cuts to education)—and after several enthusiastic weekly sessions with middle-school students from “deprived” backgrounds she’d returned home saying with a shamefaced little frown that she wasn’t going back. Zeno had asked why. Arlette had asked why. “It was a stupid idea. That’s why.” Zeno had been surprised and disappointed with Cressida when she refused to explain why she was quitting the program. But Arlette knew there had to be a particular reason and that this reason had to do with her daughter’s pride. Arlette recalled that something unfortunate had happened in high school, too, related to Cressida’s Escher-fixation. But she’d never known the details. On Cressida’s desk, which consisted of a wide, smooth-sanded plank and aluminum drawers, put together by Cressida herself, was a laptop (closed), a notebook (closed), small stacks of books and papers. All were neatly arranged as if with a ruler. Arlette rarely entered her younger daughter’s room except if Cressida was inside, and expressly invited her. She dreaded the accusation of snooping. It was 4:36 A.M. Too soon after her last attempt to call Cressida’s cell phone for Arlette to call her again. Instead, she went to Juliet’s room which was next-door. “Mom?”—Juliet sat up in bed, startled. “Oh, honey—I’m sorry to wake you . . .” “No, I’ve been awake. Is something wrong?” “Cressida isn’t home.” “Cressida isn’t home!” It was an exclamation of surprise, not alarm. For Cressida had not ever stayed out so late—so far as her family knew. “She was at Marcy’s. She should have been home hours ago.” “I’ve tried her cell phone. But I haven’t called Marcy—I suppose I should.” “What time is it? God.” “I didn’t want to disturb them, at such an hour . . .” Juliet rose from bed, quickly. Since breaking with Brett Kincaid she was often home and in bed early, like a convalescent; but she slept only intermittently, for a few hours, and spent the rest of the night-hours reading, writing emails, surfing the Internet. On her nightstand beside her laptop were several library books—Arlette saw the title Republic of Fear: The Inside Story of Saddam’s Iraq. They tried to recall: what had Cressida called out to them, when she’d left the house? Nothing out of the ordinary, each was sure. “She walked to Marcy’s. She must have walked home, then—or . . .” Arlette’s voice trailed off. Now that Juliet had been drawn into her concern for Cressida, she was becoming more anxious. “Maybe she’s staying over with Marcy . . .” “But—she’d have called us, wouldn’t she . . .” “ . . . she’d never stay overnight there, why on earth? Of course she’d have come home.” “But she isn’t home.” “Did you look anywhere other than her room? I know it isn’t likely, but . . .” “I didn’t want to wake Zeno, you know how excitable he is . . .” “You called her cell—you said? Should we try again?” Nighttime cream Juliet wore on her face, on her beautifully soft skin, shone now like oozing oil. Her hair, a fair brown, layered, feathery, was flattened on one side of her head. Between the sisters was an old, unresolved rivalry: the younger’s efforts to thwart and undermine the older’s efforts to be good. Juliet called her sister from her own cell phone. Again there was no answer. “I suppose we should call Marcy. But . . .” “I’d better wake Zeno. He’ll know what to do.” Arlette entered the darkened bedroom, where Zeno was sleeping. She shook his shoulder, gently. “Zeno? I’m sorry to wake you, but—Cressida isn’t home.” Zeno’s eyelids fluttered open. There was something touching, vulnerable and poignant in Zeno waking from sleep—he put Arlette in mind of a slumbering bear, perilously wakened from a winter doze. “It’s going on five A.M. She hasn’t been home all night. I’ve tried to call her, and I’ve looked everywhere in the house . . .” Zeno sat up. Zeno swung his legs out of bed. Zeno rubbed his eyes, ran his fingers through his tufted hair. “Well—she’s nineteen years old. She doesn’t have a curfew and she doesn’t have to report to us.” “But—she was only just going to Marcy’s for dinner. She walked.” Walked. Now that Arlette had said this, for the second time, a chill came over her. “ . . . she was walking, at night, alone . . . Maybe someone . . .” “Don’t catastrophize, Lettie. Please.” “But—she was alone. I think she must have been alone. We’d better call Marcy.” Zeno rose from bed with surprising agility. In boxer shorts he wore as pajamas, bristly-haired, flabby in the torso and midriff, he padded barefoot to the bureau, to snatch up his cell phone. “We’ve tried to call her, Zeno. Juliet and me . . .” Zeno paid her no heed. He made the call, listened intently, broke the connection and called immediately again. “She doesn’t answer. Maybe she’s lost the phone. I’m just so terribly worried, if she was walking back home . . . It’s Saturday night, someone might have been driving by . . .” “I said, Lettie, please—don’t catastrophize. That isn’t helpful.” Zeno spoke sharply, irritably. He was stepping into a pair of rumpled khaki shorts he’d thrown onto a chair earlier that day. In Zeno, emotion was justified: in others in his family, it was apt to be excessive. Particularly, Zeno countered his wife’s occasional alarm by classifying it as catastrophizing, hysterical. Downstairs, the lighted kitchen awaited them like a stage set. Zeno looked up the Meyers’ number in the directory and called it as Arlette and Juliet stood by. “Hello? Marcy? This is Zeno—Cressida’s father. Sorry to bother you at this hour, but . . .” Arlette listened eagerly and with mounting dread. Zeno questioned Marcy for several minutes. Before he hung up, Arlette asked to speak to her. There was little that Arlette could add to what Zeno had said but she needed to hear Marcy’s voice, hoping to be reassured by Marcy’s voice; her daughter’s friend was a sturdy freckle-faced girl enrolled in the nursing school at Plattsburgh, long a fixture in Cressida’s life though no longer the close friend she’d been a few years previously. But Marcy could only repeat that at about 10:30 P.M.—after they’d had dinner with her mother and her (elderly, ailing) grandmother—and watched a DVD—Cressida had left to return home as she’d planned, on foot. “I offered to drive her, but Cressida said no. I did think that I should drive her because it was late, and she was alone, but—you know Cressida. How stubborn she can be . . .” “Do you have any idea where else she might have gone? After visiting with you?” “No, Mrs. Mayfield. I guess I don’t.” Mrs. Mayfield. As if Marcy were a high school student, still. “Did she mention anyone to you? Did she call anyone?” “I don’t think so . . .” “You’re sure she didn’t call anyone, on her cell phone?” “Well, I—I don’t think so. I mean—I know Cressida pretty well, Mrs. Mayfield—who’d she call? If it wasn’t one of you?” “But where on earth could she be, at almost five A.M.!” Arlette spoke sharply. She was angry with Marcy Meyer for allowing her daughter to walk home on a Saturday night: though the distance was only a few blocks, part of the walk would have been on North Fork Street, which was well traveled after dark, near an intersection with a state highway; and she was angry with Marcy Meyer for protesting, in an aggrieved child’s voice Who’d she call, if it wasn’t one of you? THE RAPIDLY SHRINKING REMNANT of the night-before-dawn in the Mayfields’ house had acquired an air of desperation. Now dressed, hastily and carelessly, Zeno and Arlette drove in Zeno’s Land Rover to the Meyers’ house on Fremont Street, a half-mile away. Freemont was a hillside street, narrow and poorly paved; houses here were crowded together virtually like row houses, of aged brick and loosened mortar. Arlette had remembered being concerned, when Cressida and Marcy Meyer first became friends, in grade school, that her outspoken and often heedless daughter might say something unintentionally wounding about the size of the Meyers’ house, or the attractiveness of its interior; she’d been surprised enough at the blunt, frank, teasing-taunting way in which Cressida spoke to Marcy, who was a reticent, stoic girl lacking Cressida’s quick wit and any instinct to defend herself or tease Cressida in turn. Cressida had drawn comic strips in which a short dark-frizzy-haired girl with a dour face and a tall stocky freckled girl with a cheery face had comical adventures in school—these had seemed innocent enough, meant to amuse and not ridicule. Once, Arlette had reprimanded Cressida for saying something rudely witty to Marcy, while Arlette was driving the girls to an event at their school, and Marcy said, laughing, “It’s OK, Mrs. Mayfield. Cressie can’t help it.” As if her daughter were a scorpion, or a viper—Can’t help it. Yet it had been touching, the girl called Cressida “Cressie.” And Cressida hadn’t objected. At the Meyers’ house, Zeno wanted to go inside and speak with Marcy and her mother; Arlette begged him not to. “They won’t know anything more than Marcy has told us. It isn’t seven A.M. You’ll just upset them. Please, Zeno.” Slowly Zeno drove along Fremont Street, glancing from side to side at the facades of houses. All seemed blind, impassive at this early hour of the morning; many shades were drawn. At the foot of Fremont, Zeno turned the Land Rover around in a driveway and drove slowly back uphill. Passing the Meyers’ house, he was now retracing the probable route Cressida had taken, walking home. Both Zeno and Arlette were staring hard. How like a film this was, a documentary! Something had happened, but—in which house? And what had happened? House after house of no particular distinction except they were houses Cressida had passed, on her way to Marcy Meyer’s, and on her way from Marcy Meyer’s, the night before. There, at a corner, a landmark lightning-scorched oak tree, at the intersection with North Fork; a block farther, at Cumberland Avenue, at the ridge of the hill, the large impressive red-brick Episcopal church and the churchyard beside and behind it. Both the church and the churchyard were “historical landmarks” dating to the 1780s. Cressida would have passed by the church, and the churchyard. On which side of the street would she have walked?—Arlette wondered. Zeno made a sound—grunt, half-sob—mutter—as he braked the Land Rover and without explanation climbed out. Zeno entered the churchyard, walking quickly. He was a tall disheveled man with a stubbly chin who carried himself with an aggressive sort of confidence. He’d thrown on a soiled T-shirt and khaki shorts and on his sockless feet were grubby running shoes. By the time Arlette hurried to join him he’d made his way to the end of the first row of aged markers, worn so thin by weather and time that the names and dates of the dead were unreadable. Beyond the churchyard was a no-man’s-land of underbrush and trees, owned by the township. The churchyard smelled of mown grass, not fresh, slightly rotted, sour. The air was muggy and dense, in unpredictable places, with gnats. “Zeno, what are you looking for? Oh, Zeno.” Arlette was frightened now. Zeno remained turned away from her. The most warmly gregarious of men, the most sociable of human beings, yet Zeno Mayfield was remote at times, and even hostile; if you touched him, he might throw off your hand. He prided himself as a man among men—a man who knew much that happened in the world, in Carthage and vicinity, that a woman like Arlette didn’t know; much that never made its way into print or onto TV. He was looking now, in a methodical way that horrified Arlette, for the body of their daughter—could that be possible?—in the tall grasses at the edge of the cemetery; behind larger grave markers; behind a storage shed where there was an untidy pile of grass cuttings, tree debris, and discarded desiccated flowers. Horribly, with a clinical sort of curiosity, Zeno stooped to peer inside, or beneath, this pile—Arlette had a vision of a girl’s broken body, her arms outstretched among the broken tree limbs. “Zeno, come back! Zeno, come home. Maybe Cressida is home now.” Zeno ignored her. Possibly, Zeno didn’t hear her. Arlette waited in the Land Rover for Zeno to return to her. She started the ignition, and turned on the radio. Waiting for the 7 A.M. news. “SHE’S SOMEWHERE, OBVIOUSLY. We just don’t know where.” And, as if Arlette had been contesting this fact: “She’s nineteen. She’s an adult. She doesn’t have a curfew in this house and she doesn’t have to report to us.” While Zeno and Arlette made calls on the land phone, Juliet made calls on her cell phone. Initially to relatives, whom it didn’t seem terribly rude to awaken at such an early hour with queries about Cressida; then, after 7:30 A.M., to neighbors, friends—including even girls in Cressida’s class whom Cressida probably hadn’t seen since graduation thirteen months before. (Juliet said: “Cressida will be furious if she finds out. She will think we’ve betrayed her.” Arlette said: “Cressida doesn’t have to know. We can always call back and tell them—not to tell her.”) Juliet had a vast circle of friends, both female and male, and she began to call them—on the phone her voice was warmly friendly and betrayed no sign of worry or anxiety; she didn’t want to alarm anyone needlessly, and she had a fear of initiating a firestorm of gossip. She took her cell phone outside, standing on the front walk as she made calls; peering out at Cumberland Avenue, watching for Cressida to come home. Afterward she would say I was so certain. I could not have been more certain if Jesus Himself had promised me, Cressida was on her way home. One of the calls Juliet made was to a friend named Caroline Skolnik who was to have been a bridesmaid in Juliet’s wedding. And Juliet told Caroline that her sister Cressida hadn’t come home the night before, and they were worried about her, and Juliet was wondering if Caroline knew anything, or had any ideas; and to Juliet’s astonishment Caroline said hesitantly she’d seen Cressida the night before, or someone who looked very much like Cressida, at the Roebuck Inn at Wolf’s Head Lake. Juliet was so astonished, she nearly dropped her cell phone. Cressida at the Roebuck Inn? At Wolf’s Head Lake? Caroline said that she’d been there with her fianc? Artie Petko and another couple but they hadn’t stayed long. The Roebuck Inn had used to be a nice place but lately bikers had been taking it over on weekends—Adirondack Hells Angels. There was a rock band comprised of local kids people liked, but the music was deafening, and the place was jammed—“Just too much happening.” Inside the tavern, there’d been a gang of guys they knew and a few girls in several booths. The air had been thick with smoke. Caroline was surprised to see Brett there—“He wasn’t with any girl, just with his friends,” Caroline said quickly, “but there were girls kind of hanging out with them. Brett was looking—he wasn’t looking—maybe it was the light in the place, but Brett was looking—all right. The surgery he’s had—I think it has helped a lot. And he had dark glasses on. And—anyway—there came Cressida—I think it was Cressida—just out of nowhere we happened to see her, and she didn’t see us—she seemed to have just come into the taproom, alone—in all that crowd, and having to push her way through—she’s so small—I don’t think there was anyone with her, unless maybe she’d come with someone, a couple—it wasn’t clear who was with who. Cressida was wearing those black jeans she always wears, and a black T-shirt, and what looked like a little striped cotton sweater; it was a surprise to see her, Artie and I both thought so, Artie said he’d never seen your sister in anyplace like the Roebuck, not ever. He knows your dad, he was saying, ‘Is that Zeno Mayfield’s daughter? The one that’s so smart?’ and I said, ‘God, I hope not. What’s she doing here?’ Brett was in a booth with Rod Halifax, and Jimmy Weisbeck, and that asshole Duane Stumpf, and they were pretty drunk; and there was Cressida, talking with Brett, or trying to talk with Brett; but things got so crowded, and kind of out of control, so we decided to leave. So I don’t actually know—I mean, I don’t know for sure—if it was your sister, Juliet. But I think it had to be, there’s nobody quite like Cressida.” Juliet asked what time this had been. Caroline said about 11:30 P.M. Because they’d left and gone to the Echo Lake Tavern and stayed there for about forty minutes and were home by 1 A.M. “Oh God, Juliet—you’re saying Cressida hasn’t come home? She isn’t home? You don’t know where she is? I’m so sorry we didn’t go over to talk to her—maybe she needed a ride home—maybe she got stranded there. But we thought, well—she must’ve come with someone. And there was Brett, and she knows him, and he knows her—so, we thought, maybe . . .” Slowly Juliet entered the house. Arlette saw her just inside the doorway. In her face was a strange, stricken expression, as if something too large for her skull had been forced inside it. “What is it, Juliet? Have you heard—something?” “Yes. I think so. I think I’ve heard—something.” FOLLOWING THIS, things happened swiftly. Zeno called Brett Kincaid’s cell phone number—no answer. Zeno called a number listed in the Carthage directory for Kincaid, E.—no answer. Zeno climbed into his Land Rover and drove to Ethel Kincaid’s house on Potsdam Street, another hillside street beyond Fremont: a two-storey wood frame with a peeling-beige facade, set close to the curb, where Ethel Kincaid in a soiled kimono answered the door to his repeated knocking with a look of alarmed astonishment. “Is he home? Where is he?” Fumbling at the front of the kimono, which shone with a cheap lurid light as if fluorescent, Ethel peered at Zeno cautiously. “I—don’t know . . . I guess n-not, his Jeep isn’t in the driveway . . .” Between Zeno Mayfield and Ethel Kincaid there was a layered sort of history—vague, vaguely resentful (on Ethel’s part: for Zeno Mayfield, when he’d been mayor of Carthage and nominally Ethel Kincaid’s boss, had not ever seemed to remember her name when he encountered her) and vaguely guilty (on Zeno’s part: for he understood that he’d snubbed this plain fierce-glaring woman whom life had mysteriously disappointed). And now, the breakup of Zeno’s daughter and Ethel’s son lay between them like wreckage. “Do you have any idea where Brett is?” “N-No . . .” “Do you know where he went last night?” “No . . .” “Or with who?” Ethel Kincaid regarded Zeno, his disheveled clothing, his metallic-stubbly jaws and swampy eyes that were both pleading and threatening, with a defiant sort of alarm. She had the just discernibly battered look of a woman well versed in the wayward emotions of men and in the need to position herself out of the range of a man’s sudden lunging grasp. “I’m afraid I don’t know, Mr. Mayfield. Brett’s friends don’t come to the house, he goes to them. I think he goes to them.” Mr. Mayfield was uttered with a pointless sort of spite. Surely they were social equals, or had been, when Zeno’s daughter had become engaged to Ethel’s son. Zeno remembered Arlette remarking that Brett’s mother was so unfriendly. Even Juliet who rarely spoke of others in a critical manner murmured of her fianc?’s mother She is not naturally warmhearted or easy to get to know. But—we will try! Poor Juliet had tried, and failed. Arlette had tried, and failed. “Ethel, I’m sorry to disturb you at such an early hour. I tried to call, but there was no answer. It’s crucial that I speak with Brett—or at least know where I can find him. This isn’t about Juliet, incidentally—it involves my daughter Cressida.” Zeno was making it a point to speak slowly and clearly and without any suggestion of the pent-up fury he felt for this unhelpful woman who’d taken a step back from him, clutching at the front of her rumpled kimono as if fearing he might snatch it open. “We’ve been told that they were together for a while last night—at the Roebuck Inn. And Cressida hasn’t come home all night, and we don’t know where she is. And we think—your son might know.” Ethel Kincaid was shaking her head. A tangle of graying dirty-blond hair, falling to her shoulders, uncombed. A smell as of dried sweat and talcum powder wafting from her soft loose fleshy body inside her clothing. Now a look of apprehension came into her face. And cunning. Ethel shook her head emphatically no—“I don’t know anything that my son does.” “Could I see his room, please?” “His room? You want to see his—room? In this house?” “Yes. Please.” “But—why?” Zeno had no idea why. The impulse had come to him, desperately; he could not retreat without attempting something. Ethel was looking confused now. She was a woman in her mid-fifties whom life had used negligently—her skin was sallow, her eyelashes and eyebrows so scanty as to be near-invisible, her mouth was a sullen smudge. She took another step back into the dimly lighted hall of the house as if the glare in Zeno Mayfield’s face was such, she shrank from it. Stammering she said he couldn’t come inside, that wasn’t a good idea, and she had to say good-bye to him now, she had to close the door now, she could not speak to him any longer. “Ethel—wait! Just let me see Brett’s room. Maybe—there will be something there, that will help me . . .” “No. That isn’t a good idea. I’m going to close the door now.” “Ethel, please. I’m sure there is some explanation for this, but—at the moment—Arlette and I are terribly worried. And we’ve been told that Brett was seen with her, last night. It can’t be a coincidence, your son and my daughter . . .” “If you don’t have a warrant, Mr. Mayfield, I don’t have to let you in.” “A warrant? I’m not a police officer, Ethel. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not even a city official any longer. I just want to see Brett’s room, just for a minute. How can you possibly object to that?” “No. I can’t. Brett wouldn’t want that—he hates all of you.” Ethel Kincaid was about to shut the door in Zeno’s face but he pressed the palm of his hand against it, holding it open. A pulse beat wildly in his forehead. He could not believe what Ethel Kincaid had so heedlessly uttered but he would never forget it. Hates all of you. You. “If your son has hurt my daughter—my daughter Cressida—if anything has happened to Cressida—I will kill him.” Ethel Kincaid threw her weight against the door, to shut it. And Zeno released the door. He was stunned. He could not think clearly. He knew, he had better return to the Land Rover and drive home before he did something irrevocable like pounding violently on the God-damned door that had been shut rudely in his face. Like breaking into the Kincaid house. The spiteful woman would call 911, he knew. Give her the slightest pretext, she would fuck up Zeno Mayfield and his family all she could. He returned to the Land Rover, that had been parked crookedly at the curb. He saw that a seat belt trailed out from the driver’s seat, like something broken, discarded. A swift vision came to him of the pile of debris in the Episcopal churchyard. Driving away from the Kincaid house without a backward glance he thought Maybe she didn’t hear me. Maybe she won’t remember. IN THE DRIVEWAY Arlette stood waiting for Zeno to return. Waiting to see if he was bringing their daughter home with him. And so in her face, as Zeno climbed out of the Land Rover, he saw the disappointment. “She wasn’t there?” “No.” “Did you talk to—Ethel? Was Brett there?” “Ethel was no help. Brett wasn’t there.” Arlette hurried to keep up with Zeno, who was headed into the house. Suddenly it had become 8:20 A.M. So swiftly, the night had passed into dawn and now into a sunny and shimmering-hot morning. The privacy of the night. The exposure of the morning. Arlette asked, in a shaky voice, “Do you think that Cressida and Brett might have gone away together?—or, he took her somewhere? To hurt her? To embarrass us? Zeno?” “Cressida is nineteen. She’s an adult. If she chooses to stay away overnight, that’s her prerogative.” Zeno spoke harshly, ironically. He had not the slightest faith in what he was saying but he believed these words must be reiterated. Arlette clutched at his arm. Arlette’s fingers dug into his arm. “But—if she didn’t choose? If someone has hurt her? Taken her? We have to help our daughter, Zeno. She has no one but us.” Unspoken between them was the thought She isn’t really an adult. She is a child. For all her pose of maturity, a child. There was no choice now, no postponing the call, even as Zeno stood in the driveway staring with eyes that felt seared, ravaged with such futile staring in the direction of Cumberland Avenue as into an abyss out of which at any moment—(feasibly! Not illogically and not impossibly!—for as a young aggressive attorney Zeno Mayfield had often conjured the attractive possibilities of alternate universes in which alternate narratives revealed his [guilty] clients to be “innocent” of the charges that had been brought against them)—his daughter Cressida might appear; no choice, he knew, except to contact law enforcement; calling the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department and asking to speak to Hal Pitney who was a lieutenant on the force, not a close friend of Zeno Mayfield’s but an old friend from Zeno’s political days and, he wanted to think, a reliable friend. With forced calmness he told Hal that he knew, it might seem premature to be reporting his daughter missing, since Cressida was nineteen, and not a child, but the circumstances seemed to warrant it: she’d been gone overnight, she was definitely not a person to behave irresponsibly; they had learned that she’d been seen at the Roebuck Inn the previous night, alone; then, later, in the company of several men of whom one was Brett Kincaid. (Pitney surely knew of Corporal Brett Kincaid, from stories in the local media.) Zeno said they’d called Cressida’s cell phone repeatedly and they’d called virtually everyone in Carthage who knew her, or might know of her—she seemed to have vanished. Zeno said he’d gone to Kincaid’s house. And Kincaid was missing, too. Zeno spoke rapidly and, he hoped, persuasively. He was not prepared for Hal Pitney telling him that, though they knew nothing about his daughter, it had happened that Brett Kincaid had been brought into headquarters that morning, less than an hour before. He’d been reported by hikers seemingly incapacitated in his Jeep Wrangler, that appeared to have skidded partway off the Sandhill Road, just inside the Nautauga Preserve. There’d been no one with him but there’d been “bloody scratch or bite marks” on his face and bloodstains in the front seat of his vehicle; he’d been “agitated” and “belligerent” and tried to fight the deputy who restrained him, cuffed him and brought him into headquarters. “He isn’t cooperating. He’s pretty much out of it. Hungover, and sick to his stomach, and scared. He didn’t seem to know where he was, or why, or if anyone, like a girl, had been with him. We’ve sent two deputies back to investigate the scene, and his Jeep. We’re questioning him now. You’d better come to headquarters, Zeno. You and your wife. And bring photographs of your daughter—the more recent, the better.” This news was so utterly unexpected, Zeno had to stagger into the house to fumble for a chair, a kitchen chair, and sit down, heavily; he felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut, the air slammed out of him. So weak, so frightened, he was scarcely able to hear Arlette pleading with him—“Zeno, what is it? Have they found her? Is she—alive? Zeno?” Time moved now in zigzag leaps. Once Zeno made this call. Once what had been a private concern became irreversibly public. Once their daughter was publicly designated missing. Once they’d brought photographs of the missing daughter to law enforcement officers, to be shared with the media, broadcast over TV and on the Internet and printed in newspapers. Once they’d described her. Once they’d described her in all ways they believed to be crucial to finding her. Then, time passed with dazzling swiftness even as, perversely, time passed with excruciating slowness. Swift because too much was crammed into too small a space. Swift like a nightmare film run at a high speed for a cruel-comic effect. Slow because for all that was happening very little that was crucial seemed to be happening. Slow because despite the many calls they were to receive in the course of a day, two days, several days, a week, the call they awaited, that Cressida had been found, did not come. Alive and well. We have found your daughter—alive and well. This call, so desperately wished-for, did not come. (AND THEY KNEW, each hour that their daughter was missing there was more likelihood that she’d been injured, or worse.) (Each hour that Brett Kincaid refused to cooperate, or was unable to cooperate, there was more likelihood that she’d been injured, or worse, and less likelihood that she would be found.) PROVIDING LAW ENFORCEMENT OFFICERS with photographs of Cressida. Spreading a half-dozen photos across a table. Startling to see their daughter gazing up at them. Wariness in Cressida’s eyes, thin-lashed dark eyes gleaming with irony and the faintest tincture of resentment as if she’d known that strangers would be staring at her, memorizing her face, without her permission. In none of the photos was Cressida smiling. Not since childhood had Cressida been recorded smiling. Arlette had wanted to explain—Our daughter was not an unhappy person. But she refused to smile when she was photographed. Not even in her high school yearbook is she pictured smiling. And this is because . . . But Arlette could not utter these words. Her throat closed, she could not. . . . she’d said, you know that one of the pictures will be for the obituary. So you can’t ever smile. You’d be a fool to smile at your own funeral. IN THE LATE MORNING of Sunday, July 10, 2005, the search for the missing girl in the Nautauga Preserve began and continued until searchers were obliged to leave the park, at dusk; it was continued the next morning, until dusk; and the next morning, until dusk. The search differed considerably from more routine searches in the vast Preserve for lost hikers, campers, mountain climbers, numbering quite a few in the course of an average summer: for it was believed that this missing girl might have been assaulted—raped, killed?—by a man. The search was complicated by the possibility that the missing girl had been dumped into the Nautauga River, and her body carried far downstream. Yet, morale was high. Especially among those volunteer searchers who knew Cressida Mayfield and the (younger, female) park rangers who were determined to find the girl, missing in their own territory. It had been eleven years since anyone had been lost in the Preserve and had not been found alive; in that case, involving a young boy believed to have run away from home, in the winter, the boy’s body wasn’t found until the following spring. In the course of the search a miscellany of castaway items was found—rotted and desiccated articles of clothing including underwear (both men’s and women’s); single gloves, mittens; single shoes, hiking boots, and belts; mangled hats; plastic bottles, cans, and Styrofoam; maps of the Preserve, hiking books, bird books, children’s toys, a single headless doll terrifying to the volunteer searcher who discovered it believing it to be, for a moment, a headless human infant. Also, scattered bones determined to be the bones of animals or birds. Here and there, a dead, rotting animal carcass like the partially devoured doe discovered by Zeno Mayfield, that seemed to have caused the father of the missing girl to collapse in a paroxysm of exhaustion and despair. God if I could trade my life for hers. If that were possible . . . SO MANY VEHICLES parked in the Mayfields’ driveway, and along Cumberland Avenue, if the missing girl had arrived home she’d have thought it was a festive occasion. Muttering out of the side of her mouth, a droll remark her mother could almost hear—What’s the big deal? Juliet’s getting engaged—again? Bright TV camera lights in the living room as Arlette and Zeno Mayfield of Cumberland Avenue, Carthage, parents of the missing girl, were being interviewed by local TV personality Evvie Estes for WCTG-TV 6 P.M. news. Arlette hadn’t been able to speak. Zeno had done all the talking. Of course, Zeno Mayfield was very good at talking. His voice had quavered only slightly. His eyes pouched in tiredness were damp and seemed to have no clear focus. But he’d showered, and shaved, and put on clean pressed clothes, and his thick-tufted hair had been brushed properly. He knew to speak to the TV audience by way of the TV interviewer and he knew not to be nettled or discomfited by certain of the woman’s questions. Arlette gripped in her right fist a wadded tissue. Her tongue had gone numb. Her eyes were fixed to the rapacious eyes of the heavily made-up Evvie Estes. Her terror was, her nose would begin to run, her eyes would leak tears, unsparingly illuminated in the bright TV lights. Our daughter. Our Cressida. If anyone has any information leading to . . . Then, there came the surprise of the ten-thousand-dollar reward. Not one of the law enforcement officers who’d been interviewing the Mayfields had known this was coming. Judging by her confusion on camera, Arlette had not known this was coming. Zeno spoke in an impassioned voice of a ten-thousand-dollar reward for information leading to the recovery of—the return of—our daughter Cressida. SURPRISING NEWS—A REWARD. Not a great idea. Many more calls will come in. Many more calls will come in. FOR INSTANCE, from “witnesses” who’d sighted the missing girl, they were sure: in and near and not-so-near the Nautauga Preserve. As far north as Massena, New York. As far south as Binghamton. In a 7-Eleven. Hitchhiking. In the passenger seat of a van headed south on I-80. Wearing a baseball cap pulled low on her forehead. Wearing sunglasses. Coming out of the Onondaga CineMax on Route 33, with a bearded man—the movie was The War of the Worlds with Tom Cruise. As far north as Massena, New York. As far south as Binghamton. Dozens of calls. In time, hundreds. Most valuable were calls from “witnesses” claiming to have been at the Roebuck Inn on the night of Saturday, July 9. Guys who knew Corporal Kincaid by sight. Women who’d seen a girl they suspected to be, or believed to be, or knew to be Cressida Mayfield, at the inn: in the crowded taproom, on the deck overlooking the lake, in the women’s room “sick to her stomach”—“splashing water on her face.” One of the bartenders, who knew Kincaid and his friends Halifax, Weisbeck, Stumpf—“The girl came in from somewhere. Like she was alone, and kind of scared-looking. In jeans, a black T-shirt, and some kind of top, or sweater. Not the kind of girl who turns up at the Roebuck on Saturday night. Maybe she was with Kincaid, or just ran into him. I think they left together. Or—all of them left together. It was a pretty loud scene, with the band on the deck. But definitely, it wasn’t any bikers she was with—this girl ‘Cressida.’ Hey—if other people call about Kincaid, and it turns out it’s him, like if the girl is hurt—do we split the ten thousand dollars? What’s the deal?” And there was an ex-girlfriend of Rod Halifax, named Natalie Cantor, claiming to have been a “friend” of Juliet Mayfield’s in high school, who called Zeno Mayfield’s office phone to tell him in an incensed, just perceptibly slurred voice that whatever happened to his daughter, Rod and his buddies would know—“Once, the bastard got me drunk, slipped some drug into a drink, he’d been wanting to break up with me and was acting really nasty trying to pimp me to his disgusting buddies—Jimmy Weisbeck, that asshole Stumpf—out in his pickup. Right out in the parking lot, the son of a bitch. They’re all mean drunks. I don’t know Kincaid, but I know Juliet. I know your daughter, she’s an angel. I’m not joking, she’s an angel. Juliet Mayfield is an angel. I don’t know the other one—‘Cress’da.’ I never saw ‘Cress’da.’ Anything you want to know about that poor girl, Rod Halifax will know. I wasn’t the first girl he got tired of, and treated like shit. It was not ‘consensual’—it was God-damn fucking rape. And I was sick afterward, I mean—infected. So, ask him. Arrest him, and ask him. Anything that’s happened to that poor girl, like if they raped her, and strangled her, and dumped her body in the lake—you can be sure Rod Halifax was responsible.” ZIGZAG TIME ENTERED her head: hours moved slow as sludge while days flew past on drunken-careening wings. Until she could think A week. This Sunday is a week. And she hasn’t been found and it would have the ring of tentative good news: She hasn’t been found in some terrible place. He would never forgive himself, she knew. Though it could not be his fault. Yet. Arlette had long gotten over being jealous—at any rate, showing her jealousy—of her daughters. Particularly Zeno adored Juliet but he’d also been weak-minded about Cressida, the “difficult” daughter—the one whom it was a challenge to love. At the very start, the little girls had adored their mother. As babies, their young mother was all to them. Which is only natural of course. But quickly then, Daddy had stolen their hearts. Big burly bright-faced Daddy who was so funny, and so unpredictable—Daddy who loved to subvert Mommy’s dictums and upset, as he liked to joke, Mommy’s apple cart. As if an orderly household—eating at mealtimes, and properly at a table, with others—walking and not running/rushing on the stairs—keeping your bedroom reasonably clean, and not messing up a bathroom for others—were a silly-Mommy’s apple cart to be overturned for laughs. But Mommy knew to laugh, when she was laughed-at. Mommy knew it was love. A kind of love. Except it hurt sometimes—the father siding with the daughter, in mockery of her. (Not Juliet of course: Juliet never mocked anyone.) (Mockery came too easily to Cressida. As if she feared a softer emotion would make her vulnerable.) Arlette knew: if something terrible had happened to Cressida, Zeno would blame himself. Though there could be no reason, no logical reason, he would blame himself. Already he was saying to whoever would listen I wasn’t even there, when she left. God! In a voice of wonder, self-reproach Maybe she’d have told me—something. Maybe she’d have wanted to talk. COUNTLESS TIMES they’d gone over Saturday evening: when Cressida had left the house, on her way to the Meyers’ for dinner. Casually, you might say indifferently calling out to her mother and her sister in the kitchen—Bye! See you later. Or even, though this was less likely given that Cressida wouldn’t have stayed very late at Marcy’s—Don’t wake up for me. (Had Cressida said that? Don’t wake up for me?—intentionally or otherwise? Wake up not wait up. That was Cressida’s sort of quirky humor. Suddenly, Arlette wondered if it might mean something.) (Snatching at straws, this was. Pathetic!) Certainly it was ridiculous for Zeno to reproach himself with not having been home at that time. As if somehow—(but how?)—he might have foreseen that Cressida wouldn’t be returning when she’d planned, and when they’d expected her? Ridiculous but how like the father. Particularly, the father of daughters. EACH TIME the phone rang! Several phones in the Mayfield household: the family line, Zeno’s cell, Arlette’s cell, Juliet’s cell. Always a kick of the heart, fumbling to answer a call. Deliberately Arlette avoided seeing the caller ID in the hope that the caller would be Cressida. Or, that the caller would be a stranger, a law enforcement officer, possibly a woman, in Arlette’s fantasizing it was a woman, with the good news Mrs. Mayfield!—we’ve found your daughter and she wants to talk to you. Beyond this, though Arlette listened eagerly, there was—nothing. As if, in the strain of awaiting the call, and hearing Cressida’s voice, she’d forgotten what that voice was. DRIVING TO THE BANK, fumbling with the radio dial, in a panic to hear the “top of the hour” news—almost colliding with a sanitation truck. Recovering, and, in the next block, almost colliding with an SUV whose driver tapped his horn irritably at her. And, in the bank, bright-faced and smiling in the (desperate, transparent) hope of deflecting looks of pity, waiting in line at a teller’s window exactly as she’d have waited if her daughter was not missing. This fact confounded her. This fact seemed to mock her. Wanting to hide. Hide her face. But of course, no. “Arlette? You are Arlette Mayfield—aren’t you? I’m so sorry—really really sorry—about your daughter . . . We’ve told our kids, one is a junior in high school, the other is just in seventh grade, if they hear anything—anything at all—to tell us right away. Kids know so much more than their parents these days. Out at the lake, and in the Preserve, there’s all kinds of things going on—under-age drinking is the least of it. All kinds of drugs including ‘crystal meth’—kids don’t know what they’re taking, they’re too young to realize how dangerous it is . . . I don’t mean that your daughter was with any kind of a drug-crowd, I don’t mean that at all—but the Roebuck Inn, that’s a place they hang out—there’s these Hells Angels bikers who are known drug-dealers—but parents have their heads in the sand, just don’t want to acknowledge there’s a serious—tragic—problem in Carthage . . .” And not in the bank parking lot, can’t let herself cry. Not with bank customers trailing in and out. And anyone who knew Arlette Mayfield, including now individuals not-known to her who’d seen her on WCTG-TV with her husband Zeno pleading for the return of their daughter, could stare through her car windshield and observe and carry away the tale to all who would listen with thrilled widened eyes That poor woman! Arlette Mayfield! You know, the mother of the missing girl . . . CALLS CONTINUED TO COME to police headquarters. Though peaking on the second day, Monday, July 11: a record number of calls following the front-page article, with photos, in the Carthage Post-Journal. And the notice of the ten-thousand-dollar reward. Myriad “witnesses” claiming to have sighted Cressida Mayfield—somewhere. Or to have knowledge of what might have happened to her and where she was now. In some cases, making veiled accusations against people—(neighbors, relatives, ex-husbands)—who might have “kidnapped” or “done something to” Cressida Mayfield. Zeno had wanted these calls routed through him. It was his fear that a valuable call would be overlooked by someone in the sheriff’s office. Detectives explained to Zeno that, where reward money is involved, a flood of calls can be expected, virtually all of them worthless. Yet, though likely to be worthless, the calls have to be considered—the “leads” have to be investigated. The Beechum County Sheriff’s Department was understaffed. The Carthage PD was helping in the investigation though this department was even smaller. If kidnapping were suspected, the FBI might be contacted. The New York State Police. Was offering a reward so publicly a mistake? Zeno didn’t want to think so. “Maybe the mistake is not offering enough. Let’s double it—twenty thousand dollars.” “Oh, Zeno—are you sure?” “Of course I’m sure. We have to do something.” “Maybe you should speak with Bud McManus? Or maybe—” “She’s our daughter, not his. Twenty thousand will attract more attention. We have to do something.” Arlette thought But if there is nothing? If we can do nothing? There was Zeno on the phone. Defiant Zeno on two phones at once: the family phone, and his cell phone. “Hello? This is Zeno Mayfield. We’ve decided to double the reward money to twenty thousand dollars. Yes—right. Twenty thousand dollars for information leading to the recovery and return of our daughter Cressida Mayfield. Callers will be granted anonymity if they wish.” IN CRESSIDA’S ROOM. Drifting upstairs in the large empty-echoing house as if drawn to that room. Where, if she’d been home, and in the room, Cressida would have been surprised to see her parents and possibly not pleased. Hey, Dad. Mom. What brings you here? Not snooping—are you? “Her bed wasn’t slept-in. That was the first thing I saw.” Arlette spoke in a hoarse whisper. They might have been crouched in a mausoleum, the room was so dimly lighted, so stark and still. In the center of the room Zeno stood, staring. It was quite possible, Arlette thought, that he hadn’t entered their daughter’s room in years. Detectives had asked Arlette if anything was “missing” from the room. Arlette didn’t think so, but how could Arlette know: their daughter’s life was a very private life, only partially and, it sometimes seemed, grudgingly shared with her mother. Detectives had searched the room, as Arlette and Zeno stood anxiously by. As soon as the detectives were finished with any part of the room—the closet, the old cherrywood chest of drawers Cressida had had since she was six years old—Arlette hurried to reclaim it, and re-establish order. With latex-gloved hands they’d placed certain articles of clothing in plastic bags. They’d taken a not-very-clean hairbrush, a toothbrush, other intimate items for DNA purposes presumably. Cressida’s laptop. They’d asked permission to open it, to examine it, and the Mayfields had said yes, of course. Though reluctant even to open the laptop themselves. To peer into their daughter’s private life, how intrusive this was! How Cressida would resent it. The detectives had taken it away with them, and left a receipt. Almost Arlette thought I hope they return it before Cressida comes back. Almost Arlette thought, unforgivably, I hope Cressida doesn’t come back before they return it. Zeno said, falsely hearty: “It’s good that you woke up, Lettie. That something woke you. Thank God you came in here when you did.” “Yes. Something woke me . . .” That sensation of a part of the house missing. A part of her body missing. Phantom limb. Arlette’s thought was, seeing the room through Zeno’s eyes, that it didn’t have the features of a girl’s room, as a man might imagine them. Cressida’s clothes were all put away and out of sight—neatly folded in drawers, on shelves, hanging in closets. And her small stubby-looking shoes, neatly paired, on the floor of the closet. One of the detectives, meaning to be kind, had remarked that his teenaged daughter’s room looked nothing like this one. Zeno had tried to explain, their daughter had never been a teenager. Years ago Cressida had cast away the soft bright colors and fuzzy fabrics of girlhood and replaced them with the stark black-and-white geometrical designs and slick surfaces of M. C. Escher, that so strangely entranced her. She had so little interest in colors—(her jeans were mostly black, her shirts, T-shirts, sweaters)—Arlette could wonder if she saw colors at all; or, seeing, thought them sentimental, softhearted. Zeno was peering at the labyrinthine Descending and Ascending as if he’d never seen it before. As if it might provide a clue to his daughter’s disappearance. Did he recognize himself in the drawing?—Arlette wondered. Or were the miniature humanoid-figures too distorted, caricatured? Zeno’s eye was for the large, blatant, blinding. Zeno had not a shrewd eye for the miniature. Arlette slid her arm through her husband’s. Since Sunday, she was always touching him, holding him. Very still Zeno would stand at such times, not exactly responding but not stiffening either. For he dared not give in to the rawest emotion, she knew. Not quite yet. “Whatever happened, with Cressida’s math teacher, Zeno? Remember? When she was in tenth grade? She never told me . . .” “ ‘Rickard.’ He was her geometry teacher.” Arlette recalled days, it might have been weeks, of veiled exchanges between Zeno and Cressida, about something that had happened, or hadn’t happened in the right way, at school. It might have been that Cressida had brought a portfolio of drawings to school—beyond that, Arlette hadn’t known. When she’d asked Cressida what was troubling her, Cressida had told her it was none of her business; when she’d asked Zeno, he’d told her, apologetically, that it was up to Cressida—“If she wants to tell you, she will.” Their alliance was to each other, Arlette thought. She’d hated them, then. In just that moment. She’d asked Juliet, out of desperation. But Juliet who wasn’t living at home at the time—who was a freshman at the State University at Oneida—had soared so far beyond her tenth-grade sister, she’d had little interest in the sister’s emotional crises—“Some teacher who didn’t appreciate her enough, I think. You know Cressida!” Arlette didn’t, though. That was the problem. Zeno said hesitantly, as if even now he were reluctant to violate any confidence of their daughter’s, that when Cressida had first become so interested in M. C. Escher she’d created a portfolio of pen-and-ink drawings using numerals and geometrical figures, in imitation of Escher’s lithographs. “This one—Metamorphoses”—Zeno indicated one of the pen-and-ink drawings displayed on Cressida’s wall—“was the first one I’d seen, I think. I didn’t know what the hell to make of it, initially.” Arlette examined the drawing: it was smaller than Descending and Ascending and seemingly less ambitious: moving from left to right, human figures morphed into mannequins, then geometrical figures; then numerals, then abstract molecular designs; then back to human figures again. As the figures passed through the metamorphoses from left to right their “whiteness” shaded into “darkness”—like negatives; then, as negatives, as they passed through reverse stages of metamorphoses, they became “white” again. And some of the scenes were set on Carthage bridges, with reflections in the water that underwent metamorphoses, too. “It’s based upon an Escher drawing of course. But how skillfully it’s executed! I remember looking at it, Metamorphoses, following with my eyes the changes in the figures, back and forth . . . It was the first time I realized, I think, that our daughter was so special. You can’t imagine Juliet doing anything like this.” “Juliet wouldn’t want to do anything quite like this.” “Of course. That’s my point.” “Cressida’s drawings are like riddles. I’ve always thought it was too bad, her art is so ‘difficult.’ Remember when she was a little girl, not four years old, she drew such wonderful animals and birds with crayons. Everyone adored them. I’d always thought I might work with her, I’d thought we could create children’s books together. But . . .” “Lettie, come on! Cressida isn’t interested in ‘children’s books’—not now, and not then. Her talent is for something more demanding.” “But she seems to have quit doing art. There’s nothing new on the wall here, that I can see.” “She didn’t take art courses at St. Lawrence. She said she didn’t respect the teachers. She didn’t think she could learn anything from them.” How like Cressida! Yet she didn’t seem to have made her way otherwise. Arlette asked what had happened with Mr. Rickard? From time to time Arlette encountered the rabbity moustached Vance Rickard on the street in Carthage, or at the mall. Though Arlette smiled at him, and would have greeted him warmly, the high school math teacher invariably turned away without seeming to see her, frowning. “That bastard! He’d seen some of Cressida’s drawings in her notebook, and praised her; he said he was an admirer of Escher, too. So Cressida put together a portfolio of her new work and brought it to school to show him, and the son of a bitch wounded her by saying, ‘Not bad. Pretty good, in fact. But you must be original. Escher did this first, so why copy him?’ Cressida was devastated.” Arlette could well understand, their sensitive daughter would be devastated by such a heartless remark. Yet, she’d wanted to ask Cressida something like this herself. “He might have meant well. It was just—thoughtless . . . I’m sorry that Cressida was so upset.” “That was why she did so poorly in geometry that semester. She stayed away from class, she was so ashamed. She’d ended with a barely passing grade.” Arlette remembered: that turbulent season in their daughter’s life. “Cressida came to me and told me what he’d said. She was utterly demolished. She said, ‘I can’t go back. I hate him. Get him fired, Daddy.’ I was furious, too. I made an appointment to speak with Rickard who professed to be totally unaware of what he’d said, or even if he’d said it; he told me that if he’d made such a remark to Cressida it must have been meant playfully. He said he’d been impressed with her drawings and with her work in his class though he worried that she was ‘inconsistent’—‘too easily discouraged.’ ” Arlette thought yes, that is so. But Zeno was still indignant. “I wouldn’t have tried to get the bastard fired, of course. Even if—maybe—I could have. The man was just crude, and thoughtless. Cressida changed her mind, too: ‘Maybe we should just forget about it, Daddy. I wish we would. I don’t deserve any higher grade than the one I got, really.’ But that was ridiculous, she’d certainly have earned an A, if the damned Escher misunderstanding hadn’t happened.” Zeno didn’t need to add: Cressida’s grade-point average would have been considerably higher without a D+ in sophomore math. For often it happened that Cressida did well in her high school courses through a semester and then, unaccountably, as if to spite her own pretensions of excellence, she failed to complete the course, or failed to study for the final exam, or even to take the final exam. She was often ill—respiratory ailments, nausea, migraine headaches. Her high school record was a zigzag fever chart that culminated in her senior year when, instead of graduating as class valedictorian, as the teachers who admired her observed to her parents, she graduated thirtieth in a class of one hundred sixteen—a dismal record for such a bright girl. Instead of being accepted at Cornell, as she’d hoped, she was fortunate to have been accepted at St. Lawrence University. Her first year away from home, in the small college town of Canton, Cressida had been homesick, lonely; a girl who’d scorned conventional “clich?d” behavior, yet she’d found herself missing her home, the routine and safety of her home. Still, she hadn’t emailed or called her parents often and when Arlette tried to contact her, Cressida was elusive; if Arlette managed to get her to answer her cell phone, Cressida was remote, taciturn. “Honey, is something wrong? Can you tell me? Please?” Arlette had pleaded, and Cressida had made a sound that was the verbal equivalent of a shrug. “You aren’t having trouble with your courses, are you?” Arlette asked, and Cressida said coldly, no. “Then what is it? Can’t you tell me?” Arlette asked, and Cressida said, mimicking her, “ ‘What is’—what?” Arlette had been reading about suicidally depressed undergraduates, and Cressida’s reaction worried her. (When she mentioned the subject to Zeno he’d laughed at her. “Lettie! You never fail to catastrophize.” When she’d seen a TV documentary on suicide among adolescents, in which the word epidemic was used, she dared not mention it to Zeno.) When she returned home at winter break, and again at spring break, Cressida had been listless and withdrawn; she’d barely made the effort to visit with high school friends like Marcy Meyer who’d had to call Cressida repeatedly, and finally to come to the house to see her. She’d been stricken with fugues of depression, angry melancholy. She’d spent much of her time in her room with the door pointedly shut. While Juliet basked in the happiness of her engagement to Corporal Brett Kincaid, and the Mayfields and their friends spoke of little else except the upcoming wedding, Cressida was detached and indifferent. And when news of Brett’s injuries came, she’d said, after a moment of surprise and shock, “Well—Brett is a soldier after all and he was at war. You can’t always expect to be the one who does the killing.” Fortunately, Cressida hadn’t made this remark within Juliet’s hearing. When Brett re-entered their lives, however, badly damaged, initially in a wheelchair, Cressida had been visibly shocked, and subdued; her usual habit of irony was suspended. To Arlette she said: “Juliet will never marry him now. I predict.” Arlette, annoyed, had told Cressida that she was mistaken. She didn’t know her sister, clearly. “Well, just wait! I predict.” Another time, when Arlette and Cressida happened to be alone together in the house, she’d said suddenly, almost angrily: “What’s the point of all this?” and Arlette had said, “The point of all—what?” Cressida had waved her hand irritably, as if brushing away flies. “All this effort.” As if she’d meant the entire world. And its history. Arlette had gathered, though not directly from Cressida, that college had been a surprise to her. From earliest childhood Cressida had taken for granted her intellectual superiority and, though she’d have ridiculed the very notion, her social status as the daughter of Zeno Mayfield who’d bought for his family a handsome old Colonial on Cumberland Avenue; she’d taken for granted the very air she breathed, in her family’s house. But in Canton, amid strangers of whom many belonged to sororities and fraternities, living away from her comfortable home with no one who knew her, loved her, and fretted over her slightest whim or unhappiness, Cressida must have been unmoored: lost. If she’d made friends, Arlette knew nothing of them. If she went without eating properly, if she stayed up through a night, if she went outdoors lightly dressed in freezing winds; if she was careless about her health, or cut classes; if she perceived herself at the edge of the university world, not by choice or design but helplessly—no one took any special notice, no one cared. Poor Cressida! In Canton, no one even knew her as the smart one. “When she came home from college, and was keeping to herself so much, I should have tried to talk with Cressida more. She isn’t a child technically but she has the sensitive feelings of a child. She’s never gotten over having done so poorly in high school where she should have been a star.” Zeno spoke broodingly. Zeno’s monologues were all of Cressida now where previously, he’d been obsessively concerned with Juliet in the aftermath of the broken engagement. A ringing phone interrupted. Zeno moved hurriedly to answer it—the Mayfield family line—in the bedroom next to Cressida’s. “HE’S OUT? He’s—home? Just like that—out on bail?” Zeno was incredulous to learn that Brett Kincaid had been released from police custody after three days. Yet more furious to learn that Brett hadn’t been released on bail—he’d never been arrested, no charges had been filed against him. Preliminary bloodstain tests were inconclusive: Kincaid’s blood type was A positive, and some of the bloodstains in the passenger’s seat of his vehicle were type B positive, which was Cressida’s blood type; but there was no way to determine if the bloodstains were Cressida’s. Several hairs found in the front seat of the vehicle were “almost certainly” a match with Cressida’s hair and at least one fingerprint on the passenger’s door handle, though smudged, did appear to be a match with a print of Cressida’s taken from surfaces in her bedroom. Bud McManus telephoned to explain why Kincaid had had to be released. Zeno slammed down the receiver. “Fuckers! ‘Not enough evidence’ to hold him! That’s bullshit.” Brett had been interviewed at length by detectives but had insisted that he didn’t remember much of what had happened on Saturday night at the Roebuck Inn, or afterward. He did seem to remember—vaguely—that someone had been with him in his Jeep; he thought he remembered having been drinking with his friends Halifax, Weisbeck, and Stumpf earlier; with the air of one straining to recall a disturbing and chaotic dream he managed to recall that whoever had been with him in his Jeep, a girl, or a woman, had wanted at some point to get out of the vehicle, that had skidded off a road—(he thought)—but he had not thought it was safe for her to climb out of the Jeep and into the wilderness at night and so—maybe—he’d had “some kind of struggle” with her. Except maybe this wasn’t so. Maybe—that had happened some other time. If it had happened, or whenever it had happened—he was very sorry. His remarks were rambling and incoherent. His behavior was “erratic.” Several times he broke down sobbing. Several times he flew into a rage. He attempted to terminate the interview, and had to be forcibly restrained. In the struggle, the chair he’d been sitting in, in the interview room, skidded out beneath him. He fell, heavily, onto the floor. Like a dead weight he lay for some stunned seconds with his stitched-together face pressed against the floor until police officers hauled him up. O Christ he was sorry he was very sorry didn’t remember what had happened or which one of them but he was sorry and wanted to go home. Still, he did not want a lawyer. He had not done anything wrong and so he did not want a God-damn lawyer. He refused to eat. Or could not eat. He was able to drink Diet Coke in small careful swallows. What he most wanted he said was to brush his teeth. Except he didn’t have his toothbrush and he had no toothpaste. His mother Ethel Kincaid arrived at the sheriff’s headquarters on Axel Road in a high state of excitation and protest. She’d brought with her a supply of the prescription drugs her son was obliged to take—(at least a dozen different medications, most of them more than once a day), medical reports and U.S. Army discharge documents. She brought her son’s Purple Heart and the Iraq campaign medal, in a chamois drawstring bag. In a loud voice she insisted that her son was innocent of any wrongdoing and that he should not be questioned as a “criminal suspect”; he was “unwell”—“under doctors’ care”—he’d been discharged with a “medical disability” from the army. He was a “corporal” and a “war hero” who should be treated with respect and he should certainly have a lawyer, a “free” lawyer, even if he seemed to think that he didn’t want one. Mrs. Kincaid was allowed to confer with her exhausted and near-delirious son, who was still wearing the blood- and vomit-stained clothing in which he’d been apprehended early Sunday morning, and to weaken his resolve not to request a lawyer. For Corporal Kincaid seemed to believe that only a guilty man would need a lawyer. And if he had a lawyer, he would have admitted guilt. Mrs. Kincaid succeeded also in convincing detectives that her son should be examined by a doctor; and that he must be released soon, to return to the rehab clinic for his prescribed therapy. On Sunday afternoon and again on Monday detectives had come to Ethel Kincaid’s house to question her about her son and now that she’d come to headquarters, they took the opportunity to question her again. By this time the corporal’s mother had settled upon the phrase My son is innocent of any wrongdoing and this will be proved in a court of law if necessary. Returned home, Ethel Kincaid made numerous phone calls on her son’s behalf. She contacted Elliot Fisk, the local businessman who’d publicly pledged, since 9/11, to do “all that he humanly could” to help support Beechum County veterans of the Afghanistan and Iraq wars, and convinced him to hire a lawyer for her son: a “real” lawyer and not a public defender. And so, as it turned out, Corporal Kincaid’s lawyer was a Carthage criminal defense lawyer of some esteem named Jake Pedersen. Zeno was incensed, for he and Pedersen had often been allies on county bond-issue campaigns and Pedersen had helped campaign for Zeno when he’d run for mayor. Each man was prominent in the Beechum County Democratic party. Within an hour of Pedersen’s arrival at sheriff’s headquarters on Tuesday afternoon, Brett Kincaid was released into the custody of his mother and his attorney and allowed to return home. No charges had been filed against him but he was forbidden to leave Beechum County and “under no circumstances” was he to contact the Mayfields. He’d become less excitable by this time. He was walking with a cane his mother had brought him. He’d taken his meds, and in a lavatory at headquarters he’d been allowed to change into the fresh clothes his mother had provided. He’d brushed his teeth so vigorously his gums bled. “Now I want to help. I want to help, too.” They asked him, help how? Help who? “Look for the girl. ‘Cress’da.’ I want to help, too.” BY WAY OF his zealous friends in the Sheriff’s Department it was reported back to Zeno Mayfield what Brett Kincaid had said. “God damn him, he’d better not. He’d better not come anywhere near any of us.” Zeno was trembling with rage, indignation. His hands clenched and unclenched like the claws of spastic sea-creatures. On TV news, there was Corporal Kincaid flanked by his fierce-faced mother Ethel and his lawyer Jake Pedersen hurrying to a vehicle waiting near a rear door of the Beechum County sheriff’s headquarters. Reporters rushed at the young man. Mrs. Kincaid waved them away with windmill motions of her arms, furious. The corporal walked unsteadily with a cane, ducked into the backseat of the vehicle driven by Jack Pedersen. He wore dark glasses that obscured half his face but TV cameras picked up, in lurid and unsparing detail, the scarred and flushed mannequin-face and the small stitched-looking mouth. Questioned in the disappearance of nineteen-year-old Carthage resident Cressida Mayfield believed to be last seen late Saturday night in the Wolf’s Head Lake–Nautauga Preserve area. On WCTG-TV this video played, and replayed. It was followed by an edited version of the Sunday evening interview with Mr. and Mrs. Mayfield with an addendum, by bright-eyed Evvie Estes, that the “Mayfield reward” had been doubled to twenty thousand dollars. And by an aerial shot of rescue workers and volunteers searching the pinewoods of the Nautauga Preserve. A five-second interview with a husky blond park ranger who said if Cressida Mayfield is in the Preserve, they would find her for sure! Another time, photos of Cressida were shown. The high school yearbook photo which was earnest and unsmiling as if the plain-featured young girl was staring into the viewer’s eyes with an expression of subtle contempt. “So far, there has been no trace reported of the missing girl. If anyone believes that he or she has information to share about the whereabouts of Cressida Mayfield, the number to call is . . . And if any caller wishes anonymity, that will be granted.” “I HAVE TO SEE HIM. To speak with him. I promise—I won’t become emotional.” Zeno had been warned against attempting to see Brett Kincaid. He’d been warned against returning to Ethel Kincaid’s house. Outrageously, Ethel had reported him to Carthage police claiming that Zeno had tried to convince her that he had a “warrant” to search her son’s room and he’d “made threats and threatening gestures” against her when she refused to let him into her house. And that he was “spreading malicious lies” about her son Brett who was a wounded war veteran, a hero, and had had nothing to do with his daughter. Because he’d “broken off a bad engagement” with Zeno Mayfield’s other daughter, that was one of the reasons Zeno had come to her house to threaten her. Zeno was informed of these charges by a Carthage police lieutenant he knew who dropped by the house to visit with him. Avoid the Kincaids, the lieutenant said. Avoid any situation where he was likely to be over-excited. Zeno, who knew the law, or should have known the law, understood the principle here. He was the father of the missing girl, he must not blunder into breaking the law himself. “But how can they just let him go? Not even out on bail? Why didn’t they arrest him?” “Because they can’t, yet. But they will.” Zeno felt a chill, hearing these words. “You mean, if Cressida is—isn’t—if she . . .” Zeno didn’t know what he was saying. He covered his face with his hands. His jaws had grown stubbly again, his breath smelled sour in his own nostrils. The Carthage PD lieutenant placed his hand on Zeno’s shoulder. This pressure, meant to be kindly, manly-kindly, remained with Zeno after the lieutenant himself had slipped away eager to escape the strained static air of the Mayfield household. Arlette was required to calm her ranting husband. Arlette who’d scarcely slept since 4 A.M. of July 10, now days ago, feared for the man’s high blood pressure, his audible shortness of breath, the quivering of his hands. “The fingerprints in the Jeep were hers. The hairs, for Christ’s sake! The bloodstains—probably. And ‘witnesses’ at the Roebuck . . .” “Yes. We know.” “ . . . how can they just let him go! And now he has a lawyer, and that self-promoting asshole Fisk will pay for his defense!” “Yes. But there’s nothing to be done right now, Zeno. Come here, sit down, let me hold you. Please.” They were regressing, in their marriage, long a marriage of mature and nimbly wise-cracking adults, to an earlier stage of wayward and desperate surges of raw emotion, even sexual need. Indignant and belligerent in public, Zeno was susceptible to weakness and trembling in the privacy of his home, in his wife’s consoling arms. Arlette thought I will have to prepare him for the worst. He can’t prepare himself. The blood test was inconclusive because, unluckily, there was no way to determine if the blood was Cressida’s. The single smudged fingerprint and the stray hairs were also “inconclusive” because there was no way to establish that these had been left in the Jeep on Saturday night, and not at another, earlier time. That was the point which Kincaid’s lawyer Pedersen was using, to argue that Cressida had been in Brett’s Jeep on an earlier occasion, and not on Saturday night. That is, not demonstrably on Saturday night. Because the scene had been crowded and confused, witnesses contradicted one another. Some claimed that they’d seen Cressida, or someone who closely resembled her, crossing the cinder parking lot at about midnight with Brett Kincaid limping and leaning against her, on their way to his vehicle; others claimed that they’d seen Cressida, or someone who closely resembled her, on the outdoor deck of the Roebuck, in the company of others, including, or not including, Brett Kincaid. No one would absolutely claim to have seen Cressida in Brett’s Jeep Wrangler. Witnesses spoke of “bikers” at the Roebuck. Deafening roars of their motorcycles, drunken shouts. Women who’d claimed to have seen Cressida in the restroom splashing water onto her face could not claim to have actually spoken with her—“It wasn’t like she was asking for anybody to help her, see. And she isn’t the kind of person you just tap on the shoulder to ask if she’s ‘all right’—you know she’d be offended.” Kincaid’s friends Rod Halifax, Jimmy Weisbeck, and Duane Stumpf, all in their mid-twenties, lifetime residents of Carthage who’d known Brett Kincaid at Carthage High School, were interviewed individually by Beechum County detectives. Of the three, Halifax and Stumpf were known to local law enforcement: already in high school they’d been arrested for fighting, destruction of property, petty theft and public drinking but their cases had been adjudicated in the county court without recourse to incarceration. Halifax and Weisbeck had been cited in complaints by young women claiming they’d been “harassed” and “abused” by them—but here too, charges were dropped or had evaporated. Halifax had enlisted in the Marines in November 2001 but had been discharged after twenty-three days at the Marine basic training at Camp Geiger, North Carolina. At about that time, in the fall of 2001, when Brett Kincaid had enlisted in the army, Weisbeck and Stumpf had applied to enlist too, but hadn’t completed their applications. With something of the earnest clumsiness of amateur actors whose scripts have been memorized Halifax, Weisbeck, and Stumpf gave accounts of Saturday night at the Roebuck Inn with their friend Brett Kincaid that were near identical: they’d arrived at the Roebuck in separate vehicles, they’d been drinking together since about 10 P.M., they’d moved from the outdoor deck into the taproom to be closer to the bar, at one point there’d been maybe a dozen guys with them, and girls; some of them old friends, and some virtually strangers; by midnight the place was really crowded and it was sometime then that “the Mayfield girl” showed up, alone; or it looked as if she was alone; nobody knew her (except Brett) since she’d been a few years behind them at Carthage High, and nobody had ever seen her before at the lake—“Like, she wasn’t the type to hang out there.” How long “the Mayfield girl” remained talking with Brett in a corner, maybe twenty minutes, or a half hour, they didn’t know. Or when she left. Or with who. Might’ve been bikers—there was a gang of them, Adirondack Hells Angels in the parking lot tearing up the cinders. But definitely it wasn’t Brett Kincaid she left with. Because they’d all left at the same time. And it wasn’t any one of them. “IF I COULD get my hands on them. Get them alone. For just five minutes. Just one of them. Just one.” “Yes but you can’t, Zeno. You know that. You can’t.” “Stumpf is the one who’d break first. Less than one minute. If I could just . . .” “Yes, Zeno. But you can’t. Please tell me you know this—you can’t.” Like a wounded buffalo, poor Zeno. Arlette tried to hold him, stroke his snarled hair, kiss his bristling cheek. She understood how sick at heart her husband was, how terrified of what awaited them, when he failed to push her away. FIVE (#ulink_61dc2874-b764-5491-9af3-64befc20a256) ENDANGERED MISSING ADULT CRESSIDA CATHERINE MAYFIELD If you believe you have any information regarding this case that will be helpful in this investigation please contact Beechum County (NY) Sheriff’s Department (315 440-1198) or City of Carthage (NY) Police Department (315 329-8366) $20,000 reward for information leading to the recovery and return of Cressida Mayfield. Callers will be granted anonymity if requested. Name: CRESSIDA CATHERINE MAYFIELD Classification: Endangered Missing Adult Alias/Nickname: None Date of Birth: 1986—04—6 Date Missing: 2005—07—10. From city/state: Carthage, NY Missing from (country): USA Family: Arlette Mayfield (mother), Zeno Mayfield (father) Age at Time of Disappearance: 19 Gender: Female Race: White Height: 61 inches Weight: 100 pounds Hair Color: Dark brown Eye Color: Dark brown Complexion: Pale Glasses/contacts description: Clear contacts/ wire-rimmed glasses Identifying characteristics: Short, “frizzy”-curly dark hair, prominent dark eyebrows, non-raised faded strawberry birthmark on left forearm, faded (childhood) scar on right knee Medical history: Migraine headache, bronchitis, (childhood) chicken pox, measles, mumps, scarlet fever. Jewelry: None known. Ears not pierced. Attire at time of Disappearance: Black jeans, black T-shirt, black/white striped cotton sweater, sandals. Circumstances of Disappearance: Unknown pending police investigation. Cressida was last seen by witnesses at midnight July 9 in the parking lot of the Roebuck Inn & Marina, Wolf’s Head Lake, New York, but is believed to have been later in the Nautauga State Forest Preserve. Investigative Agency: Beechum County Sheriff’s Department, City of Carthage Police Department Investigative Case # 04-29374 NCIC #: K-84420081 THROUGH JULY, THAT NIGHTMARE month, and into August 2005. Waiting for the phone to ring. “The news will come by phone. No other way—phone.” HE’D ORDERED six thousand flyers. A first printing. This was a replica of the national endangered missing adults Web site for Cressida Catherine Mayfield. He’d arranged for a massive mailing to households in Beechum, Herkimer, and Hamilton counties. Volunteers affixed flyers to telephone poles, trees, public walls and the sides of buildings in Carthage and in the villages of Wolf’s Head Lake, Echo Lake, and Black River. In post offices in these places and as far away as Watertown, Fort Drum, Sackets Harbor, and Ogdensburg. And everywhere in the Nautauga State Forest Preserve—restrooms, the ranger stations, every one hundred feet along popular trails. Walking in the Preserve, along the Sandhill Road where—(he persisted in thinking)—he might yet discover some inexplicably overlooked article of clothing or item belonging to his daughter he stared at the ENDANGERED MISSING ADULT CRESSIDA MAYFIELD flyers stapled to trees making his way from one to the next—to the next—and the next—like a man with a single leg, stumbling on a crutch. Where a flyer appeared to be missing, or was torn, or rain-ravaged, he stapled another. In a backpack he carried an infinite supply. “SOMEONE WILL RECOGNIZE HER. Someone will have information. We have faith.” Through July, that nightmare month, and into August, and early September—the expectation prevailed in the Mayfield household. Waking in a place she had no idea she’d been—(slumped on a sag-bellied sofa in the basement TV room, sunshine glaring through narrow horizontal not-very-clean windows)—or when—to a sudden piercing pain at the back of her skull. A phone ringing upstairs! Stumbling upstairs to grab at the receiver. For always there was the expectation that the next call would be Cressida. Or news of Cressida. Mrs. Mayfield? Arlette? We have good news . . . Are you Mrs. Mayfield? The mother of Cressida? At last we have good news for you and your husband . . . “Yes. I mean no—we don’t give up waiting. We will never give up waiting. We are convinced that our daughter is alive and will contact us . . .” Or: “It’s a matter of faith. We know that Cressida is—somewhere. And sometime, we will see her again.” They were being interviewed: TV cameras. They were being photographed: flashbulbs. They were the Mayfields, Arlette and Zeno. And sometimes, Juliet. Family of the missing girl. “No. We are not bitter. We understand that the detectives are ‘investigating’—‘collecting evidence.’ They can’t arrest him—anyone—until they have ‘built a case.’ ” And: “We know that he knows. Everyone in Carthage knows that Brett Kincaid knows what has happened to Cressida—but he’s protected by the law, for the time being. Until the detectives have ‘built their case.’ ” Stalwart Zeno seemed oblivious, that faith in his daughter being alive after more than forty days did not compute with faith that Brett Kincaid would soon be arrested for a crime involving his daughter. Arlette understood the illogic. Arlette sensed the pity of others in the face of the Mayfields’ obdurate faith. And there was Juliet, with her stunned smile. Beautiful Juliet Mayfield, elementary school teacher at the Convent Street School, prom queen of Carthage High Class of 2000 and ex-fianc?e of Corporal Brett Kincaid believed to be the “last person” to have seen Cressida Mayfield in the early morning hours of July 10. “I know that my sister Cressida is alive and well—somewhere. I know that Brett did not harm her but I think that Brett might know who did harm her and where she is. All my prayers are with her and with Brett also . . . I do believe in the power of prayer, yes. No, we don’t see each other now—Brett Kincaid and me. Not right now. But I pray for him, too—I pray for his troubled soul.” SHE WAS FIFTY-ONE years old! A few months ago, she’d been a girl. Something skeletal had taken root inside her, not soon to be shaken. What she’d come to dread: opening her eyes in the morning. For once her eyes were opened, she could not close them again until nighttime. Once the thoughts of her lost daughter were unleashed, like a landslide, like a flash flood, they could not be curtailed. They could not be contained. Oh God. Cressida! Tell us where you are, honey. If we can come to you—tell us . . . Nor could Arlette avoid acknowledging her husband lying exhausted in sleep beside her like a winded, wounded beast that groaned and muttered in its sleep; or, worse, lay awake; having been awake for hours, thoughts churning in his head like laundry in a washer. It had long been their custom to kiss in the morning—casually aimed kisses like greetings. But now, Arlette lay very still not wanting to move in the hope that Zeno wouldn’t know she’d wakened. Yet, Zeno always knew. His brooding monologue, that had rumbled through the night inaudibly, now surfaced: “God damn I’m going out to see McManus this morning. Bastard never returned my call yesterday and I think—I’ve been thinking—there is something they know, they’re hiding from us. Some reason they haven’t arrested Kincaid yet.” Or: “I’m going over to the Meyers’ this morning. I think—I’ve been thinking—there is something more Marcy knows, she hasn’t told anyone. But maybe I can prevail upon her to tell me.” Wordless Arlette moved to kiss her husband on his mouth, that had so little to do with her, only with the continual monologue, the argument. A kiss is a way of not-speaking. A way of cowardice. Arlette was thinking of Cressida’s pen-and-ink drawing—Metamorphoses. White humanoid figures that evolved by degrees into abstract shapes and became “black”—then evolved back to their original shapes, and their original “whiteness”—but profoundly altered. Конец ознакомительного фрагмента. Текст предоставлен ООО «ЛитРес». Прочитайте эту книгу целиком, купив полную легальную версию (https://www.litres.ru/joyce-carol-oates-2/carthage/?lfrom=688855901) на ЛитРес. 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