I spin to slip past. And I think: They will tell your mother. And I think: She will know. She will ask why I left, what I needed. Can’t she give me everything I need? But I banish the thought and escape to the hall and out the door.
* * *
—
Down in Happy Camp, the emptiness enfolds me, the sense of abandonment that drifts through the cracked streets. I would have thought that out here I would crave people more, that I would miss them, but that doesn’t seem to be the case. Even the fourteen members of the church felt like a crowd, their wants so heavily imposed on me. With so few people around, it’s like we are volunteering to live inside each other; sometimes we seem to share a head. That is why your mother’s wishes have such a strong effect on me. You felt this way too; you described it to me: I’m easily influenced. I need to be alone to think straight, but even out in the middle of nowhere, I am never alone enough.
I walk past the Forest Service, up toward the high school, toward the police station. You told me it was open only four hours a day, but as I reach the station—a narrow building crowded into the corner of an empty parking lot—I see an officer inside studying his phone. He has peels of dark hair around a crown of pink that glows under the fluorescent light. His gut hangs in the hammock of his belt.
I pause outside the door. This is a big moment, I know. In all of your cases, the police statements define the narrative. They are the frame the rest of the story hangs on. Today, I will spur the police to action. They will start their investigation. They will quiz your parents, your brother, Jed. They might even interview me. Your story will be on record, and I will be that much closer to finding you.
I feel unequal to the task. I know so little of what happened. I wish Jed were here. He could provide details of the day you left, your state of mind. But he left the ranch at five o’clock Friday, roaring past the house like he wanted your mother to know about it. I may not know as much as he does—but I care more. I won’t let you disappear.
A bell clangs over my head as I walk in. The officer doesn’t look up. The station is quiet. It doesn’t look like a station. It looks like the intake office at an airport car rental company.
“Hello?”
The officer pulls away from his phone one body part at a time: eyes, shoulders, chest, chin. And then he looks hard at me, like I am the next in line on a prank that has lasted eons.
“I need to report a missing person.”
His jaw moves once, twitching over imaginary tobacco. His name tag reads Officer Hardy.
“Rachel Bard.”
He doesn’t move. Doesn’t grab a pen to take notes. Doesn’t even blink.
“Don’t you want to know how long she’s been missing for? When she was last seen?” I am ready with these details.
“It’s not a crime to be missing.” He rolls his jaw. “Especially not if you’re a Bard.”
“But—what if she’s been kidnapped? Or murdered?” My voice rises on the word. I sound silly, hysterical. And for a second, I’m the busybody, the crazy old woman. (She has to be old, because to a man, there are only two things a woman can be: young or crazy.) I can see that person in his eyes when he looks at me, and I curl in on myself and I want to go, I want to hide and I want to disappear but I won’t, I can’t, and I insist, “Her mother thinks she’s dead.”
He pinches his pink face, stands back. “Who are you? I know you’re not from around here,” he says like that’s the bigger crime.
“I’m her cousin.” It may not be a good idea to lie to a police officer, but it’s the only way I can express my closeness to you, the authenticity of our connection.
“The Bards don’t have cousins.” He says this gently, to my surprise.
“I’m her best friend.” My neck burns. Am I? I know we haven’t met but I’m the only one, the only one looking for you, the only one who cares. I have even considered that you might have left your MMC Pack with me and searched my own belongings.
He leans on his elbows. “I want you to listen. I don’t know how you know Rachel or if you even know her, but this girl has gone and disappeared about forty-five times. The first time, she was maybe fourteen. We were worried then. But then she kept on going missing. It became something of a local joke. It got so people didn’t even care. Some people just want to be missing. It’s better than being wherever the hell they are.”
I put my hand on the counter. He jumps like I threw my fist. “She didn’t want to be missing. She was terrified of it.” I know you were; we both were. This is why we are obsessed by it, by Murder, Missing, Conspiracy. Because we always knew it could be us. This man is wrong about you. This man can’t understand what only we knew. “You need to open a file. You need to be investigating. I’m telling you, something bad has happened to her. I know.”
Suddenly I’m angry. Because isn’t this just typical police? Isn’t this just the police we know? Again and again. They miss the clues. They come in too late. They wait until the case goes cold, the evidence is compromised and corrupted, then flap around ineffectually, pin the crime on whoever is weak enough not to put up a fight, while we, the people who care, we burn.
He steps back. “You’re new around here, so I’m just gonna let you know, we used to get a lot of noise from that Bard woman.” He flaps his hand. “She used to bother us all day. Thought this whole town was out to get her. Everyone had something against her. Then she went quiet. So we’re just not gonna mess with that.” He puts two hands up.
My thoughts click. “When did she go quiet?”
He wipes the sweat from his pink brow. “I dunno, few weeks ago.”
“But that’s when Rachel went missing! Don’t you see? There might be a connection.” Do I think Addy is involved? I have promised myself not to jump to any conclusions, but Addy is in prime position.
“We don’t investigate connections; we investigate crimes.”
“But what if something did happen?”
“Then it happened. I’m a cop, not a time traveler.”
I shake my head, filled with disgust, your disgust, our disgust. “So you just sit here on your phone while people go missing, get murdered? And you call yourself a cop?”
He covers his ears. “My God, it’s like that woman all over again.” That shuts me up. Once it is clear that I have shut up, he takes his hands off his ears and puts them back on his phone. Finally, he says, “If you can provide me with something concrete, a reason to believe a crime has occurred, something beyond whatever all nefarious ideas you got twitching up in your little brain . . .”
“I’ll find your evidence, and when I do, you’ll be sorry you never listened to me.”