What else didn’t I know about my husband?
I returned to the list of banking transactions and switched my focus to the credits. Using the calculator on my phone, I added up Sam’s paychecks for the past two months. I didn’t know what he made down to the dollar, but the total was lower than I expected. I went back six months and compared those totals to the current ones. The current deposits were significantly lower. Two weeks before, there had been no deposit at all.
I struggled to decipher what it all meant. Had Sam been getting cash back from his paychecks, squirreling it away until he could escape? Had he gotten a cut in pay he hadn’t told me about? He certainly hadn’t told me about the missed house payment, so what else could he be hiding?
Fury surged, bitter and sharp. What the hell, Sam?
I swept the framed picture of Sam and the kids from the shelf so that it fell facedown on the desk, that stupid desk, painted that shade of green because Sam said it matched my eyes. I expected the glass to shatter, but it remained intact, which felt like a betrayal. I yanked open a drawer and lobbed the photo inside. This time, the glass spiderwebbed.
Perversely satisfied, I slammed the drawer. Then I opened it and slammed it again, harder. The second impact loosened the brushed-nickel knob, so that it bobbled when I slammed the drawer a third time.
Where are you, Sam? Why aren’t you here?
Angry tears threatened, but I gritted my teeth against them. It wasn’t just Sam. It was all of it. The attack on the trail. My patient’s near-fatal poisoning. Finding Audrey with women I didn’t know. My father. Myself.
Then there was Carver Sweet, a man who had killed his wife and knew where we lived.
I waited until my hands stopped shaking before turning my attention back to the computer. My fingers awkward on the keyboard now, it took a couple of tries to correctly type Sam’s password. He used the same password for all of his social media accounts, for everything really, so it was easy enough to check all the sites he frequented. Or at least the ones I knew about. Then I pulled his laptop from the messenger bag he kept stashed beneath the desk and checked that. I found no surprises. Sam had always been concerned about setting a good example for his students, and he was careful about what he posted.
With Sam gone less than a day, I felt like a voyeur. A stalker. I considered posting a plea for information on my own social media accounts. Have you seen my husband? But such a plea felt premature.
Should I call Sam’s out-of-state relatives? The media? Should I hire a private investigator?
Every option I considered seemed more pointless than the last, primarily because I avoided the more difficult ones.
Sam could be in jail.
He could be in the hospital.
He could be . . .
I shook that last thought off and navigated to a database of local inmates. When that got no hits, I called hospitals, again. Finally, reluctantly, I called the coroner. Waited five minutes while records were checked. But they had not accepted the bodies of any unidentified males.
I moved on to our family’s mobile phone records. I clicked on Sam’s number, looking first at his calls, then his texts. I scrutinized most carefully the calls that were made when I wasn’t home.
I inhaled sharply. Two numbers stood out: One I recognized, one I didn’t.
The number I knew stood out because of the timing. Sam had texted only two numbers since his disappearance: mine and, apparently, Ozzy’s. Sam’s friend had lied to me.
The second number, the one I didn’t recognize, appeared three times on the day of Sam’s disappearance. None of the calls lasted longer than five minutes. One of those came in the morning before, when Sam had excused himself to take that call. Another came only minutes before we spoke that final time.
Someone knocked, loudly, and I tensed. On the doorstep stood Mr. Baldovino, a shovel in one hand and a DVD tucked under his arm. He pulled it out and thrust it at me. “Here,” he said.
When he saw me noticing the shovel, he added, “It’s best to dig it out now since it’s dormant.”
It took me a second to realize he was talking about the Japanese maple I had promised him. I killed any plant I touched, but Sam loved to garden. Out of habit, I almost offered Sam’s help. Then I remembered. I leaned in to the door frame for support.
“Thank you,” I said as I took the DVD.
He grunted. “I don’t like being lied to,” he said. I was about to ask what he meant when he added, “There’s no hanging basket.”
Of course he had watched it.
“So,” he asked, motioning to the DVD. “Who’s the man taking your husband’s car?”
When I closed the door, Mr. Baldovino still stood there, but I didn’t have the energy to answer his question. Alone again, the need for pretense gone, I slipped to the floor before my buckling knees could give way. Sunlight puddled in front of me, but I sat in shadow, the DVD in my hand. I felt as if I had been hollowed then refilled with an oily, sour blackness.
It had been easier to believe in an affair, and that Sam had left voluntarily, and I realized now that was why I hadn’t entirely discounted that theory. Rather, I had clung to it, the idea a raft in a vast and merciless ocean.
I stared at the DVD I held and told myself Mr. Baldovino was elderly, his perpetual squint proof of failing eyesight he was too proud to admit. Surveillance footage could be grainy, or so I had heard. I had never had the need to review any myself. The man my neighbor thought was someone else could indeed be Sam, caught at an angle that made him appear taller or shorter, thicker or thinner, or in some other way unfamiliar.
Even as I placated myself with this, I knew I couldn’t afford to. I needed to let go of the raft and see where this ocean carried me, even if I doubted my capacity to survive it.
The DVD clutched in one white-knuckled hand, I crossed the room to the DVD player. I brushed off the layer of dust—other than home movies, we never used the machine anymore—and slid in the DVD. I sat cross-legged in front of the TV, less than two feet from the screen, the remote cradled in my lap. The player started automatically.
The footage was sharper than I had imagined it would be. Dread carved out a space between my shoulders. The picture was crisp enough that the slim hope I had harbored that Mr. Baldovino hadn’t recognized Sam, even from across the street, disintegrated instantly.
I fast-forwarded the footage to the moments before I had returned home from the clinic. I told myself there might exist a clue visible as Sam and Audrey left the house—perhaps he was carrying a bag, or the mystery woman followed. But in truth, I just needed to see him again.
When I did, my heart broke. The way he moved—hoisting Audrey over his shoulder, his long legs skipping a step on the front porch, placing our daughter on the sidewalk with an exaggerated twirl—was distinctly Sam. Lean, athletic, relaxed. Even now, under these circumstances, my heart raced for reasons other than worry.
I imagined I could hear Audrey giggling and see Sam’s smirk. But I couldn’t. They were shapes and shadows and light and life, and then they were gone.
I skipped backward on the DVD and watched it again. By the third viewing, the pair blurred, fusing into a single entity joined by my unshed tears.
I focused on my breathing as I fast-forwarded past my own arrival home, then my hurried departure later. I had been frantic, but also oblivious, my world still intact.