Chapter 15

15

The jump from someone who can't be found to someone who is missing is long and short at the same time, because nothing has changed except your perception of the distance.

April finished her tour and joined us. We sat, the four of us, trying to make sense of what kind of a situation we had here. Liani seemed calmer now that she knew Dr. Henson wasn't at the bottom of the lagoon. The problem was, she also wasn't on its surface. Or in any room or building I looked in. Her texts went unread and calls went to voice mail.

"What should we do?" Tom asked. "She could have just gone off on the board. She could have gone to town."

"She told me she doesn't like going out in the open water," Liani said. "But she's gone, and the board is gone. And the longer we wait..."

Liani stood with her hands on her hips, staring at the grass below her feet. I looked out at the St. Lawrence. It was so wide and strong. So much water, dotted with boats and Jet Skis and islands.

"Wouldn't someone have seen her?" I asked.

"Maybe," Tom said. "There's no way of knowing."

April now had a frightened, quivering bunny energy as she played with the zipper of her fleece.

"We should check the house again," she said. "She has to be in there somewhere. You probably just missed her. We'll all look at the same time. Should we put a hold on tours?"

Holding the tours meant something was wrong. We looked at each other. Was something wrong? The level of wrong that we needed to put a halt to a day's worth of admissions?

"I can look again with Riki," I said. "That's two of us. You and Van can do the tours."

"I'm going to close the lagoon for swimming," Liani said, "and I'll take the Jet Ski and have a look around the island and out on the water. We meet back here in an hour. If we haven't found her, we call the police."

Makoto was still sitting in the window seat. She had stretched out a bit with her laptop. I ran around to another entrance to avoid her and went upstairs using the back staircase, taking the stone steps two at a time.

"What is going on?" Van said. "And who is that person who's been sitting in the hall all morning? Every time I walk past she looks like she wants to jump on my back."

"That's the grad student from Yale who's here to see Dr. Henson."

"You still can't find her? Maybe she went to town?"

"And missed her appointment?"

Van cocked his hip against the wall and chewed pensively at the antenna of his walkie-talkie.

"That doesn't sound like our Belinda," he said. "Not that I know her that well, but she doesn't seem like someone who misses appointments with people from Yale."

He didn't sound convinced.

"I'm going to search the house one more time," I said. "But keep an eye out?"

I returned to the gift shop, where Riki was reading at the counter.

"What's wrong with you?" she asked as I rushed in.

"Dr. Henson is missing," I said. " Missing -missing. Liani and Tom even swam the lagoon looking for her, and the paddleboard is gone. Liani's out there now, checking the waters around the island. We may have to call the cops. So we need to do one last serious look around the house. I need your help."

"Okay," she said, calling to two women who were noodling by the wind chimes. "Store's closed."

We started in the basement, going through every bathroom and shower stall. We looked in all the rooms with mechanical equipment, the storage rooms.

"You said the paddleboard is gone?" Riki asked, peering into the pool. "I don't think she took the board. This isn't the part of the river for that. We're right on the channel."

"Maybe she doesn't know that?"

"She's from here. She knows that."

April came down the steps and joined us, shyly coming into the conversation.

"Nothing?" she asked.

I shook my head.

"Maybe we check the boathouse again? She has to be somewhere."

I hadn't gone in the boathouse very often, not since Tom had shown me the Jet Ski. The boats it had been built to house were in the local boat museum. It was like a massive shed with a floor made of wood and water. The Jet Ski was still gone, so Liani wasn't back yet. April walked up and down the docks of the three slips, then she got down on her stomach and craned her neck to peer underneath.

"I doubt she's under the dock," Riki said, leaning against the post.

"But we should check under," April said. "Properly."

"I'm not getting in there. It's dark and weird under the building. There's all kinds of crap down there."

"I'll do it." April yanked off her shorts, fleece, and her polo shirt, so she was down to a sports bra. I turned demurely, but April wore very practical underwear—pink hip-huggers and a white sports bra, so it was basically a bathing suit. (Don't get me wrong—I have no objection to cute girls in their underwear, but there is a time and a place, and April was doing it for safety reasons. I follow a gentlewomanly code.) She jumped into the water feetfirst, bobbing, then dipping under the surface and slipping beneath the dock.

"She's not under the dock," Riki said.

I agreed this was probably true, but... where the hell was she?

"So she never does this, right? Just go to town without saying?"

"I have no idea." Riki examined her black nail polish on her right hand, feeling out the middle nail for a possible chip. "Maybe someone came and picked her up and she forgot her appointment."

The shade of the boathouse suited Riki, the way the light slanted through the openings of the slips, partially honeycombed by the netting that kept other boats out. The deep-blue streak in her hair was more pronounced, a bolt through the smooth black. And the way she cut it—so blunt, to her shoulders, sharp bangs, ever so slightly pointed at the center of her forehead, marking an arrow down past her nose, to her lips. She wore dark-blue lipstick that had worn off a bit. She reminded me of the hydrangeas that surrounded the house—at twilight, their purples and blues turned the color of electric smoke.

She looked up. I had been staring too long, and I almost turned away, but she was staring straight back at me, a smile slowly twisting on those blue lips. So I admit I didn't notice the banging from under my feet for a moment.

"Shit," Riki said. She unzipped her hoodie and dropped it, then hit the water headfirst. April bobbed up to the surface, heaving and shuddering, gagging up water.

"I'm okay, I'm okay..." she said in a not-okay voice.

The whole thing happened so fast that the shot of adrenaline hit me a moment late, and I had to recover my senses. Riki went to April and nudged her over to the ladder on the side, then supported her as she climbed up. April had a long slice down her right thigh and arm, running watery blood down her body. I reached for her wet hands and helped get her onto the dock, Riki coming up behind, her T-shirt and shorts sopping wet, her hair cemented down to her head.

"I told you," Riki said, stepping onto the dock.

April shivered and looked down at her arm and leg.

"I know, I know... I had to ch-ch-check. She's not... I got my foot stuck in the net-t-ting."

Riki stomped over to the first aid kit on the wall and returned, opening it on the floor, dabbing the long scrape with gauze.

"It's not too deep," she said. "Here."

She passed an antiseptic wipe so that April could clean the blood from her arm. April was bandaging her leg as Liani steered the Jet Ski into the open slip and cut the engine.

"What happened?" she asked. "Are you okay?"

"She looked under the dock," Riki said.

Liani came over to have a look at April, who was now putting on her fleece in an embarrassed fashion, hugging her arms into her body.

"I'm fine," she said. "I got my foot caught. I..."

She reached for her neck.

"My necklace."

She looked back at the water, seemingly considering another dive to find her missing necklace, but Riki cut that off.

"Don't," she said. "Are you kidding?"

"My grandma gave me that."

"Fuck's sake, April, you just got stuck under there."

"Did you see her?" I asked Liani.

Liani shook her head grimly.

"You didn't either?"

"No."

"Then it's time to call the cops," she said, pulling out her phone.

Again, I know this wasn't the time or the place, but I had to note that seeing Riki jump in like that had been absolutely hot as hell, and I would dwell on it for a long time.

The police boat came in from town about fifteen minutes later carrying two officers. They pulled up on the main dock, where the tourist boats came in. I guess someone had made the call to pull the tours, because the Uncle Jim boat turned before it reached us, leaving us to talk to the cops.

"So what's going on here, Liani?" one of the officers asked. "You can't find Belinda Henson?"

There was a familiarity there. Of course—they all must have known each other, small town, and Chris's death only months before.

"When was the last time you saw her?" the officer asked.

"Last night?" Tom said. "When we were swimming. We were all in the water and she came down to tell us she had a grad student coming today."

"What time was this?"

"It was right before eight, I think?" April said.

"It was," Riki said. "I came back in around eight and I saw her downstairs."

"So you all saw her around eight last night. After that?"

General shaking of heads.

"And what about this morning?"

"I know she was doing yoga," I said. "Someone came to meet with her, so I looked around the house. I went up to the top balcony..." I indicated the high balcony. "... where she does yoga every morning. I saw a spot where her mat had been. It must have rained. There was a clear mark that her mat had been there."

"But you didn't see her."

"No," I said.

"What time was this?"

"Right after the first boat came. Ten?"

"So the final time you all actually saw her was last night. How did she seem?"

I didn't know Dr. Henson well enough to know how she seemed. She seemed like a person walking by with a phone.

"Normal," Tom said. "Busy."

"Our paddleboard is gone from the shed," Liani cut in.

"What does it look like?"

"It's purple," Liani said. "Blue and purple. It has a wave pattern on it."

"And there's nowhere else it's stored?"

"It's been in there every time I've been in there," Liani said. "And I go in there at some point every day."

"All right," the officer said. "Take me up to her room."

Her gaze landed on me, so it seemed like I would be guiding this tour.

The sun was lower in the sky than when I had been in Dr. Henson's room that morning. It cut sharply through the windows, slashing the green bedspread and ricocheting off the mirror.

The officer made a note of all the things I had also noticed: the walkie-talkie on the charger, the phone being gone. But her search was more intrusive than mine. She opened drawers and shuffled through the contents. She went into the closet, had a look under the bed.

"Here's something," she said as she looked in the bedside drawer. "Her keys. She didn't take these with her."

She considered the bed for a long moment, then the desk.

"You didn't find anything in here this morning?" she said. "No messages? No notes?"

It took me a moment to realize what this question implied.

Within a half hour, a search boat with two divers was at the edge of the lagoon in the open part of the water. A glass-bottom-boat operator was recruited to circle the island. Out of a desire to do something useful, we cooked up a few days' worth of our food trays and brought them outside to feed the police officers and various other people who had come to assist in some way. We milled around as the police went through the house again. They walked from floor to floor, as we had, but came up with nothing. They were out on the lawn standing around when there was a sudden burst of activity.

"Something's up," Van said as the police moved down the lawn away from us and conferred. They talked together, looked up at us, talked again.

"That doesn't look good," Liani added.

The police officer I'd taken to Dr. Henson's room strode back up the lawn toward us, her face grave.

"What's going on?" Tom asked. He had that professional tone in his voice, the one that sounded like this whole weird event would mess up his reelection campaign.

"A boater found a paddleboard floating near Mulligan Island. They thought it must have fallen off another boat, but just in case, they turned it in this afternoon. Does the one here look like this?"

She held up her phone, which displayed a picture of a purple paddleboard with a wave pattern.

"That's it," Liani said. "Or one just like it."

It was in hearing those words that it dawned on me—and maybe some of the others, because I saw everyone exchange a look. Somewhere, in that expanse of dark water, was Dr. Henson, and sometimes people don't come back from that dark water.