Chapter Nine

NINE

The police came by the next day.

The moaning had started up again the night before, and it seemed more insistent this time. With the moaning—before it gets to screaming—you can swear you hear your name, little whispered commands. Margaret, help me. Margaret, come find me. Margaret, I need you. It’s very disconcerting. You’d think you could tune it out—like being able to sleep in the same bed as somebody who snores, which, incidentally, I had done for more than thirty years with Hal—but there is something in your brain that jolts awake when you hear your name. All that is to say, I did not get a very good night’s sleep, and when the police arrived, I was in no mood.

I worried that Katherine might have been kept awake by the moaning as well, but when I descended the stairs, I found her sitting in the kitchen, seemingly well rested. She was scribbling in the notebook she’d been keeping since she’d arrived, filling it with theories about Hal’s whereabouts. She barely noticed me when I entered.

There was no kettle boiling on the stove. I felt a petty, spoiled frustration over having to make my own tea and reminded myself that at least Katherine would have no reason to think I was constantly turning the stove on and leaving the room. Then I noticed three stacks of plates, usually stored in the cupboard, sitting out on the counter. Uh-oh. Fredricka must have reached the phase of her September shenanigans in which she felt compelled to stack objects. This would become only more of an irritant as the month continued and she switched from plates to furniture.

I tried to covertly move the plates back into the cupboard. “How did you sleep, dear?”

“Pretty good,” Katherine said, not looking up from her notes. “What’s with the plates?” She gestured with her pen.

Couldn’t get anything past Katherine. “Oh, I was cleaning out the cupboards last night. Things get dusty when you don’t use them, you know.” I could hear the speed in my voice. “Anyway, I took them out and cleaned the shelves, but then I was too tired to put the plates back. Lazy of me, I know.”

The clatter of plates returning to the cabinets temporarily overpowered the scratch of Katherine’s pen on paper. “When did you do that?” she asked. “You went to bed before me.”

“Yes. Well. I couldn’t sleep.” That at least was true. I smiled my best trust me smile, just in case Katherine was looking. She was not.

“Sounds rough,” Katherine said to her notebook. “Anyway, the police called. They’ll be by in a few hours to talk to you. So you might want to shower.”

The blood in my bedroom was even more noticeable this morning, not exactly the sight I had been hoping for when I opened my swollen eyes after a few short hours of broken sleep. I wiped the blood away with my nightshirt, but it didn’t do much good. I wondered if I should start keeping bleach or stain remover in my bedroom, at least until Katherine left or the police wouldn’t be coming by anymore. The thought of scrubbing away at a bloody wall—inhaling sharp smells of nickel and bleach—before having even a single sip of tea was not a particularly pleasant one, but sacrifices must be made.

As Katherine promised, two bored-looking police officers arrived within a few hours. Officers Jones and McDouglas. Jones was a stoic middle-aged woman with dark hair and a flat, no-nonsense mouth. Her baggy eyes landed on me and did little wavering from there on out. McDouglas was a less intimidating presence, with a jolly face and a potbelly protruding over his uniform belt. His eyes tended to focus on the house, looking with appreciation at our decor. I offered the officers something to drink. Jones declined but McDouglas accepted a glass of water. I took a glass from the stack that had appeared on the kitchen counter just a few minutes prior to their arrival.

McDouglas waved his hand in front of his face as he walked into the kitchen. “What’s with all the flies?”

Jones sat down with me at the kitchen table, notebook flipped open, while McDouglas ambled about the kitchen. He didn’t appear to be investigating anything in particular, just letting his eyes wander, killing time. Katherine joined us, although her presence was unnecessary.

“Name of the missing person?” Jones asked, pen ready.

“I already told you this,” Katherine said.

“Harold Martin Hartman,” I said. “He goes by Hal.”

“Age?”

“I already told you this too,” Katherine said.

“Fifty-nine,” I said, ignoring Katherine.

“Physical description?” Jones asked, also ignoring Katherine.

“About six feet tall. Lean build, I would say. His hair used to be brown, but it’s been gray for a few years now. He wears it short. No facial hair—could never stand it. Says it itches.”

“Any scars? Birthmarks?”

“A mole on his right shoulder.” There was also a circular scar on his ankle that looked suspiciously like a bite mark, but I decided to omit that one.

“What was he wearing when you last saw him?”

“Jesus, that was over a month ago,” Katherine said. “How the hell is she supposed to remember—”

“He was wearing a dark blue shirt. Chicago Cubs logo. Kind of ratty—he’s had that shirt for years. Blue jeans. He had this brown jacket with him—kind of a bomber style, you know, with the fur around the neck?” I smiled. Hal loved that jacket, loved it enough that it was the only thing he chose to take with him the day he left, aside from the clothes on his back.

Katherine looked at me, shocked.

“Good memory,” McDouglas said from the other side of the kitchen, eyes out the window.

“What kind of car does he drive?” Jones continued. “And if you have the plate number that would be helpful.”

Katherine snorted. Jones’ eyes darted up from her notebook, eyebrow raised in question.

I sighed. “Hal doesn’t drive.”

“Anymore,”Katherine added, eyes on me pointedly.

Jones waited for my explanation.

“I’m afraid my husband used to have a problem with drinking.”

“Used to?” Katherine snorted again.

I ignored her. “Several years back. Anyway, I’m afraid he was, you know, intoxicated behind the wheel. I suppose a few too many times. And?.?.?.” I waved my hand. Catch my drift?

Jones’ lips thinned. She jotted something down in her notebook.

“It makes things easier, anyway,” I said, although no question had been asked. “We just sold the second car. One less expense. You know how much money it takes to maintain a car. Gas, insurance, repairs. We could put that money towards something else.”

“Jesus Christ, Mom.” I heard Katherine’s eyes roll.

Jones wasn’t interested in extra details. “And Hal has been missing since?.?.?.”

“August second. A little over a month ago.”

“And have you had any communication with him since that time?”

“None.”

“Have you tried to contact him?”

I paused. I hadn’t. What would’ve been the point of that, anyway?

Katherine was looking at me like I had just told her I believed in Bigfoot, and, considering all the things I’d seen in this house, I supposed I might. “Mom?”

“Katherine tried to call him several times,” I offered. “She said that the calls always went to voicemail. Then his voicemail was full.”

“You didn’t try to call him at all?” Katherine asked. Jones might have let my inadvertent admission slide, but Katherine wasn’t about to.

“It happens sometimes,” McDouglas said. He peered into the dining room. “I like the color you guys painted the walls in here. What’s the name of it?”

“Tell me what was going on the day he went missing,” Jones said.

I glanced at Katherine. This was the part I had been dreading. “Um, I would really prefer to talk about this without my daughter present.”

“Absolutely not.” Katherine looked like I had just told her where she could shove it.

Jones glanced between the two of us, pen in hand, no help at all.

“Katherine,” I said, “some of this, it’s personal between your father and me.”

“Tough shit,” Katherine said. “I want to know what happened to him, Mom. I want to find him.” And that was that.

I looked back at Jones, who motioned for me to start talking. I sighed. “Hal and I had been having a disagreement.”

“You mean a fight,” Katherine said.

“You can let your mother tell it how she wants,” Jones said.

“She probably meant a fight, though,” Katherine said, arms crossed over her chest, pouting.

“A disagreement,” I said.

“What were you two disagreeing about?” Jones asked.

“Hal wanted to leave,” I said.

“Leave you?”

“No, leave the house. He wanted to move out, wanted us both to move out.” Hal would never have wanted to leave me. Throughout all we had been through together, that was the one thing he had been insistent upon. Neither of us was going anywhere, least of all me. It was endearing. I chose to find it endearing.

“Why did he want to move out?” Jones asked.

“Yeah, why?” McDouglas called out from the foyer, where he was examining the wooden banister. “This house is fantastic. Are these the original hardwood floors?” I hoped McDouglas would keep his ogling limited to the first floor. A trickle of blood had probably already reappeared on the wall above my bed, and I had a feeling it might distract him from his sightseeing.

“He didn’t like it here,” I said. It was the truth—a very abridged version of the truth.

“And you didn’t want to move,” Jones said. It was a statement, not a question.

“Well, no, of course not. This house?.?.?.” I sighed. “Are you a homeowner?” Jones nodded. “Well, you know how hard the whole process is. You find the perfect house, go through all the rigmarole of buying it—the bids, the loan applications. Neither of us really had a permanent home while we were growing up, so, having a home that was ours, that we loved, was important to us. We poured so much of ourselves into this house. We found all this furniture, decorated all these rooms. This house is ours. It is us, and it is so beautiful.” I gestured around at the ornate kitchen cabinets, the perfectly painted walls, the—yes, original—hardwood floors. “This is our home,” I said. This was the truth, unabridged. No pranksters were going to drive me out of my home. Not when everything was survivable.

“Right,” Jones said. “The day he left, was that the first time you two had this?.?.?. disagreement?”

Oh, we had been having escalating versions of this disagreement for months. Eleven months, to be precise, beginning immediately after last September. That had been our third September in the house, and I had believed that we had Septembers handled—or that I did, at least. Sure, we had made some mistakes last September, but mistakes were simply opportunities for learning. We would problem-solve, do even better this year. Hal disagreed. He wanted life to be normal, to be perfect, and he didn’t seem to understand that that wasn’t how life worked. He also seemed to think that we had almost died last September, but he was just being dramatic. We were fine in the end. We learned our lesson. Hal certainly learned, anyway.

“No,” I responded.

“Tell me a bit about what your relationship was like. Before he left.”

To use the word “relationship” seemed overly kind to me. Throughout our years together, Hal and I had waxed and waned in closeness and intimacy, distance and anger. However, towards the end of our time together in the house, Hal and I had existed together in the same way that I existed with Jasper in the upstairs closet or Blythe in the fireplace. Was that a relationship? Perhaps, using the broadest definition possible. Still, we had seen harder times, and the pranksters in the house were good reminders that things could always be worse. Hal had a difficult time seeing that, but I never did.

Katherine was watching me like she would the climax of an action movie, with the leading man dangling by his fingertips off a cliff.

“I suppose it wasn’t very good,” I said.

“What do you mean?” Jones asked.

“Well, when you have a disagreement like that, where no one is willing to compromise, I suppose it is easy for things to not be very good.” I always excelled at compromising. In the face of Hal’s rigid insistence, my strongest asset was my ability to bend. But when it came to this house, the possibility of leaving this place I’d made my home, I wasn’t willing to bend. It was rare for me to set such a firm boundary. Hal didn’t know what to make of it at first. “I suppose it was my fault,” I said quietly. “I was being inflexible.”

Katherine groaned.

“So—frequent disagreements, then?” Jones asked, pen scratching across paper.

“You could say that.” Truthfully, the disagreements—loud, insistent, incessant—had died by early summer. Hal certainly knew how to be a broken record (Katherine came by it honestly, after all), but he also knew a lost cause when he saw one. He realized that, for once, I wasn’t budging. He certainly gave it his all, and there was a desperation in his voice I had never heard before, but by the summer, he had retreated to his office, defeated. Working on a new novel. Allegedly.

“These disagreements.” Jones was looking at me now, her brown eyes intent. McDouglas drifted back into the room and stood somewhere behind me, silent. “Did they ever get physical?”

I felt Katherine’s stare.

“No,”I said quickly.

I felt Katherine’s stare change, pelting the side of my face like sleet.

“Before you moved here,” Jones continued, “what was your relationship like?”

“Oh, it was good,” I said.

Katherine snorted.

“It was,” I said to Katherine. I could have done without the color commentary. “You were away, Katherine.”

“Away at Aunt Noelle’s, you mean?” Katherine aimed this comment like a handgun, barrel pointed at the bull’s-eye.

“No, Katherine. You were away at college. Away at work. Away with Claire.” She flinched at this last comment. Both of us can shoot to kill, Katherine.

Jones’ gaze darted back and forth between us.

“Hal and I had our rough patches, of course,” I explained. “All marriages do. I’m sure you understand.” I glanced down at Jones’ hand. No wedding band. Okay, maybe she didn’t understand. “But we got through it. It made us stronger. And for a while there, things were good between us.”

Things had been good. The third DUI, that was what had changed things. Hal needed to do a little jail time after that one and got his license revoked. The court made him attend counseling, something I hadn’t been able to convince him to do for nearly twenty years, but I didn’t exactly have the threat of incarceration on my side. If he had gotten a fourth DUI, he would’ve been looking at no less than a year behind bars, a prospect that motivated him to take sobriety seriously for a change. It was just counseling for the drinking initially, but he figured out that he liked it and had some things he needed to work through. He started going to AA meetings, got a sponsor, actually started earning chips beyond that twenty-four-hour coin. In his counseling, he learned skills to keep calm and actually used them. We started talking again, laughing. He reminded me of the slant-grinned kid, skinny and bursting with energy, I had met when I was younger. I didn’t have to remember the rules anymore, although I still followed a few of them. Muscle memory.

All that had happened during Katherine’s senior year of high school, and she had returned home from Noelle’s house for at least part of it, so I knew she was a witness. She ought to have remembered, but she had likely not been paying attention. She had left Noelle’s begrudgingly and had already moved away to college in her mind, months before she even graduated from high school. Hal once proudly showed her his six-month chip, and she looked at him like he’d told her he had been abducted by aliens. Katherine was not as ready a believer as I was, and was far less keen to forgive.

We had six years of bliss after Hal got sober. Katherine didn’t come home very often, and when she did make brief visits, she didn’t seem to see what we saw. Still, for those six years, we were happy. Everything was as it should have been from the beginning.

Then we bought the house.

I suppose I should be thankful. Not everyone gets six years of happiness.

“And what was his mood like the day he went missing?” Jones asked. “Was he angry?”

In my mind, I pictured Hal, with his faded Cubs shirt thrown on, brown jacket tucked under his arm, not a single bag packed. The sound of the cab idling in the driveway as we stood in the doorway. Please, he said. Please come with me.

“No, he wasn’t angry,” I said, a burning in the back of my throat turning my voice thick.

Hal had clutched at my hands, his face cracking. No one deserves to live like this, he said.

I swallowed the burning as best I could. “He was sad.”

My words lingered in the air for a moment before Jones cleared her throat, relieving me of the necessity to elaborate. “And can you think of anywhere he might have gone? Any friends in the area? Family?”

“No, no family to speak of.” Parents—dead. Brother—estranged. “No friends either. Hal and I were homebodies, I suppose.” A habit we had picked up out of necessity—or, rather, Hal’s insistence—back before the six years of bliss. After that, we hadn’t so much needed the habit anymore but couldn’t seem to shake it.

“Mom thinks he might have gone to a hotel,” Katherine offered.

“At least at first,” I said. “I don’t know what he might’ve done after that.”

“Do you have access to his financial records?” Jones asked. “Credit cards, things like that? Do you share an account?”

“Oh, shit, that’s a good idea,” Katherine said, already typing, phone in hand.

“I—,” I said.

“It might let us know where he’s been,” Jones explained.

“We do share an account—”

Katherine already had the website pulled up on her phone and had managed to correctly guess our username. “Mom, what’s your password?”

“Katherine,” I hissed, “financial records are private.”

“Is it Bilboa123?” she asked. “With a capital B?”

I remained silent.

“The password I made when I set up your email before I left for college?” she asked. “That’s what it is, isn’t it?” She typed it in. “Jesus, Mom, you need to update your passwords.”

“Language.” I sighed.

“Okay, okay.” Katherine was giddy. “Five days ago, we have a purchase of eighty-seven dollars at the Save Mart.”

“That was me,” I said. “Groceries.”

“We also have a purchase of twenty-seven dollars, same day?.?.?.”

“Also me,” I said. “Gas.”

“We don’t really need to—,” Jones started, but Katherine was already going, scrolling excitedly on her phone.

“Utility bill, another utility bill. Wow, Mom—it is really expensive to heat this place. Don’t you have fireplaces? You could probably save— Wait. Here’s something from the night he went missing. An ATM withdrawal. For?.?.?. a lot of money.”

She lifted the phone and showed it to Jones. Jones’ eyebrows rose. I saw Jones’ gaze dart over my shoulder. I didn’t need to see McDouglas’ face to know that the two had shared a look.

Katherine’s shoulders slumped. She scrolled back through the remaining charges. “And the rest of these are all your purchases, Mom. I guess he paid cash from this point on.”

“Sometimes, when people leave, they expect to get frozen out of shared accounts,” Jones explained, her face full of infuriating sympathy. “Especially when there have been?.?.?. disagreements.”

“They make a big cash withdrawal right away, expecting it to be the last one they can get for a while,” McDouglas said behind me. “I’m sorry, ma’am. Sometimes people do nasty things when they leave their homes.”

I was about to tell him that I wasn’t concerned in the least about what had compelled Hal to withdraw the money, when a thought forced its way into my mind—Needs must when the devil drives—so clearly that I could have sworn it was Fredricka speaking. It was her voice, and it even sounded louder in my right ear than in my left, as if she were standing in the corner of the room and had been this whole time. Before I could stop myself, I whirled my head around. Get the hell out of here, Fredricka. Of course Fredricka wasn’t there. It was just Katherine and me and the police officers, who were now sharing a different kind of look.

“What the hell are you doing, Mom?” Katherine asked.

“I?.?.?.” I cursed myself as I turned to face forward once again. “I thought I heard something.”

Jones kept her eyes on me and smiled in a way I’m sure she thought was reassuring. I saw her pen jerk almost imperceptibly as she made a notation in her notebook, a little scribble that she didn’t want me to notice.

The officers had a few more questions for me, none particularly noteworthy. I was shaken by what I thought might have been a Fredricka sighting, and my answers sounded disjointed and off. The officers seemed to notice and kept their eyes on me even as they prepared to leave.

“Thank you for taking the time to speak with us, Mrs. Hartman,” Jones said.

“We’ll let you know if we find anything,” McDouglas said, oblivious to the fact that he had used the word “if.”

“I’ll walk you guys out,” Katherine said, a clear ploy to get some time with the officers without my presence.

As soon as the front door closed, I drifted after them, my footsteps silent against the floor. I pressed my ear to the door.

“I understand, ma’am,” I heard a male voice say. McDouglas. “But I’m afraid there isn’t a lot we can do here.”

“You can find him,” I heard Katherine insist. “You have information to go on. You know he couldn’t have gotten far. He doesn’t have a car or a license.”

“We’ll do what we can.” A female voice. Jones. “But your father is an adult, and if he wanted to leave, he has the right to do so.”

“He didn’t want to leave.” The officers didn’t know it because they hadn’t raised her, but Katherine was barreling towards a tantrum.

“According to your mother, he did,” Jones said. “They had been fighting about that very topic: your father wanting to leave. And then he left. Voluntarily, it would seem.”

“But?.?.?.”

“It sounds like your parents had some difficulties in their relationship,” Jones said. “And from what I can tell, it sounds like you know that too.”

“They did, but—”

“That can be a hard reality to face.” McDouglas now. He must have been assigned the role of Good Cop. “I know I always hated seeing my parents fight when I was younger. But sometimes people are just better off apart than they are together.” If McDouglas had raised Katherine, he would have known that this Good Cop act wouldn’t work on her.

“It isn’t a matter of me hating to see them fight,” Katherine spat. “I’ve seen them fight. A lot.”

Thanks for that, Katherine.

“Their relationship was shit,” Katherine said. “And I swear to Christ, I wished he’d leave. I even prayed for him to leave, which ought to tell you something.”

“Ma’am—”

“But he never left,” she continued. “He never did. Not once, not even for a day. He may have been a piece of shit, but he was goddamn loyal.”

“Even the most committed relationships reach their breaking point.” Jones now, voice soft to counteract Katherine’s increasing volume.

“And without any communication?” Katherine was not to be dissuaded. “Just dropping off the face of the earth like that?”

“Sometimes people who leave don’t want to be found,” Jones said. “They skip town. They ditch their cell phones. They pay for everything in cash.” This last comment was pointed.

“But”—Katherine was pleading—“no communication with me?”

“You told us earlier that you hadn’t had much communication with your father in general before he went missing,” McDouglas said.

“You said that your relationship with him was poor.” Jones now, apparently ready to remember things Katherine had already told her.

“Yes, but—”

“Is it possible”—Jones’ voice was even more pointed now—“that he is not interested in reaching out to you, given how little you two communicated previously?”

“You’re not listening to me.” Katherine’s voice was wet. Even through the closed door, I could practically see her foot stomp. “Something is wrong.”

“We understand how upsetting this is,” Jones said.

“It’s difficult to have a loved one leave and not know where they went,” McDouglas said.

“We’ll do our best to look into it as much as we can.” Jones.

“We just don’t want you to get your hopes up.” McDouglas.

“Do us a favor and look after your mother.” Jones, her voice quieter as she walked away.

“She seems like she might not be doing very well.” McDouglas, even farther away.

“We’ll call you if we get any leads.” Jones, her voice tiny now.

Through the door, I could hear Katherine’s deep, forceful breaths. She was managing to remain calm—perhaps the therapy was paying off after all—but I could still hear all the tells of a storm rapidly approaching.

I backed away from the front door, thinking it best to keep my distance until she wore herself out. When I turned around, there was Angelica, pale skin and devastated face, standing by the basement door. She lifted her knobby arm and pointed at the basement.

Shit.