Dangerous Women

  She smiled when she opened the door, the security chain across her forehead.

  He held up his pipe wrench.

  “You’re just in time,” she said, pointing to the radiator.

  No one ever thinks anything will ever happen to their baby girl. That’s what Lorie kept saying. She’d been saying that to reporters, the police, for every day of the three weeks since it happened.

  He watched her with the detectives. It was just like on TV except nothing like on TV. He wondered why nothing was ever like you thought it would be and then he realized it was because you never thought this would be you.

  She couldn’t sit still, her fingers twirling through the edges of her hair. Sometimes, at a traffic signal, she would pull nail scissors from her purse and trim the split ends. When the car began moving, she would wave her hand out the window, scattering the clippings into the wind.

  It was the kind of careless, odd thing that made her so different from any girl he ever knew. Especially that she would do it front of him.

  He was surprised how much he had liked it.

  But now all of it seemed different and he could see the detectives watching her, looking at her like she was a girl in a short skirt, twirling on a bar stool and tossing her hair at men.

  “We’re gonna need you to start from the beginning again,” the male one said, and that part was like on TV. “Everything you remember.”

  “She’s gone over it so many times,” he said, putting his hand over hers and looking at the detective wearily.

  “I meant you, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, looking at him. “Just you.”

  They took Lorie to the outer office and he could see her through the window, pouring long gulps of creamer into her coffee, licking her lips.

  He knew how that looked too. The newspapers had just run a picture of her at a smoothie place. The caption was “What about Shelby?” They must have taken it through the front window. She was ordering something at the counter, and she was smiling. They always got her when she was smiling. They didn’t understand that she smiled when she was sad. Sometimes she cried when she was happy, like at their wedding, when she cried all day, her face pink and gleaming, shuddering against his chest.

  I never thought you would, she had said. I never thought I would. That any of this could happen.

  He didn’t know what she meant, but he loved feeling her huddled against him, her hips grinding against him like they did when she couldn’t hold herself together and seemed to be holding on to him to keep from flying off the earth itself.

  “So, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you came home from work and there was no one home?”

  “Right,” he said. “Call me Tom.”

  “Tom,” the detective started again, but the name seemed to fumble in his mouth like he’d rather not say it. Last week he’d called him Tom. “Was it unusual to find them gone at that time of day?”

  “No,” he said. “She liked to keep busy.”

  It was true, because Lorie never stayed put and sometimes would strap Shelby into the car seat and drive for hours, putting 100 or 200 miles on the car.

  She would take her to Mineral Pointe and take photos of them in front of the water. He would get them on his phone at work and they always made him grin. He liked how she was never one of these women who stayed at home and watched court shows or the shopping channels.

  She worked twenty-five hours a week at the Y while his mother stayed with Shelby. Every morning, she ran five miles, putting Shelby in the jogging stroller. She made dinner every night and sometimes even mowed the lawn when he was too busy. She never ever stopped moving.

  This is what the newspapers and the TV people loved. They loved to take pictures of her jogging in her short shorts and talking on the phone in her car and looking at fashion magazines in line at the grocery store.

  “What about Shelby?” the captions always read.

  They never understood her at all. He was the only one.

  “So,” the detective asked him, rousing from his thoughts, “what did you do when you found the house empty?”

  “I called her cell.” He had. She hadn’t answered, but that wasn’t unusual either. He didn’t bother to tell them that. That he’d called four or five times and the phone went straight to voice mail and it wasn’t until the last time she picked up.

  Her voice had been strange, small, like she might be in the doctor’s office, or the ladies’ room. Like she was trying to make herself quiet and small.

  “Lorie? Are you okay? Where are you guys?”

  There had been a long pause and the thought came that she had crashed the car. For a crazy second he thought she might be in the hospital, both of them broken and battered. Lorie was a careless driver, always sending him texts from the car. Bad pictures came into his head. He’d dated a girl once who had a baby shoe that hung on her rearview mirror. She said it was to remind her to drive carefully, all the time. No one ever told you that after you were sixteen.

  “Lorie, just tell me.” He had tried to make his voice firm but kind.

  “Something happened.”

  “Lorie,” he tried again, like after a fight with her brother or her boss, “just take a breath and tell me.”

  “Where did she go?” her voice came. “And how is she going to find me? She’s a little girl. She doesn’t know anything. They should put dog tags on them like they did when we were kids, remember that?”

  He didn’t remember that at all, and there was a whirr in his head that was making it hard for him to hear.

  “Lorie, you need to tell me what’s going on.”

  So she did.

  She said she’d been driving around all morning, looking at lawn mowers she’d found for sale on Craigslist. She was tired, decided to stop for coffee at the expensive place.

  She saw the woman there all the time. They talked online about how expensive the coffee was but how they couldn’t help it. And what was an Americano, anyway? And, yeah, they talked about their kids. She was pretty sure the woman said she had kids. Two, she thought. And it was only going to be two minutes, five at the most.

  “What was going to be five minutes?” he had asked her.

  “I don’t know how it happened,” she said, “but I spilled my coffee, and it was everywhere. All over my new white coat. The one you got me for Christmas.”

  He had remembered her opening the box, tissue paper flying. She had said he was the only person who’d ever bought her clothes that came in boxes, with tissue paper in gold seals.

  She’d spun around in the coat and said, Oh, how it sparkles.

  Crawling onto his lap, she’d smiled and said only a man would give the mother of a toddler a white coat.

  “The coat was soaking,” she said now. “I asked the woman if she could watch Shelby while I was in the restroom. It took a little while because I had to get the key. One of those heavy keys they give you.”

  When she came out of the restroom, the woman was gone, and so was Shelby.

  He didn’t remember ever feeling the story didn’t make sense. It was what happened. It was what happened to them, and it was part of the whole impossible run of events that led to this. That led to Shelby being gone and no one knowing where.

  But it seemed clear almost from the very start that the police didn’t feel they were getting all the information, or that the information made sense.

  “They don’t like me,” Lorie said. And he told her that wasn’t true and had nothing to do with anything anyway, but maybe it did.

  He wished they could have seen Lorie when she had pushed through the front door that day, her purse unzipped, her white coat still damp from the spilled coffee, her mouth open so wide, all he could see was the red inside her, raw and torn.

  Hours later, their family around them, her body shuddering against him as her brother talked endlessly about Amber Alerts and Megan’s Law and his criminal justice class and his cop buddies from the gym, he felt her pressing into him and saw th
e feathery curl tucked in her sweater collar, a strand of Shelby’s angel-white hair.

  By the end of the second week, the police hadn’t found anything, or if they did they weren’t telling. Something seemed to have shifted, or gotten worse.

  “Anybody would do it,” Lorie said. “People do it all the time.”

  He watched the detective watch her. This was the woman detective, the one with the severe ponytail who was always squinting at Lorie.

  “Do what?” the woman detective asked.

  “Ask someone to watch their kid, for just a minute,” Lorie said, her back stiffening. “Not a guy. I wouldn’t have left her with a man. I wouldn’t have left her with some homeless woman waving a hairbrush at me. This was a woman I saw in there every day.”

  “Named?” They had asked her for the woman’s name many times. They knew she didn’t know it.

  Lorie looked at the detective, and he could see those faint blue veins showing under her eyes. He wanted to put his arm around her, to make her feel him there, to calm her. But before he could do anything, she started talking again.

  “Mrs. Caterpillar,” she said, throwing her hands in the air. “Mrs. Linguini. Madame Lafarge.”

  The detective stared at her, not saying anything.

  “Let’s try looking her up on the Internet,” Lorie said, her chin jutting and a kind of hard glint to her eyes. All the meds and the odd hours they were keeping, all the sleeping pills and sedatives and Lorie walking through the house all night, talking about nothing but afraid to lie still.

  “Lorie,” he said. “Don’t—”

  “Everything always happens to me,” she said, her voice suddenly soft and strangely liquid, her body sinking. “It’s so unfair.”

  He could see it happening, her limbs going limp, and he made a grab for her.

  She nearly slipped from him, her eyes rolling back in her head.

  “She’s fainting,” he said, grabbing her, her arms cold like frozen pipes. “Get someone.”

  The detective was watching.

  “I can’t talk about it because I’m still coping with it,” Lorie told the reporters who were waiting outside the police station. “It’s too hard to talk about.”

  He held her arm tightly and tried to move her through the crowd, bunched so tightly, like the knot in his throat.

  “Is it true you’re hiring at attorney?” one of the reporters asked.

  Lorie looked at them. He could see her mouth open and there was no time to stop her.

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” she said, a hapless grin on her face. As if she had knocked someone’s grocery cart with her own.

  He looked at her. He knew what she meant—she meant leaving Shelby for that moment, that scattered moment. But he also knew how it sounded, and how she looked, that panicky smile she couldn’t stop.

  That was the only time he let her speak to reporters.

  Later, at home, she saw herself on the nightly news

  Walking slowly to the TV, she kneeled in front of it, her jeans skidding on the carpet, and did the oddest thing.

  She put her arms around it, like it was a teddy bear, a child.

  “Where is she?” she whispered. “Where is she?”

  And he wished the reporters could see this, the mystifying way grief was settling into her like a fever.

  But he was also glad they couldn’t.

  It was the middle of the night, close to dawn, and she wasn’t next to him.

  He looked all over the house, his chest pounding. He thought he must be dreaming, calling out her name, both their names.

  He found her in the backyard, a lithe shadow in the middle of the yard.

  She was sitting on the grass, her phone lighting her face.

  “I feel closer to her out here,” she said. “I found this.”

  He could barely see, but moving closer saw the smallest of earrings, an enamel butterfly, caught between her fingers.

  They had had a big fight when she came home with Shelby, her ears pierced, thick gold posts plugged in such tiny lobes. Her ears red, her face red, her eyes soft with tears.

  “Where did she go, babe?” Lorie said to him now. “Where did she go?”

  He was soaked with sweat and was pulling his T-shirt from his chest.

  “Look, Mr. Ferguson,” the detective said, “you’ve cooperated with us fully. I get that. But understand our position. No one can confirm her story. The employee who saw your wife spill her coffee remembers seeing her leave with Shelby. She doesn’t remember another woman at all.”

  “How many people were in there? Did you talk to all of them?”

  “There’s something else too, Mr. Ferguson.”

  “What?”

  “One of the other employees said Lorie was really mad about the coffee spill. She told Shelby it was her fault. That everything was her fault. And that Lorie then grabbed your daughter by the arm and shook her.”

  “That’s not true,” he said. He’d never seen Lorie touch Shelby roughly. Sometimes it seemed she barely knew she was there.

  “Mr. Ferguson, I need to ask you: Has your wife had a history of emotional problems?”

  “What kind of question is that?”

  “It’s a standard question in cases like this,” the detective said. “And we’ve had some reports.”

  “Are you talking about the local news?”

  “No, Mr. Ferguson. We don’t collect evidence from TV.”

  “Collecting evidence? What kind of evidence would you need to collect about Lorie? It’s Shelby who’s missing. Aren’t you—”

  “Mr. Ferguson, did you know your wife spent three hours at Your Place Lounge on Charlevoix yesterday afternoon?”

  “Are you following her?”

  “Several patrons and one of the bartenders contacted us. They were concerned.”

  “Concerned? Is that what they were?” His head was throbbing.

  “Shouldn’t they be concerned, Mr. Ferguson? This is a woman whose baby is missing.”

  “If they were so concerned, why didn’t they call me?”

  “One of them asked Lorie if he could call you for her. Apparently, she told him not to.”

  He looked at the detective. “She didn’t want to worry me.”

  The detective looked back at him. “Okay.”

  “You can’t tell how people are going to act when something like this happens to you,” he said, feeling his head dipping. Suddenly his shoulders felt very heavy and he had these pictures of Lorie in his head, at the far corner of the long black lacquered bar, eyes heavy with makeup and filled with dark feelings. Feelings he could never touch. Never once did he feel sure he knew what she was thinking. That was part of it. Part of the throb in his chest, the longing there that never left.

  “No,” he said, suddenly.

  “What?” the detective asked, leaning forward.

  “She has no history of emotional problems. My wife.”

  It was the fourth week, the fourth week of false leads and crying and sleeping pills and night terrors. And he had to go back to work or they wouldn’t make the mortgage payment. They’d talked about Lorie returning to her part-time job at the candle store, but somebody needed to be home, to be waiting.

  (Though what, really, were they waiting for? Did toddlers suddenly toddle home after twenty-seven days? That’s what he could tell the cops were thinking.)

  “I guess I’ll call the office tomorrow,” he said. “And make a plan.”

  “And I’ll be here,” she said. “You’ll be there and I’ll be here.”

  It was a terrible conversation, like a lot of those conversations couples have in dark bedrooms, late into the night, when you know the decisions you’ve been avoiding all day won’t wait anymore.

  After they talked, she took four big pills and pushed her face into her pillow.

  He couldn’t sleep and went into Shelby’s room, which he only ever did at night. He leaned over the crib, which was too small for her but Lorie wouldn’t use
the bed yet, said it wasn’t time, not nearly.

  He put his fingers on the soft baby bumpers, festooned with bright yellow fish. He remembered telling Shelby they were goldfish, but she kept saying Nana, nana, which was what she called bananas.

  Her hands were always covered with the pearly slime of bananas, holding on to the front of Lorie’s shirt.

  One night, sliding his hand under Lorie’s bra clasp, between her breasts, he felt a daub of banana even there.

  “It’s everywhere,” Lorie had sighed. “It’s like she’s made of bananas.”

  He loved that smell, and his daughter’s forever-glazed hands.

  At some point, remembering this, he started crying, but then he stopped and sat in the rocking chair until he fell asleep.

  In part, he was relieved to go back to work, all those days with neighbors and families and friends huddling in the house, trading Internet rumors, organizing vigils and searches. But now there were fewer family members, only a couple friends who had no other place to go, and no neighbors left at all.

  The woman from the corner house came late one evening and asked for her casserole dish back.

  “I didn’t know you’d keep it so long,” she said, eyes narrowing.

  She seemed to be trying to look over his shoulder, into the living room. Lorie was watching a show, loudly, about a group of blond women with tight lacquered faces and angry mouths. She watched it all the time; it seemed to be the only show on TV anymore.

  “I didn’t know,” the woman said, taking her dish, inspecting it, “how things were going to turn out.”

  you sexy, sexy boy, Lorie’s text said. i want your hands on me. come home and handle me, rough as u like. rough me up.

  He swiveled at his desk chair hard, almost like he needed to cover the phone, cover his act of reading the text.

  He left the office right away, driving as fast as he could. Telling himself that something was wrong with her. That this had to be some side effect of the pills the doctor had given her, or the way sorrow and longing could twist in her complicated little body.

  But that wasn’t really why he was driving so fast, or why he nearly tripped on the dangling seat belt as he hurried from the car.

  Or why he felt, when he saw her lying on the bed, flat on her stomach and head turned, smiling, that he’d burst in two if he didn’t have her. If he didn’t have her then and there, the bed moaning beneath them and she not making a sound but, the blinds pulled down, her white teeth shining, shining from her open mouth.