Chapter 2
She Is Gone
He told himself it was kids.
He told himself that all of Sunday. It was the sort of thing kids did. A joke, a dare, a bad idea passed round a school bus. Someone had found his name on a list of people who had once been in the paper, and had left a chess piece on his step, because he lived on a street where a chess player lived. It made sense if he did not look at it too hard.
He put the pawn in the kitchen drawer with the batteries and the takeout menus. He put the slip of paper in his wallet, beside a square of newsprint that was folded so small it had gone soft as cloth. He did not take that out. He never did. He only knew it was there, the way you know where a scar is.
The second newspaper he put in the trash outside, under a bag of coffee grounds.
June saw none of it. They went to the library in the morning and she took out four books on endgames, and in the afternoon she tried to teach him the Sicilian Defense using salt and pepper shakers while he pretended not to follow. At dinner she was in a very good mood. She said Mr. Pell had told her she could come to the advanced group on Thursdays if she kept her scores up. She said it with great casualness, with her eyes on her plate, so that Daniel would not make a fuss.
"That's wonderful," he said.
"It's not a big thing."
"It's a big thing."
"It's a medium thing."
"I'm very proud of you," said Daniel. "In a medium way."
She grinned, and for a moment he felt it all go away. Then she said, with her mouth full, "I found a pawn on the porch yesterday."
He put down his fork.
"Which pawn?"
"Not yesterday. Saturday, I mean. Before the tournament. It was on the step, and then it was gone when I came back. I thought you put it in your pocket." She shrugged. "It was a white one. White always goes first."
"I didn't see anything."
"Someone left it," said June. She said it calmly. "It's a thing people do. At the club, when you win, they leave one on your chair." She picked at her potatoes. "I guess somebody likes you."
"I guess so," said Daniel.
Later, when she was in the bath, he went out to the car and sat behind the wheel with the door shut for ten minutes. He didn't turn the key. He thought about calling someone. He thought about who. He didn't know what he would say. Someone left a chess piece. Someone wrote a word in a newspaper. He imagined the voice on the other end, kind and patient and a little tired. Is anyone threatening you, sir? Has anyone threatened you?
No.
Can you think of why someone would want to?
He put his forehead against the cold wheel.
He could think of why.
On Monday morning he dropped her at school at ten to eight.
It was raining. She got out of the car with her backpack over one shoulder and a plastic bag over her head, and she went up the steps without looking back, which was a thing she'd started doing in September. At the top she turned round, and rolled her eyes, and gave him a small flat wave, the kind you give a bus driver. Then she was gone through the doors and into the noise.
He drove to work. He sat at his desk for six hours. He wrote two reports and rewrote one. At noon a woman from the second floor brought him a sandwich, and he ate it without noticing what was in it. At two, he found that he had been looking at the same photograph of a flooded basement for twenty minutes.
At twenty past three his phone rang.
It was a number he did not know. He picked it up on the second ring.
"Mr. Wells? This is Linda Ortiz, at Marlow Middle. I'm the school secretary." Her voice was quick and polite and a little too bright. "I'm sorry to bother you. I'm just calling because June didn't get on the late bus, and I wanted to check that everything was all right. Did you pick her up early?"
He was standing. He did not remember getting up.
"Early?"
"It's just that she was signed out. At ten to three. I have it in the book." There was a rustle of paper. "By her aunt?"
"Her aunt."
"Yes. A lady. She had a note from you, and she knew all the details, June's class, the address, even the name of the cat. June went with her very happily. She seemed to know her." The brightness had begun to crack. "Mr. Wells, I'm sure it's fine. I just thought, because Mr. Pell said, and I thought I'd. Is there an aunt?"
"I have a sister," said Daniel. "She lives in Arizona."
There was a long silence on the line.
He found, afterward, that he had said nothing else. He had put the phone in his pocket and gone down the stairs two at a time and got in the car and driven. He did not remember the roads. He remembered only that the wipers were going, and that there was a man at a crosswalk with a yellow dog, and that he had thought, clearly, as if reading it off a card: The porch light's on. The porch light's on. The porch light's on.
The woman had worn a green coat.
Linda Ortiz told him that in the front office, standing behind the counter with her hands pressed together as if she were praying. She was small and dark and very upset, and she had been crying and was trying not to. A police officer stood by the window, writing. The principal, a tall man named Carver, stood against the wall with his arms folded, looking as though someone had hit him.
"A green coat. A long one. And a scarf, over her hair, and dark glasses. She had a cold, I think. Her voice was low and a bit thick. She was young. Twenty-five, perhaps. She was kind." Mrs. Ortiz wiped her face with the back of her wrist. "She had the note. It had your signature. I mean, it looked like it. I compared it with the file. It was right."
"What did June say?"
"She asked a question. It was very quiet. I didn't hear it. The lady leaned down and whispered something, and June looked at her for a second. And then she picked up her bag and said, 'Okay.'" Mrs. Ortiz gave a little gasp. "She smiled. That's what I can't. She smiled."
Lighthouse, thought Daniel.
He did not say it. He stood in the middle of the office with the rain on his coat and felt something very large and very cold begin, slowly, to open in his stomach. It was not panic. He had expected panic. It was more like a floor going.
"I want to see the camera," he said.
They showed him. It took four minutes. A small gray recording, in black and white, from a ceiling in the corridor. A woman in a long coat, with her face turned down, walking at an easy pace beside a small girl in a yellow raincoat. The girl was swinging her backpack. The woman had one hand lightly on her shoulder. At the door they stopped for a second, and the girl looked up, and the woman bent and said something close to her ear. The girl nodded.
They went out into the rain.
He watched it five times. On the fifth, he put his finger on the screen, on the girl's face, which was turned toward the woman and was, clearly, trusting. Then he took his finger away, and the screen showed a smear.
"She said the word," he said.
"What word?" said the officer.
"Nothing. It's something we have. It's, it's a family thing." He turned. "Somebody has been in my house."
The detective's name was Maria Sosa.
She came at five, in a gray coat, with a notebook and a thermos and a younger man named Ruiz who did the typing. She was about forty-five, broad-shouldered, with short graying hair and the patient, flat, unhurried voice of a person who has said the same thing to a great many frightened people. She sat at his kitchen table and did not touch the coffee he gave her. She asked him to tell her about June.
He told her. It took an hour. He told her about the chess and the braid and the freckle and the porch light, and the pancakes. He found that once he began, it was hard to stop. He said June did not like tomatoes. He said that when she was nervous she bit the end of her braid. He heard himself saying these things in a voice that did not belong to him, level, the voice of a man filling in a form, and across the table Detective Sosa watched him with her head slightly tilted.
"Mr. Wells," she said, when he finished. "Is there anyone who'd want to hurt you?"
"No."
"Anyone you've, any dispute? A claim you turned down? A claimant who made threats?"
"I turn down a few a month. Nobody's threatened me. Not seriously."
"Anyone from your past. Family. An ex."
"My wife died. Nine years ago."
"I'm sorry."
"It was cancer."
"I'm sorry." She turned a page. "Any legal history. Anything you've been involved in. A lawsuit. A court case. A, say, a witness."
"No."
He said it at once. It came out smoothly, a little too smoothly, and at the very last second his eyes went away from her face to the kitchen window. There was a gray cat on the fence outside. It sat with its paws together, looking in.
Detective Sosa did not write anything down.
She did not say anything either. She waited. She had waited like that before, he thought, in a great many kitchens. She had waited for the sister to say where the boyfriend was, for the father to say how much the insurance was. He recognized it. It was the exact method he used himself, when a claimant told him the back door had been locked.
You lie about the thing next to the thing, he thought.
He turned his head and looked her in the face.
"I was on a jury once," he said. "A long time ago. I don't see how it matters."
"What kind of case?"
"A criminal one. I don't remember the details."
"I'll check."
"It was years ago."
"That's fine," said Sosa, pleasantly. "I check everything." And she wrote one word in her notebook, and shut it.
He told her about the pawn. He gave it to her, from the kitchen drawer, in a clean sandwich bag. He did not show her the slip of paper from his wallet. He did not mention the second newspaper, which lay in the trash outside, under a bag of grounds, with a line of red ink in its margin that said a word he had not heard for nine years.
He was aware of what he was doing. He did it anyway.
The video came at 8:41.
He was in the kitchen with Detective Sosa and Ruiz and a technician with a laptop, who had been sitting very still for an hour in the corner. The phone lay in the middle of the table. It buzzed once, and lit, and a message appeared. A number, which was not a number, a string of zeros. Under it, a single file.
Sosa put on a pair of gloves. She touched the screen.
It showed a room.
It was a small room with a metal desk and a green lamp. Behind the desk stood a row of tall gray filing cabinets with the drawers pulled out an inch, as if somebody had been looking for something. A wire ran across the floor. On the desk, next to the lamp, there was a plain black-and-white chessboard, and beside it a small digital clock with two buttons, one on each side, the kind that they used at the tournaments. The clock was lit. The numbers on it were red. 76:00:00.
A child sat at the desk. She had her coat off. She was in the sweater with the blue stripe. Her braid hung over one shoulder, and she was holding the end of it in her left hand, and she was looking straight at the camera.
"Hi, Dad," said June.
He made a sound. He did not know what it was.
"I'm okay. I want you to know that first. Nobody's hurt me. I got a sandwich and a juice and I've got a bed, and there's a bathroom." Her voice was very steady. She was reading nothing. She was speaking the way she did when she had decided, in advance, how it had to go. "They said I can talk for a minute, and then they're going to turn it off. They said it's a game. They said you have to do what the instructions say and not tell anybody, not the police, not anyone, or the clock goes faster. That's the clock. It's for me."
She glanced at it. Then she looked back at the camera.
"They said I'm allowed to play, too," said June. "They gave me a board. It's not a bad board." She swallowed. "The lady knew the word, Dad. She said it. I'm sorry. I know I'm not supposed to, but she said it exactly right."
On the table the phone shook slightly. It was his hand. He put the other one over it.
"I'm okay," said June. "I'm going to be okay. I just. Don't do anything dumb." She was trying to smile. "I mean, you do dumb things all the time. But, don't do a really big one."
The video stopped. The screen went black.
For a while nobody in the kitchen spoke. The refrigerator hummed. Ruiz had stopped typing. Sosa took off her gloves, slowly, one finger at a time, and laid them on the table, and said, in a low voice, "She sounds very brave."
"She is."
"She sounds like she's been coached. That's good. That means somebody wants her calm."
"Somebody," said Daniel.
The phone buzzed again.
It was a text.
It had no name. It was only a block of white type on a black screen, in the plain flat style of a letter to a bank.
Mr. Wells.
Your daughter is safe and will remain safe as long as you take part. This is not a ransom. Nothing is being asked of you that can be paid for.
You have been selected.
Tomorrow, 9:00 p.m. Pike Road, the bus shelter at the old cannery stop. Come alone. Bring nothing. Tell no one, including the detective who is sitting in your kitchen. She may go home.
The clock is running.
White.
He read it twice. He read it a third time with his finger under the words, as if the finger might hold them still. He heard Sosa say, behind him, "Wait. Wait. Let me see that," and a chair scraped, and the technician's keys began to clatter. He did not turn round.
Including the detective who is sitting in your kitchen.
They could see.
He looked at the ceiling. He looked at the corners, and the smoke alarm, and the little brass light fixture over the table, and the clock on the stove. He looked at the window over the sink, where the cat had been. It was dark outside. He could see only the reflection of the kitchen, bright and yellow and empty of any face but his own.
"Mr. Wells," said Sosa. She had come to stand beside him. She did not touch him. "I want you to hear me. You're not going."
"It says come alone."
"It says a lot of things. It says it's not a ransom. It's a kidnapping. Somebody who takes a child to make a father come to a bus stop doesn't want to talk." She spoke carefully. "I'll put eight people round that shelter. They won't see us. We'll follow whoever picks you up."
"They'll know."
"They can't know."
"They knew about you."
She did not answer that.
"They've been in the house," said Daniel. His voice was not steady now. "I think they've been in it for weeks. They knew the word. They knew the cat. They can see us. They're watching you take notes." He looked at her. "If I do this wrong, she gets, the clock goes faster, that's what she said. I don't know what that means. I don't know what it does. I'm not going to find out."
"Mr. Wells."
"I'll do what it says."
"You'll be killed," said Sosa quietly. "Or worse."
He did not know what worse could be. He did not ask.
She stayed until eleven. She left Ruiz in a car at the end of the street. She left her card on the table, with her private number on the back, and a long, gray, steady look that she gave him from the door. "I'm not going to tell you what to do," she said. "But if you go, leave your phone on. Leave it in your pocket. I'll find you."
"Okay."
"I mean it."
"I know."
When she had gone, he stood in the kitchen with his hands on the back of a chair. The clock on the stove said 11:12. In the sink there was a single cup. Upstairs there was an unmade bed and a braid-sized hollow in a pillow. He had not been able to go in. He stood and listened to the house, and there was nothing in it, nothing at all, and it was the loudest thing he had ever heard.
The tin was on the top shelf of the pantry.
He had gone for a glass. He had put out a hand without looking, as he had every day for nine years, and his fingers had touched, instead of the usual cold edge of tin, the empty air behind a jar of pickles. He stood still. Then he took down the pickles, and the flour, and a box of tea he did not like, and he stared at the clean round ring in the dust where something had been.
Anna's recipe tin.
It was a flat blue tin, the size of a dinner plate, with a picture of a lighthouse on the lid. It had been hers. After she died, he had never opened it. He had put it on the top shelf and left it, and it had held her handwriting, and a card from his mother, and a thin folded sheet of paper that he had slipped inside on a gray day in March nine years ago and never taken out. A single sheet, in pencil. Four lines. He had never read it twice. He had known them by heart.
He found the tin in the end, on the floor of the laundry room, behind the dryer.
The lid was off. It lay beside it, face up, the little lighthouse smiling at the ceiling. The card from his mother was there. The recipes were there, a fan of damp yellow squares. They had been spread out, neatly, in a line, as if somebody had wanted to be sure that he would see.
The piece of paper in pencil was gone.
He knelt on the cold floor of the laundry room with the tin in his hands.
For a time he did not feel anything. It was a large, soft, white absence, like the moment after a plate falls and before it breaks. Then, in his chest, something began to turn over. He had never said it. He had never told one living person. He had kept it nine years in a pantry, in a box that nobody touched, and somebody had come into his house, and walked to the shelf, and taken it down, and known precisely what to look for.
It's not a ransom, the message had said. You have been selected.
He said, quietly, to the empty room, "Who are you?"
The dryer ticked as it cooled. Nothing answered.
There was one more message, and it came at midnight, from the same string of zeros. It was shorter than the first. It was only two lines.
Leave your phone on the kitchen table, beside the place where the pawn was. If it comes with you, her clock loses an hour for every mile.
The paper you kept is safe. It is waiting for you at the place where it belongs.
He read it standing up, in the laundry room, with the empty tin against his chest. He understood that he had just been given the one instruction he could not disobey, and that it was not about the phone.
It was about a room he had not entered in nine years, and a sheet of paper that he had hoped, every day since, would one day simply stop existing.