Carthage by Joyce Carol Oates

and would not.
    As they could not believe that, at any minute, their missing daughter might not arrive home, burst into the house seeing an alarming number of vehicles parked outside—a mix of familiar faces and strangers in the living room—and cry: “What’s this? Who won the lottery?”
    The father wanted to think: it might happen. However unlikely, it might happen.
    “Oh Daddy, for God’s sake. You thought I was lost ? You thought I was— killed or something ?”
    The daughter’s shrill laughter like ice being shaken.
     
    THAT MORNING, Zeno had wanted to speak to Brett Kincaid.
    Zeno had been told no. Not a good idea at this time.
    “But just to—see him. For five minutes . . .”
    No. Hal Pitney who was Zeno’s friend, a high-ranking officer in the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department, told him this was not a good idea at the present time and anyway not possible, since Kincaid was being interviewed by the sheriff McManus himself.
    Not interrogated, which meant arrest. Only just interviewed, which meant the stage preceding a possible arrest.
    I need to know from him just this: Is Cressida alive?
    “ . . . only just to see him. Christ, he’s like one of the family—engaged to my daughter—my other daughter . . .”
    Zeno stammered, trying to smile. Zeno Mayfield had long cultivated a wide flash of a smile, a politician’s smile, that came now unconsciously, with a look of being forced. He was frightened at the prospect of seeing Brett Kincaid, seeing how Brett regarded him.
    Just tell me: is my daughter alive.
    Pitney said he’d pass on the word to McManus. Pitney said it “wasn’t likely” that Zeno could speak face-to-face with Kincaid for a while but—“Who knows? It might end fast.”
    “What? What ‘might end fast’?”
    Into Pitney’s face came a wary look. As if he’d said too much.
    “ ‘Custody.’ Him being in custody, and interviewed. It could end fast if he gives up all he knows.”
    A chill passed into Zeno, hearing these words.
    He knew, Hal Pitney had told him all he’d tell him right now.
    Driving east of Carthage into the hilly countryside, into the foothills of the Adirondacks and into the Nautauga Preserve to join the search team that morning, Zeno had made a succession of calls on his cell phone trying to learn if there were “developments” in the interview with Brett Kincaid. Like a compulsive cell phone user who checks for new calls in his in-box every few minutes Zeno could not shut off the flat little phone, still less could he slide it into his shirt pocket and forget it. Several times he tried to speak with Bud McManus. For Zeno knew Bud, to a degree, enough, he’d thought, to merit special consideration. (In the scrimmage of Carthage politics, he’d done McManus a favor, at least once: hadn’t he? If not, Zeno regretted it now.) Instead, he wound up speaking with another deputy named Gerry Eisner who told him (confidentially) that the interview with Brett Kincaid wasn’t going well, so far—Kincaid claimed not to remember what had happened the night before, though he seemed to know that someone whom he alternately called “Cress’da” and “the girl” had been in his Jeep; at one point he seemed to be saying that “the girl” had left him and gotten into a vehicle with someone else whom he didn’t know—but he wasn’t sure of any of this, he’d been pretty much “wasted.”
    Wasted . High school usage, guys boasting to one another of how sick-drunk they’d gotten on beer. Zeno trembled with indignation.
    During the interview, Kincaid had seemed dazed, uncertain of his surroundings. He’d smelled strongly of vomit even after he’d been allowed to wash up. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin-grafted face made him look like “something freaky” in a horror movie, Eisner said.
    You’d never guess, Eisner said, he’s only twenty-six years old.
    You’d never guess he’d been a good-looking kid not so long ago.
    “Jesus! A ‘war