Missing Pieces by Joy Fielding

round and surprisingly untroubled. No laugh lines interrupted the flat surface of her mouth; no worry lines tugged at the edges of her eyes. A blank slate, I found myself thinking. She hadn’t even had a chance to live. Tears welled up in my eyes. I turned away.
    “It isn’t her,” I whispered.
    Donna emitted a strangled cry. Immediately, I returned to her side. She grabbed my hand, sobbed against it, her tears lying warm and wet on my skin.
    “You’re sure?” Officer Gatlin asked.
    “Yes.”
    The girl in the photograph may have fit Amy’s general description, but her nose pointed down instead of up and her lower lip was thinner, less prominent. There were no freckles on her ashen skin.
    There was no red barrette.
    “What happens now?” I asked.
    “We keep trying to find out who she is,” Officer Gatlin said, as Fred Sheridan retreated into the back room. “We keep our eyes out for Amy.”
    “My daughter didn’t run away,” Donna told him decisively.
    “I’ll give you a ride home, Mrs. Lokash,” the officer said.
    “I’ll take her home,” I told him.
    Donna smiled gratefully. “I’m not sure I can stand up,” she said.
    “Take your time,” I told her, as the coroner’s assistant had earlier told me.
    “What about you?” she asked as I helped her to her feet. “How are you doing?”
    “Don’t worry about me.”
    Officer Gatlin held the door open for us, and we stepped out into the sunlight. Into the land of the living, I thought. “Oh, look,” Donna said, pointing to the spot where less than half an hour earlier the mother duck had been sitting with her newborn ducklings. All that remained now were a dozen empty and abandoned shells. Mother and children had vanished. “What happened to them?”
    “The mother probably took them over to the pond,” Officer Gatlin said. “There’s another bunch getting ready to hatch around back, if you want to have a look.”
    “Can we?” Donna asked me, as if she were a small child.
    “If you’d like.”
    We said goodbye to Officer Gatlin, and walked around to the back of the building. There, in a shaded corner, sat another large Muscovy duck, eggs fanned out around her.
    “Look,” Donna said, pointing. “There’s a crack in that one. It must be getting ready to hatch.”
    “Pretty amazing.”
    “Can we watch for a few minutes? Would you mind?”
    “We can watch.” I sat down on the grass, tucking my legs underneath me, the skirt of my blue dress falling in folds around me. We sat this way for several minutes, as still as the eggs we were watching, neither of us speaking, each lost in her own private world. I thought of Sara and Michelle, how grateful I was for their well-being. I ached to hold them in my arms, to tell them how much I lovedthem. Had they any idea? Did I tell them often enough? “How are you feeling?” I asked finally.
    “I don’t know,” Donna said, her voice as lifeless as the girl in the photograph. “On the one hand, I’m so relieved, relieved beyond words, that it wasn’t Amy.” She sighed deeply. “But on the other hand, it would have been almost a relief if it had been, because at least that way I would have known once and for all what happened to her. There would have been some sense of closure. Not this waiting, all the time waiting,” she said, her voice picking up urgency. “Waiting for the phone to ring, waiting for Amy to come walking through the door, waiting for her killer to come forward. I’m not sure how much more of this waiting I can stand.”
    “It must be so hard,” I said, wishing I could say more, say something,
anything,
that might lessen her pain.
    “The trial makes it harder,” she said, and I knew immediately she was referring to the trial of Colin Friendly. “Every day I read about that animal in the newspaper, what he did to those women, and I wonder: Did he do the same thing to my little girl? And it’s more than I can bear.”
    I moved to her side, cradled her in my