The Long and Faraway Gone by Lou Berney

then, after thinking about it, “Thank you.”
    The psychic lifted a hand, five silver rings, and bowed her head. She rose from the sofa, paused to sneeze again, then exited in a dramatic swirl of gauzy black fabric. Her boyfriend hobbled out on his cane after her.
    Another spray of rain cracked against the window. One of Julianna’s legs, crossed beneath the other, had gone to sleep.
    At the time, in that moment, Julianna hated Joe. She wanted to hear the psychic finish telling them how her sister would come walking up the driveway at Christmas.
    The day after Carol brought the psychic to their house, or maybe it was a few days later, the two detectives stopped by. Carol and her husband were still there—­or there again—­Aunt Nancy, too, and the rain hadn’t stopped. Julianna sat cross-­legged on the dusty wood floor. The little house smelled like mildew and ham casserole.
    It had been three weeks since the Saturday night that Genevieve had vanished from the state fair. The younger of the two detectives, the grimmer of the two, told their mother that the police were still working hard to find Genevieve. They continued to pursue every possible avenue of investigation.
    Joe understood what they were saying. “Nothing?” he said. “You got nothing at all?”
    The older detective, Fitch, cleared his throat but didn’t answer. Their mother remained expressionless. Aunt Nancy said, “Hell.”
    â€œThat’s good, though, isn’t it?” Carol said after a second, looking around from face to face to face. “If there’s no evidence that someone—­ That’s a good thing. It means Genevieve . . . it means maybe she wasn’t . . . maybe she just . . . she could have just . . . jaunted off on her own! To California, the ocean.”
    â€œThat’s possible,” the older detective said, carefully. “However, unfortunately, as we’ve explained before—­”
    â€œWe’re operating under the assumption that foul play was involved,” his younger, grimmer partner said.
    Because why, if Genevieve had jaunted off on her own, would she have left behind her car? Her purse? Her little sister?
    The police had found the old Cutlass still parked right where Genevieve and Julianna had left it, in a grassy field used as an overflow lot, not far from the Made in Oklahoma Building. They’d found the purse, empty, in a ditch half a mile from the fairgrounds. A security guard had found Julianna sitting alone outside the rodeo arena, at nearly midnight, more than three hours after Genevieve told her she’d be right back.
    â€œBut you don’t know that it was foul play,” Carol tried again. “You don’t know that for certain. ”
    Just shut up! Julianna remembered thinking. Shut up! She supposed that was the exact moment she stopped hating Joe and started hating Carol.
    â€œNo, ma’am,” the younger, grimmer detective said again. “We will continue to pursue every possible avenue of investigation.”
    Did the detectives already know, three weeks after Genevieve disappeared, that they would never find her, never find her body, that twenty-­six years later no one would have any idea what had happened to her? Probably they did. Julianna understood now what those two detectives had understood then, that the State Fair of Oklahoma—­thousands of visitors, armies of vendors and roadies, all those Future Farmers of America and itinerant carnival workers—­was a bad place to go missing. The on-­ramp to Interstate 40 was less than two hundred yards from the south gate of the fairgrounds. You could leave the fair at midnight and be in Albuquerque for breakfast. Or Memphis. Or anywhere.
    And it was a bad time to go missing, too, 1986. Before cell phones, before ATMs and security cameras everywhere, when ­people still used cash, not credit cards, to buy gas and