Where They Found Her by Kimberly McCreight

to find my father. He was off—as he was so often in the months before he filed for divorce when I was ten—with Geraldine, his then girlfriend, now wife of twenty-five years. Her house was two miles away, and my father had taken our only car.
    “You can’t stop us from taking a walk,” my mom shouted to the officers before they were out of their car. Her voice already had that familiar tremble. Soon it would rise and explode into a million furious pieces. “There’s nothing criminal about a walk.” She might have convinced them had it not been for my nightgown and bare feet.
    “She do this a lot, your mom?” Officer Max asked me that night.
    My mother did most of the things a mom was supposed to do. She went to her job every day as an administrator at the Butler Department of Buildings, and she collected her decent paycheck. She paid the mortgage and kept our house in good living order. She cooked my dinner and sent me to school with money for lunch. But she was enraged by all of it.
    After my father divorced her, the true work of my mother’s life became hating him. Making sure he knew it took up most of her time (and therefore mine) right up until she died of a heart attack while pulling weeds in our backyard the summer before my sophomore year in college. By then my dad had three-year-old twins with Geraldine, but he dutifully took up the mantle of sole surviving parent, at least financially. He also called on birthdays and invited me for holidays with an “I’m sure you already have plans” casualness. I hardly ever did, but I never went. Instead, I lived on as the orphan I had always really been. Right up until I met Justin.
    “Does my mom do what?” I’d asked Officer Max that night, because there had seemed infinite possibilities.
    “Take you out in the middle of the night looking for your dad?”
    “No,” I’d said, staring down at my hands. “It was a one-time thing.”
    That was a lie. Not my first about my mother and not my last. Because I was only nine, and already I knew there was one worse thing than having my mother. And that was having no mother at all.
    When I stepped inside the Ridgedale Police Station, the floor was sloped and creaky, the carpet worn. The air had a decidedly musty but not unclean tinge. I would have thought I’d stepped inside the Ridgedale Historical Society were it not for the portraits of uniformed officers on the wall. Seated behind a small polished wood desk was a woman with spiky gray hair, a forearm full of gold bangles, and a beaming smile.
    “Can I help you?” she asked brightly, her bracelets jangling as she straightened the wooden nameplate on the counter in front of her: Yvette Scarpetta, Civilian Police Dispatcher.
    “I have an appointment with the chief of police?” My voice rose at the end as if it were a question. Dammit. Enough with the nerves. “My name is Molly Sanderson. I’m a reporter with the Ridgedale Reader. ”
    Better. Not perfect, but I could live with it. I’d have to.
    “Have a seat.” Yvette pointed to a row of antique-looking wooden chairs along the wall, then picked up the phone. “I’ll let Steve know you’re here.”
    Question #5: Do you have enough resources to handle the scope of this investigation? Or will you have to rely on neighboring jurisdictions? That question was Erik’s, and it was a good one. Most of his questions never would have occurred to me, and I was grateful to have them.
    “Steve’s right through that door straight to the back,” Yvette said after a brief phone exchange. “You can head on through.”
    When I knocked on Steve’s office door, he was standing, talking on the phone. I hesitated, but he waved me in, pointing to the chairs in front of his desk. He was older than I’d realized out at the creek. At least early forties, with a face that looked like he’d been standing out in the elements most of that time.
    Steve nodded again after I sat, and his blue eyes locked briefly on mine before