After a lengthy ten-minute exposé on who we are, who we’re looking for, Molly steps out onto the porch. “You might try the Sanders across the street. They had a whole mob of little shits running around—but that was years ago”—she shakes her head at the darkness across the way—“most of them are off at college now.”
“Lovely,” I mutter as a steady rise of panic floods me. “Reagan?” I shout as I cross the street, but James has me beat. We hit the Sanders’ home, the Stuarts’, the Malkovichs’, and an older Chinese resident who simply goes by Yolo. “Shit.” I stagger toward the street. “Nobody has seen them.”
“Where did she say she lived?”
“Down the street!” I roar through tears. “She pointed to the woods.” We look to the end of the quiet road, to the dark twisted limbs of the pines that sway in the wind as if mocking us.
“Maybe she meant down another street.” James jumps back as if assessing the neighborhood. James and I get into the car and drive a two-block radius, painfully drudging door to door like beggars. Then a six-block radius, then ten, before we speed like hell back to our own backyard, screaming Reagan’s name at the top of our lungs, our voices threadbare, our sanity spent.
I turn to James, the heat of all of my hatred pinned on him at the moment. “Where is our child!”
His features pull down, the look of defeat written across his face. “I don’t know.”
My mind can’t stop racing. I can’t catch a single errant thought.
“God, she’s in the woods,” I say bolting past him into the expansive night, down into the icy street with its veil of fog and darkness.
“Ally!” James cries after me, but before long we’re jogging side by side screaming our lungs off, feeling the razor-sharp burn as we shout for Reagan, time and time again.
Neighbors evict themselves from their homes, stopping cold on their porches, observing as we run around like loons, our panic like a torch lighting up the night.
We hit the woods at the edge of the street and my body flares with chills. I give one last primal shout into the nothingness that has swallowed my daughter whole. “Reagan!”
But she’s not there.
She’s gone.
2
James
Concordia has always been more of a mythological place I escaped from than some small rural town tucked in the back of an Idaho hillside. Death seemed to be liquid here, constantly in motion, the inertia of which you could never escape. It held the stench of death, of dying, of far worse things than death could ever bring—those were the things I told Allison just once in the beginning of our relationship like some deep, dark confession. There are some things that shouldn’t be repeated or even said to begin with.
My gut wrenches tight as the urge to howl at the sky takes over. Reagan is out there somewhere, like a grain of sand I unwittingly tossed out over the horizon, so easy to lose, impossible to find.
I pace the creaky floors, cursing under my breath at what a fucking idiot I’ve proven myself to be.
My father shows up before the cops ever get here.
“Where’s Allison?” He storms in to find her tucked in a ball on the sofa, weeping into her hands, and recoils at the sight. My father and I share the same height, same straight nose and cheekbones that my mother said drove the women to the brink of insanity, but that’s where the similarities end. His thick hair is gray, his face weathered with time, eyes watery and red as a stoplight. He wears fatigue like a mask these days. My father is a ballbuster, a super-achiever who suffered more loss than anyone should ever have to face, and yet here I am with a fresh loss of my own. But Reagan is coming back to me. I can feel it.
In truth, this all feels like a waking nightmare, like I’m walking numbly under water and any moment I’ll be startled awake by the shrill of the alarm. If I could guess, I would say the nightmare began the day the Odens moved in next door all those months ago.
“Look, she’s pretty upset.” My voice is tight. It’s been hours since I’ve last seen my child in the flesh and it’s all I can do to keep from dropping to my knees and wailing. “I wouldn’t say anything that might set her off.” I glare at the old man a moment. Allison may not realize it, but it was my father who planted the idea in my head that we should move back to Concordia. He promised a peaceful life, a quiet existence like something out of a storybook, and I bought the Cinderella story—hook, line, and shattered glass slipper. But at the end of the day, it was simply my company he was craving. He suggested a change of lifestyle as if that was the panacea that could easily save my marriage, and that was exactly what I was hoping to do. I never told him directly about Hailey, about what really happened between the two of us, the dark turn it quickly took. But he guessed there was someone else right out the gate, and I suppose that’s all he needed to know. He shed his favorite phrase like oil, the wages of sin is death, and God knows I came close to killing my marriage. His son was a cheating fool who had lost his marriage just moments before he quite literally lost his child. But I feel like far more than a fool. I’m an asshole who should never be near Reagan again for the sake of her safety.
The whoop of a police siren fills the night air as a flashing red light strobes through the darkness. “That would be Richard.” He nods past me as I make my way outside. Richard Olsen, my first cousin on my mother’s side, is a bona fide police officer, and right about now, I’m damn glad he is.
“James.” He jogs around his patrol vehicle and offers me a hearty embrace. Something about the sight of that heavy, weighty black and white parked in my driveway makes all of this real and sends a whole new shrill of fear bumping up my spine.
Richard looks the same since the last time we met—dark crimson hair, same pale freckled face as my mother. Tears come to my eyes, and I give a hard blink trying to stave them off. The Olsens all carry on the Irish traditions as far as those rosy features go, that hair of fire as my mother called it. She once called me her little dark knight who rushed into her life to save the day. How I wish I could have saved the day when we lost Wilson and Rachel—Aston, too, but that was my boneheaded move and one I will never forgive myself for. My mother, however, forgave me right off the bat, stoic and stiff as if she had no say in the matter. Live twice as hard for the both of you, she charged me with. As an unemployed civil engineer with a wandering eye and a badly misplaced daughter, I’d say I was fucking up for the both of us instead. And I’m sure as hell no hero—least of all to my own daughter.
We head inside and Allison and I give him a detailed description of both Reagan and Ota. Alarmingly, Richard asks more questions about Ota than he does Reagan.
“We don’t think she has anything to do with this,” Allison mumbles through the tissue wadded up over her mouth. “She’s a little kid for God’s sake.” Her eyes bulge crimson and swollen as if I took a baseball bat to her, and I cringe because that’s what this surreal pain amounts to in the end.
Before Rich has the chance to offer any comfort, my father escorts a petite woman with a mop of dark hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and a heavy frown this way.
Rich stands to greet her. “James, Allison, this is detective McCafferty who will be assisting us this evening.”
“Detective?” Allison squawks. “We don’t need to open up an investigation. What we need is to send an officer knocking on every damn door in this town!”
I wrap my arm around my trembling wife as I pull her in. “I agree. Let’s get people combing the area. Have Ota’s parents called in yet?”