Five

I have said the words, I have said his name and slapped my hand on the photo of the random Buick. I have said the words and everything springs to hectic life.

I’m not sure what’s happening, but everyone seems to be moving, and one detective is on the phone again and Detective Thernstrom is talking to Mr. Verver in the corner and Mr. Verver is listening intently, his hands clenching and unclenching as he stares at the carpet. From the look on his face, I don’t know whether, like in the fairy tale, I’ve found magic balm from the hollow center of a tree, or whether I’ve opened the ground beneath us all, and we’re now plummeting fast into the dark earth.

“Shaw’s wife called the station this morning,” Detective Thernstrom is saying to Mr. Verver.

I’m at the dining room table, looking at pictures of cars. One of the deputies is talking to me, but I’m not listening. I’m listening to Detective Thernstrom’s slow, calm voice, and to Mr. Verver’s raspy uh-huhs.

“She said her husband was supposed to be at an insurance convention upstate. When she didn’t hear from him, she started calling the hotel and the convention staff. They all say he never checked in. She hasn’t seen him in two days.”

“And we know that’s his car?” asks Mr. Verver, a voice darty and hectic. “Harold Shaw. I’ve known him—not well, but known him—ten years. We know that’s his Skylark?”

“That’s his make and model. If that’s the car she saw, well, this is a big break. We have two officers heading up to the convention hotel now. We put out the APB. We’re interviewing everyone who knows the Shaws. All our resources are on this… it’s our number one priority.”

Detective Thernstrom’s voice lowers, and I strain to hear. I feel like Detective Thernstrom’s talking about me now. Like he’s saying, She might know more. She might know everything.

But that’s when the deputy starts poking me with questions again. “How fast was the car going? You’re sure you saw it twice? The same car?” And I can’t think of anything at all, and sometimes their voices spike again, and I hear Mr. Verver say, “But what can I do here? What can I do?”

That sound, the creak at the center of his throat, it’s something I’ve never heard from him, and it hums in me, powerfully.

Now, in my head, when I picture that Skylark going by, I can see Mr. Shaw behind the wheel. Though in my head, it’s not even maroon anymore but black, like the one in the book they showed me, the picture lodging in my brain.

I can see Mr. Shaw behind the wheel.

Mr. Shaw carries a briefcase and wears brown loafers and tiepins. He’s my mother’s insurance agent, or was, and the Ververs’ too. He’s old in the sport-jackety way of math teachers and principals and doctors, older by decades, it seems, than Mr. Verver.

Mr. Shaw has the glass-front office on Cloverly Way, right where the street slopes down fast. When I picture him, he’s there. I’m on my bike, riding past, coasting, sneakers kicking up, and I turn my head, glancing in, seeing him there, blue blazer, wispy brown hair, a pen in his hand, holding it like he’s not sure what it is or how it got there. And then he’s gone.

Or no, no, another time, walking by and seeing him standing, hands on hips, looking out the window as he talks soundlessly to someone, his mouth moving but the rest of his face still.

Or there, there, over on, what street is it? Huntington? Washing that maroon car in his driveway, golf shirt spattered, his son, Pete, the one in Dusty’s class, twisting a big golden sponge, Walkman cord dangling, and Mr. Shaw, face so plain, arms pale, chin faintly shadowed.

“I’ve never talked to him,” I tell the detectives. “I never saw Evie talk to him.”

Why would Evie ever talk to him? It all seems so impossible. Like it’s a big mistake, and somewhere up north Mr. Shaw is stiff-backed in some convention room chair, doing whatever people at conventions do, unaware of all the wretched scenarios spinning around him.

But elsewhere in my head, I seem to know something, or guess at it. The look I’ve been seeing on Evie’s face, behind her eyes. But I don’t talk about that. I don’t tell them about Evie’s face and what it carries because it’s just a guess, a feeling, because I know Evie so blood-thick. I know her so well that I know when I no longer know everything.

And Evie, in showing me those cigarette stubs, was showing me something private, mysterious, a slippery secret, which is what we did. Mouth to ear, we shared everything. Until we didn’t.

My mother sits me down at the kitchen table. She quit smoking after the divorce, when she started taking aerobics and got the lemony highlights in her hair. But there is a cigarette flaring in her hand now, slipped from that Benson & Hedges pack she keeps wedged under the leg of one of the lawn chairs on the back patio.

“Lizzie, how well do you know Mr. Shaw?”

It seems a funny way to ask it. I tell her I don’t know him at all, which is true. I know him like I know anyone’s dad. They’re all dads.

She takes a deep breath and shakes her head. “It’s so terrible. I don’t know how Annie is managing. Either of them. I don’t know at all.”

“It’s okay, Mom.” I can’t think of what else to say. This is not the way she usually talks to me and it seems like if I say the wrong thing, it will make her more nervous.

She looks at the cigarette in her hand, turning it like she doesn’t recognize it.

“Do you think he’s hurt her?” I finally ask. I don’t think I’ve let the idea really cross my mind until that moment.

“No,” my mother says, jerking up suddenly, face set, eyes on me. “No, honey. It’s a mistake. It’s all a crazy mistake.”

Her lie is somehow meaningful and I can feel the weight of it.

No one is saying it, but everyone seems to be so sure. Why would Mr. Shaw take Evie if he didn’t mean to touch her, to do things to her?

But no one’s actually saying it, no adults can say the words aloud. And I fight the ideas in my head, shake them off. They’re ugly things, and I don’t even know where they’ve come from. They’re like choppy collages, pieces pulled from cable movies caught late at night, hand-wringing school assemblies, leering reenactments on news shows, and snapshotted Evie in her soccer jersey, clipped in, her face pasted on bodies nude and scandalized.

I go to my room, pull out a stack of old, gold-spined horse books, and read them for hours.