Fragile

supposedly knew. Honestly, I thought she was making it up. She makes stuff up, you know, to make herself feel better.”

“She lies, you mean?” said Chuck.

“Yeah, but just, like, stories. You know, dreams. She hates it here, hates her stepfather. I always thought of them as kind of escape fantasies.”

“Britney said Charlene was afraid of Graham,” Maggie said. She sat beside her son and draped an arm around his shoulders. She was surprised when he moved in closer to her, didn’t squirm away from her embrace. Chuck stood, dominating the doorway now. He was a very big man, with a protruding belly and a barrel for a chest. Intimidating now that he was frowning.

“Was she afraid?” Chuck asked.

“She wasn’t afraid, exactly. I would say she distrusted him. She said he was inappropriate with her. That’s the word Charlene used. He’d hit her mom, but she’d hit him a bunch of times, too. It’s a violent relationship.”

Chuck issued a sigh, bent his head and rubbed the crown. A chime coming from somewhere on his person caused him to reach for his phone in the pocket of his jeans, pull it out, and glance at the screen.

“Okay, Son,” he said, distracted, still looking at the device in his hand. “When you hear from her-and I think you will-you need to let someone know. Try to get her to come home. A girl can get herself into a world of trouble out there.”

“I will,” said Ricky.

Maggie felt a flutter of panic now for Charlene, her anger dissipating, and she followed Chuck as he descended the staircase.

“So what now?” she asked him at the door.

“Everyone’s looking for her. The whole department will be putting in hours tonight knocking on the doors of neighbors and friends. We’ll find her.”

“She could already be on a train to New York, if that’s where she’s headed.”

“We’ll put out a tristate runaway bulletin, enter her name into NCIC and DCJS.” Maggie knew these were information databases, but she couldn’t remember what the initials stood for. “We’ll contact the Center for Missing and Exploited Children, get a picture up there. You know the stats, Maggie: seventy-seven percent of runaways come home within the week.”

She knew the statistics, of course. But numbers didn’t mean anything when you were talking about a girl you knew, someone you cared about. There were people-predators-waiting out there for someone like Charlene, a girl with big dreams, not sure if anyone really cared about her, afraid of her stepfather, fighting with her mother. The anger Maggie had felt toward Charlene had passed. Left in its wake was something like fear. The worst happened, even here.

When she closed the door on Chuck and turned to go back to her son, to comfort him, the grandfather clock read 1:05 A.M. She hadn’t heard the hour chime.

The day would come. He’d known that it would, of course. That it had to come. Because even then, when he was young and clueless, he knew you couldn’t bury that much wrong and make it right. And though there was no real reason to suspect that today was the day, he knew it was. It was Melody’s face, that terrible contortion of rage and misery. Her face, her voice-it brought him back. You shouldn’t have to bear witness twice. He should have left The Hollows long ago, gone away to college like Maggie but never come back. But he didn’t.

He had a laundry list of excuses-a bad knee had derailed his hopes of a scholarship, the old cliche; his mother was sick, couldn’t be on her own; he’d always dreamed of being a cop in the town where he grew up, of giving back. All of these things, all noble, with kernels of truth at their centers, were lies. The reality was that he hadn’t needed a scholarship; there was money. Anyway, he’d never been as good as all that; he’d just been better than his below-average teammates. His mother was sick, mentally ill, unstable-it shouldn’t have been his job to watch over her and then to watch her die. But he’d taken it on, even though other family members had offered a hand. He did like the idea of policing The Hollows, a way of atonement, he supposed. But it wouldn’t have been enough to keep him here. No, the truth was that he was afraid to leave. He was a coward.

Not a run-from-battle kind of coward-not afraid of heights or airplanes or small, enclosed spaces. He was not afraid of duty or responsibility. All of that was easy. What he feared were the long, empty spaces between those things where life was lived.

Melody’s wailing had turned to a low whimper. They were driving through the neighborhood around her house while the other guys knocked on doors and made phone calls. As he drove, his eyes scanned the sides of the road, looking for a dropped book bag, a shred of clothing, anything; he’d asked Melody to do the same. In a busier jurisdiction, there wouldn’t be the manpower or the time to pay so much attention to a kid who’d run away before and probably would again. It wasn’t even protocol. But in a town like The Hollows, where most people knew one another, it just seemed like the right thing to do.

“Where’s Graham?” Jones asked.

“How should I know?” Melody snapped. There was an edgy defensiveness about the way she said it that made him take notice.

“Didn’t you call him to tell him Charlene was missing?”

“Of course I did. His phone was off.” When he didn’t answer, she added, “He said he might go hunting this weekend.”

“It’s after one in the morning and you don’t know where your husband is?” The words sounded hard, judgmental.

“Not everybody has a perfect marriage like you and Maggie,” she said. She had a nasty smile on her face as she drew a pack of cigarettes from her purse.

“Can’t smoke in here, Mel.”

She lit the cigarette anyway and lowered the window. He fought the urge to grab it from her and toss it out onto the street. She had always been a rude, inconsiderate bitch, and he didn’t think Charlene was much better. Smarter, maybe. Better looking than Melody had ever been. But really Charlene was just out for herself, a con looking for a mark; if he’d suspected it before, he knew it now.

They took the road that ran out of the development and wound toward the more rural farm country. Then he took a right onto an unpaved passage that passed over a stone bridge into a thick area of woods. It was a link of wild land between two development neighborhoods, a twenty-acre strip that ran in back of the more expensive homes, so city folks could think they were in the country.

Where Melody and Charlene lived, Whispering Acres was more lower middle class. Back at the precinct house they called it Whimpering Acres because of all the domestic violence calls-an angry husband answering the door, a woman crying behind him. These days you didn’t need the wife to press charges, because they almost never did. But cops rarely hauled the husband away unless they had to, unless the woman was so obviously battered that you couldn’t get around it, unless you knew the next time you came you’d be calling an ambulance or the coroner’s office.

Patrol had been out to Melody and Graham’s plenty of times. Sometimes he was bleeding; sometimes she was. It was always a neighbor who called to complain about the noise. Jones knew what it was like to grow up like that. He felt an unwanted twinge of empathy for Charlene. At least she had the guts to run away from it; he never had. Finally, it was his father who left and never came back.

The Acres wasn’t a bad neighborhood; the streets were lined with average ranches and split-level tract houses. You might find the occasional junker in the drive up on blocks, or clotheslines in the back, a rusty old shed, a side yard cluttered with toys, twisted bicycles. Acres folks didn’t have the time or money to pay much attention to landscaping or to chipping paint or weeds poking through the sparse gravel on the drive-they were working two jobs to make ends meet.

By contrast, in The Oaks, a mile south, the single-story dwellings of The Acres were replaced with towering houses-four or five thousand square feet-surrounded by old-growth trees, meticulous yards, late-model vehicles in three-car garages. Trash cans disappeared as soon as the garbage truck had passed. Driveways were paved with multicolored bricks. Mailboxes stood in carefully groomed flower beds. These were the doctors, the lawyers, the financial professionals who commuted into the city for work each day. During the day, the neighborhood was abuzz with activity, a parade of service professionals-nannies, maids, landscapers, pool cleaners-most of whom lived in