Fragile

She looked up at him sullenly. “No.”

There were a number of things bothering Jones. The fact that Graham was nowhere to be found was chief among them. The whole hunting thing just didn’t ring true, especially since none of the morons Graham usually hung around with had gone with him. Graham wasn’t the type to go off by himself in the woods and get meditative, to hunt and reflect. He was the type to go off into the woods with his buddies under the pretense of hunting and get drunk, pass out in the blind, never fire off a round.

Other things were bothering Jones, too. According to Charlene’s phone records, she hadn’t used her cell phone since late afternoon yesterday. Admittedly, the modern teenager was a bit of a mystery to Jones. But he did know one thing: they were wired together like the Borg, constantly calling, e-mailing, texting, social-networking. If Charlene was involved in some kind of drama that led her to run away, she’d have called or sent text messages to everyone.

Then he’d discovered that the credit card attached to Charlene’s mobile account was in Graham’s name. Graham had purchased that phone for her, paid the bill every month, even though her mother didn’t know and hadn’t wanted her to have one. But Charlene had told everyone who’d listen that she was afraid of him, that he was “inappropriate” with her. It was a word all her friends and even Ricky had used independently of one another, as if she’d told them each precisely the same thing, using the same phrasing. Which didn’t mean it wasn’t true. He could see the potential in Graham, especially as Charlene grew older, her beauty eclipsing Melody’s completely. Still, if it was true, and Graham was using gifts to manipulate his relationship with Charlene, and now they were both missing, what did it mean?

“You still haven’t told us what you fought about,” said Jones. Melody responded with a sigh, her weeping subsiding. She was all dressed up in a neat red sweater and black skirt, pumps. She’d put her face on and done her hair for the local afternoon news.

“Char,” she’d said, playing the role of good mother for the camera. “Just come home, honey, we’ll work it all out. I promise. And if anyone knows anything or has seen my girl, please call the hotline.” He had to hand it to her. She pulled it out when the cameras started to roll. He remembered that about her.

“The truth is,” she said, making a show of rubbing her temples, “I don’t even remember what started it. Something about what she was wearing. It exposed her navel, and I told her to change her shirt. I told her she looked like a tramp. Things just got all crazy from there. The next thing I knew, she’d packed a bag and was walking out the door. Not the first time. I figured she’d be back in an hour. Or call and we’d make up. That’s how it is with us.”

Chuck stood in the corner of the office. He’d been silent for about fifteen minutes, staring out the window. But Jones knew he was present, listening. They’d set it up this way, eliminated all the people she was leaning on- Maggie, Char’s friends and their mothers. Sent them all home one by one. They didn’t want it to seem immediately like an interrogation.

“We have a few questions, Ms. Murray,” said Chuck, walking from his place by the window and sitting in the chair beside Melody, across from Jones’s desk. Melody didn’t look up at him, kept rubbing at her temples, her eyes closed.

“Mel, that phone of Charlene’s?” said Jones. “Looks like Graham got it for her.”

Melody opened her eyes and looked at Jones. “No.”

“It’s his credit card on the account.”

Melody didn’t say anything, looked down at her cuticles.

“It might be nothing,” said Chuck. “But the last charge on his card was late yesterday afternoon. Twenty-three dollars and change at the Safeway. Around the same time as Charlene’s last call. When did you say he left for his hunting trip?”

The pale white of Melody’s skin, the lines around her eyes, the sagging of her jowls got Jones to thinking about his mother again. It was the stroke that finally did Abigail in. After decades of threatening to become an invalid, a lifetime of imagined illness, and pointless trips to doctors in an ever-widening radius around town, he’d come home from work one night to find her on the bathroom floor, stinking of urine. For a moment, he thought it was an act.

“Mother. Mom?” he said from the doorway. She’d been complaining about terrible headaches for days, but he’d paid her no mind.

Take an aspirin, Mom.

That’s what I love about you, Jones. You’re the soul of compassion.

No doubt she would have loved the idea of him carrying her around, bathing her, changing her diapers like an infant. But even he had his limits.

“Graham and I… haven’t been getting along,” said Melody softly. “I mean, he hasn’t been coming home every night for a while now.”

“So, he didn’t go hunting?” asked Chuck.

“He said he might go hunting. But I haven’t been able to reach him.”

“Where might he go hunting if that’s what he did?”

“How should I know?” she snapped. She sat up suddenly from the grief-stricken slouch she’d been in. “What do I know about hunting?”

Chuck gave her an empathetic nod, and Jones was grateful he was there. He liked the other man’s big-city cool, an aura that he’d seen and heard it all, was surprised by nothing. Jones wanted to throttle Melody, could feel the itch in his hands, though he’d never struck a woman in his life. He tilted back in his chair, feeling it tip, finding his balance. He kept his eyes on Melody, who was getting squirmy and agitated. Outside his office, Jones heard someone laughing, smelled something vile cooking in the microwave.

“I think you ought to be out there looking for my daughter instead of sitting around here talking to me.”

“I hear you, Mrs. Murray,” said Chuck. “And I assure you we haven’t lost our focus. But there are some things that concern us. We’ve heard from several people that Charlene was afraid of Graham. What do you make of that?”

Melody blew out a disdainful breath. “That’s bullshit. That’s Charlene making a show of herself. Trying to get people to feel sorry for her.”

“But he hit her,” said Jones. “Several people saw her black eye. She told my son and Britney that he hit her.”

“It was an accident,” she said, looking away. “She got involved in a fight between me and Graham. He was swinging at me.”

Nobody said anything for a moment. Then, “I’m not saying it was right. I’m just saying he didn’t mean to do it. After that, I asked him to leave. That’s why he hasn’t been sleeping at home much.”

“So how would you characterize their relationship, then? Why would he buy her a cell phone and keep that from you?”

“Charlene has a way of getting what she wants,” she said with more than a shade of resentment. She let out a little laugh. “It’s funny, all those girls saying that Graham made these subtle advances. But it was Charlene who was always half flirting, wearing revealing pajamas when he was around, batting her eyelashes. Graham is a lot of things. Subtle is not one of them.”

“So you think she could have convinced him to get her that phone?”

Melody nodded. “Or she could have lifted his card. Graham wasn’t good with money. He might not have noticed for a while.”

Jones and Chuck exchanged a look, both picking up on her use of the past tense. Not that it meant anything necessarily. It could just mean that she considered their relationship over.

“Could she have convinced him to go away with her, Melody?”

Jones saw something flash across her face, he couldn’t say what. Was it calculating? She wasn’t a stupid woman, though he was tempted-had always been tempted-to think of her as such. She’d been a mediocre student, gone to community college, like he had. She held a good job doing something administrative at the big oil company that had some offices in a town nearby. She wasn’t an intellectual. She had what he thought of as survival smarts. She’d be what she needed to be to get by.

“Is that what you think?” she asked, a shrillness creeping into her voice. She gripped the arms of the chair. “That they ran off together?”