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By Root 640 0

could do a great deal of good in this world. I had resented her saying what was so obvious on the surface. My mother had in the past acted like a pampered housewife. In reality, however, she had always done thankless community service jobs as a nurse. She had been a volunteer for the Red Cross for several years, flying off to places where there was not basic sanitation much less four-star hotels. I know it is true that my mother, as mothers do, wanted what was best for us. Alice would debate that, saying that the evidence spoke for itself. Nellie, she maintained, was a passive-aggressive busybody who had never liked her daughter-in-law. Nellie, she said, tried, wittingly or unwittingly, to botch up our lives just to prove that I had made the wrong choice. Despite the old saw, it’s been my experience that good intentions can actually get a person a fair distance. I would never bet my life on anything, but if I did, if I had to, it would be on my mother. I would bet my life that she had always had the best of intentions and that we had benefited from them.

I didn’t mention to Alice that I’d talked with Nellie. I didn’t tell her that two days after she was taken we went to the grocery store in Blackwell. The waters parted for us as we came down the aisle. The few women in the dairy section peeled away, staring. At the end of the junk-food aisle an older gentleman with stubble and a sweat-stained green T-shirt tight across his chest and belly stood in wait. He spat on the linoleum at my feet. He breathed heavily and scowled in my face. We left our groceries in the cart by the magazine stand and walked quickly out of the store. Emma and Claire did not contain their distress. We drove twenty miles after that, to buy a loaf of bread and a gallon of milk.

I also didn’t tell Alice that the night before the preliminary hearing Rafferty stopped out for about forty-five minutes. We talked in the kitchen after the girls were in bed. He explained that he made it his business to leave no stone unturned in his cases. He’d had dinner at the restaurant Carol Mackessy managed, he’d said. Shrimp in pesto sauce. Not half-bad. We would talk in greater detail after the preliminary hearing, but he said that even now at this early date he liked to feel that he had stepped into the players’ skins. His eyes were too big for his sockets, which gave him an intensity he may or may not have had. Not into my skin, I said to myself. He sat at our kitchen table, drawing straight lines across his legal pad. There were occasions when I wondered if he was a charlatan. I wondered if he’d actually gone to law school, if he popped up to prey on helpless people. I’d have to remind myself that he came highly recommended, that he was a good friend of Dan and Theresa’s.

He seemed surprised when I told him I didn’t know much about Alice’s family history. What I’d been told about her upbringing I can say in two simple sentences. She is an only child who was raised by her mother’s best friend. Her father died of kidney failure when she was twenty-two.

“That’s all?” he asked, opening his eyes wider. Alice said once that she always worried about making astonishing remarks in front of Rafferty because she feared his eyes might pop out.

It occurred to me that what little I had said made her sound like a psychopath, like a woman who couldn’t confide in her own husband. I think he sensed my discomfort. He began asking logical questions about the farming operation. I found myself explaining in great detail about how to get a good seed bed for alfalfa. I told him my calf losses were about three percent, a statistic I was proud of. I’d made plywood four-by-four hutches for the newborns and then I’d feed them whole milk diluted with hot water, from nipple pails. Pretty early on they’d get a mix of corn, brewers’ pellets, oats, and minerals. I didn’t tell Rafferty that Alice would go on binges, talking about the problem of chin hairs for a full hour, chronicling the different electrolysists she’d been to in her life. I used to laugh until my side hurt at her impersonations