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By Root 1213 0

hands on his knees as he sits forward in the easy chair. His badge says R. PATTERSON, but you cannot recall whether he told you his first name was Roger or Rick. He has an immaculately trimmed mustache the color of copper—a more restrained version of your own daughter’s red hair—and occasionally he lifts one of his hands and abstractedly runs a finger along it. The younger trooper is clean-shaven, which makes their age difference even more pronounced. You peg the older of the troopers to be somewhere around forty and the younger to be a mere twenty-five. The younger trooper is taking notes as you speak, while the older one listens. “But did he ever say anything that might be helpful in our understanding of what’s happened to him?”

You have noticed that they do not say “his death.” He is merely missing. The other day his car was found about two miles from his house, the doors locked, and no one has seen him since. He did not show up at his office that day or the next or see any of the patients on his schedule. The troopers clearly presume that a crime has occurred, but at the moment they do not know this for sure.

“No,” you tell them. “Mostly we talked about me.” You offer a small, wan smile.

Although she is not a defense attorney, Emily has already told the troopers that, if she thinks a question is inappropriate, she is not going to allow you to answer it. They have assured the two of you that you are not a suspect in the doctor’s disappearance; they are only, to use the older trooper’s words, nosing around at the moment, and they saw that you were among his patients.

“Can we ask you why you were seeing Dr. Richmond?” Patterson asks. But before you can respond, Emily squeezes your hand.

“There is no reason to answer that, sweetheart,” she says, her voice gentle, though her gaze is intent. She looks at you squarely in the eyes.

You shrug. “I don’t mind,” you tell her. And then you turn to the troopers: “I am being treated for depression and PTSD. As you might have heard, I lost an airplane.”

“Yes, sir, we did know that,” the trooper says. “I’m sorry.”

“Me, too.”

There is an awkward pause; there was a flippancy to your tone that you hadn’t expected when you started to open your mouth.

“Did he ever mention any enemies?”

“No.”

“Any personal problems of his own? I know you were talking about the things on your mind, but did he ever relate them to something going on in his life?”

You grimace involuntarily at a sudden pain in your side, the wince traveling all the way down your arm to your fingers. Emily turns to you, and you nod you’re okay. Then you gaze at Ashley as she stands on the brick hearth by the woodstove. At the moment she seems oblivious to you and Emily and these two state troopers. She is uninterested in dolls or a playmate. She is focused solely, almost quizzically, on the long, daggerlike triangle of metal fuselage on which she is impaled, the piece of your airplane that has sliced through the side of her abdomen. She is fingering the smooth, blue edge, careful to keep her fingers from either the point or the pieces of muscle and stomach and rib that garnish the jagged lip. You find yourself wondering: Was there water in her lungs when they did the autopsy? Or had the metal killed her instantly?

Becky Davis never did call Emily back, so Emily decided to phone her. But this time she called the woman at work, remembering from their one cryptic conversation in the diner that Becky had said she did something at Lyndon State College. From the school’s automated phone system, Emily learned that the woman worked in the library. There Emily asked to speak to Becky Davis.

“Speaking.”

“Oh, I didn’t recognize your voice,” Emily said.

“Who’s this?”

“Emily Linton.”

There was a long pause at the other end, and Emily could imagine the woman sitting a little straighter in her chair. Rubbing the bridge of her nose, perhaps, the way Emily knew she herself did when she was in the midst of a phone call that she found either stressful or unpleasant. “What do you want?” she asked finally.

Emily took a breath. Becky