Searching
Searching
E bby drives west and south while Avery keeps watch for signs of Henry. They flank the river until Ebby is forced to turn back onto the main road. Up ahead, now, she sees two police cars parked near the vineyard she passed just the night before. She pulls over behind one of the patrol cars and peers down the long dirt road. There are uniformed officers in the distance, a large van, and the glint of yellow crime-scene tape, one end of which appears to be tied to a grapevine.
“The murder,” Ebby says.
Avery nods slowly and turns on the radio. Ebby is surprised at how well Avery seems to understand the French. They listen to a recorded interview with a local farmer and Avery repeats what he says in English.
“It was a dog who found the victim,” Avery says. “Early this morning.”
It was a farmer’s sheepdog, to be precise. He was nosing around among the oak and ash trees along the edge of a neighbor’s vineyard when he found something at the base of a tree. The dog stepped back and called out with a series of deep-throated barks. The sheepdog knew his territory. The farmer knew his chien . This was something out of the ordinary. It was not a cat or pigeon or porcupine or fox. It was the last thing the dog, or the man, had expected to see. Something no one should ever have to see.
“So,” Avery says, “it wasn’t actually a head on the road, it’s that the farmer only saw the back of the woman’s head at first, sticking out onto a footpath. The farmer says he’s sorry he didn’t walk by last night. Who knows if he might have been able to do something for the woman, or if he might have seen something that could help the police figure out who did this.”
“I think I saw something yesterday,” Ebby says. “A white SUV. It was headed down toward the end of the field, instead of coming out to the road, as you’d expect at that hour. I remember this because I was rushing to get to a store before it closed.” She looks at Avery. “But I was distracted. I didn’t think anything of it, just that it was a bit late to be heading into the vineyard. Do you think I should say something to the police?”
“I suppose,” Avery says. “Did you see who was in it?”
Ebby shakes her head no.
“Who knows if it was anything,” Avery says. “There are so many white SUVs around. Even our rental car is a white SUV.”
“Right, I hadn’t thought of that,” Ebby says. “That wasn’t you, wasit?”
“No, I didn’t come this way last night. I don’t know if Henry did. Before dinner, he was out driving around a bit. I was drying my hair. He said he wanted to scout locations for photographs.”
A cold feeling sweeps over Ebby.
“Henry?” Ebby says. “Henry was out here?”
“I don’t know that. I only know he went out in the rental, then came back to get me before dinner.”
On the radio, there are several interviews connected to the murder, and Ebby and Avery remain seated in the car, listening. “Apparently, there have been other unsolved murders in the center of the country,” Avery says. “But you know, I think people watch too many of those American crime shows. Not every unsolved homicide is connected. And most are committed by people who know their victims.” Avery goes quiet, suddenly, and Ebby feels her look at her, then look away.
“Oh, I’m sorry,” says Avery. “That was stupid of me. I mean, you know. Your brother.”
“Yes,” says Ebby. “It’s fine, it’s fine.” And it is, really. Finally, Avery has come right out and said something. Most of her life, people have whispered within earshot about Ebby, speculated publicly about her state of mind, talked about Baz’s death, but rarely has anyone done her the courtesy of addressing her directly about her brother. That takes courage. Henry, at least, dared to do it. And, now, Avery.
“I, of all people, understand,” Ebby says. “No one likes to think that they might be caught up in random acts of violence. People want to feel there’s a reason for everything. They want to believe certain things could never happen to them, just like that. And, mostly, they don’t.” Strange, Ebby thinks, how freely she is speaking to this Avery person. The woman who is sleeping with the man that Ebby was supposed to marry.
“Only, sometimes they do,” says Avery, quietly. “Happen.”
“Yuh, sometimes they do.”
They don’t need to say any more than this to understand each other. To know that they are not speaking only of what happened to Baz. They both grew up in Connecticut, a few towns apart. Ebby knows, without saying, that they are thinking of the same event. Avery would have been, what? Twenty years old back then? Ebby was in her car when she heard the news on the radio. A school shooting. A living nightmare. The kind of thing you kept telling yourself could not possibly happen around there, only it just had.
All those children!
On that day, Ebby had slammed on the brakes. Pulled off to the side of the road. Opened her door and taken in large gulps of air. But she stopped short of doing what she felt like doing next. Because a white woman might have gotten away with running down the middle of the street screaming at the top of her lungs—and even that was a stretch—but Ebby, one hand clasped over her mouth as if to hold in the emotion, trying to slow her breathing, knew that a black woman shrieking on this suburban street could make people react like flame touching a stick of dynamite.
Since Baz’s death, Ebby had been coached, by her parents and therapists, to find quieter ways to express rage or fright. And Ebby had always found a way. Even if she knew, in her heart, that going hysterical was the most natural reaction to certain situations. How else should a person feel like behaving when someone had just walked into an elementary school and gunned down a bunch of kids and employees? A person should want to jump out of their car and run down the road yelling.
Run away from this world.
The irony is, of the two of them—Avery and Ebby—Ebby feels she is less worried about Henry’s situation, even with her intimate knowledge of tragedy. Ebby has lived through a terrible experience that most people, she hopes, will never have to face. But despite the lingering effects on her mental health, and the challenges to her privacy, Ebby’s life has been one of relative safety.
Ebby has never been in a vehicle accident, never broken her arm or a tooth, never had her appendix taken out, never even been pickpocketed on a crowded city train. She has never been in a war zone. She is physically healthy and well educated. If you remove the unthinkable from Ebby’s life, if you excise just that one day in the year 2000 from the calendar, if you plug up the hole left in her life by her brother’s death, you see a fortunate woman, a life of privilege, a life to be grateful for. Until that day, more recently, when Henry stopped answering his cellphone.
Just as he is doing right now.
There it is again. Another stab of doubt. Where the fuck is he?
Ebby senses Avery turning in her seat to look directly at Ebby, and Ebby, too, turns to look at Avery. Until now, they have been looking at the dashboard or out the window as they have spoken. But now they sit for a moment, their faces tensed with the same question.
Without another word, they open their doors at the same time and jump out of the vehicle. They walk, in step with each other, down the access road toward the police scene, each thinking the same thing. How Henry’s disappearance has coincided with the discovery of a murder victim barely five kilometers from the cottage. How this isn’t the first time Henry has gone missing. How even after sex and flowers and romantic vacations, a woman can never be sure what goes on in a man’s head. How this understanding can send a person’s thinking in disturbing directions. When a man goes AWOL on his wedding day, you could ask yourself what else he might be capable of doing.
It is Avery who says it first. “You don’t think Henry…?” she says, tipping her head in the direction of the crime scene.
“What?” Ebby says, narrowing her eyes at her. Avery doesn’t finish her sentence, but Ebby sees, now, that Avery, like Ebby, is wondering whether Henry could, in some way, be involved in a murder. She remembers how Henry used to disappear for hours at a time, keeping his cellphone turned off. But then he’d call and show up at Ebby’s place with his camera, eager to have her see what he’d photographed.
And people have instincts, don’t they? Ebby’s instincts tell her that, despite the terrible wrong Henry has done her, her ex-fiancé couldn’t possibly be involved in a situation like this one.
Or could he?
Is Ebby, once again, making the mistake of trusting Henry? Didn’t her instincts steer her wrong the last time? He ditched her and she didn’t see it coming. Is she falling into the old trap of thinking that anything in her life could go normally for very long? Could be. But just as a police officer turns and approaches them, Ebby shakes her head at Avery’s question.
“Henry?” Ebby says. “Nah.”
Avery shakes her head. “No. No way,” she says.
Still, while Avery speaks to the police and explains that they are looking for a missing friend, Ebby pulls her smartphone out of her tote bag and begins to search. She types in Connecticut, 2018. Murders. New England. Body found . Just in case there’s something there. Anything that might suggest Henry was up to no good when he disappeared on her last year.
No-no-no, this is crazy, Ebby thinks. This cannot be. She puts her phone away. But the police are already making suppositions of their own. Which is how she and Avery soon end up sitting with a judicial police officer at a portable card table set up beyond earshot of onlookers.
“You are telling me,” the investigator says, “that your friend, Monsieur Pepper, has not been seen since before the discovery of the murder victim’s body, and you are concerned that he may be involved?”
“No,” Avery says, “we are concerned that something may have happened to him while he was out taking photographs.”
“But he was in this area. You say he was driving a white sport utility vehicle, and there are reports that such a vehicle was seen on the access road to the vineyard yesterday evening, in the same area where the victim’s body was found.”
“We don’t know, exactly, where he was. But we are all in this area. We’re staying in the village, at Hannah Frere’s house.”
“What about the person who killed the woman?” says Ebby. “Could that person go and hurt someone else?”
“We cannot be sure until we find that person and establish their reasons for doing this. And in any event, we are not at liberty to discuss certain details of our investigation at this time,” says the officer. “But until we have more information, we have to consider whether the disappearance of your Henry Pepper could be connected.”
Later, Ebby will not be sure whether she merely thought, or actually said, Oh, shit.