Catching Air (28 page)

Chapter Twenty-seven

TWO POLICE OFFICERS SHOWED
up at the B-and-B around 8:00
P.M.
, responding to Peter’s call. One was a bleached- blond woman who looked to be in her fifties, and she had a younger male partner who kept touching his gun holster—a nervous habit, perhaps, but a disconcerting one, too. Everyone sat together in the living room except for Peter, who couldn’t stop pacing. The power had been restored hours earlier, and now every lamp and overhead fixture in the room blazed. Peter had turned them all on and lit a fire in the hearth; it was as if he wanted the B-and-B to be a beacon in case Kira needed a light to guide her home, Dawn thought.

“Can you go over exactly what happened before she left?” said the female officer, whose name badge read
Wilson
.

“The power went out,” Peter said. “She disappeared right after that.”

“Did she get any phone calls?” Officer Wilson asked. “Text messages, maybe?”

Peter shook his head. “Just a few from this bride of a wedding we’re holding tomorrow. She calls all the time, though. I don’t think Kira even talked to her before she left. It certainly wasn’t anything unusual, in any case.”

“Has she ever done anything like this before?” the officer asked. She was taking notes in a small spiral pad while her partner surveyed everyone with an impassive expression. “Has she ever run off and not told anyone?”

Peter gave a little laugh. “Never. Kira is the most responsible person I’ve ever known. She wouldn’t just do this, especially not with the wedding coming up. It makes no sense.”

“No . . . fights?” Officer Wilson looked directly at Peter. “No marital upsets?”

Peter folded his arms. “I mean, sure, we bicker sometimes,” he finally said. “But it isn’t that.”

“Is there anything else you can think of? Even a small thing. Something she said before she walked out, maybe.”

“She asked me if it was hard.”

Everyone turned to look at Dawn, who was sitting on an ottoman, not quite within the circle.

“If what was hard?” the officer asked, shifting in her seat to face Dawn.

“I don’t know,” Dawn said, twisting her hands. “We were talking about the power going out and then she just said, ‘Was it hard?’ But it was almost like she was talking to herself. That was the last thing she said before she left, other than that she had to go.”

Officer Wilson wrote something in her pad. It seemed to take her forever.

“Do you have any idea what she was talking about?” the officer asked when she finally raised her head again.

Dawn swallowed against the lump forming in her throat. This was it. She’d almost fled when Peter mentioned calling the police, so great had been her worry. But then she’d remembered the soup Kira had made for her on her first night, and the extra bread Kira had slipped onto her plate when Dawn had been so hungry. There had been a hundred such small kindnesses: the lamp Kira had found for her room, the soft futon she’d ordered online, the delicacies Kira had slipped to Dawn while they cooked together.

“She was asking me if it was hard to disappear,” Dawn said, her voice a scratchy whisper. Everyone leaned closer, straining to hear. “She asked because I disappeared once before.”

Both officers visibly tensed.

“There’s one more thing you need to check,” Dawn said. She was shaking, but she forced herself to sit up straight and to meet Officer Wilson’s steady gaze. Kira’s safety was at stake, which meant Dawn needed to offer up her own, just as her mother had on that long-ago day when she’d rushed to help the little boy who’d been choking.

“There’s a guy named Tucker Newman,” Dawn began. “He may be in town, and if so, he’s after me. I don’t think he has anything to do with this, but you should know about him.”

The officer picked up her pencil again. “What should I know?”

Dawn took a deep breath, feeling the eyes of Peter and Rand and Alyssa on her. Then, starting at the very beginning, she told the officers everything.

Chapter Twenty-eight

THE HEAT WAS SHOCKING.
Kira had forgotten what it felt like to sweat, for her upper lip to grow damp and her armpits sticky and to have to gather her hair into a ponytail to get it off her neck.

She’d begun shedding layers the moment she stepped off the plane. First her hat, then her coat, then her heavy wool sweater. She was down to a long-sleeved shirt and her jeans and boots, and still she felt too warm. It was eight o’clock at night, and she was in a completely different world. Amazing how easy it had been to slip inside it: a swipe of her credit card, a flash of her driver’s license, a quick walk through security . . . Disappearing was so exquisitely simple.

She hadn’t known where she was going, until the ticket agent at the airport asked for her destination.

“Florida,” she’d said instantly, the word sounding confident and comfortable on her lips. She’d paid more than eight hundred dollars for a ticket—she, who clipped coupons to save fifty cents on a carton of yogurt!—then she’d waited for two hours, until it was time to climb aboard the plane. She’d stared out the window for the entire flight.

When you were feeling lost and desperate, where else would you go but home?

Kira walked through the terminal, heading toward the exit. Everyone had kept telling her to stop stressing, and now she was doing precisely that. She’d left her cell phone buzzing on the counter. Peter or Rand could explain to Jessica about the lost power and missing salmon and everything else. She was handing off her worries, like a bundle of dirty laundry passed over the counter at the dry cleaner’s. She passed a pay phone and paused, then used her credit card to make a quick call, dialing the number from memory.

She pushed through the glass doors and walked to the end of the line of people waiting outside for taxicabs. There was a glowing young couple who looked like newlyweds, a few exuberant families probably heading to Disney World, solo business travelers wearing suits and weary expressions, and a tanned older couple who looked like they were returning from a cruise. Funny, but they were probably all living different phases of essentially the same life, Kira thought. In another ten years, the newlyweds would be back, this time more haggard-looking and with a few kids in tow, heading toward Space Mountain and mouse ears again, and a decade after that, the business travelers would be returning from a sail to the Bahamas, their strained expressions replaced with serene ones, their pallor giving way to tans.

“Where to?” the cabdriver asked when Kira climbed into the backseat.

Again, the destination slipped easily off her tongue. She named a certain restaurant, a place with a clubby atmosphere, where the martinis were bone-dry and the walls were paneled in a dark, knotty wood, and entrées couldn’t be had for less than thirty dollars.

It was a Friday night. He’d be there, of course. He was a man who enjoyed elegant routines, and this was his end-of-the-workweek ritual.

• • •

She walked into the restaurant a half hour later and spotted him holding court in a corner booth. It felt as if decades had passed since she’d stood in his office while he’d turned his back on her to take a phone call, but he looked exactly the same: expensive gray suit, crisp white shirt, cuffs shot through with gold monogrammed cuff links, florid red cheeks, and a crescent of silver hair sweeping around the back of his mostly bald head.

Thomas Bigalow was dining with three other men who exuded the same kind of look: power that was sourced in great wealth. She recognized one of them as the district’s congressman.

She’d felt as if she’d been in the throes of a dream ever since she left the B-and-B, gliding along, her emotions pleasantly numb, following a script that her subconscious was writing but that she couldn’t predict. Now she realized what had brought her home: It was finally time to stand up to her old boss. Their last encounter had trailed her all the way to Vermont, tainting her new life there. Jinxing her ability to succeed.

She walked over to stand in front of their booth, marveling in a detached sort of way at her complete lack of fear. He didn’t notice her, not at first. He was talking to the guy on his left, the congressman, while the other two men leaned in to hear. On the table in front of her old boss was a plate holding the last bit of his steak dinner. The meat was leaking blood-red juice onto the white china. She watched as he picked up a gleaming, serrated knife and sawed off another bite, then gestured for the waiter to bring the bill.

“Mr. Bigalow,” she said, moving to stand directly in front of him.

He regarded her for a long moment, and as she felt his eyes run over her, she suddenly became aware of what she looked like: no makeup, hair that needed a trim swept up into a messy ponytail, heavy winter boots in the eighty-degree heat.

“Yes?” he said, amusement lacing his voice. “Are you here to tell us about the desserts?”

The other three men burst into laughter.

“No,” Kira said. Her voice stayed steady, her palms dry. They were nothing more than school-yard bullies. They probably
had
been school-yard bullies. “I’m not here to offer you something sweet.”

She raised her chin and stared at him.
Shame on you
, she thought. Maybe that would be a good opening line. But slowly, chillingly, she became aware of something: His eyes held only wariness and defiance. They didn’t contain a trace of recognition.

All the breath left her lungs in a whoosh, as if she’d been punched. Sure, she looked different from how she had during her law firm days, when her hair was always sleek and she wore nice suits, but how could he not remember her? She’d devoted six years of her life to his firm, more than two thousand awful, soul-crushing days in which she’d done her best every single minute. She was prepared for anything—for him to yell, or demand to have her tossed out, or mock her winter boots—
anything
but this. Being forgotten gutted her.

He was turning back to his friends now, finishing his cocktail and cracking another joke. Maybe he thought she was the daughter of a client whose case he’d lost, or a job applicant he’d turned down. Or more likely he wasn’t the slightest bit concerned about why she’d appeared. Confrontation didn’t faze him; he was steeped in it every day in the courtroom, plus he’d been married three times. He
thrived
on it. She was a gnat buzzing in his ear, something inconsequential to be swatted away.

The waiter approached, cleared away the dirty plates, and set down the black leather holder containing the check as Thomas looked at her again. “Was there anything else?” he asked, his voice pointed.

He’d forget this encounter by the time she stepped onto the sidewalk outside, but Kira knew it would haunt her. She couldn’t leave like this, defeated and meek. Not again.

Kira reached for the leather holder and waved it in the air. “Be careful when it comes to Tommy and bills, because you’ll probably end up paying more than your fair share,” she said, her voice ringing out in the hushed, elegant room. “That’s what some of his clients were beginning to complain about when I worked at his firm. Overbilling. Just ask Skyrim Holdings. You should watch yourself, Congressman, because I’d hate for your constituents to think you’re as corrupt as your dinner host. Guilt by association and all.”

She tossed the bill at Thomas and spun around to leave, but not before noticing two things: The congressman was leaning back, away from Thomas. And recognition had finally snapped into her old boss’s eyes.

• • •

Dawn tried to prepare herself for the feel of heavy metal handcuffs clicking onto her wrists. She thought she’d be read her rights, then led outside to the police car, a hand pushing down her head as she was guided into the backseat. Blue and red lights would reflect against the snow as they sped through the streets, and then she’d be locked in a grimy cage somewhere in the underbelly of this charming town, a place happy vacationers never even knew existed.

But the police officers didn’t move once she finished her story.

“So you sent back the money?” Officer Wilson finally asked. “When?”

“A little while ago,” Dawn said. “It would have arrived by now.”

They made her repeat her entire story, this time peppering her with questions, making her loop back again and again, probably to see if she’d change her tale, or trip herself up. By the time she finished talking, Dawn’s voice was growing hoarse.

“This Tucker Newman,” the female officer finally said, flipping back a page in her notebook to find his name. “What makes you think he’s here?”

“Mostly just a sense,” Dawn said. “But he did tell me in an e-mail he wouldn’t stop looking for me, and I think a friend from work figured out I was in Killington. I think she told him.”

She stole a glance at the others. Peter had known the whole story, of course, but it must have come as a shock to Rand and Alyssa. Alyssa gave her a gentle smile, and Dawn felt tears of relief prick her eyes. She looked at Rand, who appeared a little taken aback. But then he winked at her. Maybe they’d suspected there was more to her story all along, or maybe life had thrown so much at them recently that their threshold for shock had been raised to a whole new level.

The officer finally returned her notepad to her pocket, and she and her partner stood up.

This was it, Dawn thought. She’d been so worried about Tucker appearing, but it turned out to be the police who’d discovered her first, after all.

“Do not leave town without first informing us,” said the male officer. “We may want to question you more tomorrow.”

“Of course,” Dawn said. Her heart beat against her chest like a small, frantic bird. The officers were putting on their coats. Were they actually leaving?

“As for your wife,” Officer Wilson said to Peter, “we can’t consider her a missing person until forty-eight hours have passed. She left of her own volition. There’s no evidence of foul play.”

“Can’t you do anything?” Peter asked.

“We’ve got her description and the plate number of her car,” she said. “We’ll keep a lookout.”

The police left, and Dawn almost collapsed to the floor. Her confession had drained all the energy out of her, like water spiraling from a sink. Peter came back into the room and slumped on the couch, looking as exhausted as Dawn felt.

“Can I make anyone coffee?” she offered. She hesitated. “And if you guys want me to stay somewhere else in town tonight, it’s no problem.”

Rand stood up. “Coffee sounds great,” he said.

Peter was reaching for his jacket. “I’m going back out to look for Kira,” he said. “And don’t be ridiculous. You’re staying here.”

“I’ll call around,” Alyssa offered. “Maybe some of the local hotels? She might’ve just needed to get away from the wedding and everything.”

Peter nodded. His eyes were red-rimmed, and he was pale. He probably shouldn’t be driving, Dawn thought. It was dark, and the roads were slippery . . . she thought of her parents’ accident, and her throat constricted.

But now Rand was putting on his coat, too, and walking over to stand next to his brother, and holding out his hand for the keys.

“Can I come with you?” he asked. “I want to help.”

Peter hesitated, then gave him the keys.

• • •

“Why didn’t you tell me?” Alyssa’s voice was kind, but Dawn still flinched.

They were together in the living room, the lights still blazing, but by now Dawn had brought out cups of tea and the fire had been reduced to glowing embers. She thought about all the things she could say—that she was scared, or lonely, or desperate—but finally settled on the most honest, raw answer, the words that hurt the most to release: “I was ashamed.”

“Ashamed of being tricked by a con artist?” Alyssa asked.

Dawn shook her head. “Of falling in love with him.” She remembered Tucker brushing the hair from her face, and saying,
Let’s be each other’s families from now on.

“Oh,” Alyssa said slowly. “I see.”

“I’m so sorry. I should have told you. And I don’t think Tucker had anything to do with Kira’s disappearance,” Dawn said. “But if he does, I won’t ever forgive myself.”

“I don’t think that’s it either,” Alyssa said. “In fact, I’m sure of it. I bet she just needed to escape for a bit. We can all relate to that, can’t we? It was one of the reasons why I used to travel so much. And Rand . . .” Her voice trailed off, and she reached for her tea again. “Kira left before she knew the power would come back on. I bet she just had a mini-breakdown because she was worried the lack of electricity would ruin the wedding.”

“And the salmon,” Dawn added. At Alyssa’s questioning look, Dawn explained about the supplier not delivering the fish. “But I’ve called a bunch of restaurants, and I’ve come up with eighty-four fillets. They’re charging the same price they would for the entrée on the menu, and it may not be as good quality, but it’s still salmon.”

Alyssa smiled. “Good for you.” She paused, then added, “I feel a little guilty, too, you know. We all agreed to do the wedding, but Kira’s the one doing the bulk of the work. I didn’t expect to be on bed rest—I never expected to get pregnant, truthfully—and I’ve been so wrapped up in worrying about the baby and Grace and . . . and some other things, that I haven’t fully appreciated how much Kira has had to shoulder. I know you’ve been helping a lot, but I think she feels responsible. And she’s worried about money, and the wedding was going to be a big help with that.”

“Where do you think she went?” Dawn asked.

Alyssa shrugged. “My bet’s a quiet hotel, where she can have a glass or two of wine and a dinner she didn’t have to cook. I bet she sleeps for twelve hours straight and comes back tomorrow. I just wish she’d taken her phone. Peter is so scared.”

She frowned. “I just thought of something. Can you check the cell phone in my room?”

“Sure.” Dawn got to her feet. “Where is it, exactly?”

“Probably on the bureau.”

Dawn came back a moment later, holding the cell phone, and Alyssa reached for it and switched it on. “Two messages,” she said.

“The first one’s from an old photography client,” Alyssa said. “Hang on . . . She’s rambling . . .”