Thought I Knew You (4 page)

The morning we left, I couldn’t find Greg to tell him goodbye, but Sarah and I spent the entire ride home analyzing my new love interest. I was giddy on hope, and with a little prompting, I looked up Greg’s number in the company directory and called his office the day after we got home.

Until recently, I couldn’t be sure that we’d gone a day without speaking in ten years.

Chapter 5

“I
’m Detective Matt Reynolds.” The
man stood on my porch, wearing a wrinkled button-down shirt and a pair of equally wrinkled khakis. He held his credentials with the badge out for me to see.

When I made no move to look, he shifted his weight from one foot to the other, and wordlessly, I opened the door.

He stepped over the threshold. “I’m from the Hunterdon County Missing Persons Unit. I wanted to stop by to follow up with a status update.”

What status update? Here’s the status: Greg isn’t home yet.

“Do you want something to drink?” I asked, turning to walk to the kitchen.

He followed me down the hallway. “Uh… no, thank you, Mrs. Barnes.”

I detoured into the living room. “Please, call me Claire.” I motioned for him to sit on the couch, while I sat in Greg’s easy chair.

He lowered himself onto the middle cushion. “I’m going to be the lead investigator, and I promise you we will do everything we can to find your husband. Right now, we have no reason to believe he’s dead. We queried all the morgues within a twenty-mile radius of Rochester for a John Doe matching his description. So far, there’s no one. I’m leaving this afternoon for Rochester to discuss some of the details of the case with the local authorities there. We’ve had phone conversations with personnel at the hotel and the airline, and we’ve confirmed what you told us earlier. We do believe he landed in Rochester and checked into his hotel, but we don’t think he ever stayed in his room. In addition, we can’t locate his luggage.”

He pulled a pen and a small notebook out of his shirt pocket. He clicked the pen once, twice, and seemed to be waiting for me. I nodded for him to continue.

“This is all we know right now. But I do have a few follow-up questions, if you feel up to it.”

“Yes, of course. Anything.” All the talking seemed superfluous, taking up precious time. I couldn’t understand how talking to me would help them find Greg. I wanted to push him out the door, out into the real world where the clues would be.

“Mrs. Barnes… Claire, I need to ask you some tough questions, regarding your marriage, your life, things that may feel very personal. I don’t believe you had anything to do with Greg’s disappearance, but you may be able to tell me something about who did. And you might not even know it yourself, so it’s very important that you don’t hold back on me. Do you understand?”

I nodded again, frustrated at his careful pace. “Yes.”

“I need to understand the state of your marriage.”

Even though he had warned me, I was surprised at the candid statement, the abruptness of it. I inhaled deeply and closed my eyes, thinking about how to put into words what I avoided thinking about. How did I explain? We were like ships passing in the night. He went about his day, I went about mine, and if our days overlapped and we connected, great. But in the past three months, more often than not, we hadn’t.

“Greg and I have a marriage. We have highs and lows, but we don’t fight regularly.” I paused, searching for words. “But we don’t really… talk regularly either.”

“Is this a recent development?”

“He was up late at night. Working, he said, and sometimes I would hear him on the phone. When I pressed him on it, he got frustrated, frequently telling me not to worry about it. I needed to understand him. He needed me to not need that.” I stopped, staring at my hands, which were clenched in my lap. I took a deep breath, consciously relaxing them. “I don’t even know if everything I’m saying is making sense.”

Matt smiled. He had a kind smile and soft green eyes. I could see why he had become a detective. I instinctively wanted to tell him everything about my life, and I was quite sure he took a lot of confessions. I would have bet even hardened criminals trusted him.

“I understand, Claire. I was married once. It sounds familiar. It also doesn’t sound unusual. I think most marriages have these times, and more often than not, they pass. Do you think things will get better, or do you have a sense of your marriage ending?”

“No, we’ll pull out of it,” I said quickly, trying to convince the detective. And myself. “A few years ago, Greg had a friend who passed away. He became reclusive and moody. The only people who could reach him were the girls. I realized that’s how Greg deals with complicated, emotional situations. I think there’s something similar going on because his behavior lately has been the same. But this time, the reason behind it is a mystery to me. It’s been this way for close to a year, off and on, with the worst being the last four months or so. I expect to eventually know the reason behind his self–imposed exile. I was trying, but…”

Matt nodded.

Taking the gesture for encouragement, I continued. “I’d become impatient lately, pushing him, wanting to know what was in his head. I became insecure, needy. Did he still love me? I’m sure that pushed him further into himself. But I couldn’t see that at the time. I can see it a little more clearly now.”

Matt glanced down at his notebook. “Would Greg hurt himself?”

The question seemed preposterous. “No. I know I’ve admitted I don’t know my husband very well right now, that there’s something going on with him that I can’t figure out. However, I know him deep down, the person that he is, fundamentally. He’s the most stable, emotionally secure person I’ve ever met. When he has something difficult to deal with, he does withdraw. But he deals with it. That’s the difference. Suicidal people aren’t able to deal with their difficulties. In addition, he adores his kids. He would never,
ever
do that to them.”

Matt nodded. “Tell me about Greg the father.”

I relaxed into the chair, crossing my legs.
An easy one.
“Greg is the most hands-on father I know. He knows the girls inside and out. Hannah was colicky as a baby. She cried all the time, and only Greg could calm her. He’s more patient than me. He’s more fun than I am. When he takes the girls out for the day—which is one day a week, at least—he’s completely focused on them. They go to the park, have a picnic in the yard, or play outside with a ball for hours. His relationship with them is completely different from mine. I’m always doing a million things at once, and the girls have to fit into my life. He makes the girls the focus of his day, and all the other tasks fit in around them. To that extent, he’s a better parent than I am.”

“Do you believe Greg could be having an affair?”

The question hit me hard. There was a difference between knowing the police were speculating and having one of them ask me outright. I wanted to answer him steadily and unemotionally. I studied the arm of Greg’s chair, an old plaid recliner from eons ago, pilled from years of use, and resisted the urge to lean over and bury my face in the fabric. I imagined Greg sitting there, the gentle dip in the arm of the chair where he’d hold the television remote and mindlessly change the channels. I could faintly smell the remnants of his cologne, tiny pieces of Greg interwoven in the threads.

“I don’t know. I don’t think so. With who?” I shook my head. “It’s not that he wouldn’t do that to me, although I believe that, too. But it was too
out there
for him. Too far off the beaten path. Too deviant. Greg likes the order and structure of marriage, the routine. I don’t think he could juggle, lie, and compartmentalize to the degree that you would need to in order to have an affair.”

“Thank you, Claire. I think you were honest, and let’s hope that this will help. I don’t know how yet, but that’s how it goes sometimes. You collect information, and you don’t know what will be the lead, what will break the case, but when you assemble it all, sometimes the answer is in the interviews.” Before he left, he gathered the names of our friends, family, colleagues, and neighbors. He also asked for the name of Greg’s manager and the phone number.

“One more thing, did Greg have a passport?” he asked, standing in the doorway.

“He used to. About five years ago, he had to travel to Canada, and I think he had one then. I have no idea if it’s expired or not.”

“We’re going to put an alert on his passport, so we’ll be notified if he leaves the country. We’ll be in touch.” He loped across the driveway to his car, and I shut the front door behind him.

“Mommy, who was that man?” Hannah stood between the kitchen and the living room uncertainly, swaying gently against the door frame, sleep from her afternoon nap heavy in her eyes.

I took a deep breath. Leah was sleeping, and the house was quiet. It was a good time to talk to her. “That man was a policeman.”

“When is Daddy coming home?” she asked for the tenth time that day.

“Daddy is lost. Remember when you got lost in the grocery store?” She nodded seriously. “Daddy is lost like that right now, and we don’t know where he is or when he’s coming home.”

“Why doesn’t he use a map? A map can help Daddy get home!” She smiled brightly.

I laughed. “Maybe the policeman will help Daddy find a map,” I said, kissing her head. “We’ll figure it out. Okay, Hannah? Don’t worry. Daddy and Mommy love you and Leah very, very much.”

“Does Daddy have Cody with him?”

“I don’t know, Han. I guess it’s possible.” The mystery of Cody baffled me almost as much as Greg’s disappearance. I hadn’t the energy to summon a full-on search for him, but fortunately, Dad had taken on the task. The neighborhood was plastered with missing posters, and I thought it ironic that more people probably knew that Cody was missing than Greg. My subconscious had linked the disappearances, and for a while, I considered that if Greg had run off, he’d taken Cody with him. Nothing about that made sense, but then again, the entire situation seemed to defy logic. Superstitious, I left Cody’s dog bowls in place, nestled between the cabinets and the screen door. I even walked around his oversized tennis ball and Kong chew toy, leaving them in place until he—and Greg—came home. I felt an indescribable certainty that they would return together. That gave me hope, somehow.

Detective Reynolds had genuinely seemed to think our conversation would help. I also hoped that he would find something in his investigation of our family and friends. Conversely, I didn’t believe Greg’s disappearance was connected to anyone we knew.

Then what did I believe? I didn’t know. That he had amnesia and was wandering around Rochester? That would be the most positive scenario. If I didn’t believe there was an affair, or that he had left voluntarily, or that he had been kidnapped, then what did I believe had happened? I couldn’t think about it; I couldn’t focus on the why. I just asked myself the same question, a hundred times a day.
Where in the hell is Greg?

Chapter 6

I
took a sabbatical from work.
I moved in slow motion. My heart and my feet felt heavy. I broke two glasses because I forgot I was holding them and simply let go. Hannah sometimes had to say “Mommy” three or four times before I would answer her.

Hannah knew something was wrong. The Pollyanna explanation she had gotten earlier in the week no longer held water after ten days. She was withdrawn and sad, repeatedly asking me when Daddy was coming home. Even Leah missed him, particularly long after she’d been asleep, crying out, “Daddy!” as his presence in her life had been reduced to a shadowy figure in her dreams. My chest ached for them.

On Sunday morning, someone knocked on the door. I stood immobilized, gripped by fear. That had become my normal response to the doorbell or the phone ringing. I was always convinced the moment had come, that I would learn my husband was dead. But an equal part of me believed that the moment had come for me to learn the truth, that Greg stood on the other side of the door or was on the other end of the line. The battle of my conflicting instincts resulted in paralysis. I couldn’t will myself to action, and inevitably, the answering machine would click on, or Mom would answer the door.

“Mo-o-o-m!” Hannah called, a four-year-old going on seventeen. “Get the door. Someone’s been knocking.” Then, frustrated with my all-pervading hesitation over everything, she marched to the door.

“Hi, Squirt!” The deep male voice boomed down the hall. “Have you gotten taller? I feel like you are much,
much
taller than the last time I saw you!”

“Uncle Drew!” Hannah yelled.

A balloon of relief popped in my chest. What Greg couldn’t fix, Drew could. Drew would bring Greg home. I ran down the hall and threw my arms around Drew’s neck, nearly pushing Hannah into the wall. I sobbed as he held me, his body a wall of strength. I inhaled the scent of laundry detergent and a faint hint of cologne, his Drew-ness that felt like home to me.

“How did you know? Why are you here?” I blubbered into his shoulder.

“Your dad called me. I’m so sorry about what’s going on. What can I do?”

I laughed the strange seal bark, as though I’d forgotten how to laugh, and when I tried, it came out unnatural and jarring.

“Please, please help.” Truthfully, just having him there would help. I felt safer, not so vulnerable in my own home. “I’m sorry I didn’t call you back. I just couldn’t… I didn’t want to talk about any of this…”

He waved away my apology, and I motioned for him to follow me into the kitchen.

When I was five, we moved into the house next door to Drew’s family. Mom told me that the secret to making friends was to act as if you were having the time of your life. I rode my bike up and down the street, singing as loud as I could, convinced that I could lure the neighbor kids with my siren song of fun. After about an hour, all I had to show for it was a broken bike chain. While I was trying to fix the dislodged chain, six-year-old Drew appeared with what I thought was a small metal screw.

“It’s a bike chain tool,” he said matter-of-factly. He deftly pushed out the pin, snapped the two sides of the chain apart, and reconnected them, pushing the pin back into place while loosening the new connection.

“How do you know how to do that?” I asked.

He shrugged. “I fix all my own stuff, mostly ’cause I break so much, my dad won’t fix anything for me anymore.”