Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates
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that Brett was seen with her, last night. It can’t be a coincidence, your son and my daughter . . .”
“If you don’t have a warrant, Mr. Mayfield, I don’t have to let you in.”
“A warrant? I’m not a police officer, Ethel. Don’t be ridiculous. I’m not even a city official any longer. I just want to see Brett’s room, just for a minute. How can you possibly object to that?”
“No. I can’t. Brett wouldn’t want that—he hates all of you.”
Ethel Kincaid was about to shut the door in Zeno’s face but he pressed the palm of his hand against it, holding it open. A pulse beat wildly in his forehead. He could not believe what Ethel Kincaid had so heedlessly uttered but he would never forget it.
Hates all of you. You.
“If your son has hurt my daughter—my daughter Cressida—if anything has happened to Cressida—I will kill him.”
Ethel Kincaid threw her weight against the door, to shut it. And Zeno released the door.
He was stunned. He could not think clearly. He knew, he had better return to the Land Rover and drive home before he did something irrevocable like pounding violently on the God-damned door that had been shut rudely in his face.
Like breaking into the Kincaid house.
The spiteful woman would call 911, he knew. Give her the slightest pretext, she would fuck up Zeno Mayfield and his family all she could.
He returned to the Land Rover, that had been parked crookedly at the curb. He saw that a seat belt trailed out from the driver’s seat, like something broken, discarded. A swift vision came to him of the pile of debris in the Episcopal churchyard. Driving away from the Kincaid house without a backward glance he thought Maybe she didn’t hear me. Maybe she won’t remember.
IN THE DRIVEWAY Arlette stood waiting for Zeno to return.
Waiting to see if he was bringing their daughter home with him.
And so in her face, as Zeno climbed out of the Land Rover, he saw the disappointment.
“She wasn’t there?”
“No.”
“Did you talk to—Ethel? Was Brett there?”
“Ethel was no help. Brett wasn’t there.”
Arlette hurried to keep up with Zeno, who was headed into the house.
Suddenly it had become 8:20 A.M. So swiftly, the night had passed into dawn and now into a sunny and shimmering-hot morning.
The privacy of the night. The exposure of the morning.
Arlette asked, in a shaky voice, “Do you think that Cressida and Brett might have gone away together?—or, he took her somewhere? To hurt her? To embarrass us? Zeno?”
“Cressida is nineteen. She’s an adult. If she chooses to stay away overnight, that’s her prerogative.”
Zeno spoke harshly, ironically. He had not the slightest faith in what he was saying but he believed these words must be reiterated.
Arlette clutched at his arm. Arlette’s fingers dug into his arm.
“But—if she didn’t choose? If someone has hurt her? Taken her? We have to help our daughter, Zeno. She has no one but us.”
Unspoken between them was the thought She isn’t really an adult. She is a child. For all her pose of maturity, a child.
There was no choice now, no postponing the call, even as Zeno stood in the driveway staring with eyes that felt seared, ravaged with such futile staring in the direction of Cumberland Avenue as into an abyss out of which at any moment—(feasibly! Not illogically and not impossibly!—for as a young aggressive attorney Zeno Mayfield had often conjured the attractive possibilities of alternate universes in which alternate narratives revealed his [guilty] clients to be “innocent” of the charges that had been brought against them)—his daughter Cressida might appear; no choice, he knew, except to contact law enforcement; calling the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department and asking to speak to Hal Pitney who was a lieutenant on the force, not a close friend of Zeno Mayfield’s but an old friend from Zeno’s political days and, he wanted to think, a reliable friend. With forced calmness he told Hal that he knew, it might seem premature to be reporting his daughter missing, since Cressida was nineteen, and not a child, but the circumstances seemed to warrant it: she’d been gone overnight, she was definitely not a person to behave irresponsibly; they had learned that she’d been seen at the Roebuck Inn the previous night, alone; then, later, in the company of several men of whom one was Brett Kincaid. (Pitney surely knew of Corporal Brett Kincaid, from stories in the local media.) Zeno said they’d called Cressida’s cell phone repeatedly and they’d called virtually everyone in Carthage who knew her, or might know of her—she seemed to have vanished.
Zeno said he’d gone to Kincaid’s house. And Kincaid was missing, too.
Zeno spoke rapidly and, he hoped, persuasively. He was not prepared for Hal Pitney telling him that, though they knew nothing about his daughter, it had happened that Brett Kincaid had been brought into headquarters that morning, less than an hour before. He’d been reported by hikers seemingly incapacitated in his Jeep Wrangler, that appeared to have skidded partway off the Sandhill Road, just inside the Nautauga Preserve. There’d been no one with him but there’d been “bloody scratch or bite marks” on his face and bloodstains in the front seat of his vehicle; he’d been “agitated” and “belligerent” and tried to fight the deputy who restrained him, cuffed him and brought him into headquarters.
“He isn’t cooperating. He’s pretty much out of it. Hungover, and sick to his stomach, and scared. He didn’t seem to know where he was, or why, or if anyone, like a girl, had been with him. We’ve sent two deputies back to investigate the scene, and his Jeep. We’re questioning him now. You’d better come to headquarters, Zeno. You and your wife. And bring photographs of your daughter—the more recent, the better.”
This news was so utterly unexpected, Zeno had to stagger into the house to fumble for a chair, a kitchen chair, and sit down, heavily; he felt as if he’d been kicked in the gut, the air slammed out of him. So weak, so frightened, he was scarcely able to hear Arlette pleading with him—“Zeno, what is it? Have they found her? Is she—alive? Zeno?”
Time moved now in zigzag leaps.
Once Zeno made this call. Once what had been a private concern became irreversibly public.
Once their daughter was publicly designated missing.
Once they’d brought photographs of the missing daughter to law enforcement officers, to be shared with the media, broadcast over TV and on the Internet and printed in newspapers.
Once they’d described her. Once they’d described her in all ways they believed to be crucial to finding her.
Then, time passed with dazzling swiftness even as, perversely, time passed with excruciating slowness.
Swift because too much was crammed into too small a space. Swift like a nightmare film run at a high speed for a cruel-comic effect.
Slow because for all that was happening very little that was crucial seemed to be happening.
Slow because despite the many calls they were to receive in the course of a day, two days, several days, a week, the call they awaited, that Cressida had been found, did not come.
Alive and well. We have found your daughter—alive and well.
This call, so desperately wished-for, did not come.
(AND THEY KNEW, each hour that their daughter was missing there was more likelihood that she’d been injured, or worse.)
(Each hour that Brett Kincaid refused to cooperate, or was