Heather(79)

The daughter is next, at the high school a few minutes away. After she gets out of the car the girl turns to wave to her mother instead of slumping off without a second glance the way some of the other teenagers do. What Callie knows about Iris—Annabelle—she can’t decide which name to call her in her head—makes everything about this routine crackle with intrigue. How often does Iris think about who she used to be? When did she come back to leave the note for Sabrina?

Callie follows Iris again, this time to the town library. The houses along the road still bear holiday wreaths draped with velvet bows, swags of pine along porticos and railings. The library’s sign is traced in tinsel. Iris parks up close while Callie finds a spot in the back of the lot.

The building is quaint, redbrick. Callie waits for Iris to step out of her car and through the vestibule; it shouldn’t be hard to find her inside, the building small, and she’d rather not raise suspicion by tailing her right through the door. She counts to fifty before getting out of her car, kills time by glancing at the app she uses to check her home security cameras. A whole lot of nothing, just the occasional squirrel streaking across the driveway.

Inside the library is quiet, empty. She scans left, right, can’t see Iris anywhere. She studies the spines of a few books on the New and Noteworthy Fiction shelf. Grabs one at random, scans the jacket copy. Something about a plucky female detective solving a string of brutal murders in Wyoming.

She and Jane used to joke about lady detective stories like this. How you had to be damaged to want this job as a woman. Had to drink hard liquor with the boys and have had a shitty childhood to wade through the gore of it. Had to be broken in some essential way. But, underneath the jokes she knew there was some truth to the cliché. That the disorder of her childhood had pointed her to this life, with its laws and rules and uniforms. Where the unpredictable could be managed, solved, contained.

She hears a murmur of voices toward the back of the building, follows them. Stops, grabs another book from the shelf. A cedar shingle house on the cover, a green lawn livid with hydrangea.

She rounds the last shelf in the fiction section to find a small circle of chairs set up near the windows. Each chair is occupied by a senior citizen with a ball of yarn and knitting needles in her lap. One woolly-haired woman looks up, asks what time Robert is going to pick her up.

Iris answers her, “Your son brought you today, Mrs. Clifford. Your son George. He’ll be back in forty-five minutes.”

“Is Robert in the office?”

“I’m not sure what he’s up to. But look at the progress you’ve made.”

Callie catches the neck of a sweater, a sleeve halfway done.

“It is looking good, isn’t it?” the older woman says, sits herself up a little straighter.

Neither of the other two women look up, but their hands work the needles and Callie finds herself soothed by the soft click of them. Lulled. Her grandmother used to knit. Somewhere in her mother’s attic are the baby blankets and little cardigans she made when Jenna was born, stacks of them in sweet, candy-colored pastels.

She is so locked in to the rhythm of the knitting that she is mesmerized. She is surprised to hear a voice at her side.

“Do you knit?”

Iris.

She stands close enough so Callie can make out little flecks of green in her blue eyes. The little lines like commas around her mouth. It’s jarring to see the years on her face, though she is still fairly young. Almost fifty. Just no longer a girl in the woods.

“No,” Callie manages, fighting off a flush. She could not have been more off guard if Iris had walked up to her and shoved her. She had been too lulled by the knitting, too absorbed watching the quick work of the women’s needles that she had lost herself for a moment. Thinking of those baby cardigans knit by her grandmother made her recall how, at least by Jenna’s account, her drinking seemed to tip from habit to crisis in the years after her own mother died.

“What are they doing?” she asks. She wants to do anything to keep Iris talking. She cuts a quick glance to her arm. Long sleeves, again. She must keep the scar covered. She wonders if she tells people the truth of how she got it. Wonders what the truth is.

“It’s a group for seniors with dementia. They come from a local home twice a week. Studies show that the socialization is good for them, even if they don’t really engage in conversations. Greta and Teresa are mostly nonverbal now. But it gives them purpose, to work on something like this. And a lot of times their hands remember how to use the needles. Not as well as they used to. But it comes back.”

She has to force herself to focus on the conversation, to try to keep things easy and light. “And you lead the group?”

“I facilitate it. Lead is a strong word. Mostly they don’t need me. Their bodies take over and they’re doing all the work. Do you know someone who might be a good fit?”

“Me? Oh, no. I mean, maybe. I’d have to think about it. How did you learn to knit?”

“My mother,” Iris says. She turns away from Callie, watches the women working. “I learned when I was a girl.”

“Are you close?” Callie regrets it as soon as she asks. It’s a nudge too far. Too personal, too pointed. Not the question of an impartial stranger.

Iris shakes her head.

“She died a long time ago.” An interesting lie. As far as Callie could tell from the records, Vera Riley was alive—no death certificate on file. Vera is another cipher, another woman who disappeared herself without a trace. Callie expects Iris to make an excuse, to look away again. So she is startled to find Iris has turned toward her instead. Her whole body a question. Her face neutral save for the eyes, narrowed, in a way the reminds Callie of Sabrina’s yearbook photo. For a second, Callie feels as though Iris sees right through her. That she must.