“Okay, and how did Daniel react to Sophie’s disappearance?”
“Honestly, he didn’t seem to care,” she says, reaching for the pack of cigarettes and lighting another. “I know it’s not very maternal of me to say things like that, but it’s true. A little part of me always wondered…”
She stops, stares into the distance, then shakes her head gently.
“Wondered what?” I ask. She looks at me now, her daze broken. There’s a certain intensity in her eyes, and for a second, I’m convinced that she knows who I am. That she’s speaking to me, Chloe Davis, the woman engaged to her son. That she’s trying to warn me.
“Wondered if he had somethin’ to do with it.”
“What makes you say that?” Aaron asks, his voice growing more urgent with each question. He’s writing faster now, trying to remember every detail. “That’s quite the accusation.”
“I don’t know, just a feeling,” she says. “I guess you could call it a mother’s instinct. When she first went missing, I would ask Daniel if he knew where she was, and I could always tell he was lying. He was hiding something. And sometimes, when we were watchin’ the news, listening to them report on her disappearance, I would catch him smiling—no, like smirking, like he was laughing at some secret that the rest of the world didn’t know.”
I can feel Aaron looking at me, but I ignore him, keeping my focus on Dianne.
“And where is Daniel now?”
“I ain’t got a fuckin’ clue,” Dianne says, leaning back into the sofa. “He moved out the day after he graduated high school, and I haven’t heard from him since.”
“Do you mind if we look around?” I ask, suddenly eager to cut this conversation short before Aaron uncovers too much. “Maybe poke around in Daniel’s room, see if we can find anything that may point us in the right direction?”
She holds her arm out, gesturing to the staircase.
“Be my guest,” she says. “I already told this to the police twenty years ago, didn’t amount to nothin’。 In their opinion, no teenaged boy could have gotten away with it.”
I stand up, take exaggerated steps over the obstacles in the living room and toward the stairs, the beige carpet dirty and stained.
“First one on the right,” Dianne yells as I take them one at a time. “Haven’t touched that room in years.”
I make my way upstairs and look at the closed door. My hand finds the knob, and I twist it open, unveiling the bedroom of a teenaged boy, all the lights off, a stream of sunshine through the window revealing specks of dust floating in the air.
“Sophie’s, either,” she continues, her voice distant. I hear Aaron stand up from the couch, make his way upstairs behind me. “No reason for me to go up there anymore. Truthfully, I didn’t really know what to do with them.”
I step inside, holding the air in my cheeks like a child stepping over a sidewalk crack, a weird superstition. Like bad things will happen if I breathe. This is Daniel’s bedroom. There are posters on the wall, ’90s rock bands like Nirvana and the Red Hot Chili Peppers fraying at the edges. A blue-and-green plaid comforter rumpled messily across a mattress on the floor, like he had just woken up and walked outside. I imagine Daniel lying in bed, listening to his father come home, drunk and disorderly. Angry. Loud. I imagine the screaming, the clatter of pots and pans, the sound of a body slamming against the wall. I imagine him motionless, listening to it all. Smiling. Desensitized.
“We should probably go,” Aaron whispers, creeping up behind me. “I think we got what we came for.”
But I don’t listen. I can’t listen. I keep walking, drinking in this place from Daniel’s past. I trail my fingers along the wall, leading to a bookshelf, where there are rows of dusty books with yellowing pages, a couple decks of cards, an old baseball resting in a mitt. My eyes skim the titles—Stephen King, Lois Lowry, Michael Crichton. It all seems so adolescent, so normal.
“Chloe,” Aaron says, but suddenly, I feel like there’s cotton in my ears. I can barely hear him over the sound of my own rushing blood. I reach out my arm and grab a book, pulling it from its home. I hear Daniel’s voice in my mind on that first day we met. The day he had grabbed this same book out of my box and trailed his fingers along the cover, that glisten in his eye as he held my copy of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.
No judgment, he had said, flipping through its pages. I love this book.