I hurried back down to the living room. Our dog Molly was happily chomping on liver treats, which were scattered everywhere. The empty bag lay on the floor in front of the open door.
Emily was gone.
When the police arrived, they immediately called for more officers and began a neighborhood search, on foot through backyards, in vehicles that sent cones of light into every dark passage.
Pete Sunday said, “We’ll find her.”
But they didn’t find her. They never have.
* * *
We were no worse off than we had been, and yet, I couldn’t deny that the conclusion felt worse.
I felt like some credulous, desperate hag; but at least, I didn’t have to feel foolish in front of Jep or my family. No one beyond Stefan and me—and Julie and Rebecca Broom—needed to know about the ultimately doomed, possibly fanciful attempt to exonerate Stefan, which I still believed was based on truth, even if Stefan didn’t.
What he finally said was this: “What if she did kill Belinda? I didn’t save her.”
We knew all we would ever know. And still, a curious peace settled over us. We had finally changed our landline number, so most of the calls we got now were from people of good intent—I counted among those even people selling timeshares. No one was going to be crouching in the kitchen anymore or marching up and down outside chanting hymns of hatred for me and mine. Tomorrow, I might wake up as a person whose life perhaps contains ordinary sorts of trials and triumphs—a person who could spend hours worrying about mole holes in the backyard or my mother’s hernia surgery.
I stood in the cold, huddled in my parka with my mug in my hand. How long had it been since I’d felt free to stand alone outside in the dark?
Did I think I would see Longing Esme? No, I knew she was gone. Did I think that I would see Belinda’s sweet shade in starlight? I walked around to the red-carpet walk of chokeberry Stefan had made of our driveway, the rock walls and turrets crested by azaleas in frank purple to shadowy lavender, swirled round with painterly waves of phlox, bluebells, bleeding heart and trillium. All those blooming decks were fast asleep now, but they would surge back in the spring. I felt that when she left, Emily-or-Esme took with her the night that lasted four years.
* * *
The next day, we didn’t talk about Emily.
We didn’t talk about Belinda.
When Jep came home, Stefan showed us some of the real estate sheets he’d been collecting. We’d agreed that he might want to stay on at home until he got through his first year of school, but he wanted to see what was out there in terms of a house. He had plans to be an eccentric bachelor in his own pad.
A few days later, Rebecca called Stefan, all excited. She had indeed arranged that big commission for him to do a full landscaping of the parklike lawn that surrounded The Alice Hodge Safe Home and thereafter maintain the garden and the green space adjacent. The weather stayed open, more springlike than polar, so he did some planning over there, laying out strings and doing digital drawings of where he might set lavish herbaceous borders, then adding artful ornamental trees, like holly and hemlock, maybe an unusual blue ceanothus and an apple tree like the one we’d planted when he was born. He hauled paving brick, taking advantage of the strangely warm weather, and set to work constructing a small central piazza with rubbled stone benches and a huge old cement birdbath at its center, surrounded by sentinel arborvitae. So that the women residents could grow their own vegetables, he was thinking to build raised box gardens and he sketched how the succession gardens, separated by winding paths, would start with spring peonies, poppies and irises, followed by midsummer lilies and late-summer irises and asters. When he showed me and Jep the plans, the very names made me tipsy.
Becky and I met for coffee again and she told me Stefan received a lot of attention from the ladies, who competed to bring him hot cider and hang around to watch him heft the bags and stones. I tried to see Stefan as they might see him, a quiet, polite, hunky guy with an ephemeral smile, and got a kick out of the image. One day, I dropped by to view the progress. Becky, who’d popped like a plum in recent days and was now enormous in girth, was sitting outside on a folding chair with a big blanket over her lap. In the late afternoon sun nearby was a small older woman bundled in a vivid red padded coat and hat. Her grandmother, I thought; but no, to my surprise, it was Stefan’s grandmother, my own mother. To see her there filled me with delight, because, of course, her connection to the Hodges was even stronger than mine. “Look at all this,” she told me proudly, gesturing with the black lacquer cane she only affected, because my mother could outwalk a peasant farmer. “He has a gift, Thea.”