I was about to knock again when a young man opened the door—his hair shaggy but his face clean shaven. His eyes held a measure of anxious anticipation—which vanished almost instantly as he stared at me. Had he been expecting someone else?
“I’m looking for my daughter.” I fished in my handbag and produced a laminated photo of her. “Kara Lundquist.”
His confusion seemed genuine as he glanced at her picture. “What makes you think she’s here?”
“I just—” I stopped and started again. “I found an address on a piece of paper in a jacket of hers. Your address. And a name—Evie.”
“Evie’s not here,” he told me flatly. “And I don’t know your daughter.”
“Then can I talk to Evie? Please?”
His fist tightened on a piece of paper he had crumpled in his fist. “Good luck with that. She just left me. Wrote a goodbye letter.”
“I’m so sorry. Do you know where she—？”
“No. I have no damned idea where she went.”
He just wanted me gone. He wasn’t able to summon up any sympathy for a stranger and her missing daughter.
But I’d come a long way to find this house. It’d cost me well over a hundred dollars in cab fare from Sydney to this suburb in the middle of nowheresville. Not that the money had mattered, but it was the wasted time. I had no idea where I was—I’d simply shown the address to the driver and asked him to take me there.
The suburb reminded me of the town in Mississippi where I’d grown up. I lived in Lafayette County now, in a huge home on acreage. But I didn’t always. I stifled a shudder as I glanced down the street. Old, leaning houses and rusting cars on front lawns with the grass growing right through them. I could almost taste the poverty in the air. And this man standing before me right now was a reminder of that life, too. Cheap shoes, cheap polyester shirt. He was young now and handsome, still with pads of baby fat covering his cheekbones and his eyes still clear. In a few years, the desperation of his life would wear him down. In bitter anger, he might start drinking too much, too often. And he’d turn into the man I’d lived with in my early twenties.
I took out a marker and scrawled down my phone number on the back of Kara’s photo. I had twenty copies in my bag. “Please, would you call me if you do speak to your wife? I don’t mean to be pushy. I’m just desperate to find Kara. I’ve come all the way from our hometown in the US.”
Shrugging, he took the photograph. “Yeah, sure.”
Behind him on the wall, a framed photograph of a smiling, fresh-faced family took pride of place—the man looking slightly awkward in a white shirt and tie beside a pretty, dark-haired woman and two little girls in red dresses. I guessed it was a Christmas photo.
“Can I ask your name?” I said in a last-ditch attempt to gather clues.
“Yeah, it’s Gray. Gray Harlow.”
Thanking him, I returned to the waiting cab. I’d hoped for more than this. If only I’d found the address in Kara’s jacket pocket yesterday and had travelled out here then. It might have been his wife who opened the door, and she might have had the answers I was looking for.
My fingers were jittery as I closed the cab door and leaned back on the seat.
I needed to get myself to a doctor and grab a prescription for some Promaxa. The drug was for my anxiety and depression. My psych had refused to prescribe me any more of it. I’d been on it too long, she’d said, I was mentally stronger than I gave myself credit for.
What did she know? My three-hundred-an-hour psych didn’t have a teenage daughter living in a foreign country. She didn’t live with a husband whose love she’d never been able to feel. She didn’t bear the weight of the crushing feeling of a wasted life.
Blinking back the sting of tears, I instructed the driver to head back to the city.
7. Evie
I WOKE NOW, FEELING THE DRAGGING WEIGHT between sleep and consciousness, my eyes too heavy to open. I hadn’t felt this whacked since Lilly was a baby. I always woke just before Gray did, near six in the morning.
I hadn’t slept in for years, not even on weekends. Willow and Lilly were always up so early.
But this morning, the world inside and out was dead silent. And the air smelled all wrong. The rental house I shared with Gray and the girls reeked of old carpet and mildew, and Gray himself carried the familiar scents of aftershave, musk and coffee. But this air had none of that, smelling dry and coppery, with notes of incense.
I snapped fully awake.