Chapter 3

We had so much to do, and I wasn’t in the mood to put up with more questions from the police. But two days after being given my professional certification, Detective Perrin came snooping around again.

“What is it this time?” I asked. I was in the middle of packing up our apartment. I had boxes everywhere, clothes everywhere else, and all of the little things that fill a home scattered all across the floor.

“I thought I’d stop by and tell you that you and your husband are no longer the center of our investigation.”

“I don’t see why I should have been.”

She shrugged. “Most disappearances come from a family situation. It was very easy to believe that either you or Chris wanted Amy out of the way.”

“We didn’t! How many times do I have to tell you that? You just won’t believe me.”

She held up her hand, stopping me as I started to get wound up about this. “The facts don’t support our theory. We’ve been talking to your neighbors, and every one of them has told us how happy you three are together. Now, on the face of it, that’s a little hard to swallow, but my partner interviewed people back in your home town, and, well...”

I caught on. “So now you’re willing to believe me.”

She nodded. “I have ever since that day in the park. It’s taken a little longer for the others.” She looked around. “Where are you going?”

“I landed a job back home. We’re moving there.”

Her face grew still. “There are some,” she said, “who would be suspicious of you moving away like this.”

“It must be difficult to be so suspicious of everyone all of the time.” I scribbled my new employer’s name and address on a sheet of paper. “Here, call them. They’ll probably drop me like a hot potato, but someone will be satisfied.”

She didn’t touch the paper. “I’m not going to do that.” She took a card from the pocket of her blazer. “I am going to ask that you send me your address when you finally settle down.”

“Why? So you can come bug me some more?”

“No, so I can let you know when we find Amy. I’m going to keep after this. I want you to believe me when I say I’m going to get to the bottom of this.”

I wasn’t prepared for that. I stared at her stupidly for several seconds, and then nodded.

“There’s one other thing,” Deborah said as she got up. “I have someone ... I got married only a few weeks ago, and I know what it’s like to be in love. I’ve never met Amy, I hope I do, but I can only hope the love she has for you matches the love you and Chris have for her.”

She gave me a funny smile and left. I stared at the door and realized how lucky we were to have Detective Perrin on our case. I’d heard stories of the police going after someone they were convinced was guilty, even though the evidence was ambiguous. It was like they were punishing the person without a trial. That could have been our fate. But Detective Perrin had let her heart guide her.

I tried to put Detective Perrin out of my thoughts, but I couldn’t. I believed her when she said she would keep looking for Amy. I wasn’t sure about the rest of the police, but somehow she had my confidence.

A few days later, we moved, first to Terminus while I finalized the details of what I’d be doing, and then to South Valley and a town called Crescent, where the river that runs through the middle of the valley had changed course and left a large crescent lake.

The coast runs East-West here, and so South Valley isn’t really to the south. Instead, it’s more or less to the east of Terminus. There are two valleys there, one to the northeast that’s called East Valley, and the other one, closer to the coast, that’s called South Valley. Both valleys have rivers in them. East Valley was flatter and wider than South Valley, and so it was settled first. People had settled at the end of South Valley closest to Terminus, but the rest of the place was untouched. We were part of the master plan to change that.

The town of South Valley was the home of Fourth Valley Construction, and only about a dozen miles from Terminus by railroad. We checked into a hotel, and bright and early the next morning, I reported for work.

The next few days were very busy. Chris found an apartment in Crescent, and we moved there. I was tied up at work getting my professional feet under me, but more important than that, Chris and I began to reconnect.

Amy’s loss had pushed us apart. We thought of our family as three, not two, and the glue that had held us together was missing. We’d stopped going to parties—most people in Three Valleys do that after a while—and that didn’t help. We stayed together, maybe out of habit, maybe because we did relate to each other, but the hurt was with us all of the time.

Chris took the first steps to bringing us back together. I was absorbed in my work; I think that was my escape, and he took it on himself to rekindle the flame we’d once had.

It was slow at first, but he began doing the little things: he stopped by on his lunch hour and left me a cup of steaming hot chocolate with a dash of spice, my favorite. Flowers decorated the dining room table one day when I got home from work. He even impulsively bought ice cream for both of us when we were out shopping. It was a warm day, and we got the ice cream from the sundae all over our faces and hands. It was one of those funny-happy moments that you cherish because they happen all too seldom.

Two months after renting the apartment in Crescent, we had a weekend to ourselves; no furniture construction, no working on Saturday as had happened to me, no marathon shopping expeditions as we put together a household, no nothing. And I’d been paid the day before.

“I think we should go somewhere,” he said. “You know, get away for a couple of days.”

I was flopped on the couch, my shoes off, just trying to get the day out of my head. It had started with a crisis, and had quickly escalated far beyond that. I’d been bounced from one office to another, constantly being pulled, first in this direction, and then in that one. I really wanted some quiet.

“What did you have in mind?”

“East Beach.”

“Where’s that?”

“Down the coast a bit. There’s a train that runs there every day. It leaves in two hours, and if we hurry, we could catch it.”

I looked at him tiredly. Right now that sounded like too much trouble. “If you’d mentioned this to me yesterday, I might have had a chance to pack.” I blew one of my bangs off my face, shook my head, and closed my eyes.

“Janet and her husband were there last week. I asked her to pack for you.”

“You let someone else into my stuff?” This was starting to piss me off. Janet and I were friends—she lived next door and worked across the street from me. We often walked to work together, but this was too much.

“No, she got a few things at the store and put them in a bag for you.”

“They probably won’t fit.”

He started to sigh. We had fought a couple of times, and neither one of us liked it. And this was shaping up into another one. In the past, Amy had always been the peacemaker, one of the advantages of there being three of us.

“Will you give it a chance, Wendy? I’m trying to do something for both of us, and all I’m hearing is whining.”

“Where, exactly, is East Beach? What’s it like? What kind of clothes did she get me? Tell me that, and I’ll think about it.”

“It’s a resort that’s just starting up, so they have weekend specials. It’s on the beach with a private tidal pool next to it. And she got you a couple of dress things that she said will fit right in. She knows your size; you two have gone shopping together often enough.”

“What’ll we do there?” We’d had two ‘vacations,’ and both had been dismal failures. We ended up at places where you did things: horseback riding—which would have been okay except we’d ridden horses to school, and the fun of horseback riding vanishes when you have no choice in the matter—hiking, and sitting in a tour bus while we looked at strange animals and flowers.

“What would we do? How about sleeping late, being pampered by the staff, sitting in the sunshine, and other things like that?”

Doing nothing sounded better and better. “Do they have a massage?”