“Did she . . .” were the only words she uttered, and I felt how deeply I was failing her when I shook my head.
The doorbell rang just then, and Mom ran down the hall to the front door as Jill rounded the corner from the living room. They opened it together without a word, and I craned my neck to see between them. Missy was still asleep in my sister’s bed, and I couldn’t wait to tell Persephone that. “It was so weird,” I would say. “She just kept sleeping as if it was a vacation or something. I mean, you’re missing, right? But she’s just snoring away in there.” I could hear our laughter, even as I watched the police enter the house.
Two officers, a man and a woman, stood in the cramped entryway of our small two-bedroom ranch. They wiped their feet on the doormat, their hands on their belts like they were about to start line dancing.
“Are you Ms. O’Leary?” the male officer asked Mom.
“Yes,” she said huskily. “Yes, that’s me.”
“And I’m Jill Foster.” Jill stepped forward. “I’m the one who called last night.”
“I’m Detective Falley,” the female officer said, “and this is my partner, Detective Parker.” She gestured to the man beside her, who was looking beyond us as if already trying to find clues within the walls of our house. “I wanted to let you know, first of all, that we followed up on what you reported to our desk sergeant, and we spoke to Ben Emory.”
Mom stumbled backward a little. “What’s he got to do with this?”
“We understand,” Detective Falley said, “that he’s the last person your daughter was seen with.”
Mom spun around to look at me, and her eyes seemed grayer than usual, clouded by the horror gathering on her face. I looked at my feet, wiggling my big toe through the hole in my sock.
“Did you know about this?” she asked me.
I swallowed. “Yes,” I said. “I saw her leave with him. She . . .” I paused, unsure of how far to go in my betrayal. Then I looked up, keeping my eyes on the detectives, neither of whom could have been more than thirty-five. Parker even had a small patch of zits around his nose.
“She sneaks out of the house a lot to see him,” I said. “He’s her boyfriend. They’ve been doing this for months.”
Any color left on my mother’s face disappeared. Her skin became as gray as her eyes, as gray as the cold light from the cloudy sky outside. “Boyfriend?” she asked, her voice quivering.
“This is Sylvie,” Aunt Jill said to the detectives, gesturing toward me. “She’s my niece. Persephone’s sister.”
Falley nodded. “Ben says he doesn’t know where she is. Says they were driving around, got into a fight, and she demanded to be let out of the car so she could walk home. He says he let her off on Weston Road and then waited out the storm at his friend’s house overnight. We checked with the friend’s mother and she confirmed that Ben arrived around eleven p.m. and stayed until ten or so the next morning.”
“Then where is she?” I asked. “And why would she want to walk home when it was snowing? Ben’s lying! He has to know where she is.”
The detectives looked at me. Aunt Jill looked at me. But Mom just stared into nothing.
“He says she was very adamant about leaving the car,” Falley said. “Says she was opening the door and seemed ready to jump out if he didn’t stop. According to him, he pulled over to try to calm her down, but then she got out and wouldn’t get back inside. Says he got mad himself and finally drove off.”
“What were they fighting about?” Jill asked.
“Sounds like typical relationship drama,” Falley said. “He says she got angry when he snapped at her about something. It escalated from there.”
I shook my head. The only part of Ben’s story I believed was that he’d gotten mad at her. I had seen plenty of evidence of his anger; I knew he was dangerous, but I also knew that Persephone never shied away from danger.
“We’re going to question him more about the fight,” Parker finally chimed in. His voice was deeper than I expected, and this comforted me. I didn’t know my father—my mother had always told me I’d been the product of a one-night stand, or a “one-night miracle,” as she liked to say—but I always imagined that when he spoke, his voice was strong and unwavering, the way that Parker’s was now.
“We drove around Weston Road, where Mr. Emory said he let her off, but we haven’t found anything yet,” he continued. “Please understand, though—we’re doing everything we can to locate your daughter.” He said this directly to Mom, who was leaning into the coatrack. She looked so fragile that the jackets and scarves tossed over the hooks seemed strong enough to bear her weight. “We’re going to talk to the people who were operating the snowplows that night, see if they saw anyone walking around. In the meantime—can you think of anywhere she might have gone? Friends’ houses? Places nearby that she frequents?” He pulled a small notepad out of his back pocket and clicked the top of a pen.
I looked at Mom, waiting to see if she’d answer, but her eyes were still locked on some distant air.
“I . . . there’s . . .” I tried. Then I cleared my throat as Parker turned his attention to me. “Well, my aunt and cousin live just over in Hanover. But . . . they’re here, so she’s obviously not with them. Um, there’s also . . .”
But there wasn’t also.
“I don’t know,” I said. “The only person she really hangs out with anymore is Ben.”
That’s when the coatrack crashed to the floor. It landed across the entryway like a fallen tree, separating the detectives from my mother, Aunt Jill, and me. We all jumped backward. All except Mom, that is—because she’d pushed it over.
Next came the little yellow table where we dumped our mail and keys when we walked in the door. With one quick shove, it clattered to the floor, and Mom reached for one of the legs, snapping it off as if it were nothing more than a twig. We were all stunned, even the detectives, and it wasn’t until Mom swung the table leg against the entryway mirror that Parker stepped over the coatrack and grabbed her arms. Mom struggled against him, her bathrobe opening, revealing the stained T-shirt she wore underneath, and when he tightened his grip, she screamed.
“Annie!” Aunt Jill cried. “What are you doing? Calm down!”
This only made her scream louder, her face reddening like a newborn’s, and she kicked and twisted until Parker’s hands loosened just long enough for her to escape. She jumped over the coatrack and ran down the hall. We turned the corner as her bedroom door slammed shut, Missy standing in the hall with wide sleep-filled eyes.
“Mom?” she said to my aunt. “What happened? Is Persephone back?”
Any answer Jill might have given was lost in the sounds coming from Mom’s room. Furniture crashed. Throaty growls gave way to high-pitched screams. I recognized the squeak of her mattress as she—what? Pummeled her fists against it? Detective Parker marched forward and tried the knob. When the door wouldn’t open, he looked back at us. “Falley,” he said, and his partner nodded, steering me into the living room.
“Does your mother do this a lot?” she asked. She bent over slightly, staring into my eyes. “Has she thrown things and gotten angry like this before?”