Ordinary Bear, page 10
What day was it?
Though he had to piss so fiercely he feared his eyeballs might float, so fiercely he could taste urine on his tongue, he opened the door to a red-faced and teary Lissa. She wore a nightgown she held closed at the throat and duck-head slippers with bills for toes. Above them and below the hem of her nightgown, her legs were pale, muscular, smooth.
“Is she here, Farley?”
He blinked to bring the blurry world into focus.
It did not work.
He heard urgency in her voice. Anger. Something else. Fear?
“What have you done with her? Is she in there?”
“What?” The questions confused him. So did the aggression in her tone, the anxiety pulling at her features. His hand prickled as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and he wondered if he’d been asleep on it, groggy, still surfacing, trying to both wake up and not wet himself. “Who?”
Unsatisfied with his answers, she rushed at him without warning and tried to shove him aside, tried to squeeze past him into the apartment. Not a big woman—taller than Mayor Nell, but thin—her strength surprised him. Some people are built that way, their muscles like steel cables hidden beneath the skin.
“Olive? Olive, are you in there?” The words spilled out of her mouth, tripping over each other, her eyes frantic. Alarmed. Angry. “Olive, yell if you can hear me.”
He leaned forward into the doorframe, more than filling it. Surprising them both, Lissa slapped him across a rough cheek.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he said.
“She’s gone, Farley. She’s gone. Olive’s gone.”
18
DO YOU MIND PUTTING ON SOME PANTS FIRST?
She tried to shove him again. It felt like shoving a fridge. A safe. An Oldsmobile. But her determination bore enough force to move him and he backed into his apartment, stepping aside to let her in. Lissa rushed past him and ran through the empty rooms, desperately looking for any sign of her daughter.
“Where is she, Farley?” she shouted. Her panicked voice echoed like a car alarm in a parking garage. “Where is she?”
The layout mirrored her own apartment, but the starkness of the rooms disoriented her.
“Why don’t you have any furniture?” She looked back into the kitchen, where he watched her sheepishly, foggy with morning, confused and alarmed, but not irritated. “What the fuck, Farley? What the fuck? Where do you sleep?”
He pointed at the smaller bedroom. Lissa looked in, hoping to see some sign of Olive—pajamas, hair scrunchie, anything—and dreading it. But she saw nothing. A huge camouflage pack. A mostly empty bottle of Canadian Club. Dirty clothes on the floor, a pair of boots big enough to use as rowboats.
Back in the kitchen, she stepped close to him—well past the zone of personal space she’d already learned he required—and pushed his chest, hard, with both hands.
“You were in my apartment. You were on her bed.” The words left her mouth like throwing knives—fast, sharp, and dangerous. “I trusted you, Farley. I trusted you. I invited you into my home. I . . . I made you fucking salmon.”
“Lissa,” he said.
“I left you alone with my daughter.”
And just like that, she’d exhausted whatever resolve she’d been gathering. As it left, her anger went with it so that only adrenaline remained. She knew that would curdle to fear and did not want to be in her body when it did.
Fighting it, she stared at Farley for a long time, trying to gauge his sincerity. He did not back away, but his expression turned pained after a minute. The cheek she’d slapped had turned red.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“You’re wincing.”
“I have to piss.”
“Seriously?”
“You woke me up.”
In his awkward posture, she saw Olive at Macy’s after she’d drunk a cartoonishly large soda from the food court and Lissa had to put down her armful of unpurchased clothes to rush her to the public restroom on the other side of the mall. She knew he was telling the truth.
“Go,” she said.
Farley moved as fast as she’d ever seen him move. As soon as he left, she grew light-headed. She leaned against the counter. Like an open-ocean swimmer, the adrenaline had kept her out in front of the waves, but they threatened to pull her under as soon as she lifted her head to take a breath. She heard him pissing from down the hall. A thunderous stream. A satisfied sigh. He returned still wearing the ratty underwear and V-neck T-shirt in which he’d answered the door.
For the first time, she realized she stood in the kitchen of a man she barely knew—a man she’d thought homeless, a man she’d seriously thought might have kidnapped Olive—and they were both in their underwear. Self-conscious in spite of herself, she pulled her robe more tightly closed. Below his briefs she could see the scars on his legs, thick lines of raised and shining skin crisscrossed like stitching, a topographical map of intertwined rivers and roads, and she realized they ran all the way from his face to his feet.
She did not know why, but she no longer suspected him. A feeling. Instinct. Something else. Maybe she just needed a friend. A confidant. Someone.
Anyone.
How thin the lines are, how fragile our control over our worlds and ourselves, how much of it is just pretending in the first place. With her back against the cabinets, she slid down to the floor and sat, hard, on the linoleum.
“Tell me what happened, Lissa.”
She told Farley how she’d woken up with her alarm and gone to wake Olive for school. How she’d found her bedroom empty, the drawers open, some clothes gone, her backpack too.
“Could she have left on her own? Run away?”
“No,” she said, adamant. “Why would she?”
He waited.
“You saw her, Farley. She’s a pretty happy kid.”
“Was the door to the apartment locked?”
“Yes.”
“Are you positive?”
She closed her eyes and thought. Olive loved to fiddle with the locks, loved to push buttons and twist knobs and answer phones, and always had. Lissa would turn on the radio to find it tuned to static, volume blasting, or scorch toast because the settings had been slid to high. Most nights she had a bedtime routine—the lights, the locks, make the coffee and set the timer—but last night she’d had a couple glasses of wine and had fallen asleep in front of the TV well into the night. When she’d woken to late-night infomercials, her neck stiff and her bladder full, she’d forced herself to get off the couch and go to bed.
She’d been so tired. Had she checked the door? She couldn’t say for certain.
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
“Then who might have taken her? I mean, besides me?”
She met his eyes and started to speak, but the words turned to sobs before they’d even left her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” They heaved out in broken bits, her breath hitched, the muscles of her face too busy to be bothered with forming syllables. “When I woke up and she was gone, I panicked. All I could think about was you lying there with her the other night, in her bed. How much she liked you. How I didn’t really know you at all.”
He stared impassively but did not say anything.
“I didn’t really think,” she said, the breath coming in fits and spurts, her voice unsteady, irregular, bent and warped and elongated by the sobbing. “I didn’t think you . . .” She swallowed hard and set her jaw. “I just . . . I freaked out.”
Farley nodded, absolving her, but she could still see his discomfort even through her tears. Women’s tears are like fire—some men do everything they can to put out the flames, some back away out of fear of getting burned, and some are just arsonists. He just stood his ground, waiting for hers to run their course.
Lissa looked around for a tissue or a dishcloth or anything to wipe her eyes with but saw nothing.
“I’m scared,” she said.
He nodded again. “Have you eaten yet?”
“What? No, I—”
“Call the police. They won’t do anything yet but take your statement, but it’s a start. Then let’s go across the hall to your place. I’ll cook you breakfast, and we’ll figure this out together.”
“My place?”
“I don’t have any food.” He looked around the void of his apartment as if noticing the emptiness for the first time. “Or plates. Or pans to cook in. You’ve got to shore yourself up for what’s ahead, and you can’t do that on an empty stomach.”
“What’s ahead?” she asked, drawn and quartered by fear.
“The waiting.”
“Waiting? No, Farley. I have to go look for her.”
“We will.”
“She’s out there somewhere. I need to find her.”
“We will.”
“We’re wasting time.” Though it did not quite reach the level of a shout, either in volume or vehemence, the sound of her voice surprised her. Frantic. Afraid. Overwhelmed.
Farley nodded, the calmness of his response a crutch for her to lean on.
“It’s a big city. We don’t know how long she’s been gone. Running around the streets like a pair of headless chickens is unlikely to be the best way to go about this,” he said. “Cops first. Then food. Then we’ll make a plan. OK?”
She steeled herself, giving in, letting him lead her. Not just because he sounded sure but because she wanted to be led.
“OK,” she said, or tried to, outflanked by another phalanx of sobs. They drew the word out in a way that made her think she was a long way from done with tears. She shimmied her way back to her feet using the cabinet and counter for support.
“I’m scared, Farley.”
“I know.”
He watched her with a concern she would not have thought him capable of. That concern felt like a ray of sunlight she wanted to crawl into, and she realized she wanted to be held. Needed to be. Just for a moment. It had been so long since she’d touched another human besides her daughter. She needed to know other people were real, that she wasn’t completely alone.
“Will you hug me?”
He looked deeply uncomfortable with the idea.
“Please?”
Though he still looked unsure, he nodded and opened his arms, his wingspan wide enough to take flight. Instead of stepping into them, Lissa leaned back and looked him in the eyes.
“Farley?”
“What?”
“Do you mind putting on some pants first?”
19
“F-A-R-L-E-Y.”
Farley made breakfast while Lissa talked to the cops. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, how he seemed to marvel at the fragility of the eggs as he broke them into a bowl. Six. Eight. The entire dozen. Eggs were nearly six bucks at Trader Joe’s; she couldn’t eat more than three. And that was when her stomach wasn’t turned inside out. Could he eat nine? Probably—and a loaf of bread. A side of bacon. The whole pig. Why was she pinching pennies when her daughter was missing? Was this what the world did to you?
The cops arrived an hour after she called. Uniforms. Stern glares. They spoke in sober voices and wrote everything down on small paper pads. But they weren’t taking Olive’s disappearance seriously. That’s what Farley had told her as they’d stood by the window and watched the cruiser pull up outside the building.
“How can you tell?”
“The uniforms.” A few floors below them, two officers conferred with each other on the sidewalk before coming inside. “They’d have sent detectives, not beat cops.”
“How do you know that?”
“My job.”
“You were a cop?” She heard the disbelief in her voice, how it carried an edge of accusation. She hoped it didn’t sound as sharp to him.
“No. I did internal investigations for one of the big oil companies up on the North Slope.”
“What do you investigate at an oil company?”
“Land rights stuff. Environmentalist issues. A lot of sexual assault.”
“Sexual assault?”
“A drill site is basically a few dozen roughnecks living in barracks in some of the most remote, isolated places on the planet, far from civilization. Most are men. One or two are women. Bad shit happens.”
“That’s because they’re human. I work with animals. Animals are inherently better.”
Farley’s expression said he fundamentally disagreed with her premise, but he let it go.
“These uniforms won’t ask any questions that will help them find Olive,” he said. “They’re just here to placate you. They won’t take it seriously for another day at least.”
“A day?”
“She’ll be home by then,” he said. “The cops are just creating a paper trail to cover any legal stuff that comes out of this.” He squinted his good eye. “We’ll make a plan to get her back after they leave.”
“I’ll make them take it seriously.” She’d believed it when she said it. But within minutes of their arrival, she knew Farley was right. They entered without urgency, spoke with the calming tones of a Sunday school teacher, and treated her like a child who’d lost a favorite doll—not a mother who’d lost an actual child.
“I know you want to believe that your daughter was kidnapped, but it’s statistically unlikely that anyone took her,” said the female officer, her ponytail so tight it left her eyes misshapen, temples taut as drumskins. “Kids go missing all the time and turn up again. They wander off to find candy or a video game. They follow a dog on the street and get lost. Or they hide somewhere to worry their parents. It’s a form of manipulation.”
“Manipulation? She’s eight years old.”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s to scare you.”
“Why would she do that?”
“So you treat them nicer when they come home. Extra ice cream. More TV. Like that.”
“Extra ice cream?” Lissa said, trying for a conciliatory tone even though she wanted to grab the woman by her tactical vest and shake her into action. She had the Boy Scout gene, her father always said, a need to follow the rules and walk on the paths. Teacher’s pet.
“Cake. Sweets. Kids love sweets.”
A loud, metallic sound echoed through the kitchen, startling Lissa and the cops. They all looked up at Farley, who stood on the other side of the counter holding the lid to the canned ham he’d just opened. A gelatinous seal hung from its edges like a ring of moist stalactites.
“You don’t have kids,” he said. It was not a question.
The police studied him for the first time, this scarred giant slicing meat with Lissa’s chef’s knife and lowering it in a hot frying pan, where it sizzled like static on a radio. She saw the expression on the male officer’s face change and knew he thought he’d solved the case.
“Sir? You’re the father?”
“No.”
“Mother’s boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Your relationship to the girl is what exactly?” The male cop had cut his hair in the high-and-tight style they must teach at the academy—half the cops Lissa saw around town had the same cut—but the crown shone through from the hair gel he’d used. Product, the girl who cut Lissa’s hair called it. He had tight freckles that looked like ants on his face, the kind of glare meant to intimidate. She knew the look well. What had she expected when she’d called the police? Matlock? Kojak? Columbo?
“Farley lives across the hall.”
High-and-Tight looked at Lady Cop, who put her pencil to her notebook.
“Farley . . . ?”
Without looking up, he folded the slurry of eggs around the skillet. “F-a-r-l-e-y,” he said.
“Sir? Is that your first name or last name?”
“My name is just Farley.”
“Sir . . .”
“Am I a suspect?” he asked.
The way High-and-Tight readjusted in his seat, Lissa could tell he was fighting to retain his cool. He put his own notepad into the pocket of his tactical vest and leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his thighs, to stare at Farley. His pants rode up over his socks, exposing an expanse of smoothly shaved skin the color of a sliced pear. She figured him for a cyclist—the lean build, the shaved legs.
Typical Portland.
“Do you have kids of your own, Mr. Farley?”
“I used to.”
“You did?” Lissa said.
Farley nodded. They all stared across the counter, waiting for him to elaborate, but he did not.
“Where’d you get those scars?” High-and-Tight asked, his tone moving a measurable amount toward the hostile end of the spectrum.
“The secret to good eggs is to add the salt ten minutes before you cook them,” Farley said. “You can put that in your notebook if you want. It’s more useful than asking me about my scars, which have nothing to do with her daughter going missing. If you’re not going to help, at least stop wasting our fucking time.”
Farley seemed unafraid of the cops, unintimidated. Lissa wondered why that surprised her. Maybe because of how he lived. Sleeping in the camp. The unfurnished apartment. Or because of his scars and the hint of trauma—she assumed he’d want to avoid interaction with the police. Hell, even she felt intimidated, and she had nothing to hide. She’d called them, she’d asked for their help, but in their presence she still felt a kind of deference or an assumed guilt. As if she feared drawing their attention too closely lest they find some infraction or violation she’d committed and trundle her away to the station in cuffs. Their uniforms created that involuntary reaction, she knew, the same way her stomach dropped when she passed a police car while driving. She knew, too, that it was precisely the point of the uniforms. But Farley seemed immune. Maybe because of his history with uniforms in the army, or because of his history as an investigator. Or maybe simply because of his size. What could harm someone that big? The pit in her gut grew watching the cops’ reactions as Farley scooped a pile of ham and eggs onto a plate and slid it across the counter for her.
“I’m telling you I know who took my daughter,” Lissa said. “The Asshole. A drugged-up, homeless guy. Farley saved Olive from him last week.”
Though he had to piss so fiercely he feared his eyeballs might float, so fiercely he could taste urine on his tongue, he opened the door to a red-faced and teary Lissa. She wore a nightgown she held closed at the throat and duck-head slippers with bills for toes. Above them and below the hem of her nightgown, her legs were pale, muscular, smooth.
“Is she here, Farley?”
He blinked to bring the blurry world into focus.
It did not work.
He heard urgency in her voice. Anger. Something else. Fear?
“What have you done with her? Is she in there?”
“What?” The questions confused him. So did the aggression in her tone, the anxiety pulling at her features. His hand prickled as he rubbed the sleep from his eyes, and he wondered if he’d been asleep on it, groggy, still surfacing, trying to both wake up and not wet himself. “Who?”
Unsatisfied with his answers, she rushed at him without warning and tried to shove him aside, tried to squeeze past him into the apartment. Not a big woman—taller than Mayor Nell, but thin—her strength surprised him. Some people are built that way, their muscles like steel cables hidden beneath the skin.
“Olive? Olive, are you in there?” The words spilled out of her mouth, tripping over each other, her eyes frantic. Alarmed. Angry. “Olive, yell if you can hear me.”
He leaned forward into the doorframe, more than filling it. Surprising them both, Lissa slapped him across a rough cheek.
“Tell me what’s wrong,” he said.
“She’s gone, Farley. She’s gone. Olive’s gone.”
18
DO YOU MIND PUTTING ON SOME PANTS FIRST?
She tried to shove him again. It felt like shoving a fridge. A safe. An Oldsmobile. But her determination bore enough force to move him and he backed into his apartment, stepping aside to let her in. Lissa rushed past him and ran through the empty rooms, desperately looking for any sign of her daughter.
“Where is she, Farley?” she shouted. Her panicked voice echoed like a car alarm in a parking garage. “Where is she?”
The layout mirrored her own apartment, but the starkness of the rooms disoriented her.
“Why don’t you have any furniture?” She looked back into the kitchen, where he watched her sheepishly, foggy with morning, confused and alarmed, but not irritated. “What the fuck, Farley? What the fuck? Where do you sleep?”
He pointed at the smaller bedroom. Lissa looked in, hoping to see some sign of Olive—pajamas, hair scrunchie, anything—and dreading it. But she saw nothing. A huge camouflage pack. A mostly empty bottle of Canadian Club. Dirty clothes on the floor, a pair of boots big enough to use as rowboats.
Back in the kitchen, she stepped close to him—well past the zone of personal space she’d already learned he required—and pushed his chest, hard, with both hands.
“You were in my apartment. You were on her bed.” The words left her mouth like throwing knives—fast, sharp, and dangerous. “I trusted you, Farley. I trusted you. I invited you into my home. I . . . I made you fucking salmon.”
“Lissa,” he said.
“I left you alone with my daughter.”
And just like that, she’d exhausted whatever resolve she’d been gathering. As it left, her anger went with it so that only adrenaline remained. She knew that would curdle to fear and did not want to be in her body when it did.
Fighting it, she stared at Farley for a long time, trying to gauge his sincerity. He did not back away, but his expression turned pained after a minute. The cheek she’d slapped had turned red.
“Does it hurt?”
“No.”
“You’re wincing.”
“I have to piss.”
“Seriously?”
“You woke me up.”
In his awkward posture, she saw Olive at Macy’s after she’d drunk a cartoonishly large soda from the food court and Lissa had to put down her armful of unpurchased clothes to rush her to the public restroom on the other side of the mall. She knew he was telling the truth.
“Go,” she said.
Farley moved as fast as she’d ever seen him move. As soon as he left, she grew light-headed. She leaned against the counter. Like an open-ocean swimmer, the adrenaline had kept her out in front of the waves, but they threatened to pull her under as soon as she lifted her head to take a breath. She heard him pissing from down the hall. A thunderous stream. A satisfied sigh. He returned still wearing the ratty underwear and V-neck T-shirt in which he’d answered the door.
For the first time, she realized she stood in the kitchen of a man she barely knew—a man she’d thought homeless, a man she’d seriously thought might have kidnapped Olive—and they were both in their underwear. Self-conscious in spite of herself, she pulled her robe more tightly closed. Below his briefs she could see the scars on his legs, thick lines of raised and shining skin crisscrossed like stitching, a topographical map of intertwined rivers and roads, and she realized they ran all the way from his face to his feet.
She did not know why, but she no longer suspected him. A feeling. Instinct. Something else. Maybe she just needed a friend. A confidant. Someone.
Anyone.
How thin the lines are, how fragile our control over our worlds and ourselves, how much of it is just pretending in the first place. With her back against the cabinets, she slid down to the floor and sat, hard, on the linoleum.
“Tell me what happened, Lissa.”
She told Farley how she’d woken up with her alarm and gone to wake Olive for school. How she’d found her bedroom empty, the drawers open, some clothes gone, her backpack too.
“Could she have left on her own? Run away?”
“No,” she said, adamant. “Why would she?”
He waited.
“You saw her, Farley. She’s a pretty happy kid.”
“Was the door to the apartment locked?”
“Yes.”
“Are you positive?”
She closed her eyes and thought. Olive loved to fiddle with the locks, loved to push buttons and twist knobs and answer phones, and always had. Lissa would turn on the radio to find it tuned to static, volume blasting, or scorch toast because the settings had been slid to high. Most nights she had a bedtime routine—the lights, the locks, make the coffee and set the timer—but last night she’d had a couple glasses of wine and had fallen asleep in front of the TV well into the night. When she’d woken to late-night infomercials, her neck stiff and her bladder full, she’d forced herself to get off the couch and go to bed.
She’d been so tired. Had she checked the door? She couldn’t say for certain.
“No,” she said. “I’m not.”
“Then who might have taken her? I mean, besides me?”
She met his eyes and started to speak, but the words turned to sobs before they’d even left her lips. “I’m sorry,” she said. “I’m sorry.” They heaved out in broken bits, her breath hitched, the muscles of her face too busy to be bothered with forming syllables. “When I woke up and she was gone, I panicked. All I could think about was you lying there with her the other night, in her bed. How much she liked you. How I didn’t really know you at all.”
He stared impassively but did not say anything.
“I didn’t really think,” she said, the breath coming in fits and spurts, her voice unsteady, irregular, bent and warped and elongated by the sobbing. “I didn’t think you . . .” She swallowed hard and set her jaw. “I just . . . I freaked out.”
Farley nodded, absolving her, but she could still see his discomfort even through her tears. Women’s tears are like fire—some men do everything they can to put out the flames, some back away out of fear of getting burned, and some are just arsonists. He just stood his ground, waiting for hers to run their course.
Lissa looked around for a tissue or a dishcloth or anything to wipe her eyes with but saw nothing.
“I’m scared,” she said.
He nodded again. “Have you eaten yet?”
“What? No, I—”
“Call the police. They won’t do anything yet but take your statement, but it’s a start. Then let’s go across the hall to your place. I’ll cook you breakfast, and we’ll figure this out together.”
“My place?”
“I don’t have any food.” He looked around the void of his apartment as if noticing the emptiness for the first time. “Or plates. Or pans to cook in. You’ve got to shore yourself up for what’s ahead, and you can’t do that on an empty stomach.”
“What’s ahead?” she asked, drawn and quartered by fear.
“The waiting.”
“Waiting? No, Farley. I have to go look for her.”
“We will.”
“She’s out there somewhere. I need to find her.”
“We will.”
“We’re wasting time.” Though it did not quite reach the level of a shout, either in volume or vehemence, the sound of her voice surprised her. Frantic. Afraid. Overwhelmed.
Farley nodded, the calmness of his response a crutch for her to lean on.
“It’s a big city. We don’t know how long she’s been gone. Running around the streets like a pair of headless chickens is unlikely to be the best way to go about this,” he said. “Cops first. Then food. Then we’ll make a plan. OK?”
She steeled herself, giving in, letting him lead her. Not just because he sounded sure but because she wanted to be led.
“OK,” she said, or tried to, outflanked by another phalanx of sobs. They drew the word out in a way that made her think she was a long way from done with tears. She shimmied her way back to her feet using the cabinet and counter for support.
“I’m scared, Farley.”
“I know.”
He watched her with a concern she would not have thought him capable of. That concern felt like a ray of sunlight she wanted to crawl into, and she realized she wanted to be held. Needed to be. Just for a moment. It had been so long since she’d touched another human besides her daughter. She needed to know other people were real, that she wasn’t completely alone.
“Will you hug me?”
He looked deeply uncomfortable with the idea.
“Please?”
Though he still looked unsure, he nodded and opened his arms, his wingspan wide enough to take flight. Instead of stepping into them, Lissa leaned back and looked him in the eyes.
“Farley?”
“What?”
“Do you mind putting on some pants first?”
19
“F-A-R-L-E-Y.”
Farley made breakfast while Lissa talked to the cops. She watched him out of the corner of her eye, how he seemed to marvel at the fragility of the eggs as he broke them into a bowl. Six. Eight. The entire dozen. Eggs were nearly six bucks at Trader Joe’s; she couldn’t eat more than three. And that was when her stomach wasn’t turned inside out. Could he eat nine? Probably—and a loaf of bread. A side of bacon. The whole pig. Why was she pinching pennies when her daughter was missing? Was this what the world did to you?
The cops arrived an hour after she called. Uniforms. Stern glares. They spoke in sober voices and wrote everything down on small paper pads. But they weren’t taking Olive’s disappearance seriously. That’s what Farley had told her as they’d stood by the window and watched the cruiser pull up outside the building.
“How can you tell?”
“The uniforms.” A few floors below them, two officers conferred with each other on the sidewalk before coming inside. “They’d have sent detectives, not beat cops.”
“How do you know that?”
“My job.”
“You were a cop?” She heard the disbelief in her voice, how it carried an edge of accusation. She hoped it didn’t sound as sharp to him.
“No. I did internal investigations for one of the big oil companies up on the North Slope.”
“What do you investigate at an oil company?”
“Land rights stuff. Environmentalist issues. A lot of sexual assault.”
“Sexual assault?”
“A drill site is basically a few dozen roughnecks living in barracks in some of the most remote, isolated places on the planet, far from civilization. Most are men. One or two are women. Bad shit happens.”
“That’s because they’re human. I work with animals. Animals are inherently better.”
Farley’s expression said he fundamentally disagreed with her premise, but he let it go.
“These uniforms won’t ask any questions that will help them find Olive,” he said. “They’re just here to placate you. They won’t take it seriously for another day at least.”
“A day?”
“She’ll be home by then,” he said. “The cops are just creating a paper trail to cover any legal stuff that comes out of this.” He squinted his good eye. “We’ll make a plan to get her back after they leave.”
“I’ll make them take it seriously.” She’d believed it when she said it. But within minutes of their arrival, she knew Farley was right. They entered without urgency, spoke with the calming tones of a Sunday school teacher, and treated her like a child who’d lost a favorite doll—not a mother who’d lost an actual child.
“I know you want to believe that your daughter was kidnapped, but it’s statistically unlikely that anyone took her,” said the female officer, her ponytail so tight it left her eyes misshapen, temples taut as drumskins. “Kids go missing all the time and turn up again. They wander off to find candy or a video game. They follow a dog on the street and get lost. Or they hide somewhere to worry their parents. It’s a form of manipulation.”
“Manipulation? She’s eight years old.”
“Yes, ma’am. It’s to scare you.”
“Why would she do that?”
“So you treat them nicer when they come home. Extra ice cream. More TV. Like that.”
“Extra ice cream?” Lissa said, trying for a conciliatory tone even though she wanted to grab the woman by her tactical vest and shake her into action. She had the Boy Scout gene, her father always said, a need to follow the rules and walk on the paths. Teacher’s pet.
“Cake. Sweets. Kids love sweets.”
A loud, metallic sound echoed through the kitchen, startling Lissa and the cops. They all looked up at Farley, who stood on the other side of the counter holding the lid to the canned ham he’d just opened. A gelatinous seal hung from its edges like a ring of moist stalactites.
“You don’t have kids,” he said. It was not a question.
The police studied him for the first time, this scarred giant slicing meat with Lissa’s chef’s knife and lowering it in a hot frying pan, where it sizzled like static on a radio. She saw the expression on the male officer’s face change and knew he thought he’d solved the case.
“Sir? You’re the father?”
“No.”
“Mother’s boyfriend?”
“No.”
“Your relationship to the girl is what exactly?” The male cop had cut his hair in the high-and-tight style they must teach at the academy—half the cops Lissa saw around town had the same cut—but the crown shone through from the hair gel he’d used. Product, the girl who cut Lissa’s hair called it. He had tight freckles that looked like ants on his face, the kind of glare meant to intimidate. She knew the look well. What had she expected when she’d called the police? Matlock? Kojak? Columbo?
“Farley lives across the hall.”
High-and-Tight looked at Lady Cop, who put her pencil to her notebook.
“Farley . . . ?”
Without looking up, he folded the slurry of eggs around the skillet. “F-a-r-l-e-y,” he said.
“Sir? Is that your first name or last name?”
“My name is just Farley.”
“Sir . . .”
“Am I a suspect?” he asked.
The way High-and-Tight readjusted in his seat, Lissa could tell he was fighting to retain his cool. He put his own notepad into the pocket of his tactical vest and leaned forward in his chair, elbows on his thighs, to stare at Farley. His pants rode up over his socks, exposing an expanse of smoothly shaved skin the color of a sliced pear. She figured him for a cyclist—the lean build, the shaved legs.
Typical Portland.
“Do you have kids of your own, Mr. Farley?”
“I used to.”
“You did?” Lissa said.
Farley nodded. They all stared across the counter, waiting for him to elaborate, but he did not.
“Where’d you get those scars?” High-and-Tight asked, his tone moving a measurable amount toward the hostile end of the spectrum.
“The secret to good eggs is to add the salt ten minutes before you cook them,” Farley said. “You can put that in your notebook if you want. It’s more useful than asking me about my scars, which have nothing to do with her daughter going missing. If you’re not going to help, at least stop wasting our fucking time.”
Farley seemed unafraid of the cops, unintimidated. Lissa wondered why that surprised her. Maybe because of how he lived. Sleeping in the camp. The unfurnished apartment. Or because of his scars and the hint of trauma—she assumed he’d want to avoid interaction with the police. Hell, even she felt intimidated, and she had nothing to hide. She’d called them, she’d asked for their help, but in their presence she still felt a kind of deference or an assumed guilt. As if she feared drawing their attention too closely lest they find some infraction or violation she’d committed and trundle her away to the station in cuffs. Their uniforms created that involuntary reaction, she knew, the same way her stomach dropped when she passed a police car while driving. She knew, too, that it was precisely the point of the uniforms. But Farley seemed immune. Maybe because of his history with uniforms in the army, or because of his history as an investigator. Or maybe simply because of his size. What could harm someone that big? The pit in her gut grew watching the cops’ reactions as Farley scooped a pile of ham and eggs onto a plate and slid it across the counter for her.
“I’m telling you I know who took my daughter,” Lissa said. “The Asshole. A drugged-up, homeless guy. Farley saved Olive from him last week.”
