The Long Way Back, page 6
The morning is crisp but warming at the edges, the sun sparkling furiously off the water as Charlie climbs over the low stone wall and drops to the rocky beach below. It’s not really a beach, more like a thin strip of rugged coastline, covered in smooth pebbles and bits of driftwood. When she was Eva’s age, it was her favorite place on the Morrows’ property. Forget the widow’s walk on the roof (accessible only through a pull-down ladder on the second story) or the porch swing with a view of the lake and the sailboats that scudded across the waves on hot summer days. Charlie loved the slice of land between the fresh-cut grass and the ferocious rush of water. She could think most clearly in the space between tame and wild, home and away.
Lake Superior is calm this morning, the waves lapping at the stones gentle as a kitten with milk. Usually, Charlie loves this particular mood of the water: peaceful and somehow sated. There was no storm last night, not a single drop of rain fell, and still Eva was lost on a raft (Charlie’s favorite theory) in the vast expanse of water and sky. Maybe if it had been still, if these idyllic conditions had existed last night, they would have found her easily. Charlie can almost picture it: her dark-haired daughter waving in the yellow raft. Laughing at her own joke even though nothing about it is funny. Later, telling Charlie that she had to run, that it was the only way to get her mother’s attention. Why? But the why of it all is still as incomprehensible as a black hole, and Charlie knows she has to take this one step at a time. Step one: find Eva.
The waterfront that stretches the length of the Morrows’ modest estate is its own little cove, a shallow curve that is bordered on the south end by trees spilling over and into the water and a rocky outcropping to the north. Loosely speaking, the jagged peninsula correlates to the Greene’s property, but technically no one owns the beach. Charlie’s relieved that the reporters haven’t figured that out yet. Although, if they did try to hike down from the tiny, lakeside park a half mile south, the terrain wouldn’t make it effortless. The rocks are slippery, the boulders sharp. Ice-cold water on one side and a tangled forest on the other make the hike an adventure. It would be hard to navigate with cameras and equipment.
“You’ve got a great view.”
Charlie’s heart skips as she spins to see who’s found her. How long has she been out here? Ten minutes? Twenty? How did they know she was here?
But it’s not a determined reporter who’s joined her on the beach. It’s Detective James. “Didn’t mean to startle you,” he says, burying his hands in the pockets of his jacket and squinting out across the water. It’s clear to Charlie that he meant to do exactly that. “Chilly morning.”
Charlie doesn’t really feel it until he says it, but all at once the breeze off the water lifts the fine hairs on her arms and sends a tremor down her spine.
“Have you found her?” Charlie hardly dares to ask, and yet the words tumble from her tongue in a rush.
“No.”
He doesn’t offer so much as a scrap of news to soften the blow, but it’s better that way. Charlie takes the report like a clean right hook, absorbs the pain, and moves right past it.
“What next? Let me help. Let me take a boat out. I know Eva better than anyone and—”
“That’s exactly why I’m here,” Detective James cuts in, giving her a sideways glance. “We didn’t get a chance to finish our conversation last night. I have a few more questions.”
“I don’t see what good talking will do. Shouldn’t we be out looking for her?” Charlie can feel frustration coming to a head, foaming up and out of her chest in a fizz of frantic energy. But the detective cuts it with a single sentence.
“Perhaps you’d be more comfortable at the station?”
The implication is clear: cooperate here and now, or we’ll make you. Nothing she can do to help behind bars in the local jail.
“Frank is making breakfast,” she says, turning toward the house. It’s hard to leave the water, the place where Eva is. She snags one last look over her shoulder, taking in the spill of blue and the dark smudge of tiny islands crouched in the distance, and leads the way back to the kitchen. Detective James follows.
They find Frank and Sophie sitting at the table overlooking the lake, and for a few seconds Charlie can’t square the scene before her.
Sophie Greene is the Morrows’ longtime next-door neighbor and friend. She’s in her mid-sixties, short and sturdy with a neat, silver bob and blue eyes that usually glint with a mischievous twinkle. There’s no joy in her expression today, though, and she pushes back from the table to wrap Charlie in a hug that’s almost suffocating in its intensity.
“I brought food. I can’t fix a damn thing, but I can make sure you’re cared for and fed,” Sophie says, giving Charlie one last, hard squeeze. “We’re going to get through this, okay?”
Someone—Frank or Sophie?—has opened the blinds at the back of the house, away from the drive and the reporters, and lifted the sash windows. The breeze is light and fragrant, laced with lake water and springtime. On the table there is a generous griddle of fried eggs, hot blueberry drop biscuits with a drizzle of white glaze, and a plate of sausages. A full pot of steaming, black coffee stands in the middle of the table. Charlie’s stomach betrays her by grumbling.
It’s as if Sophie can read her mind. “You need to eat. And rest and keep taking care of yourself. You’ll be no good to anyone—least of all Eva—if you don’t cover the basics.” She fills a plate for Charlie and slides it across the table in front of an empty chair.
“Sit down, Charlotte.” Frank’s eyes are pleading, and he looks as if he’s aged ten years in a night. It scares her.
Because Charlie feels thick-headed, her thoughts muddled and unsure, she does as she’s told. It’s only when Sophie starts filling a second plate that she remembers Detective James. “Oh,” she says belatedly, motioning toward where he hovers in the door between the laundry room and the kitchen, “this is Detective James.”
“We’ve met,” Frank tells her. “We sent him to call you for breakfast. And the other gentleman is already eating.”
As if summoned, a tall, Black man in jeans and a dark gray blazer ducks into the room. He’s startlingly handsome, with a wide, white smile and bottomless eyes. His natural hair is cropped in a tight fade with neat, razor edging at the temples and along his high forehead. He’s holding a nearly empty plate. “Didn’t mean to disappear on you,” he says. “This is absolutely delicious, Mrs. Greene. Thank you.”
The older woman blushes, and Charlie finds herself looking between Sophie and the stranger who seems so at home in her kitchen. To add insult to injury, Scout pads out of the living room and flops down by the newcomer’s feet as if they are the best of friends.
“Excuse me,” the man says, setting his fork on the plate so he can offer Charlie his hand. “I’m Agent Jude Turner. FBI.”
FBI? And as she slips her hand in his—unexpectedly calloused, firm grip—any appetite she had is suddenly gone. But she doesn’t want to make a fuss in front of Frank and Sophie, so she pulls off a corner of her still-warm biscuit and puts it in her mouth. It tastes like dust on her tongue.
Ignoring the detective and FBI agent, she says to Sophie: “I want you to take Frank home when we’re done eating.”
“That’s the plan,” the older woman agrees. “We can walk back to my house and we’ll go from there, okay, Frank?” He looks for a moment as if he’s about to protest, but Sophie is already going on. “That way we won’t have to run the gauntlet. I’ll just take the long way back.”
Charlie’s heart hitches at Sophie’s casual words. She studies her friend for just a moment, weighing if she said it on purpose or not. It wasn’t intentional, she decides, but she has to put her fork down and take a sip of the scalding coffee to ease the knot in her throat anyway.
The Sutton girls carefully curated well over a thousand social media posts, and all but the very first few are signed: Always take the long way back. It’s their family motto, something that Charlie said to Eva when she was just a babe in arms. “Let’s take the long way back, shall we?” If she’s honest with herself, it’s a tiny stab at Rosie and the way that Charlie was never allowed as a child to linger. Their followers love it. They put it on T-shirts and use it as a sort of code to separate the true devotees from casual fans. One woman even had it tattooed on her arm in her grandmother’s graceful cursive. She tagged the Eva Explores account in all the stories she posted about the process.
Charlie tosses a napkin over her plate and takes it to the sink before anyone can inspect how much she’s eaten. Three bites, to be exact. And they’re churning in her stomach.
“If you’re done,” Agent Turner says, joining her at the counter, “perhaps you could show us Eva’s room.” He tucks his practically licked-clean plate beneath her full one and carefully places his fork in the sink.
Who is this man? And who says perhaps? Charlie finds herself staring at him, but when he looks back, she can’t hold his gaze. “Why are you here? Why is the FBI involved?”
They’re wasting time here, eating Sophie’s homemade biscuits when they should be out looking for Eva. Lake Superior is roughly the size of Maine—the Coast Guard has thousands of square miles to cover, and though she’s sure they can calculate wind speed and waves to coordinate approximate distances covered, it feels as if every moment allows Eva to slip farther and farther away. Don’t they understand the urgency? Don’t they feel the ticking bomb that is time spent unprotected against the elements? If they don’t find Eva soon, there will be nothing left to find. The thought rips through her like a flame.
If Agent Turner can sense the sudden acrid heat of her fear, he doesn’t let on. But he does say calmly, “The FBI field office in Duluth is often utilized in missing person cases, especially when the victim is a minor. We lend tech assistance and resources and offer an objective perspective when needed.”
“They handle high-profile cases,” Detective James adds, and there is an edge in his voice.
Charlie clocks the fissure between the two, but she doesn’t much care if they hate each other like she suspects. “You want to see Eva’s room? Why?”
“It’ll help us understand her better,” Agent Turner says. “What motivates her, who her friends are, how she sees the world.”
“We’re going to need her computer and her phone.” Detective James takes a far more direct route. “We need to know if she was suicidal.”
Fury turns Charlie’s blood to ice. “Eva was not suicidal,” she says coldly. “Her room is this way.”
The stairs to the second floor are through the living room. They’re narrow and creaky, something Charlie hated when she was a teenager, but loves now that her own daughter is of sneaking-out age. At the landing, there’s a ninety-degree turn and a lead glass window that is always the first to frost over in winter. Charlie glances through the diamond panes to see if more crews have joined the melee at the end of the drive, but the glass is warped and smoky at the edges. All she can see is a watercolor of green and blue.
There are two bedrooms and a small bathroom on the second floor, and Eva’s room is at the very end of the hall. After living in close quarters for so many years, the expanse of the house feels immense to Charlie, and she still finds it hard to fall asleep without the sound of Eva’s breathing in her ears. Eva talks in her sleep—nonsense words and phrases that sound like a one-sided conversation. Or, she used to. Charlie hasn’t fallen asleep close to her daughter in nearly six months.
“Here it is,” she says, swinging open the door and stepping inside. She resists the urge to follow it with: You won’t find anything.
The room is cramped but tidy, with sash windows and a slanted roof over the twin bed. Eva painted everything in shades of yellow when she moved in—buttery walls and honeyed doors and trim in a shimmery, frothy cream—and the bedspread is tufted and white. The overall effect is of unbridled optimism, happiness, and hope. See? Charlie wants to say. The girl who lives in this room can’t possibly be suicidal. Her gaze catches on a dark swath hanging over the frame of the closet door. Eva’s graduation gown. Navy with gold cords draped around the neck. She came home with it yesterday. The day before? Time seems irrelevant, and Charlie sinks to the edge of the bed.
“You okay?” Agent Turner asks. “You don’t need to stick around.”
Charlie assumes it’s a polite way of asking her to leave, but she’s not going anywhere. She shakes her head and stays put.
So the two men begin to sweep the room, casually at first. Detective James opens the closet and peers inside, careful not to disturb the graduation gown. He flips through Eva’s hangers with a knuckle, but it seems half-hearted. When Charlie turns her attention to Agent Turner, she realizes that he has slid a pair of leather gloves over his long, slender hands. They’re black and expensive, but she knows he’s not wearing them to be fashionable.
“No one has been in here,” Charlie offers. “I mean, besides me and Eva.”
“She didn’t have friends over?”
“No. I mean, yes. Sometimes.” Rarely. “But they mostly hung out downstairs. There’s not much room in here.” The truth is, Eva has only ever had one girl over: Piper Berkley. She came exactly twice, and Charlie despaired of her daughter ever making a good, true friend. But after those first awkward homework sessions, Eva found her groove in Piper’s world. Piper’s fancy house and friends and preferred weekend activities. Charlie couldn’t complain. She’d had Eva all to herself for two and a half years on the road—she could hardly grumble now about her daughter’s regular absences, especially if they were friend-related.
Agent Turner uncurls his body from a crouch and clips his head on the slanted ceiling. “I’m going to need the names and numbers of Eva’s closet friends,” he says, rubbing the spot.
“Okay.” But she isn’t sure she has that information. Eva’s friends are all new, a gaggle of long-limbed girls with dewy skin and hair so shiny it looks like they’ve stepped from the pages of a magazine. Teen? Seventeen? Charlie doesn’t even know if those magazines exist anymore, and she isn’t sure she could name Eva’s friends. She hasn’t even met them all, just seen cropped photos on Eva’s phone when she prodded her daughter for details. How many texts did Eva send over the last six months telling Charlie she was going out with the girls or @Piper’s house? Why didn’t Charlie pay closer attention to who and where and when?
“Boyfriend?”
“No,” Charlie says a little too quickly. One of Agent Turner’s eyebrows quirks, but he doesn’t press it.
“Job?”
“She works at Mugs. It’s a little cafe on Badger Street.”
“I’m assuming she goes to Landing High.”
“Yes. Since January.”
“Homeschool before that,” Detective James interjects as if trying to prove himself a valuable asset.
They’re quiet for a few minutes, both men concentrating on a more thorough investigation of Eva’s room. Detective James has pulled a pair of latex gloves from his pocket and is feeling along the bookshelf that’s crammed with everything from Jane Austen to Rick Riordan. Agent Turner has drawn the short stick and is rifling through Eva’s drawers, starting with her underwear drawer at the top of the small bureau. There’s a certain chivalry in the way he carefully lifts and shifts her things, putting it all back exactly where he found it. But the invasion of her daughter’s privacy unearths something in Charlie all the same, like black rot beneath the blade of a shovel, and she pushes herself off the bed before she loses control and screams at him to stop.
“Where’s her computer?” Detective James asks.
Charlie is clenching her fists so tight her fingers are going numb. “What?” she manages, barely comprehending.
“Eva’s computer. Landing High is entirely digital. They issue a laptop to students at registration. She’s gotta have one. Where is it?”
Yes, Eva has a school computer. It usually sits on her desk, and the power cord snaking across the surface only accentuates its absence. “In her backpack?” Charlie tries. But it’s clear to them all that there’s no backpack in the room. Still, they look under the bed and in the closets, behind the door and in every corner. Eva’s backpack is missing.
“Did she take it on the boat?” Agent Turner asks.
Charlie can’t remember. “I don’t think so. Why would she take her school computer on the boat? It must be downstairs somewhere.” But she already knows that it’s not. After years of living in Sebastian, of having a dedicated place for absolutely everything, Eva is not the kind of girl to toss her backpack on a chair or leave her coat draped over the back of the couch. Her backpack belongs beneath her desk, the top zipper open and ready for the computer that spends every night connected to the charger so it’s ready to go the next day. Eva is meticulous.
“We need to find that computer,” Agent Turner says, and for the first time there is something flinty in his voice. He’s kind, but Charlie gets the sense that he is also very good at his job. A phrase from her sporadic Sunday school days slips unbidden into her mind: gentle as a dove, wise as a serpent. It fits the FBI agent like a tailored suit.
“I’m sure it’s around here somewhere,” Charlie repeats, though the air in the room is brittle with doubt.
“Does Eva keep a journal? A diary? Anything of the sort?” Detective James is now rummaging through the three tiny drawers of her desk, rattling #2 pencils, plastic boxes of paperclips, and tacks that Eva kept neatly sorted and stacked.
Looking through his eyes, Charlie can see that her daughter’s room is almost preternaturally clean and organized. What seventeen-year-old alphabetizes her books and sorts her T-shirts by color? One who spent the last two and a half years in a twenty-seven-foot trailer with her mom, Charlie wants to explain. They had to compartmentalize their inner lives, find ways to express their individuality and process their emotions and exist in careful, unobtrusive ways. Of course, they lived loud and open with each other, sharing things that other mothers and daughters would probably consider a sort of willful violation of acceptable boundaries. And it worked for them. It was special and beautiful. It was good. But Charlie doesn’t know how to say any of those things.
