So she asked Gaines, and her question anticipated the worst of all answers, and there was a hard edge of resignation in her eyes even before the words were uttered.

“How do you know?”

“Bob Thurston was with me . . .”

And Gaines didn’t finish the statement, because he could see that moment of recognition. Bob Thurston had known Nancy, had known her well, had cared for her when she was ill, and if anyone could recognize Nancy, it would be someone like Bob Thurston.

Judith’s breathing faltered. “Are you sure?” she asked. Her voice cracked, and the words seemed faint and uncertain.

Roy Nestor turned away, unable to hold her gaze.

Gaines looked down at the ground and then back at Judith.

“No,” Judith said, her voice a broken-up whisper. “No, no, tell me no. For God’s sake, no . . .” And she looked at her neighbor, and he still could not look back at her, and it was then that the waves came. They came fast and resolute, unerring in their accuracy, right through the heart, and they battered like fists at the door.

She seemed to fold in the middle as if a crease were already there, well marked from previous losses and disappointments. The heartbreak came, and it came with every kind of nightmare in tow, and she lowered her head as if this were the very last straw.

They tried to help her—Sheriff John Gaines and Roy Nestor—but she resisted them. They followed her into the narrow wooden house, down along a corridor to the room where she had slept alone for the past twenty years. A moment of hesitation, and then she turned once more toward the parlor. And here she stood, the room no more than eight by twelve, a single window—four panes of dirty glass—a vague greasy light trying its hardest to gain entry. Beneath it sat a beaten-up chair, cotton stuffing growing through the holes in the cover, to the right a plain deal table, a two-shelf cupboard covered with netting to keep the flies out. The floor was mismatched pieces of oilcloth and linoleum, and everywhere was a feeling of despair and heartbreak.

Setting her down in the chair, Gaines paused for a moment to catch his breath.

Judith Denton looked right back at him, but he knew that she did not see him. He imagined that she was looking at the last time she’d seen Nancy, perhaps trying to convince herself that there had been some dreadful, dreadful mistake, that this was a nightmare, that any second now she would stir and wake, that she would know that her daughter was not dead, but still missing . . . and if she were missing, then there was still some small hope that one day she might return.

Better vanished or dead? Gaines asked himself again. Better to live with certainty or with hope?

But it was not a nightmare, and Judith Denton did not wake, and she felt no sense of relief.

Perhaps only then did Judith feel the full force of that news, and Gaines was on his knees before her, holding her hand while she closed up inside. The look in her eyes was now fierce and hateful, as if the world had conspired at last to take from her the only thing that mattered.

She gasped, and for a while it seemed that she would take only one breath, and somehow that single breath would be her last, and she, too, would die—right there in Gaines’s arms. But she breathed again, and then again, and then she started to sob, and Gaines held her close to his chest. He felt her tears through the thin cotton of his shirt, and Judith Denton’s tears felt like the bitter, black rain that had fallen as they’d exhumed her only child from that filthy, terrible grave.

Finally, through staggered breaths, through tears that would not stop, she found her voice. It was weak, a terrible, fragile sound, and though she uttered just a handful of words, those words seemed more powerful than anything Gaines had ever heard.

“Th-the day sh-she we-went miss-missing,” Judith stammered. “The day she went miss-missing, I ne-never said I love you. I al-always say I love you. But not that day. It ha-had to be th-that day, didn’t it? The day she disappeared . . .”

5

Gaines remembered the awareness of being alive, of waking on those rare occasions when he had clawed a handful of hours’ sleep between one march and the next, between one firefight and the next, and being surprised to find himself alive. Before the war, he had taken such a thing for granted. He had taken many things for granted. He’d promised himself that afterward—if he made it home—he would acknowledge his survival, his aliveness, each and every day. But slowly, insidiously, without even realizing it, he had forgotten to make those acknowledgments. Now it was only special occasions—Thanksgiving, birthdays, Christmas—that he remembered the promise. And times of horror. He remembered the promise in times of horror. Small horrors compared to those he had survived, but horrors all the same. Perhaps he had chosen this line of work for that reason. To keep himself reminded of how sudden, how brutal, how terrible it all could be. To forever appreciate the fragility of life. How precious, and yet how terribly fragile. Of all things, however, those who came home from war were haunted by the ghosts of those who did not. At first a sense of disbelief, becoming at once a sense of responsibility to do something special, something rare and meaningful and extraordinary with their lives. Ultimately a sense of guilt that they had not and more than likely never would. What those who did not return would never know was that all you ever wanted were the small things, the narrow routines, the insignificant details of normalcy. You did not want to stand out, to be visible, to be noticed. Invisibility had engendered survival. It was against human nature to change a pattern that facilitated a future.

And now here, of all places, was a time of horror. Gaines did not know what had been done to the girl. Most of all, he did not know why. There were no questions he could answer for Judith Denton that would assuage what she was feeling. He sat with her for more than an hour, and she eventually turned away from him, buried herself into the chair as best she could, her body tight like a knot, fists clenched and pressed against her eyes, ashamed to be unable to speak, at the same time not caring who might see her.

Her vanished child was a child now dead. This much at least she knew. The details were yet to come, and Gaines didn’t want rumors and assumptions stepping in where facts were needed. If Judith Denton was to be told the truth of her daughter’s death, then it was only right that such a truth came from him. In such instances, the law performed a function that should not be assigned or delegated.

“Judith,” he said, and he laid his hand on her shoulder. She neither flinched nor acknowledged his presence, and Gaines waited a few more minutes before he said her name again.

“Judith, I have to ask something of you now.”

Gaines could feel the cool knot of anticipation in the base of his gut. His hands were sweating, his face also, and yet he could not move to retrieve his handkerchief from the pocket of his pants.

“Judith, you hear me?”

A twitch of response in her shoulder. Could have been involuntary.

“I have something I’m gonna need you to do now,” he said. “I gotta take you over to the Coroner’s Office . . .”

Judith Denton turned slightly. For a moment, her breathing hitched and stopped.

“You tell me what happened,” she said. Her voice cracked with emotion, but beneath it was a firmness that could not be denied. “You tell me what happened to her, Sheriff Gaines. What happened to my girl?”

Gaines started to shake his head. “I can’t—”

“You’re the sheriff here,” Judith interjected. “So don’t tell me can’t. You’re the sheriff, and you can do whatever the hell you like. I want to know what happened to her—”