Fidelity Read Free

seen before.
    She reached the door with the raised gold letters that said KRAMER INVESTIGATIONS, tried to fit her key in the lock, and failed. Phil had not told her anything about changing locks. It was a simple, common sort of difficulty, but it had stopped her progress, and for the moment she couldn’t think of a way to move forward. People like building managers tended to show up at ten or eleven, and it was barely six thirty. She felt dazed.
    The door swung open, and Dewey Burns faced her. “Emily. What are you doing?”
    “Same as you.” She charged past him, as though he might shut the door on her. She took a few steps and stopped. Ray Hall and Bill Przwalski were standing together, leaning on one of the desks in the outer office.
    “Ray? Billy?” she said. “I tried to call you.”
    Ray Hall returned her gaze. “Dewey got through to us.” He was about forty years old, with gray, squinting eyes that seemed much older, as though he had been disappointed so many times that he was incapable of surprise. This morning he was wearing a black sport coat, a pale blue oxford shirt, and a pair of jeans.
    “Phil didn’t come home last night,” she said.
    “We heard,” Hall said. “I’m sorry, Emily. But I think he’ll turn up okay.”
    “But you’ve worked for him for at least ten years. You know he’s never done this before. He would never just not show up.”
    Ray Hall sighed and looked at the floor for a second, then raised his eyes to her. “I think he’s okay.”
    “What does that mean?”
    “There are two ways people disappear-involuntarily, and voluntarily. When you have a healthy man who is six feet four, has been in a few fights, and carries a gun, it’s hard to take him anyplace he doesn’t want to go.”
    “You think he just took off, without saying anything to anybody?”
    “That’s one possibility, but I don’t know yet.”
    “And what if you’re wrong?”
    “I can’t be wrong, I haven’t guessed yet,” he said. “We’ve got to stay calm and find out what we can before we draw any conclusions.”
    Emily sat down at the receptionist’s desk, because she felt her knees beginning to tremble. After a second, she realized the desk and chair were the same ones she’d used twenty years ago. She gained some strength from the familiarity. She tried to ignore the dwarf plants in cup-sized pots that April Dougherty had on the desk, and the little plush monkey with magnets on its hands that clung to the desk lamp. There was white blotter paper with doodle drawings of spindly-legged girls with long hair swept across big eyes, and the name April with a heart dotting the i. Emily noticed that Bill Przwalski was watching her and looking nervous, as though he were afraid she was about to search the desk.
    She wanted to. Her hands itched to pull out the drawers and look, but she resisted. She said to Ray Hall, “I called the police.”
    “So did I,” Dewey Burns said.
    “You did?”
    He frowned. “I told you I was going to.”
    “Not exactly. You said you were going to make some calls. What did they say?”
    “They haven’t arrested him or taken him to a hospital. They’re checking now to see if they had any contact with him since yesterday afternoon-a traffic stop or something.”
    “That’s what they told me, too.” Emily glanced at Ray Hall, but he avoided her eyes.
    She stood and walked to the door of Phil’s glassed-in corner office. When she pushed open the door, she saw that the deadbolt was still extended and the woodwork was splintered. She spun around in alarm.
    Ray Hall said, “That was me. He’s the only one who has a key.”
    She nodded and went inside. Everything in Phil’s office looked the same as it always had. She realized that she had been expecting something different. There should have been something that stood out, something that might not be instantly visible to other people, but that Emily Kramer would see. And that would tell her what was wrong. The desk