The Year of Fog Read Free

is asking him questions, monitoring his heart rate, watching for signs of a hidden motive, a carefully concealed lie.
    “We must first eliminate the family,” Detective Sherburne said last night. “Nine times out of ten, it’s the mother, or father, or both.” He watched my eyes when he said this, waiting for me to flinch; I didn’t.
    “I’m not the mother,” I said. “Not even the stepmother. Not yet. The mother picked up and left three years ago. Are you looking for her?”
    “We’re considering all possibilities.”
    The clock is ticking, the circle is widening, and I am waiting my turn.
    Cops stand around the station, singly or in pairs. They sip coffee from Styrofoam cups, shift from one foot to the other, talk quietly, making private jokes. One stands with a hand on his gun, the palm closed gently over the metal, as if the gun itself is an extension of his own body. Yesterday, Jake raced home from Eureka, where he was visiting a friend for the weekend. We spent the night in the station filling out forms, answering questions, going over every detail. Now it’s eight a.m. Twenty-two hours have passed. While I sit here, waiting, who is searching?
    It’s no secret that the longer a child is missing, the more difficult it is to find her. Danger grows by the second. Time is the kidnapper’s greatest friend, the family’s most formidable enemy. With each passing minute, the kidnapper moves farther away in some indiscernible direction, and the area that must be searched, the diameter of possibility, grows.
    Yesterday afternoon, Sherburne arrived at the Beach Chalet within ten minutes of the first squad car and immediately took charge. Now, he works at his desk, clad in a pale blue shirt and odd, iridescent tie, surely a gift that he feels obliged to wear. I imagine him at home, getting ready for work amid the domestic chaos. I imagine a happy wife, a couple of very clean children. There’s something comforting about his presence. He reminds me of Frank Sinatra, with his broad forehead and immaculate haircut, his sloping blue eyes. He moves with a kind of old-fashioned grace.
    I catch his eye. He holds up a hand with fingers spread and mouths the words “Five minutes.” He reaches for his coffee, lifts it to his mouth, sips, and sets it down again. Six more seconds have passed. Say Emma is in a car, going 60 miles per hour. In 6 seconds a car moving at 60 miles per hour can travel 170-something yards. Square that and multiply it by pi. In the time it took him to take that sip of coffee, the search area broadened by more than 870,000 square feet. If each sip is another 870,000 square feet and if there are 100 sips in a cup, I wonder how large the circle will be when he is finished, and how many cups he would have to drink to expand this circle around the globe.
    I consider all the possibilities of human bodies in motion. Did the kidnapper take Emma by the hand? Did he pick her up? If the latter, then what is the length of his stride? How many feet can he cover in a minute? And how far did he go on foot? How many yards was it to his vehicle? Did she struggle, and, if so, would this have slowed him down? Does he try to appease her when she’s hungry?
    I imagine a van stopped at a diner on some dusty highway. Inside the diner sit a shadowy figure and a girl. They are eating breakfast. Perhaps he wants to make her trust him, so the girl is having chocolate chip pancakes with an unhealthy dose of syrup, maybe even chocolate milk. Would Emma know to eat slowly in order to stall their departure? Take your time, I think, willing the message telepathically through the void. Chew each bite carefully. A song comes to me from summer camp in the Carolinas when I was an unhappy member of Girls in Action: “Give each bite fifty chews and follow with a sip of juice….” During those minutes in the diner, they are not moving in any direction; the clock is still, the circle remains static.
    This is not the only possibility.