The Year of Fog Read Free Page B

smiling as casually as a friendly neighborhood salesman. “Norm Dubus,” he says, shaking my hand. “Ready?”
    The room is blank and white and very warm. A space heater beneath the window buzzes, its coils glowing red. A smell of sweat and burned coffee. Norm shuts the door behind us and motions for me to sit down. He loops cords around my chest, tells me to sit up straight, and adjusts the height of the chair so my feet are flat on the floor.
    “Relax. I’m going to ask you a few questions.”
    On the table in front of him is a legal pad, and beside it a gold machine with a needle. He flips a switch and the machine begins to hum. The needle starts moving, scratching four flat blue lines across the paper. The questions, at first, are mundane:
    Is your name Abigail Mason?
    Were you born in Alabama?
    Did you attend the University of Tennessee?
    Is your current place of residence 420 Arkansas, Unit 3, San Francisco, California?
    He records answers on his pad, checks the needle mark, makes notations. After a while, the tone of the questions changes.
    Have you and Jake been arguing lately?
    Do you have children?
    Do you want children?
    Did you ever fight with Emma?
    Norm’s hair is glossy black, except for a couple of gray strands above the ears. He has purplish spots around his hairline, and he smells like green apples. He must have just dyed his hair in the last day or two, possibly even that morning.
    Half an hour has passed since the polygraph began.
    Have you ever punished Emma?
    Do you know where Emma is?
    Did you have anything to do with her disappearance?
    Did you lose your temper?
    Did you drown her?
    Did you kill Emma?
    As the session comes to a close, I fall apart. Norm offers me a tissue and leans over to detach the monitors from my pulse points. The sweet apple scent of his shampoo grows stronger. “Emma loves applesauce,” I find myself saying. He lifts an eyebrow, smiles in a distracted way, and an absurd jingle rolls through my head, the sort of phonic litany one memorizes in kindergarten.
A is for apple, A is for Adam, A is for Abraham.
    “We’re done here,” Norm says. “You may go.” Then, more gently, “It’s routine. Just something we have to do.”
    “I know,” I say.
    A is for Anywhere.
    Outside the police station, a reporter for Channel 7 is waiting with her cameraman. Jake looks directly into the camera and speaks into the woman’s outstretched microphone. “If you have Emma, please let her go. Just leave her in a public place. Walk away. No one has to know who you are.”
    The reporter waves the microphone in my face. Her makeup has a shiny plastic look, and her lip liner extends slightly beyond the natural edges of her lips. “What is your relationship to the child?”
    “I’m her father’s fiancée.”
    The woman presses herself between me and Jake. “Is the wedding still on?”
    “I just want to find my daughter,” he says.
    She barrages Jake with more questions, never pausing long enough to get a complete answer. “How do you feel? Where is Emma’s mother? Do you know who might have done this?” I know she’s looking for the perfect sound bite—an outpouring of grief, a statement implicating the mother, the mention of a creepy neighbor or crazy uncle—anything to make her story more interesting.
    Jake fields her questions calmly, professionally. Not once does he show impatience or break down into tears. He’s made for such moments of crisis, this sturdy Californian who is always in command. His great-great-great-grandfather was a 49er of the gold-panning kind; his father was a 49er as well, a football hero whose name still gets mentioned in the sports page, a bigger-than-life talent who died in his early forties, wasted by alcohol. Jake played football in high school and was pretty good, but he happily gave up the sport when his father died. Still, there is something of the football player’s swagger in him, a good-natured confidence that never fails to win people