Cahill put his hand out to brace himself on the door frame. His mind was racing, but it moved neither backward nor forward. It raced like a car on a lift, with someone inside gunning the engine.
“Sorry to drop a bomb on you. Articles have been in the paper every day, as far’s I know.”
“It’s impossible,” Cahill said, having recovered enough to speak, though he could hardly hear his own voice.
“Say what?”
“Why wouldn’t he have called me? Why wouldn’t police have come to the barn, why—”
“There you go,” You Got No Choice said. “Fishy, huh? You got a point; it’s odd if they haven’t made no search.”
Cahill almost tripped on the rug in the entryway on his way back into the house. He walked toward the kitchen and the pile of papers, which he wanted to look through immediately, and not at all. “Real life,” as his wife would have said. He sank into a kitchen chair and brushed the newspapers onto the floor, putting his head in his hands. The phone rang, and he got up and walked numbly toward it. Matt? Calling to say what? “This is Joyce,” his daughter said.
“Joyce, my dear, this is not a time I can talk,” he said, but another voice intruded. “And this is Tara,” a younger, more high-pitched voice sing-alonged, and he realized he’d been talking to a recording. He heard chimes, and the first unmistakable notes of the wedding march. His daughter’s voice said, “We’re sending this recording on the happiest day of our lives to announce that at one o’clock July 20, 2005, we were joined together in a commitment ceremony, blessed by Mother Goddess Devi, and we are now officially Joyce”—the squeaky voice broke in—“and Tara.” “Forever!” the voices shouted in unison. Next, he recognized the familiar strident voice of his daughter: “Don’t be put out that you weren’t invited,” she said. “Our ceremony consisted of only Mother Devi, Tara’s brother who lives next door—who did a bee-yoo-tee-ful Sufi dance—and our little girl Fluffy Sunshine, with a collar of bells and white pansies.” Tara broke in: “When you get this message, we’ll be in the air to Hawaii.” “Peace and love to you, and may you recognize the happiness we have experienced today,” his daughter said. Bells clanged merrily; over their ringing, he heard them giggling, voices overlapping: “
He put his head in his hands again, pushing his fingertips against his eyelids until he felt pain.
He went to the barn in the dark, shining the flashlight in front of him. It had rained, and tiny frogs leaped across the dirt road like tiddlywinks. In front of him grew the rhododendrons that Matt had been so delighted to have found in some nursery’s compost heap: two of them, with electric-lavender flowers, grown large beside the door. The ink on Cahill’s Post-it note had run into one black smear. He knocked, though it was obvious that the place was deserted. He had read enough in the paper to make him sick.
An oversized T-shirt was draped over an oak ladder-back chair. Matt had glued the chair’s leg for him some months back, and somehow it had remained in the barn. On the kitchen table were a few shiny copper pennies, and a
