Five Days in Summer

Parker.”
    Sarah watched his face lose color, then blaze red.
    “Please don’t print anything. Give us a day to try and find her before he gets scared. He could run and take her with him.” He listened briefly before his voice rose. “I don’t know who he . I don’t know anything. That’s why you can’t do this. Do you understand me? Do not do this! Please .” He slammed down the phone. “That was Eric Smith from the Cape Cod Times .” Sarah had never seen Will so angry; he had never dared reproach her in the past. “He saw a sign. What sign, Sarah?”
    She explained. Maxi was still strapped in her high chair and her crying grew frantic as Will’s voice rose. The boys came into the kitchen, drawn by the noise, and stood there watching.
    “I promised I wouldn’t tell the press! Sarah — why?”
    “Will, I’m sorry, I didn’t know—”
    “You should have waited till I got back. Why didn’t you wait?”
    She tried to be compliant, to absorb the moment, but finally she just couldn’t. She had done what she had needed to. She had believed in it. She would never have done anything to hurt their prospects of finding Emily.
    “She is my daughter, Will. My daughter .”
    He turned around and looked at his boys.
    “Dad,” David said in a low, steady tone.
    “Go outside, both of you. Now.”
    Sam ran out, but David just stood there and stared at his father.
    “Now.”
    David slowly turned and walked away. The front screen door squealed open then banged shut.
    Sarah stood and waited as Will, who had always seemed buoyed by good humor, searched his mind for something to say. She had never felt so exposed in front of him; but it wasn’t just him, it was everything.
    He began to shake his head, and when he closed his eyes, lines deepened across his face. Sarah was just deciding to walk the three steps over to comfort him — he was her son-in-law, nearly her own child — when the front door screeched open.
    “Dad!” It was David, back in the house. “The police are outside.”

Chapter 8
    Detective Amy Cardoza pulled up to the Parker home just before one o’clock. It had been a long morning. Police Chief Kaminer had heard about the new missing persons case and ordered Snow to hang around for roll call before going home to sleep off the night shift. That worried Amy more than a little. She had just ranked as detective after three years on patrol and she needed to be partnered in her new department. Snow’s partner had just retired. Amy had hoped Kaminer would shuffle the deck, break up another team that everyone knew was stale, but now it didn’t look that way. Kaminer had ordered Snow back to the station house by three and the obvious assumption was that he was being put back on days. Amy could see it coming, and it wasn’t pretty.
    She and Snow had worse than no connection; both their families had long, conflicting histories on the Cape. His family came in on the Mayflower, landed in Plymouth and settled on the Cape. Hers followed the same route, except they arrived a hundred years later on whaling ships from Portugal, long enough after the English to seem like intruders. Her father was the first of his family to leave the Cape in nearly two centuries, when he married an Irish summer stockactress and moved with her up to Boston to join her massive family. Amy and her two younger sisters all had their mother’s creamy skin and their father’s pitch-black hair and brown eyes. Their father had jokingly called them his “Portugish Flowers.” He told them they were true Americans and expected them to study law, medicine, finance, whatever it took to continue the long process of assimilation. He taught them to think of Cape Cod as nothing more than a hometown he’d left behind; it was never to be their destination.
    Amy stunned her family by enrolling in the police academy, then accepting an assignment on the Cape. She learned quickly why her father had left: here, the Portuguese had a long history of interracial marriage with blacks and had come to share their perceived status as second-class citizens, especially in the eyes of the lily-white locals like the Snows. To the bluebloods, they were like the summer people — perpetual outsiders whose presence was tolerated only because it kept the economy afloat.
    She knew that Snow had detested her name before he even met her. He had ignored her all her years on patrol. And now she had had the audacity to join his rank.
    All the cops joked that