One Cold Night

of it: Lisa gone and Dave unreachable late at night. Ever since last October,fully a year ago now, when with a stroke of remarkable bad timing Dave’s phone battery had run out on the worst night of his career, Susan’s automatic response to his inaccessibility had gone from mild unease to unalloyed worry. He had finally called home fourteen hours late with news of a missing person that would soon galvanize the city with fear. Thinking of that missing girl now, Susan’s worry jelled into hard anxiety.
    Her name was Becky Rothka. Becky’s mother had called the Seventy-eighth Precinct, the call was routed to the Detectives Unit, and by chance Dave caught the call — and in this arbitrary way the case became his. Becky, thirteen years old, had left her middle school one afternoon and was never seen again. Lisa had come to live with them just before Becky vanished, and with no good schools in Dumbo she had briefly attended the same grade in the same Park Slope middle school as Becky; though with ten classes per grade, they had never met. Dave had once remarked how much Becky and Lisa resembled each other: same age, both slight and fair-skinned with longish blond hair and green eyes; in appearance, they might have been sisters. But by then he had failed to find Becky and everything seemed to remind him of her. Susan still caught Dave gazing at Lisa sometimes and suspected he was thinking about Becky, the girl who got away, the one big case he had failed to close. She knew it haunted him, though he rarely spoke about it anymore.
    Thinking of Becky, Susan’s resolve melted completely. It was now ten fifty-four, only six minutes to go until eleven o’clock, but she couldn’t wait. Setting down the bottle of window cleaner and handful ofsoiled paper towels, she picked up the phone and speed-dialed Lisa’s cell number.
    Gradually Susan became aware of the repeating crescendo of Lisa’s phone ringing somewhere in the apartment. She put the kitchen phone on the counter, letting the call ring and ring so the sound would lead her to its source. It was loudest in the living room, where Susan saw that Lisa had left her paisley bag on the floor. Digging through a pile of crumpled papers, pens and lipsticks at the bottom of the bag, she found the phone. She held it in the palm of her hand and watched it ring before finally flipping it open, then answering and ending her own call. Without the electronic tether of her cell phone, Lisa’s vulnerability exploded in Susan’s imagination.
    She returned to the kitchen and called Glory McInnis. Her mother, Audrey, answered, and Susan quickly explained that they had argued (leaving out why they had argued) and that Lisa still wasn’t home. Through her end of the phone, Susan could hear footsteps as Audrey went to find Glory in her room, a door opening, voices. Glory herself came on the line, saying, “I haven’t talked to Lisa since she was on her way home from rehearsal, and that was, like, almost ten o’clock.” Susan felt a plunge of disappointment, but also a sense of relief that Glory had not yet been filled in on Susan’s confession, which had taken place after ten o’clock. The truth still felt too raw to become news; she and Lisa had to finish their conversation before it could be broken into socially digestible bits.
    One by one, Susan called Lisa’s friends; and one by one, each said they had not spoken with her that night. No one knew where she was. Susan hung up the phone and thought about what to do.
    She could search the neighborhood, but it was late and she was alone and what good would that do anyway? What would be the point of running around the neighborhood in a city where Lisa could be anywhere at all? She had a Metrocard, she was smart and adventurous and she knew her way around. Still, she was only fourteen and had been in the city only a year. Wandering the streets alone at night, in a state of emotional upheaval, could not possibly be a good idea.
    She tried Dave’s cell again, and again his voice mail answered. This time she wouldn’t give up so easily. She called the precinct’s landline and was told he had left on a call a while ago. She imagined him in a tunnel or a basement or any solid structure that eluded penetration by satellite signals; or maybe he had forgotten to charge his cell phone, a bad habit he had worked on, though not altogether successfully. She waited less than a minute and tried his cell again. On the sixth try, she finally