One Cold Night

her.”
    “I see exactly what you see here.” He struggled to keep his voice calm. “All right, Susan, since it’s Lisa... well, I agree with you that it’s a good idea to think the worst.”
    “A good idea?”
    “No,” he said. “The only idea, at the moment.”
    He unhooked his phone from his belt loop and dialed 911, since he didn’t know the number for the local precinct.
    “I need to report a missing child,” Dave said. Without prompting, he gave his name and the location of the factory. He knew this would draw out a first responding officer from the Eight-four — the Eighty-fourth Precinct, covering downtown Brooklyn, Boerum Hill, the Heights and the waterfront. And he knew what would happen next; there was too much eye-level evidence to deny that something unexpected, at the very least, had happened here.
    After the call they walked back through the garage, the factory and the store, into a cold night that seemed to have grown darker. Susan went to the footprint and knelt in front of it. Dave crouched down beside her. The partial print was definitely too large to have come from Lisa’s small sneaker. He could see by its shinethat it was sticky, still wet. Susan reached down to feel the paint.
    “Better not touch it,” he said.
    She pulled back her hand, rubbed her yellowed fingertips together and lifted them to smell the paint. Her body then uncoiled as she stood up suddenly and ran down the middle of the street, shouting, “Lisa! Lisa! ”
    Her voice echoed, then seemed to dissolve into pockets of silence. For a moment, Dave thought he heard Lisa answer, but realized it was just wind looping through the abandoned warehouse across the street. He went to its nearest window. Leaning in, he saw a vast, broken space of darkness cut into haphazard diamonds by whatever little light filtered in from the street, the sky and the river.
    “Lisa!” His voice sped through the space and boomeranged back to him. “Lisa, are you there?” But she couldn’t be. Could she? He could see no floors, just a crosshatch of beams through open space. “Lisa, answer if you hear me!”
    Susan, meanwhile, was calling Lisa’s name up and down Water Street. When he turned around, he saw her trying doors, darting in and out of side streets, shouting. He cringed at the trail of fingerprints she was leaving on door handles — but so be it. He couldn’t and wouldn’t stop her from doing this, because she had to, just as he had to call Lisa’s name into the gutted warehouse, if only for the strange comfort of hearing his own voice return to him.
    It was one thirty in the morning now. He noticed that all the buildings with windowpanes, the ones where people lived or worked, were dark — except one, on the third floor of a brick house in the middle of the block. The harsh fluorescent light in that singlewindow caught Dave’s attention. It looked like a full-spectrum plant light; beneath it was a shelf of greenery soaking it in. He thought he saw a face materialize briefly in the blinding light before moving back out of the window’s frame, but he wasn’t sure.
    He reminded himself that he was not a detective in this precinct and that as a family member his involvement would be accepted warily. He had to be careful about taking initiative in what might become some other cop’s case. What he could do now was watch the brick building’s front door. When the precinct cops arrived, he would inform them that someone may have been watching from upstairs; but the more he thought about that vaporous face, the less certain he became.
    The wait for the police seemed very long. Susan sat on the curb, hugging her knees for warmth. Dave stood alone in the street, arms dropped at his sides, becoming calmer as Susan’s agitation simmered. And then it started to happen: the sixth sense stoked by years of training and practice that brought a scene alive. The cobblestone street, the splashes of yellow paint, the ingresses and egresses of the surrounding buildings — all window eyes and blind spots — webbed together by glowing strands of possibility. Connected.
    In his gut he believed that Susan was right, that Lisa had been here. Someone had been with her. A man with yellow paint now on his shoe.
    Susan was shivering. He sat beside her and put his arm over her shoulders. Right away he felt her skin and muscles softening and warming.
    “What are you thinking?” Her voice was scratchy, exhausted.
    “Can you tell me now,” he