One Cold Night

— brought a wave of panic that nearly forced Susan to her knees. She sat at a tan marble table, pressing her hands over her mouth, her eyes darting over the marble’s map of dark veins.
    Off to the side Susan heard the café’s door open, letting in an audible flourish of the chaos outside, and she heard the door click shut. She heard Detective Bruno’s bass negotiate the usual harangue from his partner. She heard footsteps and then sensed more than heard Dave entering the café. She turned around and there he was, looking at her. The disquiet she saw in his eyes confirmed her worst fears. She got up and rushed over to him.
    “Is it true, Dave? Did Marie Rothka call you?”
    “It’s true.” His voice was low, intimate. He glanced around the café, his attention landing on an open doorleading into a backyard. “Let’s go outside where we can be alone.”
    The café’s back garden had been tiled in bluestone, upon which sat five round iron tables with matching chairs. Christmas lights were strung along the wooden fences.
    “Where’s Lisa?” Susan couldn’t help the hysteria rising in her voice. “Where is she, Dave?”
    “We don’t know.”
    “Why are we here? Why did the police come here? Why do the reporters think she’s dead?”
    At the hard sound of that last word, a floodgate broke and Susan’s tears overflowed once again. Dave held her until she had calmed down enough to listen. Then he pulled out chairs for both of them and sat facing her.
    “So far, it’s just a phone call,” he said.
    “I thought of Becky last night, Dave. I thought I was being paranoid because I kept thinking about her not coming home that day. I thought about it.”
    “Sweetie, I thought about it, too,” he said. “But thoughts aren’t facts, and fears aren’t facts. As soon as the media pounces on a case, we get bogus calls. And you have to remember that the groom used to call Marie Rothka periodically—”
    “The groom? ”
    “That’s what we called him.”
    “You never told me that. Why?”
    “I didn’t think you—”
    “No, Dave. Why did you call him the groom?”
    Dave sighed. “Susan, I don’t think you want that much detail.”
    The way he’d phrased it, emphasizing want, told her the details were painful. In fact he had told hervery little about the nuts and bolts of the case; much of what she knew she had read in the papers. “Tell me the facts, Dave, please. ”
    “Okay.” He nodded, watching Susan closely as he said, “He called Marie this morning.”
    “And you’re saying this was his usual call?” Susan asked. “You’re saying he made his regular call to Marie today?”
    “We’re not sure if that’s what it was.”
    “Why?”
    Dave paused before saying, “He said he had a new bride.” The sun flashed on them, momentarily blinding Susan before a shadow made Dave visible again; he reappeared with a desolation in his eyes that frightened her. “He called her Lisa.”
    “My Lisa?”
    “Yes, sweetie.” Dave leaned forward to take Susan’s hand, and the contrast of his warm touch made her realize how cold she was. “Your Lisa. That’s what we think he meant.”
    “Our Lisa,” she said, looking into his eyes.
    He broke his gaze away from hers and nodded silently. A breeze caught a strand of the Christmas lights and rattled it against the fence.
    “Dave?”
    “It could have been a prank caller,” he said. “Remember that, okay, Susan?”
    “But why would a prank caller call from here? Please, just give me the truth. ”
    As soon as the word slipped out, it hung between them like the golden snitch. His look was searing. He said nothing, but in his troubled eyes she could almost see the machinations of a betrayal she had delivered to him just hours ago — her ill-timed confession, her ownhard truth — as it curdled into anger and transferred into renewed rage at his nemesis, this groom.
    “If that shithead took her,” Dave said in a voice tense with frustration, “I swear to you, I’ll find him and crush him with my bare hands.”
    In Dave’s eyes, in his tone, it became clear to Susan that this was worse than any of them had imagined. Even in her own fearful imagination she had never believed Lisa could have been abducted, like Becky Rothka, by the groom. The moniker disgusted her when she thought of its most obvious references: a wedding night, an innocent girl, and... What came next brought Susan’s helplessness into her throat, stopped her breath. She felt