One Cold Night

effortless. Loving her and marrying her were the simplest and the best things he had ever done. But did they have that unassailable bond? He had thought that they did — but did they?
    From Susan, he had wanted everything: love, a home, a family. His desire for children had blossomed out of their love, and he had assumed she would feel the same way; but when he asked her, she hesitated. “I don’t know if I’m ready to have a baby,” she had told him, “or if I’ll ever be ready.” He had respected her need for time to think it over, but now the entire orbit of that conversation had tilted, and he couldn’t understand how she could love him and livewith him and marry him, yet not share with him perhaps the most significant fact of her life: that she had already had a child. What else, he wondered now, had she kept from him?
    Still, despite the stinging sense of betrayal, the thought of losing Susan shook him almost as much as Lisa’s disappearance, and the two potential losses began an entwinement in his mind. Somehow, he had to find Lisa, and to make his way back to the implicit trust for Susan of which, just this morning, he had been convinced.
    Dave wondered where to begin and thought, Anywhere. He glanced at the file nearest him: a tattered manila folder with phone numbers and names penciled across the top. Then he stood up and walked around the table to the board. Ramos stood to the left of Lisa, Dave to the right of Becky.
    “We don’t have much time,” Dave said. “If the phone call this morning really was from the same man who took Becky, and if he really does have Lisa — if it wasn’t a prank from some nut — then we have until tonight.”
    “It was him,” Marie said. “I know his voice.”
    There was silence a moment; then Dave continued. “With Becky, his pattern was this: The morning after she went missing, Marie got the first phone call; later that day, she got a letter. It was overnighted from a drop box in the Bronx, signed in her name but not in her handwriting. The letter was not, I repeat not divulged to the public, so if we get a letter again this time, I’d say the game is on. If we’re dealing with a repeat of the same crime, he may follow the same pattern, or not. I stress if. There are some obvious conclusions we could make right now on the spot, butI want to caution us not to do that. We’ll have to trust our instincts today, but at the same time we need to process the facts.” He turned toward the photographs of the girls. “They look alike. Both were adopted, or ostensibly adopted. They’re the same age. The first thing we’ve got to do is boil down the essentials.”
    Bruno drummed his tobacco-stained fingers on the tabletop and leaned slightly forward. “Why this phone call today to Marie? Why not to your wife?”
    It was an excellent question, and Dave did not have an answer. “All I know is that for the last year, the groom has made it a game to taunt Marie. We can’t say right now how the game might be changing today. We’ll have to see.”
    Ramos sat down at the head of the table and ripped off the top sheet of her legal pad. She began to make a list, the headers of which she recited aloud: “Birth dates, birth places, birth parents. Let’s start right there.”
    “Becky’s birthday was... is September sixth,” Marie offered.
    “Lisa’s is September second,” Dave said.
    Ramos wrote the information neatly on her pad. “So when Becky disappeared, she just turned thirteen.”
    “Yes,” Marie said.
    “And Lisa at that time, a year ago, was also just thirteen.”
    “That makes them not possibly blood sisters,” Bruno said.
    “Not full sisters,” Ramos said. “Not the same mother.”
    “Could be the same father, though,” Bruno said. “This Peter Adkins, maybe he got around.”
    “You know anything about that, Strauss?” Ramos asked.
    “No,” Dave said, discomfited by the thought that Susan’s young lover might not have been faithful to her.
    “Where was Lisa born?”
    “Texas, as far as I know,” Dave answered; though the truth was, he had never asked.
    “What do we know about Becky’s birth mother?” Ramos asked Marie directly.
    Marie took a deep breath, the tendons arching out of her thin neck. She unwove her hands, placed them flat on the table and sat forward. “Becky was born in Lawton, Oklahoma, to a woman with three children and a husband who had just died of emphysema. We ran an ad saying we wanted a baby and were