Phantom Prey

police. I should put the gun away. “Tell them . . . Tell them I’m going to the garage. I’m going to lock myself in the car. The garage door is up.”
    “Okay. That would be good,” the operator said. “Don’t hang up. Just drop the phone and go to the car. We should be there in less than a minute now.”
    She dropped the phone and backed toward the garage.
    She could hear sirens in the distance—and not another thing.
    The cops went in with guns in their hands, cleared the house, looked at the blood and called for a crime-scene crew.
    Alyssa went looking for her housekeeper, and found her. Helen was utterly confused by the blood; it hadn’t been there when she left.
    The crime-scene crew, from the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal Apprehension, spent two days in the house. They found more signs of blood, on the tiles in the kitchen and hallway, enough that it had apparently been mopped up. Alyssa and the cops spent the next two days looking for Frances. They found her car, found her last grocery list, but they never could find her. Then the blood tests came back from the lab: it was Frances’s blood, all right.
    According to the lab techs, there’d been a pool of blood on the floor, which had been cleaned up with a product called Scrubbing Bubbles bathroom cleaner and paper towels—there were little spit-ball, or blood-ball, remnants from the towels stuck in the cracks of the Mexican tiles. The blood spatters on the wall had simply been missed by the killer or killers, who hadn’t noticed the thin sprays of blood entwined in the floral pattern of the wallpaper.
    Frances was gone, and probably dead, and they all knew it.
    Alyssa cried, sporadically and unpredictably, for four weeks, caught in the bureaucracy of mysterious death, a slow-motion nightmare.
    No body, just the blood—and the cops coming around, and the reporters, and the cameras, and then the lawyers and the accountants, trying to work through the law. What to do about Frances’s car? I’m sorry to have to ask at a time like this but Frances’s belongings are still in the apartment, and if she’s not going to be able to pay the rent next month we have a young couple who are looking . . .
    When her husband, Hunter, had been killed, he’d managed to die with his typical neatness. Trusts in order, will in place, lists of assets and debts, a file of real estate holdings, careful records of stock-purchase dates, garnished with instructions for everybody. He’d been a control freak right to the end. He’d probably never felt a thing, his silly seaplane dropping like a rock into the Ontario woods, witnesses all around.
    When he’d died, she’d been stricken, but had recovered, and knew even on the day of his death that she would recover. They were married, but they’d been psychologically split for years, living separate lives in separate rooms; with a little sex now and then.
    Frances, though, was different.
    She hadn’t had her life yet; she hadn’t died—if she were dead— doing something voluntarily. And she was Alyssa’s blood. Whatever their conflicts—and they’d mostly concerned the father and husband, Hunter—they would have been worked through. They only needed time, and they hadn’t gotten it.
    So Alyssa cried, short violent jags at unexpected moments. And she looked for her daughter, the only ways she knew: she called people, politicians, who called the cops, who whispered back that something was going on here. . . . The politicians apologized and temporized and shuffled away. She’d become a liability.
    And she looked in the stars. She did her astrological charts, using the latest software, she talked with a master on the East Coast, who wondered aloud if Frances might still be alive . His chart for the girl showed a passage of darkness, but not death. Nothing that big.
    “Alive?”
    “It’s a possibility that has to be examined,” he said, in tones portentous even for a wizard of the Zodiac. “I see an instability, a hovering, a waiting . . .”
    The cards said the same thing. Alyssa had picked up the Tarot as a teenager, believed in the cards, used them at all-important business junctures—and she’d done so well. So well.
    And though the cards and the stars agreed that Frances, or some part of her, remained in this sphere, there was never a sign of her.
    The burden, the insanity of it all, was crushing. Alyssa lived on Xanax and, at night, on Ambien. Then she began to take Xanax to lay down a base for the