Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

way things look one way but they’re not, they’re another?”
    “How did you think things were?”
    “Permanent,” he said.
    I felt that little stab that sometimes comes along with an unexpected truth, simply stated.
    Leon lifted the camera to his face again. But this time I didn’t hear the shutter click. I wrote down, “How long is wife missing? How old is Madison?”
    “After the initial shock of it, the police investigation, all of that,” he moved the camera away from his face and turned to look at me, “everything just a dead end, I managed okay.” He tilted his head left, then right, as if he were arguing with himself. “At least that’s what I thought. Not perfect. Far from perfect. But okay. Considering.” He shrugged. “But now.” He shook his head. “I don’t know how to handle this.” If his daughter was pregnant, I wondered if there might be some female relative who could help. Or a neighbor they were close to. Was this just an excuse to try to find his missing wife again? I was about to ask when Leon started talking again. Perhaps he was finally on a roll.
    “She went out one night and never came back,” he said, covering his face with the camera. He was pointing it at the southern end of the run where a Weimaraner had dropped his ball into the water bucket and was trying to fish it out with his front paws, but I had the feeling Leon wasn’t actually looking through the lens this time.
    “Your wife?”
    Leon moved the camera away and nodded. He hadn’t taken a picture this time either. “Just like that,” he said. “Went for a walk. Didn’t take a thing with her.”
    “No money, no passport, not even a change of clothes?“
    “Just a change of heart, I guess. And Roy.”
    “That was the man she ran off with?” I asked quietly, sympathetically, finally getting it.
    Leon shook his head. “That I could understand, if that’s what she had done.”
    “But it wasn’t, is that what you’re saying?” Wanting to shake him by now. “Spit it out, Leon. I’m going to be a member of AARP before you get to the point.”
    “Roy was the dog,” he said.
    “The dog?”
    Leon nodded, though it was sort of a rhetorical question. “See, what I don’t get is that Sally never wanted him in the first place. She said, ‘No matter what you say now, Leon, I’m going to be the one taking care of it. I already have more than I can handle with the kid, going to school at night and you, Leon. What the hell do I need a dog for?’” Leon shrugged again. “Guess I was the one who needed a dog. Guess that’s what she was saying. So I said I’d take care of him. I figured that would take care of the problem, you know what I mean?”
    “But it didn’t?”
    “One night she says, ‘I think Roy needs a walk. I think he needs to go.’ So I get up to take him out, but she flaps her hand at me, picks up the leash and walks out the door. That was the last time I saw either one of them.” He scratched the side of his nose with his thumb. “I guess she was the one who had to go, not Roy.”
    “The police . . .“
    He shook his head.
    “What about Roy? Did he...“ I stopped to consider how to word what I wanted to say. But was there anything I could say that Leon hadn’t thought of a thousand times over? “Did he ever turn up?” I asked.
    Leon shook his head again. For a while, we just sat there. Leon didn’t say anything and neither did I.
    “That’s why I was looking for you,” he finally said, “to ask if you could find her for us.”
    “How long has she been gone?”
    “Five years, two months, eleven days.” He looked at his watch but didn’t report back to me.
    “That long?”
    Leon nodded.
    “Without a word?”
    He nodded again.
    “How do you know she’s still alive?”
    “I don’t,” he said.
    “There was no credit card activity that night? Or afterwards?”
    “She didn’t have it with her.” He shrugged. “She’d just gone out to walk Roy.”
    “Did she have a driver’s license?”
    “We didn’t have a car.” As if that answered the question.
    “What about social security payments made under her name? Did the police follow up on that?” I asked, thinking she could have a new name, a new social security card, a new life.
    Or not.
    “They didn’t come up with anything,” he said. “No sign of ..
    I nodded.
    He was probably in his forties, but he could have easily passed for sixty, the hair sticking out from under his baseball cap a steely gray,