Rachel Alexander 09 - Without a Word

picture of Sally. They had the same-shaped face, the same fair coloring, the same clear eyes and sensual mouth. A large comer was broken off one of the pictures of her father. The other was worn in places, as if it had been handled a lot. Yet the small box and its contents had been left behind. Either Sally hadn’t done much advance planning or she had only gone out to walk the dog, just as she said, and someone else’s planning had been the reason for her disappearance.
    There were four pictures of Sally as a youngster. She was alone in all four. Like her mother, she didn’t smile at the camera. She looked down or off to the side, enduring or obeying, but not shining. I never thought of anyone that beautiful as being shy, but Sally, at least in her photos, appeared to be just that.
    I looked at the other unnamed people, a man and woman standing about six inches apart and staring at the camera, the old woman, probably Sally’s grandmother, with the same forbidding expression that would later mark her daughter’s face.
    I looked back at the yearbook, picking it up, leaning against the arm of the couch and holding it under the light. Not grim like her mother and grandmother. Not smiling like her father. Not much of anything. I scanned the other pictures on the page and on the facing one, all the girls and about half of the boys were smiling, happy to be graduating or because the photographer told them to. But not Sally, Sally who had been pregnant with Madison when that picture was taken. She was looking at the camera but there was no hint of what was going on underneath. How ironic. She could have been a model for a Botox ad, a pretty face without emotional expression, without history, blank as a fresh sheet of paper.
    I put the book back and picked up the manila envelope, taking the rubber bands off and pulling the flap out from where Leon had tucked it in—more photographs. Had he found some of Sally as an adult, photos he didn’t know he still had?
    But when I slid them out, it wasn’t Sally I was looking at. It was Roy. He wasn’t a little brown mutt with a pointy face and large batlike ears. Roy was a Border collie. Now how on earth did Sally get anywhere with no money and a dog that big? True, Roy wasn’t full grown yet. He probably weighed no more than thirty pounds, so Sally could have lifted him. But to what avail? He was too big to fit into a carrier, not that she had one or even the money to buy one. Nor would there have been an open pet store had she had the money for a carrier. Without a carrier, she couldn’t have taken a bus, a train or a subway. Unless she’d ditched the dog first. Had Leon checked with the shelter? And would she have done that, just left him alone on the streets of New York? People did. People dumped dogs out of cars, left them in parks, tied them to fences or trees and just walked or drove away, maybe figuring some kindhearted dog lover would take up the responsibility they had let go of. Maybe not giving it a second thought. Is that what Sally had done? She hadn’t wanted a dog in the first place. Leon had made that clear.
    The next three pictures were of Madison, the same pictures that were hanging over the dining room table. And after that, one more, a picture of Madison at seven holding the puppy Roy on her lap. She was sitting on the floor in what might have been her bedroom, looking at the pup but not touching him, her arms bent, her hands held high as if she were showing someone the height of something. I set that one aside and put the others back in the envelope.
    I picked up both notebooks and sat back with them on my lap. Sally had been going to New York University at night according to the schedule taped inside the first book, studying American literature and third-year Spanish, attempting, it seemed, to get a degree. I turned through the pages of the book, notes from class, drawings in the margin of the professor and of other students. Her handwriting was small and neat. The notes proficient and detailed. I wasn’t sure why Leon had put these in the bag, nor why he’d saved them, but I supposed it was one more thing about Sally I ought to know, that she’d abandoned not only her husband and child, but her plans for a degree as well. No way the cops would have neglected to check and see if Sally had requested a transcript so that she could continue her studies at another institution in another city. No way Sally wouldn’t have known that to do so, to