The Book of Air and Shadows

French toast, and announced that thanks but he wasn’t really very hungry, at which point Mary Peg banged a teaspoon against a glass in a good imitation of a fire alarm. He jerked and stared.
    “Okay, spill it, Buster!” she said, fixing him with her eyes, these being the color of gas flame and, just now, about as hot.
    “What?”
    “What, he says. You’ve been doing a scene from
The Night of the Living Dead
for nearly two weeks. You didn’t think I noticed? You’re a wreck.”
    “It’s nothing, Ma…”
    “It’s something. It’s that girl, what’s-her-name, Carol.”
    “Carolyn.” Followed by a great sigh.
    “Her. Now, you know I never pry into the personal lives of my children…”
    “Ha.”
    “Don’t be fresh, Albert!” And in a milder tone, “Seriously, I’m starting to worry about you. You’ve broken up with girls before but you never acted all weird like this.”
    “It’s not a breakup, Ma. It’s not…I don’t know what it is. That’s the problem. I mean basically we had one date, very nice, but then she…I guess she sort of vanished.”
    Mary Peg sipped coffee and waited, and in a few minutes the whole confused story came out, the convoluted tale of Rolly, and the manuscript, and Bulstrode. Her husband had described any number of interrogations to her, for he was not among the majority of police detectives who thought their spouses too tender to listen to cop stories; nor was she. This was how it was done, she knew, a sympathetic ear, an encouraging word. She was disturbed to learn that her son had abetted what an unsympathetic person might regard as a felony, nor did she like anything of what she heard about Ms. Rolly. But she declined comment; and now her son arrived at the period subsequent to their first date: he had not of course filled in the moister details, but she had the experience and imagination to provide these herself.
    “Well, like I said, we had a nice time and I was feeling pretty good. I went to work the next day expecting to find her in the shop, but she wasn’t there. I asked Glaser and he said she’d called and said she had to go out of town for a couple of days. I thought that was a little peculiar, I mean I thought we had something going, that she would’ve called
me
, but like I said, she was a strange bird. So I was, you know, cool about it. Anyway, the day comes when she’s supposed to come back and no Carolyn. Mr. Glaser calls her-the phone’s disconnected, so now we’re a little freaked and I told him I’d go by after work and see what was up. And when I got to her street there was a big dump truck parked outside and a wrecking crew was all over her building. They were just finishing up for the day, but I could see they had set up one of those chutes that wreckers use to slide debris and stuff down to the Dumpster and it was stuck in her window on the top floor. I talked to the crew chief and he didn’t know anything. He’d gotten a call from the building management that they needed a rush job, the building had to be gutted down to the brick shell and made ready for renovation. I got the name of the management company from him but he wouldn’t let me go into the building. Like I told you, Carolyn had built all this furniture out of pallet boards, beautiful work, and there it was, all smashed up, her worktable and everything. It was like seeing her corpse.”
    Crosetti seemed to shiver. He pushed French toast around with his fork.
    “In any case, I couldn’t do anything there, and I was, like, totally stunned. I started to walk away and I noticed that the street and the sidewalk were strewn with scraps of paper. It was a windy day and I guess some of the lighter stuff had blown off the truck, or the wind had picked it up between the chute and the pile of trash in the truck. So like an idiot I went down the street bent over picking up stuff, thinking to myself, Oh, she’ll want this, this photograph, this postcard, whatever; stupid really, because she would’ve taken whatever she wanted.”
    He took out his wallet and showed her a folded postcard, a folded photograph.
    “Pathetic, right? Carrying this stuff around? It’s like magical thinking, if I hold on to something of hers, there’s still a connection, she hasn’t totally vanished…” He placed the items back in his wallet and looked so forlorn that Mary Peg had to control an atavistic urge to take him on her lap and kiss his brow. Instead she said, “What about these famous