The Year of Fog by Michelle Richmond Read Free Book Online

Jake begins, but is unable to finish his sentence. He’s referring, I know, to the statistics Sherburne gave us yesterday: 60,000 non-family child abductions occur each year. 115 of these are long-term kidnappings by strangers, the kind that make the news. Of the 115 victims, half are sexually assaulted, forty percent are murdered, and four percent are never found. But fifty-six percent—64 children—
are
found. In my mind there is no question: Emma is one of the 64. She simply has to be.

9
    A FTER SUNDOWN on the fourth day, I park my car at Fort Point at the base of the Golden Gate Bridge, about five miles north of where Emma disappeared. I walk along the waterfront, looking for clues on the narrow, rocky beach. I’m not sure exactly what I’m looking for—an article of her clothing, her yellow barrette, some unlikely message scratched in her childish hand?
    The last time I was here was with Emma and Jake, about three months ago. I have a picture of her standing at the foot of the bridge, gazing up at the enormous arcade that was rushed to completion on the eve of the Civil War. At six years old, Emma was already shaping up to be a student of history, full of questions about the soldiers who once occupied the brick fort—where they slept and what they ate and whether or not their parents got to come live in the fort with them.
    I stop at the Warming Hut to give flyers to the clerk. A little farther on, I walk out onto a floating pier. A man stands at the edge, perfectly still, fishing line slack in the water. Beside him is a cooler, empty except for a single fish lying in a bed of ice. The fish lifts and lowers its head, and a shudder wracks its silvery body. “This is my little girl,” I say, holding the flyer up. “She’s missing.” The man is watching my lips, not my eyes, and I realize that he’s deaf. He shakes his head and turns back toward the water. In a moment of disconnect, a second outside of time, I wish Emma was here with me, because she’s been learning sign language in school. As quickly as the thought comes to me, I’m aware of its absurdity. In the weeks following my mother’s death, I found myself reaching for the phone to call her before remembering that she was gone. It’s like this with Emma—each time I turn around, I expect to see her there.
    Around midnight I end up at the Palace of Fine Arts. The ducks in the pond are silent. Wind blows through the columns, bitterly cold. In the moonlight, the carvings of weeping women atop the columns seem lifelike, as if their tears are made of something more than stone. Tucked away among the urns and statues are homeless people in tattered sleeping bags. I approach them one by one, handing out dollar bills with the flyers, hopeful that one of them might know something.
    A few hours later I walk into my apartment in Potrero Hill without turning on the lights, feel my way up the stairs, kick off my shoes, and stumble into bed. It seems I’ve just closed my eyes when the phone rings. It’s my sister Annabel, long-distance from Wilmington, North Carolina.
    “What time is it?” I ask, reaching for my glasses.
    “Seven a.m. in your part of the world. How are you holding up?”
    “Not so well.”
    “I wish I could come to San Francisco,” she says, and I know she means it. She would give anything to be here, helping with the search. Once an avid traveler, she hasn’t left Wilmington since her youngest child, Ruby, was diagnosed with a severe form of autism last year. Ruby is five years old, a sweet but distant child who communicates with an elaborate system of hand signals. Ruby can hardly stand to be touched, and her sensitivity to sound is so exaggerated that the phones and doorbells in Annabel’s home don’t ring, they blink.
    “What can I do?” Annabel says. “Do you need money?”
    “I have a little in the bank.”
    “How much is a little?”
    “Not much. I’ve canceled all my jobs for the next month.”
    “What’s your