The Missing by Tim Gautreaux Read Free Book Online

store, especially the window displays on the street. Sometimes he’d found young children wandering among the mannequins as if comparing their frozen gestures and shallow eyes with those of the adults they knew.
    He toured suits, then mounted the stairs to the mezzanine and stood with his back to the women’s parlor to scan the aisles, but saw no children.
    Mary Lou Landry, the mezzanine attendant, came up behind him. “Lucky, what you looking for, darling?”
    He caught a whiff of an expensive scent and stared at her, then remembered that she spritzed herself at the perfume counter every morning. “A little blond girl, a toddler.”
    “She got herself lost? Well, stop looking and start listening. She’ll be bawling for sure if she’s still in the store.”
    He watched customers wandering over the chicken-wire tile entranced by the illusion Krine’s lavished on them. Sam sometimes felt it himself, a shrinelike ambience like that of a courthouse or a church. “Do me a favor, Mary. Lillian’s checking the front doors, so will you please slip around to the Granier Street entrance and stay there for about ten minutes? She was wearing a little blue pinafore, they told me.”
    “Oh, she wouldn’t wander that far.” Mary wasn’t about to take orders from a floorwalker.
    He leaned into her. “Not without help.”
    “Oh.” Mary clopped down the mezzanine steps briskly, her hands turned up on her wrists as if she were displaying her nails.
    Sam walked down the line of elevators and put his head in each that was open, asking the same question of the operators, then stepped into the last one and told old Melvin Stine to bring him up to two.
    “You checkin’ the tills, Lucky?”
    “I’m looking for a three-year-old girl in a pinafore.”
    “She didn’t come up in this car.” He gave Sam a look. “Lucky, how long you been lookin’?”
    He glanced at his watch. “Nine minutes.”
    “Don’t forget the stairwells. And Mr. Krine’s rule.”
    He got out and walked through children’s clothes, then into toys, telling clerks what to look for as he went. After checking the dressing rooms he unlocked a door with his key and walked through the janitor’s area and two large, hot storerooms. Outside again, catching Melvin’s car going up, he traveled to the third floor, then the fourth, which was the discount floor, a sweltering place with tall, wide-open windows and many ceiling fans whirring overhead—a repository of returned suits, remaindered shoes, garish suspenders, celluloid collars, and what was referred to derisively as the Country Corner, a few shelves of overalls, blue jeans, straw hats, brogans, red neckerchiefs. This was the province of Hulgana Ditchovich, a blocky woman stuffed into a vertically striped dress made of what seemed to be mattress ticking.
    “Mrs. Ditchovich, have you seen a little blond girl in a pinafore up here? Her parents lost sight of her downstairs.”
    “Lucky, Lucky, when will the cool-air vents come to the fourth floor?”
    He imagined Hulgana as a stolid child, holding a wooden bucket and feeding cows in the snow outside of St. Petersburg. “Maybe next season. About that child?”
    “No children up here this morning except for some farmer boys come in for shoes.” She focused on him for the first time. “Such a big man like you can’t find a child?”
    After a quick tour of the steaming storage area on her floor, he came back out and used the store phone under Hulgana’s register to call the candy counter.
    “Penny Nickens, candy.”
    “Penny, this is Sam.”
    “Lucky!” she shouted into the receiver. He liked Penny well enough but found her too exuberant, always likely to spout like a shaken bottle of pop.
    “You have a good view of the office. Is anything going on?”
    After a pause she said, “There’s a worried-looking couple talking to Mr. Krine. Oh, the lady looks so sad.”
    “Thin woman in a blue dress. Pretty.”
    “Yes. Look, I’ve got some of those new