The Missing by Tim Gautreaux Read Free Book Online Page A

raspberry slices you like.”
    “You can’t win me with candy.”
    “Oh!” she shrieked. “And you a married man!”
    He imagined all the heads turning toward the candy counter, and hung up.
    It had been half an hour since the little girl disappeared. Walking to the elevator, he remembered Melvin’s comment about the stairwell and changed direction. No one used the stairs, and they gave off a nose-burning essence of dusty concrete. He started down, and on the third flight something on a gray tread caught his eye, a little piece of yellow hard rubber, some junk missed by the janitor. He stepped past it and continued all the way to the bottom of the stairs, trying not to scuff his mirrory shoes. He was annoyed that he would have to deal with the parents again. By now, the girl had probably turned up.
    He put his hand on the knob of the stairwell door and stopped, overcome by the feeling that he’d made some kind of mistake. The whole store’s design ghosted through his mind as he tried to think of what he might’ve missed. He looked back up the stairway and pursed his lips, letting go of the knob and rising several flights to pick up the little piece of yellow tucked against the wall in the corner of a step: a child’s barrette, a yellow bar and nickel-plated clasp with a small blue butterfly set on the topside. Suddenly, he was frightened.
    Down on the first floor he met the couple, the Wellers, and when he showed them the barrette, the mother clapped her hands over her mouth.
    Mr. Krine touched him on the shoulder as if he were adjusting a table lamp. “Mr. Simoneaux, if you found this, why can’t you find the child? I was sure you’d come in here leading her by the hand.”
    “Now that I know the hair clip was hers, maybe I can.” He looked at Mrs. Weller. “She probably just found the stairs. Kids love stairs.”
    Mr. Krine raised a marble-hard face to Sam, as though to say, “Look at me and see how serious this is.” “Search again,” he said. “And this time find her.”
    The mother cried, “Why would someone try to take Lily?” and the sound of her voice made him understand that today might not be like every other day, that something terrible could be happening. Some long-dormant fear woke up in him, the mysterious taste of ash welling up on the back of his tongue.
    He ran through the milling customers to the first open elevator and told the operator to take him straight to the fourth floor. A middle-aged woman in the back of the car said, “I have to get off at three,” and he considered saying something sharp, but even now he understood that most people didn’t have all the facts. “I’m sorry for the inconvenience, ma’am,” he said. As soon as the doors opened he bounded into the discount section and in a moment was in the Country Corner. Mrs. Ditchovich was dozing behind the register, and he rushed past her back to the only dressing room in the store he hadn’t checked, one that was seldom used because people buying bulky triple-stitch denim clothes rarely studied how they looked in a mirror. Behind the showroom partition he entered a dim hall filled with a peculiar smell that stopped him cold. Suddenly the hospitals in France came back to him, with the memory of men returned from surgery reeking of chloroform, which was what Sam was smelling now as he stood frozen, trying to imagine what that odor was doing here. When he understood, he lunged for the door to the dressing room.
    The first thing he noticed was a golden blur on the floor, and a surprised older woman sitting on the bench holding a large pair of blued scissors over the head of a child, a very young, short-haired boy—his eyes rolled up in his head, his mouth gaping open—dressed in new trousers and a checkered shirt. Sam thought he had accidentally stumbled upon something horrible yet unrelated to his search, but in the next instant he saw a small blue pinafore lying next to a scattering of fine blond hair and knew he had