Chapter 14 The Interview

Margaret started with the most recent case, the one she could still touch, because the people in it were still living and the wound was still open. Samantha Boyd, 2015. She found the address in the same phone book that had given her Ellen's, and she called first, the way she always called first now. Mrs. Boyd answered on the third ring, a careful voice that sounded like it had been waiting by the phone for nine years. Samantha's mother lived in a small house outside of town, on a road where the trees met overhead and the light came down in green coins. She had not moved since her daughter's disappearance. Margaret understood that, the way she understood Ellen's house and the chair by the window. Some people stay in the place where the person left, because leaving feels like agreeing it happened. She still set a place at the table for Samantha on holidays. Margaret saw it the moment Mrs. Boyd opened the door, a second plate, a second glass, at the head of the table where the light came in best. The grief was not performative. It was simply there, like the furniture. They sat in the kitchen. Margaret brought shortbread, the kind from the bakery on Main Street, and Mrs. Boyd accepted it with the tired gratitude of someone who had stopped expecting kindness. "Tell me about the day she disappeared," Margaret said, softly, the way you ask about a scar. Mrs. Boyd was sixty now, but her face held the exhausted look of someone who had been grieving for almost a decade, the kind of tired that sleep does not fix. "She was going to work. She took the bus every morning at 7:15. The bus stop was a block from here, by the old maple. She liked the walk. She said it woke her up." "Did she seem normal that morning," Margaret asked. "Completely normal. She kissed me goodbye. She said she'd be back by six. She always called if she'd be late. She never called that night." Mrs. Boyd's hand went to the tea cup, steadying. "I waited up. I called the bus company. They said she hadn't been on the bus. I knew she had. I watched her walk to the corner." "And then?" "The police found the bus. The driver said he'd never seen her. The CCTV showed her getting on, but no footage of her sitting down or leaving. They showed me the tape. I watched my daughter step through those doors and then the camera just shows empty seats. Like she was never there." "Was the CCTV examined," Margaret asked. "Three times. By three different teams. The police, then a private firm I paid for, then the state. None of them found anything unusual. They said the footage was clean." Mrs. Boyd's voice tightened. "Clean. As if a person can step onto a bus in front of a camera and simply stop existing." Margaret thought about this, turning it the way she turned a strange catalog entry. A person visible entering a bus but invisible the rest of the journey. The bus had been examined. The CCTV had been examined. The driver had been questioned. None of it showed anything. And yet a woman was gone, and her mother still set a place at the table. "There was one thing," Mrs. Boyd said, and her hand stilled on the cup. "I forgot to mention it, all those years ago. The police didn't ask, and I didn't think. The bus had a new driver that day. He was hired just a week before. The regular man was on vacation, I think. Or sick. I don't remember." "Did they investigate the driver," Margaret asked, though she already suspected the answer. "He had an alibi. He was driving the bus. The route was confirmed by GPS. He couldn't have, they said. So they let him go." Mrs. Boyd looked at her. "Why does that matter now? After all this time." Margaret closed her notebook, the way she closed a book she meant to reopen. "Because sometimes the person who was there is the person no one thought to look at. What was his name?" "Vincent Marsh," Mrs. Boyd said. Margaret wrote it down. The name landed in her notebook like a stone in still water, and she felt, again, the shape of a pattern beginning to form. She thanked Mrs. Boyd and let herself out into the green light of the tree-lined road. The old maple at the corner marked the bus stop, a bare patch of gravel where Samantha had waited every morning. Margaret stood there a moment, looking at the road, the curve where the bus came, the distance to the corner. She thought about the morning of a disappearance. The normal kiss. The walk to the stop. The bus that arrived on time. The door that opened. The step that went in. And then nothing, except a driver who said he had not seen her and a camera that had seen her get on and not sit down. She walked to the car and sat with the door open, the spring air coming in through the gap. The pattern was beginning to form, the way a book begins to form when you have read the first three chapters and you sense the shape of what is coming. But she did not like the shape. It was not a single man in a blue jacket. It was something stranger, and Margaret Finch, who had spent her life in the orderly world of libraries, was not sure she knew how to read it. The CCTV footage that showed a woman getting on a bus and never sitting down was not a clue she had encountered before, and the driver who said he had not seen her was not a witness she had learned to trust. But she would learn. She had learned to read blue fabric and torn jackets, and she could learn to read a disappearing bus. She closed the car door and drove toward Vincent Marsh's apartment, because a new driver on a disappearing bus was the one thread she could pull. ---