Chapter One
Chapter One
Cynthia stood out front of the two-story house on Hickory. It wasn't as though she was seeing her childhood home for the first time in nearly twenty-five years. She still lived in Milford. She'd driven by here once in a while. She showed me the house once before we got married, a quick drive-by. "There it is," she said, and kept on going. She rarely stopped. And if she did, she didn't get out. She'd never stood on the sidewalk and stared at the place.
And it had certainly been a very long time since she'd stepped through that front door.
She was rooted to the sidewalk, seemingly unable to take even one step toward the place. I wanted to go to her side, walk her to the door. It was only a thirty-foot driveway, but it stretched a quarter century into the past. I was guessing, to Cynthia, it must have been like looking through the wrong end of some binoculars. You could walk all day and never get there.
But I stayed where I was, on the other side of the street, looking at her back, at her short red hair. I had my orders.
Cynthia stood there, as though waiting for permission to approach. And then it came.
"Okay, Mrs. Archer? Start walking toward the house. Not too fast. Kind of hesitant, you know, like it's the first time you've gone inside since you were fourteen years old."
Cynthia glanced over her shoulder at a woman in jeans and sneakers, her ponytail pulled down and through the opening at the back of her ball cap. She was one of three assistant producers. "This is the first time," Cynthia said.
"Yeah yeah, don't look at me," Ponytail Girl said. "Just look at the house and start walking up the drive, thinking back to that time, twenty-five years ago, when it all happened, okay?"
Cynthia glanced across the street at me, made a face, and I smiled back weakly, a kind of mutual what-are-you-gonna-do?
And so she started up the driveway, slowly. If the camera hadn't been on, is this how she would have approached? With this mixture of deliberation and apprehension? Probably. But now it felt false, forced.
But as she mounted the steps to the door, reached out with her hand, I could just make out the trembling. An honest emotion, which meant, I guessed, that the camera would fail to catch it.
She had her hand on the knob, turned it, was about to push the door open, when Ponytail Girl shouted, "Okay! Good! Just hold it there!" Then, to her cameraman, "Okay, let's set up inside, get her coming in."
"You're fucking kidding me," I said, loud enough for the crew—a half dozen or so, plus Paula Malloy, she of the gleaming teeth and Donna Karan suits, who was doing all the on-camera stuff and voiceovers—to hear.
Paula herself came over to see me.
"Mr. Archer," she said, reaching out with both hands and touching me just below my shoulders, a Malloy trademark, "is everything okay?"
"How can you do that to her?" I said. "My wife's walking in there for the first time since her family fucking vanished, and you basically yell 'Cut'?"
"Terry," she said, insinuating herself closer to me. "May I call you Terry?"
I said nothing.
"Terry, I'm sorry, we have to get the camera in position, and we want the look on Cynthia's face, when she comes into the house after all these years, we want that to be genuine. We want this to be honest. I think that's what both of you want as well."
That was a good one. That a reporter from the TV news/entertainment show Deadline—which, when it wasn't...