ELEANOR
The image permeates the membrane and flashes, in breaths, when she’s awake as well as when she sleeps: it is only the two of them on the bus. The galloping vista from the window varies in geography but never in color: it is a psychedelic rendering of the coastal town of her childhood; it is a painted sandscape of a desert in the southwest; the colors: a saturated red, ochre, the blue of a pulsing vein; all undulating at speed, at shattering breakneck speed, toward an edge, an end, toward the drop. Awake or asleep, when they reach the sucking lip, she is drenched.
The martial blare of the telephone breaks the dark surface of the room, and the dream divides, disperses, retreats into the deep of Eleanor Clay’s bones, absorbs into skin, settles in the limbic recesses tucked behind reason.
“Hello?”
“Eleanor, it’s Gordon. Listen, I think it’s time we brought you in on the Lizzie Barrett case. We’re at the train station.”
“What’ve you got?”
“Nothing, not a thing, that’s just it. I hate to give up on a missing three-year-old, but we’re about out of time. Best case scenario, you come up with nothing, too.”
Even as Detective Gordon Stanislaus said the words, he knew Eleanor would do her job successfully. He didn’t make the call until that outcome was all but inevitable. She would find the child, and that the child would be dead, case closed.
She found small things, easily lost. An earring backing in silvery late summer grass, a key at the beach. Her ability to recover the small and precious missing thing—a domestic superpower. If the object were to be found, she would. Or it would find her. Eleanor didn’t search so much as make herself available, put her body and its senses in the way of the lost article until a glint or break in the pattern of the landscape drew her attention. Every recovery felt like a conclusion. Restored to the one who suffered the loss, the object fell tracelessly from her consciousness, as if it had never held it.
Eleanor found the first child, small and precious and missed, months after Freya drowned but before Emmett and Levi moved to Denver, away from Bristlecone Springs. The lost thing was not hers, but as with the jewelry and the keys, the finding was a certainty, a fact to breathe into being.
The child was dead, of course. They would be, these small people she’d been discovering on behalf of the Bristlecone Springs Police Department for the last decade or so, eighteen children to date. Eleanor had been called in to find number nineteen, which meant that the detectives were not expecting to find the missing little one alive. Eleanor didn’t show up until all other options had been exercised.
A flash of red, a thread of yellow. In the bus station, Eleanor pulled from between and behind two rows of lockers at the rear of the terminal a chunky knit red sweater, about the size of a composition notebook, a yellow canary embroidered on the front.
“She’s not here, but she’s not gone,” said Eleanor. A terrible force flapped her ribcage.
Stanislaus gave orders to the uniformed police. “Talk to the drivers and the ticket agent again.” This was their third visit to the station since the child’s father had reported her gone.
“She’s not gone. Give me someone to go look by the river.” Eleanor didn’t elaborate.
She’s not gone. “Well,” said Stanislaus, “she’s not here.” And they were nowhere, he thought. The Amber Alert drew nothing credible. The sweater was new evidence. There might be more, he could retrace and review, put the dog to better use. But it was Eleanor who’d found it, not his regular team, and experience said that meant only one thing. We got nothing, he thought.
“Yeah, okay, Eleanor. Drubbs!” Stanislaus signaled to his detective and a uniform. “Go with Eleanor. She thinks the river.” In all these years, he still felt a freight elevator drop into his bowels whenever Eleanor said she had something. He’d never known her not to come up with a body, and if Eleanor’s antennae were tingling, a body was all he anticipated now. He’d never feel at ease around that woman, but he couldn’t, and wouldn’t, deny her record. Macabre talent, she had, and not much else, having lost one kid to the Roaring Fork, and another, plus the husband, to fallout.
“Bring the dog.”
