pages 12 and 13

“Now, where is my granddaughter?” she asked.
“I don’t know,” he replied.
“So she’s not staying with you?”
“No. She hasn’t been living with me for two months.”
“Good. I didn’t think that girl was a fool.”
“Mrs. Phillips, I—.”
“It’s Ms. and you can just call me Nana. Everyone does. And I don’t want to hear your excuses as to why you felt the need to break my granddaughter’s heart. We’ll get into that later. Why are you here, Detective?”
“Eve is missing.”
“How do you know? Knowing her, I’d bet this isn’t the first time she’s disappeared for days at a time.”
“We received a call early this afternoon from someone alleging to be holding her.”
“What!” The petite woman jumped up from her spot at the table and began to pace back and forth in front of him. She stopped every few feet, glared hard at him then continued to pace back and forth in a neat, six-foot line in front of him. She looked much more than five-feet tall.
“What do you mean ‘holding her’?”
“I mean, someone has allegedly kidnapped her. Taken her hostage somewhere.”
At this point, most women would be reeling. Alex had handled more than one grief-stricken relative in his year on the force and they were amazingly similar. He held his breath, waiting for her to crumple into her chair and start crying.
So he was shocked when she stopped pacing, rounded on him. “Well, what are you doing about it?”
“Ma’am—.”
“Nana.”
“Nana, we’re doing all we can to find her, but—.”
“What exactly is ‘all you can,’ Detective?”
“Call me Alex and we’re trying to reconstruct where and when she was abducted, which is the only starting point we have at the moment, but we have to start somewhere because we only have five days.”
“What happens in five days?”
“He kills her.”
“Oh my God.”
At this, Nana finally sunk down into her chair with a stricken look on her face.
“We need your help,” Alex said, trying to distract her from the grief she must be feeling.
“What do you need to know?”
“Was Eve staying here with you?”
“Yes, she moved in two weeks after the two of you split up. I guess that’d be about a month and a half ago, then.”
“Why did she move in with you instead of staying at her apartment?”
She frowned at him fiercely. “I’m not sure you’re the one who should be handling this,” she said.
“I have pertinent information to the case.”
“What kind of pertinent information?”
“He called me. Not my office, my cell phone. Twice.”
She didn’t look pleased at this.
“Now, why did she move in with you?”
After staring hard at him for a few moments, “She wasn’t sleeping well. She didn’t feel safe at the apartment.”
The dreams. He should have thought of it earlier, but she’d stopped having them after they’d been living together for a month. After they’d been gone two whole months he’d just assumed they were gone for good.
“Ah, I see you knew about the dreams,” she said. He looked up at her. “Don’t look so surprised, your face is like an open book.”
“Was she having them again?”
“Did they ever leave?”
Not wanting to admit that they had, he asked, “What I meant was, were they worse than before?”
“Before what? Before you dumped her? Well, she hasn’t had to face them on her own for a while, so, yes, they probably seemed stronger.”
Alex ignored the first part of her comment, but filed it away in his head to torture himself with later. “So, that’s why she moved back in with you?”
“That’s what she said, but I think there was more to it than that. She’s dealt with the dreams her entire life, since her mother had to be put in that horrible asylum. There was something else she was afraid of. She just wouldn’t tell me what.”
“So you have no idea what it could be?” Alex asked, watching as she paced. She talked with her hands, like Eve. She was always flailing them around to punctuate a point or illustrate an image.
“Nope, sorry.”
“Did she receive any strange or threatening phone calls while she was here?”
“Not that I’m aware of.”
“Was she seeing anyone knew?”
Once again, Nana looked hard at him before answering. “Do you have any idea how much I would love to lie to you right now? How much pleasure I would derive from watching your face as I told you she’d become strangely promiscuous since you dumped her and has been seeing two or three different men a week, or better yet that she’s recently engaged to a twenty-six year old model who just happens to also be a Harvard graduate and makes her deliriously happy.”
Alex had no response. Just the thought of her engaged to someone else, loving someone else, looking at someone else the way he used to catch her looking at him when she thought he wasn’t watching, made him see red. He stared at Nana’s pacing figure. Just when he’d opened his mouth to demand the name of his new adversary, she continued.
Sighing, she stopped walking and turned to face him, “Alas, the damage you wrought holds true, she hasn’t seen anyone since you. Not one. She doesn’t date, she doesn’t go to parties, she doesn’t even go out with her friends anymore. She just goes to work, comes home, sometimes she eats, sometimes she doesn’t, and then goes to bed. I usually hear her pacing around her room at night and when I yell up to her, she gets back in bed. Then she wakes up in the morning with bags under her eyes and flies out the door to work. Sometimes she grabs a bagel to take with her, most times she doesn’t.”
“Okay,” Alex said, reeling. “Just give me a minute.” He’d had absolutely no idea how unhappy Eve had been. It definitely wasn’t like her to let anything, including him, get her down like that. As a matter of fact, he recalled her going out with the girls once or twice since they’d split up. He’d sort of kept tabs on her for the first two weeks, merely out of habit, he told himself, and then he’d made himself stop. He wondered when she’d started acting reclusive. “When did you say Eve came to stay with you?”
“A month and a half ago, maybe a little later.”
“Now think, did Eve ever tell you what, besides me, may have been bothering her?”
“Well, now that I think about it, she was in a god awful hurry to get out of that apartment and over here. She just showed up one day with some of her things in her car and asked if she could stay for a while. Actually, now that you mention it, she didn’t say anything about you at the time, just that she had to get out of her apartment for a while, while she looked for a new one.”
Alex dug his notepad out of his hip pocket and pulled a pen from behind his ear. Quickly he sketched the beginnings of a small flow chart. In a circle at the top of the page he wrote ‘apartment + ?’ and then drew an arrow going down a half inch, then another circle, this one with ‘Nana’s’ written in it.
“Okay, you can’t think of any other suspicious behavior, or phone calls or anything that happened while she was staying here?”
Nana perched on her chair again and thought really hard. “No,” she said finally, “I really can’t.”
“Okay, we figured out that she never came to work on Monday, which doesn’t really prove that that’s when she was taken because she doesn’t always check in, but we’ve been working on the assumption that she was taken sometime Sunday night or Monday morning. Was she here Sunday night?”
“Yes,” Nana said shakily. Alex could tell it was finally sinking in that Eve was in real danger. Her first defense mechanism had been to attack him, but he watched now as a pained look came over her.
“She was here Sunday night, I heard her walking around. She came down to breakfast early, around six or so, maybe earlier. I was making eggs and bacon because I thought she’d like it. But then, I yelled at her about you, well, not about you, about not going out with her friends anymore and she took off. Oh God, what if he got her because she left early? Maybe, if she’d just stayed with me, something would have gone differently and she’d still be fine.”
Alex understood her guilt. He’s been carrying his share of it around since Angie’s death. ‘What if I’d just been a few minutes earlier, or I’d gone out to dinner with her like she asked instead of home to take care of Eve because she was sick? Would she still be alive?’ He felt like he should say something to ease Nana’s guilt, reassure her, but he knew that words couldn’t heal that pain. Only time would. Time. Damn it, they were running out of time. All of a sudden Alex felt each second rub abrasively against his skin, like grains of sand slipping through the hourglass.
Pushing all else aside, he tried to focus.
“Okay, can you go through Monday morning in detail. Don’t leave anything out. How exactly did she act? What was she wearing? Anything you can think of could help.”
As Nana recounted the events of that morning, Alex took careful notes on another sheet of his paper. When she was through, he flipped back to his flow chart.
Something wasn’t right; he could feel it. Nana was either leaving something out or missing something. He didn’t know how he knew, but he was 99.9% sure that Eve had been taken somewhere between this house and the precinct. The question was where.
“Did you hear any strange noises when Eve left? Anything out of place?”
“No. Well, I turned the radio on as she was leaving, I wouldn’t have been able to hear anything.”
“Did anything else happen that morning that could be significant?”
“Nothing I can think of.”
Suddenly Alex had an idea.
“Does Eve park her car in the garage?”
“Yeah, in the spot closest to the door. Why?”
“When did your mailbox get run over?”
“Monday morning, but I bet it was the kid next door, Jason has ruined my mailbox more than once before.”
Alex quickly checked his watch. It was one in the morning. He hadn’t realized how long he’d been in Nana’s kitchen. Well, the next step was to interview the neighbors and set up a timeline. It was much too late to start that process at the moment. He rubbed his eyes, feeling suddenly helpless. Finally, he took a deep breath and faced the fact that he couldn’t do much until morning. With a weary groan, he pushed himself up from his chair.
“Well, thanks you for all your help. I’ll be back in the morning to interview you further and my partner, Cole, and I will start canvassing the neighborhood. I’ll be back around seven.” With that Alex started back towards the front of the house.
He was halfway down the hallway before Nana caught him by the arm.
“Where do you think you’re going? You’re staying here tonight. You need to sleep. And besides,” she said nervously, “what if whoever took Eve comes back? No. You’re staying here. Follow me.” With that she started back down the hallway towards the back of the house.
Alex looked after her for a moment, realizing she was trying to comfort him. For a moment he was puzzled. She had absolutely no reason to feel any compassion for him. After a moment, however, he gave it up and turned to follow her retreating figure. Wednesday