The PowWow

Curtis found it a little after six in the morning, which meant he'd been running searches for nine straight hours without once asking either of us to spell him, and I only knew he'd found something because the typing stopped.

Typing stopping, with Curtis, is an event. I sat up.

"I need you to look at this before I tell you what I think it is," he said, "because I want to know if you see it too, or if I've just been awake too long and started finding shapes in noise."

He turned the monitor toward us. A list. Names, dates, locations, a column I didn't immediately understand labeled with a case number format I recognized because I'd filed enough of our own paperwork over the years to know the county's system when I saw it.

"Grave disturbances," Curtis said. "Reported and unreported. I built the search wide —…

We found her exactly where we'd started looking, which by that point in the week felt less like a good guess and more like the only fact about our lives that had held steady the entire time — Naomi at the nursery window, one hand flat against the glass in the spot Jacob usually occupied, watching David sleep like sleep was a performance she didn't want to miss a second of.

She turned before either of us said anything, which meant she'd heard us coming, which meant she'd been listening for footsteps the way you listen when you've stopped assuming good news arrives on its own schedule.

"Tell me," she said. Not hello either. Apparently that particular courtesy had gone out of style in this family sometime in the last week, along with several others.

We told her. All of it, in order, the way Curtis had made us tell…

Curtis showed up at the office a little after nine that night without calling first, which was itself the first thing I noticed, because Curtis calls first. Curtis has called first for as long as I've known him, on the theory — stated once, early, and never revisited — that a man who shows up unannounced is a man asking to be misread.

He didn't knock either. He just came in, laptop bag already open over one shoulder, and set two monitors down on the conference table like he'd measured the space for them in advance, which knowing Curtis he probably had, mentally, on the drive over.

"Talk to me," he said. Not hello. Not are you okay, which I appreciated more than I would have expected to, because I did not currently have a true answer to that question that wouldn't have cost either of us something to hear…

Rachel called me at two in the afternoon to tell me she'd put two uniforms on Mara's door for the next forty-eight hours, and that she was heading over herself after shift to see it with her own eyes instead of trusting it to a report. I remember being grateful for that in a distant, functional way, the way you're grateful for a seatbelt you've never needed. I did not know yet that I was about to need it.

She called back forty minutes later, and I knew from the first half-second of dead air before she spoke that this wasn't the same kind of call.

"Levi." Flat. Controlled. The voice she uses when controlled is the only thing standing between her and something else. "I'm at Mara's. Something's wrong with the — "

A sound behind her. Not a knock this time. Something heavier, faster, a door coming off…