Hot Springs by Geoffrey Becker Page A

something, but did it ever occur to you she might just have lost her key and didn’t want to admit it?”

SIX
    T essa Harding almost never went into her husband’s home office, but she wanted to see the photos again, and they were on his computer. David was out on his bike—he’d be gone for hours. After calling in sick the past three days, she’d gone downtown today to meet her Saturday students, only allowing herself to cry a little in between lessons—sweet Ashley Jackson, who was working on Mikrokosmos , dead-eyed James McMullen, who robotically pounded his way through the first Invention , falling apart at exactly the place where he always fell apart—and afterward she’d gone for coffee and a cookie because she hadn’t been eating at all lately. She’d gotten through half the cookie before growing nauseated. Then she’d gone out and stood by the playground in the park and watched the children jumping in and out of the fountain, laughing, shouting. She’d never brought Emily here, but she found it calming to stand at
the edge of all this hubbub and imagine that she was in fact a part of it, that one of these children in shorts and a T-shirt, or a little pink bathing suit, was hers. She saw a man who looked like the man in the photos cutting through the park. He was big, with an earnest, unremarkable face. He wore jeans and a black T-shirt, and he moved with the sort of lope she associated with stray dogs. What if they were still here? It seemed possible. There was that girl in the news who had been abducted, and it turned out later that she’d been living right in the same town for nearly a year and no one noticed. The man crossed the street and she lost sight of him.
    David had wanted to call the police immediately, but Tessa had told him they should wait. “We know who it is, and we know why she did it,” she’d said. “At some point, soon, we’ll hear from her.”
    “She’s just a common criminal,” he shouted “I don’t know why you would even want to consider her side.”
    She didn’t explain that for five years she’d lived with the certainty that something like this was coming, that the happiness she was supposedly enjoying—she was happy, wasn’t she?—was illusory, the brightly lit, glistening sunscape at the center of a hurricane, and that eventually God would reveal to her the true, darker nature of his plan.
    She had her own computer—a laptop—but the cameras were hooked up to David’s. There was one on the front of the house, another around the side. She hadn’t wanted them, originally, but now she was glad he’d put them in.
    Taped to the bottom of the monitor was a printed-out strip of paper that read “I believe in the bodily resurrection of the Just, and the everlasting punishment of the Lost.”
    Lost . She hated that word.
    She went to Pictures and located the folder marked Webcam. In it, she found the images he’d captured of Bernice and the man. They
weren’t terribly clear, and the light was poor, but there was no mistaking the girl. The camera only went off at thirty-second intervals, and there was nothing of Emily. But the man was there. Tall, with dark, shoulder-length hair parted in the middle to reveal a high forehead, a nose that seemed just slightly off kilter, possibly even broken. He looked relatively strong. There was no real way to tell if it was the same person she’d seen this afternoon, she realized. Perhaps it was just that she’d wanted to see him so much.
    Tessa hadn’t known anything was wrong. David had already left for work, and she’d made herself a new pot of coffee rather than drink the sour-tasting stuff he’d left her. She’d gotten out the cereal for Emily, and also the milk. Usually, Emily came upstairs and they ate together. She’d listened to the radio, waited. It was going to be hot and dry again. The fires up in Pikes National Forest were under control, but not out. KCME was playing Glenn Gould, and she thought how it was