Thursday, 5:50 a.m.
Zero, three, one, one.
I had typed it on Tuesday night with my hands shaking and never looked at what I was typing. Now I sat on his side of the bed with his phone in both hands and read it as a date.
"March eleventh," I said, to the room.
He'd told me once it was what he put on the first phone that ever asked him for a code, a boy of nineteen in the spring of 2001, and he had kept it through every phone since, and eleven years of me asking what's it for. He never saw a reason to change most things. It had been a stone in his pocket the whole time.
Six hours and ten minutes.
* His messages had nothing in them. The Brenners, the farm store, me asking about noodles. The one thread that should have been there I had wiped myself, on Tuesday night, with my thumb on the glass.
His calls were another matter. I'd never looked at his call log. It isn't a thing I do. Clients, the feed mill, me, me, me. And in the last three weeks, four calls out to the same number, a 715 with a prefix I didn't know. The twenty-seventh of May, two minutes, the night he'd stood at the sink for ten minutes not washing anything. The second of June, eleven minutes. The ninth, six. And Monday the fifteenth, seven thirty-eight in the morning, one minute.
Monday. I sat with that one.
At the Aunes', he'd said of Monday, lightly, at his shoeing rig on Wednesday, and Marit had told me the Aunes had phoned from Canada. He had made a one-minute call to a number that wasn't the Aunes', and then he'd gone wherever he'd gone.
At six I called it from his phone, as if he might have left it warm. It rang eight times, twelve, twenty. No voicemail, no recording, only the ring going out into a room somewhere with nobody in it. A lookup site on my knees on the bed: No records found. Unlisted. A landline, then. And what kind of man calls one four times in three weeks and tells his wife he was at the Aunes'?
I said the rest out loud, since there was no one to say it to. A girl, a March, a lake, a truck. A card that said the ice had gone out early. A man at a kitchen tap telling me about a door that won't open till the car is full, and a window that will. And a voice at half past five saying the water as if it were the name of a place.
He had gone in after her. He had come out, and she hadn't.
I put his phone in my pocket and got up.
At five past six I called Dagny, with my back against the kitchen counter. Five rings and the message. This is Dagny. I'm on the water or I'm asleep. Say what you need.* The diesel was under it, recorded in.
"It's Hanne Sorley. Cal's gone. He left around four, in his truck, north. He left a note saying he was going to ask someone. Call me the second you're in signal. Any hour."
He'd be in the pines. A four-hour drive to the top of the state, a sister who couldn't be reached in the dead stretch of it, and a man I had let go there with his hands full of keys.
Osric texted as the coffee ran through. Coming out to you. Don't touch the truck. Please. He has never once said please to me by text. He had my empty vial and my log in his truck, and either he was the only friend I had left or he was bringing someone to find me with them. I put the phone face down. Let him come.
Out in the barn the mare was calling for her breakfast, one low demanding note through the aisle window. I went out because she was the one thing on the place I knew how to fix. I soaked two quarts of the senior pellets Mr. Aubrey had carried in yesterday in both arms, and stood at her door while she put her nose in the bucket and pushed it round the stall to get at the last of it.
A state inspector was coming, or a deputy, or both, and by noon I might not be anywhere I could feed a horse from. I got my phone out and found Aubrey, P. in my client list and rang it.
It rang four times, and then his own voice, warm and a little hoarse, recorded in some quiet kitchen: This is Paul Aubrey. I'm out with the horse, most likely. Leave me a word and I'll get back to you.
"Paul, it's Hanne," I said. "She's fine. She's eating your pellets like they're going out of style." Pilot lifted her head out of the bucket and looked at me with her mouth full. "I've thought about it. Yes. After. And if I'm not here today, for any reason, Osric Quist will see to her until you come. That's all. Yes."
I hung up. It was twenty to seven, and it was the only promise I'd made in two days that I knew I could keep.
At the table I read the last card again. He knows where you are. He. Not someone. A particular man, kept at the edge of every sentence. Callum had made his case for Dagny at this table three hours ago, and it still stood up. A sister who had buried their mother alone and never once come to our door. Someone who knew where the photographs went. If it was her at the end of the road he'd taken, then he had gone to the one place a man could be sure of being met by somebody who loved him and was very angry, and I couldn't decide whether that was better or worse than a stranger.
At a quarter to seven I called Dagny again and left it shorter. Hanne. Call me.
Seven minutes later the phone rang in my hand. Aubrey, P.
"Hanne. I got your message." He sounded as if he'd been up a while, hoarse, a man with his first coffee in him. "I was down at the barn forking out a stall with nobody in it, if you can believe that. Habit. I won't keep you. I only wanted to say thank you. That's a weight off me, and I haven't had a weight off me in a good while."
"She's no trouble," I said. "You told me."
"I did." A breath that was nearly a laugh. "You sound done in."
"Long night."
"Well. They end." A pause, and a cup set down somewhere on wood. "Look after yourself, Hanne. She'll look after you, if you let her."
He rang off. I stood at my counter with the phone against my collarbone, and it was the kindest thing anyone had said to me since Tuesday, and I held on to it for a minute before I put it down.
The fourth card lay under my hand. Dr. T sold the practice and went. Nobody knows where. I looked up from it, out the window and across the road, at the gray house and the donkeys at the paddock rail. The drive beside the house was empty. The beige Volvo that had nosed in by that porch every morning for a year and a half was gone.
It had been there at half past five. I had stood in the road and looked at it.
Then I'll walk to Emil's and borrow the Volvo, Callum had said on Wednesday night, looking at the hook where his keys weren't. I had put his own keys in his hand at half past three so he would never need to. I had seen his tracks in the dew, out and north. It was the Volvo I couldn't account for.
The donkeys were bawling at the rail, at the empty porch. Emil Tiede feeds them at six with a pail that rattles like a dropped drawer of cutlery, and I hadn't heard it this morning.
I called him from the clinic's client list, Tiede, E. It rang and rang in a house I couldn't see into. No machine.
A doctor who had sold his practice and turned up two winters ago across the road. A man with a scanner on his windowsill and binoculars in his upstairs window, who had told me my husband slept like a bandsaw when I hadn't said a word about my husband. And on the one morning in a year and a half that my husband vanished, his car had gone, and he wasn't answering.
Dr. T.
I set him beside Dagny, one on a tug and one across the road. Neither would go away.
* The pole syringe hangs in the barn aisle on two nails, where it has hung since a stallion in 2019 who would let nobody within ten feet. Six feet of aluminum, a plunger at the near end and a needle at the far. I took it down. It weighed less than you'd want.
At the truck I got the drug box open. Xylazine, a hundred milligrams to the milliliter, and I did the sum on the lid in grease pencil for a thousand-pound horse. Ten milliliters. It puts a horse on its knees in five minutes with its lip hanging. For a man of seventy-one I didn't let myself finish the sum. I thought of his hands holding my films up to the light over his sink, the wristwatch sliding down his forearm, and I drew it up and capped it and fitted it to the pole.
The plan I had made at three was a plan for two. The sheriff at seven, a deputy in the trees, a husband who'd said yes too fast. There was no husband now.
At seven the desk opened. I had Marlys's number up and my thumb over it, and I thought of a deputy putting his shoulder to an old man's mudroom door, and a voice saying the water, and I put the phone in my pocket. The only door left that I could open was across the road.
Five past seven. I put the pole under my arm and took the lane at a walk.
Twenty yards down, a truck turned in off Hatchery Road. A white Ram, the clinic's. Osric's.
Behind it, close on its bumper, came a gray sedan with a state plate, going slowly, as a car goes when it has been told what it's looking at.
I turned round and went back up the lane fast, the pole rattling on my shoulder, and got as far as the kitchen door before the sedan had stopped in the yard. I put the pole down behind the boot rack with the needle capped, and stood up.
The knock came before I'd let go of the handle.
A woman in a dark jacket stood on the step with a badge wallet open at the height of my face. Forties, flat shoes, a lanyard, the level look of somebody who has counted a great many bottles.
"Dr. Sorley?" she said. "Is your husband home?"