I was sober for three days.
During that time a new client asked me to get pictures of her husband, who she thought was cheating on her with another woman. He disappeared for hours at a time on weekends, saying he was going to the hardware store, and never returned with a single purchased item. He had started to erase messages on his cell phone. He seemed, she said, like he wasn’t the man she had married.
I tracked the guy one Saturday to—of all places—a zoo. He was with a woman, all right—one who happened to be about four years old. The girl ran up to the fence at the elephant enclosure. Immediately, I thought of the animals I’d seen at the sanctuary, roaming free through the vast acreage, not cooped up in a little concrete pen. The elephant was rocking back and forth as if it were moving to music none of us could hear. “Daddy,” the little girl said. “It’s dancing!”
“I once saw an elephant peel an orange,” I said casually, remembering a visit to the sanctuary after the caregiver’s death. It had been one of Olive’s behaviors; she rolled the tiny fruit under her massive front foot until it split, then delicately unraveled the peel with her trunk. I nodded at the man—my client’s husband. I happened to know they didn’t have any children. “Cute kid,” I said.
“Yeah,” he replied, and I could hear the wonder in his voice that comes when you find out you’re having a baby, not when your child is four. Unless, of course, you have only just discovered that you’re her dad.
I had to go home and tell my client that her husband wasn’t two-timing her with another woman but that he had a whole life she had not known about.
Was it any wonder that night I dreamed of finding Alice Metcalf’s unconscious body, and of the vow I’d made that elephant, which I never did keep: I promise, she’ll be okay.
And that was when my run of sobriety ended.
I can’t remember all the details about the eight hours or so after I found Alice Metcalf, because so much happened in such a short amount of time. She was brought by ambulance to the local hospital, still unconscious. I gave instructions to the paramedics who accompanied her to call us the minute she came to. We asked cops from neighboring towns to help complete a sweep of the elephant sanctuary, because we didn’t know if Alice Metcalf’s daughter was still out there. At about 9:00 P.M., we swung by the hospital, only to be told that Alice Metcalf was still out cold.
I thought we should arrest Thomas as a person of interest. Donny said that wasn’t possible, since we didn’t know if any crime had been committed. He said that we’d have to wait for Alice to wake up and tell us herself what had happened, and if Thomas had anything to do with her head injury or the kid’s disappearance or Nevvie’s death.
We were still at the hospital waiting for her to regain consciousness when Gideon called, panicked. Twenty minutes later, we accompanied him to the sanctuary enclosure, shining flashlights into the dark, where Thomas Metcalf was standing in his bare feet and bathrobe, trying to secure chains around the front legs of an elephant. She kept trying to rip away from her restraints; a dog was barking and nipping at him, attempting to stop him. Metcalf kicked the dog in the ribs, and it whimpered away on its belly. “It’ll only take a few minutes to get the U0126 into her system—”
“I don’t know what the hell he’s doing,” Gideon said, “but we do not chain elephants here.”
The elephants were rumbling, an unholy earthquake that shuddered across the ground and up my legs.
“You’ve got to get him out of there,” Gideon muttered, “before the elephant gets hurt.”
Or vice versa, I thought.
It took an hour to talk Thomas out of the enclosure. It took another thirty minutes for Gideon to get close enough to the terrified animal to remove the shackles. We handcuffed Metcalf, which seemed awfully fitting, and brought him to a psychiatric hospital sixty miles south of Boone. For a while, during the drive, we were out of the range of cell phone coverage, which is why it wasn’t until an hour later I got the message that Alice Metcalf was awake.
By then, we had been on the job for sixteen hours.
“Tomorrow,” Donny pronounced. “We’ll interview her first thing. Neither one of us is going to be any good right now.”
And so began the biggest mistake of my life.
Sometime between midnight and 6:00 A.M., Alice signed herself out of Mercy hospital and disappeared off the face of the earth.
• • •
“Mr. Stanhope,” she says. “Virgil Stanhope?”
When I open the door, the kid speaks the word like an accusation, as if being named Virgil is equivalent to having an STD. Immediately all my defenses kick in. I’m not Virgil and haven’t been for a long time. “You’ve got the wrong person.”