The first two chapters of Every Last Trace …

Chapter 1

Inside her body lies a perfectly functioning voice box. A set of vocal cords that produce the most beautiful sound he has ever heard. A sweet, high, vibrant voice that conveys a brilliant mind, an intelligence several years above her age. But the lever that works those cords is held back, stopped by that very same mind. A sensitive mind that has been traumatized by the tragic loss of her mother, a mind that has decided that sometimes it is easier, or safer, to stay quiet than to speak.

Finn watches her from the kitchen doorway, the only child he and Lill had, kneeling at the living-room coffee table, drawing. Her long, chestnut brown hair draping onto the paper, shrouding her face. In her own world, silent for weeks. His heart sinks. He’s been home for almost a month, on forced paid leave. With all this time with Evie, he should have been able to coax her to speak by now. A tightness grips his chest, a familiar fear gnawing at him. What if she never talks again? But he has not been at his best, and maybe that’s why he hasn’t cracked her code yet. He is getting better, though. Improving every day. This morning, almost normal. He will keep trying with Evie, will not stop until he hears her voice.

For now, he leaves her be, heads into the kitchen for his morning coffee.

While his sister Keira fills her mug, he hikes up the window sash to let in the fragrance of the flowers blooming in the window box, but this is a mistake, he realizes this as the undertone of sewage and dead fish from the river comes sweeping into the room. Damn. He closes his eyes, bracing himself as flashlights arc back and forth through a midnight fog, callouts from the search party echoing around him. Nothing here. Nothing here either.

From behind him, Keira asks if he wants his coffee now. Her voice in the mist. Faraway, disembodied.

“Finn?”

He opens his eyes, but he’s still half there, in the dark with the gasoline fumes and the rot whirling around him, his shirt, cold and damp, clinging to his back. He sucks in enough air to say, “Sure.”

Keira lays a hand on his back, gentle, loving, a touch that pulls him out of the darkness. “You okay?”

He closes the window, manages a few calming breaths, cursing himself for opening it. But in his defense, the stink from the river doesn’t usually travel this far. That was a rare gust, crap luck, crap timing.

She hands him his cup, eyeing him closely. “Looks like you’re still having these episodes.”

He inhales the heady aroma of the dark roast rising up from his cup, drowning out the other smells still lingering in the kitchen, and smiles for his sister.

“I’m fine. Just some grogginess, that’s all.” He tilts his mug. “Haven’t had my caffeine injection yet.”

He doesn’t want her to worry. Keira’s the best sister he could have asked for. They take care of each other, always have. But these past few weeks she’s been extra solicitous, maybe to pay him back for when he took care of her a couple of years ago. But he doesn’t have meningitis like she did, and he really doesn’t like burdening her unnecessarily. The fact that he snapped right out of the episode is a good sign. Not worth her concern.

She moves to the table with a slight limp, a lingering symptom of her illness. She has always told him it could have been way worse if he hadn’t rushed her to the hospital when he did. And now, perhaps feeling it’s her turn to encourage professional help, she says, “Maybe it’s time you finally called Dr. Leung. She’s awesome. I find it helpful to talk to her about my feelings. I think you will too.”

“I’d be happy to talk to her about your feelings.”

Keira lets out her signature singsong laugh.

He takes a seat across from her. She can talk for hours about what she’s going through. The words just flow from her. He wishes he was like his sister, but he’s not built like she is. If anyone presses him for how he’s really feeling, his whole body goes tight, his brain scrambles, words vanish.

“Just call her,” she says, returning to a serious tone. “She’d be good for you.”

Throughout his life he has had bouts of anxiety, panic attacks, whatever you want to call them, like he’s been having since the night by the river, but he has done his best to keep his baggage to himself, especially around Evie. She brings something out in him that nobody else does, a calm. But maybe she picks things up from him, maybe he is holding her back. He swallows, sick that this could be true.

“I’ll call her this afternoon, after I take Evie to the playground. It’s a beautiful morning—we’ll have some fun together. That should help both of us.”

Keira bows her head. “Thank you. You two are the most important people to me.”

His lip quirks. “Where does Marcus rank?”

A year ago, Keira started going out with Marcus, his friend and the owner of the roofing company Finn works for. They worried it might bother him, but he was happy to be the catalyst that brought them together. Big hearts made for each other.

“Distant third,” she says. “Don’t tell him.”

They share a brief laugh.

“Kiki…”

Keira picks at the chip on her coffee mug, the hand-painted one his wife Lill gave her the year they met in art college.

“Everything’s going to be okay.”

“I hope so.”

“Finn promises,” he says. An inside joke, alluding to when they were kids and she convinced him little brothers had to speak in the third person.

Keira laughs again. The worry that was etched on her face earlier has dissolved, for now at least.

 

Finn crouches beside his daughter as she lifts her head to the large, colorful painting on the wall above the couch. One of Lill’s pieces. A centerfold she created for her children’s book about Otrokia, a utopian planet bristling with double helix slides, carousels with rocket ships and spacecraft. A futuristic amusement park as intricate as a Bosch. The book, all her artwork for it, his wife’s opus. A legacy that perfectly captures her optimism and her playfulness, the free spirit he fell hard for.

Evie moves her marker delicately across her drawing, a schoolyard full of kids playing with little robots, a creation inspired by her mother’s artwork. The level of detail, the bold and vibrant colors that make the scene come alive, fills him with awe. That at five years old she can do this. Isn’t just him that thinks this. All her art teachers. The art critic at the Boston Herald too. Featured her last month. A Charlestown prodigy. Someone to watch.

“Let’s go to the playground, Bubs. The sun is out today.”

Evie picks up a blank sheet of paper from a pile on the floor next to her, begins to draw a symbol. She can write as well as an eight or nine-year-old but communicates in pictographs during her nonverbal phases. As if words are a loophole in her mutism she’s not allowed to take.

When she finishes her image, a circle with the letter M on top of it, his throat spasms. She wants to talk about her mom, him with words, her with drawings. She was only two when Lill passed, but holds dozens of memories of her, recounts them with photographic detail whenever she speaks. He doesn’t want to turn Evie down, to not give her anything she ever asks for, but he knows what will happen if he indulges her. She may find comfort at first, but then the wound of losing her mother would gape open for her, prolonging her mutism.

“Maybe later, Bubs.” He hopes the need will pass, that she’ll move on. “Mommy wouldn’t want you to miss this beautiful day, would she?”

 

Evie, kneeling beside him, runs a stick through the sand. Mercifully the river left him alone on the walk to the playground, no unwelcome gusts, no triggering smells. And here, by the sandbox, the sun is out, the air calm, carrying only the scents of sunscreen and cedar trees, the chatter of kids. When Evie taps the ground next to the figure she has just drawn, Finn studies it, says, “Saturn.”

She gives him a thumbs up, erases the drawing, starts another one. They’ve had the sandbox to themselves and have been going like this for ten minutes. She’s drawn a tarantula, a sunflower, a tiger, a T-rex. All in silence. No hint that a word might be coming. Maybe a change of scenery would help, something else she loves.

“Bubs.”

She cocks her head, tilting an ear to him.

“How about we play here for a little while longer then go look at the street art by the shipyard?”

She draws two interlocking circles, her sign she wants him to hold her. His heart flutters. Progress, an indication she is feeling safer. Coming here to enjoy the sunny morning was the right move. It has lifted them both up, enough for Evie to want contact. A big step for her, given how withdrawn she has been the past few days. When she’s mute, she usually doesn’t like to be held, or touched. Something the doctors have told him to expect. Just give her space, they’ve told him. Let her come around in her own time. And because of her profound giftedness, making her highly sensitive, she may need more time than someone else with her condition. But it’s hard to wait. He would hold Evie all day long if she would let him.

He shuffles over so Evie is sitting between his legs then wraps his arms around her, a peace settling within him, a feeling that only Evie evokes. A feeling he hadn’t felt for so long before her birth … since a time before memories.

They sit there like this for a minute, then Evie tucks the back of her head into his chest. Another minute in this position before she touches the tip of a finger to one of the protruding veins that twist along his forearm. Slowly, she runs her finger along the vein toward his hand. When she gets there, his unfurls his fingers, and she traces the network of callouses that scar his palm, as if trying to connect all the dots. She has done this many times before, started doing it when she was baby. He loves when she does it.

Sensing she would welcome it, he kisses the top of her head, the warm, sweet scent of her scalp holding a trace of Lill. He breathes deep.

As he counts the other ways Evie is like her mother, the shape of her eyes, the tiny mole by her upper lip, a prickle on the back of his neck pulls his attention away, to a woman about twenty yards from him, standing next to the swings.

When she notices Finn looking at her, she turns her gaze from him, from Evie. Everyone else in the playground is someone he at least half recognizes from the neighborhood. But this woman, tall and thin, long dark hair pulled back in a ponytail, is new to him, a stranger. She wears a blue jacket, out of place in the summer heat, and doesn’t appear to be watching a child.

He’s wondering who she is when a little boy leaps into the sandbox and picks up Evie’s stick, the tool she communicates with, her voice now.

Evie freezes.

“That’s my daughter’s stick.” Finn holds out his hand.

The kid pulls the stick away.

“Can you please give it back to her?”

The boy hides the stick behind his back.

Finn picks up an abandoned plastic shovel and bucket. “Let’s trade.”

The kid chews on a dirty finger then drops the stick, grabs the bucket and the shovel. Finn hands the stick back to Evie, who hugs it to her chest, while the boy feverishly builds a sandcastle.

The boy’s mother, a familiar redhead, takes a few pictures with her cellphone of her son’s creation—a sorry lump of sand with zero resemblance to a fortress. In the background behind the boy, the woman in the blue jacket looks their way again, but before Finn can turn his thoughts to her, the boy totters across the sand to Evie, asks her what her name is.

When she doesn’t answer, he stomps his foot, repeats his question.

Finn wraps his arms around Evie again. Tiny vibrations from her body pulse against his skin. Her name takes shape in his mouth, but he doesn’t utter it. She won’t say anything, not to this boy, not under this pressure, but he knows that rescuing her only teaches her she doesn’t need to speak.

“Are you a dum-dum?” the boy says.

Finn whispers in his daughter’s ear. “I wouldn’t listen to anyone who’s proud of that sandcastle.”

She squeezes his hand. The boy grimaces at Evie. It’s time to leave. But before Finn can move, he catches fragments of a hushed conversation between the redhead and another mother.

Charlotte, that poor girl. Would have turned six today.

Horrible. What happened to her.

Could you imagine? Her uncle too.

Thank god they caught him.

The air catches in his lungs. Below him, the sand turns to cold, wet cement. The industrial section on the other side of the Mystic River, past midnight in a drizzle of cold rain.  The circle of his flashlight catching on something behind an electrical equipment shed. A tiny, bone-white hand. He gasps, retches.

“Are you okay?” A distant voice, from another world.

Shaking, sweating, his shirt soaked through, he looks up at the woman. The redhead.

“I’m fine,” he says, embarrassed.

He has had an episode in public, but worse than that, in front of Evie. He snaps his gaze to where Evie sat, but the stick lies silent next to hollows where her knees were dug in. His stomach twists. He scans the playground. Lots of children, but no sign of his. Then, a flutter of long brown hair near the corner of the school building. Relief floods him. But she’s about to turn the corner, disappear from view. If the gate is open, she could get to the street.

He’s out of the sandbox, running, calling after her.

Evie’s right hand, fingers curled, swings backward before vanishing along with the rest of her body into the void beyond the corner.

Seconds later, he charges past the corner, and when he does, everything goes suddenly dark, like an eclipse. It lasts for only an instant. Before he can begin to wonder what happened, he absorbs the view ahead—a flagstone path cutting between the façade of the school and a hedge running alongside a wrought-iron fence.

The path lies empty.

 

Chapter 2

 

Finn races down the path. To his left, a flat wall of bricks, a line of windows six feet from the ground. No doorways, no niches, no place for a child to hide. He scans the hedges to his right. If she hid in the greenery, he’d see her. Yellow shirt, blue shorts, bright colors against the green. Impossible to miss. But he sees nothing. And behind the hedge, the fence rises too high for a child to climb.

He sprints to the iron gate at the end of the path, the only way out. It’s padlocked, doesn’t budge.

He spins around. Where in the hell could she be? Could someone have taken her? Could they have climbed the fence with her, or taken her through the gate and locked it? But she was only out of his sight for a few seconds, less. There’s no way anyone could have taken her in that time. No way. His brain pulses with blood, confusion. He runs back along the path, pulling at the hedgerow, in case he somehow missed her.

Back at the corner of the school building, doubt creeps in. Maybe she snuck past him, returned to the playground. She must have. It’s the only possibility. He quickly scans the play area. Yells her name. Loud enough for parents and kids to look his way.

He tells the crowd his daughter has gone missing, describes her, asks if anyone has seen her, his tone laced with rising terror.

Heads swivel, shoulders shrug, a series of Nos.

He yells his daughter’s name again. But he knows one thing: she will not answer. Wherever she is, she is silent, wordless.

The playground has many possible hiding places: the climbing structure, the wooden platform, the tube slide, a tunnel, a garbage bin. He inspects them all. She is nowhere.

Cedar trees run along the fence that surrounds the playground on three sides—two short sides and a long one that runs parallel to the school building. Maybe she’s behind one of them. After asking the parents to check the cedars, they fan out toward the fence, their kids helping, eager to be heroes. But it isn’t long before worried faces stare back at him. Heads shaking.

His stomach lurches. Where is she? How could he have let her disappear? He needs to find her, now, right now. She has to be nearby. Nobody took her, he’s telling himself this, willing it to be true. Needing it to be true. He flings open the gate of the playground, scrambles down the steps to the sidewalk, checks up and down the street.

Hand shaking, he pulls his cellphone out of his pocket, presses the emergency call button.

“My daughter is missing.” He says it fast, knowing every second counts.

The emergency operator, a kind voice, asks for his name.

“Finn. Finn Vey.” His gaze sweeps across his surroundings, still hunting for a flash of yellow and blue, of long brown hair.

“Mr. Vey. Finn.” A voice in his ear. The phone. “Your daughter’s name?”

“Charlotte.”

“And Charlotte’s date of birth?”

Charlotte? Is that what he said? “Evie. Her name is Evie.”

“I’m sorry, is her name Charlotte or Evie?”

“Evie. Evie Vey. I don’t know where she is. Please, send the police now.”

“I will. But I’m going to need more information. Take a deep breath, and just answer everything as clearly as you can so we can find your daughter.” After a quick pause, she continues. “Evie’s date of birth.”

“August 16. She just turned five.”

He rattles off answers to the next series of questions. Height, weight, hair color, all the details she asks for—it sickens him to reduce his daughter to this, to physical descriptions, measurements. As if that is all she is. “Any medical conditions?”

“She doesn’t speak.”

“As in mute?”

“Selective mute. She can speak. She just doesn’t sometimes. She’s not speaking now.”

“Okay.” The operator asks for details about when she went missing, from where, how long she was out of his sight.

He tells her everything before she finally says the police are on their way, advising him to stay where he is.

“I need to keep looking for her. Maybe she went home.”

“They’ll be there in just a moment. They’ll need your help. And a picture of your daughter.”

After Finn hangs up, he rings Keira. It goes to voicemail. He tries again—same.

A few parents from the playground stand on the steps by the entrance gate. Anxious faces. He asks if one of them can wait for the police while he runs home to see if his daughter is there. A woman in tan shorts and flip flops steps forward, introducing herself.

Finn pulls up his photo album, looking for a photo of Evie to send to the woman, something she can show the police. He swipes through his recent photos, usually a string of Evie pics punctuated by the occasional shot of something else. But there are no photos of her—not the one of her dressed as Frida Kahlo on Halloween, not the one of her curled up reading on Keira’s lap, not the one of her blowing out her birthday candles. He flips frantically back and forth through his album. Photos for work, of frayed shingles, bent pipe flanges. Where are the pictures of Evie? There are dozens of them. Hundreds probably. He can’t take enough of them. Is worried he’ll look back one day and wish he took more. No way he deleted them. He checks his deleted items anyway, doesn’t find them there.

A cold shudder tears through him.

“My phone … there’s a problem.” He describes Evie to the woman, tells her to pass the details on to the police, and then he’s off running down the sidewalk, retracing the route home. He’ll find her there, or on the way there. Nobody took her, he tells himself again. He refuses to let that fear take hold. She got out of the playground, wanted to go home to draw. It’s that simple. No reason to panic. In a matter of minutes, maybe even mere seconds, he’ll be holding Evie again.

As he rounds the corner onto Russel Street, he pulls out his phone, swipes for Marcus’s number. His call goes straight to voicemail. Breathing hard, he leaves a message, tells his friend what has happened, asks him to go to the Palmer Carston playground and help the police. Right away, as soon as he possibly can.

While he runs, his eyes probe the long, narrow street, leaping from one pedestrian to the next, searching for a hint of Evie. A five-minute walk home, a two-minute run. A slight curve of the street hides his house. Maybe she’s there, just around the bend. She knows the way. They’ve walked this route hundreds of times.

Legs burning, on the brink of giving out, he sees Charlotte’s face in the cold glow of the flashlight. Her pale cheekbone, and lying next to it, a stuffed bunny. Same one Evie has.

Through the blue front door of his house, the shock of airconditioned air wicks sweat from his body. He yells for Evie, for Keira. Nobody answers. A stillness hangs in the entranceway. Something is off. In the living room, the coffee table lies clear, Evie’s artwork gone, no colored markers. Her bunny that she dressed in an art apron and pretended was her assistant is no longer on the floor where she left it. Only a couple of postcards adorn the chrome doors of the fridge, none of Evie’s drawings.

Keira rarely tidies…

He calls out again, his feet thundering up the steps. After rounding the landing, he flies into Evie’s bedroom, except there is no bed, no dresser, no bookcase crammed with art supplies and children’s books. The night sky with its blazing stars and planets that Lill painted on the walls is gone. They are blank cream now, and the room is filled with a desk, a computer monitor, a bookcase with paperbacks, a windowsill with a couple of fuzzy cacti.

He’s in the wrong house.

He’s down the stairs and out the door in seconds. The lamppost and the telephone pole stand on the sidewalk, fixtures that have always faced his front door. He turns back, stares at the door he just came out of. The blue door he opened with his key. The number fixed to the lintel.

It is his door, his house.

He races back inside, up the stairs, lungs heaving, checks Evie’s bedroom again. It is still an office. His mouth goes suddenly dry. He runs down the hall to Keira’s studio, pushes open the door.

Keira, her back to the door, stands in front of an easel, headphones on, hips swaying to music only she can hear. Finn calls her name but gets no answer. He grabs her shoulder. She startles, swivels around. Upon seeing Finn, she gasps with relief, yanks out her headphones. “Jesus, you scared the crap out of me.”

“Did Evie come home?”

“What?”

“She went missing at the playground. Is she here?”

“Who?”

“Evie,” he all but screams.

Keira squints in confusion, her face twisting. “What are you talking about? Who’s Evie?”