But whereas, before, something like that would have set Ben back a week, he rarely now allotted it more than a day. For a man who all his life had cared so inordinately about what others thought of him, Eve had an idea of the effort this required. Even when he e-mailed Abbie, as he did almost every day, or called her and left a voice mail without ever once getting a reply, he refused to let it drag him to the pit anymore.
They were home now. They parked the car and walked through the little arched adobe gateway with its creaking bleached-pine door into the garden. There was not a breath of wind and the chimes on the cherry tree hung silent. There were still yellow roses along the rails of the deck outside the kitchen door and Eve picked one as she passed and put it to her nose. The petals were brittle with frost but still there was a trace of scent. She handed it to Ben.
Maria, the babysitter, was asleep on the couch in front of the TV and Eve had to lay her hand on the girl’s shoulder to wake her. Ben had forgotten to take his cell phone and had left it in the bedroom and Maria said it had rung several times but that she hadn’t felt she should answer it. They paid her and the girl went home and while Eve went to check on Pablo, Ben walked through to the bedroom to listen to his voice mail.
There were three messages, of increasing urgency, and all from Sarah. Would he call her? It was important. Where the hell was he?
Sarah had thought it was somebody playing a trick on her. Jeffrey was always calling and putting on some funny voice, pretending to be the fire department or some famous irascible author or the Nassau County gigolo service, offering her a weekend special. So when the phone rang and the man introduced himself as Special Agent Frank Lieberg of the FBI, without missing a beat she said, “Yeah, sure, and I’m J. Edgar Hoover and you’re fired, buddy.” There was a pause and then he asked, more diffidently this time, if he was indeed talking to Mrs. Sarah Cooper and that was when she figured it had to be for real.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “Yes, I am—I mean, yes, you are.”
“Mrs. Cooper, are you the mother of Abigail Cooper, a sophomore student at the University of Montana?”
It was like the toll of a bell. She felt as if every ounce of breath had suddenly been squeezed from her lungs. In a quiet voice, she managed to say yes, she was.
Agent Lieberg asked her if she knew where Abbie happened to be and Sarah said, well, at school of course, and would he mind telling her what this was all about? She was standing in the kitchen and had been making herself some supper. Her knees had gone all shaky so that she had to prop herself up on the counter. On the TV across the room, Al Gore was kissing his wife and waving to a cheering crowd somewhere in Florida.
She hadn’t spoken with Abbie or had an e-mail from her in more than a week, but that was how it mostly was nowadays. Sarah had, in fact, tried phoning her that very morning. As usual, the call went straight to voice mail and she left another message, cheerful and chatty, asking her to call but trying not to lay on a guilt trip.
“Mrs. Cooper, I’m calling you from our Denver office. This is something that would be best handled face-to-face and I would like to arrange for some colleagues of mine in New York to come see you. Would that be convenient?”
“I guess. But what’s this all about? Has something happened to Abbie?”
“Mrs. Cooper—”
“Listen, for heaven’s sake, you can’t just call up out of the blue and then not tell me—”
“My colleagues will tell you all they can. At the moment all I can say is that we urgently need to talk with Abigail—”
“Abbie.”
“To ask her some questions relating to an incident that took place last weekend in Denver.”
“In Denver? What kind of incident? Is she okay?”
“As of now, we have no reason to believe she isn’t. We are having difficulty contacting her. Mrs. Cooper, is Abbie’s father with you at the moment?”
“He doesn’t live here anymore. What kind of incident?”
He wouldn’t tell her any more. His colleagues would be there within the hour, he said. He wanted to know if there would be anybody else with her and she told him that by then her son would be home.
Sarah at once called Josh on his cell phone and asked him to come home quickly, then put in her first call to Benjamin but only got his goddamn voice mail. She tried Abbie again with the same result. She went online and did a search for incidents that had happened the previous weekend in Denver. But she didn’t have enough information to narrow it down and found nothing that rang any kind of bell.
The two FBI agents showed up just before eight. Except that they had no hats, they could have come from central casting. Dark suits, neckties, snappy haircuts. They didn’t want anything to drink and it was even a job to get them to sit down at the kitchen table. Josh and Sarah sat opposite them and listened. And as she heard what they had to say, it was as if her heart was pumping all the blood from her veins and filling them instead with liquid dread. Her hands were clasped tightly on the table, the knuckles white. Josh gently put his hand on her forearm and kept it there.
A young man had been murdered, shot in the chest, his father’s house burned to the ground. Two people had been seen fleeing in a gray van that had later been found, burnt out. Another man who had tried to stop them was in a coma with severe head injuries. A dog had been seen falling from the van and was so badly hurt that it had later been put down. There was a veterinarian microchip implanted in the back of its neck. On the chip were the name, address, and phone number of its owner, one Abigail Cooper of Missoula, Montana. Abbie hadn’t been in class or at her apartment or been seen anywhere on campus or in town for ten days.
They asked some questions about Abbie’s political views and whether, to Sarah’s knowledge, she was a member of any radical environmental groups. All Sarah could come up with was Greenpeace which for some reason made them smile. They said they were talking about more extreme groups such as the Earth Liberation Front, which Sarah had never heard of.
The truth was that whereas a year ago Abbie had talked constantly about all her environmental work, the meetings she went to, and the campaigns she was involved in, lately she hadn’t. In fact, in the summer, she had given the impression that she now considered it a waste of time. Like rearranging the furniture on the Titanic, Sarah remembered her saying. Some strange maternal instinct told her it might be wiser not to mention this.
The two agents asked if they could see Abbie’s room. And so dazed was she by all she had heard, Sarah led them without question up the stairs. She stood in the doorway watching while they looked around. With its posters and photos and bric-a-brac, its trophies and staring echelons of stuffed toys, the place already seemed like a shrine. They asked if she would mind if they took some strands of hair from Abbie’s hairbrush on the dressing table. It might help them eliminate her daughter from their inquiries, they said gently. They wanted some recent photos too. Sarah saw no reason to refuse.
By the time Benjamin called, she was in bed. She had taken a pill but it hadn’t worked, even on top of the bourbon she’d had before coming upstairs, so she had switched the light back on and was trying to read. But her head wouldn’t stop fizzing. She’d read the same paragraph five times already. Apart from Benjamin, the only person she had called was Iris. She didn’t want anyone else to know. Iris had said all the right things, that it was probably all some terrible mix-up or misunderstanding. She offered to fly up in the morning but Sarah said no. She promised to call again the moment there was news. When she heard Benjamin’s voice, something inside her snapped.
“Where the hell have you been?” she yelled. “I’ve been trying to reach you all night.”
“I’m sorry. I—”
“Christ, I’ve been driving myself crazy here.”
“What’s the matter?”
She felt bad for giving him such a hard time, because, really, how was he to know? But she couldn’t help it. It was weeks since they had last spoken and even then it was about
the divorce, some sneaky new thing he and his lawyers were trying to pull. Of course, whenever she tried to confront him, it was always the lawyers’ fault, never his. She told him about the FBI agents and everything they had said. He listened in grave silence, occasionally asking her to clarify something he hadn’t understood.
“I’ll fly up there first thing,” he said when she had finished.
“Where? To Denver?”
“To Missoula. We’ve got to find her. Somebody there must know where she is. Are you okay?”
She swallowed, her eyes filling with tears.
“Sarah?”
“What the hell do you think?”
“Why don’t you fly out there too? We can meet in Missoula.”
“What about Josh? I can’t just leave him here.”
“Okay, maybe I’ll come to New York first.”
“Benjamin, don’t be so ridiculous! What on earth would be the point of that?”
“No. Okay.”
He went all hangdog on her. She could imagine him standing there, looking all forlorn. Then the thought knifed into her head and she couldn’t stop herself from blurting it out.
“Is she listening to all this?”
For a moment, there was silence. He didn’t seem to understand who she meant or else was pretending not to. The two of them were probably in bed together.
“Well, is she?”
“No, Sarah,” he said wearily. “She isn’t.”
TWENTY-ONE
The young cop unhitched the plastic Do not cross tape that was rigged up across the foot of the wooden staircase then stood aside for them to pass. Agent Jack Andrews nodded and thanked him and led Ben up the steps past the layers of moldy clapboard to the little landing outside the apartment door. There was a panel of cracked glass in the door with a dirty net curtain draped inside across it. Agent Andrews unlocked the door and led the way inside.
The place was cold and cramped and smelled of damp. The only concession to luxury was some overlong red velvet drapes. There was a dog’s bowl on the floor with some food in it.
“Student life, huh?” Andrews said.
Ben shrugged and nodded, tried to smile.
“You haven’t been here before, then?”
“No. She was living in a house on Fourth Street last time I was here. That was back in the spring.”
“We’ve been there. You didn’t see her too often then.”
“Since her mother and I split up, she hasn’t really . . . No, not too often. Is this how it was when you first came here?”
“Some things have been taken away for analysis. A computer, some papers, photographs, a few other bits and pieces. Everything else is pretty much as it was.”
“Are you allowed to do that? I mean . . .”
“Yes, sir. We are.”
Earlier, in his office, back across the river in the Federal Building, he had already told Ben about the other incidents. The arson attacks where similar graffiti had been sprayed on the walls. They had taken place in three different states, which was one of the reasons the FBI was involved. The other reason was that these were clearly acts of ecoterrorism.
Ben had just laughed. Terrorism? Sacramento, Reno, Portland? The idea of Abbie whizzing all over the West, setting fire to things, was too absurd for words. And as for this Denver deal, Jesus. Andrews had smiled sympathetically and looked down at his notes. Then he asked about her boyfriend, the one who called himself Rolf. He wanted to know if Ben had ever met him or spoken with him and Ben said that neither he nor Sarah had.
They had gotten all Abbie’s cell phone records and were painstakingly going through every call she had received or made since she got it. There were some calls from a number in Sheridan, Wyoming, Andrews said, from the home of a Mr. Ray Hawkins. Did the name mean anything to Ben?
“That would be Ty. If I remember rightly, his dad is called Ray. Ty and Abbie were close for a while. Though, lately, I don’t know. My wife would know more about that.”
Ben walked around the little apartment, without knowing what he was looking for or why indeed he had asked to see the place at all. But, God knew, he had to do something. Andrews’s cell phone rang and he pulled it out and went out the door to answer it. All Ben could hear were many repetitions of yes and okay and right and then he was back in the room again, putting the phone back in his pocket.
“Mr. Cooper, I have to tell you that our Denver office has this morning released your daughter’s name and photograph to the media. I didn’t know it was going to happen that soon.”
“Jesus Christ.”
At that moment the cop appeared in the doorway.
“Sir?”
Andrews walked over to him and the cop quietly told him something.
“Okay, thanks.”
The cop went back down the staircase. Andrews turned to Ben.
“We better get going. There’s a TV crew on its way.”
“What? Jesus.”
“We need to go.”
But they were too late. As they came down the staircase, a truck and a van with some kind of satellite thing on the top was pulling up in the street, the doors opening and people piling out with cameras and microphones. The cop put out his arms to try to hold them back but it was too much of a job for one man.
“Mr. Cooper? Mr. Cooper? Could we have a word, please? Mr. Cooper?”
Andrews tried to shield him as they walked to the car.
“Please, ladies and gentlemen,” he said. “If you could just let us through? Thank you, thank you very much.”
But it was no good.
“Have you heard from Abbie, Mr. Cooper?”
“Gentlemen,” Andrews said. “Mr. Cooper will no doubt be issuing a statement later. He’s not in a position . . .”
“Do you have any idea where Abbie is, Mr. Cooper?”
They were at the car now. Andrews was opening the passenger-side door for him but everyone was crowding in and jostling him. Ben managed to lower himself into the seat but didn’t duck low enough and bumped his head. Andrews was trying to shut the door but the reporter had the microphone stuck in under Ben’s nose.
“Mr. Cooper, did Abbie do it?”
“What the hell do you think?” Ben shouted. “Of course she didn’t do it!”
The door slammed and he hit the lock and tried not to look at the camera and the faces still calling their muted questions through the glass. He felt like a criminal. Andrews was in the driver’s seat now and starting up the engine.
“I’m so sorry.”
Ben was too shaken to speak. He just shook his head in disbelief.
“The thing is, Mr. Cooper, we haven’t seen that much of her lately,” Mel said. “Since she and Rolf started seeing each other, they just, kind of, hang out together, just the two of them.”
They were sitting in a corner of a rowdy restaurant called The Depot, up near the railroad. The walls were hung with paintings of the Wild West, though done with irony in bright neon colors, pinks and purples and lime greens. The music was loud but at least it meant they could talk without being overheard. Mel was facing him across the table with her boyfriend, Scott, while Ben was sitting next to the older guy with the beard who they’d introduced as Hacker, though apparently it wasn’t his real name. They’d all ordered steaks, the biggest Ben had ever seen, to which the three of them had by now done justice. Ben had barely touched his. He just wasn’t hungry.
It was Mel he had wanted to talk with and when he’d arrived here—late, after another long and devastating phone conversation with Sarah—he had been surprised to find the others waiting with her. Mel had sounded wary when he’d called her that afternoon, after the media nightmare had at last subsided. Perhaps Abbie had told her bad things about him. Or perhaps she was just shocked, like everybody, by what was going on. At first she was reluctant to meet, but she eventually agreed. Scott and Hacker had no doubt been enlisted as moral support. By now, though, everybody was feeling a little more relaxed.
“So c
an you tell me about Rolf?” Ben asked. “All we really know is that she met him in Seattle.”
“You know, Mr. Cooper,” Mel said. “We hardly ever got to meet him. Said hi a couple of times. That’s really all.”
“Is he a student here or what?”
Mel glanced a little nervously at Scott and then they both looked at Hacker, as if he should be the one to answer. Hacker cleared his throat.
“No. He put it around that he was doing a Ph.D. at Washington State. But it’s not true. I know a lot of people there and nobody’s ever heard of him. In Seattle he was living for a while in a squat with a few others. That’s where we picked Abbie up after she got hurt in the demo. I got a friend of mine to check the place out. There’s nobody there anymore.”
He took a drink of his beer and went on.
“Tell you the truth, I don’t think his real name is Rolf at all.”
“Why’s that?”
“Mr. Cooper, I’ve been involved in active environmental stuff for quite a few years now. Been known to do a little monkey-wrenching myself, now and then.”
“Monkey-wrenching?”
The three of them shared a smile.
“You never read The Monkey Wrench Gang? Edward Abbey?”
“Oh. No, actually, I haven’t. But I know what you mean. Spiking trees, that sort of thing.”
Hacker pretended to look shocked.
“Perish the thought. Yeah, that sort of thing. Anyhow, you get to know people. There’s, like, a kind of network. And once in a while some character drifts in who clearly has his own agenda, if you know what I mean. Word kind of gets around.”
Ben didn’t know what Hacker was talking about and his face must have shown it. It was as if the guy was trying to tell him something without having to spell it out. Hacker looked at Scott and Mel. Scott nodded and Hacker leaned closer to Ben and went on.