Chaingang

Sam and Mary had grown up in the same block, one of the classic next-door romances that blossomed at puberty, and there'd never been any question that one day they'd be married. They were steadies from eighth grade through senior high, and would have wed then, but Mary stayed in Waterton when Sam was attending the University of Maryland.

While Sam was away getting his B.A., she and Royce had become close. He was spontaneous, carefree, funny—and in some off-the-wall ways he was tremendously appealing. Women probably wanted to mother him, or thought they could change his ways. Men, of course, considered Royce the ideal buddy. She knew that he was a great deal more complex than he appeared to be. But that was old news.

Sam Perkins had become more than a husband to Mary—as their marriage became, perhaps, overly comfortable. He'd become like a brother. Royce, bless his damn heart, had made her take a subconscious glance at that.

“What's the deal?” he asked her, in his most serious and quiet tone. She remembered how he could be.

“How do you mean?"

“I mean Sam. Was there trouble between you?"

“No."

“No money problems? Health problems?"

“Absolutely none. He was very happy.” She was suddenly defensive. “Good health. We both worked at it. He was great. His business was wonderful."

“You guys weren't having, you know, personal problems?"

“Uh-uh.” She was surprised he'd even ask her.

“From what you say, he just ceased to exist one Friday morning, Mary. People don't vanish like that—the parked car and all. Unless he was kidnapped—and who'd want to do that? Or ... he decided to leave."

“I would have known. Something happened to him."

“Okay."

“He parked the car at the office—in back. When he got out, somebody probably pulled up beside him or honked at him. That's what I think. He got in the car with them. And then something happened to him. That's the way he disappeared."

“Mm."

“The one who kidnapped him might be waiting for some reason before they ask for money. Waiting to see if the police or FBI can ... you know, uncover their tracks."

“So you think he was kidnapped?"

“That's the way it looks to me."

“Pretty soon you'll get a demand for ransom money if that's what happened."

“Right.” It had been a big mistake to call him. “That's what the cops and FBI think, too."

“You called the Feds?"

She nodded. “Yeah."

“Well—” He wanted to tell her about himself and that he was one of the good guys. At that moment he felt very sad for her, and without thinking, he took one of her hands and held it in his. He had big, rough hands. Laborer's fingers. But he was no laborer, sitting there at the kitchen table in his beat-up leather bomber's jacket and faded jeans, looking as if no time at all had gone by. She took her hand away and got up to put coffee water on, wondering if he'd done lines. “So—if the FBI is on the case, that's good. Right?” He was trying to reassure her, she supposed.

“I guess. They didn't act very interested. These two guys came to town and talked to me here at the house, and they tape-recorded me and asked a bunch of stuff. The same things I'd told Marty Kerns. They said, ‘We'll be in touch,’ and that was the last I heard from them. I've called a couple of times since. The last time I had to call back three times to get an agent on the phone, that's how they returned my calls."

He just looked at her. She supposed he'd had to get half-stoned to come talk to her. She thought of Sam's name for him. “The Junkie,” he'd always called Royce if his name came up, and not unkindly. Now here he sat: her old junkie lover of once upon a time.

Mary Perkins awoke frightened, off kilter, out of synch like a worn film or a badly dubbed Japanese monster movie, and she had to work to fight back the edge of whatever it was that felt so intensely like desperation, shouting herself awake with a loud, unladylike curse of frustration.

Her shout was like an echo in this house without Sam Perkins. The weight of worry for her missing husband came and rested on her, reinserting itself into her consciousness, prodded by Royce's perfectly natural questions about the state of their marriage.

Half of her mind continued to sort options, stack and measure possibilities; size up the paucity of solid information she'd been able to gather about the why of his disappearance. The other half worked to nag her with worst-case scenarios, in which fictional mistresses and torturous plots nudged the dark convolutions of her thoughts.

It was the most obvious of the possibilities if you could look at their childless and increasingly platonic marriage objectively—which she couldn't. Never mind that it had been Sam, not Mary, who'd been adamant about concentrating on career, not kids, in the early years of their marriage, and then sunk himself deeper into his work. Or that it had been Sam who'd found romance too much of a bother.