Lights On, Rats Out
Private Means
A Novel
Cree LeFavour
Copyright © 2020 by Cree LeFavour
Cover design and collage by Gretchen Mergenthaler
Cover collage images: Sleeping Venus by Giorgione,
photo © Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY;
various detail images from BigStock and Shutterstock
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FIRST EDITION
Published simultaneously in CanadaPrinted in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic hardcover edition: May 2020
Text design by Ashley Prine
This book was set in Scala with Frutiger
by Tandem Books
ISBN 978-0-8021-4888-9
eISBN 978-0-8021-4890-2
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available for this title.
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
20 21 22 23 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
For Dwight Garner
Contents
Also by Cree LeFavour
Friday, May 25, Memorial Day Weekend
Friday, May 25, Memorial Day Weekend
Sunday, May 27, Memorial Day Weekend
Tuesday, May 29
Tuesday, May 29
Saturday, June 16
Friday–Sunday, July 6–8, July 4 Observed
Tuesday, July 17
Monday, July 23
Friday–Sunday, July 27–29
Wednesday, August 8
Friday–Sunday, August 10–12
Friday, August 17
Monday, August 27, and Thursday, August 30
Saturday–Monday, September 1–3, Labor Day Weekend
Acknowledgements
Friday, May 25, Memorial Day Weekend
Spotting the phone charger, she unplugged it from the wall by the nightstand and threw it onto the bed where the hard, white cube clattered against the fiberglass rim of the tennis racket. Tossing orange swim trunks she found hanging inside the closet in the same general direction, Alice again scanned the space before leaving the battered leather weekend bag for Peter to stuff, zip, and carry. Entering the kitchen, she pressed her bare foot to the side of the half case of 2018 Domaines Ott Bandol and slid it across the scratched oak floorboards to the door.
She’d offered a reward. Would she be forced to demand a photo of Maebelle sitting on that day’s newspaper? Would the Post be too tawdry? She should insist on the Times. The insanity of it. This wasn’t Somalia or Afghanistan or the Philippines; it was Manhattan’s Upper West Side—and Maebelle was a dog.
Standing at the kitchen counter, waiting for her husband to move toward the door but not daring to rush him—he was quick to snap lately—she thought of the dog’s future face. Unnaturally aged, the muzzle grizzled and eyes flat, the geriatric canine profile persisted in her mind. It was nothing like the image on the LOST DOG flyer featuring Maebelle’s eager, adorable mug, her nose practically touching the camera lens.
LOST DOG
$2,000 REWARD
NO QUESTIONS ASKED
Do NOT Chase
Last seen May 17th in Riverside Park
at 97th St. Please call:
914-219-8331
Microchip Number: 4689654234566
No, she would not be putting up these posters on every available surface in the neighborhood five years from now. It had been just over a week. When would she give up? In two months? A year? How long was long enough?
He’d left his office door open. Two rooms away she could discern the distinctive inflection of her husband’s official doctor voice on the phone.
Yes, Wellbutrin 300 XL, and the patient does not want the generic … No. DAW, dispense as written.
Waiting for him to finish the call, she remembered taking her twin daughters, Bette and Emile, to a 4-H fair upstate when their chubby legs were just sturdy enough to walk in a crowd—maybe three or four years old. Biting her cuticles, the ragged skin around her nails desperate for a manicure, she recalled the heat of that dusty August day as they waited in line for funnel cakes. She’d been transfixed by a photograph of a teenager on a LOST CHILD poster. The girl’s face was somehow off, but she hadn’t been able to identify what was wrong with it until she read the fine print below the photograph. Her name was Kaylee, and she had been taken from that same 4-H fair. She’d disappeared at just four years old; the photo on the poster was a computer rendering of the girl at fourteen, her nose transformed from a fleshy button into a bony structure, her jawline formed into a too-perfect half oval like the sharp end of an egg, her eyes set deep in their sockets beneath well-defined eyebrows. The artist had even glossed her with lipstick—or at least it looked