People don’t just vanish. They aren’t there one minute, walking along a sidewalk in the sunshine, whole and sentient, only to disappear the next. Only sometimes they do. Ask Lily.
Chapter One
The irony was that the people at the party probably thought the Corbins were the perfect family. Kate Corbin turned her attention from the speech being made by the head of the music department and glanced surreptitiously around the room, watching the large crowd gathered to welcome the new dean and his family to Wickfield.
A sea full of smiling faces in the wide, comfortable living room of Laurence Beetleman’s house. They were university folk mainly, but a few local business owners had been invited as well. “I guess I passed muster,” a bluff man with white hair and a booming voice had said to her earlier. A banker or lawyer, she couldn’t remember which, just that he wasn’t a professor. “Town and gown, you know,” he’d said with a hearty laugh. “Always that division between town and gown.”
Only she didn’t know. She didn’t know at all. They were Manhattan transplants and that division didn’t exist at New York University.
Laurence Beetleman rambled on about the lovely town of Wickfield and how the university community was like a family to him and would now welcome the Corbins into the family.
“We’re so happy we finally snared you,” he’d said to Ian when he opened the door to them, including Kate with his broad smile, shaking even fourteen-year-old Grace’s hand before ushering them inside his gracious, porticoed home, his plump and pretty wife standing radiant at his side.
Helpmeet, Kate thought. Wasn’t that what they called such a woman in Victorian novels? Was she the one responsible for the gleaming hardwood floors and well-dusted bookcases? There was a faint scent of furniture polish in the rooms, and Kate pictured Clara Beetleman lovingly rubbing the oval surface of the dark oak table and running her cloth up the curving feet of upholstered armchairs.
She thought of their own home—old home—in the East Village and how every surface carried a thin sheen of dust like the faintest sprinkling of powdered sugar, except when they gave the loft a hasty wipe-down before parties.
She glanced through the open door left of the crowded living room, and noticed with some satisfaction that a catering firm hovered in the Beetlemans’ kitchen, and then felt ashamed for feeling any animosity toward the older professor’s wife. Clara Beetleman seemed perfectly happy tending to her husband, and Kate had a sudden vision of her watering and pruning him just as she must the numerous glossy-leafed plants lining the windowsills, and had to stifle a giggle.
Ian glanced at her, a question in his blue-gray eyes, and she gave an imperceptible shake of her head. Behave, Kate. Now was not the time or place. Maybe they’d laugh about it later. At one point she would have been sure of their shared humor, but that was before. Things were different now.
“It’s been eight months!” he’d yelled at her that last night in their home. “Eight long months, Kate!”
And because she had no good answer to that, no way to pretend that she hadn’t recoiled when he’d reached for her, she’d resorted to the role of mother, saying, “Ssh, Grace will hear.”
As if Grace, a hallway away, cared about anything but how her life was being ruined by this move. Kate knew if they’d checked on her they would have found her hunched in a corner of her bed, her long, dark hair, so like her father’s, hanging like a curtain to block her sullen face from view, and plugged into her iPod so she could unplug from her parents.
If Grace slept that last night, Kate didn’t know. She only knew that she herself couldn’t sleep, watching Ian instead, his long lean body turned away from her. She’d wanted to touch him, but not in the way that he desired. She’d studied his back with its familiar constellation of moles, a smattering of dark spots scattered across the pale skin, grateful for the reassuring solidness in that long, lean muscled frame.
Yet when he breathed deeply, she spied the faintest outline of his rib cage and felt the immense fragility of the bones within that skin, knowing they could shatter, that the organs sheltered by them could rupture, that the machinelike working of his body could stall or stop.
This sense of his vulnerability was another frightening result of what had happened to her. Strange that something that had taken place so quickly—she’d been shocked to see on the police report that the span was at most a half hour—could completely alter her life. Their lives. It might have happened just to her, but it had affected all of them.
Hearing her own name pulled her out of her reverie. Dr. Beetleman was directing his smile at her now, saying, “—Kate will be sure to paint some lovely portraits of the good citizens of Wickfield.”
A ripple of polite laughter, followed by an undercurrent of conversation. People focusing those expectant looks on her now, not Ian, and some of them asking others what Dr. Beetleman was saying about the new dean’s wife? The Kate Corbin? Yes, of course, they thought the name sounded familiar, but they hadn’t realized the connection. She was the painter. Portraitist. Artist. Oh, but hadn’t they heard that she’d been attacked? Yes, but maybe it was just a rumor. She certainly looked fine.
Kate met their gaze, smiled wide enough to bare her teeth, catching the anxious glance that Ian threw her way. “Don’t worry, I’ll be the perfect wife,” she’d said with some bitterness when he’d asked for the fifth time if she was sure she’d be all right at the party.
“I can go by myself,” he’d suggested. “Or take Grace.”
“And wouldn’t people wonder where I was? What would you say?”
“I could tell them that you were painting.”
“But we both know that would be a lie.”
It was the same thing he’d said to her six months earlier, when she’d begged off the latest NYU faculty dinner party and suggested he tell people she was busy painting. “We both know that would be a lie, Kate,” he’d said, the first time they’d spoken about the fact that she wasn’t painting and hadn’t painted since it happened.
The reference hadn’t been lost on him. He understood perfectly what she was saying and responded angrily by demanding that she be ready to leave on time since he couldn’t afford to be late to his first official function in his capacity as new dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Wickfield University.
So the three of them got dressed in more or less sullen silence, unearthing clothes from the boxes and garment bags still lining the halls of their new house on one of Wickfield’s tree-lined streets.
And here they all were, Ian in a pale linen suit and dashing blue silk tie, looking handsome and arty, and Grace with her long hair pulled back for a change, wearing a batik sundress instead of her usual black T-shirt and jeans, and Kate herself in a navy blue wrap dress and high-heeled strappy sandals that Ian had called sexy when she’d bought them a year ago.
They looked like the perfect family. Smile pretty for the nice people. She could feel the corners of her jaw aching with the effort.
Clara Beetleman touched her husband’s elbow, a tiny nudge that hardly anyone but Kate noticed, the unspoken signal between husband and wife that he’d talked long enough and needed to let their guests mingle.
Ian was pulled into conversation by a tall, stoop-shouldered architecture professor with a rope of beautiful African shells hung around her neck. Grace wove through the crowd, unconscious of her lithe beauty, exiting through French doors into the summer evening. Kate started to follow, but caught herself, and stopped by the window instead, looking out on the deck and the manicured lawn beyond it with its tiny iron lanterns winking among the hostas.
The windowsill was lined with immaculate pots of African violets. She stroked one fuzzy leaf, watching