Carthage. Joyce Carol Oates

rooms. He knew the sloshing of brackish water about the mossy posts sunk into the lake, that supported the Roebuck’s outdoor deck.

      He knew the “scene” on a Saturday night.

      How puzzling, that Cressida would go to such a place, voluntarily! His sensitive daughter who flinched hearing rock music on the radio and who disdained places like the Roebuck and anyone likely to patronize them.

      “Most people are so crude. And so oblivious.”

      Such pronouncements Zeno’s younger daughter had made from an early age. Her pinched little face pinched tighter with disdain.

      Brett Kincaid acknowledged that he’d encountered Cressida at the lakeside inn. He’d acknowledged that she’d been in his Jeep. But he seemed to be saying that she hadn’t remained with him. His account of the previous night was incoherent and inconsistent. Asked about scratch-marks on his face and smears of blood on the front seat of his Jeep he’d given vague answers—he must have scratched his face somehow without knowing it, and the blood-smears on the seat were his. There were other items of “evidence” a deputy had found examining the vehicle that had been found with its front, right wheel in a ditch on the Sandhill Road on Sunday morning.

      The bloodstains would be analyzed, to determine if the blood was Kincaid’s or someone else’s. (As part of a physical examination the previous year, Cressida had had blood work done by a local Carthage doctor; these records would be provided to police.)

      Zeno had been told about the bloodstains in Kincaid’s Jeep that appeared to be “fresh” and “damp” and Zeno’s brain had seemed to clamp down. Arlette, too, had been told, and had gone silent.

      For they knew—they knew—that Juliet’s fiancé, Juliet’s ex-fiancé, who’d come very close to being their son-in-law, wasn’t capable of hurting either of their daughters. They could not believe it, and would not.

      As they could not believe that, at any minute, their missing daughter might not arrive home, burst into the house seeing an alarming number of vehicles parked outside—a mix of familiar faces and strangers in the living room—and cry: “What’s this? Who won the lottery?”

      The father wanted to think: it might happen. However unlikely, it might happen.

      “Oh Daddy, for God’s sake. You thought I was lost? You thought I was—killed or something?”

      The daughter’s shrill laughter like ice being shaken.

      THAT MORNING, Zeno had wanted to speak to Brett Kincaid.

      Zeno had been told no. Not a good idea at this time.

      “But just to—see him. For five minutes . . .”

      No. Hal Pitney who was Zeno’s friend, a high-ranking officer in the Beechum County Sheriff’s Department, told him this was not a good idea at the present time and anyway not possible, since Kincaid was being interviewed by the sheriff McManus himself.

      Not interrogated, which meant arrest. Only just interviewed, which meant the stage preceding a possible arrest.

      I need to know from him just this: Is Cressida alive?

      “ . . . only just to see him. Christ, he’s like one of the family—engaged to my daughter—my other daughter . . .”

      Zeno stammered, trying to smile. Zeno Mayfield had long cultivated a wide flash of a smile, a politician’s smile, that came now unconsciously, with a look of being forced. He was frightened at the prospect of seeing Brett Kincaid, seeing how Brett regarded him.

      Just tell me: is my daughter alive.

      Pitney said he’d pass on the word to McManus. Pitney said it “wasn’t likely” that Zeno could speak face-to-face with Kincaid for a while but—“Who knows? It might end fast.”

      “What? What ‘might end fast’?”

      Into Pitney’s face came a wary look. As if he’d said too much.

      “ ‘Custody.’ Him being in custody, and interviewed. It could end fast if he gives up all he knows.”

      A chill passed into Zeno, hearing these words.

      He knew, Hal Pitney had told him all he’d tell him right now.

      Driving east of Carthage into the hilly countryside, into the foothills of the Adirondacks and into the Nautauga Preserve to join the search team that morning, Zeno had made a succession of calls on his cell phone trying to learn if there were “developments” in the interview with Brett Kincaid. Like a compulsive cell phone user who checks for new calls in his in-box every few minutes Zeno could not shut off the flat little phone, still less could he slide it into his shirt pocket and forget it. Several times he tried to speak with Bud McManus. For Zeno knew Bud, to a degree, enough, he’d thought, to merit special consideration. (In the scrimmage of Carthage politics, he’d done McManus a favor, at least once: hadn’t he? If not, Zeno regretted it now.) Instead, he wound up speaking with another deputy named Gerry Eisner who told him (confidentially) that the interview with Brett Kincaid wasn’t going well, so far—Kincaid claimed not to remember what had happened the night before, though he seemed to know that someone whom he alternately called “Cress’da” and “the girl” had been in his Jeep; at one point he seemed to be saying that “the girl” had left him and gotten into a vehicle with someone else whom he didn’t know—but he wasn’t sure of any of this, he’d been pretty much “wasted.”

      Wasted. High school usage, guys boasting to one another of how sick-drunk they’d gotten on beer. Zeno trembled with indignation.

      During the interview, Kincaid had seemed dazed, uncertain of his surroundings. He’d smelled strongly of vomit even after he’d been allowed to wash up. His eyes were bloodshot and his skin-grafted face made him look like “something freaky” in a horror movie, Eisner said.

      You’d never guess, Eisner said, he’s only twenty-six years old.

      You’d never guess he’d been a good-looking kid not so long ago.

      “Jesus! A ‘war hero.’ ”

      In Eisner’s voice Zeno detected a tone of wonderment, part-commiseration and part-revulsion.

      It was pure chance that Corporal Kincaid had been apprehended that morning at approximately the time the Mayfields were making frantic calls about their missing daughter: taken into custody by a sheriff’s deputy at about 8 A.M. when he was found semiconscious, vomit- and blood-stained sprawled in the front seat of his Jeep Wrangler on Sandhill Road; the front, right wheel of the Jeep had gone off the unpaved road, that was elevated by about two feet above a marshy area. Early-morning hikers in the Preserve had called 911 on their cell phone to report the seemingly incapacitated vehicle with an “unresponding” man sprawled in the front seat and both front doors open.

      When the deputy shook Kincaid awake, identifying himself as a law enforcement officer, Kincaid shoved and struck at him, shouting incoherently, as if he was frightened, and had no idea where he was—the deputy had had to overpower him, cuff him and call for backup.

      Still, Kincaid hadn’t been arrested. Just brought to the Sheriff’s Department headquarters on Axel Road.

      Zeno knew, Brett Kincaid wasn’t supposed to be drinking while taking medication. According to Juliet he was taking a half-dozen prescription pills daily.

      Zeno knew, Brett Kincaid was “much changed” since he’d returned from Iraq. It was not a new or an uncommon situation—it should not have been, given media attention to similar disturbed, returning veterans, a surprising situation—but to those who knew Kincaid, to those who presumed to love him, it was new, it was uncommon, and it was disturbing.

      Eisner said it did seem that Kincaid was maybe “brain damaged” in some way. For sure, Kincaid remembered something that had happened—he remembered a “girl”—but wasn’t sure what he remembered.

      “You see that sometimes,” Eisner said. “In some instances.”