This story is reconstructed based on FBI records.
Nora Bell kept her hands around a coffee cup that had gone cold an hour ago, and Mara Ellison sat across the kitchen table from her because there was nothing else useful to do. Alice was supposed to be home by six. It was past eight now, and the radio that morning had said a young woman's body had been pulled from the Green River, and that was enough, on a night like this, to turn an ordinary lateness into something neither woman wanted to name out loud.
"She does this," Nora said, not quite believing it herself. "She loses track of time at a friend's house. She always calls." The phone on the wall hadn't rung. Mara had been sent to the Bells' street that afternoon on an unrelated canvass, had stopped in when she saw Nora pacing the porch, and had simply stayed, because twenty-seven years old or not, she knew what it was to wait for a sound that refused to come.
At eight-forty the telephone rang and Nora had it in her hand before the second ring finished. Mara watched her shoulders drop, watched the fear leave her face in a single motion, like a window shade let go. Alice had missed the bus and walked the long way and was sorry, so sorry, she hadn't thought anyone would worry. Nora laughed in the particular way people laugh right after terror lets them go, half a sob in it, and said she'd have words for her daughter when she got there, but gently, the way you scold someone you're only glad to see.
Mara left before Alice walked in the door. She had her own assignment waiting, radioed in twice already by her supervisor, Ruth Salcedo, who did not have patience to spare that week. Mara found her at a folding table near the riverbank access road, with a road map spread beneath a flashlight. "I need you going door to door along the frontage road," Salcedo said. "Find out who's willing to speak with us and how we can reach them again. If anybody has information, record what they actually say. Don't promise anything you can't deliver."
The frontage road houses were modest, set back from a highway that carried more trucks than cars, and most porches stayed dark when Mara knocked. The woman who answered at one house kept the screen door latched even after Mara showed her badge. "I'm not getting mixed up in this," she said. "You put my name on a paper, and next thing it's a reporter at my door, or worse." She told Mara that her son worked nights and her grown daughter had recently moved back in. Neither had asked to have strangers turning up at the house. Mara lowered the notebook she had opened. The woman watched it rather than her face.
"I can't guarantee your name will never become public," Mara said. "And I can't control every later use of a statement. I can explain what I'm asking before you decide whether to answer." The woman asked whether refusing would bring someone else to her door. Mara could not guarantee that either. She explained that she could record a preferred way to make contact, so anyone assigned a return visit would know to arrange it first. The woman considered that. She had no sighting to report and no information about the discovery. What she would give was a telephone number and an hour when a call would not wake her son. Mara read both back. The woman corrected one digit, then asked her to write down that a call was not permission to arrive unannounced. Mara wrote that too, thanked her, and went to the next dark porch.
It was nearly midnight when Mara returned to the car she had left outside the Bells' house and remembered her coat on the hook by their door. She climbed the porch steps quietly. Through the screen came Nora's voice, no longer frightened but exasperated, going on about dishes in the sink and a phone bill that hadn't been paid. Alice answered just as sharply. Mara stopped with her hand raised. After the silence at the kitchen table, the argument sounded almost extravagant: two people certain enough of each other's presence to be annoyed. She had wanted all evening to do something useful. Here was a safe return she had neither caused nor guaranteed. She listened for another moment, grateful for the noise, before she knocked.