Page 42 of Inextricably Tied

The air is sucked out of the room. “The serial killer?” Mrs. Albrun whispers. Her head drops into her hands. Mr. Albrun looks distant, gaze unfocused out the window. Harbinger’s fingers clamp together.

“I know it’s not much reassurance, but there wasn’t anything concrete. Just her file. No evidence, no interviews. Nothing like that.”

Mrs. Albrun takes a steadying breath before she lifts her head again. Harbinger tries to be delicate when she asks her questions.

“Did the OID tell you anything about what they think happened?”

“No.” Frustration laces through Mrs. Albrun as she stands, circling into another room to pull out a stack of papers. They’re flyers with Evie’s face and information, news articles of other missing girls or arrests. “They took our report. Sent out a detective. Before we finished telling him about the day she went missing, he started asking if she could have run away. Since then, nothing. No updates, even when I call. At first, they said they were following leads. Now, I can’t even get a call back.”

“The OID noted she could be a runaway.” Harbinger’s gaze lifts. “But you don’t think she is.”

“No.” There’s no hesitation. “She isn’t.”

The Albruns tell Harbinger all about Evie. Marching band practice that left her legs aching. An advanced statistics class she dreaded and excelled in. Her parakeet familiar that hasn’t so much as chirped since she disappeared. None of her friends know where she could’ve gone. No nefarious secrets. Nothing looming over her.

Why would she leave? What did she have to run away from?

When they finish, the Albruns lean back against the couch, exhaustion threaded through their faces. The kind you can’t sleep off, seeping into their bones every moment their daughter is missing.

Mrs. Albrun disappears into the kitchen and returns with a business card, one punch away from a discount. “This is where she was going that day after school.” Mrs. Albrun holds it as reverently as she did the picture. “It never stayed in her purse. I always told her to keep it in her wallet, but it must have slipped out.”

Harbinger’s glove runs over the star-shaped holes centered over pieces of sushi. “Do you want me to read it?” Both Albruns stare before Harbingers explains. “I can see certain things through touch. Only the past. Only what happened while she had the card. But if Evie touched it, I might be able to get a glimpse of what she was doing that day.”

“Yes!” Mrs. Albrun thrusts the card toward her. “Please. Anything.”

Harbinger reels back in her seat, taking the card between her fingers. “Just don’t touch me, please. During or after.”

Mrs. Albrun steps back toward the couch. Harbinger pulls off her glove, fingers drifting over the card before they settle on the center punch.

All the threads stretch out in her mind, a tapestry pulled loose, bound with images of Evie’s face. Rifling through her purse in school, laughing with a pair of chopsticks in hand, a petty argument outside the restaurant: teenager things. But the most recent touchpoints show Evie’s mother pulling the card off the refrigerator. Trying to hand the card to a detective. And before that, slipping the card into Evie’s hand as she hurried out the door.

Harbinger hones in on that memory. The last trace of Evie, copper strands pulled out to frame her smiling face. The card slips between her fingers as she presses her cheek against her mother’s. It’s like seeing a ghost, the last visage of someone so alive.

Then Evie’s out the door. The card floats to the ground, forgotten.

It’s a skill Harbinger hasn’t mastered, pulling emotions from objects, finding anything more than location in time and space. But there isn’t any doubt when she taps into the card’s final memory of Evie. Harbinger pulls her bare fingers away from its surface.

“I saw her at the front door.” Harbinger holds up the back of her hand. “Wearing a metal ring with a pattern cut into it. It was glowing.”

Mr. Albrun nods with rapt attention. “We made that ring for her thirteenth birthday, to glow when she was near someone she could trust…” His throat tightens. “So she would always be safe.”

What Harbinger can say is too simple, too meaningless in the face of everything else, but it’s the one resounding certainty. “Evie was happy. She smiled after you when you went back in the kitchen that morning. You’re right; I don’t think she would have left you for anything.”

Harbinger wishes she could give them more, give them anything real, but this is all she has.

The tremble in Mrs. Albrun’s lip is too much to look at. Harbinger averts her eyes, tugging her glove back on before she digs into her pocket.

“Here: text me your phone number. We’ll keep you updated on what we find. Do you have a picture of Evie I could take with me? Something more recent.”

Mrs. Albrun takes Harbinger’s simple business card while her husband moves toward a hutch in the corner. He pulls out a school portrait with Evie’s hair pulled away from her face.

He lingers on the picture before he hands it to Harbinger. She takes it between her gloves, careful not to bend the edges. “Thank you. I’ll take good care of it.”

He guides Harbinger back to the front door, and she gives a weak wave before she reaches for the knob.

“Do you think she’s alive?”

Harbinger’s hand hovers in the air. She turns back toward the living room, where Mr. Albrun’s hand rests on his wife’s shoulder. Dusk outlines the front window. Their home looks safe. Warm, despite the fog hanging over it. Like somewhere their child would want to come back to.