Chapter 4 - The Discovery of the Absence
The visitation room at the Cook County Correctional Facility smelled of floor wax, institutional bleach, and old, sour breath. David sat on the other side of the glass, his vibrant linen shirt replaced by a coarse, oversized scrub top that made his remaining tan look sickly, like old wax.
His hair was unwashed, clumping around his ears, and the casual, country-club arrogance had completely drained from his face, leaving behind the raw, jagged lines of a middle-aged man who had suddenly discovered gravity.
He slammed his palms against the glass the moment I picked up the heavy plastic telephone receiver. "Maya! You have to stop this! Talk to the prosecutors! They’re talking about fifteen years for interstate wire fraud! It was an accounting delay, nothing more! My team was going to rebalance the logistics reserves the moment I got back from the islands!"
"Your team left the building on Wednesday, David," I said, my voice flat, carried through the low-fidelity copper wires of the inmate phone system. "They took their personal laptops and their desk plants with them. There is no Vance Capital Logistics. The federal government owns the trucks now."
"I don't care about the trucks!" he screamed, his eyes rolling back in his head with a wild, animal panic. "Where is Lily? Why haven't you brought her to see me? I’ve been calling the house phone from the inmate terminal every hour. Why is Clara not picking her up from school? Maya... where is my daughter?"
I let the silence hang between us for five long seconds. The air in the tiny visitation booth felt tight, hot, and thin.
"Lily isn't at school, David," I said, my voice entirely steady, completely clear. "And she isn't at Clara's house. She’s at the Oakridge Memorial Park in suburban Palos Hills. Section twelve, row four, plot sixteen. Right under the old willow tree you always complained about because the leaves dropped into our driveway."
David blinked, his brow furrowing as if I were speaking a foreign dialect. "What? What are you talking about? Why would she be at a park? Who took her there?"
"She was buried there last Friday, David," I whispered. "While you were drinking Dom Pérignon on the deck of the Blue Horizon with a girl who doesn't know your middle name."
The phone receiver in David’s hand slowly began to drop away from his ear. His mouth opened, but no sound came out—just a dry, rattling gasp that sounded exactly like the wind moving through the frozen reeds at the edge of the lake.
"She had a fever on Monday evening," I continued, my words cutting through the telephone wire like small, precise surgical incisions. "Her temperature hit forty-one degrees within four hours. I called you at nine o'clock. You hung up on me. I called you at ten. You blocked the number. I called the ship’s satellite registration line at midnight, and the crew told me the owner had requested 'total operational isolation' for the duration of the cruise.
"She asked for you before they did the spinal tap, David," I said, watching his face closely, noting the exact millisecond the realization struck his brain, turning his sickly tan into an absolute, deathly gray. "She asked why Daddy’s phone was broken. And I told her that Daddy was very busy working to make sure we could keep our beautiful house. I lied to her so she could die without knowing her father was a coward."
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David’s body slammed forward against the glass, his forehead striking the surface with a dull, sickening thud. He was screaming now, a raw, animal noise that didn't pass through the telephone receiver, but rattled the entire metal frame of the partition. The phone dangled from its steel cord, swinging back and forth like a pendulum over the gray plastic counter.
I hung up my receiver, wiped the plastic handle with a clean tissue from my pocket, and stood up from the stool without looking back at the man weeping against the glass.
