“We’re calling it a drowning,” Cleon Harrington told the local network affiliate, when, at the steamy crux of August, Rachel Morris went missing.  Phrasing it that way saved him from having to lie.  No body had been recovered; he hesitated to state any private conclusion as fact.  But the press pressed him.  As the chief of police, he was expected to volunteer some absolute—coroner’s report, a murder suspect, at least a plausible chain of events.  Without evidence, he had nothing of the sort to give.

The dreams started here, in the uncertainty.  They bred as the shadows lengthened and the POLICE LINE tape was cut from the trees in her parent’s yard and disposed of.  No footprints to take impressions of, no witnesses.  The last person to see her had been the neighbor boy, who told Cleon that Rachel spent a lot of the summer in the willow tree trailing its leaves in the shallows at the edge of the property.  All six deputies in the department had donned waders and kicked around in the muck, to no avail.

Maybe it was only the heat haze, but Cleon saw ripples where there were none and went to hide in the Morris kitchen with a glass of lemonade.  He felt too young for his first big case; his father had never warned him to expect more questions than clues.  He’d taught him to shot and sprint, but never to squint at the dirt for the story it might offer.

Serenity summer was already aswim in funerals.  During the first heat wave, Betty Ann Frakes passed after a quiet struggle with leukemia; a few weeks later, her sister Josephine choked to death on a flounder bone.  Their neighbors, the Stewarts, lost a baby girl two weeks after bringing her home.  Max Kolsky, the grocery store manager, went when his car stalled on the Charlemagne train tracks.  Several beloved family pets had to be put down after a string of attacks by a stray with mange.  Dutch elm disease struck hard and fast, decimating too many fine trees.

Cleon wanted to stare at the losses and wait for a pattern to emerge in its own time, but the local paper had leaked the story to a new crew and suddenly he was confronted with a microphone.

“We’re not at liberty to discuss the details of an on-going investigation,” he’d offered weakly, knowing full well their were no details to divulge or withhold in the first place.  The press pressed, and Cleon was at a loss.  Every blade of grass has been combed through.  Nothing was missing from Rachel’s bedroom.  She had no boyfriend to run off with, no one to visit in parts unknown, no problems in school, no sudden cloud of depression deadening her in some slow, insidious way that might summon a suicide as yet undiscovered.  She’d made her bed the morning before, spent the day with her best friend.  Nothing was wrong.

Cleon took it upon himself to tell the friend, who lived directly across the street, though shed already been told.  The way she looked at him made the day even more impossible to bear.  Like he was to blame somehow.  Like he had done something wrong in the asking that made it impossible for Rachel to return.  The parents had called the police when they found Rachel’s bed un-slept-in, but they looked at him the same way, as if his presence was some admission that their daughter was never coming back.  He owed it to them to prove himself innocent.  Rachel was gone before his search began.  He was simply the first to declare their worst fear aloud.

Elizabeth was watching the tail end of the news report when he arrived home.  Rachel’s yearbook photo disappeared from the screen as he put away his service revolver and kicked off his boots.

“I saved you some macaroni salad.  It’s on the top shelf of the fridge.”

“I think we should move,” he answered.

“Sleep on it.”  She smiled weakly.  ”We’ll talk tomorrow.”

While his wife washed up in the kitchen, Cleon dozed on the couch, shreds of primetime television weaving into his dreams.  A laugh track ran under the day happening in reverse.  He put his boots back on, pulled out of the driveway, shook hands with Mr. Morris, pocket his card, explored the house from bottom to top.  Elizabeth kissed him on the forehead.

“You’re talking in your sleep.  Drink this.”  She put a mug of tea on the end table and went up to bed.  He drank it.  Brushed his teeth.  Slid between the sheets while she snored softly.

He was in for years of possible answers dangled just beyond his grasp.  Years of sleep where the only dream he remembered upon waking was one of Rachel, slowly slipping beneath the surface of the lake, already dead.  Some nights he dove in after her.  Others, the water turned to glass and he would slice through it as if ice fishing, reach in and search for her hand, her hair, any trace.

But the worst dream was the product of that first night, the night the story ran on the news.  In it, Cleon was bathing in a room with mildew climbing the tile grout.  It was so dark, he could not see the edges of the room.  No soap, no towels.  He was in the tepid water and watching himself at once.

Rachel walked towards him.  She wore a pale green dress with white buttons up the front the size of quarters.  And Cleon was embarrassed to see her this way, as if she was the naked one.  He stared at his knees, stared at himself staring at his knees.  Rachel sat down on the tub’s lip, put her feet in the water.  In her hand, a darning needle with a length of thick, waxy thread through its eye.

She sewed his lips together with a practiced, even whipstitch.  Cleon didn’t flinch or even bleed; he pursed his lips for her.  She tied off the last stitch with a tidy knot and he closed one eye and then the other as she repeated the process.  When she was done, he couldn’t see her or himself in the bath anymore, but her heard the water stir and knew she was gone.