Mr. Wilks pointed to the couch opposite the fire, nearest the worn elements of the rug. “Please, sit and have your say.”
“Thank you. I know this is an imposition in a trying time. I’ll explain my interest, and my qualifications shortly.” Olivier removed his suede coat and handed it to Mr. Wilks before sitting.
Mrs. Wilks lolled sleepily against the arm of the couch to his right. She wore pearls, her hair in a bedraggled bun. A tight cinched blouse, buttoned to the collar, was partially untucked and her skirt had ridden up to reveal knicks and tears in her dark stockings. Her left ankle was bandaged, and her toes were bound by a cast. She held a partially full wine glass in one hand and a smoldering cigarette in the other. She sneered, “Stop letting them in James. I can’t take it anymore.”
James hung the coat on a startlingly bare rack in a recess near the door. Tufts of fur and feathers on the floor the only indicators that the rack had ever been used. He turned back to Olivier and strode to the couch bordering the inner wall. “Elizabeth, please! I apologize for my wife, it’s… been—”
Olivier cut him off. “No need. I understand.” Then, to Elizabeth, “I apologize for intruding. I’m certain you’re at wits-end with experts and promises of hope.” He allowed a touch of sorrow into his voice. A sense of time spent at sea and the grim tedium of walking through an endless desert. “Hope is important. However, it is far more important to understand. I can’t promise it will be alright, but I can promise I will find out what has happened to your daughter.”
Anger bled from Elizabeth’s eyes and her jaw loosened. Tears welled up and started to slowly flow. She placed her wineglass on a rich oak end table and took a long drag on her cigarette, nearly extinguishing it. “I was ready to smash you in the face with that glass. Shriek and send you out the door bleeding.” She stubbed out the cigarette and gestured for another. James picked up a silver case from his own end table and handed it to her. “Yes, James, I said that was the last one, but…”
James shook his head and retrieved a silver Zippo. “I understand.”
Olivier breathed in the lingering smoke and let it drift through him as the fire flared and new smoke rose to join it. He tapped his pen on his knee. “Please, start from the beginning and tell me what’s happened.”
James threw the lighter at the fireplace and collapsed into the sofa. “You don’t even know what’s happening and you say you understand? You have answers when you don’t even have questions!”
Olivier glanced to the weeping Elizabeth and back to the trembling James. He pushed the thought of a winter morning warming with the rising sun into his eyes and offered a small smile. “I was told some details when the case was referred to me. I don’t like to let secondhand accounts color my judgment. Please, in your words, explain when this started. What you noticed. How you felt.”
James retrieved the lighter and remained standing at the hearth in silence.
It was Elizabeth who finally spoke. “It was the last weekend in February. James was wrapping up a project at work, plans for an office building in New York City. I put Laura to bed and came downstairs. We finished book club, and I sent the ladies home.” She picked up her wineglass, scrutinized the legs running down the sides, and placed it back down. “I wasn’t expecting James to be back until Monday morning. I woke suddenly when I heard a noise of glass shattering.”