Free Know Your Beholder: A Novel by Adam Rapp

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    Finally Mary said, “I saw you speaking to that man yesterday.” I asked her what man she was referring to and she said, “The tall creepy-looking guy with the mustache.”
    “So you were here,” I said. I told her how he’d claimed to have rung their doorbell several times.
    “Who was he?” she asked.
    “A detective,” I replied.
    She said something about how “these people”—I supposed she meant cops—were “relentless.” She asked what he wanted, and I told her how he’d simply asked a few standard questions. “About Bethany?” she asked.
    Hearing her say her daughter’s name was strangely shocking in that it revealed nothing more than if she’d uttered “clock” or “can opener.”
    She said, “What exactly did he ask?”
    “If I’d seen anything out of the ordinary.”
    She started bobbing her head. Tiny little nods. It was almost parkinsonian, this bobbing.
    I was confused, back on my heels, defensive, yet I still had this impulse to pull her close and feel her breasts press into me. Something about our mutual desperation. Or maybe it was just my hormonal loneliness, my proximity to an unwashed woman pheromonally spiking my testosterone. Despite our many respective thermal layers, I was convinced that an old-fashioned breast-to-chest hug would do us both a world of good.
    After her head came to rest, she said that they hadn’t filed a missing person’s report because they didn’t even know what that was.
    “Of course,” I said.
    She said that when they signed the lease they told me how they were “different.” “We’re still getting used to this kind of life,” she added.
    I told her I totally understood.
    “Why did he give you his card?” she asked, and the space between her words had shrunk, her breath had quickened.
    I said I was pretty sure it was standard procedure and that he had given it to me unsolicited.
    Then she asked if she could see the card, and I told her it was up in the attic.
    “What’s his name?” she asked.
    I told her “Mansard” and she asked what kind of detective he was. “Just a regular detective,” I said.
    Her eyes seemed to go soft-focus, and she mouthed his name a few times. Then the head bobbing started again. “Are you gonna call him?” she said.
    “Should I?” I asked.
    Her blue eyes seemed to surge. She regarded me with an attitude I can only describe as ultracontained vitriol, her mouth a small knot of bitterness. “We didn’t know about the Office of Missing Persons,” she said.
    “There’s no need to explain anything to me, Mrs. Bunch.”
    “Mary,” she said.
    “I mean Mary.”
    “I’m not a librarian.”
    “Of course,” I capitulated yet again.
    “She disappeared while we were shopping,” she said. “Someone took her right out of the fucking Target.”
    Their refrigerator hummed in the kitchen. Hides of snow calved on the roof. Someone in the neighborhood was trying to start a chain saw. Plows scraped by on distant streets. These were epic sounds.
    Then, to change the subject, perhaps cheaply, almost in the voice of another man, someone I’ve never heard speak before, I said, “I don’t mean to have to be a landlord right now, Mary, but you’re almost three weeks late with the rent.”
    “We’ll have it to you in a few days,” she replied tersely.
    Her large, unblinking eyes, their pupils enormous again. This is what grief does to your eyes, I thought. It turns them into doll’s eyes. Grief or sociopathic numbness.
    “Todd’s waiting on a check,” she added.
    “Don’t worry about the late fee,” I offered.
    For which she didn’t thank me. Mary Bunch was about as thankless as an interstate tollbooth attendant.
    “By the way,” she said, “are you planning on shoveling the front steps? Todd almost slipped and fell this morning. It’s starting to get dangerous and we can’t afford him losing any days.”
    “I have someone coming by,” I lied.
    She asked me why I couldn’t do it.
    “Bad