Free The Sight by Judy Blundell Page B

say.
    “I realize that,” he says. “There’s this thing I need called probable cause. Is there anything else you can give me to go on?” He speaks gently now. “I know it’s not easy, Gracie. But just now, you told me something that’s important, something you remembered and saw in a different light. Can you think of anything else like that?”
    At first, I’m impatient with this question. I don’t see how I can reinterpret something that didn’t stick in my mind. I can’t just pluck a sentence from my memory that Emily has said and shout, “That’s it!”
    But suddenly, I do remember something.
    “The library,” I blurt out. “Emily wanted to go to the library that day, the day she disappeared.”
    “Yes?” Detective Fusilli said.
    “Emily wasn’t a reader,” I say.
    “And? You think she was meeting someone?”
    “I don’t know,” I say. “But the library has computers. If she wanted to send a message that she didn’t want traced, she could go there.”
    Joe Fusilli nods slowly. I can see two things—frustration that he didn’t think of this already, and relief that he has something to go on now.
    I’ve given him a lead.

FOURTEEN
    The police search Zed’s computer. It’s been wiped. There’s no trace of e-mails or websites visited, not even buried in the hard drive. When they search the library computers, they find the same thing on two of them.
    They want to talk to him, but Zed disappears.
    The days pass, and they can’t find him. Shay tells me all this after she gets home from work. Her head is in the refrigerator while she roots around for something to cook for dinner. I can see that she can’t really focus on food, and for Shay, that’s saying something. She takes out a lemon, a head of cabbage, and a cantaloupe.
    She stares at them on the counter.
    “There’s always pizza,” I say.
    “I need to cook. Want to go to the grocery store?” she says.
    I know she doesn’t want to leave me alone. Diego didn’t go to work today. He hung around the house, which he never does. We weeded the garden together, just because I couldn’t stand to see him out there doing it by himself. I felt too guilty. Wewatched some lame afternoon TV. Diego chatted on the computer while I stared out the window and wished I’d have another vision that would clear everything up, even if I was too scared to try. Shay got home and released Diego from Gracie duty. He scooted out to see Marigold.
    She tells me that they are checking out all the websites visited from the library on the afternoon Emily left, but so far it didn’t sound like they’d found anything. The librarian remembered seeing her, but she doesn’t remember if it was that day. If she had, she would have gone to the police already.
    Another dead end. Another day.
    But it’s just us for dinner, and it will feel good to take a drive.
    Shay grabs the keys, and I follow. We roll down all the windows and the blast of air is warm and smells like summer. I like the early evenings here best, when the sun is liquid and pours over the fields. The sky turns this incredible color, a blue so deep that it seems to vibrate, and the shadows of the pines are purple.
    “The blue hour,” Shay says. She smiles, loving it, too.
    We drive to Greystone Harbor, where the good grocery store is. I trail along behind Shay as she buys salmon and greens for a salad. She picks up a tub of freshly baked cookies from the local bakery. When I used to go grocery shopping with Mom,she tossed things into the cart quickly, consulting her list. Shay never makes a list. She inhales, she peers, she talks to the fish man and the wine lady. I’m mildly bored, but the music is catchy. I hum along to “Secret Agent Man.”
    He’s giving you a number, and taking away your name…
    …taking away your name…
    I go away and come back. I don’t know how else to describe it. Something gray drops over me, like fuzz on a TV screen, and I hear Emily’s voice in my head, and she says,