Free Girls by Frederick Busch

pastry. Mr. Tanner nodded at the plate before him and said, “Piece of cake, you could say.”
    Mrs. Tanner ignored him. Strodemaster said, “You’re a gutsy man, Reverend.”
    Mrs. Tanner seemed to be shivering. She looked up and caught my stare. She gave me a little smile.
    Like a kid, and despising myself right away, I blew on my hands to show her it was really the temperature, not the dying.
    Strodemaster saw, and he moved out of his chair to the living room. I heard his footsteps and then the furnace coming on. He returned, chafing his hands. He sat, and the silence began.
    Finally, I said, “I’m not an investigator.”
    The father looked at my pad and my pen. “I’m a campus cop,” I said, “a security person. I have some training, but I got it twenty years ago. I don’t carry a weapon. I don’t have a license to investigate. I have a pistol permit, but I can’t imagine what good it would do us. I did a little investigating in the service—this was years ago. Not too much, not that successfully. What I mostly did was bully drunk soldiers and drug addicts and men who were sad about their marriages. That kind of thing. What I do now is run after college kids who drink too much, mostly. So you shouldn’t expect me to know a lot, or to beable to find out a lot. You need to understand how little I can offer you.”
    They stared at me. The father blinked, the mother seemed hardly to move her eyes from me, and Strodemaster ate a jelly doughnut and drank with a lot of noise. His doughnut leaked on his fingers and as he licked them he made a kind of low hum. He seemed very happy in a strange way. It annoyed me. I thought he ought to be sad. But he was enjoying this. I guessed because he wanted it so much. He seemed to have appetites for everything. His bathrobe picked up blots of coffee mixed with milk and crumbs of cake.
    “Are you religious?” the father asked.
    “Well,” I said. “No.”
    “I’m a pastor. That’s my church you passed, driving in. Sunday school is taught in the basement by my wife here. Our daughter came out of God’s house and she disappeared. You wouldn’t see that part of it as meaningful, I take it. Or would you?”
    “I don’t know yet. But I wouldn’t take it up with God, if that’s what you’re asking.”
    “She’s alive,” the mother said.
    I nodded.
    “No, she is. I feel her. I felt her after we conceived her, and I feel her stirring now. She’s alive. She’s well. She’s frightened, but she’s coping. She always could.”
    “She looks lovely. In the picture. You’ve done a wonderful job of getting the posters out.”
    “Everybody’s helping,” the mother said. “How could you not help a child that good?”
    I nodded. “And what, exactly, did you think
I
might be able to help with?”
    “Oh,” the father said, “sort of interpreting for us, in a way. I don’t know what the authorities mean when they tell us things. They’re very busy; they’re a little unwilling to talk too much about their work, I think.”
    “Habit,” I said. “They don’t mean to be cruel.”
    Strodemaster raised his eyebrows. He wanted them to mean tobe cruel, because he’d lived a life on the assumption that anyone not sleeping with him might be working against him. He must have been a child of ferocious appetites and pretty basic satisfactions, I thought.
    I said, “Look. I can get names from you, investigators on the case, and I can visit them and ask what they know. I can tell you what they tell me,
if
they tell me. I was wondering. I drew this up in the car.” I turned the pad over and showed them my little note. It asked whomever it might concern to tell me as their agent whatever the Tanners were allowed to know about the search for their child. I asked them to sign and date their signature and they did.
    The mother said, “Do we pay you a retainer?”
    “No, Mrs. Tanner. I’m not a lawyer or a detective. I’m just a friendly volunteer. I want you to have your