The Whole Town Forgot My Sister Overnight, So I Made Them Look at Her novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Man Who Had a Brother

Haley goes to Jesse Gentry, the town crank whose right hand is missing from every photo, and he believes her before she finishes; after midnight her left hand is squeezed three times.

I left before the doctor could call back.

Mom stood on the porch in her housecoat and watched me back out of the drive.

She didn't drive, so she couldn't follow me.

In thirty years I'd gotten maybe four pictures of my mother, and all of them were the back of her head.

I sat in my car at the end of their street and tried to think like a sane person.

A sane person would call the police.

I called the police, and the woman at the desk asked me to spell my sister's name twice.

"Ma'am, there's nobody by that name in the county," she said. "Is there somebody with you right now?"

I hung up.

Then I thought of Jesse Gentry.

Everybody in Bell Shoals knew about Jesse Gentry.

Twelve years ago he'd walked into the sheriff's office in his own deputy's uniform and reported his little brother missing.

His mother told the sheriff she'd only ever had one son.

He kept saying it for a year, and they took his badge.

Kids in town still called him the man who had a brother.

I'd been eighteen, and I had laughed at that too.

He lived out on the river road, in a white house with a green roof that had belonged to his grandparents.

It was two in the afternoon, and he answered the door in a T-shirt and sweatpants with his hair flat on one side.

He was thirty-three, tall and lean, with a short dark beard.

He looked worn from working nights, tired and sharp.

"You're the photographer," he said. "Coker."

"Haley."

"I don't need any pictures taken."

"My sister's gone," I said. "Last night. Nobody remembers her, not even my mother."

"Her room is a sewing room, and her fiancé is marrying somebody else."

He didn't say anything.

"I know how it sounds," I said.

"Did she sit for the old camera?"

I stared at him.

He stepped back and held the screen door open.

His kitchen was clean and bare, with one mug in the drainer and a police scanner on the counter.

He poured me coffee, and I didn't drink it.

"Tell me," he said.

I told him about the toast and the velvet chair and the count of eight.

I told him about the warm couch and the fourth plate.

He listened with his right hand flat on the table.

When I got to Callie grabbing my hand on seven, he closed his eyes.

"Which hand?" he said.

"My left."

He turned his own right hand over on the table and looked at it.

"May of 2014," he said. "My brother was seventeen."

"Miss Eugenia stopped him outside the Dollar General and offered him a portrait for our mother's birthday, free."

"She does portraits?"

"She did one for him. I drove him up the hill."

"And you were in the picture."

"His collar was sticking up." He touched his own collar. "On seven, I reached in and fixed it."

He got up and took a photograph off the refrigerator.

It was him in a deputy's uniform at some cookout, holding a paper plate in his left hand.

His right arm hung at his side and ended at the cuff.

"Every picture since," he said. "My driver's license. My mama's Christmas card. The camera at the bank."

I took out my phone.

"Hold up your coffee," I said.

He lifted his mug with his right hand, and I took the picture.

On my screen, a blue mug hung in the air beside his shoulder.

Nothing was holding it.

I set my phone down because my own hand was shaking, the right one.

"I thought I was losing my mind," I said.

"You're not." He sat back down. "You're the first person in twelve years who's sat at this table and said it back to me."

"What happened to him?"

"I don't know. I know she did it, and I know he's somewhere."

"How do you know he's somewhere?"

He looked at me for a long time.

"A little after midnight," he said, "something squeezes my hand."

The back of my neck went cold.

"Every night?"

"Every night for twelve years. Once, hard, like a kid holding on in a crowd."

He rubbed his right palm with his thumb.

"I broke into her tower in 2015 looking for him. Her brother's the police chief. That's how I lost my badge."

"What's in the tower?"

"The camera. A cabinet I never got open." He looked at me. "So I saw it too. What do we do?"

Nobody had asked me that all day.

"I don't know yet," I said. "But I'm not stopping."

"Good."

He wrote his number on the back of a water bill and pushed it across the table.

"Don't go up that hill alone," he said. "And don't sit for her, whatever she offers."

I drove home with the water bill on the seat beside me.

My phone had two messages from my father and one from the doctor's office.

I didn't play them.

My apartment smelled like Callie's perfume, and there was nothing of hers anywhere.

I lay on the couch where she'd been, in my clothes, with my cold left hand on my chest.

I must have fallen asleep, because the clock on the stove said 12:04 when I opened my eyes.

Something had my left hand.

It squeezed once, then again, then a third time.

I knew that hand.

My sister was somewhere in the dark, telling me she loved me.

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