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and wide-eyed headlamps draw close then disappear. The water cups the skyline’s reflection—a ghost city. Val clutches the plastic figurine until it begins to cut into her skin. She counts backward from ten, and then she begins to pray for the pink raft to appear in the river below.

CHAPTER FIVE
    T he Seventy-Sixth Precinct smells of burned coffee. The vinyl tile is the color of a murky swimming pool. The windows are double-thick glass and don’t look out on much besides the blank stucco of a neighboring town house.
    Jonathan sits at a large brown Formica table with a faux wood grain finish. He stares out the window of his interrogation room watching detectives lean into their small desk fans, cooling off the space between their collars and their necks.
    When he demanded his one phone call, the cops laughed. He’s not under arrest and he can make as many phone calls as he likes. But there’s no phone in here and he left his cell in his apartment. The officers assure him that he’s in for routine questioning. Missing kids are no joke they say, as if Jonathan might have been under this impression.
    Jonathan’s hangover has crept past the fog of his Tylenol PM, leaving an infuriating numbness that makes his eyes feel as if they are wearing sweaters. Now he hears his thoughts as he thinks them, a maddening echo of each unpleasant idea.
    He fiddles with the table, chipping the Formica, worrying that he has cast doubts on his innocence by asking for a phone call. If the officers return, cuff him, lead him to a cell, he wonders who he can reach.
    The only person he’s sure to get is Dawn. The girl never sleeps. He can imagine the scene if she waltzed into the station. She’d make him pay for summoning her by wearing an aqua mesh midriff top, hot pants, and platform go-go boots. She swears only “fags” wear heels before dark. I’m a queen. It’s different , she says.
    Jonathan digs his fingers into his temples as if he can squeeze the hangover out. All morning he has been struggling to banish memories of his mother, but when he closes his eyes he sees Eden’s body, her seaweed-knotted hair. And now he confuses this picture with the girl under the pier. He mistakes the pale moons of their nails, their shriveled fingers, the mud and gravel on their palms. The last time he’d seen Eden—the last time he’d been out to his parents’ summer home—her face was the color of moonstone. It looked as if the bay had sunk into her cheeks and was struggling to push back out.
    As the police wrapped her in a blanket, the sun broke over the bluffs on Castle Road on the eastern shore of Fishers Island. A soft orange glow—a warm color that brought no warmth—crept from Eden’s chin, to her cheeks, then illuminated eyes that were as still and opaque as marbles. Jonathan watched two men lift his mother into the ambulance. Three days later, when he took the ferry back to the mainland, he knew he wouldn’t return.
    He stands up and walks to the window so he can watch the detectives who brought him in passing around a photo of a girl in a Catholic school uniform. Jonathan knows this girl as well as the one he found under the pier. He’s seen them together waiting for the 61 bus on Van Brunt. He’s noticed them in the halls of St. Bernardette’s before they faded back into the sea of plaid skirts and white blouses.
    The room is soundproof. He watches the police move around as if they are in a silent movie. He watches the pantomime of their lips against the receivers of their beige desk phones. Without noise their business loses its urgency and becomes slapstick—the muted rush of two detectives grabbing their jackets from their chairs and dashing for the door, the comic exaggeration of the station’s chief chewing out a uniformed officer.
    When two detectives enter his room, they bring with them a tumble of noise—the ringing telephones, radio static, the metallic slam of desk drawers. Then the door closes and it is silent