Missing

Chapter 2

I shouldn't have punched Nick, I know that. Dr. Grant was clear on that, later. Ecklie was very clear on it.

I'm his supervisor, and I'm a role model for the office. Punching Nick was wrong, and I do regret it.

In my defense, things were crazy. I was crazy. The house was filled with people, all of whom kept eyeing me and eyeing the garden shed out back. They were moving at half speed, and I knew they were just biding their time, waiting for Sara to walk in the door any second.

Any second now.

My eyes were flitting to the door too. I looked up every time a new person arrived, but it wasn't Sara, wasn't ever Sara.

"Have some juice, Gil." Catherine was wrapping my fingers around the glass, and shouldn't she have been at home with her daughter? Great, I was breaking up families on top of everything else. The glass slipped out of my grasp and bounced on the carpet, drenching the floor with orange juice. I waited for the reprimand, but it didn't come. Catherine just squeezed my shoulder and went to get the paper towels.

Greg walked up, still on his cell. "Grissom, we've pulled the records on your home phone and both of your cells. There weren't any calls to taxi services. She's got to be in the area."

That was a relief. I'd had visions of Sara heading to Mexico in the backseat of a rickety old cab.

The front door opened again, and Nick came in. I stood up to greet him, while Catherine was still at work mopping up the spill on the carpet.

"Hey," he said, his hands in his pockets. "I'm sorry I got the message so late, I was out on a date and didn't bring my cell. Greg said you can't find Sara?"

"She's gone," I replied, looking around at the various police officers and CSI's milling about the house. "She's gone."

"Well where did she go earlier?"

I glanced back at him, wondering if he'd had some wine with his dinner. "Nick, what do you think all this is? We don't know where she went."

"Well the cab picked her up at, what, three in the afternoon?"

The moment faintly reminded me of when I had hearing problems, the way everything would go silent, very very silent. "What cab?"

He shrugged, frowning. "At the end of shift this morning, Sara asked if I'd call and arrange for a taxi to pick her up here at three. She said her cell wasn't working-"

He might have wanted to say more, but my fist flew out and connected with his cheek, hard. He ended up sprawled on the floor, his palm pressed to his cheek and outrage in his eyes. And then Warrick was there, pulling me back and muttering something in my ear, and Catherine was there, putting an ice pack on Nick's cheek, and Greg was there, and Brass was there, and Sara was still gone. And my hand hurt like hell.

"Okay, here's where we are." Brass sat down heavily, throwing a notepad on the kitchen table. It had become our center of operations after the police left, and only Sara's friends remained. "Cab driver says he took her to the bus station downtown."

"Sara hates the bus station." The words came out of my mouth automatically, even though I knew they didn't matter. Sara did hate the bus station, and she did love me and the dog, and in spite of all that she was on a bus somewhere, and what did I know, anyway?

"Greg and I can talk to the ticket sellers," Warrick said, getting up from the table. "Grissom, you got a photo we can use?"

I waved vaguely to the living room. There were eleven photographs of her in that room; he could pick his favorite.

"I'll check her financials," Catherine said, getting up. "Do you have a joint bank account?"

"Yes, but we have personal accounts too."

"Credit cards?"

I started rubbing my forehead, at which point she nodded and left.

Nick came over and sat down, his cheek a darkening shade of purple. "Her cell phone service ended at midnight. I called the provider, and they said she called to terminate her contract two weeks ago."

Brass' phone rang, and he excused himself, leaving me and Nick at the table. I looked over at his bruise guiltily. It looked like it was growing blacker by the second.

"Hey, um, Nick-"

"It's fine," he said shortly, and I nodded, and it wasn't fine, and we both knew it, but nothing was fine.

I let Bruno out to do his business, then walked slowly through the house. This was our space, this was our home. That was her glass vase and her framed artwork and her nonstick frying pan. She was everywhere here, so why would she leave?

I found myself in our bedroom, remembering the way she'd clung to me as we slept. As I slept, rather. I guess she'd just lay in bed until I fell asleep, then took her toothbrush and her shoes and my heart and crept out to a waiting cab.

"Where are you, Sara?"

Maybe she would have stayed if we'd made love before bedtime, if I'd cooked veggie burgers for breakfast, if I'd taken better care of her. Maybe she'd needed someone to listen, and I wasn't listening-

It was then that I remembered her journal.

It was wrong to read someone else's journal, really wrong. I nodded at how wrong it was, as I took it out of her nightstand and opened it.

There were pages missing. That was the first thing I noticed. Dozens of pages, ripped right out of the book. My fingers traced the ragged remnants, and flipped through the rest of the empty pages. I sighed in disappointment, before noticing something on the last page. Near the bottom, in Sara's familiar scrawl, I read:

I am half-sick of shadows.