The Tie

The Tie

           Soggy, blue patterned silk flung in a culvert. Liz Baker slowed down to peep over the edge.

            What’s the story on that? Maybe some guy got tired of the rat race, yanked off his tie, and drove off to a new life.

           Liz pictured some drone bookkeeper in a hive of cubicles. His queen bee boss stung him with constant criticism. Liz’s imagination drove him to the airport, where he flew away to flowers and honeys on a tropical island.

          Liz smiled. Her daily three-mile jog released her mind from the bonds of to-do lists, scheduled meetings, and deadlines. The gated community where she and Jeff lived in a two-story Tudor was in sight, so she allowed herself one more speculation about the tie.

           Perhaps a woman had given her lover a tie. When they had broken up, and he couldn’t stand the sight of the gift. Come to think of it, hadn’t she given Jeff a similar tie when he gave his last big presentation?

            She slipped out of her Nikes at the front door and padded upstairs to their bedroom. Twirling the full tie rack in Jeff’s closet, she noticed the blue figured one was missing.

           How odd. Could the tie in the ditch be Jeff’s? The location was not that far from their house. Or maybe he had worn it to work this morning. She couldn’t even remember what color suit he had on. 

           Liz knew Jeff frowned on her calling him at Cameron Corporation, a huge technical training facility, especially about something this trivial. She punched the speed dial number anyway.

           “Hello, may I speak to Jeff?”

Frances, Jeff’s administrative assistant, answered. “I’m sorry, he’s on vacation, and won’t be back until the twenty-third. Would you like to leave a message on his voice mail?” Liz glanced at the calendar on the bedroom wall.

Vacation? The twenty third? That was three weeks away.

“Frances, you’re joking, right? This is Liz.”

A long silence. “Uh, I didn’t recognize your voice.”

Liz knew Jeff had three weeks’ vacation coming. They had planned on flying to Cancun in November. March third, the calendar read.

This time Liz was mute.

“You didn’t know? I mean, you didn’t go? I don’t understand.” Frances babbled.

Liz didn’t either.

“Did he say where he was going?” Liz managed.

“No, in fact I was surprised when he told me two weeks ago that he had changed his vacation dates and was leaving in March instead of November. I just assumed you had decided to get away to Mexico earlier since he was under so much pressure.”

“What pressure? When I asked about work, he just said it was the same old humdrum.”

“He didn’t mention Mr. Wang, who took over our division three months ago? He watches our every move, changes projects we’ve been working on for weeks, and raises blisters on everyone at the Monday morning staff meeting.”

“No, he didn’t.”

Something in Liz’s stomach plunged like a runaway elevator. She had to get off the phone, sit down, or lie down.

“Call me back if you hear from him.” Liz said faintly. “I-I’ve got to go.”

***

Frances hung up the phone. She’d noticed Jeff hanging around the water cooler with that new graphics designer babe from the head office. Was there a connection? She could hardly wait for her break to share this latest tidbit with Brittany, her co-worker in accounting.

***

Liz rubbed her arms. Even after her run, she suddenly felt cold.

She wilted into her striped silk armchair. She ransacked her mind for plausible explanations ... none came. Wait a minute, I forgot my cell phone on the kitchen table; perhaps he left a message while I was out running. She hauled herself out of her chair. She pounded downstairs, each step so forceful; her socks made imprints in the carpet. She grabbed her phone in a stranglehold, pushed #1 with shaking hands and listened to the insanely cheery voice. “You have two messages.” The first one was Gloria from Opulence Design asking her if she knew where the Morton file was, and the second, her mother-in-law, Dorothy, reminding her that they were staying at their beach house this weekend, and would she please pop over to their house and water the plants?

 She punched in Jeff’s number, pressing the cell phone tightly against her ear.

“This is Jeff Baker. Your call is important to me. So please leave your number.”

It was a moment before she could say anything after the beep.

“Jeff, what in the hell is going on? I called your work, and Frances said you were on vacation. Where are you? Call me.” The call went to Voice Mail. Liz sank down on a kitchen chair.

She thought about calling Samantha, her closest friend, but she knew Sam had yoga class at seven on Thursdays. What would she say anyway? I have no idea where my husband is. He took off without telling me he was going on a three-week vacation. How embarrassing. Sam might think Jeff had run off with another woman. Could that be true? Ok, so their marriage wasn’t a fairy tale romance, and their sex life didn’t steam off the wallpaper, but they had been married fourteen years.

When they had met, Jeff’s reliability had appealed to her need for security. He didn’t like anything spontaneous. Did she really know him at all? She wished she had acted like she knew all about Jeff leaving on the phone with Frances. Knowing Frances, probably Cameron’s office was already humming with speculation, but she had been so shocked, she hadn’t been thinking.

Now, she must calm down and consider her options.

Call Jeff’s mother? Good grief, no. She’d never really approved of Liz, and she would be in a dither thinking he’d been abducted or something. God, what a thought. She imagined men wearing ski masks attacking Jeff and hacking off his tie. She shut down a vision of them cutting off anything else. No, he had left voluntarily, … or had he? What if someone had forced him to leave?

She had to talk to someone. Dan Kaufman, Jeff’s golfing buddy, wouldn’t freak out. She leafed through their address book to the K’s.

           He answered on the first ring.

           “Dan here.”

           “Uh, hi, Dan, it’s Liz. You wouldn’t happen to know where Jeff is, would you? Did he mention anything about going on a trip?”

           “No, is something wrong, Liz? You sound kind of shook up.”

His genuine sympathy unbuttoned her emotions. Her story and tears poured out.

“Would you like Patty and me to come over?” He asked.

“No, no, he’ll probably show up soon. If I don’t get a phone call by tomorrow, I’ll let you know.”

Liz hurried to the entryway and pulled her tennis shoes back on. She bolted out the door, retracing her steps to the ditch. The tie sprawled just out of reach in the boggy hollow. Her white tennis shoes swished in the mud, as she stretched out her arm as far as it would go. She grabbed one pointed end and hauled it up. She recognized the tiny blue triangles; they stabbed her chest and made it hard to breathe.

On the way home, she held the tie away from her body as if it were a snake ready to strike. Once inside the house, she looped it over the coat rack, ignoring the drips on the hardwood floor. She forgot about her muddy tennis shoes and tracked footprints upstairs to their bedroom. Flopping down on her celery green spread, she suddenly didn’t care who knew. She wanted help, answers, solutions. She opened her cell phone.

Her relatives and friends asked questions.

“Was Jeff depressed?” “Did he drink, do drugs?” “Was there a problem with their marriage?” “Were they experiencing money difficulties?”

Liz began to feel like a recording. “No, of course not,” she protested. But when she hung up, she felt unsure about the answers to any of these questions. When she called her mother-in-law at their beach condominium, Dorothy had asked, “What did you do to make him leave?”

Something terrible, Liz decided, but what? At least Sam had insisted on coming over to spend the night.

By the time Samantha arrived, Liz had gone through a whole box of tissues. They sat up until after three a.m., dissecting Jeff, men in general, and killing two bottles of Pinot Noir.

“Men are so damn unpredictable.” Sam said, inhaling her third glass. Liz didn’t mention the time Sam had bought that one-thousand-dollar Native American chieftain sculpture that didn’t match their French provincial.

While Sam snored in the guest bedroom, Liz wished for a dial to turn off the frightening program still accelerating through her consciousness. She left three more messages on Jeff’s phone.

There was no way Liz could skip work the next day. A shipment of evening gowns would arrive tomorrow for Saturday afternoon’s runway modeling show. She swallowed some natural de-stress tabs, applied under eye cover-up, and knotted a rose scarf at the neckline of her clinging black sheath.

On her break, she called Jeff’s work again. But no one seemed to know anything else except that he had left on vacation.

At lunch, she closed the door of her office and called the police. Liz gripped her cell phone until her knuckles were white. Finally, the officer in charge answered.

“When forty-eight hours has elapsed, then we will start searching,” he said. “Call me then and we will take down your information.”

Liz calculated in her head. Yesterday, Jeff had left to catch the Amtrak shuttle into the city at 6:30 a.m. She would have to wait until the next day to even make a report.

The policeman interrupted her thoughts. “Anyway, didn’t you say he had gone on vacation? He probably just needed to get away.”

Liz felt like screaming but didn’t, not appropriate for a businesslike demeanor.

That night, she lay on her side of the king bed. The digital clock’s numbers glowed in the dark room taunting her as they slowly turned to the hours of the morning.

***

“Pamela,” Liz said to her assistant the following morning. “I must go out. Would you please hang and steam the rest of yesterday’s shipment?”

Liz drove to police department, filled out paperwork, and was interviewed by a policewoman.

In the following days, Liz called the police station repeatedly, but no leads appeared. Jeff had become a magician, vanishing without a trace.

***

For Liz, the next three weeks were like a prolonged wait in a doctor’s office when you know you are going to have a colonoscopy. Liz moved herself robotically through ordering new summer designs, firing a model for coming in drunk for a fitting, and calming Mrs. George Franklin III, when a Size 14 St. John’s knit wouldn’t stretch around her Size 16 derriere.

At home, she laid in the bathtub until the water grew cold, forced down Italian and Chinese TV dinners, which tasted about the same, and watched sitcoms, game shows, and late-night talk shows.

On the twenty-third, Liz called in sick. When she finally got out of bed, she put on her sweats. The pants hung on her. She had lost six pounds without trying. She ate dry toast since she didn’t trust her stomach and washed it down with coffee. This whole scenario felt like a nightmare she would wake from. But each time she passed the tie on the rack, she knew it wasn’t.

 Her phone rang in her hand, startling her.

“Hello, Jeff?”

 “Liz, the three weeks are over,” Dorothy said. “You need to hire a detective. If you don’t, I will.”

For once, her mother-in-law was right. She would call tomorrow.

***

Liz felt like a suspect, interrogated by strangers about her personal life and her whereabouts on the day Jeff disappeared. Cliff Robertson, the detective, looked at phone records, flights from Seattle and Portland, and interviewed Jeff’s workmates, friends, and acquaintances. The tie, taken to a lab, had no bloodstains, just Liz and Jeff’s fingerprints. The mud came from the ditch. No clues emerged like detective shows did on TV.

Two years later, the muddy tie still lies in a plastic bag in the missing person’s evidence room.

When Liz runs after work, she focuses on the path ahead. She no longer theorizes who objects she sees might belong to or why they came to be there. She might be too close to the truth.