Missing Girls- In Truth Is Justice

by Larry Crane

  “Get him. Oh, boy,” Gavin said, a nervous grin spreading over his face. “That’s pretty radical, Marce. I mean, now? The guy’s been cooling his heels for how many years?”

  “She was alone and scared. She was chased down like a dog. It had to have been the worst kind of terror. I can’t think about anything else. I can’t stay in this house.”

  “What? Marce. What? What are you talking about?”

  “I need to get away from here and be by myself.”

  “Now, that’s—that’s just plain—” Gavin stammered. “Let’s calm down. You need to do something, and I get that, absolutely. Do what, though?”

  “You, when you couldn’t stand the pressure at home anymore, couldn’t bear knowing the truth about—whatever—you just got up and flew to New York. There was no logic. Oh, there were excuses galore, excuses galore. But no logic. I have no logic. But I can’t just do nothing anymore.” She stood again and headed for the stairs.

  “Where are you going?” he asked, following her.

  “I don’t know,” she said. She grabbed the railing and took the stairs two at a time. She disappeared into the bedroom.

  Gavin shouted, “Stop. You want to do something but you don’t know what exactly?” He reached the top of the stairs and stomped after her.

  Marcella had a suitcase on the bed. She raced around the room, grabbing clothes that were still scattered about, throwing them in. “What exactly will I do? What’s my time line? Well, I—if you insist on knowing—first…first, I’ll get a place.”

  “You have a place. This place.” Gavin sat on the edge of the bed next to the suitcase.

  “I’ll take my Royal.”

  “You’re going to write. You’re going to start a correspondence. What? With a—with a jailbird?”

  Marcella snatched up clothes and threw them at Gavin. “I can write. I’ve done some writing. That’s enough. I don’t want to talk about it anymore.”

  “Yes, and you’re a damned good writer. Hey! Start now. I’ll get a pot of coffee going. We’ll work all night.”

  “Stop helping. I’ll get a place, and I’ll get out the truth—in articles and—that’s it.”

  “Come over here and sit by me and talk,” Gavin said. “Do I have this right? You’re going to walk out of here, get a room, and in essence, start throwing spitballs at this guy from fifty miles away?”

  “Shut up!” Marcella stood in front of him and glared into his eyes.

  “Okay okay. I’m sorry. Forget that. Listen. Listen to me. You don’t know what you’re going to do? Well, let’s think it through. We put our minds to something and we can come up with—I don’t know what. I mean, you could go to him. Go to the cocksucker right there in his cell. Confront him, eyeball-to-eyeball. And then come home and tell me about it.”

  Marcella turned her back on him and walked away. “Go to him?”

  “Go to him.”

  “To his jail cell?”

  “Correct.”

  “Confront him?” She turned to look at him again, hands on her hips.

  “Eyeball-to-eyeball. This is good. We’re talking it out. We’re considering all the possibilities, no matter how crazy they seem. It’s good. I like it.” Gavin patted the bed beside him, beckoning.

  She kept her distance. “And he will see me because—?”

  “You’re not exactly interrupting his busy day, Marce.”

  “Then what?”

  Gavin puffed his cheeks and exhaled loudly. “Well—I don’t know—but the beauty of it is that you’ve got the bastard behind bars where he can’t wring your…”

  “He’s smart. He’s quick. He’s written his own appeals. He has a novel out. He’d make mincemeat of me.” Marcella turned again and went to her dresser and fussed with her hair as if she were heading out somewhere.

  “Smart? He’s been in the slammer for ten years.”

  “Thirteen.”

  “Mincemeat? Look, you’re just going to spit in his eye so to speak, that’s what I’m saying. I mean, on behalf of Victoria, right?

  “Right.”

  “Oh God. I don’t like the way you said that.”

  “As usual, you’re an immense help to me.”

  “Shit, what does that mean?”

  Marcella turned back to him and approached slowly. “You know, I guess I could try to trick him. To get him to…”

  “Get him to what?” Gavin asked, grinning nervously again. “Look, forget trickery. Stick with the—I mean, go for the balls. The man’s in irons. Get what you want, by any means. What do you want from him? Revenge? Shouldn’t someone else be getting revenge? Never mind that. Get in his face. Call him a pussy. Spit on him. Come home happy. I mean, happiness is revenge, Marce. The best there is.”

  “Stop helping.”

  “Just don’t go.”

  “You just said go to him, now you’re saying don’t go.”

  Gavin closed his eyes and collapsed backward onto the bed. “Listen! I don’t want you leaving. Leaving is too—irreversible.”

  “I’m in motion, and it feels good.”

  “The man’s a murderer, for Chrissakes!”

  “Revenge. You’ve hit the nail absolutely right on the head. I couldn’t articulate it. But you could. It’s what I want. It’s what I need.”

  “Go to him? Jesus. Marce. I don’t like the—well, staying positive, I do like the revenge. Revenge can be good—the figurative spitting—emphasis on the figurative—eyeball-to-eyeball—all of that. But I don’t like the talking to the man—the tricking—that I don’t like. Marce—oh hell, I’ve been no help to you. No comfort. I’ve been a bastard. Don’t even think about leaving.”

  “You’ve been a saint. I’ve been a bitch.”

  “Yes, you have. Stay.”

  Marcella stuffed scattered clothes helter-skelter into two suitcases and slammed them closed. She ran her eyes around the room for the typewriter. “All right, you can heat up some of the cold pizza. There’s Coke and beer in the fridge. Uh actually, you’ll have to go to the grocery store right away.”

  Gavin got to his feet and tried to take a suitcase away from her. “Marce! You stay right here with me.”

  She shoved Gavin back with her free hand and tried to sort her thoughts. Do it. Now. If you don’t, you never will. You stand around wringing your hands—cluck-cluck-clucking about the injustice—bawling your eyeballs out about your baby—but you do nothing, nothing at all. Go and set up somewhere away from this suffocating comfort that only pulls you under the covers where you sleep away the hours, some place as stark and bare as the cave that she’s in. Go out from there and attack. Go. Go.

  “I’m going to stay in motion. I can’t stop and wait for the precise details of the plan to reveal themselves. I’m under orders. I’m taking the car.”

  “Stay with me, Marce.”

  “Help me lug this down,” she said.

  “No,” he said.

  “Good-bye then. Good-bye,” she said. She threw one suitcase down the stairs, then the other, and stumbled after them—down the staircase with the Royal typewriter. She wrestled all of it all alone out the door and into the car. In the rearview mirror, she saw Gavin burst out the front door and onto the porch. She pushed hard on the gas pedal and sped away down Fardale.

  Chapter 19

  There was no stopping her. Gavin reached the bottom porch step and watched Marcella drive off, his chest heaving. The idea to leave Naperville that was so sensible only a couple of months ago seemed like total shit now. His mistake was trying to make sense of something that had nothing to do with sense.

  “Gavin…?” He looked up and saw Philomena at the head of the driveway.

  “Hello,” he said. “I guess you saw Marcella drive off.”

  “Yes. Yes, I did. But, I thought I’d supply Marcella with even more reading material,” she lisped. She wobbled forward and handed him a large magazine, Esquire November ‘65.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry I
’m flooding you guys with all this stuff. Lord knows, you have enough on your plate right now.”

  “It’s okay. The murder’s not something you easily forget.”

  “I’ll just leave it with you, then.” She turned and started for the street.

  “I appreciate it,” he said.

  She came back. “Do you? Well, good. There’s an article in there by Buckley. His sailing buddies think he’s the next coming. Have you read Airborne? Weird title for a sailing book. I actually liked it. I think to him, sailing to Graciosa in the Azores is something like Edgar Smith’s time in solitary confinement. Why not? Surely the loneliness of being on watch on the high seas at three in the morning is every bit as bad as sitting in an eight-by-eight cell, wouldn’t you say?

  “You have to give Buckley credit. He does some thinking about his station in life and understands that it’s a million miles from everybody else in the world. If it’s a beautiful setting you want, never settle for anything less than the Azores. If you want to give a hand to someone in need, strike up a friendship with a convicted killer looking for reading material. Longing for some friendship? Round up your buddies for month-long sail across the Atlantic. And then write a book about it so the rest of the world can experience true happiness.

  “The Azores. Most of the world has never seen them. But, here we have this sterling man who has, and he’s quite sure he knows another sterling man when he sees him. And it’s his duty to tell the rest of us what a sterling man Edgar Smith is.”

  “Have you been sampling your wine supply, Philomena?” Gavin said.

  “You can tell? I’m sorry,” she sputtered. “But just for kicks, allow me to entertain you with a marvelous Buckley quote from the rag I gave you.” Philomena motioned and he handed back the Esquire. “Page 120. Thank god for yellow highlighter. Ahem. I quote: ‘If a gentleman tries to seduce a lady, and she declines to go along, that is not a provocation which justifies him in killing her other than at the risk of conviction for a premeditated murder.’ She stopped reading and raised her finger for emphasis. ‘If, however, the lady suggests the gentleman has been cuckolded, that is a provocative statement, and any lethal reply by the gentleman—in a fit of blind rage—may be classified as murder in the second degree.’” 1

  She returned the magazine to him, raised the back of her hand to her mouth, and slurred: “You may not be familiar with the particulars of Victoria Zielinski’s murder, but I can say without fear of contradiction that Buckley’s version of it stinks to high heaven.” She turned and walked off.

  Gavin watched her go and went inside. He maneuvered through the furniture and boxes in the living room to the kitchen, found a can of Molson in the refrigerator, and sat with it at the counter.

  In the couple of years before Hannah went missing, they’d found a halfway decent way to simulate a satisfying marriage, mostly by doubling up on the pace of their individual interests—her civic activism, and his pursuit of ever more business triumphs. It was something like padding designed to muffle any discord that might pop up from time to time. They thought their kite was flying along as well as could be expected, all things considered. At least it flew and the wind was favorable. It was a strange complacency in which they subliminally agreed that their primary goal was to avoid unpleasantness. There was a smugness to it. Through trial and error, they had found a way to get by. It was something like closing their eyes and giving no thought at all to the possibility of bad things happening.

  But then all hell broke loose when Hannah disappeared. The wind acted up, sending the kite into a crazy spin, and there seemed to be no way to pull out of the dive. They were spiraling straight down for the ground.

  When Hannah was taken it didn’t happen to just her. A piece of him went too. He saw her face everywhere, felt her wet hair on his fingers as a one-year-old in the bathtub, heard her voice as a three-year-old struggling to repeat words to him. Did he need to laugh at her attempts to please him? Did she understand that he was laughing at her? Everything he did seemed wrong now. If it were just temporary, he still had time to fix it. He could still become the father he wanted to be—a life-long shelter from all things that could go bad, a sounding board for all the things she would want to try. But, if this was the end, the clarity of his memories of her would fade just as other memories did.

  Memories of Grandfather Foster, mother’s father, had done just that, faded so much that he would have to go searching through old family photos to remember what he looked like. He had gone to sleep as he always did, only he didn’t wake up. He was only seventy-five. A person ought to have more time to contemplate life before it dribbles away—his didn’t really dribble—it actually was a dam bursting, an aortic aneurism.

  In the war, when his best friend Bud Haley’s head got in the way of a shard of shrapnel at the Remagen Bridge fight, it was all over in a flash—and afterward even though he’d shared K rations and cigarettes with Bud for weeks, knew of his most sacred moments with his girlfriend Zoe before he’d shipped out, and tasted the fear Bud had that he would never leave Germany alive. He couldn’t remember Bud’s face for the life of him and would never get another chance to memorize it.

  He wandered back into the living room where he slumped into an easy chair and regarded the empty pizza carton on the coffee table and a six-pack of empty Molson cans standing upright on the stained beige carpet above which Marcella had sprawled on the couch with her book. He looked down beside his chair and saw four more cans. They would never have done such a thing in the house in Naperville—been so slovenly.

  They didn’t know it at the time, but probably on the altar of the First Methodist Church at the wedding, they joined not only in holy matrimony but in a common conception of themselves as the perfect couple. Everyone told them that. Who were they to deny it? All the Type A neatness they’d embraced as a married couple when it had never existed in either of them individually before was just one of these conceits—his collection of Best Books of the Western World prominently displayed in its perfectly sized bookcase proclaiming him the scholar that he never was—her eight-place Spode china set with dinner hostess extraordinaire written all over it sitting unused in their glass-front cabinet. What was this bizarre fairy story they created? Hannah’s disappearance shattered all of that self-assuredness.

  After Hannah vanished, they saw their conceit so clearly—her obsession with an unending string of volunteer committees and classes, his mindless reaching for the next rung at work, all the while trusting that Celia and Brett were old enough then to steer their own course, and that Hannah was perfectly safe walking four blocks to school.

  Marcella could think of nothing but how she had to gather them all back together again, while he hatched this cockamamie plan to put as much distance as he could between them, their friends, and their children—move to New Jersey and start over. And when they did, the world started looping even faster. All he’d wanted was to settle down into normalcy when what she had to do was the opposite, nothing less than to go into action.

  Had she become a robot that took orders from Joan of Arc, or somebody? What happened was unfair to both Hannah and Vickie, but was it truly up to her to rectify such injustice? How was she going to accomplish that? Never mind. It would come to her. Get in the car and go. Where? To a room where she would study and write and who knows what else? Somewhere east of here.

  * * *

  1 William F. Buckley, Jr., “The Approaching End of Edgar H. Smith, Jr.,” Esquire LXIV, no. 5 (November 1965), 120

  Chapter 20

  Marcella slowed in front of the Kromka’s house. It was still light, but the sun was about to set. Fardale Road, now paved, was the dirt road Vickie had run down to escape Edgar Smith fourteen years earlier. Everything would have been different if Richard Kromka had only stepped out of his front door for some reason at the same time Smith had caught up to her. He would surely have heard a commotion, a scream, something.

  It took only a minute or two to cover the distance o
n Fardale to the intersection with Wyckoff Avenue. She stopped again. Right there was the Nixon’s house where Vickie had gone to copy homework from Barbara—where Smith had turned around to drive back to where he’d seen Vickie walking along—where he’d taken action on his impulse to pick her up. He knew her, at least he had made her acquaintance before. He’d already formed an opinion—evidenced by how his description of her in his book painted her as a woman-child with urges she didn’t fully understand. He was only a little over a half mile from home as the crow flies. His wife and child were waiting for him. But he drove on.

  Marcella kept her foot on the brake and looked right and left, pondering which way to go. The panic she felt tearing out of the house lingered as a fluttering in her heart. It was not the same as Edgar Smith’s panic when he felt the need to put distance between himself and the mound where Vickie’s lifeless body lay that night, but it was panic. She breathed deeply to calm down. The urge to do something, anything, began morphing into the practicalities of where exactly she intended to go, for starters. She reached for the map she’d used earlier to scout around Bergen County. She would drive east toward the Hudson River. She turned to the right.

  It was typical suburban sprawl, with tightly packed houses giving way to stores, and then more houses and more stores until Route 17, a four-lane highway, loomed ahead. She joined the surge of traffic and headed south. She saw a Holiday Inn sign and pulled into the parking area adjacent to the entrance. The clutch of keys in the ignition glimmered in the light from overhead. She pulled them and focused on a tag that hung from the ring. She read the printing: Ticknor Apartments, #317. It was the key to Gavin’s flat in Weehawken. She’d been there just a couple of weeks before. It was comfortable. Familiar. Didn’t it follow naturally, that she would commandeer the place, just as she had the car? And besides, she didn’t intend to trash their marriage or anything. She’d slammed out of the house, sure. But it wasn’t out of anger. It was surrender to what she had to do.