The Night My Sister Went Missing

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  I ran over the dune shouting, "Casey! Stacy! Casey! Stacy!"

  I realized the only way to find my sister might be to brush up against her when I was knee-deep in surf. I was ready for anything now that I'd got through the ending of Stacy's horrific tale, the ending that I'd begged Drew for—the one that I would never have guessed.

  13

  High tide had been around midnight, and now it was dead low. The beach was a vast black canyon, with only little moving neon lines far off, where waves crashed at the ebb of the tide. I ran into the waves without stopping and waded out into the water up to my thighs. The thought of something clothed bumping me kept my scalp crawling, but there was some overwhelming sense of duty to this. The water was bathtub temperature, and I wished it were cold to keep me sane and sober.

  If you've lived here long enough, somebody could blindfold you and stick just your feet in the water up to your ankles, and you'd be able to tell whether the tide is coming in or going out. It had just started to come in. Between now and noon ... this is when bodies wash up.

  I looked toward the eastern horizon, where the blotch of dark gray against black looked wider, and I knew that as dark as it was now, the sun would start showing up within half an hour. My eyes got a little more accustomed to the dark, and I strained them, forcing myself to check for something pitch-black on the now gray-black surf lines.

  "Casey!" I screamed, then "—asey!—asey!" figuring I was screaming to either girl. But there was no response except the surf, which had calmed somewhat, I realized. The storm at sea must have stopped its ranting ... maybe had fizzled down over Greenland. The ocean moaned like usual, but it was no longer booming.

  "Casey?" I meant for it to come out louder, but suddenly I was having black breezes like crazy. A thousand eyes watched me from behind, from the sides and above, laughing, whispering about dead spooks and child molesters. The island was inside out ... bad was good, good was bad, and people who were best friends turned on each other. Secrets were screaming in the black breezes. The questioning room had given me and Drew some opportunity to play God in a way—hearing people's inner thoughts, like they were being shouted from the rooftops. You could blow up, knowing what God knows. Out there in the black I felt small and petrified, certain I was about to bump into my sister's body. My toes caught on a piece of seaweed, and I all but jumped out of my skin before realizing it wasn't hair. I stubbed my toe on a jetty rock and decided maybe this walking in the water was no good.

  Dragging myself in to shore and huffing, I caught sight of a long ragged hunk of inky blackness up ahead in what appeared as black-gray air. Out here all alone, the pier took on strange dimensions. I did automatically what I used to do while driving with my dad, and we would name shapes we'd see in the clouds. Every piling looked like the barrel of a gun to me. The clusters of burned-out building frames on top looked like skeleton fingers reaching for the dark sky, but unable to straighten. Rigor mortis had set in.

  Something kept me from screaming my sister's name again—maybe some strange certainty that I was about to see Eddie Van Doren ... And why shouldn't I? If Mr. Kearney turns out to be a good father, and Mr. DeWinter a monster, why is it weird to think spooks are real? Nothing is too weird, if that's the case.

  "Casey..." I tried, but her name was stuck in my throat while the worst black breeze yet laced its fingers around my neck and squeezed. I had never been down here alone before at night, I realized. At least not after ten at night, when I'd walk back from a friend's with little on my mind but our dinky problems. Navel Academy, shit. What made me ever think that was so important?

  I watched the skeleton fingers on the pier, waiting for something to move. It almost seemed impossible to me that I wouldn't see Van Doren dashing from one black shape to the next, trying to stay invisible, trying to lure me up there where he could—

  When I saw a body dart quickly from one burned-out shell to the next, I thought my eyes had tricked me. I stopped and watched again. Nothing moved this time, but the outline of a head and legs had been unmistakable, replaying in my mind several times. It looked like the body was missing. He's just a head ... shot himself in the head and now...

  Some crumbs of sanity sprinkled down from heaven as the head reappeared, sunk into the blackness, and then all was still. The missing body could be a white sweatshirt. Stacy?

  As I got closer I noticed long tails of neon blowing slightly in the breeze at the base of the pier. Crime-scene tape, no question, and a cop car was parked under the streetlights at the end of Pier Drive. I stopped and let the darkness be my cover until I could decide where the cop was. It was too dark to see anything moving down there, and I wondered how Stacy had got up above without being seen.

  I don't know how long I stood there letting the predawn black make me as invisible as the cop. But finally I heard my name being called from the street. I saw Drew standing beside the cop car under the streetlight, calling with his hands cupped. He looked frantic. Drew wasn't Mr. Deep Thinker, but he's got a good gauge for people—especially me. He knew that story from Mr. Kearney would turn me into a lunatic, and he didn't want me to be alone. I couldn't move, though, couldn't ease his worries. I had a chance to use his worries to my advantage, if I could just keep still.

  I watched as the darkness shifted in one spot right under the pier, and a shadow moved toward the car. Drew had got the cop's attention, and he probably would keep the guy busy for a few minutes there by the car. Once I saw the officer move into the light, I made a run for the climbing mounts.

  One good thing about low tide is that the exposed sand is as hard as concrete. I had to make sure to take very even steps toward the mounts and felt confident I hadn't left any footprints. I wasn't the first person to do this, I realized, as I climbed up quickly and steadily. The mounts had wet beach grit on them. Stacy.

  My nerve always came back to me with the sun, and it was coming so quickly now that the whole eastern sky was grayish black. I had a white T-shirt on, which would make me easier to spot. I thought of ripping it off just in case another cop was around, but instead, I crawled forward to the part of the pier where the planking didn't creak and wasn't strewn with scorched holes and rotting wood. I couldn't see anything at first, but when I got toward the end, I could see the outline of a girl in a white sweatshirt, leaning against the back of the Saltwater Taffy Shoppe's scorched shell. I crawled around to Stacy, watching her stare mournfully out to sea.

  She turned her head just as I came up. Anybody else probably would have jumped a little. She just looked back to sea again and said, "Scare the shit out of me, why don't you, Carmody? Keep quiet. Beach is strewn with cops"

  I pulled myself around, keeping low to the planking, until I was half sitting, half lying like she was, just beside her. She was bringing something pretty big out from under her sweatshirt. It was too big to fit in the pocket and looked like it had been stashed underneath somehow.

  "What've you got?" I demanded in a whisper.

  She stuck them to her face. "Night vision goggles. First experimental issue, Vietnam, nineteen seventy. Only a handful of officers got them in that war. They were my grandfather's"

  She said "my grandfather's" so easily I had to stare at her. She sure had a way of hiding her little hells. The way she looked through them so firmly, I had to speak.

  "Stacy ... you shouldn't be up here doing this"

  She pretended she didn't hear me and let off some privacy vibe. I knew her problems, and I gathered she knew I knew them, but truths that refused to be spoken dangled in the dark air. It was the stuff I imagined she had never talked about with people—even Alisa. Stacy had only tried to lead Alisa astray with some confused story about not remembering what had happened to her—or maybe she didn't entirely remember. I was clueless.

  "You ... break into the museum?" I asked. I remembered seeing night vision goggles in the glass case. I'd been intrigued by them as a kid.

  "Wasn't hard," she confirmed. "My grandmother has a pass key. I've ha
d a copy for years. I like to go down there after closing and play with the swords. In a past life I think I was a great fencer. Lately I've got this love/hate thing with weapons."

  I cringed a little, glad she'd said that to me and not the cops, being that I felt I knew her slightly better. Slightly.

  I couldn't stand being left in the dark. "Let me have a turn."

  She kept them to her face for another thirty seconds, finally muttering, "I've got this theory, and I hope it's right," as she handed them over.

  "You think Casey dove"—I stuck the goggles to my face—"because she saw someone shooting at her, and she was afraid the next shot would hit her."

  "Damn, Carmody. You aren't so stupid after all."

  The glasses were amazing. The water looked white. The whitecaps looked black. Anything bobbing around looked blackish red. I saw only one little piece of driftwood, but I saw it perfectly clearly.

  "I actually didn't come up with that on my own," I muttered. "Been at the police station all night, hearing the yada, yada..."

  But she had thought of it. I didn't see how, except through years of practice, thinking under stress. "I'm sure Lutz got his share of goop tonight," she said. "I was hoping somebody told the same thing I saw, being that I sure as hell wasn't going down there without being forced. I was a setup waiting to happen."

  I couldn't deny that at all. "What did you see?"

  She took the glasses back and scanned the sea as she talked. "It got pretty dark when the cloud crossed the moon, but I'd just been talking to Brin and Jon and Ronny about how Casey stuck out like a sore thumb in that sweatshirt. Shot went off—most people thought it was a firecracker, except I was very sure it wasn't. I'd heard the sound before ... once."

  She didn't mention firing the thing down at the jetty, but I remembered her father had said that. She went on, "I knew Casey wasn't shot, but the way she stumbled backward in amazement, it looked totally like—tra-la—she saw that someone had been aiming right for her. The moon had come back out, and I think she saw who it was. I think she was laughing in amazement. She fell forward, not backward. I think she saw Stern in the ticket booth shooting at her. By the time I looked the little window was empty, but I could have sworn somebody had just stepped back. I'd seen Stern go in there, and I figured it was him anyway. As for Casey, she took a chance. She figured the next shot might hit her, and ... what might a diver do in a situation that out of hand?"

  "Why would Mark shoot at Casey?" I asked, feeling ready to hear anything. "He seemed ... kind of hot on her. And while he's turning into another island idiot, I wouldn't peg him as, you know ... a natural-born killer."

  She simply searched the seas, and I remembered her father's words—she can't talk about people. I had asked her to make a value judgment about someone, about whether Mark had killer instinct, and I sensed the question simply fell away from her ears. Too tough—like maybe she didn't understand people at all. Maybe she'd become too confused about why people do the things they do.

  "I hear, um ... he asked you to go back with him tonight," I egged her on, thinking that was probably the true version, not that she'd asked him.

  She muttered from under the glasses, "I told him I ought to shoot his ass."

  "Shoot him?" I parroted.

  "I wish I hadn't said that. He'd all but forgotten about my little gun up until that point. I reminded him. He had to go and take it, horse around with it."

  "He broke into your grandfather's desk?"

  She shrugged. "He must have. My grandmother's had a spare key since forever, afraid my grandfather would kick over from a heart attack and no one would know where the key was, or who was next in line to get all his charity checks. He kept all that paperwork in there, plus a couple hundred dollars in cash. When we were going out, me and Mark used to break into the desk all the time, just for ten bucks here and there. Dairy Queen money, stuff like that. The first reason Mark-the-Shark gave me for coming over tonight was that his car was busted and he wanted a loan to fix it"

  The glasses made a clicking noise as she adjusted them and stared through intently. I remembered Mark saying he'd gone over to perk up the grandparents. This sounded a lot more like the Mark I knew.

  "D'you tell him to go to hell?" I egged her further.

  "I used to have this credit card ... but I don't have it anymore," she said evasively. I could imagine her cutting it into a million pieces after she couldn't use it to pay for a shrink. It must have been crazy to have every purchase show up as an e-mail to her grandfather, the Tormentor. I said nothing.

  She went on after a minute, "So I caught Mark in my grandfather's office while he was supposed to be in the bathroom, but I didn't say anything." She singsonged too casually, though her voice was tight, "'Yeah, yeah, rip off Stacy; if you can't get whatever you need in life some other way, there's always Stacy. She's a sport. She'll cover for you...'"

  She adjusted the glasses again, and her voice went back to normal. "Anyway, I'm sure that's when he got the gun, looking back on it. He'd wanted to fool with it so many times. He couldn't control himself finally. Or maybe his car repair was more expensive than whatever money was in there, and he figured he'd sell it."

  "Skank." I breathed. She still hadn't said why he would shoot at my sister, though I remembered a handgun assembly at school once. The cops running it said it's a little different when a kid has a gun than when a grown-up has one. All the kid needs to be is a little pissed off.

  "What was he mad at Casey about?" I tried.

  "You mean ... when he shot at her? He wasn't mad at her." She readjusted the focus wheels a few times. Her lips turned to jelly, and she started that swallowing thing like she'd done last night.

  "He was pissed at me," she said, craning her neck to the left of the pier. "Come on, Casey. Where the fuck—"

  She sighed, and I let her regain some composure while waiting on pins and needles. Maybe the silence got to her. "Alisa, bless her sweet, trusting, and confused heart, just told him ... this serious problem that I have."

  "Your pregnancy."

  She kept clicking the glasses, to readjust the light level, I guess. You'd think I hadn't just said the word out loud. Still, I figured she realized that I already knew—being that I'd pulled a don't-smoke-now routine on her at the yacht club. I decided I needed to know.

  "He was aiming for you?"

  "He thought he was. It got really dark." She took the glasses away from her eyes to look at me, then reached down and grabbed a big mitt of her white sweatshirt. He had thought Casey was Stacy.

  "So he shoots his own girlfriend, thinking it's me. He'd called me a slut a few minutes earlier. Excuse me, I just wasn't in the mood. I should have just shoved him over the side and rid us all of a blood-sucking leech. I ought to have realized at some point that to control my mouth is a good thing, but ... God forgive me of all my shortcomings." She handed me the glasses, smirking, and did the sign of the cross on herself with her thumb. "I decided to play with his head. He'd just ripped off my grandfather and left me to explain. I knew it, so I told him I'd have my family drum up some false paternity test, and he'd better get a job, because he'd be paying for the rest of his life. It was some bullshit. I never expected he would believe me."

  Maybe it was a number of things ... thinking she had cheated on him, thinking he might end up paying for a kid that wasn't his, plus that stuff from the school assembly—you don't need to be a natural-born killer if a gun is right there in your hand.

  I could see the sun rising, a small streak of red on the horizon, and I thought of asking if she should be looking straight at it. She didn't seem to notice it.

  "I think he threw the damn thing over the side afterward," she mumbled. "Barrel was bent anyway. He didn't hit her, but I just thought, You know what, Stacy? Don't say a blessed word. Anything you say can—and will—be held against you."

  "That was pretty smart." I looked through the glasses carefully, flinching when I'd see little bits of matter rolling in the surf, b
ut it was never anything bigger than a chunk of seaweed. I didn't think we would find my sister with these glasses. It would be too lucky, and also, Crazy Addy's voice still sang out to me: She is not in the water!... Maybe I'd got my first experiences with unpredictable endings tonight, but I figured Casey was somewhere I would never guess ... if she was still with us.

  I jerked the light meter around, jumping away from those worst of thoughts one more time. I hadn't let myself think them for more than a few seconds all night. That denial thing inside you can be your best friend in a situation like this. It keeps your pain at bay until you absolutely need it. It struck me as weird: My sister's problems were keeping Stacy from focusing too much on her own problems. Stacy's problems had been keeping me from focusing too closely on my sister. I wondered why someone didn't bottle "Helping Others" and try to sell it for a million bucks.

  I could feel Stacy watching me. Her voice came through. "Last night when Bill Nast was talking about all the cool stuff he did at Purdue, I was wishing I was him. Weren't you?"

  I tried for one last scan of the water, but the glasses fell away from my face and clunked me on the chest. It was the closest Stacy had come to admitting she was very unhappy, but I was caught up in another thing, too: She couldn't have known what I was talking about with Nast—unless she had been standing right there with us. I remembered feeling that outstanding black breeze behind me, the one so big I was afraid to spin for fear of Nast thinking I was an idiot.