by Kate Gable
We're standing under a makeshift tent. There are picnic tables, laptops, and a generator set up even though these are the outside headquarters of the search.
The local veterans’ hall was kind enough to give us the space to set up a makeshift headquarters for the search. There are tables all along the wall with volunteers. Luckily, my mom was involved enough to organize some aspect of this, even though she had trouble with going on the actual search. She had big posters made of the missing sign, along with blown-up photos of Violet smiling, laughing, and having fun.
I stare at one of the pictures in which her hair is braided and I'm surprised at how different she looks. Perhaps photographers are onto something when they say they want to capture the essence of that person. Most of the time it seems to be something serious, different, unpleasant, maybe even unattractive, unless of course it's a glossy fashion magazine, but as I look around at these pictures of my sister, I realize that none of them really represent her. They express the best versions of her, the fun, outgoing side, but that part of her has always been small in comparison to the moody darkness that often enveloped her. She was serious, bookish, and not really outgoing at all.
When I glance at the poster of the other missing girl, her friend Natalie D’Achille, I realize that the story has to be about their similarities. Nobody wants to look for an introvert. Nobody wants to look for somebody who even has a hint of darkness to them. They become a villain, especially in the superficial, surface only society, media saturated culture in which we live.
"What are you doing here?" I ask Luke after a deputy walks past us talking frantically on the phone to one of his children.
"I was assigned here, but it's good to see that you're so glad to see me," he jokes, but only partly.
His dark hair falls slightly onto his face, on his high cheekbones, and on his strong jaw. It makes me want to kiss him right here, right now, even though it would be the most unprofessional thing that I could do.
"You look nice in that suit," he says, pointing to my pencil skirt and blouse. I smile while my new bra digs deep into my back, making me extremely uncomfortable.
"I thought you'd be a little bit less dressed up," he adds, pausing for a moment.
"Well, I'm trying to look professional, even though this is in your jurisdiction. Maybe I'll get another reporter to do a story. Who knows?"
"Well, you look nice, even though I know you hate it."
"Thank you," I say and wait for him to answer my question.
"I just got a call this morning to come down here, had to take an early flight. Thought I'd surprise you."
I nod, moving my jaw from one side to another.
"Listen, I didn't ask to be assigned to this case, if that's what you're asking."
"No, I'm not."
"It's just a coincidence. Things weren't going that great up north anyway."
I'm tempted to ask what happened, but I have too many cases and too many other people's problems going through me right now.
Captain Talarico waves us over from across the hall and I quickly glance over at Luke to make sure that we are maintaining the proper distance from one another. No one here can know that we're together. It's completely unprofessional, even though I'm not officially assigned to the case. It would be a problem since I am one of the victim’s sister, but I'm glad he's here and I'm glad I have a friend to talk to.
The search is starting and I meet my mom out in front of the search headquarters. She's dressed in jeans and a hoodie and looks tired, but a little less bewildered than before.
"How was everything yesterday?" I ask, introducing Luke as Agent Gavinson.
"We're here to help you, Mrs. Carr," Luke says.
My mom looks up and down at his suit, his silk tie, and the pressed white collar. She looks completely unimpressed.
"You all act like you want to help us and we should trust you," Mom says, "but the FBI isn’t anything."
"Mom," I gasp, "what are you doing? He's here to help us. We're lucky to have them involved."
"Lucky?" Mom narrows her eyes. "No, I'm not lucky, Kaitlyn. I'm anything but that. My daughter is missing and you're here acting like it's supposed to be some big deal that the FBI is involved."
I clench my jaw and pull her aside, apologizing silently to Luke who just waves his hands like it's nothing and walks away to give us space.
"I want them to find my daughter," Mom snaps.
She pulls out a cigarette and takes a drag. The crisp cold air makes the smoke dance in front of her, but the bright sunshine also sheds light onto the thin spindly wrinkles around her mouth that years of sucking on cigarettes have formed. Her skin is almost yellow and devoid of any rouge or color. She has had better days and I know it as much as she does.
"Listen, whatever your thoughts are about the FBI, keep them to yourself. They're here to help, okay? There's another girl missing and the two cases might be connected."
"What do I care about that?" she asks, taking another puff and blowing the smoke in my face.
"What do you mean?"
"Her friend, Natalie, who lied about where she was that night or at least covered up for her boyfriend? What do I care where she is, Kaitlyn? Why do you? All that matters is Violet and now that that other skank is involved, that girl who comes from that nice family, with that big house across the way, no one's going to look for Violet as much as they'll look for her."
"They will if you don't alienate them," I say, gritting through my teeth. "They will if you clean up, you look nice, you plead for people's help, and you're grateful for people who come to help you, who really don't have to be here."
"Oh, please."
"Mom, she's a missing person. She's thirteen and there's some evidence that she might have just run away. Okay? Police, they like to believe those stories about teenage girls because that clears cases off their desks. That's better than looking for some phantom, a ghost, which is what she is now. So please, don't make this more difficult than it has to be. Okay? I want Violet found. You want her found. The police, the FBI, everybody wants her found. Let's all work together."
Mom turns her face away from me, but I can tell that I'm getting through. I walk away from her and suddenly I feel like a teenager again, annoyed and pissed off, with a desire to hit something really hard. There's this angst building within me. I hate everything that she stands for, how she treats me and Violet, and yet doesn't seem to rise to the standard of me cutting her off.
The problem is that my mom is just desperate and sad enough to keep me stringing along every time I talk to her. It was the same way when I was in college, when I moved to New York and she would call me about every little problem and keep me on the phone without letting me hang up.
Anyone else probably would have or should have, but I was eighteen years old and I couldn't force myself to push her away. I still needed her as a mother. Now? Now I need her again. Violet is still a kid and as long as she's under eighteen, I have to keep things cordial with my mom.
15
The search starts and I purposely separate myself from my mom and participate in another small pod of people. There are deputies that make assignments, giving us the usual warnings about not touching anything and taking pictures of anything unusual or suspicious.
Mom goes with a group of three elderly ladies and I join the one with twenty somethings of which I quickly discover are teachers at their school.
"I just can't believe that your sister's missing," Sarah Applegate says, grabbing my hand.
She is a peppy, outgoing woman with thick curls and a generous amount of lip gloss and mascara. She teaches math and though she's never had Violet, she has seen her around and felt like it was her duty to join the search.
"You're a detective, right?" Eliza Deal asks, getting on the other side of me as we’re looking at the quadrants that we have been assigned to.
Nothing has been laid out or mocked up. They're just estimates of space around you where you have to focus your gaze i
n order to make sure that no one misses a thing.
"Yeah. I'm her older sister," I say, giving both of them my card.
"So, what do they think happened? What do you think happened?"
"I'm not officially on the case since this isn't my jurisdiction, but we have no idea. Have you heard anything? Have you seen anything? Did anyone happen to say anything unusual about her?"
It's not ideal to talk to them under these circumstances because during a search, you have to really focus on the ground in front of you but it's also in these kind of circumstances when people tend to open up and I don't want to shut down any possible information either.
I tell them the last time that she was seen and the circumstances under which she disappeared. They both tilt their heads sympathetically.
Eliza was her homeroom teacher a few times, a rotating position where different teachers come in early morning, take roll, and organize kids and have them sit in the same classroom for about half an hour before classes officially start.
"She always sat somewhere in the middle," Eliza says. "A few times I subbed for her homeroom teacher. She always listened to her AirPods and it seemed like she was trying to catch up on homework that she hadn’t gotten to."
"She was a good student, right?" I ask.
"Yes, by all accounts. As and Bs mostly, but recently she’d started to slip up."
"Oh, what do you mean?" I ask, stopping in my tracks. Now I definitely won't be able to pay attention to the search, but I want to know more about this.
"A friend of mine teaches English, Miss Dolores. She was mentioning how the last quarter she’d stopped turning in assignments, was always distracting kids in class, and just not doing what she was supposed to. It was unusual because she'd had her the year before and she wasn't like that at all."
"Oh, wow. Okay. I'll have to talk to her," I say. "Miss Dolores, you said?"
"Yes, Catherine Dolores. English."
I write down her name in my notebook and show them, to check the spelling. I had always assumed that what Violet told me about her classes and what even Mom told me about her schoolwork was true, but suddenly I'm starting to have doubts.
If someone had interviewed my mom when I was in middle school, she would have also told them that I was mostly an A, B student, but in reality, I was forging transcripts and lying about my grades.
We continue with the rest of our search grid-by-grid. I ask them a few more questions, but that seems to be the extent of what they know since they have only peripheral knowledge of her work. Now however, I'm more certain than ever that I have to conduct more thorough interviews with her teachers and guidance counselors along with getting her school records to see what exactly was going on with her.
When I get back to the search headquarters, I find Luke stuffing his face with a donut. He was catching up on the case, reading all the files and the interviews, and didn't actually participate in the search.
"How was it?"
"I didn't find anything. I guess we'll see if anyone else did. Do you want to grab something to eat?" I ask.
"Yes. More than anything." He smiles. "I've already had two of these and I'm afraid the third one is going to put me in hyperglycemia shock."
16
I take Luke to Social 21, which is kind of a hipster restaurant bar on the main town boulevard. There are heat lamps set up outside and a bunch of cool twenty-somethings who know just the right cocktail to order, are parked under heat lamps and around the outside fire pits.
"Wow, this is unusual. I had no idea you had such a cool place here," he says.
"Yeah, this one caters to the LA audience and the food is quite exceptional."
The hostess takes us to a table for two in the back, underneath a flat big heat lamp that isn't really even that necessary since it's almost seventy degrees outside.
"Listen, I want to apologize," he says after we order a round of cocktails. It's not something we're supposed to do while we're on the clock, but I'm not officially working and he decides to go for it anyway.
"What are you talking about?" I ask.
"About showing up here without warning you. I didn't request this job specifically, but I had a choice from a few and this one would bring me to you and would be the best for my career. So that's what I decided to do."
"I just hope that you can find her," I say, suddenly choking back tears.
"Listen, I'm going to do everything I can. I'm meeting with the D’Achille family in a couple of hours."
"Is there anything else that you can tell me that I should know?"
We order our food. I eat tacos and fried avocados, which is a specialty and one of my favorites. My elderberry cocktail infused with lime arrives and we make a tentative toast to finding my sister.
He makes me believe that I'll be able to find her and even though a part of me knows that it may not be true, I go with it anyway. Sometimes hope is all you have, but it's the most important thing. We try to talk about something else, a different case, music, a movie we might have both seen, but none of the conversations stick.
“That's the thing about being workaholics and being obsessed with our jobs. It's the only thing that we think about. It's the only thing that makes everything worth it, but it also makes you a bad date."
"Why would you say that?" Luke asks, leaning back in his chair when I share my epiphany.
"Don't you feel like that? Don't you feel like all you ever talk about is police work? Like, maybe there's something else going on in the world."
"There's something else going on in the world besides solving murder cases and missing persons cases? Wait, like what exactly?" He laughs and I laugh along with him. "No, seriously though. I get it. That's probably why I haven't had a relationship last more than a year."
"What was she like?" I ask.
We haven't talked of exes yet. That conversation is still looming somewhere over our every interaction.
"Isn't that bad etiquette?" he asks. "I think I must have read that somewhere."
"What, to talk about your exes?"
"Yeah."
"No, I don't think so." I shake my head and pop a fried avocado square into my mouth, letting it melt, biting through its crispy shell and then letting the inside practically melt.
"Hey, I want to know what kind of girls you dated before me."
"Is that where we are? Are we dating?"
"No,” I say quickly. "We're just friends."
"Friends. Do you see a lot of your friends naked?"
I laugh. He takes a sip. He finishes his drink and orders another round. I shake my head.
"This isn't really the right time and place," he says after a long pause.
"I know, but I want to think about something besides our jobs and clearly neither of us have seen a movie in a really long time. So, exes are all we have."
He smiles, chuckles to himself, and finally explains, "Okay. My ex-girlfriend and I were together for two years. Well, a year officially and then off and on again before that."
"Was she in law enforcement?"
"No, that was kind of the problem. At first the hours were okay. She stayed busy with her work. She worked in PR, but after a while she just couldn't handle it. We'd have a date or plans to meet with her friends to go out and I'd be on call and I'd have to cancel. It gets tiring after a while. Not everyone can put up with that sort of thing."
"Did you ever think about getting married?"
"She wanted to. That was kind of another problem. She said that it wouldn't be a problem if we got married and we had kids, but I have a crazy job and I want to be there for my kids. I'm not going to be one of those dads that's just working all the time, who's only there for pictures and some important holidays. No, I want to be there from the beginning, even change diapers."
"Well, how's that going to work with your job?" I ask.
"Not sure yet. Not sure how long I'm going to be working."
"Really? What do you mean?" I ask, shaking my head. "You have your
whole career ahead of you."
“It's probably not good to talk about it."
"It's fine. I'm not going to say anything if that's what you're worried about."
"Just haven't been feeling it for a while. Just a lot of darkness and paperwork. I think life should be about something more than that."
"Darkness and paperwork." I laugh. "I don't think our career choices have ever been summed up more accurately than that."
"Well, I've had a lot of time to think about what it is that I don't like about my job."
"So, what about transferring? Maybe it's the office. Maybe it's your location. Your boss."
He shakes his head and admits, "I’ve worked in a few places. It's just, I'm not cut out for this. Guys who do this kind of work they're really into playing cops and robbers. They like catching bad guys. They like to be that version of themselves. Me, not so much. I kind of fell into this and have been doing it for a few too many years and now I'm just trying to figure out what else I can do before I make it official."
"So, what about my sister's case?" I ask.
"I'm going to work it as hard as I can. I'm going to find out who did it. Who took her.” He corrects himself to not make it sound so much like someone had actually killed her.
I swallow hard.
"I'll work on this case as long as it takes, Kaitlyn, but that's probably going to be it for me.”
17
It throws me off a bit when Luke tells me about wanting to quit his job. People tend to change their jobs a lot outside of law enforcement but within the small insular community, it's all about rising within your rank, upping your pay grade, and getting enough years under your belt in order to get a comfortable retirement. The thought of someone retiring early, I've never heard of that.
"What do you think you want to do?" I ask.
“I don't know. I don't really have many skills. Outside of this, I'm not sure what I'd be qualified to do, but I have certain dreams.”
