Girl Lost

by Kate Gable

  The captain doesn't seem particularly satisfied with my mom's answers, but he focuses his discontent on me and Luke, the other law enforcement officers in the room.

  "Did you talk to him about the inconsistencies in his statements about where he was that night?"

  "I only came in at the end of this conversation,” I say. "I didn't get a chance. I wanted to."

  "That's the thing, that's why we do this in the proper place and at the proper time," he says. "This is why we have interrogation rooms with cameras."

  "Yes, I know that. I'm aware of the concept, but he was talking to my mom here. He was offering up information that we didn't currently have and frankly I don't understand why you're so pissed off about it."

  “I'm pissed off because you didn't ask him the right questions. You had this one chance. Now he, as a minor, is going to go back home, talk to his prosecutor father, clam up, and we're not going to be able to get at the truth. You know just as well as I do that there was an inconsistency between where Natalie said she was the night of Violet's disappearance and where Neil said he was. He said he was with Natalie on the night Violet disappeared.”

  "Yes, I do know that, but that doesn't mean that he was going to answer those questions tonight. He came here to talk to my mom and just my mom to tell her that he was with Violet. That's it. I think that he did that without his father knowing and without his father's permission because he snuck out on his scooter, came here, and was very eager to go back as soon as his mission was accomplished."

  Captain Talarico makes some disapproving puff of a sound and crosses his arms demonstratively to shut me out. I know that he is annoyed, pissed off.

  He's not in complete control and the one thing we as law enforcement people hate is lack of control.

  What else is there to do? I take a few steps away from him and he does the same thing. It's the only way to defuse the situation.

  He needs space. He needs to regroup. If I keep pressing him and if we keep having this fight, then he's just going to dig in his heels and we're going to accomplish nothing.

  19

  I slip outside and decide that this is as good a time as any to try to find Violet's English teacher. I haven't brought up the fact that she might be lying on her grades to my mom yet and a part of me wonders if maybe she knows already but just didn't want to say anything. It would be better to have a few more facts available.

  Much to my surprise, I find Miss Dolores in the parking lot talking to the two other teachers that I met during the search. She couldn't come to participate, but she wanted to be here to show her support. We shake hands and I pull her aside, not wanting anyone to influence her answers.

  "Thanks for taking the time to talk to me," I say, as she wrings her hands nervously in front of me.

  Her hair cascades down her shoulders in soft auburn waves and she has milky white skin with a few freckles, just on the bridge of her nose.

  "Violet was a student of mine. I just can't believe that this happened to her, or to Natalie either."

  "Can you tell me what your experience of Violet was? How is she as a student? What did you teach her?"

  “Well, I had her for two years, last year for English A and then this year for English B."

  "Okay. How was she?"

  "Well, frankly, it's been like night and day."

  "What do you mean?" I ask, pulling the small notebook out of my pocket. I hesitate but decide to ask if I can record her instead.

  "I don't know."

  "It's just for my own personal note taking, just to keep track of everyone's story. I just want you to please feel free to say anything because we just never know when some little insignificant detail is going to break this whole thing wide open."

  I press record and she nervously shifts her weight from one foot to the other. Finally, she opens her mouth and starts talking.

  "Violet is such a wonderful kid. Last year she would turn in all of her assignments on time. She would come and bug me and ask me incessant questions if she ever got anything lower than a B. When I saw that I had her in my class again, I was excited. I knew that she would bring everyone’s general attitude up and she wouldn't be one of those kids complaining about too much work or too many projects. Morale is very important in middle school."

  "Yes, I know," I say, briefly remembering my own time and all of the black I wore, paired with a black lipstick and all the cynicism I spewed about how love doesn't exist.

  I was one of those kids who was always too cool for school. So, if there were anyone talking about their lives, anything emotional, or anything real, I went back to my sarcasm and my cynical analysis of how everything was stupid and not worth your time. "I'm glad that Violet was a good student. I'm glad that you enjoyed having her in your class."

  "Yes, more than that, but it doesn't change the fact that recently, this past quarter something was off."

  "What do you mean exactly?" I glance down at the recorder to make sure that it's getting it all down.

  "She changed."

  "Did she start to dress differently?"

  "No, actually she didn't. She wore the same kind of bright sunny clothes she always had, but her attitude changed. She forgot a few big assignments and she told me that she was distracted, and I was stupid enough to believe her. The truth was that she didn't forget them, she didn't even do them at all. She didn't do them on purpose."

  "How do you know?"

  "I overheard her in the bathroom was talking to Carrie-Ann, this girl who is in eighth grade and she's not good news, Detective Carr.”

  "What do you mean?"

  "She's always smoking in the bathrooms. When the dogs went around and smelled for drugs, her locker seemed to point to the fact that there was some evidence that there was marijuana in her locker. When we opened it there wasn't any, so we couldn't follow our zero-tolerance policy and expel her. She's a troublemaker. She talks back in class, she rarely does homework, and she's always skirting the rule about the length of her skirts. She got sent home a few times for wearing a midriff shirt."

  "Wow, do they still have those rules?" I ask with a smirk on my face.

  "Listen, I know that kind of policing of women's bodies is total crap. Okay? I realize that because boys can get away with wearing whatever, but those are the policies put in by the superintendent and we have to follow them. I let most people get away with a lot, but not bra tops, you know."

  I nod.

  "They're distracting. She knows that and she does it on purpose."

  "Carrie-Ann. What is her last name?"

  "Lebowski," Miss Dolores says.

  I write down the name in my notebook.

  "I had no idea that they were friends, but I guess they have been for a while now," she says. "I just happened to be in the bathroom when I heard them talking about it. I was in the stall and they didn't check underneath. They were just running their mouths about everything and everyone. I've never seen Violet like that before. She was just so confident and nonchalant. I mean, it was, on one hand, nice to see but on the other hand, very disturbing. She talked about how she didn't care about school anymore and she cursed a lot. She called me the ‘B' word and then corrected herself and called me the ‘C’ word for giving her a D for an assignment she never turned in. It was disturbing and the thing is that I've never seen the two of them hang out together. Carrie-Ann is not known to have a lot of friends. She likes to push buttons and she likes to do what she likes to do.”

  "So, she's not in the same clique with Natalie and Neil?"

  "No, not at all. Those kids know how to use soft power."

  "What do you mean by that?" I ask. "You mean like in government?"

  "You work in a school long enough and you realize that it's all about power dynamics. Middle school is brutal. Middle school is all about who you can step on to move up the rungs of popularity. People say that about high schools, but I think that in middle school you first realize the power that you can have over others and you don't have th
e empathy of high school students which should tell you a lot."

  Her blue eyes narrow and the intensity in her face grows. She leans toward me and I no longer feel the nervous energy that used to emanate from her, instead something is different.

  There's a kind of certainty that I haven't seen earlier.

  "So, tell me more about Natalie and Neil," I press her.

  "They're the popular kids at school. They, and her two brothers, are his best friends. He plays hockey and basketball. She's got about five other friends and he's got about four or five other friends. They rule the school. In terms of fashion, in terms of musical tastes, and in terms of everything. There’re lots of kids that ignore them or basically don't even get on their periphery and Violet used to be like that."

  "What about Carrie-Ann?"

  "Carrie-Ann is an odd duck. She's like a jester. She sits in the back of class, makes fun of assignments, and mocks people under her breath when all of us teachers know exactly what she's saying, but we can't exactly draw more attention to it. She's not part of that clique, they're all pretty well off and their families go skiing together. Not here at Big Bear, in Colorado.”

  "So, how does Violet fit in?" I ask.

  "Violet used to be kind of a wallflower. She was friends with Kaylee. She had a few other random friends who weren't friends with each other and she'd kind of sit and have lunch with whoever was available. I don't know exactly what happened. A few months ago, I saw her talking to Natalie and they were friendly. I was surprised. They might've worked on a project together in another class and then I saw her talking to Neil. I was like, wow, I guess they're taking Violet in and she's going to be part of the cool clique now, but, then there was Carrie-Ann. I know for sure that Natalie and Carrie-Ann never got along."

  "Really, how?"

  "They got into a fight in gym class, started screaming at each other. It almost got physical, but someone pulled them apart before that happened."

  "Oh, wow," I mumble.

  "Anyway, I don't know how they fit in with each other, but she was friends with both or at least it appeared to be that way."

  "What about her grades? What happened there?"

  "They started falling. She’d gotten mostly As before, but this past quarter she stopped turning in work. She would just not participate. She acted like she was better than everyone. So, I don't know if that was Carrie-Ann's influence or just her changing."

  "Do you think something happened to cause that?"

  "Yeah, something must have. For every action, there's an equal and opposite reaction, right?"

  "I thought that you were an English teacher. That sounds like Physics to me.” My joke lands, but she barely breaks a smile.

  "I don't know what to do to help you, Detective," she says. "This is all I know. I'll talk to some more of my friends. I'll see what gossip I can dig up, but that's how it is. That's all I know."

  I nod and thank her for her time. I give her my card and she gives me her phone number in case I need to follow up on anything. I walk away from her with a heavy heart. I appreciate everything that she has told me, but I suddenly realize just how much of a layered existence we all live, especially when we're in middle school. There are all these secrets and hidden truths. Of course, this is nothing that you would ever tell my mom. Maybe if I stayed here and we actually stayed in touch I might hear about ten percent of it.

  This is what life is like at that age. You have friends, you try to make friends with others, you get lost, and you get confused. Someone may say one thing to you, then suddenly you stop being the person that you used to be, you become someone else entirely or maybe it's worse than that. Maybe it's not a word or a sentence that someone says, maybe it's something that someone did. Miss Dolores doesn't know anything about Violet and Neil except that they were friendly, but I know more. He wouldn't have been that upset and that distraught; he wouldn't be talking to my mom with tears in his eyes about spending an hour with her right before she disappeared, if he didn't care, if there weren't other secrets eating him up inside.

  How do I figure all of this out? Where do we stand? I have to find out how Carrie-Ann is connected to all of this. I have to find out what else Neil didn't tell us about.

  The truth is that this is what it's like to talk to suspects. They admit a little bit of the truth at a time. It's like admitting everything is too painful, but it's easier to get them to say that something was an accident first before circling back and calling them on the fact that it could never have been an accident.

  I wonder what else Neil is hiding. He admitted that they were together, but what if that part where he dropped her off was a lie? What if he tried to go further, she said no, he did it anyway, and then he freaked out thinking that she was going to tell the police and he killed her? That sounds so mundane but that happens all the time. It's the stupidest reason, besides probably a car accident, to lose a life, but I've been doing this job long enough to know that it is often the cliché that takes us out in the end.

  Luke catches up with me just as I'm wandering around the parking lot trying to process everything that Miss Dolores told me.

  This all has to go in a report to be simplified and organized, yet it's in this period of transition where I don't know exactly what her words mean or imply.

  This is where the world seems to make more sense, in this uncertainty.

  Someone set up a makeshift coffee stand right next to the VFW, giving us a place to buy fresh roasted coffee without getting into our cars and driving to Starbucks. Luke buys me an espresso and I take it down in one gulp and then ask for a latte.

  "Sorry about that," I say. "Just needed a little bit of a jolt of adrenaline. I feel myself drifting away from too little sleep."

  20

  A few hours later, Luke and I decide to get some takeout and eat at his hotel. It's the only place that we can be alone without drawing attention to ourselves and there's a great Nepalese restaurant in town, one of my favorites. I make suggestions for what is the best thing to order. We pick up the food and dig in feverishly sitting across from one another at the little table in his room. We don't say anything for a while until we're both done with about half of our cartons.

  "Tell me about Violet," he says, chewing a little bit of food.

  "What do you want to know?"

  "Just what she's like."

  "She's a good sister. We have such a big age gap that it feels almost strange. We had more of a mother-daughter relationship.” It's hard for me to think back to what she was like as a kid without my eyes tearing up. Every day that passes there's more and more of a gulf that builds between us. “I don't want to talk about this," I say, looking away from him.

  There's one light fixture above our heads with rounded edges and a delicate glass design reminiscent of the '70s. I stare at it because the light that emanates is low, like candlelight.

  I don't know what I was expecting coming here. I guess another roll in the hay to take my mind off everything that's messed up in my life, but now suddenly, I feel myself getting closer to him and I'm not ready for that. Not in the least.

  "What do you make of Neil?" I ask. "His whole thing, coming over to my mom. Do you think he was telling the truth?"

  "Yeah, I do," Luke says, shifting his jaw from one side to the other.

  "What do you mean?" I gasp.

  "Just got that feeling, you know?"

  I tilt my head and prop my chin up with my hand. I glare at him in disbelief.

  "No, you can't be serious."

  "I'm totally serious."

  "What are you talking about? That's not...there's no way."

  "What do you think? He just sought her out to place himself at the scene for no reason?" Luke asks, folding his arms across his chest.

  "I have no idea what his motivation is, but he knows something. He was with her that night."

  "Yes."

  "The fact is that we would not know it if not for him coming forward and telling your mom about it. Re
member, he did it secretly. He didn't tell the cops. He didn't tell his father. He came here on a scooter because he doesn't drive.”

  “So, just because he doesn't drive means that he can't be responsible for someone's death?" The words just spill out of me.

  "What are you talking about?"

  Suddenly, everything goes black.

  "I haven't let myself think that thought before. Dead, death. Deceased, departed. There’re so many euphemisms and metaphors. There's a finality to it that doesn't come with the word gone."

  "You think that she's dead? You of all people?" Luke asks. "Please tell me you don't."

  "I don't know what to think," I say. "My sister's missing for days. She's disappeared. Nothing about my life makes any sense right now. Realistically speaking, she may be dead."

  "Don't say that." Luke throws his hand in my face. "You know that there is a strong possibility that she's alive. She's not a small child. She's a teenager."

  "You think she ran away?"

  "No, I'm not saying that, but if someone took her there's a strong possibility they're keeping her alive."

  That phrasing, his word, sends a shiver through my body. They’re keeping her alive and doing what, the worst possible things that men tend to do to women or little girls.

  "Do you want her to be dead? Is that easier for you?"

  "Shut up," I say, getting up from my seat and resisting the urge to slap him across the face. "How dare you say that? Of course, I don't want her dead. I'm just..."

  "You're being a realist? I don't think so." Luke shakes his head. He remains seated but turns his body toward mine as I pace in front of the television.

  Suddenly, the small motel room feels even tighter and more cramped as the walls start to close in around me.

  "I want to leave, but this conversation isn't over. There's still so much more to say."

  "Tell me why Neil would kill her or hurt her?" Luke challenges me.

  "It's a story as old as time. He tries to take it a little further with her and she's not happy with it, but he keeps doing it. Maybe he fondles her, maybe he rapes her, and then he feels bad. He starts to think, 'What's going to happen when I drop her back off at home? Is she going to call the police? Is my life going to be over?' So, he picks up a rock and he hits her on the head. He buries the body somewhere."