Death in Dark Places

by Drew Franzen

  Maggie answered noncommittally. “No.”

  “Never?”

  “Never.”

  Dojcsak said, “Did she talk about who she might be seeing? Mention any names?”

  “No.”

  With less patience, he said, “She left your niece to meet someone, Maggie. She lied to you. This much we know. Isn’t it possible she was meeting a boy?”

  “Anything is possible, Ed.”

  “It would be helpful to know who. It would help to account for her time after leaving her cousin’s home. If nothing else, it could help to fix a more exact time of her”—he was going to say death; instead he said—“disappearance.”

  “I know of no one special,” Maggie said. “I don’t,” she reiterated, as if she herself was unconvinced.

  “Was Missy having trouble at school? With other girls?” Sara asked.

  “How do you mean?”

  “She wasn’t being bullied, was she?”

  Maggie said, “That’s ridiculous.”

  “No, Mrs. Bitson, it’s not. In fact, it’s entirely plausible. It might have occurred online. Did she have a Facebook page that you know of?”

  Maggie stared, nonplussed. “What’s Facebook?”

  Eugene Bitson entered the room just then. If he had been able to take even temporary refuge overnight from the horrific image of his dead daughter, it was not apparent from the deep, dark pools into which his eyes had receded, or in his expression and the lines that appeared like cracked asphalt across the surface of his skin. He appeared to be retreating within himself, turning his body inside out like a reversible skin. Dojcsak shuddered. He moved aside as Eugene turned to the sofa and dropped like a lump in the vacant space beside his wife. He settled a whiskered chin in the palm of a large, calloused hand and sat silent, like a casual observer waiting for someone else to begin.

  Dojcsak recalled Bitson as a bright and athletic eighteen-year-old, destined for college, a higher education and perhaps—like his elder brother, Drew—a career in professional basketball, his chosen sport. He’d married the former Maggie McMaster in a civil ceremony, two months later dropping out of the local high school, scuttling any chance he might have had for a post secondary degree. Six months later, Maggie gave birth to a child, the first of three, a daughter and the victim’s eldest sister now estranged and living in New York.

  From that time on, Eugene held a series of manual and factory labor jobs, never regaining an opportunity to realize his full potential. He opened the Exxxotica three years earlier in response, he once claimed almost grudgingly to Dojcsak, to forced unemployment. He was a responsible, if not entirely respectable, corporate citizen and Dojcsak made it part of his regular routine to monitor, though not to harass, the Exxxotica and its motley trade, ensuring they were of legal age, if not mental capacity, to partake in the assorted novelties on offer and that the hours of operation for the store were strictly observed.

  Dojcsak watched Eugene now, deciding there no longer remained a boy within the man he had grown to become. In that, Dojcsak decided, Eugene and Maggie made a perfect pair.

  Eugene extracted a cigarette from a package concealed in a breast pocket of his tattered house robe. Despite a disapproving glance from his wife, he ignited, inhaled and offered the package to Dojcsak. Instinctively, Dojcsak accepted, dragging a finger across his cheek, inspecting the stubble that had sprouted from his chin since he had last shaved. He was aware of needing a toothbrush and needing water. Dojcsak’s tongue was thick, his throat dry like dust.

  “Missy had a birthday coming up, was going to be fourteen.” Eugene startled everyone with the sound of his own voice, though none more than himself. “Now she won’t.” He said it as if realizing it for the first time.

  Watching him smoke, Sara thought: his hands are like the roots of a small tree; large and dark, the knuckles gnarled and the nails thick and uneven like bark. They were ugly hands, she decided, but were they responsible for the death of his daughter? Other than the fact he was her father, Pridmore saw nothing yet to recommend him.

  “Where were you yesterday, Eugene?” asked Dojcsak. “From the time Missy went missing to the time she was found? Have to ask, you’re the girl’s father.”

  “So that’s it? I’m her father, I’m a suspect?”

  “For now, at the top of our list. To avoid speculation, it’s best we clear you first.”

  Eugene said, “Alright, Ed. If that’s the way it’s going to be.”

  “Way it has to be, Eugene. Talk to me before this gets into the hands of the State Police.”

  “Alright, alright. I was here, home, with Maggie, watching the TV.” He turned to his wife. A film of sweat appeared across his brow. Dojcsak himself was feeling clammy, so he did not regard this with suspicion.

  “He was, Ed. Watching the basketball while I did the wash. I was in and out, but he never left the TV.” She thought for a moment and as if it were important, added, “Only to fetch a beer.”

  “Is your daughter available to confirm this?” Sara asked. For a fleeting and panicky moment she feared they might think she was referring to the victim. Clumsy idiot! she said to herself. But Eugene and Maggie understood, answering in unison.

  “Upstairs, asleep.”

  “May I speak with her?” Sara asked.

  “You can try, but Henry,” Maggie said referring to Dr. Henry Bauer, “said she’d be out most of the day. Sedated. If it suits you, come back later.”

  Dojcsak and Pridmore shared a glance. “It would. I can drop by after dinner.”

  “Were the girls close?” Dojcsak asked.

  “They shared a room,” replied Maggie.

  Sara said, “Did they share secrets, Mrs. Bitson? Sisters sometimes do.”

  “Well,” Maggie answered, regarding Sara knowingly, “if they did, they wouldn’t be likely to share them with me, would they?”

  For the next hour, Dojcsak and Sara pressed the Bitsons for information, in an effort to construct a meaningful profile: friends, acquaintances, teachers, and instructors, anyone who may have had an especially close relationship to, or contact with, the girl. Where did she go, what did she do? Was she healthy, happy, neither or both? Any sign of emotional dysfunction, either subtle or severe: substance or alcohol abuse, subtle or severe? Attitude? Worrisome or even troublesome telephone calls? Online activity of which they were aware? Why had Maggie been so quick to telephone the police last evening, they wanted to know?

  “Missy is very good about times,” Maggie replied. “There when she says she will be, when she says she will be there, is. Mostly, her time is accounted for. I called her mobile yesterday; it went straight to answer. I called twice more, then I called you.”

  “Well, Mrs. Bitson,” Sara said not unkindly, “her time was not accounted for yesterday.” Turning her thoughts to the alley and her questions to Eugene, she said, “I’m not fond of coincidence, Mr. Bitson. It’s the first thing they teach us to suspect. Does it strike you as odd that Missy was found in the alley behind your store?”

  “Odd? I can’t explain it, if it’s what you’re asking,” said Eugene as if the notion, if only fleetingly, had crossed his own mind. “Lot of folks were angry—still are—that I opened the store.”

  “Are you suggesting her death is some kind of vendetta? A disgruntled citizen opposed to the operation of the store?” Sara asked disbelievingly.

  Eugene bowed his head. He placed a hand to his forehead as if he might be fevered. “I don’t know, I don’t know. I can’t think anymore, let alone suggest. Missy is dead, murdered and God knows what else. I can’t think of why, or who, or even where. Only how. Did she see it coming? Was she scared? I was here,” he continued, his voice anguished, “sitting where I am right now.”

  He jabbed a thick finger vigorously to the sofa, leaving a mark. “I was watching the Pacers and the Knicks. I drank a beer or two—maybe three, I don’t remember—with tortilla chips and jalapeno cheese.” (So, Dojcsak
thought, not corn nuts.) “It looked like rain. I asked Maggie to raise the drain in the cellar. When it rains, sometimes it floods. Mandy was at the kitchen table, with homework. I was here for God’s sake.” His voice quavered, an accusation not an excuse, “Watching basketball while…while that was being done to my little girl.”

  By eleven o’clock on the morning following the murder, Pridmore and Dojcsak begged their leave, Sara promising to return after dinner to speak with the eldest daughter.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE LAST OF the early morning damp had succumbed to the overpowering will of evaporation by the time Dojcsak and Pridmore left the Bitson family to each other and to their grief. The air smelled of spring thaw, a curious aroma of both resurrection and decay. Dojcsak removed his sport jacket and popped the button at his throat, releasing the tension from his shirt collar and necktie. The sun prickled on his cheeks and his chin, its warmth seeming to encourage his rambunctious whiskers to a heightened degree of annoyance and agitation.

  Pridmore returned her police cap to her head. Sara was aware but tolerant of Dojcsak’s peculiarities; the obsessive and compulsive predilection to drag a razor across his face until his skin burned; the inclination over a lunch hour to have one, or perhaps three too many beers; the preoccupation with his doomed daughter. Ed Dojcsak carried the weight of his own unforgiving circumstances like extra pounds.

  As they walked, she surveyed the neighborhood. Eighty homes in all, the community occupied a tract of fallow landscape east from the main village, south from the river, separated from its more prosperous inhabitants by geography, income and social station; it was an area from which the village had originally grown. A century old, the Bitson home itself was a two and a half story brick structure similar to others in the district that over the past twenty years had been converted gradually to multiple unit rental accommodation.

  From a lower middle class enclave of working class family, the area had been largely resettled by the migrant tourist and agri-workers who flocked here every summer, a recurring and substantially inert strain on Dojcsak’s limited resources that in the past had been responsible for petty theft and crimes against property, but never—that Sara knew—the more serious offence of crime against person.

  “What are the odds, Ed?”

  “Of?”

  “That we solve this crime.”

  “A skeptic,” Dojcsak replied. “Like your partner.”

  “Not skeptical, just concerned.”

  “About?”

  “I hate to admit it, but we’re in deep here; in up to our eyeballs, if not over our heads.”

  “I’m a fisherman, Sara,” Dojcsak said as if to reassure her. “I know my business, and I know my limitations.”

  “Is it Eugene?” Sara wondered aloud.

  Dojcsak said, “He may be guilty of many things, but my gut tells me killing his daughter is not one of them. Too much grief, not enough anxiety.”

  “Are you qualified to tell the difference?”

  “When you have a child of your own, one who’s dead or dying, Sara, you have a sense for these things.”

  Sara nodded, as if she understood. She said, “Maggie is sedated, Ed; heavily, I think.”

  “Are you qualified to tell the difference?” Dojcsak asked back.

  “I get your point. But she’s too calm, Ed, as if it were someone else’s daughter we found in that trash bin, not hers.”

  Dojcsak nodded, his expression thoughtful. “She’s found a way to deal with it; good for her.”

  After a brief pause, Sara said, “Question is, is Maggie telling us the truth about Eugene?”

  “Speak to Mandy, Sara. If she says so, I guess she is. Unless we have compelling evidence, we can exclude Eugene. It’s tempting, even convenient to suspect the father, but in the case of this girl I think we’ll find there are more credible alternatives.”

  Sara watched as Dojcsak crossed the fractured walkway to the street, mindful of his step, fingers exploring his chin as if doing so again for the first time.

  …

  Maggie Bitson watched from the open door as they made their way to Dojcsak’s vehicle, Pridmore’s slender body thrust forward on the balls of her feet as if expecting a confrontation, Dojcsak back on his heels as if fearing one. His left hand worked at his jaw, as if he were in pain.

  After a moment, Maggie closed the door. Returning to the sitting room, she removed the remaining cups, saucers and condiments from the coffee table, taking care to not chip the delicate china. She paused for a moment before passing to the kitchen, contemplating her husband. Eugene pulled himself from the sofa, struggling to his feet like a prizefighter after being pummeled to the canvas. Unwilling and unable to withstand her scrutiny, he said, “I’m going back to bed. It won’t kill us for the store to stay closed for a few days. People won’t be spending anyhow; they’ll come to talk and to gawk, not to buy.”

  In the kitchen, Maggie rinsed her tableware in a mild solution of water and liquid detergent. She dried each piece separately, arranging them carefully in the glass-faced cabinet that contained the Bitson family crystal and fine china. The collection was considerable—Royal Doulton, Limoges and Lalique, among others—painstakingly acquired over a month of Sundays, she liked to say, visiting garage sales, flea markets and junk shops within driving distance of home. With Eugene uninterested, “antiquing” had become a regular pastime for Maggie, accompanied as she was on most occasions by her girls. Yesterday’s pleasant weather had preempted their first forage of the spring, Missy choosing instead to spend the afternoon with Kendra, or someone, or perhaps it hadn’t been Missy’s decision at all.

  Maggie dried the last of the saucers, returning it to her china cabinet, folding her tea towel in thirds and placing it to dry by the sink. Standing there, her mind preoccupied by the weight of the most ultimate and irrevocable of circumstances, Maggie felt futility rise like sour bile to her throat, a feeling that of all the things she might have summoned the strength to live to regret, the loss of her daughter, in this way, could never be among them. Maggie clenched her eyes tightly against the possibility of tears and steadied her trembling fists on the kitchen counter-top. Suspicion, anguish, grief, guilt; all threatened simultaneously to overwhelm her. In time, anguish would subside. Without a resolution, suspicion would not. After a moment, she reminded herself of the funeral and the family, reaching for the Yellow Pages and finally for the telephone. Bury my daughter: for now, all I can do.

  CHURCH FALLS, SOMETIME IN THE SEVENTIES

  LELAND MCMASTER JUNIOR knew automobiles. Leland McMaster knew automobiles and he knew women. (Girls, his father would say.) Adequately maintained, a vehicle would service its owner’s needs reliably. Without regular attention, it would let you down, an idiom he’d learned from Leland Sr. over years working at the dealership, during summer vacation, on weekends, and after school. Leland knew instinctively women were not so different from automobiles. “Wash ‘em, wax ‘em, dress ‘em up and take ‘em out of the garage every so often to show ‘em off,” his father liked to say. In regard to women, young Leland McMaster was developing ideas and idioms of his own.

  “Lubrication,” he boasted to his friends, thrusting his hips forward and back in a suggestive motion, hands outstretched as if clutching the reigns of an imaginary horse, “is the secret to a good fuck. Never ride a woman dry, boys. You wouldn’t do it with a vehicle, would you?”

  So impressed were his friends with Leland’s display of familiarity in the ways of intimacy, he ascribed the crude gesture to his own imagination, failing to acknowledge the contribution of Jeremy Radigan, the young man recently employed as a mechanic at his father’s shop. (Radigan appeared vaguely familiar to Leland, though by the time Leland accurately placed him as being an indigent from the transient community by the river, it was too late.)

  Leland crushed the last of his cigarette beneath the heel of his shoe. He absently fingered the driver side mirror of the late mode
l Oldsmobile Toronado his father had offered him that afternoon. Leland had a date; you can’t very well make the trip to Albany by foot, can you, his father said? Drive safe, he was cautioned, and be home by one, Leland Senior advised before passing his son the key.

  The girl was late and Leland was annoyed, but not so much he couldn’t wait. “After all, I’m not paying for it, am I?” he said, only half to himself.

  “I work ‘till five. I have to be home for supper, with my family. But I could meet you by six,” she’d told him this morning. “If you want.”

  Did he want!

  “Never pass up an opportunity to ‘polish the knob’, boys,” he said to his friends. “So long as it’s not Mary Palm doin’ the polishin’.”

  Of course they all laughed, the younger boys self-consciously, the older boys knowingly, all the while contributing vulgar comments of their own, though since the death of Shelly Hayden they were more subdued, speaking in modest tones so as not to be overheard.

  Though the inquest had officially ruled her death accidental, Leland’s father sensed that Sheriff Sidney Womack might be reluctant to accept the verdict. He had cautioned his son to mind his behavior.

  “He might go after you to bring me down a notch or two,” his father had warned. “I won’t have that, Lee.”

  Leland wasn’t concerned, not so long as he and Ed Dojcsak were square. If Sid Womack were searching for a killer, Leland thought, he’d do best with the black boy, Drew Bitson, or the ragged collection of vagabonds who had arrived in Church Falls at the start of the summer season and who until recently had been camped like gypsies upriver from the falls.

  He had watched together with Ed Dojcsak as they smoked drugs and copulated like animals out of doors, rutting beneath the trees, in the long grass, each girl going at it with two, three guys at a time, Leland watching with a mixture of envy and disgust. Seamus Mcteer had joined he and Ed one afternoon, arriving with his camera, snapping photos like a fiend. Seamus had developed the pictures himself, for weeks generating a small part-time income selling the photos to his high-school friends.