“That is such absolute crap,” I said.
“I am just reporting—”
“But why are you reporting this? I don’t see the relevance.”
“I apologize if this line of questioning seems a little too personal, Mrs. Buchan. All I’m trying to work out is whether her disappearance is a simple running away or a suicide. And that’s why finding out about her family background is so important, especially as she’s now passed the crucial seventy-two-hour mark.”
“What’s that?”
“In most missing persons cases, the individual is either found or comes in out of the cold after three days. But if they haven’t returned home by then, the disappearance is usually—and I have to stress that there is no straightforward rule here—because that person really wants to vanish, either through the act of running away or suicide. However, suicides usually aren’t searching for something else—other than a way to end their pain. In Lizzie’s case, she’s still searching for a Prince Charming figure, someone who’s going to whisk her away from all the bad stuff in life. The fact that McQueen has dumped her—and the fact that, even after that big scene in the Four Seasons bar, she still told you he was going to leave his wife and kids and get her pregnant again—means she’s still traveling hopefully, so to speak. And the fact that, in her eyes, her parents didn’t have the happiest of marriages means that, in her own psychoneurotic way, she’s probably searching for the next guy who, she thinks, will make things right for her. If your marriage had been a disaster or blissfully happy, she might have reason to despair, thinking she’d never find such happiness or that all intimate relationships are toxic. The fact that yours was functional gives her something to play for—a chance to find the storybook romance she’s still dreaming of.
“Or, at least, that’s my take on it . . . and I could be totally wrong.”
Pause.
“Are you a psychologist, Detective?”
“That’s what I trained to be . . . before the police got me.”
“It shows. And your theory about Lizzie is very persuasive, although I never knew . . .”
“What?”
“That Dan and I exuded so much . . . functionality as a couple.”
“Like I said, it’s just a secondhand report of what she said. And you’re right—even in their twenties, kids want their parents to be picture-postcard happy and can never understand when the reality is a little grayer than that. Don’t beat yourself up about it—and sorry again if I made you uncomfortable with my rather personal line of questioning.”
“So you don’t think McQueen could have killed her?”
“We haven’t ruled that out completely, though we’ve checked out his movements in the days after the scene in the Four Seasons, and he seems clean. Who’s to say, for example, that he didn’t hire someone to do the job for him? But I’m just entering the realm of forensic hypothesis here. Because between ourselves, my take on this is: Mark McQueen might be an asshole, but he’s not a murderous asshole.”
The interview over, I went outside and waited while Detective Leary interviewed Dad. That one phrase—she never felt that her parents were a happy couple—kept thundering through my brain. So this is how she saw us. And if that was Lizzie’s take on our marriage, Jeff must have seen this too. And then there were all our friends, our neighbors, our respective professional colleagues—did they too all think: Hannah and Dan have a pretty damn loveless marriage?
Dad’s interview with Leary lasted over forty-five minutes—almost three times the length of my short, sharp shock of an interrogation. He emerged with the detective—the two of them very chummy.
“I gather you’re driving your dad back to Vermont now,” Leary said. I nodded. “And you’ll be back home in Maine tomorrow?”
“That’s right.”
“Well, I have all your numbers there and will call as soon as I hear anything.” He handed me a card with a number scribbled on the back. “Here’s my cell phone number if you can’t get through to me here. Feel free to call whenever. I know how anxious a time this is. And get your dad back safe to Burlington. We need more guys like him right now . . . even if I completely disagree with most of what he says.”
“Only half,” Dad said, proffering his hand to Leary, who shook it warmly. “And remember, we’ve got a great minor-league team in Burlington, so I’ll expect to see you for a game come summer.”
In the car, I said, “So you and Leary seem to be new best friends.”
“He’s a very impressive young man.”
“What’s this about some minor-league team?”
“Don’t you remember the Vermont Expos, our local baseball team?”
“Oh, right.”
“Turns out Leary is a big baseball fan—and loves minor-league ball. Thinks it’s purer than what’s played in the majors, which is how I see it too. Anyway, I told him about the Expos—how they’re the farm team for Montreal and play right in the great little stadium in Burlington—and invited him up to catch a game.”
“What else did you talk about?”
“Lizzie, of course.”
“And?”
“It was mainly background stuff—though he did seem particularly interested to know if I felt she had any major gripes against her parents.”
“What did you say?”
“That all kids were screwed up by their parents, but that you and Dan had screwed her up less than most.”
“Thanks for the high praise, Dad.”
“He really is a most interesting policeman,” Dad said.
“He told me he trained as a psychologist.”
“Oh, he mentioned that to me as well. But did he tell you that he spent three years before that in a Jesuit seminary?”
“That explains a lot,” I said.
As arranged, Dad and I left the Brookline PD directly for Vermont—Dan having already departed back to Portland. It was a wrench and a relief to get out of Boston. Leaving was an acceptance of our failure to find Lizzie. The relief was being forced away from the place where she disappeared. Boston is, by and large, such a low-key city. Courtesy of its patrician hangover, it is not associated with the sort of emotional extremes or edginess of a New York or a Chicago. But from now on, I’d see it as the place from which my daughter fled into the void, and I knew I’d always hate it for that reason.
The traffic out of town was light. We crossed the Tobin Bridge and hit Interstate 93 in record time. It was a straight shot north to New Hampshire and the turnoff to I-89 just beyond Concord. Then another ninety minutes to Burlington. If the route from Portland to my hometown was indelibly etched in my brain, so too was this road from Boston to the shores of Lake Champlain—a stretch of highway I’d covered so often during my student years and those summers when Dan was working in Boston. As we drove north—little conversation passing between Dad and myself—all I could think was how I once shot south for a weekend in ’69 with Margy; the two of us crashing on the tiny dorm room floor of one of her prep school friends now at Radcliffe, and smoking a joint with her near the statue of John Harvard, and buying some ridiculous tie-dyed gauzy shirt in a hippie boutique in Cambridge, and ending up at some dorm party and talking to this rather intense Harvard guy named Stan who was a sophomore and told me he’d already written a novel and wanted to sleep with me that night, but I wasn’t in the mood, even though I did find him pretty interesting, and on my way back to Burlington I really regretted not sleeping with him, and how, around ten days later, I met Dan Buchan and our entire history got under way, even though neither of us realized at the time that this was the start of a shared destiny.
Now here I was, thirty-four years later, trying to be as brave and positive as possible in the midst of my child’s disappearance, and suddenly, out of nowhere, I’m thinking back to that freshman weekend in Boston, and wondering just how my life would have turned out if I had slept with that would-be writer. No, I’m not naive enough to think I’d still be with him now. But I can’t help hypothesizing:
say I had gone to bed with him—would I have been particularly receptive or interested when this freshman med student from Glens Falls, New York, crossed my path? Might I have turned him down when he suggested a beer at some student dive? And if that had happened, I most certainly wouldn’t be sitting in this car now, attempting to keep it all together as I try to tell myself that Detective Leary is right (he’s an ex-Jesuit, after all): Lizzie doesn’t fit the suicide profile.
“Penny for them,” Dad said.
I just shrugged, not wanting to share Lizzie’s comments with Dad, even though I wondered if Lizzie saw what I couldn’t—wouldn’t—accept: that my marriage was one enormous falsehood. If I had opened up to him, Dad would have reassured me, of course, telling me that no one except the two central participants can ever really understand the complex internal geography of a marriage. But I was so emotionally frayed right now that I just couldn’t bear the idea of a father-daughter heart-to-heart. So we said little on the drive back to Burlington. Vermont Public Radio broadcast a concert of Haydn and Schubert—and the hourly news bulletins came and went without comment from us. We were both talked out—any conversation we made would have been overshadowed by thoughts of Lizzie.
When we reached the Burlington city line, Dad said, “I spoke with Edith before we left the hotel. She said she’d make dinner tonight for us.”
“That’s nice of her.”
“She’s very concerned about Lizzie.”
“You know, Dad, I think I might head straight back to Portland after I drop you off.”
“Oh, I see,” he said, sounding uncomfortable. “This doesn’t have anything to do with Edith being there, does it?”
“No, it really doesn’t.”
“But you don’t approve.”
“I just don’t want to have to explain everything about Lizzie to someone else again.”
“Edith wouldn’t demand that from you. She’s not the prying type.”
“That’s not the problem, Dad—and, in fact, Edith is definitely not the problem. The thing is, I just want time alone now. Don’t be offended.”
“Understood,” he said, but I was still pretty certain he did take my decision to leave personally. I’d always so wanted my father’s approval when I was growing up, and I had started to realize that he now wanted mine.
Fair play to Edith—upon reaching the house, we discovered that she’d had the entire place cleaned while we were away, had completely stocked the refrigerator, and had a pitcher of martinis and a plate of cheese awaiting us.
“Hannah isn’t staying,” Dad said to her.
“I really need to head back to Maine,” I said.
“I tried to get her to stay, but . . .”
“If Hannah needs to leave, she should leave,” Edith said. “I know I’d want to be alone at a time like this.”
Bless you, Edith.
“I still don’t like the idea of you driving that road at night,” Dad said.
“She’s an adult, John,” Edith said.
“And a parent is always a parent,” Dad said.
Before I left, Dad did something out of the ordinary. Instead of giving me his usual cursory I’m-not-very-tactile good-bye peck on the cheek, he hugged me. He didn’t offer me words of comfort, or the predictable I’m-sure-she’ll-turn-up bromides. He just held me for a few moments.
I departed shortly afterward. I drove east through declining light—leaving the Interstate for a splendid two-lane blacktop that threaded its way through a string of untouched small towns. I concentrated on the road, the frosted hillsides, the domestic detail of the houses I passed. I played the radio. As darkness fell and NPR switched from All Things Considered to jazz, I cranked up the volume and let Dexter Gordon’s melancholic saxophone carry me eastward. Occasionally I’d glance at the cell phone on my dash, willing it to ring and for Lizzie’s voice to be there when I answered. But whenever such agonizing, wishful thoughts crossed my brain, I blacked them out, repeating, mantralike: There is nothing you can do . . . There is nothing you can do . . . There is . . .
At St. Johnsbury, I picked up Route 302. New Hampshire arrived. An hour later I was at the Maine border. Twenty miles outside of Portland, I called home but got no reply. So I tried Dan’s cell phone—and when voice mail kicked in there as well, I left another message, telling him to expect me shortly. I glanced at the clock on the dash. Eight-seventeen. Dan probably went to the gym at the Woodlands Club for a late workout. When 302 dovetailed with 295 (American automotive life is one long series of recollected numbers, isn’t it?), I headed north and took the Bucknam Road exit in order to do some shopping at the big Shaw’s Supermarket right off the highway.
I ran up over one hundred dollars’ worth of groceries at Shaw’s. The kid who was packing the bags wheeled the cart out to my car. He couldn’t have been more than seventeen—and as I watched him put everything into the trunk, I remembered that, when she was between sophomore and junior year in high school, Lizzie lasted two weeks one summer as a checkout girl at a Rite Aid pharmacy in this same strip mall.
“I can’t do retail, Mom,” she said when she came home one afternoon and announced she’d quit. I recall liking the fact that she refused to put up with an intolerable situation. So why had she put up with her intolerable mutual funds job for so long? And why had she stuck with an intolerable married man—and couldn’t see that his promises were empty ones? When had she lost that ability to walk away from something she just didn’t like?
“You okay, ma’am?” the checkout kid asked me.
I touched my right cheek. It was wet.
“Not really,” I said.
Then I reached into my bag, fished out five dollars, and thanked him for helping me.
Home was shuttered, dark. Nine-twelve. This was quite a late workout by Dan standards. Before unpacking the groceries, I checked our voice mail. Nothing of importance vis-à-vis Lizzie—just Jeff confirming that he’d be heading to Boston on Monday and had arranged to see Detective Leary.
“He assured me that he could hold off the Boston Herald hack for a few more days. Over the weekend I’m going to talk to a few colleagues and see if there’s any legal avenues we can travel down to stop publication.”
Fat chance. And though part of me appreciated Jeff’s efforts to curb First Amendment rights in this case, there was another unpleasant part of me that thought that what he was really motivated by was his desperate need to suppress the fact that his sister had had an abortion—which simply wouldn’t play well with Shannon’s right-to-life chums.
I read my email. Mainly junk—but there was a Greetings from ChemoLand dispatch from Margy:
Hey hon
Just came home from another top-up chemo session. Seems Dr. Drugstore found a little something gray and amorphous in the lower lobe during my last MRI a few days ago and wants to zap it. Nothing too sinister, he feels—but, in true oncologist style, he is being ultracautious. So, having just spent the afternoon with an IV tube of poison dripping into my system, I’m home now, watching crap television—some moronic reality program about six couples who get locked up in a disused maximum security prison—and just wondering why you’ve gone so quiet. Have you read the dreaded book yet? If so, please call me asap so we can talk strategy.
Missing you—and wish we could down a couple of martinis right now . . . the best anesthetic going.
M xxx
More chemo . . . and something gray and amorphous in the lower lobe. Oh Jesus, that didn’t sound good at all. And to hell with the book right now. Compared to everything else going on, it was small potatoes . . . or, at least, that’s what I was going to tell myself tonight.
As I was firing back an email to Margy I heard a car pull up into the driveway. I finished the email and went downstairs. Dan was just coming in the door. He seemed surprised to find me home.
“Weren’t you due back tomorrow?” he asked.
“And a big hello to you too.”
“Sorry, I just wasn’t expecting . . .�
�
“Didn’t you get the message?”
“Forgot to turn my cell on after the gym.”
“You were working out until now?”
“Met Elliot Bixby at the club. We had a beer afterward.”
Elliot Bixby was the head of dermatology at Maine Medical—and something of a pompous ass.
“I couldn’t stand being anywhere near a dermatologist right now,” I said.
“Yeah, that thought did cross my mind, but he was there in the locker room and when he proposed a drink, and . . . I wasn’t ready to come back to an empty house. Any news from Boston?”
I shook my head.
“How’d your interview go with Leary?”
“He asked some tough questions.”
“Like what?”
“Did I think we had a happy marriage?”
“He asked me that too,” Dan said.
“So he told me. And what did you say?”
“The truth.”
“Which is?”
“Well, what do you think?”
“Tell me.”
He glanced down at his shoes.
“I said we were very happy. And you?”
A pause. He continued to look away from me. I said, “I told him the same thing. It’s a happy marriage.”
THIRTEEN
THERE WAS NO news from Boston over the weekend. I continued to ring Lizzie’s cell phone—and continued to get her voice mail. Then, suddenly, on Sunday afternoon, somebody answered. “Yeah, waddya?”
It was a man of indeterminate age. He didn’t sound sober.
“I would like to speak to Lizzie Buchan, please,” I said.
“Who the fuck is this?”
“This is her mother. Who are you?”
“That doesn’t matter.”
“Where’s my daughter?”
The Douglas Kennedy Collection #1 Page 145
