Megan hesitates before boarding the bus to a place she’s never been before, hesitates before accepting a ride with a stranger. Thinking of Billy, that horrible hospital, all those wrecked young men and boys. She’s in flight, in flight from it all.
Remembers Billy’s last leave. A year of training under his belt. Three days at home before shipping out to Vietnam. Both of them in the grip of something: anticipation, fear, the unknown.
And she is walking down that rutted drive again in the failing light, biology textbook under her arm; a prop to the lie of studying for a test with Nell. The ponies call to her from the pasture, skittish, dancing in the dark, keyed up by her unexpected nearness. She sends the dog back to the barn twice.
Waiting beneath the purple beech tree, the Indian summer warmth leaching from the day, cool air rushing in from the lake, exhaling from the woods. She should have brought a jacket. Billy will warm her up.
She feels exceptionally awake, the anticipation of touch and taste singing inside her. She is breathless and sad. Wanting him an ache so loud, so persistent, how is it possible no one else can see it or hear it? Every feeling amplified by the fact of his leaving, by the fact of a year away, all that has happened that they do not talk about. Part of her wants to peel away the secrets, confess, be comforted and forgiven. Maybe one day.
She sees the truck headlights threading up the lane, down the service road, across the railroad tracks. Billy opens his door, she climbs up and into his lap, discards her textbook, it falls to the floor, forgotten. His arms around her, he pulls back onto the road.
All the wanting in the world can’t keep him here, she thinks.
“Where do you want to go?” He asks.
“Someplace close. I have to be back by 10.”
She can feel the anger in him; a sharp bolt of tension runs up her own spine.
“How about right here, then?” He makes as if to turn into a driveway.
“Funny.”
“Side of the road?”
“Don’t be thick,” she says, then, “Turn here.”
The dirt track leads them up a hill to a boarded-up farmhouse. The headlights sweep neglected fields, broken fences, come to rest on a sagging porch.
“How come you know about this place?”
“Nell and I like to ride up here. You skirt the woods above our farm, cross Mill Creek, and after another mile or so, come down through that stand of poplars. We’d let the ponies graze and sit on the railing. Pretend like it belonged to us.”
Stepping onto the porch they hear small animals scurrying away. The red-orange moon tilts into view above the hills opposite. It’s cold. Maybe too cold. Billy pulls her against him, wraps his jacket around her, suddenly tender, surprising her, as he always does, that sweetness just below the surface.
“We could buy this place.”
“Sure we could,” she laughs.
“I’ve got some money saved up. I’ll be getting hazard pay with nothing to spend it on but cigarettes and beer. We could have a down payment, maybe.”
“I’ll be in college, Billy. And so will you.”
“After, then. But we could get started, that’s all I’m saying. Get a stake.”
“Share the house with Nell and Harlow. Split the costs. And the work.”
“One of us would need a real job, income to pay expenses while we got up and running. I could get my commercial pilot’s license.”
“I’m gonna want horses, you know. Great big draft horses. They’ve still got the old plows and harrows in that barn. Harnesses, too.”
“Whatever you want.”
“Promise me,” she says, suddenly serious.
“Anything.”
He kisses her, pulling at her clothes; whatever separates them. Unzips her pants, eases her down on the rough boards, their clothes jumbled beneath them. He unbuttons her shirt, impatient, tears the buttons.
She tries to grab her jeans, there’s a condom in the pocket, and he’s inside her, his mouth on her neck. She wants to give in, let go. He looks at her, says her name: Megan, Megan, wonder in his voice, in his touch, what passes between them overwhelms her, like ice, like electricity. “Billy. Stop. The condom.” He pins her arms over her head, watching her. There is a recklessness she almost wants to surrender to. He’ll pull out before he climaxes; she reassures herself, fear gripping her. The sounds he makes when he comes, choked, sad somehow, like a wounded animal.
She’s angry then, confused, terrified of getting pregnant. Does he know? flashes through her mind, does he want me to be pregnant again? The hell with that, she thinks, as he pulls her against his chest. Soothing her, caressing her.
“You didn’t use a condom, you . . . ”
“Shhh . . . Shhh . . . It’ll be okay.” His lips move down her body, fingers inside her, gentle, stroking her. Now his mouth where his hands were. She grabs his hair, alarmed. He’s never done this before.
“What are you doing?” His hands move to her breasts, his mouth is hot, the air cold; she has never felt so exposed. She’s resisting this orgasm, her mind stuck on what just happened, until she can resist no longer and falls over the waterfall with him, the ride down a revelation. The further revelation, she wants him again, more, again and again, she wants this wildness, wants to match his wildness with her own.
When he enters her now there is no thought of the future, or the past. He’s looking at her; he’s seeing her, seeing through her. Those eyes. A gentleness now. The words last time, last time, rise up in her. She pulls him to her, wraps her arms and legs around him. Just one more year. They can make it through one more year.
Megan hesitates one more time before deciding she can handle the guy who offers her a ride. Toys in the backseat, dog tags hanging from the mirror, a roach on the dash, Crosby, Stills and Nash on the radio. Shy smile, working man’s hands. She’ll be all right.
Megan Alsop disappears the day after Billy Flynn gets home from Vietnam.
When Nell walks up the hill to do her chores at the farm after school, no one knows yet that Megan is missing. Or that the Alsops’ dog has also vanished.
It’s easy to lose track of a girl who lives in two places: her father’s farm, her mother’s apartment in town; easy to lose track of a girl like Megan, sleeping with a boy who doesn’t love her, running with a crowd she doesn’t really know, her status so provisional there’s no one to notice when she’s not there, no one to pick up the phone, sound the alarm, give a damn.
Maeve Alsop drives up to the farm, tires spinning in the snow, talking at Asa as she hurries across the ice-crusted yard to where he stands at the woodblock. He has spent the last hours splitting logs, each bite of the axe ringing in his arms and shoulders. He knows it’s madness to have an axe in his hands. He sets it down as Maeve approaches, the handle slick with sweat, his breath rasping. Nothing she can accuse him of can be worse than the blame he heaps on himself. He has been mute with fury since storming the police station demanding that something be done and done now. Nothing he said or shouted cut through their calmly infuriating reassurance: Kids wander off; she’ll show up, probably a fight with a boyfriend.
Asa reaches for Maeve when she slips on the ice. She jerks away from him.
“The police aren’t doing anything. Why haven’t you organized a search? This would never have happened if you could have kept your family together.”
He reaches for her again, thinks, but doesn’t dare say: Maeve, sweetheart, won’t you come home? She resists; then lets herself be pulled into his arms.
Later that night, Nell, Jack, and Marion Flynn gather in the Alsops’ kitchen with Billy’s best friend, Harlow Murphy, his father Ely, and Asa’s closest neighbors, the Morgans and the Donovans, eldest sons in tow. Panic is spreading. Concerned citizens have set up a phone chain to organize volunteers. There are dozens of quickly assembled search parties all over town. People feel
the police are moving too slowly, no matter that these amateur efforts might destroy evidence. They want to do something.
With flashlights and lanterns they move into the numbing cold, heading for the dense woods above the Alsops’ farm, a wall of white. They spread out, keeping within an arm’s length of each other as much as the trees will allow. Nell walks between Harlow and her father, welcoming the shelter of the woods after the relentless wind, but soon finds the forest terrifying. Every unexpected sound, every clatter of branches lashing over their heads, every pile of leaves makes Megan’s disappearance more real. Nell keeps imagining that she sees a skein of Megan’s hair, or the outline of a boot or a body, buried in the snow. She looks to her father for reassurance; he is fully concentrated on the ground in front of him, holding himself together through force of will. Harlow reaches out and takes her hand, briefly, then returns to methodically raking the ground with his torch. Like a brother, she thinks, his cool reserve just about killing her. She flashes on Megan’s blood on the floor of that awful room, imagines blood in the snow.
Billy, floating in and out of consciousness those first days and nights, isn’t sure if he dreamed his father sitting beside him reciting his rosary, or his older sister Sheila, drinking coffee and gossiping with the night nurse. He turns his head once to find Nell working through a set of math problems. Has Marion been here, fighting with the staff? Rosie, beautiful Rosie? He can’t remember.
Where’s Megan and why hasn’t she come to see him?
Harlow Murphy. That booming laugh. Flirting with the nurse. Yes. Harlow bending to whisper in his ear: We’ve gotta get you out of here, buddy.
And Brendan, no, it isn’t possible his brother Brendan could fly in from Texas.
Bits and pieces of conversation. Is he dreaming or are they real? His father telling him he’s in one piece, over and over, like he’s trying to convince himself: You’ve got your mind, your body, your family. You hang on to that, you hang on.
The rosary, his father’s voice again, slipping away. Holy Mary, mother of God . . .
Nell stands by the window while Billy sleeps and looks through his wallet. Finds a picture taken when she was four or five, hair in braids, bangs uneven, no doubt cut at home. She hadn’t been a pretty kid, and she’ll never be as pretty as her sister Rosie, at least that’s what everyone tells her. She’s not vain, but it sticks in her guts sometimes.
Another photograph, taken in the Alsops’ orchard. Megan on a ladder, Billy’s arm around her waist; baskets of apples at their feet; Nell looking away from Harlow, his last leave before shipping out to Vietnam, lean and muscled, hair too short, sideburns too long.
She’d gathered her courage for weeks and finally reached for him, pure longing propelling her past fear. He’d taken her hands, then pushed her away. She couldn’t see how hard he worked to do the right thing, to let her grow up and make a real choice. All she could see was the way he moved away from her, head down, eyes averted, waiting for the moment to pass.
She looks at Billy now, his face closed against the pain. Dreads telling him about Megan, not sure if it’s kindness or cowardice that’s keeping her mouth shut.
The search for Megan Alsop, with local policemen, firemen, volunteers, and dogs, ends after seventy-two hours. They comb through Geneva, fanning out over the surrounding hills, torches winking on and off as they advance through fields and woods. The heaviest snowfall of the year had obliterated any hope of finding tracks.
Neighboring towns organize volunteers to search their own areas. The news of a missing eighteen-year-old girl flashes around the lake like a forest fire. Nothing like this has ever happened here. Kids wander their neighborhoods, range far and wide, and no one blinks an eye. There’s a lot of talk about last year’s unsolved Alphabet Murders up in Rochester. Three preteen girls sexually assaulted and murdered within a span of six months. Carmen in Chili, Wanda in Webster, Michelle in Macedon. No suspects. No arrests.
Two policemen stamp snow off their boots at the back door and sit down at the kitchen table, accepting Marion’s offer of coffee.
“We’re just here to ask a few questions,” the tall one says, stirring sugar into his cup, smiling as he introduces himself: Detective Jim Johnson. The sandy-haired dimpled one, former high school running back, former fourth grader in Marion’s classroom, is Dale Pope. His father owns the funeral parlor in town. You can understand why Dale might choose another line of work.
Marion ushers them into the front room so she can make dinner. Jack, visiting Billy, is expected home soon.
Nell glances up from her lab report when the two men enter the room. She stands suddenly, knocking her chair over. Looks to her mother for help or an explanation, but Marion has already returned to the kitchen.
Dale Pope rights the chair as Johnson opens his notebook, flips through several pages, and asks:
“Did you see Megan Alsop the day she disappeared, Thursday, February 3rd?”
“I saw her at school.”
“Did you notice anything out of the ordinary?”
“She may have had a fight with her boyfriend.”
“Did she talk to you about this?”
“No.”
“How did you form this impression?”
She could see Megan in the restroom, smoking, pale, her hands too busy, hiding something, her mascara a mess. Her new friends had brushed past Nell, leaving Megan behind. Nell hadn’t known what to say. Don’t say anything, Megan said. I don’t want to hear it.
You can’t be pregnant again.
Leave me alone.
Do you need help?
I’ll deal with it.
“She seemed . . . I don’t know what the right word is. Preoccupied. Sad.”
“Do you know her boyfriend?”
“I know him to say hello to.”
“You’re not friends.”
“There’s not a problem between me and Rob Chandler.”
“Someone saw you getting into Mr. Alsop’s pickup truck that afternoon.”
“That’s not true. He stopped to say hello. He was heading into town.”
“Does he often offer you a ride?”
“If he sees me walking.”
“Are you ever uncomfortable with Mr. Alsop?”
“No more uncomfortable than I am with any other adult.”
“Would you describe him as a loner?”
“I’m not going to help you paint some awful picture of Mr. Alsop. Is he a suspect?”
Johnson looks up from his notes. “Did you see Rob Chandler at school that day?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Was he in your English class?”
“I can’t remember.”
“Did you see him at lunch?”
She shakes her head.
“After school?” he prompts.
Why are these questions so upsetting?
“No. Wait. He drove by me that day,” she says.
“Was Megan in the car?”
“I don’t know. I assumed she was.”
“Could you see if there was someone else in the car?”
“He was driving really fast. They honked. I about jumped out of my skin.”
“Have you talked to him since Megan disappeared?”
“No.”
“Has he approached you in any way?” he asks.
“Why would he?” As the words leave her mouth she can see Rob Chandler lounging in the hallway outside Mr. Ware’s calculus class, staring at her. She had been so surprised she’d turned around to see who was behind her. What day was that?
“That’s all for now,” he says. “Thank you for your time.”
“Mrs. Flynn, thanks for the coffee,” Dale calls out.
“One more thing,” Johnson says. “Did Megan have any reason to run away?”
“Not that I know of
.”
“Could she have been pregnant?” He stands up, straightening his tie.
She gives him a long look. “Theoretically possible, I suppose.”
“If she confided in you . . . ”
“She didn’t.”
Detective Johnson hands Nell his card.
“We may need to question you again. Here’s my number if you remember a detail, a conversation. And you can always call Sergeant Pope.”
Nell grabs her coat and heads out to feed the Alsops’ ponies. Late. Damn it. All of the detective’s insinuations . . . But if Megan has run away then she can be found. If she’s pregnant or in trouble of some kind then it can all get straightened out.
She remembers walking the long blocks of Dorset Street, feeling as though the night had eyes and ears. She’d lagged behind, frightened, upset, with no words to corral the turmoil inside her, the dog barking at the limits of his chain grating inside her skull, the dark closing in, each step bringing them closer to this unredeemable act, when Megan unexpectedly stopped, turned back, and took her hand.
Did Nell love her or hate her in that moment? Was it Megan’s capacity for friendship or seduction which was on display? Nell isn’t sure. She may never be sure. But she will remember the gesture for the rest of her life.
Who was that?” Marion asks as Jack pulls on his pants in the dark.
“AmVets. Watkins Glen.”
“At this hour?”
Finds his boots.
“Trevor?” she asks, knowing the answer. “You’re driving halfway around the lake at midnight.”
“I’ll be back in time for work.”
“Jesus Christ, Jack. You can’t keep doing this.”
A Catalog of Birds Page 3
