The Missing Girl

by Shirley Jackson

  Shirley Jackson

  * * *

  THE MISSING GIRL

  Contents

  The Missing Girl

  Journey with a Lady

  Nightmare

  Series List

  Follow Penguin

  SHIRLEY JACKSON

  Born 1916, San Francisco, California, USA

  Died 1965, North Bennington, Vermont, USA

  ‘Journey with a Lady’ was first published in Harper’s in 1952, and ‘The Missing Girl’ in Fantasy and Science Fiction in 1957. Along with ‘Nightmare’, they appear in the collection Just an Ordinary Day, published posthumously in 1997.

  JACKSON IN PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

  The Bird’s Nest

  Dark Tales

  Hangsaman

  The Haunting of Hill House

  Just an Ordinary Day

  Let Me Tell You

  The Lottery and Other Stories

  The Road Through the Wall

  The Sundial

  We Have Always Lived in the Castle

  The Missing Girl

  She was humming, tunelessly, moving around somewhere in the room stirring things gently, and always humming. Betsy tightened her shoulders over the desk and bent her head emphatically over her book, hoping that her appearance of concentration would somehow communicate a desire for silence, but the humming went on. Debating a dramatic gesture, a wild throwing of the book to the floor, a shout of annoyance, Betsy thought as she had so often before, but you can’t be cross with her, you just can’t, and she bent farther over her book.

  ‘Betsy?’

  ‘Um?’ Betsy, still trying to look as though she were studying, realized that she could have described every movement in the room until now.

  ‘Listen, I’m going out.’

  ‘Where? At this time of night?’

  ‘I’m going out anyway. I’ve got something to do.’

  ‘Go ahead,’ Betsy said; just because one could not be cross, one need not necessarily be interested.

  ‘See you later.’

  The door slammed and Betsy, with relief and a feeling of freshness, went back to her book.

  It was not, as a matter of fact, until the next night that anyone asked Betsy where her room-mate had gone. Even then it was casual, and hardly provoked Betsy to thought: ‘You all alone tonight?’ someone asked. ‘She out?’

  ‘Haven’t seen her all day,’ Betsy said.

  The day after that, Betsy began to wonder a little, mostly because the other bed in the room had still not been slept in. The monstrous thought of going to the Camp Mother occurred to her (‘Did you hear about Betsy? Went tearing off to old Auntie Jane to say her room-mate was missing, and here all the time the poor girl was …’) and she spoke to several other people, wondering and curious, phrasing it each time as a sort of casual question; no one, it turned out, had seen her room-mate since the Monday night when she had told Betsy, ‘See you later,’ and left.

  ‘You think I ought to go tell Old Jane?’ Betsy asked someone on the third day.

  ‘Well …’ consideringly. ‘You know, it might mean trouble for you if she’s really missing.’

  The Camp Mother, comfortable and tolerant and humorous, old enough to be the mother of any of the counselors, wise enough to give the strong impression of experience, listened carefully and asked, ‘And you say she’s been gone since Monday night? And here it is Thursday?’

  ‘I didn’t know what to do,’ Betsy explained candidly; ‘she could have gone home, or …’

  ‘Or …?’ said the Camp Mother.

  ‘She said she had something to do,’ Betsy said.

  Old Jane pulled her phone over and asked, ‘What was her name again? Albert?’

  ‘Alexander. Martha Alexander.’

  ‘Get me the home of Martha Alexander,’ Old Jane said into her phone, and from the room beyond, in the handsomely paneled building that served as the camp office and, at the other end, as kitchen, dining room, and general recreation room, Old Jane and Betsy could hear the voice of Miss Mills, Old Jane’s assistant, saying irritably, ‘Alexander, Alexander,’ as she turned pages and opened filing drawers. ‘Jane?’ she called out suddenly, ‘Martha Alexander from …?’

  ‘New York,’ Betsy said. ‘I think.’

  ‘New York,’ Old Jane said into her phone.

  ‘Righto,’ Miss Mills said from the other room.

  ‘Missing since Monday,’ Old Jane reminded herself, consulting the notes she had made on her desk pad. ‘Said she had something to do. Picture?’

  ‘I don’t think so,’ Betsy said uncertainly. ‘I may have a snapshot somewhere.’

  ‘Year?’

  ‘Woodsprite, I think,’ Betsy said. ‘I’m a woodsprite, I mean, and they usually put woodsprites in with woodsprites and goblins in with goblins and senior huntsmen in with –’ She stopped as the phone on Old Jane’s desk rang and Old Jane picked it up and said briskly, ‘Hello? Is this Mrs Alexander? This is Miss Nicholas calling from the Phillips Education Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen. Yes, that’s right … Fine, Mrs Alexander, and how are you? … Glad to hear it. Mrs Alexander, I’m calling to check on your daughter … Your daughter, Martha … Yes, that’s right, Martha.’ She raised her eyebrows at Betsy and continued. ‘We’re checking to make sure that she’s come home or that you know where she is … yes, where she is. She left the camp very suddenly last Monday night and neglected to sign out at the main desk and of course our responsibility for our girls requires that even if she has only gone home we must –’ She stopped, and her eyes focused, suddenly, on the far wall. ‘She is not?’ Old Jane asked. ‘Do you know where she is, then? … How about friends? … Is there anyone who might know?’

  The camp nurse, whose name was Hilda Scarlett and who was known as Will, had no record of Martha Alexander in the camp infirmary. She sat on the other side of Old Jane’s desk, twisting her hands nervously and insisting that the only girls in the infirmary at that moment were a goblin with poison oak and a woodsprite with hysterics. ‘I suppose you know,’ she told Betsy, her voice rising, ‘that if you had come to one of us the minute she left …’

  ‘But I didn’t know,’ Betsy said helplessly. ‘I didn’t know she was gone.’

  ‘I am afraid,’ said Old Jane ponderously, turning to regard Betsy with the air of one on whom an unnecessary and unkind burden has been thrust, ‘I am very much afraid that we must notify the police.’

  It was the first time the chief of police, a kindly family man whose name was Hook, had ever been required to visit a girls’ camp; his daughters had not gone in much for that sort of thing, and Mrs Hook distrusted night air; it was also the first time that Chief Hook had ever been required to determine facts. He had been allowed to continue in office this long because his family was popular in town and the young men at the local bar liked him, and because his record for twenty years, of drunks locked up and petty thieves apprehended upon confession, had been immaculate. In a small town such as the one lying close to the Phillips Education Camp for Girls Twelve to Sixteen, crime is apt to take its form from the characters of the inhabitants, and a stolen dog or broken nose is about the maximum to be achieved ordinarily in the sensational line. No one doubted Chief Hook’s complete inability to cope with the disappearance of a girl from the camp.

  ‘You say she was going somewhere?’ he asked Betsy, having put out his cigar in deference to the camp nurse, and visibly afraid that his questions would sound foolish to Old Jane; since Chief Hook was accustomed to speaking around his cigar, his voice without it was malformed, almost quavering.

  ‘She said she had something to do,’ Betsy told him.

  ‘How did she say it? As though she meant it? Or do you think she was lying?’

 
‘She just said it,’ said Betsy, who had reached that point of stubbornness most thirteen-year-old girls have, when it seems that adult obscurity has passed beyond necessity. ‘I told you eight times.’

  Chief Hook blinked and cleared his throat. ‘She sound happy?’ he asked.

  ‘Very happy,’ said Betsy. ‘She was singing all evening while I was trying to write in my Nature Book, is how I remember.’

  ‘Singing?’ said Chief Hook; it was not possible to him that a girl upon the very edge of disappearance had anything to sing about.

  ‘Singing?’ said Old Jane.

  ‘Singing?’ said Will Scarlett. ‘You never told us.’

  ‘Just sort of humming,’ Betsy said.

  ‘What tune?’ said Chief Hook.

  ‘Just humming,’ Betsy said. ‘I told you already, just humming. I nearly went crazy with my Nature Book.’

  ‘Any idea where she was going?’

  ‘No.’

  An idea came to Chief Hook. ‘What was she interested in?’ he asked suddenly. ‘You know, like sports, or boys, or anything.’

  ‘There are no boys at the Phillips Educational Camp for Girls,’ Old Jane said stiffly.

  ‘She could have been interested in boys, though,’ Chief Hook said. ‘Or – like, well, books? Reading, you know? Or baseball, maybe?’

  ‘We have not been able to find her Activity Chart,’ the camp nurse said. ‘Betsy, what recreational activity group was she in?’

  ‘Golly.’ Betsy thought deeply, and said, ‘Dramatics? I think she went to Dramatics.’

  ‘Which nature study group? Little John? Eeyore?’

  ‘Little John,’ said Betsy uncertainly. ‘I think. I’m pretty sure she was in Dramatics because I think I remember her talking about Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil.’

  ‘That would be Dramatics,’ Old Jane said. ‘Surely.’

  Chief Hook, who had begun to feel that this was all unnecessarily confusing, said, ‘What about this singing?’

  ‘There’s singing in Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil,’ Will Scarlett said.

  ‘How about boys?’ said Chief Hook.

  Betsy thought again, remembering as well as she could the sleeping figure in the other bed, the soiled laundry on the floor, the open suitcase, the tin boxes of cookies, the towels, the face cloths, the soap, the pencils … ‘She had her own clock,’ Betsy volunteered.

  ‘How long have you roomed together?’ Old Jane asked, and her voice was faintly sardonic, as though in deference to Chief Hook she were forced to restrain the saltier half of her remark.

  ‘Last year and this year,’ Betsy said. ‘I mean, we both put in for rooms at the same time and so they put us together again. I mean, most of my friends are senior huntsmen and of course I can’t room with them because they only put senior huntsmen with –’

  ‘We know.’ Old Jane was beginning to sound shrill. ‘Any mail?’

  ‘I don’t know about that,’ Betsy said. ‘I was always reading my own mail.’

  ‘What was she wearing?’ Chief Hook asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Betsy said. ‘I didn’t turn around when she left.’ She looked from Chief Hook to Will Scarlett to Old Jane with a trace of impatience. ‘I was doing my Nature Book.’

  A search of the room, from which Betsy abstained and which was carried on with enthusiasm by Old Jane and Will Scarlett and with some embarrassment by Chief Hook, showed that after Betsy’s possessions had been subtracted from the medley, what was left was astonishingly little. There was a typed script of Six Who Pass While the Lentils Boil, and a poorly done painting of Echo Lake, which was part of the camp. There was a notebook, labeled, like Betsy’s, ‘Nature Book,’ but it was unused, lacking the pressed wildflowers and blue jay feathers; there was a copy of Gulliver’s Travels from the camp library, which Old Jane felt might be significant. No one was able to tell certainly what she had been wearing, because the clothes in the closet were mostly Betsy’s, and jackets or overshoes left in the room by Betsy’s friends. In the drawers of the second dresser were a few scraps of underwear, a pair of heavy socks, and a red sweater which Betsy was fairly sure belonged to a woodsprite on the other side of camp.

  A careful check-up of Recreational Activity lists showed that while she was listed for dramatics and nature study and swimming, her attendance at any of them was dubious; most of the counselors kept slipshod attendance records, and none of them could remember whether any such girl could have come on any given day.

  ‘I’m almost sure I remember her, though,’ Little John, an ardent girl of twenty-seven who wore horn-rimmed glasses and tossed her hair back from her face with a pretty gesture that somehow indicated that winters she wore it decently pinned up, told Chief Hook. ‘I have an awfully good memory for faces, and I think I remember her as one of Rabbit’s friends and relations. Yes, I’m sure I remember her, I have a good memory for faces.’

  ‘Ah,’ said the librarian, who was called Miss Mills when she was secretary to Old Jane, and the Snark when she was in the library, ‘one girl is much like another, at this age. Their unformed minds, their unformed bodies, their little mistakes; we, too, were young once, Captain Hook.’

  ‘Hell,’ said the muscular young woman who was known as Tarzan because she taught swimming, ‘did you ever look at fifty girls all in white bathing caps?’

  ‘Elm?’ said the nature study counselor, whose name was Bluebird. ‘I mean, wasn’t she an elm girl? Did a nice paper on blight? Or was it the other girl, Michaels? Anyway, whichever one it might have been, it was a nice job. Out of the ordinary for us, you know; remember it particularly. Hadn’t noticed either of the girls to speak of – but if she’s really gone, she might be up on Smoky Trail looking for fern; want the girls to make a special topic of fern and mushroom.’ She stopped and blinked, presumably taking in a new supply of chlorophyll. ‘Fern,’ she said. ‘Pays to know plenty about fern.’

  ‘Few of them have any talent, anyway,’ the painting counselor said. ‘In any of the progressive schools this sort of thing –’ She gestured tiredly at the canvases propped up against tree stumps or stacked upon a rock, and moved her shoulders nervously under her brand new blue and yellow checked shirt. ‘Interested psychologically, of course,’ she added quickly. ‘If I remember this girl, she did sort of vague stuff, almost unwilling. Rejection, almost – if I can find a picture you’ll see right away what I mean.’ She poked unenthusiastically among the canvases stacked on the rock, pulled her hand back and said, ‘Why did I ever –’ wiping wet paint off on her blue jeans. ‘Funny,’ she said, ‘I could have taken an oath she had a canvas around here somewhere. Sort of vague stuff, though – no sense of design, no eye.’

  ‘Did she ever,’ Chief Hook asked Betsy, ‘ever ever ever mention anyplace she might want to go? Some foreign country, maybe?’

  Old Jane’s voice had an odd tone. ‘The parents are arriving tomorrow.’

  Chief Hook rubbed his forehead nervously. ‘Lost a hunter last fall on Bad Mountain,’ he suggested.

  It was decided to search Bad Mountain, and then, unexpectedly, a house-to-house canvass along the road leading to Bad Mountain uncovered an honest clue. A housewife, glancing out her window to see if her husband was coming home from a poker game, had seen, she thought, the figure of a girl moving along the road, lighted occasionally by the headlights of passing cars.

  ‘I couldn’t swear it was a girl, though,’ the housewife persisted nervously. ‘That is, nights when Jim is out playing, I go to bed, and this night I was only up on account we had fried clams for supper, and I like clams but they don’t –’

  ‘What was she wearing?’ Chief Hook demanded.

  The woman thought. ‘Well,’ she said finally, ‘the reason I figured she was one of those girls from the camp was she was wearing pants. But then, it could have been a man, you see, or a boy. Only somehow I sort of figured it was a girl.’

  ‘Did she have on a coat? Hat?’

  ‘A coat, I think,’ the woman said, ‘le
astways, one of those short jackets. She was going up the road toward Jones Pass.’

  Jones Pass led to Bad Mountain. It was not possible to get a picture of the girl; the picture on her camp application blank was so blurred that it resembled a hundred other girls in the camp; it was assumed, however, from the picture, that she had dark hair. A man was discovered who had given a ride to a girl hitchhiking on the road to Jones Pass; she had dark hair and was wearing blue jeans and a short tan leather jacket.

  ‘I don’t think she was a camp girl, though,’ the man added earnestly, ‘not the way she talked, she wasn’t any girl from Phillips Camp, not her,’ he said, and looked at Chief Hook, ‘Bill, you remember that youngest girl over to Ben Hart’s?’

  Chief Hook sighed. ‘You see anyone else driving down the road?’ he asked. The man shook his head emphatically.

  One of the junior counselors at the camp, who went by the name of Piglet, had been driving home late from town that night and at one point in the road near Jones Pass had had the clear impression of someone ducking behind a tree into the shadows. She was unable to say whether or not it had been a girl, or even whether it had been a person, but Chief Hook questioned her remorselessly.

  ‘Can you face this girl’s parents and honestly tell them you never lifted a finger to save her?’ he demanded of Piglet. ‘That innocent girl?’

  Will Scarlett had shut herself into the infirmary and refused to let go of the phenobarbital; it was announced that she could not be disturbed. The press agent for the camp was taking all calls and managing the general search. Newspaper reporters were encouraged, but the seventeen-year-old son of the owner of the local paper was given first chance at all new developments; it occurred to this young man to ensure that a search be made over Bad Mountain by helicopter, and the camp went to tremendous expense to import one, although its six-day tour of the mountains showed nothing, and the son of the newspaper owner subsequently informed his father that he preferred having a plane to inheriting the paper, which went to a distant cousin. It was said that the girl had turned up in a town seventy-five miles away, dead drunk and trying to get a job in a shoe store, but the proprietor of the shoe store was unable to identify her picture, and it was later proven that the girl in question was actually the daughter of the mayor of that town. The widowed mother of the missing girl was prostrate with grief and under the care of a physician, but her uncle arrived at the camp and took personal charge of the search. The girls from the camp, led by the counselor in nature study and the senior huntsmen, had already gone over the mountain, looking for bent twigs and rock signs, but without success, although they had the assistance of chosen boy and girl scouts from the town. It was afterward told that Old Jane, indefatigable in leather puttees and a striped bandana and known to be extraordinarily susceptible to cold, had fallen down dead drunk in front of Chief Hook and had had to be carried home on a stretcher hastily improvised by the boy scouts, leading many people to believe that the girl’s body had been found.