The Missing Ones

by Edwin Hill

  He pressed to the gate and down the gangway to where the ferry’s captain, Zoe, waited, looking toward the darkening sky. Zoe had taken over the ferry when Pete had been fired, and it still seemed to surprise a lot of passengers to have a captain who was young, pretty, and female. But she knew how to take charge.

  “If we wait much longer,” she said, “it won’t be safe to go.”

  “Pete’s in the Jeep,” Rory said. “He’s high.”

  “What’s new?” Zoe said.

  She used to date Pete, before, and she’d faced his addiction by retreating as far from him as she could. Rory knew enough not to ask her for help. He walked to the end of the pier and held up a hand to block the rain and spray. Off in the distance, a water taxi chugged into the channel, a wake streaming out behind it. State cops didn’t bother with headway speed, no matter the regulations. As the boat came closer, Rory could see Trey standing at the prow like a figurehead, decked out in head-to-toe raingear that looked brand new. Trey hated Rory. But Rory needed Trey, especially if he ever wanted to take the state police exam again, and tonight, Rory reminded himself, could be an opportunity. Trey would need to rely on Rory’s knowledge of the island and the people who lived here, because even though Trey had married Lydia, he was still an outsider. And he always would be.

  The driver cut the engine just shy of the pilings. Trey, another detective, and a state trooper jumped to the pier. Trey barely acknowledged Rory as he marched toward the gangway. The second detective followed—a woman with yellowish hair that fell in soft curls to her shoulders, jeans with an elastic waistband, and sensible shoes. She’d also come to the island when Oliver disappeared. “Barb Kelley,” she said, sticking a hand toward him. “You’re the local deputy. Denton, right?”

  “Dunbar,” Rory said.

  “Faces, those I remember,” Barb said, studying his. “Names, not so much.”

  Rory went to shake her hand, but she doubled over and threw up. “Lived on the coast my whole life,” she said, wiping bile from her chin with the back of her sleeve. “But I’ve never managed to find my sea legs. Man, I hope we don’t have to go out again tonight.”

  “I’ll find you some saltines,” Rory said.

  “I remember that about you,” Barb said. “Helpful. Competent. My two favorite qualities. Should we catch up with the lieutenant?”

  Rory wasn’t used to hearing people compliment him. She took a few steps toward the gangway. “Come on,” she said. “You can’t do much standing there.”

  On the pier, Trey and the state trooper had waded into the crowd. The trooper was short, maybe five foot six, with thick, sandy hair. Trey, on the other hand, towered over everyone. He had the build of a college soccer player, and his dark hair looked like it had been styled since he got off the boat. He’d grown up in Bar Harbor, a coastal town of country clubs and yachts, and though he looked preppy enough, he’d spent his summers caddying rather than actually swinging a golf club.

  “I kept the ferry from leaving,” Rory reported, and instantly felt the authority that the island imbued in him melt away. “I thought you’d want to talk to the passengers before they left.”

  “Have you searched the boat?” Trey asked.

  “I thought you’d want to.” Even as the words slipped from his mouth, Rory wanted to pull them back and stop apologizing. How could he keep order, watch his brother, get the search parties going, and search the ferry all on his own? In fact, wasn’t part of his job to call in the state cops when things got out of hand?

  Trey shot him a glare as he whispered in Barb’s ear. She glanced at Rory and then led the state trooper across the gangplank and onto the ferry.

  “People in town are gathered at the community center,” Rory said. “Some people are out searching already. Anything you need, I’m here to lend a hand.” He paused a beat. “Sir.”

  “Where’s the mother?” Trey asked. He glanced at a notepad. “Frankie Sullivan. That’s her name, right? Didn’t I hear she’s the one who raised the alarm?”

  “I told her to stay put at the house in case the boy wanders home. I told her that we’d come find her.”

  Trey paused and smiled at the people waiting to leave. “We’ll have you underway in a few moments,” he said to them before touching Rory’s arm and leading him a few feet away. “You kept these people on the island with a hurricane bearing down, even though any idiot could see there’s no missing kid waiting to get on that boat. And you left the kid’s mother on her own in a drug den to do whatever the hell she wants. Shouldn’t you have called family services about this woman weeks ago? Most kids who wind up dead are killed by their own parents. You know that, right?”

  Before Rory could defend himself, Trey cut him off. “Shut up. Don’t say a word. It’ll only make it worse. I’ll go pick up the mother.”

  Rory stood still. Trey could make anyone feel small, but how much of this had to do with Lydia and the love Rory had confessed for her? How much of Rory’s humiliation had Lydia shared with her husband?

  Trey leaned in and whispered. “Don’t do any more thinking. You aren’t good at it. Lydia’s right,” he added, tapping his temple. “You’re touched. Maybe I should feel sorry for you. Make sure the ferry gets off, then come to the community center and follow orders for the rest of the night. And let me give you a little warning: If by some miracle you wind up being the one to find this kid later tonight, I’ll come for you. No matter what Lydia wants. Got it?”

  Rory’s mouth went dry. He’d had enough, tonight and every night. “I didn’t take your son,” he whispered back, grabbing Trey’s arm. “You know that. You were right there with me on the pier. There was no opportunity at all. All that bull people are saying about me, none of it’s true. You are the one who left Oliver on his own that day. Remember? I was the one doing my job.”

  “Get your hands off me.”

  Rory held his hand exactly where it was. If he moved it, he worried he might punch Trey and have a much bigger problem.

  “Dunbar.”

  It was Barb Kelley.

  “Take a step back,” she said, glancing over her shoulder to be sure no one had noticed the altercation. When Rory still didn’t move, she added, “That’s an order.”

  Rory released Trey’s arm. Trey straightened his jacket and smoothed his hair. “Don’t ever touch me again,” he said. “You’ll regret it if you do. And stay away from my wife and son.”

  Barb smiled and waved to a woman staring at them from the line. “Get out of here, Trey,” she whispered through gritted teeth. “You’re making this worse.”

  Trey turned and raised his voice. “Great job,” he said for all the world to hear. And then he headed up the hill toward town.

  “Now I need you to cool off,” Barb said to Rory. “And help me find this kid.”

  Pete chose that moment to get out of the Jeep, walking like a zombie toward the line of people and letting the blanket fall into the mud and reveal his nakedness. A group of children screamed and ran. Someone yelled for Pete to cover it up. Barb retrieved the blanket from the mud and wrapped it around Pete’s shoulders. Then she turned to Rory and shot him a glare. “Who the hell is this?”

  Rory stared at her, rain pouring from his visor. He couldn’t answer. How had any of this happened? How could he be the only one in his family still standing?

  “Faggot, faggot, queer, faggot,” Pete muttered.

  “Would you shut up?” Rory said, turning on his brother. “Please shut up.”

  Pete stumbled forward, his eyes barely open. The blanket flapped around him, and all Rory wanted right then was to make this better in some small way. He wanted to go back in time, before the summer, long before the Fourth of July, to when he could still go home.

  “I’ll take care of it,” he said.

  “Does he need to go to the hospital?” Barb asked.

  “He needs to sleep it off.”

  “He’s not drunk.”

  “Yeah, he is,” Rory said.

 
Pete couldn’t go to the hospital. He was on parole.

  “Listen,” Barb said. “Do you know what he took? There’s a shipment of Oxy that hit the area last week that’s laced with fentanyl. It’s already killed nearly a dozen people in Portland.”

  “This is nothing,” Rory said, leading Pete to the Jeep. “Nothing new at least.”

  “I hope not,” Barb said. “For both of your sakes.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Hester put the daisies into a glass vase, blue dye leaching into the water almost instantly. Then she set the vase in the middle of Morgan’s dining room table. Then she moved it. To the kitchen counter, to the front table, to the windowsill. Finally, she stashed it in the fridge, out of sight. Away.

  Kate sat in front of the TV, watching something insufferably cheerful, and Hester stared at her phone. She craved a mess, a metaphorical one at least, and what could possibly be the harm in calling the man she’d spoken to earlier? She pulled up his number, her finger hovering over it, ready to hit Send. Surely, getting out of the house, meeting people, digging into this new mystery, would help her heal. Maybe it would take her on the road, take her someplace she’d never been. But then Kate giggled at something on the TV, and Hester could feel the cold. Seeping in. Enveloping her. Instead of calling Charlie, she texted Morgan.

  Left work early and picked up the kid. You’re off the hook! See you at home.

  Another lie.

  The lies had grown easier to tell.

  She lay the phone on the kitchen counter, facedown. Even then, it called to her as it usually did. She could google her own name, read the blogs that had popped up about the story from last year, the ones that tracked the killings from state to state. But hadn’t people moved on? Hadn’t they realized that Hester Thursby was nothing more than a four-foot-nine-and-three-quarter-inch, thirty-seven-year-old librarian who was afraid to face the world? She hadn’t worked since that day in August when she’d lost Kate at the dog park, when she’d heard the slam of a car trunk and run into the street shrieking at a man driving away in a teal-colored Saturn, a man who’d locked his doors in panic while she pounded on his windows and hurled rocks at his back window. Then Hester had dialed 911 and screamed at the dispatcher till she heard a siren off in the distance.

  It turned out that Kate had wandered to the community garden, where she sat cross-legged in a bed of daisies. Waffles found her, nosing at the girl’s cheek while she pushed the basset hound away. And the whole incident couldn’t have lasted more than five minutes. Ten, tops. Though it had seemed an eternity. It had made everything that happened, everything Hester managed to push away, very, very real.

  She gave in and typed “Hester” into the search box and saw that her name still beat out “Hester Prynne” in popularity. That wouldn’t last much longer. Hester wasn’t famous. She could walk down the street or shout her name in public without much notice, but within a tiny microcosm—a very vocal, very anonymous online microcosm—she held interest. Members of that world wrote about what she’d done and what she hadn’t done. They called her a bad mother, and Hester wanted to remind each and every one of them that she wasn’t a mother at all. They made her a hero, a victim, and a whore. Here’s what was true: Last December, when Hester still found missing people, a woman had hired her to find her brother, Sam, and Sam had turned out to be more dangerous than Hester ever could have imagined. Now Sam was dead, and his friend Gabe was serving a life sentence in a federal prison in central Massachusetts. And Hester placed all the blame—every last bit of it—on herself. She’d been bored and had wanted to fill her life with other people’s stories. Women out there wanted Gabe; they wanted to save him, to protect him, to help him heal, and some of these women thought Hester could connect them to him. And they wrote her. And Gabe wrote her. Letters in plain white envelopes with postmarks from Devens, Mass., that she left unopened and shoved into a shoebox hidden at the back of a closet. She kept those from Morgan too. Would she ever have the courage to open them, or to visit Gabe in prison, to look him in the eye and fully forgive him for what he’d done? Right now, she didn’t have the courage to leave Kate out of her sight or to choose dinner at the grocery store. Baby steps, right?

  She pulled up a group text and wrote:

  Potluck tonight! Jamie, you’re in charge of the cake!

  She silenced the phone and shoved it into her pocket. Out of sight, out of mind.

  “Come with Aunt Hester,” she said to Kate, who managed to look away from the TV long enough to shoot her a glare. “Haven’t you seen that show before? Come.”

  “I am not Waffles,” Kate said.

  “No, you’re not a dog,” Hester said, hitting pause on the TV and holding out a hand. “But you still need to come.”

  Upstairs, through a door at the back of Morgan’s walk-in closet, they headed into the new room. The room used to be Hester’s own apartment, her private aerie high above Somerville that she’d clung to even after Kate came to live with them. With its slanted ceilings and tiny kitchen, with its love seat and ancient television and VCR, with its dust and grime, Hester used to come here and lock the door whenever she needed to escape. The apartment used to be her sanctuary.

  But Morgan had taken a sledgehammer to the wall between the apartments in December.

  Afterward.

  And Hester . . . Hester had told him to do it. She’d insisted that she didn’t need the space—the escape—anymore. When he finished, she cleaned out everything that had made it hers: She left the VHS tapes in a box on the side of the road. She pried the cabinets from the kitchen walls and hauled the red-and-green-plaid love seat to the sidewalk where, despite a Craigslist posting, it sat for two days in the rain till a garbage truck hauled it away. She painted the walls white and installed beige carpets. The final swipe of the eraser came when she hung blinds from Home Depot. Now the space felt huge and airy and as generic as she could make it. Anything to forget.

  She opened the closet and took out the shoebox filled with Gabe’s letters. And then she sat at the top of the narrow staircase that led to the landing below and dared herself to open one. The carpet here still smelled new. She wished Morgan hadn’t taken Waffles to work today, that the dog was there to waddle after her and force herself onto Hester’s lap. “Why you cry?” Kate asked, sitting beside her and touching a tear on her cheek.

  Hester forced a smile. “I have something in my eye.”

  Kate went to touch one of the envelopes, and Hester snatched it away, as though it might scar the little girl, as though Gabe could reach through the paper from his prison cell and harm her. She slammed the lid on the shoebox, shoved it away, and texted Charlie.

  Send me her full name, Social Security number, and birthday. And a photo of both of you. I’ll see what I can do.

  Once Charlie sent the information, it took ten minutes in databases for Hester to find his ex-girlfriend. She’d moved to Maine two years earlier, changed her name, and taken out a restraining order on someone named Daryl, who bore a remarkable resemblance to “Charlie.”

  Fuck off, Hester texted. Then she powered down her phone for the rest of the afternoon.

  * * *

  The sun had nearly set by the time Annie turned the bend on Little Ef to where the lighthouse flashed on the point. Rain lashed at her oilskins. Here, where the trees opened, winds raged along the coast. With the surf pounding on the granite shore, seawater had begun to sweep into the bay and cover the jetty out to the lighthouse. Soon enough, it, along with most of the coastline, would be isolated and unsafe to search till morning. Soon it would be too late.

  She stopped, remembering a day much hotter that this one, when the tide had pulled all but a trickle of the thick, salty water from the bay. Sailboats tied to their moorings had sunk into the wet sand, their masts leaning at forty-five degrees. Midafternoon sun had beaten down on the rocky sand as Annie had picked her way into the silt wearing shorts and an old pair of sneakers. The mud swallowed her feet whole, each step releasing a belch of
sulfurous gas. About fifty yards from shore, she dug into a clam bed with a pitchfork and filled a wire basket with a bushel of quahogs. She worked fast. The fine for digging clams without a permit was thirty-five dollars, and it might have been a million as far as Annie was concerned.

  Once she’d filled her basket with the large clams, she waded to shore only to see a flash of blue lights that made her heart sink. How could he have come so quickly? How could he have known? She stashed the basket of clams behind a clump of beach grass as Rory lumbered toward her, his heavy uniform in sharp contrast to the sweltering day. He took a moment to size her up, assessing the muddy shoes and the pitchfork lying in the sand. “Have you been out here all afternoon?” he asked.

  “An hour, maybe,” Annie said, and knew enough to smile.

  Even though she had at least five years on Rory, pretty had always been a tool in her toolbox, and at the time she’d still believed she’d maintained enough of her former self to emit health and middle-class prosperity.

  “I thought I saw you in town,” Rory said. “At the Fourth of July festivities. Right before the ferry almost crashed.”

  “I left,” Annie said. “Crowds aren’t my thing. Did anyone get hurt?”

  “Not from the crash.” Rory rested his thumbs in his belt and pushed back his cap. A trickle of sweat ran down his temple. “Anyone else been out here?”

  “Me and the seagulls.”

  He scanned the horizon. “At least these boats are out of commission,” he said, adding, “We have a missing kid in town. Fireworks are cancelled, so is the light parade. The state police are searching every boat in and out. And we need all hands-on-deck to help. Toss the clams, get changed, and come with me. You’re lucky I’m not writing you a ticket.”

  Relief surged through Annie’s body. Rory waited till she’d surrendered the clams back to the sea, before driving them off in the Jeep, lights flashing, telling Annie that the missing boy was Oliver, Lydia’s son.