by Jeff Miller
High schools made her uncomfortable. She’d struggled during her high school years—not academically, but in every other way. The institution was cruel by design. It’s the last time in life that people don’t get to choose their environment and their acquaintances. Everyone is stuck being with everyone. It’s like being at the DMV for four years, except that someone is elected prom queen.
The principal’s office had a waiting room with eight seats along the wall facing the receptionist. Half the seats were filled with surly teens; one, with a nervous parent.
“I need to talk to the principal,” Dagny said, setting her creds on the counter.
The woman picked up the credentials and inspected them. She seemed worried. “Is there a bomb?” she whispered.
“No.”
The receptionist eyed her for a moment, then led her to the back office, where a middle-aged woman sat at a desk, sifting through one of many stacks of papers on her desk. “Can I help you?” A sign on her desk read PRINCIPAL GEATHERS.
She handed the woman her creds. “I’m Special Agent Dagny Gray.”
The principal glanced at the credentials and handed them back to her. “I’m Deborah Geathers. What can I do for you?”
“One of your students is missing. Adelmo Fox.”
“Dear Lord. Adelmo?” She frowned.
“I need two things. First, I’d like to see his file. Second, we need to talk to Jessica Marigold. A private room would be best. She may have been the last to see him.”
“Of course.” The principal buzzed her secretary. “Sandra, I need the file on Adelmo Fox, please.” She turned back to Dagny. “Jessica has Spanish now. I’ll go get her.” She pointed to the door at the back of her office. “You can use my conference room.”
Any principal who knew when a student had Spanish class was doing her job, Dagny thought. And the fact that she was fetching Jessica Marigold suggested that she cared more about her missing student than she was afraid of Sheriff Don.
Dagny went to the conference room and took a seat at its small round table. Sandra brought her Adelmo’s file, and she paged through it. Mostly A grades. Never in trouble. Played on the soccer team. Adelmo was a good kid.
There was a knock at the door. “Come in.”
A gangly girl with long, straight hair and a crooked smile walked in. Dagny didn’t like her immediately.
“So, like, what’s the deal here?” Jessica asked.
“Please, sit down.”
The girl obeyed.
Dagny opened her credentials. “I’m Special Agent Dagny Gray.”
“Do I need a lawyer or something?”
“No. Adelmo Fox is missing, and I’m talking to everyone who saw him over the past few days.” This was stretching the truth, but it would make Jessica feel more comfortable and, hopefully, more candid. No one wanted to be the only person questioned about anything. Little lies like this were the fuel that powered all investigations. “I know you saw him two nights ago?”
“Yes.”
Dagny pulled out her iPad and started taking notes. “You were his girlfriend?”
“We dated,” she said, which was less than yes.
“For how long?”
“A couple of months.”
“You saw him two nights ago?”
“Yes.”
“Where?”
“In the woods behind Hillsborough Park.”
“What time?”
“It was, like, midnight.”
“Can you do better than that?”
“Maybe close to one.”
“Why were you meeting in the woods?”
“We couldn’t meet at his house, and we couldn’t meet at mine. He didn’t want to be seen in public, because of my dad, I guess.” She shrugged.
Dagny stared at her; sometimes that worked better than asking questions.
“I don’t know,” Jessica said. “He was weird sometimes. I think he thought it was romantic to be in the woods at one in the morning in the freezing dark.”
“So, it was his idea to meet?”
“Yeah.”
“Why did he want to meet then?”
“To make out, probably. He always wanted to meet after his mom went to bed. I’d sneak out, too.”
“You don’t seem to care much about him.”
“I like Adelmo, but he’s way too much into me. It’s a little creepy.”
“Explain.”
“He always wanted to talk to me about his feelings. Insisted on carrying my books in the hall. Holding doors. Stuff like that.”
“So, he was really nice to you and wanted to talk a lot?” Dagny had tried to suppress the judgment, but this slipped through.
“We’re sixteen,” Jessica said, which was a fair enough retort.
“Who got to the woods first?”
“He did.”
“What was he doing when you got there?”
“Like, kneeling on a blanket. Looking for something in the grass.”
Dagny reached into her backpack and pulled out a clear Ziploc bag with the ring in it. She held it up for the girl to see. “This, maybe?”
Jessica stared at the ring for a few moments. A tear started down her cheek. “You found that in the woods?”
“Yes.” Dagny put the bag back in her backpack.
“I didn’t know . . .” She didn’t finish the thought.
“Did he propose to you?”
“No. I mean, I went there to break up with him. I wanted to do it in person. That seemed like the right thing to do.”
“Tell me what happened.”
“I told him that I cared about him, but that something wasn’t right in our relationship, and if we continued further, we’d both end up getting hurt. I told him I wanted him to find the girl he deserves, but right now, that wasn’t me.”
“You said that?” Dagny was pretty sure she hadn’t.
“Yeah.”
“And how did he take it?”
“I don’t know. The whole thing was very emotional—very hard for me. So I left.”
“And he was still in the woods?”
“Yes.”
“On your way out, did you notice anything unusual? Anyone?”
“No.”
“What time did you leave?”
“Like, five minutes after I got there. So a little after one, maybe.”
“Did you drive to the park?”
“Yes.”
“Parked in the lot?”
“Uh-huh.”
“Anyone else in that lot?”
“No.”
The answer had come much too quickly. “Think harder.”
She sighed. “Well, maybe there was a truck.”
“What kind of truck?”
“A pickup truck.”
“What make?”
“I don’t know. It was night. If I saw it, it was out of the corner of my eye.”
“Color?”
Jessica drew a heavy breath. “Dark, I guess. Not white, I think. Something dark.”
“Big, little, medium in size?”
“Big, I guess. Not little.”
“Did you see a driver?”
“No.”
Dagny opened a sketch program on the iPad and drew a version of the parking lot. “Show me where you parked and where the pickup was.”
“I was here,” the girl said, touching a space to the far left on the map. “And the pickup was here,” she said, touching a space on the far right.
“License plates?”
“I don’t know.” She sighed.
“Anything in the back of the truck?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Bumper stickers?”
She sighed again. “I mean, I told you I don’t know.”
Dagny leaned back and stared coldly at the girl. “Whoever drove that truck probably killed Adelmo that night, right after you left. You may not care about that, but I do, so I’m going to keep asking you questions until I can’t think of any more.”
>
This was enough to summon some tears. “You said he was missing,” the girl said. “I thought you meant he’d run away or something.” She wiped away the tears, but they kept coming. “You didn’t say he was dead.”
Dagny was relieved to see actual emotion from the girl. “This is important.”
The girl nodded. “I don’t remember bumper stickers or anything.”
“Did your father know that you were seeing Adelmo?”
“No.” The girl studied her. “You don’t believe my dad did something, do you?”
“No.” If Adelmo had been the only young man to disappear, the xenophobic father of his girlfriend would be high on the list of suspects, but there were others who’d gone missing as well. “I find it interesting that you would date a young Hispanic man in light of your father’s public stance on immigration.”
“Yeah, well, that’s just him, you know. It’s not me.”
“Why were you seeing Adelmo?”
She shrugged. “I don’t know. I guess I was curious.”
“Curious about?”
“What they’re like.”
“You mean Hispanics?”
“Yeah. I mean, everyone is making such a big deal about them.”
“And what did you learn?”
“Nothing. I mean, he’s the same as any other guy.”
Dagny smiled. If you’re going to learn nothing, this was a good thing to learn. “You have any Hispanic friends?”
“No.”
“Do you know whether any other kids have gone missing?”
“No. Why? What happened here?”
“If I knew, I wouldn’t be asking you questions.” The girl wasn’t as bad as she had first thought. Being the daughter of Sheriff Don was enough to mess anyone up, and she was doing pretty well, all things considered. “What’s the atmosphere here at school with respect to immigration?”
“Less crazy than outside school, I guess. Nobody cares, really. I mean, don’t get me wrong, there’s not a lot of hanging out between groups.”
“Any tension?”
“They’re just another clique. I don’t hang out with skateboarders, either.”
“Anyone date across lines—apart from you and Adelmo?”
“Not really.”
She wanted certainty and specificity. “Anyone at all?”
“Not that I can think of.”
“Why not?”
Jessica shrugged. “I mean, it’s not just here, right? Black people marry black people. White people marry white people. Asians marry Asians. Yeah, sometimes people cross those lines, but you notice when they do because it’s so unusual. It’s not like this is the only fucked-up place in the world. My dad may be an asshole, but he didn’t ruin everything.” The girl seemed to register Dagny’s disapproval. “Whatever. I’m sorry I cursed.”
Dagny looked down at the girl’s shoes—pink canvas sneakers. “Those the shoes you wore to the park to meet with Adelmo?”
She looked down at her feet. “Yeah.”
“Hand me one of them.”
“Seriously?”
Dagny nodded.
Jessica took off a shoe and handed it to Dagny, who photographed the bottom and top of the shoe to capture the pattern of the sole and the shoe size. She gave the shoe back to the girl. “We’re done.”
“Can I see the ring?”
Dagny reached back into her backpack and pulled out the Ziploc. “It has to stay in the bag.” She handed it to the girl.
Jessica pinched the ring through the bag and held it against her ring finger. She started to cry again. “I was mean to him. I was terrible. And all he did was love me.” She handed the bag back to Dagny, stood, and started to leave.
“Jessica.”
She turned back. “Yes?”
“You’re sixteen.”
“Yeah.”
“You’ll be nice the next time.”
When the girl left, Principal Geathers was waiting at the door. She placed a stack of folders down. “I’ve got four more kids who disappeared over the last month. It didn’t seem like anything because kids come and go, their families move around. But if you think something happened to Adelmo, you ought to look at these, too.”
Dagny flipped through the stack. All boys. Average and above in grades. “Have you tried their families?”
“Yes, but there was no response.”
“That’s strange.”
“You’d think so, but it’s not. A lot of Hispanic families won’t take our calls.”
“Why?”
“They see us as the government. We make them nervous.”
“How many Hispanic kids are in the school?”
“Sixty, maybe.”
“How well do you know them?”
“Some well, some not very.”
“Could you pick out a few to talk to me? The ones most plugged into their community, and most likely to talk to me. My Spanish is bad, so fluent in English would be helpful, too.”
Geathers hesitated. “That makes me a little nervous.”
“I understand,” Dagny said.
“I’ve tried very hard to make them feel this is a safe place. Some families still won’t send their kids here. I don’t want to lose the ones we have. If they go home and tell their parents that I had them talk to an FBI agent—”
“I will make them feel comfortable. I promise you, I will. But this is important.”
Geathers took a moment to decide. “Okay.”
Standing in the front of the classroom, Dagny imagined the life of a teacher: going to the same room every day to talk to the same kids every day, moving page by page through the same book every year. The room started to feel like a prison cell. She looked out to the eighteen students Principal Geathers had gathered and figured they were eager to be paroled.
“My name is Special Agent Dagny Gray,” she said. “I’m with the Federal Bureau of Investigation.” She could feel them pulling away from her, leaning back, crossing their arms. “I’m not concerned with immigration or your status, or the status of your families. I don’t care about that at all.” She sat on the front of the teacher’s desk. “I’m here because Adelmo Fox is missing, and I believe that some harm may have come to him. From what I’ve learned, others may have disappeared, too—men older than Adelmo, but some his age as well. And I need your help. Will you help me?”
No one said anything.
“I need to know the names of anyone who is missing. How long they’ve been missing. I need to know the last place you saw them.”
Again, there was silence.
“I need this information because they may still be alive.”
She scanned the crowd, looking each student directly in the eyes. About two-thirds of them were girls, young and pretty. Some dressed in trendy clothes; some, in hand-me-downs. The boys were a varied bunch—some nerdy, some rough. Two had wispy mustaches. All of these students returned her stare with skepticism but indifference.
“Again, I don’t care about whether you or your family are undocumented. I don’t work immigration cases, and I don’t assist ICE. I mostly stop serial killers, and I think there’s one in Bilford.”
A boy started to talk, but the crowd shushed him. Never interview people in groups, Dagny thought. The students’ eyes darted to the ceiling, the floors, the walls, and at anything that wasn’t her. She remembered a time when she was young and a law-enforcement officer asked her questions she didn’t want to answer.
Maybe that was something worth sharing.
“When I was a girl, I loved my father as much as any girl could,” she said, drawing their interest. “He was a smart and gentle man who took me to Cardinals games, taught me how to ride a bike, read me books every night, and stood up for me when I was picked on.” She paused. “When I was twelve, someone shot and killed him.” She slid off the desk and started to pace across the front of the room, each step a metered punctuation to her story. Her voice shook as she spoke. “I cannot express to you the extent to
which this completely and utterly devastated me. It broke me—because I lost his love, of course, but also because I felt helpless.”
They were all looking at her now. “The cops mishandled the investigation—I’m almost sure of it. They didn’t talk to everyone they should have. They came to conclusions too quickly. I wasn’t impressed with them. I thought cops should be better. At twelve years old, I decided that I was going to be a cop, and I was going to do things right.”
These were things she didn’t talk about with anyone, and she was sharing them with a class full of teenage strangers. “Sometimes life takes you off track. I grew up and went to college, and then law school. Took a job at a big firm in Manhattan and made a lot of money. Being a lawyer was comfortable and miserable. I sank into the kind of deep, dark depression you don’t even know you’re in. Every day, I found myself going through the motions, and entire years slipped by and I had nothing to show for them except my bank statements.”
Dagny sat back down on the front of the desk. “And then one day a friend of mine was killed by a bomb in the London Underground. My friend and fifty-one others were killed as part of a coordinated attack by al-Qaeda. Their families felt a mixture of loss and helplessness—the kind I knew well. The big-city law firm seemed like the most useless and pointless thing in the world. And I remembered what the twelve-year-old me had understood so clearly.
“I quit my job and applied to the FBI. I was tired of a life without meaning and purpose. I wanted to help people who suffer like I have.
“I’ve been in Bilford for only a couple of days, but I’ve seen a helplessness and suffering that feels all too familiar. I can help this community, but only to the extent it will let me. It makes me enormously sad to say that, right now, I’m the best hope you have. So, you need to tell me everything you know. Who is missing? When did they disappear? Where were they last? If you don’t tell me these things, more people will disappear. You’ll never know whether talking to me could have saved them, but that worry will haunt you for the rest of your lives.”
She reached down into her backpack, pulled out her iPad, opened the Notes program, and waited. After ten seconds, a boy said, “Alex Trevino. He’s been gone for two weeks. He graduated last year. Last time I saw him, he was trying to get me to help him on a lawn-service job that he’d lined up. He didn’t sound like someone who was planning to leave Bilford.”
