Arrowood

by Laura McHugh

  Back in my room, I unpacked my sheets and made the bed, then parted the long ruffled curtains, the ones Grammy had made for me. After years in the sun, they had faded from bubble-gum pink to the color of jaundiced flesh, and dust sifted down to the floor as I moved them. My skin felt clammy after the bath, refusing to dry, and I wanted to open the windows, let in the night air. After a few minutes of struggling, I gave up. The wooden sashes had settled into place after years of inertia. On the other side of the glass, the moon was obscured by clouds, and it was too dark to see the river, but no matter. I sensed it there, a living thing, an artery pulsing. I’d never felt right being away from it. In the dismal towns where we’d drifted after Keokuk, I’d look out my window at scrub brush or empty fields or a parking lot and find nothing large enough or strong enough to anchor me. Nothing outside but miles between me and the river and home.

  I was too hot, my skin too slippery, to consider putting on a nightgown, so I loosened my towel and lay down on top of the sheets, thinking about my sisters’ room. Were the cribs still there? The little rocking chairs? My mother hadn’t taken any of their things when we moved, and I wondered if their dresses still hung in the closet, cloaked in spiderwebs, if their dolls and books remained strewn across the floor beneath a shroud of dust. I wasn’t ready to find out.

  I had read recently of a kidnapping that took place in a small Midwestern town not unlike Keokuk. A girl was playing in the park with her big sister when a man they recognized from their neighborhood called them over to his car. The younger sister turned her head to scan the playground, and when she turned back, her sister was climbing into the passenger seat. She heard the man say to the older girl, I’m going to tell you a secret. When he was found less than an hour later, the girl’s body had already been dumped in a grove of hickory trees. I wondered what secret he had told her, once they were alone. I’m the last thing you will ever see.

  I knew how she felt, the sister who didn’t get into the car. I had been right there with Violet and Tabitha, had left them for only a minute. I wished that I had been taken, too, so they wouldn’t have been alone. Instead, I was left behind and they went on without me, their lives from that moment a whispered secret that would never reach my ears.

  CHAPTER 3

  * * *

  As I surfaced from sleep, the bed felt uncomfortably crowded, like someone was pressed up against me, but when I rolled over and opened my eyes, I was alone, the sun blazing through the windows, roasting me like a rotisserie chicken. It was disorienting to wake up in my childhood room, and I lay there for a minute, admiring all the little details that I had missed for so many years. The fleur-de-lis medallion on the ceiling, the intricate molding around the windows, the swirling patterns that emerged if you stared long enough at the rose-colored wallpaper, the hazy view of the Illinois riverbank through blistered glass.

  I slid my phone off the nightstand to check my email, ignoring the little bubble that showed the number of unread messages, which had recently topped ten thousand. I’d long ago given up on opening or deleting all the unwanted mail: advertisements from Old Navy and Target, credit card offers, blog posts and newsletters I couldn’t remember signing up for, notices for appointments I’d missed, bank statements I preferred to avoid. I scrolled through the most recent messages, still unable to break the habit of seeking out my adviser’s name amid the junk. There was nothing from Dr. Endicott, or my fellow graduate assistants at the university—there hadn’t been in months—though one name stood out, familiar and unwelcome: Josh Kyle, the founder of a website called Midwest Mysteries.

  I had first heard from Mr. Kyle more than a year before. He’d tracked down my email address in the online student directory and wrote to introduce himself and request an interview. He called himself a “mystery buff” and was quick to distance himself from the more sensational sites that his site was often lumped in with, like CrimePhile and Haunted Heartland (“I am NOT one of those ghost hunters or gore freaks”). In that first email, Kyle had sounded like a twelve-year-old blogger who took himself too seriously. I wondered if he was, in fact, twelve years old, so I had pulled up Midwest Mysteries and clicked on the Contact page. Kyle’s picture had been enhanced with a brooding black-and-white filter. His ball cap was pulled low over his sunglasses, leaving his face in shadow, his body hidden beneath a shapeless windbreaker.

  When I read the feature he’d written on Midwest Mysteries about the twins’ disappearance, I was surprised to find it more in-depth and insightful than other Internet articles I’d come across, most of which copied liberally from the “Arrowood Kidnapping” page on Wikipedia. He also mentioned a personal connection to the case: He was from nearby Fort Madison and remembered hearing about the twins on the news when he was a kid.

  Why exactly do you want to interview me? I’d asked. I was all for bringing attention to the case if it could spark a new lead, but I didn’t see how interviewing me would accomplish that. I didn’t have anything new to add.

  I’m writing a book, he’d replied. About famous unsolved Iowa crimes. The three big ones are the Villisca ax murders, the Des Moines Register paperboy kidnappings, and the disappearance of your sisters. I want to add more personal details to bring the cases to life. It would be helpful if you could share some family stories, that sort of thing.

  So you’re hoping to profit from this? I’d asked.

  It’s possible, he’d written, that I could make some money, though I rarely make much from my writing. My other books have yet to break even. I’m not doing this to get rich. My ultimate goal is to reexamine cold cases, draw attention to them, in hopes that they might get solved.

  I wasn’t completely sure that I believed him. Professional investigators had failed, and I had no reason to believe that an amateur one, a “mystery buff,” would fare better. Was it even possible to solve a crime like the Villisca ax murders, when everyone involved was long dead? My sisters’ case was nearly two decades old, and the paperboy kidnappings even older. It didn’t seem likely that publishing personal details about the families would help anyone except for Josh Kyle, if it helped him to sell more books. I couldn’t stop him from writing about my family, but I didn’t have to assist him.

  After that first encounter, I had blocked any emails from Kyle and tried to forget about him and his book. Then, the day my father’s obituary hit the Keokuk paper, there was Mr. Kyle’s name in my in-box again. He’d switched email accounts.

  The subject line read, Sorry for your loss. In the body of the email, Kyle had sent his condolences and apologized for possibly offending me, noting that he’d sent several emails after our last exchange with no response and had taken the risk of emailing me from a different address in case I had blocked him. I didn’t write back.

  Today, though, his subject line froze my finger midscroll: Harold Singer.

  There had been one man in town with a gold car like the one I’d seen drive away with my sisters inside, a factory worker named Harold Singer. The police had dogged him to the point that he lost his job at Union Carbide and was practically run out of town. Singer claimed that he had parked along Grand Avenue earlier in the day, that he liked to sit there looking at the nice houses while he ate lunch in his car. He claimed that he had not seen me or my sisters in the yard on the day in question.

  My parents never discussed the case in front of me, and I didn’t learn the details until I was a few years older, when Grammy allowed me to read through her scrapbook of newspaper clippings. I had heard snippets of gossip from kids at my new school, once they realized who I was, but I didn’t know which parts were true until I saw it all in print. Regardless of Singer’s claims, police obtained a search warrant for his house and car. Hidden in a crawl space beneath his home they uncovered shoe boxes containing dozens of rolls of undeveloped film. Yes, he admitted, he was an amateur photographer. That wasn’t a crime. When the film was developed, investigators discovered that the photographs featured several houses around town, and that many of the pi
ctures included children—playing in front yards, biking down the sidewalk, swinging on swing sets.

  When Singer was questioned, he said that the children were incidental to the photos; he had been taking pictures of the houses to case them for potential robberies. Singer never wavered in his assertion that the timeline was all wrong, that he’d been at Arrowood around one o’clock that afternoon and then went home to sleep after finishing his lunch. No one believed him, because two witnesses (myself and my friend Ben Ferris, who lived next door) placed his car there closer to four. Ben had seen it from his bedroom window, and he knew what time it was because he was supposed to be practicing his violin. No one could confirm Singer’s alibi; however, several interrogations, searches of his property, and the impounding of his car had not revealed any evidence that he’d taken the twins.

  I had always believed that Singer was the one who had abducted them, because I saw my sisters in the gold car as it sped away. It was the only solid lead we had. The car wasn’t located and searched until four days after the kidnapping. I knew how quickly Singer could have killed and disposed of Violet and Tabitha, or handed them off to someone else. In four days’ time, he could have erased all evidence of the crime.

  I opened Josh Kyle’s email. I’m sorry to bother you, he wrote. First of all, I heard that you’ve returned to Keokuk. (I’m sorry, by the way, if you were hoping to keep that quiet—the caretaker told someone at the utilities office as he was preparing for your arrival, and word spread, as you can imagine.) Anyhow, I wanted to welcome you back. Second, I gather from your lack of response that you’re not interested in helping with the book, but I feel it’s only fair to inform you that I’m no longer including the Villisca and Des Moines cases in this volume—the book will focus solely on your sisters’ disappearance. I’ve done some investigating on my own and interviewed others involved in your case, including Harold Singer. Based on what I’ve learned, I believe your eyewitness account to be incorrect. I’d like to speak with you about what you claimed to see the day your sisters disappeared. I know how painful this must be, but if it were me, I’d want to know the truth.

  I wasn’t sure what to think. Whatever truth Josh Kyle thought he’d unearthed, he must not have shared it with anyone officially associated with the case. No one had called me with any updates. There hadn’t been any updates in years. And his accusation stung—that I was wrong about what I saw. How would he know? He wasn’t there. What I saw that day was etched into a movie reel in my brain, and no matter how badly I wanted to forget what had happened, I couldn’t. It played on an endless loop.

  —

  The twins were taken on a bright September afternoon. I had started second grade the week before, but this was a Saturday, Labor Day weekend, and it still felt like summer. My mother was somewhere inside the house, sleeping or reading a Danielle Steel novel or staring at a pile of laundry, the outside world muffled by thick plaster walls and heavy silk drapes and all the layers of black walnut woodwork. My father was away from the house, supposedly working. At the time, I couldn’t have told you what he did or why he was working on a holiday weekend, though I’d once heard Granddad call him a snake-oil salesman. I had promised my mother I’d keep an eye on the twins for a little while, and I was happy to do it. As firstborn, I was naturally bossy, and at the age of eight, the only people I could boss around were Violet and Tabitha, who were not quite two years old.

  I’d been up late the night before with an upset stomach, vomiting in the bathroom I shared with my sisters on our side of the second floor. I had crossed to the other side of the house in the dark to wake my mother and tell her that I was sick. She was alone in bed, a slight lump under the down duvet, Dad probably still awake somewhere downstairs, watching TV or listening to his records. Prescription bottles lined Mom’s nightstand. She asked if I had a fever, and I said I wasn’t sure. I wanted her to press her palm to my forehead, burn her hand, cry out for my father. I imagined her turning on all the lights, calling Granddad in a panic to ask him what to do. Instead she felt around for her sleeping pills, swallowed one dry, and sent me back to my room.

  I was tired and light-headed when I woke up in the morning, though my stomach felt better, and if whatever I had was contagious, the twins hadn’t yet come down with it by afternoon. We were playing Girl Scouts on the expansive front lawn, and I was the long-suffering troop leader. I wasn’t supposed to take them outside, but it wasn’t nearly as fun to play Scouts indoors. The twins were easily distracted and didn’t pay any attention as I lectured them about their imaginary badges for making s’mores and identifying birds. They weren’t old enough, really, for games with rules, and I wished that Mom would play, too. She hadn’t played Girl Scouts with me in a long time. When she was pregnant with the twins, we had spent whole afternoons stretched out on her bed playing Candy Land. She would nod off sometimes in between turns, and I would stare at her stomach where her shirt had ridden up, the skin stretched so tight that it was tearing apart, jagged pink fissures spiraling out from her protruding belly button. The bigger her stomach got, the less patience she had for games. Playing with children is hard, she had told me, spreading her swollen fingers across the mound of her belly and pushing back against the pointy elbows and knees that gouged her from the inside. Once your sisters are born, you’ll have someone to play with you all the time.

  The twins lolled on the blanket I’d spread in the shade of the mimosa tree, where the afternoon sun couldn’t reach us. We were close to the house, close enough that I thought Mom wouldn’t yell at me if she found out we’d gone outside. None of our neighbors were out enjoying the nice weather. Mrs. Crutchfield, who lived in the Neoclassical to our left, had a diabetic foot and rarely left the house. Across the street, the Brubakers’ Queen Anne sat empty, surrounded by scaffolding so that it could be painted and repaired while Mr. and Mrs. Brubaker were on vacation in the Wisconsin Dells. I glanced at Ben’s house and considered asking for a third time if he could come out to play. The first time I’d knocked, his mother said he couldn’t leave his room until he finished practicing his violin. He’d only recently started lessons and was still struggling with the first and simplest exercise, “Mississippi Hot Dog,” which didn’t even count as a song. Ben hadn’t wanted to play violin. He had wanted to take an art class at the Y, but his mother hadn’t given him a choice. The second time I knocked, Mrs. Ferris hadn’t even bothered to answer the door.

  Workers from the landscaping company were making a racket in the Ferrises’ yard, at work on an all-day project to prepare their lawn, shrubs, sprinklers, and flower beds for fall. Two of the Tru-Lawn trucks were parked at the curb in front of our house, and an unfamiliar gold-colored car sat behind them. It was getting to be naptime for the twins, and I knew that I should take them inside before my mother came looking for them.

  I remember holding Violet’s soft, sweaty hand, admiring the clover crowns I’d strung together and placed on her and Tabby’s identical white-blond heads in lieu of Girl Scout beanies. They were beautiful children, with my mother’s pale hair and skin. Most people had trouble telling them apart. Even our father would sometimes call the twins by the wrong names when he scooped them up to kiss them good night. But I could always tell the difference. There were subtle clues that anyone could have noticed—Vi had a way of tilting her head when she smiled or laughed, and Tabby was the shyer of the two—but beyond that, I’d always had a sense of who was who. Violet was Violet and Tabitha was Tabitha, and anyone who loved them like I did could have told them apart in the dark.

  The twins were fighting sleep and so was I, but then Tabby reached up and grabbed the dandelion I’d tucked behind my ear and said, “Mine.” Violet snatched it out of her hand and screamed, “No! Mine-mine-mine!” and Tabby let out a supernatural howl.

  “It’s okay,” I said, grabbing Tabby and kissing her sticky cheek. Both girls had grape juice stains on their faces that Mom hadn’t bothered to wash off, and purple blotches all over the white blouses Grammy
had sewn for them, the ones with bright yellow buttons shaped like ducks. “There are lots of dandelions. I’ll run get some for you. For both of you.”

  I squeezed Violet’s hand, told the twins to stay put, and ran around the side of the house toward the backyard, where dandelions had spread through the grass. There were thick patches of clover, too, and poison ivy vines climbing the iron fence. It had been that way since Tru-Lawn had stopped coming to our house early in the summer. I’d heard my mother complaining to my father about it, urging him to pay the bill or start tending to the lawn himself. I looked back over my shoulder once before turning the corner, to see Violet and Tabby chasing each other across the yard. I loved the way they ran, their arms flapping and their chubby little legs stuttering. They were smiling, their fight already forgotten.

  I pulled the hem of my shirt up to form a pouch and filled it with dandelions, counting twice to make sure I had an even number so that they could be divided equally between the twins. Next door, mowers and hedge trimmers and Weed Eaters buzzed around the Ferrises’ backyard. My head pulsed uncomfortably, a remnant of the previous night’s illness. When I approached the front lawn, the twins were not under the tree.

  I thought that they must be on the other side of the yard, just out of sight, or up on the porch, or that maybe my mother had taken them into the house. Then I heard a door slam. I turned to see the gold car peel away from the curb and, inside the passenger window, a flash of my sisters’ white hair.

  I stared after the car for a moment, confused, and then gasped at a visceral pain, like I had been stabbed through the chest with an icicle—as though my heart knew what my head hadn’t yet grasped. I had been holding the dandelions in my shirt, and my hands dropped to my sides as I began to run, the yellow flowers falling at my feet as I sprinted across the lawn and down the sidewalk. The gold car was nearly out of sight. It turned toward Main, which could take it any number of places—across the river into Illinois, south to Missouri, north to the highway. I ran until I wheezed, looking down cross streets, but the car was gone.