Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “Is she a good student?”

  “One of my best,” Oliver said.

  “So that’s a pretty unlikely scenario. Another explanation might be that, for reasons of her own, she didn’t want to describe, in her blog, how she knew about these concepts. It’s more romantic if they’re just ideas that present themselves in dreams.”

  “Lulu’s generally levelheaded. That doesn’t sound like her.”

  “A lot of young ladies are both levelheaded and romantically inclined,” Stan said.

  “That’s certainly true. I wouldn’t say Lulu is without imagination. But I think she’s scrupulously honest—maybe to a fault, as you’ll see in some of her blog entries. I just don’t see her as someone who would hide or disguise knowledge she had earned as vague images that came to her dreams. When you tack on the rest of what we know, I can’t help feeling like there’s something there.”

  Stan chuckled. He still had not smiled, and his dry laugh lacked genuine humor. “You’re supposed to be the science guy. I’m the anthropologist. I’m the one who is supposed to believe in magic.”

  “Do you?” Oliver asked him. His throat was parched, he realized. He looked about for the waiter, wanting him to return after all, but couldn’t locate him.

  “I believe there are forces that operate in the universe that you and your hard sciences comrades have not explained to my satisfaction,” Stan said. “Mexico is full of magic, if you listen to its people. Look at the folktales. Look at the literature of Latin America. Is it a coincidence that ‘magic realism’ is so omnipresent? Look at the paintings of Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, not to mention lesser-known folk artists. Magical occurrences are daily events, according to them. Are they wrong?”

  “You don’t think most of that stems from superstitious people trying to explain complicated natural phenomena using the vocabulary available to them? Then writers and artists adopting that native vocabulary in a metaphorical way?”

  “Certainly that’s one way to look at it,” Stan said. “On the other hand, I have a friend outside Ensenada who had testicular cancer. He’s an American citizen. He went to half a dozen oncologists here, Scripps, Sharp, you name it. They beat it back and it returned, more advanced than it had been. He was not a happy man, my friend. Losing both his balls was looking like his best hope, and that’s not my definition of the best of anything. Finally, in desperation, he turned—on the advice of one of his oncologists, and only with a great deal of pressure from me and some other friends—to a brujo. You know what that is?”

  “A witch doctor.”

  Stan shrugged, nodding. “More or less. A shaman, a witch doctor, a magical healer. Like Cabeza de Vaca, I suppose. Anyway, this brujo didn’t cut him open, didn’t make him ingest anything, but he massaged my friend’s testicles to the point, my friend said, that he was starting to think the brujo just got his jollies that way. After about ten minutes of that, he rolled something between his fingers and showed it to my friend. It looked, he said, like a tiny dart, with a point on one side and featherlike extensions on the other. The brujo claimed that he had removed it from my friend’s testicles and, further, that it had been placed there because my friend had been cursed. He had taken it out, but unless my friend did something about the curse, it would return.”

  “This is starting to sound like a horror movie,” Oliver said. “Aren’t these people supposed to be gypsies?”

  Without even acknowledging the comment, Stan continued. “Without making a long story unbearable, my friend had, in fact, made an enemy of a shaman in a tribe deeper in the interior. He traveled, free of pain for the first time, back to that shaman and made peace with him—which involved, if I recall correctly, the transfer of a couple thousand dollars. But when he came back to his doctors here in the States, the cancer was gone. As if it had never existed.”

  “I suppose if you believe something strongly enough—”

  “I never said my friend believed anything,” Stan said. “He was as agnostic about magic as you are. He is not an academic, certainly no fuzzy-headed anthropologist. He’s a real estate speculator. Remember, he sought out Western medicine—scientific medicine. He had to be convinced to try this brujo as a last resort. The other option was cutting off his balls. He didn’t believe in it, but he didn’t have much choice.”

  “So you don’t think there was a psychological component to the cure.”

  “I know there was not,” Stan said with certainty. “I don’t think psychology can erase cancer. My friend still has both testicles—and uses them frequently, with a variety of lovely young chicas, he claims. He believes in magic now, I can tell you that. But he didn’t at the time.”

  Stan put his hands on the table, his right resting on the stack of paper, his left on the tablecloth, and was silent. Oliver considered a number of objections or arguments, discarding each as inadequate before he gave voice to it. He was left with nothing to say.

  Finally, Stan cleared his throat. “I really need to get to class,” he said, glancing at the sun, which had lowered toward the distant horizon line. “I’ll read these more thoroughly, and call or e-mail if I come up with anything else that might help.”

  “I really appreciate that, Stan,” Oliver said.

  “I’m not doing it for you.”

  “I understand that. But Lulu needs all the help she can get, and right away.”

  Stan pushed his chair back, pressed his pudgy hands against its arms and hoisted himself out of it. His face was red, and a raspy exhalation escaped his lips, and Oliver hoped he didn’t have a heart attack before he had a chance to look at the printouts. Without any parting formalities, Stan exited the restaurant, leaving Oliver at the table. The families had left; only one couple, deep in romantic bliss and paying him no attention whatsoever, remained on the patio with him.

  The waiter returned, took Oliver’s credit card and came back a couple of minutes later with a receipt to be signed. Oliver signed it, then left the patio, descended the staircase and found himself on Prospect Street, amid high-end galleries, clothing shops and restaurants. Expensive cars crowded the street: Mercedes, BMW, Jaguar, Hummer, Range Rover, an old Ford Pinto with surfboards sticking out the back providing contrast. Families of tourists in shorts or swimsuits, carrying boogie boards and blankets, skin reddened by the sun, walked alongside businesspeople and wealthy retirees.

  Somehow, none of what he saw seemed real to him. Not as real, at any rate, as the image of a shaman squatting in the desert, shaking a copper-headed rattle and letting a poisonous snake slither up his arm.

  10

  Buck was driving up the valley, from Nellie’s ranch near the border to the sheriff’s substation in Elfrida, when the first heavy raindrops splatted against his windshield. Within moments, rain pounded the roof and washed over the street before him, as if the sky itself wept at the hopelessness of the search for Lulu Lavender.

  As soon as the metaphor occurred to him, Buck laughed at the pomposity of it. Lulu was someplace under the same sky—if it gave a shit, it could point down with a massive, cloud-formed finger and show him where. The squall matched his mood, that was all.

  He hadn’t eaten lunch, so he cruised past the station and on up to Baker’s Haus, where he picked up a turkey and ham sandwich to go and a bag of cookies for the staff. Fifteen minutes later, he walked into the station, a white paper bag in each hand. He had barely cleared the doorway before Raul was on his feet, coming toward him with papers in his hand. “You’ll want to see this,” Raul said.

  “What is it?”

  “DNA report from the lab,” Raul replied. “They got a hit on skin cells from under Kevin Lavender’s fingernails.”

  “Are you shitting me?” Buck asked, his spirits elevated.

  “That’s what the report says,” Raul answered. Buck took the papers from Raul’s hand and dropped into the nearest chair. “Guy was in the system once, in Oklahoma,” Raul continued. “Almost a decade ago. But you’ve got a photo, a name, an address, finge
rprints, the works. Even better, the prints match a couple found in the Lavender house.”

  Buck only half-listened to Raul, intent on reading for himself what the man was trying to tell him. He had summed it up, though. The epithelials, as the report put it, belonged to a man named Henry Schaffer, and his fingerprints had been found on a light switch and the bathroom faucet in the Lavenders’ home. He was thirty-one years old, with a last known address in El Paso, Texas. Having just come from Nellie’s, Buck couldn’t help wondering if the fact that Henry Schaffer had lived in a border town had any bearing on the case.

  He looked at the photo that had come in with the report, a booking photo from Lawton, Oklahoma. Mug shots were rarely flattering, and this one held true to that rule. Even then, at twenty-two, his hairline had been receding, his smooth forehead shining under the camera’s flash. A heavy, beetled brow shielded small dark eyes that glared off to the subject’s right, as if unwilling to look directly into the lens, or attracted to something out of view. His nose bulged toward the camera, accentuated by the wide-angle lens used. Beneath it, dark lips were slightly parted, showing uneven teeth. Buck couldn’t put his finger on exactly why, but he got an unpleasant sensation from the photo, as if Henry Schaffer had been making a halfhearted effort to disguise utter contempt for the whole process and the people who had brought him into it.

  Kind of like Nellie and her vibrations, he thought.

  Almost exactly like that, because Henry Schaffer and the man in the Geronimo! tapes were undeniably one and the same. Buck couldn’t suppress a smile as he continued reading.

  Schaffer had been charged, and convicted, of aggravated assault. There had been an encounter in a liquor store late at night; he and another customer had exchanged words, and then, when the other man turned his back, Henry had smashed a bottle of cheap California Chardonnay against his head. He had served eighteen months, during which he’d been involved in a couple of prison altercations. Nobody had died in any of the fights Buck could connect to Henry Schaffer, but the man—albeit only five foot nine, 152 pounds—seemed perfectly willing to respond with violence to any provocation, and maybe to none at all. Blood had been taken for medical reasons during his incarceration, which had provided the DNA sample finally matched by the lab in Bisbee.

  “Donna!” he called abruptly. Donna Gonzales came around a corner, her uniform crisp and pressed. He pushed the photo toward her. “Get copies of this out to everyone you can think of. DPS, all the PDs in the county, every sheriff’s office in the state, Border Patrol. If anyone has seen this guy I want to know about it.”

  “I’m on it, Lieutenant,” she said. She snatched up the photo and hurried away, leaving behind only traces of a flowery perfume.

  “And Donna!” he called after her. Her footfalls stopped, turned around, and she hove into view again. He held up the bag with the cookies. “Make sure everyone who wants a cookie gets one. Including me. I’ll be in my office.”

  This time when Donna left, he did too, bound for his own office. He would be on the phone for quite a while, he guessed.

  Maybe he’d get a chance to nibble on that sandwich while he was on hold.

  His first call was to Ed Gatlin’s office in Bisbee. Instead of the sheriff, he got Irena Mendez. “He can’t come to the phone, Buck,” she said. “Haven’t you heard the news?”

  “I’ve been a little busy, Irena.”

  “Do you have a TV down there? You might want to turn it on.”

  Buck hung up the phone with a sigh. He had what could be the first real break in the Lavender case, and Ed was doing another press conference? He wished Elayne Lippincott had never disappeared—not for her sake but for his own.

  “Donna!” he shouted one more time. “Turn on the TV. Apparently Sheriff Gatlin’s getting some more airtime!”

  11

  “…indication points to suicide, and—”

  “Does that mean there is no foul play suspected, Sheriff?”

  “We haven’t ruled anything out, but at this point it appears that Victor Lippincott’s fatal wound was self-inflicted.”

  “If this is determined to have been the result of foul play, would you assume that it’s connected with the disappearance of his daughter Elayne?”

  “You’re asking me to engage in hypothetical reasoning, ma’am. I wouldn’t be much of a law enforcement professional if I did that.”

  “But with Elayne still missing, isn’t it possible that—”

  “Anything is possible. And like I said, I’m ruling out nothing. For now, though, we’re not making any such connections. I’m keeping an open mind and looking at the facts as they’re presented, not trying to prove one hypothesis or another.”

  “Can you say how Mrs. Lippincott is taking it?”

  “How would you expect her to take it? Her daughter has been missing for two weeks, and now her husband has apparently taken his own life. Bea Lippincott is under a doctor’s care, under sedation, and that’s all I’ll say about her right now.”

  “Just to clarify, Sheriff, you don’t think there’s a definitive connection—you don’t think that someone has it in for the Lippincott family and has turned his attention from Elayne to Victor Lippincott?”

  “There are no indications at this time that that’s the case, no. Once again, we’ll look at every scenario, however likely or unlikely, until we know the truth.”

  “Did Victor Lippincott leave a note?”

  “We haven’t found a note anywhere in the house, which means that everything is just speculation at this point in time. Speaking of time, I’m afraid that’s all the questions I have time for right now. You’ll all be informed of any further developments in this case.”

  12

  Lulu’s head throbs, as if someone has built a highway on it and eighteen-wheelers roll over it every few seconds. She is back in the truck again. A filthy rag has been shoved in her mouth and secured there with duct tape wrapped around her head—every time she moves it (which makes the throbbing that much worse, so she avoids it when possible), she can feel it yank on the hairs stuck underneath. What she can’t avoid is the motion of the truck, which seems to have no shock absorbers at all. Every bump or seam or uneven patch of road jostles or shakes or vibrates her, and the pain makes her want to throw up, but she knows if she does, she’ll choke on it, and she doesn’t want to die here, in the back of his truck, trussed up like a steer on rodeo day. Thunder and a staccato drumming overhead make her think they’re driving through a storm.

  She doesn’t remember much about getting into the truck. He came to her, but she was still blindfolded and didn’t know until he shoved it in her face that he was holding a piece of cloth soaked with something, chloroform or ether or whatever it was he had used on her the first time, back home. Knowing what to expect this time, she tried to hold her breath, and then feigned unconsciousness. But she had inhaled enough of the stuff that genuine unconsciousness engulfed her just the same.

  When Lulu woke up, she was in the truck, where she has remained. She has no idea what time it is, or how long she was out. At some point she passed into a sleep state and dreamed, and in the dreams she saw the white girl again. The white girl didn’t speak to her, but she acted as if she wanted to. Now that she is awake again, Lulu tries to remember the details—not what happened in the dream but what the dream told her.

  Because she is pretty sure she knows now where the white girl wants her to be, and when. It would help if she knew for sure what day it was, or what time, since for all she knows she is supposed to be at the meeting place right this minute. She doesn’t think the white girl would ask her to do something completely beyond her control, but she’s never been in this situation before—she doubts if anybody has—so she really doesn’t know for sure.

  Lulu has always known she needed to get away from him. He’ll never let her go alive. He hasn’t even promised that he would, if she told him what he wanted to know, and she is not naive enough to believe he would live up to such a promise
if he made it.

  Now, in addition to her own survival, she has another reason to want to escape. The white girl is counting on her. Why, she has no idea.

  But Lulu has every intention of coming through for her if she can.

  13

  “Barry!”

  He started, letting out a surprised grunt and blinked away sleep. He had dozed off in a chair in the common room while some of the other guys watched Fox News. In a dream, he had been in a hotel room, one fancier by far than any he had seen in person, like something from a movie about rich people, and he had just entered and was waiting for Clarice to come in. She had just been in the hallway with him, holding a big brass key and counting off the numbers on the doors they passed. But she didn’t come in and she didn’t come in and she didn’t come in, and he was just realizing that she wasn’t going to when someone shook his shoulder and woke him up.

  Connie’s face swam into partial focus, too close to his to make out clearly. “Barry, wake up,” she said, her tone urgent. Her eyes were wide and alert, her lips parted, her expression one of utmost solemnity. She’s not waking me up for a poke, he thought, disappointed by the realization.

  “What’s up?”

  “There something we have to do,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Come on,” she said. She released his shoulder and clutched at his hand, catching three fingers. She let those go, grabbed again, and this time closed her whole hand around his. Some time had passed, he realized. The news had ended and a reality show played, and the people sitting around the set were different than the ones who had been there.

  She pulled on his right hand at the same time that he used his left to push off from the big, soft chair in which he had fallen asleep. When he was on his feet at last, the world started to clarify. Connie wore a long-sleeved red T-shirt and black jeans over Western boots. In her left hand she carried a black nylon gym bag, zippered shut. Outside the windows, rain hammered the bare earth and lightning strobed the darkness.