Lost Girls

by Andrew Pyper

  “There’s nobody else to ask, is there?”

  “They always told me what to do.”

  “And they told you to drive them to Lake St. Christopher, is that it? They wanted to go?”

  “I don’t know what they wanted. I just…”

  “Just took them there?”

  “Always talking about it. ‘What about the lake, Mr. Tripp?’ Those two! ‘Tell us about the lake.’ I had a choice about it at first. And then after a while it didn’t matter.”

  His voice isn’t a whisper, doesn’t travel as whispers do, but is so soft I strain for every word.

  “There are some things you can’t fight, Mr. Crane.”

  “By ‘things’ I take it you mean ‘urges’?”

  “I mean the will of others.”

  “Are you telling me—are you trying to tell me that there’s another party involved here? If so, I need you to tell me now. Give me a name.”

  The tears have been stemmed once more, but Tripp’s head now hangs down to meet his chest and his arms have fallen inward so that he takes up as little space as he can, as though he would pull his entire body up into himself and disappear if he could.

  “Whoever it is, you can’t help them now,” I continue, keeping my voice even. “It’s time to think of yourself, Thomas. And I can help you—we can help each other—if you just give me a name.”

  He wriggles his shoulders as though invisibly bound. His blinking irregular, accelerated. An audible smacking of eyelids sounding out an unreadable code.

  “Can you hear them?” he whispers.

  “I can hear you and me and an inmate barking for a smoke down the hall. What else are you referring to?”

  “They change.”

  “Change?”

  “From one to another.”

  “Well, that’s the basic structure of conversation, isn’t it? An exchange between more than—”

  “They talk to each other.”

  “Mr. Tripp. Are you trying to suggest to me your suitability for the defense of insanity? If this is your plan, you need not pretend with me. I’m your lawyer. It’s essential that you realize we have shared interests. Now, if you prefer the idea of lifelong hospitalization to the possibility of lifelong incarceration, you just tell me how you’d like me to go about it, and we’ll—”

  “I can hear her!”

  Tripp pulls himself up, leans across the table and hisses this at me, his face a mask of goggle-eyed desperation. Hands gripping the edges of the table hard enough to turn his knuckles an instant white, shoulders braced as though in anticipation of a physical blow from behind. And now bigger than I thought, as though another, larger man was swelling within his skin. Pushing out bands of vein across his forehead, slithering pulses down his neck.

  There’s something about this new turn to his performance that gives me serious pause. An urgency I didn’t recognize at first, a sharp edge that could cut through whatever lay before him. Fear. But a fear that could be translated into other extremes. And just as these possibilities begin to cloud together around him he retreats back into the depths of his chair, his eyes returning to their usual appearance as two undercooked eggs. The room turns cool again. He’s my man Tripp once more, an equal mixture of timid schoolteacher and confused child.

  “Her?” I ask. “And what ‘her’ would we be speaking of?”

  “I don’t care if you believe me.”

  “Nor do I, Mr. Tripp.”

  I stick my bare notepad back into my briefcase and rise to knock for the guard.

  “I urge you to consider the seriousness of your situation,” I say to his back from the safe distance of the door. “Perhaps the next time we speak you’ll have come to appreciate the fact that I’m on your side. That I’m the only one on your side.”

  The guard’s rubber soles squeaking down the hall to let me out.

  “A strange one, I told ya,” the leprechaun guard says as he walks me to the front doors, but seeing as I have to agree I end up not saying a word.

  SIX

  As I walk through the two hundred yards of downtown Murdoch to The Empire I’m thinking that Tripp should count himself lucky to have the law on his side. Unless something nasty bobs to the surface of Lake St. Christopher over the next few weeks there’s still no evidence that anyone is dead. No bodies, no actus reus, no murder. And although I’d rather rely on a believable alibi or overwhelming physical evidence to support a defense, a strong legal argument is still very nice, thank you. All the Crown’s main facts are easily rebuttable, and each at the very least gives rise to a creamy dollop of reasonable doubt. Pictures of girls in undies ripped from the Sears catalog and pinned up on the accused’s wall show a depraved loneliness and suspect libidi-nal preoccupations, but hardly murderous intent. And the bloodstains in Tripp’s car—they could be anybody’s. As for the muddy shoes and pants, you can’t cross the street up here without treading through something soft and brown. Add it up and all you’ve got is circumstantial will-o’-the-wisps and nothing more. So what if Tripp is an uncoachable loony who’ll bring about utter disaster if he ever gets within twenty feet of the stand? All I require is for Mr. Weird to sit there nice and quiet and keep the waterworks in check. We’ve got the law on our side. “How’re you doing today?” the concierge greets me as I step into the front hall. I squint over in the direction of the voice and find his slouching silhouette behind the desk, his teeth chipped piano keys in the dark.

  “Is there something you want to tell me, or is that just your way of saying hello in the unnecessary form of a question?”

  Cups his jaw in a toothache pose.

  “Well, now you ask, I guess I’d say a little of both.”

  “Then tell me.”

  “Got a couple messages here I took for you over the phone.”

  “Let’s see them.”

  “I’m not sure you’re gonna—”

  “Give me the fucking messages, if you don’t mind.”

  “Don’t mind at all. Just that they weren’t those kind of messages.”

  I slide forward over the carpet until my shoes thud against the front of the desk.

  “What kind were they?”

  “Prankster stuff. Kids. Girls mostly, funny enough.”

  “Hilarious.” I lay the back of my hand down on the desk. “So what’d they say? You write them down?”

  “No, sir.”

  “Why not?”

  “Didn’t ask for you in particular.”

  “Why are you telling me then?”

  “People know who you are. Who you’d be working for.”

  He says this without an edge of criticism. He says it without anything at all.

  “Get names next time,” I say. “I’ll lay charges.”

  “For what?”

  “Uttering threats.”

  “I didn’t say nothin’ about threats.” The skin of the concierge’s head glows in the blue from the computer screen.

  I step back to go up the stairs, but pause at the bottom.

  “How many?”

  “A good few.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, after this, don’t bother letting—”

  “Not a word.”

  The concierge looks up at me and shakes his head blue black, blue black, across the line of shadow and light.

  By the time I shut the door and glance out the window at the day’s intestinal clouds I’m having doubts. Not about the thinness of the evidence against Thommy Boy, but about the soundness of the whole no-bodies–no-murder thing. I think I remember some law school prof in a cheap suit (no help—they all wore cheap suits) stating that no murder conviction had ever been obtained in Canada without the evidentiary assistance of the victim’s discovered remains. But the voice of Graham Lyle nevertheless singsongs through my head as it always does when the necessity of legal research raises its pernickety head: My dear Barth, didn’t your mother ever warn you about hanging your hat on loose pegs?

  So I pull out the laptop, hook up the modem to the pho
ne beside the bed and connect with the Canadian Criminal Database through which, thanks to the monkish work of some law school drop-outs stuck in a suburban basement office, every single reported case in the nation can be reviewed at a cost of $320 per on-line hour. A little dear, I suppose, but far handier than having to schlepp the firm’s library up to this wasteland or call down to Toronto to have a paralegal pull together a memo which, in the end, is invariably wrong.

  The afternoon gradually darkens in the space outside the computer’s screen as I scroll and click through the cases summoned by my search terms, variously arranged: “homicide,” “remains,” “evidence,” “actus reus,” “discover(y).” By the time I have to turn on the bedside lamp to see my fingers it appears that my original assumption was correct. And then I come across R v. Stark. I read the whole decision before exhaling, a pain in my head like two birds pecking their way out at the temples.

  The facts annoyingly similar to those at hand. A teenaged girl goes missing in rural northern Ontario and the police boil the suspects down to one Peter Stark, the father of one of the girl’s school friends. He admits that he picked her up in town, but says he dropped her off at a gas station after he bought her lunch because she wanted to make a phone call. However, when Stark returned home at the end of the day his wife recalled his having mud and leaves stuck to his clothes. They never found the body before the trial, but the Crown proceeded against Stark anyway with little more than muddy jeans. Then he made his big mistake. In the court’s holding cells just before the trial was to begin he bragged at length to the fellow who occupied the lower bunk about how he’d raped the girl and then used an ax on her afterwards to ensure she wouldn’t tell, and then dumped her somewhere in the middle of the Manvers Township swamp. Although he stuck to his gas station drop-off story at trial and the police never managed to uncover the body, Stark was convicted and sentenced to life.

  I close the laptop and fix my eyes on the halo of mist around the streetlight swaying outside the window. What does Mr. Stark have to say about the present case? Nothing good. But there’s one fact missing in Tripp’s situation that still clearly distinguishes his from Stark’s: he hasn’t confessed to anything. And so long as Tripp remains isolated in his bug-eyed state he isn’t likely to reveal concrete details of the crime to his own lawyer, let alone the guy across the hall.

  Nevertheless, there’s one thing about today’s discovery that is quite unavoidably bad: although they certainly help, it appears that bodies are not necessary to put a man away for murder after all.

  SEVEN

  The next morning finds my head buried in the complicated tunnels of my garment bag. I’m not feeling so hot. Not true—I’m in the grip of a death fever, I’m black leather in the sun, I’m a kettle boiled dry on the stove. And there it is, my home away from home tucked into the plastic bag designed for carrying shoes. Zip back the zipper and pull it up into my arms, give it a teary kiss as though a hard-won trophy. It even looks like a trophy: a silver thermos of burnished aluminum, roughly the size and shape of a nuclear warhead. Enough coke to entertain 150 movie producers and their dates for an entire night, a volume carrying a street value equal to an only slightly used Japanese sedan. Screw off the cap and spoon a line out onto the bedside table. Without sitting up I wrench my neck into an angle that enables me to accommodate the procedure, and with an efficient snuff (I snort only when drunk or subject to an especially monstrous craving, and almost never before noon) the day begins. Everything you need and then some. A witty conversation resumed within yourself, a Gene Kelly spring to the step, two inches added to your height. A nearly perfect simulation of what I can only assume to be hope, fluttering and shy in my chest.

  “Good morning, Mr. Crane,” I say to the paintbubbled ceiling, but my voice sounds distant and thin through the air of the room. In fact it seems the entire hotel absorbs all sound but that which it creates itself. The chattering of the windows, muffled yawning within the plaster walls and the groans of the hallway floorboards echo for long moments, while a cleared throat or spoken voice is immediately drawn away.

  Slip boxers off into a ring around my feet, step over to the bathroom and crank up the hot water. But for a while there’s nothing but a thundering expulsion of icy white.

  “Don’t do this to me, goddammit,” I say to no particular person or deity, but something must be listening, for the water instantly becomes steam and my finger, which a second before was turning blue, is now pulled back a blistered red. Just as the burn’s first flash of pain arrives I manage to turn and stick it under the tap in the sink. Take the opportunity to check myself out in the mirror, my face already fogging over at the edges. The glass is old, its surface spotted black where the silver has been chipped away, and the reflection it returns isn’t quite right, not so much a distortion of shape as an unfriendly muting of light. Accentuates the shadows in a way that turns the circles under my eyes into bulging pouches and deepens the few wrinkles at the edges of brow and mouth into withering cracks. Pull back a bit and force a smile. Still a little bleached and inflated, but nothing to be alarmed about.

  In fact I could say I’m not bad-looking, but that’s what all good-looking people say of themselves, hedging their bets behind the double negative of “not bad.” So to avoid this false modesty I should simply say that I think I’m good-looking, in a certain way. The way of preppy boyishness, good posture, high foreheads and self-congratulatory smiles. Something in the way of the Kennedy boys in their early thirties (more Jack than Bobby). I have even been told this by others, although I think the likeness is fairly subtle, more an interpretation of aura than a description of physical detail. I’ve spent enough time in front of mirrors to know that I don’t look like Bobby or Jack, not really, but I admit the three of us might have stood comfortably next to each other in some school portrait or Cape Cod snapshot. It’s that look of satisfaction and easy purpose carried within a single strand of DNA that is in turn bundled in with the other strands which predetermine the less important factors like intelligence, integrity and foot size. That’s why people say I look like a Kennedy when I only remind them of a Kennedy, for in fact there’s more of the prematurely debauched Irish rugby player in my face than the shining American aristocrat.

  I circle my palm over the glass surface and wipe my face back into focus. So what, specifically, does the mirror say these days? Good things mostly, although good things in a state just prior to—or in the beginning stage of—the decline from young man firm to middle-aged sag. Beneath this, however, the fundamental elements resist and, for the most part, prevail: pronounced cheekbones, organized white teeth (apparently self-cleaning), hair that looks better tousled than combed, thin as a homework excuse and tall as an undertaker. Even from adolescence I recognized that mine was a build made for dark overcoats.

  But the distinguishing flaws, the markings of “character”—let’s not forget them, either. There’s the Crane nose: too wide and crooked as a boxer’s. Not a pretty thing to situate in the center of a face but suggestive of a tough-guy history which I’ve had occasion to be glad of. Thin lips more cobalt than crimson, eyes blue enough to go by violet. Brows turned up slightly at the corners to indicate vulnerability or, more likely, mischief. And a couple of things just plainly unfortunate: smallish ears whose tips pixie up and away from the sides of my head, a restless Adam’s apple that leaps and dives the length of my neck. But before I can go too far down the list of aesthetic regrets the mirror steams over again, leaving only a wavering shadow deep within the glass.

  I turn off the cold at the sink and do the same to the hot at the tub, the water now up to within a foot of the edge. While showers are my preference as a rule, seeing as I’m freezing my ass off I decide to step in and have a bath instead. It’s one of those old, lion-clawed, heavy-duty porcelain units installed when they built the place. And it’s deep. So for a time I lie there with eyes closed, absently whispering the opening lines of the only thing that I’ve ever memorized from beginning
to end:

  My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains

  My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,

  Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains

  One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:

  Keats. Had to recite the whole thing for an undergraduate English class taught by one of those old-school profs who still believed that speaking the words aloud was essential to catching the full force of their poetic meaning. Maybe he was right; I wouldn’t know. He was certainly pissed off when I asked him what a “Lethe” was when I was done. Apparently the question was more properly phrased not as what but where, as it turned out Lethe is the river of forgetfulness which runs through the underworld. “Perhaps you have drunk too deeply from its waters yourself,” the old bastard scolded me in front of the class, but gave me an A on my reading as I recall.

  I loved the words. I loved their sound and suggestion and rhythm, but could live without having to think too much about their meaning. It’s likely that this passion, or some lesser form of it, was inherited from my father. A professor of comparative literature, although I never knew what he compared to what. The Romantics were his specialty—Keats, Byron, Shelley and other flowery sorts—but his text of principal interest was my mother. He read her and re-read her, coveted her like a rare first edition, his affections singular and exclusive. In my limited set of childhood memories he strikes two distinct poses. The first has him sitting at his desk preparing a lecture or fussing over an essay, in either case not to be interrupted. It seems I needed only to consider approaching the sliding oak door to his study before there would be my mother’s sharp whisper behind me, “Your father is working!” The other is a picture of him reaching to embrace my mother, his face loosened into an expression of unseemly satisfaction for a grown, married man.

  Of course I was too young myself to recognize how much he loved her (in the sense of how much more than other husbands loved their wives) but in the following years, whenever I’ve bumped into someone who knew them both back then, I’ve been told over and over that while he was a committed teacher, he was a devoted husband. Always the same adjectives used to describe the same occupations. In fact I came to understand the distinction between the two through this common observation others made about my father. One can be committed to any number of things. But when it comes to people, devotion requires attention to only one.