Lost Girls

by Andrew Pyper

Too real to be strip club schoolgirls. Too easily imagined crossing the street with hair storing up the glittering heat of the sun or yawning in a rain-pelted bus shelter to function as fantasies. It’s never been real youth I’ve desired in my entertainments, but youth played out as a predictable game. This requires low lights. A few drinks. The anonymous company of similar-minded consumers. Without these the people on stage only remain people.

  Fatigue, paranoia, some major chemical overindulgence over the last several weeks leading to a full-blown anxiety attack. The more reasonable explanation. God knows I’ve called upon the pacifying effects of valium on several hundred occasions over the last few years, so it’s no surprise that under my current stress I should experience some nervousness. My doctor, therefore, is ultimately to blame for last night. Failing to automatically prescribe me a refill on my last bottle of tranquilizers is, now that I think of it, tantamount to malpractice.

  I make a mental note to write him a terse letter of vaguely legal threats when this is all over.

  Make a further mental note to get my hands on one of the local physicians and secure an order of calm pills.

  Then I finally pull my gaze from the walls, hunch over to the bedside table and cut myself a line of the powdery white just long enough to get me to lunch.

  I decide to take a new route up to the Murdoch Prison for Men, slip off Ontario Street and into the mixture of postwar apartment blocks and low-rent retail located behind it. Three-story buildings with shared balconies, stolen shopping carts parked on the crabgrass yards, and all with names like Champlain Towers, Huron House and The Algonquin set like gravestones over the doors. Between them the soft-core video store and coin laundry with a single old man stooped low to watch his tumbling undershirts, the small appliance repair shop (SPECIALIZING IN VACUUMS), the convenience store with a poster over the whole of its window announcing that it was only five months ago that they issued a $2,400 winning lottery ticket from their machine. On the sidewalk, nobody but the very young and very old: two boys popping BBs off at each other, a pair of shrunken ladies walking in silence beneath crumpled fancy hats. I move past them all but none turn to look. None but me lift their head to hear the far-off drums of thunder over the bay.

  On the corner at the end of the block the neighborhood’s makeup changes with the appearance of a narrow church. Our Lady of Perpetual Help. It must have been more or less where those junipers are now next to the front doors that old Dundurn buried himself in a snowdrift years back. What had Pittle said? Funny his choosing to impersonate an ice cube outside of a Catholic church, being a die-hard Presbyterian all his life. And he was right. It was kind of funny.

  Next door a church-run thrift shop called Petticoat Lane selling donated toys, romance novels and winter coats. Through the window I can see a couple of mothers inside with strollers parked before them, digging through the piles of kids’ T-shirts and sweaters spread out over the broad tables. Then I think: long underwear. Now that I’m here, I might as well grab some thermals to put an end to my courtroom hypothermia once and for all.

  So I’m pushing through the door and heading for the back where a small sign marked M E N hangs from the blade of a ceiling fan. They’ve got everything in here, especially if you’ve got a thing for pink cotton track pants. Or baby blue socks. Or T-shirts with airbrush paintings of kittens, fields of wildflowers, wolves howling under a full orange moon.

  But they also have men’s white cotton underwear collected in huge cardboard boxes at the back. And this is where I am, looking for pairs my size with the fewest visible stains. They smell clean enough though (they have to wash all this stuff before they sell it, right?) and you can’t beat the price: a quarter each or six for a dollar. I’ve got two pairs in hand and I’m digging deeper when I hear someone come in the front door behind me. A familiar voice, leaden and drowsy.

  Without pulling my head fully out of the box I look back. A man emptying the first of two garbage bags out over the front check-out counter. Girls’ clothes. Spreading them out for the woman in charge of receiving donations, each T-shirt carefully folded, each pair of jeans flat and stiff as though pressed before being brought in.

  “They’re not doing me any good,” the man says, and tries to smile at the woman behind the counter. “Maybe there’s someone else who can make some use out of them.”

  Brian Flynn handing over Ashley’s things, all the stripes and florals collected in the drawers of her well-ordered room. Watch him stroke his hand over each offering as though something in the touch of the material brought a particular recollection back to him.

  I can’t stay bent over the underwear forever. And seeing as there’s apparently no back door, there’s nothing else for it but a walk straight down the narrow aisle to the front. Flynn doesn’t turn at the sound of my step, continues to pass his hand over each of his donations before finally placing them into the arms of the woman behind the counter who wears a look of barely veiled distress.

  I’m almost past him now and it’s clear that I’m going to make it out without a word. But then I’m doing precisely what I need not do. Pausing to the side of Flynn’s back beside the second garbage bag he has leaned up against the counter. Opening my mouth and saying hello, waiting for the ripple of recognition to pass over his face. Then I’m saying hello again.

  “Here for the bargains?” Flynn replies once he’s returned his eyes to his hands.

  “Just looking around.”

  “Well, you won’t find much in the way of business suits in here.”

  The woman watches us from her place three feet away, her face now frozen in appalled discomfort.

  “I just wanted to say again that I’m sorry, Brian. About everything.” I nod at Ashley’s folded T-shirts.

  “You are? Well, that’s awfully nice. Thank you so much.”

  “I don’t blame you for feeling how you must feel.”

  “You know something? I don’t believe someone like you could possibly feel anything for anyone. You’re missing that part of your brain or whatever it is that makes you give a shit.”

  “Just for the record, I meant what I said.”

  I lower my head and start for the door. But before I can get by him Flynn’s arm shoots out to block my way.

  “Why’d you do that to McConnell? You tore that man apart.”

  “I was trying to make a point. A legal point.”

  “That he might have done it.”

  “Well, with all due respect, he might have.”

  “Why not me then? Right from the very beginning I’m so sure she’s never coming home I don’t even bother to go on TV with him or offer a reward. You’ve got to wonder. And hey, look at me now. Getting rid of all her things. Maybe it’s evidence. When you think of it, Mr. Crane, I could do you as much good as McConnell. So why not pick on me?”

  “Because it wasn’t you sitting in the stand.”

  “That’s it?”

  Try to keep looking at him but it’s impossible, my eyes suddenly burning and dry as though held open to a driving wind.

  “You’d better get back to your work,” Flynn says finally, pulling his arm back. I try to think of something else to say, just a couple of perfect words that must be out there somewhere, but they don’t come for me.

  Then I’m sliding around behind Flynn’s back and stepping out onto the sidewalk outside. The drumroll of thunder again, sounding closer.

  A numbness over the skin beneath my clothes, an itch from the inside out. For although I know I ditched the long underwear I’d found back in the cardboard box they came from, there’s still the kind of shameful thrill that comes with all minor, unnoticed thefts.

  “Been a while, Mr. Crane,” the leprechaun guard behind the desk says to me as soon as I walk in the door. “A good while, indeed.”

  “Nice of you to say. I’ve missed you too, Mr…?”

  “Flaherty.”

  “A pleasure to see you again, Flaherty.”

  “Wish I could say the same.”<
br />
  “I assume I’ll be put in the same place as usual. You know, the room with the one-way window that allows bored public servants to enjoy the entertainment of confidential conversations? I’ll expect Mr. Tripp to be brought to me there shortly.”

  At this Flaherty rolls his eyes but says nothing. Instead he leads me down the hall and opens the door to Interview Room No. 1 before clipping away to bring me my man.

  In the few minutes I’m left on my own I wonder what condition my client will be in this time around. Because I want something from him today: a reasonably conscious, semi-coherent client capable of giving me a straight answer. But judging from the look on Tripp’s face as he’s brought in, it may be too much to ask. Takes his seat across the table from me without being told, but there’s nothing in his eyes that connects with mine. Not even the desperation I’ve come to count on from people in his position at this late stage of the game.

  “Good morning, Thom. How’re you holding up in there, old boy?” I start, not expecting an answer, though he surprises me by offering one.

  “Not so good.”

  “No?”

  “They don’t keep them out.”

  “Who? Keep what out?”

  “The walls,” he says. “Not even the walls in here keep the voices out.”

  He shakes his head as though he hadn’t really expected they would. For a time we sit staring blankly at each other, then each of us takes a turn glancing at the bare wall as though taking in the view through a window there.

  “Well, I should tell you I’ve got some good news and some bad news,” I force myself on. Tripp’s face suggests no preference to hear one or the other first, so I choose for him.

  “The good news is that I visited the Murdoch District Medical Clinic and spoke to a Dr. MacDougall who recalled your bringing Krystal in the day she scraped her knee. The bad news is that the registering nurse identified you as her father on the admitting information form.”

  “Why would she do that?”

  “Because you told her that’s who you were. Everyone in town knows that you’re not Lloyd McConnell, and you’re telling someone who’s creating an official hospital document that you are. Why would you do something like that?”

  “You know, they were really very imaginative girls.”

  “Are you saying that Krystal wanted you to pretend you were her father?”

  “Make believe. A good story should make you believe.”

  “Like lies.”

  “What’s a lie if you believe it, Mr. Crane?”

  “Let me try a theory out on you,” I start again. “You told that nurse at the clinic you were Krystal’s father because that’s how you wanted Krystal to think of you. How you wanted both of them to think of you. Am I right?”

  Tripp grimaces for a second as though suffering some kind of intestinal discomfort. Then he collects himself and looks at me hard. Hard enough that I feel like maybe he can actually see me.

  “You can be anyone you like, if you allow yourself,” he says. “But I’ve found that it’s probably easier if you start out as nobody. What’s to stop you from being anything if you’re nothing to start with?”

  “I don’t know, Thom. How about the fact that you aren’t nobody? That your driver’s license has your name and picture on it, that you used to teach English at Georgian Lakes High School and that everyone in this town knows you’re Thomas Tripp? How about the fact that you aren’t Lloyd McConnell, that Krystal’s not your daughter? That you already have a daughter of your own?”

  “I don’t have anything.”

  He throws both of his arms above his head, knuckles cracking, and brings them down again as though in preparation for a piano recital. All this in the time it takes for the echo of his voice to be absorbed into the walls.

  “But I’m really glad you’re keeping score,” he says evenly. “Because that’s exactly what I expect of my lawyer. Certainty.”

  “Sorry to let you down, but I have to tell you that your lawyer’s not certain about a damn thing right now.”

  “You know who you are, don’t you?”

  “Less than I did before.”

  Tripp cocks his head.

  “Yes,” he says finally. “I believe we do have similar interests.”

  “Like The Lady?”

  “She’s not an interest.”

  “You signed out Alistair Dundurn’s history book from the library. And then you went to Bishop’s Hospital and tried to look at her medical records. Doesn’t that show an interest?”

  “They were always asking for more details.”

  “Ashley and Krystal?”

  “They couldn’t possibly walk into a mental hospital asking for a dead woman’s file, could they? A couple of teenagers?”

  “And you were only too happy to oblige, weren’t you, Dad?”

  He says nothing to this, appears not even to have heard it. Crosses his legs, turns to face the far wall as though lending his attention to another conversation going on there entirely distinct from our own.

  “Thom!”

  I don’t shout it, but the anger turns my voice into a cracked whip. He turns his head back to where I sit but keeps his legs facing away so that he looks like a leisured man in a café twisted around to hear the daily specials recited by the waiter.

  “I’m going to try this one more time. Did you or did you not take Krystal and Ashley to the lake on that Thursday?”

  “A teacher must always accompany his students on field trips. That’s policy.”

  “But did you make them go with you?”

  “It was their idea.”

  “And they were wearing their costumes? The ones you got through the school’s budget for the Literary Club?”

  “I told you. They insisted on details.”

  “Why, Thom? Why did you take them up there?”

  He sighs, but not despairingly. It’s not the sound of a man bringing his mind to an awful memory but the everyday sound of mild impatience. The tedium that comes from answering literal questions in literal terms.

  “They wanted to see The Lady for themselves. To make sure she was real.” He wipes at a narrow band of perspiration shining below his hairline. “And you know something else? I think she wanted to see them too.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Tripp frames me in a condescending stare for a moment, then claps his hands together and treats himself to a burst of resounding laughter.

  “Because she told me, of course!”

  The things that amuse my client. And in the noise of his amusement I feel only the straining competition of two distinct desires. I want to kill him. I want to laugh along with him.

  When he finishes both of us sit looking at each other for a time with what might be mistaken for grudging fondness. Then I set my elbows on the table and fill the space between us with an almost intimate whisper.

  “Thom, did you kill Krystal McConnell and Ashley Flynn?”

  He doesn’t breathe. It’s as though his usual vast inhalations of oxygen have been stored up for occasions like this. And when he speaks the laughter of a moment before has evaporated entirely.

  “You said you didn’t need to know that.”

  “I need to know it now.”

  “That’s funny. I thought part of what I’m paying you for is to remain single-minded. That caring would cost me more. Have your fees just gone up, Mr. Crane?”

  “Just tell me the truth.”

  “‘In my experience, such things rarely make a difference.’ My lawyer told me that.”

  “I know you remember what happened, although you probably don’t want to. You’d do anything rather than remember. All the voices in your head—they’re meant to cover it up, but sometimes they still leave holes for all of it to come through, don’t they? So I’m asking you. What did you do to those girls?”

  Now Tripp makes a clicking sound in his sinuses and draws in an impossibly long, whistling breath. When he’s full his face turns a newborn pin
k before letting it go, curling over the table. A warm wind carrying the smell of boiled meat.

  “They lived for stories.”

  “Thom, listen, you’ve already—”

  “So one day I told them the story of The Man Who Lost Everything.”

  “Are you the hero of that one?”

  “I’m the villain! The bad husband and father. There’s nobody worse.”

  “So you told them the story of losing your daughter then showed them what a good swimmer you are? Is that it?”

  “Losing and taking are two different things.”

  “So Melissa was taken from you. What are Ashley and Krystal then?”

  “Maybe you should ask them.”

  “I can’t do that. They’re dead.”

  “But you can still hear them, can’t you?”

  “We’re the only ones here, Thom.”

  “You can be here and not here at the same time.” He points a finger at me across the table, pressing rhythmically at the air until I can feel its flaring stabs in my chest. “Take enough steps away from the living, Mr. Crane, and you’d be surprised what company you keep.”

  “None of this answers my question, Thom. In fact, you haven’t answered any of my goddamn questions since I came here. Why? Why can’t you tell me this one thing without giving me all this bullshit?”

  “What if I told you that I don’t know?”

  “I’d say you’re lying.”

  “Well then, there you have it. You’ve asked your question and you’ve got your answer. Feel better? Has your burden been lifted?”

  “I think you’re the one who should be worried about burdens.”

  “Oh I’m past that, Mr. Crane. Look at me. I’m a prisoner.”

  “Well, you could be in here a lot longer if you don’t help me.”

  “Freedom doesn’t mean anything to me anymore, Mr. Crane. So what difference could the truth possibly make?”

  “It makes a difference.” I glance over Tripp’s shoulder to the one-way observation window and catch the shadowed moon of my own face. “It makes a difference to me.”

  Then Tripp does something terrible. Pulls back his lips high enough to crack the skin and bare a line of red, sore-looking gums. My client smiles at me.