(2001) The Girls Are Missing

by Caroline Crane

  “That’s what all parents say.” Even to her own ears, it sounded like feeble reassurance. “Where did you hear this?”

  “On my favorite news station. Like I say, Joyce, you ought to keep in touch. This isn’t happening in Pakistan, it’s right where you are.”

  She did not like being lectured, even if Barbara was older and wiser.

  “Probably a case of media hype. If I hear anything, I’ll let you know.”

  Gail came into the kitchen and sat down at the table.

  “I believe you conjectured the other two were a case of Greenwich Village,” Barbara reminded her.

  “Well …” She did not want to talk about it, now that Gail was here. “Everybody in this house is—” She fumbled for a metaphor that Barbara had not used, “on a very tight rein.”

  Silently Gail measured her half-bowl of cold cereal. Joyce nodded toward the grapefruit that sat by her place. Instead of eating, Gail watched her.

  Barbara’s voice came clearly over the wire. “I’d almost be inclined to bring her home, except I have a vacation coming up and I do want to get away. It’s the only thing that keeps me sane for the rest of the year. I always sent

  her to camp before, but she refused to go this year. Hates the regimentation. So hang onto her, will you? Remind her about strange men. Is she up yet?”

  “No, still sleeping. Want me to get her?”

  “God, no. She’s vile when she first wakes up. Okay, Joyce. My life is in your hands.”

  On impulse, before she could hang up, Joyce put in, “Carl’s taking his own vacation in a couple of weeks, so maybe it’ll be livelier here.” “Oh?”

  “You know, more things to do. More people around. But we’re sort of tied down with the baby.”

  “Yeah,” Barbara breathed. Then, with a brisk “Okay,” ended the conversation.

  Gail’s cereal was growing soggy as she listened. “Was that Barbara? What did she say? Did somebody else get killed?”

  “No, darling. Eat your breakfast.”

  “Well, what?”

  She would hear it anyway, as Chief D’Amico had pointed out.

  “Another girl is missing. But she’s a grown-up girl, a woman, really. I’m sure nothing happened.”

  Gail’s eyes grew huge. “How do you know nothing happened?”

  “Because it’s just… too much.”

  Which was no reason at all, and Gail knew it. Joyce left her dawdling over her cereal and went back down to the laundry. The spin was just about to finish. As she waited for it, a phrase of Barbara’s came back to her. My life is in your hands.

  My life? Did she mean that about Mary Ellen? Of course Mary Ellen was all she had. Any mother would feel that way. Joyce had not thought of Barbara as “any” mother, but perhaps she was.

  The washer ceased its wild dance and she transferred the clothes to the dryer. In this weather nobody ever wore the same thing twice, and there were mountains of laundry. At least the basement was pleasantly cool, but those stairs, after a few dozen trips, could wear a person out.

  When she went back up to the kitchen, Gail was still sitting at the table, staring at her half-eaten grapefruit.

  “What’s the matter, don’t you want that?” Joyce asked. “I thought you liked grapefruit.”

  “I don’t feel like eating right now. Mommy, I can’t stop thinking about Valerie Cruz.”

  “Are you sick?”

  Gail shook her head. Something had happened to her. This suddenly uneaten grapefruit was only a symptom. Damn Barbara for calling. But Barbara had a daughter, too. You couldn’t blame her.

  She thought of the mothers of the girls who had been murdered. She could understand the parents of even the missing twenty-one-year-old.

  Oh, just damn it.

  Why do people have to be crazy? Why couldn’t they catch a nut like that through some screening process back in grade school, and lock him up?

  “Mommy, are you mad?”

  Mad at Gail for not eating a grapefruit?

  She put her arm around Gail’s shoulder and drew her close. “I’m just so sorry this summer is ruined for you, honey. For all of us.”

  They both jumped at the sound of the doorbell. It was Anita.

  “Hi, can I come in?”

  “Of course, Anita.” Would the child never leave them alone? “You didn’t walk again, did you? I don’t think it’s a good idea.”

  “Don’t worry, I don’t talk to anybody. Did you know there’s another girl missing?”

  “That’s exactly why I think you shouldn’t go around by yourself. Really, Anita.”

  The girl tossed her long hair. “My mother doesn’t care.”

  “I’ll bet she does. She’s really quite worried about those murders.”

  Mary Ellen came sleepily down the stairs, wearing a short, spaghetti-strapped nightgown.

  “Joyce, Adam’s awake, and he’s fussing. Shall I take care of him? Is it time for his bath?”

  “You eat your breakfast, dear. I’ll call you when it’s bath time.” Joyce went upstairs and found that Adam had made a mess of himself. She was glad Mary Ellen had not seen it. In flushing the disposable diaper, she managed to clog the toilet. It stopped just short of overflowing.

  This is not my day, she said to herself. They had a plunger somewhere. In the basement, probably, of all dumb places. Any instrument specifically designed for declogging toilets ought to be kept near the toilet. She missed apartment living, all on one level.

  As she approached the kitchen, she heard Anita’s voice, low and urgent.

  “Come on. If I don’t get them back, somebody’s going to steal them, and then Denise’ll kill me. Come on, Mary Ellen. Gail’s a scaredy chicken, but you’re not.”

  Joyce barely glanced at them as she passed by. It was something clandestine. She did not trust Anita, who could do as she liked, but please leave Gail and Mary Ellen out of it.

  At the foot of the stairs she turned on a light. The far end of the basement depressed her. There was the oil burner with its many arms, like a giant octopus; the long unused coal bin which Carl had covered to keep away dirt and drafts, and two old upholstered chairs they wanted to get rid of, but the sanitation people would not pick up furniture.

  On the work table, which Carl seldom used, lay a small stack of newspapers. Good for him, he must have been collecting them for recycling. Perhaps she ought to save bottles and aluminum cans as well.

  She found the plunger and went back upstairs. They were grouped around the kitchen table like three statues, waiting for her to get out of earshot.

  She stopped and confronted them. A ridiculous confrontation, with the plunger in her hand.

  “Now listen. Nobody’d better do anything funny, understand? This is serious. If you have to disobey your parents, choose some way where you won’t get hurt. Just remember, once you’re dead, you’re dead forever.”

  She stood for a moment, watching them. They stared back at her. Perhaps she had guessed wrong. But they weren’t laughing, so maybe she hadn’t. With an almost imperceptible nod, like an exclamation point, she left them and continued upstairs. At least they would know she was keeping an eye on them.

  Mary Ellen came flitting up after her, to help with Adam’s bath. Neither mentioned the scene in the kitchen. Joyce did not want to destroy the false impression that she had known what they were talking about.

  In the middle of the bath, the telephone rang.

  “Déjà vu!” exclaimed Mary Ellen. “I hope it’s not my mother again.”

  “Your mother already called this morning.”

  It was Sheila. “Oh, God, Joyce, is Anita over there? Please say she is. No, I mean tell the truth if she isn’t.”

  “She really is,” said Joyce. “And she walked around by the road, if that’s any consolation.”

  “Oh, thank God. Just keep her there, will you? I don’t even want her going on the road by herself. She might accept a ride from somebody, and my God, we don’t know who it is. It coul
d be somebody from around here. Someone she’d know.”

  “You don’t think it’s Mr. Lattimer?” Joyce asked.

  “Well, we don’t know, do we? I still can’t understand why they don’t bring him in, but we don’t know.”

  “Sheila, I’m in the middle of giving Adam his bath.”

  “Oh, my God, you’re not going to let him drown!”

  “No, Mary Ellen’s there. I’ll keep—”

  “Do you know there’s another girl gone? That’s the third already. Do you wonder I’m jumpy? My cousin Herb, on the police force, he says people have actually been threatening them.”

  “Threatening the police?”

  “Because they haven’t found the guy. Well, I told him I don’t wonder. Here I am with three daughters—”

  “What good does it do to threaten the police?”

  “Oh, you know. I didn’t say it made sense, I just said—Joyce, how can you be so calm? You’re right in the middle of it.”

  “I am?”

  “You’re so close to the woods. Actually I guess we are, too, except there’re some houses between us and it. All you have is that meadow.”

  “Sheila, I’ve got to get back to Adam. I’ll keep an eye on Anita. She’s still around, I can hear her voice.”

  She returned to the bathroom to find that Mary Ellen had finished rinsing Adam, had wrapped him in a towel, and was sitting on the edge of the bathtub, crooning to him.

  Joyce cleaned and put away the bathinette. She felt strangely hollow. Or perhaps as though she were split in two, one of her with the surface calm that Sheila had noted, and the other with a strange, not quite physical pounding deep inside. As if something were knocking to come in. Something unspeakable, which she could not admit. She remembered that her grandmother had sometimes had premonitions.

  Instantly she closed her mind to it. As though, by denying, she could keep it from happening.

  14

  The next morning she left her children at Sheila’s house, an arrangement to which Mary Ellen consented only because Denise and fourteen-year-old June were there, and went to see her doctor. The six weeks were over, the significance of which had eluded Carl. Adam was six weeks old and his mother’s body, after childbirth, had returned to normal. Everything should have been all right with the world.

  It is all right, she tried to convince herself as she drove back through the village an hour later. The doctor had said everything was fine.

  It was—except that in front of the police station, cars were parked that had press cards on their dashboards.

  She slowed instinctively as an ambulance sped toward her, gliding like a ghost with no lights or siren. Her heartbeat quickened. It had come from the hill where she, and the Farands, lived.

  The children! But there had been no lights, no siren. It was not an emergency.

  The hill. The woods. No, not the third girl.

  In the car that followed it, she saw Chief D’Amico.

  So it was. The third girl.

  Still, she pressed the accelerator to reach Sheila’s house

  as quickly as possible, just in case. But everything there was calm.

  She did not mention the ambulance. She was sick of the whole thing, of Anita’s excitement, Sheila’s voluble alarm, Gail’s pale silence. They would find out anyway. It would be in the papers, on the radio and television. The press was all over Cedarville.

  She soon discovered to what extent it was all over Cedarville.

  Anita greeted her by jumping up and down. “Guess what! A man came from the newspaper and he asked me about when I found the body. I’m going to be in the newspaper!”

  Mary Ellen said, “But Gail found the body, too, and you didn’t even tell him that.”

  “She did not. I found it, and then I told her.”

  “That’s true,” Joyce said, relieved that they had not pestered Gail with questions.

  Anita followed them out to the car. “Can Gail and Mary Ellen sleep over?”

  From Gail came an indrawn breath and a quick, secret shake of the head.

  Joyce glanced at Mary Ellen, who was staring into space. “I’m afraid not, honey. I need them at home to help me.”

  Sheila pulled Anita away from the car. “I know how you feel,” she told Joyce in a hushed tone that promised more discussion of the murders.

  With a smile, Joyce cut her short. “I do need their help. Mary Ellen’s just marvelous with the baby, and Gail likes to cook sometimes. I could put my feet up and relax, except I’d feel guilty.” Quickly she got into the car and closed the door. She would pretend nothing was happening. For Gail’s sake, and her own. She waved good-bye to Sheila, who had both hands clamped on a struggling Anita, and drove away.

  She could not escape it for long. In the quiet afternoon, just after the grandfather clock had chimed two, a tan car with an elaborate radio antenna came up the driveway. She thought it might be the police again, but the young man who knocked at her kitchen door was someone she did not know.

  He flashed a card at her. She could not see what it said.

  “Ma’am, I understand your daughter was one of the kids who found the first body. Is she here? Could I talk to her for a minute?”

  It ended in a plea. Joyce’s face had frozen.

  “Who are you?” she demanded.

  “From the News Item” He took out his card again and held it while she read every word.

  “I’m afraid not.” She hoped Gail was in the house and not outside where he might find her. “She’s been very upset by this whole thing, and she wouldn’t want to talk about it.”

  “You’re speaking for her, ma’am. Could I have her opinion on that?”

  “You could not. I’m her mother and I know how she feels. You won’t get anything from her anyway. She didn’t see a thing. Now please go.”

  “Just for a minute. Just a—”

  “No! I said no! I don’t give a damn about the public’s right to information, or about your career. I care about my child, and if I have to get violent, I will.”

  She stood glaring at him. He was young and thin with an air of sincerity, but also the brashness of someone determined to get a news story. He bowed his head in mock capitulation, then stood away from the house and looked up at the second-story windows. Apparently seeing nothing, he returned to his car.

  “I’ll be back,” he promised as he drove away.

  He had gone only a short distance down the driveway when he had to stop for another car coming in.

  This time it was the police. The reporter had to back up to let them enter the parking area, and then once again he drove off.

  She felt an odd anticipation as Chief D’Amico got out of the car. This was something familiar, something reassuringly secure.

  He had a partner with him, a young man with very curly blond hair that made her think of soap bubbles. D’Amico introduced him as Art Finneran.

  “I’m glad you came,” she told them. “Do I have any legal protection against reporters? That man who just left was hell-bent on bothering my daughter, and I don’t think she can take much more of this.”

  “There’s nothing that says you have to talk to them,” D’Amico replied.

  “I didn’t. You found that girl, didn’t you? The one who was missing the other day? I saw an ambulance.”

  “We found her.” He sounded grim and yet resigned. “We’re going around the neighborhood, asking if anybody noticed anything unusual that night. It doesn’t have to seem related. Just anything different from the ordinary.”

  “Which night?” She could not remember when the girl had disappeared.

  “Monday. She never came home from work that night—she worked in the city—but obviously she got back to Cedarville.”

  “Monday. That was the night my stepdaughter was out. Found a boyfriend and went out on his motorcycle without telling me. I was so worried I wouldn’t have noticed an earthquake.” She went on to describe the evening. It had been unusual, but only for the Gilw
ood family.

  “Why don’t you come inside?” she suggested. “It’s cooler in the house. I usually close the blinds on days like this.”

  They followed her in and sat at the kitchen table, where the girls could not hear them. She offered them iced tea, which they declined.

  D’Amico set his cap upside down on the table and twirled it slowly as he talked. “Mrs. Gilwood, how well do you know the neighbors?”

  Her head jerked upright at his question. “Not very well. You get to know people who have children the same age as your children. They aren’t the closest neighbors, but you know, the Farands—”

  “Yes, I know them.”

  “Her cousin is one of your men.”

  “Right. So you haven’t had much to do with anybody except the Farands?”

  “And Bruce and Pam Cheskill.”

  “Nobody, for instance, on this road?”

  “No, they’re all older, or their children are older. Why do you want to know? It can’t be—”

  “In a very close-knit community,” he said, “where everyone knows everyone else, and feels responsible for them, a thing like this—if it happened at all, you’d get to the bottom of it much faster. That’s all. We have to try every possibility.”

  It sounded like an evasion. He must suspect someone, and wanted to find out more about him. Someone—on Shadow-brook Road? She could not believe it, even though she didn’t know any of them very well.

  “Every possibility,” he said again, as though he could read her mind. He asked other questions, trying to bring out what she did know about her neighbors. He asked her about her own household.

  “So you’re mostly here alone with the children. What time does your husband get home from work?”

  “Six-thirty. He takes a train that leaves Grand Central at five twenty-three.”

  “Is he ever late?”

  “When the train’s late.”

  “Ever work late? Take a later train?”

  “Of course, now and then. Everybody does things differently sometimes. What are you driving at? What is it you want to know?”

  She fought a mad urge to get up and open a window. She was suffocating, but the window would only make it hotter.

  “I want to know everything I can,” he said gently. “Then we start putting it together. And only after we’ve gotten somewhere can we sort out what’s relevant and what isn’t, so bear with us, okay?”