“Where do they come from?” I asked.
“From Asia, years ago. Some bee nut probably brought them over, in a suitcase. They already wiped out most of the feral bees. And medicines won’t kill them.”
“Mites and pesticides have been around for years.” Mãe’s eyes were focused on a spot far away. “Healthy hives like ours have been pretty much resistant. I suppose moving them during the hurricane might have made the bees vulnerable.”
“We have to destroy the hives.” Dashay looked at Mãe.
“I’ll do it tomorrow.” She sounded numb.
“I’ll help.” Dashay took a deep breath. “And now you want the bad news? The deputies were here today. They went through the house and all around the property.”
Mãe unclasped her hands and dropped her arms. “Did they have a warrant?”
“No. They asked me if they could look around, and I said we have nothing to hide. They swooped through here and then they left. They didn’t take a thing. I watched to make sure.”
I dipped a shrimp into a bowl of red sauce and ate it. “Dashay, did you really think they’d steal our stuff?”
She and my mother looked at me with disbelief, then sympathy. “Not steal,” Mãe said. “She meant take away evidence.”
It took me a few seconds to come to terms with the idea: the sheriff ’s deputies thought I might be involved in Mysty’s disappearance. Meantime, Grace jumped onto the sofa between my mother and me. I petted her.
“That other girl, the one who came into Flo’s with her that night?” Dashay waved her hands, as if to conjure a name.
“Do you mean Autumn?”
“Autumn, yeah. She was here. She came last night, rang the buzzer on the gate. She wanted to talk to you.”
“She has my phone number.” Grace licked my arm and began to purr. Did she love me, or was she after the shrimp?
“Yeah, well. She said she needs to talk to you, and she said she’ll be back.”
But Autumn didn’t return that night. We went to bed early, mindful that the next morning I would be talking to the police.
The Citrus County Sheriff ’s Office was a brick building in downtown Inverness, and the interview took place in a pale green room with a large table, plastic chairs, and a huge United States flag mounted on a wall. Mãe was asked to be present. The detective, whose name was Pat Morley, was a balding man of medium height wearing dark trousers and a white shirt with short sleeves. He had a face and voice so ordinary that you’d never remember them. His gray eyes looked as if they’d been bleached. He sat opposite us, and he asked me questions in a low voice, taking notes on a pad.
He asked me the same questions he’d asked on the phone: how I’d met Mysty, how long we’d been friends, how much time we’d spent together, where I’d been the night she disappeared; he looked at Mãe from time to time, inviting her to confirm what I’d said, and she always said, “That’s correct.”
He asked about our trip to the mall, and I told him about my lunch with Mysty. “I had a sense that someone was watching us,” I said.
“What kind of sense? Did you see someone?”
“I felt it. I didn’t see anyone.”
He didn’t bother to write it down.
He asked about Jesse in more detail: Did he and Mysty have a relationship? How close were they? And he knew about Jesse’s visit to our place the week before she disappeared. What had we talked about?
Then it became awkward. Up to that point, I’d answered every question honestly, without cheating—in other words, without listening to his thoughts. But now I needed to know what was in his mind, so I tuned in. And what I heard shocked me, so much so that my face must have shown it, because Mãe sent me a thought, Be careful.
Detective Morley didn’t really care what I said! He was going through the motions, asking questions, but his notes were mostly scribbles that would never be transcribed. He’d made up his mind: Jesse had killed Mysty. It was only a matter of time, he was sure, before her body was found.
“We talked about drinking and driving,” I said, my voice clear and emphatic. “I told him he needed to stop drinking.”
Morley said, “Yes, he told us that. He has a very high opinion of you.”
But he was thinking, Dumb kid. Lost control one night and ruined his life, and for what? A little tramp like that?
I began to say, “Mysty is not a tramp,” but I stopped myself. “Mysty isn’t a bad girl,” I said. “She’s bored with her life, maybe. And Jesse isn’t a bad guy.”
He thanked us for our time.
Mãe said, “Wait. What are you doing to find her?”
“The family put together a search team,” he said.
Something was bothering me, something I couldn’t quite remember. I went over all of his questions again in my mind, and then it came to me: the man in the van.
I told Detective Morley about seeing the van the day I’d met Mysty and Autumn, and again on the night they’d walked out of Flo’s. He opened his eyes a little wider, and he took some notes—real ones, this time. “What kind of van was it?”
I tried to visualize it, to see it as it moved out of the parking lot. “It was beige. There was a name in silver on the back door,” I said slowly. “Chevrolet.”
“Did you notice its license plate?”
“No,” I said, “but the driver—” I’d been going to say, “had no eyes,” but I got a strong warning from my mother not to say it. “He was leering at the girls, the first time I saw him,” I said.
The detective wasn’t interested in that.
“He was heavyset,” I said. “He was bald.”
We left the station and got into Mãe’s truck—her own, not the rental van, which Dashay was beginning to unload back at the house. She waited until we were out of the parking lot before she said, “Why didn’t you tell me about seeing the blind man?”
“I tried,” I said. “Twice. Both times, other things intervened.”
We drove back to Homosassa Springs without talking.
As she pulled into the lot in front of Flo’s Place, I said, “I’ve seen him before. In Sarasota.”
She said, “Okay.”
“Have you seen him, too?”
“No, but I’ve heard about him.” She switched off the engine and turned toward me. “Didn’t your father ever tell you about harbingers?”
Harbingers, she explained over an early lunch at Flo’s, are signs of things to come.
“Not everyone sees them,” she said. “I don’t. But your father has seen the blind man twice, and it sounds as if you’ve inherited him.”
“The blind man in Glastonbury.” I remembered my father talking about seeing the man in England, not long before my father was made a vampire. I’d seen the man in Sarasota; the next day, the hurricane hit and our condominium caught fire. Of course, he couldn’t be blind. He drove a van.
“But who is he?” The mere thought of the blind man made me uneasy.
“Your father thinks harbingers are Jungian shadows.” She took a bite of her grouper sandwich.
I’d read only a smattering of Jung and Freud. My father had treated their essays as fiction, by and large. “Do you mean they’re not real?”
“They’re very real to those who see them.” She took another bite and chewed it slowly. “Jung thought shadows were visions of our own unconscious selves, which we repress.”
“But I saw the man in the van.” I knew he was more than a shadow. “So did Autumn and Mysty.”
My mother believed me. “Yes, you saw a man in a van. But was he really blind? You saw what you most fear: someone full of malice, someone with an absence of vision. He’s your shadow man.”
I asked, “Do harbingers always mean bad news?” Flo’s was unusually noisy that day, and I had to raise my voice to be heard.
“For your father, yes. But not for everyone. Dashay’s harbinger is a black bird, a grackle, that swoops at her. It happens when change is coming, for better or worse.”
> The concept of a harbinger didn’t make much sense to me.
Logan, the bartender, came over to our table—a rare occurrence, since he liked to stay behind the bar. “Heard you were visiting the sheriff this morning,” he said to Mãe.
One aspect of living in Citrus County that I never liked: everyone knew everyone else’s business. Someone had spotted Mãe’s truck and lost no time spreading the word.
Mãe said, “Yes, and why were we there?”
He grinned and pointed at the TV set over the bar. The Tampa station was broadcasting a photo of Mysty, then shots of two distraught-looking people; the caption read PARENTS OF MISSING GIRL.
“Only one circus in town this week.” Logan looked at me. “So you knew this Mysty?”
“I knew her,” I said. “But not well.”
“She and her friend looked like trouble waiting to happen. Still, it’s shameful when a girl disappears.” Logan turned to my mother again. “Remember the last one?”
She nodded, her eyes on me. “There was another one?” I asked.
“Over the years there have been a few,” Logan said. “The worst one was the last one, two years ago. They found the little girl buried in her neighbor’s yard—”
“You have customers.” Mãe tilted her head toward the bar. She didn’t want me to hear the details. She didn’t want me to be further upset.
But in the days to come I heard all sorts of details, things that I’d never imagined. While I was growing up in Saratoga Springs, sheltered from TV and newspapers, learning about philosophy and mathematics, people were disappearing all over America—all over the world, really. Every year, tens of thousands of people vanish—most of them adult males. But the media attention tends to go to pretty girls and children—about three hundred children are abducted every year and never return. More than a million teenagers run away from their families every year. Most return home within a week, but roughly seven percent—seventy thousand teenagers—are never heard of again.
It was hard for me to believe such things happened at all, let alone with such frequency. I felt as if the world I lived in was only a façade—that beneath its skin, a darker world raged and rampaged. I’d glimpsed that world before, but I’d never known how vast and malignant it might be.
Afterward, whenever we drove in Mãe’s truck, I noticed teenagers wearing music earbuds or talking on cell phones, paying no attention to either world—to the posters of Mysty, or to strangers who might be watching them. I wondered who would disappear next.
When we returned home, Mãe and Dashay burned the trays of the beehives. I didn’t help. I didn’t want to see them burn. The acrid air came into the house and lingered for days.
For dinner that night I made a salad, but none of us ate much. Mãe excused herself and went off to have a bath. Dashay and I played Crazy Eights, but we both were thinking of other things and played poorly. The game dragged on.
When the front gate buzzed, Dashay said, “It’s that girl again.” And a second later, Autumn’s voice came through the intercom.
When I went down to the gate, she was waiting for me. She wore sunglasses, tight black jeans, and a tank top with one word printed on it: NOT.
“I need to talk to you,” she said.
“Why didn’t you call me?” I unlocked the gate and beckoned her inside.
“Cell phones can be traced. Or bugged.” She wheeled her bicycle up the driveway.
We sat in the moon garden. Even though the sky was growing dark, Autumn kept on her sunglasses. The air stayed hot and humid. It didn’t bother me, but Autumn wiped her forehead with her hand from time to time. “I hate Florida,” she said.
“Weren’t you born here?”
“Yes,” she said, “and I’m counting the minutes until I leave. So, what did you do to Mysty?”
I hadn’t expected that question. When I tried to hear what she was thinking, all I heard was a static-like buzz. Who are you? I thought.
I heard, in response, a soft, high-pitched whining sound. It came from Autumn—not from her mouth, but from somewhere inside her.
Then Dashay was there, her back to me, bending toward Autumn.
“Somebody call me?” she said softly. She took off Autumn’s sunglasses, and Autumn didn’t move.
I craned my neck and had a brief glimpse of Autumn’s eyes—wide open, with light moving across her left iris.
Dashay moved to block my view.
“Yes, my pretty pretty,” she said. “You’re the one calling me. I hear you now. I can’t hear you! I hear you loud and clear. You’re not there! I don’t hear anything.”
She went on, crooning nonsense (“I see you, I can’t see a thing. I can feel you, you’re no place at all”). I wondered if Dashay was mad—if Bennett’s disappearance had disconnected her sanity. Discomfort, hot and prickling, climbed up my spine.
But I didn’t leave. I closed my eyes, and my eyelids turned colors, twists of violet. After a minute or so, I heard the whining sound again, and then a sudden popping noise.
I opened my eyes. Dashay turned away from Autumn, her face triumphant.
“Want to see?” she said to me, She held out her right hand, clenched tight.
Part of me did, but I shook my head. “It’s Autumn’s demon, isn’t it.”
“She had a sasa in her, yes. I heard it. Sometimes they sing at night. Sure you don’t want to see? ’Cause I need to drown it quick.”
I took a quick glance. Something small, dark, and slimy looking quivered in her palm. Then she closed her hand and walked off toward the river.
Autumn hadn’t moved while we’d talked. She sat, her eyes open, breathing normally, her palms flat against her knees. She blinked and stirred. “So what do you think happened to Mysty?” Her voice was matter-of-fact, as if nothing had happened.
I told her I didn’t know. She nodded, but she was thinking, She knows more than she’s saying. I could hear her thoughts, now that the sasa was gone.
I wondered what she’d done to acquire a sasa.
“Jesse took a lie detector test yesterday.” She said it so casually. “Today they told him he failed and he has to take two more.”
“Poor Jesse.” I hoped that being hypnotized hadn’t affected his performance.
“My brother is no liar,” she said. “He says she stood him up that night.” But she was wondering, Did he kill her?
“I don’t think he did it,” I said. “He doesn’t have that kind of temper. Besides, why do you think she’s dead?”
“It’s been four days.” Autumn hunched her narrow shoulders. “They’re usually dead by now.”
“You don’t seem very upset,” I said.
“Well, it’s not like she meant that much to me.” Autumn stood up to leave. “It’s not like I even knew her very well.”
But she was lying. Mysty was the only friend she’d ever had.
I walked her down to the gate. “Aren’t you scared to be out alone at night?”
She draped one leg over her bike and mounted it. “I’d like to see somebody try to come after me,” she said.
Chapter Seven
Once upon a time, my mother thought that place names with the letter S in them were lucky. That’s the entire reason she’d chosen to live in Saratoga Springs, and later, S attracted her to Homosassa Springs.
Conversely, she decided that places that began with the letter D were unlucky. She thought they attracted negative energy. For her, that explained why so many murders and other crimes occurred in places like Deltona and DeLand, Florida.
But Mãe outgrew those superstitions. Luck, she decided, was more about a person’s attitude than about anything else. Good and bad things happened randomly, everywhere.
Attitudes aside, when bad things happen it’s natural to try to find reasons, to look for patterns. “Bad things happen in threes” was a saying I heard often in Homosassa Springs, after Mysty disappeared. It’s always quoted after two bad things have happened, and people go out of their way to find n
umber three. If I’m sure of anything, it’s this: number three will find you.
I never did learn who started the rumor that I killed Mysty. Before Autumn lost her demon, she might have done it; after her encounter with Dashay, she lacked sufficient malice. Most likely it was one or more of Jesse’s friends, trying to shift attention away from him.
Dashay was the one to tell me. The lunch crowd at Flo’s Place thought that Mysty was dead (“like that other poor girl two years ago”) and that I was somehow responsible, since I was apparently the last person who’d talked to her.
I’d been deep in conversation with Mary Ellis Root when Dashay burst in, wearing a striped shirt, white jeans, and red sneakers—it had been her summer uniform that year. She looked particularly jaunty next to Root, who wore a lumpy dress and oversized men’s sunglasses. I didn’t appreciate being told in front of Root that the town thought me a killer, but Root enjoyed the spectacle; I could tell from the way she clasped her hands. I’d never been able to hear her thoughts; I decided that she must block them all, all the time. She must be a vampire, I thought. Yet I hated to think she was one of us.
Root had come by to collect my father’s latest mail, and I’d asked her about Vallanium. I’d shown her one of the little red capsules that Michael had given me.
Yes, Root said, she’d heard of it. She’d heard the drug was popular in Tampa, near where she was staying. Apparently it was sold in the high schools.
“What’s in it?” I asked her.
“Who knows?” She rubbed her hands, looking uneasy at not having an answer.
“Could you analyze this for me?”
Then Dashay sauntered in with her rumor story.
One thing about vampires: we generally disregard rumors. When you don’t have a presence in society, it doesn’t matter much what people say about you, unless things go to extremes. Then you simply disappear and move on.
But for some reason this one did matter to me. “It’s not fair,” I said. “I had nothing to do with Mysty that night. And why does everyone assume that she’s dead?”
From their faces alone, I saw that Dashay and Root assumed the same thing.
The Year of Disappearances Page 8
