Missing

by Adiva Geffen

“It seems that she wasn’t. Naomi says Avital thought only about her career in the beginning, just shoots and catwalks all day long. Then suddenly, she stopped everything and turned all strange, until finally no one heard from her again.”

  “No more contact with anyone? Including her family?”

  “There are rumors about a family dispute, something about missing money, an empty lot Avital took from them. Come, I want to show you something.” He looked down at the note in his hand and started driving to the outskirts of the settlement, until we reached a construction site surrounded by a tall wooden fence.

  We got out of the car and walked toward the fence. He seemed pleased with himself, as if he were about to sell me a piece of real estate containing an oil well.

  “So, what do we have here?”

  “This is the lot taken from Sagit’s family.”

  Now I got it. “The empty lot Sagit intended to build her dream house on?”

  “Not exactly. Has anyone ever told you you’re a very impatient person? Come,” said Ginger and walked down the fence toward an imposing iron gate. When we got closer, he pointed up.

  I raised my eyes and took in a large sign bearing the words Magidal Preschool Network, Opening Soon.

  We got back in the taxi and sat together in silence. I took a deep breath and asked the question that had been bugging me all along. “Tell me, did you ask how she died?” He nodded. Deep in my heart, I already knew the answer, but I wanted to hear him say it.

  “She jumped.”

  I sank into the backseat and closed my eyes. What the hell was going on here? Who or what had pushed those beautiful girls to their deaths?

  24

  I didn’t want to spend the night by myself. Evening had fallen, and my sense of aloneness had become unbearable.

  I asked Ginger to drop me off at home. My old home, in Holon, with Pops.

  I found him reading one of the military history books he loves so much. My dad loves reading about revolutions, mainly ones that take place overseas and involve Marxists and communists. As soon as I went inside, he started to fuss over me with paternal excitement. Then he said he had something for me and handed me a cardboard box with a new cell phone, the latest i-something that could sing, tap dance, and iron my clothes at the same time.

  “Pops, it must have cost you a fortune.”

  “Well, you can’t go about doing what you’re doing without a good phone. Besides, you need a cell phone for guys to call you.”

  “And you need guys to call me to get closer to the only royal title you’re missing — Grandpa,” I answered with a smile. “You shouldn’t waste my inheritance money like that, Pops. The police will give me back my cell phone.”

  “But you haven’t been available for two days.”

  “I told you, the police have it.”

  “All right, then. Now you have a new one. They promised me it’s the Mercedes of cell phones.”

  I smiled to see how much pleasure he was getting from this. “How did your visit with the pastor go, Pops?”

  I quickly learned that just as we had suspected, Pastor Raphael admitted that Daria had indeed shown up, following Alice’s advice, at the church on Levanda Street. The good pastor had decided to help her and arranged a place for her to sleep.

  “And lied through his teeth to us,” I said.

  “He said she’d looked lost and desperate.” Dad defended his pastor friend. “Probably reminded him of himself.”

  “Poor child.”

  “She asked for a temporary place to stay, and he arranged a room for her next to his church. Now he feels guilty.”

  “For what?”

  “For possibly not protecting her enough. For letting her down. The pastor fears he might have said something that helped you find her. It’s a good thing you didn’t go there by yourself.”

  I snorted dismissively.

  A cloud of sorrow covered his face. “Look, dear, it’s important you understand that this entire mess is very harmful to his community. They’re afraid the police will start asking questions. You and Sammy have stirred up a hornet’s nest this time, and quite a few people could get hurt because of the mess you’ve left in your wake.”

  “He lied to us. Who knows what else he’s done,” I protested.

  “He only helped a child in distress, no questions asked. That’s just the sort of man he is, and I ask that you respect that.”

  I said nothing. Dad echoed my silence. Then he rose and went out to the balcony. I watched him leaning on the railing, trying to find comfort in the quiet street below. What was I going to do with him? What could I say that would appease him?

  I remembered what Tamara used to say — sometimes, a hug is better than words. When he came back to the room after long minutes of silence, I rose to meet him with a hug. He purred like a happy cat.

  “Want some tea?” he asked, which was code for Everything’s fine. Let’s move on.

  When he came back from the kitchen a few minutes later, we sipped together companionably. The tea was too sweet and too bitter, but the atmosphere in the room made up for it.

  “So how does he explain his visit to Ehud Gal’s house, the journalist?”

  “He went to see Gal because Daria had asked him to.”

  “What for?”

  “She asked him to tell Ehud where she was.”

  “Isn’t that what they invented phones for?”

  “Maybe the pastor was afraid to speak on the phone. He went there because the girl was afraid she was being followed. Who better to understand such fears than an illegal immigrant?”

  “And that was the only thing he went there to tell him, just where she was?”

  “The pastor claims he spent only a few minutes there, passing along the details Daria had asked him to. The journalist thanked him, asked him to keep Daria safe, and to tell her he was moving ahead. And then he left.”

  “Moving ahead with what?”

  Dad shrugged.

  “Is that it?”

  “He just went there and came back. Daria told him she was afraid to go herself. He thinks she felt persecuted or threatened by someone or something.”

  “Dad, she was an assistant teacher in Yokneam, not a drug lord.”

  “Let it go, sweet pea. You couldn’t have prevented her death. Just let this whole thing go. Too many people have been harmed by you poking around where you don’t belong. Let the girl rest in peace.”

  “No, I won’t,” I protested. “This is about an investigation we undertook at the request of the girl’s parents, not some sort of personal whim. It’s a job like any other, just like sewing curtains. This is what I do for a living.”

  He looked at me and smiled then said he was going to bed.

  “And Cooper?” I asked him as he left the room. I knew he was avoiding the subject.

  “Oh, Cooper. Talk to him, Dikla — you broke the man’s heart. If you’d only give him a chance to—”

  “That’s my affair,” I interrupted, sorry I’d brought him up.

  “Mine too, if you want me to ever get that missing royal title,” he said and winked at me.

  I settled for raising a skeptical eyebrow.

  “You do what you want. I’ve put some clean sheets in your room.”

  My room. My good old childhood room.

  Dad hadn’t touched it since my long-gone teenage days. The old wooden bed with the flowered sheet covering the lumpy mattress, a white chest that once housed my socks and pajamas and now served as the home of the two Greek dolls Tamara and Dad brought me back from their cruise to Rhodes. A round mirror slightly bitten by time at the edges — I used to spend hours in front of it, examining my budding breasts. The pink carpet, the wooden chair with the rounded back — Dad had bought it for me at the flea market and assured me Caesar himself had sat on it while crossin
g the Rubicon. A faded photograph of my mother, who had left us and this world too soon. I picked up the yellowing photo and was awash in a tsunami of painful emotions.

  What would Mom say if she saw me taking refuge in my childhood room at the age of thirty-one, seeking emotional shelter and looking for comfort in the past instead of living in the present like my friends, who were running orderly households, raising the grandchildren Pops craves so much.

  The childhood room suddenly felt suffocating. Too many memories. Not a cozy nest so much as an oppressive cell. I knew I wouldn’t be able to fall asleep there. I picked up the bedding Dad had left and moved to the living room couch, hoping he wouldn’t hear me. I had no strength left for any more paternal concern.

  But even there, far from the mirror of my childhood, I couldn’t find sleep. When the sheep I was counting started screaming and jumping off roofs, I decided to give up.

  I sat up and reconsidered the adventures of poor Daria in my mind. I turned everything I knew back and forth and upside down, trying to stitch together fragments of information and events. Was the information Daria gave to the journalist the source of all the trouble? How much of it did her parents know? What secrets had Evie kept from us? And if she’d known Daria was in trouble, why hadn’t she told us anything about it? Once again, I tried to conjure up Daria’s last moments in my apartment: she was sitting on the sofa scribbling something; I wished her good night; the room began to spin all around me; there were empty glasses on the table, the leftovers of my pizza, her pizza, which remained almost untouched….

  The pizza. The pizza Eve had sent us as a surprise. That bizarre delivery guy who had terrified Daria so. I needed to check out the company that employed the guy who had given us that apocalyptic sermon.

  I left Dad a nice little note explaining that I couldn’t fall asleep and had decided to leave. I went out to the street, waved down a taxi, and went home to my apartment.

  I opened the door, ignoring Chechnya’s growls and accusations and went straight to the trash can. Praise the Lord, the empty pizza box was still there: Israel’s First Organic Pizza — Ramat Poleg Commercial Center. Ramat Poleg? No wonder the pizza had arrived cold — the place was at least fifteen miles from Tel Aviv.

  I didn’t think twice before I called Sammy. It was almost midnight, but I had to tell her the exciting news. When she disagreed with a threatening sleepy growl, I grudgingly told her it could wait till morning and hung up.

  25

  “What the hell did you wake me up in the middle of the night for?” Sammy snarled as soon as I stuck my nose into the office.

  “They’re building a Magidal Preschool in Sagit Doron’s settlement.”

  “And they’ve built the Taj Mahal in India and Notre Dame in Paris. There’s nothing illegal about building things, Shoshkowitz.” “They’re building it on the empty lot that used to belong to Ehud Gal’s family, a lot they were somehow swindled out of.”

  “That’s what you woke me up for?”

  “No. I had to tell you the pizza Eve sent us was a trick. She wanted the delivery guy to give Daria some sort of message.”

  “Mon Dieu!” Sammy looked to the ceiling. “You’ve lost it completely. Too much detective fiction, Shoshkowitz — you need to switch to romance.”

  `“Sammy, it’s a long way from Ramat Poleg to Tel Aviv, a bit of a stretch for a pizza delivery, don’t you think?”

  “It’s an even bigger stretch between the evidence and your assumptions.”

  “Maybe. Anyway, I’m ordering a pizza.”

  “Why?”

  “I want to find the delivery guy.”

  “And what exactly will you do when you find him?”

  “Talk to him. I want to know if the news about the solar eclipse that terrified my Daria so much was his idea or someone else’s. Maybe he’s even part of the group Daria tried to escape.”

  “Shoshkowitz, give yourself a couple of hard slaps and wake up. Eve just wanted to treat her daughter to some pizza. Why are you making a big deal out of it?”

  “Sammy, don’t you get what happened? He wasn’t just delivering a pizza, he was delivering a message. He was a messenger of doom, a messenger of wrath, an actor in some sort of Grand Guignol theatre play. He screamed his bullshit nonsense as if had been scripted.”

  “What did he scream exactly?”

  “He promised us the end of the world was coming because someone was about to eat the sun.”

  “He’s probably right,” Sammy groused and rubbed her knee.

  I ignored her and called Israel’s First Organic Pizza. A teenage girl answered cheerfully.

  “Hi, can I order a pizza?”

  “We have a hundred shekel minimum for deliveries,” she told me with no small amount of glee.

  “I want eight family-size pizzas and four large salads.”

  “No problem, where to?”

  “Mapu Street.”

  “Where’s Mapu Street?”

  “What do you mean ‘Where’s Mapu Street?’ Tel Aviv.”

  “Sorry, we don’t deliver to Tel Aviv.”

  “Why?”

  “Look, lady” — all her good cheer had evaporated into thin air — “we’re in Ramat Poleg, almost twenty miles away.”

  “What if we pay for—”

  “Sorry.”

  She hung up on me.

  I had no more doubt that the pizza guy was a messenger of evil. The pizza was just an excuse to get into my apartment. But what had frightened Daria so much in the delivery guy’s mumbo jumbo? And who had sent him — Eve or someone else Daria had gotten in trouble with?

  “Who are you calling now?” Sammy asked dryly.

  “Eve. I want to hear from her own lips an explanation about how and why she—”

  “Are you out of your mind? The family’s in mourning!”

  “We have to clear this up.”

  “Let me talk to her.”

  “Go ahead. Don’t forget to ask her why she had a pizza delivered from Natanya to Tel Aviv, and if she was the one who wrote the delivery guy’s speech. Come on, I’m waiting.”

  Sammy issued a submissive sigh and started dialing. She stopped before pressing the final digit.

  “I don’t want to bother her. Can’t it wait a little?”

  “I’m calling the police.”

  “And tell them what?”

  “That I have enough evidence for them to reopen the case.”

  “You don’t.”

  “I’ll settle for someone wearing a uniform knocking on their door to ask a few questions. For example, how come their darling daughter went missing and they never thought of going to the police? Or how come the parents of the century took their sweet time in coming to collect their lost little lamb? You want more? How they’d manage to convince a pizza place twenty miles away to deliver pizza to Tel Aviv? And why has an army of goons in helmets shown up everywhere Daria spent her final hours?”

  “None of this makes them guilty of anything.”

  “Maybe, but I think we should leave that to the police. The hands that pushed Daria from the roof may not have been theirs, but I’m sure the police will have a few questions once they hear about the Ehud Gal connection.”

  Sammy wrinkled her forehead. “Leave it to me, all right?”

  “Sammy, I don’t understand you. How come you turn into such a wimp where Evie is concerned? What happened to the ruthless, take-no-prisoner woman I know and love? So, you taunted her with some bullshit in school — so what? People grow up. Seems to me the abused little princess Czardas has grown up into a monster, with an international reputation, a sister-in-law who’s revered by education experts all over the world, and an income second only to the Pope’s, which, by the way, is also something we should look into.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You think
they make that much money giving workshops? The villa and the luxury vehicles, Sammy, don’t come from giving awareness seminars. Daria, Ehud, Avia-Avital, a stolen plot of land, what else do you need to see that this time I’m right? That this is not just about my guilty conscience?” I rose from my chair abruptly and prepared to leave the room.

  “Wait.”

  “I’m tired of waiting. It’s time to act.”

  “Let’s just say I haven’t been to Yokneam in a very long time,” Sammy gave in sullenly. “What was the name of that Rum baba sensation again?”

  “Well, good morning and welcome back to the world of the living.

  “I’m doing this for you, Shoshkowitz,” said Sammy. “It’s hard for me to watch you crumbling with guilt and getting lost on the Internet. If I know you, you won’t rest until you’re convinced Daria jumped with her own two feet.”

  “Am I supposed to be touched, Sammy?”

  “Maybe I don’t want you to get into trouble all by yourself, all right? Besides, I’ve decided to get emotional only one day every year. Look at the calendar, Shoshkowitz, this is your lucky day.”

  Sometimes, I almost feel like giving my big boss a big hug. Almost.

  ◊◊◊

  I sat in front of my computer and tried to find more information about Ehud Gal. The guy made a living as an investigative journalist for hire. He had a pretty impressive record of exposing corruption in cellular companies, banks, hospitals, government agencies, etc.

  The guy was a kind of an Israeli Woodward and Bernstein bringing public malfeasance to the attention of the poor citizens. A journalist like Ehud Gal must have some very powerful enemies in some very important places.

  I moved on to look for information about Avital Gal. There were endless photos of her online. She was stunning, with a smile that could melt steel hearts. Numerous articles were published following the death of The Queen of the Runway. I learned Avital was discovered by a fashion photographer at the ripe old age of thirteen. All the articles mentioned the family had refused to be interviewed.

  She died on May 2009, at just thirty-one, about three years ago. Such a beautiful girl. Promising career. Why would she jump?