by Kim Powers
On the kitchen counter, the red message light on the answering machine was blinking. I hit the playback button then headed up to her bedroom. I was halfway up the stairs when I heard my message to Skip.
“Hi, honey. I wanted you to hear my voice, first thing when you got home from school. I’m sorry about this morning . . . and last night.”
Her bedroom door was closed. That wasn’t so unusual; she was always in there on her iPod or computer or cell phone.
I knocked. Nothing. I knocked again.
“Honey, you sorta forgot you have to make the meatloaf in order to eat it. I brought home Chinese. I left a message but . . . ”
Still nothing.
I cracked open the door; at least she wasn’t hiding under a pair of headphones. She was just hiding under the bedcovers. Maybe getting up so early to run in the mornings wasn’t such a good idea anymore, if she collapsed when she got home.
“Okay, sleeping beauty, that Chinese food is congealing by now. Like slime. Like that stuff snails leave behind on the sidewalk and you know how . . . ”
I dived in to tickle her, but all I got was a wad of pillow. Skip wasn’t under the covers; her pillows were, scrunched up into the shape of a body.
A body, under the pillows . . .
The outline of a body . . .
Her body, spray painted in red onto the bottom sheet, the paint still wet and sticky and bleeding into the fibers of the sheet . . .
She was bleeding . . .
The outline was bleeding . . .
For a split second, I thought, that’s it, no more of those drama kids. They’re a bad influence, making you play stupid pranks like this . . .
And in the next second, I knew it wasn’t a joke or anything to do with drama club or anything Skip had done or . . .
A note, handwritten, was jabbed into the middle of the “body” with an open pair of scissors.
“YOU’VE KEPT ME WAITING LONG ENOUGH.”
You can’t make sound without air, so I didn’t make a peep, because at that moment all the air went out of my body.
Gone. Everything gone.
Sound. Air. Everything. Nothing. Skip. Life. Gone.
CHAPTER FIVE
“He should be reading. The note. Just about. Now.” He said it for Skip, and for himself.
There was a rattle in his voice, an extra . . . need (and a need for oxygen) that he hadn’t heard in quite a while. It had been so long since he’d talked in front of anyone; so long since he’d had company that he hadn’t had to pay for, that he chalked it up to nerves. And the dust he’d stirred up in his old classroom, where he’d come back to roost.
Four months ago, when he’d first inspected the site, the classroom he remembered best from his old grade school had been empty, except for books. Hundreds of them; textbooks and library books, thin little children’s books and big, fat rain-bloated encyclopedias, dumped in a pile in the middle of the floor, as if someone had tossed them there for a pogrom but had forgotten the lighter fluid and matches. All the books he treasured from childhood, dumped in the middle of a buckling floor that was covered with bird shit and mouse droppings, the pages of the books themselves warped and stuck together with black mold. At the front of the room, the wooden chalk rail was still there, now landscaped with stubs of white and colored chalk that had been rained on for years, from a hole in the ceiling. Now, it all looked like anthills of melted calcium, gummy little stalagmites. There weren’t any desks to get in his way anymore, as there had once been; the old-fashioned kind with a seat that had a storage for books underneath it, then a heavy metal armature that reached up to a flat surface on top. The only desk in the room now was in the middle, and it was bolted down. It wouldn’t move, no matter what.
Skip was seated there now, her arms and legs taped to its sides, her glasses removed and her eyes blindfolded with layers of gauze, a strip of gaffer’s tape across her mouth to keep her quiet for a while. That was the toughest part.
For him.
For her.
It took all of his concentration to make his hands do what he was telling them to; they were shaking as much as his voice had been, and he didn’t want her to think he was nervous, not up to the task he’d assigned himself. It might give her ideas. He pulled a chair up next to her desk and set to work, as tender as he could be, given the circumstances.
“Tighten your mouth. It won’t hurt as much. That way.”
She flinched as he put one balled-up hand against the tape on her mouth, to peel off the tape from the opposite side. He hadn’t pressed it down that hard to begin with, so it wouldn’t hurt when it came time to take it off.
He pulled it off, but Skip didn’t make a sound. She breathed a little deeper, and clenched her lips together so tightly that the pink of them almost turned white. He’d thought she would scream; he’d soundproofed the room for that, but still, he was glad it had been unnecessary.
For now.
She moistened her lips with her tongue; they must be dry and burning, from the tape. He’d prepared for that too. He tried to put a straw between her lips, but she tightened them closed, even more.
“I assure you. The water is safe.”
She licked her lips again, the tiniest peek of tongue flicking out; some of the color came back. She swallowed, trying to make more saliva. He saw the movement in her throat.
“Please. You’re not meant. To go thirsty.”
She braced her body, but she didn’t clinch her mouth again. He took that as a sign, an okay, so he put the straw back between her lips, careful not to touch her flesh with his fingers.
“An old-fashioned straw. From a soda shop. Shoppe. With an extra p-e. I like old-fashioned things.”
He could tell she wanted to resist; she pushed against the curved wooden back of the chair as far as she could, but thirst won out. She sucked at the straw, and when what came through it didn’t taste strange—he saw her cheeks moving, swishing the water around inside her mouth, testing it—she took some more. But held it there. He didn’t see a swallow.
“We had to . . . a sedative. To calm you down. It happens to all of us, I used to get so . . . ” He stopped, remembering something. “Anyway. You’re dehydrated. And afraid. It’s okay. Anyone would be. I would be. I have been. Drink.”
She took in another mouthful of water. She gulped it down, then took some more. The biggest gulp yet. She swished it around, then spit it in his face, level with hers from sitting.
Silence, then he spoke. “Most kidnap victims. Would know. NOT. To do that. Didn’t your. Father . . . teach you that?”
Whether she was just panicked and could barely talk—or she wanted to get back at him—he didn’t know. But the way her first words to him came out, it sounded like she was imitating him. Mimicking him.
“It never. Came up.”
That one pause—between never and came, intentional or not—was what set him off. All his good intentions out the window. The one that was boarded up.
“Then I’ll play Daddy. Lesson number one. Never spit. At your kidnapper.”
He slapped her so hard that his handprint formed on her cheek. And then he poured cold water on it, to try and make the hurt go away.
That slap—that was the hardest part.
For him.
For her.
For now.
CHAPTER SIX
Detective Aretha Mizell was halfway through her standard speech, walking up the stairs—“You have a fight? She get mad? She’s cooling off somewhere, happens all the time”—when she saw the outline on the bed, bleeding and red and sticky, and that shut her up.
That’s why the policemen had called her in, after receiving the initial report and doing a walk-through of the house and quick intake with me. They’d said the same things, too—don’t worry, it’s a fight, a teenage thing, she’s run off somewhere to make you sweat it out—until they saw the bed.
The outline wasn’t of just anybody, or any body: it was of Skip’s body. The way she fell asl
eep. I’d seen it a million times, when I’d tiptoe in to kiss her goodnight: the way she curled up her knees and put a pillow between them, then twisted her torso around to face the other direction. You’d think that would hurt, but she’d be snoring away. My baby girl. Snoring. Dreamland. And now . . . you could see what made this teenager different than all other teenagers. It was like a painting, in brushstrokes of aerosol, of Elizabeth “Skip” Holt. My baby girl. My only girl.
Mizell forgot her 101 speech the minute she saw it.
“Jesus.” She thought it was as bad as I did, although she caught herself and tried to mask it. I could see her eyes scrambling, trying to process what she’d just seen, but still come up with something hopeful to say.
“I know this is scary, all this stuff going on in here . . . ”
—The police taking pictures, dusting for fingerprints. Fingerprints? In our house?
“ . . . but it’s just to get the ball rolling, for when she comes back and this has all been for nothing.”
The look on her face didn’t say nothing. What they were doing in Skip’s room didn’t say nothing. Bagging up her computer. Looking at the note on the bed every which way. Flashbulbs going off in every inch of the room. That all said something—something horrible.
“I called all her friends . . . anybody I could think of . . . and her phone’s still here. It was on the kitchen counter when I came in. She can’t live without that phone. She’d never go off without it.”
“So we’ll need to take that too,” Mizell said soothingly, almost trying to hypnotize me with her low honey voice to drop Skip’s phone into a paper sack before I even know what I’m doing. She was short but hefty; her upper arms were straining against the fabric of her suit jacket. She looked like she should be anything but a detective. HR, maybe; middle management, but with a little bit of power. One of those comforting women, forty-something, who could make any situation better, even firing someone. She was wearing a wig, not a very convincing one. I wondered if she was going through chemo, but the rest of her looked too healthy for that.
Why the fuck was I even thinking about what she was wearing, or how bad her wig was, when my baby was missing?
She hefted the evidence bag Skip’s phone was now in. “Plastic. Those cop shows on TV get it so wrong. Plastic,” she snorted, expecting me to follow. Wanting me to be as outraged as she was—or maybe to know how good she was, that she knew plastic was wrong. Mizell was trying to make this as good for me as it could be, give me something to focus on, a string of conversation, to keep me from howling at the moon.
But I didn’t want easy. I didn’t want chitchat about plastic. I wanted to howl at the moon. I wanted to scratch my eyes out, so I couldn’t see any of this: Skip’s bedroom, almost alive with fingerprints, brought up by the police with their powders. Like smudgy little dots on a pointillist painting, or pinky swears that Skip and her friends had ground into the room, when it was first painted. Those little swirls—fingerprints or whatever they are: they were all so innocent. I looked down at my giant ham of a fist and was ashamed of it. Ashamed of being grown-up. Ashamed of being a man. That’s who had to have taken her. Some man. Some man with a big hand. Somebody strong . . .
“And we’ll need to get your fingerprints, too,” Mizell said, as if she had just read my mind, “to rule you out against any other adult hits we get.” She nodded to one of the techs in the room, who set up a makeshift printing station on top of Skip’s bureau. I barely felt his hands on mine, inking them and then guiding them into the correct white boxes on a sheet of paper.
“Some folks are afraid of fingerprints, just like I’m afraid of needles. But no reason to be afraid of anything that can help us do our job. Fingerprints are our friends. That’s right, just two more to go,” Mizell said, her eyes not just on my hands, but everything in the room.
I yammered on, to keep from dying. “We’ll have to move. I could repaint this room a dozen times but I’d never get rid of all that fingerprint powder. I’d always know it’s there, whatever color I used. Skip likes pink—it’s weird, she’s not a girly girl, but she still likes pink—but maybe a dark color. I guess that would cover it up, if I painted it really dark, like a maroon or something . . . ”
Mizell, to her credit, didn’t look at me like I was losing my mind.
“I’m partial to the green family myself. My bedroom now? Forest green. My bedroom when I was a little girl? Lime green. Go figure. I never was a pink girl myself. Now my daughter, she’s a lemon yellow . . . ”
Just two crazy people, talking to each other. A big black woman, calmly doing her business and trying to talk me off a ledge.
“Mr. Holt—Mr., that’s right? Not Dr.?—maybe it’d be better if we had one of these policemen take you downstairs to wait while we . . . ”
I couldn’t move. I couldn’t stop staring at what the policemen were doing, taking off the bottom sheet that had the outline on it. “I didn’t think you could leave fingerprints on sheets. On fabric, I mean. I try to keep it clean, her room, you know . . . she has to pitch in and help, the sheets, the laundry, the cooking, all that stuff. I don’t want her growing up thinking that she doesn’t have to work . . . or that she’s special because of the Olympics, you know, except that she is special, she’s the most special . . . ”
“Mr. Holt. Please.” She put her hand on my shoulder, to begin guiding me out of the room, just as one of the techs picked up a jar of Karo syrup on Skip’s dressing table, next to a bottle of red food coloring. Underneath it, now ringed with a circle of dried “blood,” was the research book that the drama club had put together for their Hell House. Pictures of car wrecks and back-alley abortions and kids on gurneys and teenagers with pimples and syringes stuck in their waxy white skin.
The tech held it up with a gloved hand and a raised eyebrow.
“That was for this Hell House she was in,” I said. “At Halloween. You know . . . the drama club. They got extra credit for making their own blood.”
The second tech raised his eyebrows too, as they dropped it into a paper sack.
Evidence. Hell House. The damn drama club.
“They needed somebody young. A teenage hitch-hiker. It’s the theater department,” I said, as if that would explain everything, excuse away what a bad father I was. “She wants to be an actress. Actually she wants to be a little bit of everything. An artist. A singer. Some days she wants to be . . . well, you’ll see. We’ll find her and you’ll meet her and you’ll see.”
I couldn’t stop talking.
I couldn’t stop shaking.
“I wanted to be Nancy Drew when I was little,” Mizell said. “The black Nancy Drew. We’re gonna find her.”
She started to take me out, and saw the giant stuffed giraffe that Skip had in the corner of the room, almost hidden away when the door was open. Skip had wanted it—the giraffe—because she said it looked just like her. Too tall. Around its neck was my decathlon medal from the Olympics, just about the only thing in the room that wasn’t obliterated with fingerprint powder. The gold on the medal seemed to glow, it was so polished, just like Skip’s snowballs in the attic.
Mizell reached out her gloved hands to pull it from over the giraffe’s neck, then tossed it to one of her guys. “Don’t forget to dust this,” she said to them, as she closed the door behind me.
They searched the house, even though I already had. Once by myself, and again with the first cops who showed up, before they called in Detective Mizell. In the den, Sig and Wendy tried to keep me busy, while all I could focus on was the sound of their footsteps all over the place; heavy ones, and then the lighter heels of Mizell. I tried to imagine the things in our house the way they’d probably see them.
Would they see clues I missed? Would we pass, as a family? Would I pass, as a father?
I did a mental tour that matched their footsteps. Nothing in the basement except for old furniture and workout equipment I didn’t use much anymore—a weight bench and treadmill and barbells. A b
ox of tile from a DIY project for the bathroom. A sack of grout. The old smoke alarm that Patti had yanked out of the ceiling in frustration because it kept going off whenever she cooked, and then it still kept going off, even disconnected and down in the basement. We’d thought we had a ticking bomb somewhere until we discovered that the battery was still alive.
What else was down there? A cardboard “wishing well” painted with fake rocks, from when Patti had been drafted to be a class mother and help out with Skip’s kindergarten Halloween party, years ago. Patti dressed up like a witch and crouched down inside the well, hooking candy onto a bamboo fishing pole every time one of the kids dropped it in. That cardboard puppet theater, from when Skip went through her puppet phase, now sagging with basement damp. Everything a reminder of the family we used to have, the family we used to be.
The family I couldn’t let go of.
When they left the basement and started for the attic, I jumped off the couch to lead the way. “One of the steps is sorta wonky. A board is missing and we’ve got mouse traps up there . . . maybe it’s a raccoon, I don’t know, I hear something at night . . . ”
Oh. You haven’t fixed the step? You let your daughter walk up that? You let her go where mouse traps are set out and animals can get in?
They didn’t say it, but I knew they were thinking it: that I was a bad father. They started thinking it the minute Wendy came over, and they saw me hug her. They started thinking it the minute they saw all that stuff from Hell House.
But I didn’t let her be in it, I wanted to scream at them. I didn’t sign the damn form! She forged my signature and did it without my permission!
Oh, so you admit you have a daughter who runs off without permission, who does whatever she wants. That you run a house with no discipline. You let her come home by herself after school, no adult to greet her . . .
The cops went in the attic first, flashlights aimed in front of them, and got blinded when their beams hit all of Skip’s little mirrors. Mizell put up her forearm, covering her eyes.
