by Alan Russell
Cheever only got one knock in before the door opened. An older woman greeted him. Standing behind her were three anxious faces: ones Cheever recognized from the pictures he’d seen, though in those poses they’d been smiling and relaxed.
“I’m Detective Cheever,” he announced. “I’m the lead detective on this case.”
Even before Cheever was shown into the house, Eleanor Pierce asked about her daughter: “Have you found Stella?”
“No,” said Cheever.
Everyone seemed to deflate in front of his eyes.
In the privacy of Mrs. Downing’s den, Cheever began the family interviews, starting with Duncan Pierce. Behind closed doors the man’s granite veneer broke; he no longer had to be strong for his family. As Duncan choked up and his tears fell, Cheever surreptitiously observed him. He would have bet the farm he wasn’t seeing alligator tears.
“Take some breaths,” Cheever advised. “You okay to answer a few questions?”
Duncan nodded, and Cheever said, “Last night did you check and see if the house was locked up?”
“I think it was,” said Duncan, even though his face showed his uncertainty. “I remember making sure the front and back doors were locked, but I can’t swear I checked all the windows.”
“If you had to guess whether you did or didn’t check them, what would you say?”
“I’d say that I did. Usually I just do it on autopilot.”
Cheever nodded. He hadn’t seen any sign of forced entry, but the locks could have easily been picked.
“We don’t have much in the way of valuables,” said Duncan. “And with all three bedrooms on the second floor, I never thought I had to worry about an intruder.”
“Do you remember your dog barking last night?”
Cheever had encountered the enthusiastic young golden retriever in the Pierces’ backyard.
Duncan shook his head. “Copper isn’t much of a watchdog. The family joke is that a burglar would be in more danger of being licked than being bitten. We thought that was a good thing, especially with all of Michael’s and Stella’s friends coming and going.”
“Was the dog inside the house last night?”
Duncan nodded.
Cheever continued with his series of questions. He would be asking most of the same questions of all the family members. The detective was looking for any deviation in what they had to say. At the same time he was already convinced he was spinning his wheels.
Still, experience had taught him to listen carefully when an interview was concluding. That’s when people usually offered up what was really on their minds.
“I didn’t read to Stella last night,” said Duncan. “I usually read to her.” Tearing up, he added, “I wish I had.”
Unlike her husband, Eleanor Pierce didn’t try and hide how distraught she was. Seeing her pain reminded Cheever of how his ex-wife, Karen, had looked while trying to cope with the illness of their daughter. Her desperation had bordered on madness. That’s what happens when you’re overwhelmed by worry and grief. In retrospect, Karen had been more honest about her feelings than he had. And after Diane’s death, his emotional distance had done in their marriage.
Cheever wished he could tell Eleanor Pierce that everything would be all right, but he was afraid she would read the lie in his face. He knew only too well how things didn’t always turn out all right. It was his job to be steady and reassuring. The family needed a shoulder to lean on, and he could be that.
“After going to bed,” he asked, “do you remember hearing anything unusual during the night?”
In any investigation you look for lies or inconsistencies. So far no red flags had turned up. Eleanor shook her head, but then she averted her eyes.
“Last night Duncan closed our door to the hallway. It’s usually open. If there were noises, I doubt we would have been able to hear them.”
“Why did he close the door?”
She hesitated a moment. “We were intimate.” With trembling lips she added, “It was Valentine’s Day,” as if she felt the need to justify their need for privacy.
“What time did you fall asleep?” Cheever asked.
“It was about ten thirty. Right after—after—we both dropped off. Usually I make a point of reopening our door. But I fell asleep.”
There was no forgiveness in her admission. Eleanor Pierce was blaming herself.
“We don’t know what happened to your daughter,” said Cheever. “But nothing you’ve said puts you at fault.”
She shook her head. “I should have reopened the door.”
As her tears fell, Cheever traveled back through time and saw Karen’s anguished face.
“I never heard anything,” Eleanor said.
Michael Pierce’s room was on the other side of Stella’s. Like his parents, he hadn’t heard anything; like his parents, he also had a tearful admission.
“Last night I was listening to music.” Speaking so softly so as to barely be heard, he added, “I’m not supposed to do that.”
“How late were you up?” Cheever asked.
The eleven-year-old boy shook his head. “I’m not sure. I guess it was around ten. I fell asleep with headphones on.”
“So you didn’t hear anything other than your music?”
Michael nodded, then roughly wiped away tears.
“I used to listen to music when I was your age,” Cheever said. “My parents didn’t allow it either, so I always had to sneak my radio into bed.”
“I listen to music on my cell phone,” Michael said.
Cheever knew better than to ask the boy his favorite bands or music. He was about twenty years behind the times, and he knew it.
Instead, he said, “I understand your family was at the beach last night.”
Michael nodded.
“What was your sister doing most of the time?”
“She was playing with all the kids.”
“Did anything unusual happen?”
The question made the boy think, but finally he shook his head. “No.”
“Did you notice Stella talking to any strangers?”
Michael offered another shake of his head.
No stranger danger, thought Cheever. No anything.
CHAPTER SIX
Normally, Luke Hart would have been ecstatic about getting a day off from school, but there was nothing good about getting this day off. His mother had kept him home after learning that Stella had disappeared. In the three years since Luke had moved into the neighborhood, he and Michael Pierce had become inseparable. Michael was a year and a half older and acted like the older brother he didn’t have. Because the two boys were always together, Luke saw a lot of Michael’s sister, Stella.
She wasn’t a bad kid, really, except she always wanted to hang out with them. Sometimes it was fun to have her around, though. She was almost as fast as the boys on a bicycle, and could skate better than either of them. And unlike other kids, Stella never whined or cried much. She didn’t snitch either. There were a few times when Luke and Michael would have gotten into some pretty hot water if Stella had squealed, but she never did. Stella was always bringing him things, too, like cookies or juice boxes. During the summer, she’d operated a lemonade stand and given him free glasses. Michael teased her, saying she had a crush on Luke. Instead of denying it, Stella had said Michael liked a girl named Tracy, which put him on the defensive. For a youngster, Stella was pretty smart.
Michael was right about her liking him, though. Just yesterday, his mom had brought him a big manila envelope that had been left on their porch with his name on it. Inside the envelope was a handmade valentine. Lots of effort had gone into its making. Rose petals and beads had been formed into a huge red heart. In big, if uncertain, letters, a secret admirer had written, I LOVE YOU LUKE HART.
Stella hadn’t signed it, but he knew her block printing. And there was another giveaway: Stella always called him by his full name. To everyone else, he was just Luke. But to Stella he was Lukehart, like it w
as one word. Michael had once said, “Why do you call him Luke Hart? Why don’t you just call him Luke? That would be like him calling you Stella Pierce instead of Stella.” With the kind of dignity you wouldn’t expect from someone her age, Stella had replied, “His name is Luke Hart, isn’t it?”
For a little kid, Stella was something.
He hadn’t told Michael, or anyone, about the valentine. Usually he tossed out things like that, but Luke had deposited it in his desk drawer. He had even secretly pulled it out a few times to admire it. Everything had been cut out and pasted very carefully. There were even ornate designs along the borders.
Labor of love, thought Luke. It was an expression he heard his mom use sometimes. Now he understood what she meant. It must have taken Stella days to make the valentine. She would have done it secretly, knowing Michael would tease her unmercifully if he found out what she was doing.
Now that Stella was missing, the valentine made Luke feel funny. It sort of hurt thinking about it. He had considered showing it to his parents or the police, but hadn’t felt quite right about violating Stella’s secret.
Luke wondered where she was. The whole world seemed to be wondering the same thing. He and Michael had spent most of the day leading the police to all their secret spots, places to which Stella had tagged along with them. The police spent a lot of time at the flood channel, pulling out big flashlights and going real far into the storm drain. At the Torrey Pines Reserve, the police picked up some candy wrappers from their “cave,” which was really nothing more than a recessed rock overhang, but they didn’t seem to think that Stella had left the wrappers there. The boys even showed the police the spot where they played “alligator” near the railroad tracks. That’s what they called it, because not much more than their eyes showed aboveground as they waited for a train to come along. They put pennies on the tracks and hunkered down near the rails, close enough so that when the train raced by, the ground beneath them shook and they could feel its heat. The hot air always whipped at them, and their senses were overwhelmed by the noise and the clacking of the rails. From experience, they knew that pennies flattened best. Dimes worked, and so did quarters, but not nickels. For whatever reason, the train wheels picked up nickels and carried them along.
Stella was always fascinated by the way in which nickels hitchhiked a ride. She thought there must be something special about them. When they went to the tracks, she always brought along a nickel. Michael thought what she did was stupid. Instead of getting a trophy, she just lost a nickel, but Stella didn’t see it that way. For her, the nickel went on a trip. She always wondered how far it traveled.
One moment it was there, and the next it disappeared.
Sort of like Stella.
When Luke and Michael ran out of places to show to the police, they returned to a neighborhood very different from one they had ever known. It was almost like an invasion was going on. There was activity everywhere. Uniformed marines jogged up and down the streets. Lifeguards had moved inland from the surf and were using ATVs, binoculars, and walkie-talkies to help in the search. The Border Patrol wasn’t looking for undocumented workers, but a little girl. Helicopters and planes flew low over the houses, and a bloodhound team kept sniffing its way around the area.
Luke wanted to join in the search, like a lot of his neighbors were doing, but his mom wouldn’t let him go out without his father. His dad planned on coming home early, though. Then he and Michael and his father would go out and find Stella, and he’d thank her for the valentine. He wouldn’t care what anyone else thought.
In the meantime, his mom seemed intent on hugging him as much as she could.
CHAPTER SEVEN
Cheever paused for a moment from his call making to observe the setting sun. The day might be over, but he and his team would continue plodding even if the investigation seemed to be going nowhere. There were officers reviewing CCTV footage from the area. They were hoping to pick up something—be it a vehicle, or an individual, or even a glimpse of Stella slipping out of her house. So far they had nothing.
Incoming and outgoing calls on the Pierces’ house phone and on their cell phones were being monitored, but there had been no ransom calls, and nothing to indicate Stella had been kidnapped.
From inside Duncan’s home office, Cheever called another one of Stella’s classmates. He identified himself to the mother, but didn’t need to say much. Everyone knew about Stella. The woman got her daughter on the line.
“Hi,” he said, “this is Detective Cheever.”
Eleanor Pierce froze in the hallway. Cheever had asked the family to think back on anything out of the ordinary that might have happened of late, and she’d remembered Candy Stewart’s ghost story. She had come to tell him about it but heard him talking on the phone. Judging from the detective’s high-pitched and overly friendly tone, she suspected he was talking to a child.
“And that’s the last time you saw Stella, Caitlin?”
Caitlin Richey, thought Eleanor; she was Stella’s classmate.
“And has she seemed sad lately? Has she said anything about being unhappy?”
Eleanor felt the heat rise in her cheeks. It was silly for her to be offended by the detective’s questions, but she was. Wasn’t she a good mother? But today she felt so—negligent. She knew it was easy to second-guess everything that she had done the night before, because she was doing a good enough job of that herself. All day she had been questioned, and it seemed to her that everyone was judging her to be an unfit mother. If she had been more conscientious, the questioning looks seemed to say, nothing like this would have befallen her daughter.
“Have you noticed anyone approaching Stella recently, someone besides a member of her family? Maybe an adult you don’t know? I want you to think about that . . .”
Eleanor stopped listening. The detective had asked her the same kinds of questions, though not in the sugarcoated voice he was using now. She listened while he finished his conversation with Caitlin.
Cheever must have been alerted by her shadow. When he stepped out into the open, Eleanor didn’t even try and pretend that she hadn’t been eavesdropping. His eyes took a read of hers; she hoped she didn’t look as lost as she felt.
“I came over to tell you a ghost story I heard at last night’s beach gathering,” she said, “but while I was standing here, I decided it’s probably nothing.”
“Tell me about it,” said Cheever.
Eleanor told him the story of Jason’s death in the fire, and his brief return, and how the boy had posed for his final picture.
“The story seemed to make an impression upon Stella,” she said. “She talked about it all the way home. Stella even asked us whether we would miss her if she died, and I told her we would miss her more than anything in the world.”
Silently, tears dropped down her face.
“The ghost story is likely only a coincidence,” Cheever said, his words as soft as the hand he put on her shoulder.
Of course it was, thought Eleanor.
“There’s nothing more difficult than waiting,” he said. “I know. I lost my only child, a little girl, to leukemia. As awful as the disease was, what made it worse was that purgatory of waiting. You want to go punch brick walls, but instead you’re forced to sit and wait. You want to scream, but you’re forced to whisper.”
Eleanor decided not to correct him. She wasn’t in purgatory; she was in hell.
“Did you and Mary Beth finish up Stella’s Facebook page?” he asked.
Eleanor nodded. Mary Beth Carey was an SDPD criminalist who was especially good with computers. “It’s up and running.”
“I’d like to see it,” he said.
The detective followed Eleanor to the living room, where she brought up the Facebook page. Beneath a picture of Stella were the words HELP US FIND STELLA! There was a physical description of Stella and contact information, along with pictures of her.
“Until today I never realized how many children go missing in Calif
ornia,” said Eleanor. “Mary Beth told me there are almost a hundred thousand of them every year.”
She wasn’t even sure she’d voiced her thoughts aloud until the detective answered.
“It’s a quiet epidemic,” said Cheever, “probably because the vast majority of the kids who go missing are runaways.”
She nodded. Mary Beth had said the same thing. Eleanor felt the need to make one thing clear, though: “My daughter did not run away.”
“I know that,” said Cheever.
Her cell phone began ringing, causing her hands to shake. She was scared of what she might hear. In the next room the techs were suddenly on alert, ready to listen in on the call if necessary. Their anticipation was short-lived. Arlene Hart was on the line.
“I know you told me earlier that you didn’t need anything but my prayers,” said Arlene, “but I’m bringing over a pot roast. I also have a coffee cake for the morning.”
“You don’t . . .”
“I do. I’ll be over in five minutes.”
Tears welled up in Eleanor’s eyes. It was awful feeling so helpless.
“There’s a pot roast on the way,” she said. “It’s likely to go to waste unless you and your team eat it.”
“What about your family?”
“I might be able to get Michael and Duncan to take a plate,” she said, but she didn’t sound hopeful.
As six o’clock rolled around, the activity level inside and outside the Pierce home became noticeably less frenetic. The detectives from Homicide Team IV were still working the case, but there were fewer uniforms. A few search-and-rescue teams were still looking for Stella, but most had conceded to the darkness. Still, dozens of officers were going door-to-door talking with residents they had been unable to interview earlier in the day. Every stone was being turned over.
Cheever found Eleanor and Duncan Pierce in the living room. Both looked up when he walked in, but they could tell by the expression on his face that he didn’t have any news for them.
