The Missing Place

by Sophie Littlefield

  Colleen was digging in her purse for tissues, getting ready to offer comfort, when Shay said coldly, “I know about Darren Terry.”

  Darren Terry. The name was daggers, ice picks, chain saws. Colleen had worked so hard to bury the memory that its invocation was like a rock shattering glass, leaving shards everywhere. Neither she nor Andy had spoken that name aloud since they met in their attorney’s office to countersign the settlement four years ago.

  They had talked about moving away from Sudbury, and sometimes, when Colleen glimpsed Nan Terry driving around town in her little BMW or running along the Blue Hills trail, she still wondered if it would have been better if they had. But that would have meant forcing Paul to start over at another school for his sophomore year and finding all new therapists and a new psychiatrist, just as he’d finally gotten comfortable with the current ones. And besides, no one knew, besides the Mitchells and the Terrys and the lawyers and the school administration, which was the whole point.

  No one knew. But Shay, who had known her less than forty-eight hours, was staring at her with revulsion and fear, just like Nan Terry had looked at her at the Safeway last fall the one time Colleen broke her own rule and didn’t make the trip over to the Norfolk grocery, just in case.

  “How—”

  “Fuck how,” Shay snapped, cutting her off. “Tell me exactly what Paul did and why.”

  “He . . .” Colleen’s mouth moved, but nothing came out. How many times had she had this conversation with herself? How many times had she told herself this story in an attempt to find some new angle, some softening, some abatement—to soothe herself?

  “Paul is severely dyslexic, and he has ADHD. And he also used to suffer from oppositional defiant disorder.”

  “Oppositional what?”

  In that word was reflected all the skepticism Colleen herself had ever felt, every bit of Andy’s resistance, every conversation with Paul’s teachers through the years when she pleaded for a little extra understanding, a second chance, a do-over.

  “I know it sounds . . . made up, but it’s a real diagnosis. It’s often linked with dyslexia and attention deficit. For kids like Paul, ordinary schoolwork can be incredibly frustrating. Especially in adolescence. Everyday things we take for granted are really difficult for—”

  “Lots of kids are frustrated,” Shay said, her voice thin steel. “Lots of kids suck at school. And they don’t have half of what you were able to give your kid, and they still don’t go around beating the shit out of other kids.”

  “You don’t understand,” Colleen said, feeling the remainder of her composure crumpling. She was having trouble breathing, her gut tightening. “They teased him. Every day of his life since kindergarten, someone was always picking on him. Ever since they started learning to write and Paul began to understand that he was different. All through school, and we come from an incredibly competitive district, the kids are attuned to the expectations—”

  “My kid got teased. Every kid gets teased. All through fourth grade Taylor got called Shrek because he was tall and his ears stuck out. But you just tell them to deal with it.”

  “It’s . . . it’s something you’re born with,” Colleen continued doggedly. “He was . . . he didn’t hurt Taylor. That’s what you’re thinking, isn’t it? That he hurt him?”

  Tears flooded her eyes, making her vision blurry. Her hand found the tissues in her purse, and she pulled out a clump and pressed them against her face.

  “How can you say? After he nearly killed that boy? Over a little teasing?”

  Colleen twisted in her seat so she could look directly at Shay. “It wasn’t just a little teasing! It was every day at football, every single day. Calling him a retard. A monkey. Darren and the other kid, Tanner, he was even worse. It wasn’t even about the dyslexia, anyway, it was over a girl Tanner had been interested in, this girl Paul took to the homecoming dance, and he’d known Paul since back in grade school when Paul used to have a specialist shadow him in second grade. I mean, it had been almost a decade, but when Tanner got upset about this girl, he just brought it up again like it was yesterday, and Paul reacted.”

  She knew that Shay must have heard the evasion, the desperate denial in her voice. “And Paul and Taylor were friends. You said it. You said Taylor told you about Paul. That they were—that they were close.”

  “But Paul never told you about Taylor. Right?”

  Colleen’s mouth hung open as she tried to think of what to say. Had he? Had she somehow missed it, maybe he hadn’t used Taylor’s name, maybe some mention or allusion that she had missed or glossed over? Maybe he’d talked to Andy and not her, one of the times the two of them went out to get firewood or pick up wings or Chinese, hadn’t there been a few times they’d been out much longer, Colleen saying nothing because she guessed Andy had taken him to the Hub for a beer and hadn’t told her because he wasn’t legal yet?

  “Maybe Taylor thought they were friends,” Shay said, “and all along Paul’s thinking something else. It’s festering, it’s growing . . .”

  “Stop,” Colleen begged. “Please. Look. We were on our way to the rig, right? We’ll find people who knew them. We’ll ask. Just, please, reserve judgment.”

  “Your detective. Does he know? Did you tell him?”

  “Steve?” Colleen said, stalling, but of course she couldn’t get out of it, she had to tell. Shay with her Googling, her finding of facts, ferreter-out of secrets; somehow, she couldn’t keep anything concealed from Shay for long. “It hasn’t come up yet, but if it does, if there is any reason to mention—”

  “There’s a very fucking good reason, as far as I’m concerned. My son. Who trusted your son, befriended him, without knowing anything about his past, about what he’d done. No, don’t talk.” She held up a hand to stop Colleen from speaking. “Here’s how this is going to work. If we haven’t found them, haven’t figured all of this out by tomorrow afternoon, either you tell the police or I will. And you’re going to tell Steve before you ever fly him out here. Else we part ways, we both go on our own. But that’ll put you out here with no car and nowhere to stay.”

  Colleen nodded dumbly. How had this even happened, how had it gone so wrong? The car continued to idle, the rumble of the engine occasionally interrupted by a tick or a pop.

  She couldn’t do this without Shay. She wouldn’t be able to venture out here, on these nameless back roads, searching for oil rigs, wouldn’t know where to start on the reservation, who to talk to, where to go. With Shay, things just seemed more . . . possible. She was fearless in ways that Colleen could only imagine.

  “It’s got to be something with Hunter-Cole,” she mumbled. “The safety violations. Or it could have been something we haven’t even thought of yet.”

  “Are you seriously going to try to tell me those are better options? Is that what you’re praying for when you close your eyes at night?” Shay eased back onto the road. “Our boys are still missing. All I care about is finding them. Far as I’m concerned, what Paul is is one more possible explanation. For both their sakes I hope he didn’t do something. But I just don’t got enough give-a-damn to worry about your feelings, so don’t ask me to.”

  Colleen nodded again. So they had a new understanding. And she had something terrifying to worry about.

  Because the only thing worse than her son and Taylor going missing was the possibility that it was Paul’s fault. That despite the years of therapy and medication and mindfulness training, despite all the progress he’d made, he had gone into a rage so powerful that—like what happened once before—he wouldn’t even remember how he ended up with blood on his hands.

  THEY PULLED OVER where the new road had been cut from the earth and churned with snow and mud. Dead stalks poked out from the tread marks made by dozens of trucks, evidence that not long ago, this land was undisturbed.

  A few hundred feet away, the rig rose high into the air, painted the primary colors of a child’s toy: the tower was white lattice with a bright yellow
core; equipment clustered around the base was yellow and red. It cast a shadow that seemed to go on forever. Four cobalt blue holding tanks were lined up like beads on a necklace. A perimeter road had been carved out; inside it the earth was raw and crisscrossed with tire tracks. Half a dozen trucks were parked haphazardly. A few men moved between the vehicles and machinery; no one seemed to be looking toward the road.

  In the passenger seat, Colleen stared, glassy-eyed and so miserable she was practically vibrating with pain. But Shay couldn’t let herself care. She imagined the separation between them made of something solid—Lucite, or very thick glass, a boundary neither of them could breach. Colleen was not the enemy—but she might be something even more dangerous. Because if Shay allowed herself to feel pity or even compassion, it might cloud her thinking.

  So, back to the rig. A few of the men were walking toward the road. Or was that her imagination? Were they trying to see through the windshield, taking down her license plate? Had the supervisors been warned to be on the lookout for her and Colleen, ever since they began searching for their boys?

  Shay felt conflicting impulses. If they did nothing, they would learn nothing, except for the fact that the rigs were bigger up close than she’d ever imagined. If they got out of the car, they risked getting in trouble for trespassing, and alienating management further, making them even less likely to lend assistance. On the other hand, hadn’t they already announced their intentions by making the calls to Hunter-Cole in the first place?

  While she was mulling over her options, a black pickup truck made a lazy, wide turn on the cleared land and started driving slowly toward them down the access road. The women waited without speaking. When the truck stopped a dozen yards away, Shay squinted at the driver, but other than wraparound sunglasses and a baseball cap, it was hard to see much through the windows. After a few minutes the truck pulled even so that his driver’s-side door was only a few feet from hers and he rolled down the window, motioning her to do the same.

  The blast of cold air was instant and bracing. Now she could see his whole face: unfamiliar, lined and sun-weathered, colorless lips, and a sandy brown growth of beard.

  “You ladies lost?”

  “No. I know exactly where I am. I’m staring at a rig where a bunch of men who worked with my son are making piles of money for Hunter-Cole.” Despite her bravado, Shay felt her heart pounding under her shirt.

  The man took his time removing his sunglasses. His eyes narrowed against the sun, revealing a nest of wrinkles at the corners. This man was no stranger to the outdoors, and judging from the wear on his suede coat, he actually worked for a living. “Who are you?”

  “I think you know who I am. Either that or you’re dumb as a stump. Who are you?”

  Now the man smiled, a tight and mean-spirited smile. “You’re starting to hurt my feelings,” he said softly. “I’m the safety compliance officer. One of the good guys.”

  “Show us your ID,” Colleen said from the other seat. Shay gave her a quick glance, surprised she’d come back to life.

  The man chuckled. “This ain’t Law and Order. We don’t have badges. But I can tell you, you’re starting to get on the nerves of my bosses. And while that may not flutter your wings, I’ll tell you something else that you ought to care about. You are barking up the wrong tree. Nothing happened to your boys on the job. I give you my personal guarantee.”

  “Really? Are you on every job site every minute of every day?” Shay demanded. “Were you there last fall when the wireline went through one of your employees’ guts? Or when two guys fell off the same platform in one month because Hunter-Cole didn’t put up the regulation guardrail? Were you there when your lawyers bought off their families?”

  There was the slightest flicker in the man’s expression, a tic at his eyelid, which quickly disappeared. “Give the little lady a medal,” he drawled. “She knows how to use Google. Only you got a ways to go, because if you’d read everything on the subject you’d know that we settled. Not because we were guilty. But to make it go away.”

  He waved his hand, as if shooing away an annoying fly. “That’s what Hunter-Cole does, you know. When whiners start making a lot of noise like whiners do, and it becomes a threat to productivity, they settle. Except you two, you don’t really pose much of a threat at all, do you? Two ladies in a girlie little SUV—unless you get out of this car and take your tops off, you’re not even providing much entertainment.”

  Shay was trying to work up a comeback when Colleen unsnapped her seat belt and opened the car door. She was out of the car in seconds and plodding unsteadily through the shin-high snow, around the car to the road. When she reached the flattened snow, she made better progress, striding toward the rig.

  The man cursed and backed up, spinning snow under his tires. He executed a sloppy three-point turn and began following Colleen, his front bumper inches from her backside. She paid him no attention.

  “He’s going to run her down,” Shay said out loud, and then she was out of the car too, running to catch up. Or rather, slogging through the snow as fast as she could. She came abreast of the truck and slammed her fist into the side, instantly regretting it as pain traveled through her wrist and arm.

  “Take a video if he runs me over,” Colleen yelled. “Post it online.”

  It was a good idea. But Shay used her energy to catch up instead. They arrived at the periphery of the cleared area, and a handful of men gathered at the base of the rig, watching them.

  A bearded man in an orange vest over a brown coverall came unhurriedly down the stairs. He waited, with his arms folded, as they walked the rest of the way, the truck close behind them. When Shay and Colleen were a few yards from the small crowd of workers, the driver parked and jumped out of the truck. He was out of breath when he jogged around to join them.

  “This is how you contain them, Pardee?” the bearded man at the front of the group asked. To Shay and Colleen he said, “I need to ask you to leave. This is a hazardous environment and you’re not dressed or trained for it.”

  “We’ll take that risk,” Colleen said. “Some of you worked with our sons. Did any of you know Paul and Taylor?”

  There was murmuring among the crowd of men; the man in the vest turned around and glared at them. “Back to work,” he said. “This ain’t no tea party.”

  “Hey!” Shay yelled, as they began to disburse. “I’m Taylor Capparelli’s mom. Fly’s mom. This is Colleen and her son is Paul Mitchell, or you might know him as Whale. If you know anything about where they are or what happened to them, you need to tell us. Please, do the right thing and tell us!”

  “That’s enough now, ma’am, you’re making a fool of yourself,” the man in the vest said, taking her arm. Emboldened, the man who’d driven the black truck came around and grabbed hold of Colleen. “We’re going to escort you back to your car so you don’t hurt yourselves. Now don’t fight me, or someone’s liable to get hurt.”

  “You all have mothers!” Colleen called, struggling to get out of his grip. “Wives and daughters and sons. People who love you. If you were missing, they would want to know what happened to you!”

  An idea occurred to Shay. “369-648-2278! Call me, please! Anytime. If you know something, call!”

  “471-216-9669!” Colleen yelled, and then they took turns repeating their phone numbers while the men dragged them back to the Explorer. Shay let her body go limp. Though she weighed only a hundred twenty pounds, the coat and boots must have made her hard to handle because the man dragging her cursed harder and sweat formed on his brow despite the cold. When Colleen caught on, she did the same thing, all the while screaming their phone numbers even as the group of men dispersed and disappeared into the rig.

  At the car, Shay shook off the man’s arm and opened the driver’s-side door and pretended to get in. At the last minute she twisted and slammed the door hard against the man. The edge cracked against his elbow.

  “Fuck! Are you insane?” He jumped around for a minute,
massaging the elbow, and then he grabbed her arm and pulled her from the car, pinning her against the door. Shay knew what was coming; they were hidden from view of the rig. She worked up a gob of spit and let it fly a split second before he hit her, and as her head slammed into the window she had the satisfaction of seeing her saliva land on his cheek.

  She tasted blood when she fell to the ground, but she laughed anyway, getting up on her hands and knees. She felt around her mouth with her tongue: didn’t feel like any of her teeth had been knocked out or broken. Probably just cut on the inside. Colleen was screaming something and running around the truck to help her, but Shay pushed her away.

  “Bet you’ve got my number memorized now,” she yelled, getting to her feet and dusting herself off as the man walked disgustedly back toward the rig. “Don’t be a stranger!”

  sixteen

  “AT LEAST LET’S see if there’s a clinic,” Colleen fretted as they drove toward the edge of the reservation. “There’s got to be one somewhere here.”

  “Don’t need it,” Shay said for the second time. “It’s just a little cut. He didn’t hit me that hard—probably because if he broke my nose or blackened my eye I’d have proof he assaulted me.”

  “You do have proof! I saw the whole thing!”

  Shay laughed. “They’re gonna be real attentive at the police station when you demand justice for me, right? After they told us to mind our own business? You can bet that Hunter-Cole has someone on the payroll over there, anyway. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the next person to get in our face is a cop.”

  The scattered buildings—prefab housing, mostly, with a few battered-looking shacks and cinder-block buildings here and there—gave way to a tiny business district, the main road bisected by two other streets and a single stop sign. A general store had several neon beverage signs in the window. There was a feed and hardware store and a secondhand shop. A gray-sided building with a green roof was the nicest-looking structure, the sign lettered onto the side reading INDIAN AFFAIRS.