by Karen Ellis
A shiny black SUV swerves around her car and pulls in behind the pickup. At the wheel is a woman with cropped bleached hair and bright red lipstick. She strides across the lawn in her pretty sundress and leather sandals and polished toenails, then pauses to look at Elsa. Who looks back. So it’s true; even way out here, on the urban edge of basically nowhere, gentrification is seeping in. To think, a pool.
“You must be the new owner,” Elsa says.
The woman doesn’t smile. “Can I help you?”
“No.” Definitely not. Elsa can’t imagine a single way this woman could possibly help her.
She starts her engine, drives to the end of the block, turns off Whitelaw Street onto Albert Road. Chastises herself for giving in to impatience; she doesn’t think clearly when she allows anxiety to guide her. What did she expect, going home in the daytime (not home anymore), when common sense suggests she should only return in the dark when no one’s looking? She should have done what she’d told Lex she was doing and gone into the office. Maybe she still will, if only to erase her lie.
The ceiling fan tick-tick-ticks its steady rotations above the bullpen of pushed-together desks, a vast chopped-up space with sealed windows overlooking the snaky gray East River on one side and the towers of lower Manhattan on the other. The morning has devolved into waiting: for Lex to report that he’s located Charlie; for the interlopers to vacate (if temporarily) the family house long enough for Elsa to get back in; for Marco to return to their call from the on-hold void he’d left her in. Finally, she gives up trying to ignore the rhythmic beats of the fan, wheels away from her desk, crosses the room, with her phone still in her hand, and switches it off. Like when a refrigerator hum suddenly stops, a delicious hush unfurls across the eleventh floor.
“Do you mind?” Matt Gonzales looks at her with his up-too-late-last-night bloodshot eyes. “And you in long sleeves—aren’t you hot?”
“Not really.”
A sheen of sweat materializes on his forehead.
Elsa switches the fan back on.
On her colleague’s desk, as casual as a flung-open magazine, sits a file on a missing child with a picture: a boy photographed against a backdrop of a bookcase, with side-combed hair, freckles, and a milk-carton smile. Elsa is sure she’s seen him a thousand times before and wonders why some parents insist on sending school photos when something personal and specific would be much more helpful. Even so, despite the generic quality of the picture, the boy’s eyes call to her. They always do. Green, clear, bright, impossibly innocent.
She asks “How’d it go yesterday?” assuming the photo is from his Bronx case.
Gonzales looks momentarily baffled, and then shrugs. “Yesterday was great. Took my son to Yankee Stadium.” Elsa knows that his son is twelve years old and crazy for baseball, but that isn’t what strikes her about his answer.
“I thought Marco put you on a case yesterday—you were supposed to be first in rotation.”
He chortles. “Guess Marco pulled a fast one on you.”
She already knows that Lex Cole requested her because he’d told her so, but why did Marco have to add a lie to an omission? Marco’s voice resurfaces on the other end of their call. She lifts the phone back up to her ear. “Okay, Elsa, I had to kick ’em in the pants but they’re putting the reports through now. Keep an eye on your e-mail and you should start to see things within a few minutes.” A victory, given that until now none of the administrators of the implode-on-demand messaging apps have ponied up with the records for Ruby.
“Thanks.”
“Talk later.”
“Marco, wait. Tell me again why you put me on this case.”
A beat. She wants him to know that she knows, and she wants him to regret lying to her—and to never do it again. And he answers, “You were requested.”
“Oh. That’s funny. I thought it was because Gonzales wasn’t available.”
“I don’t believe he was.”
“Right, because he was at a baseball game. Versus me visiting my dying father.”
Marco sighs. “All right, I’m really sorry, I am, but I didn’t want to take all day twisting your arm and I wanted you on this one.”
“Why didn’t you just tell me someone asked for me?”
“Because I didn’t think you’d believe me.”
“My ego’s not that much in the toilet, is it?”
“Let’s just say you can be modest to a fault. Okay? So I came at it another way. Got you on board, didn’t I?” A hint of humor in his tone is infectious, and without meaning to she can’t help forgiving him.
“Fine. But next time, do me a favor and don’t bullshit me.”
“You got it.”
Back at her desk, the fan gyrating noisily above her head, Elsa clicks and clicks and clicks on her e-mail until a new batch floods in. Marco was right; all at once, each of the texting apps has finally responded to the warrants.
Kik and Yik Yak yield nothing—neither does Whisper, Ask, Omegle, Down, or Poof. If Ruby uses those apps at all, the texts that have already been read have self-destructed. But two unopened messages from her are sitting on Snapchat’s server, both addressed to Paul, the boy she’d mentioned in recent journal entries. Ruby had sent him a close-up photo of one of her eyes with the pupil pinprick-small, as if she were staring into a light. He never retrieved the message. Half an hour later, about fifteen minutes before she turned off the security camera at Queens Beans, she sent Paul another unopened message: 10. C u. Bring.
Elsa glances up between the tall buildings and notes the cotton-batting sky. Rain is coming. She thinks of Allie, who still hasn’t responded to any of their calls or texts. She’s beginning to see what Ruby meant in her journal about her best friend being a real bitch sometimes, but then she catches herself. There has to be a reason for all this silence.
She picks up her phone to check in with Lex, but before she has a chance, a text from him pops onto her screen: Found Charlie. Pier 62 Skatepark, Chelsea Piers. I’ll wait for you there.
Paul likes to skateboard, she recalls. He alone?
Nope.
On my way.
The park is busy with people in shorts and T-shirts or summer dresses, lapping up ice cream and scarfing down hot dogs and bottles of water. A pack of boys on skateboards swoop up and down and around the undulating curves of a concrete bowl, their bodies arcing into the movement. Standing beside Lex, watching from a distance, Elsa is amazed by the grace of these young men. She recognizes one as Charlie Hendryk, gangly, with close-cut dark hair, but in the blur of frenetic movement she can’t tell if Paul is among them.
The sun beats down on Elsa in her slacks and long sleeves, a sheen of heat pillowing between skin and fabric. Not since she was a child has she exposed herself to sun or prying eyes, and though she’s used to the discomfort of what’s become her eccentric-in-summertime mode of dressing, she is never unaware of the difficult position her compulsion has put her in. By the end of June, which is when she generally gets around to switching from her winter wardrobe, she’ll change to white linen and a broad sun hat, a costume suggesting an aversion to sun, not to visibility.
Lex asks Elsa, “Why aren’t they in school?”
“Regents week.” The end-of-school-year week devoted to state testing for public high-school students; different subjects were tested at different times, so the kids popped in and out of school.
“Ah, right.”
He lifts a hand to cover a yawn, and suddenly she smells the deli’s exclusive patchouli as if it wafted out of his clothes with the movement of his arm. She steps closer to him and the scent grows stronger. She presses her nose into her own sleeve to take a whiff and there it is, woven into the fabric of the same shirt she wore yesterday. She’d failed to bring a change of clothes to the hospital last night.
He grins. “Laundry day?”
“No. I thought you smelled like something, but it was me.”
The grin broadens; he tilts his head as if about to deliver
a comeback, but then he doesn’t.
Surprised by her disappointment—she wants to hear what he has to say—she relegates herself to silence as well. Embarrassment sets in. The intensity of her visits to the family house hits her now, how her personal worries have risen to the front of her consciousness and threaten to skew the investigation, tempt her to see everything through the lens of her own story. It’s one of the biggest mistakes an investigator can make; she learned early not to allow her private mind and her professional mind to merge. She tells herself that the confluence of her father’s illness, the sale of the house, and the mysterious disappearance of yet another child is making her too sensitive. It isn’t the first time that her tendency to overthink has edged her a little off track. She tells herself to stop it, stop it right now, and plant her focus back on Ruby. On personally questioning the ex-boyfriend. On the hope that one of these skateboarders is the boy Ruby was trying to reach just before she disappeared.
The strange moment dissipates when three younger boys glide over to the bowl and wait for a signal to join in, which never comes. When one of them dives in anyway, he’s summarily chased out by a boy with long hair flying around his face. Rebuffed, the interlopers move to another bowl. Charlie and his friends yowl at one another and shake their fists.
Elsa notes, “They’re a tight group.”
“United front.”
The boy who chased away the gatecrashers now flies above the edge of the bowl and simultaneously yanks off his T-shirt, throwing it down before diving back into the anarchy of male bodies. Elsa is startled to see that his back is covered by a tattoo of a dog, and the dog is wearing a crown.
Unless, of course, the dog is a wolf.
Paul King of the Wolfpack. Not a hundred and seven, but maybe seventeen.
Elsa says, “See that boy who just took off his shirt?”
“With the big tattoo?”
“I think that’s Ruby’s new boyfriend.”
Elsa and Lex approach the bowl and stand with their feet right at the edge, calmly watching the boys until Charlie notices them and signals his friends to slow down. One by one, they fly up and out, land hard, and snap their boards up into their hands. They cluster, the six of them, while Charlie approaches alone. Tall and lanky. A mess of short brown hair.
“Hello, Officer.”
“Detective,” Lex corrects him. “This is my colleague Special Agent Myers. She’s with the FBI.”
“Elsa.” Smiling, offering a hand. “Mind if we have a chat?”
The boy’s eyes, filigreed with fresh bloodshot, glance at Lex. “Is Ruby still not home?”
“That’s right,” Elsa says. “I know you already talked with Detective Cole, but I have a few questions too. Forgive me if we go over some of the same ground.”
“I can’t believe this.” Charlie glances behind him at his friends, all watching closely.
Elsa asks, “When was the last time you saw her?”
The way his expression clouds, something jumps in her chest. “Friday, I think it was. At school.”
Elsa doesn’t flinch. She clearly recalls Lex telling her that Charlie reported seeing Ruby last on Thursday.
And then, as if reading her, Charlie corrects himself: “No, Thursday. It was Thursday, in the cafeteria. I mean, I see her around at school all the time. We’re in the same grade. So.”
“Okay if I ask a personal question?”
He shakes his head, but answers, “Sure, it’s okay.”
“I know that you and Ruby used to go out, and that you broke up. But were you interested in getting back together with her?” Beside her, Lex shifts his stance. He probably hadn’t thought to ask this question yesterday when he spoke with Charlie; in Elsa’s experience, the guy cops almost never do.
A flush rises on the boy’s acne-scarred cheeks. “Maybe.”
“Did you try?”
He nods, looking at the ground.
“When?”
“A couple of weeks ago. I really like Ruby. I tried to get her back, it’s true, but she wasn’t interested, so I gave up. That’s it. I can’t believe she’s missing. I’ll do anything I can to help find her.”
“We know you will,” Elsa tells him, because kids always deserve the benefit of the doubt. At first, anyway.
Lex asks, “What about your friends? Any of them know her?”
Charlie turns around. “Yo, Paul, get over here!”
The boy with the wolf tattoo lumbers over with a comically awkward gait, a surprise considering his mastery of a skateboard and a camera lens. Up close, he looks very young, barely sprouting facial hair.
Paul says, “Hello, ma’am and sir?”
“They’re looking for Ruby,” Charlie tells his friend.
Elsa asks, “Mind if we talk to Paul alone?”
They wait until Charlie rejoins their friends, out of earshot.
“Paul,” Elsa begins, “were you and Ruby planning to get together on Friday night?”
“Yeah, like, she was supposed to meet me?” A waver in Paul’s voice. “At, like, ten o’clock? And, like, she didn’t show?”
“You give her a call?” Lex probes. “Find out where she was?”
“I dunno, maybe. Like, I can’t remember.”
“Text? Anything?”
Paul shrugs his thin shoulders. “I didn’t hear from her, so, like, I figured she wasn’t going to make it.”
“Were you and Ruby”—Elsa almost says dating and corrects herself—“hooking up?”
Again, Paul shrugs. Apparently, he doesn’t know that either.
She leans in and informs him, “You didn’t open two Snapchats from her.”
“Wait, you saw our Snapchats?” Paul’s jaw actually drops, as if this intrusion into his privacy is the real problem at the moment.
“Was she supposed to bring something at ten o’clock, or were you?”
“I dunno what you’re talking about.”
Elsa forces a deep breath. “How old are you?”
“Sixteen.”
The same age as Mel. No wonder teenage girls generally prefer older boys. Elsa has to wonder what Ruby, who has nearly two years on Paul, sees in him.
“What was she going to bring you, Paul?”
“Nothing.”
“What were you going to bring her, then?”
This time there’s a slight pause. “Nothing.”
“How well do you and Ruby know each other?”
He shrugs again. “I don’t know.”
“Is she your girlfriend?”
“We weren’t, like, hooking up, to answer your question.”
“What were you doing?”
“Nothing. Just hanging out.”
“Alone?”
“Not really.”
“Does she skateboard too?”
“I dunno.”
There are no girls in their group today, and Elsa guesses that this is an exclusively boys-only activity—wolfpacking together. She can’t bring herself to believe that Paul is the leader of this posse. Is Charlie?
The pack reassembles, and Elsa and Lex hand each of the boys their cards with instructions to get in touch if they hear anything about Ruby’s whereabouts. As soon as the investigators turn their backs and walk away, the boys on their skateboards crash and whoop back into the bowl.
“They don’t seem to give a shit,” Elsa says.
“No, they do. They’re just boys, bad at talking.”
“I’ll say.”
“Thing that struck me is that Charlie seems to be putting on an act with these kids, trying to be cool. At home yesterday, in front of his mother, he was smart and articulate. I don’t know why he’s hanging around with those losers.”
They watch in silence for another few seconds as the boys circle one another in the bowl. Lex leans closer to Elsa as if joining her in seeing the same thing, the patchouli smell rising again, that powerful, unmistakable smell of the deli. Her thoughts reverse to yesterday, the half-wrecked house, and apprehension reki
ndles with an urge to run back yet again, but her mind takes over and quashes the impulse. She can still see the pursed red lips of the new owner, assessing her suspiciously—the recollection sends a flare of shame through her. It isn’t the Myers family home anymore. Elsa has no right to lurk there. Her father’s words echo like a skipped stone: Let it go, let it go, let it go. Move forward. Don’t look back.
7
The Haverstocks’ postage-stamp lawn is half mowed, the wild part strewn with spent dandelions, as if the job was postponed a long time and then hastily abandoned. To the left, beside the house, a white tent over chaos. People everywhere. A barrel with plastic water bottles sweating under the noon sun. Just beyond the tent and its dark swath of shade, a pair of reporters stand in the brightness interviewing a middle-aged couple.
“That the parents?” Elsa asks Lex. She parks at the curb behind a television van with an enormous antenna sprouting from its roof. She’s been here before, many times; not here but here, in the roiling belly of a community trying to reel back in one of its children. Someone lost or taken or just gone. Sometimes it succeeds, sometimes it doesn’t, but for Elsa this is always the moment when the strain of not-knowing kicks in. A reviled and familiar helplessness prickles across her skin.
“Yup. Peter and Ginnie Haverstock.”
The father, tall and stomachy, has one arm fastened around his wife’s shoulders. Her lips tremble as she speaks, her skin pale, untended black bangs stringy on her forehead.
Elsa and Lex get out of the car and cross the lawn. Under the tent, a long table is a free-for-all of food. Dunkin’ Donuts has donated takeout coffee and dozens upon dozens of doughnuts, and people have brought homemade meals. Another table is stacked with photocopies and manned by a woman in a white visor wearing a stick-on name tag.
“Welcome to the circus,” Elsa mutters to Lex, slipping into a useless digression in her mind: What would her life have been like if this many people had swarmed to the house in Ozone Park in search of her, only to find her huddled in a locked closet? She imagines the relief, the celebration, but wonders if outsiders could really comprehend how lost a child can be inside her own house. At some point you’re beyond saving; no one can show you how to unswallow all that darkness.
