A Map of the Dark

by Karen Ellis

  Before she has a chance to turn away, he leans over the table and attaches his spare daughter-button to her shirt, a knuckle pressing into her shoulder for leverage to close the pin. She wonders if he can feel how fast her heart is beating at the unexpectedness of this strange gesture, the fact that he’s touching her, actually touching her.

  “Extra protection,” he says, “for my rosebud.”

  Elsa wanders out from under the tent, calming herself, refusing to make too much of that oddball—search parties always attract a handful of socially inept volunteers, people who don’t get invited to real parties so they show up to any gathering that will have them—and veers in the direction of the street. She removes the button from her shirt and tosses it into her bag. Dials Lex’s cell again and this time, finally, he answers.

  “Where are you?” she asks.

  “Station house,” he says. “I thought I told you.”

  “You didn’t. Listen, I spent some time with Ruby’s parents, and we need to talk—Ruby had a fake gun.”

  “Shit.”

  “I’m on my way over. I just have to track down my niece…” As soon as Elsa says it, she spots Mel across the road in the company of a teenage girl. “See you in a few.”

  Mel and the girl walk with their heads tilted together, chatting. The instinct that Mel shouldn’t be here returns with force.

  Shading her eyes with her hand, Elsa says, “There you are.”

  The girl, whose limp blond hair angles across her face in such a way as to reveal only half of it, looks out suspiciously with a crisp blue eye: Who is this random person, and why is she talking to us?

  Mel says, “Hi, Auntie Elsa.”

  “Oh,” says the girl. “She’s your aunt.”

  “Yeah, but she’s an FBI agent,” Mel tells her, “and she’s, like, one of the people in charge of the investigation. Special Agent Myers.” The name rolls off her tongue with a borrowed authority.

  Distrust quivers across the girl’s features and suddenly Elsa recognizes her from Ruby’s Facebook page.

  “Please, call me Elsa.” She offers a hand, which the girl shakes hesitantly. “You’re a friend of Ruby’s.”

  Mel smiles. “This is Allie.”

  Resisting an urge to say, Yes, I realize that, Elsa says, “Ah, the elusive Allie.”

  “The what?”

  “We’ve been trying to reach you. Didn’t you get our messages?”

  “Who’s we?”

  “Me and my partner, Detective Cole.”

  “I never listen to my messages.”

  “He even stopped by your house.”

  “When?”

  “Yesterday. No one was home.”

  Allie shrugs and seems on the verge of an eye-roll but stops herself, blinking away the impulse to dismiss this probing adult.

  Elsa says, “I understand you saw Ruby on Friday night. At work.”

  “I was the last one to see her,” Allie clarifies.

  Lowering her voice, Elsa asks, “Allie, did Ruby say anything to you about the fake gun she took from her father’s workshop last week?”

  They look uncomfortably into each other’s eyes a moment. “Gun?” Allie says. “No.”

  Elsa’s pulse spikes, a subtlety in the emphasis of that no. She wants to get the girl alone and is about to suggest it when Allie’s phone emits a repetitive boinging sound. She steps aside to read the message. When she’s done, she looks at Elsa. “I’m so scared about Ruby, I really want to help …but if I don’t hurry I’ll be late for my math Regents. Should I skip it, do you think?”

  “You can’t think of anything else Ruby said that might be useful to us?”

  “Honestly,” Allie says, “trust me, if I knew anything, I would tell you.”

  “Okay.” Elsa nods, though it isn’t okay; the minute people start spouting honestlys and trust mes, red flags wave. “Go ahead, but I’d like to touch base with you later.” She hands Allie her card. “Call me.”

  “I will. Promise.” Allie walks away quickly, thumb-scrolling the face of her phone.

  “Did that seem weird to you?” Elsa asks Mel. “Kind of…abrupt?” As they pass the tent, she notices Teddy watching them.

  “Did Ruby really have a gun?”

  And he’s listening too, Elsa thinks. “Shh. Keep your voice down.”

  “Did she?”

  “It’s plastic.”

  “Yeah, but still.”

  “I would have liked to talk with Allie a little longer.”

  “She has a test—don’t take it personally.” The way Mel says it—in defense of the girl, conspirators in a newly plotted friendship—sends a frazzle of discomfort through Elsa.

  “Listen, Mellie, I need to work without distractions. I’m hoping we can get back up to Sleepy Hollow tomorrow and I have a lot to do first.”

  “The hospital”—Mel’s face clouds—“is so depressing.”

  Impatience crackles, and Elsa orders, “Come on, we’re going.”

  “Wait—why?” Mel follows her aunt in the direction of the car. “That detective said you guys were looking for Allie. I found her for you. I was only trying to help.”

  “Mel.” Elsa raises her voice, finally out of earshot of Teddy and the tent and the other searchers. “This is an investigation—I can’t have my family members getting involved.” Elsa unlocks the car with a remote bleep.

  “Why not?”

  Another car pulls to a stop to wait for the parking space. Too upset to answer, knowing that Because isn’t going to cut it, Elsa defaults to an authoritative “Get in.”

  Mel is silent all the way into Manhattan. This time, when José opens the car door, Elsa says firmly, “Stay inside until class. I mean it.” Feeling that if Mel is locked inside, she’ll be safe. Knowing that isn’t necessarily true. Elsa’s skin itches but she denies herself the satisfaction of scratching. Instead, she holds her breath, watching as Mel disappears behind the brilliantly reflective glass doors—an apparition that is fully there and then suddenly gone.

  8

  So what do we make of this gun thing?” Lex swings a cowboy boot onto the edge of the station-house conference table and leans over to inspect a seam that’s coming apart.

  “Lex, that’s disgusting.” Elsa pulls the half sandwich he saved for her, tuna, away from the dirty sole of his boot.

  “Sorry.” He lands his foot on the floor. “Didn’t sleep a whole lot last night, lost my manners.”

  Elsa folds the sandwich into its wax paper wrapping. She isn’t hungry. “Clearly Ruby was up to something. The Amber yielded nothing, and now this.”

  “You know who I’m pissed at right now?”

  Elsa nods.

  “The father,” he says, “for not telling me this up front.”

  “Yup.”

  “What was he thinking?”

  “He wasn’t, apparently. He was feeling. Lex, people seize up when they’re scared. It’s human nature.”

  “Sure. But we’re talking about his daughter.”

  “Yeah, I know. I’m pretty pissed at him too.”

  “So, Ruby had a gun—why? And she turned off the security tape at work—why? And then she disappeared.” Tapping his boot on the floor to the rhythm of questions unpaired with answers, tiny echoes bouncing off the hard walls.

  Elsa’s phone bleeps with a text from Marco letting them know that a liaison from BAU-3—the section of the Behavioral Analysis Unit that deals specifically with children—is available to consult on the case. Calling in the BAU can mean leaps forward, but it can also bring more delays, and until now Elsa hasn’t been ready to initiate that crapshoot. She tells Lex, “Marco wants us to talk to someone at the BAU. At this point, I think he’s right.”

  “Psychologist?”

  “More or less, but with Quantico mojo behind them.”

  “Probably a good idea.”

  Elsa answers Marco, tells him to go ahead and arrange it. In minutes, the call comes through.

  “Hello.” The anal
yst’s tone is rich with confidence. “Just to start by introducing myself, I’m Dr. Joan Gottesman Bailey but please call me either Dr. Bailey or, preferably, Joan. I understand that you’ve got a missing seventeen-year-old, and you’re looking just for phone consultation at this point?”

  Elsa answers, “Correct.”

  “Well, a teenager that old could easily still turn up, of course.”

  “Exactly.”

  “She’s been gone how long? Catch me up.”

  Elsa begins at the beginning, retelling a story that becomes less knowable the more familiar it gets.

  “Okay,” Joan says, “let me get on this,” and already Elsa can hear the faraway click of typing as she taps, presumably, into the powerful database of the NCAVC—the National Center for the Analysis of Violent Crime. Elsa feels a murky combination of encouragement and fatigue, her thoughts swinging briefly to her father and an urge to call him, followed closely by a savage itch on her shoulder. When she reaches under her collar to scratch, Lex’s attention shifts to her and she pulls her hand away from her skin. He stares at her with a disturbing intensity, finishing up his own phone call.

  “What?” she asks.

  “That was MasterCard. Ruby’s credit card was used this morning—in Vermont, outside Bennington.”

  9

  Coins of sunshine flash through the branches until leaves grow so dense they block out nearly all the light. The deeper in they go, the darker it gets. Her wrists are bound tight, like she’s praying. Her parents raised her as an atheist and she never thought of it before but there are different kinds of prayers. Anything can be one, if you want it to.

  What is a quark?

  The smallest unit of matter; makes up protons.

  What are molecules?

  Two or more atoms held together by chemical bonds.

  What is an organelle?

  Part of a cell that has a specific function.

  What are five types of organelles?

  Nucleus, mitochondrion, something something, something, Golgi body.

  The rope chafes with every step and then with a pop she feels the skin on her right wrist break apart. Pain burns raw. He’s got her cuffs tied to another rope that’s attached to his belt, so if she tries to get away he’ll feel a pull. He walks in front of her, fast, tugging her along in short jerky steps.

  She stopped pleading an hour ago. Now she quietly goes where he goes, wherever that is. He’s crazy. And strong. He actually used the word love before and she thought about becoming a nun if she lived. Or a monk if they took girls. Or just someone who lived alone and kept away from everyone. Her mother would try to stop her from “thinking that way” and help her forget the nightmare that was past. But it isn’t past yet; it’s happening now. This is her life right now. This is what is happening to her today.

  She summons a feeling of her mother reaching for her to pull her out of this, and thinking about her mother makes her see a future, a tiny glimmer up ahead, as in the real world, the world outside of this. But in the now world, the right-here world, her last view of daylight is swallowed into a false sunset. And she feels a heaviness. A sadness. And she does not want to go on.

  But then the side of her neck twitches with the little marching band of her tattoos, her Smurfy dwarfs mobilizing themselves for a meeting of the board. She invented them by accident, drawing on her bedroom wall when she was eight, angry at her parents, pencil in hand. Gradually their world grew and she called it Hopewall, a town and a world of its own, population currently one hundred and twelve.

  They just keep reproducing. And they are busy, always up to something.

  Their leaders are the original members of the clan: Carrie and Velma and Arnold (no one is named Arnold anymore) and Jesus, pronounced Hey-Zeus. Which is why when she got her first tat on her fifteenth birthday—just her and two friends and a tattoo artist who didn’t care about parental consent, not that her parents have an issue with tattoos; “Choose your battles,” her mother always says—she brought a drawing of them with her to the mall. The tattooist did a pretty good job, etching the miniature creations in a daisy chain climbing her neck. Now her little quartet, her board of directors, travels everywhere with her, all expenses paid. They always seem to know when a plan veers off course and are ready to volunteer for anything at a moment’s notice.

  Sensing trouble, they leap off her neck and shimmer into view on the ground in front of her, waving, calling, cajoling, urging her forward.

  “Do not give up!” Velma orders.

  “You go, girl,” Jesus prods, “you go.”

  Carrie scowls. “This isn’t cheerleading.”

  Arnold marches quietly among them; he’s scared too.

  Velma, always practical, suggests: “Use your time to study!”

  Order from smallest to largest:

  Cell, tissue, organ, organ system, organism.

  She wiggles her fingers until her remaining ring, the purple one, shimmies down over her knuckle and then past her other knuckle and falls to the ground with a soundless plop that she decides only she can hear.

  If a ring drops in a forest and no one is there but you and him, does it make a sound?

  10

  The sign says PARKING ONLY WHILE SHOPPING AT GREENBERG’S. The lumberyard’s outbuildings sprawl around the lot, green barnlike structures sheltering pallets of hewn wood planks, shelves stocked with vats of compound and paint and sundry other construction materials. Astride one building, a forklift is parked behind a flatbed truck, which is parked behind a cherry picker, an able convoy awaiting purpose in the sweet Vermont air. Elsa pulls in and takes the spot closest to the door marked OFFICE.

  “Doesn’t look like the kind of place a teenage girl would go shopping,” Elsa observes from behind the wheel.

  “Nope.” Lex kicks up a storm of dust when he slams shut the passenger door.

  Across the road, an empty lot is filled with starved, yellow grass. It looks as if it hasn’t rained in a while, though the sky is so mottled with gray-white clouds that she suspects the drought won’t last much longer.

  They cross the lot to the office door. Inside a small room stacked with paperwork is an industrial desk with a sign reading BOSS/SECRETARY/GREENBERG HISSELF. No one is there. Something moves inside a garbage can filled with crumpled paper, and then a mouse catapults out.

  “Mr. Greenberg?” Lex asks, chuckling.

  Elsa makes way for the mouse to leave through the front door, feeling proud of herself, lover of all life, when a large steel-toed work boot crushes it. It doesn’t make a sound. The person belonging to the boot kicks the remains outside before they can get a look at it, which is fine by Elsa. She’s seen plenty of bodies over the years—dead, almost dead, dead a long time—but something about an oversize person destroying an undersized creature for no reason gives her pause.

  “Wow,” she mutters.

  To the six-foot-plus, two-hundred-fifty-pound red-haired man standing in front of them, Lex says, “Detective Lex Cole, New York Police Department, sorry to barge in unexpected.”

  “Cops?” the guy asks. “You’re always welcome here. Mice, not so much. I’m Greenberg. What can I do you for?”

  Elsa introduces herself, earning an eyebrow hike that would be comical if it weren’t so offensive, the disrespectful Lady detective scowl every female investigator suffers from time to time. She ignores it. “You sold something this morning, about eight thirty, for exactly”—she consults her phone, where she’d jotted the number on her notepad app—“twenty-one dollars and sixty-seven cents. We’re wondering who you sold it to.”

  Greenberg says, “Huh.”

  They stand back to give him space as he comes around to the front of the desk, where he presses himself into the chair and flicks on his desktop monitor. After a minute, he looks up from the digital receipt. “Yup. Eight thirty-two a.m., for the amount you said, to one Ruby Haverstock. Shit. Wait a minute.” His eyes flicker. “Damn. I made that sale myself, a dozen pine boards and a
pound of nails, but it was a dude comes in here from time to time. ’Cept these days, you never really know if someone decided to make a change—guy, girl, whatever.”

  “You don’t pay attention to the name on the credit card when you make a sale?” Elsa asks, stating the obvious in question form solely because she wants to see his reaction.

  “Usually I do, ma’am. But this morning we were busy, and I was waiting on the coffeepot to finish. Wasn’t too clear, I guess. Damn. Damn.”

  “Okay.” She stops him. “You’re not in trouble, Mr. Greenberg. We just want to know who used the card.”

  “Don’t know his name, just his face.”

  “Can you make that bigger?”

  Enlarged, the digital receipt shows a loop and a slash, a signature that could be anyone’s.

  “Do you by any chance keep security cameras on-site?”

  “You bet we do.” He slap-types angrily until he finds what he wants. “Been robbed too many times not to keep our eyes open. You wouldn’t believe the junkies we got up here, and we carry copper wire, so you know what we’re up against.”

  “Bane of every construction outfit all across the country, I hear,” Lex says.

  “Oh yeah.” Greenberg types. “Okay, okay, here we go.” He squints at the screen, furiously tapping the keyboard’s down arrow. “Eight fifteen to eight forty-five this morning, that sound about right?”

  “Just to save time,” Elsa says, “let’s narrow that to eight twenty-five to eight forty. Unless the buyer browsed?”

  “Nope. He came, he ordered, he paid, he went.”

  Elsa and Lex stand behind Greenberg and watch some extremely boring television for four minutes, and then a dented white van drives into the camera’s frame. Parks. Someone inside pauses to sip from a large cardboard cup and adjusts his aviator sunglasses in the rearview mirror before he steps out of the van. He carries the cup with him, finishes what’s in it, and tosses it into the trash. Elsa makes a mental note to retrieve it on their way out.

  For a moment he looks familiar, and then he doesn’t. On the tall side, jeans, black T-shirt, a couple days of stubble, longish messy brown hair. Elsa asks, “Can you please replay that?”