A Map of the Dark

by Karen Ellis

  You continue your work, pretending not to hear. Your heart races but you stay put, stubborn to the core. Because it isn’t fair. It isn’t fair. It isn’t fair.

  Deb repeats, “Move down.”

  “Mommy says move,” Tara echoes from below.

  If you press the pencil harder into the page, the gray darkens and the numbers grow bold. Mrs. Fisher will appreciate that.

  Even before it starts, you know what’s coming. The metal cooking spoon whacks hard against the back of your neck and then, when you turn to face your mother so she can see your eyes at the moment of her cruelty, it slams your shoulder. There will be bruises, maybe blood, depending on how long she keeps it up this time.

  Pain carries the report of a new attack quickly through your nerves, lighting you up with an impulse to bolt, but your brain is ready. You rarely run anymore because Deb always catches up with you, and sometimes it’s easier just to get it over with. At eleven, you’ve grown up and accepted your punishment, though punishment for what, you’re still unsure, except that it has something to do with your innate badness or wrongness or nastiness or all of the above.

  The reddish-brownish sauce splatters across the kitchen with every strike before Deb runs out of gas. This time, eight in all, two short of the usual ten.

  You learn another lesson: with endurance comes progress.

  By the end of it, Tara has snuck away with her Barbies. Your homework has been ruined with sauce from the stew. And Deb, who has exhausted herself, has retreated to her room with a glass of wine. You clean up the kitchen, change your clothes, and redo your math on a fresh sheet of paper.

  When your father gets home from work, he kisses you on the cheek and asks how your day has gone. “Fine,” you tell him. But you know that he knows, because he has to, doesn’t he? The kitchen is too clean for this hour of the day, the house too quiet, everyone in a different room.

  24

  It has something to do with his sisters,” Elsa says.

  The faces of her fellow investigators come into focus, turning to her with surprise as if she’d left the room and barged back in with an interruption. She had left the room, in a way; she’d zoned out deeply enough to miss a whole section of their conversation.

  Lex asks, “What?”

  “His sisters bullied him—three sisters. He could be reenacting something.”

  “Or reinventing it,” Joan says, in energized agreement, “for a better outcome in which he’s less hurt. He’s scratching an unsatisfiable itch, for the third time.”

  An unsatisfiable itch. Yes, that’s it. Elsa’s skin electrifies with understanding, telling her they’re on the right track. This is how it always happens. This is the feeling she gets when the pieces of a case start to fit. Lex was right—it’s why she’s so good at this work, and why it’s so painful. Her skin tells her when a child is within her reach, her unstoppable, unfixable skin.

  Elsa turns back to the list of girls. She pulls up all their Facebook pages and arranges them across her screen: rows of moody teenagers. Thinking aloud, she says, “Wouldn’t it make sense that he’d play this out close to home? Home being the operable concept for a guy whose sisters tormented him. This one girl, Hope Martin-Creech, disappeared the very morning that Ishmael Locke went shopping in her town—Bennington, Vermont, just across the border from Sammy Nelson’s upstate cabin.”

  A click and there is a happy selfie Hope recently posted on Facebook. Her wide smile defies a tapered chin. Lank dirty-blond hair, angled at her jaw, a flyaway wisp off her forehead. Pale brown eyes. Freckles sprinkled across her cheeks and nose. Tattoos of impish figures climbing one side of her neck. “Sixteen. Tenth grade. Lives with her parents and two younger brothers. Good student, no boyfriend, no drugs, no problems. Hasn’t been seen since Monday morning when she left for school.”

  “It makes sense to me,” Joan agrees.

  Lex says, “Me too.”

  “We’ve got DNA profiles from some of the hair samples in the van,” Owen says. “Let’s see if we can get a sample from this Hope girl. See if there’s a match.”

  Lex says, “If she’s not on file, then maybe her parents have her hairbrush. I’ll make some calls.”

  “No,” Elsa says, “I’ll do it.”

  Reaching for her phone, she uncrosses her legs abruptly and feels a warm, wet trickle along her shin. It’s happened before: the wound weeping too generously for the bandage to hold. Most women fear getting their period on white pants in front of other people. Elsa? Her blood has been known to flow embarrassingly from anywhere.

  “You okay?” The way Lex is looking at her, like a concerned brother. He reads her too well.

  “Fine.” The phone is already ringing. There’s no time to get to the bathroom so she reaches down to adjust the bandage, if only temporarily. Her call is answered halfway through the first ring.

  A woman’s voice, thin with distress: “Hello?”

  “Is this Mrs. Martin-Creech, Hope’s mother?”

  “Yes.”

  “I don’t want to alarm you, Mrs. Martin-Creech, but this is Elsa Myers, I’m with the FBI and I’m calling because—”

  The woman says to someone near her, “Ernie—it’s the FBI.”

  A man comes on the line: “This is Detective Sergeant Ernie Bennett.”

  Elsa introduces herself. “We’re looking for a seventeen-year-old girl missing from New York City since Friday, and we’ve connected her to someone who traveled from here to Bennington in the last twenty-four hours. This man, he’s a known repeater, and we’re concerned that—”

  “You’re calling about Hope.”

  Elsa’s bandage breaks loose again; blood moves down her ankle. “Yes.”

  “She’s been missing since yesterday,” Bennett tells her, “and this morning we found two items of her jewelry in the woods near her house, so we figure she was in there at one point. Now, with what you’re telling me, Special Agent…”

  “Myers. If he does have Hope,” she says, “then he’s probably got our girl too. In the past he took them in groups of three.”

  Bennett falls silent so abruptly, she suspects he’s swallowing a curse he won’t let loose in front of the frightened mother.

  Holding the phone away from her mouth, Elsa asks Lex, “How fast can you get us a copter?”

  Lex answers, “Right away.”

  “Do it.”

  To Detective Sergeant Bennett, she says, “Hold tight, we’ll be there as soon as we can.”

  25

  #getmethefuckoutofhere, Mel types after uploading the selfie of her blazing-red cheek, deleting the addendum #hatemymom because that just feels too harsh. But still. Post. And now the cold fact that her mother just slapped her, hard, is out into the vast cyber-cloudy nether-space of whereverness that is Facebook. Part of the conversation. Feels good and right for one split second and then embarrassment sets in.

  Delete.

  High noon in the hospital parking lot, bright and unfiltered. Mel holds a hand over her eyes and contemplates her next move. She’d stomped down the hall with her mother chasing her saying “You can’t leave when Gramp is about to die!” actually saying die in her mad voice right there on the cancer ward where everyone really is dying and no one needs that kind of tell-it-like-it-is reminder practically shouted in the hallways because it is what it is and they already know that. Mel knows Gramp is dying but he isn’t dying today.

  “Well, Mom, you fucking hit me.”

  “Shhhh.”

  “You don’t want anyone to hear about it but you didn’t mind doing it.”

  Ding and the elevator door opened and Mel stepped in and pressed the close-doors button over and over until they finally closed. Her mother just standing there looking shocked that her sweet little daughter would actually leave.

  Her mother has never hit her before.

  Her aunt has never betrayed her trust before.

  Adults are such hypocrites.

  She’ll go back to the city. Live her own
life in a way that feels honest.

  She swipes her phone for an Uber and, presto, up drives a blue car. Great app. You don’t have to wait.

  She doesn’t see an Uber sign anywhere but the window rolls down and the driver looks at her through his sunglasses and nods so she knows it’s her ride. She leans into the air-conditioning, says, “Train station,” and gets into the backseat. Some button he’s got pinned to his shirt glints for just a second; it’s a face, but she can’t see whose.

  The car curves out of the parking lot and she feels good, really good, making a break for it. The look on her mother’s face when the elevator doors closed. She’ll head to a friend’s place, not home—scare her mother, just overnight.

  After about ten minutes she notices fields, not buildings. “Excuse me, sir? Isn’t the train station the other way, in town?”

  His face looks sweaty, and now she notices a nasty scratch down one side. His left hand stays on the wheel while his right elbow crooks over the seat and he half turns for a quick look at her. When he smiles, a bend in his nose flattens out, but it isn’t really a smile. He says, “There’s a better train station in the next town.”

  She doesn’t know how one train station can be better than another unless it’s closer. But she doesn’t ask. This guy gives her the creeps. Just so long as he gets her there.

  She thumbs a text to Charlie: Can you meet me Met steps one hour? She should be back in the city by then.

  Her mother called him a drug dealer, but she doesn’t want his drugs and she only sort of likes him, but still, if she can get a selfie with him and throw it onto Facebook and not delete it, well, guess who wins round one? Her mother didn’t listen when Mel told her it was a stupid mistake and wouldn’t happen again. She just wouldn’t listen.

  yup will be there

  cool

  So that’s set.

  She feels the car swerve to a stop and looks up, expecting they’ll be at the train station. But they’re not. They are nowhere—not even a house in the distance. The bright blue sky from before has gone all gray, like rain is coming, like they’ve entered a different world.

  He turns around fast, his arm reaching all the way back to snatch her phone right out of her hand. “I like you,” he says, and he hurls it out the window.

  “What the fuck!”

  The back of his hand slams against her cheek so hard, she feels each knobby bone of his knuckles. Pain spitfires through her face, into her brain, silencing her.

  “Met your aunt yesterday”—lifting his sunglasses, showing her his eyes—“she was looking for you. Gotta say, you made this pretty easy; usually I have to work harder to get my girl. Only one hospital in Sleepy Hollow. And you—you got right into my car.”

  She recognizes him now: that weird guy from Ruby’s house who watched them, Auntie Elsa whispering, “Shhh.”

  A worm uncoils in her stomach.

  With a click, he locks the doors from up front. She rattles the handle but it won’t budge. He jerks the steering wheel and speeds back onto the road.

  26

  Faded white clapboard, chipped black shutters, a saggy porch. The Martin-Creech house would look neglected if not for the well-tended flower beds seaming the front walk with vibrant color. Deb was also that kind of gardener, Elsa remembers, keen on decorating the outlines. A FOR SALE sign is staked on a front lawn glistening wet from a quick rain amid the familiar chaos of neighbors and visitors who have gathered to help search for Hope.

  Every time Elsa thinks that—search for Hope, look for Hope, hunt for Hope, find Hope—the banal phrases confront an awful reality. Hope, in this case, is an actual girl, the second girl in a week to go missing at Nelson’s hand, her hair now positively identified in his van along with Ruby’s and the hair of two of the girls missing since 2012.

  Elsa glances around at the hive of state troopers, local detectives, FBI agents, neighbors, and strangers who have come to join the search, and she flashes back to yesterday at the Haverstocks. Scar tissue, she thinks; families and communities surging together to heal an unexpected injury. Lex and Joan stand beside her, taking it in.

  Just arrived, she group-texts Owen Tate and Rosie Santiago, who stayed behind in New York. How’s it going there? Elsa doesn’t envy them their task of contacting the families of those long-lost missing girls, ripping off the old scabs, poking a finger into the wounds. Asking questions and offering nothing but hopeless answers.

  Rosie responds: Painful. You?

  Circus, zoo, are the first words that spring to mind, but Elsa plugs the defensive sarcasm. Instead, she types, Still getting the lay of the land.

  Startled by a weight across her shoulders, she looks up from her phone and there is Joan Bailey administering a sideward hug. Elsa doesn’t know what to say; she doesn’t know if she likes the unexpected affection or if it crosses a boundary. Both, maybe. Fresh off a helicopter flight during which they chatted about irrelevant things, the two women numbing themselves with words while Lex shifted his focus between his phone and the obscurity of passing clouds, Elsa realizes now that that was not idle conversation. Joan had been sussing her out, therapizing her.

  Joan says, “I see an agent I know over there. He might have some insight.” The behavioral psychologist looks at Elsa with the kind of contemplative pause, ever so slight, that expresses an unspoken request for consent to step away.

  “Go ahead.” Elsa keeps her tone level, professional, despite a spark of emotion.

  Joan crosses the lawn toward a pair of men, one in uniform.

  Lex asks, “What was that?”

  Ignoring his question, because she doesn’t know what it was, not really, she says, “Let’s get started.”

  They go in search of Detective Sergeant Ernie Bennett but cross paths with a tall woman who stops when she sees them. An inch of gray roots borders the center part of her blond hair; her eyes droop, wet, heavy.

  “I’m Becky,” the woman says. “Hope’s mother. You must be Special Agent Myers from New York.”

  “Elsa, please. This is Detective Lex Cole, NYPD.” As she reaches to shake the mother’s hand, a wind gust lopes out of nowhere and she has to push hair out of her eyes and tug down a sleeve to fix herself.

  “Thank you for coming,” Becky says, “thank you so much, this has been such a nightmare.”

  “We understand,” Elsa says. “We’re going to do everything we can to help find your daughter. Becky, I know this is awful for you, but do you mind if we jump right in?”

  “Please.”

  “You’ve been shown the mug shots?”

  Becky nods. “I didn’t recognize him.”

  Just then a school bus pulls up and discharges a pair of blond boys, one slightly taller than the other. They wear matching blue backpacks. One has neon-orange sneakers, the other’s are green. They shout hellos to their mother, drop their backpacks at her feet, and, ignoring the clumps of people on their lawn, run to the driveway, where a basketball hoop is attached to the front of the garage. A ball is quickly produced and a game started.

  Elsa says, “We should speak with Detective Bennett.”

  “He was in the kitchen a little while ago,” Becky offers, “unless he’s back out in the field.”

  In the field. Already she’s adopted the lingo of a search.

  Becky sighs. Picks up her sons’ backpacks. “Check the house first?”

  “Sure,” Elsa answers. Restless to find the detective, who probably is back in the field by now, but also feeling pulled by the family, the sense that there is always something important to learn on the inside. Knowing that houses, and mothers, are rarely as they appear on the surface.

  They follow Becky into a comfortable, lived-in kitchen with pushed-aside piles of paper competing with gadgets and condiments for counter space. Ernie Bennett is not there.

  Becky catches Elsa glancing at the fridge where the family’s last holiday card is prominently displayed: red plaid border, holly boughs, and bells; a tall, handsome father smilin
g beside his well-groomed wife, their poised teenage daughter, and the two grinning boys. “Tim’s a pilot for United,” she says. “He was based out of Boston until last year, when they switched him to Chicago.”

  “That why you’re selling the house?” Lex asks.

  “He’s hardly ever home. We thought it would give us more time together if we moved there.”

  Elsa asks, “Where is he now?”

  “En route here from Anchorage. He’s worried sick.” In an instant, she seems to melt. “I don’t know how much longer I can take this. That other girl…what did that man do to her?”

  “We don’t know.” As for what Elsa guesses he did, she won’t say.

  “Do you really think there’s a chance Hope is…okay?”

  “Definitely.” An exaggeration, but it’s in everyone’s interest to bolster Becky’s optimism.

  “Maybe Ernie’s upstairs,” Becky says.

  They follow her up a carpeted, bending staircase. No Bennett, but Elsa can’t help pausing in Hope’s room. It’s small and full, the walls painted a faded lilac and covered with whimsical pencil drawings. The intricate illustrations are everywhere that’s not blocked by bed, dresser, desk, or bookshelf. A copious assortment of stuffed animals crowd her headboard. On her nightstand, a ceramic bowl is filled with a tangle of rings and bracelets, and a jewelry tree is strung with a webbing of necklaces. By the position of a bookmark, she is halfway through A Confederacy of Dunces, presumably for school, unless she’s an independent reader.

  “I tried to stop her from drawing on the walls when she was little,” Becky says, noticing their interest, “but it was useless, so I just let her go at it. I’ve grown to really like them. I wish there was some way we could take the walls with us when we move.”

  “She’s got talent, that’s for sure.” Lex steps up for a close look at a group of little figures on a boat, mobilizing to fight a giant wave.

  Elsa follows his gaze and before she knows it is pulled into Hope’s imaginings, they’re drawn with such conviction—the way a tiny hand raises to the monster wave as if to halt it, the bend of a little arm over eyes to block the terrifying sight, a face buried in a cage of spiny fingers, and the one rushing gleefully into the arc of water with a surfboard. That subversive act of resistance speaks to Elsa’s heart; she doesn’t know this girl, this young artist, and probably never will, but suddenly her desire to reach her before it’s too late colludes dangerously with her anxieties over Ruby and her father and Mel, who still hasn’t returned her call. Elsa can’t save Roy from the disease that’s consuming him, unsell the house, or force Mel to forgive her and pick up the phone—she can’t pull back time and with it Tara’s hand—and she can’t uncut her skin this morning, but if she can save these lost, presumably injured girls…if she can… if Ruby and Hope at least can have a future, then maybe…maybe what? The impulse lingers in the back of Elsa’s mind like an unfinished sentence and all she can think to say to Hope’s mother is, “She could be a graphic novelist when she grows up.”