Little Girl Gone

by Alexandra Burt

  It’s time to enter the elevator, to descend. I go down to the first floor, and feel an immense sense of calm.

  I take the map off the desk and hold it. I rub it between my thumb and index finger. My fingertips feel the folds of the thick paper. An origami riddle of creases, its pleats automatically undo but are awkward to close.

  I descend further.

  I hear a loud popping sound ringing in my ears. It turns into a sharp pitch, and then my ears ring. I’ve heard this sound before. A gunshot? Something inside of me shifts; I smell gasoline, metal and gunpowder.

  I open my eyes and I look at Dr Ari. Everything around me starts to buzz and then the world grows muffled as if I’m under water. Dr Ari’s lips move but I cannot make out any words. The world around me switches to black and white and the silent movie is complete.

  Roads, traffic lights. Rain, darkness.

  A dot on a map.

  Dover.

  Chapter 20

  Dover, New York. Nine thousand people on less than sixty square miles. No major highways, just two thoroughfares. Numerous hamlets and rural communities too small to be considered villages were scattered about, their inhabitants rooted within its soil like the knobbled and rugged oaks, leaning with the wind. No one lived out here unless they were born here. Or wanted to disappear.

  As I drove down Route 434 towards Anna Lieberman’s house, I passed miles of dense trees that changed abruptly into open fields dotted with barns. The once red boxes sagged towards the ground, stood abandoned, bleached and gray, ready to be taken over by nature.

  Dover’s Main Street was like so many main streets in upstate New York. The roads, lacking white center lines, wove along the hilly terrain, flanked by small wooden houses. They were worn, not so much by traffic, but by time, and concrete cracks wove their way along the surface like mucus snail trails. Some of the cracks were filled in with black tar, some left to deepen and lengthen. The narrow sidewalks, distorted by tree roots, were broken up by T-shaped power-poles with their cables draped from one pole to the next, like masts of ghostly onlookers of a parade cancelled decades ago. The houses were covered by drooping roofs and surrounded by chain-link fences keeping old, arthritic dogs at bay.

  Anna Lieberman’s last known address was off Route 22. Anna and David were originally from Dover, yet the farmhouse they’d grown up in, and that burned down back in 1982, was located so close to Oniontown that they might as well have been from there.

  Oniontown screamed rural poverty and had a reputation of its own; three hours north of New York City, depending on city traffic, Oniontown is a Hudson Valley hamlet of Dover, not actually a town, but a collection of rundown trailers and dilapidated farms.

  I turned right just off Main Street in Dover and arrived at Anna’s house. The sound of an axe splitting wood echoed down the street and a garbage truck’s diesel engine revved on and off. I passed 126 Waterway Circle slowly, taking in the house and the yard. Anna’s backyard was fenced in by seven-feet-tall sun-bleached poles.

  126 Waterway Circle, the first of six houses of a cul-de-sac, appeared unkempt but not uninhabited. The entire neighborhood was dangling lightly off the ledge of being deemed ramshackle. There was a crooked ‘For Sale’ sign posted in front of the house on the left.

  I parked the car on the main road instead of in front of Anna’s house, got out, passed the house, and continued down the warped sidewalk. I strained to read the sign in the front yard of 128 and I took out my cell phone. I had only five percent of battery life left and I wasn’t going to use it on a call pretending I was interested in the house. I slid the phone back in my purse.

  I turned and went up Anna’s pebble walkway, a scraggly, fuzzy mess of stones and weeds cushioning my every step. The fence paint was chipped, the posts’ concrete anchors gaped open, releasing the posts from their duty of keeping the fence in an upright position. Some fence sections were standing upright, some leaning, and one almost flat on the ground. The overgrown yard was covered in knee-high weeds. Whatever shrubs and bushes there were, appeared wilted, their dead leaves cracked, leaving the roots bare in the soil, exposed to the elements. The property seemed vacant, abandoned even for quite some time, if it hadn’t been for an older model Chevy Caprice with mismatched hubcaps parked under the carport.

  There were chairs on the front porch, and multiple wind chimes hanging from the rafters. The chimes clinked a wretched song of despair while the strings holding the metal pipes in place were about to give in to gravity. Some of the missing pipe parts had been replaced by forks, their tines bent about randomly. The drooping black roof was patched with brown shingles.

  The porch slumped worse than the roof. Two crates formed a makeshift table, with two folding chairs placed on either side of them. The chairs looked as if they had been stolen from a reception; their chipped gold paint alluding to a wedding ceremony long past.

  No sign of David Lieberman’s truck. I took a few deep breaths but couldn’t keep my hands from shaking. My purse was heavy, weighed down by the loaded gun, more a good luck charm than anything else. I had never fired a gun before and the one in Jack’s closet was the first I had ever held in my hand. It was a Taurus 905, a 9 mm, whatever that meant. I had spent an entire afternoon online looking up the mechanics and how to fire it, but I had a feeling that if it came down to it, handling it would leave me dumbfounded. The gun in my purse was unnerving me, adding to my tension, the facts I had gathered started to merge into a ball of yarn; secure engagement, ready to fire disengagement, drop the hammer manually by pulling the trigger while lowering the hammer with the thumb.

  My knuckles rapped the paint-chipped door. It sounded hollow. The door opened and I recognized her immediately.

  Like a scene from a Dutch painting the petite woman stood in the doorframe, in her hands a basket filled with vegetables: carrots with wilted leaves, white bulbous turnips turned purple. There was another green leafy vegetable I couldn’t identify, maybe water spinach or Swiss chard. Anna looked wholesome holding the vegetable basket, capable of extracting life from the earth’s soil. Her hands were covered in mud, her nails rimmed with dirt.

  I looked up from the basket and took in her appearance.

  Anna Lieberman’s red hair was tied in a knot at the nape of her neck. Some strands had escaped and made her appear disheveled. I had quite a few inches on her, which caused her to look up at me. Her body was lean yet not in an athletic kind of way but rather fatigued and worn out. She wasn’t at all unattractive, but seemed to have lived a hard life, past her prime.

  ‘Yes?’ she asked as she considered me. She was visibly out of breath.

  ‘I don’t mean to intrude, I … I don’t know, I have a question.’ I swallowed hard and forced my face into a smile. ‘I … I’m sorry to disturb you. You look like you were in the middle of something. I …’

  She smoothed a strand of hair behind her ears. She then paused as if she had decided there was no need to fix her appearance. I was just someone lost, or asking for the nearest mechanic shop or something insignificant. Her smile exposed white crooked teeth. She put the basket of vegetables on a table in the foyer. The table held a sizable stack of catalogs, the top one a glossy cover of a Greek island, judging by the white houses with blue roofs and the azure ocean in the far background.

  ‘I was out back and I wasn’t sure if I heard someone knock. How can I help you?’ She looked me up and down.

  Threadbare industrial carpet, frayed at the edges, extended over the threshold. She was barefoot.

  ‘I wanted to ask you about the house. The one over there.’ I took a step back and pointed at the little white house next door with the ‘For Sale’ sign in the yard.

  She looked puzzled, as if she was unaware it was for sale, or surprised that someone wanted to buy it.

  ‘I don’t know much about it. Maybe you should call the number on the sign and ask to see it.’ She ended the sentence as if it was a question.

  ‘How about the neighborhood, the schools?
Is it pretty safe? How about break-ins? Real Estate Agents never tell you the truth.’ I added the last sentence to let her know that I valued her opinion.

  ‘I wouldn’t know about schools around here. I don’t have much contact with the neighbors and I don’t read the local papers.’ She kept holding her soiled hands up like a surgeon ready to make the first cut. ‘I need to wash my hands. Why don’t you come on in for a cup of tea?’

  She stepped back and I entered Anna Lieberman’s house.

  ‘Thank you so much. Buying a house is a major investment. I just want to make sure I pick the right one.’

  The threadbare carpet turned out to be a square piece of leftover outdoor carpeting. The rest of the floor was covered in hardwood planks, creaking underfoot. The house was old and worn, drafty even on this mild day. There was a living room straight ahead, and another hallway to the left. The kitchen, to the right of the living room, led straight into the backyard. The house smelled of mold and musty carpets, traces of furniture polish and Lysol. There was a frayed couch with lifeless throw pillows and a crooked coffee table. Countless travel magazines with glossy covers lay strewn across the coffee table and the couch. Some cover pages were torn, others had rings from sweating glasses, leaving the pages warped. The rugs crunched like straw underneath my feet. The furniture was mismatched. It was the home of a woman who had furnished a house with hand-me-downs and donations. Everything was worn, just short of ending up in a dump or in a landfill. Yet it was as clean as one could clean an old house. The colors were muted, washed out, except for the shiny travel magazines.

  Anna Lieberman led me through the hallway and straight into the kitchen where she pointed to a chair by the kitchen table. She rapidly pumped a soap dispenser while the water was trickling. The soap was unable to cut through the mud, so she washed her hands twice but still didn’t seem satisfied. As she applied the third round of soap, she asked, ‘Coffee or tea?’

  ‘I don’t want to impose, really,’ I said. ‘Whatever you’re having is fine with me.’ I put my hands in my lap and interlaced my fingers to keep them from shaking.

  ‘Tea it is.’ She opened a cabinet door and took out two chipped mugs. She switched on the stove and took two teabags out of a canister on the counter. She dropped the bags into the mugs and sat across from me on the other side of the kitchen table. Anna Lieberman’s demeanor seemed open and friendly and I felt a sudden tinge of remorse for misleading her.

  ‘It might seem odd wanting to buy a house in Dover, but I grew up around here. The area is kind of my home,’ I said.

  My inventiveness surprised me. One believable lie after the other slipped off my lips. Why not go further?

  ‘Actually, I’m from Poughkeepsie,’ I added as I cupped the empty mug, trying to hide my shaking hands. I had seen a sign by the road and remembered the name of a town just west of Dover. ‘I like the area.’ My mind was racing. I didn’t want the conversation to stall, but I couldn’t think of anything to say. The silence stretched, became obvious.

  Anna jerked ever so slightly when the kettle whistled. She poured boiling water into the mugs, the tea turned the color of cognac, and a fruity aroma drifted towards my nostrils. When the wooden knob of a drawer didn’t budge, she wiggled it left and right and then fiercely yanked at it. The drawer opened and she reached for a spoon while turning towards me.

  ‘Poughkeepsie?’ she said and nodded. ‘That’s not far from here.’ She eyed the spoon in her hand, a spoon that seemed small, almost elfin, as if made for a child. New and polished, shiny, not fitting with the rest of the house.

  ‘About twenty miles west,’ I said and tried to ignore the image that burst into my mind of yet another spoon. A spoon – wasn’t it mere days ago that I had held one just like this in my hand – Mia’s spoon, its rubber tip turning white when food was too hot.

  When I looked at her hand again, she held a regular teaspoon that didn’t resemble the one from earlier at all.

  Anna returned the kettle to the stove and while she searched the cabinet for sugar, I took a closer look around the kitchen. Like everything else in the house the counters were worn and showed deep scratches and knife marks. The table and chairs were old and chipped from use. The buffet – the glass in the doors was missing – had been repainted. The paint, a buttery yellow with a green tinge to it, had been applied in a thick coat and the wood seams appeared caulked with paint. The linoleum floor tiles had risen around the edges and when I pushed the raised edges with the tip of my foot I heard a crunching sound. The fridge and the stove were ancient. The kitchen counters were cluttered with torn pages from travel magazines, flower pots and bags of soil, and small seed packages, as if I had interrupted her while she was planting, repotting, and pruning right here in the kitchen.

  As she inspected her hands for cleanliness, I took in her shabby floral blouse and the skirt. The colors were faded, yet the blouse was clean and pressed.

  ‘You have children?’ she asked and ran her finger around the top of the mug.

  The question caught me by surprise.

  ‘One. I have just one. A daughter.’ How peculiar it felt to speak of Mia as if she was safe at home with her father or a sitter. What was I even doing here, I asked myself, what did I expect to find? Lieberman wasn’t here, his sister seemed to be some meek woman in an old rundown, drafty house tending to a garden out back. Even more peculiar was the fact that I had no idea how to even steer her in the direction of her brother and my missing child.

  As I watched, Anna pulled the teabag from the steaming mug, never flinching as she squeezed every last bit of hot liquid out of it. She got up and stepped on the foot pedal raising the garbage can lid, dropping the teabag into the can.

  A foul, irritating odor hit my nostrils. The stench was stomach-churning, sinister and heavy, permeating my every pore, yet it was sweet, with an undertone of clean in a putrid kind of way, a lemony scent maybe, but not quite as fresh, more chemical, in a potpourri kind of way. Like … a familiar rotten reek, conjuring images of diapers piling up in the nursery, prompting Jack to shake his head in disapproval. Diaper? Yes, diaper smell.

  ‘Fertilizer,’ Anna said. She stepped off the foot pedal, closed the lid, and placed a hand on top of it, as if trying to contain the odor. ‘Smacks you right in the face, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Smells like dirty diapers,’ I replied. My anxiety was catching up with me, soon perspiration would begin to soak into my clothes. It took everything I had to get a grip on myself and keep my voice from shaking.

  ‘You wanted to know more about the area …’ Her voice trailed off. She paused every so often and cocked her head as if she was trying to capture a melody coming from the far distance. ‘Let’s see, there is a small park at the end of …’ I let her go on and on, and gave her a smile every time she looked up at me.

  She was no longer the plain girl with the frizzy hair I had seen in the 1982 newspaper article. Sitting across from her, the differences between the older pictures of her became obvious; her face had lengthened; the bone structure was more refined, almost angelic.

  My distraction with Anna, her house, her appearance had gotten the better of me but I needed to know where her brother was, needed to know if he was capable of what I thought him capable of. I wanted to hear the story of the fire, the story about her family, her brother’s story, something, really anything that would explain what he had done and where he was. Was this another one of my thoughts going astray, a thought that started out as ‘I wish I could talk to his sister’ and then ended with me in her kitchen drinking tea?

  ‘You must be doing a lot of gardening,’ I said. ‘Just vegetables or flowers or both?’ I looked at the floating teabag inside my mug and reached for the sugar.

  Anna pushed the sugar bowl towards me. Her hand, free from the mud and dirt, seemed malformed, its movement suggestive of arthritic joints. The edges of the inside of her palms were pulled together by scars, affecting muscles and tendons, restricting the movement of her fingers. C
hanges had left brown marks within her dermis, clearly burn marks from a fire.

  ‘I want to use the insurance money from my house in Poughkeepsie to buy a house here,’ I kept on going as if in a trance, trying to erase baby spoons and foul smells from my memory. I needed to focus and concentrate. ‘It’s not a lot of money and I still have to buy furniture and appliances. Everything I owned …’ I paused to make it more dramatic, ‘… burned up in a fire. I have nothing left.’ I lowered my head for a second, partly to play the role of a victim, partly because I didn’t think I looked sincere telling the tale.

  I looked up to see the impact. Her eyes darkened and my words rested between us like the sugar cubes in the chipped bowl.

  She stirred her tea, her hands clasping the spoon, her index finger pointing helplessly and aimlessly about.

  I was good. I was surprised how good I was. I never thought that I’d be able to con my way into her house and then dupe my way into her kitchen. I wanted her to gently descend into the past and reappear with a story. The story of the 1982 fire and her brother, David Lieberman. And then we’d talk about him being a kidnapper.

  ‘A fire? Your house burned down?’ Her voice cracked and her body shifted in the chair. Her spoon dropped with a clang back into her mug. ‘I’m sorry to hear that. Did anybody get hurt?’ Her eyes were big, her pupils dark. She hid her hands underneath the table.

  ‘No, it was just an electrical fire, some faulty wiring. I wasn’t home when it happened.’

  My next question would be ‘Do you live alone?’ then ‘Do you have any family?’ then I’d say ‘A brother? Tell me about him’ then ‘I need to tell you something, I want you to hear me out. I have a suspicion …’