Missing Persons

by Stephen White

  “Mr. Miller and Reese got home around nine-twenty, right?”

  “Give or take.”

  “But close.”

  “Close.”

  “Mallory was gone by then.”

  “Correct-o. We think. Nobody actually looked for her until the next morning. People forget that little detail. She had a big head start.”

  “You think she was home at nine-twenty, Sam?”

  “No, I think she’d already split. But I do like arguing with you. That part’s kind of fun.”

  Fox had done digital magic to the Christmas night footage. The resulting images of the Miller home were grainy, and the shadows were darker in a few places than was ideal, but the video was clear enough that the conclusions Fox reached really weren’t controversial.

  “The helicopter footage from Fox shows no footprints in the snow around the Millers’ house. Not on the walk, not on the driveway, not through the yard. And no tire tracks up the driveway into the garage.” I waited for him to disagree, but he seemed to be ignoring me. Finally, I added, “And lights were on in the house, right? Both floors.”

  “So what? You know any kid who remembers to turn off lights?”

  “All that’s at nine-sixteen?”

  The buzzer sounded. Sam said, “It was actually nine-eighteen by then. But why quibble? We’re friends.” He pointed at the fresh sheet of ice down below. “Game’s starting.”

  “So are you saying you think that Mallory just happened to hustle out the door between like nine-eighteen and nine-twenty?”

  Sam smiled at me pleasantly and said, “Maybe she was watching the Christmas thing on Fox News and timed her exit perfectly to confound the helicopter. We hear she’s a bright kid.”

  I made a face that expressed my displeasure at his condescension.

  He kneed me gently. “Hey, Alan, so far I’ve just been agreeing with you about stuff you learned from somebody else. Maybe some of it’s right. Maybe it isn’t. But I can’t tell you what I think, you know that, not if it involves what I know as a cop. But you know what else? Intruder theory, runaway theory-it doesn’t make any difference. None. The lack of footprints in the snow on Christmas night is an anomaly no matter what theory you like. The kid got out of the house without leaving a trace. How? Microclimate? I don’t know. Come on, it looks like Simon’s on the ice for the start of the second period. Let’s give the kids some support.”

  Simon was indeed on the ice, at left wing. Both teams were sloppier with the puck at the start of the second period than they had been in the first. I was about to ask Sam whether the kids might be having trouble with the fresh ice laid down by the Zamboni when he spoke first.

  “Reese Miller’s a hockey player. Did you know that? I’ve seen him play a few times. He’s good.”

  I hadn’t seen any mention of Mallory’s little brother’s hobbies in the paper. But then I’d been making a concerted effort not to read about the more gossipy aspects of the case. “No, I didn’t know that.”

  “He’s had some trouble.”

  I leaned forward so that Sam would know that I was looking at him. “And you know this as a cop or as a parent?”

  “The latter.”

  “What kind of trouble?”

  “God, you’re nosy tonight. You heard that his dad sent him out of town for a while until the commotion dies down?”

  “To visit family?” I asked. I hadn’t heard.

  “I shouldn’t say, but yeah,” Sam said. “I’m not sure I would have done that. Seems like a time when you’d want your kid close by.” I opened my mouth to agree, but Sam was done with the conversation. “Let’s watch the game.”

  18

  Bob entered my office for his additional, day before New Year’s Eve appointment carrying a boom box.

  Mallory Miller had been missing for five days.

  He and I had met almost a hundred times by then and he had never walked in the door with a boom box, or any other prop, for that matter. Without preamble, but with an almost sinister smile that underscored the fact that he seemed to lack a chin, Bob set the stereo on the table between us and pressed the “play” button. I didn’t recognize the tune at first-maybe because I’d managed to make it through the years on both sides of the recent cusp of centuries deprived of any familiarity at all with boy bands-but I realized soon enough that I was listening to a disappointing cover of Del Shannon’s glorious “Runaway.”

  A run run run run runaway.

  Bob’s preferred, but dubious, choice of versions was a seriously overproduced adaptation of the classic featuring a harmony of voices obviously lacking in testosterone. I patiently adopted the role of audience, unsure why that day’s psychotherapy required musical accompaniment, and unsure why-if we required music at all, and that song in particular-we couldn’t be listening to the almost flawless original. At what appeared to be a predetermined moment Bob decided to turn the session from surreal soundtrack to painful karaoke. His voice, a strange mix of soprano and something else, added a decidedly creepy new layer to the sugary harmonies that were filling my office.

  Bob had chimed into the song at the precise point that the lyrical progression had reached And I wonder / I wa wa wa wa wonder. But he didn’t stop there. He sang, “Why / why why why why she ran away / And I wonder where she will stay.”

  He reached forward and hit the “stop” button.

  I wondered if I was supposed to clap.

  Bob could carry a tune. I had to give him that.

  Once I was certain he was finished, at least for the moment, I tried to think of something intelligent to say. I failed.

  Sitting back, Bob was quiet for most of a minute before he said, “I’m writing about it.”

  “You are?” I asked, trying not to reveal the true level of stupefaction I was feeling at what was happening in my office. Was Bob writing songs?

  “Yes.”

  Bob played board games. His favorite was Scrabble, but he’d always maintained that he was a pretty decent chess player, too, and I had no reason to doubt him. And I knew that he’d once driven all the way to Laughlin, Nevada, in his Camaro for a big Monopoly tournament at one of the casinos. Ideally, Bob’s vision of ideal human interaction was that everyone should follow game protocols, that people should take turns, that everyone should know the rules, and that any and all disputes should be handled via consultation with a reference manual.

  Needless to say, since most people acted as though life had no rules and as though there were no manual to consult, in real life Bob was frustrated more often than not by the manner that people behaved.

  In Bob’s game-centered worldview-a perspective that he definitely applied to conversations-it was my turn to speak. His hollow yes had constituted the totality of his turn and started the clock on mine. Given the presence of the boom box on the table between us, and the revelation about the writing he was doing, that probably wasn’t a good time to reiterate a salient point I’d been trying to make for most of a year about the actual parameters of human communication. I took what I hoped was a safer road. I asked, “What kind of writing are you doing?”

  “A story. I think it’ll be a novel. I don’t know.”

  My turn again. “What… are you writing about?”

  I knew, of course. I was hoping that I was wrong, but I knew.

  “I know some things about what happened to the girl. That’s what started it but it’s mostly stuff I’m making up.”

  “You know some things?” I said, trying to smother the skepticism that had crept into my question.

  “Things that aren’t in the news. I’m thinking I might call it My Little Runaway.”

  And thus the song.

  “The girl” had to be Mallory, right? She was Bob’s current obsession, wasn’t she? Had to be her.

  Maybe, maybe not. In psychotherapy, assumptions are termites. Let them survive unchallenged and they’ll eat away at the foundation. In an effort to exterminate at least one termite, I said, “Mallory Miller? You kn
ow some things about what happened to her?”

  “Yes.” He leaned forward, his elbows on his knees, his hands clasped in front of him.

  Bob leaning forward startled me. Why? Simply because it brought him closer to me, and “closer” wasn’t one of Bob’s things. “Closer” is what schizoid personalities try to avoid the way arachnophobes try to steer clear of spiders. For a moment I considered the possibility that Bob had only leaned forward to once again turn on the boom box so that he could sing along to another song.

  But he didn’t touch the stereo. He had leaned closer for some other reason.

  Belatedly, I realized that it was again my turn. All I could think of to say was “Wow.”

  Bob nodded an acknowledgment that I’d caught up with the conversational progression. “What she was thinking. You know, like that. Nobody else knows it.”

  With those words I decided that Bob had indeed leaned forward to share a secret with me. From a therapeutic perspective, it was a sign of true progress. I began entertaining the possibility that he might, against all odds, be getting better, but that fantasy was short-circuited by my wish that Bob had shared a different kind of secret with me-something about sex, or petty theft, or self-medication, or violent dreams. Just about anything else.

  Anything other than something about Mallory.

  Bob had many personal faults. Some were born of his underlying pathology; some were more difficult to explain. He was cold. He was irritable. He was intolerant. I suspected he was a bigot. He was mistrustful. Organic vegetables were more compassionate than he was. The list could go on. And on. But as far as I knew-and after two years of Tuesdays I knew as much about him as anyone-Bob wasn’t a liar.

  Which meant one of two things. The first possibility was that Bob somehow did know some details about Mallory’s disappearance, or at least about her state of mind prior to her disappearance.

  The other option that I was considering? That Bob just thought he knew those things.

  But was it likely that he could be so wrong? The natural history of schizoid personality is not that it’s a precursor to schizophrenia. Although schizoids may display idiosyncratic thinking, failure in relating typically doesn’t lead to psychotic failures in thinking. But, I reminded myself, the natural history of schizoid personality doesn’t rule out progression to serious thought disorder either.

  I forced myself to entertain the possibility that I was witnessing initial signs that Bob might be showing signs of decompensation. Usually the resolution to such therapeutic quandaries mattered little, if at all, outside the confines of the consultation room. That time? That time it might make a hell of a lot of difference. The girl in question, Mallory, was still missing, and… I realized that I didn’t know how to finish that sentence, but also realized, belatedly, that it was my turn to finish some sentence. I said, “You know things that the police don’t know?”

  He replied to my question with an apparent non sequitur. “I rent a garage for my Camaro. I’ve told you that. It’s why it’s still so cherry.”

  “Yes, we’ve talked about the garage.” I had to try not to sound exasperated.

  “Well, the garage is right next door to Mallory Miller’s house.”

  He paused a long time, long enough so that I considered that it might, again, be my turn to speak. Although his news was interesting, I was getting ready to squander my move intentionally by saying something innocuous, like, “It is? Right next door?” But Bob wasn’t really done with his turn-he was the hesitant chess player who hadn’t quite lifted his fingertips from the piece he’d just slid across the board.

  He said, “See, I know things. They say ‘write what you know.’ Well, I know about… this. At least a little.” He grimaced. Before I had a chance to respond and ask him about the reason for the grimace, he explained on his own by saying, “But I don’t want to be on TV.”

  Although I’d not heard a direct answer to my earlier question-“You know things that the police don’t know?”-I was left with the impression that the answer was yes. Still, despite some concerted effort, I couldn’t get Bob to say another word about Mallory that day. My intuition told me that his provocative tease about the missing girl would lose its energy if a long weekend intervened. I said, “Let’s continue this tomorrow.”

  “What?”

  “This seems important. Can you come back tomorrow for another session?”

  “Because of her?”

  “Because it seems like a good idea. To me.” What I didn’t say was that scheduling three appointments with a schizoid personality in the same week was a clinical strategy that bordered on the absurd.

  “I can’t afford it.”

  “I’ll work with you on that.”

  He didn’t agree; he acquiesced.

  His departure at the end of his session was much less dramatic than his boom box entry had been. As he did sometimes, he asked for permission to leave using the French door that led directly outside from the back of my office. The alternative route-returning down the hallway that my office shared with Diane’s and then out through the waiting room-brought with it the risk for Bob of confronting another human being, an option that, on most days, he was unlikely to choose. I assented to his request, of course, and he grabbed his things and walked into the cold without a thank-you or a good-bye or a see-you-tomorrow.

  I kept my eyes on him until he’d traversed the small backyard of the old house, scissored his way over the poor excuse for a fence on the south side of the property, and begun to close in on the distant sidewalk along Canyon Boulevard.

  As I watched him trail away, I belatedly wondered whether I should have pressed him harder about Mallory and what he knew. But the truth was that at that moment, were I a betting man, I would have wagered that Bob’s knowledge of Mallory was something that approached delusion.

  The conclusion saddened me. Regardless, I’d know more soon enough.

  My last clinical appointment of the year was going to be the next day, with Bob Brandt.

  19

  Diane didn’t miss much.

  “Did your schizoid man bring that boom box with him into therapy?” she asked me as we both rushed toward our office suite’s only bathroom in the few moments that we were stealing between sessions.

  I’d never told Diane that Bob suffered from schizoid disorder. But she was an astute diagnostician and had probably come to her own DSM conclusion about him after one or two awkward encounters while she was retrieving a patient in the waiting room.

  For appearance’ sake, I played coy. “My last appointment brought a boom box with him, yeah. Actually played me a song on it. Could you hear it through the wall?”

  I slowed so that Diane could make it through the door into our tiny kitchen before I did. As she crossed the space and spun into the adjacent bathroom she didn’t pause to thank me for my gesture.

  “What song?” she called through the closed door.

  Diane was just making conversation. She didn’t really care what song. I was pleased that her mood seemed improved. She hadn’t enjoyed too many good days since Hannah’s death.

  “ ‘Runaway.’ ”

  “Del Shannon?”

  “No, some boy band.”

  “Holy moly. Which one?”

  To my dismay, “Holy moly” had apparently survived the cut. “How the hell would I know? All I listen to anymore is Raffi and The Wiggles.”

  “Your boy-band days will come sooner than you’d like and you’ll look back wistfully on the Raffi period. Was it about Mallory? Is that why he played the song?”

  The toilet flushed loudly as I pondered the eerie accuracy of Diane’s associative intuitiveness. “Why would you guess that?”

  Efficient sink sounds. The door opened. Finally.

  “Because I am the psycholog-ess,” she offered, as though it somehow explained her rare perceptive skills.

  “What?”

  “Never mind. Could he be an Asperger? Your guy? Mr. Boom Box.”

  Dia
ne’s question knocked me off balance just a little. Fortunately, I’d already given the issue some thought. I said, “From a pure social-skills point of view, maybe. But the criteria for schizoid fit him like a glove.”

  “It’s trendy, you know. Diagnosing Aspies. Schizoid is so… sixties.”

  “Yeah.” I squeezed past her into the bathroom. I didn’t feel comfortable discussing Bob’s diagnosis and, anyway, my bladder was screaming.

  “You want coffee?” she asked.

  “No thanks,” I called through the door as I fumbled with my zipper. At that moment, the thought of adding another liquid, especially a diuretic, to my system seemed masochistic.

  Diane said, “I still haven’t heard from the cops about Hannah’s session with Mallory. I kind of thought I would.”

  “After this much time I don’t think you’re going to.” The relief I’d begun to experience in the privacy of the bathroom was exquisite. Talking out loud felt like a particularly intrusive chore.

  “Do you think she ran?” Diane asked.

  “I do.”

  “Someone should know what I learned from Hannah.”

  I moved to wash my hands, but didn’t reply. Wasn’t sure how to reply. Eventually I said, “It’d be great if you could say something, but you can’t.”

  “Too many people think they know what was going on in that family. The media does, the cops do, Mallory’s father probably does, too. Truth is that it seems like a lot of people all know a little bit but nobody is talking to each other. Nobody has the whole picture.”

  I dried my hands while I considered her point. I had to admit she had one. Although I could have argued that the same thing was true about almost any family anywhere, the Miller family was a special case. It seemed likely that despite the intense law enforcement and media assault on their privacy, no one had developed a complete picture of what had been going on in the Miller household prior to Christmas night.