Songs for the Missing (7 page)

When he left she flipped them again, and then again, unsure. She opened the flyer and dragged the pair over to the waiting empty space. A click and she’d be done. They didn’t have time to waste, yet she balked as if she were making a mistake. The twin Kims smiled out at her, cheeky and bright-eyed, ripe. The right flyer might save her life, Fran knew—the manual said so—but all she could think of was the boy in the Colts hat, the badly animated flickering candles and glowing rainbows. She wanted to stop and close the folder, turn off the computer, afraid that once she sent Kim into that other world, she’d never get her back.

The Right to Disappear

His gut said they were screwed, and nothing he could do would change that. The old guy was clueless. He’d been gone almost two hours now while they sat here cooped up, doing nothing.

At the same time Ed knew they couldn’t afford to piss off the cops. Yes, he was frustrated, but Fran was so stuck on what was right that she didn’t understand their position was weak. Always deal from strength, that was one fundamental law of his business. (Another was, you can’t bargain with an idiot.) They could only hope the detective had turned up something, and that’s what was taking him so long.

He knew Kim’s friends well enough by now that he could read them like clients, Nina and Elise especially. Elise seemed normal, calm but concerned, asking how they were, if there was anything she could do. Nina, as usual, was all over the place, impossible to stop, but J.P. hardly said anything. He didn’t seem surprised, and talked dully, as if he’d just woken up. Maybe it was shock, but it bothered Ed. If he was eighteen and his girlfriend was missing he’d be tear-assing around town looking for her.

There was a lot about Kim and J.P. he didn’t get. They were sleeping together, Fran assured him, yet when they were deciding on colleges Kim had scoffed at the idea of going to Ohio State. When he and Fran had faced the same choice they’d battled their parents to stay together. While he sensed that sex had returned to the semicasual status it held in the seventies, he was confused by their lack of romance. As a father, he was at times grateful for that missing intensity, but as a man who liked to surprise his wife with flowers, it baffled him. Maybe he was old-fashioned, but to him a couple meant a strong bond, with positive and negative charges constantly arcing between them. He’d never seen Kim and J.P. kiss, let alone argue.

Outside, the sun flashed off a passing car—not the detective’s. It was already hot, a good day to be on the lake. According to the thing Fran had printed off the internet, they needed to be out searching with blood-hounds, beating the bushes from here to the interstate.

He offered the deputy a soda, then, pouring himself one, asked when they should expect the detective.

“I’m really not sure.”

“Can you call and find out? Tell him we’re getting a little antsy here.”

“Sure,” he said, then went outside to do it.

Ed watched him from the window. His nametag said Oester, but Ed couldn’t put an address to it.

“This is bullshit,” Fran said, holding aside the curtain. “I think you should call Perry.”

“I want to wait and see what this guy says.”

“Maybe Perry can talk to him.”

“I’m hoping he won’t have to.”

“God help me, if they screw this up we’re going to sue them for everything they’ve got.”

It was a reckless statement, tempting fate, yet he’d had the same thought. “I know,” he said, and held her.

“Connie’s coming over.”

“Good.” Exactly what they didn’t need—another cook.

The deputy headed back up the drive, and they broke, Fran taking her place at the computer.

“He’s on his way,” the deputy said.

“Did he find anything?”

“That’s what he’s going to talk to you about.”

“So you don’t know.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s all right,” Ed said. “Thanks for checking.”

While they waited he went over his pitch. Forget the family—her friends agreed she had no reason to leave. She wasn’t in trouble, she hadn’t broken up with her boyfriend, she hadn’t met anyone new, she wasn’t pregnant or depressed or on drugs. She hadn’t taken any favorite clothes or jewelry, she hadn’t taken her glasses or even a box of her contacts. She hadn’t mentioned leaving to anyone, hadn’t left a note. Altogether, the facts pointed to her not being a runaway, and yet, with no other evidence, the police were assuming she was. He was hoping that that, along with some honest parental hysteria, would shame the man into action. If not, he’d call Perry.

If he’d known how hard convincing them was going to be, he would have sliced open his own arm and dripped blood across the backyard.

At the computer Fran ran out of paper and fought with the feed tray. He was afraid she’d break it, but didn’t look, just stood there watching the street, and soon she had it going again.

He had practice at waiting, his livelihood depended on it: waiting for buyers, waiting for counteroffers, waiting for contracts. This was different. This was like waiting for the market to pick up. For over a year he’d been riding it down, liquidating their savings to pay the bills. The feeling he had now was the same, and even the sight of the unmarked car pulling in didn’t change that, unless the passenger door opened and Kim got out, head bowed in apology, her hair hanging limp and dirty.

No, only the driver’s side opened. The detective tottered as if he had bad knees, stopping once to adjust the fat stack of folders under his arm. Beside Ed the deputy left his post at the window to get the door. Fran took advantage of this, stealing over.

“We’ve got to have dogs,” she said.

“I’ll try.”

“You get them.”

They sat on one side of the kitchen table with the detective across from them, shuffling his papers like a lawyer at a closing. He folded his hands and hunched over them.

“First, I want you to understand that because this is an open investigation I can’t share every piece of information we uncover with you. For the good of the case sometimes we have to withhold things, okay? I know that’s not what you want to hear, but believe me, it’s in your daughter’s best interest.”

Ed didn’t believe this one bit, but nodded.

“Second, I think it’s important to remember that as an adult your daughter has a right to privacy. If we locate her and she requests that right, legally we’re prevented from telling you where she is.”

“That can’t be right,” Fran said.

“Third, Mr. Larsen, I know this is a difficult time, but I’m going to have to ask you to please refrain from contacting any further persons of interest.”

It didn’t have to be J.P. He’d talked to all of them. “I was just calling around to see if anyone knew anything.”

“I appreciate that, I’d just rather we didn’t muddy the waters.”

“Are you saying we can’t talk to her friends?” Fran asked.

“I’m not saying that. You can talk to her friends, you can talk to your neighbors all you like, but please let us talk to them first. It makes our job that much easier.”

“Got it,” Ed said.

The two uniforms were still going door-to-door, the detective said, but he was finished with his preliminary interviews. He’d talked with her coworkers, and by phone with Ed’s mother—a surprise that made Ed like the guy even less.

“Did you find out anything useful?” Fran asked.

“Everyone seems to like your daughter—”

“I think we told you that,” she said, and Ed patted her arm.

“No one believes she’d just run away.”

They nodded at each other in confirmation.

“At the same time, I’m finding some low-level involvement with drugs among her circle.”

It wasn’t entirely a shock, though Ed found himself grimacing. Was this good or bad for them? They had so little to negotiate with.

“At this point I can’t say much more. I’m applying for a warrant to get access to her bank account, hoping that might tell us something.”

“But so far,” Ed said, “you’re not finding any evidence that she planned on running away.”

“In most cases there wouldn’t be any. Whereas in a forcible abduction you generally have some sort of trail—if not witnesses then some kind of physical evidence: a car, a purse, signs of a struggle.”

“But not always,” Ed said.

“Not in all cases, but in a significant majority. The bottom line in either case is that we need to get word out and start looking for her as soon as possible. The deputy says you’ve put together a flyer.”

Fran pushed a copy across the table.

“Outstanding, except technically we still have to go with ‘missing’ at this point. I know it’s hard, but try to think of it as a good thing.”

Behind him the back door opened with a swish. The deputy took a step toward the back hall and met Connie, lugging a plastic bag from Staples, a ream of paper inside weighting it like a brick.

“Hey,” she said.

“I’m going to ask you to wait outside if that’s all right,” the detective said, and motioned for the deputy to accompany her.

“What I’m worried about,” Ed said reasonably, “is that we’re coming up on twenty-four hours, and no one’s really looking for her.”

“I know it doesn’t feel like it, but we’re looking for her as we speak. Right now we’ve got two units checking every inch of Route 7. Every patrol car in the county’s got her on their screens—Conneaut, Ashtabula,
and
the state police. We’re tied in with Erie, same for Cleveland and Akron. She’s out on the wire with the car. That’s national, plus she’s registered on every major website, including the FBI’s.”

“What about dogs?” he said.

“Dogs are great if you’ve got a clear idea of where you’re looking, but they’re not much help finding cars at long distances, and that’s what we’re looking at here, I’m afraid.”

“It wouldn’t help if we brought a team in,” Fran asked.

“Here in the house, you mean. They’d get her scent but I’m not sure what they’d do with it. There’s no sign that anything happened here, and even if it did, you’ve still got the car as a mode of transport.”

“They could search for her along 7,” Ed said, “or down by the river.”

“I know it sounds logical, but you’re talking a needle in a haystack. When we find the car, that’s when we want the dogs. What we need right now is leads, and the way to get leads is to get her face out there. That’s why the flyer’s so important.”

The technique was familiar to Ed—burying the client’s naive question beneath an avalanche of shoptalk. As in any business, flashing a little knowledge with nothing to back it up was a red flag to a professional. He had thought the guy was doddering and incompetent; now he realized how truly screwed they were. As the detective went on lecturing them, Ed remembered standing by the side of 90 with the girl’s abandoned Toyota, the sense of the road going on forever in both directions, impossible to follow, and beyond its narrow shoulders, the land and the rivers and the oceans, the whole world. A person could be anywhere.

Fran looked at him, lips pinched, and shook her head. This guy wasn’t interested in helping them. He’d have to call Perry, but even that—his gut told him—wouldn’t work.

“All right,” Ed said, to stop him. “So what do we do now?”

Answers to Name

Everyone had secrets, that was life. Driving over with Hinch, Nina thought it wasn’t just her. They’d all lied to the detective. Kim would have too if it had been one of them. She’d always been better than Nina at keeping her secrets, ever since they were little. Kim would get a kick out of the irony: They really needed her now.

The secret they were protecting was nothing compared to Kim being missing, and separate from it, as far as Hinch and J.P. knew. They were guys, interested only in what affected them directly. Being Kim’s best friend, Nina had an endless stock of confidences to draw on, many of them connected, or at least overlapping at the edges. She’d never had a problem carrying them before—it was a privilege to be chosen over Elise, and Nina had reciprocated, holding back almost nothing (drunkenly kissing J.P. that one time in the bathroom was an exception, an honest slip she could barely admit to herself )—but now, faced with the question of what might have happened to Kim, Nina, more than anyone, had to decide what was important for the police to know and what wasn’t.

So far she hadn’t decided or divulged anything, stonewalled the guy, as if the code of silence was absolute. She could tell he didn’t believe her, asking if she’d take a lie detector test, then saying, “I might just take you up on that.” She almost wanted to. Having the truth forced out of you was somehow more honorable than squealing.

They had to pass the DQ on their way to Kim’s house. Normally as they cruised by, Hinch would click his heels together and give a rigid
sieg heil
, but like Nina he had his eyes on the side streets, as if the cops could have possibly overlooked Kim’s little car. They rode in silence, out of respect, and still Hinch bobbed his head to some inner jam band. Earlier he’d complained—to make a joke—that it was his day off, except Nina could see he’d shaved and was wearing hiking boots instead of his Tevas in case they needed to search the woods.

Kingsville was still and bright around them, black shadows under the heavy trees, flags hanging limp. As they jounced over the tracks by the box plant, looking both ways, the baked air shimmered like water in the distance, and Nina wondered if anyone had checked the right-of-way out of town. As girls they’d walked the ties for hours, the Three Amigos, imagining their dream lives in mythical cities like Rome and Paris, spying on line workers taking smoke breaks and mothers sunning in their backyards. They’d make peanut-butter-and-banana sandwiches and fill a canteen with ice cubes and Kool-Aid and hike to the bridge over the river and dare one another to jump, until one day, the summer before eighth grade, Kim stood up from where they were sitting high above the sluggish current, smiled at them and stepped off. Nina didn’t even think. Still wearing her sneakers, she launched herself after her, hollering all the way down. “Don’t be a chicken, Elise!” They taunted, treading water, until, with a shriek they imitated for years, she leapt, arms flapping.