The Pillow Friend (44 page)

“I was following right behind him, then he wasn't there,” I said flatly.

“Yes!” The cry came from the woman in the old-fashioned car. She nodded eagerly. “That's exactly what happened! He just
winked
out of existence.” She snapped her fingers in emphasis.

“I was watching the road, of course,” said the man, sounding apologetic. I had the feeling he'd said this before. He cleared his throat. “So I didn't exactly see what happened. But I had noticed two figures in the field, a man and a boy, and when I looked again—just after Emma here cried out—there was just the boy.”

My mother's face settled into an aloof, stubborn expression I had seen before when one of us kids, or my father, was being difficult. It meant that she wasn't going to waste time on argument.

“Take me to him, Ian,” she said. “Show me
exactly
where he was when you lost sight of him.”

I did what she said, although I already knew it was hopeless.

We searched that whole field, over and over again, at first quietly, then, in increasing desperation, calling loudly for “Daddy!” and “Joe!” The people in the other car, the only other witnesses to what had happened, stayed with us to help.

Finally, when it began to get dark, we gave up, driving to the nearest town to report my father missing. Here again the people in the old-fashioned car were helpful: the man was a judge called Arnold Peck, his wife was a Sunday school teacher, both of them well-respected pillars of the local community—even their two solemn, pretty little girls had a reputation for honesty—and so the impossible tale of my father's disappearance was treated seriously. Search parties were organized, with dogs; a geologist was summoned from the university in Madison to advise on the possibility of hidden underground caves or sinkholes beneath the ordinary-looking ground.

But no trace of my father, or what might have become of him, could be found.

It's strange, after all these years, how vividly I still recall the events of that day: the heat of the sun on the back of my neck as I plodded around that desolate field; the smell of earth and crushed grass; the low buzz of insects; the particular shape and hue of the little yellow flower that my father stopped and picked before he started his endless journey; the despairing sound of my mother's voice calling his name.

What's really strange about it is that none of it actually happened.

My father
did
disappear—but not like that.

My “memory” came from a book about great unsolved mysteries, which I'd been given as a present for my ninth birthday, just a few months before my father vanished. One of the stories in the book was about David Lang, a farmer from Gallatin, Tennessee, who disappeared while crossing a field near his house in full view of his entire family and two visiting neighbors one bright sunny day in 1880.

How long I believed I'd seen the very same thing happen to my father, I don't know. At least I seem to have had the good sense not to talk about it to anyone, and eventually the fantasy fell away like a scab from an old cut.

But there's another twist in this tale of unreliable memory.

More than twenty years later, when I'd gone about as deeply into the subject of mysterious disappearances as it is possible to go, I discovered that the story of David Lang's disappearance was a complete fiction, probably inspired by a short story by Ambrose Bierce, but certainly with absolutely no basis in fact. It first saw light as a magazine article in 1953, and was picked up and retold in dozens of other places. Although later researchers conclusively proved that there never was a farmer named David Lang in Gallatin, and that everything about him and his mysterious disappearance was made up out of whole cloth, the story still survives, floating around on the Internet, popping up in books dedicated to the unexplained, while other, genuine, disappearances are forgotten.

Although David Lang did not exist, real people vanish every day.

Let me tell you about some of them.

At the time, it felt more like the end, but looking back, I think this was the beginning:

As I read those words on the
Guardian
's Web site, a terrible numbness spread through me. I read the opening paragraph again, more slowly, but it was still the same. Linzi Slater was dead.

The old leather office chair creaked as I leaned back, turning my eyes away from the screen. I wasn't ready for the rest of the sordid details. I stared, unseeing, at the wall of books to my left and heard the sounds of life that filtered into my dusty, cluttered office from the world outside. Laughter and applause from my next-door neighbor's television, the screech of air brakes from an HGV on the street outside, the more distant rumble and whine of a train approaching the nearby station. Life went on as usual. Of course, I had suspected for some time that Linzi was dead, but suspecting is not the same as knowing.

My throat ached. I found it hard to swallow. I felt sorry for the young girl I'd never known, sorry for her mother, and, more selfishly, sorry for myself. I had failed Linzi and her mother.

The police, it was true, had failed them, too, with less excuse. At least I could say I had tried. The police, with far more resources than I could hope to muster, had preferred to believe Linzi was in little danger. They had decided she was just another runaway. Young people go missing every day, and most of them vanish by choice. They run away from difficulties at home, or they go in pursuit of some barely understood dream. Linzi was sixteen, rebellious, moody, often truant from school. She had been seen last on a winter's evening within half a mile of her home, leaving a corner shop where she had bought a pack of cigarettes. After that, nothing, until a few days ago, when an unlucky dog walker had stumbled across a decomposing body under a bush in Sydenham Hill Woods nature reserve.

I'd been there often myself, since a school friend had mentioned it was a favorite hangout of Linzi's. She enjoyed the gloomy romanticism of the paths that wound past ruined houses and a disused railway cutting. I remembered the dim winter light, the smell of damp earth and leaves, the eeriness that always attaches to a place once settled and civilized, but now reclaimed by the wilderness. Reasoning that if she remained in London, Linzi might return to at least one of her old haunts, I had gone there several times. And as I'd tramped along those shaded woodland pathways I felt I was getting to know her, that just being there was bringing me closer to her. As it turned out, I'd been right, only not in the way I'd imagined. I must have walked past her hidden body more than once. She might have been dead within hours of vanishing. Almost certainly there was nothing I could have done to save her by the time her mother came to me three weeks later.

I read on, fearing, but needing to know how she had died. Murder? Suicide? An accident, even? Sydenham Hill Woods was a strange place to go on a winter's evening. It was a long walk—more usually, a bus ride—from Linzi's home, a destination for a Saturday or Sunday afternoon when the sun was shining. Still, people did do things on impulse—teenagers, especially.

Had it been arranged? Had someone asked her to meet him there, intending to kill her?

Another image came to my mind: a girl crawling through a low, hidden opening, into a cavelike space. I recalled reading about an early suicide attempt by Sylvia Plath: after leaving a note saying she was going for a long walk, she had crawled into the tiny, almost inaccessible, space beneath the house, with a bottle of pills, and huddled there, entombed, to wait for death.

Had Linzi been suicidal?

Her mother hadn't thought so. Janis Lettes, Linzi's mother, was convinced Linzi had no serious problems. Sure, she wasn't terribly happy at school, but there was nothing bad enough to make her run away. She'd been insistent that theirs was a close relationship, that she would have known if Linzi was depressed. As I recalled it, Mrs. Plath, too, had believed her relationship with her daughter was exceptionally close. But there would always be secrets even the most loving daughter didn't share with her mother, whether casual experiments with drugs and sex or the careful plans for her own death.

I heard the bubble and hiss of the coffeemaker in the next room and thought of getting myself a cup. Instead, I forced myself to read on, anxious to know how and why the girl had died.

But that was something no one knew yet. Forensic examination was under way. The next sentence shocked me.

Linzi was dead—how could there still be hope?

I was soon enlightened. Despite its lead, this story was not about Linzi Slater. Not really. The great newspaper-buying public had never heard of her. Linzi's disappearance had been a local story. It never made the national news, never lodged within the general consciousness as some crimes did. Maybe, if she had been a couple of years younger, or prettier, with a matched set of middle-class parents, the hacks might have turned her into a
cause célèbre
instead of ignoring her. But the press had not been interested in Linzi Slater when she vanished, and they weren't much more now. The point of this story was not that Linzi Slater's body had been found, but that someone else's hadn't.

This story was about the Nicola Crossley case.

Nicola Crossley, a fourteen-year-old from Kent, had vanished two months ago on her way home from school. Her parents had not come to me, or to any other private investigator, for help: they didn't have to. The police had made finding Nicola Crossley a top priority, and the media and public had responded. Her parents had made an emotive appeal for her return on television, her last-known movements had been reconstructed on a special episode of
Crimewatch,
and her brother had set up a Web site devoted to gathering information he hoped would lead to her return. But, so far, every hopeful new lead had come to nothing. When an early-morning dog walker in South London stumbled across the decomposing body of a young girl, every journalist in the country had thought of Nicola Crossley.

I thought of poor Janis Lettes and wondered how she was coping. I wanted to express my sympathy, but I didn't have the nerve to call her. She'd had faith in me once, and I'd let her down. Although I'd had nothing to do with Linzi's death, and couldn't possibly have saved her, I still felt guilty.

Instead of picking up the phone, I logged onto a few more news sites, searching for information, but everywhere I found only the same few sad, bare facts about Linzi, and a rehash of the Nicola Crossley case. Within a few days, I was willing to bet, there'd be a thoughtful piece in the
Guardian
on the subject of unsolved missing persons cases, or teenage runaways, and maybe Linzi's story would finally be told. Maybe her killer, if he existed, would be caught. But that wasn't my job, and this wasn't my case, although it had haunted me for more than a year.

Another question ate at me, one more grimly personal than the mystery of how and when she had died. Maybe I'd been given the case when it was already too late to save her. But why the hell hadn't I found her?

Janis Lettes could barely pay for a week of my time, but I'd worked a solid month for her, off the books, in my supposedly spare time: looking all over London, talking to everyone who had known Linzi, following up everything that looked remotely like a lead. There were precious few. If she'd had a secret life, or nurtured dreams of leaving, they'd remained hidden from the girls who called themselves her friends. Trying to get a feel for who she was, I'd spent hours in all her usual haunts and hangouts, nowhere more than Sydenham Hill Woods. I'd felt instinctively that it was significant, so I'd kept going back. I must have come within a few feet, if not inches, of her body, without knowing.

I'd failed before. I don't mean to imply that I was such a hotshot investigator that I'd found everybody I went looking for, because I certainly hadn't. Observational skills, intuition, dogged persistence all played a part in my success, but so did serendipity, and you couldn't count on that. Normally when I drew a blank, I just moved on to the next problem. The unsolved case remained open in my mind, a burden I would always carry with me, but it didn't stop me from taking on more. But somehow this failure felt different, and weighed more heavily. Maybe it was just the timing, because over the past year there had been a string of cases I couldn't solve, people I couldn't find, and it was making me reassess my whole career.

Maybe, after all, I wasn't any good at it. Maybe, for the better part of a decade, I'd been coasting along on luck, not skill, and now that luck had run out.

Also
coming in summer 2006
be sure not to miss

THE SILVER BOUGH

Lisa Tuttle's brand-new novel following
The Mysteries
tells the tale of a small Scottish community at the end of a remote peninsula who suddenly become cut off from the rest of the country by a landslide, blocking the only road out of town. But soon it becomes apparent that they've been cut off from the usual constraints of reality as well. . . .

Here's a special preview: