The Year of Disappearances (16 page)

She set the note near Autumn’s sleeping bag. Autumn slept on her stomach, and all we saw was her out-flung arm and a mass of dark hair.

“Thanks for being nice to my friend,” I said to Bernadette, once we were outside.

She shrugged. “I feel sorry for her. She seems a little lost.”

We carried our backpacks to the parking lot and found two seats at the very rear of the Hillhouse van. The March morning felt crisp, the sky streaked orange by the rising sun. Other students took their time finding seats; some carried cups of coffee or hot chocolate, whose aromas perfumed the van. All I’d had for breakfast was a gulp of tonic, straight from the bottle; often that was enough for my breakfast, but today I felt hungry, and groggy from lack of sleep.

Professor Riley and Professor Hoffman were the last two to board. They looked sleepy. “No singing,” Hoffman said to us.

When the van finally left campus, I turned to watch Hillhouse disappear—and that’s when I saw a beige van pass, headed in the opposite direction. I couldn’t see the driver or the make of the vehicle. Despite the heater in our van, I felt a faint chill.

Most of the students dozed on the brief ride to Okefenokee. I stayed awake. As the sun grew higher in the sky, my mood began to lift. There must be thousands of beige vans in Georgia, I told myself.

By the time we arrived at the swamp’s entrance near Waycross, picked up our camping permits, and packed our canoes, it was nearly ten
A.M
. The temperature was 65 degrees, warm enough to shed our down jackets and vests. We put our sleeping bags and supplies in trash bags, set them in the center of the canoes, and tied them down with bungee cords.

As I was tying my trash bags to the canoe, Bernadette said, “The poor thing—look!”

An alligator lay on the bank about a hundred feet away from us. It looked as if its skin had shrunk to cling to its skeleton—emaciated, but still alive. We could see life in its small, dark eyes.

“What’s wrong with him?” I asked.

Professor Hoffman said, “Could be old age, or maybe he was hurt in a fight.”

“Can’t we do something to help?” Bernadette’s voice carried across the water, and one of the park guides came over. “That’s Old Joe,” he said. “He’s getting ready to die. We don’t interfere with nature.”

Bernadette didn’t say anything, but her shoulders hunched, and I knew she disagreed. Later she said to me, “Something is dying. And no one is paying attention.” She shook her head.

Each canoe held two, and Bernadette and I were partners. For the initial part of the trip, we both paddled; later, we took turns. I wore a thick coat of sunblock on my skin, and she had sprayed both of us with insect repellent. I told her that bugs never bit me, but she wasn’t convinced.

The waterway we rode was called a canal. At first it was the color of slate—gray, with indigo veins and variations—and the canoes rode it calmly, our oars making barely a splash. There was no wind, and the only sound was the low groaning of frogs. Along the banks alligators lay, singly or in couples, some watching us, some ignoring us. Mating season was two months away, and they weren’t yet inclined to be territorial.

For several minutes, none of us talked. The air smelled fresh and aromatic, reminding me a little of the smell of witch hazel. My mother kept a bottle of it in the bathroom at home. I didn’t want to think of home, so I tried to categorize the scent more precisely: it was both acidic and sweet, with perhaps a hint of turpentine. Nothing like witch hazel, really.

After we rounded the canal’s last bend, we entered a prairie—a wide expanse of flowering swamp. Here the water became deep brown, the color of steeped tea. A breeze began, and conical yellow flowers bobbed close to the canoe. As we went further, those flowers seemed to multiply, emerging from fleshy green foliage strewn across the prairie as far as we could see.

Professor Riley said the flowers were called golden club. Their other name was “neverwet,” because their succulent-like leaves repel moisture. They resist the elements that do not favor them, he said. They are likely to endure.

By the time we pulled our canoes ashore on the island late that afternoon, our eyes were as tired as our arms. We’d seen green and blue herons, sandhill cranes, ibises, kingfishers, and more gators than we could count. As I flipped our canoe over, a thick blue-black snake more than six feet long emerged from a sandy mound close by.

I didn’t like snakes then any more than I do now, but they had more right to be on the island than I had. I stood still. As the snake slithered into the brush, I felt the presence of someone behind me.

Professor Hoffman didn’t speak until the snake had disappeared. “Well, well,” he said. “Recognize it?”

“An indigo snake?”

“Very good. They’re an endangered species, you know. Their natural habitat has been turned into shopping malls and housing developments. Now, unfortunately, they’ve developed the habit of napping on roads.”

After dinner that night (potatoes and vegetables and herb-seasoned tofu, wrapped in foil and roasted in the fire), Hoffman talked about the species that we hadn’t seen that day.

“The Carolina parakeet—the only parrot species indigenous to the United States—was wiped out in the usual ways. Its habitat was destroyed by foresters. Some birds were captured and kept as pets; their feathers were used to decorate hats, but the tame birds weren’t bred because they were considered so common, and eventually they died off. Most of the wild ones were hunted by farmers, who thought they were pests.

“The Carolina parakeets were highly social creatures. When birds were shot, the rest of the flock would return to the site and gather around the dead bodies. Of course, hunters were waiting for them. We don’t know what caused the birds’ ultimate extinction, but it’s suspected that the remaining few succumbed to poultry disease.”

Bernadette set down her plate. “This is so depressing.” Her voice was low, but I’m sure it carried.

Nonetheless, Professor Hoffman kept talking. “Similarly, the ivory-billed woodpecker was wiped out by heavy logging and by hunters. By the 1920s it was considered extinct. One pair—the birds mate for life—turned up in Florida, but they immediately were shot by specimen collectors.”

“Idiots!” Bernadette said. The other students ignored her.

“A few years ago, research teams found evidence of ivory bills in Florida and Arkansas. If their findings are confirmed, the bird would be called a lazarus species. Anybody know what that means?”

The girl called Jacey said, “In the Bible, Lazarus was raised from the dead by Jesus. It was considered a miracle.”

“Well, in scientific terms, it’s no miracle. It’s simply a sign that the original survey claiming the species extinct was flawed. When a creature presumed dead forever reappears, the scientific community is always glad to be proven wrong.”

Bernadette nudged me. “I have to pee. Come with.”

The cabin had no bathroom, but an outhouse wasn’t far away. So far only the girls in the group had used it, the boys preferring to go behind trees. Bernadette went into the wooden hut, complaining about men using the world as their toilet.

I waited outside, watching the lighted windows of the cabin and listening to the night. The air was filled with the sounds of frogs, occasional moans from owls, and rustles from the woods near us. And then, the sound of Bernadette screaming.

The outhouse door swung wide and slammed against the wall. Bernadette leapt onto the grass, clutching the waist of her jeans.

The cabin door opened. Professor Riley said, “You okay?”

Bernadette ran inside the cabin, and I followed.

“Something in there bit me!” she said. “Do you think it was a snake?” She held out her ankle, turned it to show a red welt.

“That’s not a snakebite,” Riley said. “More like a blackfly.”

A fly bite was so much more acceptable than a snakebite. I confess, my first thought had been of the huge indigo snake, slithering through the long grass into the outhouse to wait for one of us. (Later I learned that the indigo isn’t poisonous. It swallows its small prey alive.)

The food and exercise made all of us sleepy. But Jacey refused to spend the night in the cabin. “This place creeps me out,” she said.

We’d brought along two tents, and Jacey proposed setting one up. She said she wouldn’t sleep outside alone.

No one else wanted to join her, so I volunteered.

Bernadette said, “You’re crazy.”

“The bugs don’t bother me,” I said. “And the air in here is a little stale.” It smelled musty, like dead fires and old clothes.

So, Jacey, whom I knew only as the smallest girl with the longest braids in school, and I spent the night in the tent. We didn’t sleep much. The rustlings I’d heard before seemed louder as the night passed, and we heard nearly constant movements on the ground near the tent.

“Raccoons,” I said, but Jacey said, “Too big for raccoons.”

We dozed off and awoke to more sounds: something seemed to be walking around the perimeter of the tent. It made a rattling sound as it moved.

Jacey sat up in her sleeping bag. She whispered, “Ari, Ari. I’m scared. I think it’s the fetcher.”

“Who?”

She breathed loudly. “The devil’s fetcher. Coming for our souls.”

Like most vampires, I’m not easily frightened. I remember watching horror movies at my friend Kathleen’s house; I was more intrigued by the faces of her family responding to the movies than by the monsters on-screen. But that night, on an island in a swamp so remote that our cell phones didn’t work, I let myself succumb to the sensation of fear. It was curiously pleasurable.

“What does he look like?”

“He can change his appearance.” Jacey whispered in bursts and breathed deeply in between. “Sometimes he’s an animal—a dog or a wolf or a calf. Other times, he’s a person—an old man, or a woman with bloody hands. Sometimes they cut out your heart and eat it.”

“How do you know about them?”

“I’ve always known.” She took another deep breath. “I’ve dreamed about them, too.”

Outside, the footfalls slowed, then sped up again. They sounded too loud to be an animal’s, too fast to be a human’s. Around and around the tent they went, accompanied by the strange rattle.

“I’m scared,” I whispered, and I heard the surprise in my voice. Fear tingled and spread through my blood with each heartbeat.

“We could call for help,” Jacey said.

“Wake everyone up?” I wasn’t
that
scared. “Jacey, they’d make fun of us all over campus. We’d never live it down.”

Then the thing outside stopped moving. It began making sounds, softly at first, then louder. I can’t describe what they sounded like—imagine a puppy yelping, then pitching its voice higher, and finally so high that it threatened to shatter your eardrum.

Jacey made a strange sound too, a low gurgle in her throat.

Fear wasn’t fun anymore. She grabbed my shoulder, and I held her hand. I don’t know how long we stayed that way, wrapped in our sleeping bags, clutching each other, listening to the keening that came out of the dark. Sometimes I thought I heard words in the howling. Once I thought I heard it speak my name.

I heard Jacey thinking,
And tomorrow they’ll find our dead bodies in the tent.
I wondered what she’d think if she knew she was holding the hand of a vampire.

We didn’t sleep again that night. The thing outside eventually went away, but we knew it could come back anytime it chose.

Once daylight was strong, I unzipped the tent flap and saw only grass and trees and sky. I chided myself for being a coward. Why hadn’t I simply gone outside to see what made the noise?

The scariest things are the ones that visit us in darkness, the ones we never see. And the fear that kept us paralyzed in the tent that night left a funny residue, a bitter taste in my throat, a reminder that, after all, in some ways I was vulnerable as any mortal.

H
umans see things differently than animals do. Humans are much better at detecting unmoving objects. Animals’ nervous systems have evolved to detect movement, since motion may indicate the approach of a predator or prey. But a frog can’t even see a stationary object because of neural adaptation; its visual neurons don’t respond to unmoving things, in order to save energy.

Theoretically, humans do better at seeing stationary objects because their eyes are always moving, counteracting neural adaptation. But sometimes they fail to see objects in their field of vision because their attention is directed elsewhere. Skilled magicians know how to induce and manipulate states of inattentional blindness. That’s why tricks work.

Not much research has been devoted to examining vampires’ vision, but based on the little I’ve read on the Internet and on my own observations, it tends to be more acute than humans’. A vampire’s retina has more rod and cone cells than a human’s, making it more responsive to light and color. Yet even with that enhanced vision, the vampire eye may be susceptible to inattentional blindness. Like humans, and like frogs and dragonflies, we sometimes fail to see what is right in front of us.

Jacey and I avoided each other for the rest of our time in the swamp. Each of us reminded the other of the sour experience of fear that began as fun and progressed to something malignant.

Bernadette—who said she’d slept like a baby—did the paddling that morning. I slumped in the rear of the canoe, half-asleep, ignoring the alligators slumped along the banks, half-asleep.

Professor Hoffman, wide awake, gave us an impromptu lecture that drifted back to me in partial sentences. He was talking about alligators’ vision—how their eyes have layers of reflecting tissue behind the retinas that act like mirrors. “We call the tissue
tapetum lucidum,
” he said. “Anybody know what that means?”

It means “bright carpet,” but I felt too sleepy to volunteer. Hoffman said the tissue acts like a mirror to concentrate available light, helping the gators to hunt in the dark. And it’s also responsible for the way alligators’ eyes look at night if you shine a flashlight on them—they glow red, like burning coals.

Bernadette said, “Creepy.”

The whole trip had been a little too creepy for me. And I wasn’t looking forward to spending the night on a wooden platform, surrounded by who knew what. Vampires need sleep even more than humans do, to keep our immune systems healthy.

Hoffman was talking about something called succession—the natural process of change that occurs in a habitat. If the peat in the swamp built up, the swamp would become a shrub, and later a hardwood, habitat. “What keeps the swamp a swamp is the natural occurrence of wildfires,” he said. “As fires burn away peat, open lakes are left. Without the fires, this place would be a forest.”

One moment, I was half-asleep, half listening to the lecture, feeling mildly annoyed at the prospect of what I thought lay ahead. The next, we were all fully awake, thanks to Jacey’s screaming.

She saw it first: close to the shore, amid the golden club plants, something dark was floating.

Jacey said, “What? What?” She screamed again, and then someone else screamed.

I sat up, but the other canoes blocked my sight. But as we drifted, I had an open view of the shape in the water—dark clothes billowing out and a head of dark hair. The shape looked terribly out of place. It looked
wrong.

The professors took out their cell phones. Neither had a signal. Then they pulled out maps, trying to identify our location and find the best route to a place where the phones would work.

“Jacey, you okay?” Professor Riley said.

She’d hunched forward, panting. Later she told me she was trying not to vomit.

Hoffman told the other girl in Jacey’s canoe to do the rowing. “The rest of you—everybody paddle.”

We turned the canoes around and Hoffman led us back toward the landing where we’d launched them. The pace of our paddling was twice as fast as it had been on the trip out.

From time to time I glanced over at Jacey to see if she was okay, but all I saw was the back of her jacket. She still bent forward, head inclined so that she couldn’t see anything beyond the canoe’s interior.

Bernadette kept looking at Jacey, too, and I heard her say something indistinct. “What did you say?” I said.

She turned her head sideways. “Jacey looks like the Six of Swords.”

I remembered the image of that tarot card: a cloaked woman leaning forward in a punt, a ferryman behind her, using a long pole to propel them to shore, and six swords before her, holding her in place. Bernadette had said the card signified escape.

We felt exhausted by the time we reached the landing. Professor Hoffman called 911, and Professor Riley arranged for the van to pick us up. We’d had enough wilderness to last us a long time.

The other students were uncharacteristically quiet. No one wanted to talk about what we’d seen until we knew what we’d actually seen, yet no one could think of anything else. Once the van came and we were headed back to campus, Riley insisted on stopping at a fast food place, but no one ate much.

The campus and our dormitory building looked and smelled reassuringly familiar. Bernadette and I carried our trash bags of supplies and sleeping bags into the room, and I dropped mine in order to turn the light on. But I couldn’t find my lamp.

“Turn on the overhead,” I told Bernadette.

When she switched on the bare bulb, the room’s details jumped out at us—our unmade beds, Autumn’s sleeping bag on the floor, and across and around it, the remains of my lithophane lamp. It must have fallen hard, because fine shards of glass and porcelain glittered in a wide arc across the floor. Autumn wasn’t there.

I felt too shocked and tired to say what I was thinking:
Why did Autumn have to break my lamp?

“Let’s clean it up later,” I said.

Bernadette looked from the broken glass to me. “But where will Autumn sleep?”

“We’ll leave her a note,” I said. “We can crash in Jacey’s room, and Autumn can have the sofa in the lounge.” I didn’t care where she slept. I wanted my lamp back.

Bernadette picked up her trash bag again, and I followed her down the hall to Jacey’s room.

Bernadette knocked. When Jacey opened the door—her face white, eyes red—Bernadette said, “You’ve got company.”

When it was time to go to dinner, we stopped back at the room. Autumn still wasn’t there.

“Where do you suppose your friend is?” Bernadette asked.

I thought of Autumn and her tendency to get into trouble in the past. “She’s an independent kind of girl,” I said. I hoped she hadn’t broken anything else.

Very early the next morning, my cell phone rang. Dashay’s voice sounded odd, lacking emotion and inflection. She said, “I’m calling to tell you to expect some visitors.”

The way she spoke made me think someone else might be listening to our call, so I made my voice neutral, too. “Who’s coming?”

“Your mother,” she said. “And Cecil. Agent Burton.”

“May I talk to Mãe?”

“She’s not here,” Dashay said. “She’s in Georgia, visiting family.”

The only family my mother had was a sister in Savannah, and she never visited her.

“Is everything okay?” I asked.

“She’ll explain when she gets there. She’s already on her way.”

“How are you?” I asked, feeling as if I were in a play.

“I am all right.” Her voice bordered on singsong. “I took a trip to Atlanta last week, to look up an old friend.”

She must mean Bennett,
I thought. “How is he?”

“He and his fiancée are very well.”

Dashay’s artificial calm began to worry me. Soon after that, we said good-bye.

I went back to our room and stepped around the glass shards to get my towels and shampoo. After a shower and a change of clothes, I realized how hungry I was. Bernadette was still asleep, so I went to the lounge to see if Autumn wanted breakfast. But the old couch in the lounge was vacant.

I went to breakfast alone.

Back in the room again, I was sweeping up the remains of my lamp when Mãe came in. I dropped the broom to hug her. When we pulled apart, the sight of her face alarmed me—she looked drained, as if she hadn’t slept in days.

“What’s wrong?” I asked.

That’s when Agent Burton walked in. He apologized for disturbing us, but his voice didn’t sound sorry.

At his suggestion we went to the library, to a closed-off nook called a carrel. Burton took out his tape recorder and coughed a few times to test it. He looked more somber than I’d ever seen him.

Then he told me that the thing in the swamp was a body, and the body was Autumn’s.

Later—after a week of being interviewed by Burton and the Georgia State Police, of being given a series of polygraph tests, of walking around in a state of shock—I listened to my mother apologize. She said she’d wanted to call, warn me about what was coming, but she and Dashay decided it was better for the police to witness my first reactions to the news.

By the end of that week, Burton felt fairly certain that I hadn’t caused Autumn’s death (she’d been strangled, he said, but they weren’t sure where it had happened), but he was troubled by what he considered the “unbelievable coincidence” of three girls who knew me disappearing and two (at least) ending up dead. (To a lesser degree, he was troubled by the polygraph’s measurement of my abnormally low skin temperature, which Mãe persuaded him was a side effect of treatment for “a rare form of lupus—the same kind that killed her father”).

Then came word that one of the dorm’s resident advisors told police she’d seen a stranger carrying an oversized trash bag out of the dorm the morning we’d left for the swamp.

“I figured he was part of the canoe trip,” she said. She hadn’t been close enough to get more than a general impression of the man. Medium height, she said. Bald. Wearing sunglasses and dark clothes.

I told Burton about the beige van I’d seen approaching campus as we left for Okefenokee.

“We put out an alert last time you mentioned a van,” he said. “Nothing turned up.”

“Well, you’d better put out another one,” my mother said. “Someone killed that girl, and he’s still out there.”

He thought I’d imagined the van, but he did make a note.

“What if”—I framed the question as I asked it—”what if whoever took Autumn was really after me?”

To my surprise, Burton had already thought of that. Yes, I was listening to his thoughts again. He was brooding on the placement of the body, how likely it was that whoever killed her had known the route of our canoes, had wanted us to find her.

“Anything’s possible,” he said. “All we can do now is conjecture.”

Aside from signs of struggle—the broken lamp, the sleeping bag half-turned inside out—the dorm room held no evidence of the presence of anyone aside from Autumn, Bernadette, and me. But the police had found the note Bernadette left for Autumn, and they questioned Chip, her ex-boyfriend. Chip’s alibi—that he’d been trying to steal a car on the night in question—didn’t impress them much. They’d also questioned Jesse and Autumn’s father, both in Sassa and in Georgia, where they’d volunteered to come. At the family’s request, I met Mr. Springer and Jesse one afternoon at the brick police station.

Mr. Springer was a middle-aged man, overweight, who perspired heavily and barely spoke. He had Autumn’s chin and eyes. Jesse looked different—his head was shaved, and he’d lost weight. His eyes were clear, and every move he made seemed purposeful.

“We know you had nothing to do with it,” he told me. “We just want you to tell us what happened.”

I told them the same details I’d told the police about Autumn’s visit. She hadn’t seemed upset so much as depressed about the breakup with Chip. And I mentioned her phone call to me, when she’d told me Jesse was joining the marines. “She sounded very proud of you,” I said.

He straightened his shoulders for a moment, nodded as if to say thanks. He and his father hated talking about Autumn’s death. It made them feel powerless.

My time as a person of interest ended after the forensics lab found DNA under Autumn’s fingernails. The sample they took from me didn’t match it.

The last thing Burton said to me was, “Call me if you remember anything else. Meantime, please be careful.”

I thought about the night in the tent, the thing outside, the weird noises. If I mentioned any of that, Burton would once again think I was imagining things. But Mãe must have heard what I thought. As we walked to the truck, she checked to be sure I was wearing my cat amulet.

During the week of my interrogations (that’s how I’ve thought of it ever since), I lost my normal sense of taste, smell, sound, and touch, and I saw things without taking in details.

In my philosophy class, the professor had told us about “philosophical zombies”: hypothetical creatures who act like humans, but who lack any sense of being alive. They can walk, talk, eat, drink—without any subjective sense of the experience. That week, I felt like a zombie.