Desire Lines (14 page)

Inside, in the newsroom, a couple of reporters are sitting at their desks sipping coffee and staring groggily at computer terminals. One glances up and nods as she comes in. This pleases her, even though she knows he probably doesn’t recognize her and he’s just being polite. It makes her feel like one of them—a reporter on assignment. She can see Jack at the far end of the room in his glass-walled office, talking on the phone. His feet are up on the edge of his desk and he’s bouncing in his spring-coiled seat, tossing a beanbag in the air.

As she walks toward him she is suddenly nervous. He’s busy, and she isn’t; he’s wearing a tie, and she’s in jeans. He’s been here for hours (she can see the evidence, paper coffee cups lined up on his desk), and she’s just strolling in. This article is probably the least important thing on his agenda—he assigned it to her as a novelty, probably because he felt sorry for her—and it’s the only thing on her mind. Plus, there’s that
business of the invitation to go out the night before hanging between them. Does he feel as awkward about it as she does?

“I can come back,” she stage-whispers at the door to his office, but he gestures emphatically for her to sit down.

“Yeah. Right. Okay,” he says into the phone, lifting his feet off his desk and sitting up in his chair. When he looks at her, she can see the stubble on his chin and circles under his eyes. “So let me know when you’ve got something down, and we can go from there. Right. Friday. I need it by three. Hasta la vista, baby.” He replaces the receiver and stares at the blinking red lights on the handset. Then he looks up at her. “Hello,” he says.

“Hello.”

“You look rested.”

“You look like you had a rough night.” She smiles.

“Yeah, it’s probably just as well you didn’t go with us. Somebody’s intern had the crazy idea to do tequila shots.” He rubs his head. “I’m getting too old for that stuff.”

“Oh,” she says, “it was an office thing.” She’s surprised to find she feels a pang of disappointment.

“Yeah, I thought you might want to meet some of the others. They’re a good bunch.”

As always, Kathryn is struck by Jack’s casual generosity, his impulse to bring people together. He was like that in high school, organizing Friday-night video evenings and arranging rides to parties. He had more friends than anyone she knew. But she remembers Rachel snapping at him once, in front of a large group, “I needed to talk to you. I didn’t want this to be a huge thing with everybody else,” and all of them standing there uncomfortably while Jack tried to explain that he didn’t realize, he didn’t understand, he thought it would be fun with more people, and he thought she’d think so, too. Looking at his bloodshot eyes across the desk, Kathryn promises herself that she won’t make any more assumptions about his motives. “I’m sorry about begging off,” she says. “Next time, okay?”

“Okay. And no interns, I promise.” He hits the desk with both palms to signal a change in the conversation. “So what about the Jennifer story? Are you on board?”

Kathryn shifts in her chair and glances down at her blank notebook. She hasn’t followed any of the half-dozen paths Jack suggested, from contacting the police department to reading old clippings to interviewing family and friends. She isn’t sure where to start, and she’s also somehow afraid of being seen as taking advantage of their misery. After all, she knows Jennifer’s family, knows the pain they’ve been through and how raw it still is. It was an ordeal for them to have to talk to the police and the press as much as they did at the time; they certainly won’t want to rehash the whole thing now. “Well, I’ve done some asking around,” Kathryn says, “and it’s the funniest thing. Nobody seems to know where she is.”

“Really,” says Jack.

“That’s right.”

“You’re quite a sleuth.”

“It’s still speculation at this point,” she says. “I’ll let you know when I can get something more solid. In the meantime, I need you to point me in a couple of directions.”

“At the same time?”

“Yes, I need a good spin on this story.”

They both grimace at the lame wordplay, and he puts his face in his hands. “I can’t keep up with you. I can’t keep up with me. I need a cup of coffee.”

THE LIBRARY AT
the News is staffed by a heavy woman with a nimbus of salt-and-pepper hair wearing a batik-print skirt and a loose purple tunic.

“Joanne, Kathryn is doing a special assignment for us and needs to get into the archives,” Jack tells her. “Can you set her up?”

Joanne nods, giving Kathryn a once-over. “What does she need?” she asks Jack.

“It’s a missing-persons case,” Kathryn says. “The girl’s name was—is—Jennifer Pelletier. She disappeared in June of 1986.”

“Oh, sure, I remember it. Unsolved, right?”

“Right.”

“You got a lead?”

“Well—” Kathryn starts.

“She’s covering some different angles,” Jack says.

Joanne gives Kathryn a skeptical look. “I thought they worked that case up and down and sideways. Hard to see what different angles you could find after all this time.”

Jack glances at the big clock above her head. “Hey, I’ve got a meeting in a couple of minutes,” he says. “I appreciate your help on this, Joanne.” To Kathryn he says, “Let me know if there’s anything I can do.” He lightly squeezes her arm and then lifts his hand in a wave. “Talk to you soon.”

Kathryn looks after him as he leaves. She’s slightly stunned by the smoothness of his departure, the friendly squeeze and empty promise of it. The squeeze conveys both empathy and distance; it lets her know that Jack has brought her as far as he is going to, and she’ll have to go the distance alone. Though it seems like an intimate gesture, there is nothing personal about it.

“So what are we after?” Joanne demands.

“I need to see any story related to this case, and maybe even before. Is it possible to find unrelated pieces that might have mentioned her name?”

“We don’t have a search database going back that far. But I’d bet her mother has a scrapbook. You could ask her.”

Kathryn tries to remember if Jennifer or her mother had kept such a thing. Neither of them seemed the type.

“We do have all the articles on the disappearance, of course,” Joanne continues. “I’ll need to track down the microfiche. What’s the date on that?”

“June thirteenth, 1986,” Kathryn says automatically. “A Friday.” The date is as fixed in her brain as her own birthday.

“Is that the date that it happened, or the date the first article appeared?”

“Friday the thirteenth, huh? The date it happened. I guess the first article would have appeared on Monday, the … sixteenth.”

When Joanne goes off to find the articles, Kathryn sits at a table and begins to compile a list of people to talk to: Jennifer’s mother, her brother, Will. Rachel, Brian, Jack. The detective who worked on the case, the reporter who covered it. Abby Elson, a friend of Jennifer’s none of the rest of them knew very well. Chip Sanborn? Kathryn writes his name and then crosses it off the list. She wonders which teachers might have anything to say. Miss Hallowell was Jennifer’s English teacher, but she’d moved to Portland a few years after they graduated. Like Jennifer, she had once, as a Bangor High student, starred in the school play, and she saw this as a special bond between them. Miss Hallowell had been distraught at the news of Jennifer’s disappearance; she joined the search parties, organized a phone hotline, and cried a lot in public. Kathryn puts her name down with a question mark. Mr. Richardson, the flamboyant drama teacher who smoked cigarettes with his students behind the school, had featured Jennifer in several of his productions; he might have something to say. And then there was Mr. Hunter, the social-studies teacher who also ran the orienteering club. Kathryn and Jennifer had been in his class senior year, and Jennifer did orienteering. Mr. Hunter was young and charismatic, one of the few teachers at the school who was adept at jumping over the great divide between teenagers and adults.

“Well, here’s what we got,” Joanne says, handing Kathryn a manila folder. “You can use one of those projectors over there.” She motions toward a row of old-fashioned-looking light boxes with darkened screens. “I’ll be here if you need anything else.” She turns around and busies herself at her desk.

“Thank you,” Kathryn says.

Joanne nods. “Those stories have been picked over by everybody and his brother, but who knows, maybe you’ll find something nobody else could.” She shrugs doubtfully.

Kathryn puts her bag on the first table she comes to and switches on the machine. Opening her folder, she sees that the four sheets of film are labeled neatly in chronological order, beginning with the Monday after Jennifer’s disappearance, June 16. She takes the top sheet and puts it on the light table, moving the magnifying glass above it until the first article is projected onto the screen.
BANGOR HONOR STUDENT MISSING,
the headline announces. It’s by a staff reporter named John Bourne. “After graduating with honors from Bangor High School on Friday afternoon, Jennifer Ann Pelletier and her family celebrated over dinner at Pilot’s Grill. Then, like many new graduates, she met up with her friends for what her twin brother, William, 18, says was a ‘casual, relaxed get-together’ down by the Kenduskeag. Around 11:30
P.M.,
according to witnesses, she said she was tired and wanted to walk home,” Kathryn reads. The article continues:

No one has seen or heard from her since.

The Bangor Police Department is taking the disappearance seriously, and is asking the public’s help in locating Pelletier. According to Detective Ed Gaffney, she is 5 feet 5 inches in height, and weighs 117 pounds. She has shoulder-length blond hair and blue eyes. The night she disappeared she was wearing Levi jeans, a white cotton shirt, a black cotton sweater, a black and silver belt, black shoes, and silver earrings and bracelets.

Pelletier exhibited no unusual signs of behavior or mood in the weeks before her disappearance, according to friends and family members. “She was excited about graduating, and kind of sad about it, too, like all of us,” her brother said. “But she was her normal self.”

Described as a popular, well-liked student, Pelletier was active in drama and sports in high school, with a leading role in the school play, “Grease,” this spring. She lettered in cross-country last fall. She was also a member of the National Honor Society and the orienteering club, and she volunteered regularly at Westgate Manor, a local nursing home.

Game wardens using dogs searched the area for Pelletier on Sunday. A ground search, organized by her family, was conducted by volunteers, “with no results,” Gaffney said. Local shelters were also checked.

Anyone with information about the missing girl is asked to contact the Bangor Police Department at 555-7370.

There are dozens of articles in the summer and fall of 1986, Kathryn can see, skimming the sheets of film. The headlines tell the story:
SEARCH FOR BHS STUDENT INTENSIFIES, NEW EVIDENCE FOUND IN DISAPPEARANCE, POLICE MOVE TO QUELL RUMORS IN CASE OF MISSING STUDENT, THEORIES ABOUND RE: BANGOR GIRL’S DISAPPEARANCE.
After a while, because there’s so little news, the stories focus on Jennifer’s state of mind. In
GIRL’S DISAPPEARANCE REMAINS A MYSTERY
, John Bourne writes, “For all of her 18 years, Jennifer Pelletier has lived in Bangor, and she knows it like the back of her hand. When she was a child she was obsessed with maps of the city, and she’d spend hours studying them, her mother, Linda Pelletier, recalls. ‘Jennifer knows every shortcut and side street in this town,’ she says. ‘She would never just get lost here.’ She did so well in orienteering at Bangor High School that the club leader, social-studies teacher Richard Hunter, says ‘it’s as if she has a built-in compass.’”

By 1987, the headlines have become more desperate:
GIRL’S DISAPPEARANCE STILL A MYSTERY, POLICE “ACTIVELY INVESTIGATING” CASE, MOTHER SEEKS AID, RESIDENTS OFFER REWARD IN CASE OF MISSING GIRL.
As the years go by, they achieve a tone of resignation:
NEW NEWS ON PELLETIER CASE ONLY RUMORS, AN UNSOLVED MYSTERY, GONE BUT NOT FORGOTTEN
. Finally, eight years after her disappearance,
WILL JENNIFER PELLETIER EVER BE FOUND?

Along with the articles on the case, most of them written by John Bourne, the microfiche records a series of advertisements placed in the classifieds by “The Loving Family of Jennifer Pelletier.” The first one, dated July 4, 1986, reads, “This is one of your favorite holidays, Jennifer—a time of celebration and joy. Wherever you are, and whoever you’re with, we want you to know how badly we miss you and how much we love you. Please come home!” Another, a few months later, implores, “Whoever has information about my daughter, I beg you to let us know! You aren’t helping her or yourself by keeping quiet. We will find out what happened to her, it’s only a matter of time. Do the right thing—come forward.”

The lack of a response to this plea reverberates in Kathryn’s ears. No one came forward. If anyone knew, they never told.

She switches off the light and sits back in her seat. All these articles building toward a resolution that never comes. Optimism and energy turn to warning and fear, and then, inevitably, new stories take precedence and interest wanes. Nobody cares what happened to Jennifer Pelletier anymore; it’s yesterday’s news. They did the best they could, they tried their damnedest to find her, and nothing ever turned up. The case may still be open, but the book is closed.