Desire Lines (17 page)

“Right. Well, I’m doing a follow-up story for the
News.”

“Something turn up?”

“No. Not yet.”

He nods again, more slowly this time. “Well, Gaffney’s here,” he says. “I don’t know if he’ll talk to you. He got pretty sick of the reporters covering this case the first time around.”

“I only have a couple of questions,” she says. “Tell him it’ll be five minutes. I promise.”

He points at her, his hand cocked like a gun. “Two things you learn in this job,” he says. “Never turn your back on a suspect, and never trust a reporter. Especially when they give you their word.” He walks across the room to a glass-enclosed office and shuts the door.

Kathryn watches the two men in the office—the wiry desk sergeant and the potbellied, dark-haired officer behind the desk. Gaffney is wearing black aviator glasses, like a celebrity on a talk show, and, though the others look as if they haven’t been outside all summer, he sports a deep tan. Now that Kathryn sees him, she recognizes him from the investigation. He wasn’t the one who interviewed her—it had been some female officer with a gruff manner and a barbershop haircut. But he was on the news a lot back then, commenting solemnly at press conferences on their habitual lack of progress.

Gaffney rises slowly, hitches up his pants, and adjusts his belt. Then he nods his chin toward Kathryn and the desk sergeant comes out to get her.

“So,” Gaffney says when she’s standing across from him, “I understand
we’ve got a new reporter on this old case. Don’t they have anything better for you to do?”

“I’m Kathryn Campbell,” she says, holding out her hand. “I appreciate your talking to me.”

“Is that what I’m doing?” His eyes narrow, and he puts his hands on his belt. She lets hers drop to her side. “Kathryn Campbell,” he muses. “That name sounds familiar.”

“Maybe from the case,” she admits. “I was a friend of—”

“No, wait a minute. You related to Sally Campbell, by any chance?”

“Um, yes,” she says, startled. “She’s my mother.”

He stands there, staring at her, and then he breaks into a grin. “Well, son of a gun. She’s a good woman, your mother.”

Kathryn smiles uncertainly. “How do you know her?”

“You ask your mom,” he says. “Tell ‘er Gaff says hi.”

“‘Gaff?”

“She’ll know,” he says. “Now. What can I do for you?”

TWO HOURS LATER
, Kathryn has a copy of the missing-persons report in her hand, which Jennifer’s mother had filled out a day and a half after Jennifer vanished. Sitting in the Bagel Shop, chewing on a bialy, Kathryn runs down the list:

Description:
Medium-length light blond hair, 5′5″, 117 pounds, light blue eyes.

Distinguishing features:
A mole near her heart, a scar on her right arm, and another across her right knee.

What were they wearing?
Blue jeans, white cotton shirt, silver belt, black boots, black sweater, amethyst ring (I think).

Access to
a vehicle?
Not that I know of.

Possible destinations?
Unknown. But her passport is missing (I don’t know how long—we couldn’t find it in her room yesterday).
Has the person gone missing before?
Not longer than a night.

Frame of mind before they left?
Fine. A little distracted, maybe. No indication that she wanted to leave or had plans to leave.
Will you go pick them up if they’re found?
Of course.

At the bottom, Jennifer’s mother has scrawled, “Jennifer is not the runaway type. Please help us find her before something terrible happens. We’ll do anything we can to get her back.—Linda Pelletier.”

Consulting a burgeoning case file, Detective Gaffney went over the details of the case with Kathryn in his office. Jennifer’s mother first called the police at 3:00
P.M
. on Saturday after trying to track her daughter down herself. At 4:30
P.M
. an officer went to the house, where he talked to Mrs. Pelletier and Will for forty-five minutes. He filled out a report and wrote at the bottom, “Last seen Friday around midnight. Probably at somebody’s camp or in Bar Harbor. Mother very concerned, but concedes daughter isn’t always reliable. Agrees to wait until morning to send out APB.”

Sunday morning, according to a follow-up report, the police sent out a statewide all-points bulletin with Jennifer’s vital statistics and short interviews with family and friends about her state of mind. Kathryn finds her own quote, which echoes the others: “She wouldn’t just run away—she isn’t like that.” And then, as if to prove it, “She is excited about being a counselor at Camp Keonah in two weeks.” Several people mentioned that she had appeared distracted lately, and that it wasn’t the easiest year, but things seemed to be getting better. At the bottom of the report, Detective Gaffney had typed, “8/25/85 Father died in single-car accident—possible suicide. 9/25/85 J.P. rushed to ER to have stomach pumped—possible suicide attempt. Mother remarried 11/16/85. No further incidents. Active in drama club, sports, good student, popular. Plans to attend Colby in Sept.”

That afternoon, the police took a K-9 unit to the site on the river where Jennifer was last seen. The dogs were given a piece of her clothing and set loose. Jennifer had said she was going home, but her scent told a different story. The dogs followed her trail for several miles, turning
left on Outer Kenduskeag instead of right toward her home as everyone expected. But when the dogs reached Griffin Road they got confused, two of them heading north, the other one running in circles around the intersection, and police had to abandon the effort. After that, a five-person team set out on foot along the route, looking for a sign of struggle or a scrap of fabric. In the underbrush near Kenduskeag they found a hammered-pewter barrette that Will later identified as his sister’s; she often clipped it to a belt loop on her jeans. In the report Gaffney speculated that she may have been keeping to the side of the road to avoid notice.

The next day the first article appeared in the paper. Divers were sent into the Kenduskeag; a small boat traveled slowly up and down the river as two officers with binoculars scanned the shoreline and examined rock formations protruding from the water. By late morning a citizens’ patrol that Will had organized fanned out across a mile-wide expanse, moving slowly through the trees and long grass and the housing developments around Husson College. When they reached the Griffin Road intersection they split into three groups, two following the road in each direction, one moving straight ahead on Kenduskeag Avenue and the area surrounding it, a flat, marshy field and a small wood.

Late that afternoon, on the road going north, someone picked up a gum wrapper, berry-flavored Carefree, Jennifer’s favorite kind. That and the barrette were the only clues they found, through weeks and months of searching. They set up a hotline and followed up all the leads phoned in, no matter how tenuous or absurd they seemed, but nothing panned out. Jennifer had vanished, it seemed, into a car going north, a car that detectives concluded must have picked her up on Griffin Road sometime between 12:30
A.M
. and around 5:00
A.M
., when traffic got heavier and someone would probably have seen her.

When the story went out on the wires the next day, people began to report having spotted her as far north as Quebec. There were dozens of sightings of an eighteen-year-old girl with white-blond hair—at rest stops, all-night diners, after-hours clubs. But, as Gaffney told Kathryn,
hundreds of people say they’ve seen the Loch Ness Monster, too. It may exist, but there’s never been any conclusive proof. And until there is, the case is no closer to being solved than it ever was. “A mystery like this is a powerful thing,” he said. “It gets under your skin. You keep thinking you’re going to figure it out; the girl’s going to turn up, you’re going to find that piece of the puzzle that shows you the whole picture. And then, when you don’t…” His voice trailed off. “Nobody wants a case like this. It eats at you for the rest of your life.”

Intent on the papers in front of her, Kathryn is startled when a Bagel Shop employee addresses her. The girl is wearing a kerchief over her dark, frizzy hair and balancing a tray of dirty mugs on her hip. “Done with that?” she says, gesturing toward Kathryn’s half-eaten roll and cold coffee.

“Uh, sure,” Kathryn says. She looks around and notices the noontime crowd filling up the tables. “I guess I’ll get some lunch,” she says apologetically. The girl nods and moves away, and Kathryn goes up to the counter to order a bowl of matzo-ball pea soup—a comforting if peculiar combination she remembers from high school. She used to order this soup on winter days when her mother brought her downtown to the Grasshopper Shop across the street for a rare mother-daughter spending spree. Laden with bags of 100-percent-cotton shirts from Guatemala and leggings from Esprit, they’d stagger into the Bagel Shop for a ritual lunch. They both pretended the shopping was a bribe, but Kathryn secretly liked these lunches as much as her mother did. The only thing was, her mother always insisted on ordering the most traditional Jewish food possible—pickled herring, gefilte fish, chopped liver. “When in Rome …” she’d say brightly, and then spend an hour pushing the food around on her plate.

Settling back into her booth with the brimming bowl of soup, Kathryn leafs through the pages from Jennifer’s folder that Gaffney let her copy. The file was open, and it would be until she turned up, but Gaffhey said he wanted to keep some of the information from the general public, like the interview with Jennifer’s mother. He allowed Kathryn to read it
at the station, but not to take it with her and not to allude to it in any articles. The folder also contained pages from Jennifer’s senior-year diary, a document remarkable mostly for its lack of distinguishing detail. “Tuesday, November 14,” one typical entry read. “Went to school early with Will, finished chem report. Read 20 pages of Catch-22 for English. After school went to Dairy Queen with K.C.”—at the sight of her name, Kathryn’s stomach tightens—“Made plans for the wknd. Orienteering. Wiped. An early night.”

Orienteering. It was a club Jennifer belonged to—or a sport; Kathryn couldn’t remember the distinction. Mr. Hunter had started it the spring of their junior year. It grew out of a segment of gym class where they were sent into the wooded acres around the school with compasses and hand-drawn maps and taught how to navigate their way out. Most of the kids got lost on purpose and used the time to smoke or fool around or head off to the parking lot to gossip for an hour in an unlocked car, but a small core of people really got into it. They studied it like a foreign language, figuring out how to read the position of the sun in the sky, the shadows of the trees, bent stalks, matted grasses, the minute gradations of a quivering compass, the inscrutable crosshatchings of a poorly photocopied contour map. The whole exercise held little interest for Kathryn, but Jennifer was captivated. When Mr. Hunter convened an after-school group, she was one of the first to sign up. “It’s an amazing concept,” Jennifer enthused. “It’s what the Indians have been doing for thousands of years. Once you learn to find your way out of the wilderness on your own, you’ll never be lost.” She went on about how to identify desire lines, the foot trails people create through unmarked territory. “How can you not want to know this stuff?”

“When am I going to need it?” Kathryn said, rolling her eyes. “You may not have noticed, Jen, but we live in towns these days. With paved roads and sidewalks and these newfangled things called street signs. I’m not planning on getting lost in the woods anytime soon.”

“What about hiking?”

“Wherever I want to go hiking, I can promise you, somebody has already been. And there are clearly marked paths and rest stops and other hikers to say hello to along the way. Wandering out into a forest or up some obscure rock face is not my idea of a good time.”

Jennifer grinned. “You’re a wimp. And I feel sorry for you if something ever happens and you actually need those skills to survive.”

“Like what?” Kathryn said, imagining a camping trip gone wrong.

“Like, I don’t know. World War Three.”

“What are you talking about?”

“It could happen,” Jennifer said. “And I’m going to be ready for it, and you’re not.”

Kathryn looked at her for a long moment. “Where are you getting these crazy ideas?”

Jennifer pulled back. She didn’t answer. Finally she said, “All I’m saying is, this stuff could be useful to know.”

Kathryn nodded and they dropped the subject. After that, Jennifer didn’t talk much about it, except to say that she’d been hiking near one northern lake or another and saw a moose, or watched the ice break up on a warm day.

In class, Kathryn kept an eye on Mr. Hunter to see if she could detect a strain of freakish nationalism, but he gave nothing away. Whenever she asked him a direct question—about the citizens’ right to bear arms, about nuclear stockpiling or the function of government, he always turned the question around: “What do
you
believe?” When she pressed him, he said, “My opinion is irrelevant. It’s more important for you to figure out what
you
think.”

“Oh, he’s just playing teacher,” Will said when she told him. “You know how Hunter does that. I’m glad Jen is so interested in something.”