Girls (17 page)

I went into our dead baby’s room.

Then we were on our feet in the library. People discussed the irony of information sealed away in a campus building dedicated to disclosure. The Secret Service agents could not be consoled. Warnings
were made and a meeting scheduled for the next day. One of the agents described it as the last. Piri said something about the right to privacy. She smiled at me shyly and I remembered how she’d told me her father was a New York cop.

And in the Jeep, driving up the campus road in second gear because, I guess, I forgot to shift into third until I heard the gearbox nagging, I thought of how in this part of the country, they keep the corpses all winter long. They don’t get into the ground until April. Plants begin to bloom, and so do the graves. The frost line is high, but in April they get through the lingering snow and the iron surface of the ground by using a backhoe. Then they bury the dead. I shifted up to third, but on too steep an angle, and the engine bucked, so I downshifted and made my way very slowly to the top of the campus. I went up past the old graveyard filled with dead professors, toward the quarry where the redheaded girl had tried to kill herself. I wanted to be alone under the low, dirty clouds of the darkening day, and I was, when I turned the engine off and put both hands at the top of the wheel and leaned my forehead onto them. I must be a very bad and selfish man, I thought. I must have loved Fanny more than our child, our baby girl we had named Hannah, who was dead and under the snow.

W
HEN
I
CAME HOME
, Fanny was at work, of course. I nevertheless called to the house that I was there. The dog, who had been up with his forepaws on the inside of the door, already knew that. I let him out, and I walked with him a little. Our road had three-foot snowbanks, and he occasionally jumped up onto them and lifted his face into the winds and then clambered down. He made a series of notches in the snow that hemmed us in as we went about a half a mile up the road and then walked home. I stopped below an evergreen that had turned skeletal and brown. I hoped it was a tamarack tree. I thought they were the kind of evergreen that goes through seasonal cycles and in the spring comes back tender and green. I looked at mouse trails in the snowbanks, and rabbit tracks. I thought how much was going on when I didn’t see.

“It’s a kind of natural history lesson for the optimism-impaired,” I told the dog. He seemed pleased to be addressed and, both of us steaming at the muzzle, we went home.

I turned lights on. After the meeting in the library, I wanted brightness, room to room. For company, I turned the TV set on and let a smooth fellow with a nasal hum tell the house about weather in
Colorado and Wyoming. Upstairs, I turned on the hallway light. I forced myself to move with no hesitation when I went into the baby’s room.

She had cleaned it. She had used a shovel and a garbage pail for the burnt, shredded wallpaper. They were still in the room, the square-ended shovel with its wooden handle inside the metal pail. They looked like a big mortar and pestle in the window of an old-fashioned pharmacy. She had put the smaller pieces of Sheetrock and large dried piles of joint compound into the pail along with some of the smaller splintered chunks of stud. The rest, I thought, she must have carried down to the garage. Near the pail was a dustpan and a straw broom she had used to sweep the floor.

It looked like any room in process, a room in a house that someone was going to redecorate. Maybe we can do that, I thought. Maybe it would be good for us to look at wallpaper and paint. We’ll buy a gallon of flat ceiling white, I thought. And some new rollers, and a low-luster oil-based paint for the windows and molding and doors. We’ll take home paint chips and hold them up to the wall, and we’ll talk about colors.

I looked at the quarter-round molding I might replace with something a little more ornate. I was good at mitering cuts of forty-five degrees. I might box in the windows with four-inch casing, I thought. The dog had a length of splintered stud, and he chewed it, shaking it in his teeth once or twice in case it was alive. I kept my back to the corner of the room in which we had stood Hannah’s crib.

The new one was nearly eighteen, a Filipina with a black father and missing from a school for troubled girls in Oneida County, probably too far from us for the maniac to be the same. Her face in the grainy, sun-blurred photograph looked taut, thoughtful, dubious about something. They could have printed a picture of an owl dropping a pellet and I would have read a lot of emotions into it.

I wondered if girls had been kidnapped, murdered, preyed upon
for years. Maybe it was the times, and therefore everything human and otherwise from when we began might not be at fault. Including, maybe, nature and God and the universe and Captain Marvel and Mother Teresa. Elmo gave me the details and showed me the poster, which had been mailed from the Oneida County Sheriff’s Department. It was battered and stained, as if they had dug through snowdrifts to get it into the mail.

Perhaps it was the times. Or maybe it was the Tanners. They had enlisted so much help, even from passing truck drivers and people stopping for coffee on the Thruway going north-south as well as east-west. An item ran in the Binghamton papers about their posters. The reward was now $7,500, and I’d heard it was Mrs. Tanner’s pension money and Reverend Tanner’s life insurance, which he’d borrowed on. There was talk of a home-equity loan to bump the reward into more impressive ranges if they didn’t hear something soon. They were stripping themselves to get her back. It made sense. What could you use the money for if she didn’t come back? So maybe the parents of other victimized girls were following the Tanners’ lead. Everyone was crying for help. That was what the Tanners were teaching them. Don’t wait quietly. Do what you can. Call for help. Praying, Mrs. Tanner would call it, I was sure.

We had a run of days with temperatures closer to ten than to zero. Students walked around gloveless in what was, of course, ferocious cold, their coats open, no hats or scarves and their work boots untied. I knew they didn’t believe in a dangerous world. Yet they fastened posters to their windows and they stood in corridors, waiting for class or a meeting with a teacher, staring at the faces of vanished children. Men tied up children and flayed their skin in measured strips. Women sometimes helped them. Little boys were penetrated by middle-aged men using bottle necks and broom handles. Girls were raped in the mouth by men they later called Granddad. And these children I watched out for didn’t trouble to lace their boots.

I was running an equipment check on my Jeep, something I’d suggested to all of the staff. It was early in the day, and I was in the little parking lot in front of the security building, a small gray-and-white
Cape Cod cottage on the edge of the campus. I folded the blankets, looked inside the first-aid kit for what can save someone’s life—rubber tourniquet, sharp, heavy knife for the tracheotomy none of us thought we’d be able to perform, the inflatable plastic sleeve that would immobilize a compound fracture and keep a jagged bone from piercing an artery. I had a wire brush for cleaning battery terminals, the extralong jumper cables that were getting a workout this year, a miniature air compressor that ran off the cigarette lighter and could generate pressure to swell a tire enough to get someone to a service station. I had a folding shovel, wire grids for traction, a ten-pound bag of ice melter, a five-gallon can of gas, a gallon of antifreeze. I found Sergeant Bird’s summary.

I knew it had made its way into the back of the Jeep because I didn’t want to read it. I hadn’t seen the Tanners in days. I’d haunted myself with their daughter, but I’d done nothing to help them or her. So I closed the back hatch, buckled myself behind the wheel, started the engine, and, while it heated, I read about Janice Tanner.

It started with a detailed physical description. She was thinner and in general smaller than I’d thought. Her underthings were white, according to her mother. The Tanners must have hated giving that information. Thinking why is like learning the worst in advance, I thought. Her feet were narrow. She liked to wear a ponytail with a velvet-covered rubber band around it.

She had no personal problems. Period. She was happy. Period. She participated in extracurricular events. She helped her mother in Sunday school. She was excellent in school except for math and science, in which she was given C’s and D’s. I knew about those. She volunteered two hours a week in the library, where she helped to shelve books and do clerical work for the librarian. She played the coronet in the middle school band. She was friendly and had charmed all of her teachers without wooing them.

She was friendly. That was why. It was why she’d given someone directions while standing close to his car. Why she’d gone into somebody’s house or trailer or truck. Why she was never coming home. Janice was a friendly child.

But maybe still alive, I insisted, though I didn’t believe myself.

They had done a fine job, as troopers always did, of canvassing. Every house in the hamlet had been covered, of course. And two reports referred to a car the witnesses were certain did not belong to anyone in town. One talked about “one of those long, low things that makes all the noise when it starts off.” Another said it had “a bump in the front.” Both thought it might be black or dark blue or brown.

I went back inside and told the dispatcher I’d be off the air for a while, that I was cooperating with the state police.

She said, “That big black one? Over?”

I said, “He asked me if you dated. Over.”

I had no business leaving the campus for an hour or more, but I did. Instead of filling the tank at our pump, I drove into town and filled it halfway full out of my own pocket. My conscience didn’t feel twelve gallons better, but my conscience was going to have to take care of itself. I drove north, then west, and went over the hill to Masonville. I could see black clouds coming in briskly, and I knew we’d have a storm. I thought I ought to call Fanny and warn her, but warning people of storms, for the past several weeks, was the same as calling up to tell them to look outside.

In Masonville, I parked outside the post office, which was on a corner and gave me a view of the broad street that ran down from the school to the northern route to the Thruway. I was willing to bet he made his New York pickups either on the Thruway or the Onondaga Reservation, and, either way, he’d have to pass me. Of course, he might sleep until two in the afternoon. He might be out of town. He might even, from time to time, attend class. I had to respond to the report, and the car with a bump in the front, that arrogant air scoop, and its glasspacks or shot-out muffler, seemed to be the only reason to have asked for and read the report. It contained nothing. They had nothing to work with. If Janice Tanner was going to be found, a lucky accident had to happen. I was maybe their luck.

After half an hour, I figured I wasn’t, and I was restless about getting back to the job. I moved the Jeep to one of the lots near the school, where I hoped to bury its blue paint job and lettering and
bubble light among a batch of bright-colored cars. You wouldn’t call me undercover. I took what I thought I might need, and I began to walk the small campus. I stayed on its outside edges at first because I thought to find him in his car. The buildings were pure state architecture, ugly and gray and sad, with windows that didn’t look like they’d ever been open and doors that slammed on sour-smelling hallways. Janice’s poster was on every outdoor bulletin board and was taped to the wire-lined glass inserts of the doors. Her small sad features rippled in the winds that seemed to be getting colder.

I heard what I thought might be the car, but I couldn’t see it. I ran back from the rear entrance of what was apparently a dorm to the walkway. Now I didn’t hear it. I swiveled, turning my ears so they wouldn’t catch the wind roaring in them. Several students leaving the dorm walked wide detours. I didn’t blame them. But I did hear the throaty, harsh rumble of his engine. I ran back to the lot and found my car, which was about as well disguised as a hippo in a frog pond.

I started up and aimed at what I thought was the direction. I stopped at the driveway from the lot and turned the engine off. Someone behind me revved his motor, then honked. But I heard the kid’s motor above the horn, and I took off. At the corner, I saw him. He was heading to the western edge of Masonville. I went with him, not hanging back, but not forcing the issue. The streets were plowed and they’d been salted, and, though the nose of his Trans Am swung out when he made his turns, the Jeep held tight. We were leaving the business district, and then the streets of small wooden houses and tarted-up double-wide mobile homes. The farther west you went, I thought, the less was there. We climbed gradually and were on a plateau that, as I remembered, had farms on it, and county roads, and empty fields.

I was right. He was jittering now, because the roads up here were not salted and the surface was slick. You could see for miles ahead and around us. We were on one of the lines of a grid of small roads that connected farms. In the late spring and in summer, these vast fields of snow bounded by gray-black road would be creamy with soy
and wheat. The rest of the crop would be feed corn for cattle on the dairy farms. Now, though, everything was white, with the dirty clouds above, and a weak sun suggesting itself, but not with much force. We passed a few farms. I knew he was going a back way toward the Thruway as he now headed north.