Harmless (11 page)

Amber spoke again. “They might have gone for a walk in the woods. Just to be alone. Girls need their space to grow.” Was Amber going to lecture them on menstrual-based initiation rites in pre-industrial societies? She had a point, though. Kids wander off without thinking, caught up in their own mood.

Joseph imagined Rebecca sneaking up the driveway, followed by Franny. They close the gate behind them, but which way do they turn? Why were they leaving? They were all overlooking something, a clue that might be right under their noses. It was like trying to piece together the bones of an animal no one knew the shape of. “Does Rebecca have friends in town?” he asked.

Jane nodded.

“Could she have gone to see them?”

“She doesn’t drive.”

“I’m trying to bring in more possibilities.”

Alex sneered at Joseph’s detective talk and stepped away from the fire, his expression fixed, set in defiance against the crushing, deep-sea atmosphere they were descending into.

“If they were planning on going somewhere, they’d have left a note,” Joseph said. “They’re not ready for that level of ‘fuck you’ yet.”

Liz agreed. “They’re practically kids.”

“To us the girls look like kids,” Jane said. “But not to the perverts.”

Joseph wanted to disagree, but he remembered Derek
assessing the girls’ bodies and his own silent complicity.

“Jane, we’re in the middle of the country,” Liz said.

“
How
long have you lived here?”

“We know most of the locals.”

“How does
knowing
help? Half of Rebecca’s teachers are moral retards. Mr. Jenkins still lives with his mother. He
understands
what girls are going through. That’s how they get to them.”

“You really think Mr. Jenkins came out here?”

“You know his type, Liz. What they’d do to a girl if they could get away with it.”

Joseph knew where Jane was going. He read about it all the time. The troubled teenage girl drawn into an online relationship with a middle-aged man posing as a wise, caring friend. The secret rendezvous at a motel. The obscene trophy photos extracted along with her virginity and dignity. Would Franny get sucked into that? He should
know
! She could be on her way to meet her online soulmate right now, accompanied by Rebecca. But then why not leave a note to cover their tracks?

“I don’t think they were planning to be gone long,” he said.

“Maybe they were frightened by all the noise around the fire.” Alex’s face flared in the orange light. “You sounded like a bunch of fucking idiots!”

“Hang on there, brother,” Julian said. “We sounded like a bunch of kids—
big
kids. The gals wouldn’t be scared.”

Mike agreed.

“Maybe
your
kids would be fine with it, and
his
.” Alex pointed at Joseph. “But Rebecca doesn’t usually see her mother stoned out of her mind, singing like—”

“Singing like what, Alex?” Jane said. “Go on, tell me the
truth
.”

“You were pathetic.” Alex wanted to blow this wide open, but Jane’s willing expression seemed to make him back off.

Mike tossed a fresh log into the flames, the surge of heat and light blurring Alex to a suggestive smudge, like one of those ectoplasmic faces in a seance photograph. Joseph inventoried the pinched mouths around the fire. Things were bad. If the girls had gone for walk, they’d be back by now or else they would have called. Everyone knew it, but there was power in not saying it, as if silence could keep the evil at bay a little longer.

“Let’s expand the search,” Julian said. “We’ll each take a direction and
yell
their names. We can cover a lot more ground if we, like, fan out.”

He gave them a team leader’s nod and ran toward the work shed, calling the girls’ names. Alex, drawing from a dwindling reserve of protective contempt, set off diagonally toward the back fence, while Jane and Amber took to the field, where only this afternoon Joseph had watched Franny and Rebecca walk. When Liz told Mike to check the phone for messages he looked like he’d never been so glad to be given a job—and why not?
His
kids weren’t missing.

Joseph headed for the stretch of scrubby land running beside the highway, passing Alex’s chicken coop and stopping to peer inside. The girls could be in there, playing a practical joke. He stepped through the low doorway, making out the hay-filled but chicken-less shelves along each wall. Even stooped over in the tiny house he could hear the adults calling the girls’ names. He’d be the last to add his voice to
the chorus, making this an official
search
, a nightmarish word from the 24-hour news cycle. How many times in his life had he heard the increasingly desperate updates?

Police have begun a search for a missing nine-year-old girl
.

Police have expanded their search to include a nearby golf course
.

Police are narrowing their search to a stretch of shallow creek bed
.

The search for Carrie Wilson
—by this point the victim’s name is cited without referencing the case—
has ended, along with the hope of an entire community
 …

All that searching, when the police knew the girl was already dead. They even had a rule of thumb: if a missing child wasn’t found within forty-five minutes of disappearing, the abductors were already miles from the scene, safe in some motel or suburban basement, the child’s body awaiting violation. Never mind if someone spotted the child stepping into a white sedan or holding hands with a woman wearing a parka—after forty-five minutes those clues are about as useful to a child’s recovery as autopsy details. Where did he pick up this urban lore? The media, which once again had conditioned his responses without providing any helpful information.

But Franny was
not
a child. When a child disappeared the police searched the local ravine, where a man walking his dog had found her mitten. You saw the girl’s picture on every network—always the same photo, the child smiling eagerly, beaming innocence and milk teeth and hope. No one gave the police a photo of their kid melting
down at a birthday party or pushing their sister off the jungle gym.

Franny was a teenager, immune to the logic of the Forty-Five-Minute Rule. You were talking about a victim potentially
accepting
the invitation into the white sedan. Not a willing victim, but one lured to her death in a moment of misplaced independence. As if that made it better.

He felt a sob welling up from his chest and stood up straight, smacking his head against the peaked ceiling, the giant in his lair crying like a little boy.

He added his
Frannys
and
Rebeccas
to the net of voices trawling the night, turning his head on every
Franny
to extend his voice across the road. The girls were out there. No one could tell him otherwise. As he repeated the names he noticed that Franny’s name made his voice rise with a piercing force, paternal love expanding his vocal range. Of course it did—he’d been one of the first to speak Franny’s name when she was born and he’d spoken it tens of thousands of times since, in whispers, in playful accents, in the voices of imaginary characters, in soothing tones when she awoke from nightmares.

He stopped calling Rebecca’s name and put everything he had into
Franny
, imagining the word as a magical bird flying free to seek out ears trained from birth to hear its call.

Franny
—it flew from his mouth, out over the dark fields and into the trees.

He wasn’t supposed to believe in magic or a spirit–matter divide. Matter was neutral, an atom in your child’s heart no
different from its counterpart in a tree or a worm, but he didn’t believe that—
no one
did, not where a parent’s love was concerned.

He walked on, launching a flock of magical
Frannys
from his drying mouth. Where was she? He did a 360-degree scan of the terrain, taking in the pointless geometry of black and navy blue stretching to every horizon. He was getting closer to the forest. The girls might have gone for a walk in the woods. It made sense. He approached the trees, calling Franny’s name again and again until the word became meaningless, the component syllables slipping apart into nonsense words:

Fraaalllyy
.

Flaaaanee
.

Fwaaalllly
.

He switched to
Frances
until he got his little girl’s name back, but he seemed to be speaking phonetically, as though reading a foreign language out loud. Then her name disintegrated in his mouth again. What kind of man can’t keep his daughter’s name intact?

Franny
: what
did
her name mean? What is a
Franny
? An old-fashioned party hat? A cakey dessert? A sexual euphemism?

“Shut up!” he shouted.

He stopped and listened to his friends’ raw voices calling out, leaving no spaces between the names, as if they were afraid of silence. Where was she? The right answer must be buried deep in his brain, behind some obstructing cranial fold, but as hard as he tried he couldn’t squeeze it free. He fell to his knees, mumbling fragments of prayers from his
altar-boy days, imploring God to take this cup from his hand and he’d—what? Do God a favour? Take someone else’s burden? If so, he’d gladly take Franny’s. Maybe that was the deal:
God, take this cup from my hand and replace it with Franny’s
. What was he asking? He couldn’t even get his prayers straight.

Joseph groaned into his hands. The forest was about fifty feet away, the dark wall of trees looming over him like a raised drawbridge. He stood up and stepped onto a stretch of almost-bare earth sectioned by tire tracks extending from the highway to a cleared area in front of the woods. Some of the tire tracks were deeper than others, but he didn’t know what that signified. A break in the trees marked the beginning of a wide path, probably the one Alex had emerged from that afternoon. Rebecca and Franny must know about it. They might have followed it into the woods and then got lost when the sun set. They could be a hundred feet away and not know how close they were to home. He shouted their names through cupped hands and waited for a reply. Nothing.

The moon had risen, fat, milky, and neutral, turning the bare ground a faintly glowing silver, like a fish’s belly. The forest towered higher with every few steps, pulling him into its wake like a ship passing silently in the moonlight, and when the wind picked up, the rustling treetops became the silhouettes of rats running along the decks.

He slapped his hand over his eyes. He could not enter the woods. He called Franny’s name, giving his full attention to the word. She had to hear him. She had to. She was out there.

T
he bright kitchen was as unchanged as a photograph. The light bulbs glowed at their appointed levels, the appliances were still off, the dial tone unbroken. Joseph punched in Franny’s number and the message started on cue, her voice coming to him from a distant computer server, where it resided with billions of other information bits—corporate banking documents, medical records, video clips of rapists working out their fantasies on young female bodies.

He slammed down the receiver. He would not look at the clock or wait for the phone to ring. His head buzzed. The kitchen was losing its solidity—the wall would disintegrate if he touched it, revealing a hidden alternative reality, ancient and pointless. He ground his palms into his eyes to stop the awful pictures taking form, and the mocking voice started in on him again, laughing at his useless efforts.

He rushed through the sunroom and out the door, catching his foot on the bottom stair and nearly falling into the bushes. There it was again: the rustling noise, accompanied now by a soft crooning—animal, human, he couldn’t
tell. He shook the branches and heard movement in the lower branches.

“Franny! Is that you?”

He plunged his hand in until he touched something warm and yielding—
Franny
, alive, cooing like an injured bird! He wrapped his fingers around—was it a limb, a finger maybe? The limb shifted its downy flesh as he raised it from the ground, his elbows pushing aside the web of branches. There was a moment of resistance, then the branches erupted with a high shriek. Sharp claws slashed at his hands, raking his nose and cheeks. A rough hand or finger poked him in the eye and he staggered backward, still clutching the small living parcel as it gouged his wrists.

A chicken! He was holding a chicken, thrashing its wings and screeching, its phonetic range hinting at rudimentary language skills. It started to peck at his left hand with the uncanny focus of the lower animal orders, biting the same soft spot between his thumb and index finger, striking and withdrawing its tiny head, black dinosaur eyes unblinking. What could he, a stoned city boy, bring to match such singular purpose? He might as well try to stop the grass growing.

He squeezed the chicken’s chest hard with both hands until the head sprang straight up like Jack from his box, the bulging eyes catching little diamonds of light, those soulless black eyes—instinctive, stupid. Why was it safe while Franny was lost out in the dark? Why should it be allowed to live unharmed? Did the world need the eggs that badly? He took hold of its feet and with a running step swung the body into the door frame, riding a rush of release and elation, swinging the body against the hard wood again and
again until it went limp. The chicken’s head was a bloody mush, and the body seemed to have shrunk to half its former size. He was afraid to drop the corpse—it might hit the ground running, the headless torso zigzagging toward the fire, announcing Joseph’s crime.

The vision passed and he threw the body into the dark grass on the front lawn. He wiped his bloody hand on the door frame and decided to check the bushes again, knowing he’d never stop thinking Franny might be in there if he didn’t. He reached between the branches, body tensed for a second attack, until his fingers came up against the warm, smooth surface of an egg. He lifted it up to the dim light, marvelling at the perfect shell as if it were the first solid thing he’d touched since Franny went missing, and he carefully wrapped the egg in a handkerchief he found in his jacket pocket, branded with the logo of a Caribbean rum, another media freebie. He put the bundled egg in his pocket and vowed to keep it safe until the girls returned, when he’d place it beneath the warm, feathered belly of a new mother.