Sisterland (34 page)

That night I
awakened just before twelve o’clock, which was less than an hour after Jeremy and I had gone to bed; I felt that old sense of menace from my childhood, and I wondered at first if there’d been a noise in the apartment, an intruder even, but as I continued to listen, I heard nothing irregular. Jeremy was next to me, sleeping on his side, and I considered waking him but resisted; usually, it was enough just to know I could. I smoothed out my T-shirt, which had ridden up, and tucked my hair behind my ears, and I thought to myself,
Everything is fine
, and in the next instant, I thought,
He doesn’t work in a post office, he works in a copy shop on New Ballas Road
. Though I could see why Vi had been confused, because his uniform, his button-down shirt, was pale blue. He was a clean-shaven guy in his forties, with a blond, almost military crew cut, and the name tag over the left pocket of his shirt said
DEREK
.

I got up and went into the living room; I dialed Vi’s cell number and sat down on the couch. (I sometimes had to stop and think, when I called Vi, which was her phone number and which was mine. Once, shortly after moving in with Jeremy, I’d meant to call Vi from my cellphone but called my own home phone, had heard but not really paid attention to my voice on the outgoing greeting, and had proceeded to leave a message for Vi. Later, I was briefly bewildered listening to it.)

“What are you doing up?” Vi said when she answered. In the background, I could hear music and the rise and fall of multiple voices.

“Where are you?” I asked.

“A few of us are at this guy Maxwell’s house, but I’m leaving in a sec.” Then she laughed. “Wait,
you
know Maxwell.” She lowered her voice to a whisper and said, “Should I tell him you’re about to get married, or you think that’d break his big, bearded heart?”

“Vi, I saw the kidnapper,” I said. “In a dream, I mean. I think he works at a copy shop.”

“A coffee shop?”

“
Copy
. Like Kinko’s but not a chain. I think you’re right, though—I think he lives in one of those buildings. So what do we do now?”

“He has really short hair, right? And he’s almost handsome in this
cheesy way, like he should be on a reality show except that he’s so creepy?”

“His name is Derek. I could see it on his badge.”

She was quiet for so long that I might have thought, if I hadn’t still been able to hear the background noise, that we’d been disconnected. At last, she said, “I’ll make you a deal. If you call the police, then you can say you’re me.”

If I’d looked
on the Internet to find the number for the Florissant Police Department, surely I’d have seen that the tip line was anonymous, but I didn’t look on the Internet. Instead, I pulled down the White Pages that Jeremy and I still kept, back in 2004, on top of our refrigerator, and I called the main number, and the person who answered connected me to the tip line, and I said the following: “I hope this doesn’t sound too weird, but I’m a person who sometimes has premonitions or I guess you could say ESP, and I’ve had one about Brady Ogden and what I think is maybe the person who kidnapped him—well, who was involved in kidnapping him, or could have been—I think it’s a man named Derek—that’s his first name—and he works in a copy shop, like a Kinko’s but not Kinko’s, and he lives in a complex called Terrace View Apartments, which is on Woods Mill Road. I don’t know any of this for sure, but I think maybe. And my name is Violet Shramm, Violet like the flower and Shramm is S-H-R-A-M-M.” I left Vi’s cellphone number; she didn’t have a home phone. Then, as ordinarily as if I’d called to cancel a dentist’s appointment, I said, “Okay. That’s all. Thanks so much.”

When I returned to bed, Jeremy said, “Who were you talking to?” But he seemed barely awake.

“I was watching TV,” I said. “I couldn’t sleep.”

On Thursday nights,
Jeremy played what he called nerd poker—all the players were professors from either his department or the physics
department, and the only woman who participated was Courtney Wheeling—and I took my father to the grocery store. We still returned to the Schnucks on the corner of Manchester and Woodlawn; from year to year, it was the closest I got to our old house on Gilbert Street. In the cereal aisle, my father said, “Your sister has liked living on her own.”

“I’m trying not to take that too personally.” I had last spoken to Vi the night before, about forty-eight hours after I’d left the message on the tip line, and she hadn’t heard from the Florissant police, which made me unsure whether to be relieved or disappointed. Either way, I couldn’t imagine she’d have mentioned the Brady Ogden business to our father.

Then he said, “I know the bride’s family usually pays for the wedding,” and for about a second, I felt a surge of hope—I hadn’t even been sure that he was aware that this convention existed—but my hope began to wither when he said, “My dilemma is that I question if Vi will ever marry.”

Though I questioned the same thing, it was still a bit shocking to hear him state it so baldly. “We’re barely twenty-nine, Dad. People get married later now.”

“Well, don’t forget I was a good deal older than you girls when I married your mother. But I’m referring less to your sister’s age than what you might call her temperament. I don’t know that she’s the marrying kind.” Again, I felt a little shocked, even a little defensive on Vi’s behalf, while essentially agreeing.

“I’d like her to have some stability like you have with Jeremy,” my father said. “Just something to fall back on over the long term, after I’m not around, and I wonder if you wouldn’t be disappointed if instead of helping out with your wedding, I made a down payment on a house for your sister. I’m awfully sorry I can’t do both. As your mother knew all too well, I’ve never been a financial whiz kid.”

I blinked and said, “That’s fine.” My voice was uneven, but not so hideously that it required his acknowledgment.

“I know it isn’t fair to you—”

“Dad.” I held up my hand. “It’s fine. We don’t need to talk about it.”

But he wasn’t finished. “I’m sure they must pay the professors handsomely
at Wash U,” he said. “If you weren’t marrying someone responsible, I wouldn’t—”

“It’s completely fine,” I said. “Really.”

“There
is
something I want you to have.” He was the one pushing the grocery cart, and he looked at me then, my tall, thin, old, sad father, wearing a short-sleeved poly-blend plaid shirt and gray slacks. “It’s in the car.”

We finished shopping and loaded the plastic bags into my trunk. I wasn’t planning to remind him of whatever it was he intended to give me—I feared another twenty-five-dollar Starbucks gift card—but when we were seated, he passed me a small royal blue velvet pouch cinched at the neck. I knew immediately what was in it; to open it would be like opening the past. But he was waiting, and I had no choice. I was then holding my mother’s charm bracelet, the charms dangling like false promises: the little gold baseball bat and the malachite shamrock, the windmill, the poodle with eyes of tiny turquoise, the miniature beer stein. “How does the saying go?” my father said. “Something old, something new … I thought this could be your something old.”

There had been certain things I’d wanted badly in my childhood, and instead of getting them, I’d grown up; I did not want them any longer. But I said, “Thank you, Dad.”

“Would you like me to put it on you?”

I forced a smile. “I think it’ll be more special if I save it.”

Jeremy was usually
out until after eleven on poker nights, and back in our apartment, I turned on the TV. I would have called Vi to tell her about the bracelet, but I thought she was working, which was why I was surprised when my cellphone rang shortly before nine and her name came up. “I just got back from meeting with a police detective,” she said. “I think they believe us.”

“You’re not at the restaurant tonight?”

“I called in sick. The detective was a woman, but her name is Tyler.”

“When did you hear from them?”

“Just this afternoon. Come over and I’ll tell you about it.”

“I’m in my pajamas already.”

“So?”

After a second, I said, “Okay. I’ll come over.”

When the detective
—Tyler McGillivary—had called Vi that afternoon, she’d wanted to see Vi as soon as possible; twenty minutes later, she was in Vi’s living room. Detective McGillivary had asked her questions for close to an hour: about Vi’s life and her job, about her previous premonitions, about the specific senses Vi was having with regard to Brady Ogden. Detective McGillivary wanted to know how closely Vi had followed the case, which wasn’t all that closely, or if she’d ever had contact with the Ogden family. “Did you know Brady has two brothers?” Vi said, and I said, “Did you not know that?”

Detective McGillivary used Vi’s bathroom—Vi wondered if she was snooping—and when she emerged, she asked if Vi had time to come in to the station. Detective McGillivary gave her a ride (it wasn’t a police car she drove, and it didn’t even look like an unmarked police car; it seemed like it was her personal car, partly because Vi saw the stub to a movie ticket on the dashboard), and at the station, Detective McGillivary took her to a private room. The detective went to get them coffee and returned accompanied by two other people, both men, who obviously were also on the police force, though Vi forgot their names and titles immediately upon being introduced. With these men present, Detective McGillivary asked many of the same questions she’d asked at Vi’s apartment, especially the ones about the guy Vi thought was the kidnapper and the ones about being psychic. “You didn’t say anything about me, did you?” I said.

“It came up that I have a twin.”

“Did they ask if I have senses, too?” They had; I knew they had.

“I said you don’t like talking about it. Which, I know, Daze, I promised you and everything, but what would you have done? And I swear I didn’t say you were the one who came up with the name Derek. They really weren’t that interested in you.”

They all were respectful toward her, Vi continued, much more than
she’d expected. The way they talked to her, it was as if she’d been a witness to a crime and they appreciated her help. Even when she described how Guardian had first spoken to her at Reed—here she looked at me meaningfully—they didn’t seem to be rolling their eyes.

Detective McGillivary suggested they go for a drive, and one of the men went, too; Detective McGillivary drove, the guy sat in front, and Vi sat in back. This time, on the backseat, Vi saw a pair of swimming goggles.

They took her past the Ogden family’s house and around their neighborhood, past the elementary school Brady Ogden had attended, and then they drove to the apartment complex where I hadn’t turned my car off, and they sat there for a long time, maybe forty-five minutes, and talked about different things. They were relaxed with her, Vi said; it was like they were just hanging out, but as they were leaving, Vi abruptly felt short of breath and heard Guardian say, “He needs your help.”

“Did the detective say she’d be in touch?” I asked.

“Yeah, or that I should call her if more stuff comes to me.”

“Will they tell you if they find him?”

Vi gave me a peculiar look. “They won’t have to,” she said. “It’ll be national news.”

Again, as when
I’d called and left the message on the tip line, I thought something would or should happen immediately; Brady Ogden should be found, and the man who had abducted him should be arrested. But the weekend passed, the last weekend before my wedding, and Vi had neither called nor been called by Detective McGillivary. I had had no further senses about Brady Ogden, though I’d had plenty of thoughts about him during the hours I couldn’t sleep at night—a nine-year-old boy inside an apartment in one of those big awful buildings, with a predatory, blond-haired man.

Jeremy and I were to leave for Mendocino on Wednesday. On Monday, I called Vi and said, “Will you ask the detective if there’s any news?”

“You ask her. Just say you’re me again.”

“Our deal was that you’d talk to the police.”

“But I have nothing to
say
to her.” Didn’t Vi always have something to say? She added, “You just want this to be resolved before your wedding.” But she didn’t sound mean or judgmental as she said, “Daze, there’s nothing you can do right now for Brady Ogden.”

That night, Jeremy
had just dumped spaghetti into a pot of boiling water when I said, “I want us to still get married, but I think we should cancel our wedding. I’m sorry.”

He looked at me with an unfriendly expression. “Didn’t we already have this conversation?”

“Vi’s been having senses about Brady Ogden, and I drove around with her last week and she thinks she knows which building his kidnapper lives in, which means it could be where Brady Ogden is, too, if he’s still alive, and I had a dream that the kidnapper’s name is Derek, and then Vi met with the police.”

“And that changes our wedding plans how?” If I’d thought Jeremy’s jaw would drop in astonishment, it would have meant I didn’t know my fiancé. I hadn’t thought this, but it still surprised me just how unruffled he was.

And his question was, in a way, a good one. But in another way, its answer seemed self-evident. I said, “You don’t think it’s gross for us to have a fancy party celebrating ourselves when a little nine-year-old boy is still missing?”

I could see Jeremy’s irritation around his mouth. We virtually never fought, which Vi had once told me meant we weren’t honest with each other, so my familiarity with his displeasure was as its observer rather than its inciter. Every few months, someone would royally piss him off—a drunk guy at a Cards game who threw a cup that hit Jeremy in the head or a mechanic at a garage who he felt had overcharged me—and in a clipped way Jeremy would make two or three comments about what a bottom-dwelling waste of humanity the person was, and then his ill humor would pass.

But this was different; this time, Jeremy’s displeasure was directed at me. He said, “Brady Ogden has been missing for, what, two months?”