Songs for the Missing (5 page)

“Anyone else she might turn to in a tight spot?”

“Nina and Elise, that’s really it.”

“Neighbors?”

“The Hedricks next door. They haven’t seen her.”

“Good neighborhood.”

“Very good.”

“How long have you lived here?”

She had to subtract. “Thirteen years.”

“Know everybody.”

“Yes.”

“Any suspicious characters?”

“No.”

“Anyone move in or out in the last few years?”

“No.”

He asked about traffic, and what kind of service workers came around during the day—landscapers, delivery vans, meter readers. He asked about Kim’s cellphone bills and e-mail accounts, who was on her buddy list for instant messaging. He asked if she knew when Kim had gotten paid last, and whether she’d made any big purchases lately. Any clothes or bags missing? What kind of driver was she? How many miles were on the car? Had it been in the shop recently, even for an oil change? On and on, with the same bureaucratic coolness, skipping from one leading topic to the next, pretending to be utterly noncommittal. He never badgered her, but it was relentless, and tiring for her, having to strain for answers. There was so much she didn’t know.

Finally he set the pad aside. “Okay, next to last question. Would you be willing to take a polygraph test, if it’s necessary?”

“Yes.”

“Thank you. Now I’m going to ask you the single most important question I’m going to ask you today. I don’t want you to think about it, just say the first thing that pops into your head, no matter what it is, okay? Ready?” He paused like a talkshow host. “What do
you
think happened to Kim?”

The answer came to her, complete and irreducible, not at all new, but she naturally balked at it. Now she understood why Ed had looked sick coming out of the room, and the mother in her rose up, adamant. There was no way she was going to let him do this to Lindsay.

“Mrs. Larsen?” he prompted, and she resented him for making her say it, as if she were betraying Kim.

“I think someone took her.”

BOLO

Not knowing any better, they did what he told them. The first thing they needed to do was call around and let everyone know they were looking for her. This would let her know they were on her trail if she really was a runaway. None of them believed she was, though Lindsay remembered with a twinge how Kim said she’d miss her (she hadn’t told the detective, and now she thought she should have). Was that why she’d taken her to lunch, to secretly say good-bye?

They waited in the upstairs hall while the detective poked through Kim’s room, the deputy shining his flashlight under the bed and dresser and around the bottom of her closet. He was interested in the Sea Wolves tickets fringing her mirror, and one from a Cake concert at the Agora Ballroom, trying to imply that she knew her way around Erie and Cleveland. Her father explained that they all went to those games with her grandmother, it was a tradition, and that the concert had been three years ago, before Kim had gotten her license. They’d driven her and Nina and Elise to Cleveland and celebrated their anniversary with a nice dinner before picking the girls up after the show. But the man did find something right off that had taken Lindsay herself a while to notice and then delivered to Kim like news: In the collage of pictures she’d stuck to the wall above her headboard, there wasn’t a single one of her and J.P.

He turned up nothing except a butane torch in a shoebox packed with Newports that Lindsay already knew about. Since there were no signs of foul play, they’d be going forward with a missing persons investigation rather than a suspicious disappearance.

“Isn’t the fact that she disappeared suspicious enough?” her father asked.

No. Without specific evidence they couldn’t consider Kim at-risk.

“That’s idiotic,” her mother said. “She’s a child out there by herself. That’s as at-risk as it gets.”

“I understand,” the detective said. “I’m not a fan of the policy myself. On the other hand, I’m glad I didn’t find anything to make me think otherwise. I very well may find something when I talk to her friends that changes my mind.”

He asked for a recent picture, preferably a head-on shot of her smiling. Lindsay thought this was a sentimental way of getting people’s attention—help find the pretty girl. Later she’d read online that it let forensics superimpose a skull over her face and directly compare the teeth.

Her mother had her favorite shot of Kim from graduation propped beside the stereo. Kim was cradling a dozen roses in one arm and her diploma in the other, smiling in too much lipstick like Miss America. Her mother had sent copies of it to all their relatives. She was always showing it off for company, picking it up with a glass of wine in her other hand, saying Kim could have been a model if she wanted. Lindsay’s boring school portrait sat next to it, an unfair comparison. Her mother slipped the whole mat out, leaving the empty frame flat on the sideboard.

In the kitchen the detective called in an APB on the car and a Be On the Lookout bulletin for her. As they waited for him to finish, her mother laid an arm over Lindsay’s shoulders, something she never did. Instead of comforting her it set off a whole chain of inner alarms, and she stood there paralyzed, feeling its weight.

“Make those calls,” the detective said. In the meantime he’d interview her friends while another unit canvassed the neighborhood.

“How long is that going to take?” her father asked.

“You want to start searching on your own, feel free. It’s probably not the most efficient use of your time, but I understand some people have to. Just make sure you have someone here to take down any information that comes in. You have caller ID?”

“Yes,” her mother volunteered.

“Take a cellphone,” he told her father. “If I can’t get anything out of the friends, most likely we’re going to go public, so don’t go too far, okay?”

He backed the unmarked car out of the driveway, leaving them with the deputy, whose presence stifled any real discussion.

“Help me make a list of people to call,” her mother asked her. They sat at the kitchen table while her father hovered, pacing to the window as if Kim’s car might come rolling down the block.

“Go,” her mother said. “I know you want to.”

“Where am I supposed to go?”

“Then help us call.”

It was the kind of stressed-out exchange between them that Lindsay hated, made worse by the deputy pretending not to hear. Like always, her father did what her mother told him, sitting on the other side of Lindsay so she was sandwiched between them.

They started with her closest friends, using their cellphones so they didn’t tie up the line. They tried Nina again, first getting Nina’s mother, who was surprised they hadn’t found her, as if they just hadn’t looked hard enough. Nina offered to call around, and her mother gratefully accepted—too quickly for her father, who wanted to keep some control over the situation.

“Why?” her mother asked.

“I just think it would be better if we did it ourselves.”

“What’s the difference? We’re going to call the same people anyway.”

“I’d like to know who she’s calling that we’re not.”

“It doesn’t matter,” she said.

“It would be nice to have a record of it.”

“You want me to call her back and tell her not to?”

“No,” he said, but upset, as if that wasn’t the point.

They called J.P. and Elise and Hinch and Sam and Marnie while Lindsay flipped through the Kingsville High Caller, writing down the numbers of people she’d heard Kim talk about. As she pushed deeper into the alphabet, skimming the seniors, she passed over her own classmates, struck by how few she could call friends. What if she were the one missing, what kind of list would she have?

Dana, Micah, Jen, the Hedricks . . . Father John and the families at church she babysat for, but they knew nothing about her, the same for her teammates—remembering Shelly’s throw tipping off her glove and rolling into right field while the runners wheeled around, and Shelly turning away from her. She’d wanted to disappear then, and when her father squeezed her shoulder as they came off. “It’s okay,” he said, “we’ll get ’em back,” except they didn’t, and when she went around collecting the bats and bases after, no one helped her.

If she disappeared, besides her parents, who would really miss her?

“I’m completely serious,” her mother was saying beside her. “I wouldn’t joke about something like this.”

“Who’s next?” her father asked, and Lindsay turned the pad toward him.

Her mother was done, and tipped it her way. “I swear, that woman’s on the wrong medication.”

“Who’s that?” her father asked.

“Jeannie McKenna.”

“I wouldn’t be surprised.” He ducked his head, a finger in his ear, and broke into his phone voice, bright and excited, as if he were trying to sell something. “Hello, is this Tim Means? Ed Larsen here—Kim’s dad, yeah, hey. I was hoping you could do us a favor.”

They worked outward from the center of her life to the edges. On his computer her father still had the roster from her last season with the team, three years ago. Her mother dug through the church caller for members of her youth group. Kim didn’t see those people anymore, but Lindsay took down the names anyway, leaving room for comments. A lot of them weren’t home—probably on vacation, her father thought; it was that time of year.

“Hi,” her mother said, “this is Fran Larsen. We’re looking for our daughter Kim—she used to be in the bell choir?”

She didn’t say “runaway” or “kidnapped.” She just said Kim didn’t show up for work, and that her car was missing, and that they were asking people who knew her to keep an eye out for her. The way she said it, it almost sounded normal.

When the house phone began ringing, Lindsay started a log. One by one the neighbors checked in. Everyone was confused and sorry for them. Everyone wanted to help. Lindsay wasn’t allowed to handle these calls, just to document them. The deputy came around the table to look over her shoulder. “That’s good,” he said like a teacher, and she was way too proud of herself. Her grandmother always said she had nice handwriting.

When they were done with Kim’s friends her mother called Connie at the hospital and wandered into the living room as if she didn’t want them to hear. Lindsay expected the deputy to follow her but he just stood there. Her father called Peggy, the receptionist at his office, and canceled a house showing he had that afternoon. Lindsay figured they didn’t need her anymore, but as soon as he hung up he turned to her, puzzled. “She wouldn’t have taken the boat out, would she?”

“I don’t think so,” she said slowly, unsure, since she knew Kim and J.P. had taken it out several times, once with her onboard. The people at the marina didn’t care as long as you had the code to the gate. She pictured Kim standing at the wheel with her back to shore, slowly motoring out through the gap in the breakwater.

The marina took a few minutes to get back to them. The boat was in its slip with the cover on.

Her mother was still talking to Connie. Her father went over the lists with a pen as if he was correcting them.

“Did you want to try the Landrys again?” Lindsay asked.

“No, I think we’re done for now.” He thanked her for helping.

“Sure,” Lindsay said, like it was easy, and went straight upstairs, afraid he might ask her something else.

Away from them, she could breathe. She could think. She’d just woken up when her mother told her, and it still didn’t seem real. She needed time alone to figure out exactly what it all meant, the way she barricaded herself in her room with an impossible problem set from geometry and emerged hours later with not just the right answers but an understanding of the relations behind the equations. When people said she was smart (she’d heard it used as an insult too), she didn’t believe them, because at first she didn’t get anything. She was slow to pick up on jokes, and often found herself rewinding conversations to see where she’d lost hold of the meaning. People thought she was weird, and shy, but really she was just dense and self-centered. Like now, with Kim, she knew she should be feeling more than this. Things were different—her parents working as a team was proof that this was serious—yet after so long she couldn’t stop being jealous of Kim and wondered, crazily, if she was playing a trick on them.

The detective had asked them not to touch anything in Kim’s room. Lindsay saw her father close the door; now it stood wide open. Cooper was sacked out with his head under her dresser, as if that made him invisible. She used him as an excuse, aware they could hear her downstairs. “Come on, Goob,” she said, “I don’t think they want you in here,” but not hard enough to budge him.

She stood at the foot of Kim’s bed, still as a ninja, taking in the pictures and dressage ribbons on the wall, the hand-carved African mask and the cross made of a single twisted palm frond, the pennant from Camp Conestoga, where they’d both gone. She knew the room intimately; she’d been snooping through it since she could walk. She’d lifted each skating trophy high above her head like they did in the Olympics, and tried on every new hairclip and headband. She could feel Kim here, and smell her. Every piece of furniture, every object, the paint, the carpeting, even the dust motes floating through the sun connected them. Beside her nightstand Barry Bear sprawled atop a jumble of stuffed animals, staring back with amber eyes. On her desktop sat the wire cup of colored pencils Lindsay had always coveted, and a vial of black sand from Hawaii, and the dancing hip-hop hamster from her grandmother Kim would leave on just to annoy her. The top of her dresser held the real treasure: her jewelry box, maroon velvet with a dozen little drawer-pulls like gold BBs, on one side of it a flotilla of ornate porcelain jars and imported candy tins and lidded raffia baskets, on the other, arranged by height, a half-dozen bottles of perfume that Kim refused to share and Lindsay had secretly tested. Her bookcase was alphabetized, neat rows of paperbacks interrupted by a block of Harry Potters, the bottom shelf filled with complete sets of Tolkien and C. S. Lewis and SAT manuals thick as phone books. Nothing, Lindsay thought, that she would really need.