The Local News (17 page)

Then there were the Crazy ones. These all existed in the same swirling universe as Melissa Anne’s. They contained detailed theories (one promised that all the clues to Danny’s whereabouts could be found in the movie
Seven
and implored us to pay careful attention to
GLUTTONY
and
VANITY
and
Kevin SPACEY)
or a garbled list of nonsense (one repeated
Hercules
and
life-force,
nineteen and twenty-three times respectively, in a single paragraph). After wading through so much illegible scrawl and garbled syntax, I came to almost admire the plainspoken, straightforward awfulness of Melissa Anne’s work. She was, at least, good at what she did. I did to the Crazies what I did to the Nices: marked a
C
on the envelope flap.

Wrong letters were the simplest to discern.
I saw Daniel at an I-90 rest stop outside of Minnesota on July 29th.
This, four days before he disappeared. Or another:
As I have already told the police, I treated a boy who resembled your son on September 6th at St. Mary’s Emergency Room in Saginaw. He had a broken arm. He reported a peanut allergy and had a large port-wine stain spanning his left shoulder.
No allergy, no stain. All, marked with a
W.

As I completed each small pile of Nice, Crazy, and Wrong, I made new reconnaissance trips to the cabinet, refiling the completed letters and grabbing new ones from fresh folders.

There was a final category that I didn’t return to the cabinet, stashing them instead in the top drawer of my desk. These were the Viables. Viables sounded more right than wrong, offered no good reason to be dismissed. These were the shopkeeper who thought Danny purchased a winter coat in Sault St. Marie, the cabdriver who allegedly gave him a ride through Akron, the social worker who swore she admitted him to a homeless shelter in Flint for two nights in October. The Viables were the most threadbare of all the letters, the most heavily scented with my mother’s cigarette smoke, most pulpy from her repeated handling. She too had recognized these
were different. These were the letters of her familiar tableau: hunched at the table, cigarette in hand, pages spread before her.

Yet.

For all her scrutiny and obsession, she had done nothing more than file them haphazardly away. She had never begun to make even the most rudimentary sense of them. A growing incredulity rose in me as I amassed Viables (there were nearly two hundred of them, out of over seven hundred letters total) and began matching them to each other. Three claimed to have seen a rusting brown sedan near Larkgrove Elementary the night Danny disappeared. Two contained reports of Danny hitching a ride along I-94, one near Chicago in late summer, another outside Minneapolis later in the fall.

How could my mother, I wondered, not have thought to seek out similarities? To group like themes? To look for the most basic of clues? For all her months of notes and index cards and manila folders, she was a terrible detective, simply the worst, rendered wholly ineffective by—what? Sentiment? Stupidity? I spent long stints of
What I Will Tell Denis About This
imagining how we would laugh at her rank amateurishness, her incompetence that bordered on negligence.

On my fifth day with the letters, I got out of bed to work on them. The middle of the night, I discovered, was the ideal time for such work, my parents well asleep, my mind naturally teeming. Soon I was matching the pair of sightings from across the border in Canada: a prep cook in Windsor who’d recognized Danny as a brief diner regular from mid-to late October, and a lady who insisted he passed through neighboring Essex in December. Three letters came from Indiana, a zigzag through the state from Valparaiso to Muncie to Terre Haute. Two letters placed him respectively driving over the Mackinac Bridge to the U.P. and spending November in subzero Marquette.

It was well past four when I finally finished. In all, nearly sixty Viables had been matched with at least one other. Letter after letter sat stacked along my desk in piles according to their relation to each other, an intricate cross-hatching. I imagined how I would sweep my hand in the air, telling Denis,
Look. At. This.

I was buzzing with the adrenaline of a job well done. And with sleeplessness too. My eyes were starting to blur.
Danny here, Danny there, Danny everywhere,
I thought singsongily, almost as an afterthought. The task had been so much about figuring it out and getting it right; it hadn’t been particularly (or at all) heart-wrenching. Now, as my brain began to loosen itself from the hours of hyperfocus, he swam in. I pictured him in Canada, on interstates, in rusty brown sedans. In the moments before sleep, I felt all-powerful, as if I had, just by the act of reading of him, repopulated the world with possible Dannys, sprinkling the map with an army of my brothers who might at that very second be sticking his thumb into an Indiana roadway or sleeping soundly in a faraway neighborhood or maybe even, I thought with a jittery nervousness, marching determinedly toward home.

Denis came over early the next week, Kimberly in tow. I was on the phone with Lola when they arrived. “Is that the Menace?” Lola said when she heard all the noise in the background, everyone saying hello to everyone, finding chairs around the table. My mom had prepared an hors d’oeuvre plate of sorts, unwrapping cheese slices and opening a jar of green olives with pimientos.

Lola said, “I don’t have anything against Mexicans, but that guy is slimy. I’m not saying that to be prejudiced.”

I told her I had to go. Denis was already sticking his hand into
the olive jar, popping three in his mouth at once. Kimberly held up her hand as my mom held the plate in front of her. The cheese slices varied between white and yellow, though they were uniformly shiny and limp, except for a stray beagle hair sticking to a yellow one. “No thanks,” she said smilingly. She was sitting up very straight.

“Tip says Jerold Terry thinks you’re nice,” Lola said quickly, as if she’d been saving this for the end as a way to keep me a bit longer. Jerold Terry was a sophomore wrestler. We’d sat next to each other at a basketball game the week before. He’d breathed heavily out of his mouth and made a cawing noise any time Franklin made a basket. I couldn’t remember saying anything to him.

“So?” I said, trying to sound nonchalant.

“He’s cute,” she said unconvincingly. We both knew Jerold Terry wasn’t cute. He had a receding chin and a huge gap between his front teeth. His braces looked as if they were shredding the insides of his mouth. Though no Franklin boy, aside from David Nelson, had ever thought anything of me. There was, despite myself, something stirring about this news. Denis and Kimberly already had their notepads in front of them, pens poised and ready, moving, as usual, in unspoken synchronicity.

“I gotta go,” I repeated.

“Later, dater,” Lola said—one of her many catchphrases meant to impart familiarity between us, though it often had the opposite effect.

I hovered just beyond the table—nobody offered me a seat—and listened as Denis summarized for my parents all the information he’d gathered so far: talks with the police and the neighbors near the basketball court and the men who’d been playing on the next court over, the friends and teachers and coaches at school. Anticipation thrummed through me, as if I were made of taut violin strings instead of muscle and tendon, and they were being soundlessly
plucked and plucked. Denis covered familiar ground—Danny was a loyal, charismatic figure at school, well liked but also with well-known aggressive tendencies. He’d been benched from practice twice for getting too rough during scrimmages.

“That’s what he was supposed to be doing during scrimmages,” my dad said. “It’s a rough game.”

Denis nodded and didn’t protest. He seemed to be growing inured to the defensive twang that accompanied nearly anything my father said to him.

My mother drummed her fingers on the tabletop. “What’s this got to do with where he is?”

“You can’t build a house without a solid foundation,” Denis said.

My parents looked unimpressed by the metaphor. Denis talked about how there’d been no eyewitness reports of any sort of abduction, though there were a few reports of an unfamiliar brown sedan in Larkgrove that night.

“Rusty,” I said. Denis turned to me, as if just realizing I was in the room. “A rusty brown sedan,” I repeated, louder than I would’ve liked. My mother turned in her seat to get a look at me, squinting, her cigarette smoke ribboning thinly in my direction.

Denis nodded. “No plates, not even a partial. The police tried to follow up, but nothing panned out. We’re staying on it, though.” He talked of Danny sightings as far away as Florida, as near as western Michigan.

“Do you know about the one in Quebec?” I said. “That might count as farther than Florida.”

My mother’s squint deepened. My father blinked slowly at me, both of them looking like they were trying to remember where they knew me from. I imagined these to be something like the looks they’d had when I spoke my first sentence (I began talking in sentences, the story goes, having skipped single words entirely,
leapfrogging from
gah
and
oooh
and
eek
to
Mommy, close the door),
though hopefully, back then, without the vague suspicion that seemed to color their faces now.

Denis shook his head, a Mona Lisa smile on his face.

“I did the letters,” I announced, though only Denis knew what I was talking about.

“Ahh,” Denis said slowly, then, “Right,” as if just remembering his request.

“Excuse me,” I told my mother, who sat in her usual chair next to the cabinet. I scooted behind her, opened drawers, and pulled out folders. She made a reflexive
Don’t
noise, a corrective sort of hoot that suggested
Put those down,
though I began slapping folders on the table anyway. I explained about the Nices and Crazies and Wrongs, pulling letters from folders and pointing out the penciled notations on the flaps.

“I’ve kept everything,” my mother said, and, when no one responded, “Saved everything.” As Denis and Kimberly began rifling through letters, she flapped her hands in a strange, airy gesture, as if she were trying to take flight. “Careful,” she said quietly, “no need to scrabble everything.” I assumed she meant
scramble.
She looked—typically—on the verge of tears. But instead of feeling sadness or even pity for her, I had an urge to squash her, to rub her nose in this, to
burn
her, as Danny would have said.

“Hang on,” I said, a bit of game-show hostess to my voice. “There’s more.” I ran upstairs to get the Viables, all paper-clipped and sorted into their own fat folder now. When I came back down, the kitchen was quiet except for the sound of rustling papers. Already Denis and Kimberly had pools of letters in front of them. I watched as Denis flipped to the back of several envelopes to look at my penciled notation. His smile had flowered into something broader now, though it was still hard to read. Bemusement? Admiration?
My father watched with arms crossed over his chest, as if waiting for Denis to flub a magic trick. My mother was red-faced, the color starting at her neck and then splattering her jawline before finally dotting her cheeks in an uneven pattern reminiscent of Lola’s freckles. Her expression, a mix of bewilderment and injury, suggested that instead of having helped in the investigation of her missing son, I had removed a vital organ in her sleep.

I held up the folder and announced, “These are the Viables.” I detailed my system and gave examples—the I-95 grouping, the handful that had reported him hanging out on campus in East Lan sing, the pair that insisted he was working behind the counter of an ice cream shop in Traverse City. When I dropped the folder in the middle of the table, it made an important-sounding
splat.
Envelopes spilled out the sides. The gesture was dramatic and a little silly; I was getting a bit carried away.

Denis nodded. “Good girl. Very, very nice. Above and beyond.” The last statement he made to Kimberly, and she made a cooing, affirmative noise. I grinned. For a while the two of them looked through the Viables, murmuring to each other while the rest of us watched. I tried not to be bothered by the particular way they had of quietly conferring that left the rest of us feeling like we were eavesdropping. I interjected when I could. “That stack,” I told them, “all came from Indiana,” as if they were incapable of discerning the postmark, and “Those couple of anonymous ones came from River Rouge,” again as if they’d grown suddenly illiterate.

My father remained stony, but my mother grew more and more fidgety, picking up stray envelopes, stacking them into piles, taking some of the pages out and eyeing them closely, as if making sure I had not defaced anything. “When on earth—?” she finally said, by now smiling strangely, trying to affect a tone of gratitude or admiration. But the strain in her voice, the particular pitch and tremble,
betrayed enough to make Denis and Kimberly stop what they were doing to stare.

“Just when I had time,” I said in a fake, breezy tone. “After school and stuff.”

She took a long drag from her cigarette.

“You know, we’ve been talking of going to River Rouge,” Denis said, holding the letters in his fist. I’d never been to River Rouge—the forty-five minutes separating Fairfield from Detroit might as well have been a continent, given the rarity with which we neared the city limits—but I knew what downriver towns were like: scabby homes, faded local businesses, factories decades past their prime. “There were sightings in the early weeks,” Denis said. “Seems as good a starting point as any, in terms of canvassing beyond Fair-field.”

Everyone murmured assent. Even my father nodded. “Reasonable,” he said.

“Can I go?” I said, the words out of my mouth before I was even fully conscious of them, and with a breathy eagerness that left in its wake nakedness—me, a child begging for a new kitten or a trip to the ice cream store.

“Why on earth?” my mother said. The smile was gone.

My breathing came out loud. I feared the color of my cheeks.