The Missing Place (10 page)

“Paul said he liked his room. He said it was really nice.”

“Oh, yes, ma'am, we have the nicest ones of any of the camps,” Jennie said sincerely. “Everybody wants to stay here, but we're booked out. Companies buy up whole blocks. Okay, turn here.”

Under Colleen's feet, the carpeted floor felt hollow, and she wondered how much insulation had been laid between the floorboards and the bottom of the unit. Between steel and earth, the winds would rush and the snow would blow all winter long, but it was almost too warm inside.

On either side of the hall, metal numbers marked plain gray doors. Men's and women's restrooms bore signs reading
QUIET, PLEASE! FOLKS SLEEPING!!
On a few of the doors, cartoons and photographs had been taped up. One had a pair of tiny stuffed toy reindeer arranged in a pornographic pose, held in place by duct tape. About a third of the doorknobs held
PRIVACY PLEASE
tags, and Colleen imagined the men inside, blinds drawn, sleeping through the daylight hours.

“Here we are,” Jennie said, unlocking a door. She stood aside for Colleen to enter first.

Inside the room was the faint but unmistakable funk of male sweat. The bedding was strewn haphazardly, pillows and blankets on the floor. Besides these two details, Colleen's first impression was that it resembled a hospital room more than a hotel. The space was small, a double bed with no headboard wedged in one corner and a small laminate desk and chair in another. In the remaining two corners were narrow metal lockers, just big enough to house a few changes of clothing and stow a duffel bag. Hooks on either side of the door served for towels and coats. A single window faced across a fifteen-foot expanse of unmarred snow at the neighboring wing. The only decoration in the room was a TV suspended from the ceiling; its position suggested the best viewing would be from the bed, not the desk chair, which struck Colleen as sad.

The departing guest had left clues to how he'd spent his leisure time. A half-empty bag of Doritos shared space on the desk with a beef jerky wrapper and several empty Styrofoam cups. On the floor were copies of
Road & Track
and
Penthouse.

“Sorry about the mess,” Jennie apologized. She grabbed a corner of the sheets and yanked the remainder of the bedding off the bed before sitting down. “You go ahead and take the chair.”

“This room . . .” Colleen placed her hand on the laminate desktop. It was warm from the heat blasting from a fixture in the ceiling. “It's not what I pictured.”

“But you should see some of the other places,” Jennie said defensively. “Everything here was new when they set up. I mean, we have maid service twice a week and they can have new towels anytime they want. And people are good about keeping it quiet. We're real strict about that. We got cameras on the halls, nobody ever tries to break the rules here.”

“What are the rules?” All Paul had said, last Thanksgiving, was that nobody partied at the camp. The more Andy ribbed him about it, the more he clammed up, refusing to talk about what he did with his free time.

“No alcohol or drugs, no women in the rooms except the staff, no gambling, and keep it quiet. I mean, right there, that keeps the partying out. And the guys know if they break the rules and get barred, they aren't going to have anywhere to stay.”

“What do they do when they're not working?”

“Depends how far they're going to the job site. The rigs can be an hour or more away, especially in bad weather. So mostly it's just the younger guys on in-close jobs who go out. If it's a big game on or something, they'll get together and watch it in the rec room. The kitchen does something nice on special occasions and holidays. Like for Super Bowl? They're going to fly in king crab.”

“But the younger ones,” Colleen pressed. “Like Paul. They go to bars?”

“Well, the guys work twelve-hour shifts, so a lot of 'em, the ones with families? They just want to get through their hitch and go home. The younger, single guys, yeah. There're a few places in town.
I
don't go,” she added. “I'm engaged.”

“Could you give me a list of places they go? Did you ever happen to hear Paul or Taylor saying where they were going?”

“No, ma'am, I'm sorry, I never did talk to them like that. But yeah, I'll write down a few for you. I wish there was something more I could do.”

“Jennie, listen. Is there anything you could think of, any guess of what might have happened to them?”

The girl's expression turned not so much wary as sad. She twisted a button on her sweater and seemed to be trying to decide how to phrase what she wanted to say. “We talk about it,” she finally said. “Me and the girls. This one girl, Megan, thinks one of them got hurt, and maybe the other one was going to report it. If he was the only one who saw, and the supervisors thought they could keep it quiet . . .”

“Hurt how?” Colleen demanded. “What kind of injury?”

“Well, they were with Hunter-Cole, right? And Hunter-Cole works their crews real hard, and they got a reputation for safety problems. They lost three men last year, it was in the papers. Had the inspections and all; OSHA was out here making a fuss, they put a ton of money into fighting it. I mean, I don't know all the details, but supposedly they have guys in Washington trying to get the rulings reversed and it ain't anywhere near over.”

“Three men
died
? How?” Colleen's mouth tasted bitter—just saying the word took effort.

“Well, one fell. He didn't have his harness on, that was straight regulation failure and they took a hit for that. I don't even know how much the fines ended up being. The other two, though, the families signed an agreement they can't talk about it, so I don't really know. I mean, there's rumors and all, but people talk all kinds of crazy.”

“They signed an
agreement
?” Thinking,
Who would do that, who would get in bed with the devil that killed their loved ones?

“You got to understand, Mrs. Mitchell, they autopsy the bodies, and if there's any drugs in their system then they don't have to pay out. It's in the contract they all sign. And it can even be something like Ritalin, some of them take it just for the energy to get through their shift. Anything at all.”

“But that would never hold up! No jury would let a corporation off the hook.” Not if the victim was attractive, anyway. Flash a picture of a young man in the prime of his life—her mind went to the picture of Paul on her refrigerator at home, her favorite, in which he was holding up a plastic fish in a souvenir shop in Cozumel, pretending he'd caught it.

She forced the image out of her mind.

“Ma'am,” Jennie said quietly. “What you got to understand is some of the families don't have the money for the hospital bills. And the burial. If the company ain't going to cover it, it's a powerful reason for them to make a deal. I'm not saying they're happy about it. I got this friend from school, her boyfriend got his hand crushed last year, he can't work now. She told him to sue, but the company lawyers sat him down and laid out how if he took them to court they were going to get this whole team from Minneapolis to fight it, and even if he eventually won they'd make sure it took years. And they got a baby coming. So he took the settlement. And it was a lot of money, almost two hundred thousand dollars. They're building a house south of town.”

“But—” Colleen did the calculation—a few hundred thousand dollars was no compensation for the years ahead that the boy wouldn't be able to earn. She didn't know what to say. She settled for, “I'm very sorry for your friend's boyfriend.” It hardly seemed adequate.

“Mrs. Mitchell, can I ask you something?”

“Yes, of course.”

Jennie took a breath and looked down. “Did your son have some sort of like . . . problems?”

Colleen froze. The habit of years, the defensiveness, surged up instantly.
He's just an active boy, just like all the other boys
—the old chant, the one she recited in her mind like a mantra since preschool, echoed in her brain. This was it, the thing they spent all the money on, making sure he could pass for
just like everyone else.
Money and a raft of tutors and coaches were what allowed him to get into the college prep track and then—miracle of miracles—Syracuse. His success was proof it had worked. No teacher had sent home notes with the names of specialists in the last few years; Paul hadn't returned home despondent over teasing since before puberty. But paradoxically, the more successful the ruse became, the more insistent the voice:
Please just make him like all the other kids, don't let them notice.

“Can you be more specific?” she asked faintly, stalling for time, trying to figure out where the greater betrayal lay—telling his secrets or letting even the tiniest sliver of a clue slip through her fingers.

“I'm sorry, I don't mean anything by it, but did he like to gamble? Like did he have a gambling
problem
?”

“What? Oh, Lord, no,” Colleen said, her relief so great she lost her composure. “I mean, he's never gambled, that I know of. Maybe a few slots in the Las Vegas airport.”

“Oh. Because why I ask is, there's been a few guys that get hooked on the casino up on the reservation. It sounds crazy, but they'll go up there and run through their whole check and keep going. I just thought, I don't know. If he'd got in trouble that way. Him or Fly.”

“Fly?”

“I mean Taylor. Sorry. It's these nicknames they give each other.” She smiled sheepishly and shrugged.

“Jennie, why did they call my son Whale?”

“Well, because of those shirts,” Jennie said with what seemed like fondness. “With the little whale on them? Nobody had ever seen those before. Especially that one he had? It was yellow and blue, I think.”

Colleen got it. The shirts she bought at the preppy little shop downtown, the one that the local kids were so crazy about. They were way too expensive, seventy-five dollars for a polo shirt, but Colleen had always felt it was well worth it to buy the trappings that would help Paul fit in. The yellow and blue—well, yes, she could see why that one wouldn't play well here, color-blocked and turned-up-collared and looking like a parody of a Ralph Lauren ad. But Paul had never cared about his clothes—he wore what Colleen bought him and, that night when he'd lit out for North Dakota the first time, he would have simply taken the bags he'd already packed for Syracuse, the suitcase full of preppy clothes.

“Does he still wear those?” she asked softly.

“Oh, no, ma'am, not after the first couple of weeks.”

Oh, Paul.
Colleen felt regret for her error, longing to go back and do it right. If only she'd known that she couldn't keep him from Lawton, she would have found out what they wore up here and made sure that her boy had it, that he had everything he would need to get by. Suddenly she understood why Paul had refused Andy's offer, over the holidays, to take the Cayenne since Andy was getting a new car. Paul was bound and determined to buy a truck when he got back to Lawton. A truck! It had struck her as so outlandish, when they were offering him a vehicle that could handle the weather, and all he had to do was drive it out there.

But now she got it. Everyone else had trucks. So Paul would have wanted a truck.

Jennie dug her phone out of her pocket and checked the time. “I'm sorry, I just have to make sure I'm back in time so they don't wonder where I got to. But we have a few more minutes.”

“Jennie, listen. Ms. Capparelli says that the boys' things might have been saved. Their belongings, from the rooms.”

“Well, what I heard, the police are supposed to pick up F—Taylor's stuff, only they haven't come by yet. And ma'am, there wasn't anything in your son's room.”

She looked away when she said it, embarrassed or reluctant to add to Colleen's pain.

“What do you mean, there wasn't anything?”

“Like he packed up before he left? I didn't see it but I talked to Marie, she's the one who cleaned the rooms on their wing that Friday, the day after they went missing. They clean on Tuesdays and Fridays. And she said Paul's room was done up neat, he made his bed and left the towels hung up off the floor and there wasn't anything else in the room, not even in the trash.”

“Oh,” Colleen said. The news felt significant, but what did it mean? In a way, it was hopeful: her son had deliberately packed his things and taken them away. He'd
planned
to leave, in the middle of a hitch. But why? And why were Taylor's things undisturbed?

A sharp twist in her stomach signaled a very specific terror, and she pushed back against it. No. No, she was
not
going to allow her mind to leap to fantastical conclusions, scenarios she had no business entertaining, given how little information she had.

She had to focus on what she
could
do, now. One step at a time. The past was done, and the future, if she could influence it at all, was going to require all her attention.

“Listen,” she said. “I don't know how to say this to you, Jennie, and I know we just met and you have no reason to trust me. But I am going to ask a favor of you, and I just have to hope that you'll understand I am asking you as a
mother.
You're—you're someone's daughter, and I hope your mother loves you and would do anything to keep you safe. So. I know this is breaking rules, a lot of rules, and exposing you to risk—but could you give me Taylor's things?”

Jennie's lips parted in protest.

“Wait, wait, don't say no yet. Hear me out. We've just been to see the police. Chief Weyant, he practically came out and told me they don't have the resources to work on this case. You know they aren't going to be happy to investigate what you just told me, the possibility that someone at Hunter-Cole is covering up safety issues. I mean, that doesn't even sound like a police thing, that's got to be federal or OSHA—or, I don't know, but if the boys got tangled up in something like that, the Lawton police aren't going to be any help at all. But Shay—she
knows
her son. Knows him the way only a mother can.”