The Year of Disappearances (8 page)

I was thinking about Mysty’s voice on the phone that night, the soft drawl that lingered over words of more than one syllable and sped up when she was excited. Wouldn’t she have told me, if she’d been planning to go away?

“Ari?”

One of the boys in the car said my name, twice.

I recognized the voice. “Michael.”

He got out of the car. He was thinner than I’d recalled, but otherwise the same: long hair, dark eyes, dark clothes. I looked at his mouth and thought of our first kiss. It had happened the previous summer, at a fireworks display; I’d seen the reflection of a red chrysanthemum shower in his eyes as he kissed me.

“I can’t believe it’s you,” he said.

“It’s me,” I said.

“How long have you been in town?”

Behind him, someone opened a car door and got out—a tall person with short hair. I couldn’t be sure if it was a boy or a girl.

“Two days. We’re leaving tomorrow,” I said.

“You should have let me know.” For a moment we didn’t speak.

Then I said, “You haven’t changed.”

“But I have,” he said. “I’m a vampire now.” The figure behind him moved into the light from the storefront. It was a girl, and she felt jealous.

Mãe came out of the liquor store carrying a large paper sack.

“This is my mother,” I said, and told Mãe, “this is my friend Michael.”

All the while I was thinking, he’s
one of us
?

You might wonder how one vampire recognizes another.

There are a few tests. Does he cast a shadow? Is he susceptible to sunburn? (UVB rays burn our skin more than a thousand times faster than they burn human skin.)

Neither of those tests works at night, of course. Others are more subjective. I mentioned earlier that vampires have cool skin, don’t perspire, and have no smell; humans, particularly those who eat meat, have a pronounced sweet, salty odor that deodorants and antiperspirants can’t mask or prevent. Because we monitor our diets, vampires tend to be thin; there are tales of Colonists who gorge themselves on red meat, but I think those are urban legends, all in all.

Many vampires, including my father, suffer from periodic sensory overload syndrome (SOS). Artificial light and sunlight, as well as complex visual patterns that overstimulate the optic nerve, may cause dizziness, anxiety, and nausea.

Since most vampires are aware of SOS, they tend to avoid patterned clothing, particularly paisley, herringbone, and polka dots, as a courtesy to others. And most of us have acute sensitivity to sound, smell, and texture. That’s why we avoid op art, tend to play music low and wear ear protection when we go to rock concerts, don’t wear perfume, and get nervous around shag carpeting and sandpaper.

My mother had told me that vampires are prone to vertigo induced not only by heights and loss of balance, but by enclosed spaces that appear to have spiral or labyrinth patterns.

Short of testing susceptibility to these stimuli, we rely on instinct and observation. Does he speak in carefully phrased sentences? Does he have a low, well-modulated voice? Does he demonstrate near-perfect memory? Since we associate these traits with fellow vampires, we become guilty of the same tendency humans have: to stereotype, or profile, one another.

When Mãe invited Michael to join us for a drink back at the hotel, I was relieved when he said he’d come. It would give me a chance to figure out who he was.

The bartender was falling in love with my mother.

Michael and I sat in high-backed wicker chairs on the glassed-in porch of the hotel bar, a pretty place with tall ficus trees and votive candles glimmering on each table. Mãe stood at the bar trying to order. But the bartender wanted to flirt with her. And she wasn’t stopping it.

Half of my attention was on her, the rest on Michael. As far as I could tell, he was not a vampire. His voice was low enough, and he did think before he spoke. But his thoughts didn’t have the same texture as those of my mother, my father, and Dashay, the vampires I knew best. His were wispy, soft; theirs had more substance, even when they were emotional or perplexed.

“I’ve been meaning to call you.” Michael was watching my mother, too, thinking how pretty she was.

Why isn’t she wearing a wedding ring?
I thought suddenly.
After all, she’s still married.

Michael looked at me. His brown eyes had an unfamiliar, docile expression.

“Are you taking drugs?” I asked. I felt glad that no one was sitting near us.

“Well, yeah.” He smiled. “I told you, I’m a vampire now.”

I noticed that he was perspiring slightly.
No, you’re not,
I thought.

“You haven’t tried V?” His voice trembled slightly.

“V as in…?”

“Vallanium. The drug that makes you a vampire.” Michael pushed back his long hair with both hands. “Ari, it’s amazing. You take two a day, and you live forever.”

“This stuff is a pill?”

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a small black canister, like the ones film comes in. He snapped off its lid and shook two dark red capsules into the palm of his hand.

“Want to try it? It’s a nice buzz, kind of like smoking weed, but if you take it with vodka you get these images…” He shook his head. “It’s hard to explain.”

“Is it expensive?” I looked down at the capsules. Each was inscribed with a tiny
V.

“Yeah. But I have a job now. I’m not in school anymore, I’m working at the All-Mart warehouse.”

The bartender was pouring the drinks, finally.

“Maybe I’ll try it later,” I said. “I’ll pay you, if you like.”

He shook his head. “No, that’s cool. You should try it.” He handed me two capsules, which I slipped into my jeans pocket. “I’m sure you can find a dealer down in Florida,” he said. “Everybody I know is on V.”

“Put them away before my mother comes back.” She was paying for the drinks.

He slid the canister back into his shirt pocket.

Mãe carried a tray to the table: two glasses of Picardo and one of cola. Michael looked disappointed. “What are you drinking?” he asked.

“It’s called Picardo. Want a taste?”

Mãe gave me an inquiring look.
I’ll tell you later,
I thought.

The red glass glowed in the candlelight. Michael lifted it to his lips, took a sip, and began to cough.

Sorry, my friend,
I thought.
You are so not one of us.

My mother said all the right things. She brought up the subject of Kathleen so delicately that Michael wasn’t upset. Then again, maybe the V kept his emotions in check.

“It’s been hardest on Mom,” he said. “She’s on antidepressants, and they make her kind of numb. At least she gets out of the house now. For months she stayed in bed.”

“And they never found out who did it?” Mãe’s voice was soothing.

“No, although for a while there they thought Ari or her father might be involved.” He glanced at me. “You knew that.”

“The FBI agent even showed up in Florida,” I said.

“People still say it’s funny that you left town after the murder.” His mind filled with hazy suspicions.

“I could never do anything like that.” I said. “Neither could he.”

“I know,” he said. “Hey, I was sorry to hear that he died.”

Mãe briskly changed the subject. She asked Michael about his plans for college, and he explained at some length, in the vaguest possible terms, why he didn’t have any.

After Michael left us that night, with promises to stay in touch that we all knew would not be kept, Mãe and I stayed at the table, talking about the things we couldn’t say before.

“Doesn’t he deserve to know the truth?” I asked.

“What’s the truth?” Mãe finished her drink and waved her fingers at the empty glass.

The bartender had never taken his eyes off her, and he refilled the glass at once. He wanted to linger, but she cut him short with one glance, and he retreated. I realized that she’d put up with his flirting before to give Michael and me a chance to talk in private.

“All we know is what Malcolm said in Sarasota,” she said. “He might have been lying. He’s good at that.”

But I’d heard him confess, and I remembered the details—he’d talked about the way he killed her. He’d done it because she was a nuisance, he said.

“Even if Malcolm did kill her, what good would it do to tell Michael?” Mãe’s eyes were dark. “We don’t know where Malcolm is. We have no proof. Trust me, Ariella, it’s better not to say anything.”

I trusted her. But I felt the weight of knowing, like a kind of sickness inside.

W
e left Saratoga Springs the next morning with boxes and baggage shifting behind us in the truck.

On the drive out of town, I made my mother stop at the cemetery. Kathleen’s name was engraved on a large stone, next to a smaller one headed with the names of her parents. All of their birth dates were on the stones, followed by dashes and spaces to fill in the years of their deaths. Kathleen was the only one with two dates. I left one of the CDs she’d given me near her stone. I’m not sure why.

“And so we bid farewell to Saratoga Springs.” Mãe turned the truck onto the ramp for Interstate 87. She sighed and glanced at me. “I’m sorry.”

“For what?”

“I’d thought coming back here would do you good. You know, give you some sense of closure—”

“I hate that word.” Then I apologized for interrupting her.

“Catharsis, then.” She pressed down on the gas pedal, but the truck kept its own pace, barely above the speed limit. “I hate automatic transmissions,” she said.

“
Catharsis
means ‘purification.’” I stared out at the rolling green hills. “I don’t feel particularly pure.”

“It’s not your fault that Kathleen died.” Mãe edged the truck into the right lane. “And it’s not your fault that Mysty disappeared.”

We’d barely crossed the New Jersey state line when my cell phone rang. The Citrus County Sheriff ’s Office had tracked me down.

The detective told me at the beginning that they were “following leads,” but that Mysty hadn’t been found. My sick feeling intensified.

He said. “Did she say anything to you about leaving town?”

“No.” I went over the substance of my phone conversation with her, twice. But it all seemed so trivial. “She sounded happy, yes. She had a date with Jesse that night, she said. Jesse Springer. He’s Autumn’s brother. No, I don’t know him well.”

The detective asked where I’d been the night she disappeared, and I told him home. I knew better than to tell him about my vertigo that night, or about sensing the presence of something evil. I agreed to come in to the sheriff ’s office after we’d returned.

“Mãe?” I said. “When will we be home?”

The truck was merging onto the New Jersey Turnpike. “Tomorrow night, I guess. We still need to eat and sleep.”

I told the detective that I’d come in on Tuesday morning, and hung up. “I wonder where she is.” The cab was cold, and I wrapped my arms around myself.

“You don’t think she ran away?” Mãe drove the way she danced—smoothly and rhythmically. She rarely used brakes.

“No.” I couldn’t picture Mysty having the gumption to run away. “She was bored, sort of, but she was in love. Or she thought she was.”

“How about you?”

My mother’s mind didn’t work the way my father’s did; it impulsively jumped from idea to idea, while his was methodical, even when it leapt to connect disparate concepts.

“Are you asking if I’m in love?”

She lifted her right eyebrow. (I couldn’t lift only one. I’d tried.) It was her way of saying
You know very well what I mean.

“No.” I said it decisively. Whatever I’d felt when I saw Michael, it wasn’t love. More like regret, for what might have been if Kathleen had lived.

One thing I’d learned: the death of a loved one changes everything for those who survive.

Later that day I noticed the capsules’ bulge in my jeans pocket and took them out. Mãe asked what they were, and I told her.

“A pill to make people vampires,” she said. “Not possible.”

“I thought maybe we could have them analyzed.” I wondered who was selling the stuff.

“Good idea.” She flicked the truck’s turn signal. “We’re in Maryland now. I say we stop for lunch. We’ll find a good seafood place.”

I said okay, even though I didn’t have much appetite.

We stopped for the night at a hotel in South Carolina and got an early start the next morning. We drove into Homosassa Springs as the sun was setting. It sank between patches of trees, a fierce tangerine-colored orb.

As the truck idled at a traffic light, I saw, stapled to a power post, the first sign:
MISSING
, the headline read. A photo of Mysty (younger, wearing no makeup) smiled beneath the words. The sight of it chilled me, made her disappearance not an absence, but a scary presence.

The light changed and we drove on. The poster was on every third electric pole.

When we finally turned onto our road, and into our driveway, I felt weary relief.
This
was home, not Saratoga Springs. Lights within the house glowed yellow through the windows (real windows—the glass had been replaced). Forever after, yellow lights against a darkness have meant home for me, and home always signifies love and mystery.

Dashay didn’t wait for Mãe to switch off the engine before she came outside, carrying Grace to greet us.

“So,” she said. “Do you want the bad news first? Or do you want the
bad
news?”

Inside, we heard the bad news: she’d got a report back from the Department of Agriculture researchers who had analyzed our dead bees. They’d found multiple pathogens in the bees, possibly caused by pesticides or a virus, along with evidence of mite infestation.

“You’re going to love this part,” Dashay said to me. She perched on the arm of a chair, adjusting her turban-like towel. She’d taken to washing her hair every night, something Mãe said was “typical of lovelorn women.” “The mites are called varroa mites, little parasites that suck the life out of the bees. Their nickname is ‘vampire mites.’ Nice, huh?”

Mãe stretched her arms over her head and interlocked her hands to crack her knuckles. “Lovely,” she said.

“Where do they come from?” I asked.

“From Asia, years ago. Some bee nut probably brought them over, in a suitcase. They already wiped out most of the feral bees. And medicines won’t kill them.”

“Mites and pesticides have been around for years.” Mãe’s eyes were focused on a spot far away. “Healthy hives like ours have been pretty much resistant. I suppose moving them during the hurricane might have made the bees vulnerable.”

“We have to destroy the hives.” Dashay looked at Mãe.

“I’ll do it tomorrow.” She sounded numb.

“I’ll help.” Dashay took a deep breath. “And now you want the
bad
news? The deputies were here today. They went through the house and all around the property.”

Mãe unclasped her hands and dropped her arms. “Did they have a warrant?”

“No. They asked me if they could look around, and I said we have nothing to hide. They swooped through here and then they left. They didn’t take a thing. I watched to make sure.”

I dipped a shrimp into a bowl of red sauce and ate it. “Dashay, did you really think they’d steal our stuff?”

She and my mother looked at me with disbelief, then sympathy. “Not steal,” Mãe said. “She meant take away evidence.”

It took me a few seconds to come to terms with the idea: the sheriff ’s deputies thought I might be involved in Mysty’s disappearance. Meantime, Grace jumped onto the sofa between my mother and me. I petted her.

“That other girl, the one who came into Flo’s with her that night?” Dashay waved her hands, as if to conjure a name.

“Do you mean Autumn?”

“Autumn, yeah. She was here. She came last night, rang the buzzer on the gate. She wanted to talk to you.”

“She has my phone number.” Grace licked my arm and began to purr. Did she love me, or was she after the shrimp?

“Yeah, well. She said she needs to talk to you, and she said she’ll be back.”

But Autumn didn’t return that night. We went to bed early, mindful that the next morning I would be talking to the police.

The Citrus County Sheriff ’s Office was a brick building in downtown Inverness, and the interview took place in a pale green room with a large table, plastic chairs, and a huge United States flag mounted on a wall. Mãe was asked to be present. The detective, whose name was Pat Morley, was a balding man of medium height wearing dark trousers and a white shirt with short sleeves. He had a face and voice so ordinary that you’d never remember them. His gray eyes looked as if they’d been bleached. He sat opposite us, and he asked me questions in a low voice, taking notes on a pad.

He asked me the same questions he’d asked on the phone: how I’d met Mysty, how long we’d been friends, how much time we’d spent together, where I’d been the night she disappeared; he looked at Mãe from time to time, inviting her to confirm what I’d said, and she always said, “That’s correct.”

He asked about our trip to the mall, and I told him about my lunch with Mysty. “I had a sense that someone was watching us,” I said.

“What kind of sense? Did you see someone?”

“I felt it. I didn’t see anyone.”

He didn’t bother to write it down.

He asked about Jesse in more detail: Did he and Mysty have a relationship? How close were they? And he knew about Jesse’s visit to our place the week before she disappeared. What had we talked about?

Then it became awkward. Up to that point, I’d answered every question honestly, without cheating—in other words, without listening to his thoughts. But now I needed to know what was in his mind, so I tuned in. And what I heard shocked me, so much so that my face must have shown it, because Mãe sent me a thought,
Be careful.

Detective Morley didn’t really care what I said! He was going through the motions, asking questions, but his notes were mostly scribbles that would never be transcribed. He’d made up his mind: Jesse had killed Mysty. It was only a matter of time, he was sure, before her body was found.

“We talked about drinking and driving,” I said, my voice clear and emphatic. “I told him he needed to stop drinking.”

Morley said, “Yes, he told us that. He has a very high opinion of you.”

But he was thinking,
Dumb kid. Lost control one night and ruined his life, and for what? A little tramp like that?

I began to say, “Mysty is not a tramp,” but I stopped myself. “Mysty isn’t a bad girl,” I said. “She’s bored with her life, maybe. And Jesse isn’t a bad guy.”

He thanked us for our time.

Mãe said, “Wait. What are you doing to find her?”

“The family put together a search team,” he said.

Something was bothering me, something I couldn’t quite remember. I went over all of his questions again in my mind, and then it came to me: the man in the van.

I told Detective Morley about seeing the van the day I’d met Mysty and Autumn, and again on the night they’d walked out of Flo’s. He opened his eyes a little wider, and he took some notes—real ones, this time. “What kind of van was it?”

I tried to visualize it, to see it as it moved out of the parking lot. “It was beige. There was a name in silver on the back door,” I said slowly. “Chevrolet.”

“Did you notice its license plate?”

“No,” I said, “but the driver—” I’d been going to say, “had no eyes,” but I got a strong warning from my mother not to say it. “He was leering at the girls, the first time I saw him,” I said.

The detective wasn’t interested in that.

“He was heavyset,” I said. “He was bald.”

We left the station and got into Mãe’s truck—her own, not the rental van, which Dashay was beginning to unload back at the house. She waited until we were out of the parking lot before she said, “Why didn’t you tell me about seeing the blind man?”

“I tried,” I said. “Twice. Both times, other things intervened.”

We drove back to Homosassa Springs without talking.

As she pulled into the lot in front of Flo’s Place, I said, “I’ve seen him before. In Sarasota.”

She said, “Okay.”

“Have you seen him, too?”

“No, but I’ve heard about him.” She switched off the engine and turned toward me. “Didn’t your father ever tell you about harbingers?”

Harbingers, she explained over an early lunch at Flo’s, are signs of things to come.

“Not everyone sees them,” she said. “I don’t. But your father has seen the blind man twice, and it sounds as if you’ve inherited him.”

“The blind man in Glastonbury.” I remembered my father talking about seeing the man in England, not long before my father was made a vampire. I’d seen the man in Sarasota; the next day, the hurricane hit and our condominium caught fire. Of course, he couldn’t be blind. He drove a van.

“But who is he?” The mere thought of the blind man made me uneasy.

“Your father thinks harbingers are Jungian shadows.” She took a bite of her grouper sandwich.

I’d read only a smattering of Jung and Freud. My father had treated their essays as fiction, by and large. “Do you mean they’re not real?”