The Year of Disappearances (9 page)

“They’re very real to those who see them.” She took another bite and chewed it slowly. “Jung thought shadows were visions of our own unconscious selves, which we repress.”

“But I
saw
the man in the van.” I knew he was more than a shadow. “So did Autumn and Mysty.”

My mother believed me. “Yes, you saw a man in a van. But was he really blind? You saw what you most fear: someone full of malice, someone with an absence of vision. He’s your shadow man.”

I asked, “Do harbingers always mean bad news?” Flo’s was unusually noisy that day, and I had to raise my voice to be heard.

“For your father, yes. But not for everyone. Dashay’s harbinger is a black bird, a grackle, that swoops at her. It happens when change is coming, for better or worse.”

The concept of a harbinger didn’t make much sense to me.

Logan, the bartender, came over to our table—a rare occurrence, since he liked to stay behind the bar. “Heard you were visiting the sheriff this morning,” he said to Mãe.

One aspect of living in Citrus County that I never liked: everyone knew everyone else’s business. Someone had spotted Mãe’s truck and lost no time spreading the word.

Mãe said, “Yes, and why were we there?”

He grinned and pointed at the TV set over the bar. The Tampa station was broadcasting a photo of Mysty, then shots of two distraught-looking people; the caption read
PARENTS OF MISSING GIRL
.

“Only one circus in town this week.” Logan looked at me. “So you knew this Mysty?”

“I knew her,” I said. “But not well.”

“She and her friend looked like trouble waiting to happen. Still, it’s shameful when a girl disappears.” Logan turned to my mother again. “Remember the last one?”

She nodded, her eyes on me. “There was another one?” I asked.

“Over the years there have been a few,” Logan said. “The worst one was the last one, two years ago. They found the little girl buried in her neighbor’s yard—”

“You have customers.” Mãe tilted her head toward the bar. She didn’t want me to hear the details. She didn’t want me to be further upset.

But in the days to come I heard all sorts of details, things that I’d never imagined. While I was growing up in Saratoga Springs, sheltered from TV and newspapers, learning about philosophy and mathematics, people were disappearing all over America—all over the world, really. Every year, tens of thousands of people vanish—most of them adult males. But the media attention tends to go to pretty girls and children—about three hundred children are abducted every year and never return. More than a million teenagers run away from their families every year. Most return home within a week, but roughly seven percent—seventy thousand teenagers—are never heard of again.

It was hard for me to believe such things happened at all, let alone with such frequency. I felt as if the world I lived in was only a façade—that beneath its skin, a darker world raged and rampaged. I’d glimpsed that world before, but I’d never known how vast and malignant it might be.

Afterward, whenever we drove in Mãe’s truck, I noticed teenagers wearing music earbuds or talking on cell phones, paying no attention to either world—to the posters of Mysty, or to strangers who might be watching them. I wondered who would disappear next.

When we returned home, Mãe and Dashay burned the trays of the beehives. I didn’t help. I didn’t want to see them burn. The acrid air came into the house and lingered for days.

For dinner that night I made a salad, but none of us ate much. Mãe excused herself and went off to have a bath. Dashay and I played Crazy Eights, but we both were thinking of other things and played poorly. The game dragged on.

When the front gate buzzed, Dashay said, “It’s that girl again.” And a second later, Autumn’s voice came through the intercom.

When I went down to the gate, she was waiting for me. She wore sunglasses, tight black jeans, and a tank top with one word printed on it:
NOT
.

“I need to talk to you,” she said.

“Why didn’t you call me?” I unlocked the gate and beckoned her inside.

“Cell phones can be traced. Or bugged.” She wheeled her bicycle up the driveway.

We sat in the moon garden. Even though the sky was growing dark, Autumn kept on her sunglasses. The air stayed hot and humid. It didn’t bother me, but Autumn wiped her forehead with her hand from time to time. “I hate Florida,” she said.

“Weren’t you born here?”

“Yes,” she said, “and I’m counting the minutes until I leave. So, what did you do to Mysty?”

I hadn’t expected that question. When I tried to hear what she was thinking, all I heard was a static-like buzz.
Who are you?
I thought.

I heard, in response, a soft, high-pitched whining sound. It came from Autumn—not from her mouth, but from somewhere inside her.

Then Dashay was there, her back to me, bending toward Autumn.

“Somebody call me?” she said softly. She took off Autumn’s sunglasses, and Autumn didn’t move.

I craned my neck and had a brief glimpse of Autumn’s eyes—wide open, with light moving across her left iris.

Dashay moved to block my view.

“Yes, my pretty pretty,” she said. “You’re the one calling me. I hear you now. I can’t hear you! I hear you loud and clear. You’re not there! I don’t hear anything.”

She went on, crooning nonsense (“I see you, I can’t see a thing. I can feel you, you’re no place at all”). I wondered if Dashay was mad—if Bennett’s disappearance had disconnected her sanity. Discomfort, hot and prickling, climbed up my spine.

But I didn’t leave. I closed my eyes, and my eyelids turned colors, twists of violet. After a minute or so, I heard the whining sound again, and then a sudden popping noise.

I opened my eyes. Dashay turned away from Autumn, her face triumphant.

“Want to see?” she said to me, She held out her right hand, clenched tight.

Part of me did, but I shook my head. “It’s Autumn’s demon, isn’t it.”

“She had a sasa in her, yes. I heard it. Sometimes they sing at night. Sure you don’t want to see? ’Cause I need to drown it quick.”

I took a quick glance. Something small, dark, and slimy looking quivered in her palm. Then she closed her hand and walked off toward the river.

Autumn hadn’t moved while we’d talked. She sat, her eyes open, breathing normally, her palms flat against her knees. She blinked and stirred. “So what do you think happened to Mysty?” Her voice was matter-of-fact, as if nothing had happened.

I told her I didn’t know. She nodded, but she was thinking,
She knows more than she’s saying.
I could hear her thoughts, now that the sasa was gone.

I wondered what she’d done to acquire a sasa.

“Jesse took a lie detector test yesterday.” She said it so casually. “Today they told him he failed and he has to take two more.”

“Poor Jesse.” I hoped that being hypnotized hadn’t affected his performance.

“My brother is no liar,” she said. “He says she stood him up that night.” But she was wondering,
Did he kill her?

“I don’t think he did it,” I said. “He doesn’t have that kind of temper. Besides, why do you think she’s dead?”

“It’s been four days.” Autumn hunched her narrow shoulders. “They’re usually dead by now.”

“You don’t seem very upset,” I said.

“Well, it’s not like she meant that much to me.” Autumn stood up to leave. “It’s not like I even knew her very well.”

But she was lying. Mysty was the only friend she’d ever had.

I walked her down to the gate. “Aren’t you scared to be out alone at night?”

She draped one leg over her bike and mounted it. “I’d like to see somebody try to come after me,” she said.

O
nce upon a time, my mother thought that place names with the letter
S
in them were lucky. That’s the entire reason she’d chosen to live in Saratoga Springs, and later,
S
attracted her to Homosassa Springs.

Conversely, she decided that places that began with the letter
D
were unlucky. She thought they attracted negative energy. For her, that explained why so many murders and other crimes occurred in places like Deltona and DeLand, Florida.

But Mãe outgrew those superstitions. Luck, she decided, was more about a person’s attitude than about anything else. Good and bad things happened randomly, everywhere.

Attitudes aside, when bad things happen it’s natural to try to find reasons, to look for patterns. “Bad things happen in threes” was a saying I heard often in Homosassa Springs, after Mysty disappeared. It’s always quoted after two bad things have happened, and people go out of their way to find number three. If I’m sure of anything, it’s this: number three will find
you.

I never did learn who started the rumor that I killed Mysty. Before Autumn lost her demon, she might have done it; after her encounter with Dashay, she lacked sufficient malice. Most likely it was one or more of Jesse’s friends, trying to shift attention away from him.

Dashay was the one to tell me. The lunch crowd at Flo’s Place thought that Mysty was dead (“like that other poor girl two years ago”) and that I was somehow responsible, since I was apparently the last person who’d talked to her.

I’d been deep in conversation with Mary Ellis Root when Dashay burst in, wearing a striped shirt, white jeans, and red sneakers—it had been her summer uniform that year. She looked particularly jaunty next to Root, who wore a lumpy dress and oversized men’s sunglasses. I didn’t appreciate being told in front of Root that the town thought me a killer, but Root enjoyed the spectacle; I could tell from the way she clasped her hands. I’d never been able to hear her thoughts; I decided that she must block them all, all the time.
She must be a vampire,
I thought. Yet I hated to think she was one of us.

Root had come by to collect my father’s latest mail, and I’d asked her about Vallanium. I’d shown her one of the little red capsules that Michael had given me.

Yes, Root said, she’d heard of it. She’d heard the drug was popular in Tampa, near where she was staying. Apparently it was sold in the high schools.

“What’s in it?” I asked her.

“Who knows?” She rubbed her hands, looking uneasy at not having an answer.

“Could you analyze this for me?”

Then Dashay sauntered in with her rumor story.

One thing about vampires: we generally disregard rumors. When you don’t have a presence in society, it doesn’t matter much what people say about you, unless things go to extremes. Then you simply disappear and move on.

But for some reason this one did matter to me. “It’s not fair,” I said. “I had nothing to do with Mysty that night. And why does everyone assume that she’s dead?”

From their faces alone, I saw that Dashay and Root assumed the same thing.

“Here, give me the capsule.” Root stretched out her hand, which reminded me of a paw; thick hair grew like fur across its back. “I’ll find out what’s in it, and I’ll let you know.”

Then she gathered up the mail and left without saying good-bye, as if she’d had more than enough of our company.

“So that Root is a friend of yours now?” Dashay’s voice dripped skepticism.

“At least she doesn’t spread rumors.” I felt miffed, but I couldn’t stay mad at Dashay. “I have a question,” I said.

“You always do.”

It wasn’t easy to phrase this one. “It’s okay to kill a demon?” My father was an advocate of nonviolence, and I’d grown up thinking that all killing was wrong.

Dashay listened to me without moving, without even blinking. “It’s like removing a cancer,” she said. “Once you know it’s there, it would be wrong not to get rid of it.”

I took a deep breath. “So what does it look like?”

“Every sasa is different.” Dashay walked over to the bowl of nuts on the coffee table. She lifted out a walnut. “It was about the size and shape of this nut, but dark, and without a hard shell. It’s softer, you know. Like a tumor.”

I’d never seen or felt a tumor, and I hoped I never would. “So it doesn’t have eyes?”

Dashay laughed. “You looked at it, remember? No, it does not have eyes or ears or a nose.” Then she laughed again. “Don’t look so disappointed. It does have a little mouth—that’s how it attaches itself. And it vibrates and sometimes it sends out a high-pitched sound that only foy-eyes hear.”

I didn’t tell her that I’d heard it, too.

Later that day we received a visit from the FBI.

At the sound of the buzzer, my mother went down to the front gate. She returned a moment later, followed by Agent Cecil Burton.

I’d seen him only a month ago. He’d turned up at the place in Kissimmee where we stayed after the hurricane. He was still trying to find out who killed Kathleen.

Now that I was a “person of interest” in Mysty’s disappearance as well, he wanted to ask me some questions.

I was lying on the living room sofa, reading
The Count of Monte Cristo
and thinking about the nature of honor, when he came in. From our first exchange of glances I knew this interview wasn’t going to be anything like the last one.

Agent Burton’s eyes had always been world-weary, but this time they had a look of cold determination. His fingernails, buffed and trimmed the last time I’d seen him, were ragged now, as if he’d bitten them.

He said, “How are you, Miss Ariella?”

I sat up. “I’m fine.”

He sat in a chair across from me. Mãe offered him a drink and he said that water would be very nice. As usual, he wore a suit and tie, in spite of the heat. He looked fit, but his eyes were bloodshot, as if he hadn’t slept well in a long time. I had a sense that personal problems were keeping him awake.

“Lovely place you have here.” He took a small tape recorder out of his pocket and set it on the table between us.

Mãe came back with two glasses of water, which she set on either side of the tape recorder.

Agent Burton said he had some questions for me that were important in finding out what happened to Kathleen and to Mysty. He asked if I wanted to help.

“Of course.” I sent Mãe a quick question:
Am I allowed to listen to his thoughts?

Mãe sent back,
Of course.
She sat on the sofa next to me.

The next hour went quickly, but I felt exhausted by the time it ended. Listening to Burton’s questions and his thoughts required concentration. Answering the questions was the easy part.

By and large, I told him the truth. We’d been over the details of Kathleen’s murder before, so I found myself repeating things I’d already said. Of course I didn’t talk about Malcolm, or his admission that he’d murdered Kathleen.

From time to time my mother let me know that I was doing a good job.

When we got to Mysty, Burton’s thoughts became fresher and more complicated. Now I had to think before I spoke. Yes, I said, I’d heard rumors that I was involved in her disappearance.

His thoughts told me he didn’t take the rumors seriously. He was mostly intrigued by the coincidence: two girls I’d known had come to “bad ends.” That was his phrase for it. Like most people, he assumed that Mysty was dead.

“Tell me about Jesse Springer.”

I told Burton all I knew: the kayak accident, the trip to the mall, Jesse’s interest in the stars and deep space, Jesse’s decision to stop drinking.

I even mentioned Jesse’s visit to our house the night I’d hypnotized him. All I left out was the hypnosis itself.

It was hard for me to talk at times, because Burton was thinking such contrary thoughts: that Jesse had deliberately capsized the kayak to get attention, that he’d only pretended to stop drinking, and that he’d killed Mysty without a qualm.

The polygraph tests indicated that Jesse was lying in response to some questions. He’d said that he’d agreed to meet Mysty that night at one of the river docks, but that she never turned up.

Apparently Jesse fit the FBI profile for Mysty’s abductor/murderer: a white male between twenty and thirty who tended to be a loner and substance abuser who’d had previous problems with the law. Mysty’s stepbrothers in Tennessee also had been interviewed, but were ruled out as suspects since both had solid alibis.

Burton asked me about the man I’d seen driving the beige Chevrolet van, but he was thinking that the man-in-van was a long shot. Jesse was the one.

I was so intent on listening to his thoughts that I stopped in mid-sentence, having no idea of what I’d been saying. “I’m sorry,” I said.

“It’s natural for you to be upset,” Burton said, but he was thinking,
All in all, she’s a pretty cool customer.

Mãe said, “She’s only fourteen.”

Finally the tape recorder was shut off. Burton looked at me, his eyes still cold and detached. “If you think of anything else,” he said, and handed me his card.

I already had this card, but I took a new one.

That’s when Dashay came in. She’d been swimming in the river, and she strode into the living room, wrapped in a red towel, beads of water flying from her shoulders. Her skin gleamed, and her hair was hidden by a vintage bathing cap festooned with white rubber zinnias. Anyone else would have looked ridiculous in this getup. Dashay looked stunning.

Agent Burton dropped the tape recorder as he stood up.

Mãe and Dashay tried not to laugh.

“How do you do?” Dashay extended her hand as my mother introduced them and smiled her dazzling fake smile. She stood close to Burton and looked into his eyes.

A spot near the kidneys,
she thought.
Nothing sizable yet. Probably a result of consorting with criminal types—or with the ex-wife.

A week later, I stopped riding my bicycle.

I’d developed the habit of riding into town three or four times a week, going to the library or the drugstore, drinking a soda, and stopping for a swim on the way home. The city streets were quiet those days. Most of the locals had volunteered for the Mysty search parties.

I saw one group, fanned out in the forest between the town and the river, walking slowly, looking from side to side. I knew they were hoping to find a body, and the thought made me shiver.

At the library and the drugstore, people stared at me with suspicion. I heard them thinking:
That’s her. She’s the one. Poor Mysty.
And sometimes I had the sense that I was being followed, although no one was visible. Finally the unpleasantness outweighed my need for exercise. I stayed home.

We were visited again by the sheriff ’s detectives, who asked the same questions as before. I felt like a parrot, repeating syllables that carried no meaning for me.

Our house was finished now, stronger and larger than it had been before the hurricane. Mãe had added three new rooms and a deck for my telescope. But I didn’t feel like stargazing, or helping her arrange the furniture and artwork we’d brought from Saratoga Springs.

The days were quiet with the work crew gone. Mãe mourned her honeybees and Dashay brooded about Bennett; both tried to hide their feelings. We were living in a house of heartbreak.

Mãe tried to interest me in Florida folk tales. Dashay renewed her offer to teach me about sasa. I wasn’t interested. And I didn’t want to go to Flo’s to eat oysters. I had no appetite.

My mother told me that many vampires are prone to bouts of depression. “Some of it is justified,” she said. “When you look at the state of the world, it makes you more than sad.”

My father, I thought, had given me a classical education but had kept me from knowledge of current events and crime. He’d wanted to keep me optimistic for as long as he could.

The strangest thing about that time: words failed me. I couldn’t find the right phrases or terms. More and more, I resorted to nodding and shaking my head, and then to avoiding opportunities for conversation altogether.

At night I lay awake for hours, thinking about Mysty and Kathleen: people who’d been presences in my life only briefly, and now were voids. I remembered my father talking about presence and absence, tension and release, as the basis of all art and all science. I wanted to think about the implications of that, but my head was too foggy to get anywhere.

One morning, after a nearly sleepless night, I came out to the kitchen and found Mãe sitting at the table, doing the
New York Times
crossword puzzle. She downloaded it on her computer every morning.