Where I Lost Her (20 page)

“Does this Alfieri guy have any sort of record?” I ask, almost not wanting to know.

“Not as far as I can tell. Of course, if he's using an alias or something, then there might be more to the story. But on the surface, he seems clean.”

“What do we do now?” I ask.

“Well, my friend at the PD passed this info along to Strickland.”

I sigh, rub my temples. My head is starting to pound. “But he didn't believe me either; he thinks I'm some stupid drunk who hallucinated the whole thing. Or made it up for attention. He's just as bad as Andrews.”

“Maybe so, but I know Strickland. I know how he operates. And the way Andrews threw him under the bus over the search, I suspect he's pretty eager now to save face. If he can somehow prove you were telling the truth, then he can save his own ass.”

“So what does this have to do with her?” I ask. “With the girl?”

“To be honest, not a whole lot,” he says. “But I have a feeling the police are going to become a lot more interested in finding her now.”

I am seething. All of this has become an elaborate battle of the egos, and what's at stake is a child's life. I can't wait for this cockfight to play itself out.

W
ith Jake gone, I wake up with the first hints of light in the sky. At home, I usually linger as long as possible before rising. Many mornings Jake is long gone before I get up.

“Don't you hate waking up after the day's already started?” Jake usually asks, like it's a race. As though by the time I roll out of bed I'm already lagging behind everyone else, as if I'll never be able to catch my stride.

I know he thinks I have just never transcended my adolescent tendencies to sleep as long as possible before being forced to get up and start my day. Even back when I was working, when the world demanded my presence, I was late to the game.

My intentions are always to wake early, the optimism of my alarm clock–setting never wavering. But inevitably, predictably, its sounding is followed by at least a half dozen swipes at the snooze button before I am finally, reluctantly, pulled into consciousness.

Jake, on the other hand, rises early and takes a short run in the park, then comes home to shower and have breakfast before heading in to work. All the while I remain dreaming.

He is a creature of habit: after his run—coffee, a hard-boiled egg, a slice of toast with butter. Every day, no deviation. I, on the other hand, eat something different every morning: oatmeal, donuts from the bakery down the street, omelets made with an unpredictable assortment of vegetables and cheese and meats. I am impulsive in this, as in most other things as well. I grow bored easily, with food as with everything else. Mangoes, special sausages from the farmer's market, weird smelly cheeses. Whenever we took trips

I always wanted to try the most exotic dishes; I'm the kind of person who tells the waiter to surprise me. Jake says he loved me at first because I made him feel adventurous. That if not for me, he'd never stray from his routine.

I used to imagine when we finally had a baby, that Jake would be better prepared. He was already accustomed to staying up late and rising early. His life was already measured into increments, each hour predictable and safe. Children love routines; this is what I read on the Web sites I searched. Jake would be that steady force, and I would adjust.

My own mother was like a scrap of paper in the breeze—her every moment dictated by the wind, by whim. As a child, I longed for the routine I saw in my friends' homes. At Effie's house, they had Taco Tuesdays. Pizza and a family movie on Friday nights. Saturdays, her father took her and her sister on outings (to museums and on hikes, kayaking on lakes, or exploring historic landmarks), but they were always home in time for supper, which Effie's mother ensured was waiting for them on the table. I used to think this would be the kind of family I would make. And that someone like Jake could make that happen.

But after Guatemala, any semblance of order I'd managed to establish, any routine, quickly devolved. I returned to the comfort of my own chaos, and Jake remained steady. Predictable.

How did I not notice? How did I miss the cues, the clues that something in Jake's routine had changed? I feel stupid and so, so sad.

 

Like Jake, Effie wakes up early. By the time I get dressed and make my way from the guest cottage to the camp, I can see the light on in the kitchen window. Hear the sounds of the public radio station, smell the freshly brewed coffee.

“Knock, knock,” I say.

“Good morning,” she says, smiling, and gives me a hug. “How did you sleep?”

I shrug. I have been dreaming of the woods. I spend all night wandering, looking for her. By the time I wake up, my legs are exhausted. I must sleep with my entire body clenched tightly like a fist.

Surprisingly, Plum is up as well. She is sitting in the kitchen nook, writing. She is wearing soft pajamas; her hair is a puffy halo around her head.

I sit down next to her and snuggle into her.

“What's this?” I ask, looking over her shoulder.

“It's a letter for the fairy,” she says.

“Oh, cool,” I say.

Effie is making a giant salad, chopping veggies and hard-boiling eggs. They rattle around in the boiling water on the stove. The kitchen is steamy. She is becoming more and more like her grandmother, Gussy, I think. Up early, already thinking about lunch. About dinner even. When we were kids I would never have imagined her so domesticated. We were little feral creatures when we were children. But I guess this is what motherhood demands.

“Hey, can I borrow your bike?” I ask her.

“Sure, it's in the shed. You going on a ride?”

“Yeah. I feel like I need to get out, get some exercise. All I've done since I got here is eat.” The words feel hollow, and I wonder if she knows I'm lying.

“Plum might want to go with you,” she says, and my heart sinks.

Plum looks up at me hopefully.

“I was thinking about going all the way into town. I don't think she can go that far yet, can she?”

“Oh, no. She just tootles around here.”

“I can ride all the way. I'm really good at bike riding,” Plum argues.

“You know what,” I say, nudging Plum's shoulder. “How about tomorrow we take the bikes up to the swimming hole and leave this note for Star,” I say.

She looks disappointed, but shrugs. “Okay.”

“Will you be back for lunch? I'm just making a big chef's salad,” Effie says.

“I should be back in a couple of hours,” I say. “I just need to clear my head.”

“Let me help you get the bike out of the shed,” Effie says, wiping her hands on her apron. “It's a total disaster in there.”

 

We find the mint-colored beach cruiser in the back of the shed, covered with cobwebs. There is a ratty rattan wicker basket attached to the handlebars, a rusty bell. I untangle it from the girls' bikes and back it out of the shed. The chain has slipped off and I need to thread it back on. The seat is low; I am a good head taller than Effie, and so I dig around for a wrench to raise it.

I haven't ridden a bike in ages. Brooklyn is not conducive to bike riding, at least not bike riders like me. I'm a drifter. I get so caught up in the scenery around me that I tend to weave into the road. I went riding once and was nearly killed by a semi. And even if I'm not in danger myself, I'd likely pose a risk to some innocent pedestrians.

Effie and I lived on our bikes as kids. They were the vehicles to our freedom. From the time we were Plum's age, we were allowed to go as far as our bikes would take us. We never worried about helmets, about strangers, about anything but the burning of our calves as we pumped our legs to pedal up hills, and the beautiful release when we made it to the top, the wind in our hair as we coasted down the other side.

“You're not going back to his house, are you?” Effie asks. I can see the worry in her eyes. The cautious plea for assurance that I won't do anything stupid.

“No,” I say, shaking my head. “I'm just going for a bike ride. Jesus.”

She frowns. This is not how we treat each other. In the decades that we've been friends, I can count our arguments on one hand.

“But tomorrow, I do want to go to Lisa's. She's on your Friday route, right?”

And then the realization hits me, that it's been a full week. A week ago, Jake and I were on our way up from New York. A week ago the biggest concern I had was how to deal with that woman's texted flirtations with my husband. It seems laughable now that I could have been so caught up in something so trivial. Such futile frustrations and sorrows.

“Oh, shoot, I totally forgot to tell you yesterday,” Effie starts. “When we were at the library and I was checking my route, the schedule? Lisa canceled tomorrow's visit. Left a message saying not to come this week, that the kids are still reading the books they got last week.”

“Huh,” I say. “That's weird.”

She shrugs. “Nah. Not really. People do that sometimes.”

“You don't think it has anything to do with me?”

“I don't
think
so,” she says, as if this is the first time she has paused to consider it.

“She was pretty pissed off when I brought up Sharp living so close to her day care,” I say. “She knows we're friends. And if that dog really belongs to that Alfieri guy, maybe she's hiding something?”

Effie shakes her head. “Nah, I think you're reading too much into it. It happens. People cancel visits. Change the dates. It's no big deal. But the main thing is that she's not on my route tomorrow like you'd hoped. That's all. I just wanted to let you know. That we can't just stop by there tomorrow.” I feel like a scolded child.

“
Okay,
” I say, irritated. “Got it.”

“Do you have your phone?” she asks, and I can hear exactly what Zu-Zu and Plum must hear.

“Yes,
Mother,
” I say, teasing. But there is a bitterness beneath my joking. I can taste it in the back of my throat. I hold up my phone to show her and toss it and my wallet in the basket, kick up the rusty kickstand, and throw my leg over one side.

“If you make it to town, can you grab a loaf of French bread from the Shop 'n Save?” she asks, and I feel like she is challenging me. Calling my bluff.

“Sure,” I say, and push off slowly.

As I pedal away from the camp, I see Plum in the window. I ding the little bell and wave. I think about going the other way around the lake, the long way, so as not to be tempted, to not even consider what I am considering. But my legs have a will of their own, and so I turn right, follow the road that will take me past the woods where I found her.

I
t's foggy this morning; I can only see a few feet in front of me, and the condensation gathers on my skin, clings to me. I feel like I'm riding my bike through a cloud. It's thick and obscures everything; I almost ride past the spot in the road, almost miss it. At first I blame the foggy haze, but then I see what's different.

The yellow police tape is gone.

Someone has removed the yards and yards of it. Unwound it from the tangle of trees. Every bit has been removed, the woods returned to normal. There is no evidence, no demarcations that this was the spot where a little girl wandered into my life and then vanished. There is no lingering monument to our encounter.

I have always hated roadside memorials: the white crosses or street signs littered with stuffed animals and candles. Cards and flowers. The well-intentioned gestures turning into grotesque monuments after the first rain. The matted fur of the toys, the soggy mess, and dying candles. Neglected, abandoned, and then all but forgotten.

But now, I wish there was
something
. Some acknowledgment that she was here. Some simple recognition. Without this, it's as if she truly never
did
exist. As though she is, as everyone claims (as everyone would prefer to believe), a figment of my imagination. A fabrication. A dream.

But even in this sea of mist, even without the police tape, something deep and intuitive nags at me. The way the early morning light filters through the trees here. The bend of the road. My body has memorized the spot. I am a walking monument, I think. A breathing sepulcher. I am a catacomb for this lost girl.

I slow the bike down here. My heart is beating hard from the ride so far. It throbs rhythmically in my wounded hand. I have been gripping the handlebars too tightly; the ache in my palm extends all the way to my knees. I must have been pedaling harder than I thought. The bike only has one speed, which would be fine on flat surfaces, but the terrain here is rarely horizontal. I am breathless.

I try to remember the exact place where she stood that night, the exact spot where she slipped out of my fingers.

I know I should keep going. I should just keep riding the bike all the way into town, park it outside the Shop 'n Save, and choose the best loaf of French bread to have with lunch. I should buy some flowers for Effie as well, pick up some gumdrops to leave at the fairy house for Plum to find. I should load it all into my basket and make my way home, forget about her. Let her go.

But I can't make my legs move. I am frozen in this spot. And even as I know I shouldn't, am absolutely aware that this is dangerous, that I have promised both Effie and Ryan that I will leave all of this in the hands of the police, I get off my bicycle. I roll it to the edge of the woods, lift it up onto my shoulder, and hide it in a thicket of deciduous trees. Even though I hear their admonishments, their pleas, I can't keep myself from grabbing my phone and wallet from the basket, and following her, the ghost of her, back into the woods.

 

Mist shrouds everything. The forest is a different place depending on the time of day. The last time I was here with the search team, it had been high noon, the sun burning through the foliage overhead. The forest floor marbled in sunlight. But now, the sunlight struggles not only through the canopy of leaves but also through the thick mist that clings to the leaves like gauze. It is cool and damp and loud here. The birds' songs, the clucks and trills competing. An orchestra warming up, a cheeping cacophony.

I think about the information I read online, about what a child lost in the woods will do. About how older children will run, but how younger children will simply find a safe spot and burrow in. That most lost children are found within a mile radius of where they disappeared. But a radius emanating from where? What is the center of this imaginary circle? Is it the spot in the road where I found her? Where she stood in her tattered tutu and ladybug rain boots? Is it outside Sharp's trailer where I found her barrette? Is it somewhere else? How am I supposed to find her if I don't know where it started? What is the locus? Where do I even begin?

I also think about the clues, about the thousands of clues they say a missing person leaves behind. The fact that it only takes a trained eye, an attentive searcher, to locate them. I search for her in the trampled leaves, in the heady scent of the trees.
Where are you?
I whisper.
Where did you go? What clues did you leave for me?

Here is what I know, I think, as I walk slowly across the pine-needle-littered ground:

I found a child, a wounded child, in the middle of the road. And then she disappeared. Helicopters with heat-seeking probes did not find her. Dogs did not find her. A legion of volunteers did not find her. But she exists. She must exist, because I found the barrette that was in her hair.

Sharp, a registered sex offender and convicted felon from out of state, is living out here in the woods too. And this guy, Alfieri, is connected to both Sharp (I know this because I saw it with my own eyes the night of the storm), but also possibly Lisa down the road. I know this because of that dog—the dog that (if I believe the psychic) at some point scared the little girl. I think of the terror in Mary's eyes as she described its sharp teeth.

I walk through the woods, purposeful now. I am trying to think like a little girl who is alone in the woods and scared. If a small child's tendency is to burrow in, to find a safe place to hide, then where would she go? I use the rising sun as my compass, heading south. I know I must be close to Lisa's house now. Her house is closest to the spot where I found her. Which means that maybe Lisa's house is where she saw the dog? But Alfieri blew past me on the road that night, headed
north
toward the lake, with the dog in his truck. Unless he returned later, after I left, this doesn't make any sense. And where was he going? To Sharp's? And what does any of this have to do with the girl?

I try to create not only the geography of her path, the geometry, but a chronology.

The barrette was in her hair when I found her, which means she was on Sharp's property
after
I found her. This means, I suppose, his yard is the center of that circle. That her possible paths should radiate from that horrifying point. That if what I've read is true, then she should be within a mile or so from that spot. But if so, why hasn't anyone found her?

And it has been seven days. Does the circle's center change with each day? None of the Web sites talked about this: how many circles. How many trajectories. I think of the water rings on Ryan's desk, interlocking. Endless.

 

I walk faster, try to imagine a child's logic. What would Plum do? Would she run? Or would she look for a place to hide? As the mist clears, the color of the forest changes. It brightens, a Technicolor wonder of a thousand shades of green. I become hot, the hair on the back of my neck sticky as I hike through the thick trees.

And then, abruptly, I come to a clearing. And I see the backside of Lisa's house. The backyard littered with toys. Would the little girl have seen this that night? Would she have been drawn by the colorful ride-ons, by the plastic slide and seesaws? There is a small playhouse, and I wonder briefly, stupidly, if she might just be curled up inside.

But then I see something else too, something I hadn't noticed before. An outbuilding, a sort of dilapidated barn. It's set back from the house about a hundred feet, right where the woods meet her yard. I walk carefully, cautiously along the wooded border, obscured, I hope, by the trees that are dense here, close together.

It's 7:30, still somewhat early, but I would imagine that kids would be getting dropped off soon. Parents who have to be at work by eight o'clock. But her driveway is empty. Even the black Honda, the car that had been in the driveway when Effie and I came, is gone. I strain to hear beyond the warbling chorus of the birds, but I don't hear the sound of children either.

That's strange. I move closer toward the house, try to catch a glimpse of something, anything to suggest that Lisa is inside. That it's business as usual today. But then I am overwhelmed by the realization that the house is empty. The porch light is out. Not a single light is on inside the house. From where I am standing, I can see a white piece of paper taped to the door, fluttering a bit in the wind.

I come out of the woods cautiously and then run down the hill toward the house. I am breathless when I reach the front door.

“Family emergency. Closed until further notice. Sorry.”

Effie had said that she'd canceled the bookmobile's visit, but hadn't she said something about the kids just not being done with their books? Where is she?

I turn back toward the woods and look to the barn again. I peer behind me to make sure I am alone, and then run along the path, the dew-drenched grass tickling my bare ankles. The door opens easily and I go into the cool barn. Sunlight streams through the wooden slats. The combination of darkness and blinding light is disorienting. I shield my eyes and peer up into the beams. As my eyes adjust to the light, I can see a hayloft above, and my heart pings. I climb up the ladder, wondering if she would have been able to do this, if she was old enough to climb. I try to remember how old Effie and I were when we were first able to climb the ladder into her tree house.

And if she could climb, would she have been afraid? I remember walking behind Zu-Zu when she was only three, making sure she clung to each rung, watching to make sure that her foot didn't slip, sending her tumbling backwards into me.

I reach the top and hold my breath as I peek into the loft, terrified of what I might find.

But she's not there. Of course, she's not there.

What am I doing here? Have I lost my mind?

I sit down in the loft, dizzy, vertiginous, and peer down at the floor, which is striped with sunlight. And my heart flies to my throat.

I blink hard. But when I open my eyes again, the sight has not gone away.

I climb onto the ladder, and back down quickly until I am standing on the floor. And I kneel down onto the dirt-packed ground. I reach my good hand out and tenderly touch the ground, the dark stain. I brace myself, but it is dry. I move to the next spot, and test it as well. Whatever stained the floor has had time to harden. To
congeal
.

I scramble to my feet and back away, unable to turn away from the horrifying vision in front of me. When I push the doors open, the entire barn floods with light and confirms that what I am seeing is not a hallucination. Not an awful dream.

Blood
. The stains are dried blood.

It's as though there has been a massacre here.

My ears buzz and fill as if I am sinking into the depths of the lake. My vision goes black, save for the stars. And I am drowning in the night sky, filled with constellations. All of the unanswered wishes. I need to get out of here. I need to leave.

Willing myself not to pass out, I run blindly toward the driveway, feel the gravel beneath my feet, running toward the road. But I am losing, sinking.

“Jesus Christ,” a voice swims to me, where I float adrift in this black sea. Hands grab my shoulders before I collapse. “Waters? What the hell are you doing here?”