Missing Girls- In Truth Is Justice Read online

  “And,” Gavin asked.

  “He’s got a record. His brother-in-law gave him this job delivering phone books all over the county. You can’t get too nosy. People have reasons for everything. So, he has a record. He’s gainfully employed. Doing his job.”

  “Did he seem overly friendly to you,” Marcella asked.

  “Would you be overly friendly to a private investigator? He clammed up. Another wild one was a school bus driver, another old guy. He accused another driver of being suggestive to the children.”

  “What does that mean,” Gavin asked.

  “The guy carried on a running conversation with the kids about everything under the sun. How did he know this? He’d trained him. The more experienced drivers mentor the new guys. So, when he went on his observation run with the guy, he thought he talked too much. How many guys were that friendly to a busload of eight-and-nine-year-olds? It can get ridiculous fast. But you have to keep poking around. You never know.”

  “Am I wasting my money with you?” Gavin asked.

  “If I were you, I’d keep the time clock ticking,” Rathskeller replied. “It’s not dead in the water from day one as some are. It’s fluid. We don’t have the lead we need, but we’ll get it if we keep poking around as I said. Keep poking around.”

  “Mr. Rathskeller,” Marcella said. “The guy with the record, what’s his crime?”

  “I’d say don’t jump to conclusions. The man was accused and took a plea bargain that landed him in the jug for two years and probation that is still running. He took it to erase a longer sentence. He’s got kids to take care of. He was charged with indecent exposure.”

  “One last thing,” Marcella said. “Our daughter Celia is at Carleton College up in Northfield, Minnesota. Out of the blue, she got this letter. I suppose we can expect that people reading of Hannah’s disappearance just flood the authorities with tips. They don’t know who to contact, and they don’t want to get too deeply involved, so they just send the tip to the family. We haven’t gotten any here, but this letter, I guess, is a tip. Somebody read or heard that Celia is at Carleton. So, they sent it there. Cel’ thinks it’s just some crackpot acting out. But she didn’t want to leave anything to chance. I know what it says, but I’m not sure what it means.”

  Dear Celia Armand, February 21, 1971

  I’ve read about your sister and am very sorry. Someone told me about a little girl who could be her and how she’s in the same house as someone who didn’t have children before only now she does have one. I’ll get a snap of her if I can and send it so you can see for yourself.

  Sincerely,

  Pinky Nugent

  Chapter 10

  The story they planned to announce to Brett and Celia, and that Marcella would tell friends she met around town and at the A&P would go like this: Gavin had received a job offer at Citizens First Bank in Manhattan that required his presence right away. His acceptance was a joint decision between the two of them. He would settle into his new position and find a temporary place to bunk while he scouted around the metropolitan area for a neighborhood and a house. Marcella would stay in Naperville until they worked out the details.

  Brett had called and asked to come over, just to catch up on things in general. He’d be arriving soon. It was so like him, and so unlike his father who he matched in so many ways. Physical ways. His hands and feet were big, bigger than they should be, given his height of six feet two. Gavin was sociable but it was something he had to work at. Brett’s likeability came out of genuine curiosity. It was second nature to him to pose the question that nobody else ever did. People said he was like her in that way. She always smiled at that.

  I don’t like the story, she thought. It’s Gavin’s concoction, a lie. He’s moving to New York alone. I’m not moving. Not only that, I don’t want anyone thinking I’d consider for a split-second abandoning Hannah. He likes the story for its air of practicality. Falsity is more like it. Anybody who knew us would never believe it. Never before in our marriage of twenty-three years did we approach life this way. Even as recently as a year or two ago, we would have jumped in the car and sped off to New York, making the whole eighteen-hour drive in two days. We’d give ourselves a day to rest up, research the geography, buy some maps, spread them out under our coffee cups—fuck the brown stains. Then boom. We’d haggle about where to go and finally flip a coin to decide which suburb to scrutinize first.

  The year and a half since Hannah disappeared had collapsed into a glob of nothing. The bedrock of their existence as a family now had massive cracks. Where before, she had been the dynamo, the one who remembered everything, arranged everything, had her hand in everything, now she was putty. Brett would never have thought of his mother as needing advice from him. Advice from him? He was the one who couldn’t find his shoes on the morning they were going to drive him to Northwestern. He had trouble learning how to drive himself. Now he was sitting in her kitchen asking personal questions.

  “I’m sorry, but it sounds very odd to me,” Brett said. He told her he’d heard from Celia that Gavin had moved to New York.

  Marcella brought out some lunch meat along with sandwich buns, lettuce, mayonnaise, and lemonade. They sat across from each other in the breakfast nook.

  “I didn’t say he’d moved. I said he was in New York,” she said. “Anyway, are all of you carrying on this conversation about me behind my back, as if I’m this basket case in an asylum somewhere?”

  “Are you splitting up?” Brett asked.

  “No. Where did you hear that?” she asked.

  She wondered when this audacious directness infected him. This is not how they used to converse. Used to? He sounds more like my father than my son. Come on, I’m the mother.

  “I didn’t hear that but it’s what it seems like to me,” Brett said. He stood and began working over the sandwich makings. He tore off a couple of slices of boiled ham, ripped a sandwich bun in two, slapped the ham between, and then slathered on healthy gobs of mayo.

  “Can I fix you one?” he asked.

  “Take care of yourself,” she said.

  “You’re clearly upset. I’m sorry you’re having this trouble, but I think you should try to work it out before you go splitting up.” He carried his sloppy sandwich back over to the table and sat down. Then he popped up and poured himself some lemonade. “Pour you some lemonade?” he asked.

  “Take care of yourself. I’m fine,” she said. “Where do you get this splitting up business?”

  “I heard,” he said. “Word gets around.”

  “We’re not splitting up. You’re making a mountain out of this. It’s not really trouble. We’re working through some things,” she said. Marcella got up to fetch a knife for him to halve his sandwich and fumbled around in the silverware drawer with her back to him.

  “Celia says you’ve jointly decided to take a break from each other. That’s trouble.”

  “It’s also untrue. I didn’t say that. So, you two are making things up. When were you talking to Celia?”

  “Should I go out there and talk to Dad about it?”

  Wouldn’t that be typical? Gavin, carrying on these intensely personal conversations with Cel’ and Brett, as if the kids had more cred with him than I do. Both of them. I can just see the two of them, taking a walk, discussing all of these things. Well, I wouldn’t be surprised if Brett made more of a dent than I ever would. It’s just the way things are.

  “Calm down. We’re approaching this whole thing rationally and unemotionally, your dad’s problem-solving style,” she said.

  “I don’t understand this whole thing you’re talking about. Celia said you were jittery.”

  “I went up to visit your sister at Carleton. I just wanted to see how everything was going with her. I wasn’t jittery. I was pleased to see how well she was handling it.”

  “Yes, she told me,” Brett said. “But there was this sadness that sat on your shoulder the whole time. That’s the way she described it to me. I guess I turne
d that into jittery.”

  “I wasn’t sad at all. We had fun in Northfield, period,” Marcella said. She got up again and went to the cupboard for … well, she forgot what for. “Have some lemonade.”

  “I have lemonade. You and Dad are fighting. Face it,” Brett said. He stood and took the glasses from Marcella.

  “How can you lose a child and not have it affect you in a million ways,” she shouted, then sat at the table again and calmed herself. “I’m having trouble—we’re having trouble, figuring ourselves out. I feel guilty. Why can’t you see that? I should never have even considered letting her walk by herself to school. I was self-absorbed and neglectful.”

  “None of it was your fault, Mom. It wasn’t your fault, not a single bit.”

  “You can say that, but it doesn’t mean a thing. Your father feels guilty too. How could we not? How can we ever go on from here? That’s what’s going on.”

  “I got a draft notice in the mail,” Brett said.

  Marcella slumped in her chair and clamped her eyelids.

  “Oh! Oh, for god’s sake, no,” she said. “No. You’re still in school.”

  “I’m of draft age. It’s standard procedure. We just haven’t been focused on it with all the rest of the stuff going on. I’m not still in school. I didn’t follow up on the MS application I was talking about. A person can’t hide out in school forever. They’ve even told me where to report and when. They suggest that I begin to think about what specialty I might want to pursue. I’ll have to choose one. I’m sorry.”

  “You’re sorry? Why are you sorry?” He’s sorry because his life cannot be put on hold like yours, idiot. “I knew there was reason to apply for grad school,” she said.

  “Grad school makes no sense if you don’t even know what you’d study.”

  “It does if you’d rather not muck around in the jungle dodging bullets a thousand miles from here, or worse to have one of the bullets find you.”

  “It’s not a death sentence.”

  “You don’t know that. It seems like one to me.”

  “I’m not a peacenik. I finally have to put my money where my mouth is. Dad went, and you were right with him all the way. Don’t change your spots for me. I couldn’t live with it.”

  “This is not the same at all. It’s no fight to the death with a German war machine that’s sending people off to be gassed. It’s this nasty little fracas with rice paddy coolies a million miles away.”

  “Oh, so we’ve sunk to ethnic slurs.”

  “Brett. I don’t want you over there. Soldiers are dying every day.”

  “I get to choose my war?”

  “We’ll approach it carefully. There are a lot of ways to serve. You could do any number of things.”

  “I’ve been called. Fifty thousand guys like me have given up everything. It’s not a question of joining your sorority sisterhood in trashing this low-bred president of ours, as you put it—or coming up with some half-assed, self-preserving conscientious objector bullshit. If I weasel out of it someway, it means someone else has to go in my place. I can’t live with that. It’s only fair. They could have called a million other guys. I didn’t volunteer. They pulled my number.”

  “Don’t go.”

  “This doesn’t become you—you who pressed people on the street to stand up for something.”

  “Don’t do that to me,” she said.

  “It’s only the truth,” he said.

  “What does Lisa say about it?”

  “A lot, but we don’t agree on anything connected to the subject of the war.”

  “Good for her,” Marcella said.

  I had pressed people to stand up for something, it’s true, she thought. But that was of the let’s-all-get-together-and-improve-the-world mania that infected me at eighteen—that I took with me to Carleton along with my typewriter and my woolen cap for winter. Also, it was in the midst of the build-up for World War II, and I’d have to be a complete nothing not to get behind all the guys lining up at recruiting stations. And it was so easy to wrap bandages and pack care packages and collect books to send off—activities that were so much a part of joining the adult female world anyway, even if there didn’t happen to be a war going on.

  This mess the country is in seems so different—protests and draft card burning and all that. If Brett did go over there, it would not have the same feeling that he was part of something bigger than himself, bigger than all of us. And if he didn’t come home, I’d never forgive myself for not trying to keep him out of it somehow.

  Chapter 11

  Gavin took only the barest minimums with him to New York. The shower still had his shampoo and nail brush in it. The medicine cabinet contained his deodorant, and the drawers and sink top held his electric razor, power toothbrush, mouthwash, water pic, and hydro-cortisone lotion. It was Gavin’s way of saying that the arrangement was strictly short-term. As if they’d be living under the same roof again in a week or two. Well, he did fly in a couple of times. Last time being a month ago.

  “I’ve been asking around. There’s no consensus about the best place to live,” Gavin said on the telephone. “People commute an hour and a half without batting an eyelash.”

  “It takes you an hour door-to-door in Chicago,” Marcella said.

  “Here, people get around on trains, buses, ferries, and subways,” he said. “I’m getting to be an expert. From Weehawken, I take the ferry across the Hudson, and grab the subway uptown. No sweat. I’ve been looking. I went out to Westchester. It’s tony and very pricey. That would be train all the way.”

  “Good for reading the paper,” she said.

  “Staten Island is all about the ferry. Heavy-duty urban,” he said.

  Marcella spent her days wandering around the house, the yard, and out to the garage. Gavin always left the car out on the driveway and so, she did too. He said it was so passersby and possible burglars would know that somebody was home. Actually, there wasn’t any room in the garage for the car, not with the ping-pong table, the yard tractor, the snowblower, the air compressor, and the canoe that occupied the center of the space, along with the metal shelving around the perimeter loaded with cardboard boxes and an extensive array of power tools, hedge clippers, bushwhacker, and chainsaw. She stared at the snowblower and envisioned Gavin bulked up like the Michelin Tire Man in his parka and arctic explorer’s hat with ear flaps, cranking up the machine, raising the automatic door and roaring out into snowdrifts with a cloud of breath encircling his head.

  “I rented a car and explored New Jersey. Traffic everywhere. A lot of people take the bus to work,” Gavin said, on the phone again.

  “Would you go for that?” she asked.

  “No,” he said.

  She found herself besieged with bills that she hadn’t concerned herself with before. It wasn’t as if she couldn’t handle them. It just opened her eyes to the meticulous bookkeeping system that Gavin had created. All the bills for the year were filed away alphabetically in folders, the taxable expenses methodically recorded, and the checkbook reconciled each month. When the mutual fund reports appeared in the mail, she didn’t even open them. What was the use? She didn’t have a clue about that.

  She discovered checks payable to Yasmina Chadran. One for $750 in February and again in March. Yasmina? She was the crackerjack organizational genius who opened his mail for him and managed everyone coming into the executive suite. But, that was back in Chicago. She’d talked to Yasmina dozens of times. She answered the phone with that mellifluous English accent that carried competence and loyalty. The checks began the month Gavin started in New York. Did he bring her with him? Was he subsidizing her rent somewhere?

  When I confessed to kissing and being kissed by Gus Breedlove, Gavin took the information in and filed it under “Marcella’s Infidelity” never to be spoken of again. But in reality he allowed it to grow into a cancerous lump somewhere inside him. If he could do that, how could I question the reason for the checks made out to Yasmina Chadran? It
could break out into something ugly. I can’t.

  She noticed water on the floor of the basement trailing away from the water heater. She thought about it for a week before she finally called a plumber.

  On the phone again with Gavin, she said: “The water heater was leaking. I replaced it.”

  “It’s inevitable. Stuff craps out,” Gavin said. “Hey, I’m flying back tomorrow after work. Pick me up?” he asked

  Marcella met him at the gate at O’Hare. She saw him coming from a long way off. She recognized his way of moving—long, purposeful strides—carrying the one piece of luggage as if it only weighed a couple of ounces. He looked young and strong, as when she’d met him at Union Station in Chicago dressed in his Army olive drab dress uniform and overseas cap settled firmly into his bushy brown hair—with his duffel bag slung over one shoulder, coming home after the war. Their eyes had met, and they ran to each other on the train platform, and clung together in the steam from the locomotive—just like in the movies back then, hopelessly fake and perfect.

  Now, he almost broke into a trot as they came together. They walked arm-in-arm to the car. It was a semi-straight shot of about thirty miles southwest from O’Hare toward Naperville.

  “Let’s eat out. Just stop for a bite,” Gavin said.

  “Have a place in mind?”

  “No. Just somewhere along the way.”

  “Hardly the MO of Gavin Armand. No plan at all?”

  “We need to get off the beaten track. That’s the plan. A place we’ve never been to before, where it’s sure we won’t see anyone we know.”

  “Are you sure there is such a place?” she said.

  They stopped not all that far from Naperville, in Glen Ellyn at Justine’s Restaurant, a dimly lit place with a menu that didn’t challenge.