The Missing Read online

  THE

  MISSING

  SARAH LANGAN

  For J. T. Petty

  Crises, precipitate change.

  —Virus, Deltron 3030

  Contents

  Epigraph

  PROLOGUE

  WINTER

  PART ONE

  CONTAMINATION

  ONE

  Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?

  TWO

  The Monster in the Woods

  PART TWO

  INCUBATION

  THREE

  Splitting Atoms

  FOUR

  The War Between the States

  FIVE

  Robitussin for What Ails You!

  SIX

  The Melancholy Choir

  SEVEN

  Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’

  EIGHT

  The Hunger

  PART THREE

  INFECTION

  NINE

  The Human Trick

  TEN

  Babes in the Woods

  ELEVEN

  It Was So Sad It Was Funny, or Maybe It Was So Funny It Was Sad

  TWELVE

  God Only Knows

  THIRTEEN

  Make Friends and Solve Crime in Your Spare Time!

  FOURTEEN

  A House Divided

  FIFTEEN

  The Fat Kids Kept Coughing

  SIXTEEN

  I Hate You!

  SEVENTEEN

  The Dandy

  EIGHTEEN

  Bloody Carpet

  NINETEEN

  Leaky Eyes

  TWENTY

  An Itch in Her Bones

  TWENTY-ONE

  Romeo and Juliet

  TWENTY-TWO

  A House in Ruins

  TWENTY-THREE

  Wheel of Fortune

  PART FOUR

  DISEASE

  TWENTY-FOUR

  Quarantine

  TWENTY-FIVE

  It’s Okay to Eat Fish, ’Cause They Don’t Have Any Feelings

  TWENTY-SIX

  Juliet, the Belly Dancer

  TWENTY-SEVEN

  Going Lou McGuffin

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  Witch

  TWENTY-NINE

  Brother’s Keeper

  THIRTY

  From Death, Life

  THIRTY-ONE

  The Lump in the Bed

  THIRTY-TWO

  Mostly It Was Just Plain Sad

  THIRTY-THREE

  The Victorian

  THIRTY-FOUR

  Room 69

  THIRTY-FIVE

  The Cellar

  THIRTY-SIX

  Quickening

  THIRTY-SEVEN

  Mad-e-line!

  THIRTY-EIGHT

  My Heart Stopped Beating, But Still I Go On

  THIRTY-NINE

  The Persistence of Silence

  FORTY

  Cyanide

  FORTY-ONE

  Choke

  FORTY-TWO

  Escape

  FORTY-THREE

  Hunger Pangs

  FORTY-FOUR

  Separation

  FORTY-FIVE

  King Solomon’s Dilemma

  FORTY-SIX

  Luck and Divinity

  EPILOGUE

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  PRAISE

  OTHER BOOKS BY SARAH LANGAN

  COPYRIGHT

  ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

  PROLOGUE

  WINTER

  In winter the dark creeps up on you. I’ve hardly finished my dinner and the sky right now is black. There is no electricity anymore, so I navigate at night with candles. The flames throw shadows that assume peculiar and familiar shapes. All the animals are dead, even the squirrels and rabbits. Come to think of it, I have not even heard a cricket. Through the cracks in my windows and chimney flue, there is only the howling wind, and underneath that, barely discernible screams.

  But let me begin at the beginning: once upon a time.

  Once upon a time Corpus Christi was a sleepy, contented place. Early mornings were silent affairs, disturbed only by the sounds of spoons stirring coffee and alarms set to talk radio with the volume turned low. We were a tightly knit community, and during the summers our children roamed free. At night the younger ones played manhunt on front lawns while the older sneaked beer by the river. They each thought they were getting away with something, as if the rest of us did not remember with fondness those same rites of passage.

  Unlike the rest of Mid-Maine, where the only queues to be found were at the unemployment offices, Corpus Christi thrived. Our hospital had the best cancer research facilities on the East Coast, and lured doctors from as far south as New York. We were scientists and bankers, artists and teachers, and our stores were all family owned. Each year Wal-Mart tried to plant its roots along the side of our highway, but in a unanimous vote every spring, we salted the earth.

  But even before the bad business with James Walker, there were signs. That spring, a fire at the Clott Paper Mill in nearby Bedford fanned sulfurous clouds into our skies that burned our eyes for days. The chemistry of the woods changed after that, and our trees began to die. While there was no unemployment line, state funding cuts and rampant lawsuits year after year took their toll, and we watched our hospital decline. Fresh coats of paint, new slate roofs, dents in cars that needed to be hammered right again, were all postponed for one year, and then another, and sometimes another. As if we’d been infected by Maine’s economic disease, we knew that layoffs and closed shops were soon to follow. But back then, our welcome signs were bright and cheerful, and our streets paved, and our lawns neat and green. We took pride in where we came from, and we expected good things from our futures.

  Still, there were signs. The summer before James Walker, my husband and I stopped sleeping through the night. I used to sit in my kitchen with a cup of milky Lipton tea until chirping birds signaled the coming dawn. I could feel something expectant waiting to open its eyes inside me, as if my body knew what my mind could not guess. If I look hard enough, I can find all kinds of signs. On a family vacation, I can remember seeing my daughter swim out past the breaking waves. It was not her hands, but her hair that sank last. I hesitated before I jumped in after her and pulled her out. Perhaps a part of me knew what my mind could not guess, and had wanted to save myself a broken heart.

  But I digress.

  I have a story for you. Forgive me if it seems I’m telling you things that I could not possibly know. This is a small town, and you hear gossip. Besides, the dead do speak.

  So gather round, as I used to tell the children during story hour. Gather round.

  PART ONE

  CONTAMINATION

  ONE

  Where Are You Going,

  Where Have You Been?

  “George?” Lois Larkin called out to her fourth-grade class. Her voice was muffled, and she held the attendance book close to her nose. It was a sunny Tuesday morning in September, and the clock tower had not yet chimed nine A.M.

  “Uh huh,” George answered. He was chewing on a red Crayola.

  Lois raised her wet eyes from the book. “George, don’t eat that. It’ll make you thick.” Then she took a deep breath, just like she’d learned in speech therapy, and corrected herself: “Sick.”

  George pulled the crayon out of his mouth. Its entire top half was missing, and his teeth were coated in red wax. Lois shook her head. George Sanford: not the brightest of God’s children.

  Lois Larkin was twenty-nine years old, and had been teaching fourth grade since she’d moved back to Corpus Christi seven years ago. Her figure was slender but curvy—what the barflies at the Dew Drop Inn called “slammin’.” When the boys and eve
n the girls in her class daydreamed out the window, they were usually fantasizing about the feel of her long, black hair, and the scent of her NILLA Wafer-flavored breath.

  Kids loved Lois. Parents loved her. Drunks hooted happily at her. Even animals flocked to her. Lois was lovely save for one flaw. The space between her two front teeth was so wide she could cram a pencil through the gap. She’d submitted to six years of braces through middle and high school to close it, but nary a month after the metal cage in her mouth was clipped, her teeth migrated to their nascent terra firma, and the gap returned. When she was excited she lisped, and spit sprayed through the fissure, landing like an indifferent plague on the faces of friends and foes alike. Today, for example, the open page of her attendance book was damp.

  “Jameth Walker?” Lois asked.

  “Here,” James called.

  “No kicking, James. Feet thraight ahead…straight ahead.”

  “Yeth, Mith Loith,” James sang. His smug grin spread from ear to ear. Lois’s first instinct was to crack the boy on the head with her soft book, but instead she continued.

  “Caroline?”

  “Here, Miss Lois!” Caroline waved both hands in the air and squirmed in her chair like she had to take a piss. It occurred to Lois that maybe she didn’t like kids so much.

  Lois blotted her eyes with a snot-covered tissue. Took a deep breath. Said the words slowly. “Boys and girls, I have thomething called an allergy. Do you know what that is? Ith when you sneeze a lot and your eyes get all watery. For some people, like Johnnie, dogs make them sneeze. For me, ith mold and ragweed. I’m not crying. Do you understand?”

  They nodded. Caroline raised her hand and moaned: “Oh! Oh!”

  “Yeth, Caroline.”

  “I have an allergy to penicillin. That’s an antibiotic, for, like, if you get AIDS.”

  Lois nodded. “That’s very serious, Caroline, and good to know. Now, ith Kerry here today?”

  “Yes.”

  “Alex Fullbright?…Michael Fullbright?”

  The list went on.

  In fact, Lois was lying. She wasn’t suffering from allergies. She was crying. But today was the big class trip, and though she’d wanted to stay home, there hadn’t been time to call in a substitute. So here she was, lisping her way through attendance and praying that some snot-nose like James Walker didn’t raise his hand and finally point out the obvious—she wasn’t wearing her engagement ring.

  In hindsight, what happened wasn’t surprising. A part of her had always known that Ronnie and Noreen were no good. When they used to tell her about some heartbreakingly stupid decision they’d made, like spending their paychecks on lottery tickets instead of rent, the evidence had been as plain as the gap between her teeth; these people were useless. But then she’d forget, because Ronnie’s house was a sty that smelled like stale milk, and who else would remember to open the windows so he didn’t get a headache? Because sure, Noreen was mean as Joan Crawford on diet pills, but deep down, she had a huge heart, right? You just had to look with a magnifying glass. Besides, Lois wasn’t perfect, either. She lisped, collected bugs, and snacked on raw hamburger meat when she was premenstrual, for Christ’s sake.

  Besides, it wasn’t their fault her life turned out so crappy. She should never have moved back to Corpus Christi after college. At the University of New Hampshire, she’d been happy. Unlike in high school, where she’d felt like a big-boned giant, college men had asked her on dates. She found friends who shared her love for the Science and Nature category of the Genus edition of Trivial Pursuit. She stopped covering her mouth when she talked, because it turned out that so long as she apologized, people were okay with an occasional ocean spray.

  But during the winter of her senior year, her father had been driving down the road that connected Corpus Christi to Bedford. His Nissan hatchback skidded on black ice and flipped once before it landed in the woods. The dashboard crumbled, shattering both his legs. It happened late at night, and his frozen body wasn’t found until the morning. No one could explain why he’d left a warm bed and his slumbering wife, Jodi Larkin. He had no secret girlfriend, and he didn’t smoke or drink. He’d still been belted into the driver’s side of the car when the snowplow driver found him. Even with a set of broken legs, most people would have crawled out the open passenger door and searched for help, but not Russell Larkin. They found his cell phone in his pocket, reception clear as a bell, but he never made a single call. Probably, it wasn’t a suicide. He’d just wanted to go out for a drive, feel the night air, and look at the stars. Yes, she’d reassured herself; it probably wasn’t a suicide.

  After the funeral her grades sank like granite quarry stones. She only barely graduated college. Didn’t bother with the applications for PhD programs she’d intended to send out, or make plans for a job that summer. “Don’t you love me anymore?” Roddy Chase, her boyfriend of two years, had asked the night before they marched in caps and gowns down College Square’s Dimond Hill. They were sitting on the brick stoop outside her dorm, and she knew she was supposed to tell him that his deep voice turned her knees to putty, but there hadn’t been room in her heart for love right then. There’d only been room for her dad’s gravity-stricken face at the open-casket funeral. Roddy’s shoulders had drooped as he’d walked away, like the top of his spine had turned to Jell-O, and that had reminded her of her dad, too. The next thing she knew, she was living at home again, substitute teaching at the elementary school, and hiding her mother’s empty bottles of Gordon’s Gin in the recycling bin under liters of the Poland Spring they’d started using after the fire.

  Corpus Christi was a pretty place, and great for kids, but if you wanted to do something other than work at the hospital or spend your parents’ money, you moved to a big city. Lois got bored after a few months, so one night on her way home from work she ducked into the Dew Drop Inn. She’d planned to sit in a corner and sip an apple cosmo for an hour, and then go home. If things had gone according to that plan, her life might have turned out differently. She might have gone back to school, or at least applied for a job teaching high school biology. But life never happens the way it should.

  At the Dew Drop Inn, she’d spotted her old high school friend Noreen Castillo. Noreen nursed geriatric patients at the Corpus Christi Medical Center. She was smart and funny and mean. In high school Noreen used to say things like: “Your ass looks fat in that,” or “The stories you tell: They’re funny but they take too long. People stop listening and then you look stupid. I’m only telling you because we’re friends.” So there Noreen was, perched over the bar at the Dew Drop Inn, and Lois knew she should have smiled and kept walking, because the girl was a nuclear reactor full of trouble. But Lois was lonely, and Noreen was company. They had a few drinks together that night, and the night after that. Pretty soon, it became a regular thing.

  Ronnie Koehler and his friends went to the Dew Drop Inn, too. Ronnie’s 1996 season record of twenty-one home runs still stood at Corpus Christi, and because of it TJ Wainright poured him every third Budweiser draft for free. Ronnie wasn’t a jerk about how popular he’d been back in school. He wasn’t bitter about it, either, which Lois thought was pretty admirable since people had expected him to go pro. When Ronnie’s high school sweetheart went loco and left him for an ashram in Woodstock, Noreen chased after him like a horny monkey. She got drunk and draped herself over his shoulders like the only way she’d let go was if he carried her home. But it was Lois that Ronnie eventually asked on a movie date.

  She should have turned Ronnie down. He was Noreen’s claim. Besides, he’d dropped out of Thermos Community College to work as a cashier at the Citibank. He and Andrew Lynack shared the top floor of a house, and every night before bed they smoked a bowl of Maine’s finest, and every morning before twisting those pin-striped polyester ties into Windsor knots, they waked and baked.

  But when he asked her out, Ronnie put his hand on her shoulder. His fingers were meaty, all knuckles and calluses. Not since Roddy Chase had a
man touched her like he meant it. A warmth ran through her sweater, under her turtleneck, all the way to her skin. Everything inside her jumped and settled in a way that had felt exactly right. Before thinking about it, before anticipating Noreen’s wicked ire, she’d agreed to go see Tom Green’s Freddy Got Fingered at the multiplex with him.

  Within a week Ronnie gave her crabs. Took seven weeks to get rid of the little devils. Tiny red pinpricks of blood permanently stained her bedsheets from where they’d clenched their sharp jaws along her pubis. He caught them from his ex, and had thought he’d exterminated them, but a few determined eggs had clung to the fibers of his bath towels, waiting to hatch. When she told him what he’d done, he turned beet red and let her pick every Netflix they rented for a month (French films with subtitles that she didn’t even like, just to punish him). If she hadn’t been a bug person, fascinated by every aspect of their tiny bodies, she probably would have dumped him.

  “Ronnie’s a total loser,” Noreen screeched while sucking so hard on her Camel Ultra Light that its tip sizzled. They were at the Dew Drop Inn, and over the weeks they’d been dating, Noreen’s jealousy had quietly condensed under a flame of hot rage until it became a thick, black soup. “Also, I’m pretty sure he’s gay. He and his roommate want you to be their beard.” Lois knew she should have defended Ronnie. But instead she’d nodded like maybe Noreen was right, and then changed the subject. Noreen wasn’t worth fighting with. Half the things she said when she’d been drinking she didn’t remember, and the other half she didn’t mean. Life went on like that for a while. Every Thursday the two of them threw back a few apple cosmos at the Dew Drop Inn, and Noreen crapped all over her, and Lois ate it all up like it tasted good.