The Missing Read online

  The shriveled thing in the bed smiled while Noreen cried, and he knew for sure that it wasn’t Lois Larkin. Anybody with a beating heart, even his old roommate Andrew, would take pity on Noreen right now. They’d understand she was trying, and with Noreen, trying counted for a lot.

  Lois brayed harder, and he realized that the gap in her teeth had gotten smaller. In fact, she hadn’t lisped once tonight. He squeezed Noreen hard. This thing, not Lois, it meant harm.

  Together, he and Noreen backed away. Noreen wasn’t crying anymore. She was shaking, and he knew that she was scared, too.

  Before he turned for the door, a red glow against her windowpane caught his eye. Shit! Blood! he thought at first, but it wasn’t blood. It was a reflection. There was a bird feeder out on the ledge, and in the summer Lois liked to watch them gather and sing their songs. Like a pied piper, animals had always been attracted to her. Once during a picnic, a whole slew of ladybugs had landed on her yellow sweater and jeans. They’d moved across it so that her clothes had looked alive, and for a second there he’d thought Lois Larkin was magic.

  On the sill was a pile of cardinal red feathers. His eyes focused, and he saw the bird’s sticklike bones, too. The pile was far away, but he thought he could make out a skull, and, yeah, a tiny claw.

  He turned fast and started for the door. “Ronnie!” Lois called. Her voice was rasping and wet.

  He kept walking, calm as he knew how. Please, he thought. Don’t say it. I’m begging you, Lois Larkin. Don’t say it.

  “I told you I was hungry,” she said.

  He gave up the pretense of a dignified exit. Holding Noreen’s hand, he ran.

  TWELVE

  God Only Knows

  Fenstad Wintrob was whistling. The tune was the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” and he smiled as he strode down the hospital corridor. He and Meg had slept curled like spoons for the last few nights, and for the first time in a long while, he hadn’t thrashed from bad dreams.

  Humbled by the sight of Meg’s injury, and by extension the frailty of her parents’ health, Maddie had been genuinely pleasant at the breakfast table this morning. She’d eaten her entire grapefruit, and gone so far as to bus the table and run the dishwasher. She’d donned the motley of a court jester (purple hair and lace stockings), but neither he nor Meg had objected. In its way it was charming, and so was she.

  Before leaving for work he’d kissed Maddie’s cheek. She’d grinned so wide that her green eyes had sparkled, and he realized that one day somebody besides Enrique Vargas would see past her thrift-store hand-me-downs and black eyeliner. They’d recognize her for the swan she really was, and that day would break his heart.

  The first order of business was outpatient group therapy. Sheila, the heavyset bag lady with the rich son, was the first to arrive. She’d double-wrapped a chain-link bicycle lock around her waist like a belt. As she sat down on the couch, the chain rattled.

  “What are you wearing?” Fenstad asked. Likely it was the same lock that Meg had swung at Albert.

  She fussily lifted a link and then dropped it again so that it plinked back into place. “My lucky charm!”

  Bram and Joseph arrived soon afterward. In Albert’s absence the session was dour. Fenstad tried to address their grief, but they weren’t ready, so instead he just checked the dosage on their meds. “Coulda been me,” Sheila muttered, then drew her linked belt tight around her waist like an autistic’s hug. “I saw the look on his face. He’da hit me, too.”

  “He’s very sick,” Fenstad said.

  Bram interrupted. He was the most functional of the group, and over the last two years had managed to hold down a job editing copy for the Sentinel. “He was my friend.”

  “I’ll miss him,” Fenstad said, and as soon as he said it, he knew it was true. He was going to miss toothless, Tourette-ticking Albert Sanguine. Something about the guy, despite this bad business, had always seemed genuinely good-natured. Decent, even.

  After group therapy, Fenstad’s schedule was free. The rest of his appointments, all six of them, had canceled due to a virulent chest cold making the rounds through town. He decided to visit Albert. When he got to Albert’s room, his foot collided with the IV tree on the floor and its metal stand swiveled. Wire tubing ran the length of its stand, and the needle attached to it was on the floor. Fenstad spied a small pinprick of dried blood on the white sheets. Other than that, all traces of Albert were gone.

  Fenstad poked his head out the open window. The chart hanging from the bed had been updated only an hour ago. There was no way Sanguine could have made the jump. It was a ten-foot drop to the parking lot. Last he’d checked, Albert had been too weak to stand.

  Fenstad notified the attending physician. An hour later hospital security had checked every closet, empty room, and gurney in the building, but Albert was nowhere to be found. Fenstad was in the middle of searching the inpatient mental health ward when something occurred to him: Meg. If Albert had beaten all odds and gotten loose, she might be in danger. He called her from Cyril Patrikakos’s station straightaway.

  “How are you?” he asked when she picked up the phone.

  She moaned like she was in pain. “No one showed up for story hour. Molly says it’s all my fault: I killed the library.” Then she lowered her voice, and in good humor whispered, “Crusty hag!”

  “I’ve got something to tell you,” he said.

  “Uh oh. What now?”

  “Albert Sanguine is missing. Last I checked he had one foot in the grave, but there’s a possibility he escaped. I wanted you to know because he might go back to the library, since it’s a place he feels comfortable.”

  Meg didn’t say anything, so he filled in the silence. “He was too sick to lift his head Tuesday night. My guess is he crawled off some place looking for booze, and died there.”

  Meg didn’t answer. He tried to think of additional words of comfort, but his mind went blank.

  “Fenstad?” she finally asked.

  “Yes?”

  “I want to come home.” Her voice cracked. She was whispering so that Molly didn’t hear. It surprised him how quickly she’d turned from cheery to weeping. And then he got it. She was still in shock. Two days ago her friend had beaten her senseless, and in self-defense she’d opened his liver. Recovering from such a trauma would take time. She should never have gone to work today.

  “That’s a good idea,” he told her.

  “I don’t want to be alone.”

  For one brief instant, his reason left him. She couldn’t be talking about Nero, could she?

  “So you’ll stay with me?” she asked.

  He closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb. How could he keep misinterpreting her this way? Was it possible that something was seriously wrong with him? “Yeah. My patients all canceled. I’ll come right home.”

  He found Meg propped on the love seat in the television room with her cast lifted awkwardly on the arm of the furniture. She was watching All My Children, which meant she was in bad shape. He hadn’t seen her watch daytime television since her baby blues with Maddie. For two months she’d refused to brush her hair and had threatened to leave him. And then, just as suddenly as she’d become a stranger, she’d returned to herself and started keeping house again.

  The room was dark, and the curtains were all drawn. It was so unlike Meg to take anything this hard that he was thrown by it. “He’s not coming for you. And if he does, I’ll stop him,” he said.

  She didn’t answer for a long while. On the television, Susan Lucci was telling her husband that she was actually his long lost half sister so they’d have to get divorced, but they could still exchange cards over Christmas. “It’s not just that, Fenstad. Something happened.”

  Room 69 at the Motel 6 flashed into his mind. It was on the ground floor, and the sweaty blankets had been maroon and gray. “What is it?” he asked.

  “I want to pretend I imagined it,” she said.

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sp; He lifted her injured leg and sat beneath it. With his fingers he reached inside her cast and scratched. “I’m listening,” he said. It was a joke between them; the shrink of the house, always listening. It had become less of a joke during the early years, when he’d worked too hard to come home for dinner or help around the house, or even discipline the children. But she smiled again, like the misgivings between them were a river that had run dry.

  “Remember how Daddy wouldn’t come to our wedding?”

  Fenstad nodded. Her father had been the loud, potbellied vice-president of a men’s loafer company in Philadelphia. He’d never approved of Fenstad, and because of that he’d died without meeting his grandkids. The rest of his children still lived at home. They worked odd jobs like convenience store clerk and door-to-door Mary Kay lady. None of them married. Frank Bonelli hadn’t wanted the competition, so he’d crushed every instinct in his children that had smacked of independence or ambition. As the eldest, Meg had been his favorite, which explained why she’d been the only one strong enough to leave.

  “Yeah. I remember your dad,” Fenstad said.

  “Did you tell Albert about him in group therapy?”

  He shook his head emphatically. “No personal information. You know that.”

  She shrugged like she wasn’t quite sure she believed him.

  He reiterated. “I never said a word, Meg.”

  She frowned. “Then I must be crazy…Do you know what he said to me? He made me sit on his lap—I didn’t tell you this part because I knew you’d get upset, but he held me down. I thought he was going to…Well, you can guess what I thought he’d do.”

  Fenstad’s hand paused in mid-scratch. That sneaky bastard. “Go on,” he said.

  Meg continued. “He was holding me so hard. And then he said that thing my dad said to me the morning we got married: ‘Where did I go wrong?’ And the worst part, you won’t believe this, Fenstad, but he sounded like my dad. He really did.”

  Any other woman, Fenstad wouldn’t have believed it. He would have guessed that she was still hysterical, or in shock, or even delusional. But Meg wasn’t prone to fits of fancy. If he didn’t know for a fact that such a thing was impossible, he’d believe her simply because she was Meg. “He sounded like your father?”

  Her eyes were watery, and he pulled her close. Her mean-spirited father. Things came into focus, and he understood this crisis she’d lately been suffering from. Her father had died ten years ago, but for Meg his memory was still strong. Frank Bonelli was still whispering that nothing she did and no one she loved was good enough. It explained her anger, and the way, every once in a while, she looked at him and Maddie like they were strangers. In a way, it even explained Graham Nero.

  She sighed. “Just telling you about it, I know it can’t be true. It was probably a coincidence. But at the time, I don’t know. I felt like I was looking at my dad, not Albert Sanguine…”

  He started scratching her leg again. “It’s not silly. Albert’s sick, but he’s smart. People like him can manipulate without even knowing it. He’s known you for years. Maybe you once mentioned your dad to him, and he guessed that it was a sore point. So he used it.”

  She didn’t say anything for a while, and then finally nodded. “That makes sense,” she said. It made him feel good, and useful. The way a man should feel.

  “Let me fix you something to eat,” he said.

  He started to get up, but she pulled him back onto the edge of the couch, so that he was sitting by her waist. Then she unbuttoned her blouse. “After he said that to me, I thought of you. How you’re so much better than most of the men I’ve known.” She was looking at him when she said this, and he knew she meant it.

  The diamond pendant he’d given her for their tenth anniversary sparkled between her breasts. He laid his palm flat over it, and watched for a reaction. She arched her back. “Think you can be gentle?” she asked.

  “I can try,” he said.

  THIRTEEN

  Make Friends and Solve Crime

  in Your Spare Time!

  Fate! Jean Rizzo had decided when she saw the announcement last week. She’d been eating a peanut butter and fluff sandwich in a locked bathroom stall during lunch when she noticed the blue cardboard sign taped to the wall: “Become a Baker Street Irregular. Make Friends and Solve Crime in Your Spare Time!—Sponsored by the Sherlock Holmes Admiration Society.” She got so excited that she’d dropped her Fluffernutter on the pee-sticky floor right then and there.

  Sherlock Holmes was cool under pressure. Smart. Classy. A loner, sure, but people respected him. Even Data from Star Trek: TNG wanted to be more like Sherlock. Hooray! She was going to become a Baker Street Irregular! Sophomore year was going to rock.

  Every September she tried something new. Seventh grade was the year of the disco hot pants and matching feather barrettes. She’d been going for Xanadu-era Olivia Newton-John, but achieved transvestite-hooker-with-something-to-prove instead. In the eighth grade she tried smiling all day long. She figured popular people were happy, so if she grinned like a moron they’d mistake her for one of their own. “Whatcha so happy about Jeannie?” Justin Ross had mocked relentlessly from the seat in back of her (why did their names have to be so close in the alphabet?). Then there was cheerleading. She didn’t even want to think about those pretend pom-poms. But seeing that sign for Sherlock Holmes while picking the hunks of Wonder bread from between her teeth, she’d decided that things would change. No one was going to flick spitballs into her hair that she wouldn’t find until she got home and her dad shined his shit-eating grin and asked, “Is it snowing loogies out?” Justin Ross wasn’t going to pull her chair out from under her so she fell on her ass. Teachers would stop looking at their seat chart to remember her name. Yes, sophomore year was going to be different.

  For one, she had a not-so-secret weapon. Over the summer, magic happened, and her boobs had swelled from A cups to full Cs. She’d stolen a $19.99 red gingham strapless dress from Target to show them off. Stowed it in her backpack, and then bought cheap Bonne Bell raspberry lip shimmer at the counter so the security guards didn’t get suspicious. She was wearing the dress in honor of club day today, and when she looked in the mirror she knew she was the spitting image of a sexed-up Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island.

  Right now she was strutting through the gymnasium while her bra-less boobs jiggled (if you’ve got it, flaunt it!). School was over, and practically everybody was at club day. Well, everybody who showed up. A ton of kids were out sick today.

  Ubiquitous table tents advertised things like yearbook committee, computer programming, and theater set design. She scanned the rows for the Sherlock Holmes Society, but didn’t see it. “Cheerleaders Are S-E-X-Y!” one sign announced, and around it, girls with perfect figures and dimpled smiles lazed like lizards enjoying the sun. She walked past them as fast as she could, because last year she’d tried out for the JV team. The tryouts were a sham, it turned out. The senior selection committee picked their little sisters for the team. That was how most things worked in Corpus Christi. Everybody told you that you had a fair shot, but they were full of shit.

  Anyway, she’d tried out because her dad was always harping on how important it was to be on the winning side of things, and cheerleaders were definitely winners. When her turn came, she shouted her lungs out in front of almost every girl in her ninth grade class: Every body in Corpus Christi wanted to be a cheerleader. She’d waved her arms and moved not just with energy, but with real grace. Some of the girls had smiled like they were impressed, and she’d thought: Three weeks hollering “Rah-Rah-Team” in my dad’s moldy basement, and I finally found something I’m good at.

  Suddenly one of the judges in the bleachers snickered. Her teeth were blindingly white, like she gargled with bleach. She covered her mouth to keep from exploding, like the sight of Jean Rizzo holding pretend pom-poms because the stockroom had run out of real ones was just too funny. All the popular girls, Jean realized right then, had magicall
y gotten real pom-poms, and the losers hadn’t even gotten batons. The girls with pom-poms were in the running, and all the rest, no matter how hard they worked, no matter how many fake catcalls and spitballs they endured, would never make the cut.

  That’s when she lost steam. She’d whispered the final “Go-o-o-o Trojans!” before dropping her imaginary pom-poms and wandering off the athletic field. Maybe the lucky girls who’d made the team still remembered that, or even felt bad about it. Maybe they didn’t care, so long as they got what they wanted. At home that day, her father was waiting. When he saw the tears in her eyes, he shined his ever reliable shit-eating grin and asked, “Didn’t make the cut, Jeannie?”

  Now, everywhere she looked at the club sign-up event, kids were laughing and talking like the high school belonged to them. Like they were kings. Even the shaggy-haired, peach fuzz-faced, waiting-for-the-apocalypse-so-I-can-shoot-up-the-school rifle-team kids were yucking it up. She walked down the rows of tables like passing through a gauntlet: auto shop gearheads, red-eyed environmental club potheads, Ivy League-bound young Republicans.

  That was the thing about the people at this school. Even the losers had it easy. Sure, some of them acted human. If they teased her too much, they felt bad and apologized later. The dorky ones even invited her to sit with them at lunch, but in the end they were all the same. Their lives were perfect. They worried about luxuries like the prom, boys, homework, and whether they’d go to college out of state. They didn’t have to steal their clothes, and nobody ever handed them a jar of fluff and told them it counted as dairy. They came home every night to a home-cooked meal, and she came home to a shit-eating grin.

  But passing through that club gauntlet, she decided that today everything would change. She’d find people just like her, who loved Sherlock Holmes. Maybe there was a secret society of them, even, and they ran the school. She’d add her name to the sign-up sheet, and tonight she’d get an anonymous phone call. A deep-throated, mysterious voice would confide: “The invisible hands that elect the class president. Prom queen. Winners of the Battle of the Bands. That’s us, the Sherlock Holmes Society. We’ve been watching you. Sorry we made these last fifteen years so hard, but we needed to be sure you were cool. Welcome aboard. We knew you had it in you. First meeting’s in Danny Walker’s basement. Wear your red dress. You look like Mary Ann from Gilligan’s Island in it.”