The Missing Read online

  “She hates the sun all the sudden,” Jodi whispered, as if Lois might hear. “Don’t ask me why. Miss Smarty Pants and all her pie-in-the-sky ideas, she never made any sense to me. And look where she wound up after all that school.”

  “Where is she?” he asked.

  Jodi nodded her head down the hall. “Her room. She’s been begging me to call you since the kid went missing, so she should be happy you’re here, but who knows. She’s not herself most of the time. I was thinking you could give her something to calm her down.”

  Jodi began walking. She favored her left hip, which reminded him of Meg. He hoped that she and Maddie were safe at home.

  Lois’s room was dark and damp. The wooden floorboards groaned as he walked across them. Some of them were loose. The place smelled like the sickly-sweet baby’s breath flowers from a funeral. In a few strides he reached the window and pulled open the blinds, which reminded him of Maddie for a second: Rise and shine, munchkin. It reminded him of his mother, Sara, too.

  “Shut the blinds, Dr. Wintrob,” Lois said. Her voice was gravelly, and she held a slender hand over her eyes to protect them from the late-afternoon glare. “The sun…It hurts.”

  Tacked to her walls were two Brad Pitt posters. A pile of stuffed animals stood like sentries along her pink desk. The pink wallpaper was peeling, and her blankets were white eyelet that had faded over time into yellow. This was the room of a child, and yet she’d lived here for seven years since graduating from college.

  He put his hand on her neck, where her lymph nodes had swollen like goiters. Her temperature was subnormal, and her hands were covered in the telltale rash. She’d been scratching, and her fingers were bleeding. One of her fingernails was missing, and the flesh there was bright pink. “Please, Mother,” Lois repeated. “It burns.”

  Jodi shut the blinds so the room was dark and stagnant. He caught himself holding his breath. This virus would be quite a present to bring home to his family tonight. Then again, if this thing was airborne, precautions wouldn’t make much difference. “How long have you been feeling this way?” he asked.

  She wheezed her answer. It sounded more like breath with shapes than words. “Since the woods.”

  “There’s a bad bug going around. You’ve definitely got it.” He sat on the corner of her bed and felt her pulse. It was slow and thick. Her breath smelled like offal, and he thought for some illogical reason of the bird on the stoop. What had she been eating, to smell this bad?

  Jodi fluffed the pillow behind Lois’s head. Then she felt Lois’s forehead with her lips. He’d seen this before. The enabler and the enabled switch places. It confirms their relationship, and binds them more tightly together, like an oath sealed in blood.

  After her failed engagement to Ronnie Koehler, Lois had been considering leaving town. Now she spent her time watching afternoon game shows in bed. Albert, Lila, Lois, the kids in the morgue. He was losing them. One after the next, like ducks in a shooting rage. Pling, pling, pling.

  “I’ve got to get my TV Guide. Season premieres start this week,” Jodi announced. “I’ll be right back.”

  After she left the room Fenstad said, “You’ve had some bad luck.”

  “Yeth.” she said. Then she started coughing. The phlegm left a trail between her lips and her bedsheets. He handed her the box of Kleenex at her bedside. She breathed out fast when she took it, and her breath almost initiated his gag reflex. He swallowed fast to keep from retching, and thought again about the bird.

  “A lot of people have this, so I don’t think you should go to the hospital. You won’t get any decent attention. But the second your breathing gets worse, don’t tell your mother. I don’t trust her to make a smart decision. Dial nine-one-one.”

  She nodded, and he knew she would heed his advice. She was a sensible girl, with the exception of the company she kept. She reached out her hand, and he took it. A small, guilt-filled voice told him that he needed to leave here—she was infected, and now he might get infected, too. He might bring this home to the women. He silenced that voice. They didn’t pay him three hundred thousand dollars a year to abandon the people who needed him most.

  Lois was cold, so he folded her palm into a fist and rubbed. He liked her a lot. Every time she came in for therapy, he hoped she’d stand up during a session and realize what he’d known all along: She was lovely in every way.

  “I need your help,” Lois breathed. He saw that her eyes were wet. “In the woods. Tim Carroll found me. Did he tell anyone what he saw?”

  Fenstad shrugged. He’d heard she was hysterical, but that was all.

  She smiled wryly. He didn’t like that smile. It looked like defeat. “Then he didn’t tell anyone. He’s thuch a gentleman. I wonder how they didn’t notice the animals. I guess they didn’t want to thee them…I ate the dirt out there. The dirt was full of blood. James’s blood. And thomething else, too. Something’s inthide me now. At night I don’t even lisp…”

  Her tone was flat and her lisp was indeed less pronounced. Autohypnosis, perhaps. It was understandable. Under extreme stress, otherwise ordinary people crumbled. Like buildings, they toppled in unpredictable ways.

  “How do you know you ate blood?” he asked.

  A tear ran down her face but she didn’t break down. “Because it tasted tho good.”

  Fenstad let out his breath. This was worse than he’d guessed. This was hospitalization bad. Maybe even schizophrenic-break bad.

  “I would have eaten the toe, too. Thath why I screamed. Because I was hungry for it.”

  He tried to conceal his shock. It wasn’t easy. “What toe?”

  Lois couldn’t lift her head from the pillow, but her wide, dark eyes focused on his face. “James Walker. I ate his toe. I eat other things, too. Birdth…mostly birds. At night it geth worse. It’s something inside me from the woods.” She coughed again, and this time wiped the phlegm on her hair so that it shone. Much of her hair was plastered to her scalp in nappy locks, and when he’d first come in he’d mistaken it for grease. Now he realized that she’d been using her head as a handkerchief for days.

  “I locked my windows last night. Nailed them shut so I couldn’t get out. I’m more myself than I was yesterday. I’m trying to starve it, so it leaves me alone. But I can’t last another night without…eating. I need you to lock me up.”

  He noticed now that she’d hammered nails diagonally through the window ledges. They formed a bent and uneven line across the wood. A few were rusty, and most were quite thick. He looked down at the floor, saw the hammer on her desk, and realized she’d gotten the nails by plucking them from the joints in her own floorboards.

  “I was wrong,” he said. “You belong in a hospital. You’re not well.”

  She nodded. The tears returned, and she squeezed his hand hard. “Ever since the woods, I can feel it looking out from my eyes. The problem is, I like it. I’m afraid I’ll break the windows tonight unless you lock me up.”

  Fenstad shook his head. He’d studied cases in which viral infections passed the blood-brain barrier and caused dementia and even schizophrenia. He hoped it wasn’t a virus. He hoped it was stress. Stress, at least, was less likely to leave her permanently damaged.

  “I wish it was stress, Dr. Wintrob,” she said, as if she’d read his mind. Then she laughed that same bitter laugh. “I wish it was cancer.”

  He shook his head like he was trying to shake something loose from it. “You need to go to the hospital.”

  She looked at him, a large set of black eyes and gaunt skin. “You know, I don’t feel things the thame way I used to. The baby in my stomach is too little to move, but since the woods, it kicks. Maybe it’s sick, too. Normally I’d care about my own baby, but I don’t, you see.”

  “You’re pregnant?” Fenstad asked, and he wondered whether it was an hysterical pregnancy—she needed a reason to go on living. On the heels of this, he’d solved the mystery. This change in her person wasn’t viral; it was psychological. She needed to get awa
y from the people closest to her, but she didn’t have the courage to leave them, so instead she’d developed a new personality to do her dirty work for her. It would make enemies of them, and set her free. Smart machine, the subconscious. It insisted on survival, even when good manners would have us all six feet deep.

  Lois smiled. “Do you know some women invent pregnancies? They get big and then suddenly, poof, they get small again. They want the attention so bad that their bodies change, just so people will notice them.”

  “I didn’t say you were having an hysterical pregnancy, Lois,” Fenstad answered.

  She smiled. “No?”

  Her brows, what remained of them, were knit together and he thought that he didn’t like this new identity she’d created. There was violence lurking beneath this girl’s black eyes. There was madness there, too. “I’ll help you. We’ll go to the hospital. I’ll have you confined for the night, and tomorrow we can decide what to do.” “If you hate someone, does it mean you never loved them?” she asked.

  Fenstad shrugged. “Depends on why you hate them. Are you talking about your mother, or yourself?”

  Lois chuckled. The sun had begun to set, and its red rays were moving slowly out of sight. “I think it means you never loved them…”

  Just then Jodi came through the door. Out the window, the last of the sun’s rays clung to the far wall in slanted red lines that splashed across Lois’s dilated pupils, and out of sight. The room went dark. Only her eyes and the phosphorescence of his watch hands illuminated the room.

  Lois coughed. She didn’t cover her mouth, and the smell was pure sulfur. Then she closed her eyes. Her breath clicked, and wheezed, and finally stopped. Fenstad shook her. “Lois!” he yelled. Behind him, Jodi dropped her TV Guide with the show about Mormons and their many wives emblazoned on its cover.

  Lois’s head rolled. Her nightgown was open to the third button. He felt her heartbeat with his palm. It was weak, but present. After a few seconds, she opened her eyes again. “Fennie,” she said.

  Fenstad blinked. Looked at his hand on her breast and promptly removed it. “Dr. Wintrob,” he corrected.

  “Right.” She smiled. Her pupils were so massive that the brown of her irises was gone. He wished, suddenly, that he had not come to this sick place. He wanted to be home with his wife, where he belonged. He wanted to be anywhere but here.

  “I’m hungry,” she said.

  Jodi began to shiver like she had late-stage Parkinson’s, and he realized that she was terrified. “She ate all the steak Tuesday night while I was sleeping in front of the Wheel of Fortune marathon. I don’t even think she cooked it. She goes out at night, too, but last night I locked her in her room. Don’t want the whole neighborhood seeing her in her skivvies. And there’s something…New friends of hers from the bar, maybe. They bang on the windows at night. They tease me.” Jodi was crying now. She picked up her TV Guide and rubbed Bill Paxton’s face as if for reassurance.

  Fenstad’s stomach dropped. Neither woman was making sense. Could the infection have caused some kind of mass hysteria? Did its smell have a neurological effect? He didn’t know, but this child’s room with its torn-up floors where a grown woman spent her days watching television was dark and cold. “She needs to go to the hospital. Help me get her to my car.”

  “I don’t want to go,” Lois said. “I like it here, in my room. Don’t I, Mom?”

  Jodi looked from Fenstad to Lois, and didn’t answer. She cupped her mouth with her hand in an unwitting pantomime of speak no evil.

  “Lois. You’re going to the hospital,” Fenstad said.

  Lois laughed. Her wheezing was less pronounced, but still audible. “I changed my mind.”

  “You’re too sick to make decisions,” Fenstad said.

  Lois nodded. “Exactly right. It’s my mother’s decision, and you don’t want to make me angry, do you? Because I know where you live, Jodi. I’ve lived with you my whole fucking life.” Then she smiled. He noticed with a start that the gap between her teeth was gone.

  Jodi covered her face and peeked between her fingers. “But Lois,” she said with phony concern. “I want what’s best for you.”

  “Really?” Lois asked. Then she smiled, because all three of them were in on the dark, unbearable joke.

  Fenstad looked from one woman to the next, and he thought the worst part of this bedside scene was not Lois’s madness, but the grotesquerie of their relationship. For almost thirty years these two had played the roles of loving mother and daughter. Probably neither of them knew right now how much they hated each other.

  “I like it here,” Lois said. “We’ve got lots of wonderful game shows on the television.” Her teeth were as straight as those of a 1950s Hollywood actress. The lisp he could understand: Autohypnosis made men walk on hot coals. But the teeth? What was this?

  Jodi nodded. She was shaking so hard that even her head was jittering. “You know best, Lois,” she said.

  Lois’s nightgown was white, and for a moment he was back in Wilton, Connecticut, where the carpet was deep blue, and in the sickbed slept a crone. Fennie? Is it a lump?

  Lois’s breath smelled like a fly-infested slaughterhouse. Even in textbooks, no one changed this much this fast. He remembered the half-eaten bird on the front lawn, and with a jolt wondered if Lois’s alter ego had murdered James Walker in those woods.

  “I read in the paper that Ronnie and Noreen set a date,” he said, because he wanted to get her talking.

  “So?” she asked.

  He shrugged. “Miller Walker can’t be happy about his missing son. Things won’t go over well for you if you stay in town, Lois. A little time at the hospital will be good for you.”

  Lois shook her head. “You’ll see,” she said.

  “What happened in the woods? Tell me again,” he said.

  Her voice was deep and watery. “You’ll see, Fennie. You’ll see.”

  “Dr. Wintrob to you.” He took a shot in the dark: “Is it seeing out from your eyes right now? Can I talk to it?”

  “Time’s up, Dr, Wintrob,” Lois said. “Fifty minutes. Session’s over. I noticed that sometimes you cut me off at forty-five, and even forty. Am I that dull?”

  Fenstad didn’t move. “I’m not leaving. I like you too much.”

  Lois grinned. “I think my heart stopped beating.”

  He looked down at the creaking floors. Their nails were missing, but instead he thought he saw the plush blue carpet in Wilton, Connecticut, soaked in blood. “Stop it,” he said.

  Lois lifted her hand to the middle of her chest. Then she opened another button, so that he could see her exposed breasts. “Feel,” she said.

  He shook his head. She lunged for his hand and forced it against her bare skin. He thought about girlie magazines, and track practice. He thought about Lois Larkin’s nipple under his palm, and her beautiful beating heart. He felt himself go hard.

  “You want me, don’t you?” she asked.

  He pulled his hand back and shook his head. The room was dark, and he could see only shapes, the tiny slivers of white in her eyes, and her perfect grin. “He’ll leave us all alone. Daddy doesn’t love me anymore. Do you?”

  Fenstad’s brow was sweating. The sulfuric scent in the room was thick. Why was he wearing jeans? He never wore jeans to work. They smelled, too. They smelled dirty like he was in high school again, fishing his school clothes from the hamper because when she was angry with him, Sara Wintrob left his laundry untouched.

  “Do you love me?” the woman in the sickbed asked, and he answered her immediately. Answered her the way he’d always answered her.

  “Yes, Mother.” The floor was full of blood. It squished, and his leather shoes were soaked. It sucked on his feet like hungry mouths, pulling him down. Deep down. Drowning him. How old was he? Forty-six? Sixteen? He didn’t remember for sure.

  “I’m not sick,” she said.

  Her voice. He hated it. His hand made a fist. He would strike her, his mother. He’d beat
her senseless and bloody like he’d always meant to do.

  “You know I was never sick, don’t you?” she asked. She was laughing at him. He’d wipe that grin off her face. He’d wrap his hands around her throat like she deserved. “Speak up, boy. I can’t hear you,” she said.

  “That’s enough!” Jodi cried distantly, but her voice was like static. He could hardly hear it over the barking black dog. Whose dog? His dog? Did he own a dog, now?

  He didn’t hold back because she was a woman. He swung as hard as he could. Her face turned red, and something went flying. A tooth? Her mouth was bleeding. Bitch. He’d shown her. Oh, yeah. Now she knew. Back in Wilton, Connecticut, she was crying her fucking eyes out.

  She didn’t cry. The look on her black-eyed face wasn’t shock. It was satisfaction. She laughed, this woman. Not his mother. God, why had he thought she was his mother? Just his patient, Lois Larkin. He’d struck a woman. His own patient. Her mouth dripped blood all over the dingy yellow sheets. As she watched him, she cupped her hands under her chin and began to drink.

  “It tastes so good,” she said.

  “That’s enough!” Jodi howled while Lois cackled. His hand hurt bad. His hand was on the door. He should stay even though he’d done wrong. He should fix what he’d broken, and make it better. That was his job. It had always been his job. He’d better not lose his job, or his wooden house would come tumbling down.

  “Fennie? Do you feel it?” the woman in bed whispered, and he was running out the door.

  NINETEEN

  Leaky Eyes

  Fenstad’s eyes were leaking. He’d parked his Escalade in the driveway of his house, but he wasn’t ready to go inside. He was waiting for the leak to stop dripping.