The Missing Read online

  “Help me!” a child cried from down the hole, and it sounded just like James Walker, only its tone was flat. Lifeless. Lois crawled toward the sound, but then stopped. She should run now. She knew she should run, because this thing was inside her, and she wasn’t the captain of her own ship. “Is he really hurt?” she asked.

  He’s bleeding all over, the voice answered, and Lois knew that even if this was a trick, she had to look. She was his teacher. This was her job. She knelt by the side of the hole. The stones clicked together, but the sound they made was more hollow than she’d expected. She looked closer, and with a gasp saw that they weren’t rocks, but bones. Then she saw what she hadn’t noticed before. The sound came out of her, the bark. A gasp of air pushed out so fast that her windpipes became a horn.

  Animals lined the clearing. In her mind, she saw what they’d done. A deer lay on its side not twenty feet away. On its stomach lay the dying moose that had chewed out half of its underside. They’d gored each other.

  This place had no respect for the living or the dead.

  They held you down. They made you weak. They don’t know what you are. They don’t know what you could be, but I do. Clean up your last mess, Lois, it told her, and she hated it for saying that. She hated it for speaking to her…Then why did it feel so good?

  The soil smelled rich as copper (blood?). It slithered inside her. A balm for the itch. She thought about Noreen and Ronnie. Her mom. Her dad, who’d lived his life like an apology. She thought about the little shit James Walker, who right now was calling her name: “Miss Lois, help me!” But it wasn’t really his voice, she knew that. It was a trick someone was playing. Maybe even a trick she was playing on herself. She thought about the path she could walk out of the woods that would lead to lead to misery, and the Dew Drop Inn.

  You know what you have to do, Lois. Clean up the mess, and I’ll give you everything you want. In her mind’s eye she saw her fourth-grade class grinning at her with red smiles. She saw herself walking out of these woods with James in hand, a queen. Mostly she saw the spilled blood of those who had wronged her, and she liked that, too.

  Clean it up, the voice told her, and she knew what to do.

  Ronnie. School. A wedding. A kitchen with real parquet tiles. Three dogs, so none of them ever got lonely. They slipped away. All the things she’d wanted but never got. All the hopes she’d had. They ran out of her like water until she was empty. A vacant thing that wanted filling.

  Clean it up, it told her, and she licked her lips.

  The ground was damp, and she ran her fingers through it. She bent her face close to the earth and smelled it. The itch in her stomach came back. It spread to her blood. It crawled across her skin. It lived behind her eyes. She wanted this so bad.

  Clean it up.

  Her stomach roared. She was so hungry. Hungrier than she’d been in her whole life. Her instincts were screaming. They were telling her to run, because in this dirt she could see James’s blood. But her whole life she’d made the wrong decisions. Cared for people, and gotten nothing back. Maybe it was time to listen to another voice. A better voice.

  Clean up your last mess, lovely Lois.

  Still on her knees, she pressed her face against the dirt and opened wide. Clay and sand, iron and granite. It tasted so good, and she knew that every mistake she’d ever made, every wrong path she’d ever taken would be proven right, because it had led her here.

  She licked the bones. The taste warmed her stomach, her fingers, sent heat through her toes. James’s blood. It filled her with that freshly fucked feeling Ronnie had never given her, but she’d pretended, she’d always pretended.

  Clean it up, Lois. It said her name like a caress, like a kiss. She felt herself go hot between the legs. You know you want it. She lost herself, and she didn’t even feel it happen, because she’d been lost for a long time. She ate the dirt, fistfuls of it. She ate the blood until it was gone.

  Far away, the search party called James’s name, but he was gone. The voice had gotten him. The voice that lived inside her now. The voice she’d given a home.

  Ronnie, Noreen, her mother. Tim Carroll. Carl Fritz. Miller Walker. Fenstad Wintrob. The bitch at the salon who always looked her up and down like her clothes weren’t good enough. That asshole bartender TJ Wainright at the Dew Drop who watered down her apple cosmos. They’d be sorry now.

  Lois swallowed another handful of dirt. It didn’t go down this time, but stuck in her throat. Her stomach clenched and then rolled. She retched. Tears came to her eyes. It had been such long a time since she’d thrown up (New Year’s Eve, 2000?) that she wasn’t sure what was happening. Her whole body spasmed. Dirt and small rocks heaved from her mouth. Mud ran down her chin and splattered against the collar of her pink jersey, and James’s sweatshirt, too. It trickled down the small incline on the ground and pooled around her knees.

  Along the periphery she saw the carcasses of animals. Possum, birds, the fawn she’d seen eating out of a Dumpster that morning. Its lone glassy eye watched her, unblinking. She remembered then where she was, what she was doing, what she had done. An earthworm squirmed between the gap in her teeth, and she gagged, crushing it there. She spit it into her hand, along with another mouthful of mud. Then she stopped.

  Into her palm, she’d spit something solid. She flexed her fingers, and it rolled. Her face burned red, and more than any other time in her life, she hoped that right now was not happening. The thing was round and small. Soft, but substantial. Its skin was peeling back from its bone, and its nail was missing, but its shape was unmistakable. It was a child’s pinkie toe.

  She opened her mouth into another dry sob, only this time she screamed.

  SEVEN

  Do Not Forsake Me, Oh My Darlin’

  “Your wife’s in the ICU. She came in with the ambulance,” Fenstad’s secretary, Val Pliner, announced. He blinked, and ran the words over in his mind a few times to make sure he understood them. His wife never got sick, and if she did she kept the evidence of her frailty (tissues and Tylenol Cold) hidden in purse like a secret drinking habit. This had to be a mistake.

  “You’re sure it was Meg?”

  Val’s thick gray hair was gathered by a rubber band into a functional, if unappealing, ponytail. She nodded. There was a blue thumb-shaped smudge of ink on her forehead, and he focused on it while he tried to steady himself. “Admitting called me as soon as they read her last name,” she said. Since they were one of ten Jewish families in town, people tended to take note at the name Wintrob.

  “She’s here or she’s hurt?”

  “Hurt. She was attacked. I don’t know by who.”

  Fenstad saw the color red. It washed over his eyes and dripped onto the floor. It puddled around his shoes and sucked at them like thirsty mouths. He was that kid in Wilton, Connecticut, all over again. Squish, squish, along a carpet of blood. He took a breath. She was fine. He took another breath, there was no blood. He took a final breath, and willed himself not to feel it, this pounding in his chest. “What happened?” he asked when he trusted his voice not to break.

  Lila hovered in the doorway. “Dr. Wintrob?” she asked. Her blouse was wet with antibiotic ointment, and he knew there was something he’d wanted to tell her, but he couldn’t remember now, what it was. “I’ll see you next week,” he said.

  Lila’s delicate features tightened. “But—” she said.

  He shook his head. “Not now.”

  Lila pushed past Val and started down the hall. Her heels clacked unevenly, as if her shoes were too big for her feet. Fenstad knew he should go after her, but he couldn’t. A weight was pressing hard on his chest like he was going to suffocate, and in his mind the floor was wet with blood. “How bad is it?”

  Val shrugged helplessly. “That’s all I know. She was rushed in. I’ll call back, find out more.”

  This last part he hardly heard. He didn’t bother to tell her he couldn’t wait for a phone call. He was already walking away. ICU was six hallways, three
colored tape changes, and one floor down. He didn’t know it, but he was running. His leather shoes squeaked against the tile like basketball players shooting hoops in a gym.

  It was that fuck Graham Nero. It had to be. He’d been meaning to pay Graham a visit for a long time now, let the sonofabitch know where things stood. But time had passed, and his rage had settled into cold reason, and he’d let things stand, which turned out to be the worst decision he could have made.

  That smug prick. He’d probably been planning this for months. Staking out the house, watching. Biding his time. And then this morning, he’d spied Meg’s open legs on the front lawn, seen that she wasn’t wearing panties. After Fenstad left for work and Maddie for school, he’d strolled up the driveway. Opened the back door like he paid the mortgage on it, like master of the fucking universe. She’d probably been washing dishes when he’d sneaked up behind her. The morning news on the radio would have drowned out his footsteps. Graham was too smart for a gun. Most likely, he’d lifted the serrated knife over the bread bin that Fenstad had used to slice his morning roll, and pressed it against her neck.

  Fenstad raced from the blue line to the red one. Skidded past a fat orderly wearing light pink scrubs, and two patients in gurneys pushed against a wall. His breath was fast and wheezing. Louder than his own thoughts. Graham Nero. He pictured the guy tearing his wife’s robe. Graham Nero. He pictured the guy pounding her against the kitchen floor. Graham Nero. He pictured them in bed at the Motel 6, room 69.

  He was wet with sweat when he got to the ICU. Cyril Patrikakos, the body-building receptionist, didn’t bother talking when Fenstad came racing by. He pointed at room 132. Fenstad rushed in. A bloody pulp attached to an IV drip lay in the bed. Fenstad couldn’t make out the patient’s face. Too many white coats clogged the room. His breath rushed out like a deflating balloon, and his knees buckled as he leaned against the wall. He slid down along his back until he was squatting. Fucking Graham Nero. In his mind, a neighbor’s German shepherd was barking and the floor was wet with blood.

  He startled when someone touched his shoulder. Meg. He sputtered. Meg! She was leaning on a set of aluminum crutches, and her left leg was set in a still-damp fiberglass cast.

  “That was fast. I was just about to call you.” Her normally pin-straight hair had given way to messy curls, and her blouse was missing a button. He circled his arms around her crutches and hugged her tight. Breathed her salty sweat deep into his chest until he owned a part of it. Then he led her into the bright hall. Once there he asked, “What happened?”

  She shook her head. “I’m sorry. Were you worried? I planned to call you.”

  He knew this wasn’t true. Meg didn’t like leaning on people, especially Fenstad. More likely, she’d planned to go straight home from the hospital, cook dinner like always, and tonight when he pointed out that her leg was broken she’d say something like, This old thing? I hardly noticed it.

  “You’ve got nine lives. I knew you were okay,” he said. “What happened to your leg?”

  She shrugged. “I got beat up is what happened.”

  Fenstad clenched his jaw tightly enough to give him an instant headache. Still, he kept his tone light. “Who?”

  “Albert Sanguine went berserk,” she told him. “So I hit him with a bike lock.”

  “Albert?”

  She nodded. “The library’s a mess. I’ll be lucky if the town doesn’t fire me.”

  Fenstad peered into the hospital room, where the cardiac monitor beat unevenly, and then back at his wife. “That’s Albert?”

  She nodded. The two of them looked at each other for a few long seconds. Albert was skinny, but tall. When he panhandled outside Citibank, he got more money than anybody else because the sucker was big. Fenstad and his wife bent their heads together until they touched noses. “You took him out with a bike lock?” he whispered.

  She shrugged. “A bike lock was all I could find.” Her expression was deadpan, and after a beat they were both grinning. As often happened, he was awed by her beauty. Meg Wintrob got better, and more sure of herself, with age. She leaned on his chest, and he gathered her crutches in one hand.

  “What happened?” he asked.

  She told him about Albert’s nervous fit and subsequent violence. When she finished she said, “Your friend, the internist Mike Yunes, told me that Albert’s liver is, what’s the word?”

  “Cirrhotic,” he said.

  She nodded. “When I swung the chain, I ruptured it. He started bleeding out his mouth. Mike says he was dying anyway. Now it’ll happen a little sooner.”

  “But you’re okay?”

  She nodded. “Embarrassed, mostly. This wouldn’t have happened if I’d listened to you about Albert. He’d be okay, too.”

  “True,” he said, and her smile disappeared. Then he quickly amended, “But it doesn’t matter. What about your leg?”

  She looked down at it. The cast extended from the bottom of her foot to right below her knee, which was bruised and purple. “My ankle. Mike said the break was clean but it’s going to heal slow.”

  He shook his head, truly impressed. His wife, she was tough as nails. “It’s broken?”

  “That’s why there’s a cast, Fenstad.”

  “Meg, I thought it was sprained. Walking on that the way you did, most people would have passed out from the pain.”

  She smiled, pleased with herself. “Not bad.”

  He had to agree. “Not bad at all.”

  After Meg gave her statement to the deputy police officer on duty (Tim Carroll was busy with the search for James Walker, so it was Gabe Simpson who returned from the woods to fill out a report), she left for the ladies’ room to wash her face, and Fenstad returned to room 132.

  The room was now empty, save for slumbering Albert Sanguine. The chart clipped to his bed reported that the trauma of surgery to repair his hemorrhaging liver would only hasten his death. Fenstad leaned over the bed. Albert’s slow breath caught in his throat like a snore. He smelled like home brew and the bile that was clogging his GI tract. His white hair was combed to one side, and his yellow skin sagged over his face like dough. He looked sixty years old.

  Fenstad sighed. He’d become unmoored for a while back there. Since that nonsense with Graham Nero last year, he wasn’t nearly as steady as he used to be. At times he was even unreasonable. He knew he had a problem, but it was pointless to go confessing such things to some staff shrink who might give him a bad psych evaluation. When his name got mentioned for promotion to department head, a bad evaluation was the kind of thing that would hold him back. The salary was half a million a year. Meg wanted that. She’d been counting on it. He took a deep breath. He’d overreacted; that was all. But now he had everything under control: Physician, heal thyself.

  In the bed, Albert’s breath caught, but he didn’t wake. He’d punched a candy striper a few months ago, but Fenstad had never imagined he was capable of attacking two small women and a little girl. As with Lila earlier today, he felt a measure of shame that he had not guessed this might happen, and acted to prevent it.

  He’d been Albert’s doctor for six years, and over that time they’d weathered his delusions, his annual effort to kick the Scope habit, and one suicide attempt. In group therapy he didn’t jabber endlessly about himself like the rest of them; he listened. When sessions ended, no matter how sick the booze the evening before had made him, he shook everybody’s hand and wished them a good week. He was a class act, which made his refusal to stay on the meds all the more tragic.

  This violence was not in his nature. But then again, everyone has a dark side. Fenstad looked at the man who’d tossed his wife against a Plexiglas wall like a ceramic doll. A part of him wanted to pull the morphine drip from his arm, so that he knew the kind of pain Meg was smiling through right now.

  Albert opened his eyes. They took a second to focus, but when he recognized Fenstad, his face tightened into a mask of pain. “The library,” he rasped. He tried to lift his head from the
pillow, but couldn’t.

  “Easy,” Fenstad said. Looking at Albert’s deep-socketed eyes and ashen, toothless gums, he didn’t give him a couple of days to live: He gave him a couple of hours.

  “Mrs. Wintrob, is she…dead?” he asked.

  “You broke her ankle.”

  His mouth pruned into a look of pain, and he squinted. “I didn’t mean to hurt her,” Albert whispered. Then he added. “She’s always so nice to me. I love her.”

  Fenstad’s throat went dry. “Lots of people love Meg.”

  Albert nodded. His hair was as white as the pillow, and the few teeth he still had were brown. “Can’t you smell it?”

  “You’re safe here, Albert.”

  Albert shook his head. “No, I’m not,” he whispered. “I hear it calling in the woods, Don’t you?” Then he opened his fist flat along the side of his leg, and he wiggled his fingers. Fenstad took his hand, and held it. He didn’t usually cross this physical barrier with patients, particularly the ones who beat up his wife, but then again, his patients weren’t usually dying.

  Great things had once been expected of Albert. He’d planned to organize new mass transit trains in Los Angeles and design waterfront parks off ribbons of highway in Florida. And now he would die young, and in disgrace.

  “It’s not fair, is it?” Fenstad asked.

  Albert blinked, and they were both quiet. Then he whispered so softly that it might have been a tick, “Put a pillow over my face. I’ll be dead, and it won’t like my taste.”

  Fenstad pulled his hand free. “Get some rest. I’ll come back tomorrow.”

  “Tick-tock! In a week you’ll all drop!” Albert sputtered. Spit flew out from the gap of his missing teeth.

  “It doesn’t live in the woods, Albert. It’s you. It lives in you.”

  Another tear rolled down Albert’s cheek. “It’s real. You’ll see. The pillow, please.”

  Fenstad paused for a moment. Something in the sound of Albert’s voice. Something ominous, like déjà vu, and a dog barking. He shook his head, turned his back, and started out of the room. “Rest well,” he called as he walked out.