Missing Girls- In Truth Is Justice

by Larry Crane

  MISSING GIRLS

  MISSING GIRLS

  In Truth is Justice

  Larry Crane

  A Revisionist History Novel

  Breadalbane Publishing

  Southport, Maine

  MISSING GIRLS

  In Truth Is Justice

  by

  Larry Crane

  Published by

  Breadalbane Publishing

  18 Spruce Drive

  Southport, Maine

  04576

  Copyright 2015 Larry Crane

  Printed in the United States of America

  ISBN: 099697041X

  ISBN 13; 9780996970419

  Library of Congress Control Number: 2015919494

  FIRST EDITION

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted In any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

  Also by Larry Crane

  A Bridge to Treachery

  Baghdad on the Wabash and Other Plays and Stories

  DEDICATION

  For Jan, with love

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Missing Girls is a work of fiction. Part of the story intersects the Edgar Smith murder investigation, trial and his eventual release from prison. The public record of the case is accurately presented here, but fictitious meetings and conversations with Smith in prison, as well as other fictitious meetings and conversations with lawyers, jurors, witnesses, and other people who were central to the case live on these pages only as figments of my imagination. In real life it didn’t happen this way.

  The novel started out as a play performed on the stage of the Bergen Community College Black Box Theater in New Jersey as The Whole Truth. Later it was presented as a staged reading at HRC Studio Theater in Hudson, NY as Transit of Venus, and as a staged reading with the same name at Acorn Productions in Portland, Maine. I’m indebted to the directors and cast members of these theaters, for their insights, and their questions about why people do what they do. Also, my thanks go out to The Playwrights Workshop based in Bergen Community College for the support and encouragement they provided over several years, particularly Mary Riskind, Georga Taylor, George Speer, Vincent McKenna, and Jared Saltzman. Thank you Jeri Walker of JeriWB Word Bank for your acumen as plot and character judge, and your meticulousness as copy editor. Thank you Debby Hayden, Kim Gordon, and Richard Sewell for lending me your encouragement, your time and your feedback skills.

  PART 1: March 1970 - August 1971

  Chapter 1

  Marcella hunched her shoulders and tugged at the collar of her woolen coat to fight back against the frigid March afternoon wind. She hurried up the back stairs of the schoolhouse and then down the hall toward the fourth grade classroom.

  “Late again,” she muttered. I’m always running late, she thought. Could’ve skipped this chat altogether—left more time for the Food Pantry crew meeting. I was pressing there. It wasn’t good. Nobody likes it when I press.

  She pictured Hannah at a desk in the back of the room peeking over the pages of a book while they discussed her. But as Marcella came through the door, she found the teacher alone at her desk.

  “Hi,” she said. “I’m late. As usual. Busy busy.”

  “Mrs. Armand, hello. I’m sorry Hannah’s not feeling well.”

  “Pardon me?” Marcella said.

  “Actually, I wasn’t sure you were coming.”

  “Did she say she wasn’t feeling well?”

  “She wasn’t in class. The office hasn’t called you?”

  “No,” Marcella said. She retreated toward the door.

  “The office may have overlooked my attendance sheet. I’m sorry. Then, she did come to school this morning?”

  “Yes. My god, you don’t think she went to the nurse or something? You would have heard if she did. Correct?” Marcella blurted out.

  Abigail Gentile looked stricken. She swept into the hall and down toward the principal’s office with Marcella on her heels. The girl could pass for a student herself, Marcella thought—with the abbreviated skirt and the stubby legs. She heard a radio blaring and echoing off the bare walls the closer they got—Nixon welcoming the Apollo 14 crew back to Earth. Forget deep space and the universe. Where’s Hannah?

  The nurse and the Phys Ed teacher emerged from rooms up and down the corridor and joined Abigail and Marcella in a circle with Principal Crosby in the center.

  “Slow down. It’s some kind of mix-up. She’s in the building somewhere, I’m sure,” he said.

  Marcella broke away from the cluster and sprinted down the hallway. She slammed into every classroom, the school staff trooping after her. She ran to the front of the building. Could Hannah be thinking I might be waiting there to pick her up? She ran back to the principal’s office.

  Mrs. Springstedt, the school secretary, joined the group. “Dina and Shelly were still in the playground outside. They both said they hadn’t seen her all day. Other kids, not in her normal buddy group, agreed. No one saw Hannah all day,” she said.

  “We’re searching,” Crosby said. “She could be any number of places. Don’t panic. Don’t panic, please.”

  A police patrol car pulled up in front of the school. Two officers came through the front door. “Let’s try to piece this together. We’ll start by methodically checking at all the possibilities. I’m going downstairs to the library. Officer Easterly will go to the cafeteria. We’ll find her. Everything’s going to be all right. We’re on it, we’re searching. Stay calm.”

  Marcella called Gavin at his office in Chicago, something she almost never did.

  “Hannah’s gone missing,” she said.

  “Gone missing. What do you mean?” he asked.

  “She’s gone. She’s missing.”

  “Marce, calm down. What are you saying?”

  “I’m saying she’s missing. Come home right away.”

  “Hold on. It can’t be. Are you sure she’s actually missing and not …”

  “She hasn’t been at school all day. Her friends haven’t seen her. I’m scared. I’m scared, Gavin. Come home. Right away. She’s missing.”

  A small group of their friends gathered in the parking lot where they bunched together against the wind, listening to Gavin’s plans. They didn’t have a lot of time before sundown. He had them organized in teams of two each to comb Brookside Park, all along Oakwood Creek, and through Engle’s Forest preserve. He’d gone straight to the school from the train station. If she didn’t turn up by nightfall, they agreed to gather back at the school at 7:00 a.m. for another assignment. It would be Saturday.

  At home, Marcella gave Celia and Brett their instructions again, this time to search more thoroughly, behind the boxes in the attic, in the basement, in the garage, and in the storage area above the garage. It’s silly and overkill, but who knows? Hannah could surprise me. And besides, it helps to feel I’m of some use—Celia skipped the senior play rehearsal, Brett had sped home from Northwestern University. This is what I can do.

  It’ll all end with laughter, she thought. The front door bursting open—a policeman or a neighbor or Gavin or Brett pushing through with Hannah held against his side—Hannah breaking free and running to me and burrowing her face in tight against my chest and holding on with all her strength—a crazy, impossible discombobulation pouring out in a torrent of half-heard words and sobs. Anger and ecstasy. We’ll stagger to the couch together and collapse into it, entwining our bodies until she begs for air. And I’ll loosen my grasp and hold her off—to study her face and to push her hair back and smother her with sloppy k
isses—and then pull her back in against my breast with everyone in a circle around us. So fitting. Or is it?

  Sid Nickerson, the Naperville Chief of Police stood in the middle of the living room in front of the family. “The entire department is on alert. We’ve been in every store in town, and the school staff has gone through the school building and grounds three times. I need the name of every friend she has,” he said. “She might have played hooky with one of them and is afraid to come home.”

  “She wouldn’t do that,” Marcella said.

  “Even if she wouldn’t, we need to ask her friends if they know anything,” he said.

  “We’ve had instances of children just being too scared to say they’ve done something

  they knew they shouldn’t do.”

  “She might have a secret sleepover,” Celia said.

  “She could be camping in somebody’s backyard tent,” Brett offered, then wished he hadn’t when the chill of March weather registered.

  “That’s good, it’s all helpful,” Nickerson said. “But, you need to give me a full description of Hannah—nicknames, marks such as moles and scars and piercings, the clothes she was wearing when you last saw her.”

  “She’s Hannah, just Hannah to everyone. We call her Sweetie here at home. She’s four feet six inches, sixty-five pounds, blonde hair, and brown eyes. She’s got a little scar on her forehead right at the hairline. She’s got a mole on her back, right back here,” Marcella said reaching back to touch her own wing bone. “She’s wearing a flower-pattern dress, light yellow with blue flowers, white cotton knee socks, patent leather Mary Janes, black rubber boots, and a full-length wool coat.”

  “Was she carrying anything?”

  “Her knapsack. Smallish, blue.”

  “What’s in it?”

  “A notebook, pencils. Two books, mathematics and general science.” Marcella snapped back the answers, precise and efficiently brief, as if this would speed up the process and have Hannah back in her arms in a matter of minutes.

  “Lunch?”

  “Hot lunch at school.”

  “A purse?”

  Marcella stood directly in front of Nickerson, her eyes pinned to his whenever he finished jotting her answers into his aluminum police report clipboard and looked down at her. “A little change purse, in the knapsack,” she answered.

  “Braces?”

  “No.”

  “Piercings?”

  “God, no.” Nickerson allowed a smile that immediately disappeared with a frown from Marcella.

  “What time did she leave for school?” he asked.

  “Seven forty.”

  “How exactly would she walk to school—shortcuts and such?”

  She fired the answer back: “Straight down Oak to Main, through town, then up Sterling to the school.”

  “Can you give me a recent photo, several if you have them handy?”

  Celia had already gathered three pictures that she handed over—one of Hannah in a baseball cap with a determined look on her face as she swung a bat at Brookside Park, one in her rainbow colored two-piece swimsuit looking directly into the camera as she emerged from Herrick’s Lake, and one close-up of her beaming face in this year’s school photo.

  “I’m going to the station. Contact me there with whatever questions or suggestions you have. I’ll be there all night. I’ll be in touch,” Chief Nickerson said.

  “Where’s the phone book,” Gavin said. “Somebody start giving me names.”

  “No need for that, Mr. Armand. I have officers calling everywhere,” Nickerson said.

  Don’t stop believing just because the sun is sinking into the horizon, she thought. Nickerson’s competence and thoroughness aren’t comforting, especially when nothing seems to come of it. It’s nutty, but our ineptitude gives me hope—as long as it’s just us searching, there’s the chance that we haven’t thought of the one something that will turn out to be the key to finding Hannah. Keep on searching for that one thing.

  As night settled in, the cork that had been rising steadily in Marcella’s throat stuck in her gullet, and she couldn’t catch her breath. They had come to the end of busywork. Helplessness squatted in the center of the circle they made in the living room. They held hands. Their breath came in shallow gasps.

  “Let’s all sit down. Try to be calm. I’m going to work on a flyer,” Gavin said. He clamped his hand over his face, but they all saw the fear that took control and displayed itself as a clutch of anguished wrinkles across his eyes. They looked down at the floor and tried to stem the tears that welled in their eyes. He turned and clambered up the stairs to his desk with Brett on his heels. Celia and Marcella sank into the cushions of the couch, crowded together and clinging each to the other.

  Gavin went out at midnight with Celia and Brett in the car and drove all around town while she waited for a miracle phone call. At three thirty in the morning, they were gathered downstairs in the living room, Marcella still on the couch. She awoke, sure she’d heard Hannah upstairs, and screamed, “Hannah, you come down here right this instant!”

  Gavin, Celia, and Brett clustered around her. “Try to sleep,” they said. “Try to sleep.”

  Chapter 2

  By nine o’clock Saturday morning, Brett and Gavin had xeroxed a thousand flyer copies at Walgreens downtown. It was a blow-up of the school picture of Hannah’s face, a description of what she was wearing, and an offer of $5,000 for any information. One hundred and twenty-three parents and their children gathered around Gavin as he handed out flyers in front of the school. Brett kept working the Walgreens copying machine to get another thousand printed. The plan was to fan out, expanding the reach to neighboring towns by stapling copies to telephone poles.

  When he finally conceded that the police were doing much more than they could ever do, Gavin stopped organizing search parties of all the friends and acquaintances who flooded them with offers of help. The telephone rang incessantly. First the newspapers then the television stations latched onto the story. As much as he hated telling the same details to one reporter after another, he had to keep it up. How else was all the publicity the media could generate going to happen?

  Gavin, Marcella, Celia, and Brett finally gave in to their hunger pangs and attacked the refrigerator looking for anything handy to eat. Gavin stood at the front window and took a bite out of a ham and cheese sandwich while watching the slow parade of cars outside, a drive-by of the morbidly curious. It was even more obvious because they lived on a cul-de-sac, he thought.

  Chief Nickerson was a tall, gray-haired uniformed police officer with a softness along his jawbone and a folds above his eyelids that showed he’d been around more than a few family tragedies. “The television people are requesting an announcement of some sort for the nightly news,” he said. “We’ve gone door-to-door all along the route she takes to school, ditto in every shop on Main. Nobody saw her. We’ll ask for volunteers to join the department and the firemen in a thorough search of our local wooded areas and along Oak Brook. I’ve limited the TV folks to one remote truck that’ll be parked outside pretty soon now. There’ll be lots of reporters. I’ll give a short briefing about what we know, Hannah’s description, time of disappearance, and so on. Then, you can say anything you’d like. I won’t let them badger you. When you’ve had enough, tell me, and I’ll stop it.”

  “One more thing,” Nickerson said. “What might be her favorite spot in all the world to go to when she wanted to be alone?”

  “I don’t think she ever wanted to be alone,” Marcella said.

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “Do you know anyone at all who might want to have Hannah stay with them? An aunt, an uncle, a friend?”

  “Someone we know who would just take her?” Gavin asked.

  “People do strange things. They may not think of it as abduction. They may just neglect to tell you they have Hannah at their home. Have you noticed anybody that you don’t know in the neighborhood?”

  “No,” Marcella said.
>
  “Have there been any workmen around, people doing little jobs even as small as mowing lawns or washing windows?”

  “No.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Armand, it’s now been more than twenty-four hours. Time is definitely of the essence. Because of her age, Hannah’s disappearance is considered high risk within our missing person protocol. More and more questions will be coming as the state and federal agencies bear down. Please don’t think this is because of something you have done or not done. We are going to have to become a lot more intrusive in your life, but it’s not because you are suspected of anything. The TV people might zoom in on officers knocking on doors all over the neighborhood. They might see officers collecting evidence.”

  “What kind of evidence?” Gavin asked.

  “This may be disturbing, but it’s positive. We’re on the move, running down every item on our information-gathering checklists, but it can be disconcerting to the family. We need access to the entire house, garage, and yard. We’ll be poking around in Hannah’s room, in the basement, the attic, closets, opening drawers, scrutinizing the car, everything, everywhere.”

  “Looking for what?” Marcella asked.

  “A diary perhaps, notes Hannah may have left. We need to get more detailed identification information, clothes, shoes, hair samples, fingerprints, blood type. We need to be in contact with your doctor, your dentist.”

  “Oh my god,” Marcella said. She slumped in a heap on the couch.

  “I suggest you start composing a statement to make to the reporters outside. I won’t allow the reporters to ask questions of you.”

  The crowd in front of the house grew by the dozens in anticipation of the press conference. They generated the strange hum of a hundred simultaneous conversations, swarmed over the sidewalk and spilled into the street. Gavin heard the Chief instructing his people: “All right, seal off the street. Set up the microphone right out there on the sidewalk. Restrict onlookers, reporters, and what have you, to the pavement in front. Get them off the sidewalk. We need to keep the yard untouched until we’ve had a chance to go over it. We’ll start the press conference in ten minutes.”