The Night My Sister Went Missing

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  "And let's face it," she went on. "Stacy bought a gun. I mean, that is a very weird thing for someone around here to do. I mean ... her sense of humor is out of hand, anyway. We all know that, right?"

  "But have you ever known her to be, uh, aggressive? Or violent?"

  "I would say she's a bit ... vicious. I've been the victim, many times. It's not just the quiet kids. But, like ... okay." She snapped her fingers and held up her pointer. "I was with her on the last day of school in the cafeteria. She was in one of her moods from hell, and when we were walking past the chem-lab table—you know what that is?"

  "I would imagine the ... science nerds?"

  "Two points. This one kid, Gary McDermott, was staring at her. I mean a lot of people stare at Stacy and me, but she doesn't take to it the way I do. I just think, Okay, somebody thinks we look hot. That's a good thing. For some reason she can't stand it. So she, like, barks to McDermott, 'What the hell are you looking at, McDumbnuts?' Something like that. I was all, 'Stacy. Chill out. He's a sweet kid, and all he did was look at you. It's a compliment.' Anyway, she's vicious like that."

  I looked at Drew in confusion. Drew and I had been sitting at the next table, and Stacy and Cecilly were coming to us, so I was watching as that thing happened. Cecilly hadn't said anything in defense of Gary McDermott. She had just looked at him and laughed.

  It was no big deal, Cecilly's memory loss; I guessed anyone could miss a fine detail. By the time they had got to me and Drew, they were their usual fun selves again, fussing with my hair, telling me I needed to buzz it this summer in prep for the academy.

  "Hey. I remember Stacy trying to give you her Dunkin' Donuts bag that morning. Remember that?" Drew said.

  That was right after the hair fuss. "Yeah. Had a lemon doughnut in it."

  "She said that after she bought it she decided she wasn't hungry. Maybe she had morning sickness."

  I nodded but searched my memory for any signs of her not feeling good. She had been almost perky, what with the McDumbnuts thing behind her. She was still a friend, and I hated to think of her going around school all queasy and confused, maybe suspecting the worst and not knowing what to do.

  "So you've noticed changes in Stacy's behavior since ... when?" Lutz went on.

  "I would say ... since maybe April. I was actually expecting her to get a little crazy in January when her parents finally split up. But she came through that with barely a shrug. All she ever said was, 'It's about time, ey?' I didn't notice anything until months later. We used to joke with her sometimes that in a past life she was a rottweiler. It seemed like we got to saying it every day by the time school ended. And that was the week she broke up with Mark."

  "She broke up with him?"

  "Well, she says she broke up with him."

  "But you have reason to believe otherwise? That he might have broken her heart?"

  "Yeah. Truthfully, we'd been telling Mark to break up with her."

  "Why?"

  She shook her head slowly a few times. "You can put up with meanness in your friends, so long as it's not, you know, directed at any of you. If it starts coming your way too much? That is not a friend. We were starting to think even Mark Stern could do better."

  "She was spiraling."

  "Yeah. Lately she's been getting totally blue, flying off the handle. One minute she'll be her fun, laughing self, and the next minute she'll be snapping at you. A couple days ago a bunch of us were on the beach, and I turned the channel on her radio. She was all, 'I was listening to that song, bitch!' I didn't get too upset about the 'bitch' part. She called everybody bitch. She'd just wander up in the mornings at school sometimes, all, 'Hey, bitch. Wha's up?'"

  "That's her ... usual greeting."

  "We're used to it. It's, like, something she brought here from her 'old neighborhood.' Her grandparents might be loaded, but her life was not like this before she moved from Connecticut. She's just—"

  Cecilly broke off for a confused giggle. "—just this odd combination of too rich and too poor! You turn the station on her radio, and there's no saying what you'll get. So she stormed down to the water and just stood there looking out at the waves—for an eternity. It was crazy. I mean, like, forty minutes later, she was still down there. Over a song!"

  "But you think she was upset about this breakup?"

  Cecilly drummed the tabletop like she was thinking about that. "Mark Stern is no great loss, believe me. He's really shown his true colors this year. He'll never stop being in high school. All he did this whole winter was hang around here, hang out with us. He never talked about where he ought to go to school or what he ought to be doing. He's turning into a giant afterbirth. Tthink ... she was upset because he broke up with her, rather than her breaking up with him. It was a huge ego blow—first time that ever happened"

  My eyes wandered to Drew. I couldn't pinpoint why, exactly, Cecilly's words didn't sit right. Last year I might have heard something like that and thought nothing of it. Now I had one foot out of high school, and it struck me that it didn't make sense.

  "Do people really spiral to the point that she's describing, just because they don't beat their boyfriend to the punch line?" I muttered.

  "Mmm. Some people do, I guess." Drew shrugged. "You and I wouldn't do that, but..."

  I watched him, maybe understanding why he couldn't quite manage to finish the sentence. Some of you wants to reason, "Stacy's turning into a conceited ho, just like her mom." Some other part is hearing with some sort of new ears or something. And you're saying to yourself, "Wait. She stands at the water's edge, spiraling for forty minutes, because she couldn't beat Mark Stern to the punch line. Does the word shallow mean anything to anyone?"

  "Duh, maybe she already suspected she was pregnant," I tried, but Cecilly started talking again.

  "It gets worse. I don't know if you could write all her behavior off to raging pregnancy hormones. Have you seen Mrs. Kearney lately?"

  Lutz looked down. "Come to think of it, I haven't"

  "Just ... go to their house. Go there and knock on the door. Get her to come downstairs. You'll die."

  "Is she ... not well?"

  "'Not well'?. Her eyes are swollen shut. She's got twenty-five scratch marks on her face. Stacy's mom is saying Stacy did that to her. Tried to scratch her eyes out."

  Lutz wrote all this down slowly.

  "I mean, we all get pissed at our mothers, but is that any reason to scratch your mother's eyes out? That is so ... out there."

  As Lutz wrote on, I remembered how Stacy always had this love/hate thing going with her mother. When she was with just a few of us she knew really well, she would mutter that her mom was a sleaze and lay pained hints about her golf-pros-on-the-side. But once, Todd Barnes heard that song, "Stacy's Mom," on the radio and changed the words a little to how Mrs. Kearney had it so going on. I thought Stacy would have laughed after the things she'd told us, but she stormed off. It was hard to feel sorry for her, even when her eyes were filling up, because she spewed as much venom toward Todd at the same time. Stacy was hard to figure. I remembered Stern used to call her "high maintenance."

  "I'll look into Mrs. Kearney's injuries. Thanks. Maybe it was somebody else," Lutz muttered uncomfortably. "I think we've all heard our share of Mrs. Kearney's, um..." He stopped.

  "What, extramarital escapades? What a turbo slut. I'm sorry." Cecilly laughed nervously. "I'm not here to pass judgment on anybody. But she married an absolute pig. I don't know why their family came back here. But some of my mom's friends say Mrs. Kearney got tired of living poor, and maybe after twenty-five years, her parents said, 'Fine, live with us rather than starve.' God knows they've got the room."

  Lutz shrugged. He'd heard this whole schmear twenty times over. "Truthfully, I've never heard the DeWinters utter a bad word about their daughter or her husband. And I do know they sent money over the years in spite of their heartache over the marriage. Some say that Wally Kearney would send it all back."

  "Still, you've heard
the one about how he used to eat like a pig at the table, just to disgust Mr. and Mrs. DeWinter," Cecilly said.

  Again Lutz said, "I live here."

  "God, your wife's family bails you out of financial trouble, and to repay them you chronically lay farts at their dining room table to get your sons to laugh at you. Mrs. Kearney made her bed. If you're going to marry the guy who cuts your father's grass, and he turns into a slug who likes to scratch, guzzle twenty cans of beer a day, never get a real job, and turn out two sons just like him ... that's your cross to bear, my mom says. Or put it this way: You can divorce him. But you can't go around while you're still married, just dive-bombing on any golf pro, tennis pro, plumber, electrician, or mail carrier who will have you."

  Cecilly was really ripping on about the Kearneys/ DeWinters, but I reminded myself that she was behind closed doors. I had never heard her like this. I mentioned it to Drew.

  "You haven't been around this summer as much in the early parts of the night," he reminded me. That's when I've been writing on my blog. "It's gotten almost this bad."

  I guessed I'd heard most of this before—just never in one gigantic serving. I also knew that Stacy's grandmother on her dad's side had been a waitress at some diner in Connecticut, and Stacy still went to visit her maybe three weekends a year. We never heard her mention her Kearney grandfather. We assumed he was either dead or long divorced.

  There had also been some talk about Stacy's older brothers, but they were a lot older, like the youngest being around twenty-three. So we only knew they both turned out sludgy like the father, and the DeWinter grandparents were sick about it.

  I don't think the brothers had ever been in trouble with the law, but when they moved here, they got their own place and never lived in the DeWinter house, so we weren't around them much at all. The older one supposedly always had worked with his dad on the lawn service and wanted to keep the family business going. Some hell of a family business, but that was the story flying around. The younger one always wanted to live by the ocean and saw this as his chance. He was a clammer.

  The couple of times they'd been at the house picking up their father, Stacy had always seemed embarrassed by them, and she would drag us up to her bedroom and close the door. They looked kind of scary—in that scratching, swaggering, muscle-bound, "Ey! Yo!" way.

  "Do you know where Mr. Kearney is living now?" Cecilly leaned forward again.

  "Yes. I know." The captain wrote some more, and I jerked to face Drew again.

  He laughed nervously. "Try ... the Ocean View. Moved in with his sons."

  I shuddered. I might have guessed Stacy's brothers lived down there. The name, the Ocean View, is deceiving. There is no ocean view; it's close to the clam hole, a part of the back bay that smells of dead clams at low tide, and is a series of maybe thirty one- and two-bedroom apartments. The place is used by the welfare department to house displaced families. Alas, Mystic's too-poor.

  Cecilly added, "If I lived with a mother that selfish and a father who probably beat everyone while on his beer benders, I might be ready for the nuthouse, too. But I would not have tried to scratch my mother's eyes out. And about the gun? The last week of school, some of us were down at the McDonald's one night. Mark was there, and he told us, 'Stacy bought a gun off the Internet. It came today.' I was all, 'Why?'

  "But no one could get a straight answer out of either one of them. He kept saying, 'It's to protect herself from you bitches.' Stacy kept saying, 'I just want to be a rootin' -tootin' cowboy!' I mean, the whole concept was so sick. I never asked questions. I never thought about it again until I had the thing in my hand on the pier."

  "And where were you on the pier when you heard the shot?"

  "I had just about decided to go talk to Alisa. She was still standing by the rail, right where she had been talking to Stacy and Mark, but now she was all alone. She looked pissed about something."

  "And what was she mad about?"

  "I figured it was because Todd was still sitting there talking to True. I was going to tell her True wouldn't hone in on Todd ever, but especially not three days after their huge breakup. But I never got that far. Casey was standing between me and her."

  "Did you say anything to her?"

  "Yeah! Being that Mark Stern was no longer in sight anywhere, I got into it with her that she needed to ditch him, and I didn't care if she had to go out with Billy Nast to do it. Nothing against Billy, you know..."she stammered. "You just say things like that..."

  The truth is, Cecilly could say things just as evilly as Stacy could. I didn't know what to make of this rootin'-tootin' talk, this scratching of one's mom's eyes. I just was vaguely suspicious there was a problem in the telling here.

  "Get to the point," Drew muttered, irritated.

  "So the gun went off," Lutz encouraged her.

  "It sounded like a little splat in the dark, like a little firecracker. Casey had been spewing back in my face about how everyone needed to leave her alone about Mark. And she stopped, like, midsentence. I thought she stopped because, like me, she wanted to look closer to see what the spark was. But she reached really quick for her neck."

  "Her neck? Do you mean her throat?"

  "No. It was more to the side. Her neck." Her own hand flew to her neck down under her ear.

  "And you think she was hit?"

  "I know she was. I saw blood. I mean, it was dark on that pier, but it was blood. It was like black liquid rushing through her fingers."

  "You saw blood rush through her fingers"

  "Yes. Then she screamed."

  Lutz stared at the paper for a moment, wiping his hands on his pants legs. My mind went crazy. I hadn't heard Casey scream. But I'd thought I'd heard her laugh. Had it been a scream? Had I heard it wrong? Finally Lutz picked up the pen again and quit staring.

  "She, like, staggered backward, back where the rail had burned through, and she turned and went over the back of the pier."

  "She went over frontward?" Lutz asked, and I could see where he was going. Lutz was asking, Did she fall or dive?

  I wanted to add, What do you mean, "she turned"? You say you couldn't see in the dark ... Are you sure this supposed blood wasn't a shadow? I looked at my watch again. 12:37. Endless night.

  "And you say you didn't see where the shot came from?"

  "No. I was watching Casey. I was afraid she was going to go over even before she went over, but there was nothing I could do. So I never thought to look until she was gone. I never saw the gun. I don't know where it went or anything. But I do know that suddenly Stacy Kearney was standing there beside me, screaming herself."

  "And where was Mark Stern all this time?"

  "In the toilet. That's what True says. She saw him go in there—"

  "The toilet?" The captain raised his eyebrows, and she smirked with her head down.

  "Okay, so we all know there's no functioning toilet on the pier. But there's that little remaining shell of the old ticket booth. If there's too many girls around and a guy doesn't want to take a leak over the side, they'll still go in there. It's shaped just like an outhouse. It totally stinks—"

  "Fine, fine." Lutz jotted down something.

  She leaned forward and flopped back, as if she was getting stiff from sitting. "Here's what I think. Stacy's been going a little crazy. Maybe her drunken father beat her once too often, who knows? I think maybe she got a gun to protect herself, in case he came back to the house on some bender one night and tried to beat her mom or the DeWinters to death. As for her being pregnant, she has told me a thousand times she would never sleep with anybody in high school. She said she could never stand to risk having an abortion. But Stern is such a polecat, and obviously he got her to cave in. When he breaks up with her, she's ... not okay, but she's making it, until she finds out she's pregnant. She wants him back, maybe wants a father for this baby, because she doesn't want to go through with an abortion like she always said she was afraid of. But he's not coming back. Because of Casey Carmody. So ...
you tell me the rest."

  Lutz cleared his throat, watching Cecilly glance around again at the walls. Somehow I knew she was trying to spot a recorder.

  "You don't have any idea where Stacy was coming from?" he finally asked.

  She shook her head woefully. "The moon was tricky. Out and in and out ... I could barely see Casey fall. Stacy just ... materialized beside me. Look, I know it sounds like a total soap opera." She held up her hands defensively. "But just take away the gun for a minute. Take away the gun, and you've got the same normal high school, same normal small-town crap that goes on anywhere. I've been feeling like a freak all night because I touched a gun, but everyone did. It was just so normal the way it happened. I'm not a freak. We're not freaks. Okay?"

  4

  "Tell True to come in here," Lutz said to Cecilly, "and you can either wait for her outside or go along home."

  "I'll wait," Cecilly said. I figured Cecilly wouldn't be happy until she'd heard every last version of what happened up there.

  There was a commotion by the door. Cecilly was trying to hold it closed, but fingers were coming around trying to push it open.

  "Captain Lutz!" Cecilly couldn't close the door all the way because of the fingers. "It's, um ... you know."

  "Captain Lutz! I must have a word with you!"

  The foreign accent that made her "with you" sound like "weese you." Drew must have recognized the voice. He laid all his weight on me to get me to move.

  "Oh god. You definitely don't want to be here anymore, bro—"

  I stood my ground as a face I knew peered over the officer's shoulder.

  "Maybe Crazy Addy saw something and won't be talking crazy for once," I proposed.

  "Ms. Gearta, please go home! I will call you, I don't have time right now—" Lutz's impatience rang through.

  I stood hypnotized as Crazy Addy, aka Adeleena Gearta, managed to squeeze herself past Cecilly and go in. Her ice green eyes kind of glowed neon. Crazy Addy is in her thirties now and is a haint around these islands—someone whose voodoo store you go visit with a group of blasted friends when you want to know if your girlfriend is cheating or where you'll get accepted to college. Crazy Addy tossed crystals and then "looked in them," or she stirred up some birdbath-looking thing and said she saw things in it. We thought she was very cheesy, though the girls liked getting their future romances predicted.