The Night My Sister Went Missing

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  My mind was bobbing all over the place, so Drew asked the important question. "Why did Stacy buy that gun?"

  "Got me." Stern spread his arms again. "She got it the last week before I broke up with her. She showed it to me and said, 'Look at this little thing! Isn't it cute?' It was wrapped in a handkerchief, and when she unfolded the handkerchief, my eyeballs almost flew out of my head. I held it. I couldn't help it. But I didn't ask anything, like where she got it, or how, or how come."

  "Why not?" Drew asked in irritation.

  Stern squirmed again. "I guess because ... I knew I wouldn't get a straight answer. When did you ever get a straight answer out of Stacy?"

  I felt that for once Stern had nailed down a truth. Maybe that was why Stacy could make you so jumpy. She could laugh and joke and threaten and entertain thoroughly in a crowd. But she never talked about anything. She never said how she felt about anything. That's when a friend really becomes a friend—when they talk to you about something important to either you or them. Stacy acted like she didn't have problems, or when she did, they surely were not worth discussing. It was all chatter with her—sometimes fun, sometimes mean and hard to take, but rarely serious.

  "I mean ... I was the boyfriend. I was closer to her than anybody, save Alisa. Maybe. If there's anything in there"—he knocked on his head—"besides icicles and nails, I never saw it."

  But he was overstating his case.

  "There's something else 'in there.'" I burst past them and walked down to the end of the dock, staring into the condo lights on the far side of the cove, watching the masts of the boats docked there, despite the fact they all belonged to summer people we didn't know.

  "What, you're gonna defend her now?" Stern laughed uneasily into my back as they shuffled up beside me. I almost turned and slugged him. I didn't remember seeing Stacy with that gun at all on the pier, but I'd seen him with it plenty. I wanted to kick her for buying the stupid thing, but kill him for passing it around with so much mouth.

  "Remember when Casey broke her neck and had to start high school in a halo?" I asked instead.

  Nobody answered, which smacked of "If you can't say something nice about a guy's sister, don't say anything."

  "I thought even my mom would go hoarse lecturing her on being vain and insecure, and how she ought to count her blessings she wasn't starting high school in a wheelchair instead. None of it did much good. Casey was so impossible that I would leave the living room as soon as she came in. Her girlfriends quit calling. Stacy wasn't too friendly with her at that point, because Casey hadn't gone to high school yet. But she was there, like, so many nights. And the morn ing before school started, she fixed up Casey's hair somehow and fixed her up with makeup..."

  Everyone stayed quiet. I had never bothered thanking Stacy. Some things are just between girls. But coming for Casey on the first day of school must have had all the appeal of crawling through a briar patch. I heard a laugh and realized it was mine. "I mean ... most of the time, Stacy was doing her Stacy routine. You know—'Casey, shut the fuck up before I shove this mascara tube up your nostril...,' 'Listening to you whine is as fun as drinking dish soap—get over yourself before I puke on your shoe ...' La-la-la."

  "See? She's a troll!" Stern said, and I wondered if he brought a new depth to the meaning of idiot.

  Drew mumbled down at our feet, "Proverbs twenty-six four," which is this very cool saying that we both like: "Don't answer a fool in his folly, lest you become like him."

  I let Stern rant on a little. "You want some motive, Carmody? Maybe I've got some. I'm not saying for sure, but tonight when I was at her house? Stacy asked me to go back with her."

  I turned as slowly as possible, considering this was news to me.

  Mark shrugged. "I said no ... I was with Casey now."

  "Did she get mad?" Drew asked.

  "Yeah. I mean ... no. I mean, she's, like, the mystery bitch. Hard to read. She started laughing in that evil way of hers, and right in the middle of it, she started crying. So she was, like, laughing and crying. And then she says to me, 'Forget I ever asked that. I don't know what comes over me sometimes...,' as if she suddenly 'remembered' she was too good for me. She was always acting too good. Even when we went out. It got on my nerves totally. I stuck around, thinking I would finally get a piece, but I didn't even get that"

  "All right, let's just go." Drew jerked on my arm before giving me time to contemplate a new definition for the term "fucking pig." Stern didn't seem to realize I'd apply his little philosophies to my own sister. "Let's leave conversations like this to the cops! They'll analyze the sweatshirt for evidence. They'll order a paternity test!"

  Drew kind of spit all that over his shoulder as he pulled me along, and I heard Stern say, "Go ahead! They can order anything they want...,"then I was glad to be out of earshot of his donkey voice.

  "Let's go to the beach," I muttered to Drew.

  "As soon as a cop sees you, they'll have someone drive you right back down to the station. In fact, they're going to notice you're missing any second and send a car out to—" Drew stopped dead at the same time I did, seeing someone in a hooded white sweatshirt, sitting on the front steps of the yacht club. The place was closed and dark, but the white sweatshirt almost glowed. I forgot for a moment that they had found my sweatshirt, and I tore over going, "Casey?"

  I was within five feet when I heard "Not Casey," coming from the girl. Her hood was up. She pulled on her earlobe and said, "Sounds like..."

  Charades. Casey sounds like ... I remembered, disappointed and annoyed, that Stacy had been wearing a white hooded sweatshirt tonight, also.

  "What are you doing here?" I asked.

  After a moment she stood up, not pulling the hood down. "Same thing you are."

  Her face caught the glow of the moonlight. If anyone found Stacy Kearney beautiful, it was probably due to the fact that she was tall and thin and had nice blond streaks in her hair. There was nothing much to notice about her face. She had a thin line of a mouth that widened into a smile for her ornery moments, but her eyes never laughed. You'd be hard-pressed to say what color they were. But now there was some strange softness behind their hardness.

  I guess it would be accurate to say that Stacy looked like she'd been slapped in the face five times and still refused to cry. Her throat got in some sort of swallowing spasm, and I just waited, frozen, because she looked so strange.

  But when she snapped out of it, her voice was surprisingly even. "Okay, I checked every boat on every dock here before Mark-the-Shark showed up. I looked inside the cabins even if they were locked. The only other boats Casey would probably be on are docked at the Moorings. Alisa's down there. Or was. It's closer to the beach than this, so maybe she went home, but you can catch her on her cell phone."

  She looked me square in the eye and must not have liked what she saw. She stammered only slightly. "Y-you know the number."

  "Stacy's had it bad for Kurt Carmody for a while..." Cecilly's words banged through my head, if for no better reason than they were easier to think about than whether Stacy was pretending to be an innocent searcher. If Stacy felt anything for me right now, even sorrow, you just would never know. I might as well be a boss at a job she doesn't like or hate. But she refused to break this stare-off, and it left me slightly less apt to think she was guilty of much, though her attitude seemed challenging and, under the circumstances, pretty tasteless.

  "Stacy, why in the hell did you buy a gun?" I asked, surprised at the softness of my tone.

  She looked out toward the water, where Stern and Barnes were sitting on pilings and talking in low voices. She reached into the huge pocket of the sweatshirt and fumbled around. I stood rooted, thinking she had the missing gun in there. But after a moment she brought out a cigarette and a lighter. I'd have sworn there was nothing else in the pocket.

  As she flicked her lighter, my hand went to her wrist. "Don't," I said.

  As I'm not usually in people's business, that probably tipped her
off that I knew a couple things. She paused only for a second, then lit the thing anyway. She inhaled deeply and sent a slow exhale over the top of my head. I tore my eyes from her challenging ones, thinking, Great. Hurt a baby just to be strong on me. What the hell is wrong with you?

  "Let's go, buddy," Drew murmured.

  But she hadn't answered my question yet. I was entitled.

  "Unless you're going to ask if I fired a gun at your sister, I don't think you have a right to ask me anything." She flicked ashes.

  "Did you fire a gun at my sister?"

  She took another long drag of the cigarette. "No."

  I wanted to strangle her as she exhaled over my head again, but the swallowing spazzes came back over her throat and the strange look returned to her face.

  "And where were you when the gun went off?" I kept it up anyway.

  She kind of flinched, then laughed sadly at the ground. I could never understand tough girls like this. Stacy could buy a gun, then pull a total hurt-and-astonished routine when I imply she might have fired it. That's what her look absolutely was—blatant hurt—but before I could rub the goddamned situation in her face, she turned toward the street and dropped the cigarette in the gutter without bothering to stomp on it with her Reefs.

  "Drama queen," Drew mumbled at her back. Then he said utterly loudly, "And where will you be if the cops want to ask you some stuff?"

  "At home," she hollered straight up, without turning or breaking stride.

  "You better be," he whispered, and it was my turn to haul him along, back to the police station, before they realized I had left and decided I somehow looked suspicious.

  6

  The commotion inside the police station had got well under way, as kids overflowed from Captain Lutz's office out into the front corridor. Obviously the cops had been rounding them up. I could see one other cop in Lutz's office now, a young cop they called Little Jack, even though "Big" Jack had been retired since I was nine. My parents lugged Casey and me to Big Jack's retirement dinner, where it became known to me that Sergeant Jack Cantrell had personally piggybacked seventy-some people from their flooded houses to higher ground in the March storm of 1963. Some cops' names shouldn't be used over again.

  My eyes scanned hopefully for Casey. I didn't see her. But my eyes locked with True's, and if Casey had been found she would have rushed me. She was just standing off to the side with Cecilly. True was wearing a dark sweatshirt, her arms crossed, and she didn't exactly look happy.

  I headed for them, passing two of Casey's friends who were sniffing up scared tears. I just pretended I didn't see the girls. I didn't need anyone crying in my face yet, and True and Cecilly looked only a little tired and irritated.

  "You talk to Lutz?" I asked.

  True shook her head. "I started to. About a minute into it two officers brought in the sweatshirt. They took some pictures, and now it's on its way to some lab. I saw it, though. There wasn't any blood on it. Just mud and seaweed."

  I glanced at Cecilly, who looked ready to burst, and she let fly with what I already heard her tell Lutz. "I saw blood, Kurt. I still think it was blood and ... you're entitled to know what really happened."

  I wasn't surprised by Cecilly's stubbornness. Somehow everything she said was a "fact" to her.

  Drew changed the subject. "We just checked the yacht club. We saw Stern and Barnes down there looking. Saw Stacy, too."

  "Yeah, what was she doing?" Cecilly asked. "Pretending to be hunting?"

  I said nothing.

  Cecilly put her hand on my arm and looked genuinely concerned. "Not that I think Casey ... isn't going to be found. But we know a shot got fired, and I think I know who fired it."

  I wasn't supposed to know the load of stuff she'd told Lutz, so I kept up the quiet routine.

  "Up on the pier I had seen Stacy talking to Alisa, so I assumed she was with Alisa when we heard the shot. But I just overheard Alisa say to Little Jack that Stacy had walked away from her, and she didn't know where she had gone. I never saw Stacy until after the gun went off. Suddenly she was beside me, screaming Casey's name along with everyone else."

  Drew groaned, so I didn't have to. I could see Alisa Cox sitting beside Lutz's desk. Little Jack was sitting in Lutz's chair, watching Alisa fill out the form each of us had to fill out before giving a statement.

  "She just got here," Cecilly said. "She was looking for Casey down at the Moorings with Casey's friends. One of the day-shift officers also showed up back there, and he had a flashlight. They looked in every boat. She's not there"

  "So Alisa's going to talk to Captain Lutz now?" I asked.

  "She's in line," True muttered. "I'm still next"

  "Casey's not at our house, she's not at the yacht club, and she's not at the Moorings," I spat out, feeling more and more ready to look at the whole truth. It suddenly seemed like a more sane deal than so much confusion. I made myself acknowledge that my sister could be a mile and a half out, treading water ... or something even worse. I looked at my watch. 1:25. At least my parents were in the air and wouldn't be calling for a few more hours.

  "True!" Lutz's voice echoed from the corridor, and I could barely see his eyes raise over the crowd of kids. True moved toward him, and they disappeared down the little corridor where Drew had found me, to go into the questioning room.

  "So really ... what did Stacy have to say for herself?" Cecilly asked.

  I shrugged. "Said she didn't do it"

  "Did she say what inspired her to buy a gun?"

  "No."

  "What is up with her and the weird, goddamned secrets?" Cecilly said to nobody in particular. She tapped one foot on the floor, glaring over my shoulder. "There's who you ought to talk to." She jerked her head, and I turned to see Alisa. "She knows a lot more than she's saying."

  "About what?" I asked.

  "About everything. The way the two of them always have their heads together, it's obnoxious. I used to think it was just a random party move. You know: Act like you've got some serious, secret business, because it makes you look important. But they do it so much, I really think Stacy confides in her. Actually tells her stuff. Because tonight Alisa's been saying Stacy couldn't have done it. She wouldn't say why not, but she's the only one saying that. So she either knows something, or thinks she knows something"

  Alisa was standing now, nodding at Little Jack as she handed the report form back to him. She turned and locked eyes with me over the tops of a couple heads. She's not tall, but I am. Something like a polite, distracted smile formed on her face, though she looked away again fast and went to sit in a chair just outside Lutz's office to wait her turn.

  "Gimme a stab at her," Cecilly said, and patted my arm before heading over there. I didn't want to follow her with Drew and make Alisa feel so put on the spot that she clammed up. But I didn't want to sit back here, either, and listen to girls sniff.

  Drew followed me without even asking where we were going.

  We lucked out. It seemed Lutz had totally forgotten about this little corner of his new wing. With most of the officers still on the beach, we were able to edge up to the window.

  Lutz was watching True with his hands crossed over his chest. This time he looked upset. True was red and nervously picking at her fingers.

  "How is it," he asked, "that the head of our church's youth group can get herself into situations like this?"

  She only sighed and muttered, "I'm sorry."

  "Oh, really. Why can't you ... inspire people not to go on that pier instead of ending up there yourself? Isn't that what leaders do?"

  She grabbed her long ponytail and gripped it in dread. "Only ... I'm not really a leader. I do the youth group for my dad. He wants me to. And, you know ... my big sister Melanie turned out to be such a PK. I just can't do that to him. He's not perfect, but he doesn't deserve that."

  PK stands for Preacher's Kid, and PKs are often known for being totally badly behaved, as Melanie proved over the years. She's twenty-one now and finally tryi
ng to straighten out, but when she was True's age, she'd had a string of run-ins with authorities for shoplifting, drunk driving, possession of marijuana—you name it. Now she has a baby boy that True brings to the beach sometimes to give Melanie a break.

  "But it puts big-time pressure on me, because I'm just not a leader. I just ... don't know how to say no to my dad."

  "Sounds like he's not the only one you can't stand up to," Lutz said, though his tone was not harsh. She just raised and lowered her eyebrows, staring at her thumb while she picked at it. He finally noted, "You have loud, unruly friends"

  True brought her wrists up to her eyes and rubbed. When she flopped them down, her eyes were glassy, starting to spill. "Yeah, and I'm sick of it. I've been sick of it for months. I'm basically here because Cecilly wanted to come, but I think she saw a lot more than I did. I just want to tell what I know, and once I leave here I'm dropping all these kids. Every one of them. I wanna be ... I wanna be good, Captain Lutz. I just don't know how to do it with them as my friends."

  She broke off for a few good sniffs, and I found myself glancing sideways at Drew. He looked as uncomfortable as I felt. I had too many worries on my plate, but the concept barreled through them and landed at the front of my brain: True was talking about me. She was clumping me in with Stacy, Alisa, Stern, Barnes...

  And so was Lutz. Am I loud and unruly? I didn't feel like that.

  I started to wonder about something else: how people can be so close to one another that you have a nickname for your crowd, and how you can know so little about them. I stood watching True, feeling guilty that I really had no idea what she would say to Lutz—or how she would say it—or how she would feel about it.

  "The Mystic Marvels!" She finally forced herself to laugh while sniffling. "You know what I've been wondering while I was sitting out there? I've been wondering if the kids who live down at the Ocean View think they're el-perfecto, too. I don't know if anybody thinks of themselves as bad. We all have excuses. And we all like each other. How can someone be bad if you like them? Huh?"