The Night My Sister Went Missing

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  "Really?" Lutz wrote that down, letting nothing show on his face to indicate that he'd heard the exact opposite version: Cecilly had reported that tonight Stacy had asked Mark to go back with her. Mark had told us the same thing.

  I glanced at Drew, who looked puzzled.

  Alisa laughed. "That's what kind of an idiot he is—he'll pop a question like that, with me right there in Stacy's house. He's too stupid to think I wouldn't be watching her back, right outside the door, if he asked to talk to her alone about something. Stacy had broken up with him because she was completely sick of his sex-on-the-brain routine. And here he was, going out with Casey Carmody and coming on to Stacy, as if that made him look like a knight in shining armor. She laughed in his face."

  "You heard this yourself?"

  "Plain as day. He said, 'I miss you. Don't you miss me? Why don't we do something about it and never say we did?'"

  "You sure it wasn't the other way around? Her looking for a father in a moment of desperation? Without thinking?" Lutz hinted.

  "Plain. As. Day. You can ask Stacy yourself"

  "Do you know where she is?" he asked.

  "She told me she was going home."

  They exchanged stares.

  I figured Stern was a big liar, but Alisa threw me off guard again. "Stacy said to Mark, 'If I were really Casey's friend, I would crank up my little rootin'-tootin' cowboy gun and put you out of your misery, lowlife. You're lucky I'm lukewarm on Casey these days.'"

  "'Lukewarm'?"

  "Well, Stacy and I started talking, in, like, April that we are suddenly lukewarm on all of our friends. Life around here just seems like a big bore."

  I looked at Drew, and his eyes rolled to mine. Boredom seemed to be the Mystic Marvel plague.

  "But that's what lukewarm is, Captain Lutz: lukewarm. You don't shoot a person because they suddenly seem dull and boring."

  He tapped his pen on the table. "Why'd you tell Mark about the pregnancy?"

  "I don't know anything about repressed memories. Truth? Yeah, I think that concept is way out there. But I kept getting back to the fact that Mark is so self-absorbed and stupid sometimes, maybe he used one of those date-rape drugs on her, the kind that you only have hazy memories afterward, if any. Stacy defends her dad all the time, almost as if to let me know she's really sure he didn't do anything to her. I can't stand the sight of the guy, but every once in a while I can get to believing her. Tonight? I believed her. I thought I would tell Mark, being that Stacy would die before showing she needed people. And as the father he ought to help Stacy make a decision. He's been irresponsible for too long. But I knew as soon as it was out of my mouth that it had been a brain flake."

  "He didn't make any admissions?"

  "No. In fact, he marched up to Stacy and called her a slut. I thought he was going to slap her. Then he told Cecilly Holst, just to get even, I guess. Put it this way: If he drugged Stacy and date-raped her, he wouldn't be running around telling the biggest gossips on the island that she is pregnant. He'd be begging for Stacy's silence and for the privilege of paying to terminate the pregnancy. Right?"

  Lutz said nothing at first. He shook his head. "I don't know. I can't find a starting point tonight that helps make everything I'm hearing believable. You sound sincere, Alisa. But let me tell you something: Your story about a girl not remembering getting pregnant is like Noah not remembering he built the Ark. There's something wrong with the story. It was either a serious date-rape drug, or a serious, serious incest problem."

  Alisa crossed her arms defensively. "And we're back to ground zero. There are things about Stacy even I don't know. And I know just about everything. I mean, it's no big deal for two best friends to talk about their romps with their Joes, even their mistakes with their Joes. Why would I care if Stacy took a quick break from her almighty Catholicism? I'm Protestant." She smirked but didn't smile. "Unless it's someone utterly raunchy and disgusting and beyond belief. I guess that's why I'm missing my beauty sleep to be here. I don't know anything about Casey Carmody. I didn't see anything. But someone needs to look into Mr. Kearney."

  Lutz drummed his fingers on the table, nodding, and Alisa drummed hers on her arms. "Well then, tell me this, since I told you so much, Captain Lutz."

  "I'll try."

  "Does a girl who's being abused like that by her father ever go to crazy lengths to protect him?"

  "Happens often," he said after a moment. "Lots of girls will continue to love their parents when their behavior is beyond belief. The girl feels responsible, feels like she's sending Daddy to jail. There's all sorts of motives like that."

  She stood up slowly, rolling her eyes. "Okay then. Well, you solve it—after you solve this one. I'm just here to help Stacy. As for the pier, I heard and saw nothing ... I never even heard a splash."

  I got a chill again over that stupid splash. That nonsplash.

  I barely paid attention, trying to imagine my sister treading water ... or snoozing on a boat with her airhead face half into a pillow. Any image that made me think of her alive was good.

  Alisa was talking again. "... when everyone up on the pier came running, at first I thought they were making it up. You know the stories these guys can tell about the ghosts and goblins wandering around up there. I thought this was some ... Eddie Van Doren's ghost just fired his suicide pistol at Casey Carmody or something..."

  Lutz caught my full attention by pushing his chair back with a g-g-g-g-grunt. "Well. Since we've got no body, no blood, and a whole lot of people claiming to have heard a pistol shot from a gun no one claimed to fire, you might not be too far off." Lutz stood up with a sarcastic smirk followed by a yawn.

  I don't think he'd have smirked if he'd known what was coming his way next.

  9

  The surf club on Mystic is made up of three core guys, one core girl, and maybe a dozen other stragglers. They're not really a club in that they hold club meetings or do anything in an organized way. It's just that you might see a pack of eight or nine of them on the beach, or in the Pirates' Den, or in the surf shop, and that core of four was generally always there.

  Lutz brought in the three guys at once, because somehow Indigo Somers hadn't come up onto the pier. The three guys made the room look kind of crowded. At the same time, it was odd to see Jon Hall, Ronny LaVerde, and Brin Olahano without Indigo and a crew of stragglers. They seemed like a body with an arm chopped off.

  And they didn't look happy about being questioned, either. They stood inside the doorway, kicking at the floor with their bare feet until Lutz said, "Take a seat"

  "Dude, we don't know anything," Jon said with a polite but nervous laugh.

  "Are you busting us again?" Ronny asked. He turned his pockets inside out with a pleading look.

  "Because they've been good, both of them." Brin jerked his thumb down the row. "They've been going to meetings"

  "Yes, I know." Lutz nodded hard.

  "Wednesday we did Step Eight," Jon said pleadingly.

  "And we were just up there, tonight, not doing anything we shouldn't on the pier. Except ... being on the pier in the first place. Ha-ha!" Ronny laughed nervously.

  "You know, we were just examining the stars and all," Jon said.

  Drew muttered with a yawn beside me, "Huey, Dewey, and Louie," meaning that despite how Ronny was a blond and Brin was Hawaiian, these three were so much alike sometimes it could get confusing to listen to them. One thing the surf club was organized about was keeping their voice inflections the same. They all said "yah" instead of "yeah" and "bod" instead of "bad"

  Lutz said, "Nobody's busted tonight. This is just friendly, just routine. Who knows? You might have seen something that you didn't know you saw."

  "'Cuz the three of us were hanging out way off in the foundation of the old haunted house," Jon said. The Haunt was the first thing that burned to the ground up on the pier, but the metal girders were still in place. They worked like rusty benches.

  "Look," Lutz said, rubbing the bridge of his
nose, "something potentially very serious happened on that pier tonight. I'm not interested in anyone's marijuana escapades right now. I'm more interested in ... what you observed on the pier."

  "You mean, like, who was acting strange?"

  "If anyone was, yes"

  "The only strange sight I saw was Bill Nast." Jon gave a nervous giggle. "You wouldn't expect to see him at one of our parties. It's like a duck in a gaggle of seagulls. How's that? Good analogy?"

  "But he wasn't doing anything. Bill's a good guy. He does my chemistry for me in school," Ronny added. "Ha-ha."

  "Did you hear a shot fired?" Lutz asked them collectively.

  "Yah."

  "I heard it."

  "Absolutely. But we didn't know it was a gun until people started running past us. It sounded like a ... like a cap gun," Brin said.

  "Did you see the gun?"

  "No," Brin went on. "We heard later that a bunch of the Marvels were passing it around, but it never made it over our way. Carmody and Nast were standing a ways down from us. I think I saw Carmody give something small back to Mark Stern."

  I heaved a little sigh of thanks, thinking Brin was one witness for me in case Nast had slung his head up his butt and couldn't remember things right.

  "Yah, that was all we saw," Ronny said.

  "Did you hear anyone say who fired it?"

  "They were pretty focused on getting off the pier and going down to the water to try to find Casey," Jon said. "Only thing I heard was that the gun belonged to Stacy Kearney."

  "But Stacy gets a bum deal around here." Ronny nodded again.

  "How do you mean?"

  "People want to grind her up. It's hard to explain. You have to be like us..."Ronny made a circling motion to include his two friends. "You have to be on the outside looking in at the M&M's, but with a view close-up."

  "The M&M's?" Lutz asked.

  "Yah. The Mystic Marvels." Brin looked at his two friends, and they laughed a little. "Hey, we don't have much problem with the M&M's. We share the same beaches, same parties ... When we get lucky, we even share the same babe pool. They're pretty nice—Kurt Carmody and those guys. They don't hassle us. But you kind of have to notice that some of those kids, they're, um, intolerant?"

  "Intolerant how?"

  Brin rubbed his forehead, like the exercise in hunting for words was tough. "Maybe intolerant is a bod word. That means, like, about gay people and Islamic people and all of that. For them it's just ... anybody. And usually it's just one person, because they won't take on a crowd. But they'll, like, take on one of their own and totally annihilate that person, slowly but surely."

  "Happens to somebody every year," Ronny put in. "I'd have been nervous seeing Billy Nast up there. But this season it's been Stacy Kearney so far. So I figured Bill was relatively safe. Ha-ha."

  "Were people speaking ill of Stacy tonight that you heard?"

  "Yah," Jon said. "They were like frothing curs over that Stacy is pregnant."

  "And how did Stacy respond to this?" Lutz asked.

  "She looked okay to me." Ronny shrugged. "She just came past like she was looking for somebody to talk to, and she stopped to joke with us for a minute."

  "I totally felt, like ... she was holding her head way up. Though maybe her head weighed a ton," Jon said. "Is that a good one? Ha-ha."

  "What were you talking about with her?"

  "Uh ... we were talking about the moon," Jon said. "How it went behind this cloud, and the whole Mystic Marvels, like, disappeared. And you could only hear them, but they were like the ghost of Eddie Van Doren. All you could see was Casey Carmody's white sweatshirt. She looked like a huge white ghost in her bro's sweatshirt. Stacy, she just looked and said, 'How could a beautiful girl like Casey look so el-huge-o? That moon is not doing her justice.' Something like that. It wasn't totally funny, but we were cracking up with her. You had to be there." Lutz kept writing.

  "We didn't mention it, like, 'Yo, are you really pregnant?'" Brin said. "We just wouldn't do that. We figured, you know, that's her business."

  "So then what happened?"

  "She walked away and we, like, stuck our heads together kind of immediately." Brin grinned sheepishly. "We didn't want to hurt her feelings or anything. But we were wondering about this thing Mark Stern said to her on his way past to the ticket booth, which is the toilet. You know..."

  "What did he say?"

  "He said 'slut-cheater' to her on his way past. She flipped him the sign language. Two and two makes four, ya know? He wouldn't be calling her a slut-cheater if he was the dad, and she wouldn't be flipping him the bird if she wanted him as the father. So we came up with our own theory about who's the father."

  "And what is that?"

  The three of them looked at one another and cracked up.

  "No..."

  "No..."

  "No. Uh-uh."

  Lutz laid down his pen and rubbed at his eyes. His polite grin was starting to look petrified in place.

  "I don't think it's going to help you find Casey Carmody," Brin said.

  Lutz cleared his throat. "Well, why don't you let me decide that. There's every other officer on the force down on the beach and bay right now. It's my job to get some mileage out of you guys. Is your, um, theory based on something you saw?"

  "Yah, lots of times. And it makes sense," Jon said, "though in a strange way."

  "And what's weirder is there were six of us hanging out in my backyard after the coast guard told us to clear the water and quit trying to help. And, like, all at once, we all drew the same conclusion," Brin added, crossing his arms defensively.

  "And all of us were clean and sober. Completely." Jon X-ed his T-shirt with his pinkie. "Well, all of us except one"

  "Dude." Ronny glanced sideways at him in a disapproving way.

  "Well, we're practicing Step Ten! Don't let any secrets back up on you," Jon argued.

  "Yah, but Lutz doesn't need to know who wasn't sober, so long as it wasn't one of us!" He snapped his head around to face Lutz. "Right?"

  Lutz let a stream of air out of his nose. "So long as it wasn't someone I've busted before."

  "No," Jon said. "It was just Tito."

  Tito Consuelez, I would almost say, is "core" in the surf club.

  "He was all smoked up, but he was having a bod day. He lost his new board in the water," Jon said.

  They watched Lutz write this down, and their eyes turned fearful.

  "Don't be like that!" Jon begged him. "Tito just got the thing! It cost over five hundred dollars! His ankle strap came loose. The board must have gotten caught in a rip under the pier. I mean, we looked everywhere. He wasn't taking it so well—"

  "On surfer beach? Just south of the pier?"

  "Yah," they all chimed.

  "We decided it was in Van Doren's Dungeon," Brin said remorsefully.

  "I'll just make a note of it. If the coast guard comes up with a stray board, we'll call Tito and see if the ID matches. All right?"

  They started to relax.

  Van Doren's Dungeon refers to Eddie Van Doren and all the surfboards that have been lost under the pier during the summers. Rumor had it that his ghost rises out of the surf to steal some poor bastard's surfboard, and suck it down to some hell under the pier, aka Van Doren's Dungeon.

  I'd say that on Mystic we'd always lost two boards a summer under the piers before Van Doren's suicide. The massive pilings that cause riptides and sea froth could occasionally suck a board. The board would seem to absolutely disappear. More surfboards did seem to disappear after Van Doren's death—like, last year there had been four boards lost. But the mature people on the island wrote the increase off to the barrier islands chronically shifting and the surf patterns changing. One board recovered a mile out by a fishing trawler last summer didn't kill that Van Doren rumor. Eddie Van Doren's ghost spit that one out, was all.

  "With two choppers and two coast guard cruisers out there, maybe Tito'll get lucky," Lutz said, reinforcing that he wasn't interest
ed in drug adventures. "So what's our big theory? Can we relate this to who fired a gun and potentially hit Casey Carmody? Or is it just another dose of Mystic garble?"

  They were all three quiet, except for a nervous laugh or two.

  "Captain Lutz, you just had to be there. You had to be up on that pier at the half moon," Jon said, edging forward in his chair. "The half moon shines with an eerie light, more eerie than a full moon, because it plays more tricks. And the stars get totally bright at the half moon. Like flashlights. We were watching this ... this just one little baby cloud that came along slowly in front of the flashlight stars, and then passed right over the half moon. Stacy was standing there talking about Casey Carmody looking like a ghost in a bulky white sweatshirt. It was like ... a prophecy or something. Because two minutes later Casey Carmody totally disappears."

  They all three shuddered, and I tried to ignore the spit gathering in my mouth.

  "I thought ... you said Stacy Kearney gets a bum rap around here," Lutz muttered, not looking up from his paper. "Now you're implying she pulled the trigger?"

  "No!" they exclaimed.

  This time Ronny urged himself forward. "We were talking about Eddie Van Doren's ghost. And later it struck us—do you know when Eddie Van Doren died?"

  Lutz sighed, as if he was expecting something I couldn't figure out. The date, being his first day as police captain, was so clear to him that he spouted it. "Sunday, September second—three years ago, Labor Day Weekend"

  "Well, Indigo was in my backyard tonight, and we were all talking about this just as the police car came up," Jon said. "She pointed out that Stacy Kearney arrived on Mystic the day before school started their freshman year. She arrived the day after Eddie Van Doren died. Doesn't that strike you as odd?"