The Night My Sister Went Missing

by Carol Plum-Ucci

  But by the time the paramedics were in the room with Mr. DeWinter, he was already sitting up, refusing an oxygen mask. He looked very gray, but very alert. Not near death.

  Before Lutz could bail on the questioning to end up in the ambulance with Mr. DeWinter, one of the deputies came through. He said they'd found Stacy Kearney. Wally Kearney had been speeding off of Mystic in her Audi. When a cop pulled him over, they'd found Stacy in the trunk of the car. The officers, knowing they had just saved Stacy, were not watching her as they arrested Wally. She had taken off into the night.

  But they had Wally Kearney in the chief's office, in handcuffs.

  12

  I don't know what came over me—maybe that fight-or-flight syndrome my dad's always writing into his Mike Atlas stories. But I turned and followed the little corridor around to the bigger one and stalked into the back lobby. I was going to punch this guy's lights out.

  Drew must have sensed my growing anger, because he was grabbing at me again and saying, "Don't get stupid ... you're exhausted, is all."

  "I gotta do something! I am exhausted from standing around and doing nothing, that's all! He started all of this—"

  If it hadn't been for her father, Stacy wouldn't have gotten twisted up enough to buy a gun. It wouldn't have ended up on the pier, and my sister and I would be home sleeping right now. I felt like I was being torn in half all of a sudden—half of me was worried for my sister and half for Stacy.

  Things are not always the way they look. And though it looked like Stacy tried to hurt my sister, something inside of me was still insisting that was all too easy.

  "Let's pick on the rich kid that everyone hates," I muttered with sarcasm, and tried to get Drew off my arm. "Think they'd be so busy hating her if they knew what we know?"

  "I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that she's rich," Drew argued.

  "Am I the only person on this goddamned island with any imagination?" I yelled. "Give me an ending I couldn't predict, please!"

  I said it so loud that Drew backed off. But the police had their own yelling match going on, so no one was paying much attention. All the kids were finally gone, and Mr. Kearney was alone with Little Jack outside Chief Aikerman's office. I don't know where the arresting officers were, but Mr. Kearney was having a loud say.

  "—ain't telling you nothing! I want a lawyer! And I want you to tell those two ... Neanderthals who brought me in to go find my kid that they scared off!" With his hands cuffed, he was pointing his index fingers toward Little Jack's chest. But he dropped into a chair as Lutz came out of the questioning room.

  "Gee, that's funny, Wally." Lutz moved to the coffeepot with some crazed, exhausted laugh. "I don't suppose she was at all scared by being in the trunk of the car!"

  "I ain't saying nothing." Mr. Kearney looked down, and I suddenly wondered at the value of punching out a guy with a pissed-off cop and an exhausted police captain surrounding him. I came toward him, though. I think I was going to grab him by the collar and shake his head loose. But he looked up and pointed both fingers at me.

  "I'll tell you where she is ... she's off trying to find his sister! She decided she wouldn't leave until the Carmody girl was found. So me and my sons, we stuffed Stacy in the trunk. She was leaving now, tonight, with me and her brothers. That was what the four of us decided at midnight, so—"

  "You trash heap—" I reached for him, but Lutz was faster and got me in some kind of a strong hold without even spilling his coffee. I managed to say, "Stacy wouldn't go anywhere with you!"

  "Split 'em up, Jack!" Lutz roared, and I supposed he meant for Little Jack to take Mr. Kearney into the other room, but Mr. Kearney still wasn't budging from his chair.

  "Wait, Lutzie!" Mr. Kearney looked from him to me. "The kid's sister is missing ... he's gotta be half-crazed. I ain't talking to you, but I'll talk to him. My daughter likes him! Let him go! He ain't gonna do nothing to me."

  I wondered how he knew so much, and I wondered what he meant by "My daughter likes him." I had only seen Mr. Kearney—and had barely said hello to him—the times I saw him at Stacy's house over the years. But he had seemed to recognize me pretty quickly.

  Lutz loosened his grip slowly. Maybe he thought he could get some information this way. He held on to my arm as Little Jack pulled a chair up so I was facing Mr. Kearney, but from about six feet away. "Wally, if you say one thing to upset this kid, I will find something to add to the lengthy list of charges we got going now—"

  Mr. Kearney stared at me, but he laughed. "Gee, I'm so frightened. I wasn't even speeding. What have you got on me?"

  "You were speeding ... that's why you got stopped"

  "That's a crock—you recognized Stacy's car."

  "Driving a stolen vehicle, attempted kidnapping ... We'll stop there for the time being."

  Lutz must have thought I didn't know about the worse crimes or that I was staring at a complete pig. I supposed this was part of the ending I could never have guessed—that I'd be sitting across from a child molester who was trying to talk to me while in handcuffs. I sat frozen.

  "Stacy has this theory about what happened to your sister." He leaned forward and I felt myself leaning back, though he didn't appear to notice. "It ain't necessarily good, but it ain't the worst, either. That little derringer I just found out about tonight ... We'll talk about my feelings on that later. Stacy said that after she got it, she couldn't stand herself until she tried to fire it once. So she secretly took it down to the south end, where the jetty is, and she loaded up the chambers and fired it once when nobody was around. She said the barrel is slightly bent. She said the gun went off when she fired it, but the bullet only travels about twelve feet, and she found it on top of the sand. It didn't even get enough crank to dig itself a hole."

  "Stacy fired the gun?" I muttered, not getting it. I just got a flash of how somebody ought to say something before the night was over that didn't make Stacy sound atrocious.

  "She's a little over the top sometimes, I'll give you that," Mr. Kearney said. "But she wouldn't shoot at nobody, and don't miss the point: The gun ain't shootable. I mean, it'll go off, but the bullet don't travel. In other words, whoever fired it—whether they meant to hit your sister or not—they didn't hit her. She ain't shot."

  My head spun. If he was telling the truth, then the "little hole" Stern said he saw in the sweatshirt was a barnacle bite. And why the hell didn't Stacy tell me at the yacht club that the gun was defective? Maybe she figured her word was worth less than zero around here—not that the whole thing mattered as much as Mr. Kearney seemed to think.

  "Sorry, but I don't feel better," I muttered back. "My sister fell three stories into a riptide because of the very presence of that gun—"

  "She dove. Stacy says she dove. D'you hear a splash?"

  The ill-fated nonsplash. At 4:34—I glanced at my watch—I wondered if we'd all been taking stupid pills ... listening to too many pier spook stories.

  "No," I confessed, embarrassed, but he laid it out anyway.

  "What does that tell you? What does a clean dive sound like when there's swells coming under a pier?"

  I said nothing, feeling a combination of retarded and irritated. I couldn't understand why Stacy would be having this long conversation with the guy who'd turned her life on its head, to put it mildly. Can she really have memory loss at times?

  "Stacy said your sister's been wanting to try that dive since she could walk and talk. She said she's a good enough diver to try it if she thought she had to ... and airy enough to forget there's a hurricane four hundred miles east, sending its hells into the riptides."

  He was probably right on both counts, which made me more irritated. I looked him over, vaguely aware of this feeling that I was talking to a complete stranger. Mr. Kearney's voice was the same, but he looked very different than the last time I'd seen him, which had to have been a year ago. He'd dropped maybe forty pounds. He was shaved, and his hair was cut nice. For once he was wearing a button-
down shirt instead of the PIT BULLS ARE BETTER THAN POODLES T-shirt I'd never seen him without. He had a scalded look around his collar, like men get when they've cleaned up after working outside, but he didn't look like an oversized dog-dump. He'd have passed for a white-collar professional if he'd kept his mouth shut.

  "Stacy said two pretty good swells rolled in after your sister went over. If she had the sense to stay on top of the water, she probably didn't get nailed by the pilings, and she'd have gotten taken out to the down-seas in a rip. She's swimming in from the down-seas—slowly—trying to find her way in between rips. That's what Stacy hopes."

  That's what everyone hoped. I did get the news flash that because Stacy had so many problems of her own, it seemed rather unselfish that she would be out looking for Casey. And here was this guy sitting in handcuffs, watching me dead-on, while he was about to be charged with god-knows-what-it's-called. I felt like I should hate him more than I suddenly hated him—if that makes sense. Not much was making sense.

  "You're saying my sister dove because she thought she was being shot at."

  "Yeah. That's what Stacy said."

  "So who shot at her?"

  "Well..." He sat up with a disgusted laugh. "That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, ain't it? All I knows is ... my daughter comes to us all in hysterics around midnight, saying she's about to be charged with murder. She was bawling about swells and riptides and how it's her fault because of the gun belonging to her." He spun his head and glared at Lutz. "Me and my boys, we're all, 'What gun? Where's the gun now?' She don't know. She said she never saw it up on the pier, but she's assuming it's either hers or it's another gun that belongs to some spook ... I don't pay no attention to no spook stories. It's hers. Bloody Christmas ... So my big boy, Richie, says to me, 'What the hell have we been waiting for? We don't even own a couch. What furniture we've got is all rental. So let's go—now.'" "You were going back to Connecticut?" Lutz asked. "To hide Stacy?"

  A lot didn't make sense still, but I thought, Damn, what a predicament for Stacy: Get devoured by your friends and arrested by the police, or risk an escape with your disgusting old man. Maybe Mr. Kearney spiffed up so he wouldn't gross her out. Who knew.

  He responded to Lutz, "Did I say yet I was answering your questions? I just wanna help the kid." He looked me up and down again. "My daughter likes him, all right? His sister's missing."

  The silence was long, and I realized he was waiting for me to ask my questions. Just to be a prick I almost said, So you were going to Connecticut to hide Stacy? But I held on to it.

  "So you don't know who fired the gun"

  "She didn't tell me that part."

  "How the hell could she not tell you that part?" I demanded. "That's seventy-five percent of it"

  His answer really chilled me. "Stacy tells what she wants to tell. She holds on to what she wants to. If she's an expert on anything, it's how to tell the what and hold on to the who when somebody's guilty of something. I'd say it's almost second nature to her to protect people who are guilty."

  He swallowed. The silence hung so thick, I thought for a minute we were getting a confession on the spot. But he went on with what almost sounded like nonsense, looking dead at me. "I got a lot of time on my hands in the winters, kid. Grass don't grow much after October, so you know what I do? I whittle. I make picture frames, and I had all these whittled picture frames of my kids all over me and Sam's bedroom. I made one a couple years back, and Stacy snatched it from me, all, 'You don't need another of those, silly,' which is her way of saying, 'Thanks, I'll take that.' It was a little one. So I seen it a couple weeks later. Fell out of her handbag. Had a picture in it of you and her taken out at the mall early on in high school. You remember that picture?"

  I didn't. "Sort of."

  "You were clowning around in front of Macy's. Anyway, that ain't the only picture of you she had, by far. So in her not-talking-about-it way, she's made me feel sort of like I've known you well. And being that you've been the center of a lot of attention tonight, I don't suppose you've missed any juicy gossip."

  I didn't contradict him, but starting with Billy Nast and ending with hiding out by the questioning room, I hadn't been the center of activity. But I could see where he was going. He didn't say the word pregnant. I didn't say anything. I shifted uncomfortably, realizing he'd read the truth in my eyes.

  He turned to Lutz. "Don't jump too fast or too far, Lutzie. Don't go arresting me yet. You'll be sadly disappointed once the facts come in."

  You could have heard a feather hit the floor.

  "I'm not jumping fast." Lutz's voice sounded devoid of anything, even suspicion. I wondered how he could do that. Was he starting to think it was Stern again? Even if he did, he let Mr. Kearney go on.

  "I'm going to tell you all a story. One story, because then I get my one phone call, and then I'm getting out of here. And kid, here is one story you need to hear that you will never hear from Stacy. Because it has to do with people, and my Stacy, she can't talk about people."

  I got that same sickening ring-of-truth feeling, as when Stern had asked, "When did you ever get a straight answer out of Stacy?" Stacy talked about cars and weather and sports scores—in fact, some days she rarely shut up—but it's your thoughts about people that bring you closer to someone. Stacy never said a good—or a bad—word about anyone, I realized. It's like people had all the importance of sand by the sea as far as her talking went. Her actions said otherwise, but I thought that was a very dead-on statement her father had just made. I sat frozen because I was this combination of intrigued and appalled at myself for being intrigued by this guy.

  "It has to do with why we came back here. Me and Stacy's mom had money problems, I ain't denying that. But we were okay ... happy as most couples, probably a lot of it was because my boys weren't college material. But it was looking like Stacy was, and the missus got this idea in her head that we try things her parents' way for once—we make up to them so we give Stacy a chance. With me in charge of it, Stacy'd have ended up at some community college for two years and that's it.

  "Me, I couldn't stand the DeWinters from day one. They used to make Sam crazy, and I realized that two seconds into the first time I talked to her. But she threatened to divorce me if I didn't do like they said and come live with them until we could get enough cash together for our own place near them. I never had my stones so much in other people's pockets, but I ain't got nothing if I don't have my family.

  "But the biggest part wasn't the hell of living with your in-laws. It was watching my wife turn from seminormal into a vegetative state—and I don't mean by seminormal that Sam wasn't my best friend. She just was always prone to headaches and these little ... I called them mental attacks, when she thought people were trying to break in, or one of the kids was gonna get stolen, or she was dying of cancer. After we moved here? It got worse. Not only that kind of stuff, but she'd wake up screaming from these nightmares, and she could never tell me what they were about. Before a year was up she was so doped on Valium she didn't know me half the time, and when she did it was like she was a zombie.

  "I ain't no shrink, but I ain't so very stupid. All these questions I'd had over the years, they started backing up on me until they weren't just questions. They were obsessions—like, I had to know the answers. Like, how is it Samantha DeWinter could fall in love with me, when she could have had any stinking rich Harvard-type guy on the island back then? Why'd she agree to get married at seventeen? Why was she always getting headaches and freaking out, and then being fine again? After we moved here, what in God Almighty's name was going on? She'd wake up screaming with these nightmares, and I'd be all, 'Sam! What'd you dream?' And the only answer I could get was, 'I remember!'

  "You got any idea where I'm going with this, kid?"

  "No..."

  He turned toward Lutz. "I bet you do, don't you?"

  Lutz was trying to look blank, but it wasn't working so well. For one, his jaw dangled. Drew cleared his throat, wh
ich brought Mr. Kearney's gaze back around to me.

  "Kid, you're important to my daughter, so you're important to me, too," he said like a broken record. "And you'll hear the truth someday soon, anyway. My wife, she wasn't dreaming ... she was remembering. Being in the house brought some things back to her that you wouldn't be able to believe that a person could ever forget."

  Lutz put a hand toward me, saying, "A paternity test will tell." He wanted me to get up and leave, as if Drew and I were too naive to hear this sort of thing. Maybe I was, but I didn't want to move.

  Mr. Kearney just laughed in disgust and said, "You cops, you always have to have your evidence. Even if common sense tells you the truth. You ain't gonna keep me here in handcuffs until you've got that kind of evidence. Get my cell phone out of Stacy's car. Call my boys. Ask them where Stacy's been living for the past two months. She's been living with us. Now, why might that be?"

  "I'd rather hear that from Stacy," Lutz said.

  "Hear it from whichever of my children you want! But you probably heard some story that I got thrown out of DeWinter's house after he found me outside Stacy's room one night. Isn't that what flies through your little gossip channels? Being that nobody would ever believe me, and I couldn't prove nothing—not even to myself—I didn't add my own info to that trash heap. But let me ask you a question: What in the hell was Clifford DeWinter doing outside my daughter's bedroom in the middle of the night, to find me outside her bedroom? Where I'd been suspiciously keeping watch for weeks?"

  I couldn't decide where the gross ache was coming from—my head or my stomach—or whether it was late or early ... My watch floated in front of me automatically. 5:07. I just shot up out of the chair. It was gut instinct moving me, because I did not have any sense left to think with.

  "Gotta take a leak...,"I said, but after I walked casually back to the rest room, I shot out the front door and sprinted the block and a half to the beach. Two girls in white-hooded sweatshirts ... I kept seeing them both in my mind, and I couldn't tell which was my sister and which was Stacy, but suddenly they were equally important to me. One might still be out in the water—the other was carrying some evil spawn, and if I was very, very lucky, she wasn't out there in the water by now, too.