What Happened to My Sister

by Elizabeth Flock

  “Oh, Mr. Burdock, I could kiss you right now—”

  His hand flies up again so I hush.

  “So I’m going to step away,” he continues, “check on things in the back. Might take me a couple of minutes. Maybe I’ll see you when I come back, maybe I won’t …”

  As he’s talking and without looking down at it, he turns the book upside down so it’s now facing me. Before retreating to the back room he looks at me. “You tell anybody about this, I’ll deny it,” he says.

  I silently pantomime locking my lips and throwing away the key.

  “One more thing,” Hap Burdock says. “Get that kid outta there, would you?”

  And then he’s gone. And I’m worried sicker than I was when I first came in. My panic sends a shot of adrenaline up my spine—it’s like my blood drank a six-pack of Red Bull. It only takes a second, he’s right, to find “Parker” on the guest registry. Room 217. I bust back out into the afternoon heat, give a fake everything’s-okay wave to Cricket in the car and, once out of her sight line, I rocket up the stairs to the second floor.

  At first I knock gently. Tap-tap-tap-tap-tap, pause, then tap-tap. The universal “friendly” knock.

  Nothing happens.

  I check to the left and right, and when I’m sure no one can see me I knock again and put my ear up to the door to hear if there’s any sound of movement inside.

  Still nothing.

  “Carrie? Mrs. Parker?” I call out through a fake smile so I sound breezy and casual. “It’s Honor Ford. Just wondering if anyone’s home.”

  I knock again. Harder this time.

  “Hello?” I call through the door. “Anybody in there?”

  Please God, don’t let me be too late. Now all pretense is gone and I’m banging on the door. To no avail. The shades are drawn so I can’t see in through the window. Please God.

  “Carrie? Honey, it’s Mrs. Ford.” I listen again. Nothing.

  Now I know what I need to do. I go back downstairs to the car, fasten my seat belt, and pass Cricket my cell phone.

  “Call your father,” I tell her, shifting into drive, feeling like the Terminator, ready to kick some ass.

  “What happened?” Cricket asks, full of fear. “Where’s Carrie?”

  “Just get your father on the line and hand me the phone.”

  A half hour later Eddie and I are at home, sitting at the dining room table, Cricket and Mother tucked safely out of earshot in Mom’s bedroom watching TV because I don’t want either of them overhearing the come to Jesus I’m about to have with my husband.

  “Christ, Honor, I thought someone was getting murdered, the way you sounded on the phone,” Ed tells me. “What’s going on? What’s all this?”

  He tips his chin at the piles of dolls Mother has started making. Given how sparse they are, I suspect it will take more convincing to part with enough Chaplin memorabilia to raise the money we’ll need.

  “By the way, I’ve only got an hour,” Eddie adds. “I told the desk sergeant I was taking an early break but I’ve got to get back so—”

  “I’ll get right to it,” I say, pushing stray hair behind my ears and taking a deep breath. “Frankly, I don’t know what to do about the Carrie situation. I thought somehow it would resolve itself or something would be revealed that would answer my questions—oh, I don’t know what I thought. I didn’t want to jump to the same conclusion the Dressers jumped to about us.”

  “What’s the Carrie situation? The Dressers? Honor, get to the point for God’s sake.”

  “Okay, okay! Jeez. Here it is. Carrie is clearly neglected. You can see that too, right? I mean, I know you’ve only been with her for a few minutes and it was emotional and all but surely you could see that she’s neglected at the very least. She’s malnourished, her clothes are far too small for her, she turns up with bruises and strange marks. And now she’s missing.”

  “What do you mean she’s missing?” he demands, leaning forward and putting his elbows on the table. I see the fierce protective streak that has made my husband such a damn fine police officer.

  “Well, I went over to the Loveless to pick her up and after waiting awhile in the car I ended up going up to their room—”

  “It’s just her and her mother, right?” he interrupts.

  “Yes, and I still have never met her mother,” I say, “which is another thing. Wouldn’t you want to meet the person your child is spending nearly every waking minute with? How could this mother let her nine-year-old daughter go off with strangers every day? For all she knows, we’re child molesters!”

  “What happened when you went up to their room? I take it no one was there.”

  “No one was there,” I say, nodding.

  “So how do you know she’s missing and not just out with her mother, running errands or something?” he asks.

  “Ed, I’m telling you, something’s wrong,” I say. “I’m looking you in the eye and telling you I can just feel it. Maybe it’s a mother’s intuition, maybe it’s some cosmic sign, I really don’t know. But this is me and I’m asking you, I’m begging you, to help me get to the bottom of this.”

  “Baby, you know we can’t file a missing person report unless someone’s been gone for—”

  “Don’t even finish the sentence. I know. But this is me talking to you. This isn’t some nervous Nellie stranger who doesn’t know diddly about what goes on out there in the world. It’s me and I’m telling you I’ve got a really bad feeling about this.”

  We lock eyes for just a moment, but it’s long enough for me to know he still loves me. He still loves me! Focus, Honor. Focus.

  “What about Cricket?” he asks, looking down at whatever random pile is sitting in front of him. “I assume you’ve asked her where she thinks Carrie might be.”

  “She was with me, waiting in the car when I went up to the room at the Loveless,” I say, “and she looked worried sick—panicked almost—when I said Carrie wasn’t there, so I just tried to calm her down and then I called you.”

  “Let’s get her in here,” Ed says, standing up to call for her. “Cricket? Come on down here!”

  “They’re in Mother’s room with the TV on, so let me go get her,” I say.

  When I come back Eddie looks up from reading one of the foreclosure documents.

  “This is unbelievable,” he says, shaking his head and looking back down.

  “I just had a very illuminating talk with Mom about it this morning,” I say, with a hint of sarcasm. Illuminating it was not.

  Eddie’s head jerks up.

  “So I take it she told you,” he says, missing the sarcasm.

  Instead of displaying my confusion, I just sigh, fall into the dining room chair I’d been sitting in, and wait for Eddie to elaborate.

  “Honor, I swear I didn’t know, and by the way, she came to me,” he says. “I don’t want you to think it was the other way around. She came to me.”

  It’s the oldest trick in the book: pretend you know what someone’s talking about until you do know what someone’s talking about.

  “She came to you,” I say, careful to clear my voice of accusation.

  “Not long before we … before we split up,” he says, “your mother came to me and said she had a sizable nest egg and wanted to help ease the pressure on us. I guess she thought our problems were all money-related, what with the medical bills and all. I didn’t want to take her up on it—I downright refused her the first time she brought it up. I figured you’d hate me even more if you thought I was taking handouts from your mother. But then she said you wouldn’t have to know. It could just be between the two of us, your mom and me, until—oh, I don’t know, until I could somehow get my head back above water financially.”

  So she hadn’t sent the money to Hunter after all. That’s why she didn’t want me blaming him. She didn’t want me telling him about the foreclosure because it truly wasn’t his fault. Oh my God. The medical bills bankrupted my mother. Oh my God.

  “How long did y�
��all think you’d be able to keep this from me?” I ask. “Don’t even answer that—I know the answer: forever. You thought you’d be able to keep this secret from me forever. You made it this far so I guess you thought you were almost home free. You’ve always played it close to the vest, Edsil, so this shouldn’t come as any real surprise.”

  “Honor, please,” Ed says, his eyes pleading with me. “You think I wanted to be in this position? You think I wanted your mother to put her life on the line like that? I didn’t know! She said she had a lot in savings and I promised her I’d pay her back …”

  I should control my temper. I know I should. But I don’t. Sue me.

  “This is exactly the type of thing that tore us apart,” I spit the words at him like a snake. “You don’t let me in, Ed. You’ve never let me in. You’re so goddamn stoic and proud and private. I’m your wife! I’m the one you should have come to with the money problems! Not my mother. Me. Your wife. Every time you opened the mail or sat down to pay the bills, every single fucking time I’d ask you how we were holding up you’d say fine, just fine, until it was too late!”

  “Honor …”

  He can’t stop me now. No one can.

  “And every time her name came up, every single fucking time her name came up, a cloud would come over your face and you’d leave the room,” I yell. The tears are cracking my voice. “Or if you couldn’t physically leave the room, mentally you would just shut down. Locking me out entirely. Going back to work when you didn’t need to because you couldn’t stand to grieve with me!”

  “I went back to work because we’d been accused of child abuse, Honor, remember? I went back to work because the longer I stayed away, the guiltier we looked! I went back to work to try to hold on to my job, Honor, Jesus!”

  There are tears in Ed’s eyes now too.

  “You could have shown some emotion when she died,” I hiss, not ready to accept his rationale, sensible though it is. “Would it have killed you to have squeezed out a tear or two when she died? You didn’t cry! You didn’t cry once. Until … until …”

  “Until Carrie.”

  We’re both startled by Cricket’s sudden appearance. I’d been so overwhelmed with anger and hurt and sadness I’d completely forgotten about Cricket. Again.

  “Why can’t you guys just let the past be the past?” Cricket cries at us. “Why can’t you move on? You think Caroline would be happy to know you split up after she died? You think she’d feel good about knowing her death caused you to break up? Huh? Because that’s what happened. Caroline died and I’m not reason enough to try to stick it out.”

  When Eddie and I start protesting, Cricket shushes us. Shames us, really.

  “Look. You both love each other, right? Right?” She looks hard at both of us, like a headmistress doling out detentions.

  Then Eddie looks me in the eye and answers her, “Yes, honey. Yes, your mother and I love each other.”

  “Mom?”

  I don’t need to look at her to know she’s turned her burning gaze to me. I look into Eddie’s eyes and goddamn it all. Goddamn it all to hell.

  “Mom?” she presses me.

  “Fine! You win!” I holler at both of them. “I love your father, okay? I love him but he drives me crazy and if he thinks …”

  The rest of my words are muffled because he has leapt out of his seat to come around and gather me into his arms, laughing at my pride in not wanting my anger to dissipate, kissing the top of my head, murmuring my name, knowing that now we can fix this. It’ll take a lot of work but now we can fix us.

  “So, Dad? Did you find Carrie yet?” Cricket, the inveterate subject changer, brings Eddie and me back down to earth.

  “Oh my God, Carrie,” I say, fixing my hair and straightening my blouse after our movie moment.

  Ed is similarly discombobulated, but his rearranging has to do with his trousers and that’s all I’ll say.

  He clears his throat and sits down in the chair next to mine.

  “Cricket, did Carrie ever mention any favorite hiding places? Anything she liked to keep secret?”

  Now it’s Cricket who’s squirming, which I must say is surprising. I assumed she would answer no, otherwise why wouldn’t she have brought it up earlier? But her silence is telling. I know my daughter well enough to know she’s holding something back.

  “It’s okay, honey, you can tell us,” I say.

  “You’ve got to tell us if you want to find Carrie,” Ed says.

  Cricket looks frightened but doesn’t say a word. Which just proves she knows something.

  “Cricket, it’s not breaking a promise if it’s a matter of life and death,” Ed tells her. “Now, I know you want to be a good friend to little Caroline by keeping secret whatever she’s asked you to keep secret, but a real friend would know that any little detail will help find her, so whatever it is, you need to tell us.”

  “It’s a matter of life and death?” Her eyes widen in pure terror.

  “It could be,” I say.

  Ed nods.

  After agonizing over it some more, Cricket finally says, “So, um, Carrie was asking me all kinds of questions about the computer, you know, because she hadn’t ever seen one before—remember how she came over that first day? It was like she was from another planet. I mean, who’s never seen a computer?

  “She was all could you ask it anything and what about family history and on and on. I just kept saying yeah and asking her what she needed to check out but she didn’t say at first. Not that day, at least.

  “Fast forward and it comes out that, um, I guess her father was murdered back when she was little. Then she said she had a little sister but there was something secret about it. She wanted me to look up birth records for her. She said her momma says she never had a sister but she knows for a fact that she did. She made me promise not to talk to anybody about it. I had to swear up and down to Tuesday I wouldn’t breathe a word of it to y’all or anybody.”

  “Her father was murdered?” Ed and I speak at once in near unison.

  “I asked her if her mom had files or pictures she could look through and Carrie said no.” Cricket ignores our question and continues. “I think her mother’s mean or crazy or something but I don’t know. Carrie never really says anything bad about her—it’s just a feeling I get. Anyway, I found her sister’s birth certificate online. We were so psyched. It was awesome. She copied it down word for word in that notebook of hers. I asked her why her mom would tell her she didn’t have a baby sister if she did but I don’t think she knew the answer to that any better than I did.”

  Ed cannot sit still a moment longer. “I’m going to call this in,” he says, getting up while dialing his cell phone.

  “Why? What do you think happened to her?” Cricket asks. “Mom? She’s okay, right? I’m so scared now.”

  I reach for her and, still a little girl at heart, she comes over and sits on my lap even though she’s way too big for it, and buries her head in my arms while we listen to Eddie talk to the station house.

  Where are you, Carrie? Where are you?

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Carrie

  When you’re hurt and away from home ever-thing seems scary. Car horns sound like they’re aimed at you and you only. Lights look mean they’re so bright. Footsteps are all heading your way, about to discover wherever it is you’re hiding. No one smiles. Every smell makes you want to throw up.

  When the sun of the following day sets about scorching the ground and anyone stupid enough to walk barefoot on it, I take cover under the bramble bushes in an empty lot a couple hours’ walk away from the Loveless, squinching myself small enough to fit in what little shade they throw. If I had my flip-flops I might could keep going but I don’t so I wait for the sun to ease up before setting out again. I scan the dirt for anything looking like food and catch sight of some trash toward the middle of the lot that might be something. I pick my way around the broken glass and abandoned tires and find there are still some potato chi
p crumbs at the bottom of a bag called Lay’s, so I tip the whole bag into my open mouth to be sure I get every last one. Someone walks by. I panic and race back to my bramble bush but they don’t see me. Phee-you. My heart slows back down. I don’t want to be a scaredy-cat but Momma always says you can’t always get what you want and I guess she’s right. I am a scaredy-cat. At least today I am. After listening to my belly growl one too many times I give up and scrape some dirt into a pile so I can take pinch bites. It’s not as bad as you might think and it quiets my stomach. That’s the good news. The bad news is now, instead of thinking about food, I cain’t help but think about what happened in the dark back at the pool. Waking up to a man standing over me. His grunts as he pinned me down. The stink of his beer-breath as he tried to pull off my pajama shorts. The ache in my legs as I kicked him off me before he could. The crinkle of trash underfoot when I scrambled to the ladder of stairs. The cool metal steps leading me up, up, up, up to the edge of the empty pool I thought no one else knew about. The thump-thumping of my heart beating in pure fear. The slap-slap-slapping sounds of my bare feet against the pavement, running me away from the man in the pool, away from room 217, away from Momma.

  I fall asleep, wake up, then fall back asleep again. By the time I wake up for good, the sun’s gone down but night hasn’t entirely taken over yet so I set out from the empty lot feeling dizzy and sore but I’ve got to keep going. I keep telling myself that the whole way there. Keep going. Keep going. Keep going. My eyes are giving me trouble but I figure that’s the least of my problems.

  At the exact second I press the doorbell I realize it’s probably later than it looks and I shouldn’t be bothering them. A light comes on over my head and the front porch comes into focus when I squinch my bad eye closed and blink with the good one. On the porch swing, a book is splayed out and it looks familiar but like I said, I cain’t see all that well right now. If I had air-conditioning like they do here I’d never set outside in this heat ever. Even if the book I was reading was real good.

  “Oh my goodness, Carrie! We’ve been looking all over kingdom come for you, honey,” Mrs. Ford says, pulling me into her body for a hug then pushing me back an arm’s length to see me better. “You’ve had us worried sick. Oh my God—what happened? Sweet baby Moses in the rushes, what on earth happened to you? Come inside here, come on in, there you go. One more step. Eddie! Mother! Someone come out here, will you? There you go, honey. Oh my God, just look at you.”