by Luke Geddes
Yesterday, he’d waited for her at her cubby as usual, a cardboard file box in his arms. “Ellie! I’m so glad I’ve happened to run into you.” The box was filled with more of his custom Troll dolls. At a glance Ellie recognized a Vladimir Putin, a Charlie Chaplin (or maybe Hitler?), an O. J. Simpson (complete with too-small gloves), and a Tammy Faye Bakker.
“I don’t want your dolls,” she’d said.
“Although doll art is a legitimate idiom, I’d classify my work more along the lines of—”
“Who cares? I dropped your class, so now you have no reason to talk to me.” She motioned for him to step aside so she could get her backpack from the cubby.
“And I’m heartened, finding you here, to see that our breakup hasn’t soured you on higher education.”
“I broke up with you.”
“Yes, be that as it may. The work in this box, the product of a years-long process, is not for you, but—”
“Great, because I don’t want it.” She turned to leave, but he blocked her way.
“I have a favor to ask. A while ago you mentioned that Mark and Grant from the Home Channel were—”
“You want me to get your little craft projects on TV.”
The Professor sighed. “If you had stayed in my class, surely you’d understand the distinction between ‘craft’ and ‘art.’ ” He shoved the box into Ellie’s chest. It was heavier than expected. “They’re not insured yet, so be careful.”
She’d thrown them all in the dumpster behind the cafeteria on her way to the parking lot, and presently the memory of the sight of them—the product of the Professor’s years-long process—in a fetid pile of institutional food waste was all that kept her from descending into total despair as she “liked” a friend’s new cover image depicting the cinematic skyline of a major metropolitan city. This same friend had not responded to any of Ellie’s messages since June.
Keith had taken most of the day off to help the CHAANT crew work with police to broaden their search efforts. In all her life, Ellie had not known her father to have any hobbies—all he did was work, eat, watch TV, and sleep. This thing with Veronica Samples’s task force was the closest he’d ever come, and who could guess what inspired it? Maybe he was really Lindy’s abductor and he was sabotaging the search from the inside, he had a whole secret existence as a serial murderer, Wichita’s heir apparent to the BTK. Nah, a psychopathic killer would have a rich inner life and a modicum of physical strength, the better to move corpses and evade law enforcement with, which Keith clearly lacked—and besides, even the phony gore in the horror movies Ellie watched on TV nauseated him. Or maybe it was pretext for an affair with Veronica or some other sad townie. Yuck. The thought of Keith being “romantic”—she pictured the way he’d devoured a cruller whole yesterday—made her gag.
Not that she’d blame him for straying. Stacey was hardly human, as silent and stiff as one of her pieces of pottery. They’d driven to work together that morning, had been sitting side by side at the counter since opening, without exchanging a single word. In point of fact, Ellie had intentionally not spoken directly to her mother in weeks. She hadn’t noticed.
Probably Stacey had always been like this, and in fact, no matter how far back Ellie searched her memory, the obsession that culminated in the sapping of her college fund had always been there. Once Ellie had helped her father track down on the internet a piece Stacey had been pining after for months. It was to be a gift for her birthday, a Redware sgraffito plate, whatever that was. When she unwrapped the package, Stacey said thank you, tried to smile, but then her lip quivered and she sighed. It was not the real thing but a cheap reproduction. She fetched a price guide from her shelves and held up a page with a photo of the genuine artifact, which looked exactly like what Ellie and her father had bought. “The difference is obvious,” she said and explained in a teacherly voice various methods for spotting fakes. Finally, she handed the gift back to Ellie, as if there were something she could do with it. She dropped the plate on the floor, ran to her room, and refused to open the locked door until her father negotiated to take her out for ice cream. Meanwhile, her mother sat in the dining room drinking wine from a box. When they got home, Stacey sighed and said, “I thought you were showing an interest in my interests,” like Ellie had been the one to hurt her. She was only twelve at the time.
She had thought of this often in the past few months. Stacey had collected pottery for as long as Ellie could remember, but in the past few years it was all she lived for. It was clear her mother resented her. That Ellie didn’t give two shits about pottery, that Ellie was her own person with her own life and feelings, had wounded Stacey. But there was also the time this summer, a week or two after her parents had sat her down in the living room for a serious conversation about the state of her college fund, when Stacey roused Ellie awake in the middle of the night. It had started as a “small indiscretion,” she’d explained in a tone of contrition Ellie had never before heard, and then all the money had “somehow gotten away after a while.” For that moment she could admit Stacey surely never meant to hurt her, and Ellie could imagine the aloneness of devoting your life to a hobby no one in the world cared about. But the feeling wouldn’t last. “You know I’m sorry,” Stacey had said as she gazed down at Ellie in bed, and the more Ellie thought of it, the angrier she got. Stacey couldn’t just concede that she had something to be sorry for, she had to say it like that, like it was a done deal. If all Stacey could do was put it in those words, then Ellie didn’t know that her mother was sorry.
The mall was even more abandoned than usual. They hadn’t seen a single customer all day, and the only dealer who’d even briefly passed through—unfortunately—was Margaret Byrd earlier that morning. Keith had done a good enough job promoting Mark and Grant’s appearance that everyone was probably saving their visits for Monday. If Mark and Grant were even really coming. It was obvious something was up. Though Ellie tried to spend as little time as possible with her parents and did her best to ignore them when forced to share space, even she could see that Keith changed the subject whenever Stacey or one of the dealers asked for details about the filming, and he’d all but disappeared since joining the Lindy search last night. (Evidently he’d canvass to the ends of the earth to find some little brat he’d never met, but for his own daughter refused to offer a simple cosigner’s signature.) He had to be avoiding some hard truth. TV People—people who actually appeared on TV, tan and handsome and charismatic, with animated eyebrows and bright voices, pearly Hollywood smiles and hairless necks—who could blame them if they decided to snub as unassuming a hellscape as Wichita, Kansas?
Between Keith and Stacey both, Ellie had lost the parent lottery. Fortunately, she had a plan to escape them, inspired by a half-remembered episode of Encyclopedia Brown. The first step was collecting her mother’s Social Security number and easily forgeable signature on the fake Heart of America paperwork she’d created with the graphic design software at the school computer lab, which she would then transfer to a private loan cosigner’s form. Unfortunately, the lack of customers today posed an obstacle. Stacey wasn’t an idiot (in most ways) and Ellie’s plan was not that clever. She’d been counting on a decent Saturday crowd to provide enough distraction so that Stacey wouldn’t look or think too hard about the form Ellie would spring on her in the middle of a checkout rush.
Happily, however, Stacey provided her own distraction. She’d been watching the clock all day, intermittently popping into the back room to use the research computer to place last-minute eBay bids. Given that she was already deep in the hole for Ellie’s college money, this was, of course, supremely fucked up. Perhaps if she wasn’t inured to Stacey’s idiocy, Ellie could muster up some rage. Instead she only lamented that Stacey couldn’t have a healthier, more affordable addiction, like huffing gasoline.
“Mom? I’m done over here. You can use this computer if you want,” Ellie said. She closed Facebook and opened eBay in a new tab. Stacey hesitated. “The co
mputer in back has been freezing up.”
If Stacey realized these were the first words Ellie had spoken to her in weeks, she didn’t show it. “Thank you, dear.” She took command of the keyboard and mouse and with a practiced tapping of her fingers logged in instantly, clicking through to an auction for something called a “1903 Van Briggle design #141 stoneware bowl,” set to end in one minute’s time.
With practiced casualness Ellie set the papers next to the mouse pad. “Mom?”
The red countdown clock glowed in the deep blacks of Stacey’s dilated pupils. Her left-clicking finger twitched, and under her breath she whispered, “Nope, not yet, too soon.”
“Mom? Mom? Mom!”
“What, Ellie?”
“Um, Dad left some paperwork for you. The note said it’s really important. Tax stuff or something.”
“Sure, dear.” The countdown clock was in the forties. Stacey paced nervously in place.
“Are you listening? Mom?”
“Yes, some paperwork. I’ll get to it in a minute.”
“Dad said it’s really important and needs to be finished ASAP.”
“In a minute, Ellie.”
“Looks like he just needs your Social and signature. I can do the rest.” Ellie took a pen from the cup on the counter and set it on the fake form. The fluorescents in the lobby were too bright, exposing the obvious seams in Ellie’s handiwork, but now it was too late.
Stacey typed into the bid box a number greater than twice what Ellie got in her biweekly paycheck.
“Mom? It’ll only take a second. Okay? Okay? Okay, Mom? Mom?”
“Okay!” Stacey grabbed the pen without taking her eyes off the screen. “It just so happens I have twenty-seven seconds to spare.”
Ellie pointed. “Social Security there.” Her heart throbbed. It was working. Her stupid scheme was actually working.
Stacey was on her fourth digit without having even glanced at the paper when the doors jingled and Keith sauntered in wearing a T-shirt with one of Lindy Bobo’s pageant photos printed on it under the caption FIND HER!!!!
Stacey dropped the pen. It rolled off the counter and onto the floor. As Keith approached, she adjusted the computer monitor so that he couldn’t see it. “Keith,” she said, taking a quick glance up from the screen, “you’re in early. I thought you weren’t coming in till closing.”
“It’s almost five thirty,” he said, “but I am going to have to skedaddle right after balancing the register. There’s a Take Back the Night rally at College Hill Park.”
Ellie forced another pen into Stacey’s hand. She tried to position herself so that Keith couldn’t see the form. “That’s so interesting, Dad. Take back the night from who?”
Keith thought for a moment. “Well, take it back from Lindy, I guess. To find her.”
Stacey clicked “confirm” on her bid with seven seconds to go. She was, at the moment, top bidder. Ellie touched her wrist to remind her to finish filling out the form, but she was frozen in concentration as the clock ticked down its final seconds.
“Dad, could you real quick get me a soda from the vending—”
“Shit!” Stacey said at the red Sorry, you’ve been outbid message. She cut her eyes at Keith. “Here, you do your own paperwork. I’m going home.” She tossed Ellie’s form at him and went to the back room.
“No, Mom, wait!”
Keith’s brow furrowed as he examined the obvious fake. “Ellie,” he said in a melody of disappointment. “I don’t even have to tell you this is a bad idea. But that you’ve stooped to such dishonest—”
Stacey emerged from the back with purse draped over her arm. “By the way, Keith, the Eagle called to confirm the time of the filming on Monday. It’s still on for three o’clock, right?”
Keith swallowed hard.
“Yeah, Dad. Three o’clock without a hitch. Right?”
“Mmmhmm.” Keith crumpled the papers. “We’ll have to discuss this later, Ellie. As punishment I’m going to leave closing procedures to you. Now that I think about it, Veronica could use an extra hand prepping for tonight. When you’re done I want to see you at the park to help out with the search. Every action taken is a step toward recovering little Lindy.” Unconsciously he patted his shirt.
“If I find her, I’m taking that reward money and you’ll never see me again.”
“Ten thousand dollars is not worth as much in the real world as you think. Trust me. Make sure you double-check the balance after you lock up.”
That wouldn’t be too hard, considering they had not made a single sale.
Ellie’s parents left together. She couldn’t remember the last time they stood or walked side by side. When she was sure they were gone, she locked the door, flipped the sign to CLOSED, and dimmed the lights. Fuck it, the Heart of America was closing early.
13 SEYMOUR
Wichita was not a city kind to pedestrians, its grid defined by commercial sprawl and characterless residential clusters stitched together by the crisscrossing of I-235 and Route 54, highways that took you nowhere interesting in any direction, not without at least a three- or four-hour drive past state lines. And no matter which way you went, it seemed to Seymour, the last things you’d see before the plains, the prairie, the flats, the empty heart of the country, were a Best Buy, a Dillons grocery store, a sad empty building with unblinking window-eyes where yet another doomed franchise met its bitter end. Even here in College Hill, one of the few areas one could call an actual, walkable neighborhood, no one expected to get anywhere without driving.
Wichitans, Seymour thought, those misguided people who had made the mistake of making the city their home, treated pedestrians with a regional brand of antipathy. The few times he’d gone for his nightly walk—and this was before the panic over little Lindy—cars would slow to a crawl, cast their brights as they followed him home, like they needed to reassure themselves he wasn’t some thief or thug or monster, to make certain he belonged. If Seymour stopped or waved or acknowledged them in any way, they’d roll out of sight, circle the block, and return. By now he had a hard time reminding himself there was anyone in the driver’s seats. He was so unused to seeing a human being outside of his or her car that he tended to think of the vehicles as dumb, overprotective animals that didn’t know any better than to trail him home and nip at his ankles.
So it made sense that when CHAANT, the College Hill AMBER Alert Neighborhood Taskforce (were you allowed to put an acronym within another acronym?) searched for lost Lindy Bobo, they searched by car, scouring the neighborhood with their windows down blasting Lionel Richie’s “Dancing on the Ceiling,” the little girl’s favorite for competition dance routines, wagging high-powered flashlight beams across lawns. A mobile death disco, Seymour had called it when it began, and that got a chuckle even out of Lee, who was a tough audience these days.
What didn’t make sense was that Lee had volunteered his and Seymour’s time toward the search effort. “This isn’t like back East,” he’d said that morning when he’d tasked Seymour with posting MISSING flyers throughout the few blocks of the neighborhood that weren’t yet plastered with them. “You have to actually talk to your neighbors here.”
“Or they won’t invite us to the cross burnings? They’d have to leave their cars first.” When they’d announced to their friends their decision (though really it was much more Lee’s than Seymour’s, and it really wasn’t much of a choice but a consequence, the end result of the shop’s failure and their bankruptcy) to move here, at best they’d reacted with ironic delight, jokes about American Gothic and The Wizard of Oz. At worst, they’d acted as if Seymour and Lee had been sentenced to some sort of shameful exile. To them, Kansas was one vast sunflower field of pitchfork-wielding Westboro Baptists. In truth, Seymour felt more a victim of discrimination here as someone who preferred to walk or take public transportation than as a gay man. Which was not to say he and Lee didn’t get ugly looks on occasion. But he soon realized that here everyone got that look, for just about
any reason. He called it the Wichita Scowl. No one was openly hostile, just seething with unspoken judgment. Everyone in this town was so terrified of anything even vaguely unfamiliar to them that they all just went around scowling at one another like cavemen chasing their own shadows. It was one thing Seymour appreciated about Wichita. He’d always been the token misanthrope in his group of friends; here, everyone hated everyone else as much as he did.
So what was he doing at the tail end of Veronica Samples’s mobile disco, holding their mint but unpackaged 1967 Bat Signal Flash-Gun out the car window? He guessed he owed it to Lee after how pissed he’d gotten about his little prank on Margaret Byrd, but that didn’t mean Seymour was going to be nice about it. “I feel like I’m outside my body watching myself right now.” He made a laser sound as he pointed the beam at a dog. It was the only flashlight they owned.
“This is what neighbors do for each other,” Lee said, his knuckles white against the steering wheel. “At least this way we don’t have to talk to anyone and we still get credit.”
“I spent all morning on flyer duty. Isn’t that credit enough?”
“You missed last night’s meeting because you got loaded and passed out at eight o’clock. And then woke up at eleven today.”
“That’s when my morning begins,” Seymour said. “And I bet it’ll really endear us to the neighbors if we’re the ones who drag Little Miss Prairie Princess’s torn-up corpse out from under a dumpster.” Lee ignored him, turned on the tape deck. The tinkling piano opening to “Endless Love” played. “Oh god, at least spare me the balladry,” Seymour said, punching the eject button. A cacophony of asynchronous Richie croons blared from the cars in front of them. “Although Richie’s early work with the Commodores is not so bad. MOR pop with funk overtones, occasionally inventive production.” Seymour cringed as he spoke. It was a part of himself he couldn’t turn off, the pedantic connoisseur that had to not just know everything but own it, too. How he had looked up to, as a burgeoning teenage collector, the cranky, bearded men who lorded over the record stores whose haphazardly stacked milk crates he spent every weekend digging through. These were men devoid of civility, whose every utterance was a reference to some obscure variant pressing—this Rubber Soul features an exclusive false start on “I’m Looking Through You,” this Headquarters sleeve is the exceedingly rare version in which Davy, Michael, Micky, and Peter sport facial hair in the bottom right corner photograph, while in the common version they’re clean-shaven. They were sleazeballs who worked on the side as exterminators or census takers so they could scout houses for unwanted collections, who had no time for anyone unappreciative of the wide-ranging influence of first-wave krautrock or the superiority of original mono mixes, whose stores kept no consistent hours, were only open when they felt like it, were often open even when the CLOSED sign hung in the door because they hadn’t bothered to flip it, who accepted cash only, who never had correct change or any change at all, who would throw in this beat-up copy of Trout Mask Replica if you’d just let them keep the twenty. Seymour, now settling into middle age, had finally become one of them just as the breed achieved irrelevance; nowadays every asshole with a cell phone had instant access to hyperlinked repositories of the rarefied knowledge he’d spent his entire life accruing, and to corporate-owned algorithms giving recommendations not of what they should like but of what they knew they already liked.