The Girl at the Border

by Leslie Archer

  “So you want her, this Helene Messer.”

  “Head on a platter,” Dey said. “Money too—every dollar.”

  “She might have spent—”

  Dey sighed. “It pains me to say this, Self; believe me. But in that case take out of her hide every dollar you don’t recover.” Dey poked a well-manicured finger into Jimmy Self’s chest. “She’s a shadow; you’re a shadow. Find her. Make this right.”

  Angela stayed on at the dig after Richard left, though within hours of his departure the armada of reporters, having squeezed every drop of news out of Kieros, passed on to newer stories on other continents. He had left when the sun was at its zenith, without a word, without shaking hands with anyone, without even a glance toward Kieros—who was, in any event, giving another in a seemingly endless string of interviews regarding the most current finds, not the least of which were the extraordinary Etruscan tomb guardians Richard had uncovered, explained to him, and indexed and catalogued for him.

  Walking down to the shingle with Richard, she was aware of the buzz of the paparazzi, aware that the rumors of their alleged affair had escaped the hive and, like bees in search of pollen, were spiraling farther and farther afield. She found that she didn’t care. Her sole objective had narrowed to Richard’s shocked face. Still, they exchanged not one word nor even stood especially close. Just being in one another’s vicinity was sufficient, as if they were planet and moon that had somehow lost any semblance of gravitational pull on each other. Drifting now, close, but not of the same system.

  As she watched the seaplane take off, she thought of a bird returning to a nest that no longer held its beloved egg. She thought she caught a glimpse of his grim profile through the Perspex window as he was transported back to the mainland, on the first leg of his journey back to Dearborn, to his already-fragile wife, and to a house that no longer held Bella.

  Bella was missing. She had told her mother she was going to study at the local library and walked out the door of the house, and that was the last anyone had heard or seen of her. Had she been kidnapped? Was she a victim of a hit-and-run, lying in a ditch by the side of a rural road? Or had she run away? She was desperately unhappy: that much Angela knew from her correspondence with Bella.

  She did not enter the dig for the balance of the day; no one asked her to. In fact, no one approached her. She wandered the shingle, found the spot where she and Richard used to sit, gaze out at the changing colors of the water, and talk. She stared at it, not wanting to sit there ever again. The sun sank in a painfully slow retreat, and each moment of sunset reminded her of their time together. She ate dinner alone; she tasted nothing, left early. She could not bear to move back into her tent. Lying on her mattress in his tent, staring up at the canvas, she felt gripped by a terrible desolation, as if she had been evicted from her life.

  Sitting up, she turned on the light, brought out her copy of Moby-Dick, and, turning randomly to a chapter, read for the umpteenth time and with great avidity how Mr. Stubb killed a whale. Melville’s dense, precise prose brought to life a scene she could not on her own imagine, a braided strand of the past both courageous and harrowing. And through this alchemy her surroundings grew dim and hazed, the ache of Richard’s absence receding. With Melville’s numinous writing she was never alone; she was always close to what others might term God.

  At length, her lids heavy and fluttering, she put aside the novel, turned off the light, and lay down again. Approaching the precipice of sleep, she willed herself to dream of Richard, of her father, of a meeting that would never take place in the real world but by her will would be summoned up inside her mind. She would dream of her mother, of a happy reunion. But dreams didn’t work that way. They had their own logic—or illogic—formed and orchestrated by Morpheus, the Greek god of dreams. And so, deep in REM sleep, it was Bella she saw—Bella alive and afraid, backpack strapped on like a turtle’s shell, winking in and out of shadows that crept and moaned like living things. Angela called out to her, but capricious Morpheus stole her voice away. Still, she screamed and screamed, Morpheus gripping her throat so that she was unable to warn Bella, unable to guide her home.

  She awoke with that scream stuck like a chestnut burr in her aching throat. One arm swung off the side of the mattress, the back of her hand scraping the floor. In the dark, the feel of something hard against her fingertips: Richard’s cell phone. Amid the dreadful frenzy of his departure, he had lost it. Grief-stricken, she had not thought of it until now.

  She picked it up without conscious thought, without any feeling that she was violating his privacy, only grateful that he had left something behind, something she could look at and hold close. In her agitated state, with the dreadful feel of the dream with her and a bitter taste in her mouth, she pressed the messages icon to see if Bella had answered the last email she had sent. She had not. She plugged in the phone to recharge the battery and left it on, next to her, as if this connection could in some mysterious way become a ghostly channel between her and Bella.

  When it had recovered half of its juice, she texted Bella.

  Where r u? she wrote. Worried about u.

  Nothing.

  An hour later: Bella?

  Bella, vanished, was silent.

  The next morning, she headed back to her work—Richard’s work, really—detailing Cul and Culsans. The doorway into the tomb was still closed. Kieros had not come near her, let alone spoken to her, since Richard’s abrupt departure. She was the only one who knew of his betrayal of Richard, hijacking the media to cut Richard out, to take the credit for the stunning Etruscan find. As she approached the winged guardians, she was shunted to another part of the dig, where she was put to work labeling shards of Cretan urns. Of course she was angry, but in truth her mind was elsewhere, and she found that she lacked the energy to fight with these people or with Kieros. For the life of her she couldn’t get Bella out of her head; she fretted all day over the sketchy details of her disappearance that Richard had hastily shared with her.

  Every hour or so she returned topside, checking Richard’s cell, hoping against hope that Bella had contacted her. Each time, she was greeted by nothing but silence. Anxiety, buried deep inside her since Richard’s departure, began to grow, eating away at her, distracting her from her work. Was Bella still alive? Was she in danger? She had to trust that Richard would get to the bottom of those questions, that he would find Bella.

  Just before noon, another archaeologist, a Brit named Nigel who had given her scarcely any attention in all the time she had been at the dig, stopped by and chatted in a friendly manner before offering to help her with the labeling. She was so floored she said nothing, simply nodded, gesturing her welcome with her upturned palm. In his company, the remainder of the day and evening passed bearably, almost pleasantly. She found Nigel engaging in that coolly detached way of the overclass Brits whose origins traced themselves back to the old stiff upper lip, fortitude in the face of adversity, self-restraint in all things, and all that rot, what? In fact, she found Nigel’s gentlemanly companionship a kind of balm to Richard’s abrupt absence.

  To her surprise, he also had a wicked sense of humor.

  “A handsome chap walking through Hyde Park at night hears a lady’s voice in the bushes,” he began as they made their way to breakfast on the second morning after Richard’s departure. “‘Fancy a good time, only five quid?’ Why not? the chap thinks. He’s just about to press himself against the lady when a policeman shines his torch into their faces. ‘Oi! What’s going on?’ says the policeman. ‘Do you mind?’ replies the chap. ‘I’m about to have sex with my wife.’ ‘Sorry, mate,’ says the policeman. ‘I didn’t realize she was your wife.’ ‘Neither did I,’ responds the red-faced husband, ‘till you shone your bloody torch!’”

  She was still laughing when Kieros hurried up to her, his face looking blanched, his expression pinched.

  “Angela,” he said, in a pained voice, “may I have a word?”

  It was his solicitous to
ne that alarmed her. She and Nigel exchanged a glance before she nodded, following Kieros. He stopped beneath a pencil pine, opened his mouth, closed it again almost immediately. He seemed suddenly out of breath.

  “Kieros, what is it?” she said coolly.

  “It’s about Richard,” he said, mopping his brow with the back of his hand. “There’s no easy way to say this, I’m afraid. Richard is dead.”

  FIFTEEN

  Jimmy Self sat in his office, chewing on his wad of stale Juicy Fruit, mouth filled with the bitter taste of his life. Staring at the loaded .38. So much had happened in the four years since Dey had given him the Helene Messer job—just not to him. He was an asterisk in the criminal record books, an angry pimple on the butt of postmodern life. Times had passed him by, as they had Dey, God rest his soul.

  No one came to see Jimmy Self now, which was sad but just as well, seeing as how his energy level was lower than ants’ balls. A brain tumor would do that to you. Especially, maybe, the inoperable kind that pulsed inside his head, spewing its poison with every beat of his heart. The shit had hit the fan about nineteen months ago, when he had begun smelling smells that weren’t there, having bouts of tunnel vision and massive headaches, and then galloped downhill fast from there like a spooked horse. The last surgeon he had seen had wished him well. Adios, amigo.

  Time yet to reach for the .38, do what had to be done? His right hand twitched. As if it belonged to someone else, he watched it make its way toward the handgun, toward sweet oblivion.

  He had four ex-harpies, two of them dead, thank Christ; the other two would happily dance on his grave, now they had sucked the fiscal life out of him. Well, they would get their wish soon enough. His first, the nastiest, had given him kids—a son and then, two years later, a daughter—whom he had rarely seen as children and never as adults. He had given them all the things money could buy: a decent roof over their heads, food on the table each night, then, later on, the best schools, ballet lessons, sports equipment, a never-ending parade of expenses, spent money he’d only ever see again in his dreams. Okay, so he was rarely home, and maybe he liked drinking a bit too much, a girl on the side or two or, one memorable time, three, but in his line of work that was par for the course. He was living in a pressure cooker, for Christ’s sake. Even the strongest-willed man—which, admittedly, he was not—needed to work off steam every now and again. And with wifey unresponsive and the kids always around, no way was he getting his rocks off at home.

  Speaking of which, every now and again he thought about putting the remnants of his talents for running lost people down to finding wifey. Never actually got up the will to do it. Or the nerve.

  Well, but he had reason. Four years ago, right around the time he had accepted the commission from Dey, he had decided to go see his son. Adam worked at a high-tech startup. What he actually did Jimmy neither understood nor cared to. In any event, one late morning, understanding the time-shifted hours high-tech firms kept, he had taken himself to the Meatpacking loft, hard by the High Line, that was the East Coast headquarters of the company where Adam worked.

  He stepped off the oversized freight elevator into a hive of worker bees. Exposed brick walls, polished concrete floor, high warehouse windows housed what seemed like endless rows of young men and women, staring into their workstation laptops—laptops so they could bring their work home with them, maybe. Backs bowed, eyes staring straight ahead, their fingers blurred over the keyboards. To Jimmy, the scene looked like something out of 1984, a book he had read in college. At the time it had made him laugh; it seemed George Orwell had created an absurd future. But standing in front of the reception desk, from behind which a seeming teenager stared at him with wide-apart sloe eyes, as if he had gotten off on the wrong floor, he understood that Orwell’s future had overrun his own.

  He asked for Adam.

  “Which one? Adam Howe or Adam Self?”

  “Self,” he spat out of his dry mouth. And when he gave his name, the receptionist said, “Oh wow. Are you and Adam related?”

  Jimmy felt his tongue stick to the roof of his mouth. “Distantly,” he managed to get out. She shrugged, not really listening, certainly not interested, and punched up Adam’s extension.

  Jimmy waited, feeling a numbness creep over him, the same numbness he’d experienced as a cop running down a dark alley in pursuit of an armed perp. Fear and excitement in equal measure.

  At length, a tall young man in chinos and a polo shirt emblazoned with the company’s logo appeared. Jimmy peered at him, trying to find traces of himself in the face. Instead, he saw his wife. Stronger genes, right?

  “Yes,” Adam said brightly. “How can I help you?”

  “Adam,” Jimmy said faintly, “I’m your father.”

  Clouds rolled in, dark and frosty as a winter night. “I don’t have a father,” Adam said.

  “I’m not dead,” Jimmy told him, voice stronger now, a soldier advancing through no-man’s-land, unsure who he would be facing when he reached the other side. “Your mother might have told you that but—”

  “What part of ‘I don’t have a father’ didn’t you understand,” his son said coldly.

  Before Jimmy could make the arguments he had rehearsed over and over or even open his mouth to reply, Adam had turned on his heel. Vanished back into the beehive of high-tech industry with an aggressive stride that was 100 percent his father’s.

  Now, watching a pigeon deposit its droppings on the sill of his single grime-coated window, Jimmy sighed. Was it any wonder he hadn’t sought out his daughter? His right hand touched the cold blued steel. He felt the pressure mounting in his chest.

  Still, he stared morosely into his smudgy computer screen. Habits died hardest. Every morning before he pulled up all the presorted news clippings, missing person reports, Amber Alerts, anomalous sightings, and mass transit surveillance footage available from every federal, state, and local law enforcement agency, he read the newspapers. He did this, frankly, not to keep up-to-date on world happenings, which he couldn’t care less about, but to scan the New York City scene, trolling for new customers. Affairs, pols caught in sex webs spun out of their arrogance and entitlement, criminal indictments of shady men looking for any avenue of escape, no matter how grimy or obscene. His meat and potatoes, in other words. Now, at the end of the line, stuck in the terminal depot, it didn’t matter. Like a dead frog jumping when an electrical pulse was put to it, he dutifully paged through the newspapers—the real ink-on-paper ones, not that electronic crap spewed out through the internet. He turned pages with a galvanic herky-jerky movement. On page 6, he paused. Why bother, he asked himself. He wasn’t going to find work this way; he hadn’t for nine months, three weeks, four days. He picked up the gun. The weight felt good in his hand, like coming home.

  And that was when he saw Helene Messer. His heartbeat came out of its flatliner as the soles of his shoes beat a tattoo on the sticky linoleum floor. Good Christ, he thought, could it really be? But didn’t Helene have light eyes?

  With mounting excitement, he put aside the .38, reached over, unlocked a drawer. For a moment, he did nothing, stared as if mesmerized at the shadowed contents. Then, with a convulsive gesture, he drew out the file, much smudged, grease stained, and dog-eared, that Dey had handed him a lifetime ago on the Brooklyn docks. Opened to her photo. Yup, light eyes. But still . . . she could be wearing colored contacts, and the resemblance was just too close for him to ignore. He felt like he was witnessing the resurrection and the light. Spooky.

  Helene Messer, the only case he’d never solved, the only lost person he’d never found. With his time running out, he could blow his brains out in his office turned waiting room, or he could get his ass in gear and solve one last case—find the only subject who had driven him to distraction even after Dey’s untimely demise. The case was no longer his; it had officially gone dormant. The money had long ago ceased to come his way. But it wasn’t dead. Inside his head, its heart smoldered; the subject lived and breathed. And m
ocked him.

  Helene Messer. If this young woman who was, according to page 6, having a steamy affair with the handsome but very married archaeologist at her side was, in fact, Helene Messer.

  Only one way to find out. He rose, his body and his chair groaning in unison; picked his way across the untidy space; hauled opened the protesting window. The alley outside smelled of stale Chinese food and urine. Moments later, holstering the police special, he left his relic of an office. He didn’t bother locking the door. Let the pigeons claim it as their own.

  SIXTEEN

  Six weeks or so before Bella disappeared, Maggie actually made an effort to deal with the living nightmare—her own heart of darkness—that had held her captive ever since Bella had been born. Breaking ranks with the dealer she had years ago found by hook and by crook, she took herself to a meds psychiatrist; she had no desire to rehash the effects her mother and father had had on her childhood, mainly because she didn’t understand childhood and so didn’t believe in it. And she had no intention of telling a stranger what she could barely admit to herself. No, she wanted someone to dispense pills that would make her better, though by this time she had no clear idea what “better” would feel like or if, in fact, she would find it palatable.

  In any event, she forced herself into a dress with a low, provocative neckline under the misguided idea that if the shrink was attracted to her, he would be more likely to give her what she wanted. Perhaps it worked, for precisely fifty minutes after she walked into his office, she emerged with a diagnosis of “alienated depression” for her medical insurance and, clutched tightly in her hand, prescriptions for a cocktail of Lexapro and Wellbutrin XL, which she was to try for three weeks before calling him. He said it would take that long for the compounds to reach full efficacy. She didn’t feel like waiting for that long, but oh well.