Two Girls Down

by Louisa Luna

The other two were coming at her fast, one taller than the other, both scrawny, and Vega thought she could fight one but not two, especially if they did that thing that boys were so fond of, where one held your arms back and the other took shots.

  And then there was the interest of time. So she pulled the Springfield from her holster and waved it at them casually.

  “Go away,” she said.

  They both stopped where they stood. The tall one’s jaw fell open like a puppet without a hand, but the short one was galvanized, high off the possibility of violence.

  “I’m-a call the cops on you and your busted-ass face, bitch!” he said.

  They lingered for a second, the short one rattling off imaginative threats punctuated with “cunt” and “bitch,” and didn’t seem to be wrapping it up.

  “Go away!” she shouted, this time aiming the Springfield at the short one’s chest, and he finally shut up.

  They both ran out, the front door flying open, letting in the cold and the light for a second.

  Vega put her gun away. She jumped the bar, swung her legs around, and knocked over a few mugs. Pastor was trying to stand, still stunned, a thin line of blood trickling from his eyebrow. He was mostly moaning.

  The old man on the other side of the bar had not moved, still drank his beer.

  “You got something to say, Papi?” she said.

  He put his mug down, pinched his upper lip to wipe the foam, and pointed at her.

  “You remind me of my late wife,” he said thoughtfully.

  Vega was too distracted to laugh, so she nodded. Then she looked back down at Pastor, who was sitting up with his knees bent and his head down. He asked her to turn off the taps, so she did. One by one the streams stopped, reminded her of ceiling leaks getting plugged. Then she sat on her heels next to Pastor, who thanked her before he told her everything he knew.

  17

  Cap sat with Jamie in Junior’s office. As she listened to him, ruddy splotches appeared on her cheeks and forehead, tears spilling loosely from her sealed eyes. She rubbed them with her fingertips.

  “Jamie, we’re getting all the security video we can and canvassing the strip mall near the ballet studio,” Cap said. “Do you remember anyone who stood out? A delivery person or a salesman maybe?”

  “No, it was just a strip mall, and it was just her ballet class. I don’t remember a delivery guy,” whispered Jamie, coughing. She smacked her forehead with her palm gently. “Part of me feels like I got Bailey; there’s no way I’m gonna get Kylie too, right?—that’s just too much luck.”

  Cap knew he should speak, but he couldn’t think of anything that didn’t sound patronizing.

  “I just,” Jamie started, “I just think I could handle anything….I think I could live with just Bailey if I had to, I just, I just…” She kept braking on the “just.” No new tears were coming; her eyes were small and dry, her face wet like a stone. “I just couldn’t handle it if they cut her up. You know, her body parts. I’ve thought about this a lot. Then I’d do the overdose right. Bailey could live with my folks.”

  She touched her hair dreamily, still gazing past Cap as she thought about it. Cap stood up and saw confetti in the corners of his eyes, held the edge of the table with one hand, queasy.

  “Wait here. I’ll be right back,” he said.

  Jamie nodded, still spacey.

  Cap jogged out of the office, down one floor to the break room, fed dollars into the vending machine. Two packs of peanut M&M’s dropped to the tray, and Cap grabbed them and ran back upstairs to Jamie. She was still staring blankly ahead, resting her head on her fists, stacked on top of each other.

  “Here,” said Cap, setting the candy on the desk in front of her.

  She raised her head and looked at the yellow bag like it was a rock from the moon.

  “Have you eaten any solid food yet?” Cap said, ripping open his own bag.

  “Yeah, I had some toast and soup.”

  “Try a couple,” he said. “They’ll give you a little energy.”

  He tilted his head back and poured some of the candy into his mouth and started crunching. Then the syrupy sweetness of mass-produced chocolate hit him, and he accidentally made a little grunting noise.

  “You really like M&M’s,” said Jamie, opening her bag with two hands.

  “The cheap sugar’s the only thing that keeps me going when I’m this tired,” he said. “Might help you too.”

  “Kylie doesn’t love anything like she loves sugar,” she said. “I tell people that and they’re all, duh, she’s a kid, but it’s different. I have two kids, and Bailey loves ice cream and cake and Twizzlers as much as the next, but Kylie…”

  She paused, shook her head, stared at the bag of candy in her hand.

  “Go on,” said Cap.

  “I still have to stop her from sucking on ketchup packets when we get hot dogs. She puts them in her pocket. It’s like a drug problem.”

  She set the bag down on Junior’s desk.

  “Do you think…they actually lured her with candy, like the stuff they used to tell us when we were kids?”

  Cap swallowed and the candy went down rough—a collection of unchewed peanuts.

  “This sounds a little more organized than that,” he said. “Which is good for us actually. Random’s usually harder to figure out.”

  Jamie nodded. She picked out one M&M, bright unreal blue, and ate it. She closed her eyes and held it in her mouth for a good long time.

  —

  In the big blue conference room, Vega connected her laptop to a projector, and the image, split into four, appeared on the beige screen: the parking lot of the strip mall on Church Street; the western entrance where the ballet studio was visible, in between a shoe store and a juice bar; the eastern entrance; and the rear parking lot for trucks making deliveries.

  The Fed and Traynor stood and stared, watching footage in black-and-white, people coming and going.

  “How’d your guy get this so quickly?” said the Fed.

  “He has a talent,” said Vega.

  “Maybe he should come work for us,” said the Fed, glancing back at his boss, who sat and drew delicate slashes with his fingertip on his tablet.

  “He’s an independent contractor,” said Vega. “How far you want to go back—six months?”

  “Six months?” said Cap. “Come on.”

  “Let’s start with one,” said Traynor. “Emerson?”

  Em sat near the head of the table chugging an energy drink, surrounded by three officers still in their blues from their previous shifts.

  “Yes, sir, we’ll each take a screen. Looking for a white male who shows up more than once, probably near or around the ballet studio.”

  “Anything that stands out, anyone who looks familiar,” said Cap.

  “The ballet instructor remember anything?” said Traynor, nodding to the Fed.

  “We talked to her for about an hour,” said the Fed. “There’s a guy who works for Moreland—came in to measure mirrors a while back. She said she didn’t like the way he looked at her and some of the older girls.”

  “Was Kylie one of the older girls?” said Cap.

  “No. Oldest was twelve. But that may not make a material difference to a pedophile,” said the Fed. “Our man at Moreland is going through his records, trying to find the guy he sent to measure their mirrors—he’ll send it as soon as he has it.”

  “Does he need someone to help him along?” said Junior, annoyed.

  “I’m sure he’s capable, Captain,” said Traynor.

  “There’s only nominal information in the McKenna and Cahill files about the ballet classes, so we should get the parents in here.”

  “The McKennas are on their way now. Anything from neighboring businesses?” asked Traynor.

  The Fed shook his head.

  “Everyone’s got a story. You ask people enough questions, they start to think the UPS guy looks suspicious.”

  “Vega?” said Traynor.

 
“Pastor was with Marsh at Alex Chaney’s the day Kylie was there. He didn’t realize it was Kylie—in his memory she only stood out because she was a little girl in a roomful of dopers. He thought she was Chaney’s kid sister or something,” she said, glancing at the video feed. “He remembers she told Marsh she wanted to be a movie star. And he asked her how old she was and where she went to school.”

  “So he gives her his number?” said Cap. “That doesn’t seem plausible.”

  Vega shrugged.

  “Who cares,” she said softly, as if it were just the two of them in the room. “He knew enough about her to find her. Name, school. Denville.”

  “We’ve got people canvassing the strip mall on Church,” said Traynor, charting maps in his head. “Detectives and lieutenants calling the parents of the kids in the ballet class. Let’s get prepared for the mirror man.”

  “We can do the interview,” said Vega.

  “No,” said Traynor definitively.

  Vega stared at him, surprised, and Cap stiffened up, ready to fight. Really, Chief? she thought. Now we’re taking our dicks out?

  Traynor swabbed at the air with his hands like they were windshield wipers, erasing it.

  “It’ll take some time to get him IDed and in the house. Let’s put it to use. Sydney McKenna’s parents should be here soon. Cap, Vega—why don’t one of you talk to them?” he said.

  “What about Ashley Cahill’s parents?” said Cap.

  “They’re divorced. Father lives in Philly, but the mother still lives in Lebanon, right outside, so we’ll talk to her first and then if we need to, go to the father. I want all of this face-to-face.”

  Vega got it. People thought more when you were in the room with them. They had better memories, consciences. And you could see their eyes.

  Traynor continued: “Apparently Mom can’t leave the house, says she’s ill. Didn’t sound so stable when I spoke with her.”

  Vega remembered lying in her bed in junior high and high school, falling asleep listening to Eminem or Black Flag on headphones, and then waking up long after the CD ended. How she’d hear her mother making her rounds around the house, checking doors and windows, murmuring the mantra of her neuroses: “Safe, safe, safe.”

  “I’ll go, I’ll see Ashley Cahill’s mother,” she said then, so firm, so assured, you’d think she’d made the decision years ago.

  —

  Cap’s phone hummed and jumped with texts on the desk in front of him. He was in Traynor’s office alone. Messages were stacking up, flashing at the top of the screen from people he knew and sort of knew, friends he hadn’t talked to in a few years, and also his parents in Florida, his cousins, of course Nell, and even one from Jules, who usually only contacted him about logistics.

  The texts said things like this:

  “Buddy you are on CNN!!!”

  “I just saw you on the news you look old”

  “Please call me dad is so proud he says xoxo mom”

  “U and Alice are on every network! Any closer to finding kylie?…”

  “Cap, be careful.”

  That last one was from Jules, and Cap smiled at her use of punctuation, even in a text. Formal and academic, except with his name. When they’d been married she called him Max, but after the split, on the rare days she actually used his name to address him, he was Cap. It sounded casual enough coming from anyone else, and from her it meant exactly that. She was anyone else now. Still, he stared at her text and felt something resembling joy.

  He wrote back a restrained “Trying. Thx for checking in.”

  Then he wrote to Nell, “Don’t stay up too lateral,” the autocorrect button popping up.

  “I wolfs :)” came back.

  Then the door opened, and it was Junior, with a couple behind him.

  “Max Caplan, Toby and Erica McKenna.”

  Cap shook their hands. They were both young and attractive, tan and brunette. The man, Toby, was tall with a full head of thick hair and glasses, his wife petite with a perfectly oval face. They all sat in a small circle of chairs Cap had arranged because he hadn’t felt comfortable sitting behind the chief’s desk.

  “Thank you for coming,” said Cap. “Especially so late.”

  “Happy to do it,” said Toby McKenna, his voice deep.

  With the small circle frames on his glasses, Cap thought he was a twin for Clark Kent.

  “I realize this can’t be easy.”

  Neither responded to that. Both smiled politely, looked at their hands and each other. Even unnerved, their faces retained their clean beauty.

  There were plenty of young parents in and around Denville—Cap found it to be a function of the suburbs. People had bigger houses, more rooms than they did in cities, so they filled them up with kids. This was not what he had experienced growing up in Sheepshead Bay. When Cap was four or five and begged his mother for a little brother, she’d said, “Where we gonna put him, Maxie? The bathtub?” He grew up with pots and pans stacked on top of one another in cupboards that could never quite close, the fan of handles jutting from the doors. Later he found out his mother’d had her tubes tied when he was a year old. We don’t have the money, and he’s just about perfect, his mother had said to his father. Why tempt fate?

  But around here, you had kids and you had them young and you had a few. Even knowing that, though, Cap thought the McKennas looked awfully young to have an oldest child who was twelve years old. He put their age at about thirty, so of course it was possible that they’d had kids in high school or right after, but there was something off-center about them; he couldn’t quite pin it down.

  He remembered from the file that Toby McKenna had been driving for a livery car service in Harrisburg at the time of the abduction. But Cap didn’t read that now. Not from the brown leather shoes with a black rubber outsole, tan blazer, Clark Kent build, and glasses with designer frames.

  “Mr. McKenna, can I ask, are you still working for the black car service—what was the name again?” he said.

  “No, not Elite Fleet, not anymore,” said McKenna, adjusting his glasses shyly, humbly dapper, Cap couldn’t help but think. “We opened, me and Erica were able to open our own service a year ago in Middletown—a few cars, a few drivers. Catering to high-end clients.”

  He said it quickly, made Cap think it was something he didn’t want to dwell on.

  “I see,” Cap said, smiling, friendly. “Going well I hope? Always tricky with a small business. Believe me, I know.”

  “Yes, it’s going okay,” said McKenna, quick again.

  “We’ve been very lucky,” added Erica McKenna. “Right place at the right time.”

  She smiled then, and Cap saw a twinge cross her face. For a moment it looked as if she might cry.

  “I’m pleased to hear it,” Cap said. “If anyone deserves it, it’s you folks.”

  They both nodded, looked down and away. Shutting the door on pain or hiding something. Or both.

  “So,” Cap said. “I’ll get right to it here so you can go back to your lives and your family.”

  He leaned forward and rested his forearms on his knees, clasping his hands to show them: this is a conversation, not an interrogation.

  “We have reason to believe that Kylie Brandt’s kidnapper had some kind of connection to her through her ballet class initially. Ashley Cahill in Lebanon also took ballet, and I understand Sydney did as well, that right?”

  “Yes,” said Erica. Her husband nodded.

  “I guess what we just need to know here is if you remember anything strange surrounding the ballet class in particular. Did you take her to ballet generally, Mrs. McKenna?”

  “Yes,” said Erica again.

  “Great. Let’s start with the teacher—her name was in the file.” Cap reached behind them and grabbed the folder, opened it. “Nancy Topper?”

  “Miss Nancy, they called her, all the girls.”

  “Miss Nancy,” repeated Cap. “Anything seem off with her? Anything stand out?”

&
nbsp; “No, I don’t think so,” said Erica, glancing at McKenna. “Syd liked her well enough.”

  “Okay,” said Cap. “Now can you recall anyone, anything that didn’t seem right at the class, or maybe where the class took place? At the”—he flipped through the pages of the file, searching for the name—“Junior Tiptoes Dance Studio?”

  Erica shook her head, appeared confused.

  “I’m sorry, like what?”

  “Anything,” said Cap. Still they both looked at him with blank faces. “I apologize, I’ll be a little more specific. Do you remember anyone else, besides Miss Nancy, who was in and out of the studio and may have seen Sydney? A deliveryman, a salesman, someone who worked in a nearby business?”

  Erica gripped the small purple handbag in her lap.

  “No,” she said, sounding genuinely sad. “I’m sorry, I just don’t remember anyone like that.”

  “The police asked us all these kinds of questions when she first disappeared,” added McKenna. “We made lists of all the people—all the parents of the other kids, names and numbers.”

  “I understand,” said Cap, holding his hands up. “And again, I’m sorry to have to rehash this. It’s just that we can’t take anything as a coincidence right now, and three little girls who all took ballet—and the same equipment distributor serviced all three ballet studios—it’s something we noticed.”

  Cap flipped through the pages in the folder and didn’t speak for a minute. He wanted to see if the McKennas might offer up anything else without his prompting. The thing about it was, he believed what they were saying, both of them, but he could not shake the feeling of a bad tooth decaying in the gums.

  That’s when he saw the picture. It was a Christmas card showing the whole family—a glossy green strip with all of their smiling faces, the girls in green dresses, the boy made to wear a sweater vest, and McKenna and Erica, both at least twenty or thirty pounds heavier. Their tragedy explained the weight loss easily, but their faces were different too, Erica’s nose now smaller and turned up at the end while in the picture it was longer and thicker. McKenna’s eyes now wide without a wrinkle, while for that Christmas, tired and furrowed after undoubtedly driving a third-shift hack. In Cap’s experience it was seldom that parents looked better and healthier after losing a child, yet here the McKennas were, right in front of him, two years after their eight-year-old had vanished, looking like superheroes on their off day.