by Maria Semple
To give you a sense of where Elgie was emotionally during the weeks leading up to this, he vacillated between believing Bernadette would come traipsing through the door and worrying that something terrible had happened. As soon as he learned Bernadette had skedaddled to Antarctica, leaving them all worried sick, well, he was furious. I can tell you, I found it a little strange.
“You don’t get mad at someone for getting cancer,” I said. “She’s clearly sick.”
“This isn’t cancer,” he said. “She’s selfish and weak. Instead of facing reality, she escapes. She escaped from Los Angeles. She escaped into her Airstream. She escaped from any personal responsibility. What did she do when confronted with this fact? She literally escaped. And now I’m fucking blind.”
Audrey, he isn’t blind. My father was blind, so I don’t have patience for exaggeration. Elgie just has to wear tape over his left eyeglass lens until his cornea heals, which will be soon.
The H&H Allegra finally sailed into port. She’s smaller than any cruise vessel I’ve seen in Seattle, but a real gem, with fresh paint. The dockhands rolled up a set of stairs and the passengers started filing out and going through immigration. Elgie sent word that we were there to see Bernadette Fox. Passengers and more passengers streamed by, but no Bernadette.
Poor Elgie, he was like a dog whimpering by the door for his master to get home. “There she is…,” he’d say. Then “No, that’s not her. Oh, there she is!” Then all sad, “No, that’s not her.” The passengers slowed to a trickle, and still we waited.
After a long worrisome gap of no passengers at all, the ship’s captain and a few officers walked toward us in a tight pack, talking severely among themselves.
“She didn’t,” Elgie muttered.
“What?” I said.
“You’re fucking kidding me!” he said.
“What?” I said, as the captain and his gang entered the immigration hut.
“Mr. Branch,” the captain said in a thick German accent. “There seems to be a problem. We can’t find your wife.”
I’m not kidding, Audrey. Bernadette did it again! Somewhere along the way, she disappeared from the ship.
The captain was really shaken up, you could tell. He’d reported it to the president of the cruise line and promised a thorough investigation. Then it got truly surreal. As we stood there, absorbing this huge bomb that had just been dropped, the captain graciously excused himself. “The next group of passengers is due to arrive,” he said. “We must prepare the ship.”
The purser, a German woman with bleached-blond hair cut very short, handed us Bernadette’s passport with a sheepish smile, as if to say, I know it isn’t much, but it’s all we have.
“Wait a second—” Elgie cried. “Whose responsibility is this? Who’s in charge?”
The answer, it turns out, is nobody. When Bernadette boarded the ship, she left Argentina (it was stamped right there on her passport), so this wasn’t Argentina’s problem. But because Antarctica isn’t a country, and has no ruling government, Bernadette didn’t officially enter anyplace when she left Argentina.
“Can I search the boat?” Elgie pleaded. “Or her room?” But some Argentinean official insisted we couldn’t board because we didn’t have the proper paperwork. The captain then trudged back along the rain-swept dock, leaving us standing there, agape.
“The other passengers,” Elgie said, running to the street. But the last bus had already departed. Elgie then made a mad dash toward the ship. He didn’t get far because he ran into a pole, which knocked him to the ground. (His depth perception is hinky because of the one dark lens.) By that time, the Argentinean customs agent was standing over Elgie with a gun. My screaming had caused enough of a ruckus for the captain to at least turn around. The sight of Elgie flat on the slimy dock, groaning, “My wife, my wife,” with a gun pointed at him, and me jumping up and down, was enough for even a German to take pity. He came back and told us he’d have the ship searched and to wait.
As far as I was concerned, if Bernadette was across the ocean in Antarctica, Antarctica could keep her. Yes, you heard me. If I didn’t like that woman before, I really didn’t like her now that I was pregnant with her husband’s baby! The reason I can admit to such craven selfishness is because here’s how much I love Elgie: if he wanted to find his wife, then I wanted to find his wife. I swung into full admin mode.
I got in line behind the dozen crew members wanting to call home during their quick turnaround. When it was my turn, I miraculously got through to Agent Strang at the FBI. Elgie and I shared the earpiece as Agent Strang connected us to a friend of his, a retired maritime lawyer. We explained our dilemma, and he searched the Internet from his end.
Our silence made the waiting sailors more irate by the minute. Finally, the lawyer got back on and explained that the H&H Allegra was registered under a “flag of convenience” in Liberia. (I’ll save you a trip to the atlas: Liberia is an impoverished, war-torn country in West Africa.) So that was of no comfort or help. The lawyer told us to expect zero cooperation from Harmsen & Heath. In the past, this gentleman had represented families of persons who’d gone missing from cruise ships (who knew that’s an industry unto itself?), and it took him years and government subpoenas to obtain so much as a passenger list. The lawyer then explained that if a crime occurred in international waters, the government of the victim has jurisdiction. However, Antarctica is the one place on the planet that isn’t considered international waters, because it’s governed by something called the Antarctic Treaty. He said it looked like we had fallen down a legal rabbit hole. He suggested we try to get the Liberian government to help, or the U.S. government, but we’d have to first convince a judge that the “long-arm statute” applies. He didn’t explain what that was because he was late for squash.
Agent Strang was still on the phone, and he said something about us being “shit out of luck.” I think he had grown disgusted with Elgie and especially Bernadette, for the trouble they had caused. For some reason he was no fan of mine, either.
Time was ticking. Our only connection to Bernadette was the ship itself, which was leaving in an hour. The fleet of buses returned, this time with a new group of passengers who dismounted and started to wander around snapping pictures.
Thank God the captain kept his word and returned. The ship had been searched top to bottom with a carbon-detecting ray gun that checks for stowaways. But nobody who was not a crew member was on board. Elgie asked the captain if he knew of another ship that could take us (us!) to the places Bernadette visited, so we could search for her ourselves. But every ship with ice-breaking capabilities was booked years in advance. Adding to the sheer impossibility of heading out to find her, the Antarctic summer was ending, and the ice was closing up. So even the H&H Allegra, on this next trip, wouldn’t be going as deep into Antarctica as it had on the previous one.
Trust me when I say nothing could be done.
“Stop! Warten sie!” It was the purser, running toward us in her short skirt and ankle-high cowboy boots, waving a notepad. “This was found on the desk.” But there was no writing on it. “The pen is pressed down.”
Elgie took off his glasses and examined the paper. “It’s indented—” he said. “We can send it to a forensic specialist. Thank you! Thank you!” The pad of paper is now in the hands of a lab in Delaware that tests for such things, at huge expense, I might add.
They say hope for the best. But how can you, when the best is that Bernadette was left behind on an iceberg in Antarctica? It’s one thing to disappear from Seattle. It’s quite another to disappear in a land with no shelter and the coldest temperatures on the planet.
We returned to Seattle this morning in a state of shock. Elgie checked his voicemail and had a bunch of calls from the headmaster at Choate. It seems like something is now up with Bee. Elgie wouldn’t tell me what. He’s on a plane back east to see her, which seems a little sudden.
As for me, I’m trying to focus on the here and now: my pregnancy
and furniture for the new house. So many bedrooms, and a full bath for each! We’re waiting until I’m safely in my second trimester to tell Alexandra and Lincoln about the new baby. Bee knows nothing of the pregnancy or our trip to Ushuaia. Elgie wants to wait for the captain’s report before he sits her down. Bee is scientifically minded, so he thinks it would help to have some facts in front of her.
Anyway, I told you this one would be a doozy. Oh, I miss you, Audrey. Come home soon!
Soo-Lin
THURSDAY, JANUARY 20
Fax from Audrey Griffin
Soo-Lin,
Don’t worry about that email from Ushuaia. I’ve been in much worse shape than that! Don’t believe me? I was actually arrested for disturbing the peace one night at the Westin! The charges were dropped. But still, you have nothing on me when it comes to being run amok by emotions. And I didn’t even have the very legitimate excuse of pregnancy hormones. Congratulations! You, Elgie, and the baby are in my prayers.
That is very unsettling news about Bernadette. I don’t believe for a second that she froze to death in Antarctica. Please do send the captain’s report as soon as you receive it. I am quite anxious.
Love,
Audrey
TUESDAY, JANUARY 25
Fax from Soo-Lin
Dear Audrey,
Keep that last letter I wrote you, and frame it, for it is an artifact from a fleeting moment when I could call true happiness my own.
You know how I said Elgie was heading back east to see Bee? Which I found kind of strange? It turns out Elgie withdrew Bee from Choate. He just returned to Seattle with her in tow!
Remember what a sweet, quiet girl Bee always was? Well, the child is unrecognizable, I tell you, absolutely consumed with hatred. Elgie moved back into the Gate Avenue house to be with her. But Bee refuses to sleep under the same roof as him. The only place she wants to sleep is Bernadette’s Airstream. Saint Bernadette!
Elgie is so guilt-ridden, he’ll do anything Bee wants. She won’t go back to Galer Street? Fine! She refuses to step foot in my home for our weekly dinners? Fine!
You’d never guess the source of all this turmoil. It’s the most incredible “book” Bee wrote. She won’t let anybody see it, but from what little Elgie will tell me, it’s based on emails between you and me, Audrey, plus the FBI report, even handwritten notes between you and the blackberry specialist. I have no idea how Bee got her mitts on all of this. Not to point fingers, but the only person who could possibly have had access is Kyle. (The old Kyle.) Perhaps you can confront him during your next therapy session. I, for one, would like some answers. I’m even paranoid this fax will fall into enemy hands.
Elgie wants Bee to go to Lakeside in the fall. All I can say is she had better get over herself because there is no way we’re moving that Airstream over to the new house. Can you imagine? We’d be the hillbillies of Madison Park. “We”! As if Elgie would ever want to live together as a family!
I’m sure you think I’m being horribly selfish, but my life has been turned upside down, too! I gave up my job, I’m pregnant at age forty by a man whose life is in turmoil, plus I have terrible morning sickness. The only thing I can hold down is French toast. I’ve already gained eleven pounds, and I’m not even in my second trimester. When Bee finds out that Bernadette perished, not to mention about the baby, who knows what she’ll do?
Here’s a letter from the cruise company along with the captain’s report, plus the forensic analysis. And those gorgeous pictures I promised of the poppies from Ushuaia. I’m late for a VAV meeting, and boy do I need it.
Love,
Soo-Lin
*
FROM ELIJAH HARMSEN,
PRESIDENT OF HARMSEN &
HEATH ADVENTURE TRAVEL
Dear Mr. Branch,
Let me begin by expressing my sincerest condolences to you and Bee for the sudden disappearance of Bernadette. I can only imagine what a shock it must be to lose such an extraordinary woman.
Since Harmsen & Heath was founded by my great-grandfather in 1903, the safety of our passengers has always been our top priority. Indeed, for over a century we have enjoyed an unblemished record.
As promised, I have enclosed a report compiled by Captain Jürgen Altdorf. It is largely based on the electronic signature created by your wife’s magnetically coded ID card. It paints a reliable and detailed portrait of her shipboard life: daily disembarkations, purchases in the gift shop, bills from the ship’s lounge. Additionally, Captain Altdorf conducted extensive interviews per Harmsen & Heath protocol.
Your wife’s last recorded activity occurred on January 5. She went on the morning excursion, and returned safely to the ship, then made some significant charges at the bar. At that point, the H&H Allegra headed through the Gerlache Strait. It should be noted that the ocean was unusually turbulent during the next twenty-four hours. We were forced to cancel two planned disembarkations. Out of an abundance of caution, several announcements were made over the PA system, warning passengers not to go out on deck during such severe weather.
I believe the weather conditions and charges made at the Shackleton Lounge will give you a better understanding of your wife’s condition on the day she was last seen. While nobody can ever know what really happened, there are inevitable conclusions to be drawn.
While unpleasant to contemplate, the facts may provide a small measure of comfort to you and your daughter during this difficult grieving period.
Sincerely, and with my utmost condolences,
Elijah Harmsen
*
Captain’s report
THIS IS A REPORT FILED BY CAPTAIN JÜRGEN GEBHARD ALTDORF OF THE HARMSEN & HEATH ALLEGRA BASED ON PARTICULARS FROM ELECTRONIC SIGNATURE OF PASSENGER ID CARD #998322-01 ON 26 DECEMBER VOYAGE FROM USHUAIA, ARGENTINA, TO ANTARCTIC PENINSULA AND REGARDING THE VERIFIED PRESENCE OF MANIFEST PASSENGER #998322-01 BERNADETTE FOX U.S. CITIZEN, WASHINGTON STATE, SEATTLE.
26 DECEMBER 16:33 PASSENGER BOARDED HH ALLEGRA ASSIGNED CABIN 322. 26 DECEMBER 18:08 PASSENGER COLLECTED PHOTO ID CARD. 26 DECEMBER 18:30 PASSENGER MARKED PRESENT FOR MUSTER DRILL. 26 DECEMBER 20:05 GIFT SHOP CHARGE $433.09 USD FOR CLOTHING AND TOILETRIES.
27 DECEMBER AT SEA. 06:00 PASSENGER RECEIVED TREATMENT FROM SHIP’S DOCTOR FOR MOTION SICKNESS. 27 DECEMBER PASSENGER NOTIFIED HOUSEKEEPING NOT TO ENTER ROOM FOR CLEAN OR TURN-DOWN SERVICE UNTIL FURTHER NOTICE. HOUSEKEEPER RECALLS VARIOUS CONTACT WITH PASSENGER IN SHIP HALLWAY AND ENVIRONS. INQUIRY ABOUT CLEANING AND TURN-DOWN SERVICE. PASSENGER REFUSED ALL SERVICE. NO HOUSEKEEPING SERVICE LOGGED FOR DURATION OF JOURNEY.
30 DECEMBER 10:00 PASSENGER DISEMBARKED DECEPTION ISLAND, WHALERS BAY. 30 DECEMBER 12:30 BOARDED SHIP. 30 DECEMBER 13:47 PASSENGER LOGGED OUT NEPTUNE’S BELLOWS. 30 DECEMBER 19:41 BOARDED SHIP.
31 DECEMBER 08:00 PASSENGER DISEMBARKED 70.6S 52.4W WEDDELL SEA. 31 DECEMBER 13:23 LAST PASSENGER TO BOARD.
1 JANUARY 10:10 PASSENGER DISEMBARKS DEVIL ISLAND. PASSENGER REEMBARKS 16:31. 1 JANUARY 23:30 PASSENGER SIGNS FOR 2 PINK PENGUIN DRINKS AT SHACKLETON LOUNGE. 1 BOTTLE WINE CABERNET AT DINNER.
2 JANUARY 08:44 PASSENGER DISEMBARKS DANCO COAST. 2 JANUARY 18:33 REEMBARKS. 2 JANUARY 23:10 1 BOTTLE CABERNET WINE AT DINNER. PASSENGER SIGNS FOR 2 PINK PENGUIN DRINKS, LOUNGE.
3 JANUARY 08:10 DETAILLE ISLAND PASSENGER DISEMBARKS. 3 JANUARY 16:00 PASSENGER BOARDS SHIP. 3 JANUARY 19:36 PASSENGER SIGNS FOR 5 PINK PENGUINS, LOUNGE.
4 JANUARY 08:05 PASSENGER DISEMBARKS PETERMANN ISLAND. 4 JANUARY 11:39 EMBARKS. 4 JANUARY 13:44 PASSENGER SIGNS 1 BOTTLE CABERNET WINE LUNCH. 14:30 PASSENGER DISEMBARKS PORT LOCKROY. 18:30 REEMBARKS. 4 JANUARY 23:30 PASSENGER SIGNS 4 PINK PENGUINS, 4 WHISKEY SOURS, SHACKLETON LOUNGE.
5 JANUARY 08:12 PASSENGER DISEMBARKS NEKO HARBOR. 5 JANUARY 16:22 PASSENGER CARDS IN. 5 JANUARY 18:00 PASSENGER SIGNS 2 BOTTLES WINE, SHACKLETON LOUNGE.
6 JANUARY 05:30 SHIP UNABLE TO ANCHOR DUE TO OCEAN CONDITIONS. 6 JANUARY 08:33 ANNOUNCEMENT MADE, ROUGH SEAS. CONTINENTAL MEAL SERVICE ONLY. 6 JANUARY 18:00 ANNOUNCEMENT MADE, SHACKLETON LOUNGE
CLOSING.
15 JANUARY 17:00 PRELIMINARY ROOM CHARGES TOTALED. BILL PLACED IN PASSENGER’S DOOR.
16 JANUARY 16:30 PASSENGER MARKED NOT PRESENT FOR FINAL DISEMBARKATION BRIEFING. 16 JANUARY 19:00 PASSENGER DOES NOT SUBMIT PAYMENT FOR BAR BILL, GIFT SHOP BILL, AND CREW GRATUITY. 16 JANUARY 19:00 PASSENGER DOES NOT RESPOND TO REPEATED PAGES. 16 JANUARY 19:30 PASSENGER DOES NOT ANSWER REPEATED ATTEMPTS TO ENTER CABIN. 16 JANUARY 19:32 PURSER ENTERS CABIN. PASSENGER NOT PRESENT. 16 JANUARY 22:00 EXHAUSTIVE SEARCH OF SHIP DOES NOT LOCATE PASSENGER.
17 JANUARY 07:00 PASSENGERS INTERROGATED BY MYSELF AND PURSER. NO RELEVANT INFORMATION GAINED. PASSENGERS RELEASED. 17 JANUARY 10:00 CARBO THERMAL SCAN REVEALS NO UNACCOUNTED FOR PERSONS.
**PHOTO DOCUMENTATION REVEALS NO PHOTOS OF PASSENGER IN CRUISE PHOTOGRAPHER’S ARCHIVES. NO VIDEO OF PASSENGER FROM SHIP’S VIDEOGRAPHER.
*** SEARCH OF CABIN 322 REVEALS PAD OF PAPER WHICH HAS PER INSTRUCTIONS BEEN TURNED OVER TO USA EXPERT.
*
Report by Tonya Woods, forensic document examiner
Dear Mr. Branch,
Using an Electro-Static Detection Apparatus (ESDA), we analyzed the second-page writing present on several sheets of stationery with the HARMSEN & HEATH ALLEGRA letterhead. Due to the three distinct depths of indented writing, it is highly probable that a three-page letter was written. It is signed, “Love, Mom.” This strongly indicates to us that it is a letter written from a mother to a child. The most frequently repeated words are “Audrey Griffin,” which appear to have been written at least six times. While we are unable to piece together the whole letter, we are somewhat confident that the letter contains the following phrases:
“Audrey Griffin is the devil.”
“Audrey Griffin is an angel.”
“Romeo, Romeo.”
“I am a Christian.”
“Audrey knows.”
Please let me know if I can be of further assistance.