by J. S. Volpe
“Let me guess,” he said. “You’re here to tell me I need new double-hung vinyl replacement windows.”
“We—” Cynthia spluttered. “We were—we just—” She scowled at herself, then balled her fists and lifted her chin and said, “Do you know where my sister is?”
Mr. May grunted.
“Why do you think I would know where your sister is?” he asked. Cynthia opened her mouth to respond, but before she could say anything, he held up a finger and said, “Wait, let me see if I can work out your reasoning.” He began to pace back and forth as he spoke, his cane moving at his side in short, swift arcs. He looked like a geriatric lawyer delivering a closing argument. “The shoe and the signs of activity in the clearing point to her being on my property last night, yes? And more importantly, I’m weird and old. The strange elderly hermit who never hangs around at the local coffee shop, or wherever folks gather these days. I must be antisocial and thus a horrible person, right? Never mind that I can barely walk.”
Cynthia blushed. “It’s more than that,” she protested. “What about your obsession with my family?”
Mr. May looked baffled. “My what?”
“I remember you always pumping me for information when I was a little girl, asking all kinds of nosey questions about my family and what we were up to.”
He stared at her with surprise, mouth wide, eyes blinking. Then he emitted a small, soft laugh and nodded. “I see. Psychological relativity at work.”
“What, you’re saying you don’t have some kind of interest in my family? That I’m only misinterpreting something?”
“No, I do have an interest in the Crow family. But my interest is not quite as sinister as you seem to think.” He fixed his gaze on Calvin. “You, however, are not a Crow.”
“Um, I’m Calvin. I’m a Beckerman.”
Mr. May nodded. “It’s nice to, ah, to meet you.”
“Likewise.”
“Look, do you or don’t you know anything about my sister’s disappearance?” Cynthia said to Mr. May.
“I might know something, but only in an indirect and thoroughly innocent way. Or rather, I might suspect something.” He glanced down at his bent, frail body, then sighed. “If I were younger, I would be out there looking for her myself. I have experience with, ah, investigatory matters. But I find myself rather lacking in mobility these days.”
“What, were you some kind of detective or something?” Calvin asked.
Mr. May laughed. “No. Nothing like that.” He regarded the duo with narrow, appraisive eyes a moment. Then he stepped back and motioned them forward. “For goodness’ sake, step out of those bushes. You’ll wind up with bugs in your shoes.”
They did so, wriggling out a narrow gap between two bushes, then spent a moment shaking the tiny leaves from their clothes.
Mr. May watched all this with a small smile.
“The intrepid investigators,” he said softly.
Calvin glanced up at him sharply, thinking he was making fun of them. But instead Mr. May looked thoughtful, almost wistful. His eyes were distant as if he were remembering something.
“How did you spot us anyway?” Cynthia asked. “I mean, I thought we were being pretty careful.”
“Alas, it was merely bad luck on your part. I happened to be out in the woods, taking a look at the Stone Pillar.”
“The pillar?” Calvin said. The Stone Pillar was an eight-foot-tall column of limestone that jutted straight up out of the earth in the woods a quarter mile due north of the May house. It was three feet thick at its base but tapered to a mere foot across at the top. Most people believed it was either a marker erected by the Indians to designate an important spot or just geological detritus plopped down in an unusual position by the receding glacier. Calvin preferred to imagine it was the last surviving relic of some ancient, long-forgotten civilization.
“Was something going on there?” Calvin asked.
“I assume you know about the burn in the clearing?” Mr. May said.
“Yeah,” said Cynthia. “The police still don’t know what caused it.”
“I imagine they don’t. Anyway, I thought I’d check a few other significant sites around the woods and see if they showed any changes in condition, as well.”
“Why do you think other sites would be…changed or whatever?”
Mr. May hesitated, staring at them in silence for a moment as if he were trying to make up his mind about something. Then he turned and waved a hand at the woods.
“This area has a curious history,” he said.
“It does?” Calvin said.
Mr. May didn’t respond. Instead he fixed his gaze on Cynthia. “Do you know much about your family’s history?”
She raised her eyebrows, surprised by the question. “Um…a little. I don’t know. About what, exactly?”
“Spirit Cave, for instance?”
“What about it?”
“Do you know why it’s called Spirit Cave? Do you know how it got sealed up the way it is now?”
“I remember my dad mentioning something about how a long time ago there were, like, caverns back there or something, and someone dynamited it shut.”
Mr. May goggled at her. “That’s it?”
“Um…” Cynthia shifted uneasily, looking like a pupil caught unprepared for a sudden pop quiz. She glanced at Calvin, who shrugged. “Yeah?”
Mr. May shook his head. “It was dynamited shut by my great-grandfather, Turner May, and your great-great-great-grandfather, Hamilton Crow, in 1871.”
“Oh!”
“And as for why they did it…” He checked his wristwatch. “Well, that’s a rather long story. I assume you are investigating Emily’s disappearance in a purely unofficial capacity?”
They nodded.
“And now that you have ruled me out as a suspect (I hope), do you intend to continue your investigation?”
Calvin and Cynthia glanced at each other. Calvin saw in her eyes the same conclusions he himself had reached. Though they hadn’t ruled out Mr. May in a legal, evidential sense, this brief conversation with him had convinced them he had nothing to do with Emily’s disappearance. Instead of the creepy nutjob they had been expecting, they had found a likeable, intelligent man sadly hindered by a failing body. Unfortunately, with Mr. May out of the running, they had no other suspects or ideas about where to look for one.
“We want to continue the investigation,” Cynthia said. “Or, well, I do—”
“I do too,” Calvin interjected.
“But…” Cynthia shrugged.
Mr. May nodded. “You don’t know how to proceed from here, eh? Well, let me tell you, I want to find Emily as much as you do. Obviously I cannot trot about hither and yon as I once did, but you two can. And with a whole lifetime of investigatory experience behind me, I can help guide you.”
“But what did you investigate?” Calvin asked.
Cynthia’s phone jangled in her pocket.
“Oh, crap,” she groaned as she dug it out of her jeans. “I bet I know who that is. They must have finally noticed I wasn’t in my room, after all.”
“You didn’t tell them where you went?” Calvin said.
“They wouldn’t have let me go. My mom…” She shook her head, then took a deep breath and answered the phone.
“Hi, I—”
The outraged voice that blasted from the phone was so loud Calvin and Mr. May could hear it a few feet away, though they couldn’t quite make out the words. Cynthia winced and moved the phone a few inches from her ear.
“Mom, I just took a walk,” Cynthia said the moment there was a lull in the torrent of angry words. “I wanted to—” More angry words. “Yeah, I know, I just—” More angry words. “Mom, I—” More angry words, then sudden total silence. Cynthia put the phone away, then gave Calvin and Mr. May a sheepish look.
“I gotta go,” she said. “I don’t think I’ll be able to get away again today.”
“What about tomorrow?” Mr. May said. “Could
you come by here tomorrow?”
“Maybe. Probably. I’m sure I can figure something out.”
“And you?” Mr. May said, turning to Calvin. “Will you be free tomorrow?”
“Sure,” Calvin said. “It’s Saturday. I’ve got all day free.”
“Good. Then why don’t both of you come by here as early as you can. We’ll need lots of time. There’s a lot I need to tell you.”
“About what?” Cynthia asked.
“About history. About the woods. About your family and mine. About…other things. I can’t say for certain that all of it will be relevant to whatever has happened to your sister, but it might be. And then we can figure out how to proceed with the investigation.”
Calvin eyed him with wonder. “What is it you investigated anyway?”
Mr. May smiled. “You’ll find out all about it tomorrow.”
Chapter 7
Donovan Crow and Violet O’Donohue
1
Donovan Crow sat on the edge of his bed and stared at Emily’s face on the flier that one of the cops had left on the kitchen table this afternoon. It was the standard missing child flier, with a photo, the vital stats, the reward being offered ($10,000 at last report), and the number to call if you had any info. Donovan had seen thousands of these things before, on TV and the Internet and the wall at the post office. The difference was, this one showed someone he knew and loved. This one showed his sister.
He set the flier aside before it made him start crying again. He had blubbered more than enough already. The flier was warped and crinkled from his teardrops.
He took a drag on the Marlboro between his lips, then gagged at the acrid burnt taste that filled his mouth. His plucked the cigarette from his mouth and looked at it. It had burned down to the filter while he had been gazing at the flier. Shaking his head, he mashed it out in the ashtray on his bedside table. Then he lit another one.
Normally he was more careful about smoking in his room. Normally he would have the window open and a stick of incense burning to mask the smell, but right now no one cared. No one was going to come up here and check on him. Everyone was lost in their own private hell. At last check, Mom was asleep on the living room couch, having exhausted herself bitching out Cynthia after Cyn had gotten back from wherever the fuck she had gone; Cynthia sat in the armchair nearby watching TV shows she hated, glued there by a sense of guilt and duty; and Dad had retired to his workroom in the basement, ostensibly to do a little therapeutic woodworking, but more likely to get quietly drunk.
And then there was Emily. Wherever she was.
He felt the tears returning. He clenched his teeth and scrunched up his face against them, but this time he couldn’t hold them back. They built up in his eyes, ready to spill…
There was a tap-tap-tap at the window.
He looked up, a relieved and grateful smile spreading across his face even though the curtain was drawn and he couldn’t see who it was. There was only one person who would be tapping at his window at this hour. Exactly the person he wanted and needed to see.
He set his cigarette in the ashtray, knuckled the dampness from his eyes, then got up and opened the curtain. As expected, it was Violet O’Donohue, his kinda-sorta girlfriend (sometimes she seemed cool with them being a couple; other times she insisted they were nothing more than BFWBs).
Donovan raised the sash, and Violet climbed inside. Without a word, she threw her arms around him and gave him a rib-cracking hug. He clutched her petite figure close, the underside of his chin against the top of her head. There were a few bits of leaves clinging to her long, dark-brown hair, no doubt from the oak tree she had climbed to reach the porch roof and thence his window. He absently picked them off.
“Dude, I am so sorry about everything,” she said. Then she drew back and looked him in the face, her green eyes narrowing to slits. “What we gotta do now is get your sis back, then find the motherfucker responsible and beat the shit out of him with pillowcases filled with cans of Coke.”
“Yeah,” he said with a small smile. It was weird: Violet was the craziest person he knew, but now, amid the sea of bad craziness his life had become, she was his constant, his island of sanity and comforting familiarity.
“Here,” she said, digging into the pocket of her jeans. She pulled out a baggie full of pot. “Deb gave me this to give to you. She said you’d probably need it.”
“Yeah.” He did need it. He had finished off his last batch of weed two days ago. Which turned out to be a good thing. Otherwise the cops would have found it when they were searching the house. “Tell Deb thanks. You know, maybe I should start saving the seeds. We could grow some in the woods somewhere. It’s the perfect place.” He frowned. “Well, usually.” The tears returned. He sat down on the edge of the bed, his head lowered. “Shit.”
Violet sat next to him and put an arm around him.
“Why don’t you tell me everything that’s happened,” she said. “All I got at school was a lot of rumors and spin and official bullshit. Besides, talking’s supposed to help in situations like this, right? So just, like, start at the beginning.”
After heaving a long, shaky sigh, he did.
2
“So, wait,” Violet said after Donovan had finished, “you’re saying they think she met this guy in the park yesterday afternoon?”
“Well, they don’t know for sure,” Donovan said. “All Emily told Anna West was that she talked to the guy sometime yesterday. She didn’t say where. But, see, the only places she went yesterday were school and the park. She was around other people the whole time she was at school—her friends, her teacher, the other kids—so it’s really unlikely she could’ve talked to some guy without anyone noticing. But at the park…” He shrugged. “I mean, she goes up there and just jumps rope in that corner near the rose bushes. She was there for, like, nearly an hour that day. Anybody could’ve talked to her.”
“Dude, no, the thing is, I was in the park yesterday afternoon. Only for, like, fifteen or twenty minutes, but still…”
“You what?”
“Yeah! Remember I was comin’ over here? I stopped off at the park on my way over to sort of hang out a little, have a smoke, watch the funny people on display.”
“Did you see Emily?”
“Uh-uh. I was right along the edge of the woods about where the walking paths end, so the corner where she was was way out of sight. But I saw other people. I even recognized some of them. One of them might be the person responsible.”
“Why the fuck haven’t you called the cops about this?”
“Cuz I didn’t fucking know they wanted to know about it.”
“But it’s been all over the news. The cops’ve been urging anyone in the park yesterday afternoon to come forward ever since late this morning. Didn’t they announce it in school?”
“Dude, I skipped school today. And I have better things to do with my free time than sit on my ass watching fucking television or listening to the radio or surfing gay-ass websites like my geektard sister Lauren.”
“You have to tell the police about this.”
“Oh, come on. Me and cops aren’t exactly on speaking terms. You know that.”
“Violet.” He grabbed her arm, his jaw set, his usual quiet insouciance replaced by a cold, icy firmness that made Violet blink at him in surprise.
“All right, all right,” she muttered. “Do the cops have a phone number?”
“Of course they do!”
“Well, how the fuck would I know? I never call ‘em.”
“There’s a tip-line number.” He grabbed the flier and showed her the number at the bottom.
Violet sighed. “All right. Fuck. Let’s do it. Where’s your phone?”
He got out his phone and handed it to her. “What happened to your phone?”
“I kinda lost it.”
“Again? Your dad’s gonna be pissed.”
“Yeah, yeah. When is he ever not pissed?”
She dialed the number of the
police tip-line. The instant the other end was picked up, she started talking as fast as an auctioneer: “Yeah, hi, look, I was in the park yesterday, when you guys’re asking about, and I can tell you some of the people who were there. There were a bunch of kids playing softball down on the baseball diamond. And then there were these two thirty-something chicks chatting with each other by the big rosebushes the city maintenance crews’re too fucking lazy to trim. One of the chicks was black and the other was white, and they both had babies in strollers. I think you can rule the babies out as suspects. And maybe the chicks, too, but you never know. Also, there were a couple of people whose names I know. And they were both adult men, which means they are totally the most likely suspects, because we all know the depths of douchiness grown men are capable of. One of them was this dude named Roger Grey, who’s got, like, totally nerdy, parted-on-the-side light brown hair and glasses. He looks like the kinda guy who probably hasn’t gotten laid in, like, ever. The other one was Theodore Walsh, that fat-ass motherfucker who runs the antique store in the strip mall on Horst Road. That guy is a total fucking wanktard, and you really oughtta look into him first. My guess is, he’s the one you want. Did you get all that? Cuz I ain’t—” She frowned. “My what? My name? My name is Susan Hubbard. Bye, now.” She hung up and handed the phone back to Donovan.
“Thank you,” he said.
“You’re welcome.” She watched him put the phone back in his pocket, then shook her head. “You know, the cops aren’t gonna do shit.”
“They’re doing everything they can—”
“Aha!” She thrust out a finger like a debater about to make a winning point. “The key there is ‘everything they can’! They’re, like, hampered by too many bullshit rules. I mean, think about it: O.J. walked; Casey fucking Anthony walked; Jack the Ripper never even got caught.”
“That was another country and, like, a thousand years ago.”
“Cops’re the same everywhere. They’re either a bunch of power-tripping dickwads, or they’re all bound up by shitloads of bureaucratic rules. The sad fact is, most crimes never even get solved. And you know why? Rules! That’s why! But me? I don’t follow nobody’s rules but mine. I think we oughtta investigate this shit ourselves. Cuz, I mean, cops need warrants and crap to look through someone’s house. Me? I don’t need a fucking warrant. I’ll just bust in when no one’s home. Boom. Job done.”