The basement was his destination, there was no sense stalling. He found the door and swiped at the light switch and the bottom of the stairs appeared. As he descended, the air grew cooler, laden with the cavelike smell of mold. The walls were stone and mortar, the floor concrete, painted battleship gray. A bulbous and chromed old fridge stood in the near corner, and beside the brick chimney, attached to it by shiny galvanized ductwork, a hot water heater and modern two-stage furnace. On the front panel was the number of a good local HVAC contractor; from a chain depended a frosted plastic sleeve containing its service records. He was surprised to find it was fitted with central air—a luxury his mother protested she didn’t need.
Central air meant at least 100 amp service, which he confirmed at the breaker box. He did a quick check of the pipes above him in the joists and found a typical mix of copper and PVC, proof of recent work. The mouse baits didn’t bother him (he’d just chuck them) and the sump pump in the far corner was standard for homes of the era. He went upstairs thinking he might have lowballed himself on the price.
He moved from room to room, taking time to get the best pictures, given the gray light. In the master bath there were plastic grip bars beside the toilet and in the shower (he’d remove them before he showed the house), and the door in the hall bath was scratched badly below the knob by a dog that wanted out, but all in all the place was solid.
As much as he looked for one, there was no catch. He’d lucked out. It happened. There was no logic to it, and no irony, only this odd timing that kept him from being happy, or from showing the excitement he felt—the same charge he got when he was new to the game, the poker player’s thrill at picking up his cards and fanning out a pat hand.
In the midst of this premature celebration, he almost forgot the garage. It hadn’t been redone, and as he approached it, key in hand, he feared it would be stuffed with all the junk from the house. The sectioned door creaked up, resisting him, to reveal a pair of dented metal trash cans that could have been his mother’s. They were far too heavy for an elderly woman to drag to the curb, but there was no wheeled caddy either, and again he flashed on her solitary life here, and his mother’s in their old house, and Wozniak’s grandmother while he was overseas, and wondered if it was inevitable that Fran would end up alone.
Back at the office they all wanted the lowdown. They weren’t being patronizing, they were just bored. Things were slow, and like a losing team they needed to feed off every little success.
“It’s not the Taj Mahal,” he said, “but I think I can work with it.”
At the end of the day he called the daughter and told her he’d looked over the place. With disinterest he ticked off the property’s faults along with its selling points as if they were equal, and recapped the sorry state of the market. She waited, not once interrupting, interested only in the price. He recommended they start at 89,9—eight thousand higher than his original number.
“I was hoping for a hundred,” she said. “I see on your website you’ve got houses on State Street listed for 124 and 119.”
The internet made everyone an expert; it drove him crazy.
“Those are three-family apartment houses. The zoning and taxes are completely different. For a one-family three-bedroom, we’re scraping the ceiling, mostly because of what great shape the place is in.”
He was only being honest, but some proud part of him wanted to tweak her, and he had to disguise it behind an upbeat tone of voice. Over the years he’d learned to deliver unhappy facts as if they were good news.
“Let’s start at 95 then,” the woman said, as if that was a compromise.
“I’m not sure the market will support that.”
“We can always lower the price.”
“Eighty-nine nine we have an outside shot at. Ninety-five is pushing it. This isn’t Pittsburgh.”
“Believe me, Mr. Larsen, I understand that better than anybody. Let’s try 95. If we have to lower the price, we lower the price.”
It was hard if not impossible for sellers to understand they were in this together—that he now had a stake in their house and was doing everything in their combined best interest. It was the buyers who would end up paying, yet in the beginning it was the sellers who distrusted him, probably because they felt they were losing something valuable, and that he was profiting from it.
“My worry, Mrs. Kern, is that the market will do it for us, and that by then 89, 9 could be pushing it.”
She thanked him for his concern as if it were misplaced and that any further argument would be futile. She was an only child, there were no other survivors he could appeal to. Beyond that, she was his client. Right or wrong, she would have her way.
“My wife reminded me the other day,” he said when they’d finished their business. “We knew your mother from the library. She used to joke around with our girls.”
“Thank you for remembering her.”
“She was always so proud of you. Everyone in town was.”
She laughed, just a stuck cough. “That was a long time ago.”
“Do you still play, if you don’t mind my asking?”
“I don’t anymore, but it’s kind of you to remember.”
She’d indulged him, and he wanted to keep going and ask why she’d given it up—how, really, she could walk away from that talent. If they were riding in a car together to view a house, he would have found an offhand, joshing way to extract it from her, but the phone was too direct. He didn’t want to be rude.
“I’m sorry about your daughter,” she said.
“Thank you,” he said, as he said to everyone, “I appreciate it.”
“One of the last conversations I had with my mother was about her. She prayed for her, even when she was in the hospital.”
“That was good of her.”
“She was a good person. Better than I’ll ever be.”
She was the one being kind, trading this intimacy, but when he got off he thought it was unfair of her—as if he were still anonymous and not the object of mindless curiosity. Maybe that was why she no longer played: She hated being in the paper and having everyone treat her like a freak. He could have told her he knew how she felt.
The next day was sunny, one of those crisp October afternoons with a blue sky like summer. The landscapers came, and he got a nice shot for the website. Just before quitting time he officially posted it, and drove over on his way home to plant the Edgewater sign by the front walk. It was a part of the job he loved—like baiting a hook—though at 95 the place would sit for a while.
He wasn’t surprised that the first few queries it drew were from other brokers, or that they were surprised to find him on the other end of the line. Everyone said they were glad he was back, as if he’d survived a lingering illness. He assured them that he was too, and that it was good to be working—not entirely a lie, because sometimes it was. He liked being in the office, doing nothing more than drinking his coffee and eating his bagel and filling in the morning’s crossword, or choosing which listings to show clients from out of town. He was aware that his fleeting pleasure at these moments was disproportionate and fragile, based on a willed forgetfulness. In a larger sense, much of his daily life as he knew it no longer mattered, yet he clung to it.
His intuition proved true. No one was interested in Mrs. DeMarco’s at 95, and as interest rates rose and the market softened further, the daughter refused to budge. Every Friday he sent the landscapers to rake the leaves and clean the gutters, figuring the weekends would bring out the Lookee-Lous.
The weekend before Halloween, after prolonged and frustrating deliberations with Mrs. Kern, he scheduled an open house for Sunday between one and three, as he would for any sluggish property, paying an extra twenty dollars for a featured ad in Thursday’s insert. Almost immediately he was sorry. He could make church, but to get everything ready he’d have to skip coffee hour and the haunted hayride. Fran said that was fine, as if he didn’t need her permission, but still it felt wrong. Since t
hey’d been back at work, they dedicated their weekends to Kim, as if they might find her by looking part-time. Last weekend he’d spent half of Saturday taking the boat out of the water. This seemed like he was giving up completely.
If Fran had asked him not to—one word from her and he would have held off. Instead, Saturday night she made cookies for him to tempt the buyers, a ritual that dated back to the girls’ early years. They loved open houses, chasing each other shrieking through the strange rooms, high on chocolate, while Fran helped him showcase a den or kitchen. He knew the business but relied on her eye for design. He still did: Anytime he rearranged a cluttered table or banished a lamp to a closet, he was exercising her taste. They were a team, and if she had any misgivings about tomorrow he would have agreed it was too soon and scrapped the whole thing. Now he’d have to go through with it.
In church he worried, but once he was there everything was fine. The OPEN HOUSE sign was in place, the yard free of leaves. He parked the Taurus by the garage, covering one of the worst cracks. The day was clear and cool, and he raised the blinds so light poured in the windows, then set the thermostat to seventy. He ran hot water in all the sinks, and in the tub and shower. He flushed both toilets, up and down, and listened to them refill. He was wearing his best suit as if it were a formal occasion—ridiculous, yet it felt right. Today he needed every advantage.
At five to one he did a last walkaround, pinching lint from the stair carpet. He made sure he had enough business cards and squared the pile of listings beside the plate of cookies. The specs were the least of it. He was ready for any question. By now it was no exaggeration to say he knew the house better than its owner, and he could honestly vouch that it was a good house. The price was too high, maybe, but someone would be very happy here. He stood in the front door, waiting for them.
The Advanced Stages
Sooner or later they’d find her. In a ditch. In a thicket. In a creekbed.
All fall Lindsay tracked the open cases online, watching as, one by one, they closed. The Alzheimer’s patients and retarded adults, the little kids and alcoholics, the prostitutes and college students and runaways. The pretty girls like Kim.
The leaves were down, and it was easier. Hunters discovered them, hikers, horseback riders, early morning fishermen tromping through tall reeds to their favorite spots. Lindsay pictured their initial confusion and panic and then the long, drawn-out inconvenience, the whole day ruined, maybe flashbacks, nightmares. No one wanted to be part of that, even briefly.
At home it was inescapable, though they told her nothing. Her birthday was coming up, and her mother was bugging her about what kind of party she wanted. They could go bowling or roller-skating or they could just have something at home. How many people was she thinking? What kind of cake did she want? What did she want for presents? She needed to give them some lead time.
“I don’t want anything,” Lindsay said.
“It’s your birthday. What do you want to do?”
“I don’t know.”
“Well, think,” her mother said.
She wanted contact lenses. She wanted a job like Dana’s at Quizno’s so she’d have some money of her own. She wanted to be able to take the car without her mother acting like she’d never see her again. She wanted to go out on Friday nights with her friends. She wanted—if the right guy asked her—to go out on a date.
She asked for the contacts. Her mother warned her that they were expensive—they might be the only present she’d get. Her father asked what was wrong with her glasses.
“It’s not about her eyesight,” her mother said, though he was only joking.
It wasn’t because of Kim and the way she made fun of her glasses (of her, really, except no one but Lindsay remembered that Kim). Last week in gym class she was under the basket, caught in a knot of more aggressive girls going for a rebound, when someone’s arm knocked them off. When she put them back on (by then the action was shifting to the other end), she realized she was the only one in the whole class wearing them, and she wondered how long that had been true. In December she was finally getting her braces off, and she thought she might as well make a complete change—as if, once she shed her disguise, the world would discover she’d been beautiful all along.
Sometimes, leaning into the bathroom mirror, she could almost see the face she wished she had, and sometimes before taking a shower, turned in strict profile with her shoulders back and stomach sucked in, the body. She was going to be sixteen and no one had ever touched her.
Though she knew it was wrong, and complicated, for a short time she would have let J.P. Not anymore.
It was all boys thought of, according to her mother. She’d obviously never met the boys in Lindsay’s class, who were obsessed with their XBoxes and PSPs and skateboarding and hockey and the Clash and their own disorganized punk bands and parties and smoking and drinking and dope and cars and zombie movies and hot sauce contests and Jack Black in Saving Silverman and getting the hell out of Kingsville like everyone else. They might pay attention to Cara Penrose’s boobs when Cara passed by their lunch table, but Lindsay doubted they spent hours in serious contemplation of them—or not the way she’d wasted whole days and nights agonizing over J.P. Guys weren’t like that, or not the guys she knew.
She didn’t want a party. She didn’t want a cake either, but her mother insisted, steering her toward the confetti one from last year. Lindsay didn’t remember liking or not liking it, just the novelty of the colored dots inside the sponge cake, but went along to end the discussion.
“Did you want to invite Dana and Micah over, or do you want it to be just family?”
“Just family.”
“I’m sorry it’s not going to be nicer. It’s supposed to be your day.”
“I really don’t care,” Lindsay said, but she could see her mother didn’t believe her.
Otherwise life had fallen into a dulling routine. Halloween was over, all the candy was gone except her father’s nasty Paydays. After school there was a gap of an hour and a half before her mother got home. She couldn’t be alone in the house, because it was possible Kim had been taken from there (they’d changed the locks), so she and Dana hung out in the Hedricks’ basement, sprawled on their horrible aqua leather sectional, watching dumb VH-1 shows and trading the latest sophomore gossip. Three days a week Dana worked, and she watched by herself, Mrs. Hedrick checking on her every once in a while as if she might disappear.
Dinner was the hardest. Her mother had instituted a prayer for Kim before every meal, and it seemed to Lindsay that it was always her turn to say it. “And please help bring her back to us safely. Amen.”
“Thank you,” her mother said.
Though there was never a formal discussion, it was now Lindsay’s job to do the dishes. She dedicated herself to it with the same concentration she gave her homework, making sure she got every spot off the stovetop.
Later, her mother went up first, her father watching TV from the far end of the couch with his eyes closed.
“Go to bed,” Lindsay told him. “I’ll close up.”
“Okay, chief,” he said, and then locked up anyway.
In her room she found the missing, or they found them for her. A deputy on routine patrol. A woman walking her dog. A DOT mowing crew. The leaders of Scout Troop 121.
She had her favorites, the little kids and teenagers she hoped had just run away. In the company of adult male, the FBI posters said, making her guess whether he was a kidnapper or a boyfriend or both.
Some had been missing for years but still had active sites. The first-grade teacher from the little town in Georgia who’d been a beauty queen. The college track star who went jogging at dawn in her upscale Dallas suburb. Lindsay wondered if someone who was plain would inspire the same devotion.
In the spillway of the lake. In the woods behind the ShopRite. In a field off of U.S. 41.
Burned under the overpass. Wrapped in plastic. Bound with ligatures.
In a chest-typ
e freezer. In a foot locker. In a duffel bag. In an oil drum.
Dismembered. Decapitated. Partly skeletonized. In the advanced stages of decomposition.
There was never a mention of rape or torture, no matter how obvious the probability, as if by some unspoken agreement the reporters decided to leave out the most upsetting details. Those were the cases Lindsay took with her to bed, filling in the empty spaces as if these real-life nightmares could replace her own. What would it feel like to be stabbed or strangled or beaten to death? When would you pass out and stop feeling it? Was it just blackness then, and nothing after that? She had nothing to imagine it with besides sleep.
An irrigation worker in an orange grove. A Jet Ski rider by the marina. It was like a game of Clue without weapons or suspects.
She found herself looking at people strangely during the day. Ultimately everyone in her French class would die (Madame Cassada first), the question was when and where and who would find them. If they were lucky it would be in bed. A nurse would come, like at her grandmother’s place. EMTs, people who knew what to do. On the bus home she sat with Dana and Micah, watching the sun flash through the newly bare trees, wondering if there was anyone out there waiting to be found.
Some of them turned up alive hundreds of miles away, identified in bus stations, but more often they were rotting in landfills and canals and ravines, in rockpits and flooded quarries. In abandoned cars. How many of them had sisters, and what were they supposed to do?
The idea occupied her as she sat alone on the Hedricks’ sectional, watching “The 100 Best Toys of All Time,” counting down the last half hour before her mother came home. Number 29 was Battleship, one of their favorite games—one that Kim usually won, though that never mattered. She remembered playing it on the floor of Kim’s room one rainy day, both of them lying flat on the carpet so they couldn’t cheat, the white pegs accumulating in diagonal patterns and then the short straight lines of red. She was eight or nine, an age when Kim agreeing to play with her was enough to make her happy.
Songs for the Missing Page 21