The Missing Ones

by Edwin Hill

  A hand gripped her wrist. It gave her enough strength to pull herself up the rock wall, inch by inch, till she slipped over the lip and onto level ground. Trey fell back and pulled her onto him. She coughed and expelled water from her lungs. She crawled onto her hands and knees and coughed till she couldn’t cough anymore, and then she collapsed onto her back. Rainwater rinsed the salt down her cheeks, onto her lips, and into her mouth. She sucked at it, so grateful for the taste. So grateful to be more than surviving. To be alive.

  “Annie, Annie, are you all right?”

  Annie looked into Trey’s eyes. He was laughing. That’s what you said to a CPR dummy.

  “Shut up,” she said.

  He fell beside her, turning so that he faced the sky as well. “What the hell were you doing? Why did you run like that?”

  “I didn’t want Frankie to see us. And I was thinking about Lydia. She’s my best friend.”

  “Best?” he said, rolling toward her.

  The light from his headlamp blinded her, but the touch of his fingertips on her cheek was unmistakable. Now she could give herself over to that version of herself, of the Annie who, at least in her imagination, was open and kind and funny. Who was someone she’d always wanted to be. Unlike Lydia and Vaughn, Annie understood that no matter where you lived, people watched and drew conclusions. She knew that you could lose the thread of your story and lose track of your lies if you gave away too much. But out here, in the storm, under the cover of night, she felt safe. Finally. And the lighthouse would still be there tomorrow.

  She turned off Trey’s headlamp. She kissed him. Deeply. It felt like the first time all over again. With him. With anyone.

  It wasn’t. On either count.

  CHAPTER 7

  “Darling,” Prachi said to Hester when she took the vase of blue daisies from the refrigerator, “these flowers! They’re hideous!”

  “Shut up,” Hester said, as Prachi quietly lifted the flowers from the blue-tinted water and trimmed the stems, every snip of the scissors an indictment. The woman, who could make sweatpants and a Burger King t-shirt look refined, couldn’t help herself.

  “Put them someplace you’ll appreciate them,” Hester said, right as her phone beeped with a text from Wendy Richards, bowing out of the evening: Something came up! So sorry!

  Hester had met Wendy when she’d been hired to find Sam Blaine. Wendy was rich, from a prominent Beacon Hill family, and she’d helped guide Hester through the confusing media frenzy that had followed Sam’s death. Recently, though, Wendy had opted out of most of their plans, and it seemed that the season of their friendship may have passed. How many times could they talk about what it felt like to date a serial killer? Besides, Wendy’s prominence had grown since last winter, and she likely had something better to do on a Friday night than eat potluck in Morgan’s second-floor apartment. Hester flashed the display at Prachi, who finished trimming the flowers. “She’s moving on,” Prachi said. “And forgetting.”

  “It’s not that easy for everyone,” Hester said.

  “Let me know how I can help,” Prachi said, filling the vase with fresh water and letting the silence of the unsaid hang between them.

  Hester yanked open the silverware drawer and grabbed a fistful of cutlery.

  Out in the open-style living room, the rest of the party guests chatted away. Besides Wendy Richards, all of Hester and Morgan’s friends had shown up for the celebration—all five of them. There was Prachi, who’d gone to Wellesley with Hester and Daphne, and Prachi’s partner, Jane. Jane was tall and blond and taught yoga a few hours a week, and the less Hester spoke to the two of them about money, the better they got along. Of course, Angela White had come too. Last winter, Angela, a detective with the Boston police department, had headed up the murder investigation involving Sam and Gabe, and she’d befriended Morgan. Now, the two of them spent most Sundays camped out in front of the TV watching sports. Her wife, Cary, was a quiet, thoughtful African American woman who worked as a social worker at the YWCA in the South End, and their six-year-old son, Isaiah, managed to tolerate Kate constantly following him around. Prachi’s greyhound, O’Keefe, snaked from the living room and into the kitchen, with Waffles at her heels.

  The last guest to arrive was Jamie Williams, who strode into the apartment as though he lived there, his enormous hands dwarfing a pink bakery box he’d picked up from Lyndell’s in Ball Square and a little white dog named Butch at his feet. Jamie had moved into the first-floor apartment—Daphne’s apartment—in the spring, right after being released from the hospital for a gunshot wound, a wound Hester still blamed herself for. Now, on most nights, he came upstairs and joined them for dinner, usually staying into the evening.

  Hester took the bakery box and stood on her toes to kiss his cheek. “Thank you,” she said.

  Jamie paused. He always paused before speaking, the words taking a while to form. “It was . . . nothing,” he said.

  “Is it raining?”

  “Not really.”

  “So much for the storm,” Hester said. The hurricane had changed course and headed out to sea toward Maine with only a few scattered showers and gusts of wind to mark all the preparations and panic.

  “Jamie, my man!” Morgan said. “How about a beer!”

  Jamie grabbed two Jack’s Abby lagers from the fridge. “Nice . . . flowers,” he said, before joining Morgan in the living room.

  “It’s a bigger crowd than last year,” Prachi said. “Any word from The Post-It?”

  “Where do you think she is?” Hester asked.

  “Who knows? Daphne is just being Daphne,” Prachi said, giving Hester’s shoulder a gentle squeeze.

  In the fifteen years since they’d graduated from Wellesley, Prachi and Daphne had held an unstable truce, their sole connection being their friendship with Hester. Hester often wondered if Prachi was glad Daphne had left. She stacked a pile of paper plates on the breakfast counter. “Soup’s on,” she shouted.

  Everyone had come through on Hester’s call for a potluck, bringing pizza, roast chicken and vegetables, pad Thai, and a pupu platter—enough to feed twenty. Prachi was first in line, unable to resist taking the lead, as ever. Once they’d moved to the farmer’s table, pouring wine and water, passing a salad, Hester dug into a mound of macaroni and cheese, watching across the table as elegant Prachi and gentle Jane tore into slabs of meat and sawed at chicken legs. They’d gone from vegetarian to vegan to paleo over the summer, and Hester could feel Prachi judging her for the pepperoni pizza on her own plate, but she shoved those feelings aside. Kate and Isaiah finished their meals and asked to be excused. Angela raised a glass and toasted to Morgan, and once the warmth of being together settled in, Hester closed her eyes and let the feelings of love and friendship envelop her. These people, every one of them, cared for her. Somehow, she had to remember that. Why had she spent these past weeks feeling terrified and alone? Why had she spent even today feeling that way, when she could have called anyone here? Could she confess? Could she treat this party like an AA meeting and admit she had a problem?

  She opened her eyes. The room had grown quiet. All faces had turned to her.

  “Maybe you need a change,” Prachi said.

  “We could meditate together,” Jane said.

  “Or go to the shooting range,” Angela said, wrapping an arm around Hester’s waist. “You haven’t been yourself,” she added. “What happened, anyway?”

  “We want to talk to you,” Morgan said. “About work. About Kate’s school.”

  “What’s happening?” Hester asked.

  Behind her, in the living room, something fell over, and Angela shouted to the kids to stop horsing around.

  “I think it was O’Keefe,” Jane said.

  “We’re doing this because we care about you,” Angela’s wife, Cary, said.

  And she used her therapist voice, which was what set Hester off. They were treating this like an AA meeting, and it would have been okay if it had been her idea, if she�
�d been able to maintain control, but it was not okay for them to ambush her like this. She held out an arm so that Kate ran to her. It was all she could do not to swear in front of the kids, and then she thought, Fuck it. “Is this a fucking intervention?” she asked.

  Kate smiled. “Fucking intervention,” she said.

  “Fucking intervention!” Isaiah said.

  “Thanks a lot,” Angela said.

  Hester stood, her napkin falling to the floor. Kate clung to her leg. Waffles snatched the paper napkin, and O’Keefe and Butch chased her around the table, into the living room, and across to the kitchen.

  “Honey,” Morgan said.

  “It’s just that . . .” Angela began.

  “Darling,” Prachi said. “You have to admit you’ve been acting mad!”

  Jamie didn’t say a word, and for once his silence sent Hester over the edge.

  “You can all go to hell,” she said. “Party’s over. The storm never came anyway, so who cares.”

  She stepped over the bench and headed to the stairs. As she passed the buffet, she stacked two slices of pizza on top of each other and glared at Prachi. “I love carbs,” she said, as she tore at the crust.

  She carried Kate up the stairs, and it took all her strength not to turn and face the silence, to take in the stares from the people in the world who cared about her most. Minus one. Daphne. The only one who could truly understand.

  * * *

  Rory and Pete still lived in the same house where they’d grown up, a sprawling farmhouse right outside of town that had been one of the first structures built on the island. Every year, Rory painted one side of the house red and by the time he came around four years later, the wind and elements on the island had worn the paint away. The house had a barn, where Lydia kept her horses, and a meadow where they’d played as children. He pulled the Jeep up to the back door and helped Pete inside. Walking into the kitchen still felt like home, though most nights he ate dinner at the counter, something straight from the microwave. In the years since his parents had passed away, Rory hadn’t changed a thing. The same photos hung on the walls, the same carpets covered the floor, the same furniture filled the rooms. Even Rory’s own bedroom, with its single twin bed and Lord of the Rings posters, hadn’t changed. When he’d left this house at eighteen, he hadn’t ever imagined moving back.

  He led his brother up the narrow stairs to Pete’s room and helped him lie down. Pete seemed to be coming down from his high. He closed his eyes as his head hit the pillow and mumbled, “Thanks for having my back.”

  He sighed, his chest rising and falling with each breath.

  Rory sat in a chair and watched for a few moments. “What’s in the house?” he asked.

  “Nothing,” Pete said.

  “Are you sure?” Rory asked.

  “It was a one-time thing.”

  “Okay,” Rory said as he waited for Pete to fall asleep. When he did, Rory began the search, in the bathroom they still shared, in the medicine cabinet, then the toilet tank, and then the linen closet. When he didn’t find anything, he moved on, through the house, from room to room, till finally he found a stash of blue pills at the back of his parents’ closet, in the pocket of his mother’s down parka. Rory flushed them down the toilet.

  Pete had been sixteen when their father had died. Like Rory, Pete went to high school on the mainland, so it had been easy enough for Rory to leave Portland on the weekends—to leave the friends he’d made there—to come home. He’d needed to keep family services at bay. Rory’s dreams certainly hadn’t included being responsible for a sixteen-year-old kid, but family came first. Still, it had been easy to ignore the warning signs, the missing cash and Pete’s failing grades. How could any teacher expect a kid who’d lost both parents in the space of a year to learn algebra? But the ferry had been a wake-up call. Pete could have killed someone that day. Today was another wake-up call. It was time for things to change.

  Back in the room, Rory tossed the empty vial on the bed. “I found them,” he said. “And they’re gone.”

  Pete sat up. “Where?” he asked.

  “You know where,” Rory said.

  “Those must have been Mom’s,” Pete said. “See, the prescription’s from years ago.”

  Rory was used to bargaining. He’d bargained with his mother first, who’d wanted the pain to end. Afterwards, he’d bargained with his father, who’d wanted to forget. “Next time,” Rory said, “you’re going to the hospital, and you’ll take the consequences.”

  “There won’t be a next time,” Pete said.

  There always was. “Let’s hope,” Rory said, pausing as a thought flashed through his mind. “You don’t know the missing boy, do you? He’s four years old, and he lives at the Victorian. That’s where you were today, wasn’t it?”

  Pete shook his head and closed his eyes.

  “Are you sure?”

  “I was taking a walk.”

  The thing with drug addiction was that everyone had to lie. Pete lied about what he took, and Rory lied about what he saw and knew. It was a hard habit to break.

  “Be careful tonight,” Rory said as he left.

  At the community center, he found Barb Kelley studying a map of the island with the state trooper who’d made the crossing with her. “This is Nate. Nate, this is Rory. And Rory, we need your island expertise,” she said, her vowels long and her accent unapologetically Down East.

  Law enforcement in Maine was enough of a tight-knit community that Rory knew Barb had a husband who taught high school math and two children under the age of five. He knew that she could come off as an easy-to-dismiss housewife. But he also knew that Detective Kelley had an unparalleled close-case record, much better than Trey’s. The only thing holding her career back was herself—she refused to take the lieutenant exam.

  “You gonna stand there like a trout, or are you gonna help us out?” she asked.

  “Sorry,” Rory said.

  “No apologies,” Barb said. “Not on my command. Everything all set at home?”

  Rory nodded.

  “I hope so,” Barb said. “It’s heading toward seven o’clock. How long has the boy been missing?”

  “Since about three forty-five,” Rory said. “At least, that’s when his mother found me.”

  “We probably have two, maybe three hours before the storm really hits. The island may be small, but we can’t cover all this terrain tonight, even with everyone in town searching.”

  Rory stepped up to the map. “We’re still two hours from high tide, but it’ll be as high as it gets. I asked Vaughn Roberts to send people to Little Ef, where the boy lives. That’s assuming he wandered off.”

  “And if someone took him?” Barb asked.

  “Then he could be anywhere. But let’s assume the best, at least with civilians involved.”

  “Good instincts,” she said, turning toward Nate to confer. He nodded and headed outside.

  “Where’d Trey drive off to in such a hurry, anyway?” Barb asked as soon as Nate was out of earshot.

  Rory still smarted from the way Trey had belittled him on the pier, but in his heart, he knew the lieutenant had been right. Rory should have brought Frankie Sullivan in. He should have isolated her and questioned her till she told him everything she could about her son, about her life and her secrets, and by not doing so, Rory had jeopardized the case and Ethan Sullivan’s safety. He had no excuse. If the child had done anything but wander off on his own, then his mother would be at the very center of that story. Rory didn’t want to admit any of that to Barb, even as she smiled patiently. But the detective could probably wait out the most stubborn of suspects, and until Rory answered her, that’s exactly what he’d be to her. “Trey went to pick up Frankie Sullivan for questioning.”

  “He went by himself?” she asked.

  “As far as I know.”

  “He’s been gone for over an hour. How long does it take to get there, five minutes? And that wife of his, where is she?”

&
nbsp; “I don’t know,” Rory said. “I just got here.”

  “She’s pretty,” Barb said. “His wife.”

  Rory caught himself. He’d started trusting the detective, letting her draw him in too close, but now she was hinting at something he didn’t want to touch. “People say that, but I don’t really see it,” he said. “I’ve known her too long.”

  “Since when?”

  “Since forever. We grew up next door to each other. We used to play in the field between our houses.”

  “Have you been a hothead since forever?” Barb asked, and when Rory went to defend himself she put a hand on his arm. “Look, you’re one person. And one person can’t be in more than one place at a time. Seems to me that maybe the pier was the place to be this afternoon, with everything else going on. And I’d have left the mother alone at the house too. What if Ethan had wandered home and we’d dragged her here for questioning. That’s not a scenario I’d have liked. And I’m sorry about your brother. That must be hard.”

  Rory knew enough not to respond, keeping his mouth shut till Barb turned her attention to the bulletin board. “What about houses?” she asked. “Most people are gone for the season. And boats. You found the first boy on a boat.”

  “Most boats are in drydock, and most houses are empty,” Rory said. “We should search outside while we still can and turn to structures later. If he wandered into an empty cabin, at least he’s out of the elements.”

  “Exactly what I was thinking,” Barb said. “You’ll stay here with me and manage the command center.”