The Missing Ones

by Edwin Hill

  Morgan kicked off his shoes and tossed the wool hat to the floor. Hester curled up alongside his body. “Best idea I’ve heard all day,” he said.

  WEDNESDAY, SEPTEMBER 25

  CHAPTER 17

  Hester met Morgan for the first time a year and a half after she and Daphne graduated from Wellesley. “She hasn’t mentioned me,” Morgan said when Hester opened the door of their Allston apartment one February afternoon. A statement. A fact.

  “I barely know her,” Hester said. Her first sentence to Morgan. A lie.

  “She calls when she’s in trouble.”

  “Who are you?”

  Morgan walked into the apartment as though he lived there, tossing a ratty peacoat onto an even rattier chair, a cat carrier dangling from one hand. He opened it, and the mangiest cat Hester had ever seen (till then) leapt out, claws digging into the sofa. “I’m her twin brother.”

  “Daphne’s at work,” Hester said, though in truth she hadn’t seen Daphne in a day or two, which wasn’t out of the ordinary, since they worked opposite schedules. Daphne tended bar, while Hester worked at Widener. Still, she peeked into Daphne’s bedroom and was relieved to find an unmade bed and piles of clothing. Anything neater would have set off alarms. “And she hates cats.”

  “I go to Tufts,” Morgan said. “To the vet school out in Grafton. The rest of the family lives in Southie. Good ol’ Boston story: father was a cop, mother a kindergarten teacher. There are eight other Maguires running around, most within a stone’s throw of this apartment. Ever met any of them?”

  All this surprised and didn’t surprise Hester. By then, she’d known Daphne for over five years, and it had been five years of the two of them. “We keep to ourselves,” she said. “My mother lives on the South Shore.”

  Those words surprised her all over again, because now Morgan knew more about her childhood than anyone else, including Daphne.

  “I ignore most of the Maguires,” Morgan said. “But not Daphne. You must know the Daphne Charm.”

  Daphne had a lot of good qualities, but Hester wouldn’t say charm was one of them.

  “Yelling,” Morgan said, swooping the cat from the ground and cradling it to his shoulder. “She thinks it’ll get her what she wants. She’ll scream her head off when she sees this cat. But his name is Hamlet, and it would be great if he could stay here for a few days. He has nowhere else to go.”

  Hester took the cat. It curled onto her shoulder, a gentle purr strumming through its body. She’d dreamed of having a pet her whole life. “What do I do about his fur? It’s disgusting.”

  “That’s the thing with cats,” Morgan said, “you give them an ounce of love, and they usually fix themselves. And if the fur stays like that, then that’ll be Hamlet’s Charm. What’s yours?”

  “I don’t have one.”

  “I bet you do,” Morgan said. “But point me to where Daphne works. That’s usually the best place to start.”

  Hester led Morgan the three blocks to the Turin, a German-style beer garden. Inside, they found a dark and warm bar, with a few patrons dotting the floor. Morgan ordered two IPAs, and when the bartender brought the draughts, he asked if Daphne was working.

  “She’s gone,” the bartender said.

  “Since when?”

  “Since I started.”

  Morgan took a long quaff, and all these years later, lying in bed in this strange inn on this remote island watching him sleep, Hester could still see him steeling himself for what was to come. “Your manager around?” he asked.

  A moment later, a woman with brown hair tied in a sensible ponytail strode onto the floor. “Your friend can go to hell,” she said.

  “We’re not friends,” Morgan said. “What did she do this time?”

  “She’s been gone since I asked her to clean the grease traps,” the woman said. “No one likes to, but we all have to sometimes. I found hamburger grease at the bottom of my bag. At least she knew enough not to come back. And if I do see her, she’d better watch out.”

  Morgan downed the rest of his beer. “The Daphne Charm,” he said.

  Back at the apartment, he asked Hester what the rent cost and wrote a check for three times the amount.

  “Aren’t you a student?” Hester asked.

  “I’m good for it. And don’t tell Daphne I came or about the check, it’ll only piss her off. But call me if you need more money. And Daphne’ll show up. She always does.”

  “I can keep a secret,” Hester said.

  “Maybe that’s your charm, then,” Morgan said as he put his coat on and gave Hamlet one last pet. “Take care of him, okay?”

  Hester shrugged, but after he left, she lay on the sofa and let the cat knead her chest with his paws. Morgan turned out to be right. With a few days of regular food and water, Hamlet’s coat grew shiny and healthy, and when Daphne walked in the door a week later, she barely mentioned their new roommate. She didn’t talk about where she’d disappeared to at all, and Hester didn’t ask. Those were the types of things they didn’t discuss.

  Two months later, it was Hester who called Morgan for the first time—she always remembered that—and it was Hester who asked to meet him in Davis Square, a world away from Allston, to talk about Hamlet. She wore a dress that day, and makeup, and when they sat in Mike’s, an old Italian-American restaurant with picture windows that opened onto the square, a pepperoni pizza between them and a pitcher of Blue Moon to share, Hamlet—who wound up living with Hester till he passed away—hadn’t come up once. Neither had Daphne. They talked for hours on a perfect spring evening when cherry blossoms were in bloom and yellow pollen coated the world, and Hester had known that everything had changed. Her last words to Morgan that night had been, “Daphne can’t know about this,” as he’d pulled her in for a goodnight kiss.

  Up until then, it had been Daphne and Hester against the world, united and alone. Meeting Morgan—meeting anyone—felt like a betrayal. Hester knew already that Morgan would understand this better than anyone.

  Now, as the sun rose, and light filtered into the tiny room at the inn, she touched Morgan’s cheek and brushed red hair from his eyes.

  Things had changed again.

  * * *

  When Morgan woke, it took him a moment to remember where he was, or why Kate and another child were asleep beside him in a strange bed. Sun shone through thin drapes, lighting up a small room decorated with antique furniture. In an instant, he remembered the drive to Maine and the late-night boat ride to the island. He remembered spending most of the night feeling the roll of the surf beneath his feet before falling into a deep, dreamless sleep, and he remembered listening to Hester breathe beside him and wondering whether she’d fallen asleep, or whether she was faking it to hold off their inevitable fight. He sat up.

  As usual, Hester had taken the opportunity to escape.

  He carefully rolled off the bed to avoid waking the children and slipped into the hallway bathroom, where he splashed water on his face and tried to prepare himself. He and Hester would have it out. He’d take his lumps and every insult she hurled at him, and she’d take what he threw at her, and in the end they’d survive this, like they’d survived it all. That much he believed.

  He found her sitting on the porch in a rocking chair, staring out to sea, and he suspected she’d heard him coming and dreaded the conversation as much as he did. Part of him wanted her to feel it all, to believe that everything might not work out in the end. He wanted her to feel a fraction of what had coursed through him yesterday when he’d thought that she may have finally left. He wanted her to worry. He gave her a moment, pretending to appreciate the landscape, to breathe in the fresh, salted air, to listen. Then he stretched and let out a long, exaggerated sigh.

  “Bakery’s closed,” she said. “No coffee either. At least they have Charleston Chews at the General Store.”

  “Where’s Waffles?” Morgan asked.

  “I don’t know,” Hester said.

  “She wanders,” he said. “
She’s a hound. We’ll never find her now.”

  “We’re on an island with no cars,” Hester said. “In a place where people watch out for one another. Of all the things to worry about, for once Waffles isn’t one of them. Where’s Kate?”

  “Upstairs. Asleep.”

  “Did you leave her alone?”

  He heard a hint of panic in her voice, and it was all he could do not to snap, to tell her to quit it, that she couldn’t protect Kate from everything and everyone, and that if she tried, she’d lose. Then he thought, Why not? He’d played nice for long enough, and it hadn’t gotten him anywhere. “I left her upstairs asleep in a queen-sized bed,” he said. “The same kind of bed she sleeps in at home. And she’s fine. What’s going to happen to her?”

  “Anything could happen. She could fall out of bed and hit her head. She could wake up and wonder where we are. She’s in a strange place. She could get kidnapped.”

  “See that shovel over there, the one leaning against the shed?” Morgan said. “If I hear anyone, anyone at all, I’ll bash the motherfucker’s brains in.”

  “Don’t swear,” Hester said. “It doesn’t come naturally. You wouldn’t do that. Ever.”

  “I would, actually, if I thought there was any real danger. I’d protect you, Kate, Waffles, all three of you from anything I could. I’d even protect that other kid.”

  “Oliver,” Hester said.

  “Who is he anyway?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  “Well, I’d even protect Oliver. I sometimes wonder if you understand that about me. But right now, I don’t think there’s any danger. Do you?”

  Hester leaned forward and rubbed her eyes. “There’s danger everywhere.”

  Morgan didn’t know what to say, just as he hadn’t known what to say since he’d seen Hester in that hospital bed all those months ago, her jaw wired shut, her eye black, her body nearly broken. He hadn’t known what to say when she’d come home from the hospital either, so he’d taken that sledgehammer to the wall behind his closet in a show of brute masculinity while she’d watched, her every movement telling him to stop while her mouth told him it was what she wanted. And he hadn’t known what to say when he discovered her first lie, that day a week and a half earlier when he ran into her boss, Kevin, and Kevin mentioned that Hester hadn’t been to work in a month and that they missed her.

  In their life—their life “before”—things with Hester had been easy. Not perfect, but easy. Now that they weren’t, Morgan wondered if he had it in him to fix them. A part of him wanted to take her hand and pretend that the last forty-eight hours had never happened, to let her off the hook, to not only ignore that the intervention had happened but to tell himself it hadn’t been necessary all along, that Prachi and Angela, even Jamie, hadn’t insisted that he needed to do it, that he needed to take a stand. “Why did you come here?” he finally asked.

  Hester took a deep breath and answered in one long exhale. “Because Daphne asked me to.”

  “Did she ask you to come alone?”

  “She didn’t say one way or the other. She wrote that she needed me.”

  “Okay,” Morgan said. “Tell me what you know,” and he listened as Hester told him about “Annie,” and the decrepit house she’d lived in, and about finding Trey Pelletier’s body on the beach. She also told him about the two missing boys.

  “Missing children,” Morgan said.

  “Two of them,” Hester said. “Oliver. The boy upstairs. He went missing on July Fourth. Another one went missing the day before yesterday.”

  Morgan could feel the fury he’d managed to keep at a simmer begin to boil over. “Two missing four-year-olds?” he said.

  “They turned up safe and sound,” Hester said.

  The words spilled out on their own. “You do this on purpose,” Morgan said. “All this lying to me and creating danger where none exists. And it doesn’t even make any sense. The stupid, stupid choices you make. I mean, you won’t bring Kate to a daycare center that’s five minutes from your work, but now you bring her to an island the size of a postage stamp where two children have already gone missing, and you decide it’s a good idea to import a third? Why not put a sign on her back that says Take Me!?”

  “Oh, no,” Hester said, shaking her head. “We’re not doing this. Not today.”

  “Yeah, we are,” Morgan said. “You left our house in the middle of the night without bothering to return the thirty or so texts that I sent. I had no idea where you were. And you left to find my long-lost sister. As far as you knew, there was still an Amber Alert out when you got on that ferry. Why can’t you mind your own fucking business? You nearly got Kate kidnapped once already.”

  Hester stood, walked into the garden, and turned on Morgan. “You didn’t get that one quite right,” she said. “I did get her kidnapped, and don’t ever, ever forget it. And it was all my fault. Do you think that taking a sledgehammer to a wall undoes any of that? Or planning interventions? Do you think any of it will protect Kate from this awful, awful world? And do you want to know how to swear? You do it like this: You are a fucking, fucking fuckface!”

  “Excuse me.”

  Morgan froze at the sound of someone else’s voice. He was standing on the porch, leaning forward, jabbing an index finger at Hester, his face bright red as he prepared to unleash a tirade of his own swears. But he glanced toward the source of the voice and saw a deputy who’d let himself in through the garden gate with Waffles in tow.

  “Is this dog yours?” the deputy asked.

  Hester swept a lock of black hair from her mouth and pushed her glasses up her nose. When she turned to the deputy, she had the decency to look chagrined. “How did you know?”

  The deputy thumbed the tag on the dog’s collar with Hester’s contact info on it. “Aren’t too many Hesters around these days,” he said. “He was getting into the garbage by the community center. We have leash laws.” The deputy laughed. “Believe it or not. But don’t worry. Just watch him, okay?”

  “Her,” Morgan said, putting his hand out so that Waffles trotted to him. He took a treat from his pocket and held it over her nose till she lay down. “She’s a female.”

  Hester glanced from Morgan to the cop. “This is my husband,” she said.

  A lie.

  She lied because it was easier than the truth, or at least that’s what Morgan told himself, and it bothered Morgan more than he wanted to admit.

  “Morgan,” Hester said. “This is Rory. He’s the local deputy.”

  “It looks like you were in the middle of something,” Rory said. He caught Hester’s eye. “Everything okay?”

  “We’re fine,” Hester said. “Morgan’s mad at me, and I deserve it. I was an asshole. But we yell at each other all the time.”

  “Nothing else? Do you need me to stay?” he asked in a way that made Morgan feel guilty.

  “Not at all,” Hester said. “It’s not that kind of fight.” When Rory still wouldn’t move, she added, “I know you’re doing your job, and you’re doing a good job by not leaving, but really, I am fine. This won’t escalate. It never has, and it never will.”

  She took Morgan’s hand, which only made him feel worse.

  Rory put one foot on the porch and leaned over his knee. “Have you heard from your friend?”

  “You’ll be the first person I’ll call when I do,” Hester said. “Are you finally worried about her?”

  “You must be Annie’s brother,” Rory said. “I recognize the hair.”

  “It’s a dead giveaway,” Morgan said. “Her name is Daphne.”

  “I keep forgetting,” Rory said. “But call if you need anything,” he added as he backed out of the garden.

  “Have you seen Lydia?” Hester asked. “I still have her kid. Don’t you think it’s weird that she vanished too?”

  “She’s around. I’ll send her your way,” Rory said.

  As the deputy left, Hester sat back in the rocking chair and sighed. “I keep thinking about Lyd
ia and everything she has to sort out now. Everything she needs to do.” She glanced at Morgan, a trace of a smile starting. “I’m glad I didn’t find your body yesterday, even if I do want to kill you right now.”

  Morgan squeezed her hand. “I want to kill you too,” he said. “And I’m pissed off, though I appreciate the third-party acknowledgment of your own assholeness. I’m pissed in a way that means I’ll remember this for a long, long time. Like, forgive but never forget pissed off. Like, we will get Kate back to school and you back to work. As in, we need to deal with it tonight, not tomorrow. Not next week.”

  “I do these things to be secretive and manipulative,” Hester said. “It’s what you love about me.”

  Morgan leaned across the rocking chair and kissed Hester’s cheek. Waffles dashed around the perennial garden. She found a fallen tree limb three times her size and tore at it with a frenzy. “In a month,” Morgan said, “winter will probably be here. This whole garden will be unrecognizable.”

  “Everything will be unrecognizable if Daphne comes home,” Hester said.

  Morgan knew how much Hester cared for Daphne, and that she also dreaded his sister’s return and what it would mean for Kate. Unlike Hester, he couldn’t ever weigh one loyalty against another.

  “Where else has Daphne been this last year?” Morgan asked.

  “Portland, before here. That’s as much as I know.”

  “We could swing through there on the way home,” he said, glancing at his phone. It was 8:15, and the morning ferry to the mainland left at 9 a.m. They’d need to hurry or be stuck here till afternoon.

  “She may be there,” Hester said, and paused before adding, “And she may still be here.”

  It took a moment for the implication to sink in. “You are not staying,” Morgan said. “Not in a million years. Not in a billion.”

  “Someone has to,” Hester said. “Think about it. It’s what makes sense. What if she’s off hiding out somewhere? What if something happened during the storm and she’s hurt? Besides, I did find the body. They want me to stick around.”