“It’s just a baby,” Lucy said.
“We’ll throw it back.” Nolan squatted down and worked the hook from its mouth.
He started to curve his hand around the fish, readying to lower it back into the creek, when Patrick shoved him out of the way. Placing one hand over the fish to keep it still, Patrick pulled out his pocketknife and stabbed the fish in the head. Lucy cried out, horrified. Nolan tried to shove Patrick aside, but it was too late. The fish stopped moving. Its eyes clouded over. A thread of blood slid down the golden scales, turning them the color of rust.
“What did you do that for?” Nolan shouted at Patrick.
“My rod.” Patrick shrugged. “My fish.”
It was their last time fishing together, the last time at McGee Creek. When they got home that day, Nolan took both his and Lucy’s rods from the shed, broke them in half across his knee, and tossed the pieces in the garbage. They hadn’t talked it over—they didn’t have to—Lucy would have done the same if Nolan hadn’t done it first.
“I haven’t fished McGee in years,” Harry muttered, more to himself than actual conversation. “Used to be a good hole for browns and rainbows up there.”
He made one final cast into the invisible river, then drew the rod close to his body and turned to face her. His expression was hard to read. The creases deepened around his eyes and his lips puckered together, as if he was thinking over what to say, trying to find the words that would make her leave. Then he let out a long sigh and his face relaxed.
“What can I do for you, then, Lucy?” His voice softened around her name.
He’d used the same tone with her ten years ago when he took her statement. She and her mother had sat across from him at the table, his pudgy fingers fumbling to open a small notepad, his hands trembling a bit as he pressed a pencil nub to the paper, promising Lucy she wasn’t in any trouble. Information was all he needed, anything that might help them figure out where to start looking for her brother. She had struggled with what to say to him back then, and she struggled again now.
“I want to know whatever you can tell me about Nolan’s case,” she finally said. “What evidence you collected, who you interviewed, any suspects you had, leads you followed.”
His expression hardened again.
“I was so young when Nolan went missing,” she tried again. “I don’t remember much about what happened in the days after and no one in my family will talk about it. I was hoping you might be able to help me put some of the pieces together. So I can understand and maybe get some closure.”
Harry tapped his finger against his fishing pole as he studied her. “See now,” he said. “That was the biggest problem with your brother’s case. We didn’t have all the pieces.”
“Anything you can remember would be helpful,” she said. “I just want to know what happened to him. I just want some answers.”
“Afraid I can’t help you with that.”
“The case file? Your notes?”
He shook his head. “All of that stayed with the department. It’s all in a box in the basement somewhere. And I imagine that’s where it will stay. Unless new evidence is found or a witness comes forward or . . .” He paused and a muscle in his jaw clenched. “We never found a body. For all we know your brother could be going by a new name now, working at a Denny’s in Texas or mixing margaritas in Cabo.”
“Do you really believe that?”
“It’s more likely than some of the other stories going around these days.” He gave her a knowing look and then continued, “I saw the article. Someone sent it to me in the mail. Anonymously, like they were doing me a favor.” He laughed, a bitter sound, and shook his head. “From the very beginning your mother was a challenge. Always questioning the way I ran things. Questioning the department. She had this habit of calling my captain every morning to see if there’d been any overnight developments. But even all that was better than the way she started acting after those pictures turned up.”
Several weeks into the investigation, Lucy had come home from school to find all the curtains drawn and her mother sitting cross-legged in her bathrobe in the middle of the living room with the lights off, nursing a half-empty bottle of vodka. Photographs lay scattered on the floor around her. Lucy turned on a lamp in the corner, and Sandra shrank from it.
“Turn it off!”
Lucy did as she was told and then stood in the dark waiting for her eyes to adjust. On the handful of occasions when their mother went overboard with the wine—drinking two bottles instead of just one glass—Nolan had always been the one who handled it. Talking softly to her, he would take Sandra by the arm and guide her to the bedroom where he tucked her under the covers. Then he would sit and watch old romantic comedies with her until she fell asleep. Lucy took a shuffling step forward, reaching out to touch her mother’s shoulder, but Sandra flinched away from her. She bent over the photographs, studying them and muttering to herself as she sipped from the vodka bottle.
“Mom?” Lucy kept her voice soft, the way Nolan always did.
Sandra blinked and looked up at Lucy in surprise, as though she only now realized she was no longer alone. Then she gestured to the photographs, which, at the time, looked to Lucy like nothing. Black, underexposed shots of the moon, maybe, nothing important. Nothing worth getting so worked up over. She had not recognized them for what they were, but even if she had, she wouldn’t have said anything. She’d been so scared then. Of her mother, of Patrick and of Adam, of herself. Scared that someone would find out what she’d done.
“I brought them these,” Sandra said in a hushed, conspiratorial voice, sloppy with booze. “I showed them and they said it’s nothing. It’s not related, has nothing to do with your brother. That’s what they said. But I think they’re lying. I can see it in their faces. Sons of bitches. They know what this is and for some reason they’re not telling me. Why? What are they hiding?”
Detective Mueller told them from the beginning that there would be things he couldn’t talk about, questions he couldn’t answer while the investigation was actively being worked.
“They’re doing the best they can,” Lucy said.
Sandra’s whole body went stiff. “So you’re taking their side now?”
Before Lucy could protest, Sandra scooped up the photographs and shoved them into an envelope. “I’m going back down there. They have to listen to me. I will make them listen.” She gulped more vodka, some of it spilling onto the front of her shirt. “They can’t ignore evidence.”
She tripped on her way to the bedroom to change. The bottle fell from her hand and landed with a splintering crack on the floor. She cried out. Lucy ran to help her. Glass shards lay scattered at her feet. She lifted her right foot. Blood dripped from a deep gash along the sole. Lucy reached to steady her and help her into the bathroom to clean the wound, but Sandra pushed her away, hard enough that Lucy banged her head against the wall.
“You’re lying to me, too,” Sandra said, oblivious to the tears welling in Lucy’s eyes. “I can tell.”
Panic rose in Lucy’s chest. She expected Sandra to confront her then about the things she’d told Detective Mueller, all her many half-truths, but instead Sandra mumbled something incomprehensible and limped to her bedroom, slamming the door behind her, leaving Lucy standing alone and panting for a breath that wasn’t choked by fear. A few seconds passed and then came a quiet sobbing from Sandra’s bedroom, a sound that crept into the shadow places and pressed into the cracks in the walls and floorboards, the cracks in Lucy’s heart. She retreated to her bedroom, dragged a high-backed wooden desk chair to the door, and shoved the top bar under the knob. Then she scrambled onto her bed and pushed herself back into the corner as far as she could go, curling her knees to her chest.
She had never seen her mother so unhinged and erratic. Before Nolan disappeared, whenever Sandra drank too much she fell asleep. She was useless, but never mean, never violent. Her behavior that night was something new and terrifying, and the next morning,
early, before sunrise, Lucy slipped from her bedroom, crept to the kitchen, and called her father. “Please come get me,” she’d said. “It’s not safe here anymore.” He didn’t come for her right away. He said it was more complicated than that. There were custody agreements and court orders. He had to talk to Sandra first. He told her to sit tight, to be patient with her mother who was going through a lot right now, but he came for her eventually, after several long phone calls with his lawyer and several shorter ones with Sandra.
Her last day at the house, as Lucy packed her single suitcase with clothes, Sandra sat on her bed drinking straight from a new bottle of vodka and alternating between sobbing and screaming. With one breath she begged Lucy to stay, with the next she called her a traitor and accused Lucy of lying about Nolan, lying to get her way, lying and abandoning her own mother, the woman who’d given birth to her, who’d raised and loved her more than her son of a bitch father ever could. Lucy packed quickly and silently, and when she left, she had felt nothing but relief. She didn’t have any idea until now what those photographs had been, or where they’d come from, or why they’d been so important to Sandra, how far they’d sent her spinning over the edge.
“For a while your mother wouldn’t give up on those photographs,” Harry continued. “She insisted they were important to the case, that they were evidence of . . . of something. At first we took them seriously. We had a specialist take a look. We wanted them to be something, our smoking gun. But then she began to throw around words like flying saucers and alien abductions and government cover-ups and, well . . .” He scowled into the middle distance, silent for a while.
Lucy waited him out.
“Your mother made my life hell for a long, long time.” He returned his gaze to Lucy. “She turned an already shitty case into a full-blown shit storm. And we lost so much traction because of her behavior, too, because of her drunken claims of UFOs and police collusion. No one took her seriously after she started spouting that nonsense. No one in the department wanted to work with her. Whatever leads, whatever momentum we had, were lost. She fell apart on us, and then the case fell apart too.”
His grip tightened around the fishing pole. “Your brother’s case was the biggest disaster of my career. I lost a promotion because of it and was turned into a laughingstock. The other guys started calling me Agent Mulder and clipping articles from those trashy magazines to hang above my desk. ‘Woman Gives Birth to Two-Headed Alien,’ that kind of bullshit. If I could go back, I would do a lot of things differently, starting out with not taking the case in the first place.”
“You did the best you could, given the circumstances.” It wasn’t true, he could have done more, but Lucy said it anyway, to soothe his wounded pride.
He nodded and his tone softened again. “I appreciate you’re wanting some kind of closure, but I’ve worked enough cases in my lifetime to know there’s no such thing. It’s a myth perpetuated by psychiatrists and greeting card companies. Finding out what happened to your brother that night will only break your heart even more than it’s already broken.”
He leaned in close to her then and she caught a whiff of stale coffee beneath a thick cloud of sunscreen. “Look, I get it. I have a big brother. I know how it is. You idolize him. You think he can do no wrong. But trust me when I tell you that Nolan was a troubled kid headed nowhere fast. When it comes to the people we love, we don’t always see clearly. We don’t always know what’s really going on in their lives. Or we choose not to see. But maybe that’s okay, you know? Maybe it’s a kind of self-preservation.”
He smiled at her, but there was a sadness in his eyes, and something like relief. “You know, Lucy, it’s okay if you want to tell yourself that he ran off with that girlfriend of his and they lived happily ever after. It’s okay to let it go with that and move on with your own life. No one will think any less of you.”
He tipped his head toward the house. “Let me walk you out.”
Back in her car, Lucy considered how different this Harold Mueller was from the man with the badge and fumbling hands, who had come to their house with so many questions and frightened her into saying something, anything, just so he would go away again.
Sandra had held Lucy’s hand through the entire interview, rubbing her thumb across her skin with enough force to leave a small bruise. Lucy told Detective Mueller the truth, or what she thought was the truth. Mostly. “I went out with Patrick after Mom left for work. Around seven. We went to the Burger Barn and then we just drove around for a little while. I got bored and he dropped me off at the house. I went to my bedroom and put on headphones and fell asleep. I didn’t see Nolan at all that night.”
She told him she hadn’t heard anything either, or noticed anything unusual until the next morning when Nolan didn’t come to breakfast and then she just assumed he’d woken early and left the house already because his pickup wasn’t in the driveway. He was upset about being expelled from school and about being sent away to live with their father; he was upset about a lot of things, but he’d been especially worried about this girl, Celeste. This was Lucy’s excuse for why she waited so long to mention Nolan’s absence. She thought he’d gone over to Celeste’s house and stayed there. She wanted to believe that’s what happened anyway. For two days she kept her mouth shut, and only on the third day, when Sandra asked if she’d spoken to Nolan recently, did Lucy admit that she hadn’t seen him since Friday.
She kept the rest of the story to herself. How before they went to Burger Barn, Patrick stopped by his house and they raided his parents’ liquor cabinet. How she drank so much that large chunks of the night were lost to her now, swallowed up in a tidal wave of booze. How she couldn’t remember exactly what time she got home, or how she got home.
She’d been confused and scared and fourteen, and lying to Detective Mueller and her mother seemed better than telling them the whole truth about how she didn’t really remember much of anything except the harsh taste of liquor burning down her tongue and a knot in the pit of her stomach. Had Patrick dropped her off? Had she walked? Did she call a cab? She had no idea. She remembered being out with friends and then the next thing she remembered after that was waking up in her own bed with sunlight streaming through the window, and she was wearing the same clothes from the night before, only they were covered in dust and her jeans were ripped, dried blood caking her knees. When she woke, she had a pounding headache and a bitter taste in her mouth. When she woke, she raced to the bathroom and puked up the watery contents of her stomach. When she woke, Nolan was gone and she didn’t know where, but it seemed in her best interests to keep her mouth shut about the drinking and all the things she didn’t remember. It seemed a good idea to simply pretend she’d been home. Her memories grew no clearer with time. They weren’t like marbles carried in her pockets, whole and solid objects to be taken out whenever she needed them, turned over and over and never changing shape.
So many times in the past ten years, Lucy had thought about the night Nolan went missing and the days leading up to it. She’d gone over and over it in her head, lost sleep wondering, but it hadn’t made any difference. What she could remember was always less than what she couldn’t, and even if she told the truth, it wouldn’t be enough to bring him home. Away from Bishop, it had been easier. Ten years spent acting as if it didn’t matter, as if her missing brother and her missing memories had nothing to do with each other. Ten years in denial. Ten years wasted. Harold Mueller was wrong. There were worse things in life than a broken heart.
CASEBOOK ENTRY #3
STRANGE HAPPENING:
Dead Birds
DATE: September 13, 1999
LONGITUDE/LATITUDE: 37.363084 W, 118.39929 N
SYNOPSIS: Discovered two dead birds in the bed of my pickup at 15:00. They were arranged chest up, wings spread as if they fell midflight. Wings intact. Unclear how long birds had been lying there prior to my arrival as my pickup was left unattended from 12:35 to 15:00.
OBJECT DESCRIPTION: Both birds ar
e brown in color, small—possibly house sparrows. No apparent injuries. No aircraft of any kind spotted in the vicinity at time of discovery.
OTHER WITNESS STATEMENTS: None have come forward, though student parking lot was crowded at time of discovery. Experienced strong sensation that I was being watched, but could not find anyone in my vicinity who was paying specific attention or behaving in an overtly suspicious manner.
WEATHER INFORMATION: 64°F; winds from W at 9 mph; mostly cloudy; light rain early in the day, but no electrical storms or high winds.
LOCATION DESCRIPTION: Bishop Union High School student parking lot, NE corner of campus at W Pine and N Fowler St, Bishop, California. Pickup was parked in first row, 10 spaces from the left.
PHYSICAL EVIDENCE: I received a small shock opening the tailgate. Residual static from UFO?
CONCLUSION: Pending autopsy results. Will bring birds to County Health Dept. to be tested for possible cause of death.
Nolan told the UFO Encounters Group about the dead birds at the next meeting. At first he wasn’t going to. Birds died every day for various reasons. They flew into car windows, or were eaten by cats. Whole flocks struck by lightning or a fast-spreading disease, birds falling down dead in a great tumble of feathers and beaks. He heard about it on the news sometimes: 150 starlings dead in Boaz, Alabama; over 1,000 snow geese dead in Sandpoint, Idaho; 300 waxwings dead in Eustis, Maine. Once, a bird flew hard into the glass of his closed bedroom window and didn’t get up again. He buried it under a bush in the front yard.
Dead birds were common, but the ones in his truck bed were so oddly placed and perfectly intact—just the two of them, side by side, their wingtips touching—that his mind went straight to Celeste, who had met him for lunch earlier that day, how perfectly her hand fit in his. Standing in the parking lot, Nolan had felt the hairs on the back of his neck pop and his skin tingle, the air electric, though the skies were clear for as far as he could see, and though he hadn’t seen an extraterrestrial craft prior to or immediately after finding the birds, it seemed a very real possibility that one had come and gone, generating some kind of sonic boom or electromagnetic pulse that brought these two down. He’d spent a few minutes searching the rest of the parking lot, but found no other birds fallen, no flocks or feathered evidence. He’d sealed the two birds into Ziploc bags with every intention of leaving them with the county health department to determine cause of death, but the receptionist sent him and the birds away with a look of disgust, and he had no choice but to take them home and stick them in the back of the freezer under a Butterball turkey until he could connect with someone in the department who had more authority to order the kind of test he needed.
Everything We Lost Page 12