by Laura McHugh
“Yeah,” I said. “Still getting used to being back in the house.”
“I hope you don’t mind me asking,” he said, “but what have you been doing for the past…ten years? Is that right? I can’t believe it’s been that long.”
“Going to school, mostly. And moving. I’ve lived in four different states since I saw you last. I guess this makes five.”
He shook his head. “That must have been hard, moving all the time.”
I shrugged. I didn’t know how to explain that after a while it gets harder to stay in one place. I’d grown used to the pattern my dad had set—if things weren’t going well, move on to a new town that hadn’t yet proved disappointing.
“Didn’t you ever think about going somewhere else?”
“Sure,” he said. “I thought about it, when I was in school. Things change as you get older, though, you know? Different priorities. I’ve lived here all my life, my family’s here. It meant a lot to my dad that I came back and joined his practice.”
The waitress plunked down our drinks, giving my Diet Coke to Ben and Ben’s iced tea to me. Ben said thank you and then switched them after she left.
“So, are your degrees in history?” he asked, thumbing through a pile of sugar and sweetener packets.
“Yeah,” I said, leaving out the fact that my master’s was incomplete, that I hadn’t turned in my thesis and didn’t know if I ever would. I wondered what he would say if I told him about Dr. Endicott, if I laid my arm across the table and told him how I’d gotten my scars.
“I knew you’d stick with it,” he said. “You were obsessed, carrying that Legendary Keokuk Homes book around, telling me all those boring stories over and over. I think you had the whole thing memorized.”
He was teasing, but it was true. “Tell me about that thing your mom’s doing, the tour,” I said.
“You’ll have to get the details from her, but really what they’re trying to do is boost tourism here, raise some money to fix things up. I don’t know if you’ve had a chance to look around town, but it isn’t exactly thriving. It’s sad, when you think about how it used to be.”
The waitress delivered a basket of warm bread, and Ben pushed it toward me, along with the butter. “I guess I could at least go talk to your mom about putting Arrowood on the tour, see what all I’d have to do.”
“She’ll probably try to recruit you to join the historical society, too. I mean, if you’re planning to stick around awhile.” He tilted his head to look at me, and for a moment the grown-up Ben, the dentist who wore ironed shirts, receded, and there was my Ben, my best friend. I had missed him.
“I think so,” I said. “I hope so.”
“I’m glad to hear that.” He kept his eyes locked on mine long enough that my pulse ratcheted upward, and then he busied himself with his drink, pouring in two sweeteners, his spoon clinking against the glass as he stirred. “Lauren’s thrilled, by the way. She’s in town from Iowa City for a friend’s wedding and she really wants to see you, but she couldn’t get away tonight. Could you maybe stop by Mom and Dad’s tomorrow and say hi before she heads back to school? She hardly ever comes home, so it might be a while before you catch her again.”
“I’d love to,” I said. “Is she in grad school now?” His sister and I had been close once, too. Lauren was a few years older than the twins, and during each summer I spent in Keokuk it had been hard for me to look at her without imagining Violet and Tabby at her age, wondering if they were playing softball or having sleepovers or whatever else Lauren was doing.
“Would you believe dental school?”
“Are you kidding? Her too? How did that happen?”
“Well, Dad will have to retire eventually, and we’ll share the practice. It’s amazing how appealing dentistry starts to look when you’re not good at anything else.”
“But…do you even like it?” I asked. “You never wanted to be a dentist. And what about the comic books? You were such a good artist. I was sure you’d end up doing something creative.”
He shrugged, tapping his fingers on his glass. “That was just a hobby. I was never good enough to get anywhere with it. I don’t draw much anymore.” He was quiet for a moment, and then his face brightened. “Right now all my creative energy is going into restoring my house. I bought a foreclosure on Orleans Avenue, just a couple blocks from the Sister House.”
“Congratulations! What style?”
“Folk Victorian.” He grinned. “I knew you’d ask. I hope you’re very impressed that I knew the answer. I never could keep the different kinds straight like you. I’d love to have you over once I get things cleaned up a little. Right now the first floor is down to studs, and there’s nowhere to sit.”
“I’d love that,” I said, pinching crumbs off a piece of bread. “I went to see the Sister House the other day. It looked abandoned.”
“Yeah,” Ben said softly. “I’m sorry you had to see it like that. It was a rental for a while, but the bank’s got it now. I actually considered buying it when I was looking at foreclosures, before my place came up for sale. It’s not beyond fixing.”
The waitress appeared with heaped plates of breaded catfish and hush puppies and french fries, everything crispy and golden and glistening with grease. I closed my eyes and inhaled, transported back to the era when my family had come here for catfish every Friday during Lent, the powerful link between scent and memory urging my fingers to trace the sign of the cross, north-south-east-west, across my flesh.
—
The oldies station was playing Britney Spears songs from the nineties as we drove back home. We agreed that it was a sacrilege—“oldies” should refer only to music made before we were born—but it didn’t stop us from singing along, trying to remember dance moves from the videos we used to watch together on MTV. Ben parked in my driveway and rolled down the windows.
“Thanks for dinner,” I said. A light breeze sifted through the car, fluttering the pharmacy school graduation tassel that hung from his rearview mirror. The scent of Ben’s woodsy cologne swirled around me, and I wanted to bury my face against his neck, breathe him in. His lips parted, and my mind raced ahead, placing words in his mouth. He would ask why I had stopped writing back, all those years ago, and I wouldn’t know what to say. Or he would skip right over the past and ask to come inside.
“My pleasure,” he said. “I hope we can do it again soon.”
I smoothed my dress with my palms, watching the wrinkles flatten out and reappear. Neither of us had mentioned the twins, and I knew once I did, the night would no longer be about me and Ben. Part of me didn’t want to know the answer, didn’t want to raise the question.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Of course.” His hands rested on the steering wheel. I remembered how his fingers used to be smudged with graphite, silver lines under his nails from constant sketching.
“The day the twins disappeared…you saw the gold car, too. How did you know what time you saw it?”
He didn’t say anything at first; his gaze was fixed straight ahead, on his reflection in the windshield or something in the darkness beyond. He shifted in his seat, twisting to face me. “Is there a reason this is coming up now?”
“There’s this guy who’s writing a book about the case. He has a website that’s all about unsolved crimes. He wanted to talk to me. He said he asked you for an interview, too, and you turned him down.”
Ben frowned. “Josh Kyle? Yeah, I wasn’t sure it was a good idea.”
“I didn’t think so, either, but I met him, and he seems all right.”
“You sure?”
“He’s a little intense, maybe, but I guess you’d have to be, to do what he does.”
“Do you know about his brother?”
“Yeah. He told me he ran away and never came back. He said he’s still looking for him.”
“Did he tell you everybody thought he had something to do with his brother going missing?”
“No. Why would anyb
ody think that?”
Ben sighed. “It was all over the news when it happened. He and his brother went camping up near Bonnett Lake, and two days later Josh drove home alone in the family station wagon. Well, almost home. He was what, eleven or twelve? Didn’t really know how to drive. He wrecked the car on a gravel road just outside Fort Madison. All the camping gear was gone. His brother was gone. He said he’d slept in the car and woke up alone, the campsite cleared out. Their neighbors started talking about how he didn’t get along with his brother. Josh was one of those awkward kids who always kept to himself. He didn’t really have any friends, and his older brother picked on him mercilessly. People thought he might have snapped and done something to him out there in the woods.”
It didn’t seem likely to me that an eleven-year-old boy would be strong enough and smart enough to kill his much older brother and get away with it. I tried to picture Josh at that age, small and awkward, alone in the woods, not yet obsessed with the intricate puzzles of unsolved crimes.
“You can probably find the old stories online,” Ben continued. “I’m just saying, you might want to know more about him before you get involved with his project.”
“I’m not asking for him. I just need to know, for me. How did you know what time you saw the gold car? Did you look at a clock or something?”
The wind picked up, clacking the branches of the oaks. Ben raked his hand through his hair, an old habit from the days when it was long enough to be unruly. “I remember my mom sent me to my room to practice the violin, and told me not to come out until she came to get me. Dad was out golfing, Lauren was with our grandparents for the weekend, and the house was quiet. After a while, I thought Mom had forgotten about me, and I snuck downstairs to see what she was doing, but she wasn’t there. I went back up to my room and played some videogames. Later I saw her coming out of the carriage house. She’d been spending a lot of time working on the upper level…she was fixing it up as a sort of guesthouse. I know I saw the car before my mom came back, but that could’ve been anytime.”
He looked at me in a way that sent the years reeling backward, to a time when we were inseparable, when Ben was as much a part of me as my bones and my grief. He touched my hand, tentatively, with the tips of his fingers, points of heat on my cool flesh. I wondered, if he wrapped himself around me, if I might begin to thaw.
“They asked me if it could have been around four,” he continued, “because that’s when you saw it. I said yes. I was always on your side, and I thought if you saw it at four, I must have seen it at the same time.”
My heart stuttered. I had been so sure, and it felt like a betrayal to question my own memory. But if Ben and I, the only two witnesses, were both wrong, I had to admit it was possible that some other truth existed, and that the search for my sisters had been on the wrong path from the start.
—
I didn’t feel like going inside after Ben left, to sit alone in the empty house. Instead I sat in the wet grass beneath the mimosa tree, looking out across the dark yard to the street, where I could still picture the gold car pulling away from the curb. I hadn’t known that my last day with my sisters had been preserved on film, and seeing those images in print after carrying them around for so long in my head was strangely comforting. In Singer’s picture, the same as in my memory, the twins and I were happy and smiling.
After Violet and Tabitha disappeared, I started to pay close attention to photos of missing children, the ones in newspapers and on flyers and TV. When you see a picture of a missing child, it’s usually a school photo or family snapshot of the kid with a huge grin and bright eyes, oblivious to their approaching demise. That child who was now likely dead, covered with leaves in a ditch or floating in a pond somewhere, or held captive in a dark basement with no hope of getting out, that little boy or girl smiled and smiled while you studied the picture and begged them to tell you where they were, what had happened. I wanted them to stop smiling. I wanted them to know that something terrible was coming, to be ready. I wanted them to fight back, or run and scream, or stay home that day, to avoid whatever had made them go missing. It was too late by then, by the time you saw their smiling faces on the posters.
The twins were no different. The image that was plastered on posters and shown constantly on the news was their eighteen-month photo, taken at the Sears portrait studio in the mall. They were wearing aqua dresses with fluffy tulle skirts, their pale hair clipped to the side with matching butterfly bows. They grinned, showing off tiny pearl teeth in their tiny pink mouths.
It was the same with pictures of me from before. But not after. In every school picture from then on, my expression was resigned, wary, grim. When the photographer urged me to smile, I stared him down, unyielding. If I went missing, the world would know that I had seen it coming, that my fate was unavoidable. No one would have to look at my smiling face and think, It never should have happened to this one, so happy and full of life.
CHAPTER 9
* * *
Josh called me Sunday morning while I was sitting out on the terrace in my nightgown, eating Cap’n Crunch from the box. The sky was pale and chalky, a haze over the river. The window Heaney had opened for me slid shut while I slept, and I had woken with the faint scent of mildew clinging to everything. Even now, in the open air, I could still smell it on my skin.
“Hi, Arden,” Josh said. “I hope you don’t mind me calling. I thought it would be easier. Do you have a few minutes to talk?”
“Yeah,” I said. “I’m not doing anything.”
My laptop sat on the table in front of me, a dozen tabs open in the Web browser. I’d been reading about the disappearance of Josh’s brother. Whether or not Josh’s official account was truthful, he had clearly been traumatized by whatever had happened in the woods. One of the articles said that he’d been injured in the ensuing car crash, suffering bruises, abrasions, and a broken wrist, and that his parents insisted he be kept at the hospital overnight for observation, because he appeared to be in a state of shock. Someone in another article questioned whether he could have incurred those wounds in a struggle with his brother and staged the crash as a cover-up.
“I wanted to go over a few things.” I thought I could hear papers shuffling. I imagined him in his apartment, wearing his windbreaker, his gray hair hidden beneath his ball cap. “First, I looked into Singer’s claim that he had a white dog in the car with him. There’s nothing about a dog in any of his statements. He didn’t say anything about it to investigators.”
“So he was lying.”
“Not necessarily. He might not have thought it was relevant, and besides, if he was planning to use the dog to lure kids into his car, like he told you, he wouldn’t have been eager to bring it up.”
“I guess. Maybe.” I swiped a cloud of gnats away from my face.
“My next step is to see if there’s any evidence that he owned a white dog back then. His friends or neighbors might remember. And I can find out if dog hair was found in the car when they searched it.”
“You’re thorough,” I said. “I didn’t think you’d take the dog thing so seriously.”
“I know it’s important to you. If there was a dog, it might be easier for you to accept that you didn’t see the twins with Singer. So I’ll find out. In the meantime, I’m narrowing down the suspect list.”
“Who’s on it?”
“Your neighbors, the Tru-Lawn crew that was working at the Ferrises’, a FedEx driver who knew your parents and delivered a package down the street. Pretty much anybody who could have been in the area without drawing attention to themselves.”
I had thought for a long time that every possible lead had already been investigated to a dead end. The spotlight, though, had always been on Singer. Could such an intense focus on the wrong suspect have caused even the most obvious clues to be missed entirely?
“The Brubaker house across from Arrowood, for instance,” Josh continued. “It was empty at the time. The owners were on vacation, and
the house was undergoing extensive renovation work while they were gone. Several different contractors had access to the house—painters, carpenters, plumber, electrician. I’m trying to find out if one of them was over there that day.”
“Didn’t they search all the nearby houses, though? I know they searched ours, more than once.”
“Yeah, but they didn’t get to every house right away. How much time passed,” he asked, “before they started looking in your neighborhood? They were trying to find the gold car as quickly as possible. It was just the local police force, at first, before they called in the big guys for help. They didn’t have any experience with kidnappings. They could have missed things. They did miss things, or we’d know what happened to your sisters by now.”
“So we’ve gone from one suspect to the entire neighborhood. How do you rule people out seventeen years after the fact?”
“Most of them have alibis,” he said. “I’m checking to see how strong they are, whether or not they were ever verified. Maybe someone lied for a husband or boyfriend back then, said he was home with her, and now her story’s changed. Sometimes time and distance can bring things to the surface. Something that didn’t seem significant then might stand out now. You never know.”
“Thanks for keeping me updated,” I said. “I appreciate it.”
“Are you feeling better?” he asked.
“What do you mean?”
“From the other day. You seemed a bit shaken up after looking at the pictures. I just wondered if you were doing better now that you’ve had some time to take it in.”
“I’m okay,” I said. That was the answer people wanted, when they asked.
—
Shortly after breakfast, I stood on the front porch of Arrowood, working up the nerve to go next door and visit Lauren. The Ferrises’ Gothic Revival was as familiar to me as my own—more so, maybe, as I’d spent so much time over there on my summer visits, especially that last summer, when I was fifteen. The Sister House wasn’t the same that year. Aunt Alice had fallen and broken her hip and then developed pneumonia. By late July, Grammy was sleeping in Alice’s hospital room, afraid to leave her alone overnight, and Dr. Ferris had offered to let me stay, temporarily, in one of their guest rooms. It was during that time that the mayflies began hatching on the river, and they swarmed into town by the millions to mate and die, their adult lives measured in hours. Dead mayflies lay in heaps at the bases of streetlights and storefronts, covered windshields and roads, and drifted into gutters like black snow. They were scraped from the sidewalk with shovels, into massive piles that smelled like rotting fish.