I Hope You're Listening

by Tom Ryan

  His mouth drops open, and suddenly he is angry.

  “Oh yeah, Dee, like you’re the only person who was affected by this. Like her parents—your parents—didn’t have to deal with a lot to get over this. Like she didn’t have any other friends besides you.”

  He stops, his mouth still half-open, his eyes wide, as if he’s said something he didn’t want to say.

  “I don’t feel that way at all, Burke,” I manage to say, but he’s already got his hands up, palms out like he’s warding me off.

  “Do you know what, Dee? Just forget about it. There are plenty of people who do care enough to give a shit.”

  This is rapidly spinning out of control, and I’m aware of Donkey and Maggie and the others listening to our conversation. I step farther from the dugout and drop my voice to a harsh whisper, so he has to lean in to hear me.

  “I’m sorry I didn’t tell you about the note, Burke. But they told me not to say anything.” I’m annoyed. What right does he have to my personal information anyway?

  “Well. I thought you were supposed to be my best friend. She went missing from my street after all.”

  I stare at him, unable to think of anything to say. Why is he so angry?

  His face drops and he closes his eyes. “I just…I don’t know what to do. I feel like if I’d known something earlier, I could have helped figure something out. I mean, Layla is still missing.”

  “I don’t know what you could have done,” I say. “Honestly.”

  He stares at me beseechingly. “I don’t want to believe he did it, Dee, but it’s getting clearer by the minute. Even my mom thinks he did it. My dad doesn’t, but only because it’s his brother.”

  “I guess that’s understandable,” I say.

  “Well, he’s going to have to start facing facts soon,” says Burke. “I can’t stop thinking that if I’d only paid better attention, maybe I could have stopped it. Do you know they think he left that note for you as a bait and switch? His alibi for when Sibby disappeared was so tight that they think he tried to connect the two cases so he’d be off the hook. Maybe he cut up the magazines for that note right under my nose and I was too stupid to notice.”

  “Burke,” I say, “you can’t blame yourself.”

  He ignores me. “Here’s another thing.” He leans in close to me, and a waft of sticky, pungent weed breaks through the icy cold of the night. I see a clear point of desperation in the middle of his glassy eyes. “Do you know how hard it is to live across from the Gerrards? It’s awful. The mom just sits in the window, glaring across at us, hating all of us.”

  “Burke,” I say. “She doesn’t hate all of you.”

  He ignores me. “And the dad has gone completely nuts. I’ve seen him go out of their house into the yard and back into the woods. He’s out there at all hours, leaving the wife behind by herself. It’s really sad. My mom tried to bring them some food, but she was barely even aware that there was someone else in the room with her. He even went out into the woods in the middle of that snowstorm. He’s looking for that kid, Dee. And if my uncle did what they’re saying he did, he might be the only person who knows where she is.”

  I look back at him, not sure what to say.

  “I can’t help you, Dee,” he says. “Sibby’s gone, just like Layla, and the sooner I’m able to forget about them both, the happier I’ll be.”

  He turns and walks back to his group.

  24.

  I still have Jonathan Plank’s business card shoved into the inside breast pocket of my parka. I’m not sure what to expect, but when I call him the next afternoon after school, he picks up his phone right away.

  “Plank.” His voice on the other end is professional. Brisk, like he’s in a hurry.

  “Hey,” I say. “This is Delia Skinner.”

  There’s a pause on the other end of the line, as he works to remember, then his voice returns, and now his voice is smoother, full of calculated recognition.

  “Delia,” he says. “How are you?”

  “Do you have time to meet me?” I ask. “Like, kind of under the radar?”

  “Yeah,” he says, snapping to business. “How about half an hour in the restaurant downstairs at the Best Western?”

  I didn’t expect to see him almost instantly, but I was the one to call him. I can’t very well turn him down now.

  “That works,” I say. I pause. “Don’t tell anyone, okay?”

  “I won’t,” he says immediately. I’m still not sure whether I can trust him or not, but the tone of his voice reassures me at least a little bit.

  By the time I arrive at the restaurant, Jonathan Plank is already sitting in the window, nursing a coffee. He waves and half rises from his seat as I approach.

  He waits until I slide into the booth, across from him, before sitting again. The waitress appears.

  “You want something to eat?” Plank asks me.

  “No, I’m okay,” I say. “Just an iced tea,” I tell the waitress.

  As Plank orders his sandwich and fries, I look at him, trying to understand from his face and the friendly way he talks to the waitress what kind of person he is.

  “I’m glad you got in touch,” says Plank, turning back to me. “I didn’t think I’d hear from you.” His fingers reach out and slide a small black notebook toward him, he flips it open and pulls a pen from his breast pocket.

  “I’m not here to give you an interview,” I say, looking at the notebook pointedly. “None of this is on the record.”

  He nods slowly, then looks down at his notebook, where I see a list of questions neatly written down and numbered. He considers them for a moment, then flips the notebook upside down and shoves it to the side, sticking his pen back into his pocket.

  “Sure,” he says. “That’s totally fine. Whatever works for you.” He seems willing to hear me out, but I still feel uneasy.

  “I just want to know what it was like back then,” I say. “When Sibby went missing. You were here, right? What did people think had happened?”

  He looks at me quizzically, and I know that he’s trying to figure out what I’m working toward here. “How much do you know?” he asks.

  This is the million-dollar question, the glitch in the matrix: I don’t know anything. I’ve kept myself so isolated from the truth about Sibby’s disappearance that I don’t really know what it was like. I have my own few scattered memories, but I’ve never really spoken to anyone about it. Not my parents. Not Burke.

  Only Sarah. Until yesterday, the thought of her made me soften, relax, but now the thought of her puts a sour taste in my mouth.

  “I don’t know much,” I admit. “I haven’t really wanted to rip open that wound.”

  “But you’re here now,” he says.

  I shrug. “I guess I can’t hide from it any longer.”

  “So,” he says, “what exactly are you looking for?”

  “I want to know what you think happened to Sibyl,” I say.

  He laughs, not unkindly. “Don’t you think if I knew that I would have written about it by now?”

  “I know you don’t know exactly what happened to her,” I say, “but you must have had some broad theories. I dug up some of your old stories last night. They all took the angle of the ‘mysterious small town with a big secret.’”

  “Because I believed it,” he said. “I still do. There’s no way in my mind that this could have been some random event. Two kidnappers just happened to be in the woods together at the same time and just happened to stumble across two girls playing in the woods? It doesn’t make any sense. Whoever did this had to know the area, had to know that kids played in that forest, had to know that there was a perfect spot to hide a car to make a clean getaway onto the highway.”

  “So you think that whoever did it was from town?” I ask.

  He nods slowly. “From town or closely connected to town. I’ve gone over it and over it, and I keep coming back to the same thing: it was too clean to be random.” He leans back in his boot
h and holds his hands out, palms up. “But that’s as far as my theory goes.”

  “Do you think Sibby and Layla are connected?” I ask.

  He shakes his head. “Terry O’Donnell was one of the first people we looked at when we were making our list of possible suspects. He was an unemployed transient with a criminal record. But he had an airtight alibi. Several witnesses corroborated that he was at the movies with his girlfriend and his nieces and nephew on that particular afternoon.”

  “So you do think he took Layla,” I confirm. “Just not Sibby.”

  Plank shrugs. “I can’t think of another scenario that fits as well as that one.”

  I’m about to push back, maybe for Burke’s sake, since what he’s saying seems true to me, but his eyes shift abruptly to stare behind me, and suddenly we’re interrupted by a loud, confident voice that seems to have snuck up right behind me.

  “Nice trick you pulled with the car horn the other day. I never would have thought that one up myself.”

  I recognize the voice before she’s even stopped next to our booth: Quinlee Ellacott. She’s got an unlit cigarette pinched between the fingers of one hand, and with the other, she’s holding a coat in place where it’s draped over her shoulders, clearly about to step outside for a smoke.

  “How’d you score this interview anyway, John?” she says, half-amused, half-annoyed. “Candy? Cannabis?”

  “I don’t smoke weed,” I say, “and since you’re on your way out to suck back some nicotine, maybe you should hold back on the judgment calls.”

  She grins. “I’m impressed,” she says. “You’ve got some attitude. She giving you some good dirt, Johnny boy?”

  I stand from my chair.

  “As a matter of fact, I haven’t told him anything,” I say. It’s one of those truthful statements that sounds so much like a lie that I blush, cursing myself right away for it.

  “Is that right?” asks Quinlee.

  “Yep,” I say. “I asked him to meet me because he’s about the only journalist I trust in this town, and I wanted to know if he had any advice about keeping vultures like you away from me and my family.”

  Quinlee doesn’t miss a beat. “That’s all fine and good, sweetheart, but not talking to you is only a minor speed bump. I’ll find loads of people to talk, don’t worry. Everyone wants to be on TV.”

  “You’re not on TV,” I say, pushing back. “You’re on the internet, in a tiny little window.”

  She makes a mock sad face. “That might just about hurt my feelings if millions of people weren’t watching that little window.”

  “We aren’t all like you, Quinlee,” says Plank. “Some of us are actually interested in real journalism, not just sensationalism.”

  “You just keep telling yourself that,” says Quinlee. She looks at me. “Listen, you might already be starting to figure this out, but these stories are linked. They might not be connected, but they’re sure as shit linked. There’s one hell of a spicy parallel between this missing girl and the shit you went through as a kid, and believe me, it’s not going to go unnoticed. Whether you like it or not, Sibby Carmichael is about to become a household name again, and you’re going to be dragged into it too. You can waste your time talking to Mr. Plank here, and get your story out into a tiny little market only to disappear in a day or so, or you can trust me to give you some serious and sympathetic exposure.”

  “I don’t want exposure,” I say. “I don’t want anything from anyone except to be left alone.”

  She shrugs. “Doesn’t matter, sweetheart. You’re part of this, like it or not. Anyway, I’m not going to waste time begging, but I’ll give you a fair heads-up: I will be telling your story. You can decide whether or not you want a chance to help me figure out how to do that.”

  She winks at me, nods at Jonathan, then turns on her heel and marches through the restaurant toward the lobby.

  “Shit,” I say.

  “It’s a tough industry,” says Plank. “She’s right about one thing: someone’s going to tell your story. But don’t let her fool you: she doesn’t have to be the one to do it. Our paper has a good reputation, and there’s enough interest in this story that a feature article about you, with an exclusive interview, would go viral pretty quickly.”

  I shake my head. “Not gonna happen.”

  “Worth a shot,” he says. “Just promise me something? If you do change your mind, will you give me some serious consideration? I promise I’ll respect your boundaries.”

  Reluctantly, I nod.

  “You know, Dee,” he says, “I asked for this assignment. Begged for it actually. I don’t even write crime stories anymore. I’m on the sports beat. But I…I want to find out what happened to Sibby too. I’ve never been able to get beyond it.”

  “Yeah, well, join the club,” I say. I stand and reach out to shake his hand. “Thanks for talking to me today.”

  “Anytime. Seriously.”

  I find a rear exit, so I don’t have to walk through the parking lot and encounter Quinlee again.

  It’s almost dark by the time I leave the Best Western, and the wind has picked up a bit, sending a sharp chill through my coat and sweater. I pull my scarf tighter around my neck and put my head down against the cold.

  As I walk home, I think about Plank’s version of events. If it’s true that someone from town took her, isn’t there a really good chance that they’re still here? But what am I supposed to do, start interviewing people one at a time? Hardly a good way to keep a low profile.

  This gives me an idea. I step into a bus shelter to get out of the wind and pull my phone out of my pocket, searching quickly through my contacts.

  Brianna answers on the first ring.

  “Delia,” she says, her voice crisp. “This is a surprise.”

  “Hey, Brianna. I’ve been thinking that you’re right. I should help out more. With the school and stuff,” I say, cutting right to the chase. “Do you still need someone to take care of raffle tickets at the hockey game?”

  There’s a pause before she speaks again, and I know I’ve taken her by surprise. “Actually,” she says, and her voice is suddenly cheerful, even chummy. “That would be a huge help. I couldn’t find anyone else to do it, and I was going to have to run double-duty myself. It’s this coming Saturday though.”

  “Yeah,” I say. “I know. I can do that.”

  “Perfect. Just show up at the arena an hour before the game and I’ll get you set up.”

  I hang up and shove my phone back in my pocket.

  25.

  The Carmichaels live in a condo right downtown. It’s a fancy building, with a doorman and a glittering lobby. Elevators with mirrored walls and brass handrails.

  It’s not what I expected. The Carmichaels weren’t poor—at least no poorer than anyone else who lived on our street when I was growing up—but they definitely weren’t rich either. I remember Sibyl’s clothes being handed down to her little sister, Greta, and their parents collecting empties on the back porch to return for the deposit money.

  This is not a “save your bottles for cash” kind of place. This building is rich.

  The Carmichaels are expecting me. I found Mr. Carmichael’s email address online, and after a day of waiting, he responded. When I give the doorman my name, he runs his fingers down a list on a clipboard behind his little booth and smiles.

  “Yes,” he says. “Here you are. Go right on up, fifteenth floor.”

  As I step out of the elevator, a door at the far end of the hallway clicks open, and Grant Carmichael, Sibby’s father, appears.

  “Delia,” he says, extending both hands in a greeting as I approach. I’m not prepared for how different he looks. His hair is still thick, but his temples are gray, and in his expensive-looking gray wool slacks and thin blue sweater, he looks like a magically aged version of the man in my memory all this time. I remind myself that time has passed for him, just as it has for me. For his daughter.

  “Hi,” I say, suddenly awkward.
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  “Please, come in.” He turns sideways and gestures into the apartment, and I hurry to move past him.

  He closes the door behind us, and I kick off my shoes and drop my backpack onto the floor of a gleaming white marble foyer. I catch sight of myself in a gilt-framed mirror and almost laugh. I’ve done my best to dress in what passes as “nice” clothes, but I am still so out of place in this apartment it’s almost ridiculous.

  “Come on in,” he says, and I’m relieved that his voice makes him sound more like the suburban dad I remember. He puts a hand lightly on my back and guides me around a corner into a large living room. I have a vague impression of expensive furniture and fresh flowers, but my attention is almost completely drawn to the woman on the other side of the room.

  Astrid Carmichael, Sibby’s mother, is perched on the edge of a charcoal armchair. She’s attempting to stand, but even from across the room, I can see that her entire body is trembling. Her hand grabs an arm of the chair and grips, and although her mouth is half-open to say something, she can only stare at me, her eyes wide.

  Until now, I’ve managed to stay collected, calm, working myself through this entire exercise step-by-step. Get on the bus. Follow the map on my phone to their building. Talk to the doorman. Say hello to Mr. Carmichael.

  Now, it all crumbles, and the anxiety that is emanating from Mrs. Carmichael in waves surrounds me like a contagion. I have the sudden feeling that my knees are going to drop out from under me, and my head swells with rushing blood and emotion.

  Like her husband, she’s dressed completely differently than I would have expected, in her case, a pale yellow silk pantsuit. My best friend’s mother, the pretty woman who liked to wear simple cotton sundresses and bake German treats like her mother had, who plastered Band-Aids on my knee when the situation arose, now looks like a society woman.