Missing White Girl

by Jeffrey J. Mariotte

  “Not necessarily,” Buck replied.

  Jace gave another wiggle of his shoulders. “Lulu and I are involved with various political causes,” he said. “Sometimes the cops don’t like it.” He blinked a couple of times, as if consciousness had just started to catch up with his body. “Sorry, you want to come in?”

  He stepped away from the door and Buck followed him inside. The cottage was one big room, its floor made of tongue-and-groove planks painted deep blue. A freestanding kitchen counter separated off an area containing a sink, a small refrigerator plastered with stickers of cartoon characters and what must have been rock bands Buck had never heard of, and a hotplate on a tile counter. Pots and plates had been piled on the counter behind the hotplate. On the wooden freestanding unit were plastic tumblers, stacked upside down on top of one another, and a couple of ceramic mugs.

  Jace slept on the other side of the room. A mattress with a tangle of bedding lay on the floor below a window that was open about four inches. No curtains blocked the window; sunlight blasted through, nearly obscuring the view to the next peak, the next couple of miner’s cabins similarly occupied by non-miners. Nearby stood a wooden wardrobe with no doors that served as Jace’s closet. Clothes hung inside, surprisingly neatly considering the rest of the place. Beside that a low bookcase had two shelves actually devoted to books and two others holding underwear, socks, T-shirts and the like. The room reeked of incense in spite of the open window. Guess all the hippies haven’t gone yet, Buck thought.

  “You want some tea?” Jace asked.

  Buck looked around for someplace to sit. Against the white plaster wall by the door, to which some of the same posters he’d seen in Lulu’s room had been stapled, leaned two webbed lawn chairs, folded shut. Next to them stood a TEAC stereo system with a glowing red power light and yellow digital display. No sound came from it. Probably, Buck thought, Jace had fallen asleep listening to a CD. Beside that, sitting on the floor with cords and cables snaking all around it, Buck saw a desktop computer system, turned off. He gestured toward the lawn chairs. “May I?”

  “Go ahead,” Jace said.

  The yellow and aqua chair unfolded with a raspy squeal, and Buck settled tenuously into it, hoping the frayed ribbon webbing would bear his weight. “No thanks on the tea,” he said. “I’m good.”

  “Mind if I make some?”

  “It’s your place.” The chair groaned when Buck shifted, but it held. “Lulu spend much time here?”

  “Once in a while,” Jace answered. He moved behind the counter and ran some water into a copper-bottomed saucepan, then put it on one of the burners. “She’s a good girl, you know. Her parents like me well enough—liked me, I guess, now. But they still prefer her to sleep at home, even though they know we’ve been, what’s the phrase? Sexually active.”

  “Can’t say I blame them for that.”

  From beneath the counter, on the side Buck couldn’t see, Jace pulled a box of tea bags. He chose one and placed it inside a mug, paper tag hanging out, then leaned against the counter waiting for the water to boil. “You have any idea where she is yet?”

  “I was hoping maybe something had occurred to you,” Buck said. “Or that maybe you’d heard from her.”

  “Not a thing,” Jace admitted. “I don’t mind telling you I’ve been worried, though. Practically tearing my hair out, not sleeping well. I just want her to be okay, you know?”

  “I know, Jace. And I’m sorry to say that my investigation isn’t bearing fruit yet. That’s why I’m here—I figure there must be more I can find out about Lulu, something that’ll point me in the right direction. So I thought, who better to learn from?”

  Jace shrugged. So far it was his most useful skill. “I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know anyone who’d want to hurt her.”

  “You said the two of you are involved in various causes,” Buck reminded him. “Some of which attract the attention of law enforcement. Can you tell me about those?”

  “She’s not really too involved in that sort of thing, except through me,” Jace said. He pinched his tea bag out of the mug and set it on the counter. “Except Bridges Not Borders, which is more her deal than mine. I mean, she’ll come up to Bisbee for a peace march or something, and sometimes pass out flyers or petitions down in Douglas, but she’s not part of the committee, doesn’t go to meetings or anything like that. With school and all she’s got plenty to do.”

  “I’m sure that’s true.”

  “So I don’t see how her disappearance could be related to any of that. I guess maybe if she crossed the wrong people while working for Bridges Not Borders, some of those Minutemen or something…Have you looked into that?”

  “Not yet,” Buck admitted. Nellie Oberricht had assured him that Lulu was never put into a position where she would encounter such people. He had thought at the time that she was telling the truth, but truth wasn’t always objective. If Lulu had been out in the community posting notices and circulating petitions, she might well have run across people who took a different view of things than she did. When it came to immigration issues there were almost as many opinions as there were people to hold them, and anyone who claimed they knew the absolute solution to the problem was lying, delusional or both.

  “Are you going to?”

  “Yes,” Buck assured him. “I’ll be looking at everything and everyone until I find her. I was just hoping you could narrow the field a little for me.”

  Jace peered into his mug as if the answer could be read in the tea leaves—except that they, of course, had been confined in the bag and removed. “I wish I could come up with a magic answer for you,” he said.

  “You and me both, son,” Buck said. “You and me both.”

  3

  Lulu can’t escape the stink of the dead woman.

  Then again, she hasn’t been allowed to shower since he took her, and she still wears shorts that she has peed in several times, so the dead woman is probably glad she can’t smell Lulu. He hasn’t bothered to move the body, but just leaves it on the floor where it fell, among the litter from fast-food meals and frozen dinners and the soft drink cans. Lulu doesn’t know if he’s leaving it there to torture her, or if now that the woman is dead she is beneath his notice, just like Lulu’s questions and complaints are beneath his notice. He seems to live in his own interior world, she thinks, paying little attention to anything outside it except when he specifically wants something.

  She has figured out what he wants. Not how he knows he can get it from her—that she doesn’t understand at all. But what it is, she is pretty sure of.

  He wants to know when and where she will cross the border. The white girl, whose name might be something like Aztlán, and then again, might not.

  The trouble is, even if she wanted to tell him, she can’t. She doesn’t know herself. She knows only that she will know—that when it is time, she will be granted the knowledge, maybe in a dream or some other way. It isn’t like she has a printed itinerary or anything. All she knows is what she has seen in her dreams. The white girl is coming, Lulu is supposed to meet her, and after that…

  After that, she doesn’t know. The dreams never go past the moment of meeting. Even then, they’re…well, they’re dreams. Vague, obscure, contradictory, changing in her mind even while she tries to get their details straight, to remember them. She remembers reading about Freud, about a study in which people were supposed to transcribe someone telling them about a dream three times in the first few minutes after waking up, and how the details of the dream would be different each time, but in the teller’s head she would be describing the same dream. It’s just that the brain can’t cling to the first set of memories because the second and then the third set override them. So even if she had been given a date, a time, a place, she would have no guarantee that what she remembered was the right date or time or place as it had been offered.

  But she can’t explain that to him. He doesn’t want to hear anything except the answer to his questio
n. And if the answer is “I don’t know” or “I can’t tell you” or anything along those lines, it earns her another slap from those butter-soft hands.

  And now, apparently, Lulu has earned herself a companion, a dead woman on the floor in the doorway to her room—the bedroom in which she has been kept, which she has come to think of as hers, as if she could or would want to possess any part of this cabin, or this experience. He’d tied the blindfold on tighter, and she can hear him walk to the doorway now and again, where he pauses, presumably checking to make sure she hasn’t messed with it again.

  She hasn’t, because she knows what she would see, if she could see, and she chooses not to. But there’s no mistaking the reek of her, the spoiled meat smell that gradually overcame the smell of the bodily wastes she evacuated into her pants when he snapped her neck. It has a sweet underscent but the predominant odor is sharp and nasty, filling the room, filling her nose, inhabiting, she suspects, her own skin cells and the fibers of her clothing so that she will never be completely free of it again.

  If he leaves the woman there, it will only get worse. Already she can hear the buzz of insects on the body, flies, and several times during the night and morning the flies have left the woman’s body and landed on Lulu, causing her to awaken and swat them away. She has already had to contend with a few spiders and is desperately afraid one of them will be a black widow, or else a centipede will get inside and bite her, or maybe a tarantula. Most bites would not cause death, which would, at this point, be a welcome relief, but they would cause intense pain, agony, and she would not, she is sure, be allowed to seek medical attention or to treat the bites in any way.

  All her life, Lulu has collected hugs the way her friend Sasha collects horse figurines. To pass the time and to try to ignore the dead woman, in her mind she makes a list of the people whose hugs she misses the most. Mom, Dad and the boys top the list, of course, and those are hugs she doesn’t believe she’ll ever have again. Grandpa Lavender gave great hugs too, but he’s been gone for years now. Jace, of course. Becka, wiry and strong, is one of her favorite girl-huggers. Oliver Bowles is stingy with his, probably because he’s a teacher and all, but she’s had a couple and liked them. Paul, her first real boyfriend, during her senior year at high school in Elfrida, when they used to go up D Hill outside Douglas to make out. Some of the best have been hugs from complete strangers, at peace marches or at the Farmer’s Market—the kind where someone just agrees so intensely with what she’s doing that he or she spontaneously open his or her arms.

  Will she ever add another hug to the collection? Magic 8-Ball says “not looking good.”

  Footsteps come toward her doorway, interrupting her list-making. An exaggerated pause, and then another one sounds, as if he has stepped awkwardly over the woman’s body. At least she’s an inconvenience to him that way, Lulu thinks, with some degree of satisfaction. The footsteps continue, straight toward her.

  Lulu waits, mouth closed, willing herself to be relaxed, casual. He’s not going to hurt you too much, she tells herself. He doesn’t want you to die, because then he’ll never find out what he wants to know.

  “When is she coming?” he asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  He slaps her, across the left cheek. The blow stings.

  “When?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you, I don’t know!”

  He slaps her again, with the other hand. Her right cheek starts to burn.

  “Do you want to end up like her? I know you know she’s still there. She tried to rescue you, and I had to kill her. I don’t enjoy killing, particularly, it’s just something that has to be done sometimes.”

  “Like the way you killed my family?”

  “It had to be done. Because I needed you to be able to tell me when she’s coming.”

  “And I can’t do that.”

  He slaps her again. Lulu tastes blood. Will he ever figure out that the slaps hurt but they’re not having the effect he wants?

  “You will tell me,” he says. “You don’t want to end up like her, alone on the floor of a cabin somewhere with the bugs picking at you. Do you want to see her eyeballs? They’ve started in on those but haven’t finished yet; it’s really quite fascinating. I can take off your blindfold if you’d like to see that.”

  “No, thanks,” Lulu says. He’s probably bluffing, she figures. There’s nothing to see from where she is, chained on the floor. Nothing that would help her escape. Which means the reason he wants her blindfolded is that he doesn’t want her looking at him. That’s fine with her—from the few glimpses she’s had, she finds him hideously ugly. She would rather look at the partially consumed eyeballs of a dead woman than at his face. “Look, I can’t tell you when she’s coming, or even where, because I just don’t know. So you might as well let me go. Either that or fucking kill me already.”

  She braces for a slap that doesn’t come. Is he thinking it over? Will the time come, she wonders, that he’ll realize I’m never going to tell him? Will he kill me then, or let me go?

  She shakes her head, even though she knows he won’t understand why and there is no one else to see. He’ll never let me go.

  I either escape or I die here. There are no other choices.

  4

  He considered himself an artist of death. His talents were legion, and killing—in creative, masterful ways appropriate to the gravity of the subject itself—was only one of them. Another talent was knowing what might happen, what should happen, and which path of those available he needed to take to ensure the right result. Yet another was being able to nudge people along, when necessary, to get what he wanted from them.

  But with Lulu Lavender around, he felt like a novice at all of it.

  He should have known the redheaded woman—Peggy Olsson, his landlady—would come snooping, and he should have put some artistry into her death, not simply snapped her neck like a barbarian. For that matter, he should have put more effort into the deaths of the rest of the Lavender family. Killing two with a knife and two with a gun? Where did one locate the aesthetic in that?

  According to his grandmother’s version of family legend, when he was born a cloud of angry blackflies preceded him from his mother’s womb. His aunt (both women had raised him together, after his mother’s death in childbirth) always insisted the flies emerged from his mother’s mouth as she breathed her last. What they agreed on about the flies was that they foretold his gifts, his talents, in a real and unforgettable way (although at least one of them, if not both, had obviously forgotten some of the details). He had never believed either one—both women were imaginative and prone to hysteria—and he had made early examples of his art from them, apprentice pieces he understood, but he had only been eleven years old at the time, still learning by anyone’s standards.

  After they were done, he stayed in the house with their bodies for three weeks before anyone discovered them. During his time alone he taught himself about anatomy and pored through their books and journals and grimoires, the best of which he stashed among his own possessions so that when he was moved into foster care, they wouldn’t be sold along with the rest of the old women’s things.

  His life had been spent in similar pursuits—honing his craft, practicing his talents, learning ways to improve himself. He had stumbled upon his first references to the white girl, but having become aware of her, he had made her a focus of his attentions. Now he was close, so close, to possessing her. While he still wasn’t sure what her origins were, or even exactly what she was, the effect that she promised—ever more power, so that the proximity of someone like damned Lulu (shackled and blindfolded, mewling like a lost kitten half the time) would never again limit his abilities—made her worth the long search and the desperate measures he had taken along the way.

  The trouble with magic was that, while one could discover certain secrets by experimentation, by trial and error, specific objects like magical artifacts had to be discovered by being told about them or readin
g about them. Which meant someone else had to know about them first. In the case of the white girl, he had learned from a man who called himself Kale, a Hawaiian variant of Charles (although the man didn’t appear to have a drop of Hawaiian blood in him), who had himself learned about it from Silliam, a mage who had written about the girl before his early, violent death. He and Kale had not been friends, but they had been peers, had shared information from time to time. Kale had recognized as soon as he’d spilled what he knew about the white girl that he should have kept silent. Probably he had never believed she would surface again anyway, so talking about her didn’t matter.

  Kale had been wrong. Now she came, casting her long shadow once more across the earth. She had been born of magic, forged in blood, and if the legends were true, she could restore to her people that which had been lost. That had been her intended function, and the shaman whose creature she was had knowingly, willfully sacrificed his own daughter so that it might one day come to pass. On the other hand, she could be used almost like a battery, generating power untold to any who knew how to claim it. He believed himself to be among the latter, and he had every intention of doing just that.

  He crossed to the cabin’s front door and turned the knob, pulled it open. Fresh pine-laden air wafted over him, the breeze skritching trash across the hardwood floor behind him. Shafts of sunlight transformed the pine branches into delicate lacework; smaller trees and shrubs lurked in the shadows of the tall ones like members of an entourage waiting for their chance to overthrow their betters. Birds darted from shadow to sunlight and back. A gray squirrel spiraled up a nearby trunk.

  Nature for its own sake held no interest for him. Nature as a means to power, however, held a great deal. Power was the thing that drove him, the only thing.

  As he stood in the doorway, though, he realized why he had been drawn to the door. His talents weren’t completely disrupted by Lulu’s presence, after all. A distant rumble coalesced into the sound of an approaching truck’s engine. He opened his senses more, sent a tendril of wonder across the gap, through the trees, searching for the truck.