Lost Girls

by Andrew Pyper

  “That’s Ashley,” he says, pushing the picture closer so that I have to stick my cigarette between my lips and move to the other end of the couch to take half the album on my knee.

  “She’s eleven there. Always wanted to be a ballet dancer. Never knew where she got the idea, but from as soon as she could talk that’s all she wanted. Well, what could I do? There was no classes for that sort of thing up here, and even if there was I couldn’t have afforded—well, there weren’t any ballet classes. But I got her that tutu there anyway, secondhand. And my God, didn’t she wear that thing every minute she could! Come home from school and on it went. And on she’d go, spinning and kicking around the place ‘til dinner and then up round and round again ‘til bed. Had to move all the furniture over against the walls to give her room! I thought my neck was going to snap off from the angle I had to watch the TV at. Not that I minded. No. Of course I didn’t mind at all.”

  He turns now to the album’s back page and puts his finger on the face of a woman in her early twenties with small but clever eyes and a slightly fierce smile broadening her mouth.

  “That’s her mom,” he says.

  “I see what you mean. Very similar indeed. But I must say, there’s definitely some of your genes in Ashley as well, Mr. Flynn.”

  “Really?” He pulls the album back to his own knee and takes a close look. “Which part?”

  “The eyes,” I half lie, for though both the girl’s and her father’s eyes were blue, hers were liquid circles and his twinkly slits. “I believe she had your eyes.”

  “You think?” He sits back, pleased. “Maybe she did, y’know? Maybe she did take something from the old man.”

  For a time neither of us speak, just smoke, and after I stub my cigarette out on the Pope’s forehead Flynn sticks the pack out at me and again I pull one out. It occurs to me that perhaps I should take the lead here, direct him to some area of inquiry that may be of use. But the truth is I’ve forgotten what these areas are.

  “The police came to talk to me soon after the girls disappeared,” Flynn starts again, “and at first I thought they were just being supportive or something, giving me plenty of ‘We’re very sorry’ and ‘We’re just coming by to get the details straight here, Brian’. Then I realized they thought I might have been the one. That they were coming around so much and asking questions because they wanted to see if I’d slip up. And why not? Strange guy, unemployed, lives alone, nobody seems to know him. Isn’t that the sort of person who does these kinds of things?”

  He takes an aggressive pull from his cigarette and looks up at me.

  “Isn’t that why you’re here?” he exhales. “To see if you can pin it on me so you can save your guy?”

  “I would if I could. But the police had nothing on you, and so far neither do I.”

  “And you’re just here to see if you could dig something up. Well, I guess that’s what you’re paid for, right? I guess Tripp deserves his rights and all that. And you’re the man who’s been given the job, so it’s no fault of yours. Let me tell you something.”

  In one fluid movement he scrunches his current butt out and lights another, sticks his free hand into the wiry scrub of his beard.

  “I used to work in a mine outside of town until management figured we’d dug too deep, it was too expensive to go deeper when you could just dig another hole someplace else, so they closed us down. Was out of work nearly two years. And then the men at another mine up the road a couple hours went on strike—saying it wasn’t safe and they were trying to get the owner to do something before somebody got killed. But when a bunch of their management guys came to town advertising for temporary workers, I went. And I knew what it meant. I was a strike breaker, a scab, whatever. All those men on the picket line had their own kids and bank loans and the rest. They needed to work. And me and the others that went up there, we just walked through their pickets to do their work for them, and nobody laughing but the owner.”

  He runs his tongue over lips so dry they’ve lost their color, pulls on his nose between forefinger and thumb.

  “But you know what the bugger of it all is, Mr. Crane? I’d do it again. Because I had my own little girl, my own bills to pay. I had my family to take care of, y’see? And while I knew that what I was doing was taking money from those men and bringing that mine closer to shutting down once and for all—while I knew all that, none of it meant a thing. Because it was a job, and I had to take it. Just like you. You’ve got your job, and nobody’s going to like you for doing it—I don’t like you for doing it—but you’ve got to. Besides, there’s nothing you or the judge or McConnell or Tripp can do about it. Or me. Nobody can bring her back.”

  Flynn sits back in his chair now and looks about him as though there were others in the room who until now he’d been ignoring. Finding it’s still only the two of us, he rests his eyes on his mud-caked shoes and moves them back and forth, confirming that the feet within belong to him.

  “I’m sorry, I’ve been going on so much I haven’t let you ask a single thing,” he says after a time.

  “Not to worry.” Take another puff. “Well, let’s see. I guess I’m mostly wondering about alternative explanations.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “For example, do you think it’s at all possible that Ashley ran away from home? Took off someplace with Krystal and the two of them just haven’t called home yet?”

  Flynn’s shoulders fall away from his neck. “You mean, do I think she’s alive?”

  “Someplace else.”

  “No, sir, I don’t.”

  “You sound fairly certain.”

  “That’s because I am.”

  “You mean, you don’t believe Ashley to be the type to run away from home? As far as you’re aware, she was happy?”

  “I’m not saying she was happy. I’m not saying she wasn’t. I’m telling you, I know she’s dead.”

  “Mr. Flynn—may I call you Brian? I’m not trying to tell you about your own life, but it couldn’t have been easy bringing a teenaged girl up all on your own. Maybe there was boy trouble. Maybe she went off to have a little adventure and got carried away. Nobody could blame you for that. I’m just asking if you would admit that it’s possible.”

  He twists what’s left of his cigarette into the ashtray and sits forward.

  “I’m going to tell you something now that you can take as fact. With me and Ashley, all we had is each other. That’s it. If she were alive today, I’d know about it by now. She wouldn’t leave me here alone unless it wasn’t her choice.”

  With this Flynn jerks back and circles his hands over his hips, feeling the pockets for the lighter. Eyes returned to his shoes.

  “I’m sorry, Mr. Flynn. But would you mind if I used your bathroom?”

  “Left at the end of the hall,” he says without looking up.

  I move around him past a narrow kitchenette to a stunted hallway of four open doors: linen closet, bathroom, Flynn’s shadowed bedroom and, directly across from it, a tidy off-white square containing a single bed. Ashley’s room. I step inside and the first thing I notice is the smell, somehow entirely distinct from the rest of the house despite the open door. Fabric softener, one of those sporty, unisex colognes, and somewhere beneath them the faint traces of gym sock. But nothing out of place now, the navy-striped comforter smoothed carefully over the bed. I glance across the hall into Flynn’s room—peaked ranges of laundry, an unglued Pamela Anderson poster folding over itself on the wall beside the bed, the vague corona of sunlight at the edges of tightly drawn curtains—and recognize that it wasn’t Ashley who kept her room this way but her father. After she’d gone. Somehow it’s obvious that this is where he’s spent a number of his subsequent afternoons, picking up the randomly dropped clothes and folding them back into the drawers, washing the sheets and vacuuming the carpet as though in anticipation of an exacting guest. On the walls, the boy TV stars she’d likely grown out of but hadn’t got around to taking down, a single framed watercolor o
f a twirling ballerina on a solid blue background, dancing in space, in sky. The top of the dresser dense with photographs slid into clear plastic sleeves. Postcards—Niagara Falls, Maple Leaf Gardens, the Peterborough Lift Locks—wedged around an oval vanity mirror. All of it as it was before but now pondered over, dusted and straightened. The kind of room you peek into on guided tours of historic homes, fixed and untouchable on the other side of a red velvet rope.

  Move closer to the dresser, my nose probing through the valleys of photos. Ashley glum in her Confirmation dress, taking a vicious whack at a leaping field hockey ball, standing beside her father on a beach of stones the size of dinosaur eggs. None of her mother. I guess her to be the sender of the postcards although I don’t check to see.

  Then my fingers find a single loose photograph tilted against the bottom of the mirror, pick it up to hold close before my eyes. Ashley and Krystal standing side by side in white lace dresses with blue ribbons. Standing in front of a leaf-dappled forest, hands held. Their faces not quite grim but kept willfully straight like actresses posing for a period portrait.

  It’s the only thing I’ve touched but somehow I can’t put it back. Instead I’m sliding it into the inside pocket of my jacket, stepping out of the room and remembering to leave the door open as I’d found it. Leaning into the bathroom to flush the toilet, lowering then raising my fly before returning to the living room and landing on the sofa with a relieved sigh.

  “Better?” Flynn asks, a new cigarette worked into an orange rage.

  “Much.”

  He holds the pack out to me again and I take two, slip them into my breast pocket. “For later,” I say.

  “No problem. Here, take a couple more. You never know.”

  “Thank you.” I throw them in with the others. “I was just wondering, Brian, about how you felt with regard to Ashley’s participation in Tripp’s afterschool group?”

  “She was crazy about it. Krystal too, the both of them. Making up little plays together in Ashley’s room there but never letting me see. You know girls. Everything’s a big secret.” Sucks the cigarette in his fingers down to the filter and keeps going so that for a second I’m convinced he’s about to swallow what’s left. “Why do you ask?” he says instead, the butt a dried bean between his lips.

  “Just that Mr. McConnell felt that the girls’ being in that club was somehow not such a good idea.”

  “It wasn’t any school club that did them harm, Mr. Crane.”

  He waves the air in front of him with the back of his hand.

  “Just one more thing,” I say. “Why did you decide to call me back? It’s one thing to understand what my job is, but it’s another to allow me into your home. You must hate me.”

  “Oh!” He laughs once, then coughs. “There are things in this world I hate, Mr. Crane. Things I’ll definitely hate forever. But people? Not really.”

  Thinking he’s finished I slide down the couch to collect my coat, but he stands sluggishly and laughs once more before speaking.

  “As for why I bothered to call you back, I’m not sure. No sir, I’m not sure at all.” He shakes his head, then looks up at me directly, an irregular pulse at the corners of his mouth. “I suppose it’s because, other than the police, and the TV and newspaper people at the beginning, you’re the only one who’s called.”

  I thank him for his time and the cigarettes, leave him standing in the crooked door of his house that is a house only for lack of a better name. Rooted there with arms now lifeless at his sides and on his face the faraway look of the unconsoled.

  EIGHTEEN

  I can’t work. Not like I used to, exploding minor inconsistencies in the police notes into fatal flaws, automatically discerning the irrelevant flotsam from the nuggets of pure gold among the facts. I’ve been slowing down. Time I should have spent organizing the mass of Crown evidence has instead been invested in taking longer and longer night walks around town with fallen leaves scuttling behind me on the cracked streets. Staring out the tall window of the honeymoon suite at the locals lurching about acquiring the necessities of life or killing time in the cool drizzle that threatens to extinguish their cigarettes. Or, more often than anything else, gazing up at the pictures of Krystal and Ashley, their eyes staring back at me in what I’ve come to take as some kind of impossible effort toward communication. Trying to say something to the one guy in town who is the least interested in having them say anything at all unless under circumstances of their being alive and well, returning on the Greyhound from touring with whatever band it’s important for kids to tour with these days or a failed attempt at finding waitressing jobs on the west coast.

  And there are other concerns. While I know the last thing mild paranoia and bad work habits need is the continued use of a drug known for its side effects of mild paranoia and bad work habits, I can’t stop myself from setting new personal records for daily coke intake. I’ve already gone through more than half the thermos that was supposed to last until Christmas and it’s not even Halloween yet. Even though I live on my own in the city and rarely seek the company of others, somehow up here the isolation is more concentrated, as though something imposed from the outside. The alternative relief of rye-and-gingers and barstool companionship in one of the local taverns has been ruled out. The Lord Byron has given me the creeps since my first and only visit, and the couple other places I’ve walked by at night just seem too sad to be entered.

  But it’s all worse the longer I go without a line. Step over to the bedside table and cut a couple fat ones. There. No excuses now.

  Pull the chair in close, straighten the nearest police report before me and stare down hard at the words. First one, then the other, string them together. Remember reading, Barth? Maybe it would be easier if there weren’t such a distracting contrast between the black print and white page. I push the lamp to the far edge of the desk. Darker now, but no clearer, the paragraphs blotching together in the middle, glistening blobs spreading out to steal whole chunks from sentences. Touch one and my finger comes back slick with red grease.

  Fucking nosebleed. Dripping out fast over the pages and now on my shirt. All at once I’m pushing the chair back, wiping hands across my lips and smearing them over the back of my pants. It comes with the territory: the exploding vessels, the burned-out septum. But this is an especially bad one. A geyser of thin stickiness spilling liquid copper down the back of my throat.

  In the bathroom slapping at the toilet roll, whole yards spinning off onto the floor, scrambling it into a loose ball and pushing it against my face. Wad after wad thrown into the sink and the whole time I’m ignoring the voice in my head—apply pressure— because I’m not exactly sure what it means. But after a time just mopping seems to do the trick, or slows it down anyway, and I roll up a couple tight cigarillos of paper and cork them in each nostril where they’re soon glued in place.

  Back to work, Barth old boy.

  But it’s still no good. After five minutes I stand again and walk to the window to look out over the empty intersection below. It’s late, though not that late, last call at the bars only half an hour ago (an occasion marked by a collection of howls and slurred threats echoing down the street). There’s nothing to look at now but the absurd changing of the traffic light, directing movement that doesn’t exist. Press my forehead against the cool glass. Exhale. Leave stains.

  Then I see something.

  A glimpse of movement across the street, two figures stepping into the circle of streetlight. Girls in drab cotton dresses, once white with fancy lace at the seams but now stained ivory, the lace in need of restitching. Around each of their waists a tattered blue ribbon tied in a partly loosened knot. Standing in front of the old Bank of Commerce, a cold-faced limestone vault half-dissolved from acid rain. Eyes raised to where I stand at the window. One light-haired and the other dark, the light one snug in her dress and the dark one shrunken inside hers.

  “Hey!”

  I knock on the window harder than I need to, rattli
ng the loose glass in its frame, but they don’t move.

  “HEY! HEY!”

  They give no sign that they hear me aside from both of their arms rotating at the shoulders in a steady, almost mechanical movement. Except these girls are real. White skin shining out from beneath and through their hair, the caps of their knees distinctly visible just under the hems of their dresses. They’ve got to be freezing their asses off, no jackets on a night like this, as dry an evening as Murdoch’s seen in the past two weeks but probably the coldest yet, the air having taken a final turn towards winter. Serves them goddamn right if their hands fall off.

  “Who are you?” I shout through the glass, breath curling back into my face.

  Then the answer arrives on its own: a couple of the doughnut shop girls trying to mess with me. Went out and blew twenty bucks on a couple thrift-shop dresses, waited in the dark until I came to the window so they could do this little Ash and Krys memorial freakshow in my honor. Apparently the crank calls weren’t entertainment enough.

  So now I’m pulling open the bedroom door, pounding down the stairs without thinking to grab my coat. When I’m out the front door my first plan is to run straight at them but I don’t, not right away, just squint across the street to where they stand. From here I can better see their too-white faces, thick with pasty foundation, eyes blotted out with mascara. It’s the Goth look. Big with certain girls of that age, all Anne Rice novels and fishnet stockings. Punk witches cooking up spells for the bad guy’s lawyer.

  “I know who you are, you know!” I call across at them. “I can get your numbers. One call, and believe me, you’re both in deep shit.”