by Susan Perabo
She missed that, the wail of the hair dryer, her mother’s long hair flying in wispy curtains, the steamy bathroom . . . though the little white dog was warm on her lap, and the day had been mostly quiet and peaceful, and maybe she wouldn’t be there forever, in the apartment, with the man.
There wasn’t any decent reason she could think of why he couldn’t let her go.
•
“What’s all this?” Evan asked.
Meredith opened her eyes. They were driving through the main square in town, the intersection with the town hall and the courthouse and the two old churches. In the courtyard outside the town hall, where there was a farmers’ market on Wednesdays and where on other days the homeless man sat on the nicest bench and everyone made a wide berth around him, a few hundred people were milling around.
“Pull over,” Meredith said, realizing what “all this” was, recognizing half the kids in the eighth grade. This was the reason they weren’t at the mall.
Her father pulled the van into the bike lane and turned around in his seat. “You want—”
She slid open her door.
“Meredith—” her mother said.
But she was already out of the van, her feet on the sidewalk, walking into the midst of it. Someone she didn’t know, a heavyset woman with huge glasses, thrust a yellow flyer into her hand. Here’s what all those selfies were good for. Lisa Bellow, bright eyes, all smiles, laid out in black and white across the 8½x11 that read MISSING.
Someone grabbed her arm. It was Evan.
“What’re you doing? They’re flipping out. You can’t—”
A horrible screech interrupted him. There was a man with a megaphone on the town hall steps.
“If you’re going door-to-door, please go as a team,” the man said. “We have as many flyers as you need. We’re trying to get one to every house in the county. But please go as a team. Do not go alone.”
She looked back down at the flyer.
TAKEN FROM CHESTNUT STREET DELI BARN ON WEDNESDAY OCTOBER 8. 5'5", 110 LBS. BLOND HAIR, HAZEL EYES. LAST SEEN WEARING BLACK LEGGINGS, WHITE BLOUSE, AND GOLD SANDALS.
“If you are part of a search party please coordinate with the police so that we can cover as much ground as possible,” the man with the megaphone said. “This is a police investigation. They appreciate all the community support but we need to let them do their work.”
Who was this man? Meredith wondered. The mayor? Was this what county mayors did? She pushed through some people to get to the front of the crowd, though she didn’t know what she was going to do when she got there.
There were clots of her classmates and clots of parents and clots of teachers. It was a cool fall afternoon and the courtyard was lined with pumpkins and if you didn’t know what was happening you might imagine these people had all gathered for a Halloween parade, a fall festival, something celebratory.
Lisa’s best friend Becca Nichols was sitting on the bottom step of the town hall with a tall stack of yellow flyers beside her. There must have been a thousand of them, secured with a stone on top.
“Hey,” Meredith said. “Um . . . ”
Becca looked up. “Flyers?” Becca was in her algebra class. They saw each other every day, but in her eyes and her tone there was no acknowledgment that she even knew Meredith.
“Sure,” Meredith said. “Yeah.”
Becca slid a stack from under the stone. “Don’t go alone,” she said flatly.
“I won’t,” Meredith said. “I . . . my brother . . .” She looked around but couldn’t locate Evan. The crowd was thick; it had closed behind her and she could no longer see the street where she’d hopped from the van. It wasn’t a few hundred people, she realized. It was way more. One huge mass of bodies. She wondered if Evan could have gotten lost in a crowd so large. Would it be harder to find her with one eye? Where were her parents? Had they sent him after her and then gone to park? She was stupid to have leaped out of the van like that. A crowd like this—five hundred? seven hundred?—you could disappear into and it might be hours before anyone even knew you were missing.
Becca handed her the stack of flyers, which fluttered in the breeze as they passed from hand to hand, and Meredith turned from the steps. She saw the homeless man at the edge of the crowd. He was wearing a gray hoodie that was stained on the chest with something brown . . . coffee, it looked like from far off. She took a step toward him. Or maybe it wasn’t brown. Also, maybe it wasn’t a hoodie. The stain might have been red and the hoodie might have been a sweater. The homeless man had a black wool coat on over it so it was hard to tell. This was the black coat he always wore. Last winter, when it was in the single digits for two weeks straight, her father had gotten out of the car at the courthouse intersection and given the homeless man his green North Face winter jacket. They’d been on their way out to dinner, and Meredith had watched from the car as her father held the jacket out to the man, and the man had taken it warily from her father’s hand. But the next time they saw the man, a few days later, he was still in his black coat. “He probably sold your jacket,” her mother had said. “He probably traded it for drugs.”
Some people started singing “Amazing Grace.” A group of women. Who knew who they were or if they even knew Lisa. A few more people started singing, including some of her classmates and their parents. Out of the corner of her eye Meredith saw Becca stand up.
“Jesus,” Becca said. “Not again.”
Meredith turned from the steps and bumped into a man. He was tall and blond and smelled of cigarettes. He was too young to be anybody’s father.
“Easy, girl,” he said, laying his hand on her shoulder. She pulled away and turned left and there was Evan, his phone at his ear, shouting over the singing, “I’ve got her! I’ve got her!”
He slipped the phone in his pocket and smiled at her.
“Heart attacks all around,” he said.
She wanted to hug him but resisted. But she did not resist when he took her hand and led her through the singing crowd and back to the minivan.
•
“I’ve been trying to call you,” Jules said. “Your mom said you were sick.”
“Kind of,” Meredith said.
It was Saturday night. She was sitting in her room, on her bed. The new shoes were on the floor beside the bed, looking up at her. The stack of yellow flyers was on her desk. What was she supposed to do with them? Why had she even taken them from Becca Nichols? It wasn’t like she was going to go door-to-door herself, looking for Lisa. But it seemed horrible to throw them away or even put them in the recycling bin, so she’d just set them on her desk until she could figure out what to do with them.
Downstairs, her parents were watching something on television; they’d muted it as she’d passed, asked her if everything was okay, could they get her anything, blah blah blah.
“Oh my god, at school yesterday, oh my god,” Jules was saying. “People were freaking out all over the place. We had an assembly where they told us not to freak out, but the whole time it was totally obvious that everyone was freaking out, including the people telling us not to freak out. Only like half the school was even there because everybody’s parents are like oh my god, no way are you leaving this house.”
“Jules,” she said. “Listen.”
“Did your parents make you stay home? Or were you really sick?”
“Listen,” Meredith said. “I’m trying to tell you something.”
It wasn’t Jules she should have called. It was Kristy. Kristy was her better friend, probably her best friend. And Kristy was quieter, less dramatic, always more willing to listen without interruption. But had anything that had ever happened to her been more worthy of drama?
“It was me,” she said.
“What was you?”
“I was the other person in the Deli Barn. I’m the Other Customer.”
There was a long silence. Then:
“What do you mean?”
“I mean I was there. It was me. I was ther
e with Lisa, and the . . . person. I wasn’t in school Thursday or yesterday because I was in the hospital.”
“You’re in the hospital?”
“Not anymore. I was, but now I’m home.”
“You were there? You saw it?”
Meredith drew her knees to her chest. It felt like she was talking about something she’d seen on television, like she was relaying someone else’s story. It didn’t really make her feel anything to tell Jules this, nothing but the rush that came from the act of telling, of having news, of sharing a secret. It wasn’t a happy rush, but it wasn’t a sad rush either.
“Yeah,” she said. “I saw it.”
“Jesus. Jesus, Meredith.”
“I know, right?”
There was a long silence, then another, “Jesus. What’d your parents do? Are they flipping? What’d Evan do? Oh my god, I can’t even believe—”
“Nobody knows,” Meredith said. “I mean, except the police and my parents and Evan, obviously. And now you.”
“So what happened? Can you tell me the story? Are you allowed to tell me the story?”
“There’s no story, really. I was just getting a root beer. And then the guy came in and then he took the money and then he took Lisa and that was it.”
“What did you do?”
“What do you mean?”
“What were you doing while all that was happening?”
“Lying on the floor,” she said. “He told us to lie on the floor.”
“Jesus.”
“You can’t tell anyone, okay?” Meredith said. “I’m going back to school on Monday and you can’t tell anyone.”
“Don’t you think people are going to find out eventually? Isn’t there going to be like a trial or something?”
“For who?”
“Okay, that was stupid. I just mean, it seems like this is the kind of thing people find out about.”
“Just keep it to yourself, okay?” Meredith said. “For now? Okay?”
She knew that Jules would tell. She wouldn’t tell everyone—she wasn’t going to post it on Facebook or anything—but she would tell at least Kristy and probably two or three other people, because Jules liked to know things first but, more importantly, Jules liked to tell things first. It wasn’t like letting out the intolerant cat, exactly, but rather like leaving the door open to see what the intolerant cat would do.
Meredith hung up and lay down on her bed. You could never tell for certain, 100 percent, what a cat would do. But Meredith knew that Lisa knew what the dog, Annie, would do. The dog would wait until everything in the bed was over. Then the dog would leap up onto the bed and form a barrier between Lisa’s body and the other body.
Meredith knew that Lisa could count on this. She was sure of it. It was all she could count on.
8
Claire knew Meredith was on the phone and she knew it was Jules whom she would call first, because Jules’s personality was stronger and she would say things that would make Meredith feel better. Concrete things. Definitive things. Jules was just dumb enough to be sure of herself, to offer proclamations and advice without any waffling, unlike Kristy who had always been wise enough to waffle. That said, Claire had heard all of them—not just Jules, but Kristy, and Meredith, too—say things about other girls that had shocked her. The predictable antics of Lisa Bellow and her clique of mean girls often paled in comparison to the cruel judgment of the supposed nice girls in the back of her minivan—their slut shaming, their collective contempt, their insistence that the most popular girls were “stupid hos.” Every carpool, entire lives were being dismissed with the wave of a hand.
Maybe they were all bitches, Claire thought. Maybe that was all there was to be in eighth grade. Maybe you didn’t have any choice. Maybe your only choice was figuring out what kind of bitch you wanted to be.
She could never say something like that to Mark. It wouldn’t be as bad as willfully injuring a child with a dental instrument, but it was in the same ballpark, lumping every eighth-grade girl into that one ugly category. She knew that when he looked at Meredith and her friends the girls he saw were still eight or nine, still only playing at being teenagers, their giggles about kisses instead of blow jobs, their whispered conversations some version of the Mystery Date board game they had played years ago, where the luckiest girl always wound up with the dark-haired singer from the boy band. Claire knew that Mark not only imagined the girls that way, but that was what he really saw when he looked at them, the way an anorexic girl really saw a fat girl in the mirror, despite all the physical evidence to the contrary.
Not that Claire was any expert on teenage girls, or even (or, okay, especially) her own teenage girl. She listened to them in the car as she drove them to the mall or a movie or a birthday party, and sometimes she stood outside Meredith’s room and listened to her talk on the phone, or listened to the three of them late on a Friday night during slumber parties, their voices clear as day until they dropped to whispers when a romantic bombshell was coming. She was not the mother who sat around chatting with the girls about who was going out with whom and what the popular shoes were.
(The shoes. Mark had called them cute, those awful gold sandals, but had there ever, ever been any more ridiculous shoe? She had seen them on the feet of some of her young patients and sighed inwardly, amazed again by the power of peer pressure. Only when under the hypnotic power of someone else, or someone elses, would a person believe that the shoe, last embraced by a hot, sandy society approximately two thousand years ago, was actually attractive. Still, Claire knew that there was some compelling reason Meredith had picked those shoes on this day, and so she was not going to say anything about it. If Meredith had picked out those shoes on a normal day, at the end of a week where she had not almost been abducted, strapped them on and wobbled absurdly around the shoe store like she had this afternoon, primed for the colosseum, Claire would have said no way.)
•
Claire had not turned on the news, or read the news online, or listened to the car radio, or even read the updates that rolled across her iPhone. If there was any news any of them needed to hear—if Lisa Bellow was found, however she was found, or if there was a suspect and it was necessary for Meredith to become involved, Claire was certain they would hear from the police. After Meredith’s abrupt departure from the van at the crowded town square and her reappearance ten minutes later, hand in hand with her brother, Claire wanted to believe that their part in the drama was finished, and believed it so much that for a few hours on Saturday evening she forgot the story that was whirling around out there, the work that was being done, the leads that were being followed. “I just want things to go back to normal,” Meredith had said at breakfast. She had said those exact words, of her own accord, not been fed them by anyone, had thought and spoken them herself. So that’s what they would strive for: normality. All day Saturday they’d heard nothing from the police. But on Sunday the police detective, the woman, called and said they’d like for Meredith to look at some pictures.
“We can come to you,” Detective Waller told Claire. “To your house. But we’re at a point where we do need her help.”
“You have a suspect?” Claire asked.
“We’re at a point where we need her help,” Detective Waller repeated.
It was not Detective Waller who arrived at the house but the other detective—the tall man with the mustache. His name was Detective Thorn. He appeared with five thick books, photo albums of suspects. On each page there were four pictures, hundreds of men in all, maybe thousands. Could all of these men possibly be suspects in Lisa Bellow’s abduction? It seemed to Claire that perhaps they should just take a picture of every man on the planet and get these giant books out whenever anything happened. Maybe that was what they did? Everywhere the police went, everyone they talked to, maybe they automatically brought the books of men who might take you.
Meredith sat at the dining-room table and flipped through the books slowly. She looked at every man. Claire
sat beside her. They were mug shots, mostly, and a lot of the men looked defiant and a lot of them looked broken and a lot of them looked, well, normal. And then there were a few who looked unhinged, sporting the crazy psychotic smiles you imagined when you heard a sound at night, alone in a house. And a few more who looked like they just didn’t care, the Logan Boones of the world, their names on the board still meaning nothing to them, their walk still the easy swagger of the superior. She imagined in jail that would come to an end. She imagined that a week in prison was not unlike having a dentist hurt you with her tools.
“If you see anyone that even looks a little bit familiar,” Detective Thorn said, “we can get another picture.”
“I hardly saw him,” Meredith said. “The mask . . . ”
“I know,” the detective said. “But it’s worth a try. Try to imagine him some other place, not at the Deli Barn. Imagine you see him across the street when you’re walking somewhere. It’s cold out so he’s wearing a ski mask. He’s just a man taking his kids sledding.”
Detective Thorn turned to Claire. “That helps sometimes. Distance it from the event. Take the anxiety out.”
Claire thought this idea—imagining the kidnapper, on the sidewalk, taking children sledding—would likely cause more anxiety rather than less, but she didn’t say so.
Meredith’s face was blank. She turned another page, then another, and all the men looked back at her. It could be any one of them, Claire thought. She could be looking right at him and not even know it. What was she supposed to recognize?
Meredith closed the last book.
“Sorry,” she said.
“No apologies necessary,” he said. “We’ve got some more books. One more today and then maybe another couple tomorrow. If you’re up to it.”