When the Stars Go Dark: A Novel

by Paula McLain

  “Why did you guys get split up?”

  “I don’t even know, really. I came home from school one day and Lisa was gone. There were social workers here.” He scratches his shoulder hard as if the memory itself is right there at his fingertips, a sting or an ache. I know that instinct. The ongoing futility of it. How you can never quite reach the place that hurts.

  “Did you get adopted, too, then?”

  “No. I was too old, I guess. I got taken to a foster home, but I ran away.” He still has half a cigarette left, but reaches for the pack on the table and squeezes it for comfort. The cellophane whispers against his palm. “I ran away five or six different times, then went to a group home when no one else would take me. When I was eighteen I came back here, but my parents had left. Carl doesn’t like me much, but he hates everyone. You saw.”

  “I’m so sorry.” I know my words sound just as meaningless now as they did when strangers said them over and over to me when I was growing up. Language fails sometimes, but I am sorry for Hector. He’s old enough to remember everything. The battle wounds of his childhood. The loss of his sister, the confusion, the displacement. The pain. He’s me, and Lisa is Amy or Jason. Both. But now more loss has come. More tragedy.

  “They should have told me they couldn’t take care of her,” he goes on about his parents. “I would have done it myself. We could have figured out something. At least we’d be together.” His pupils bloom black, dilating with emotion. “They brought her home from the hospital and that was the best day of my life. Before that, it was just me and these crazy people. But after? I took care of her.”

  I want to cry listening. Instead I nod.

  “We slept like puppies, on this mattress on the floor? I kept my arms around her like this.” He lifts his hands to show me. “We were always together. Anyone even looked at that girl and I was there. You know?”

  I do know. The savage loyalty in his voice takes me all the way back to that Christmas alone with Jason and Amy. Those hours and days, which felt suspended in some sort of bubble, when nothing could touch us. “You protected her.”

  He draws hard on the Camel, the paper collapsing with a hiss as he wrestles with the past. “I tried. Our parents were really messed up, but everyone is, right?”

  Not everyone, I want to say, but also know he has no reason to believe me. “What kind of kid was she? Quiet?”

  “Lisa?” His laugh chops out, hard and spontaneous. “That girl never stopped talking or dancing. She sang in the bathtub, running down the street. She would sit down under the mailbox and play with nothing. With rocks, you know? And she’d be singing.”

  Suddenly I can see her, that girl. He’s called her up, and it makes me feel gutted. How can it happen in one life, to be stolen twice? “Do you remember anything ever happening, before you guys got split up?” I ask him. “Something that changed Lisa’s behavior? Did she ever get real quiet, or cry for no reason, or seem afraid?”

  “Why? What are you thinking?”

  “I’m not sure. I want you to look at something.” From my pocket I draw out Cameron’s missing poster and unfold it in front of him.

  “Shit,” he whispers and puts his cigarette down. “That’s gotta be her.” He pulls the page near him, shaking his head back and forth, his eyes glistening. “I can’t believe it. She’s so pretty, so grown-up. You have to find her.”

  “I’m doing everything I can. What else do you notice?”

  He studies the page for a long moment. “Those are her eyes. Lisa’s eyes. But she looks so sad here. Right?”

  “I think so too, and I want to figure out why. Life is hard, Hector. You and I both know that, but I can’t see this girl sitting under a mailbox singing at rocks.”

  I can feel him trying to process what I mean. He grips the paper more tightly, his thumbs whitening around the nail beds, as if he wishes he could climb inside of it somehow and touch her. Help her.

  “My Lisa was a fighter,” he finally says. “Man, that girl was stubborn. You try to take a toy from her or get her off the swings before she was ready and you had a tiger to mess with. She’d ball up her fists like this.” He holds one hand up, makes a face that tells me he sees her right now, close enough to touch. “Fierce.”

  “So what happened? That’s what I want to know. That’s why I came here, to see if I could figure it out. Do you have pictures around from when you were kids?”

  He shakes his head. “Nothing like that, sorry.” Looking at the poster again, he says, “Can I keep this?”

  “Of course. I’m going to give you my number, too.” Flipping the poster over, I write the digits for Will’s office and my name beside it. “You think of anything useful, let me know. And if you want me to keep you in the loop, I can do that.”

  “Yeah.” He digs in his pocket for a wadded receipt and scrawls his phone number for me, passing it over. “If there’s any way I can help, let me know, okay? You got people looking for her, right?”

  “We do.”

  “Good.”

  He walks me to the door as Cricket trails us. At eye level on the nicked jamb, there’s a tarry black smudge the size of a handprint. The doorknob looks plastic. This place feels so cramped and dingy and hopeless I have a crazy urge to take Hector with me, to throw him in the back of the car with Cricket and run for the hills. But he stopped being a child a long time ago. And anyway, he’s not asking to be rescued.

  (forty-three)

  It’s late when I finally reach the village. I drive past the sheriff’s office, hoping to find Will still at work, and catch him getting into his car to head home. He rolls down his window as I pull alongside him. Before I can even squeeze in a hello, he says, “Where in the world have you been? I’ve been looking for you for hours.”

  “I told you I was going to Sacramento.”

  “Even with red tape, I thought I’d hear from you by two. What gives?”

  “Do you want to grab a drink?” I backpedal. “I can explain.”

  His expression doesn’t soften. “Come inside. It’s been a long day. There’s a lot to catch you up on.”

  With Cricket trailing me, I follow Will to an empty conference room with bad fluorescent lighting. He plunks down in the nearest chair. “Well?”

  “I just got excited, I guess.” I take a seat across from him, feeling increasingly as if I’ve been sent to the principal’s office. “When I opened the file, I found the address for Cameron’s birth family was in Ukiah. Isn’t that eerie? What are the odds?”

  “So you went to Ukiah? Was the family still living there?”

  “The parents are out of the picture now, but I met an uncle and Cameron’s brother, Hector. I’ll tell you, it’s heartbreaking the way these two kids were split up by social services, Will. Hector never even knew where they took his sister. He got blindsided, and then shuttled through foster care. You can see it’s really messed with him.”

  Will’s face remains flat and expressionless. “Did you interview this guy or run a group therapy session?”

  I feel a spear of shame. “Why are you being so hostile?”

  “You don’t know?” He takes off his hat and drops it between us with emphasis. “You’ve been gone all day without checking in, making decisions that concern this case without prior authorization, and now you come back with nothing but a script for a made-for-TV movie.”

  I swallow back more embarrassment, his words knocking me further off-balance. “I’m sorry. I should have touched base first. I just had a feeling I should go alone.”

  “My department doesn’t run on feelings, Anna. And this investigation doesn’t, either. I should have been there, or one of my deputies. Then at least we’d have had two sets of eyes on the situation. How do we know this Hector’s not a suspect?”

  “He’s not. I know it.”

  “You know how? Did you check to see if he h
ad a criminal record? What about the uncle? You get license-plate numbers for me? Aliases? Alibis for the night of September twenty-first?”

  No was the answer, but he was missing the real point. “You sit behind a desk too much, Will. Instinct is fifty percent of the job at least. And shit. Hector probably does have a record after the number the county did on his childhood. But he cares about his sister and wouldn’t have done anything to hurt her, even if he had access to Cameron, which he didn’t.”

  “Hold up. I’ll ask again, Anna. How are you coming to these conclusions? First you’re sure Drew Hague is the guy who abused Cameron, and we’ve got nothing. Then you tell me Steve Gonzales isn’t a suspect based purely on some feeling you have. Thankfully you got lucky on that one.”

  My face has grown hot. “Why are you giving me such a hard time? If you don’t trust my judgment, what am I doing here?”

  “Hang on. Can we deescalate for a minute? I’m just doing my job, Anna. Trying, anyway. You’re a great resource, and I’m really grateful you’re here. But the questions I’m asking you, I have a right to ask you. Okay?”

  I look at my hands. “I should have called you from Sacramento. I can own that. But I’d bet my legs Hector Gilbert didn’t take Cameron Curtis.”

  “I’m sure you’re right. Let’s just follow protocol and run a background check—see what we’re dealing with. And we should bring him in for a polygraph, just standard procedure. Same with the uncle, and same with Steve Gonzales. We have to cover our bases.”

  “Cover your ass, you mean,” I say without thinking.

  “Anna.” His warning chimes.

  “Sorry.” I roll my shoulders up and back, trying to release the knots there. “It’s been a challenging day.”

  “Yeah, here too….Now I need you to watch something with me. You’ve missed a lot.”

  (forty-four)

  In one corner of the conference room, a TV and VCR sit stacked on a wheeled metal AV cart. Will crosses over and clicks on the set, pushing the play button. It’s tonight’s taped episode of America’s Most Wanted. A pretty blond journalist I don’t recognize is interviewing Kate McLean and Gillian Pelham. Maybe she’s not even a journalist. The show isn’t exactly hard news.

  As the interview begins, the camera zooms in on the two girls sitting side by side on a narrow studio couch. They look brave and poised and very, very young to me. Which they are.

  “We thought it was a prank at first,” Kate McLean says. She has shoulder-length brown hair with a straight center part, a button nose, and wide-set brown eyes. “Polly could do stuff like that sometimes. She was a good actress.”

  I can’t help but notice she’s using the past tense, and feel it like a needle prick. “We’d already been goofing around a lot,” Gillian Pelham adds, tucking a dark blond strand of hair behind her ear. “Talking about Halloween and trying to scare each other. We put white makeup on Polly and she did her eyes like a ghost and painted her lips black.”

  “Then what happened?” the interviewer urges.

  “She went out to get sleeping bags for us,” Gillian continues. “When she came back there was a guy with a knife and a duffel bag standing behind her in the door. He was older. He didn’t look scary or anything, not at first. That’s why I thought Polly might be kidding.”

  “It didn’t feel real,” Kate is quick to add. “That’s what I was thinking. And he was really calm, the way he was talking. He said he wanted money and Polly showed him her jewelry box. She had fifty dollars. That’s when he changed. His voice got harder and he told us not to scream or he’d slit our throats.”

  “Then he started to tie up Polly and she was crying,” Gillian says. “He took pillowcases off the bed and put them over our heads. He tied us up after that. I said the cords were too tight and he loosened them a little and said he was sorry.”

  “That’s when he said if we counted to a thousand, Polly would be back,” Kate finishes for her.

  “But that didn’t happen?” the interviewer prompts gently.

  “No,” Kate replies. “We heard the screen door slam and then we tried to get out of the cords he tied us up with. Gillian was stumbling around and trying to wake up Polly’s mom who was asleep next door.”

  “We were both really scared,” Gillian says.

  “Of course you were. Your friend had just been kidnapped. I think you’re very brave. And everyone in America is looking for Polly’s kidnapper from the description you were able to give the police. Millions of people watch this show. Everyone is trying to find Polly. Everyone wants her to come home.” Her face is the picture of somber hope, her eyes pointedly soft. “What can you tell America about who Polly was? How was your friend so special?”

  “She’s really funny,” Kate replies, almost smiling for a split second. “Her favorite color is purple and she eats cinnamon toast every day after school.”

  “She wants to be an actress,” Gillian adds. “She’s madly in love with Mel Gibson. There’s a poster in her room with these two black-and-white cats and a Dalmatian that says DON’T BE A COPY CAT. That’s her. There’s no one like Polly.”

  * * *

  —

  After the interview, the usual number rolls across the screen for tips, then the tape goes black. My eyes shoot to Will. Even though I’m numb and hungover from our talk, my mind has begun to whir.

  “This is exactly why we need this town meeting yesterday,” I say. “Cinnamon toast. Almost no one in town knows anything about Cameron. You can’t care about something you can’t picture.”

  “Okay, sure. But listen. You know the actress Winona Ryder? Seems she’s flying to Petaluma tomorrow on Harrison Ford’s jet. I talked to Fraser and it seems she’s collected donations from a bunch of A-listers for a private reward if Polly’s found. Anna, it’s two million dollars.”

  “What? That’s crazy! Even if they can get that kind of money together, why spend it on Polly? Why is Ryder so invested anyway?”

  “She spent part of her childhood in Petaluma. She and Polly even had the same drama teacher. Apparently she’s been watching the news and decided it was time to act. She just called today. Talk about a media circus.”

  “So we go back to Emily. She’s got two million dollars, easy.”

  “Money isn’t the issue, Anna, and you know it. The problem is we have no evidence. The FBI thinks Cameron’s a runaway. You don’t get America’s Most Wanted coverage for that. I’m not sure we have a prayer of getting even local media right now, despite Emily’s help. Everyone will be covering Ryder’s visit.”

  “I think we have to try anyway. We can’t control media interest, but we can fucking show up, right?”

  “Maybe,” he offers. “Anyway, there’s something more.”

  “Did Polly phone again?”

  “No. Fraser’s pretty sure now that call was a prank. But Silicon Valley is jumping in. Some computer systems hotshot has been watching the news and had the bright idea to scan Polly’s missing poster into a computer. A bunch of network companies have donated equipment. They’re faxing thousands of posters all over the world and using the Internet, too. Someone told me that ten million people in half a dozen countries have seen the poster.”

  “Holy shit. That number.”

  “I know. It’s a brave new world, right? Can you imagine where we’d be if we had something like this ten years ago, or twenty?” His eyes flash with meaning. Jenny.

  Just like that, her face shimmers up. Her laugh. Her walk. Her voice out on the headlands, flickering through the dark and then gone. Since her disappearance and long before, missing children and teens were seen on blurrily reproduced posters taped to telephone poles or tacked up in post offices. What would be different if the Internet had existed in 1973? Crisply faxed likenesses of Jenny generated and shared everywhere in a blink? Maybe nothing, or maybe everything. Maybe the entire thrust of
our lives.

  “Can we do something like this for Cameron?” I ask. “Shannan, too?”

  “I’ve already made some calls.”

  “What do you think of me going to talk to Shannan Russo’s mother?”

  “To learn what?”

  “If there’s something that links the two girls.”

  “Personally they seem like night and day to me. If you didn’t see a connection with Polly, why would you look here?”

  “Promise you won’t laugh?”

  His look is noncommittal.

  “I saw Tally Hollander.”

  “The psychic? Oh brother, now I really am worried about you, kid.”

  “C’mon. Bear with me for a second, Will. Some of the things Tally said about Shannan and the way she grew up made me think the two girls share some emotional DNA. I just want to check it out.” I grip the table in front of me, cool and flat and real. “This isn’t a vision I’m talking about. When Tally called Karen, she opened up and shared all kinds of things, how there was a lot of upheaval in Shannan’s childhood, men coming and going, exposure to violence. I know she was hard as nails with you, but if I can get Karen to talk to me, we might learn a whole lot more about how Shannan may have crossed paths with a psychopath.”

  He sighs and I see how tired he is. We’re both running on steam. “Okay.”

  “Okay?”

  “It’s a long shot, but honestly, all the breadcrumbs matter, I guess.”

  “That’s right. They do.”

  (forty-five)

  Early the next morning, I head to Gualala to Karen Russo’s workplace, a dated-looking salon called Rumor’s All About Hair. She’s leaning against the front desk when I walk in, a pretty if slightly hardened brunette in a dark smock over belled jeans and high cork-bottomed wedges. I put her in her midthirties, which means she probably had Shannan at eighteen or nineteen.