The Missing dm-1

by Chris Mooney

  What if it isn't your mother? Darby thought. What if the man from the woods is downstairs?

  No. This was the writer's fault; that stupid Stephen King had gotten her imagination all worked up. Her mother was downstairs, not the man from the woods, and Darby could prove it by simply taking a walk down the hallway to her mother's bedroom and looking out the windows at the driveway where Sheila's car would be parked.

  Darby dog-eared her page and walked into the hallway. She leaned over the banister and looked into the foyer.

  One dim light was on, and it was coming from the living room – probably the banker's lamp on the table next to the stereo. The kitchen lights were off. Had she turned them off on her return trip upstairs? Darby couldn't remember. Sheila had this thing about leaving lights on in empty rooms, always made it a point to say she wasn't working all these extra hours to put Lester Lightbulb through college -

  A black-gloved hand gripped the downstairs banister.

  Chapter 4

  Darby jerked away from the railing, her heart hammering so hard and fast she felt dizzy.

  Instinct took over, and with it came an idea. Her boom box radio was set on top of her bureau, right next to the door. She turned it on, clicked her bedroom door shut and slipped inside the spare bedroom across the hall as a shadow on the stairwell grew larger.

  The man from the woods was coming up the stairs.

  Darby wiggled underneath the bed, over boxes of shoes and stacks of old decorating magazines. Through the three-inch gap between the dust ruffle and the carpet she saw a pair of work boots come to a stop outside her bedroom door.

  Please God, let him think I'm in there listening to my music. If he went in there, she could make a run for the stairs – no, not the stairs, her mother's bedroom. The nearest phone was in her mother's bedroom. She could lock the door and call the police.

  The man from the woods stood in the hall-way, deciding what to do.

  Come on, go into my bedroom.

  The man from the woods stepped inside the spare bedroom. Darby watched in horror as the boots came closer… closer… oh Jesus no, he was standing only a few inches from her face, the boots so close she could see and smell the grease stains.

  Darby started to tremble. He knows. He knows I'm hiding under the bed -

  A crude mask of stitched-together, flesh-colored strips of Ace bandages fell to the floor.

  The man from the woods picked up the mask. A moment later, he walked out of the bedroom and back into the hall-way. Her bedroom door burst open to bright light and dance music.

  Darby scrambled from underneath the bed and ran into the hall-way. The man from the woods was standing in her room, looking for her. She ran into her mother's bedroom and swung the bedroom door shut, catching a glimpse of the man chasing after her, a real-life Michael Myers dressed in greasy blue coveralls, his face covered by the mask of Ace bandages, his eyes and mouth hidden behind strips of black cloth.

  She locked the door and then grabbed the phone from the nightstand. The man from the woods kicked the door, rattling it against the frame. Her hand was shaking as she dialed 911.

  There was no dial tone.

  Thump as he kicked the door. Darby tried the phone again. Still nothing.

  Thump. The phone had to work, there was no reason why it shouldn't work. Thump. She flipped over the phone, and in the dull white light coming from the outside street lamps Darby saw the plug, nice and snug, in the back of the phone. Thump.

  Darby jammed her finger on the receiver again and again and still no dial tone and THUMP and CRACK as the one of the door panels split open.

  A jagged line ran down the panel, a foot or so above the doorknob. THUMP and CRACK and the wood split wider as a black-gloved hand reached through the hole in the door.

  Sheila's blue plastic toolbox, the one she used for her small projects around the house, sat on the edge of the TV stand. Inside the toolbox full of old plastic medicine bottles holding tacks, small nails and hooks, Darby found her father's hammer, the big Stanley he had used around the house.

  The hand was on the doorknob. Darby swung the hammer and hit him on the arm.

  The man from the woods screamed – an ungodly howl of pain Darby had never heard another human being make. She went to hit him again and missed. He yanked his hand back through the hole.

  The doorbell rang.

  She dropped the hammer and opened the window. The storm window was still down. As she worked on opening it, she remembered her mother's words about what to do when you were in trouble: Never yell for help. Nobody comes running when someone yells for help, but everyone comes when someone yells fire.

  Screaming coming from inside the house. The song ended and Darby heard a woman crying hysterically.

  'DARBY!'

  Melanie's voice, coming from the foyer.

  Darby stared at the hole in the door, sweat running into her eyes as Frank Sinatra sang 'Luck Be a Lady Tonight.'

  'He just wants to talk,' Melanie said. 'If you come downstairs, he promised to let me go.'

  Darby didn't move.

  'I want to go home,' Melanie said. 'I want to see my mother.'

  Darby couldn't turn the doorknob.

  Mel was sobbing. 'Please. He has a knife.'

  Slowly, Darby opened the door and, crouching low, looked through the banister and into the foyer.

  A knife was pressed against Melanie's cheek. Darby couldn't see the man from the woods; he was hiding around the corner, against the wall. She saw Mel's terrified face and the way her body shook as she sobbed and struggled to breathe around the arm clutched tightly around her throat.

  The man from the woods moved Mel closer to the bottom steps. He whispered something in her ear.

  'He just wants to talk.' Black tears from Melanie's mascara ran down her cheeks. 'Come down here and talk to him and he won't hurt me.'

  Darby didn't move, couldn't move.

  The man from the woods cut Mel's cheek. She screamed. Darby moved down the steps.

  Drops of blood, bright and red, ran down the wall near the kitchen. Darby froze.

  Melanie screamed, 'He's cutting me!'

  Darby took another step, her eyes on the wall, and saw Stacey Stephens lying on the kitchen floor, blood spurting between the fingers clutched against her throat.

  Darby ran back up the stairs. Melanie screamed again as the man from the woods cut her.

  Darby slammed the bedroom door shut and opened the window facing the driveway. The branches from the hedges tore up her bare legs and the soles of her feet something awful. She limped her way to her next-door neighbor's house. When Mrs Oberman finally answered the door, she took one look at Darby and immediately ran to her kitchen to call the police.

  Darby had overheard two things: the phone lines to the house had been cut, and the spare key her mother kept under the rock in the garden was missing. The key had been there a little over two weeks ago. She had last used it after locking herself out of the house and definitely remembered putting it back.

  To know about the hidden key, the man from the woods must have been casing the house for some time. Nobody would come right out and say it, but Darby knew it was true.

  She sat in the back of the ambulance parked in Mrs Oberman's driveway. The back doors were open, and she could see the shocked and curious faces of her neighbors in the revolving blue and white lights from the police cruisers. Policemen armed with flashlights were searching her backyard and the wooded area separating Richardson Road from the nicer homes on Boynton Avenue.

  All the lights in her house were on. Through the downstairs windows Darby could see part of the foyer, the blood on the pale yellow walls. Stacey's blood. Stacey was still lying inside the house because she was dead. Police were taking pictures of her body. Stacey Stephens was dead and Melanie was missing.

  'Don't worry, Darbs, your mom will be here any minute.' The deep but calming voice belonged to the patrolman standing next to the ambulance door. This huge intimidating bea
r of a man was a close friend of her father's named George Dazkevich. Everyone called him Buster. Buster had helped out around the house after her father died, taking her to movies and to the mall. His presence helped calm her.

  'Have you found Mel yet?'

  'We're working on it, kiddo. Now try to relax, okay? Can I bring you something? Some water? A Coke?'

  Darby shook her head and looked at the car parked against the curb, a beat-up Plymouth Valiant. Melanie's car.

  Melanie's going to be okay. The man from the woods was in a lot of pain. I'm pretty sure I broke his hand. Melanie would have figured that out and would have fought back and escaped. She's probably hiding someplace in the woods. They're going to find her.

  Sheila arrived just as the EMT finished stitching up a particularly nasty gash on the inside of Darby's thigh. The blood drained from her mother's face as she stared down at the Frankenstein mess of stitches on Darby's legs and feet.

  'Tell me what happened.'

  Darby fought the urge to cry. She needed to say strong. Brave. She sucked in air and then broke down in tears, hating herself for it, for being small and scared and weak.

  Chapter 5

  The next morning, Melanie was still missing.

  With the house now a crime scene, the police moved Darby and Sheila to the Sunset Motel on Route 1 in Saugus. The room Darby shared with her mother had shag carpeting and a hard mattress with coarse sheets. Everything smelled of cigarette smoke and desperation.

  For the next week, Darby looked through binders packed with mug shots. The police were hoping a face might spark something. It never did. They tried hypnosis more than once and finally gave up when detectives were told she wasn't a 'willing subject.'

  Darby went to bed each night with her head stuffed with mug-shot faces and unanswered questions. The police wouldn't tell her anything beyond variations of 'everyone's working real hard.'

  Both the newspapers and TV had talked about the vicious stabbing of Stacey Stephens and the frantic search efforts for Melanie Cruz, who had been abducted from the house of a friend. The friend was a minor and her name couldn't be released, but an 'unnamed source close to the investigation' stated this 'friend' was believed to be the intended target. The only piece of evidence ever mentioned was a chloroform-soaked rag the police found in the woods behind the house.

  By the end of the week, with no new information coming in on the case, reporters started focusing on Stacey's and Melanie's parents. Darby found she couldn't read their tearful pleas, couldn't face the anguished looks captured in the pictures and video footage.

  One evening, after Sheila had left for work, the FBI agent, Evan Manning, stopped by with a pizza and two cans of Coke. They ate on a rickety table near the pool. They had a lovely view of the liquor store and trailer park.

  'How are you holding up?' he asked.

  Darby shrugged. The droning sound of traffic and the smell of exhaust filled the warm air.

  'If you don't want to talk, that's fine,' Manning said. 'I'm not here to pump you with questions.'

  Darby thought about telling him about school, how everyone, including most of her teachers, stared at her as though she had stepped off a UFO. Even her friends were treating her differently, talking to her in cautious tones, the way you'd speak to someone afflicted with some rare, terminal disease. Suddenly, she was interesting.

  Only she didn't want to be interesting. She wanted to go back to being her old boring self, back to being a normal teenager looking forward to a long summer of reading books and pool parties and hanging out with Mel down at the Cape.

  'I want to help find Mel,' Darby said. The way she figured it, if she helped find Melanie, then all would be forgiven, and people would stop staring at her as though what had happened to Mel and Stacey were her fault.

  Manning placed a hand on her arm, squeezing it. 'I'll do everything in my power to help find Melanie. And I'm going to find the man who did this to you. That's a promise.'

  After Manning left, Darby headed to the vending machine for another Coke. She saw the pay phone outside the office door. The words she had practiced saying over and over again this past week were now burning to get out.

  She dropped a quarter into the pay phone.

  'Hello?' Mrs Cruz said.

  I'm sorry for everything that's happened. I'm sorry for Mel and I'm sorry for what you're going through I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry.

  As hard as she tried, Darby couldn't get the words out. They were stuck in her throat, lodged in there like hot stones.

  'Mel, is that you?' Mrs Cruz said. 'Are you okay? Tell me you're okay.'

  Mrs Cruz's hope, bright and so alive, made Darby hang up and want to run someplace far away, someplace where nobody, not even her own mother, would ever find her.

  Sheila couldn't afford the motel anymore. The house still hadn't been released by the police, and when it was, there would be cleanup and repairs. Darby was going to spend the summer at her aunt and uncle's beach house in Maine. Sheila was going to stay in town with a coworker. She would drive to Maine on her days off.

  Darby went with her mother to a grocery store in Saugus to stock up on food for the long drive. Taped inside the grocery store window, right near the front door so no one would miss it, was a poster board holding a blown-up picture of Melanie. It was yellowed from the sun. The word missing was written in big, bold red letters above her smiling face. A reward for $25,000 was listed, along with a toll-free phone number.

  Sheila was rummaging through her coupon folder when Darby turned the corner near the cash registers and spotted Mrs Cruz talking to the store owner. He took the rolled-up poster board from Melanie's mother and walked toward the front window.

  Mrs Cruz saw her. Their eyes locked, and Darby felt the full weight of Helena Cruz's stare, only this stare carried something that made Darby want to duck and run: hatred, cold and hard and fixed on her. If given the chance, she was sure Mrs Cruz would, without a moment's hesitation, trade Darby's life for Melanie's.

  Sheila slipped her hand around her daughter's shoulder, and Mrs Cruz's stare withered and died.

  The store owner handed Mrs Cruz the old poster board with the sun-faded picture of her daughter. Melanie's mother walked away, taking small, deliberate steps as though the floor were a thin sheet of ice that might break. Darby recognized that walk. Her mother had moved the same way when she had walked to Big Red's casket that final time to say good-bye.

  Maybe there was still time. Maybe Evan Manning would still find Melanie alive. Maybe he would find the man from the woods and kill him. At the end of the movie, the hero always killed the monster. If Special Agent Manning found Mel and brought her home, life would be okay – definitely not the way it was before the monster had arrived, and certainly not back to being normal, but okay.

  On Saturday morning, the start of Labor Day weekend, Darby woke up early to help her uncle dig the fire pit for the annual lobster bake. By noon, they were sweating. Uncle Ron put his shovel in the sand and said he was heading up to the house to grab a couple of sodas.

  Darby kept digging. As she breathed in the cool, salty air blowing off the water, she kept thinking of Melanie, wondering about the kind of air she was breathing right now, if she was still breathing at all.

  Three more women had disappeared back home. Darby had found out two weeks ago when Uncle Ron and Aunt Barb had taken her to breakfast. While they were waiting for a table, Darby had spotted a copy of the Boston Globe lying on a table. The phrase 'Summer of Fear' was stretched across the top page above the smiling faces of five women and a teenage girl in braces.

  Darby recognized Melanie's picture right away, along with the pictures of the first two women, Tara Hardy and Samantha Kent. Darby had held the exact same photographs in her own hands.

  The information on Hardy and Kent was pretty much a rehash of everything she already knew. The article's main focus seemed to be on the three women who had disappeared after Melanie – Pamela Driscol, twenty-three, from Charl
estown, going to school nights for her nursing degree and last seen walking through a campus parking lot; Lucinda Billingham, twenty-one, from Lynn, a single mother who went out for cigarettes and was never seen again; and Debbie Kessler, also twenty-one, a Boston secretary who went out for drinks one night after work and never made it home.

  The police handling each of these investigations wouldn't comment on what evidence linked these women together, but they did confirm that a task force had been established headed up by a special agent who belonged to the FBI's newly formed unit called Behavioral Science. The agents who worked in this group, the article said, were specialists in studying the criminal mind, especially those who were serial murderers.

  'Hello, Darby.'

  Not Uncle Ron but Evan Manning, holding out a can of Coke. She caught the sad, almost empty look in his eyes and knew, right then, what he was here to say.

  She dropped the shovel and ran.

  'Darby.'

  She kept running. If she didn't hear him say the words, then they couldn't come true.

  Manning caught up with her near the water. The first time she broke free of him. The second time he grabbed her by the arm and spun her around, hard.

  'We caught him, Darby. It's over. He can't hurt you.'

  'Where's Melanie?'

  'Let's go back to the house.'

  'Tell me what happened!' Darby was shocked by the sudden anger in her voice. She tried to pull it back, but the fear was already humming through her limbs, telling her to go ahead and scream it out. 'I don't want to wait anymore, I'm sick of waiting.'

  'The man's name was Victor Grady,' Manning said. 'He was an auto mechanic and he abducted women.'

  'Why?'

  'I don't know. Grady died before we got a chance to speak with him.'

  'You killed him?'

  'He killed himself. I don't know what happened to Mel or any of the other women. Chances are, we'll never know. I wish I had a better answer for you. I'm sorry.'

  Darby opened her mouth to speak, but no sound came out.