While Melissa gives the girls ice cream, Gemma helps clear the table. Frank and George remain in the dining room talking. Around nine o’clock they all say warm and polite good-byes.
They give Karla the choice of coming home in Frank’s car or Gemma’s. She chooses Frank. When they arrive home, he carries Karla up from the car. She wakes up in his arms. Gemma gets her into pajamas and into bed before realizing she forgot to make Karla brush her teeth. One day can’t hurt that much, she decides. To help Karla drift off, Gemma reads to her from The Secret Garden. It’s a book she herself loved as a child, but she hadn’t remembered how weird it was. The heroine, Mary, doesn’t even cry when her parents die. Gemma was shocked to read that this time around, and mentions it to Frank, who is unperturbed.
“Lots of children’s books are weird. Roald Dahl was a huge anti-Semite,” he offers.
Still, Gemma hopes reading to Karla will protect her, at least a little, against the temptations of video games and reality television. It’s the same reason she bought Karla porcelain dolls with big glass eyes instead of Barbies. As she kisses her daughter’s forehead, she thinks: all this time, and all this money, to pretend that our children live in the nineteenth century, except without polio.
She turns off the light in Karla’s room, and then the light in the hallway. Gemma lives in a big, beautiful house, separated from the main road by half a mile of scrubby grass and paved dirt. At night, it is quieter than she would like, though both Frank and Karla are light sleepers.
Once the lights in the kitchen and living room are off, Gemma retreats to the study, a glass of white wine in her hand. She sits down at her husband’s desk, opens up a search engine, and types in her brother’s name. She can find only one article, from a small newspaper, titled VIGIL HELD FOR VICTIMS OF JOHN LOGAN, CRAWFORD MURDER, by Juliet Leonard. The picture of the vigil is blurry and dark, and the article is perfunctory. It mentions Blake’s name only once, and that he had been found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity. Gemma’s mother had hoped, against reason, that Logan might have been the one truly responsible for Sara’s death. The fact that he was in jail when she was killed hardly deterred the belief. Gemma is sympathetic to her mother’s delusion, but barely.
Women, the article informs her, are 25 percent more likely than men to be murdered by someone they know. The article also quotes a Crawford student named Odile Mendelssohn, saying, “We have to face reality in order to change it.” Gemma searches her name, too, and finds that she is now a yoga teacher in Berlin, which doesn’t sound at all like a bad life.
Gemma calls her mother’s number. Who else can she possibly talk to about what Karla is doing? Who else could begin to understand? Hope rises in her as the phone rings. You have reached Alice Campbell. Please leave your name and number …
Gemma calls again, but hangs up after the second ring. It’s better to have the conversation in person, she decides, already knowing that she won’t, that she will never have the courage, and that even if she did, her mother could not help her.
She pours herself another glass of wine, then two, then four. Around midnight she begins to feel ill.
Gemma goes into the guest bathroom, locking the door behind her. She curls herself around the toilet, begging her body’s forgiveness. The white tiles of the bathroom floor are beginning to gray, she notices. Soon they will need to be redone.
Serena
Colleen is sitting in my office, her thin legs crossed at the ankles, looking distraught. I haven’t seen her since her wedding, sometime in the nineties. Prior to that, when she was still a Faraday, we worked together at a law firm in midtown Manhattan. Shortly after Colleen left, I became an investigator for the firm. Five years after that, I opened up my own private investigation business. We didn’t really keep in touch, so it’s a surprise to see her now.
She’s a pretty woman, a little frail-looking, but otherwise indistinguishable from any other Westchester soccer mom. I give her black tea in a paper cup.
“It’s so good to see you, Serena. I’m really sorry that I haven’t been better at keeping in touch. You look fantastic.”
“It’s good to see you, too. How can I help you?” I don’t want her to waste her time being nice to me.
She takes a deep breath and hands me a picture that looks like it was taken for a school yearbook.
“This is my daughter, Luna.”
I nod, vaguely remembering a birth announcement many years ago. The girl has blonde hair parted down the middle and is smiling gamely at the camera.
“How old is she?” I ask.
“Eighteen. Just. Her birthday was in August,” says Colleen.
August, I write on my notepad. I could remember this on my own, but I think it makes people more secure to see me write things down.
“She’s gone missing,” Colleen tells me. “There’s no sign of foul play, and she’s technically an adult, so the police won’t help us. We were hoping you could.”
“I probably can, yes. Tell me a little more about Luna.”
Colleen takes several deep breaths before continuing. “My husband, Richard. Did you ever meet him?”
“I think so.”
“I’m his second wife. He had a daughter from his first marriage, Sara. She was killed in 1997.”
“I’m so sorry to hear that.”
“Luna was only two years old. Too young to remember, but, of course, something like that has an effect.”
“I can only imagine.” Often people come to me when what they really need is a decent therapist, but I’m not sure that’s the case with Colleen.
“Luna was always a shy kid. Well behaved, even when she was a baby. When she was, oh, ten or eleven? She started going to this summer camp. Willow Creek.”
I write the name down on my notepad. Colleen continues.
“It’s a Christian camp, in New Jersey. Richard and I aren’t religious. It wasn’t our idea. Some of her friends from school were going. We thought, what harm could it do? She seemed really happy there. She went every summer, and then even became a counselor-in-training. Luna graduated from high school a few months ago. The eighteen-year-olds at Willow Creek have the option to go on this two-week-long retreat-type thing. Richard was nervous about that. He said it sounded like a cult.” She paused, as if waiting for me to agree with her husband. I said nothing. She continued.
“Like I said, Luna’s always been good. Good grades, nice friends, all that. We never even had to give her a curfew. I think it’s because of Sara. She doesn’t want to give us anything to worry about, right?”
“I understand.”
“So it didn’t seem right, I thought, to not let her go. When I drove to get her, she wasn’t there. I spoke to the director of the camp,” she tells me. “Her name is Loretta O’Neill. She’s not … She doesn’t seem all there to me. I spoke to her, maybe yelled at her, a little. I wanted to know where my daughter was. She told me, ‘She’s fine, she’s safe, she doesn’t want to see you. She’s following a different path.’ I called the police, and they spoke to Loretta as well. They said there’s nothing they can do. Luna was supposed to start at SUNY Purchase a week ago.”
“Luna’s eighteen, right?”
“Yes.”
“All right. Anything else you want to tell me?”
Colleen sighs.
“Luna’s hair is blonde, like mine. Just before she left for her retreat, she came home from a sleepover with it dyed brown.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Sara’s hair was brown,” says Colleen. “Luna just looked so much like her. I thought Richard was going to have a heart attack. But he just walked out of the room.”
“Sara, you said she was …” I struggle to put it politely. “That she was murdered.”
“Yes. By her boyfriend. Blake Campbell.”
I write down the name. “Is he still in prison?”
“No. He didn’t go to jail. He was found not guilty by reason of temporary insanity.”
&nbs
p; “I’m so sorry,” I say again.
“It was hard for Richard. For all of us. But especially …” Her eyes widen. “Do you think he has something to do with this?”
“No, no, that’s very unlikely. I just need to follow up on all possibilities. OK?”
I take down all the rest of the information she can give me. The names and phone numbers of Luna’s friends, her height and weight, blood type, allergies. Most of those things won’t matter, but I want Colleen to feel that I am being thorough. She hands me a small stack of photographs. Luna and a group of friends all dressed as Disney princesses, carving pumpkins. Luna on a soccer field, her face distorted with determination. Luna at her debutante party, thin arms in white satin gloves. Luna at her graduation, flanked by her grinning parents.
“Do you think you can find her?” Colleen asks.
“Yes,” I say, truthfully. Next to adultery, the missing sons and daughters of nice suburban families constitute the majority of my livelihood. “But the sooner I start, the better. I’d like to drive out to Willow Creek tonight, actually.”
She hands over the check immediately.
Richard Morgan’s first wife, Christabel, Sara’s mother, is a psychic in western Massachusetts. She sells healing air plants and amethysts at exorbitant prices on her online store. Whether she’s always done this, or if it’s her way of coping, it’s not my job to figure out. She and Richard divorced in 1989. I doubt Luna would go see her, but I place a sticker on my map anyway.
I put another sticker on the town in Maine where Blake Campbell grew up, and now lives, working at a library. Just in case. But I start at the most obvious place, Willow Creek.
Because a private investigator who drinks is such an unforgivable cliché, I take pills. They are given to me by a psychiatrist on West Ninety-Seventh Street. He’s Harvard-educated, very well dressed, and so uninterested in me I doubt he could pick my face out of a lineup. He gives me a stimulant often used by the air force, Modafinil, ostensibly to help with the fatigue caused by my depression. The first week I took it, it made me so agitated, I thought I was going to strangle my dog. Now it works pretty well. I take fifteen milligrams, fill my car with gas, and drive to New Jersey. My dog, Capote, sits in the passenger seat, panting joyfully out the open window. He looks more like a wolf than household pet, which is occasionally useful.
The Willow Creek property is two and half hours outside New York City. Its website boasts of horseback riding, archery, and Christ. It’s almost winter now, and the campus is eerily empty. I leave Capote in the car with the windows rolled down and walk to the main building.
A guy is sitting behind a fake wooden desk, clicking absentmindedly at a computer. When I walk in, he nearly jumps. I’m probably the first person he’s spoken to all day.
“Welcome to Willow Creek,” he says, recovering.
I show him my badge. Often people ask to see my license as well, but he’s just a kid. At the slightest suggestion of authority, his face goes white.
“I’m looking for Luna Morgan,” I say.
His eyebrows go up.
“We’re committed to protecting the privacy of our community members,” he says, robotically. Someone, I am sure, has instructed him to say exactly that.
I get out my wallet. I have a hundred dollar bill, but looking at the guy’s T-shirt, stained with ranch dressing, I suspect it will be excessive. I put two twenties on the desk.
“How about a forwarding address?” I ask.
He stares at the money. He can’t be older than nineteen. I wonder if he and Luna were ever friends.
He scribbles on a purple sticky note and gives it to me without meeting my eyes.
“The Wilsons. They used to come here when they were kids. They run an antique store outside Norton Hill. Nice people, and they always need spare hands.”
On my way to Greenville, I stop at a rest area on the Taconic. Capote and I do a few laps around the parking lot to stretch our legs. I buy a bottle of water and a pack of M&Ms. In the bathroom, someone has written on the wall: YOU FEEL EMPTY BECAUSE YOU ARE. Below that, in tiny red letters, someone else has written: I FUCKED YR MOM.
“Antique store” is a nice term for the Wilsons’ property. It’s a junkyard. Just looking at their stuff makes me want to get a tetanus shot.
“Can I help you?” A girl dressed in shorts and a man’s T-shirt appears. Her hair is dark, except for a halo of light roots.
“Luna Morgan?”
“Yeah,” she says, without thinking. And then: “Who are you?”
I show her my badge. “You’re not in trouble. Your parents have sent me to make sure you’re safe.”
“I am.”
“I can see that,” I tell her, making my voice gentle. “But I wouldn’t be doing my job if I didn’t ask you a few questions.”
“Like what?” She crosses her thin arms across her chest.
“Why don’t I get you a coffee? Is there somewhere nearby we can go?”
“Depends what you mean by nearby.”
The closest coffee shop is in downtown Greenville, a brightly lit place twenty minutes away from the house. It has lots of glass and metal.
I can’t have caffeine with my meds, so I order peppermint tea. Luna gets a latte and a chocolate croissant, which she consumes in two bites.
“Food isn’t great there, I’m guessing.”
She shakes her head.
“Why don’t you order some more stuff? To take back with you?”
“Really?”
“Don’t give me that look. I’m billing it all to your parents.”
She laughs. “In that case, definitely.”
I wait while she eats another croissant, and a blueberry muffin.
“It’s cool that you’re like, a female detective. I think my mom told me about you once.”
“Investigator, not detective. I don’t work for the police.”
“Still.” She tilts her head. “Do you carry a gun?”
“In my car. Not on my person.”
“And the dog?”
Capote is tied up outside the café, napping peacefully. “He just keeps me company.”
We stare at each other for a while. It’s a trick I learned from psychiatrists. People hate silence and will start talking just to make it stop.
“So I guess I’m supposed to tell you why I’m here,” she says, finally.
I shrug. “Actually, that’s not part of my job. Though I am curious.”
“You know about Sara, right?”
“A little.”
“She died when I was two. I don’t remember her at all. But when I was like, ten, eleven, I started having these horrible dreams. And I couldn’t always tell what was real and what wasn’t. I would tell my parents stuff like, Sara is my substitute teacher. Or I saw her at the supermarket. I’d see a girl in a magazine ad and be like—there she is! In retrospect, it must have been, like, fucking awful for my dad.”
I nod.
“But not your fault.”
“No, it wasn’t.” Her eyes narrow. “They put me on medications.”
“Which ones?” I’m always very curious about other people’s prescriptions.
“God, I don’t even remember. My mom told me they were vitamins. I know I was on lithium at one point. That was the worst.”
“Jesus.”
“Yeah. And they didn’t even really work.”
“That would make me hate my parents, too.”
She looks at me in surprise. “I don’t hate them. At all.”
“Really? Typically, that’s what running away indicates.”
“I know. And I know they’re probably furious.”
“Worried, more like.”
“I just need space.”
“From them?”
“No, from her. From Sara. I don’t see her anymore but I still … feel her. Like a string tied around my throat.”
“Your mom said that when you dyed your hair, it made you look like her.”
“Yeah,
” Luna answered. She seemed embarrassed.
“Why?”
“If I could explain,” she said, “I wouldn’t have done it.”
I pretend to sip from my empty tea cup.
“Do you feel better now?” I asked.
“What’s that thing people say? ‘Wherever you go, there you are’?”
“I think I’ve heard that once or twice.”
“I guess it’s, ‘Wherever you go, there you are, and there’s your dead half sister,’ too. But it’s easier. Not being in that house, with my parents. I’m a little bit more free.”
What could I say to that?
“So, what now?” she asks. “Are you going to tase me? Throw me in your truck, take me back to Westchester?”
“No. Technically, that would be kidnapping. Also, your parents paid me to see that you’re safe, not to bring you home.”
“Oh.” She seems genuinely surprised by this, but recovers quickly. “So, like, are you going to take a picture of me holding today’s newspaper?”
“I was thinking of a video,” I said. “My phone will time-stamp it. Just you saying hi, saying something to let them know you’re OK.”
“All right. Do we have to do that now?”
“I guess not.”
“I need time. To think of what to say.”
“How about I come by your house this evening? Is that enough time?”
“Yes. That’s fine.”
I drive her back to the Wilsons’. As she unbuckles, I notice that she’s shaking slightly. Before I can think better of it, I say: “You don’t really want to go back there, do you?”
“Not particularly,” she answers, lightly.
“What’s it like?”
“Not that bad,” she says quickly. “They’re nice. Really religious.”
“I thought you were, too.”
“I was, I guess. For a little while. I don’t think it’s exactly my thing.”
“Understandable. But they’re not hurting you or anything, are they?”
“God, no. It’s just …” She gestures at the decrepit house and the desolate landscape that surrounds us. No eighteen-year-old wants to be here.
Finally, I tell her: “I could drive you to—what’s the nearest real town?”
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