Disappearance at Devil's Rock

by Paul Tremblay

  Allison: “That Arnold somehow made that . . . um, connection to his father’s death really seemed to make an impression on Tommy. And it seems clear, at least from the diary, that Tommy has been thinking about his father a lot this summer. He even writes about disappearing, too.”

  “Yes. I know. Reading all that has been, well, devastating, frankly. I’m always asking him to talk to me, to tell me anything, and I’m not trying to pry or lead him into anything he doesn’t want to talk about. He’s not rude or a bad kid, or anything like that, and we’ll talk about his favorite TV shows and movies and stuff. Tommy’s the sweetest, kindest boy you could ever meet. He doesn’t like to talk about the heavy stuff. Or not with me, anyway.”

  A door opens and closes, and Kate shuffles out into the kitchen.

  Elizabeth calls out over her shoulder. “Kate? I’m in the living room with Detective Murtagh.”

  Kate says, “Okay.” She rubs her eyes and walks a tight little circle in the kitchen before opening the refrigerator door and pulling out a bottle of orange juice.

  Elizabeth: “Can you hang out in your room for a few more minutes? I’ll come get you when we’re done.”

  “Okay. But I want to go over Sam’s house soon.”

  “You can. Just give us a few more minutes.”

  Allison says, “It’s up to you, but I don’t mind if she’s here.”

  “I rather have her not here for now.” Elizabeth stands up, and Kate leaves the kitchen with her glass of juice. “Thank you, Kate.”

  Allison asks, “Can you give me a list of William’s friends on the off chance Arnold is someone who knew William or is connected to him somehow?”

  “Oh, jeeze, his old friends and coworkers. I can give you names, but I haven’t spoken to most of them since his funeral.”

  Allison says, “That’s fine. We can work with that. Now, this might sound like a weird question—”

  “It’s all been weird.”

  “That third page you found this morning, the one that says ‘Don’t leave. I’m still here.’” She pauses to clear her throat, unhappy with how her voice is sounding. “Any idea what that means? Do you think Tommy is quoting someone, maybe William?”

  “What? No. I don’t have any idea what that means. Why do you think it’s something William said?”

  “It struck me that Tommy wrote about wondering what his father’s last words were in his diary. Remember? I’m trying to piece together how obsessed Tommy had become with his father’s accident, any possible connection to Arnold, and how it might’ve played a role in his disappearance.”

  Elizabeth puts down her cup of coffee on the floor, folds her legs up onto the couch, closing up and off. Allison just lost her. She doesn’t blame her. Her questions about her dead ex-husband sound like she’s grasping at the shortest of straws. She might as well move on to the next question, the one she’s been waiting to ask all day.

  “Where did you find the most recent diary pages?” She doesn’t add the observation that it’s more than odd she keeps finding them, parsed out, once a day and like a wake-up alarm.

  Elizabeth exhales deeply. “I found yesterday’s in the middle of the living room floor.”

  “The living room floor?”

  “Yeah, there.” Elizabeth points at the floor and then folds her arms across her chest, cupping her left elbow in her right hand. “And I, um, I have to tell you. I haven’t been finding Tommy’s diary pages bookmarking random other books. Not this morning, but the previous three mornings they were left there on the rug.”

  Allison looks at the floor and it’s as empty as an unused theater stage. “I’m not sure I follow. How did they get there?”

  “Kate. And I’m sorry I—or—she wasn’t more forthcoming about the diary and stuff. It’s been a mess, you know? But she admitted to finding his diary last night and that she was tearing out the pages and then getting up at night and leaving them out on the floor for me to find in the morning, because, well, Jesus, it’s a long story, Allison.”

  Allison doesn’t know what quite to say and stumbles through something that’s supposed to be commiserative. “Okay. Yeah, I can’t imagine how difficult this is for Kate, and what she might have to do to, um, cope.”

  Elizabeth looks over her shoulder and down the hallway. “Yeah. Kate had been so adamant about it not being her, you know, leaving the pages out, that at first I thought it wasn’t her.” Elizabeth pauses and looks into her lap, like she’s given the most embarrassing confession. She says, “And then I kind of let it go on, you know, because . . . because this all has been so hard to deal with. Impossible. Just fucking impossible, and if doing this—” she points at the rug, and the speed and momentum with which she speaks increases, and to Allison this ramble sounds like a rationalization, and not as honest as what she said when she looked into her lap a few moments ago “—was how Kate needed to deal with it, or cope like you said, then okay. But Kate and I had a big fight, late last night, or early this morning. And, I didn’t handle it well, I’m afraid.” Elizabeth laughs softly at herself. “Understatement of the year. I yelled, kind of went crazy, tore apart her room, looking for the diary, and made a mess of everything. Everything.” Elizabeth abruptly stops, cuts out.

  Did Allison say that people were always capable of the worst decisions out loud earlier, or did she think it? She’s been so knocked off her axis by this unexpected revelation and turn in the conversation, she isn’t sure. “I think you and Kate are holding up amazingly well, and I’m sure Kate will forgive you for yelling at her. Did she eventually admit to leaving out the diary pages?”

  “Yeah, and she gave me the rest of the diary.” Elizabeth hands her the book.

  The front and back covers are black and the spine thin. The book feels as fragile as an ancient artifact. There couldn’t be more than fifty pages in the book even before some of the pages were torn out. Allison opens it. The page with Tommy talking about his late-night chat with Arnold is the opening page, buffeted at the spine by the jagged edges of previous pages torn out. Allison carefully peels back each edge to count the missing pages. She counts twice and there are six, which accounts for the previously found entries. She then carefully flips past the intact entries. Between the “I’m still here” page and the rest of the unused notebook more pages have been torn away. She says, “There’re pages missing after these last pages you e-mailed me.” She holds the diary open at the spine to show Elizabeth the perforated edges. “There are—” she counts “—five pages missing. Did you ask Kate if there were more entries and if she had them?”

  “Yeah, we saw that. And Kate swears the book was that way when she found it. After everything we went through last night, I don’t think she’d be lying about having more missing pages.”

  Allison closes the diary and says, “Okay. Should we talk about that small camera you have mounted on the TV stand?”

  “Yeah.” Elizabeth nods her head. “I thought, especially when the pages first started showing up, that there might be a chance, you know, that it was someone else, not Kate, leaving them out.”

  “Who?”

  “I—I don’t know, maybe Luis or Josh, or some other kid from school was sneaking into the house, leaving the pages. I’d left our doors unlocked in case Tommy came back, so I don’t know, I thought maybe it could be Tommy doing this, too.” Elizabeth stops, looks away, and rubs her eyes. She’s clearly uncomfortable answering the why of the camera.

  Allison needs to restate the last part. “You thought Tommy was coming home and leaving out the pages for you to find?”

  “No. Yes, but not exactly, I mean. I’m not explaining this very well. But I bought the camera thinking one of two things would happen: we’d catch on video who was leaving the pages, or Kate would have to admit to doing it.”

  “What did you get on video?”

  “Not much. The camera’s been kind of glitchy. Or I thought it was. Kate was actually secretly controlling it so I wouldn’t see her leaving the pages out for
me—and she admitted all this to me. I let her set the whole system up. She synced it to my phone and to her phone, too, without telling me. She’s very tech savvy and I’m not, and last night, she muted the alarm we’d set up with the camera notifications. There’s a clip from yesterday morning though that Kate says wasn’t her.”

  Elizabeth takes out her phone and moves closer to Allison on the couch. Elizabeth shows her a still of the room from 2:11 A.M., and then a video from 4:34 A.M. Other than the diary pages on the living room floor, there wasn’t anything else out of the ordinary that Allison could see. Elizabeth played the video three times and appeared to grow more frustrated with each viewing.

  Elizabeth says, “At first I thought—”

  Kate says, “Hi?”

  Kate is behind the couch, telephone-pole straight with her hands held behind her back. She wears a loose white T-shirt from a summer lacrosse camp, and there are thin backpack straps over her shoulders. She wears jeans with holes and frays on the tops of the thighs, a giant hole like a denim mouth over her left knee. Her hair is up in a tightly tied ponytail. The purple streaks blend in and fade into her dark hair. Her chin is up, and she looks so much like her mother, but there’s another’s face underneath. Allison wonders if Elizabeth sees her that way, too.

  Kate waits until both adults are turned around and facing her before continuing. “Um, Detective, did Mom tell you that I woke up the other night and saw someone standing outside my window?”

  Allison looks at Elizabeth quickly, then back at Kate and says, “No.”

  Elizabeth: “I was about to tell her, and show her the video you said wasn’t you.”

  Kate doesn’t take her eyes off Allison and says, “The one that was just a snapshot of the room, that was me. I had the camera take a shot of the room, then I like shut it off—”

  Allison: “How?”

  “With the app on my phone. And then I dropped the pages out there, then turned the camera back on. But that second video—I have no idea why the camera went off. It wasn’t me. And I think it went off at like the same time I saw what I saw outside the window. It could’ve been a dream, I guess, but it seemed totally real, and it was scary.”

  Allison: “I bet. Could you tell if it was a man or woman? Did you see a face?”

  “I couldn’t see much. Hard to tell how big it was or anything like that. It was dark in my room and dark outside, but it was like an even darker shadow standing there, you know, in the shape of someone, outside my window, and then it, I mean, whoever it was, was gone pretty quick. When I got out of bed and looked out the window, that shadow wasn’t there anymore.” Kate pauses and says, “There seems to be a lot of that going around in Ames.”

  Allison: “A lot of what?”

  Kate: “I dunno, dark shadows of someone looking in on people’s houses. It’s kinda scary. People all over Twitter and Facebook are talking about it, calling him shadowman, and talking about that big article this morning, yeah?”

  Allison: “We have received a number of complaints very similar to your description.”

  Kate: “Mom, did you tell her about seeing a dark shadow in your room, that first night after Tommy disappeared?”

  Elizabeth tilts her head and stares hard at Kate, and then she coughs and breathes deeply again. “No, Kate.”

  Kate: “Why not?”

  Elizabeth looks at Allison as she talks. “It’s not the same as what she said she saw, or what other people are reporting. I was in my room and I’d just woken up, went to the bathroom, still groggy—”

  Kate: “Mom.”

  Elizabeth holds up a stop hand at her daughter. “—let me finish. It was one of those half-asleep, late-night things, eyes seeing shapes that aren’t there. Anyway, I thought I saw something near the chair in my room. But I got up and went over to the spot and it was nothing. Really.”

  Kate: “Mom, you’ve been saying you saw the shadow of someone hiding next to the chair, like a person was crouched down or something, and you said you thought it was Tommy.”

  Elizabeth: “Kate—”

  Kate: “It’s true.”

  Elizabeth: “Listen, I—”

  Kate: “Why are you being like this?”

  Elizabeth is yelling now. “Kate! That’s enough!”

  The two Sanderson women abruptly end the exchange before Allison resolves to intervene. The silence is as long as it is uncomfortable. Elizabeth is looking down into her lap, and her arms are crossed again. Kate is still standing behind the couch. Her rigid posture has relaxed, or sagged. She adjusts one of the straps on her backpack.

  Allison is not quite sure how to proceed. She wants to hug them and shake them both violently while demanding to know what the hell is going on in this house. She says, “Kate, can I ask you something?”

  “Yeah.”

  “There are more pages missing from Tommy’s diary. Five of them by my count.” She holds up the diary opened to the second section of the spine where there are missing pages. “Did you tear them out?”

  “No way. I swear. When I found the diary, it was like that. Those pages were already torn out.” Kate is calm and her expression doesn’t change, her eyes are hard and unwavering. Unreadable. If she’s lying, it’s a righteous lie in which she fully believes.

  “Do you know where those missing pages are? I know you found the diary in his room, did you find anything else with Tommy’s writing like this?”

  “No. Just his drawings and stuff. I haven’t found anything else like the diary and I haven’t found any missing pages anywhere. I’m going to my friend’s house soon, and you can feel free to check my room while I’m gone if you want.”

  Allison: “If it’s okay with your mom, I think I’ll take you up on that offer, and I think we should go through Tommy’s room as well.”

  Elizabeth nods. Kate remains motionless, a picture of a teen’s assured defiance.

  Allison continues. “I’m sure you realize this already, Kate, but based on the pages we’ve received so far, especially ones that mention Arnold, assuming there are more pages, it’s possible they contain critical information.” Allison hopes she doesn’t sound condescending. She wants Kate’s trust. Allison also doesn’t want to sound too desperate or too impersonal. “Information that could help us locate Tommy.”

  Kate says, “I know and that’s why I’m totally telling the truth now. And I do have something else for you, Detective.” She brings a hand out from behind her back and she holds something small, and what appears to be the top of a plastic sandwich bag sticks out from her closed fist. “I found these two coins on top of Tommy’s bureau.” She opens her hand, holds up the bag, and shakes it. The two coins inside jingle. Kate readjusts her backpack straps, then reaches over the couch and hands the bag to Allison.

  Allison opens it and looks inside but does not shake the coins out onto her palm.

  Elizabeth says, “I’d forgotten about these.”

  Allison: “You’ve seen these coins before?”

  Elizabeth: “Kate showed them to me a few days ago. Tommy used to collect coins like crazy when he was younger. Fourth and fifth grade, mostly.”

  Kate: “One coin looks like a nickel, but it has this weird empty face and then a big eye hanging above it. I think maybe it’s the seer coin that Tommy talks about in his diary. When he said Arnold showed him pictures of the coins he worked on, and then on the page with the picture, Tommy said something about wanting to put the seer coin over his eyes, yeah.”

  Elizabeth: “Oh, Jesus Christ . . .”

  Kate keeps talking, “And, you know, Tommy says Arnold called himself a seer, right?, so who knows, I started thinking that maybe Arnold gave Tommy the coins or something.”

  Allison carefully manipulates the coins in the bag.

  Kate, looking over Allison’s shoulder, says, “That one is just a penny. But the Lincoln head has like a big crack in it.”

  Allison: “Have you taken out the coins? Touched them with your hands?”

  Kate: �
��Yeah.”

  Allison: “That’s fine. We’ll still try to get some prints off these if we can.” Allison inspects the coin with the tails side of a nickel and the heads side with a silhouetted face in profile and a large, roughly etched eye hovering above. Allison opens her notebook. “Can you show me where you found these?”

  Kate: “Uh-huh. Like, now?”

  “Yes, please.”

  The three of them go to Tommy’s room. Kate walks in without hesitating, her thumbs hooked in the backpack straps. Elizabeth hangs back and allows Allison to go next.

  It’s brighter in this room than it is in the hallway with natural light pouring through the windows and reflecting off the light blue walls. Tommy’s bed is made. His room is clean, tidy, staged. Tommy’s books and comics are stacked neatly in the bookcase along the wall and the bedframe bookcase. His desk is huge, a peninsula jutting out into the middle of the room, and made of thick, serious wood. Its top is well organized, with pens and notebooks in their spots and a dormant laptop, graffitied with stickers and a Sharpie. Next to the desk is a milk crate filled with more notebooks.

  Kate says, “I found the bag up here, and it was inside the metal tin, near at the top.”

  Tommy’s bureau isn’t as neat as his desk and is cluttered with hats, superhero action figures, and loose change. The metal tin sits in the back middle, a raincatch for pocket-sized trinkets.

  Allison asks, “Do you know where the bulk of his coin collection is?”