The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  This one sat like a showroom model in the middle of their two-car garage. He had committed the space to this work, banishing both Marta’s car and his own to the carport. Marta was not pleased, but nothing he did seemed to please her any more. The garage had become his sanctuary, and he kept it as clean as the hospital’s maternity ward.

  His Falcon was bright red, different in color than the unmarked pale green fleet cars but otherwise exactly like the Argentine-built models he remembered. It had taken him years to find it because, it turned out, the Falcon Club of Buenos Aires considered the l965 model among the most collectible. That year’s model represented the precise midpoint of a marque that flourished between 1960 and 1970, but it was the high point as well. The Mustang, introduced late in the 1964 model year, co-opted the Falcon’s market niche. In 1965, fewer than 3,000 hardtops and 500 convertibles like this one were made; many considered the 1965 Sprint the last of the pure Falcons.

  He knew none of this when he began looking, of course, and the search had become an obsession unto itself. Marta once asked him to explain it, but he couldn’t. He could only tell her that, like so many other retirees in their aging suburban Pittsburgh community, he thought he needed a hobby.

  “Why not fishing, Ramon?” she had asked, even though she understood perfectly well its appeal to him. “Why a car? Why this old and ugly car?”

  Once he found it—a steal, given the devaluation of the Argentine peso and the seller’s desperation—he had begun work immediately on the interior, proof that automotive restoration was not a familiar science to him. He had since soiled the refurbished upholstery with grease and rust, and the new convertible top had an unfortunate gouge from the time he’d punctured it with a screwdriver. But now, after three years, it was nearly done. The alternator was the last major part he needed.

  He set the part beside the other package on his tidy workbench, beside his copy of the “Falcon News Technical Tips Manual,” and awoke the iPod in its dock on the shelf above. He often worked to Mozart’s Requiem. Today, in celebration, he needed special music, something that soared. He chose Beethoven, the Ninth Symphony, and turned up the volume. Seconds later, those powerful opening notes burst from the ceiling-mounted JBLs at each corner of the garage. He felt them in his chest and, for a moment, closed his eyes.

  Soon the music shifted, the drama of the start giving way to the composer’s incomparable symphonic intricacy. He turned and lifted the car’s hood. Guerra smiled, remembering how quickly he had learned the peculiar language of the Falcon aficionados. The engine was puny, an “economical 170-cubic-inch six.” The transmission was the optional “three-speed Cruise-O-Matic.” The restored machinery beneath him practically gleamed, and again he felt a rush of pride. Nothing compared to the satisfaction of a job done well.

  And now he had his alternator, which would fill the empty space in the engine compartment that, at the moment, was a tangle of exposed wires. He carried it as he might a Christmas gift and grabbed a socket wrench from among the tools on his workbench. Bolting it in would be a simple matter, and when it was done, he knew his restoration of the Falcon’s electrical system finally would be complete. He would have a fully functioning, Cruise-O-Matic memory of a time in his life when he’d been a man of influence and power, a licensed doctor with military rank. A time before the commissions and investigations and his secret life as nobody in a place that still didn’t feel like home.

  Still, this was his life now, and he would protect it at any cost. He set the alternator into its place and readied the wires, enjoying the thought that soon he could drive it any time he wished.

  Chapter 18

  Melissa understood completely—Jim and Brenna didn’t want to leave her alone. But she was starting to feel like a prisoner in the house, her every move monitored, her every word interpreted for hidden meaning. Her father had knocked twice as she bathed last night to ask if his running shorts were hanging on the door hook, like she couldn’t tell he was just looking for a response, any response. Brenna was no better.

  Annie—and thank God for her cantankerous younger sister—wasn’t much for walking on eggshells.

  “Caught in the Act is on, preggo,” she announced. “Stop hogging the couch.”

  Melissa closed her book. Annie was trailed, as usual, by Brenna’s son, Taylor, who was a year younger than Annie but timid and far less worldly. Still in their junior lifeguard sweats, their hair still wet, they both held open cans of Coke and paper plates carrying chipped ham sandwiches.

  “Sweet!” Melissa said, uncurling her legs as both kids settled in. “What’s today’s brawl?”

  “Fat cheating sluts,” Annie said. “Total boho skank.”

  “It’s a rerun,” Taylor added, “but it’s sooo sick. They catch this lady boinking her husband’s dad on her desk at work, and her husband goes nuts.”

  Annie aimed the remote and the TV blinked on. The show that made reality TV stars of cheaters and cuckolds was well underway. The rail-thin husband had already been stunned by secretly recorded video of his three-hundred-pound wife’s furtive rendezvous. “With effing Karl?” he screamed just as the screen filled with the image of an older man, apparently Karl, shuffling nervously in the backseat of a nearby black SUV. “You’re effing kidding me, right?”

  “Wellll,” the show’s host said, his voice oozing empathy, “why don’t you ask him yourself?”

  The host opened the SUV’s door, and the disrespected husband charged as soon as Karl stepped out. The ugliness was spilling into the street as Melissa left the room, the fat slut’s T-shirt already torn and her swaying breasts digitally obscured. Not that she had a problem watching another sleazy, staged-for-TV meltdown; she just wasn’t in the mood at the moment. Except for the sounds of Taylor and Annie chanting their bloodlust, their cavernous old house was quiet as she made her way down the hall toward the office.

  Her dad left again as soon as he’d dropped off the younger two, saying he’d be gone a couple of hours—but, Melissa noted, without saying where he was going. Brenna was at work at least until six. Truth be told, if Annie and Taylor weren’t here she’d probably have watched the ultrasound video another dozen times. Dr. O’Shaughnessy was right. Seeing that murky recording of her lima-bean daughter, imagining who she might be, wasn’t making this decision any easier.

  She was thinking of the manila file Jim and Molly had reviewed with her years before, when she turned eighteen, the assembled paperwork of her adoption “just in case you ever need it.” They could never have imagined these circumstances then, but she needed it now. Jim kept it among the hanging files in the lower right drawer of his home office desk, and she went directly to it, hoping it wasn’t locked, relieved when the drawer slid smoothly out with a single tug of its handle.

  The file labeled in Molly’s flowing script stood out immediately from the files of insurance policies, bank statements, and car and real estate paperwork whose tabs were labeled in Jim’s cribbed printing. For the first time in a long time, Melissa heard her own name in her adoptive mother’s long-dead voice. She tugged it out and laid it on the desk. The file was worn and smudged, and when she opened it, she found a familiar photograph on top.

  Taken on the day she was presented to Jim and Molly, it showed her as a dark-haired and somber five-year-old surrounded by the people who would become her family, but who at the time were strangers. She was wearing a green velvet pinafore with a white lace collar. Jim and Molly flanked her, on their knees and beaming on the front porch of their first house. Behind them stood her Uncle Michael and Aunt Carole, strikingly younger and smiling, too, but in a posing-for-a-holiday-portrait sort of way, not smiling from the heart in the way Jim and Molly were. Her uncle’s arm was in a sling. She was struck, for the first time, by Michael Dorsey’s face as a younger, thinner man. It seemed much more—what? Familiar?

  Melissa laid the photo aside, focusing on the papers in the file. They were loose and in no apparent order, as if put together in a hurry. What s
he noticed now was how few of them there were. She’d always heard that adoptions were a bureaucratic marathon of official forms and disclaimers and notarized affidavits. This file was maybe half an inch thick. Maybe Jim and Molly kept the rest of it somewhere else? She flipped through what was there, most of it from one Allegheny County department or another. Toward the bottom was an unlabeled manila envelope. Open it? She didn’t debate long, pulling out a small stack of documents and laying them on the desk.

  Her birth certificate was on top. Like the photograph, she’d seen it many times before, whenever her age needed validation. Her father had once explained its significance. This was an “amended” birth certificate—the word was stamped in red ink just below the extravagant “County of Allegheny” inscription at the top—that bureaucrats everywhere seemed to accept as official recognition of her life. It was a standard part of any international adoption and contained little personal information, but she studied it for clues anyway.

  Melissa traced her index finger along the empty lines that would have recorded the time of her birth, weight, length and “Attending Physician.” Considering her history, it made sense that such details were missing—just two more lost pieces to the puzzle of her life. In the space naming her parents, only Jim’s and Molly’s names were listed—thus, the “amended” designation. As far as anyone in the United States knew, Jim and Molly were her biological parents.

  Underneath the birth certificate was an immunization record signed by her pediatrician, Dr. Edward Farrell. If you didn’t count the various therapists she’d had since she was thirteen, or the surgeon who removed her ovarian cyst a few years ago, Farrell was the only doctor with whom she had an ongoing relationship until her recent visit to Planned Parenthood. Melissa scanned Farrell’s cryptic notations and dates. She must have felt like a pincushion during her first days in the US. They’d inoculated her against everything during her initial visits, just in case. But those details told her nothing.

  She read each page, several dozen in all, struck mostly by what wasn’t there. The first five years of her life were a blank slate. There were no immigration papers, no documents from the orphanage in Buenos Aires where Uncle Michael told her she’d been raised, no adoption agency forms, no letters of recommendation attesting to Jim’s and Molly’s fitness as parents. The rest was the odd, bloodless paperwork of citizenship, a record of official diligence by Jim and Molly once she arrived in the US, but preceded by nothing.

  Melissa flipped the final full page over, thinking she’d come to the end. Beneath it, though, was a small piece of rectangular parchment. She turned it over and read the words that said—if her eroded high school Spanish was correct—“Certificate of Baptism.”

  The certificate could have been in this file for years without her knowing. Jim and Molly weren’t exactly devout Catholics, though both had been raised that way. She checked the handwritten date. She’d been baptized, apparently, on the day before she was brought into the United States. But baptized where? The place name didn’t look like a church or an orphanage. She tried to decipher some of the handwritten words—Campo de Mayo? Navy? Mechanical School? That made no sense.

  Regardless, why would Jim and Molly ever have mentioned it, really? As far as she knew, it was the only Catholic sacrament she’d ever received.

  Two signatures scored the bottom of the certificate. The first, apparently the name of the officiating priest, was “Fr. Enrique Espinoza.” He’d written his name in the crimped scrawl of someone who signed a lot of official paperwork. The other signature was clearly a woman’s, sitting neatly on the line where the witness was to sign. Its looping letters spelled out another name she’d never heard: “Beatriz Vargas.”

  So she’d come to Jim and Molly as a fully accredited Catholic? She’d have to tease her dad about dropping the ball.

  Chapter 19

  Braddock was one of the upstream towns along the north shore of the Mon River, a place dominated by the once-mighty Edgar Thomson Works of US Steel and the big gas plant, and forever caught in the backwash of Pittsburgh’s renaissance. Tracks for both the Pennsylvania & Lake Erie Railroad and the B&O ran through the town center, and the ancient wood-frame houses were filled with the descendants of slaves as well as Eastern Europeans who came through Ellis Island to work hard and live free—tradesmen of all sorts, millhunks and railroad workers and river people. Car repair shops and churches existed, often side by side, in roughly equal numbers. Just across the river, the latticed white tower of Kennywood Park’s once-grand wooden roller coaster, the Thunderbolt, rose like a surreal Shangri-la.

  Christensen loved places like Braddock, so different from his world of academia and the gleaming Downtown skyline, but no less a part of the grand psyche of Greater Pittsburgh. Driving the small town’s streets as he was doing now, fumbling with the scribbled address Brenna researched and gave him that morning, was like tracing the region’s sophisticated 21st century personality to its working-class roots. If modem Pittsburgh was high art and corporate cash and luxury boxes at Heinz Field, Braddock was Iron City beer and pierogies and Sundays built around early church and the Steelers TV kickoff time at the Local 1219 Hall.

  Christensen pulled the Explorer to the curb. Washington Street had been easy enough to find. It was one of three parallel streets that ran between the two railroad lines. But he’d driven its length three times now looking for an address, 47½ Washington, and each time come up empty. He thought, oddly, of Harry Potter searching for the train that would take him to Hogwarts for the first time. Told to board at platform 9¾, the young wizard had to step through a brick wall and into another dimension. Trey Brosky was proving no less difficult to find.

  Christensen squinted at the house numbers. The house at 47 Washington was a tar- shingled two-story, neatly kept but no wider than his car. Number 49 was a three-story stack of aluminum siding and open dormer windows. The two were separated by a narrow concrete walkway. Could another residence really be somewhere in that gap? Christensen killed the engine and stepped out.

  He’d known he needed to talk to Brosky from the moment Ray Krug told him the towboat pilot’s strange story. If it was true, why had Brosky waited fifteen years to tell anyone about rescuing four people from the icy river the night of the plane crash? And when he did finally tell the tale, why had he told it only to Krug, a freelance aviation buff with no official connection to the crash investigation? Something wasn’t right.

  His initial attempts to track Brosky through public records were futile. The man wasn’t listed in the phone book, wasn’t registered to vote, didn’t own a car, and didn’t own property in Allegheny County. He’d been married, but that was more than forty years ago. The wife was dead. It wasn’t until Brenna called the attorney for Local 79 of the Riverboat Pilots’ Union, a longtime friend, that she’d come up with an address.

  “Brosky’s still alive then?” Brenna had asked the union lawyer.

  “He fucking well better be,” he told her, “or else we need to find out who’s cashing his pension check every month.”

  Christensen stepped into the gap between the houses. It was so narrow he had to turn sideways so his shoulders wouldn’t scrape along the facing walls. Sure enough, a small mailbox hung from the back corner of 47 Washington Street. No name, just a number: 47½. The concrete walkway led through a tidy backyard to a converted single-car garage, which backed up to an alley, which bordered the P&LE tracks along the river just beyond. Anyone living in that garage must feel every grinding turn of a passing locomotive’s iron wheels.

  When he knocked on the delaminating veneer of the structure’s hollow-core door, Christensen heard an immediate clatter of metal followed by a magnificent combination of swear words. He imagined the hard fall of cheap cookware with handles broken long, long ago.

  “Dropped the goddamned rent check in your box,” a voice inside rasped. It had the same cutting edge as a running chainsaw, but lower.

  Christensen knocked again. “Mr. Brosky?”
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  “Check your mailbox, Vernon. It’s in there. I swear.”

  “It’s not about your rent, Mr. Brosky,” Christensen called. “You don’t know me, but I need to talk to you.”

  The pause was punctuated by another round of clatter. He was picking up whatever he’d dropped.

  “Mr. Brosky?”

  “Go to hell. Ain’t buying nothin’.”

  “I’m not selling anything,” Christensen called. “I just need to talk to you.”

  He could hear what sounded like a loose bear in the tiny garage—the sounds of furniture scraping across the floor, indistinguishable thumps and thuds, an angry growl. After maybe thirty seconds the floral print curtain covering the door’s open window parted, and Christensen looked into the face of a man clearly on the last lap of life.

  “What?” he said.

  Barely noon, and still Christensen caught a whiff of hard liquor through the screen. The man’s crimson nose was a July Fourth of broken blood vessels, and he obviously cut his dull gray hair himself. His chest was bare—he might be completely naked, for all Christensen knew—and an ugly purplish line, an open heart surgery scar, ran equidistant between his hairy nipples from the top of his sternum to some unseen point farther down his bulging belly. He could have been seventy-five, or maybe fifty. Been rode hard on rough road, as Brenna might say.