The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  “I’m Jim Christensen, Mr. Brosky.”

  “Congrachafuckinglations, chief. What you want?”

  “Ray Krug told me where to find you,” he lied. “I’m trying to find out—”

  “Who?”

  Christensen took a step backward. Every word Brosky spoke added to the intoxicating cumulus in front of Christensen’s face. He also wanted to retreat to a less threatening distance.

  “Ray Krug. You talked to him a couple years ago about the airplane crash? In the river?”

  Brosky’s ravaged face transformed from hostile to startled. The old man looked like he’d been smacked.

  “About the people you saved?” Christensen prompted, then waited for Brosky to regain his footing.

  Brosky finally shook his head. “Got nothing to say to nobody.”

  “Please, I—”

  “Don’t know any Krug,” he added.

  “I’m just a guy,” Christensen tried. “I’m not from the government, or the Air Force, or the police, or the towboat company, or anything. I’m just here—I heard your story and was hoping I could ask you a few questions.”

  “Got nothing to say, I told you.”

  “Strictly between us, Mr. Brosky.”

  “Go to hell, chief. Talking about this brought me nothing but trouble.”

  Christensen stopped pressing. What kind of trouble? He stared through the window into Brosky’s bloodshot eyes, then fished into his shirt pocket for one of the pictures he’d brought along. He found the one of Melissa, his only recent snapshot of her. He’d taken it a few years before as she left for work the first day of her new job, before her life got more complicated. She was smiling, wearing the power suit Brenna bought her, but with her middle finger extended to counter the maturing effect of the clothes. Christensen held it up to the window. The old man squinted as he studied it.

  “Charming,” Brosky croaked.

  “My daughter,” Christensen said. “Melissa. It’s a silly picture, I know. But the girl you pulled out? I don’t know for sure, but I think it was her.”

  Brosky dropped his guard. “Too old,” he said, his voice suddenly dull. “This was a little girl, four or five.”

  “This is her now,” Christensen said. “We adopted her when she was five, from Argentina. That military plane—she’s always had emotional problems, but when they found the wreckage those problems started to get very intense. I think their finding the plane triggered all that, and now I think that maybe this plane was bringing her into the country, maybe illegally. So I wonder if somebody had tried to keep the whole thing quiet.”

  Brosky passed a hand across the gray stubble on his cheeks. “So?”

  “So—” Christensen knew he was at the break point. So? “Long story, but she needs to know everything she can about her birth parents. For medical reasons. It’s important, or else I wouldn’t be bothering you.”

  “There’s other ways.”

  “This wasn’t like other adoptions.”

  Brosky nodded, but said nothing. Then, slowly, he opened the door. He wasn’t naked, but wearing Bermuda shorts fastened with a thin leather belt that cinched beneath his overhanging belly. On his feet he wore a pair of battered off-brand sneakers, unlaced.

  Christensen stepped into the dim space, a single room lit blue by the murmuring TV. The space was maybe eighteen feet across and twelve feet deep, with a cooking area on one side and an open toilet on the other. Brosky had fashioned a crude shower around a floor drain in the room’s corner. He’d hung a garden hose from a hook high on one wall and, suspended from an extender rod bridging the corner, a clear-plastic shower curtain festooned with Teletubbies. A simple iron bed, unmade, lay parallel to the back wall. The only thing between it and the concrete floor was a worn scrap of carpet. The place smelled of mildew and beer and piss.

  “Thanks,” Christensen said.

  Brosky shrugged and closed the decrepit door behind them. The room darkened. “Man’s home is his castle,” he said, and Christensen wasn’t quite sure how to respond.

  “Of course. I appreciate your having me in.”

  Brosky killed the TV, a chunky picture-tube dinosaur he’d been watching from a webbed lawn chair positioned directly in front of the screen. He lifted the chair and carried it to the small table beside the stove, gesturing for Christensen to sit in the lawn chair already there.

  “I got a daughter out there somewhere,” Brosky said.

  “So then you know,” Christensen said, grateful for the sudden traction Brosky’s words gave their conversation. “No matter how old they get, you still—”

  “We couldn’t keep her.”

  Christensen’s mouth hung open a moment as he sifted for an appropriate response. To ignore the man’s pain would be thoughtless. To ask would be prying.

  “I’m sorry,” he said at last.

  Brosky closed his eyes, but his lips moved. He seemed to be counting. “She’d be thirty-seven now, I think. We was just kids—this was before me and Jeannie got married—so we gave her up.”

  On some subconscious level, Christensen had always known the joy of an adoption was preceded by someone else’s tragedy. He’d just never had to look one of those tragedies in the eye.

  “Do you know—how much do you know about her?”

  “She was adopted. That’s all. Then me and her mom ended up getting married anyway, but we never could have more ’cause of the cervix cancer Jeannie got. I wonder about her all the time, though, ’specially after Jeannie died. I thought maybe she should know. She could get the cancer, too, they tell me.”

  “Did she ever try to contact you?” Christensen asked.

  “Not that I know.”

  “You’re not an easy man to find. Maybe she’s tried.”

  An open Iron City beer was sweating on the worktable beside the stove, and Brosky rose suddenly to retrieve it. He drained it with his back to Christensen before reaching into the small refrigerator for another. “Want an A’hrn?” he asked, his back still turned.

  “No, but thanks.”

  Brosky twisted the cap from the beer and brought it and a nearly full bottle of Imperial to the table. He poured the whiskey into a sticky shot glass and tilted it back, chasing it with a long pull from the beer. A Pittsburgh blue-collar classic: an Imp and an Iron.

  “So, then,” Christensen asked, “can you tell me what happened that night?”

  Brosky waited for his head to clear, then fixed his rheumy eyes on Christensen. “What the hell,” he said, shrugging. “Like I got anything to lose.”

  Chapter 20

  Christensen leaned back into the frayed webbing of his lawn chair as Brosky began. Something the old towboat pilot had said at the contentious start of their conversation again came to mind. Telling his story to Krug had brought him nothing but trouble. What the hell did that mean?

  “I’d been pushing coal for two days between here and Weirton,” Brosky said. “The furnaces were still running pretty regular then. This was my last scheduled run.”

  “So you were heading upriver, toward the Thomson Works?”

  Brosky nodded. “Almost home. I’d passed the Point, the J&L plant, coming up on the Glenwood bend. The bridge was just ahead.”

  “What time of day?”

  Brosky went for his Iron City, sipping now. “It was almost dark. That time of year, coulda been four, five. Right around there. Time blurs on a long run like that.”

  He’d been drinking, too, from what Krug had said. No need to bring that up, at least not yet.

  “I just remember Cousin—my front-end guy—yelling into the walkie-talkie about something coming at us just off the starboard. Debris.”

  “Debris?”

  “Chunk of a wing. Big old thing, torn off like it was made of cardboard. Something like that can fuck you up good if it gets underneath. So I shut everything down.”

  Brosky stopped, as if waiting for a reaction, but Christensen wasn’t sure why shutting down the boat’s engine was significant.


  “That’s a big deal?” he asked.

  “That many barges? Loaded up full? Christ—you’re pushing upstream in a current moving six, eight miles an hour against you that time of year. Suddenly you’re shut down, no power at all. You got any idea how many tons you got floating free at that point? How much damage that could do? It’s like riding a bomb, and you don’t know where it’s gonna hit.”

  “With the engine off, you had no control?” Christensen asked.

  “You could knock out a bridge pier, like the one took out that interstate overpass in Oklahoma. Take out most anything. The company finds out I shut down, lemme tell you, they’d have my ass dry-docked so fast. But I didn’t want to chance it. You break a prop, you’re in the same fix anyway with no options. Least this way I could start the engine again if I got in trouble.”

  Christensen knew nothing about river navigation, but Brosky’s logic seemed sound. “The guy up front, this Cousin, he was clear about its being an airplane wing?”

  “Big fucker. Other one was right behind it, too. That’s where Cousin found them, hanging on to that second one.”

  Christensen leaned forward. “The little girl?”

  Brosky nodded. “All of them together. The one guy was holding the girl plus the other guy and the lady. I didn’t see them, but Cousin got the wing tied off, and that’s who we pulled out.”

  “That’s—” Christensen counted them out on his fingers. “Four people. Two men, a woman, and the little girl.”

  “The girl was unconscious. Half froze. Blue. Didn’t think she was gonna make it.”

  “Dark hair?”

  “Couldn’t swear to it. We had some blankets and put her in one of those. Based on what I know—we was about a mile downstream from where the plane went in—they’d been in the water probably ten, fifteen minutes. Water like that’d kill a lot of people. Hell, the channel was clear, but there was ice along the banks.”

  Melissa’s desperate, breathless words in the bathtub came back to Christensen like an echo. Cold, she’d said. Please don’t let me sink. “The others,” Christensen said. “Tell me about them.”

  “I helped Cousin pull them into the barge. Time he got the wing tied off, they was at the barge closest to me, so I ran down from the pilothouse to help. Gettin’ ’em over the side wasn’t easy.”

  “You had to lift them straight up then?”

  Brosky nodded. “The woman and the girl was no big deal, but one guy was pretty big. He was conscious but half froze like the girl. His legs weren’t working too good. The other guy was unconscious. Cousin stayed down there with them after we got ’em up, but I had to get back up to the wheel. Then I lost track of all that, ’cause I’m keeping my eye on where we are, waiting to start the engine as soon as everybody was out of the water and we was clear of the debris.”

  Brosky shook his head and sipped the beer. He picked at the peeling label, his respiration quicker now. Nothing he said or did suggested this story was a fabrication, although Christensen knew that a traumatic memory didn’t have to be real to feel real.

  “The engine was shut down,” he asked. “Could you hear anything?”

  “Just the woman,” Brosky said. “She was raising hell, babbling away. Mexican or something, you know, yelling the same thing over and over. I couldn’t understand her, but you know how they are. Coulda woke the dead.”

  “Spanish?”

  “Sure as hell wasn’t English.” Brosky shrugged. “She was half out of her mind, is all I know. Cousin tried to get her quieted down. Like I said, I was more worried about gettin’ the engine started and keeping us out of trouble. Soon as I got us underway again I radioed in to river patrol for help.”

  “How long before they showed up?”

  Brosky snapped his fingers. “The plane was already down for about fifteen minutes, like I said, so there already was a river patrol in the water up where it went in. Soon as I radioed and told them I’d picked up some people, they sent that boat downriver. It was fast, I know that. Minutes after my call. That’s when I found out it was military.

  “The plane?”

  “First thing the river patrol said. Couple of them got right to work with the thermal blankets, trying to help the people we pulled out, but one patrol guy came straight up to the pilothouse. Said there was something weird about this one. Told me to hold it where we were till the investigators got there. It was real clear they didn’t want me moving upriver toward the crash area.”

  “Any idea what he meant?”

  “Security. Where we were, nobody was watching. Once you get up past the Glenwood Bridge, you’d have a lot of witnesses. I was told to hold right there so nobody’d see what was going on.”

  “That your guess?”

  Brosky shook his head. “I know this: Them that showed up—this was maybe twenty minutes later—wasn’t cops or NTSB. They was government.”

  “But not from the National Transportation Safety Board? What made you think that?”

  “I just knew.”

  “Air Force?”

  “They wasn’t wearing uniforms. Lemme put it this way: They showed up, took all my information, and told me to keep my mouth shut ’cause of national security. ‘This never happened,’ the one guy said. ‘We clear on that?’”

  “That’s what he told you?”

  “Exact words.” Brosky drained what was left of his Iron City. “So yeah, I pretty much forgot the whole thing until this, ah—what’d you say his name was?”

  “Who?”

  “The guy who sent you here.”

  “Krug. Ray Krug.”

  Brosky stood, unsteady on his feet as he moved across the room and dropped the empty bottle into a metal garbage can. It shattered as it hit the other bottles inside. “Nothing but trouble,” he said.

  “Tell me about that.”

  “Sure you don’t want an A’hrn? Got one left.”

  “It’s yours.”

  Brosky opened the little fridge and snagged the beer. “Guy comes to see me a couple months ago, right? He’d found some record, through river patrol or the tow company or something. Figured out I’m on the river that day, because he checked the records at the locks downriver and saw what times I’d clocked through them. I mean, he’d figured our load, our speed—he’d just about pegged our location right down to the foot. There was no point lying.”

  “Wait,” Christensen said. “In all those years, nobody ever asked you about this?”

  “Nope.”

  “Or talked to anyone on your crew?”

  “Cousin’s dead. There was one other man on board. I can’t speak for him, but I doubt it. Don’t even think the government boys talked to him that night.”

  “And you never said anything to anyone?”

  “Not till two months ago, with this Krug. But the calls, now that didn’t start till after the story in the paper. I disconnected my phone after that.”

  Christensen sat forward, an involuntary reaction. “What calls?”

  “There was a story in the Press about the anniversary of the crash and all that goofball talk about the mystery. It talked about what happened.”

  “But you got calls?” Christensen prompted.

  “My name wasn’t even in the goddamned thing. It barely even mentioned the survivors. Said there were rumors about a towboat rescuing some people, but that was it.”

  “But if Krug’s name was in it—your name’s on Krug’s website. Anybody who found that website probably could have found you, just like I did.”

  Blank stare. “Web what?”

  Christensen waved away the question. “But the calls?”

  “Told him to go fuck himself,” Brosky said. “I don’t scare easy.”

  “He threatened you?”

  “I should ‘keep my head down.’ His words.”

  “‘Keep your head down.’ Meaning?”

  “Don’t say nothin’. That’s how I took it. And that’s the bitch of it. All those years and I hadn’t said a word.
Just the one time, to that guy. Then it gets into print and suddenly I got this lame-ass deep breather up my butt.”

  “Any idea who?”

  “No idea. He called twice more, always late at night. Just tells me to keep my head down, then hangs up. That kinda pussy-ass shit.”

  Christensen tried to imagine his brother-in-law making threats on the other end of the line. He couldn’t. Dorsey might have learned all sorts of things during his career as an international government operative, but hankie-over-the-phone mob-style intimidation probably wasn’t among them. Still, the thought sent Christensen back into his shirt pocket, and he fished out another photograph. It was about thirty years old, taken at his sister’s wedding. As a slightly drunken bridegroom, the younger Michael Dorsey was thinner and had a reasonable thatch of hair. It was neatly trimmed, well above his ears, in a manner Christensen always considered strictly Republican—and that was well before Dorsey went to work for Reagan. He’d chosen the photo from an old family album because he knew it showed Dorsey as he might have looked when the plane went down, as opposed to the heavier, balder media celebrity so familiar to Pittsburghers.

  Christensen pushed the picture across the speckled Formica tabletop, careful to steer it around the various sweat rings from Brosky’s beer bottles. He said nothing as the old man examined it, making sure he didn’t somehow skew Brosky’s reaction.

  After a long time, the towboat pilot nodded.

  “What?” Christensen said.

  “I’ll be damned.”

  Christensen kept his mouth shut, waiting for Brosky to elaborate.

  “The big guy, the one I helped Cousin pull out of the water,” Brosky said. “Never talked the whole time, just laid there shivering. In shock, I’m pretty sure.”