The Disappeared Girl

by Martin J. Smith

  “But Melissa and the baby?” Christensen prompted. “You eventually tracked them down.”

  “I don’t know how, don’t know anything really, but this guy, the doctor, came to me with a proposition. He’d found them, he said. Together. Same orphanage. A lie, it turns out. But things were going bad fast. The junta was collapsing, and he knew how vulnerable he’d be if the truth got out. He said he could get the two children if I could get them, and him, out of the country. So I came up with a plan.”

  “To place them with us, me and Molly?”

  Dorsey swallowed. “I’m so sorry, Jim. I—it seemed so simple. I had something you wanted so badly. I knew if I could pull it off, I could at least watch them grow up. With everything that had happened—Jim, try to understand what a blessing that was. I thought I’d lost them all.”

  Christensen resisted the urge to challenge the astounding lies about Melissa’s personal history, no matter that Dorsey’s treachery was well-intentioned. Dorsey knew how badly he and Molly wanted a child, how they’d tried and failed to arrange a domestic adoption. He’d filled that gaping hole in their lives, and before this the gesture had seemed the greatest gift possible. Now the truth lay between them like a land mine. Christensen’s emotions were a poisonous stew laced with gratitude. Even now.

  “But this doctor, he wanted out?”

  “He knew I could arrange passage for him into the US. He wanted papers, a new identity, a fresh start so he could get set up here and send for his family.”

  “So you arranged it? The papers and everything?”

  “For him. For Melissa and the baby. He also wanted passage for a woman, his nurse—this Vargas woman—and later for his own wife and two daughters. So I arranged everything and sent all the paperwork ahead in a diplomatic pouch. He agreed to bring Vargas and the children to the base the next day—”

  “Bullock Air Force Base?”

  “I’d arrange a plane, a cargo plane. You know the one.”

  Christensen suddenly sat forward. “This man, the doctor, he’s still in the United States?”

  Dorsey nodded. “Runs an import-export business down on the South Side. Still living under the name I put on the INS docs—Ramon Guerra.”

  The name didn’t register with Christensen.

  “I’ve heard you mention him,” Carole said.

  Dorsey gestured to a tapestry hanging from the living room wall, a ranchero scene in shades of brown, blue, and black. It was rough wool and woven by hand and striking because of its size. “He sent us that a few years ago. He’s still pretty grateful. You actually met him once. The ‘Hair of the Dog’ Party, about ten years ago? He came up and introduced himself.”

  “The creepy eyes,” she said. “I remember him.”

  Dorsey nodded. “You know the rest of the story.”

  “The plane crash?”

  “My fault,” Dorsey said. “Entirely my fault.”

  Christensen sat forward. “But it ran out of fuel. How was that—”

  “We couldn’t put down at a commercial airport, Jim. No way. Reagan had nominated me for the eastern regional INS job. So here I am, coming home with a military plane full of illegals with doctored papers? What could I do? Let the pilot put down at an unsecured county airport? Can you imagine the fallout? I ordered him to divert.”

  “And he agreed, with the fuel situation?”

  “I—I thought he was bluffing, being overly cautious. It was another two minutes’ flying time to the National Guard base at Greater Pitt, for God’s sake. So I gave him no choice.” Dorsey paused. “Helluva pilot. Put that flying whale down between those two bridges. He and the copilot hit first—”

  His voice trailed off.

  “Those of you in the back of the plane had time to get out,” Christensen said.

  “The woman, the nurse, she had the baby with her. I pushed them through the emergency door before it sank. Melissa, too. The rest is a blur. When the towboat pilot pulled us out, I counted noses. We’d all made it except Michael, the baby.”

  Dorsey looked away. He’d finally said the boy’s name.

  For a moment, Christensen was lost in the overwhelming sadness of the story. Then he remembered: This wasn’t some musty anecdote about an exposed South American regime. This was here and now. People involved in this travesty were still dying. Trey Brosky, Beatriz Vargas—they’d died just this week, and within hours of telling him their stories. Coincidence? Not a chance. Christensen didn’t know details, but that cop, Demski, was talking murder. A snippet of their police station conversation bubbled up: No sign of forced entry. Both of them may have known their killer well enough to open their doors. The accusation spilled into the room before Christensen could stop it.

  “The people who know this story are dying, Michael. The towboat pilot. Vargas. They told me their stories this week, and now they’re both dead.”

  It was how the conversation had started, but for the first time Christensen could see the implication hit home. If he’d been falsely accused, Dorsey’s already pale face might have turned red with rage. Now, instead, his face turned the color of ash.

  “Wait—Jim,” Carole said. “Y-you think Michael killed these people?”

  “The truth, Michael. Tell us.”

  Dorsey struggled to his feet from the deep sofa and swayed for a moment like a man about to collapse. “Oh God,” he said. “Oh Jesus Lord.”

  “Stop the lies, Michael,” Christensen said.

  Dorsey retreated from the words, backing slowly across the living room, moving away from Christensen and Carole without ever turning aside. He only stopped when he bumped ass-first into a delicate rolltop desk that sat along a wall at the edge of the dining room. Dorsey turned, suddenly, and opened the top right-hand drawer. When he turned back, he was holding a matte black handgun. His eyes were wild, and he waved the weapon like a conductor’s baton.

  “Stay here,” he said.

  His wife stood up. “Michael?”

  “Don’t goddamn move, Carole. I mean it.”

  She sat again. Christensen waited beside her in helpless silence. Dorsey was too far away for him to charge, but close enough to hit his mark if he wanted to start shooting.

  “Stop this, Michael,” Carole commanded.

  “I’ll try.”

  “Michael, don’t,” Christensen said.

  Dorsey backed toward the front door, freezing them in place with the gun. He held it on them with his right hand as he reached for the doorknob with his left. As he pulled the door open, pale afternoon sun showered his broad back. The bright burst of light scorched Christensen’s tired eyes, and his brother-in-law became a hulking silhouette in the doorframe. Still, he heard Dorsey’s parting words with crystal clarity, delivered as they were in the voice of a radio titan:

  “I started all this. I’m the one who should stop it.”

  Chapter 56

  Christensen hated to leave his devastated sister, but he was up off the couch with his car keys in hand as soon as the tires of Dorsey’s car scratched out of the driveway.

  “Melissa,” he said. “I’m not sure where she is.”

  Carole nodded. “Go. I’ll be OK.” Then she grabbed his pant leg. “This is a bad dream, Jim. Please tell me it is.”

  Christensen dropped to one knee and pulled her forward from the couch and into a hug. “It’s a nightmare, Carole, but we’ll get through it. Focus on that. We’ll get through it. But I’m sorry I forced this—”

  “The gun—what’s Michael going to do?”

  He didn’t know the answer. “Call 911 now. Tell them he’s in his car. Tell them what it looks like. Give them the license plate number.” He knew his next words would open a whole new world of tragic possibilities, but he said them anyway. “Make sure they know he has a gun. Do you know if it’s loaded?”

  “I know it is. We never had any kids around, so—”

  The words triggered something in his sister, and she doubled over and clutched her arms over her head. “This
can’t be happening,” she wailed. “Oh God. Oh God.”

  “Carole,” Christensen commanded. “I need you now. I have to go. Call 911. Tell them Michael’s out there, that he’s upset, that he has a gun.”

  “I can’t,” she cried. “I tell the police—you think that’ll stay a secret for long in this town? He’s Michael goddamned Dorsey. It’ll ruin him. It’ll ruin everything.”

  There it was, Christensen thought—the compromise that made all this possible. Her husband’s success had given her the life she’d always imagined, but only now, as it was all coming apart, could he see how tangled her identity was with his, how much simpler it was for her not to ask questions. No matter how deeply her husband had hurt her, Carole’s chief concern, even now, was public embarrassment and potential damage to his career.

  “Call,” he said. “If you don’t, I will. Michael needs help.”

  There was no logical reason to believe Dorsey would try to hurt Melissa, but they were well past logic. The possibility was all Christensen could think about.

  “Carole, look at me. You could save his life, or someone else’s. Tell me you’ll call.”

  His sister lifted her head and reached for the telephone handset on the end table beside the couch. Christensen waited until she pushed the three buttons for the emergency line, then sprinted for the front door. By the time the Explorer bounced over the driveway curb and into the street, dark thoughts were crowding his head.

  The landscape along Ohio River Boulevard flashed past. When the tops of the Downtown towers came into view, he snatched the phone from his pocket and speed-dialed the house. Surely Melissa was home by now.

  He swerved around a dump truck after the second ring. He braked to avoid rear-ending a rusting Ford after the fourth. By the time their home answering machine kicked on, he was in full panic mode. Where the hell was she?

  “It’s Dad,” he said after the tone. “’Lis, pick up the phone. Please, honey.”

  He waited, counting backwards from ten.

  “If you’re not home, do me a favor. As soon as you get this message, go somewhere. Go—listen, go to Brenna’s office Downtown. Long story, but you shouldn’t be home alone. I’ll explain when I see you, but just do that, OK? It’s important. You need to be with somebody. Uncle Michael—I don’t think he’d try to hurt you, but he’s been drinking and he’s very upset and we don’t know where he is. And he has a gun with him.”

  He couldn’t say more. He wasn’t going to reveal the identity of her biological father on an answering machine message.

  “Call me on my cell as soon as you get this,” he said, and hung up.

  The wind roaring through his open driver’s side window rustled some papers in the passenger seat. He’d brought along his notes from the conversation with the Abuelas group in Buenos Aires, and seeing them now triggered a thought that, at first, seemed unrelated. From the synaptic snarl of the last few hours arose a memory of Dorsey’s parting words: I’m the one who should stop it.

  Christensen had taken Dorsey’s words as a suicide threat. Now he wondered. There was one shadow figure in this twisted drama—a well-connected doctor who’d fled Argentina near the Dirty War’s end. He’d taken a new identity more than two decades before and lived, still, somewhere in the Pittsburgh area. The hair on Christensen’s arms stood straight up. Cornered people do desperate things.

  Chapter 57

  Even as she searched her father’s house for the source of the noise, Melissa hadn’t really expected to find anyone. Or maybe just to find Brenna, Annie, and Taylor home earlier than expected. Now, as she pushed into the home office, she came face-to-face with a stranger. He was sitting behind the desk like he was waiting for an appointment to arrive, a leather doctor’s bag set squarely in the middle of the desktop.

  He winked. “Melissa, is it not?”

  She took a step back and hit the solid edge of the doorframe. If he had stood, or come at her, she would have known how to react. But he just sat, his hands folded together on the desk, smiling a grandfatherly smile. He had thinning hair, a heavy jaw, and a lush graying mustache.

  Melissa slipped sideways into the open doorway, but stopped. She answered from the hall, just beyond the threshold of the room. “I don’t know you.”

  “Of course, but please—I am an old friend of your father’s.”

  “I’ve never seen you before.”

  He nodded. “Not in a long time. You were quite small when we last met, quite small. You were—let me think—five. Yes. Five years old. And now I understand you are having a child of your own!”

  She found him utterly disorienting, but wasn’t exactly sure why. Part of it was the accent. But she had told so few people she was pregnant. How did this stranger know?

  “My father told you that?”

  “Oh yes, yes,” the man said. “Such wonderful news, Melissa. She would have been quite pleased, your mother.”

  He dangled the word like bait. “You knew Molly?”

  “Molly?” He shook his head. “I am afraid—ah, your adopted mother. No, no, I did not have the pleasure. I—”

  “My stepmom—Brenna?”

  The man looked confused.

  “Wait,” Melissa said. “You mean my birth mother?”

  The man seemed flustered. “Perhaps I have said too much.”

  “You knew her?”

  “Yes, I did. But I only meant—”

  Melissa wasn’t convinced. “What was her name?”

  “Your birth mother? You would like me to tell you her name?”

  Melissa crossed her arms. She found herself avoiding his gaze. Each time their eyes met she felt confused. She shifted her weight from one foot to the other, hoping to seem relaxed. “If you knew her, then what was her name?”

  “So this is a test?” he asked.

  “Tell me her name.”

  “She was a skeptic, too, your mother,” he said, smiling and shaking his head. “Quite amazing how each child is linked to its parent by blood, is it not?”

  Melissa waited. Her mistrust was reaching critical mass, and the man seemed to sense it.

  He leaned forward. “Her name, Melissa, was Julia. Julia Limon.”

  The name, spoken by this stranger, hit Melissa like a breaking wave. She was nearly swept off her feet by a surge of emotions—elation, fear, anger—but mostly a breathtaking curiosity. Here, maybe, was someone who could tell her who she was, or at least more about her past than anyone she had ever known. She felt the acid burn of a million questions in her throat, but for the moment she choked them down. Who was he?

  “Quite a woman, your mother,” he said.

  “Tell me.”

  “Beautiful, very much like you.”

  He was offering nothing, dangling lures as she circled. “So you know her name. That doesn’t mean anything.”

  The man winked again. “And stubborn, too?”

  “Who are you?”

  “A friend of your father’s, as I said.”

  “But what’s your name?”

  “Guerra. Please, call me Ramon.”

  “I don’t know that name. Jim’s never mentioned you.”

  He flicked a speck of dust from the top of her dad’s desk, then fixed her with a stare. “But I never mentioned Jim.”

  When he looked away, Melissa stepped toward him. She dropped her guard. “My biological father? You know him, too?”

  The man shrugged. “Now I have said too much.”

  Her words came in frantic bursts now. “Your accent. You’re from Argentina? God. Oh God. Do you have any idea how long I’ve wondered—”

  “All these years,” he said. “I’m sure you have many—”

  “What can you tell me? About my mother? My father? You knew them both?”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Were they in love?”

  Melissa’s own question startled her. There was so much she wanted to know, but for some reason that one pushed its way to the front.

  “Very
much,” he said. “Perhaps you will learn their story someday.”

  She stepped closer. The stranger stood up, almost defensive as she approached. He crossed the room, edging away, but she stalked him into the office’s rear corner. For the first time, Melissa noticed that his eyes were different colors, and she found the effect mesmerizing, almost inviting.

  “Tell me more,” Melissa demanded. “My mother—I’m told she was a journalist?”

  “For La Opinion, yes, the largest paper in Buenos Aires.”

  “And she disappeared when I was about four or five?”

  “This is true.”

  “And she was pregnant?”

  He nodded.

  “So—wait.” Melissa suddenly recognized a new possibility. The dam burst of questions stopped as suddenly as it started. “You must know what happened, then.”

  “Oh yes.” He nodded like a forgiving priest.

  “After she was kidnapped, she was taken to a hospital,” Melissa said. “At a mechanical school. A lot of pregnant women were taken there. The military, they were stealing the babies.”

  They were standing close now as she pressed in. She felt powerful and in control, totally unafraid. She stared hard into his face and saw what she believed was a deep pool of empathy. Ramon Guerra smiled, and she waited for—expected—some words of comfort. Then he opened his mouth.

  “Subversives breed subversives.”

  If he’d slapped her, she couldn’t have been more startled. “I’m not sure what that’s supposed to mean.”

  His smile became a smirk. “I am accustomed to being misunderstood.”

  “But why—”

  His cold hand was like a viper strike, choking off her question. In a single motion, the stranger whirled her into the corner and pressed his body against hers, her illusion of control vanishing as he tightened his grip on her throat. Melissa tried to draw a desperate breath, but it was too late. She felt a pressure in her skull as the blood there stalled.

  He caught her right hand with his left as she reached for his balls. Her other arm was wedged between their chests, and she couldn’t free it no matter how hard she tried.