The Missing Place

by Sophie Littlefield

  “All I know is the handles they used up here. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t even, I don’t know if it’s the same ones.”

  “When did these ones go missing?”

  The man squinted, as though the question caused him pain. “Let’s see, I heard it Thursday last. They were moving a rig out Highway Nine east of town, the boys didn’t show. I got a friend on Highway Patrol, is how I know.”

  “It’s him, then! He went missing the same day, that’s the first day he didn’t come back to his room.”

  “Well, listen. There’s someone you maybe ought to see.”

  “You know something? Anything. Anything at all, please tell me.”

  The man took a deep breath and let it out, shrugging off his vest. He folded the vest in half and began to roll it up, not meeting her eyes. “I don’t know a damn thing. Wish I did. But she might, and I’ll take you to her right now.”

  “Who?”

  “The other mom.”

  three

  DAVE CALLED HIS wife to tell her he’d be late. As he drove, he told Colleen he had moved to Lawton from southern Missouri during the last boom, in the late 1970s. He met a local girl, married her, and stayed. The airport job was a good one, and he didn’t miss the work on the rigs, or the prospect of losing his job when the boom started to fade.

  The snow was coming down more heavily now, dusting Dave’s windshield between each swipe of the wipers. His truck smelled pleasantly of oil and tobacco. It seemed like the only traffic on the road was trucks—pickups like Dave’s, bigger than those Colleen saw around Boston, many of them jacked up on larger-than-life wheels, but mostly long-bedded vehicles both empty and loaded with equipment. Traffic moved slowly, giving Colleen a chance to watch the town go by outside her window.

  Lawton seemed to be one long stretch of four-lane highway, lined with gas stations and restaurants and lumberyards and storage facilities. A huge Walmart looked like it was open for business despite the hour and the weather. They passed two motels, both with brightly lit NO VACANCY signs and parking lots full of pickups.

  Dave hadn’t actually met the woman he was taking Colleen to see. He only knew where to find her because his wife’s sister worked at the same clinic as the woman who’d rented the other mother her motor home.

  “But how can she be staying in a motor home in this weather?”

  “Generator.” He didn’t seem inclined to say anything more on the subject.

  Dave pulled onto a street lined with shabby ranch houses at the edge of town; the cars and trucks in the driveways looked old and battered. He drove slowly, reading addresses on mailboxes. Televisions flickered in windows.

  “This’ll be it,” he said at the end of the block, pulling in front of a small house with white siding. Parked at the side of the house was the motor home, several feet of snow piled on its roof.

  Colleen felt her stomach twist. “Would you—I mean, you’ve done so much for me already, and I insist on paying you, of course . . .” She dug in her purse for her wallet. “But could I ask you to come with me? To make sure she’s here?”

  “Put your money away,” Dave said roughly. “Of course I’ll go with you. Let me come around, it’s a big step down.”

  Colleen’s stomach growled as she waited, and she realized she hadn’t eaten anything since a protein bar in the Minneapolis airport, many hours earlier. Dave offered his hand and she took it, letting him help her out of the cab.

  He got her suitcase from the back and waited for her to walk ahead of him. Colleen’s boots made neat prints in the snow that had fallen since the drive was last plowed. She tugged her scarf tighter around her neck so that only the center of her face was exposed to the bitter chill. Once she got close, she could hear voices from inside the motor home. She took a breath and knocked on the door.

  It opened almost instantly. Standing inside was a small woman in a navy blue sweatshirt several sizes too big for her, printed with a tornado and the words FAIRHAVEN CYCLONES FOOTBALL. Bleached, kinked hair was loosely piled on top of her head; much of it had come loose and cascaded around her shoulders. She had startling blue eyes ringed with thick black eyeliner. Colleen got a whiff of the air inside—pot and pizza. The television was on; that’s where the voices were coming from.

  “Brenda called over,” the woman said. “You must be Whale’s mom.”

  THE WOMAN ACROSS the tiny table looked as though a tap with Shay’s little pink craft hammer would shatter her into a thousand pieces. Which you might expect, except Colleen Mitchell looked like she’d been this way forever, long before the boys went missing. You didn’t get lines as deep as the ones between her eyebrows and around her mouth in a single week.

  “You’re lucky you found someone to drive you,” Shay said. “We’re supposed to get six more inches by morning.”

  “Lucky,” Colleen echoed, like the word was in a foreign language.

  Dave took off as fast as he could without being rude. Shay knew how that went too. Most people didn’t like to be around bad luck; it was as though misfortune was contagious. But the men here in Lawton had surprisingly old-fashioned manners. In the three days since she arrived, strangers had opened doors for her, let her cut in line at the coffee shop, and even offered to carry her groceries to her car.

  “I know what you need,” she told Colleen.

  “Oh, I—I couldn’t,” Colleen said quickly, eyeing the bottle on the table. Shay had been drinking weak Jack and Cokes, smoking and thinking, before Brenda called, and she hadn’t put the bottle away because there wasn’t anywhere to put it.

  “Oh, no, I didn’t mean that, though a drink might not hurt. You need something to eat. I’ll make you something.”

  “No, thank you so much, but I’m not hungry.”

  “Yes, you are,” Shay said patiently, the way she’d talk to Leila. “Come on. You been on a plane since, what, this morning? Probably didn’t have any lunch?”

  “I had something,” Colleen said miserably. Her eyelids were crepey, makeup collected in the creases. Her lips were pale and flaking. She gave off a faint smell of fabric softener and sweat. And she looked like she was about to cry.

  “Well, now you’re going to have something else. What time is it in Boston, anyway? An hour ahead, right? That’s almost one in the morning.”

  Shay kept up a steady stream of conversation while she got the bread out of the little fridge, the ham, cheese, mustard, and put a sandwich together. Colleen answered a word or two at a time, her voice dull. Both plates were dirty, so Shay served the sandwich on a folded paper towel. She poured a glass of milk and set that down on the table too.

  “Eat.”

  Colleen picked up the sandwich and took a bite, chewing with her eyes glazed. Shay doubted she tasted a thing. The woman still hadn’t taken off her coat and scarf, though the RV was so cold that Shay didn’t blame her; she herself wore long underwear and a sweater under Taylor’s old sweatshirt. And that was with the generator blasting almost constantly. Brenda had come over after work to complain for the second time that Shay was running it too high. But since weather.com said it would get down to minus three degrees overnight, she’d decided to just turn it back up and let the bitch complain.

  Shay gave the glass of milk a gentle push, and Colleen picked it up and drank. Like some kind of robot, like worry had taken away her will. That wasn’t good. It was way too early for that, and Shay—veteran of crises since before she could walk, though nothing like this—should know.

  “Okay,” she said, keeping it friendly but firm. “So let’s figure this out.”

  Colleen set down the sandwich. A crumb clung to her bottom lip. “I didn’t even know there was another boy until tonight. That seems . . . I’m sorry. I’m sorry about your son and the way I came barging in here.”

  Shay shrugged. “The company doesn’t want you to know. Why would they? All it can mean is more trouble for them.”

  Colleen’s frown deepened, emphasizing the groove in her forehead. “I don’t unders
tand.”

  “The company? Hunter-Cole Energy? Look, think about it. How many accidents have you heard about up here in the last couple years? Workplace accidents, where they lost workers?”

  “Accidents?”

  “Come on, you use Google, right? I have an alert set up on Hunter-Cole.” Shay waited for Colleen to process what she was saying, because people like her never expected women like Shay to be able to do anything with a computer. Which admittedly had been true until a couple of years ago, when she started selling her boxes on Etsy, so there was that. “Any time a guy gets hurt on the job, they have this whole team that tries to bury the news, but it still leaks out if you know where to look. It’s hidden, but it’s there.”

  “You mean like the man who had the seizure?”

  “Well, sure. That. But everyone knows about that one.” In August, a fifty-two-year-old grandfather had a seizure, his first, and fell from the platform. He died in the helicopter en route to Minot. It might have escaped national attention—Shay would bet the lawyers were working their asses off doing damage control—but People magazine ended up doing an article. The man’s daughters were pretty, his grandchild adorable—shit like that sold. “But there’s been others. More than you’ll ever know about if you don’t keep your eyes open.”

  Colleen’s chin trembled. “And you think our boys . . .”

  “Whoa, whoa, whoa, I didn’t say that.” Too late, Shay saw the panic in Colleen’s eyes and realized her mistake. “No, come on, honey, you are not going to go there. I don’t for a minute believe our boys were hurt on the rigs. I mean, there’s protocols they have to follow, they have to call the next of kin—”

  She seized Colleen’s hand and felt the tremor pass through her wrist. Her fingers were waxy and cold, her polished nails sharp against Shay’s skin. Next of kin, she shouldn’t have said that.

  “If our boys had been hurt at work, they’d be busy trying to buy us off. There’d be a pack of lawyers sitting here, and instead all you got is me. It wasn’t an accident. That’s not what this is.”

  Shay felt Colleen relax fractionally. Her shoulders slumped and she stared at the sandwich.

  “That’s right, eat,” Shay said softly. She waited until Colleen took another bite before continuing. “So, think like the company would. The boys go missing. It could be a hundred things. Guys don’t last out here, the work’s not what they think it’ll be, they don’t like the cold, they miss their girlfriends back home. Whatever. Say twenty percent of them quit the first week, right? And that’s a conservative guess.”

  A little color had come back to Colleen’s face. “I didn’t know,” she said quietly. “I don’t know anything. Paul didn’t—doesn’t—tell us. And I didn’t know where to look, who to ask. We don’t have anyone else, any friends, any of his friends . . . we’re the only ones, with a son who came out here to work.”

  “Damn, not me,” Shay said, with feeling. “I know half a dozen families with sons up here.”

  For a while there, it was all the kids could talk about—the rig or the service, the only solid opportunities for boys who graduated from Fairhaven with bad grades and a blemish or two on their records. Fairhaven—a stupid name for a central valley town whose population was half illegal immigrants and the other half competing with them for shit wages. It wasn’t any kind of haven and it sure as hell wasn’t fair, but that’s what they had. Taylor and another boy, Brad Isley, had gone the weekend after graduation; by the end of summer, three more boys had followed them. Two were already back—homesick, overwhelmed, just plain broken by the hard work. “Anyway, the company doesn’t care, it’s just a hole to fill. They need another worm, so they hire and move on—”

  “Worm,” Colleen said, interrupting. “I’ve heard that twice today. What does it even mean?”

  “You don’t know what that means?” Thinking, What kind of boy doesn’t share that, the first thing they learn on the job? “It’s what they call the new guys. First couple months on the rig, they do all the work no one else wants to do, they’re worms. Later they become hands, like the rest of the guys. Roughnecks, roustabouts. You know.”

  “Oh.”

  “Anyway, the companies up here are hiring as fast as they can. A lot of times they don’t even process the applications until the boys are already on the job, just get them to sign all the releases and send them on to HR. And you know HR is in some office building in another state, and meanwhile up here where the work is getting done it’s all about getting the boys in a hard hat and on the floor. So a couple of them go missing, they don’t care, they don’t have time to care, all they’re worried about is they don’t want any more bad press. So they hand it off to the suits, and they do their thing and keep it out of the news.”

  Colleen looked like she was trying to decide whether to confide something. “They called us,” she said after a moment. “Hunter-Cole did. They called Andy at work.”

  “Andy—that’s your husband?”

  “Yes. He’s a partner at his firm, his name’s on it, so I guess he was easy to find . . . anyway, the Hunter-Cole management tracked him down. They offered their support, said they would help in any way they could.”

  Shay snorted. “Yeah. I bet.”

  Colleen nodded wearily. “They didn’t have any specific suggestions. So then when we decided to hire our own detective—”

  “You hired a detective? To look for your son?”

  “Well, yes.” Colleen evaded Shay’s gaze; she looked embarrassed. “Someone to supplement the efforts of law enforcement up here.”

  “Law enforcement up here couldn’t find their ass in a can. Sorry,” Shay added, regretting the way it had sounded. She was bringing her own issues into this, something she’d promised herself not to do.

  “I just thought that someone who was dedicated to the task, who wasn’t juggling a lot of other cases . . . anyway, I had Andy call the guy at Hunter-Cole back. Just to tell him, you know, that Steve Gillette, that’s the detective, would be giving him a call? And suddenly the Hunter-Cole guy got really evasive. Started backpedaling . . .”

  “They’re trained to do that,” Shay said. “Like they learn it in law school or something.”

  “So I called.” Colleen straightened in her chair. “I called the Hunter-Cole offices myself. I repeated the same thing Andy said, that Steve Gillette would want access to whatever they could show him—time cards, employment records, like that. And the whole narrative changed. They were polite, but it was like a wall went up. They didn’t so much answer my questions as promise to look into them. Get back to me later. That sort of thing.”

  The anger in her voice—that was good; that’s what she would need. “That’s why you’re here, right?” Shay asked. “They told you no once too often?”

  Colleen looked directly into Shay’s eyes for the first time since she knocked on the door of the motor home. “Yes. Yes. Andy wanted me to wait. He said . . . he said we should give Paul a few more days, it was probably all a misunderstanding.”

  “Fuck that,” Shay said before she could stop herself. “You’re the mom. You know when something’s wrong.”

  “Yes. That’s what I tried to tell him.” Colleen nodded. A moment passed, and then she rested her hand on the bottle and turned it so she could read the label. “I don’t believe I’ve ever had Jack Daniel’s.”

  “You want me to pour you one?”

  “Maybe. Yes. Do.”

  LONG AFTER COLLEEN’S breathing had gone deep and even on the opposite side of the motor home, on the bed Shay had made by flipping the dining table and chairs, she lay awake, thinking. Part of the problem was that she was cold—she’d given Colleen most of the blankets, saying she’d be fine in her layers and second pair of socks, which wasn’t quite enough to keep the chill off—and part of it was Taylor.

  During the last conversation they’d had, Taylor had talked about a girl. Charity, Chastity, some old-fashioned name like that—Shay wished she could remember. But it probably wouldn
’t help; there was always a girl. Taylor never stayed focused on them for very long; they came and went, affably and without drama, a series of pretty, smiling, exuberant girls who held no grudges and remembered him with affection. “Say hi to Taylor,” they all said when Shay ran into them at the grocery or the bank, and she promised to do so, though she could never keep them all straight.

  Her tall, broad, handsome son, cocaptain of the Fairhaven football team, had never lacked for female company. So when Shay listened to him talking about his latest, driving to work with the phone tucked between her ear and shoulder and an eye out for cops because she damn sure couldn’t afford another ticket, she hadn’t been paying attention. Nowhere near enough attention, considering it was the last conversation she’d had with him before he disappeared.

  She remembered that Taylor had talked about this girl’s skin. Well, sure, didn’t every twenty-year-old girl have beautiful skin? Shay certainly had—people used to stop her all the time to ask her if she modeled. There was a time when Shay had taken comments like that for granted. And maybe this girl did too, this girl who was among the last to see him.

  As for the rest of his life, Taylor reported that it was all fine, nothing new, the job was a job, the guys were great. Taylor was never one to complain; the thing he said most often was “you do what you gotta do.” Which was amazing because his father used to say the very same thing, may he rest in peace. Maybe it was in the blood, though Shay liked to think she’d had a hand in turning out a boy who wasn’t afraid of hard work. Lord knew she’d done her share.

  Deep in the night was the only time Shay couldn’t keep the fears away. She listened to Colleen breathe; she heard a dog bark somewhere. The generator cycled on and off; the heater blasted hot, dry air. She’d be glad to get out of this tin can, but she had no idea where to go next, a fact she hadn’t yet shared with Colleen.