The Missing Place

by Sophie Littlefield

  The chief glanced over at Shay and acknowledged her with a nod. If he knew about her prior visit, he didn’t let on. “Sure thing. Come on back. Get you ladies some coffee? Water?”

  Colleen declined, murmuring her thanks, and they followed him to a large office at the corner of the building. The windows looked out over the street where they’d parked, and then past the downtown to the old houses and barns and vacant lots at the edge of town, beyond which the white-and-tan landscape stretched to the horizon under an oppressive gray sky. The snow had stopped, only to seem to be gathering for a greater onslaught later.

  The women took the chairs facing the chief’s desk. Weyant rested his hands on the laminate desktop and regarded them gravely. “Let me start by telling you the same thing Sergeant Sanders told Mrs. Capparelli. We are concerned that your sons have been out of communication, and we are devoting as many resources as we can to locating them. But we can’t rule out the possibility that there’s an explanation other than them getting into some kind of trouble. We’ve seen too many of these boys light out of here without giving notice, just to show up a few weeks or months later in another state entirely. You know how it is when you’re that age.”

  “Not really, no,” Colleen said coldly. She sat very erect in her chair. “Please share a little more about your line of thinking.”

  “Oh. Well—all I meant was, you got a twenty-year-old, especially a boy, a male, there’s going to be a lot more hormones and such than common sense at work. If I had a nickel for every fight we had to break up in the bars—and this is after these boys come off a twelve-hour shift that would knock me out, I’m not afraid to say it—well, I’d be a rich man. Then we got the casinos barely an hour away, or—and this happens more often than we like to admit—they just get tired of the guy-to-girl ratio around here, they take the money they’ve made and go looking somewhere else. Find a girl and an easier job and don’t get around to writing home for a while.”

  His speech concluded with a shrug, the chief looked relieved, even a little pleased with himself. It was a better, smoother version of the speech that Sanders had given Shay two days earlier. Clearly, Weyant had put a little thought into it, adding the bit about the boys coming off long shifts, for instance—that was a nice touch. Maybe he saw the writing on the wall, figured he’d be using the speech on a regular basis. Heck, maybe it really was true, and he already had.

  Colleen didn’t say a word. She watched him expectantly, barely blinking, her face giving nothing away. The chief put a finger under his collar, loosening it, and cleared his throat, waiting for one of them to say something. But Shay decided to take a page out of Colleen’s book and stayed silent.

  “So,” Weyant finally said.

  “My son has not left town for a girl or a casino,” Colleen said, her voice tight. “He and his friend Taylor are missing. Instead of focusing on the unimaginative list of possible scenarios you’ve come up with, I am wondering why you and your men aren’t doing any actual police work in an effort to find them.” She held up a hand to stop Weyant’s protests. “I understand that your resources are finite. I can only guess at the demands on your staff. I’m not a police officer. But I damn well expect my son—our sons—to get at least as much attention as a liquor store holdup or highway accident or domestic dispute. And you haven’t told me one concrete thing you’ve done to find out where they are.”

  “As I told Mrs. Capparelli—”

  “And that’s another thing.” Fury had gradually shaded Colleen’s face a deep red. Shay marveled at the change in her. Somehow she’d pulled her shit together, turning from the blubbering mess in the truck stop to a fearsome bitch. “It’s Ms. Capparelli. Not Mrs.”

  Weyant looked from Colleen to Shay and back again. “Look here,” he started.

  “I am interested in everything you have to say,” Colleen went on, opening her purse and searching through the contents. “In fact, I want to make sure I get it all down.”

  “I’ll take notes,” Shay said, grabbing her notebook out of her own handbag. Later there would be time to resent Weyant for being intimidated by Colleen after dismissing her. For now, they needed to benefit from the momentum. “You talk.”

  “Thank you.” Colleen returned her purse to the floor. “Let’s start with which officers are involved with the case, or assigned to it, or whatever the proper term is.”

  “I don’t have to . . .” Weyant wiped his forehead, shaking his head, before starting over. “I wouldn’t want to say without checking the duty roster. But you can consider me your liaison. I don’t want you contacting my officers, disrupting their work. You need something, you come to me.”

  Colleen raised an eyebrow. “Noted.”

  “That’s not what Sanders told me before,” Shay muttered.

  “It’s all right, Shay,” Colleen said, giving her a bland smile. “We can revisit that later if we need to. Now, what steps have your officers taken? Who have they interviewed; what leads have they tracked down?”

  “When Ms. Capparelli notified us of her concern, officers were sent out to the Black Creek Lodge—”

  “Not the first time I called,” Shay interrupted, as she wrote. “Took you all three days.”

  “They interviewed staff there and confirmed the boys hadn’t been around for a few days,” Weyant continued, testily. “They talked to their employers. Believe they went out in the field. They’ll have the names of the supervisors they talked to. But the upshot is, no one on the rig knew anything. The boys simply didn’t show up for work.”

  “The officers spoke to the men who worked closely with Taylor and Paul? Their coworkers?”

  “I’m sure they did,” Weyant said, looking not very sure at all.

  “What about other men who were staying at the lodge? Restaurants or other places they were known to go?”

  “Well, now you’re getting into a gray, that is to say, an area where we don’t devote more resources until there’s a reason. Something to suggest a direction to go.”

  “You mean, like them still not turning up?” Shay snapped.

  Weyant turned on her, his irritation obvious. “Like an indication that harm has actually been done to them. Your son’s vehicle hasn’t been seen at the lodge since the day you reported him missing, which to me says there’s a good chance he drove out of here on his own steam.”

  “Truck. Not vehicle. My son drives a white Chevy Silverado. And what about the fact he left his things in his room?”

  Weyant shrugged. “A few changes of clothes and some deodorant? There wasn’t anything valuable. He could easily have replaced it all. Or maybe he took what he cared about with him. I don’t see that meaning a whole lot one way or another.”

  “What about the boys’ phone records?” Colleen said. “Have you looked into who they spoke to? Whether there have been calls since they disappeared?”

  “Let me guess,” Weyant said wearily. “You like watching cop shows. No, look, don’t get all in a twist. It’s just, to put it mildly, they can give you an unrealistic idea of how that sort of thing proceeds. Even if we had the boys’ phone numbers—”

  “Gosh, too bad they wouldn’t have been all over the lodge’s records,” Shay interrupted. “Or their employment applications, for that matter. Or in Sergeant Sanders’s notes, since I told him.”

  “Even if we had the numbers,” Weyant continued, ignoring her, “they’re likely to be with out-of-state carriers, and we can’t just fax them a picture of our badges. It’s a little more complicated than that.”

  “Well, I’ll tell you what,” Colleen said, reaching across the desk to a little bronzed stand holding the chief’s business cards. She handed one to Shay and jotted a phone number on the back of another, along with the word Sprint. Then she added her own name and phone number. “We’ll give you their phone numbers right now. Carriers, too. There, we just saved you two steps. I put my phone number on there too, so you can reach me whenever you have something to report. Feel free to share it with yo
ur officers. Now, what happens next?”

  Weyant blinked, looking both angry and a little overwhelmed. “What happens next is I thank you for your input, and I go back to doing my job, which is to put my limited resources and budget to work the best way I can see. Yes, I will follow up with these numbers and I will review the case with my staff. But you want to be the one to explain to all these people”—he smacked his hand down on a stack of folders stuffed with paperwork—“why you’re more important than they are? You want to know what else I’m dealing with? How about a woman whose boyfriend hit her so hard her teeth went through her lip? Or this one, we got a six-year-old who disappeared Tuesday, and his father’s missing too, and he’s got a known meth problem and a gun.”

  He was breathing hard, leaning over his desk, looking like he wanted to sweep the folders to the floor. It was time to go. They’d pushed as hard as they were going to get away with—for now.

  “You’ll follow up and let us know,” Colleen said, standing with dignity. “We appreciate that. But let me add one thing. I can mobilize the press in my own hometown easily. Maybe you don’t care much what they’re saying about Lawton and its police department in the greater Boston area. But my husband is a respected attorney with contacts all over the country, and he won’t hesitate to involve the media if we feel that the police are not giving our son’s disappearance sufficient attention.”

  She turned and headed for the door. Shay stood too, as did Weyant. “As for me, I may be nobody,” Shay said, “and I don’t have money and I don’t know anyone important. But I won’t go down quiet. This is my son who’s missing. I’m his mom, and I don’t have anything to lose.”

  She closed the door behind her, harder than she intended, the sound getting the attention of everyone in adjoining offices. Shay could feel her face burning as she strode after Colleen, refusing to meet the eyes of the people they passed.

  They didn’t speak as they exited the building or on the way to the car. Shay slid into the driver’s seat and put the key in the ignition, but she didn’t turn it. Colleen put her seat belt on and sat with her arms folded, staring straight ahead.

  Then she started to shake. Shay watched Colleen’s careful composure disintegrate, torn between sympathy and the knowledge that it was going to get a lot harder before it got any easier.

  “You did good,” she said quietly, as silent tears streamed down Colleen’s face.

  Colleen nodded, not bothering to wipe the tears away. “He was just so . . . I don’t know. Smug? Supercilious?”

  “I don’t have any idea what that second one means, but I don’t like that fucker. Only it doesn’t matter how we feel about him. We need to use him, Col, you hear? Him and everyone else who can help us. Nothing else matters. Now, we going to the lodge? You ready for that?”

  “Yes,” Colleen whispered fiercely, digging for a tissue. “Yes, I am.”

  eight

  SHAY WAS A good driver, Colleen had to give her that. She’d adapted to the road conditions and didn’t make any of the beginner mistakes that caused so much trouble back east. She hovered under the speed limit, left ample room for the cars in front of her, and dropped back whenever the ubiquitous long-bed trucks passed them.

  They drove back through town, block after block of strip malls and lumberyards and churches now familiar. A few more times back and forth and she’d have the whole town memorized. What was it Paul had said, during his first trip home? That it was easy to feel like you fit in. Something like that. He’d been irritated when Andy called Lawton a one-horse town. Andy hadn’t meant anything by the description, but something had already changed between them: it was as though for the first time in his life Paul had found something that was his alone, and he guarded it jealously.

  By then they’d accepted that nothing they did or said was going to change Paul’s mind. Any hopes that the first few weeks of hard work would convince Paul of the absurdity of his choice were dashed when he returned home even more enthusiastic than before he’d left. He paced the house restlessly during that first visit, and if he didn’t complain out loud that he couldn’t wait for his days off to be over, it was only because they’d all retreated into a state of forced politeness, the aftermath of the violent arguments before he left.

  How Colleen had longed to touch her son during that visit. To put her arms around him, to inhale his scent, to reassure herself that he was still hers. But something was broken in their relationship. Oh, for heaven’s sake, she knew exactly what was broken, because she’d been the careless one who broke it. She was the one who delivered ultimatums and demands, years and years of them, thinking she was building him into something stronger and better, believing that someday—eventually—he’d come around.

  If she had other sons, she would know what to do next time. Colleen understood now that a boy of eighteen or nineteen might not be a man in every way, but he wasn’t going to let anyone tell him what to do. Her belief in her own authority struck her as ridiculous and even pitiable now, proof of a careless ignorance, which felt, in the worst moments, like the sin that had driven him away.

  She’d been the one to find his note that morning, the morning Andy was supposed to drive him back to Syracuse to start his sophomore year, which was actually his second attempt at his freshman year, though they didn’t discuss that. It should have been Andy who found the note, because he was always up first. He made the coffee and got the paper while she was in the shower, then came up and took his turn in the shower while she dried her hair and dressed. But Colleen hadn’t slept well that night. She woke at three o’clock and tried to get back to sleep until five, turning one way and another trying to get comfortable, alternately too hot and, after she cast off the covers, too cold. Andy slept through it all, as she replayed the week’s arguments in her head, Paul’s anger and their objections and pleading, the plans she thought they’d all agreed to at the therapist’s office, his grudging agreement to stay on the Concerta and Pristiq.

  At five, she gave up. She padded down the hall in her bare feet and briefly considered looking in on Paul, one last chance to watch her son sleep before he left, abandoning the idea mostly because she didn’t think she could open the door without waking him. She went downstairs and got the coffee out of the freezer and a filter from the cabinet and had been about to fill the pot with water when she saw the piece of paper centered next to a bowl of apples on the island. Paul’s handwriting, blocky and childish and slanted down the page. She hadn’t even begun to read when she knew he was gone. Her fault, her fault, all her fault.

  The road out of town seemed carved by a router that dug wide ditches on either side, for reasons Colleen couldn’t fathom. One wrong turn and any of these trucks could catch a wheel and tumble in, like soldiers into a moat. The land was not as flat as it looked from the air; a long, gradual ascent led them past empty fields, stalks of some dead crop poking through snow, and warehouse-size buildings that seemed cobbled together from sheets of metal. Once they crested the top of the hill, more of the same was laid out in front of them as far as she could see: squared-off fields, graveled drives that led to roundabouts before heading back to the road, small squat clusters of industrial vehicles.

  Shay signaled and eased over to the shoulder, taking a slow right turn. There was a bridge, pavement edged with rocky earth, over the ditch or culvert or whatever it was.

  “This is it?” Colleen asked as they pulled even with a guard shack. Downhill from the shack, on the other side of a parking lot the size of the one in front of Walmart, was a grid of long, low buildings that reminded Colleen of the chicken farm in Vermont she had visited once as a child, the stench of the cramped open-air buildings worse than anything she had ever smelled.

  When Shay rolled down her window, the only scent on the air was of the cold. A man bundled head to toe came out of the shack with a clipboard in his hand. He was wearing cloth gloves with the fingertips cut off, clutching a pen.

  “Me again,” Shay said. “Shay Capparelli. I�
��m here to see Martin.”

  “He know you’re coming?” The man spoke from underneath a fleece hood with a mask covering the lower half of his face. The shack must have no insulation at all.

  “Yup.” The two stared at each other for a moment, the wind blowing snow up from the ground and into his eyes, then the man waved them on and retreated into the shack.

  “I said I’d be back,” Shay said defensively. “So yeah, he ought to know.”

  The parking lot was only about a third full, but many of the spaces had recently been occupied, judging from the snow pattern. Shay parked next to one of the few scraggly trees in the lot, the Explorer dwarfed by the massive pickup trucks on either side. Colleen followed Shay to a cedar-sided lodge at the intersection of the long, plain buildings. The doors and railing were festooned with dry brown pine garland, and a wooden deck and steps out front had been shoveled and salted.

  “They put some money into the main building,” Shay said grudgingly. “It’s pretty nice. You know what the dorms are made of, though? Shipping containers. Just like they send over from China. They freight them in, weld them together and cut holes for windows, and put up the lodge practically overnight. Martin, he’s the manager we’re going to see, he says when they dismantle this place you won’t be able to tell it was ever here.”

  “Paul told us this boom will last for twenty years. At least. That seems like a long time for a temporary structure.”

  “Yeah, Taylor said some people are saying that. But the boom in the seventies? That ended pretty much overnight, left a lot of people out of work,” Shay said in disgust. “I had an uncle, down near Galveston, showed up one day and the company was gone. Not just the rig, not just the portable office, the whole company. He was out a month’s pay, didn’t find work for the rest of the year. That’s why these camps are all temporary now, nobody wants to get stuck with a building down the road.”

  Their boots clanged against the metal tread embedded in the steps. They entered a tiled vestibule with another set of doors leading inside, a sort of air lock that kept the wintry air from blowing into the building. In a box on the floor were dozens of pale blue fabric booties and a hand-lettered sign reading WATCH YOUR FEET! WEAR BOOTIES PLEASE! THIS IS YOUR HOME—ACT LIKE IT!