by Karen Ellis
“They’re trying to help.”
“Yeah, I guess they are.”
“Even I’m not that cynical, and I worked Vice.”
“Lex.” She looks at him. “I wish you wouldn’t do that.”
“Do what?”
“Interpret me. That’s the second time you’ve called me cynical.”
“But aren’t you?”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Sorry.” He grins, not sorry at all. The kind of person who picks up on everything, lets nothing go. Who has a lot of friends because it wouldn’t occur to him not to. Who doesn’t understand, or accept, that some people—her, for instance—value their boundaries.
“I’m realistic,” she tells him. “That’s not the same as cynical.”
“Elsa”—warmly—“I didn’t mean it as an insult. We’re cops—who isn’t cynical? In fact, I think it gives you an edge. It probably makes you better at what you do.”
She stops listening to him when Ruby walks through the front door of the house and onto the lawn, wiping her palms on her jeans as if she just washed her hands and couldn’t find a towel. Elsa can’t move. No one else seems to notice and then, as quickly as Ruby appeared, she morphs into another girl.
Elsa mutters, “What the—”
“Who’s that?” Lex follows Elsa’s gaze.
Stepping forward, Elsa asks, “What are you doing here?”
Mel’s smile fades as she registers Elsa’s dismay. “Sorry, Auntie Elsa, I got home and went online and saw this and I couldn’t resist. Isn’t it okay? I mean, they want volunteers. I thought maybe I could help.”
“No,” Elsa says, “it isn’t okay.”
Lex offers Mel a friendly handshake. “Detective Lex Cole, working with your aunt. Pleasure to meet you.”
“Hi.” Mel shakes his hand, then turns to Elsa. “Why not?”
“Because this isn’t a world you need to see. This is my world. Your world is a better place.”
“Do you realize how crazy that sounds?”
Elsa looks to Lex for some adult reinforcement—if he really does want to be her friend, here’s a chance to prove it—but instead he uses the moment to steal away from the family drama. Mutters, “Thinking maybe Allie’s around somewhere, thinking maybe I’ll have that chat,” then loses himself in the crowd.
Elsa asks Mel, “Does your mother know you’re here?”
Mel’s expression reads, Seriously? But she attempts a more reasonable response. “Mom’s preoccupied. You’re my grown-up today and now you know I’m here. I was about to call you.”
“Really?”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know, Mel. I’m not comfortable with this.”
“Who’s Allie?”
Silence thickens between them. Mel’s curiosity and stubbornness are just two of the things Elsa loves about her niece. But not here; not today. “I want you to go back home,” Elsa says. “Now.”
Mel hesitates. “Just so you know, I love you. A lot.”
Elsa watches with a fleeting sensation of victory as Mel crosses the lawn as if to leave, but then she veers under the tent instead. Exasperated, Elsa follows, but doesn’t catch up until Mel is already standing in front of the table where the white-visored volunteer—ROSEMARY scripted on her name tag—is distributing flyers to the troops.
Rosemary hands Mel an inch-thick ream of MISSING signs emblazoned with a recent photo of Ruby smiling cheerfully, looking right at the camera. Rapt, Mel reads over the details.
Elsa considers her options: She can stop this here and now and order Mel home, where she’ll stew in resentment; she can tell her niece to stay by her side while she tries to investigate, which will land anywhere and everywhere on a range from inappropriate to unprofessional; or she can default to being the understanding aunt she’s always been and allow this caring young woman to follow her instinct. When she reaches Mel, she hears her saying, “I want to help find Ruby,” with such feeling that Elsa lands on option three.
“Of course you do,” Rosemary says in the sweet tone of a retired kindergarten teacher trying to help in any way she can. “You could post those signs. I’ll give you a map. How does that sound?”
“Awesome.”
Mel glances at Elsa, who halfheartedly nods permission, and off she goes.
Resigned for now to the power of her niece’s enthusiasm, Elsa sweeps her gaze across the bustling lawn. Lex is nowhere in sight. A few of the neighbors’ houses have been engulfed in the effort to find Ruby, doors hanging open to the heat, people marching in and out. Everyone focused on a task: posting signs, like Mel, or serving food, or logging volunteers, or queuing to join the next group to depart on the ever-widening canvass of this neighborhood and beyond.
She looks at Ginnie and Peter Haverstock, crossing the lawn toward their front door, dragging long shadows. Their desperation frightens her and will continue to frighten her until she can solve this for them. She knows herself. Still, she needs to meet them, so she steps into the squall with her trademark gleaming-armor-of-false-stoicism.
She comes up behind them. “Mr. and Mrs. Haverstock?”
They turn to face her, and she’s startled by their bloodshot eyes.
“I’m from the FBI, Special Agent Elsa Myers. I’m working with Detective Cole.”
“The Amber Alert.” Ginnie wastes no time getting to the point, her voice a stew of accusation and fear. “It didn’t work.”
Elsa says, reassuringly, “It can take time,” though she feels like a liar. When Amber Alerts work, results are usually quick. Silence tends to evolve into bad news. “I know the wait is awful. Is there anything you can think of to tell me that you might have forgotten before?”
The father opens the front door. “Please come in.” A shimmer of anxiety in his invitation; she hears the plea in his please.
The Haverstocks usher her directly into a modest living room. The windows are closed and the air is blessedly cool. Peter settles into a worn green corduroy chair beside a small table littered with objects: a folded newspaper, a TV remote, a bottle of upmarket beer, and a framed photograph of the family of three that looks like it was put down in haste. Elsa imagines that he’s been gazing at the picture for reassurance; a loving father, lost in a fog of uncertainty. She thinks, suddenly, of Roy, and feels a twist of unease. Feels time slipping away from her. Forces her attention back to Ginnie Haverstock, sitting beside her on the couch, talking.
“Next week is Ruby’s eighteenth birthday. She doesn’t want a party. She has plans with her friends, but …”
Into the troubled silence, Elsa inserts the question that bothers her the most in all this: “Are you sure you can’t think of any reason she would have disabled the security camera at Queens Beans Friday night?”
Mrs. Haverstock leans forward, the skin on the front of her neck pinching. “It doesn’t make any sense to us. That’s what worries me, along with her being gone—she isn’t a devious kind of kid. She’s a good girl, never does anything to disappoint us, always tries her best.”
Elsa turns to Peter. “You must be proud of her too.”
“Do my best to keep her in line,” he says with an effortful half smile.
She asks, carefully, “How were things when she left for school Friday morning?”
“Fine.” Peter’s hands unfold, blossom almost. “I was in my workshop when she left. The garage door was up and I waved at her and she waved back. It was the last time I saw her.”
“She was out pretty fast, as usual,” Ginnie adds. “Ruby keeps busy. She doesn’t waste a minute. She always lets me know if she won’t be coming straight home from work, which is why I was surprised when I didn’t see her by nine o’clock. She takes the bus home. Follows a pretty regular schedule.”
“How was her day at school?” Elsa asks.
“I spoke with her in the afternoon,” Ginnie answers, “and she sounded fine.”
“Eleventh grade?”
“Yes. We have plans to visit co
lleges as soon as school lets out next week—the day after her birthday, as a matter of fact.” Ginnie’s smile incites a cascade of dry lines, turning her face into an abstract of dread. “She’s our only child and we’ve been saving up for years.”
“Mind if I ask what you folks do for a living?”
“I’m a medical research assistant; I work at Rockefeller University. My husband is an adjunct professor of statistics at Queens College, and he also has a business on the side.”
Elsa asks, “Oh?”
“Three-D printing,” Peter explains.
“The workshop you mentioned? Where you were when you last saw her?”
Peter nods. “I’ll show you, if you want.”
As they all pass through the living room, Elsa’s gaze lingers on a collection of family photos atop an upright piano pressed between overstuffed bookcases. Ruby as a baby, a toddler, a little girl, a teenager. Lots of smiles.
Inside the attached garage, Mr. Haverstock’s enterprise has displaced any possibility of housing a car. One whole wall is lined with metal shelves stacked with spools of plastic filament in a rainbow of colors. Leaning against one end of the shelf, flattened boxes are stacked vertically, according to size. In the center of the space sits a stainless-steel workbench holding a glass-fronted black cube that looks like a cross between a microwave and an old TV. With the garage door closed, the air in here is uncomfortably hot.
Peter walks across the garage and pulls aside a stained white sheet covering another shelf. “This is the kind of stuff I make.”
It runs the gamut: a gray six-inch bust of a man in glasses; a blue statuette of a boy swinging a baseball bat; a DNA helix in primary colors; a shoe-box-size rectangle that, on closer look, is a model of a modular house; a pair of silver-webbed shoes; a gun.
“It isn’t real,” Peter tells her, noting her attention to the gun.
“It also isn’t legal.”
Color drains from his face. “I know—but the client’s paying really well, and I didn’t think it would do any harm.” The absurdity of that last statement momentarily sucks the air out of the room. Ginnie averts her eyes. Elsa can’t take hers off Peter’s embarrassed expression.
Elsa asks, “Who’s the client?”
“An executive who travels a lot. Said she’d feel safer.”
She. Elsa gets it. But of course the assumption is dead wrong; statistically, the gun will make the client’s life more endangered if she has the bad luck to run into trouble.
“Well,” Elsa says, “she’s mistaken, but that’s not why I’m here. Just do me a favor, Mr. Haverstock, and don’t make any more phony guns for people, okay? It’s bad business, and frankly, it’s part of the problem, not the solution.”
“I get it. And I won’t—I promise.”
She stoops to glance under the workbench where an unfinished piece of furniture appears to crouch like a hiding animal. “Making a…chair?”
“That’s the idea. I like to challenge myself, try stuff I haven’t done before. This one’s been tough.” Adding: “Ruby sometimes helps me out in here. I’ve been teaching her a thing or two about how to use the printer. She enjoys it.”
“She really does,” Ginnie agrees.
Elsa asks, “Does she have any other hobbies?”
“She likes to knit, and she’s a reader—historical thrillers are her favorite.”
Both parents smile wistfully. Ruby is clearly a beloved child.
Elsa reaches into her purse, hoping for an old tissue to wipe the sweat dripping down her forehead. Finding nothing, she uses the palm of her hand.
“Sorry about the heat,” Ginnie says. “I’ll go switch on the garage AC.”
As soon as his wife is gone, Peter leans close enough for Elsa to feel the sticky dampness of his breath against her face and whispers, “I need to talk to you about something.”
“Okay.”
“It’s about that gun. Something I thought you should probably know.”
The skin on the back of her neck shivers at the first curls of air-conditioning seeping from an overhead duct.
His pupils dilate, black pools on the yellowish eyes of a drinker. “The first one I made for the client, well, it disappeared.”
“Stolen?”
“Not exactly.”
“When?”
“Last week, Wednesday.”
“What do you mean by ‘not exactly’?”
“I asked Ruby and she admitted she took it because Charlie, the ex, was bothering her. She says she thought if he saw the gun, he’d get the message to leave her alone.”
“Bothering her how?”
“She wouldn’t give me specifics. Teenagers are secretive, you know?”
“And the gun—you let her keep it?”
“It isn’t real.”
“It looks real.”
“Maybe I made a mistake, but at the time it seemed okay. I mean, she’s a pretty girl. She could use some protection.”
Elsa contains a quick reaction: she knows from personal experience that you don’t have to be pretty to need protection. “Anything else you want to tell me while we’re alone?”
“I’m sorry I didn’t mention this to Detective Cole before. I didn’t want Ginnie to know—it would scare her—”
And piss her off, Elsa thinks.
“But it’s been bothering me. At first I was sure it didn’t mean anything, but now I don’t know what to think.”
“So, did Ruby ever show Charlie the gun?”
“I don’t know.” Peter’s face blazes crimson. “We never had a chance to talk about it again. I’ve checked her room, her locker at school, everywhere I can think of, and it’s nowhere.”
Shielding her eyes from the bright sun, Elsa searches the front lawn, the tent, the backyard for Lex, annoyance growing the longer he fails to answer her calls and respond to her texts. She needs to consult with him about the fact that Ruby stole a fake gun from her father’s workshop two days before she vanished. Clearly, something was going on with the girl that doesn’t align with the happy-family, good-student picture presented by her life’s surfaces.
Under the tent, Elsa grabs a bottle of water from the barrel of melting ice and notices that Rosemary’s information table is being supervised by someone else: a tall young man with combed-back brown hair and a notably crooked nose. Not young, Elsa corrects her first impression as she nears the table, but youngish. Thirty, maybe thirty-five. His name tag reads TEDDY. The left side of his shirt collar sags under the weight of a photo-button showing the adorable smiling face of a little girl, two lavender bows holding curly hair off her forehead—another missing child, Elsa assumes, thinking she doesn’t want to hear the roll call of this guy’s various rescue attempts. She’s seen his kind before, perennial volunteers who show up at every possible search party, traveling real distances to help out but also to bask in the drama. She has a litany of her own never-found girls and boys, and replaying them is like a helpless dream where you’re caught inside a hall of mirrors in which innocence inverts, those little smiles becoming helpless screams. She deflects the thought by looking at a well-worn copy of The Invisible Man beside a stack of flyers on the table. She uncaps the bottle of water and takes a long, cooling drink.
Tuned to her, he says, “Great book. Read it?”
“No,” she says, “but I did read Invisible Man in high school, the one by Ralph Ellison.” She’d had to write an essay on it but hadn’t minded, as it was her favorite book that year.
“I read that too but I like the H. G. Wells better—it’s science fiction. I like science fiction—I mean, if I had to choose a genre. My sisters told me always to bring a book, you know, in case things got boring. But this hasn’t slowed down, not for a minute.”
It’s a strange remark, Elsa thinks—the idea that a search party could grow dull.
Teddy picks up a stack of MISSING signs and tops it off with a little-girl button identical to his own, plucked from his front pants pocket. “Here to voluntee
r?”
“No.” She holds her hand up in refusal of the signs, the button with that sweet little girl. And then she asks, defying the emotional discipline that begs her not to: “Who is that?”
Teddy smiles. “My daughter.”
“When was she…”—regret now for her assumption about the button when it seems that he himself is a parent whose life now revolves around his own lost child—“when did it happen?”
“She’s fine.” Teddy smiles. “I come to these so I can protect her, you know, ‘gather ye forces while ye may.’”
“Isn’t it ‘rosebuds’—carpe diem, ‘seize the day’?”
“Is it?”
Well, Elsa thinks, no one likes to be corrected, even if they’re wrong. She’s just glad to know his little girl isn’t anyone’s victim, even if she’s got a peculiar father.
“What can I do for you, madam?” he asks.
“I’m looking for someone—two people, actually. I can’t tell if the network’s spotty out here or if they’re just not responding.”
He turns over a sign and picks up a pen. “I’m happy to take down an analog message if you want.”
Analog message; did he actually say that without irony? She wonders if, along with being a science fiction buff, he builds gizmos to test the air for signals. “My niece,” Elsa says, “is sixteen, and she has—” About to offer details, she cuts herself off. The place is swarming with teenage girls with long dark hair, and now that she thinks of it, she can’t remember what colors Mel is wearing. “I’m also looking for Detective Cole. He may have stopped in here.”
“He did, just a little while ago. If he comes back I can tell him you were looking for him.”
“Special Agent Myers—just say Elsa.”
But Teddy notes it all, Special Agent Elsa Myers, in chicken-scratch handwriting. He asks, “FBI?”
She nods. “Thanks.”