My first year at UVA, I roomed alone. It seemed wrong to share a dorm room with anyone else. It also seemed to me to be a perfect refuge for Abby when she needed to get away from home. But it was also the beginning of my semiconscious efforts to wall myself off from others. I didn’t want to be a hermit; I tried to join a fraternity, for instance, but it didn’t take. More time for my writing, I told myself, and that was honest, at least. I began a novel that I would eventually burn in a mall parking lot outside of Charlottesville before starting The Unforgiving. But there was a calculated pleasure in staying in my room on the weekends when Abby couldn’t come up, typing on my desktop while my classmates were out partying. It was also, I see now, a self-imposed exile for the crime of making Fritz disappear.
It was hard enough dating Abby long distance, but to be attending classes where I felt Fritz was supposed to be, to walk past the Rotunda or cross UVA’s own Lawn, felt like I had cheated all over again somehow, that I had wrongfully taken Fritz’s place. Part of me, the same part that dimly perceived that, in some eventual future, I might be able to accept that my friend was gone, realized this wasn’t true. But a larger, or at least louder, part of me had the sudden expectation that Fritz would be found, and soon. It had been six months since he had disappeared, and I was having the strangest premonitions. Three crows flew across my path, one after the other, as I walked to class; my dorm bathroom was clean three days in a row; I aced all three tests that I had in the same week. I took it as a sign from the gods, a portent of good news. I kept waiting for my phone to ring, for Abby to tell me tearfully that Fritz had been located, that he was coming home.
Magical thinking is nothing new. But it was all I had. Hitting a series of green lights on the way out of Charlottesville, finding a dollar bill on the hall floor outside my room—everything was a sign that the universe was conspiring to return my friend to me. That I received no phone call from Abby about Fritz did not matter. It was merely a test of patience, of will—of belief that my friend would be found. Abby did call to tell me that her mother was slowly improving, getting out of bed, even seeing visitors one at a time, but I half listened to such news, keeping my ear cocked and ready to hear approaching footsteps, the creak of a door, a sound of greeting.
Christmas break came and went. I had wanted to spend it with Abby but couldn’t because her family had gone to the Keys. I called her the day she got back. I had a plan. “Listen,” I said. “I’ve got a crazy idea. Something we could do this summer.”
Abby yawned. “Sure,” she said. “As long as it doesn’t involve a lot of driving. Mother wouldn’t fly to Florida, so we drove.”
“I was thinking we could go look for Fritz.”
I waited five very long seconds, holding the phone and listening to Abby hold her breath.
“What are you saying?” Abby managed.
“Look, I know it’s crazy, but I’ve got it figured out,” I said, plowing forward. “The police are idiots. They don’t know your brother. You know all the places you’ve gone. On vacation. We go to all the places where Fritz went on vacation. That’s probably where he ran off to, someplace he knows. I know we’ll pick up his trail. I’ve saved up some money—”
“This is insane.”
“It is not. I got a job in a restaurant, and I’ve saved some money.”
“Matthias, we don’t even know that he ran away.”
“Sure we do. Sure we do. He took out all that money, right? And I told you about the argument we had, how stressed out he was about college. He ran, Abby. We could do this. I know you don’t want to drive, but listen, I could borrow my mother’s—”
Deliberately, Abby said, “I am not going with you to hunt for Fritz.”
“What?”
“Matthias . . . I’m going to go to Juilliard. This summer.”
Now I held my breath, staring at the water stains on my wall. “What?” I said again.
“I was going to tell you,” Abby was saying. “This weekend, when I came up to visit—”
“You can’t go to Juilliard,” I said. “We—we have to find your brother. He’s your brother, Abby.”
Her voice was frosty. “I know who he is, Matthias. And don’t tell me what I can and can’t do. I need to play the cello again, I—” Her voice softened. “Look, my mother is doing better. She doesn’t talk anymore about wanting to die. This past year—it’s been awful. And now it’s time for me to do what I need to do, to move on.”
“Move on?” I said. “Move on?”
In a low voice, she said, “He’s gone, Matthias.”
“He’s missing.”
“And we’re going to go find him? This isn’t a Hardy Boys mystery, Matthias. He’s gone. He’s my brother and I love him, I always will, but it’s been almost a year—”
“Ten months.” Even as I said it, I knew it was stupid, but I was angry.
“And I hope he comes back,” Abby continued, ignoring me. “But—I can’t do this. I have my life to live, too. Juilliard has a spot for me. It’s not like I’m going out of the country. It’s New York City. I can take a train—”
“I can’t believe this,” I said. “It’s like you don’t even love your own brother.”
A longer pause, like the empty space between peals of thunder. And then a decisive click, another pause, and then a dial tone.
I had not spoken to Abby Davenport since.
NOW, STANDING IN SAINT Margaret’s gym, listening to Gwen Stefani insist she wasn’t no hollaback girl, my first instinct upon seeing Abby was to drop my Coke and run for the door. But then Abby saw me. I stood there, ignoring Terence Jarrar as I watched Abby walking toward me, a neutral smile on her face. Her hair was cropped in a sort of pageboy bob, but aside from that and something a bit more adultlike in her stride, she looked remarkably like she had all those years before. She stopped just outside of hugging range.
“Hi,” she said.
I smiled, my throat dry as sandpaper. “Abby, hey,” I said. “Wow. You look great.”
“What are you doing here?” she asked. Her tone wasn’t challenging or defensive. Her words were a simple question.
“Well, I’m teaching at Blackburne now,” I said, still keeping a smile on my face. “I got weekend duty, so I’m officially chaperoning for the dance tonight. How about you? Are you here for a reunion or something?”
Abby’s red-headed companion from earlier stepped up, holding two cups. “She’s a faculty member here,” she said brightly, handing one cup to Abby. Then she smiled at me, a cherubic pixie. “Hi, I’m Kerry.”
“Matthias,” I said. We shook hands. Then I turned to Abby. “You teach here?”
She nodded. “Yep,” she said. “Started last year. French.”
Kerry looked from me to Abby. “So how do you kids know each other?”
I looked at Abby as if for permission. She brushed a strand of hair off her face and said to Kerry, “We knew each other in high school.” She turned back to me. “You’re teaching English, I guess, right?”
She was being polite and cold at the same time. “Yeah, fourth formers,” I said. “Are you still playing the cello?”
For a moment Abby’s composure slipped, and she glanced down at the floor. Kerry laughed. “The cello?” she said, disbelieving. “But Abby hates music. I’m the chorus director, and Abby can’t stand to listen to recitals.”
Abby stood stock-still for a moment and then looked up at me, her eyes registering a brief flare of panic. At that moment, the overhead lights cut out, and the students all cheered as the DJ took to the stage. A Katy Perry song played from the speakers, so loud it was almost percussive, and the students all began dancing in circles around us, waving their hands and arms and jerking their heads to the beat. Abby took the opportunity to step back into the crowd and walk away. I would have gone after her if Rusty Scarwood hadn’t walked past at that moment and tripped, accidentally spilling his Coke onto Kerry’s feet. By the time I gathered some napkins to wipe off her shoes and had Rusty stammer an apology, Ab
by had completely vanished.
CHAPTER TEN
The late drive home from Saint Margaret’s was quiet, most of the boys flattened by the disappointment of high expectations. Terence stared out the window into the night, his blurry reflection—two holes for eyes, a slack, round mouth—the face of a befuddled ghost. I hadn’t seen him dance with anyone, which saddened me. Only Rusty Scarwood claimed to have had a good time, and judging by the lipstick at the corner of his mouth, I suspected he was telling the truth. He held court at the back of the minibus, talking in a low voice as a few boys listened with mingled awe and regret about how he had gotten a girl’s phone number.
I tried to focus on the road, my head filled with Abby Davenport. Seeing her had shaken me, almost more than what Pelham Greer had told me about Fritz. How had she ended up teaching French at Saint Margaret’s? What had her friend Kerry meant about Abby hating music? Was she seeing anybody? I hadn’t noticed a wedding ring, but had I really looked? She walked away from me so quickly. Had she walked away because I brought up painful memories, or because she hated me? Did she know anything about Fritz? And if she did, how was I going to find out? These thoughts played in my head like a feedback loop, amplifying one another without providing an answer. But on that long drive back to Blackburne, I did reach one conclusion: seeing Abby only confirmed my resolve to find out what I could about Fritz.
LATER THAT WEEK, I drove to the sheriff’s office outside of Staunton. It was a whitewashed cinder-block bunker with small windows and glass double doors in a heavy steel frame, all offset by a dusting of red and white flowers and low scrub bushes for landscaping. As I sat in the parking lot behind the wheel of my car and looked at the front doors with the sheriff’s logo on them, I wondered what the hell I was going to say to Sheriff Townsend. I’d called his office the day before, hoping to schedule a phone meeting, but as soon as a receptionist had answered, I had abruptly hung up. My thought at that moment was that I would be more likely to get a response, maybe even some answers, if I spoke with the sheriff in person about Fritz’s case. My experience with agents and editors in New York was that it was harder for someone to bullshit you to your face than over the phone.
Now that I was here, however, I was having second thoughts. Why would he speak to me in the first place? I wasn’t a family member, I had no new information to contribute—Pelham Greer’s info notwithstanding—and he had no obligation to tell me anything about Fritz’s case. I was also suffering from an irrational fear that by going into the sheriff’s office, I would run the risk of getting into some kind of trouble. I had always had a healthy respect for cops, but I had also been slightly afraid of their ability to put people in jail. Once in college, I had been pulled over for suspicion of DUI—the officer told me he thought I’d been weaving. I hadn’t been, but I humbly submitted to the field sobriety tests while three of my classmates sat in the car. When I was done, one of them, Dax Mullen, angrily muttered, “Town and gown, man. He just did that shit ’cause he saw the UVA parking sticker on your car.” He had urged me to go to police headquarters in Charlottesville to file a complaint, but I had declined. When it comes to the police, I am the kind of guy who hopes I never get stuck in a lineup, because I know I would look guilty enough to be mistakenly picked as the drug dealer or the hit-and-run driver or the child molester.
As I sat in the car, squeezing the steering wheel until my knuckles started to ache, two uniformed deputies came out the front door and walked past me to their cruiser. One of them swiveled his head to look at me, as if he were wondering why I was casing the building. That was enough to get me out of the car and headed for the glass doors, my heart thudding furiously.
As luck would have it, Sheriff Townsend was in, and I had to wait no more than ten minutes on a bench in the tiny waiting room before a female deputy waved me back to his office. Townsend was around fifty, with a suggestion of roundness in his features—his face, shoulders, even his hands. He wasn’t fat, exactly; he looked like he knew his way around a buffet, but his handshake was firm, and he sat easily enough in his leather chair behind a massive wooden rampart of a desk.
I started by introducing myself as a Blackburne grad and said that I was interested in the Fritz Davenport case from 2001. His eyebrows lifted slightly at that, but he said nothing, so I explained how I had been Fritz’s roommate and very close to his family and, now that I had returned to Blackburne as a teacher, my interest in Fritz’s disappearance was sharper than it had been in a long time. Sheriff Townsend was sympathetic. “No one wants to lose a friend,” he said. “But to lose a friend like that, just vanishing . . .” He shook his head. “I sympathize, Mr. Glass. How can I help? Please understand,” he added, waving a hand over his desk, as if dispelling an unpleasant truth, “there’s not much to tell.”
“Is there anything to tell?”
He smiled briefly, creases appearing and then disappearing in his round face. “Well, we never found him, obviously. And not for lack of trying. Local and state police in Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, Tennessee, Maryland, Pennsylvania, D.C.—all involved. Of course, we helped spearhead the initial search efforts. No evidence of foul play. No physical evidence of any kind, really. In this type of situation, it’s the lack of physical evidence of a person that’s the problem.” He gave another brief, sympathetic smile, and then his face smoothed over, becoming professional again. “No eyewitnesses actually saw him leave campus. There was no ransom note, no letter home from Fritz saying he was fine, no nothing.”
I looked at Sheriff Townsend’s desk. Aside from two neatly stacked-and-squared wire in- and out-boxes, a phone, and a blotter, the desk was immaculate. “I’m sorry, Sheriff, but . . . have you been reviewing this case recently?” I asked.
He looked at me, his smooth face fractionally more serious. “Why do you ask?”
“Well, you seem to remember quite a lot about it. You don’t have the file in front of you, and it was nine years ago . . .”
Townsend’s features relaxed, and he gave me a rueful smile. I was beginning to realize that Sheriff Townsend had several smiles in his repertoire. “Not the kind of case you forget,” he said, almost apologetically. “I was a deputy at the time, running our criminal investigations division. We were the guys on point for this case.”
“Do you have any idea what could have happened to him?”
Townsend exhaled and leaned back in his swivel chair, the leather creaking beneath him. “You’ve got eight hundred thousand people reported missing each year in the United States,” he said. “More than half of them are eighteen or younger. Most are runaways, and lots of them come back within three days. Some are kidnapped, usually in some sort of parental custody issue. Some are victims of violent crime. But some just go right off the radar. You never find them. Never. It’s horrible for the families. They just want to know.” He sighed. “I can’t imagine how hard it was for the Davenports to do what they did.”
“What do you mean?”
He glanced at me. “That’s the other reason I remember the case pretty well,” he said softly. “They had him declared legally dead, just last year. Got a copy of the death certificate for our files.”
I stared at him. “What . . . How did they do that?”
“Law says someone can be declared legally dead if he’s been missing for seven years with no sign. The Davenports held on for eight, but they finally went to a judge and got him to declare his death in absentia. It’s terrible, but a family can go through that kind of thing for only so long. It’s a way to come to terms, awful as it sounds.”
I’m sure Townsend said something else, but it didn’t register as I just sat there, staring blankly at him. The Davenports had declared Fritz legally dead. The news was like a heavy door swung shut with a boom that sent dust flying. No wonder Abby had reacted oddly when I’d shown up at the dance at Saint Margaret’s.
Walking down the hall with Townsend toward the front door, the sheriff apologizing again for not having more to tell me,
I gazed blankly at the flyers pinned to bulletin boards on the walls. A Most Wanted poster for a suspected bank robber. Public service announcements about seat belt use. A picture of a child—a little girl, age seven—missing since last month. And then I found myself in front of what looked like an invitation to an office party. It was in honor of Deputy Lester Briggs, who was retiring.
“Something wrong, Mr. Glass?” Sheriff Townsend asked.
“I . . . no.” Briggs was the deputy who had come to my room with Sam Hodges the night Fritz had disappeared. The flyer for his retirement party was dated more than a month ago. “I just saw this flyer here and remembered that Deputy Briggs was one of the first officers out at Blackburne after Fritz disappeared.”
Sheriff Townsend kept his face neutral, although I thought I saw his eyes tighten just a bit. “He was a good officer,” he said. “Retired just last month.”
I nodded. “I’d like to thank him, for everything he did with Fritz’s case and all,” I said. “Does he live around here?”
He pondered this. “I believe he said he was moving to Florida,” he said. “Wanted to go fishing and live near a beach.” He held out his hand and we shook. “Good luck, Mr. Glass,” he said. He watched me through the glass doors as I walked to my car, his expression obscured by the sunlight glaring off the glass, transforming him into a shadowy apparition in the doorway.
CHAPTER ELEVEN
The day that Terence Jarrar shot himself was a beautiful fall day: crisp, about sixty degrees, boundless azure sky. It was three weeks before Thanksgiving break, the height of autumn when the trees refuse to surrender their colors to the gray chill of winter lurking around the corner. The air that day was so raw and clear, it was as if it had been created mere minutes before. The low mountains to the west stood in stark contrast against the bright, open sky, and everything was both vast and close at hand in that strange light. Cheeks burned and hearts quickened at the sudden gusts of wind that blew over the playing fields and against the brick walls. More and more students had been gathering in the Brickhouse for french fries and hot chocolate during breaks. Teachers had begun wearing turtlenecks and the occasional tweed jacket, while students wore baggy sweaters and college sweatshirts. Expectations of going home hung almost palpably in the classroom, and everyone seemed to step with a little more bounce than usual.
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