The Missing Hours

by Julia Dahl

  “Give me one reason I shouldn’t call the police right now,” said Gabe.

  “Because your daughter is in some deep shit.”

  “Who are you?” demanded Gabe.

  “I’m the guy she owes fifty grand. I’m the guy whose brother she put in the hospital. And I’m the guy who’s going to make your life pretty fucking miserable if you don’t let me sit down and tell you what needs to happen.”

  “Do you know where she is?” Edie asked quietly.

  “Maybe.”

  “When was the last time you saw her?” asked Michelle.

  “I can tell you that. But not for free.”

  “Why would Claudia owe you fifty thousand dollars?” asked Gabe.

  “Would you like me to explain?”

  Edie watched her parents look at each other. They were going to say yes. They were going to invite him in. What else could they do? As he walked toward the center of the first floor and into the sunlight, the man fiddled with the bill of his Mets cap. He tugged it up and gave his head a little scratch, and that’s when Edie recognized him.

  “You’re the other guy in the video,” she said.

  He paused and Edie thought she saw a hint of a smile. Or was it a sneer?

  “She showed you?”

  “No,” said Edie, raising her voice. “None of us have seen my sister in two weeks. She’s not answering our calls. She’s not online. Because of what you and Chad did to her.”

  “You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about,” said the man in the hat. “Would you like to see a photograph of what your sister did to my brother? Yeah, I think that’s a good idea.”

  He pulled his phone out of his pocket, scrolled and clicked, then handed the device to Edie. It was a picture of someone in a hospital bed, head wrapped in white bandages.

  “She attacked him. She lured him. The police say that when they find who did it it’ll be felony assault. Maybe even attempted murder. He was in a coma. They don’t think he’ll ever fucking hear right.”

  “There isn’t a reason in the world we should believe anything you’re saying,” said Gabe.

  “My sister didn’t attack anybody,” said Edie. “She barely weighs a hundred pounds.”

  “Oh, I’m sure she paid somebody to do it. Because that’s what you people do. Pay people to do shit you want done but are too pussy to do yourselves. Don’t worry, whoever actually held the bat, or whatever it was, he’ll get his. But right now, if you don’t want me to go straight from here to the New York Post with the story about the psycho rich bitch who destroyed a young artist’s life, you’re going to give me fifty grand.”

  “You’re not going to the newspaper,” said Michelle. “If that’s your brother in the video he’s in as much trouble as she is.”

  “Not the way I see it. Jeremy is an all-American college boy. And people are getting sick of this feminist ‘me too,’ ‘rape culture’ bullshit. Your daughter is a privileged little princess who had a temper tantrum because she got too drunk and couldn’t keep her legs together. And now my brother’s life is ruined.”

  “Your brother is a rapist,” said Edie.

  He didn’t even seem to hear her. “Just give me the fucking money and you’ll never see me again.”

  “What about Claudia?” asked Gabe. “You said you’d tell us where she is.”

  “No, I said what I know about where she is would not be free. I tried to get Claudia to cooperate. Now I’m trying to get you to cooperate. If she had just given me her phone I wouldn’t be here.”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” screamed Edie. She stood up and went toward him. Her whole body was vibrating with fear and disgust. She wanted to claw at his face. She looked around. What could she throw? What could she do to make him tell her? “When did you see her? What did you do?”

  “I didn’t do shit,” said the man.

  “Where is my sister?”

  “I don’t know where your fucking sister is.”

  “Get out,” said Gabe. “I’m calling the police.”

  “I told you that was a bad idea,” said the man.

  “I don’t give a shit what you told me. I don’t have a fucking clue who you are and you’re in my house, threatening my family.”

  The man pulled a gun from beneath his waistband and pointed it at Gabe.

  “My name is Lars Cahill, and you’re going to put the phone down. You’re going to give me the money you owe me and my family, and maybe, maybe we won’t sue your ass for every penny you have. I know a pretty good lawyer.”

  Was he talking about Ridley? “Who sent you here?” whispered Michelle.

  “Your fucking daughter sent me here.”

  Edie’s dad stood frozen, eyes on the barrel of the weapon that was inches from his forehead.

  “There’s money in the safe,” said Gabe.

  They all looked at him. Edie’s parents had argued about the safe for years. Her dad always wanted to keep more cash in it than her mom. Michelle believed in banks. She believed in real estate and the stock market. She was practiced at having money and she felt certain that it would always be there. Why shouldn’t it? People who were afraid kept piles of cash in a safe at home. What did they have to be afraid of?

  “Take me up there,” said Lars, the gun still pointed at Edie’s dad.

  “No.” Gabe looked at Edie and Nathan. Lydia was upstairs. “I’ll go.”

  “No way, you’ll call the cops.”

  “In ten minutes, you can walk out of this house with fifty thousand dollars in your pocket. But you have to trust me.”

  Lars didn’t answer immediately. He adjusted his grip on the handgun.

  “All I have to do is walk upstairs and get the cash,” said Gabe. “What I care about is my family. I’m not going to fuck with you while you have a gun on my family. I want this over as fast as you do.”

  “Three minutes,” said Lars.

  Gabe ran toward the stairs and Edie heard his footsteps up the first flight, then the second. Nathan gently pulled Edie toward him, and guided her body behind his. He reached out to Michelle and did the same. The three of them stood in a triangle, holding on to each other. Would this work? Gabe said the money was in the safe, but what if it wasn’t? What if Lars got angry? When she was pregnant, Edie and Nathan had watched a PBS documentary about stolen babies and adoption scams. People in the U.S. are willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for a light-skinned newborn. What if Lars had watched the same show? What if Lydia started crying? Where was Claudia?

  “Where’s Claudia?” she asked.

  Her mother squeezed her arm. “Just wait.”

  Lars lowered his gun and Edie saw that he was trembling. Was that good or bad? If he’s scared, he’s unpracticed, maybe unsure about being there. Maybe that’s good. He doesn’t want to hurt them. But scared is careless. And careless plus gun is bad. She watched his face. Again, the smile-sneer.

  “You guys have a place on Martha’s Vineyard, right? She’s probably up there.”

  Why hadn’t they thought of that? Her sister loved that island. The first year Edie was gone at Vassar, Claudia tried to convince their parents to let her stay at the Edgartown house and finish high school there. Claudia wasn’t the kind of kid who was always planning her future, but when she talked about “someday,” it was always on the Vineyard. Someday maybe I’ll own a flower shop. Someday maybe I’ll teach surfing. Someday maybe I’ll open a gallery. Of course that’s where she’d gone.

  “Is she okay?” asked Michelle.

  Lars shrugged. “Last I saw her she had a bus ticket and was having a drink at the TGI Fridays in Port Authority.”

  Gabe came down the stairs with a handful of cash wrapped in the neat bundles Edie and Claudia had snooped at as kids. The paper money wasn’t nearly as interesting to them as the jewelry Michelle inherited: big milky pearls; cocktail rings with knuckle-sized sapphires and emeralds; diamond necklaces, diamond bracelets, diamond earrings, a dainty diamond watch with a
black silk strap. The girls would play with the jewelry for hours when their parents were gone. Lars could have had all of it if he’d been a little smarter maybe. Fuck him, she thought.

  Lars took the money from Gabe and went to count it, but seemed to reconsider when he realized he’d have to put the gun away. He backed toward the front door. It was almost over.

  “He said he saw Claudia at Port Authority,” said Michelle. “She’s on the Vineyard.”

  “How did she seem when you saw her?” asked Gabe

  Lars lifted his sweatshirt and stuck the gun into the front of his pants.

  “How did she seem?” he said. “She seemed like a bitch.”

  Edie kept the scream inside. When Lars left the house was silent. They all looked at the door. Would bullets come flying through? They did not. Gabe flipped the deadbolt. It was over. And upstairs, Lydia was crying.

  “Go,” said Gabe.

  Edie went and so did Nathan. When they came back downstairs, Michelle was on the phone fruitlessly trying to book a charter flight to the Vineyard that evening. JetBlue was the only commercial carrier that flew from New York to the island, and in the off-season the flights were every other day. The ferry from the mainland cut off service early, too, so even if they’d gotten in the car thirty minutes ago, they wouldn’t have been been able to make the last one. Edie listened as her father left a message for Dave Wilcox, the Edgartown caretaker.

  “Call me back as soon as you can,” said Gabe.

  Edie set Lydia down on the Boppy pillow and gave the girl her finger to hold. She was supposed to be doing at least an hour of “skin to skin” with the baby every day. She was supposed to lie down, bare-chested, and place Lydia on her and they were supposed to … breathe? Bond? They were never going to get this time back. She sat on the sofa holding the baby and strapped the nursing pillow, like a foam lifesaver, around her waist. Her mother came in from the kitchen, breathing hard.

  “I can’t get us there until the morning.”

  “Should we call the police now?” Edie asked.

  “I called Ingrid,” said Michelle. “I gave her the name and she’ll get back to us.”

  “Ingrid isn’t the police,” said Edie.

  “She’s better.”

  “Dad?”

  “I sent you both a link,” said Gabe. Michelle sat down on the sofa next to Edie and they clicked. The link was an article from the New York Post, published the day before:

  NYU “ROCK” STAR BRUTALLY ATTACKED ON CAMPUS

  By Larry Dunn

  He’ll never play again.

  Long Island native Jeremy Cahill, 19, was set to make an album with Green Day, but the freshman’s father says a “sicko” attacked him on the way to meet with a professor, shattering an eardrum and fracturing the teen’s skull.

  “Whoever did this is a monster,” said Peter Cahill, 56.

  NYPD Sgt. Wesley Swain said Cahill was assaulted around 9 p.m. Saturday night in the Washington Mews.

  A police source who asked not to be named said that surveillance cameras in the area may not have been functional, and the department is actively seeking witnesses.

  “His phone was gone, but whoever did it left his wallet and his backpack,” said the source.

  Cahill is the lead singer and guitarist for the band Rock. He grew up in Port Jefferson, NY.

  Edie’s hand was on Lydia’s chest; it began to tingle.

  “The kid was telling the truth,” said Michelle.

  “Some of it, at least,” said Gabe.

  Claudia had to be in Martha’s Vineyard, thought Edie. This horrible thing had happened to her and she’d run. I would have run, too.

  “I’m gonna call the house,” Edie said. “Maybe she’ll pick up.”

  But the phone in Edgartown just rang and rang, and the family decided that the best plan was to go to the Vineyard tomorrow and get Claudia. Whatever she’d done, they’d deal with it.

  Edie guided Lydia onto her breast and the girl, possibly sensing that another frustration might actually destroy her mother, latched on easily. Edie touched her black hair and looked at the tiny white dots across her face. The pediatrician said they were normal, that they’d be gone in a couple of weeks. What else would be different in a couple of weeks? Lydia finished her meal and gave a popping burp when Edie patted her back. Nathan found a notepad in the kitchen and they started making a list of all the things they needed to bring with them to the Vineyard. The pump, the bottles, the nipples, the nursing pillow, the diapers, the wipes, the Aquaphor, the onesies, the swaddles, the little first aid kit with the thermometer and the medicine spoon and the fingernail clippers and the nose bulb. They needed bags for the milk she pumped and pads for inside her nursing top. They needed so much all of a sudden. If she wasn’t so weighed down, could she have prevented this? If Edie hadn’t had the baby, would Claudia have come to her instead of running away?

  Dave Wilcox called back the next morning as they headed to the airport. Gabe put the call on speaker.

  “I’m at the house with the police,” said Dave. “There’s no sign of Claudia. But a young man appears to have spent the night. He says Claudia told him he could stay.”

  TREVOR

  The plan, before he fucked it up, had been for them to take separate busses on separate days to Claudia’s family home on Martha’s Vineyard and wait there together. Until it blows over, she’d said. It sounded reasonable at the time. But as the days passed since she’d told him to fuck off, Trevor realized that nothing that had happened was going to blow over. And none of it was reasonable. He went through the motions of class and eating but the more time that went by, the more worried he became. She hadn’t explicitly said that she wanted him with her for protection, but it made sense: Everyone in her life was unavailable, untrustworthy, or both. She’d leaned on him and he’d let her down. He’d thought he’d known better than her. And now she was alone on an island—if she’d even made it there.

  Trevor decided he had to act, so he packed a bag and bought a bus ticket and on the long ride to Massachusetts he imagined all the things that could have befallen her. She could have been overpowered by Chad and disposed of by Ridley. She could have run from the room covered in blood, been grabbed by security and arrested. She could have jumped in front of a train.

  After eight hours on three different busses, Trevor boarded the ferry at Woods Hole. The long, low boom of the horn startled him, and he went up onto the deck to watch the boat push off. Every brunette was Claudia. It was all a big misunderstanding. It was dark when they docked in a little town with twinkly lights and sailboats floating along the shore. Should he show up unannounced? Trevor stood beneath an overhang at the terminal and watched people get into cars; some lined up for a bus. He was nervous so he started walking uphill, toward the lights. The big grocery store was still open but employees were starting to bring bags of garbage out to the parking lot. He heard the crash of glass bottles together and it reminded him of the summer after junior year when he worked making sandwiches at a deli near City Hall. On the shifts when he helped close, they’d blast music and mop, and then he’d take the trash out to the alley where homeless people sometimes bedded down. Once he’d startled a man digging through the dumpster. The man was squatting precariously along the edge of the giant bin and when Trevor kicked the back door open he fell in. Oh, shit! Trevor said. Are you okay? He stepped on an overturned milk crate and looked down at the mass of bags, some open and leaking; rotting sandwich meat; coffee grounds; cartons of half-and-half; slimy ribbons of shredded lettuce. The man was face down and for a moment Trevor thought maybe he was dead. Are you okay? he repeated. After a few seconds, the man stirred; he tried to bring his knees beneath him and press his arms to push himself up, but the bags were shifting and unsolid, like the colored ball pit at Chuck E. Cheese. A ball pit of stinking, filthy garbage. Trevor extended his arm to the man. His face was brown and deeply lined. He wore a thin, plaid, button-up shirt with pointed Western-style pocket flourish
es. They locked hand-over-forearm and the man climbed out. He was three times Trevor’s age, at least, but probably six inches shorter. Gracias, he said, and before Trevor could think to ask if he wanted a sandwich, the man hurried off. Trevor wondered how long the man had lived in Canton. How far from home had he traveled to end up falling into a garbage dumpster? Would he have left that place if he’d known? Would Trevor have left Canton if he’d known he’d end up sneaking onto an island off Massachusetts in a desperate attempt to apologize to a girl he hardly knew? He wanted to get to Claudia more than he’d ever wanted anything. He felt helpless against the force of the want. And yes, he wanted to touch her. He wanted her to reach for him. To look into his eyes and say, I understand. You were trying to keep me safe. I love you, too. He’d imagined it so many times it felt like it was possible. He walked back down the hill to the bus stop, but the sign said he’d missed the last shuttle of the night. According to the map on his phone it would take two-and-a-half hours to walk to her house.

  The wind pressed against him as he moved, head down, along the sidewalks and bike paths and sandy shoulders connecting the little towns that made up the island. Was this place even real? Would a wave come and wash it all away before sunrise? For one long stretch beside the water, on the island’s northeast side, each step forward felt like a feat. When the path turned into trees that blocked the whipping gusts of ocean air, the relief was so profound he momentarily felt as if he were floating.

  Her house was surrounded by a low stone wall, partially hidden behind a stand of evergreens that towered over the power lines, their night-black needles swaying thickly overhead. Trevor could see no lights in the house, but the high, bright moon illuminated a gate, and a path. The salt in the air had made the skin on his face stiff. He was thirsty. He climbed the three stone steps to the front door and cupped his hands around the window cut into the top half. If anyone was inside, they were asleep. He tried the handle. Locked. Lightly, he rapped a knuckle against the glass.

  “Hello,” he said quietly, though he sensed it was to no one but the house itself. He needed to sit down, take a minute, make a plan. He walked back down the steps and turned onto the grass, keeping close to the house as he walked along the front and down toward the water. What he found on the other side was spectacular. Wide tiers of stone patios extending left and right to a swimming pool and farther, down toward the ocean. Outdoor furniture neatly covered, barrel-sized planters, a fire pit, a brick pizza oven. He knew she was rich, but damn. Trevor followed the path to the top patio and the wall of French doors. He looked up at the second level of windows—the bedrooms, he presumed. Was she up there? Was anyone? Was this his Romeo moment? Of course not.