The girl was last seen on Thursday evening around 9 P.M., when she said goodnight to her parents and went upstairs to her bedroom. She is described as being 5 foot 3 and 115 pounds. She was last seen wearing a pale pink nightgown with matching silk robe. Mr. and Mrs. Flynn retired shortly after, leaving it open to speculation whether their daughter left the house of her own accord or was removed forcibly from the premises. The police reported there was no sign of forced entry or a struggle, strongly suggesting the former.
Several classmates, who all spoke on the condition of anonymity, said that Flynn had been acting strangely in the weeks before her disappearance. Disappointment over losing a part in a school play, coupled with a recent breakup with her long-term boyfriend, weighed heavily on the girl, who even her parents described as “troubled.”
“We just want her to come home,” said her mother.
Anyone with information regarding Elizabeth Flynn’s whereabouts should contact the Williston Sheriff’s Department.
So much had changed in the days after that story ran. The picture of Calder and Betty at the junior prom was splashed across the front page of the following week’s paper. “Tragedy in Williston: Local Boy Confesses to Killing Ex-Girlfriend.”
Eighteen-year-old Elizabeth Flynn, who disappeared from her home last Thursday night, is now presumed dead in light of new information, according to the Williston police. Calder Miller, Flynn’s ex-boyfriend, has apparently confessed to drowning Flynn in the ocean, on a small beach right outside the town’s border.
Police are not revealing any further information at this time, and the motive for the alleged crime remains unknown.
It is now believed that Flynn’s body, which remains missing, may have floated out to sea with the tide. Police have cordoned off the beach and are treating it like a crime scene as they search for evidence to corroborate Miller’s story.
I read through the rest of the articles, detailing how the police had fumbled the investigation—Calder was still seventeen when he’d confessed, and without either his parents or an attorney present during the interrogation, everything he’d said was deemed inadmissible. Without his confession, the police couldn’t even prove that Betty had been murdered; her body had never been found, and any physical evidence had been washed away. He’d had no motive, and if anything, the evidence pointed to her practically stalking him, playing the part of the spurned lover. Other members of the senior class said that she was always cornering him outside of rehearsal; phone records showed that she called him over and over. Finally, Shelly, who’d had a thing for Calder since kindergarten, went to the police and told them Betty had been talking about running away, that she’d been trying to get Calder to go with her, and when he refused she finally gave up and went off with another guy, one of the many she’d been sleeping with, and to where nobody knew. Conveniently, Betty had never mentioned a destination. It all sounded like bullshit to me, but it was enough for the county. The prosecutor had no choice but to let Calder go. Emily Shepard had been replaced with one of Leroy’s toadies.
By the beginning of December, the headlines had changed again. “Police Speculate Missing Girl May Have Run Away.”
Dad came in as I was reading.
“Don’t worry,” I said, “I’ll put them all back.”
He walked over to where I was sitting and glanced down at the paper.
“So she’s not even officially dead?” I asked.
He shook his head. “Officially, she’s still a missing person.”
“Did you ever see the transcript of Calder’s confession?”
“It’s sealed,” he said.
“How sealed?”
“Forget it, Fin. I called in every favor I had with the cops, and they still wouldn’t let me read it.”
“Fuck.”
He sat next to me on the floor and took a sip of my coffee. “God, this tastes horrible.”
“It might be time to invest in a French press for the office.”
He surveyed the stack of newspapers. “They really screwed this one up, didn’t they? He was a high school senior—they just assumed he was eighteen. His birthday was only two weeks away, but it didn’t matter. Without the confession, they had nothing.” He sighed.
Dad had not liked Betty. He had been subtle about it, but I knew how to read him; inference was usually the only way to find out what he was thinking. He’d found her too brash, too brazen, too quick to give in to her impulses and emotions; Dad preferred steady people, thought moodiness was for the weather. Like most everyone in Williston, he’d been put off by her reputation with boys, although he seemed to feel sorry for her instead, a pity tainted with disgust. My mother told me that he held Betty’s parents equally responsible for her behavior, that their self-righteousness and obsession with religion had sent her careening toward the opposite extreme.
He may not have liked her, but he didn’t think she had it coming, and his sadness over her death was real; he was one of the few who saw it as a genuine tragedy.
“What’s the story with the fire?” I asked.
“I’m not sure yet. The fire department didn’t want to comment at all. But the cops are saying there’s evidence of a break-in.”
I looked at Dad directly, my facial muscles perfectly controlled. “A break-in?”
“Someone kicked in a boarded-up window to the basement. Went in through the boiler room.”
I made a big production of reorganizing all the newspapers I’d pulled from the boxes. “I have to get going.”
“I’ll see you at the game later?”
Williston’s softball team was serious business. Dad had to attend every Sandpipers game for the paper, and one of the few impositions he placed upon me every summer was that I accompany him, at least to the home games. Sports were the absolute last thing on my mind, but I wanted to keep him happy while I could. “Don’t worry,” I said. “I’ll be there.”
• • •
I drove straight from Dad’s office to Serena’s house after looking up her address in a dusty phone book I found under Dad’s desk. She lived in an old Cape Cod a couple of miles outside of town, fallen into the sort of disrepair I’d expected at the Flynns’. The red paint was peeling, and the yard badly needed mowing. From the outside it looked empty—no cars in the driveway, all the curtains drawn—but I climbed up the porch steps and rang the bell anyway.
Serena answered after a couple of minutes. Her hair looked brighter than yesterday, as if she’d spent the morning freshening the color. It was still damp, and pink drops of water streamed down her neck, collecting in her collarbone and staining the white collar of her tank top.
“I need to talk to you,” I said. “Can I come inside?”
“It’s better if we go somewhere instead. Let me get my shoes.”
She closed the door, leaving me waiting on the porch. When she reemerged, her jeans were tucked into her boots and she was carrying a sweatshirt, as if she thought we might be out late enough for the sun to go down and the temperature to drop.
I waited until we were back on the highway before I told her what Dad had said about the fire.
“It’s not like I was wearing gloves. I could have left fingerprints all over the windowsill. And what about you? Who else knows you have that key?”
“Don’t worry about it,” Serena told me. “It’s going to be fine.”
“I never should have slashed the principal’s tires. Anybody could have seen me do it.”
“I had a feeling that was you,” she said, apparently pleased to have this suspicion confirmed, and I found myself, ridiculously, hoping I had impressed her. She pulled out her key ring and wound the school’s master free from the metal coil. “You take it. Just in case they start looking into other ways people could have gotten into the building. You were never a senior here, no one would think you’d have one.”
“Okay.” I wasn’t sure that made much sense, but Serena’s confidence swayed me.
“Where are we going, exactly?” she asked. “Did you have a specific destination in mind?”
“Would you think it’s really morbid,” I said, “if we drove to the beach?”
“You mean the place where he killed her?”
I flinched at her bluntness. “Yeah.”
“I wouldn’t think it was morbid if you wanted to visit her grave, but she doesn’t have one, so I guess the spot where she died is the closest thing.”
I looked out the window. “Thank you.”
I knew the spot from the news reports; it had been a favorite of Betty’s, a place where we’d had picnics and gotten drunk together countless times. It was just a small rocky cove, a narrow strip of sand with clutches of towering pine trees on either side. It was strange to think of him drowning her here—how had he gotten her out here? Had they gone into the water together? In November the ocean would have been freezing, too cold for swimming, even on a drunken dare. None of it made any sense.
Serena and I sat next to each other on a large, flat rock facing the water. I took my shoes off and buried my feet in the damp sand. She followed suit, unlacing her boots and easing them off her feet, then removing each sock, rolling them up into neat little balls, and tucking them inside her shoes, an economy and precision to her every movement that fascinated me. The waves were small and gentle, the foam rolling up just a few feet from our toes.
“You’ve been out here before,” I said.
“I come out here all the time, but I’ve never been here with anyone else.” She reached into her pocket and pulled out a tiny blue pill. She bit it in half and handed the rest to me. “Here.”
“It’s so small,” I said.
“It doesn’t feel small. Trust me. It helps if you chew it. Kicks in faster.”
I obeyed without further objection, wondering briefly if Owen was her supplier. But Owen had said he didn’t know any girl with pink hair.
“Tell me about meeting her. Tell me about church camp.”
Serena snorted. “Oh God, that place. It was so awful. They sent me there for—well, I guess for the obvious reasons.”
“How did they find out? Did they catch you with someone?”
“I wish. At least then I would have had a little fun first. No, I’ve never had a girlfriend. Slim pickings up here, you know? Not like in New York, I bet. I wrote a zine, and I traded with other people for theirs—mostly other girls our age. I had pen pals all over the country. We would write to one another and talk about how shitty it was to be trapped in these small towns.” She paused and scratched at her septum ring. “There was one girl in particular, Monica. We wrote each other all the time, sent each other packages and mix tapes. Then we started talking on the phone. I guess it was as close to romance as either of us had ever gotten, which is pretty pathetic considering we’d never met. And then my mom found the letters. I think they’d always suspected, but once they had proof—that was it, off to church camp.” She shrugged. “How much did Betty tell you about that place?”
“Not much. She didn’t like to talk about it.”
“I can’t say I blame her. It was fucking awful. In the brochures, they make it sound like any other camp, just with Bible study. But it’s not. There’s all this emphasis on discipline. All the showers were cold, the food was just gruel. If you got in trouble, they made you stand in a corner facing a wall, not talking to anybody, nobody allowed to talk to you, for like ten hours a day. We called it the red shirt treatment. Once I was doing it and I got my period, and they wouldn’t even let me go put in a tampon. I had to stand there with blood running down my legs until my ten hours was up for the day.”
“Jesus.”
“All in his name. A couple of kids tried to run away, and when they were caught they got the red shirt treatment for a week. Anyway, Betty was the only other person there from Williston. We were both on kitchen duty, cleaning dishes, scrubbing pots, so we got to talking. I almost didn’t recognize her at first, it was so weird seeing her out of those fifties outfits, in a uniform just like everybody else. I liked her. She was funny. Even at that shithole, she still kept her sense of humor.”
Betty had called me right before she was shipped off to camp, just a few days until I was supposed to arrive in Williston for the summer. She told me she had cheated on Calder, and that one night the cops found her parked in a car with some guy. She wouldn’t tell me who it was. That kind of thing happened all the time in Williston, and usually they just let you off with a warning. But this guy was older, and she intimated it wasn’t the first time she’d been discovered in the backseat of a car with her pencil skirt up around her hips. Anyway, the cops brought her home, told her parents. Word got around, Calder broke up with her, and her parents sent her off to Bible camp.
“For fuck’s sake,” I’d said to her on the phone that day. “Why did you do it?”
“I don’t know, I don’t know,” she wailed, “it’s not like I haven’t done it before. But now he knows, the whole town knows.”
“Who was it?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Come on, tell me.”
“I mean it,” she said sharply. “It doesn’t matter.”
“Why didn’t you just break up with Calder if you didn’t want to be with him anymore?”
“I never said I didn’t want to be with him. I just did a stupid thing. It’s so fucking textbook—I can hear your mom’s voice in my head, telling me I don’t think I deserve someone like Calder so I sabotaged it on purpose. I don’t know, maybe I was just bored.” There was a tinge of real hysteria in her voice, enough to make me feel shitty and powerless and so far away. “He broke up with me and now my parents are sending me away and by the time I get back he’ll have a new girlfriend and it’ll be like the last twenty-one months never happened.”
I tried to find some words of comfort, but came up short. The truth was, she was probably right. For two months every year I swapped one home for another. I knew all too well how much could change in just one season.
The summer after my freshman year of high school had been a grim one; that spring, I had fallen in love with both New York City and a shy blond boy named Tad, who had delicate, almost pretty features and wore checkered Vans and black rubber bracelets. Our courtship consisted of him giving me skateboarding lessons in Washington Square Park, eating falafel, and combing the used-CD section of Generation Records. My face got hot every time his shoulder brushed mine or he clumsily reached for my hand. When I left for Maine, he gave me a mix tape (he’d used black and white paint markers to color it checkered, like his shoes) and one of his bracelets, which I didn’t take off all summer. I spent the bus ride to Maine staring out the window, crying and listening to Tad’s tape. By the time I came home, of course, he was eating falafel by the fountain with another girl and showing off his skateboarding tricks for her.
“She talked about you all the time, you know,” said Serena, bringing me back to the present.
“She did?”
“She was pissed about being sent away for the summer because that was the only chance you guys ever really had to be together. She missed you.”
“I missed her, too.” We got by during the school year with our phone calls and visits and letters, but summer was when our friendship really flourished, and when she was at camp last summer we weren’t even allowed to speak. It had been a long two months without her; I did some part-time work at the paper, archiving old issues and writing the occasional obituary, but there wasn’t enough to keep me busy, and most days Dad cut me loose by lunchtime, leaving me with the rest of the day’s endless hours to fill. I did my best—naps on the screened-in porch behind the house; trips to the beach, where I only sometimes found the courage to plunge into the icy Maine waters; long, aimless drives, a luxury for a New Yorker who norm
ally lacked access to a car. Sometimes at night I went to the parties deep in the woods, where I hovered awkwardly around the fringes. I had grown up here, so I wasn’t officially from away, but I lived in New York City, and I certainly didn’t belong in Williston anymore; all the in-jokes and gossip were lost on me without Betty there to fill me in. I could only rely on Owen so much for entertainment; he was happy to provide me with frequent sex, but understandably reluctant to appear with me too much in public, since I was still in high school.
Betty and I had overlapped for just a week at the end of the summer, but she had been quiet and distant, beset by the unlights, and I’d only seen her once, despite my frequent efforts to coax her out of her bedroom.
I’d shown up at her house uninvited and let myself in without ringing the bell. I found her curled up in a ball on the basement couch. She was wearing cutoffs and a plain black tank top, unwashed hair pulled back in a ponytail; no makeup, no lipstick. She smelled like stale sweat instead of White Musk. I was so used to seeing Betty in her vintage clothes, this simple outfit looked like a costume.
“Am I supposed to start calling you Lizzie again?” I’d asked.
“My mom made me donate all my clothes to Goodwill.” I swallowed hard at the thought of her scrupulously curated collection of vintage dresses hanging from the racks surrounded by used polyester pantsuits and stained rayon blouses, the scent of her perfume overwhelmed by that ubiquitous thrift shop mildew. “She threw away all my makeup. Something about vanity and pride. I think there was a subtext about me being a whore.”
“Come on, you’re not a—”
“I don’t know, I might be. By Catholic standards, I definitely am. By small-town high school standards, it’s still a little unclear.”
“I’m not convinced monogamy is natural for seventeen-year-olds. You really shouldn’t beat yourself up about this so much.”
A Good Idea Page 6