“I love you, bou bui.” The Cantonese word for “darling” or “treasure,” which Dad hadn’t called me in years and years, not since Ma Ma Scott was around, and I always thought it was for my Chinese grandmother’s benefit.
“Yeah, okay,” I answered, embarrassed. “I love you too and whatever.”
“And whatever.” He sniffed.
Avoiding my stepmother’s eyes, I tell most of this to Officer Griffin.
“So that’s that,” Lindy says. “We went to bed last night, and when I got up this morning he wasn’t here, and he’d left everything behind. When he never came back, I called you all.”
“Good, good.” As Officer Griffin writes, she twirls a stray piece of brown hair around one finger. It’s funny because dozens of girls in my grade do the same, and absolutely nothing else about Officer Griffin is “girlie.” Except for a few escaped strands, her hair is scraped into a hard little knot at the back of her skull. Her eyebrows are wild, her shoulders square, her skin pink and rough. I wonder who her daughter is. Sugarbrook is small enough that I might know her; in fact, there’s an Ashley Griffin in a few of my AP classes, a supernaturally pretty senior who wears body glitter and purple and gold hair chalk, our school colors, to soccer games with the rest of the popular girls. I’ve never seen Officer Griffin at a game, but maybe Ashley is embarrassed by her mother. I guess daughters sometimes are.
Sitting across from the officer, Lindy looks her opposite in every way. Even though it’s late at night and we’re in our own home, diamonds hang from her earlobes on thin chains, the crystals twinkling against her sculpted blond hair. Instead of a bathrobe or a sweater she has a cape wrapped around herself, a white wool thing with pink silk lining. When she stands and stretches, the silk yawns inside her sleeves like the tongue of a snow-white animal. Officer Griffin’s fuzzy coat hangs gracelessly over her chair back. This is a town of Nikes and North Face, and Lindy clips around it in heels and Burberry.
She tilts the coffeepot into her mug. When nothing drips out, she sighs and sets it in the sink. “Immy, it’s late, and you have school tomorrow.”
Officer Griffin snaps her book shut. “You’re right about that. But this is good, a good place to start. You think of anything else, Lindy, you give us a call. You too, Imogene.”
I nod, slump out of the kitchen, and pretend to climb the stairs to my bedroom. Instead I stop on the landing and drop silently to the carpet to listen in. There’s the clank of Lindy dumping the rest of the cups in the sink, and then in a low voice she asks, “How does this work now? I mean, what can we expect from the police?” She sounds calm, but of course it’s her job to stay composed.
“First off, you did the right thing, calling us.” Officer Griffin is trying to keep quiet, but hers is the brassy kind of Bostonian voice that carries. “Now, we got Mr. Scott’s pictures, and a list of his friends, and his credit card number, though we know he left his card with you. The fact that he didn’t take out a whole bunch of money is good—means he’s probably not planning on staying gone too long. I’ll get this info out to everyone on patrol, put in a report to NCIC—that’s the National Crime Information Center. In the meantime, keep his cell phone with you in case he calls in, or somebody who knows something calls.
“But you have to understand, it doesn’t look like foul play. Your husband doesn’t have any serious health problems. I know you got some concerns about his mental state, but the fact that he planned for this shows he’s at least in control of his faculties, you know? We’ll look into this. But . . . it isn’t always a crime to go missing. We do find him, we’ll take it from there. Just do us a favor: you and your stepdaughter sit tight. You think of anyone who might know anything, let us know. But don’t go investigating on your own. That won’t help anyone.”
“I understand.”
“Just one more question before I go, Mrs. Scott. Today being what it is—does that mean anything special to you? Besides, you know, the roses-and-candies rigmarole?”
“I don’t think so. Sometimes Josh remembers, sometimes he’s working on a book and he doesn’t. My husband . . . isn’t always a Valentine’s Day sort of person.”
Lindy thanks Officer Griffin and in the shuffle of her leaving, I creep the rest of the way into my room, quickly shuck off my jeans, and lie on my bed in the dark. Lindy won’t believe I’m asleep already, not even close, but she’ll read the signs. She’ll know better than to talk to me.
Sure enough, after she climbs the stairs, her shadow pauses outside my bedroom door for only a moment before the hall light clicks off and her footsteps carry her away to her own room.
I give it a minute, then ease open the drawer of my nightstand, where I find the subject of my second half truth. It’s not that I lied to Officer Griffin; I only left out the part of the story that wouldn’t mean anything to her, and she’d think I was crazy if I told her what it meant to me. So how could it possibly help us?
Carefully, carefully, I lift out a perfect half of a fist-size gray stone, left here by Dad in the night. It must have been; it was here when I got up this morning, no note or anything, just the stone heart I’ve never been allowed to hold and haven’t seen in five or six years—not since Dad met Lindy, at least. I cup the rock close to my nose in the blue-black dark. Even now, the crystals glitter faintly in the starlight through my curtains.
Down the hall Lindy stirs loudly in the big bedroom—banging around in her closet, maybe, or searching my dad’s for clues. While I wait for her to go to sleep I clutch the stone to my chest, curled up around my secret like an oyster around a pearl.
THREE
On the bookshelf in Dad’s home office, set apart from worn-out paperbacks by Graham Greene and Raymond Chandler and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, there’s a row of his own novels in hardcover. The shiny dust jackets on the older books are greased with little fingerprints from me sneaking them off into the night when I knew I wasn’t supposed to. I’d slip out the books and leave the jackets behind, propped up. They only just fit into the squat shelves, so unless Dad picked them up he’d be none the wiser. And he never picks up his own stuff, never reads it again once it’s been published, and never wanted me to read it either. Said it’d give me nightmares, all those crime scenes and rib spreaders. He joked it’d make me creepy, besides; a pale little kid who reads books about a morgue could turn into a pale teenager who sets death traps for squirrels and weaves their delicate matchstick bones into friendship bracelets. Which, all right, maybe I’m not a homecoming queen, but I’ve never once set a death trap for anything.
None of his protests worked. I was nine when I read his very first novel, A Time to Chill. I didn’t understand every four-syllable word or the science of cadavers, and did my best to skip over the naked parts (dead-naked, not sex-naked), but I was hooked. Captivated. When at last he wised up, he brought me kid books by the paper-bagful. Parentally acceptable stuff like From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler. Everything by Caroline B. Cooney. The stiff, yellow-spined Nancy Drews. I didn’t enjoy the trashy teenage-thriller stuff so much. Girls my age now (who seemed so old then) hiding in dark corners in skimpy summer dresses. Or running down an alley with their blond hair streaming. Or caught in a pair of headlights on a dark road by some unseen vehicle. They were always scared shitless, those girls on the covers. And they hardly ever solved their own mysteries. What happened was the big bad guy would find the girl before the girl found him, then chase her around a Florida swamp for a while until an alligator ate him from behind at the last possible second. But I read those books anyway, and picked up the next before the “Oh, come on” had rolled off my tongue. Soon enough I went back to the adult stuff, the classics I like best with brooding detectives and grisly murders and grown women, but sometimes I still read the old books, visit those silly girls on dark roads.
There’s just something about a mystery. You’ve got this question rattling around your head, so all-consuming that there’s hardly room for anything else. What’s Moriarty
up to now? Who’s the devil in a blue dress? What is the secret of the old clock? But the whole time, you have faith you’ll have your answer by the last page.
No, more than faith. Before she was my stepmother, Lindy said in one of our few sessions together that faith is a special thing that only exists where there isn’t any proof. Faith was how thirteen-year-old me had dealt with my dad flopping through life like a fish onshore for the few months prior, one of the roughest bad times he’d been through.
Faith has never been my forte. Even Miles Faye, the star of Dad’s books, doesn’t operate on it; throughout the novels, the handsome forensic pathologist is all about the facts, always muttering to himself, “What do you know, Miles?” Right now, I could fill my own book with what I don’t know about Dad. I have the stone heart, and a theory that even I’ll admit sounds crazy, but few hard facts.
But that’s okay. Because in mysteries, if nothing else you know that no matter how weird or dark or hopeless things get, one way or another it’ll all be right by the end.
After a long and silent hour, by which time I’m sure Lindy’s in bed for good, I leave my room and pad barefoot down to Dad’s office. He and I made a deal that he’d never rifle through my bedroom looking for weed or notes from boys or squirrel bones, and I’d never snoop in his office, where he keeps his scribbled notes and half-birthed books and who knows what else. I doubt he’d care if I snuck around in his bedroom (Lindy absolutely would care) but his office is his private space.
Still, didn’t he invite me in by leaving our stone for me to find?
The summer before I started high school, Dad took me out for pizza to let me know he was dating our brand-new family therapist. He’d never brought a woman home before because he loved me and he loved us, and I was all he needed. But now that I was old enough, maybe I could understand that he sometimes felt . . . “isolated,” he had said. He never said lonely, was always really careful with the L-word.
I concentrated on building a breadstick bridge across my salad bowl and asked, “Why are you telling me this, anyway?”
He reached over the pizza and patted my hand. “Because you have big shoulders. You know what that means?”
I didn’t then, but maybe now I do.
I turn the knob to Dad’s office, putting my weight on it as I push the door open so the warped edge won’t scrape the top of the frame. Usually it’s locked. Lindy and Officer Griffin must’ve opened it; I know there’s a spare key hidden in the decade-old plastic cactus on the kitchen windowsill. Inside it’s dark. The streetlights outside filter through the horizontal blinds, painting pale bars on the carpet. It’s a little creepy. Not that I’m afraid of the dark or anything pathetic, but for some reason when it’s late at night or ungodly early, this house I’ve lived in all my life doesn’t feel . . . quite like mine. Like the hallways are longer, the furniture just to the left of where I remember it, the people in the pictures slightly unfamiliar.
When I breathe deeply, the sweet-spicy clove smell of Djarum Black cigarettes fills the room. Dad’s favorite, a kind of pretentious habit he picked up when he quit his very practical job and sat down to type his first book. To Lindy’s dismay, he inhales them by the carton every few years when he’s truly, especially stressed, and even though he swears he sticks his head out the window to smoke, the smell clings.
I trail my fingers along his desk, cluttered with all the stuff you’d expect. Coffee mugs crammed with pens. Printed pages in a dozen stacks with scribbles that’d be indecipherable to anyone but Dad. His favorite paperweight, which I bought him on a field trip to the New England Aquarium: a plastic mermaid floating in sleek blue glass. His laptop, which Lindy has combed through and Officer Griffin has briefly perused. Neither of them found a document titled “Where I Am by Joshua Scott.” Nor did they find a roadmap marked with a big red X in his desk drawers. I open them anyway to double-check, and find only tins of mints and Dunkin’ Donuts receipts and a Rubik’s Cube, unsolved.
On the bookshelf, I see what I really came in for. I pull out A Time to Chill, the first book in the row of Dad’s novels. On the dedication page, I find the familiar words: “To Sidonie, with all my love.” The rest of Dad’s stuff is dedicated to me or, in books published after Lindy came along, to “my best girls.”
In the very back where the author’s headshot should go, there is instead a picture of my mother holding me in her hospital room at Good Shepherd (which gives the impression that Joshua Scott is either a small woman with a masculine name, or a baby). She’s in an armchair, limp-haired and haggard and blurred with sweat. She cradles pink newborn me in her arms, resting against a still-ballooned stomach under her hospital gown. I think she looks happy. I mean, it’s not the most flattering picture; maybe that’s why she never wanted Dad to take another. There aren’t many pictures of me and my mother. Which seems crazy; you can’t spend five minutes on Facebook without stumbling into two hundred photos of some older cousin’s kid eating Cheerios. Then again, she left when I was two. All my baby pictures fit in a polka-dot child’s album, and my mother must’ve snapped most of them, because she’s not in them. When she does show up in shots, she’s a white pair of hands steadying me as I climb into a laundry basket, or she’s the hem of a skirt, a socked foot, a bent knee, or the nut-brown tips of her dangling hair.
These flashes in the corners of photos are all I have. Aside from the story of her leaving, Dad never talked about my mother. “That’s all in the past,” he said whenever I asked. But we read Faulkner in AP English last fall, and I know Dad has a bunch of him on the shelf between Terence Faherty and Gillian Flynn. So I think he should know better that the past isn’t dead . . . or however that old quote goes.
I shove back Dad’s battered rolling chair from the desk and settle down in the groove that’s almost warm, then start up his laptop. It’s a sleek black machine that I’m not supposed to touch, but have on rare occasions. The password—Faye4321—has always been scribbled on a sticky note under his mouse pad. Not his most cunning maneuver.
The laptop pings to life, too loud in the silent house, the screen unnaturally bright in the dark office. After I punch in the password, his background picture materializes, some old painting of fishermen in a boat.
A man of complicated tastes, my dad.
I click search on the start menu and look for “Sidonie Scott” in all documents, then in all files and folders and then, desperately, in pictures and videos. “Sidonie” turns up nothing either, so I open an internet window and Google “Sidonie Scott,” not for the first time. Not for the fiftieth time either. No dice. I’ve tried to use Google-fu to find out more about my mother than the next-to-nothing my dad’s been willing to tell me. But there’s no Sidonie Scott on Facebook, or LinkedIn, or in the online White Pages. No one’s written a single news article about a Sidonie Scott who could possibly be my mother. And it’s not like it’s a common name. As far as I can tell, she’s nowhere.
Of course, other than her name (and not even her maiden name, at that) I don’t have much to go on. Dad hasn’t heard from her since the divorce papers, filed through a lawyer who kept her location a secret. After that, Ma Ma Scott left my resilient Scottish grandfather alone in Maine for a few years to help Dad look after me. This I remember in a fuzzy slideshow of dress-up games and PB&J lunches and Dad staggering in from work and crushing me to him as if he hadn’t expected to find me at home waiting.
So we weren’t always the happiest family in Happy Town. But I wasn’t a gloomy kid or, contrary to Dad’s predictions, a creepy kid, and life wasn’t so bad. The worst that happened in an average day was my dad forgot to buy hot-dog buns because he was wrapped up in writing Vital Signs, so we used folded white bread like a pair of losers. Just sometimes, usually at night, and especially when Dad was going through one of his bad times, there was this thing, a dumb hungry animal in my chest. And I didn’t know what to call it, but I knew that it was my mother. My dad must’ve felt it too. Otherwise he wouldn’t have had the bad tim
es, would he? At least, that was my theory.
On a whim I Google “Joshua Scott.” The usual turns up: “Joshua Scott is the author of a series of medical mystery novels following forensic pathologist Dr. Miles Faye,” yada yada. I scroll through, but there’s nothing about Joshua Scott disappearing. How long will that last?
I push myself back from the desk and hug the copy of A Time to Chill. I need to think. No, I need to think like Dad. How hard can it be to find him when I’ve been reading his mysteries since I was a kid? He even left a clue for me especially. The stone heart won’t be in Officer Griffin’s missing persons report. But then, I’m not sure Dad is missing. I mean, he’s clearly not here, but giving me the heart like this, it can’t be meaningless. He wouldn’t ditch me for any old reason. He must be searching for something. Or, considering what he left behind, for someone. And searching isn’t missing.
Well, I can search too.
I’ve even got an idea where to start. Whenever I’m trying to find a lost object—a favorite mystery, a very un-favorite textbook, my cell phone, a sneaker—Lindy’s well-meaning and unoriginal advice is: “Figure out where you last had it, and that’s where you should start looking.”
I don’t remember my mom, but the picture in back of this book is my proof that she was real, that she was a whole person who once held me. And if that’s the case, then maybe Good Shepherd is where I truly had her last.
FOUR
While Mr. McCormick fiddles with the volume on Love’s Labour’s Lost—not the play, but the musical where Alicia Silverstone’s Princess of France speaks with nearly the same accent as Cher—I reach across the aisle and poke Jessa Price with my pencil eraser.
The Mystery of Hollow Places Page 2