The Weight of Living

by Michael Daigle

  Nagler glanced around the store as he absorbed Joe Marin’s tale, then shook his head to break the reverie.

  “Yeah, I mean, I don’t really know. Social services picked her up and they’ll get her clean and clothed.”

  “How could any kid get that filthy?” Joe Marin asked.

  Outside, Nagler wrapped his fingers through some of the gaps in the eight-foot chain-link fence that separated the grocery parking lot from the steep drop-off that led to the railroad tracks forty or so feet beyond, and filled the rest with billows of chilly breath. The grocery building, like many along that stretch of West Blackwell, had been erected as warehouses or freight offices to handle the railroad trade. When the freight business had faded, the track became a commuter rail line to Newark and New York City. The transit authority had a repair yard on the south side of the active tracks. As he watched, a few lighted cars were pulled and pushed through that yard. At the far eastern end, he knew, some of the broken-down rigs were stored. Could she have been sleeping or hiding there?

  It made sense. She would possibly search a trash bin for food.

  But Joe Marin’s comment matched Nagler’s own observation: “She was just so passive. What’s up with that?”

  After leaving the grocery. Nagler had shuffled along the main street through the morning’s half-light, watching the early traffic huddle at streetlights, puffing trails of white exhaust, then darting forward, drivers, ghostly shapes illuminated by faint dashboard lights, sipping from mugs and tapping phones. A few semis steamed at the curb, lights flashing as drivers rattled up the rear door and hauled out the bags of commerce they had to deliver before rolling the door to a slamming close and forcing the truck back into the traffic flow.

  He banged open some shed doors looking for sleeping bags, Sterno cans, ashes on the floor and food wrappers, signs that some smart street kid, some feral kid, might leave.

  But our kid is not a street kid, he decided.

  Not in a tank top and shorts without shoes.

  Maybe a drug house, he thought. There were a few on the east side, usually just a cellar, but one on Belmont, an old mansion, was well known as a junkie hotel: Rooms with mattresses, divided by hanging sheets, closet doors with locks, air like acid, the color of coal smoke.

  In their raids, police usually found the kids of junkies huddled in an upstairs bedroom with multiple locks, stored away from the making, brewing, shooting, snorting, and fucking.

  Did she just run in panic from that, awakening to the fact that one day she’d move from the third-floor bedroom to a first-floor mattress and trade blow jobs for nickel bags? Or did someone tell her to flee, get out while she could. Someone in a junkie haze yelling, “Get a life, kid. Ain’t one here!” Then as she stood undecided, “Scram. Go get found.”

  Did she run barefoot into the cold night to be found?

  But found she was, Nagler thought, as he left a message for the commander of the drug task force to set up some drug house raids.

  The air had an icy sting; frozen mist shrouded the streets.

  She would not have hugged herself as she walked; the cold would have slipped like indifference from her hardened skin, her shell, her silent shell; like sin from the forgiven.

  ****

  “You were right, she’s eleven or twelve,” Grace Holiman said as she handed Nagler two photos.

  “We took one before she cleaned up and the other after. I’m guessing, given her condition, that if anyone saw her recently, she would have been dirty.”

  Nagler pulled his eyes away from the photos, glanced at Holiman and nodded. “Yeah. Makes sense. Give her an exam?”

  “No, Frank. I’m sorry, we can’t yet. We need permission. We ran a bath, figuring that resting in the warm water would be better for her than a quick shower, but she wouldn’t get in. She wouldn’t let the assistant undress her. It wasn’t aggressively defiant, just a pull of her shoulder, a half-turn away. She finally undressed and stepped into the bathtub after we all left the room. She was behind a curtain the entire time, but it made no difference.”

  “Did she say anything?”

  Holiman closed her eyes and formed a steeple with her fingers in front of her face. “Not a word,” she replied softly.

  “I don’t know... is she autistic or something like that? Depressed, mentally ill?”

  Holiman collected a pile of papers on her desk and tapped them together before placing them in a manila envelope. “I’d say no, first glance. There is a calculation taking place in those eyes, measuring how much distance she must maintain. Right now, that distance is immeasurable. It’s like she deliberately stopped reacting to words, touch, laughter, or any stimuli. I can’t imagine the pain that would cause that type of withdrawal.”

  Nagler nodded and stood up to leave. “I’ll see that these get distributed,” he said, waving the photos.

  Holiman said thanks. “We’ll need to find a parent, an adult family member, or a guardian before we can do any testing of her condition, either mental or physical. For now, we can monitor her. If no one shows up, we can seek guardianship. But that’s getting ahead of ourselves. Right now, I’d settle for a name.”

  ****

  Nagler found reporter Jimmy Dawson in Lauren Fox’s office in city hall. They were both on their hands and knees shifting sheets of paper from one pile to another.

  “That’s an odd way to play Twister,” Nagler said as he pushed open the door.

  “Don’t!” Both Dawson and Lauren yelled.

  Nagler held the door, peeked around the corner, and asked, “What?”

  “We just got them sorted,” Lauren said. “Open the door carefully and you can stand in the corner by my desk.”

  Nagler opened the door just enough so he could slide into the room, and then sidestepped his way to Lauren’s desk.

  “What is all this?”

  “Foreclosure statements,” Dawson said. “From the past six months.”

  “For the entire state?”

  “No, just the county,” Dawson said, standing. He offered Lauren a hand up.

  She stood, wiped her knees, and then smiled at Nagler. “Hi, Frank.”

  He smiled back and they shared a long glance. “Do I want to know?” he asked, nodding at the piles of paper.

  Lauren shrugged. “You might. There’s something odd here.”

  “Like what?”

  Dawson looked at Lauren, waiting for her to speak, but she nodded toward him.

  “Okay. Part of that old scam with Chris Foley and Gabe Richman had included shell companies buying up distressed properties. Some of those were bought after Foley, acting as the emergency management coordinator, filed a raft of phony condemnation notices. Remember?”

  Nagler said, “Yeah. So?”

  “Home foreclosures are higher in New Jersey than nearly anywhere else in the country, the fallout from the Great Recession. But in this county, they are higher than even the higher-than-normal New Jersey numbers, maybe four times higher. At one point before the economic recovery, they would have been high, but now five or six years later, they should have started to level off, if not drop.”

  Dawson waved his arms over their paper towers. “Someone is gaming the system. Usually in a foreclosure, the bank that holds the mortgage winds up with the house again. But here, the banks are being shut out.”

  “Why is that a problem?”

  “Someone is jumping the process. It’s like they get an early look at the paperwork and file before the banks. Because the banks, which in theory should at least get paid the remainder of the bad mortgage when they resell the property, are getting stiffed. The new buyer is selling off the home to one or two companies in quick succession. Then the original buyer ‘goes out of business’” — Dawson rolled his eyes and made quote marks in the air — “and the bank doesn’t get paid. The scheme could be worth millions.”

  “Okay,” Nagler said. “What happens to the buildings?”

  “Most are still empty,” Lauren said. “I�
��m working with the city tax office to create a list. City is losing thousands in tax revenue.”

  Nagler waved his hands over his head and chuckled. “You lost me on the last turn. At what point does this scheme make money for the schemers? Don’t they have to sell the homes to make back their money? And at what point does it become a crime? Sounds like a bunch of cases for civil court, not criminal.”

  “Maybe,” Lauren said. “We’ve just started digging.”

  Dawson placed his hands on his knees and stared at the piles of paper. “It’s gotta be someone inside the system.” He shook his head. “Inside knowledge.”

  “Ooo-kay,” Nagler said. “When you find their ink-stained fingerprints on the deeds, call me. Meantime, Jimmy could you post these photos? And here’s the hotline number we are asking people to call.”

  Dawson gazed at the two photos, held side-by-side. “This is her, huh? The kid in the trash?”

  Nagler frowned. “Don’t call her that. But, yeah, that’s her. We sent the photos nationwide to all the missing kid sites, and are wading through the sexual predator sites. We’re gonna hit drug houses in a couple of days, once we get warrants. Schools, churches, shelters ...” Then he stopped and blew out an exasperated breath.

  “What?” Lauren asked.

  Nagler squinted at her as he faced the question for which no one had an answer. “How does a young girl wearing nothing but a tank top and shorts, without shoes, end up sitting in a garbage container in the middle of a cold night?”

  Jimmy Dawson and Lauren Fox answered the question with blank stares, and then individually nailed their glances to the floor.

  “We have a lot of work to do,” Nagler muttered.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Sometimes people don’t want to be found

  “How dark a place does it have to be that you’d leave it wearing what she was wearing? How bad does it have to be that sitting in a garbage bin was a better choice?”

  Grace Holiman patted Frank Nagler on his back and said, “Come with me.”

  The girl, still nameless after a week, laid on her bed facing the wall. A half-eaten tuna sandwich and a few carrot sticks were on a plate on the side of the bed.

  “Is that how she spends her days?” Nagler asked.

  “Yes,” Holiman said softly. “An aide talks to her about an hour a day, showing her drawings of homes, people, animals, reading stories, just trying to get some response. She wanted her old shorts and tank top. Makes me think that was what she wore most of the time, maybe all the time. But maybe those clothes mean something more than that. Sometimes when we remove children from abusive homes, they cling to an old coat, clutch it like a shield. Then, two days ago, she wouldn’t get dressed. She was almost unnaturally comfortable being naked. Most girls her age are shy about their bodies and being seen naked is embarrassing. Obviously, it made all the other girls in the room very uncomfortable. We had to put her in a private space after the first two days she was here and she refused to wear clothes. At first, she wouldn’t take a bath, and now she won’t wear clothes. It’s erratic to say the least.”

  “Did she say anything to the other girls?”

  Holiman shook her head. “Not that we know.” She smiled. “And we’d know. These girls would tell on their mother just to gain an advantage.”

  Nagler peered back through the window in the door and sighed. “What do you think that means?” he asked as they walked to Holiman’s office.

  “I won’t speculate; we know so little. We have not found any family statewide who had said they have a missing girl fitting her description, and no agency we contacted had any record of a request for help. She wandered off, they moved.” Holiman shrugged. “She escaped from something, someone.”

  Nagler asked, “Is it possible in New Jersey in the twenty-first century that a group of people could be so far off the grid and out of social contact that no one, no police or government authority, would know where they were?” He bit his lower lip. “Escaped, maybe? A runaway? Out-of-stater? We need to check out the truck stops.”

  Holiman smiled sadly. “That is the question, Frank. Is it possible that there is some old cabin or shelter in a state park somewhere, a hidden shack in the Pinelands, or even an abandoned space in an industrial building that someone could live in undetected? That might account for the dirt that coated her, and for her being apparently underweight.”

  Nagler didn’t buy that supposition. “Maybe the woods up in North Morris or in Sussex, but not in Ironton or a similar city. You social workers do that annual homeless count, and we go with you. We have gone through nearly all those empty buildings more than once.”

  “True,” Holiman said. “But we still miss people. Sometimes people don’t want to be found.”

  Nagler felt himself pull back. He knew that was true. People can hide, easily. Lauren Fox hid in plain sight for two years, and he couldn’t find her.

  “That’s true,” he agreed. “But why?”

  “I’ll leave that to you,” Holiman said. “We are preparing a petition to family court that would name the state her temporary guardian while we look for a relative. In the meantime, the Catholic Sisters have agreed to let her stay at their home in Mendham.”

  Nagler stood up to leave.

  “You know, Frank, and I’ll just throw this out there. What if she didn’t run away? What if someone deliberately left her at the grocery, placed her in the garbage bin and told her not to move, knowing she would be found?”

  “If that was the case, why didn’t they drop her at a hospital emergency room, or a police station? They could have done that and still not been seen.” He scratched his brow. “But that is an interesting question.” He paused in the doorway. “Call me when the court makes its decision. Thanks.”

  ****

  The girl’s photos were spread all over Ironton: Schools, the library, Rashad Jackson’s community center, restaurants, the post office, train station, the hospital, any place that had a bulletin board, a wall or door.

  Nagler personally checked truck stops and rest areas on the Turnpike and Route 80, side roads and the Parkway, and even queried the big-rig drivers waiting to enter the port in Newark. They all had tales. Teen-aged hookers, abandoned kids left at the end of a country road with an envelope containing a hundred bucks and a note. Runaways, kids escaping barren homes, abused kids who found the guts to run from the old man’s belt or his friends’ nightly visits, tired of being shared for sex, tired of being alone in homes of degradation; finding that being alone on the road was at least a chance to have the highway grind off the dirt of a hopeless way of life.

  But no one knew her. Maybe in Paterson at a diner, but, naw, too young; was a little blond girl a month ago in Pennsy off 81, but she was older, got into a blue Ford ... Nagler thanked them all, gave them copies of the photos and his card and said, “Just in case.”

  Barry taped the photos to an empty mayonnaise jar and placed it on his counter, the lid secured with duct tape three times around.

  “That’s not your vacation fund,” Nagler joked.

  “You know me better than that. Every cent will be given to the Sisters for taking care of her. Maybe they can buy her some shoes. It’s sick, man.”

  The photos were sent to every police department and school district in the state, every county social service department and then to those agencies in Connecticut, New York and Pennsylvania.

  New York TV stations descended on Ironton to do stories, so many, in fact, the Westend Supermart banned the stations’ satellite trucks from its parking lot.

  The hotline received hundreds of calls.

  Nagler was glad that Lieutenant Maria Ramirez had volunteered to supervise the line. She oversaw a crew of police academy trainees and demanded that all the calls were recorded accurately. “I want every word,” she told the rookie cops. “Every word. I want the nuance in the voice. Nothing is unimportant.”

  And so the calls came. Mothers tearfully insisting the girl was their daughter, mi
ssing for nine years; fathers seeking a child lost in divorce, siblings demanding that the cops give back their sister. Offers to take her in. Childless parents inquiring about adoption. Grandparents, officials, out-of-state social workers, police officers; the endless list of the broken-hearted, the angry, the heartfelt caring. Fifty calls, a hundred. But none that offered a clue, a name, an address, a birth date or any identifying information.

  Nagler spent time reading missing child cases online, and then called up investigators who often fumbled for information, while others had the details on the tip of their tongues.

  “What are y’all looking for?” a detective from Atlanta asked.

  “Patterns,” Nagler told him. “Hints, clues, anything really. We’ve not had a case like this here and I’m looking for a way in.”

  “I hear ya,” the detective, John Guidrey, said. “We had a case maybe ten, fifteen years ago, sorry, ain’t exactly sure. Involved three or four young girls who were kidnapped by some ex-military who lived out in the woods. Story was he had lost his daughter, a girl about eight, in a nasty divorce, and seems he was trying to replace her. Sorta flipped. Case went on for some time. Seems he’d take one and if she wasn’t the perfect match for his daughter, he’d let her go. One girl was found in Jacksonville, another over in North Carolina and a third at an I-81 rest stop. Fourth girl was never found. We eventually discovered his cabin, a shack really, and searched the site and there was nobody there, a couple small bedrooms, a dirt cellar, but there was one room made out for a little girl with dolls and cute dresses and all. Really creepy, but still, just damn sad.”

  That’s a long time ago, Nagler thought. “Any evidence that he molested the girls?”

  “None in the records, but we don’t have it all. Three different Georgia counties involved, different states, some pretty sloppy record keeping. Then investigating detectives retired, died, moved away. Different times. I’m not sure how deeply they followed that question, if you know what I mean.”