How Quickly She Disappears

by Raymond Fleischmann

  Proof, she thought. Your proof is waiting in my aeroplane.

  But what exactly was she looking for? Elisabeth made her way back to the cockpit. And, sitting down in the passenger seat, she noticed something that she hadn’t seen before: a small compartment near the bottom of the instrument panel. About the size of a magazine, the compartment had a small latch that Elisabeth released with the lightest tug. Maps—dozens of them, each neatly folded—and, beneath them all, there was also something else: an iron lump that at first Elisabeth didn’t recognize.

  Then she was holding it in her hands: an old-fashioned compass, a pair of calipers. And there, etched into the metal near the pin, were the initials of the designer and forger of the compass: H. F. Metzger, Lititz, Penn. Her father’s name.

  * * *

  —

  John was unswayed by the compass’s significance, to say the least.

  “Your father’s compass,” he repeated, holding it in one hand. His voice was flat, dubiously puzzling through her words as if a child had just reported something strange and only semicomprehensible. “You mean your father actually used this?”

  “No, he made it,” Elisabeth said, and she pointed at his name. “This is his work. It’s from his shop.”

  “And you smashed a window of the plane?” John said, looking at her now. “Are you serious, Else?”

  “What?”

  “You smashed a window?”

  “You’re missing the point,” Elisabeth said. They were standing on the stoop behind the house. A minute earlier, Elisabeth had pulled John out of his class. She had told him about the letter, but she hadn’t mentioned Alfred’s proposition or the first pair of notes they had exchanged. She had mentioned only the compass, and now she snatched it back from him. “This is evidence,” she said, wagging the compass in John’s face. “And that’s not the only thing. You remember my sister’s little bird? Alfred’s handwriting is similar.”

  “Similar, or the same?”

  “I can’t be sure,” Elisabeth said. “But remember the connections to the war, too. That dagger my sister had—”

  “Was standard-issue if you fought in the war,” John said. “They’re not exactly rarities. My uncle Adalard has one, and he uses it to chop vegetables.”

  “Fine, but it’s still a connection. It’s a commonality.”

  “What’s your point?”

  “My point is that this is all adding up. Alfred’s handwriting. His service in the war. It fits with the person who took my sister.”

  “A person who’s a veteran and has nice handwriting.” John made a face at her. “You’re right, Else—that really narrows it down.”

  “Don’t talk to me like that. This isn’t nothing. This is something.” She lifted her hand, still clutching the compass. “This is proof.”

  “Of what?”

  “That he was involved,” she said. “Never mind about the handwriting and the war. Let’s just say that’s coincidence. Even if it is, he still had my father’s compass. He’s still connected. He knows something more. He’s telling the truth about that, at least. Do you really think this is all—”

  “He could have gotten the compass anywhere.”

  “Not anywhere. Lititz.”

  “He could have gotten it secondhand. It could have come with the plane itself.”

  “Then how would he have known this is my father’s name?”

  And, for a second, that did seem to win John over. Then his lips soured, and he shook his head.

  “Else—”

  “Stop. Whatever it is you’re going to say, just stop it.”

  He started to turn. “I’m going back. Thanks for the break. Very helpful.”

  “Am I being unrealistic? I’m not stupid. I’m not crazy.”

  “No, but you should let the police deal with this.”

  “Why?”

  He stared at her. “Because they’re the police. This is what they do.”

  “I’m dealing with this,” Elisabeth said, “and I’ve found more in a week than they have in two months. I’m not sure how it all fits together yet, but it’s adding up to something.”

  “Tell me specifically: What does this prove?”

  “That he’s not just toying with me. That he knows something.”

  “That’s not specific. What does this prove, Else? That he murdered your sister? It’s a thing your father made, and the other stuff is just conjecture. They’re presumptions.”

  “They’re leads,” Elisabeth said, and she hated how plucky that made her sound. Cartoonish. She felt like the heroine in a radio program.

  “Okay,” John said, and now he faced her straight on. He slipped his hands into his pockets and walked toward her. “I’m going to say this as your husband: Let the police handle this. Pass on the compass if you want to—that’s fair—but then stay out of it. Enough is enough. You’ve obsessed about this plenty, Else, and Christ knows I’ve been patient with you. You’ve let Alfred get to you just like I said he intended to do, and now you’re grasping at straws. Here’s the truth—”

  “The truth—” Elisabeth began, but John’s voice rose above hers.

  “Here’s the truth,” he boomed. “You’re failing me as a wife, and you’re failing Margaret as a mother. Think about that. Are you listening? Are you hearing me?” He stepped forward as if challenging her to a fight, and out of instinct, she stepped back. As much as she would hate herself for it later, she retreated. “It’s been two months,” John said. “Two months of flying to Fairbanks, wasting money, wasting time, playing the fool.” He spat that word. Fool. “This has taken up too much of your time. Drop it. For God’s sake, just drop it,” and in a rush, he stormed inside the school, slamming the door behind him.

  CHAPTER 16

  Fuck him. And fuck Sam York. She wasn’t letting this go. But she was rattled. John could do that to her.

  “Listen,” Elisabeth said, whispering to herself. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, staring down at her feet. She waited for a moment, and then she said the word again. “Listen.”

  Even when she was a child, that word had been a sort of mantra for her. Very often, when she was alone, it was easy for Elisabeth to let her mind consume itself with nightmarish fantasies, waking visions that would take hold of her almost instantaneously. At night, she would be alone in her bedroom and sense that someone was watching her just beyond the window, and in five seconds flat she could see the glint of a man’s eyes, the soft curves of his motionless limbs. Other times, she would be walking home late from school after an evening of work on the yearbook, and suddenly she would imagine an inhuman figure loping through the cornfield beside her, a thing that moved on all fours, crooked knees and bony elbows pumping furiously as it scuttled like a crab through the cornstalks. The field swaying in the wind became its motion; the scurry of an animal became its knuckles troweling through the dirt.

  They were nothing more than fantasies, but the rush of their creation and the vividness of her imagination made these visions so potent that the terror they delivered was immediate and absolute. She would feel impelled to break into a run, and occasionally she did, but in time Elisabeth learned to quell these visions with that single word. Listen, she would tell herself, and it would help her calm down. Gather herself. Listen. There’s the sound of crickets. There’s the throttle of a car. Listen. There’s Uncle Harry snoring. Listen.

  “Listen,” she told herself again, still staring at her feet. “Just listen,” and she did. At first she noticed very little, but then she heard the stiff, rhythmic beat of someone cutting wood. Then she heard the suck and sigh of her own breathing, the faint tick of Delma’s claws as she traipsed through the living room. Listen. Someone laughed in the distance. Listen. A group of children hurried down the road, whooping as they played hoop and stick. Listen. Just listen. She closed her eyes. She tried to relax.
>
  She would write Alfred back in spite of John; it was all as simple as that. She was on the cusp of something. The verge of a breakthrough. The handwriting. The compass. The dagger from the war. These pieces were adding up to something, though Elisabeth wasn’t yet sure what that something was. Alfred was involved. She believed that. She didn’t need to take his word for it; she had the proof right here. More pieces of the puzzle were what she needed now. Until she knew what involved really meant, she needed more information. And she would get that from Alfred. Only Alfred. John? She didn’t need him for anything.

  But she knew that he was right about Margaret, and that was what had shaken her. Yes, in these past few weeks of endless work, Elisabeth had neglected her—Margaret, her only daughter, her pride and joy and greatest triumph, the most important person in her life.

  The most important person in her life? Really, was she? Elisabeth stared at the backs of her open hands, searching the crests of her veins and the parched earth of her dry skin as though she might find an answer there. These were Jacqueline’s hands she was looking at. Jacqueline’s flesh and gray-blue blood. That was true, wasn’t it? In a sense? Today, her sister’s hands would look more or less identical to hers. Elisabeth often thought about things like that—all the similarities that she and her sister would still share. She hadn’t seen her sister in twenty years, but they would recognize each other immediately. They would know each other because they were each other, and not many sisters could say that.

  The resonance of the calipers was not lost on Elisabeth. It wasn’t simply that this tool was of her father’s making. He had made many instruments throughout his career—saws and drills and hammers and punches and picks. It could have been anything in Alfred’s plane, but it wasn’t just anything. It was a compass. A pair of calipers. Jacqueline was speaking to her. Reaching for her. She remembered her sister’s voice from that dream weeks ago. Calipers, Jacqueline had said. Calipers, and with that she had meant so much more. Come find me.

  And Elisabeth would. She’d be damned if she didn’t. And that meant, for the time being, that Margaret would have to wait. In six weeks, she had already made sacrifices. She had skimped on Margaret’s education. She had paid her daughter less and less attention, both as a teacher and as a mother. And going forward, Elisabeth could only guess what other sacrifices she might have to make.

  But these sacrifices—past and present and future—were sacrifices worth making. Her sister or her daughter? Ultimately? She couldn’t say, but for now, her sister. Margaret could wait. She had to. Elisabeth stood, crossed the room, took a seat at the small vanity in the corner.

  A photograph, a lock of hair, and a self-drawn portrait. That was what he wanted.

  First, she cut her hair. She pinched a few inches’ worth between two fingers, and she clipped it loose with a pair of sewing scissors. She fastened the hair with a wind of white thread. Then she leaned to the side and pulled an album of photographs from a nearby bookshelf. She chose a picture of her and John, one that he would never miss, a forgettable shot John’s mother had snapped outside of a Lancaster diner two months before they left for Alaska. Elisabeth had dressed up for the occasion—a town-tailored rayon crepe dress, feather-trimmed sleeves, finger waves in her hair—but she and John had fought in the car on the way to the restaurant, and their dinner had been marred by lengthy spells of brooding silence. John’s mother, however, had been oblivious.

  “Let’s get a picture of the lovebirds,” she had said in the parking lot. “Cuddle up, you two,” but only their shoulders had touched, and their smiles were like winces.

  Now Elisabeth cut the picture in half, leaving only the image of herself. I asked for a photograph of you, she imagined Alfred writing if she did anything otherwise, not a photograph of you and your husband. She set the picture and the lock of hair aside.

  Then she set to work on sketching an illustration of herself. With the hard cover of a book as her board, she sketched an outline of her head and shoulders, and soon she was filling in the details—the contours, the shading. Against the paper, she held her pencil at an angle as though it were a stick of charcoal. Continually, she raised her eyes to study her reflection in the vanity mirror.

  She had never been skilled at drawing. She had taken two classes in high school, lessons that had been agonizing at the time, twenty twitching students sketching pots of flowers or arrangements of fruit as their geriatric teacher droned on about ratio and form. Circling them like a weary tiger, he’d tap his cane against the boys’ bottoms when he caught them slouching. With the girls, he’d do the same, only he’d tickle. Elisabeth’s illustrations never turned out well. Her apples looked like warts. Her flowers seemed to wilt.

  Her skills hadn’t improved in the intervening years. Her self-portrait was barely recognizable. The more details she added, the less it became. The woman in the illustration was a mass of smudges and shadows. It seemed to be a portrait of a person submerged in dark water.

  But a portrait was all he had asked for, not an accurate portrait necessarily, nor a skillful one. She guessed that accuracy was beside the point. The point was control—he wanted her following his orders. That, and he wanted something he could use to gratify himself. Elisabeth picked up the photograph again, and she made herself think of that now. She saw him in his cell, hunched like an animal in one corner. He held her photograph in his left hand, and he held it close to his face, close enough to see it in all its detail, close enough even to smell it, to taste it. Pulling up the side of her skirt and then pulling aside her underwear, Elisabeth stuffed the photograph between her legs, and she rubbed it against herself like a piece of bath tissue.

  “I hope you choke on it,” she said, slipping the photograph, hair, and folded illustration into an envelope. Then she retrieved another sheet of paper.

  Let’s begin, she wrote, and in fluid cursive she signed her full name—Elisabeth Helene Metzger Pfautz—and in doing so she couldn’t help but feel like she was signing some contract with the devil himself.

  CHAPTER 17

  Tuesday and Wednesday pass, and you and Jacqueline keep your distance. You barely speak. You carry on with your chores, and many of these you undertake together, but you and your sister work side by side in silence. Neither of you attempts a reconciliation. When your chores are done for the day, Jacqueline locks herself in her bedroom. You spend time in the woods. You crack branches against trees. You tie the stems of leaves together. You hurl stones against larger rocks and watch them splinter. You think, and you worry.

  But you never tattle. You know that you should, and you want to, but you don’t. You hate to prove your sister right, and her challenge echoes through your mind. You won’t, she told you. You won’t. That alone makes tattling almost worth doing.

  But you still feel a sense of obligation to keep The Plan a secret. Your dedication to Jacqueline goes beyond honor or oath. It’s ingrained in you. It’s habit. You’re faithful in a way that’s almost involuntary. Again and again, you consider the possibility of tattling, but as soon as it enters your thoughts, you brush it away.

  So you don’t tattle, but that doesn’t mean you’re powerless. There’s one thing that you can do, and you’ve always known that you could do it. The hatbox beneath her bed. The money. The train tickets. If Jacqueline refuses to change her mind, if she’s truly bent on going through with this, then you know what you have to do, and you won’t feel the least bit sorry for having done it. It’s her fault for putting you in this position.

  But getting to the hatbox is easier thought of than done. Surely, Jacqueline knows what you must be planning, and she protects her bedroom like a guard protecting a bank. Though the two of you rarely speak, she’s always a few feet away. She’s watching you. Listening. She’s waiting for you to try something. The days pass, and you never have your chance.

  Until, suddenly, you do. On Thursday morning, your father walks into the kitchen while yo
u and Jacqueline are washing dishes, and he claps his hands together.

  “I’m driving to Ephrata,” he says, “and, Jacky, you’re going with me.”

  You both turn from the sink. Your hands drip foam on the floor.

  “What?” Jacqueline says. “Why?”

  “Do you remember Mr. Helmer?”

  “No.”

  “He’s a die maker, and he’s going out of business. I’m buying a press and a set of molds from him.”

  “But why do I have to go?”

  “Because,” your father says, placing either hand on Jacqueline’s shoulders, “I think it would be nice.”

  “Take Elisabeth.”

  “Elisabeth’s staying here.”

  “That’s not fair,” your sister says, her voice jumping up half an octave. “Why am I going but not her?”

  “Because the two of you need some time apart,” your father says, looking first at Jacqueline and then at you. “I don’t know what’s going on, but an errand would do us all some good.” He turns to walk out of the kitchen. “We’re leaving in half an hour.”

  She whines. She protests. She tries to bargain. But your father is stubborn, and in time, to your surprise, Jacqueline relents.

  “Don’t go in my bedroom,” she hisses as she walks toward the door. She’s as angry as she’s ever been—angrier, even, than the night in the workshop earlier that week. You’re surprised that she doesn’t spit at you as she passes. But you say nothing in return. You don’t grin or glare or poke your tongue out. You let her go.

  You wait a few minutes for good measure. You stand by the living room window and watch Papa crank his screenside truck. It rattles to life, and you wave at Papa and Jacqueline as the truck rumbles away. Then you’re alone. You retrieve a grocery bag from the kitchen, and you head upstairs.