How Quickly She Disappears

by Raymond Fleischmann

  And in that way, maybe this would bring them closer together. Elisabeth thought of the other night when she had confided in Margaret about her sister. Wasn’t that the single best thing she had done for their relationship in months? It had made her feel closer to Margaret, and she knew that Margaret felt the same way. Remember: Margaret had wanted to help. Why? To solve the mystery, but what that really meant was that she wanted to be closer to her mother, and that’s precisely what this would do. The episode at school had been an episode rooted in loneliness. But now—now they would be a team. They would be friends. They would be confidantes. They would solve the mystery, and they would solve it together. She couldn’t fight against Margaret, but perhaps she could work with her. Perhaps this was exactly what needed to happen.

  “Of course I’ll do it!” Margaret swooned. “You can count on me, Mama.”

  They were sitting in Margaret’s bedroom, Elisabeth in her desk chair, Margaret seated on the edge of her bed. The door was closed, and John had already gone to bed, exhausted from another grueling day at the base. Elisabeth had explained everything—or almost everything. She didn’t tell Margaret about the episode in September, her brush with the lion’s teeth. But she wanted to be sure that Margaret had a sense of it. She wanted her daughter to make an informed decision.

  “Take this seriously,” she said. “I want you to really think about what you’re doing. Mr. Seidel—”

  “I’m not scared of Mr. Seidel,” Margaret said. “I know what he did to Mr. Sanford, but I don’t care.” She sat back, leaning on her hands, smiling smugly. “I could be his daughter. That’s what he told me.”

  Elisabeth puzzled at that. “When did he say that?”

  “When he stayed with us.” She bounced closer to the edge of the mattress. “I can’t wait to meet Jacqueline. She’ll look just like you, right?”

  “You’re getting ahead of yourself. I want you to really—”

  “What’s Mr. Seidel going to talk to me about?”

  Elisabeth sat back. “I honestly don’t know, but I think talking is beside the point. He’ll probably just ask you about school and Fairbanks and other little things. I think he just wants to see you.” This is all a game to him, and you’re the ante. That would have been the easiest way to put it, and the most honest. “He’s lonely,” Elisabeth told her instead, “and this visit will mean a lot to him. It’ll be a favor, understand, so he’ll do us a favor in return.”

  “He’ll tell you where the man is living. The man who kidnapped Jacqueline.”

  “Yes.”

  She jumped to her feet, and then she flung herself back down on the bed, bobbing with excitement. “This is amazing,” she said. “I feel like Monsieur Poirot!”

  “Okay, okay,” Elisabeth said. “Be quiet now, all right?”

  And then she explained, just to be clear, that this was something to be kept strictly between the two of them.

  “This is our secret,” she said. “You absolutely can’t tell Papa about this.”

  “Why not?”

  She worked through it for a second. “Because it’ll worry him.”

  “But there’s nothing to worry about,” Margaret said. “I’m not scared of Mr. Seidel, and you’ll be there the whole time.”

  “No, no,” Elisabeth said. Had she really failed to make that clear? Or had Margaret not listened? “I’ll be there with you at the prison, but not in the visitation room. You’ll be meeting Mr. Seidel alone.”

  Margaret’s face went slack. “Oh.”

  “But I’ll be right around the corner. I’ll be right outside the room, and if anything goes wrong, I’ll be there in a heartbeat.”

  Even that felt too ominous. If anything goes wrong. Then again, she had wanted Margaret to make an informed decision, and now she understood the situation in all its gravity. But after a moment, she dismissed it.

  “I’m still not scared,” Margaret said. She grinned, positively glowed. “We’re a team, Mama. I won’t let you down.”

  Elisabeth lay in bed for an hour that night. She was sleeping in the guest room—she hadn’t shared a bed with John since Tanacross—and the bedroom was as dark as a tomb, illuminated only by a single shuttered window. She was chewing her lips. Kneading the sheets in her fists. Was she really willing to trust Alfred? She could still turn back. She could call off the whole thing.

  But, yes, truly, in her deepest core, she thought that she could trust him. She convinced herself of it. She could trust him because she trusted Jacqueline. She believed in their connection. Alfred’s dream was no coincidence. A huge, sweeping field, he had told her. The two of them holding hands. Come and get me, Jacqueline had beckoned in her own unceasing dreams, and Alfred’s visions were proof positive that her own desperate reaching would finally find its mark, not in dreams but in true life.

  It was all preposterous, she knew. Dreams. Visions. A universal connection. This wasn’t like her. She was a sensible woman. A rational woman. But the connection between her and Jacqueline went beyond the senses. Their connection could not be explained in rational terms, but that didn’t mean it wasn’t real.

  Why, then, couldn’t she fall asleep? Why couldn’t she relax? Nerves, she told herself. It was just nerves. She lay blinking in the dark, but sleep never found her, and with it neither did her sister.

  CHAPTER 35

  Saturday. Margaret was free from school, and John was grading in his office at the base. It had snowed the night before, and the world was a muted wash of white. Smothered in fresh powder, everything looked tighter. The world seemed to be drawing a long breath.

  They were silent in the car, but Margaret didn’t appear to be nervous. Hers was the silence of concentration. She was an athlete braced for the big one. The debutante at the top of the stairs. She felt confident and unintimidated, or so Elisabeth hoped, all the more because of the exchange they had shared before setting out.

  “Put this in the pocket inside your parka,” Elisabeth had told her, and she had given Margaret a hunting knife clasped in a leather sheath. Eight inches long and razor sharp, its handle was carved from the antler of a caribou. It had been a gift from Mack. “Just in case,” Elisabeth had added, and they both ignored the implications of that.

  “I thought it’d be bigger,” Margaret said now. They were walking inside the prison, and Margaret was glancing all around her.

  “I know. I thought the same thing.”

  “Where are the watchtowers? And the patrols?”

  “They’re all inside, I guess.”

  She mulled that over. “That’s the most important thing, I suppose.”

  “Yes,” Elisabeth said, “I suppose it is.”

  She had to fill out some extra paperwork for Margaret, and Margaret had to sign a separate record book. Juveniles, its cover read in flaking gold print, and there were only a handful of entries above her own. As always, the Walrus processed them, accepting their paperwork without even reading what they’d written. But he was more chipper than Elisabeth had ever seen him. He grinned with the warmth of a saint as he watched Margaret fill out her record.

  “Looks just like him,” he told Elisabeth, and she could have corrected him, but instead she merely smiled.

  Saturday, it seemed, was the most popular day of the week for visitations. Two other prisoners were seated at either end of the table: a wizened Negro and an Indian boy no older than eighteen. The Negro man was speaking to a pair of well-dressed women approximately Elisabeth’s age. Daughters, she assumed, or perhaps even granddaughters. The women spoke at a normal volume, but the man spoke so bashfully that Elisabeth couldn’t hear him from even ten feet away. The Indian boy was talking to his mother in a weary, wavering dialect of Athabaskan. It was similar to but different from the Tanacross dialect, and Elisabeth could only partially comprehend it. She understood just one sentence in its entirety.

  “Don’t let
them see you crying,” the boy’s mother told him.

  They waited for twenty minutes. And then, finally, the lock clicked open and the door swung wide, and Alfred was with them. Elisabeth had expected elation. Margaret, my dear, she imagined him booming, and would she stop the embrace he’d surely attempt?

  But as he approached them, and as Elisabeth and Margaret rose to their feet like gracious diplomats, Alfred solemnly shook his head.

  “You’ll have to come back another time,” he said.

  Elisabeth’s mouth fell open. “What do you mean? Why?”

  “I wanted to meet Margaret alone.” He glanced at the other visitors. “We’re not alone. You’ll have to come back another time.”

  “No, no,” Elisabeth said, stepping forward. “We’re here now. We’ve done everything you asked.”

  “We’re not here alone. That was the agreement.”

  “The agreement,” Elisabeth said, “was to talk with Margaret one-on-one. No guards, no me. That’s what you said, and that’s exactly what we’re giving you. If there are other people here, I can’t control that.”

  “Elisabeth—”

  “No,” she spat, “this is it.” She had never felt so adamant about anything in her life. She had already gambled. She had already gone above and beyond. Time and time again, she had capitulated. She had given him everything he wanted. And now he was trying to wheedle out of their arrangement? No. She wouldn’t let him. “You told me this was about trust,” she said. “I’m here. Margaret’s here. And now you’re the one turning your back on us. You’re the one betraying my trust. A deal’s a deal, Alfred. If you don’t—”

  “All right. Okay.” He hunched his shoulders and lowered his head, glancing again at the other prisoners and their families. He was embarrassed, Elisabeth realized. He was losing face like this, getting scolded by a woman. “You’re right,” he said quietly, “but you still have to wait outside.”

  “That was the arrangement.” She looked at Margaret, and Margaret offered the slightest of nods. “Twenty minutes,” Elisabeth said. She checked her wristwatch. “It’s eleven twenty-five now. I’m coming back at a quarter till twelve.”

  “Fine,” Alfred said. “Now go.”

  She had already planned this moment in her mind. She wouldn’t say good-bye to Margaret. She wouldn’t hug her. She wouldn’t offer so much as an encouraging smile. For Margaret’s sake and her own, she’d do nothing that would give more weight to the situation, nothing that might suggest there was anything to worry about. She would turn and knock on the door, and then she would walk through it. She would leave her daughter with a murderer, and she wouldn’t look back.

  And yet she couldn’t help herself. As the door swung open, she turned her head and looked, just for a second. Margaret was watching her. Their eyes met, and the room seemed to pinch smaller, and in that brief moment Elisabeth almost went back for her.

  But she didn’t. She walked through the door and it closed behind her. As far as Elisabeth knew, Margaret was still watching her as she left.

  “Wait a moment,” Elisabeth told the guard, a young man she had never seen before. His coifed hair and gleaming patent leather shoes had all the signs of a new hire. His key was in the lock, but now he paused. “Can you leave that unlocked?”

  “The door?”

  “Yes.”

  “Why?”

  She was ready for that. “My daughter’s been sick with nausea all morning. She might need to run to the bathroom fast.”

  “We’re at the desk right over there,” the guard said, pointing down the hallway. “She only needs to knock. We’ll hear her. We’ll come in a flash.”

  “But it’d be easier to leave the door unlocked. Would you really mind?”

  “We’re not allowed to do that,” he said, smiling sheepishly. He turned the key, and the lock clicked with all the tightness of a cocking gun. “It’s a rule, you know?”

  No matter. It was all right. Everything was fine. Margaret wasn’t even alone; there were five other people in the visitation room. Five, and two of them were men. Maybe they weren’t guards, but their presence was still a stroke of good fortune, and Elisabeth felt much more at ease. Yes, everything was fine. Better than expected.

  She retrieved a chair from the lobby and set it beside the door. Her ear would have been pressed against it had she been any closer.

  And she did hear their voices. Faintly, beneath the Athabaskans’ halting words and the optimistic chatter of the two young women, she heard Alfred speaking to Margaret, and she heard Margaret speaking back in kind.

  “Warmer,” she heard Margaret say, and a few seconds later, as if reassuring Alfred, “It’s fine.”

  Then Alfred spoke for a long bout, but his voice was so hushed that Elisabeth couldn’t make anything out. She leaned closer to the door, but it made no difference. Silence for a time, and then came the rattling cacophony of the courtyard’s door being opened, and Elisabeth jumped to her feet. She heard the door slam shut a moment later.

  Sure enough, Alfred and Margaret had gone outside. Through the room’s barred window, Elisabeth peered inside, but the Negro and the Athabaskan boy and their visitors were the only people seated at the table. Content and unalarmed, they were all still talking among themselves. The boy was smoking a cigarette now, staring into space as his mother idly talked.

  But everything was fine. There was no reason to worry. Margaret could handle herself, and this was what they had all agreed to in the first place, wasn’t it? The two of them alone. Her daughter and Alfred shut away by themselves.

  But Elisabeth didn’t feel like sitting down anymore. She paced in front of the door, peering inside every few seconds. Two minutes crawled by. Then five. She checked her watch as often as she checked the window. A guard walked past her, paid no attention, turned the corner down the hall.

  Seven minutes. Ten. They were still outside. What in the hell were they doing outside? Maybe, Elisabeth thought, there were other inmates and their families out there, too. Despite the previous night’s snow, it was warm today—a balmy fifteen degrees—and the sun was shining brilliantly. People would want to be outside, wouldn’t they? Maybe Alfred and Margaret weren’t alone. And even if they were, this was the arrangement. This was what she had gotten herself into. And she did trust Margaret. Alfred, too. Didn’t she? Things would be fine.

  Twelve minutes. Fifteen. With each second that passed, Elisabeth expected the courtyard door to come clattering up, two shadows casting across the floor like unfurling rugs. And there she would be—Margaret, her daughter, unharmed. He asked me about school. I told him about Saturn’s moons and the Battle of Barnet.

  But twenty minutes came, and the courtyard door never opened. The very second her watch read a quarter till twelve, Elisabeth tried to enter the visitation room, remembering the door was locked only after she had furiously rattled its handle. She knocked, staring at the others inside the room. Stupid. They couldn’t unlock it either.

  “Hey,” she shouted in the direction that the young guard had walked. “Excuse me, can you open this?” She jiggled the handle noisily, as if that might catch his attention. “Hey, excuse me. Guard?”

  Nothing. She loped down the hallway. And then she saw why the guard wasn’t answering her: He wasn’t at his desk.

  “Hey,” she said. Then louder, glancing around, “Hey! Hello?”

  She walked farther down the hallway.

  “Hello?”

  No answer.

  The lobby, then. The Walrus. She jogged down the hallway in the other direction, turned the corner, found him sitting at his desk. He was reading a magazine—a gossip rag, of all things. The True Story of Joan Crawford, its cover read, and Crawford stared straight at her with those piercing, sultry eyes.

  “Can you unlock the visitation room, please?” Elisabeth said.

  The Walrus looked up, rais
ed one fat finger. “Ask the guard down there.”

  “He’s not there.”

  “Not where?”

  “At his desk,” Elisabeth said. She stepped in the direction she had come from, hoping to usher him along. “Can you please just help me?”

  “He should be there.”

  “He’s not.”

  The Walrus leaned across his desk for a better view. “There he is.” The fat finger again. Pointing. “Ask him.”

  The younger guard was at the far end of the hallway. Where had he gone? Where had he come back from? It didn’t matter. Elisabeth was at the door in three strides, shouting and waving the guard forward.

  “I need to get in,” she said. “Come on. Open the door. Open the door.”

  And finally, she was back inside. The courtyard door was still closed, and she dashed to it, reaching for its handle by the floor. It was heavier than she expected, heavy and rusted, with wheels that screeched and fought against their tracks. She struggled with it, but then the door was up, and the light reflecting off the courtyard’s snow blasted through the room like cold fire. She stood, and she stared.

  The courtyard was empty. Margaret and Alfred were gone. Save for a few footprints, the yard was as peaceful and undisturbed as an old country cemetery. What Elisabeth didn’t notice, not right away, was a space in one corner where the gathered bank of snow had been cleared. And carved into the crumbling wall was a hole, ankle high and eighteen inches wide, much too small for an adult, but just large enough for a child.

  CHAPTER 36

  The caustic cold against her forehead, cheeks, and chin. Her hands buried in the fresh snow. Weight around her chest and underarms, someone pulling her up from the spot where she had fallen. She never lost consciousness, so it wasn’t that she fainted. But as soon as she saw the empty courtyard, all the power in Elisabeth’s body left her instantly, and then she was lying on the ground. Not moving. Not crying. Not even blinking. It was like a switch had been flipped. She wasn’t even human anymore. Just a pile of limbs and skin and bone, lifeless and without purpose.