Vanishing Act

by Barbara Block

  George muttered something I couldn’t hear and viciously kicked at a soda bottle lying on the sidewalk. Then he pushed the terminal door open and went inside. I followed.

  “What the hell am I supposed to do?” he demanded.

  “Get dressed and go home.”

  “That’s ridiculous. Next I suppose you’ll tell me I should sneak back in my house?”

  I shrugged. “Hey, don’t take this out on me. You didn’t have to say yes.”

  “So you keep telling me.” He rubbed his ear. “My sister’s other kids are fine. They’re not running around on the streets. They’re going to school. Doing what they’re supposed to. Raymond’s always been a pain in the ass. What’s his problem anyway?”

  “I’d say you’re going to get to find out.”

  “Just what I want,” George muttered as he glanced around. “I’d forgotten how bad this place was.”

  “Well, buses aren’t the transportational choice of the rich and famous.” Or even the middle class, for that matter. If they were, the place would have looked a lot different.

  The air in the station smelled of sweat, alcohol, and disinfectant. The fluorescent light George and I were standing under flickered on and off. The walls and floor were different shades of grayish-brown. Video games and vending machines took up the wall nearest to us. Wanted posters were pasted up beside the cashier’s window. Lines of straight-back chairs were bolted into the middle of the floor. Ten people were slouched down in them, piles of bags at their feet. The place was quiet except for the canned laughter coming from one of the small televisions three kids were clustered around and the squeals from two small boys who were chasing each other while their mother, gray with fatigue, watched helplessly.

  George rocked back and forth on the soles of his feet impatiently. A minute later the loudspeaker crackled into life.

  “At least the bus is on time,” he noted.

  I nodded. We watched the doors across the way open and disgorge a stream of people into the terminal. They were mostly old men and women and young women with small children.

  George craned his neck to look. Then he pointed. “There he is.”

  I followed his finger. Raymond was wearing a ski hat pulled down over his ears, an open triple-fat goosedown jacket, an immense purple sweatshirt, and pants that I was willing to bet came down below his ass. He had a boom box in one hand and a duffel bag in the other. He could have been a poster boy for ghetto couture. There wasn’t one cliche he’d managed to avoid.

  “God,” George muttered, appalled. As Raymond sauntered toward us, George unconsciously straightened his tie and touched the collar buttons of his light blue oxford shirt as if reassuring himself. “He didn’t look like that at Thanksgiving.”

  I began feeling sorrier for George. He was definitely going to have his hands full. By now Raymond was about six feet away. George plastered a big smile on his face. “So, how was the trip?” he asked.

  Raymond gave a sullen shrug.

  George tried again. “Where are your other bags?”

  “Out there.” Raymond jerked his head to indicate the direction he’d just come from. Then he looked me up and down. It was a long, insolent look. “Who’s the white bitch?” he asked his uncle.

  I could hear the intake of George’s breath.

  “It’s okay.” I put my hand on his arm to restrain him. “I can handle this.” I smiled at the kid. He looked like fourteen going on twenty. “Cute.” Raymond didn’t say anything. He just stood there, grinning and staring at me. “Just so you know,” I continued, “I understand that you don’t want to be here. I understand that you figure if you’re obnoxious enough, maybe your uncle will put you on the next bus out of here. But that’s not going to happen.” I took a step toward him. “And don’t call me bitch again. I don’t like it.”

  Raymond kept grinning.

  Suddenly I wanted to smack him and wipe that grin off his face. I had a feeling George did too, but I couldn’t tell what he was thinking. His face had become all angles and planes, the way it did when he was upset.

  I wondered when the first blow-up was going to come, because I didn’t want to be around when it happened.

  Chapter 6

  Marks shifted around in his seat and wiped the barbecue sauce off his hands with a paper napkin, wadded it up, and added it to the growing pile of red, grease-stained paper beside him. It was a little after one the following afternoon, and Marks and I were sitting in a booth in Tippy’s, a barbecue and beer joint that wished it were on a North Carolina back road instead of Syracuse’s North Side. The decor leaned to driftwood, fishing nets, old license plates, stolen traffic signs, Christmas lights, and anything else the owners had on hand. It was a down-and-dirty place frequented by truckers, bikers, and other assorted carnivores. The only vegetable Tippy’s listed on the menu was potatoes, and those came deep fried.

  I’d lucked out and gotten Marks on the phone around ten that morning, a pleasant surprise, since I’d been expecting to play telephone tag with him for the next couple of days.

  “I just got off the phone with Sampson,” Marks had told me, his voice sounding as if he’d smoked a couple of packs a day for the last thiry years. “He said you’d be calling.”

  I blessed George.

  “I was wondering if I could buy you lunch?”

  “Maybe. You own Noah’s Ark, right?”

  “Right.”

  “My stepson’s been in your store.”

  “Really?” I said, snuggling the phone against my ear with my shoulder as I broke open a roll of quarters and put them in the drawer.

  “He was looking at a three-foot Burmese.”

  “That’s an expensive investment,” I’d observed. “About four hundred dollars if you add in the aquarium, heat rock, and lights.”

  “That’s what the guy behind the counter told him. It’s for his birthday.”

  “Birthdays should be special.” Pickles, the store cat, had jumped up on the counter and begun meowing for her mid-morning snack. I fed the cat a couple of treats. She grabbed them out of my hand and retreated. She’d been under ten pounds when I found her—now she weighed almost twenty. “Maybe we could help each other out,” I’d suggested as I watched my cat eat.

  There’d been a short pause on the other end of the line, then Marks asked if I knew Tippy’s.

  “Who doesn’t?”

  “Meet me there at one. I can give you twenty minutes. Thirty tops.”

  I gave Pickles one more treat and closed the box. “How will I know you?”

  “I’ll be the fat, balding guy sitting in the front, eating barbecue. ”

  As it turned out, that described half of the men there. The other half might have been bald too, but they were wearing baseball caps, so I couldn’t tell.

  I was standing in the doorway looking around and brushing snowflakes off my jacket, inhaling the wonderful odors of frying potatoes and roasting meat, when a guy sitting in a booth halfway down the room raised his hand and waved me over. His scalp gleamed like a freshly waxed floor. His skin was pink and flushed. When he looked at me, I saw that his most prominent facial feature were his earlobes. They were long and fleshy and totally out of character with the roundness of the rest of his face. In the Orient that feature would have have made him a man of good fortune; here it just made him a customer for cosmetic surgery.

  “So you’re Robin Light,” he said, looking up.

  I nodded, took off my jacket, and slid into the banquette across from him.

  “You look better than the guys downtown said you would,” Marks observed, his eyes lingering on my breasts a fraction longer than necessary.

  “That’s a relief.” I could just imagine what the guys downtown had said.

  “Yeah. I bet you were worried.” He gave a mirthless laugh. “How’s old George doing?”

  “Well enough.”

  “He sounded good. Maybe I should quit my job and go back to school too.”

  “Why not?” />
  “Because I got too many expenses, that’s why.” He pointed to his sandwich. “My wife is trying to get me to cut down on red meat. She feeds me fish and pasta. I hate fish and pasta.”

  “She’s probably doing it for your own good.”

  “That’s what she tells me, but personally, I think she’s doing it to make my life miserable. I mean, what’s the point if you can’t eat what you want? Skim milk in your coffee?” He shuddered. “And now she’s got something worse. Rice milk. Whoever invented that should be shot.” He absentmindedly pulled on his earlobe. “This is what I get for marrying again. Now, my first wife, she served me meat loaf and mashed potatoes when I came home for dinner. I’m lucky if Lucy fixes me anything at all. She’s too busy driving her kid out to the rink for hockey practice.” He broke off as the waitress came over to take my order.

  “How old is your stepson?” I asked after she left.

  “Fifteen.” Marks speared six or seven french fries. “I don’t know why he wants a snake, but he does. I mean, it’s not like that thing is going to greet you when you come through the door.”

  “And his mother says it’s okay? She doesn’t mind?”

  Marks reached for the ketchup bottle. “Mind? She thinks it’s a great idea. ‘So educational,’ ” he said, mimicking her voice. “My first wife wouldn’t have had a thing like that in the house.” He doused his french fries and put the bottle down. “Sometimes you don’t know when you’re well off.”

  I made a sympathetic noise as the waitress came back with my order, and I changed the subject. I really didn’t want to hear about Marks’s martial mistakes. “Why don’t you bring your son in,” I suggested after I’d taken a bite of my barbecue sandwich. “I’m sure we can fix him up with something he’d like at a price you’ll like.”

  Marks smiled and picked up his sandwich.

  “Saturday afternoon would be a good time.” Tim wouldn’t be working then. Which would save me from explaining why I was about to make a sale that the store wasn’t going to make money on.

  “Who hired you?” Marks asked.

  “Her brother.”

  Marks didn’t say anything, which was interesting.

  “He seems sincere.” I had to raise my voice to be heard over a woman wailing about the man she’d lost. Someone had put money in the jukebox.

  “I’m sure he does.”

  “And a little intense.”

  “Yeah. He’s that all right.” Marks folded up his napkin. “He was pulled in on a second-degree assault a couple of years back. Did he tell you that?”

  I shook my head. “No. He didn’t.” But thinking back to the way he’d acted when he’d seen Tommy West at the Yellow Rhino, I wasn’t surprised. “What happened?”

  “The usual crap. A bar brawl.”

  “That’s not a big deal.”

  “Except in this case he was waving a gun around.” Marks inspected a french fry before popping it in his mouth. “Also right after his sister disappeared, Hayes started threatening her boyfriend. The kid’s family had their attorney get an order of protection taken out on him.”

  “Did he use a gun there too?”

  “Naw. Threatened him with a bat. Sometimes they can do more damage than a bullet.” Marks took a gulp of soda. “Of course, the punk denies the whole thing.”

  “He told me he just pushed him a little.”

  “Not exactly.”

  “Is there anything else about him I should know?”

  Marks hesitated for a moment. Then he said, “Oh, what the hell,” and went on. “Not that this necessarily means anything, but when he was fifteen he got sent away for a while.”

  From what Bryan had told me, I’d half expected as much. “As in juvie?” The singing stopped as suddenly as it had begun.

  “As in one of these private places that rich kids go when their parents can’t handle them anymore. If he’d been poor, he’d have had a PINS taken out on him.”

  What Bryan had told me about his father dying and his mother having to go out to work flashed through my mind. “Where did the money come from? I thought the family was supposed to be poor.”

  Marks shook his head. “You got me. I’m just telling you what I read in the report.” He took another bite of his sandwich.

  I did the same while I considered what Marks had just said. It was interesting, but only from the point of view of Bryan’s veracity. “Are you saying that Bryan is involved in his sister’s disappearance?”

  “No, I’m not saying that.”

  “Then what are you saying?”

  “Nothing. I just thought you’d like to know that I wouldn’t consider him to be what you would call a reliable informant.” Marks started in on his french fries again.

  “Thanks.” I had come to that decision myself. The men sitting in front of us got up. Their bodies filled the aisle. I watched them ambling to the cashier as I spoke. “You think that Bryan Hayes’s scenario of Tommy West’s snake killing his sister is bullshit?”

  Marks snorted. “Have you seen the snake?”

  I shook my head.

  “It’s true it’s long, but it’s real skinny. Maybe the thing could choke a kid to death, but it sure couldn’t do an adult.”

  I took a sip of my soda and another bite of my sandwich. I chewed slowly. I’d forgotten how good the food here tasted. “What do you think happened to Melissa Hayes?” I asked after I’d swallowed.

  Marks shook his head. “You got me. Maybe she just couldn’t stand things anymore and she took off.”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “Some of her clothes were missing. A couple of pairs of jeans. A couple of T-shirts.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Her roommate went over her stuff.”

  “She must know her clothes pretty well,” I said, thinking of Melissa Hayes’s jam-packed closet.

  “She said they shared. Also the Hayes girl’s pocketbook was gone.”

  I repeated what Bryan had said to me about Melissa always taking it with her.

  “He told me that too.”

  “But you don’t believe him?”

  Marks shrugged. “It’s possible.”

  “What did her roommate say?”

  “She said she didn’t know about any theft.”

  “Did you check and see if one had been reported?”

  “This isn’t Weedsport,” Marks replied, a defensive edge in his voice. “I’m responsible for hundreds of cases.”

  I took that as a no. “I’m sure you are.”

  “Damn straight.” Mollified, Marks settled back down and took a sip of his coffee. “At the time, I didn’t know she was going to fall off the face of the earth.”

  I thought back to the conversation I’d had with Calli that morning at breakfast as I put some ketchup on my fries.

  “Sorry, but I didn’t find out much,” Calli had said after she’d ordered an egg-white omelet and dry wheat toast from the waitress at Denny’s. “I spoke to the guy who worked on the Melissa Hayes thing. He told me everything he knows is in here.” She’d pushed the manila envelope next to her coffee cup across the table.

  I couldn’t help noticing that she’d gotten fake nails, which was in line with the other changes she’d been making. Since coming back to Syracuse, Calli had lost twenty-five pounds, cut her hair, changed her makeup, and gotten contact lenses.

  As I opened the envelope I thought that every time I saw Calli she looked younger. I took the articles out and quickly scanned them.

  “You’re right,” I’d said. “There isn’t much here.”

  “Evidently there wasn’t much to write about.”

  There were three articles. For all practical purposes, they said the same thing. Melissa Hayes disappeared on blah, blah, blah. If you have any information, please contact the police at blah, blah, blah. “I’m surprised more of a fuses wasn’t made.”

  Calli had taken a sip of coffee. “I put it down to compassion fatigue.”

  “Com
passion fatigue?” I’d said.

  “Yeah. What is it? Four or five kids have vanished over the past two years. No one wants to read about it anymore. It’s too depressing.”

  “Great.”

  “That’s just the way it is,” Calli had said before asking me whether or not I thought she should get a cat.

  I’d read the articles again before my lunch with Marks, hoping I’d missed something the first time around, but unfortunately I hadn’t.

  Now I was hoping I’d get more information from Marks. I leaned forward slightly and listened intently as he continued talking.

  “Since she disappeared right before Thanksgiving, at first I figured she’d decided to take an early holiday. Maybe she decided to skip out on her finals. Maybe she’d met someone.”

  “She had a boyfriend.”

  Marks looked amused at my naivete. “So?”

  “Right.” Dumb comment. I ate a few french fries. “Were any charges logged on her credit cards?” I asked after I’d eaten a few.

  “No, but Melissa took three hundred dollars out of her bank account the day before she left. And yes,” Marks said, anticipating my next question, “the teller remembers her doing it.”

  Another thing Bryan hadn’t mentioned. I wondered if he knew, but then I realized he had to have. The police would have told him. “Three hundred dollars isn’t a lot these days.”

  “True,” Marks conceded. “But it’s enough to take you out of here if that’s what you want. She could be in New York City. In Florida. Who the hell knows?”

  “Did you check the bus terminal?”

  “And the train depot and the airport and the cab companies. Nothing.”

  I ate a few more fries. They were crisp and salty and had their skins on, and I could have just eaten a plateful of them and been happy. “What about the sugar glider?”

  “The sugar what?”

  “The pet she just bought. She’d gone to a certain amount of trouble to get it, and then she abandons it at the dorm. Her brother said she’d never do that. That she always took it everywhere she went.”

  Marks shrugged. “Bryan told me that too, but, hey, maybe she got tired of it. Look at all the dogs running around Westcott at the end of every semester. Kids get them and then let them go because their parents won’t let them take them home and then we get the calls from the neighbors complaining about them tipping over the garbage cans.” When I didn’t say anything, Marks leaned forward slightly. “Listen, we followed procedure. We went through her phone book. We talked to the people we were supposed to talk to and checked the places we were supposed to check. We didn’t come up with anything. Not even a hint of anything.”