“Hi, Mama,” I said.
Then she slapped me hard.
My head stung, and Leif burned on my eyelids too. His hardness getting harder, the bloodier I got.
“What the hell is wrong with you?” she asked. “Your sister is missing, Margaret.”
The word missing hit me as if she’d slapped me again. It’s odd now to think that it took so long for the seriousness of the situation to sink in with me. Was it the fact that I was wrapped up in my own tailspin? Was it the fact that I didn’t want it to be true? Either way, the weight of the word missing, the state of it, seemed to hover above me, just out of reach, in the weeks after I discovered that Ma had filed Dee’s report.
“And Pete said you’ve been living in Riverwest. For Christ’s sake. You’re lucky to be alive.” I didn’t want to speak to the dramatics of this comment, so I bit my lip.
“I’m sorry I didn’t tell you.”
“You’re going to be sorry.”
I looked at Pete. He shrugged.
“I really don’t know what happened, Mama. I saw Dee on the Fourth, but we had a fight . . . Not anything serious. Just the usual stuff. And she ran out. She didn’t even call me once after that.”
“Then you should have known.”
She was right. I should have guessed something was wrong.
“I want you to stop thinking about your own damn self so much.”
I nodded. She had said what I was thinking. I thought I would cry, so I scrunched my face tight.
“It’s not your fault, though, baby.” I put my hands to my face, afraid they would come away wet, and felt the places where my cheeks were still sore. Wasn’t it, in some way, my fault? Was that why I resisted believing Dee was gone? Because if I let that fact sink in, I’d also have to admit how much of her disappearance could be my own fault?
“But we’re gonna find her?” I croaked. Ma brushed my jaw with her fingers. Peter coughed. “We just need to find Frank.”
“We’ll find her.”
Ma stepped back but held the frame of my shoulders as if she were afraid I might leave. I took in the living room, and suddenly, I did want to leave. The house had been turned into a command center. A tattered map of Milwaukee spanned the entire north-facing wall. Lake Michigan was a wide blue mouth reaching toward the window. There were tiny red dots to show where Dee had been before she went missing—home, the mall, classes, work, a restaurant on Brady Street. (There was no dot in Riverwest.) It gave the city a diseased look, all the dots spread across the map like chicken pox. I thought of a picture of us when we had chicken pox together—all three of us lined up tallest to shortest, Dee last, barely four, with our shirts off to show the speckled skin.
The coffee table was littered with legal pads and phone books, numbers and notes, and more maps. The ink made me dizzy, so I collapsed on the leather sectional and put my head in my hands. I felt my mother’s eyes on the back of my neck. I realized she blamed me, in a way, for losing Dee. She couldn’t know, and I hoped she never would know, the circumstances surrounding Dee’s disappearance, but she knew I’d ignored her calls for weeks. She put a cup of black coffee in front of me.
“So what the hell is going on, Margaret?”
I told my mother what I’d told Peter and Wolski, how Dee had been seeing Frank, how she had found out that he was cheating on her and maybe lying about his identity, and how she was planning on confronting him. I could tell Ma was stung that Dee and I had kept her relationship with Frank a secret, and that she wanted to have words with me about this, but there were too many logistics to discuss. Instead, they filled me in on everything they’d been doing so far—the interviews, the phone calls, the posters, the hotlines.
Later, Suze arrived to help us make pie and to busy the house, which was empty, and quiet, and full of worry and other things my mother wouldn’t name. Even the ghosts seemed reluctant to go about their usual ghostly business—slamming doors, and clanging pots, and rattling paintings in their frames. My aunt arrived in a flurry of perfume and incense. She carried grocery bags stuffed with red wine and Crisco and rhubarb, and she marched to the kitchen like it was Thanksgiving in July. Peter was asleep when she arrived, but my aunt roused him, and we all went into the kitchen. Ma opened a bottle of green chartreuse and poured shots for everyone. Then we made pies. I remembered this from my father’s death too. My mother and my aunt had dusted the whole kitchen in flour, and the ceramic tiles were slippery with wayward Crisco for weeks after his funeral. My mother hated idle hands.
We mixed the dough in big blue glass bowls, and then my mother spread waxed paper over the whole kitchen table, and we stood on the chairs and dusted the paper with a thick coat of flour, and then we rolled the crust. I had no idea what we were going to do with all of those pies—meat pies with carrots and onions and potatoes and cheese, fruit pies with strawberry and rhubarb and apple and blueberry, and sweet pies with pecans and key lime and chocolate. We baked them in rounds, and the kitchen got so hot we all had to go sit out in the backyard. We finished the green chartreuse and watched the fireflies flit through the tall grass. When the pies were done, my mother was exhausted, so Suze put her to bed.
The kitchen was still too hot to breathe in, so we sat outside. Suze chain-smoked and I sat on the stoop beneath her so she could brush my hair, which she said looked like a rat’s nest. I closed my eyes and leaned against her shins. The night was humid and quiet, except for the rush of the traffic toward the city that echoed behind our fence. It was a night Dee and I probably would have gone out drinking. She would have tried to get me to wear a dress; I would have asked her to pick a top that covered her belly button and her stunning hips. (It mattered not at all; men hounded her in her track sweats and her dresses.)
“I’m going to tell you something no one else will,” Suze said.
I turned to face her, and she tucked some stray strands of hair behind my ear. I shivered. The human ear is a very delicate thing, I thought.
“What’s that?”
“You’re going to have to tell the truth eventually,” she said.
“I am telling the truth,” I said.
“Then tell it better.”
Suze stroked my head.
Suze left after midnight, and I didn’t have the courage to go into my old bedroom, the one I’d always shared with Dee, so I curled up on the couch and read and reread the missing-persons report. Each time I read it, Dee became more and more of an abstraction, a character, a sketch of a human, and it scared me but not enough to stop reading it. The thing was, I was looking for something. Now I can see that I was trying to understand if I really believed she was missing. I think I still believed (or was it just a hope?) that Dee was laid up somewhere with Frank, hiding from me, and Ma, and Pete, from the repercussions of the Fourth. Or maybe she was scared to hear what I might say when I found out she was back with Frank? This prospect hurt most of all.
I woke up in the night and forgot where I was. I reached down to the floor to find Leif and his gun, but my fingertips brushed the worn carpet instead. We were not allowed to eat in this room when we were younger, but we used to do it anyway, when Ma wasn’t home. There was often a thick, crumby line of food left between the couch and the coffee table. Ma cursed us for this. I ran my fingers there, but the carpet was clean. I called Leif from the living room phone with my eyes closed. He did not pick up.
May 2019
The psychic, overwhelmed by the enormous popularity of his tours, canceled and rescheduled our last session three separate times. I could tell, during those weeks, that we were losing Ma. Sometimes when I visited her, she was disoriented; Where the hell am I, baby? she would ask me. She would laugh and cry within the same sentence. Sometimes she didn’t speak at all and just stared at the pictures of Dee that she piled up next to her bed in a sad heap of toppled frames. So when Pete called me after the latest cancellation, I assumed it was about Ma.
“Do you have a minute?” Pete asked me on the phone.
“Of course.”
“Great,” he said. He exhaled heavily. “Can you come over?”
“Oh, Pete,” I said. “It’s late. I’m—”
“It’s about Dana.”
“Okay,” I said.
Though my brother’s house was lit up, and from the street the windows shone with warm yellow light, inside the house had the cold air of punishment. Peter let me in through the garage without a word. The house was too quiet. In the kitchen Helena sat at the table in front of a plastic tub containing two bedazzled cell phones and associated accessories. A pit of wire snakes. Alive. Pete tossed a thin manila folder on the table. Helena slid it toward me. A sticker on the folder’s tab said: Property of Wauwatosa Police Department. I opened it, though I did not want to.
Inside there was a grainy cell phone photo, a screenshot of a Snapchat frame, that the police had blown up and printed on glossy paper. Most of it was blurred, but this was what I could see: a girl on her back in bed, her top off, her hand reaching down into her underwear. There was a stuffed dog with glassy eyes on one of the pillows. A cereal bowl with a few sad Cheerios encrusted in dried milk on the bedside table. A girl’s room. A baby’s room. I looked at the photo too long. I turned it over and slid it back toward Helena. Though what was visible of her face was obscured, the girl, I knew, was Dana.
In a poorly devised revenge plot, Cal, the boy Dana had been seeing, had distributed this screenshot to all his friends, who had then begun to distribute it to boys beyond her high school. A mother of one of the boys had found the photo and reported it to the police. Cal was being investigated for possession and distribution of child pornography. Pete and Helena decided to take away the girls’ phones because it seemed the vitriol would not stop. This only angered Dana’s sister, Sophie, who felt it was unfair to punish her for what was happening to Dana. Pete and Helena asked me to speak to Dana, who had locked herself in her room and refused to come out. I said I would try. I sat in front of her bedroom door and I said, I love you, baby, and Why don’t you let me in? But she made no noises behind the door, and eventually, I just began banging my forehead against the wood. Sophie came out to watch me: I saw that familiar look of pity tinged with fear. I was accustomed to people looking at me this way. I was numb to it. After I’d become nauseated and disoriented on account of hitting my head against the door, Sophie went to get Pete, who pulled me away. As my brother was guiding me down the stairs, Sophie kicked at the bottom of the Dana’s door and produced a thin crack in the wood. I stared at it. You slut, Sophie yelled at the door, you ruined everything.
Pete called me a few days later to say that Dana’s pediatrician had suggested she be put on suicide watch. He’d prescribed her some antidepressants and said they might want to look at other schools.
“And she’s asking for you now,” he told me.
I swallowed a gulp of wine that dried my mouth out. “For me? Are you sure?”
“You should come by,” he said.
July 1991
The morning after Pete picked me up from my place and I met Detective Wolski for this first time, Ma doled out tasks. Some of our extended family, with a few from my father’s side who didn’t have work or were able to take off, came over and we strategized. The day was sunny, and the walls of the kitchen shone hot yellow; I’d drunk too much of that nasty chartreuse.
Ma assigned us tasks that, if Dee had been labeled critical missing, the police department would have been required to undertake. Because her case hadn’t warranted sufficient suspicion, according to Wolski, we were supposed to exhaust our own investigations. These included, per the Milwaukee Police Department Missing Persons SOP: Conduct a search of the home and grounds from which the person went missing, conduct a search of the last location the missing person was seen and conduct an interview of those who last saw the missing person, fully identify and separately interview anyone at the scene of the disappearance of the missing person and treat the location as a possible crime scene, identify any areas at the incident scene that have been disrupted or may have the potential for the presence of evidence and safeguard those areas, broadcast a description of the missing person and vehicle, and conduct a canvass of the neighborhood. Ma, Pete, and Suze had already exhausted a number of these items by the time they brought me home to help.
Ma asked me to call the Milwaukee Journal; she said we needed an announcement in the paper. I spent the morning listening to a bad recording of Beethoven’s Fifth, and I never got through to a human. I borrowed Suze’s car and drove back downtown. No one profited more from the murders than the newspapers; the week after the serial killer was arrested, circulation and sales hit record highs. Milwaukee, and the rest of the nation, had a dark, insatiable appetite for this story.
The first of the victims to be identified was a twenty-three-year-old man named Oliver Lacy. He was engaged to the mother of his two-year-old son at the time of his death. Lacy’s mother identified her son from a photo of his severed head. Minutes after she’d returned from the Police Administration Building downtown, her house was swarmed with reporters. On the evening news, she sat in her recliner with her granddaughter on her lap and blinked into dozens of flashes. The fuzzy ends of microphones brushed her lips. When one cameraman turned his lens on the scene behind him, we saw reporters standing on her coffee table, framed family photos smashed on the ground, mud and grass from the reporters’ boots on her carpet.
Inside, the Journal offices were packed with people in motion, weaving around desks, typing furiously on massive IBMs, dropping paper, picking up paper, passing out coffee and sandwiches, shouting to one another from across the room or into phones. It sounded like everyone in the room was being paged, but no one seemed to mind the cacophony of fifty pagers going off at once. No one noticed me. I approached the desk closest to the office doors, where a young woman was holding a phone to her ear with her shoulder and writing furiously on a legal pad. I waited, and she flitted her eyes up at me, once and then twice, annoyed. She put the phone down, kept writing, and asked, “Can I help you?”
“I hope so,” I said.
She glared. I supposed if I said the serial killer’s name, they’d roll out the red carpet. Peter said some of his lawyer friends had heard other media outlets, particularly national ones, were giving limousine rides and steak dinners to the killer’s relatives or neighbors, even his prom date from high school, in exchange for exclusives.
“We’re very busy,” the woman said.
“Who can I see about getting a missing-persons announcement and photo in the paper?”
“Is he gay?”
“Excuse me?”
“Is the missing person gay?”
They had yet to identify all the victims.
“It’s my sister,” I croaked, not sure what to say.
“Oh,” the woman said, obviously disappointed. She pointed across the room at a cubicle fitted into a corner. “He might be able to help you.”
I knocked awkwardly on the wall and poked my head into the makeshift office. A young man, a boy, really, whipped around in his swivel chair. His eyes were wide, rimmed red with fatigue and chemical alertness.
The walls of his cubicle were lined with photos. One wall was just children, and they were mostly stiff school photos—cheesy smiles against purple and green backgrounds, pressed collars and combed hair. Others were candid—a girl at her dance recital, another at a picnic; one boy grinned at the bottom of a Christmas tree, the presents like a fort around him. One wall was covered in photos of young men.
“We’re a little behind,” the boy said. I scanned the photos: Milwaukee’s missing. Where were all of these people? “We’ve been flooded with requests, mostly by families of young missing men. Now everyone thinks maybe their son was one of the serial killer’s victims. Can you imagine?”
There was a face I recognized: the jazz prodigy from Chicago whom I’d seen on the news a few weeks back. I stared at this man; I wondered if he was dead.
“Can I help you?”
The boy fidgeted. The small, tired look of him made me want to take him into my arms and rock him to sleep.
I nodded. “My sister’s missing. We need an announcement in the paper.”
“Okay,” he said. And it was that simple. He asked for a copy of the missing-persons report, as well as a photo. He ran the report through the copy machine without looking at it.
“Do they always make the family do this?” I asked him.
He shrugged. “Journal and PD relations are at an all-time low, but usually, the detective passes along the information, or whoever filed the report. Who’s your assigned detective?” He flipped to the front of the report he’d just copied. His face reddened.
“What’s wrong with Wolski?” I asked.
The boy was embarrassed, and he hesitated. “He’s not a bad guy,” he offered.
“But . . .” I waited.
“He’s got bad stats,” the kid said.
I wasn’t following. “Meaning?”
“Meaning he doesn’t usually find the people he’s looking for.”
I frowned, and I could tell the kid felt like he’d said too much.
“But that’s not always a reflection of the detective,” he said. “Obviously, some cases are more easily resolved than others,” he added.
“Wolski thinks she ran away with her boyfriend.”
He shrugged. “So you know what I mean.”
The Journal didn’t print the damn thing for a week, and when they did, it was hidden in the lower corner of page eleven: a two-inch-square box below a shrunken, grainy version of Dee’s face. The notice was printed in the same issue that called 1991 Milwaukee’s “deadliest year ever,” citing not only the gruesome murders of that summer (eleven and counting) but also the murder of a nine-year-old boy by a group of teenagers who’d allegedly killed the boy on account of the Chicago Bulls jacket he was wearing.
The Comfort of Monsters Page 20