Leif called that week to tell me Erik had run away again. Leif was out of breath, and his voice was strained, as if he were choking. He said Erik had seen the tiny report about Dee in the newspaper and had spooked. Was he afraid of Frank? I was afraid of Frank. Maybe we were the only ones. Leif said he had no idea where Erik had gone. He had left in the middle of the night with a backpack and fifty-two dollars in cash that he’d stolen from Leif’s wallet. He hadn’t left a note or a forwarding address.
“So he’s not with you?” Leif stammered.
“Why didn’t you call me sooner?”
“I can’t be responsible for everyone, goddammit.”
“I tried to call you,” I repeated. I’d called our apartment and his parents’ house every night to talk to him about Dee’s disappearance, but the phones had rung and rung. Once his mother had picked up their landline and shouted, We’re not interested!
“I bet Erik and Dee are together somewhere,” he said. “They probably decided to take a trip. Get some air, get out of the city.” I thought of all the empty, airy promises I’d made Dee on the night of the third—Canada and Thailand, a house in the woods or the jungle. A place where we’d be safe.
“You’re dumber than Wolski,” I told Leif.
“Fuck you,” he said.
I hung up. I put my head against the wall and rolled my forehead across the stucco. The wall felt almost like a cool ice pack. Pete put his hand on my shoulder and I jumped.
“Any news?” Peter asked me. He wrung his hands.
“Erik’s run away,” I told him, and he threw his hands up, frustrated by any news that didn’t seem Dee related. “Again.”
“Who the hell is that?”
“Leif’s brother,” I said. Pete squinted. I explained, “Dee and Erik were friends. Became friends.”
“I see,” Pete said. “Peg? I need to know from you.” He paused.
Pete and I had never been all that close. I’d always thought he was hard on me, unnecessarily so. I never understood why. “What?” I gulped.
“What do you think is going on here? What’s happened to her? Is she with this kid? Is she . . .” Neither of us wanted him to finish asking that question. I nodded, though.
“She isn’t with him. I don’t know, Pete. It’s bad . . . You know she wouldn’t . . . We don’t go this long. Ever. You know that.”
He clenched his jaw. Rifled around in his pants pocket for his cigarettes. Though Pete had once told me he abhorred the habit of smoking, after Dee went missing, he started smoking almost as heavily as Suze. He plugged a cigarette in his mouth and spoke with it clamped tightly between his teeth. “That’s what I thought. Now you need to start acting accordingly.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” I asked him.
He went toward the door. “You’re taking this all a little lightly, no?”
“And you’re a real asshole, you know that?”
Ma heard us and stormed into the room. “What is this?” she yelled.
Pete hid his cigarette but inched toward the door. “Nothing, Ma, nothing.”
I stared at the carpet.
Federal Rules of Evidence
Article VI. Witnesses
Rule 608. A Witness’s Character for Truthfulness or Untruthfulness
Reputation or Opinion Evidence. A witness’s credibility may be attacked or supported by testimony about the witness’s reputation for having a character for truthfulness or untruthfulness, or by testimony in the form of an opinion about that character.
May 2019
Before I went back to Pete’s to see Dana, I tore up my apartment looking for the photo. It had occurred to me that it was the only thing I had to offer her. I thought it might represent a way forward. Or that it might make her listen to me. Or that it might help her imagine a life after the photo of her that Cal had circulated. I’m sure my method was not sound. I’m sure with any other fourteen-year-old, it would have been abhorrent. Maybe it was abhorrent even with Dana. I knew Pete and Helena certainly would not approve. But it was all I could think. Sometimes understanding the ubiquity of your pain can soothe that pain, but perhaps that was too cruel a lesson for a child.
These thoughts were as depressing to me as the existence of the photo itself. I couldn’t remember what I’d done with it since the day I’d wanted to hide it from Dana, and I made a mess of my place looking for it—I opened the boxes and rifled through the papers, tore down stacks of books, kicked up dust. Eventually, I found the damn thing in the top drawer of my dresser. I slipped the photo into my purse and drove back to Pete’s.
At first I was afraid she was going to refuse to let me in again. I knocked three times and heard nothing behind the door. I reached into my purse and felt the photo there. I wished suddenly I hadn’t brought it, or that I had brought something else—flowers or a book. Something normal. The photo felt like a hot, heavy coal.
“Come in,” she said. I opened the door. Dana was sitting on her bed in her pajamas. They had polar bears on them. I was reminded of a time when she had looked at me very grimly and said: Did you know if greenhouse gas emissions remain on their current trajectory, polar bears will be extinct in my lifetime? She had always been a practical but lugubrious child. She hugged her knees into her chest, which made her look very small. Her hair was greasy and stuck to the sides of her face.
“I love you,” I told her.
“I love you too, Auntie Peg,” she said. “I’m glad you’re here.” Her words were robotic. I wondered what kind of drugs they had her on. I tried to see beyond the dopiness of those chemicals and into her. I sat on the bed with her. She moved away from me.
“How are you?” I asked.
She nodded. I didn’t dare touch her.
“I came to tell you something,” I said. “About me.”
Dana frowned. “Yeah?”
“Something, well, some things have happened in my life.” I felt my throat closing. I wondered if this wasn’t a terrible idea, and then I knew it was, but I didn’t think I could turn back. “I’ve wanted to die before. Because of these things.” Maybe I was admitting this to myself for the first time. Dana’s face was blank. The type of blankness that could easily explode into rage. I was scared of her. I reached into the bag for the photo and laid it on her lap. I felt, for a moment, that the photo might singe the polar bears on her pajamas. Even medicated, Dana blushed brightly upon seeing the photo. She picked it up and put it close to her face. “This is . . .”
“That’s me, yeah,” I told her. “And my sister . . . Dee . . . your auntie Dee took that. She saw this.”
Dana stared for a few seconds longer and then handed the photo facedown back to me.
“What is that?” she asked. In the hallway, we heard a door slam. “It’s disgusting.” She wanted to wound me. I didn’t mind. So little could hurt me the way I’d already been hurt.
“I know,” I said.
“Why did you show it to me, then? What is it?”
“It’s a mistake I made,” I said. “The biggest mistake I ever made.”
Dana’s face was still red, and her eyes were watery and sick.
“And I’m still here,” I said. “Even . . . after this.”
I put the photo back in my purse. We were quiet. Dana stared out her window.
After a long time, she looked at me and said, “But you’re so sad.”
July 1991
After the Journal article ran, Wolski called to say he’d gotten an anonymous tip from a caller who’d seen Dee in the Menomonee Falls cemetery the day she left Leif and me in Riverwest.
“Wolski wants to know if we want to go out and canvass the cemetery,” Peter said. He was holding the phone against his chest and winding the cord around his forearm. By this point, we had begun to sink into a very specific, very desperate kind of existence.
“We?” I asked. “Jesus, isn’t that his fucking job?”
Ma and I were eating strawberry rhubarb pie at the kitchen table. She pushed crumbs ar
ound with the tines of her fork. Lately, it had been difficult to get her to eat anything except pie. Peter eyed Ma with her half-eaten plate. He shrugged.
“Let’s go today,” Ma said. “This is our first real lead since—” She paused. They both turned to me, and I realized what a disappointment I’d been to them. They’d hoped to find Dee holed away with me in Riverwest, or they’d hoped I’d know more about the night she disappeared, the days and the weeks after. I was crushed that I knew only slightly more than they did.
“We can be there in an hour,” Peter said into the phone. “Any chance of getting a second detective out there?” He nodded grimly; I knew Wolski had told him there wasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of it.
Ma tossed the rest of her pie in the trash can.
The cemetery was well kept, thoroughly manicured, and even in late July, very green. There wasn’t a fallen tombstone, or a brown patch of grass, or a wayward plastic bag in the whole sprawling place. The tombstones sprouted from the ground in straight even rows. Ma and Suze and Peter and I walked the winding footpaths and sweated in the afternoon heat. Peter said to look for anything suspicious, but there wasn’t a single leaf of grass out of place. This was the kind of cemetery where visitors were encouraged to plant flowers at the foot of a grave rather than bringing their own, because cut flowers browned and needed to be collected as trash. But what then could people bring when they went to visit a grave? I always found it comforting to have something in my hands when we went to visit Dad’s grave. I liked to bring a worry stone that I’d worn smooth over the course of the year. Here, I didn’t see mementos at any of the graves. If there was something out of place, we would see it. At the top of a gentle hill, we saw a funeral underneath two big oaks. A man, a woman, and a child stood graveside while the undertakers lowered a heavy metal casket into the ground with a crank. The man held a shovel like he’d never had cause to use one. There was a priest reading from some papers, but we were too far away to hear the words.
Wolski came late and he came alone. We’d covered almost the entire area when he found us peering down on the burial below. He half jogged over to us, I suppose to give an air of urgency, or because he felt awkward walking while we all watched his approach. Suze lit a cigarette and blew smoke in his direction.
“I don’t think we can smoke here,” Wolski said.
Suze inhaled deeply.
“We’re done,” Peter said.
Wolski shook his head. “I was just speaking to a few of the groundskeepers—do you know who runs this place?” Wolski was often nauseatingly rhetorical. “This guy’s parents.” He held up the terrible sketch of Frank I’d helped the police artist, a buddy of Wolski’s, draw a few weeks back. I didn’t know if it was my memory or the artist’s lack of skill, but the sketch was . . . disturbing. It was accurate enough, but he looked a lot less sleazy in the sketch than he had in person. Wolski was smug; he bobbed his head. “I was just speaking with them. They said his name isn’t Frank, it’s Anthony, but they call him Tony. And as far as they know, he lives in Ohio now.”
At the bottom of the hill, the man tossed a shovelful of dirt over the top of the casket, then accidentally dropped the shovel into the grave. The shovel clattered against the casket, and the noise shook a few birds from the oak trees. The child screamed, and the woman clamped her hand tightly over the child’s mouth; she rubbed his upper arm vigorously but would not hug him. The child screamed louder and shook the rest of the birds from the trees. He kept on until the man hit the child and he stopped. I thought suddenly of Leif. We hadn’t spoken for a week or more. The birds flew from the trees and toward the undertakers’ house. There was a thin gray line of ashy smoke funneling from a brick building and into the sky.
“What’s that building over there?” I asked.
Wolski followed my gaze. “The crematorium.”
May 2019
The day of the last session was a Sunday. I felt that Sunday as if we’d been at it all for centuries: not just missing Dee and hoping she was alive and, when so much time had passed that we knew she wasn’t, hoping that we would find out what had happened to her and, when even more time had passed and we figured we’d never know for sure, hoping still that we’d find her body somewhere in the city of Milwaukee. It wasn’t just all that, though this progression by itself entailed a certain wrenching fatigue.
But the weeks since the psychic had come to town had felt longer than the last ten years combined, and they produced a different kind of exhaustion. At least for me. Maybe it was the pretending, or the way in which I felt I had to pretend I wasn’t fooled by this kid, while at the same time I desperately hoped and at some point had begun to believe that maybe, somehow, he’d work a miracle for us. I remembered spinning slowly through Milwaukee’s sky with him at the bar at the Hyatt. His insistence on the photo. It was this kind of nonsense, these “embarrassing” feelings, as Henry would have called them, that I had to fight. But as the weeks wore on, I found myself less and less capable of drumming up incredulity and more and more alive at the prospect of finding Dee’s body. Some people think faithlessness is an easy way out, because they know sustained belief takes mountainous effort. But a commitment to incredulity, disbelief, hopelessness is its own kind of exhausting faith. The difference between them is one fills you up, the other drains you dry.
Pete’s pet journalist, Charlie, was there again that day. He was fresh-faced and full of jittery energy; he clicked and unclicked his pen on repeat. He refused to make eye contact with me. Otherwise the group was relatively small—Ma, me, Pete, Suze, Wolski, and of course, Thomas Alexander’s entourage. Dana had wanted to come, but Helena didn’t think it was a good idea. I promised I’d fill Dana in on everything. Since I’d shown her the photo, she’d renewed her efforts with my files. I told myself this meant it hadn’t been a terrible mistake. At the very least, it had gotten her out of her room. It was as if now she believed she had a piece of the puzzle that mattered. But I was afraid of what she was looking for.
While we were all taking our places, the lights began to flicker. Thomas Alexander was seated at the community room piano, idly tapping at the keys. Dee’s Walkman was on the bench next to him just barely touching his thigh. When the lights went out he became very still. Then Thomas Alexander began to scream.
It was an odd noise, something like the way I assume an animal might sound when it’s being eaten alive. A hair short of human. The room went quiet, and I expected that Thomas would stop once he had everyone’s attention, but he didn’t. He just kept screaming; the pitch of the noise was infuriating. The lights flickered. Pete’s journalist whimpered. Outside, it began to snow in heavy wet clumps. Late May. The sky was dark and full of snow. The lights glared on again and Thomas Alexander kept screaming. I wondered where the nurses were—why hadn’t they come to see who was screaming? A girl on Thomas Alexander’s team, whose job I’d never really understood, ran over to Thomas and put her hands on either side of his flawless face. His eyes roamed wildly in the sockets. We waited. Thomas Alexander screamed. I caught Wolski’s eyes. He blushed. The girl was rubbing her hands over and over Thomas Alexander’s cheeks. She leaned in to him and brushed her lips ever so slightly against his, leaving a millimeter of space between their lips. It was not a kiss. The screaming stopped. The lights flickered off again. And then on again. I looked around the room and felt for a moment as if I’d slipped out of time. Who were all these people? Why were they here? Who was this child screaming at the top of his lungs?
The psychic leapt up from the piano and rushed to Ma. He held Dee’s Walkman in one hand and my mother’s hand in the other. He pushed his Ray-Bans to the top of his head, revealing a sweaty, unwashed face and sunken eyes.
“She wants to tell you where she is,” he said. His makeup from the night before clung messily to his eyelashes and stained his face black. Had he slept yet? Had he been crying earlier? What was wrong with him?
“Where?” Ma whispered. The snow was getting heavier outside,
and it was almost dark. In the west, the sky was turning the dark purple of a plum skin, but snow fell and fell.
An assistant spread a map across Thomas Alexander’s lap and handed him a Sharpie. He bent down close to it. His spine made the shape of a C. He drew a big mark over the County Grounds. “She’ll be here,” he said. Ma leaned over. She groaned. “Underneath a dog.”
Ma took the map from him and motioned at Peter to come take a look. I went over too. Pete held it out and we peered into Milwaukee’s sad grids. The X marked an old, unkempt cemetery. I had a memory of Dee telling me Frank had taken her on a date there. Thomas Alexander tapped this X over and over again with the Sharpie.
“Here,” he said. “Here, here, here . . . There is a cemetery here that everyone has forgotten about. Is that right? That’s where she is. She told me. In the woods, there is a shrine. Not to her. The shrine is for the dog. But she’ll be there.”
Wolski came up and peered over Thomas Alexander’s shoulder at the map. He pinched the bridge of his nose and shook his head. “Milwaukee County owns all that. I think they lease it to the medical college? Either way, totally blocked off. Private. Has been for a while now.”
Ma didn’t hear him, and if Thomas Alexander did, he took no notice. Charlie Makon was scribbling notes on an old-fashioned reporter’s pad. I wanted to burn the damn thing.
“This is it,” Thomas Alexander whispered. The room was closing in. All of us were getting closer and closer to Ma and Thomas Alexander. The bodyguards were moving toward the center of the room too. Thomas Alexander turned to look at me. “And Dee said to tell you, he’s coming back.”
July 1991
The next time Leif called Ma’s for me, I could tell he was in a bad way. I drove to Riverwest in Pete’s car to bring him pie, because that was all I had. The apartment was a shit hole, and this had never been more apparent to me than that night. Leif was collapsed over the kitchen table, which was littered with ramen noodle wrappers and beer bottles. The apartment had the sad smell of stale cereal. My spider plant was on the kitchen floor, half of it spilled out of the pot, its white roots reaching toward the window.
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