Lost Girls Read online

  “Mr. Tripp, what shirt are you referring to?”

  “My shirt. The one in the freezer. If they’d just asked I would’ve shown them, but they never asked. ‘Thom, is there anything else here you could show us?’ If they’d said that, I would’ve taken them to the garage out back, opened up the freezer and handed it to them. But they never did.”

  He laughs gently in disbelief. The kind of laugh one hears in coffee shops and post office lineups from people telling stories of foolish politicians or incompetent bosses. It’s the most normal sound I’ve heard from him yet.

  “So your shirt’s in the freezer, and the police didn’t find it in their search. O.K. But why did you put your shirt in the freezer in the first place?”

  “Because it had blood all over it!”

  With this Tripp lets out a roar, pulls his arms off the table and brings them down upon it again. Big-time laughter, muscular and fierce as a shouted threat. The tears that now trickle down his cheeks the sufferings of a perverse humor, not signs of whatever else he suffers from.

  “Thomas, listen to me now. Whose blood was it?”

  “It wasn’t mine.”

  “No? Then whose?”

  He comes in close, leans across the table far enough that I can smell his yeasty breath.

  “Krystal’s. It was Krystal’s blood,” he says. “Do you want to know how it got there?”

  “First things first. Where’s the shirt now?”

  “It’s funny, actually.”

  “Thomas, tell me exactly where the shirt is. I’m serious. Right now.”

  I check my watch.

  “Locked inside the freezer, down in the garage out behind the building. They must have thought it belonged to the neighbors or something.”

  “Where’s the key?”

  “Which key?”

  “To the freezer.”

  “Inside the flour jar in the cupboard. But the apartment’s locked, and I don’t know where that key is.”

  “Not to worry. But listen carefully now: I advise you, strongly advise you, Thomas, to keep quiet about this, alright?”

  His eyes endure a spasm of repeated blinks and his lips fold together and disappear into his mouth but he says nothing more. I have no choice but to take this as confirmation of his word.

  I get up and knock on the door, concentrate on keeping my breath even. But the guard takes longer than he should, and before I get out of there I hear Tripp’s voice over my shoulder. Words I have to turn and have him twice repeat before I catch them.

  “Melissa is my daughter’s name,” he says.

  As I leave I glance back and see him being brought to his feet by the two men who will return him to his cell, his head shaking in wonder and a trembling smile of pride on his lips.

  Late that night I go for a walk by Tripp’s apartment. The convenience store below is dark, which I expected, the hours of business stuck on its door stating that it closes at eleven. The apartment above is dark as well. In fact the only light the building emits comes from the reflective band of yellow police tape that crosses the doorway to the staircase up to Tripp’s. No car, homecoming drunk or nocturnal dog walker has passed by since I’ve been here, which must be something close to half an hour.

  I head up the lane that runs between the convenience store and the house next to where the garage is. Sticking my face up to its window I find the freezer, a lunar glow reflecting off its white enamel surface.

  From there I pass through the side lane once more and around to the door up to Tripp’s, ripping the police line off and sticking it into the pocket of my overcoat. Then I set to work on the lock. Although I’ve never done this sort of thing before, I’ve had the benefit of defending enough car thieves, b&e artists and other unofficial locksmiths that I’ve acquired a pretty good idea of the techniques through osmosis. And as it turns out, this one isn’t much of a challenge anyway. An old handle lock with a gaping keyhole that, after sticking my nosehair tweezers in and fiddling around for a couple minutes, clicks open without any trouble. Then up the stairs to Tripp’s door, tweezers again at the ready, but there’s no need. The fools left it open, and with a quick turn of my gloved hand I’m in.

  Tripp was right about the key: buried in a mason jar of enriched-white above the stove. But I don’t leave yet. Move around the corner and into the living room, lit only by the orange fog that seeps through the window from the streetlight outside. Everything neat and tidy, teacherly even: the bookshelves organized according to binding (one wall of hardcovers, the next coffee table books buttressing stacks of alphabetized paperbacks), the 14” TV topped by old greeting cards (“Lordy! Lordy! Look Who’s Forty!”), the beige furniture arranged in a careful square on the perimeter of the matching beige rug. I’m expecting pictures of the daughter everywhere but there’s no sign of her. The room little more than a low-budget stage set of a room, a bachelor pad before the bachelor has moved in.

  But the bedroom’s a different story. The police have left the catalog pages on the wall, every inch plastered with the crinkled gloss of giggling, pointing, hand-holding girls. On the bed, a fresh pile of clippings and stacks of YM and Seventeen. Waving arms about for balance on roller blades, applying cucumber slices to closed eyes, kissing a clear-skinned boy as parents peep out at them approvingly through living room curtains. The discarded covers: “Love Quiz: Is He Ever Going To Treat You Right?” set on the pillow next to “No More Bad Hair Days!” From every corner comes the same sour odor that Tripp breathed at me across the interview room table, the hot gust of his insides. Somewhere behind me the electric baseboard heater ticks and rages.

  I hold my breath and back out, pull the door shut behind me, breathe again. Down the stairs, I pull out the police line I’d ripped off on the way in. Tack it back to the door frame using the back of a hardcover Criminal Code I’d brought along for a hammer, then around again to the garage.

  More lock luck there, or at least further evidence of the local constabulary’s stupidity, for while the main door for the admission of cars is locked, the side door for the admission of humans isn’t even properly closed, let alone bolted shut. Once in I pause for my eyes to gather enough light so I can shuffle over to the freezer. Trying to stick the fussy little key into its fussy little lock in the semidarkness results in a pounding chest pain so great it can only be the final precursor to a full-blown coronary. Then, with my hand shaking in widening loops, the key suddenly slides in buttery smooth as though toying with me from the beginning, and the garage’s silence is broken by the crypt-like squeak of the freezer’s lid as I heave it open. For a moment my eyes are blinded from the light of the internal bulb reflecting off the crusted ice within. Then I see it, lying in a bundle next to a stack of frozen T-bones and tub of rainbow sherbet: a blue-striped button-down with a dozen dime-size stains over the arm and shoulder. I was expecting something more explicitly horrible, splashes of gory crimson on perfect white cotton or a clear plastic bag clotted by telltale pools and smudges. But it’s just a shirt with spots on it.

  I pull it out and tuck it inside my coat. Then I’m out the door, down the lane and back in front of Tripp’s building, half expecting the street to be clogged with police cruisers, curious neighbors and snuffling search dogs. But there’s not a soul but me. One arm across my chest holding Tripp’s shirt in place I walk back to The Empire Hotel with long strides, wondering whether anyone who looked my way would see a man who’d just done something wrong, or one whose head was lowered only to shield his eyes from the rain.

  SEVENTEEN

  Someone slips a note under my door. Standing in the middle of the honeymoon suite, my body still dripping from the shower and in it comes, a flash of white traveling across the floor. The shadow of another’s hand playing across the light from the other side, the brief, awkward flight of the paper—all a too-easy betrayal of walls, locks and doors.

  After waiting for the sound of the messenger’s footsteps to recede back down the stairs I squint over the note’s chil
dish print, made less readable by the almost dried-out purple marker used in its execution:

  Dear B. Crane, “Honey. Suite”:

  Brian Flynn on phone. Says “Sorry didn’t call back sooner.”

  Says “Can meet today.” He lives at 212 Grange.

  He says “10:30 a.m. would be good.”

  THE MANAGEMENT.

  Brian Flynn. Ashley’s father, with whom I spoke briefly at the same time I contacted McConnell, telling him how I’d like to get together at his leisure to ask a few questions. He said he’d get back to me later. And now he wants to meet this very morning. All The Murdoch Phoenix had to say about him was that he was a single father, laid off from the nickel mine several years back. He seemed to actively avoid the media throughout the investigation, regularly failing to attend press conferences during the search and, later, choosing to leave the histrionics to McConnell. So why does he want to talk to me now? Had McConnell convinced him that this would be a good opportunity to vent on the next best thing to the bad guy himself? Or was it another trap, the big man standing before the window over at Flynn’s right now, poring over a leatherbound Bible, cooking up new hexes for round two? No matter what the plan is, I’m obliged to go. All for the potential benefit of my boy Thommy T.

  But before I reach the door I notice something I’d already forgotten: Tripp’s bloodied shirt on the floor where it was dropped the night before. The sight of it lying there next to my own dropped shirts, pants and cotton miscellany causes me to stop, my eyes pondering its shape as though a complex piece of sculpture. But it’s not. In fact there’s nothing to it at all. A polyester-cotton blend nearly a decade past the fashion even if cleaned and pressed, but in its present condition nothing more than a stained and crumpled rag. If I just look at it there beside my own shirts, as a shirt among shirts, the distinction between them blurs and fades.

  So what message could this particular shirt carry all on its own? That I’m now obstructing justice, that’s clear. Clear, but unknown to any but myself. And as for Tripp? So little blood, really. Would it have meant all that much when the police discovered it, as they surely would have when some bright spark finally got it in his head to find out who owned the freezer and crowbar the thing open? It wouldn’t mean the end of the game, but it would’ve been an unhelpful turn of events, to employ an understatement. Tripp would be forced to testify in order to explain the blood away, and even if we could devise something good on that count, God knows what further self-incriminations might escape his mouth on cross-examination. That’s the real issue, or at least as real as any other.

  I pick the shirt up, stick it in the plastic bag it came in along with the wrappers from yesterday’s lunch and skip downstairs, out onto the street. Pop open the trunk of the Lincoln and toss it in.

  Here’s a distinction drawn after extended time spent in the company of liars, pushers and thieves: What’s far more amazing than how easily one can come to do wrongful things is the ease with which one can then go on to forget about them.

  Brian Flynn lives in the kind of house that is only nominally a house, there being no other word in English usage to describe such a structure (“shack” or “shed” not being quite right either). It’s the sort of lopsided affair one sees in towns like this, their occurrence tending to increase for every mile north one travels: square-faced facade with a door in the center and two small windows on either side encased in plastic to help keep out a greater portion of the winter’s cold, a sparsely shingled roof supported by walls of equal parts wood and tar. A forgotten place, or a place that should have been forgotten long ago, being originally constructed as a short-term residence for contracted laborers with the view that, when the contracts expired, it would be abandoned and eventually razed. But here it is. Forty years past its due, a wavering plume of woodsmoke rising from its tin chimney and a mailbox stenciled THE FLYNNS at the gate.

  I park directly out front, consider for a moment keeping the engine running in case McConnell awaits inside and I need to make a swift retreat, but decide against it. Flynn lives at the end of a street made up of “homes” like his own, many with motorcycles and despondent beer guts topped by vacant faces squinting out from the front stoop. In such neighborhoods, leaving a rented Lincoln Continental on the street with the engine running may be unwise. So instead I pocket the keys, knock twice on the door’s splintered surface and ready myself for an immediate attack. But when the door is scraped open it’s not by a towering threat but by a small man with shaggy black hair and a shapeless beard beginning to yield to outcroppings of gray.

  “Mr. Crane?” he asks, his eyes closed as though unused to even the dull light of a day such as this.

  “Thank you for returning my call, Mr. Flynn.”

  “Wasn’t going to at first, but then I thought, ‘Why not? It’s not like you’re Mr. Busy these days,’” he says, throws a dry laugh out into the street. “So I guess you might as well come in.”

  He steps back and I squeeze in through the narrow space afforded by the front door which the frame’s leaning angle opens only partway. Inside the house is cramped, dark (the sun unable to penetrate the rain-streaked plastic over the windows), bookless, but warm. There’s also a smell of burnt coffee, canned tomato soup and cigarettes which, taken together, isn’t as unpleasant as the individual components suggest.

  “I have to tell you, I was a little concerned about coming over here today,” I say, standing on the bubbled square of linoleum that counts for the full extent of the front hall. “I thought that Mr. McConnell may have been here with you.”

  “Lloyd? Never spoken to the man in my life,” Flynn states flatly, now standing in the middle of the living room in a plaid shirt and Montreal Canadiens pajama bottoms.

  “Never?”

  “Well, no, not never. Called here a couple times last year when Ashley and Krystal were hanging out a lot, saying he didn’t think it was a good idea for my girl to be spending so much time with his. When I asked him why he thought so he’d just say, ‘C’mon now, Brian,’ over and over, like I should know without his saying. And he was right, I guess. I did know.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Because he’s got money and I don’t.”

  Flynn’s arms twitch at his sides like snakes held by their ends.

  “But I thought none of that would’ve mattered after the girls went missing,” he continues, “so I left a couple of messages with him at the time. He never called back. Still, you’ve got to give the man the benefit of the doubt, right? Considering all he’s been through.”

  “Benefit of the doubt. Quite right.”

  I take off my coat and hang it over my arm. Flynn doesn’t move. For a moment it seems this may be it, the interview’s over, he’s frozen to his spot on the threadbare shag forever. But when he responds to what I say next it’s with a disarming gentleness.

  “Mr. Flynn, may I say at the outset how sorry I am about your daughter.”

  “Oh yeah? Well, thanks for saying so. It’s funny, but not many people have. They look at you alright, sometimes with sad faces and other times just curious. But usually they don’t say anything. They’ve probably done all their talking to Lloyd, and they figure there’s not much point in giving their sympathies twice.”

  He takes the coat from my arm as he speaks and places it over the end of the room’s fake leather couch with black hockey tape over the holes where the stuffing has begun to escape. When he’s finished speaking he lowers himself into a brown La-Z-Boy with a foldout leg rest. To his right, a side table equipped with a giant ashtray with Pope John Paul II’s face painted in its basin and the remote control to the TV, an old set with a cabinet made of molded plastic shaped like a baroque wood carving. He signals for me to sit on the couch, and I do.

  “Not much, is it?” he asks, and while I know he means the extent of his worldly possessions, I shake my head and pretend not to follow. “My humble home. Ain’t much. But it’s amazing how you get by. No job for six years no
w. The breathing’s not so good these days.” He bangs his chest by way of illustration, and in fact it doesn’t sound so good, a rattle inside him like an empty can kicked down an alley. “God knows what sort of nastiness got in the lungs all that time underground, but they’re sure as hell not good for much anymore. Then again, I don’t know if I’ve missed much. Don’t get a speck of mail but whatever the government sends me. But like I said, it’s amazing how you get by.”

  Flynn smiles absently, reaches into his shirt pocket, pulls out a cigarette and lights it without looking at his hands.

  “Must have been hard. Bringing up a child all on your own,” I say, realizing I’ve left my bag with my notepad in it by the door, but I stay where I am.

  “Well, she wasn’t a child long. And she was never a problem. Never, not from day one. I can’t say I was much of a father. I’m not taking any credit for myself, no sir. She was just a sweet kid somehow all on her own.”

  He exhales a shaft of smoke from the hole in his mouth where his two front teeth used to be. Again without looking, digs his hand back into his shirt pocket and extends the pack to me. Under normal circumstances I’m not a smoker (not for health concerns, but a mortal fear of yellowing teeth and the acceleration of wrinkles) but I take one from Flynn now along with his lighter and give him a nod in thanks.

  “You know how fathers always say their daughter’s just the spitting image of their mothers?” he asks me. “Well, with Ashley, it really was the truth. The very spitting image. Would you like to see for yourself?”

  “Why not?”

  With this Flynn lunges out of his chair, leaves the room for a moment and returns with a white binder with Your Wedding scripted in flaky gold on the cover.

  “I stuck all the wedding photos in the closet and put pictures of Ashley in instead,” he explains, giving me a look that suggests certain things are too messy and happened too long ago to be worth going into the details. Then he opens the album up near the middle and shows me a picture of his daughter wearing a pink tutu, dark hair tied in a single braid, arms held up in a circle around her head. It was taken in this room, in the place where Flynn now sits, the only difference being that behind the girl stands a stubby artificial Christmas tree sparsely entangled in tinsel.