Lost Girls Read online

  “That’s right. I was wondering if I could ask you about him.”

  “You can try. HUSTLE!”

  “O.K. What happened that made him start to act strange in the time leading up to Ashley and Krystal’s disappearance?”

  “Nothing really. Just the total destruction of his life. One of those divorces with so many lawyers involved it probably left both of them broke. But Thom was never worried about the money. It was Melissa that he wanted. To keep his daughter. So when the judge awarded him joint custody I tried to tell him, ‘Hey, you did alright there, guy,’ but he wouldn’t say anything. Just get this dark mask around his eyes like the Lone Ranger or something. And then he really fucked up. TASHA! WOULD YOU DO ME A FAVOR AND GET UP OFF YOUR ASS?”

  She keeps the whistle clenched in her mouth, the little ball inside rattling with her words as though caught halfway down her own throat.

  “Fucked up how?”

  “Started trying to see Melissa when he wasn’t supposed to. The idiot. Courts do not take kindly to fathers mooning around their daughter’s schoolyard on days when they don’t have visiting privileges. Everybody gets very upset. And so I try to tell him that, and he just gets that Lone Ranger face again. I DO NOT LIKE BALL HOGS! Told me how one time he went to Melissa’s school and walked in the front doors to try to pick her up or talk to her before her mother got there, or something like that, but the vice-principal sees him coming and calls the cops. Because everybody knows about this guy, right? So the cops come and write him up some ticket saying he’s in violation of the custody order and leave him there outside the school grounds and tell him to leave the girl alone. And then it starts to rain. I swear to God. Thom Tripp was not the kind of guy to make stuff like that up. Just pissing down on him. But he doesn’t move, staring up at all the windows of the school to find Melissa’s face and sure enough he does. She’s right up there on the second floor looking down at him along with everybody else in the place—they’d heard the sirens, eh—and that’s her dad, just standing there. This drowned rat of a man waving up to his scared little girl.”

  Now Zoe is running over toward us, one of her bruised knees dripping a neat line of blood into her sock. “Rock out there,” she pants. “Got scraped up.”

  “SUB!”

  One of the girls from the bleachers behind us trots stiffly out, giving Zoe a swift whack on the behind with her stick as she goes.

  “I heard that he later tried to take Melissa away,” I say, the words turned to a billowing mist against the side of Miss Betts’s face. “That that’s why the court finally denied him access. Why the wife moved away.”

  “I heard that too. But Thom wasn’t saying much by then. To anybody. I mean, I still cared about the guy, right—he was in need of some serious help—but what can you do? I say hello to him and all he can do is give me this ‘Do I know you?’ look. DIG! DIG! DIG! After a while, looking out for a guy like that starts to get a little tired.”

  There’s the crack of lumber as one of the bigger girls gets away a good shot that’s stopped dead by the goalie’s ribcage.

  “NICE SAVE! NICE SAVE!”

  “What about the Literary Club, all the time Thom was spending with the girls. Did anyone think that was unusual?”

  “Absolutely. The way he was all hush-hush about it, like he was running a goddamn cult instead of a discussion group or whatever it was. Even rigged up a little curtain he threw over the window of his classroom door on Thursdays after school so nobody could look in. Definitely weird. But those girls, they just loved it. Pretty much dropped everything they used to be into except for that club of theirs, which wasn’t a club at all really, just the three of them. All top secret. And that’s probably what they liked about it. Girls that age love to keep their secrets.”

  “So you really don’t know what they might have been doing in there?”

  “Like I told you, I don’t have a clue. Nobody did. And Thom wasn’t telling.”

  “Would you agree to be a witness if I need you?” I raise my voice another notch to be heard through the patter of rain on Miss Betts’s nylon shoulders. “To testify as to Thom’s character? I know you two were friends, and he could use your help.”

  “You know what?” she replies after a time. “I really hope you’re a good lawyer. Because that’s the only kind of help Thom Tripp needs now. And as for me being a witness for him? After what he did? Let me tell you this: Ashley used to be on this team. I used to be her coach. She was a good kid. She had a spark. Krystal too. There’s nobody around here that doesn’t miss the both of them like hell.”

  For the first time Miss Betts turns her head away from the field to look at me, her broad face glazed in moisture.

  “I’d rather be the first to throw the goddamn switch than help that bastard one inch,” she says, then turns away from me again and blows her whistle. Three sharp blasts through the freezing rain that call her players in.

  Even with all the lights off behind me the gray of the laptop’s screen is giving me a headache. One of those dull, not-going-anywhere numbers that leads you to seriously consider knocking your skull against the nearest door frame. Turn off the computer and watch the last traces of color flee into the corners. The room swelling in the darkness.

  I’m feeling around for a pen, making a list I can’t see. There on the legal pad before me in oversize handwriting so that I might make sense of it in the morning. A descending column of invisible names. “Don’t just deny. Blame it on somebody else.” Another fundamental Grahamism, but it was a rule I knew already.

  McConnell

  Flynn

  The dads. Always a good bet. McConnell almost too happy with the way things are turning out, too quick with an angry, vengeful word for the press. And those threats. If I can get all that in we might be in business. Flynn a poor second, but was so certain his daughter was dead he didn’t even want to consider the possibility that it could be otherwise. Maybe parents have their instincts. But they’re also the most likely to do their own children harm, statistically speaking. A patriarch who can’t control his anger. A lonely, disposable depressive. Snapshots any jury could recognize from miles off.

  Laird J.

  Any kid who keeps a detailed scrapbook on two female classmates who end up going missing has got to be considered suspicious. And if I could dig up some evidence of an interest in Satanic heavy metal or an obsession with horror movies, we could be onto something.

  Runaways

  They’re not dead at all. Or might not be. The lake’s not that big, but the wide world certainly is for girls who had something to run from. Krystal’s house couldn’t have been a barrel of laughs, and Ashley was surely smart enough to figure out that a job somewhere on her own offered better prospects than sticking around with her goingnowhere old man. And best of all: still no bodies.

  Unidentified third party

  Get one of the profilers from the R.C.M.P. to shock the courtroom with the number of violent psychotics currently at large on the continent. Just the suggestion of a stranger-passing-through-town scenario might be enough. People know the warped psychologies of serial killers better than their own these days. Or they’ve at least seen The Silence of the Lambs.

  T.’s assistant

  Even if the lake disposal scenario sticks, it’s still a hell of a job for the teacher to have pulled off all on his own. If I can fish a name out of him we could sell his friend and plead our way down to something reasonable. Sometimes five years can feel like you’ve gotten away with it.

  I close my eyes and roll my head back on my neck, grind a satisfying pop from the cartilage. Time for bed, if I can find it. But for a time I stay at the desk and face the wall, not sure if my eyes are closed or whether the dark is all that I can see.

  The Lady

  I write this without seeing it on the page but feel its shape in the slow “L,” the coiled “y” of my hand. Then I fold the paper into the smallest square I can squeeze between my fingers and flip it back over my shoul
der. Wait to hear the sound of it meet the floor but there’s nothing but my own breathing and the touch of rain against the glass.

  TWENTY-ONE

  The next morning delivers blue sky, clear light and even a swirl of warmth in the air, and with these invitations Ontario Street is the busiest I’ve seen it. This is to say that at any given moment half a dozen squinting mouth-breathers could be observed scuffling along, wiping at their noses and waiting for the light to change. I head up toward the courthouse, nodding at those I pass. Nobody responds but I pretend not to notice, chin held up to the sun. Why not? Things—the whole confused lot of them—may not be as bad as they seem. And after all, even if they are, they bear no direct personal consequences. It’s not me who sits languishing in a prison cell awaiting his fate. No, sir. I’m out here on the sunny street, overcoat unbuttoned, fresh oxygen and Colombia’s finest replenishing my blood.

  When I reach the top of the street I make a left and soon find myself standing at the library’s front door. Ten after nine and it’s still locked. Consider turning around but knock instead, and in a moment the door is opened by little Doug Pittle, his eyes blinking up at me in amusement.

  “Been here eighteen years and that’s the first time anyone’s knocked to be let in before nine.”

  “It’s ten after, as a matter of fact.”

  “Ten after, then. It’s still the first time anyone’s ever knocked on this door. Period.”

  We walk down the hall to his desk and from its edge pick up a paperback The Catcher in the Rye in the advanced stages of decay.

  “The library’s most popular selection,” he explains, cutting off a strip of duct tape and wrapping it around the book’s spine as I hold it for him. “There’s a long-standing rumor at the high school that it contains an explicit sex scene. They’d be so much better off going with D.H. Lawrence. Or even Wuthering Heights.”

  “Don’t you subscribe to Sports Illustrated? Surely the swimsuit issue would be in the highest demand.”

  “It would be. But the town council banned it after it was discovered that photocopies from it were being distributed at the school. Black and white photocopies.”

  “Desperate times require desperate measures.”

  When he’s finished snipping off the excess tape I put the book back down and look out the narrow window next to the desk. Two men in leather hockey jackets smoke outside the courthouse doors across the way, waiting to be tried or questioned or ordered to relinquish their drivers’ licenses. When finished, they flick their butts like flyfishermen, send two orange flares arcing under a sky now flattened by cloud.

  “So, was your earlier research here fruitful, Mr. Crane?” Pittle asks, taking an X-Acto blade to a cardboard box on the floor containing what appears to be the new installment of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

  “Call me Barth. And it was very fruitful, yes. But I have a question this time around.”

  “Oh?”

  “Of a more historical nature, I suppose.”

  “I see.”

  He stops lifting the volumes out of their box and looks up at me in that unflinching, scientific way of his.

  “It’s all rather unlikely, so let me just tell you what I’ve heard and then maybe you could tell me what you know.” He blinks once, his whole body still crouched over the open cardboard box. “The other day I bumped into a Mrs. Arthurs, out there on Lake St. Christopher. Nice lady, though given to quite fantastic stories. The one she told me involved a certain Lady in the Lake, attempted child abductions, and her fall through the ice to her death. I’m summarizing here to save you from the macabre details. What I’m wondering is if any of this rings a bell with you.”

  “Of course it does,” he says now, stands, his eyes never straying from mine. “Everyone who lives around here knows that one.”

  “So it’s a lie?”

  “Wouldn’t say that. More like Murdoch’s Loch Ness Monster, but without the benefits to the tourist trade. In fact, there’s a number of people up here who blame The Lady’s bad vibes for the lake’s lack of investment. The thinking is that nobody wants to put money into a place known to inhabit a spirit intent on possessing other people’s children. And there’s a certain logic to that, I guess.”

  “And what do you think?”

  Pittle slides a hand into a pocket of his corduroys, combs the other through the front tuft of his hair.

  “I think Helen Arthurs is a valued relic and entertaining in her way,” he says, taking his time, “but quite likely deep in the late stages of senility. I think the woman behind The Lady in the Lake was real but has been dead for a long time and these days is just something high school kids use to scare themselves with at Halloween. It’s become a tradition for guys to take their girls up there to tell them their version of the tale, smoke a couple joints, drink booze stolen from their fathers’ liquor cabinets and try to get laid.”

  I step away from the window to lean my back against a standing bookshelf holding the whole of the Reference section: a copy of the Toronto phone book, a taped-together Oxford English Dictionary, a color atlas of the world and the Guinness Book of World Records. All of it shaking slightly from a brand new tic that pulls my shoulder blades together with a sudden violence every few minutes.

  “So you don’t believe there’s anything to it?”

  “Believe? That’s different. You’ve been up there yourself, haven’t you?”

  “To investigate the circumstances—”

  “Then you know what it’s like. What do you believe?”

  I answer with a sequence of cleared throat and unhinged mouth.

  “O.K. Tough question,” Pittle finally laughs. “And not fair. I don’t think I could answer it myself.”

  He pulls both his hands from pocket and head to scratch his beard with a sudden vigor, takes a moment to smooth the longer whiskers away from his lips. “So what was your question?”

  “I guess you’ve already answered it, more or less.”

  Pittle returns to lifting the box’s contents onto the floor. In his miniature arms each book appears to be the size of the stone tablets Moses carried down the mountain.

  “You mind if I ask a question of my own?” he asks with his back turned.

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m having trouble seeing what Mrs. Arthurs’s story has got to do with your client.”

  The shoulder blades pull together and the Guinness Book thumps over onto its side on the shelf.

  “Tripp? It’s got nothing to do with him. How could it? I was just wondering how nuts the old lady actually was.”

  “Which old lady?”

  “Mrs. Arthurs.”

  “So you were wondering if she—Mrs. Arthurs—could be of assistance to the defense’s case?”

  “No. Of course not. No, no.” I work up four mechanical shots of laughter. “It’s of cultural interest only.”

  “I see.”

  Pittle’s head remains set to the work before him, the muscles in his shoulders pushing tight cords against the inside of his cable-knit sweater. Outside the window, a clutter of sparrows emerge from the remaining leaves of a giant maple, startled by some invisible threat. I push my back away from the bookshelf to stand before Pittle’s desk.

  “Listen, Doug,” I say, keeping my throat as loose as possible in order to deliver a just-a-guy voice. “I don’t want you to think that I—”

  “I don’t.”

  Pittle stands now and turns to me, his teeth sugar cubes buried in facial hair. “Lawyers, reporters. Librarians, too,” he says. “Questions are our business.”

  For a time both of us stand there with eyes cast at different corners of the room. Through some crack in a doorframe or windowpane comes the faint smell of woodsmoke.

  “Well, thanks, Doug,” I say finally. “But I suppose I should be getting back to the real world now.”

  “Sure,” he shrugs. “Any time.”

  But before I move I do an odd thing. Raise my hand to wave at him as though
he were standing at some distance away. A stupid, inexplicable gesture, but Pittle doesn’t acknowledge it. It takes a conscious effort to bring my arm down again. To prevent any further strangeness I keep both hands busy by sending them to my throat where they straighten my tie all the way down the hall and out into the broad world of light.

  Seeing as I’m in the neighborhood I decide to drop in on Tripp on my way back, justify my per diem with a social call on the guy who’s paying the bills. Short and sweet, a hang-in-there-big-fella pep talk—this is what I have in mind. But then the interview room door opens and it’s clear that even this modest plan was overly ambitious. My client’s face an enlarging moon, bloodless, puff-jowled.

  “You look well, Thom,” I lie as he lands in the chair across the table from me, his hands absently hooked to the opposite edges.

  “I wouldn’t know. They don’t let me look in any mirrors.”

  “That’s cruel and unusual punishment for anyone to endure. Want me to smuggle one in for you?”

  “I’ve gotten used to it, actually,” he says, moving his head around on his neck in a slow orbit of mechanical crunches and squeaks. “A little while longer and I’ll have forgotten who I am altogether.”

  “Well, you just give me the word if you need anything else, O.K.?”

  “Anything. Right.”

  I’ve been in here thirty seconds and it feels too long. Like sitting next to the drunk who’s decided to talk to you and you alone on a poorly ventilated subway car. And there’s something that comes off Tripp’s skin—moist, feverish, a wet sheepdog sweat—that shrinks the space around him.

  “Just thought I’d check in on you. See how things were going,” I say, tensing my knees for a quick lift up and out of here. “But if there’s nothing else, I might as well get back and—”

  “Have you been up there?”

  Awake. My client sounds awake.

  “Where’s that, Thom?”

  “The lake. Where else?”