Lost Girls Read online

  So it is that I find my nose stuck in the crimpled pages of the May 17th issue of The Murdoch Phoenix, when the girls were first reported missing. The initial story ran as a front page blurb noting that two local students had not been seen since the previous Thursday (the Phoenix was published every Tuesday) and that, the girls being close friends, it was suspected by police that they’d most likely “run off for the weekend.” The next issue featured two pictures of the girls, the same yearbook portraits published in every paper in the country. Smiling, floral Sunday-best dresses, side-by-side, blanketing the top half of the front page. One light-haired and dimple-chinned, the other dark and freckled, blue eyed both.

  The story below told of how the police were now of a radically different opinion from that of the week before, how search teams were being arranged throughout the area, how Armed Forces helicopters were brought in to run aerial patterns over a hundred-square-mile grid, and how two senior O.P.P. homicide detectives had been assigned to the case to “explore potential foul play scenarios.” In the weeks that followed stories chronicling the frustrated search appeared on every front page, and never failed to include a vague quote from the detective in charge (“Every avenue of investigation is being pursued,” “All of the department’s resources have been made available,” and, later, “It’s true that we are now treating the case as a homicide, although of course we remain hopeful”). Then, during a heat wave in the week following Labor Day which registered the highest temperatures the town had experienced since 1937, Thomas Tripp was arrested and charged with two counts of first-degree murder. The police weren’t releasing anything to the press that wasn’t already known: the girls were last seen after school that Thursday getting into the back of Tripp’s car, both wearing white summer dresses, and that authorities were now “marshaling the full extent of the evidence for the Crown.” At the bottom of the page a small photo of the accused inset at the lower left-hand corner, a face carrying the bewildered look of those who have suddenly found themselves in serious trouble.

  Having read through every story from the beginning to the present (“Tripp Hires Prestigious Toronto Firm for Defense”) I bring the entire pile out of the pantry and stand it on a table next to the library’s lone photocopier. After an hour of holding my head over the machine’s blinding flashes I amass an inky heap as thick as a nineteenth-century Russian novel.

  When I’m finished Pittle stands, moving around to lean against the shelf that holds the magazines—Time, Popular Mechanics, Maclean’s—all neatly labeled and untouched.

  “Can I help you with anything else?”

  “Maybe you can. Do you have anything in the way of a local atlas or history? Something that might provide a kind of general overview of the town?”

  “You’re a historian as well then?”

  “Not at all. I just like to know what I’m dealing with.”

  “You mean where you’re dealing with,” he laughs, dark as coffee. “I know just the thing.”

  He slides around the corner into the stacks and in a few seconds returns with a large, apparently untitled hardcover book.

  “A History of Northern Ontario Towns,” he announces. “Compiled by Murdoch’s own late Alistair Dundurn, honored World War II veteran, amateur historian and, in his later years, well-known eccentric who walked the town’s streets talking in a language known only to himself. Remember him myself, although he died just a couple years after I arrived. Found him frozen solid in the middle of a snowdrift beside the doors of Our Lady of Perpetual Help after the big blizzard of ’84. Everyone thought it was a funny thing, his choosing to impersonate an ice cube outside of a Catholic church, being a die-hard Presbyterian all his life.”

  “Sounds interesting,” I say, meaning not the book but the way its author died.

  “Some of it is,” Pittle says, meaning the book.

  He holds it out to me and it instantly shrinks in the transfer from his hands to mine.

  “It’s got a good chapter on Murdoch in there,” he says critically. “Histories both official and unofficial.”

  “My thanks. I guess I should haul all this stuff out of your way now, though. What do I owe you?”

  “Well, I don’t imagine you’ve counted all those copies, and I’m certainly not about to, so why don’t we just call it even. And as for the book loan, consider yourself an honorary member of the Murdoch Public Library. Or perhaps more a visiting scholar.”

  “That’s quite a designation.”

  “It comes with one condition.”

  “Yes?”

  “When it’s all over—the trial I mean—you agree to give me an exclusive interview. A few remarks for Phoenix readers.”

  “Agreed,” I say, and sticking the heavy wad of paper and book into my leather document bag, walk out the library’s front door and back down Ontario Street through a bitter autumn rain that, although varying in its intensity, has been falling since the day I arrived.

  Back in the honeymoon suite I take out the copied articles and arrange them chronologically over the bed. Then, without an idea in my head, I take the rest of the afternoon to tape them all in this order to the wall next to the desk, the dresser, the window frames and then, standing on a chair, in a series of lines beneath the wood moldings of the ceiling around the entire perimeter of the room. When I’m finished I consider the fruits of my work and marvel at its pointlessness, at the way I’ve voluntarily made an ugly room even uglier. Put together like this, the smudged print of text blends together so that only the yearbook photographs and banner headlines (“No Sign in Search for Local Girls,” “Our Little Sweet One: A Father Talks,” “Lost Girls’ Teacher in Custody”) stand out. It’s as though the walls themselves now disclose a tale of their own, pushing through the layers of insulation and plaster. A story told largely without words, and the few that could be seen acting only to provide different titles to rename the same recurring image. Although the girls’ smiles are unchanging, their intimations are subtly enhanced as I walk around the room, transformed from something innocent to ironic to tragic to, by the end, a mocking ambivalence.

  I wasn’t aware of their names until now.

  Of course I’d seen them typed out on police reports and witness statements and in every news story I’d read about them but, my mind on other things, they failed to register as names. The personality of the words ascribed to faces, the language used to translate people into paper.

  Krystal McConnell.

  Ashley Flynn.

  Names of the times. Borrowed from soap opera characters of prominence fifteen years ago who have since been replaced by spiffy new models: the social-climbing Brittany now an unscrupulous Burke, the generous Pamela a refitted, urbanized Parker. But when Krystal McConnell and Ashley Flynn were named deep in the heart of the ’80s the thing was cuteness, feminine delicacy raised to an aesthetic paradigm. Pink cotton perfumed with designer fragrances. A belief in the transformative powers of positive thinking, spring water, German-made automobiles and avocado. Brand names in banners beneath made-up family crests, galloping polo ponies and green reptiles embroidered over every heart. And everyone named according to a particular version of the pedigree fantasy. Ashley: transplanted Southern privilege, a destiny lying in sorority mixers and a marriage of health club memberships, state-of-the-art appliances and night courses in nouvelle cuisine. Krystal: light refracted through the grooves and crests of fancy cut glass, a fragility tempered with the Eastern European heartiness of an imported K.

  I look again at the grainy pictures on the wall. Pointillistic dots in varying degrees of light and dark that blur up close but magically assemble into faces as I pull away. Ashley and Krystal were their names. And that, at the moment they obligingly smiled at the corny joke told by the school yearbook photographer, was what they looked like.

  ELEVEN

  Three days of wading through police notes and warrant documents, of prepackaged ham sandwiches purchased from the corner store beneath Tripp’s apartment a coupl
e blocks away, of sleeping in the desk chair and listening to the rain tap-dancing on the eaves. Three days of working alone and Barth Crane could use a little entertainment.

  “Evenin’,” the concierge says to me when I reach the bottom of the Grand Staircase.

  “Good evening. Any messages?”

  He lowers his head either to check for notes that may have fallen to the floor or to give me a better view of his vein-mottled baldness. When he rises again he squints at me through the lobby’s gas lamp gloom.

  “Nope. Nothing but—just more of the same.”

  “Fine. If I get any serious calls, could you have your staff please refer them to my room?”

  “Staff! Ain’t no staff but me!”

  He makes a clacking sound against the roof of his mouth that one immediately wishes one had never heard.

  “Well, I suppose that explains why the phone was left ringing off the goddamn hook the other night.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Nothing. Thanks so much for your help.”

  “Not a worry.”

  Then he lowers his head once more in what I can only take to be a bow of some kind, but I prevent myself from looking again at his awful scalp. Instead I turn and pull open the door to the Lord Byron Cocktail Lounge, stepping into an even greater darkness than the one I’d come from.

  At first, the only appreciable light emanates from the small stage at the far end of the room, and even this is of the purple fluorescent kind known only to strip bars and adolescent basement bedrooms. At the moment, however, the stage is empty, and after my eyes adjust I see that most of the bar is empty as well. There’s a table of four beards in lumber jackets slumped around a table of half-consumed pitchers, three loosened ties with rolled sleeves spotted around the stage, and what I assume to be one of the dancers sitting at the bar in a transparent blouse and bike shorts, her impossibly long blonde hair hanging stiffly down her back as though the plumage of an extravagant nineteenth-century hat. In the background the muted rumblings of cheesy jazz, a barely recognizable “Little Girl Blue.”

  Acquire a double rye and ginger and take a table near the stage but well off to one side against the wall where the darkness is almost complete. For a while nothing happens, and nobody seems to mind, not even the lumber jackets who look the sort who wouldn’t stand for excessive delays in the delivery of entertainment. I finish my drink and raise my arm to the barman for another.

  Then, without the usual P.A. introduction and change in music that signals a new dancer’s arrival, a young woman takes the stage and immediately drops her slip to the floor. She’s blonde as well but unbleached, and judging from the taut smoothness of the flesh at the back of her thighs and under her arms, could be no more than twenty years old. But as she dances it’s impossible to get a good look at her because of hair so loosely feathered it shrouds most of her face. The kind of hair one finds on those embarrassed by a scar or spotty skin, yet the few glimpses she offers suggest she’s as likely pretty as not. Moves without interest in her movement, fingertips running down over her ribs and stomach as though checking for dust. Hips swaying a little too slow for the music so that she’s always a halfbeat behind, hands now squeaking up the brass pole at the side of the stage. Raises her arms above her and the whole of her body, slender and pale and high, is clinically displayed.

  When she finishes the audience applauds dutifully but without the usual whistles or howls, which I assume is out of either boozy distraction or respect for her tender age. She bends down and picks the gauzy white slip up off the floor, lets it fall over her shoulders. On her way to the bar I wave to her to join me and she brings me another drink as well as one for herself.

  “Like the show?” she asks when she sits, places the fresh drink she’s brought for me down beside its two empty friends. Her skin egg-yolk yellow inside the thin fabric.

  “I did indeed, thank you. I feel much better now.”

  She makes a hollow sound at the back of her throat in place of laughter. Even up close I can gain no better view of her face, and she keeps herself a little turned from me to make sure of it. But her body leans into the table, a leg sliding forward to make contact with mine.

  “You want me to dance?”

  “In a minute maybe. How about we talk a little first. You live in town?”

  “Not exactly. But I know you don’t.”

  She moves her head so that it’s now at a different indirect angle from before, but as she does she exposes a flash of teeth from behind the veil of hair.

  “Oh, so you must know me pretty well, do you? Let’s see then. What’s my name?”

  She laughs, once.

  “No? It’s Barth.”

  I extend my hand to her but she doesn’t take it. Instead she pulls her feet up beneath her on the chair and rocks back and forth distractedly to the music, which has now changed to a heavy metal ballad from the ’70s that I can’t quite place. And then over the girl’s shoulder I see the older blonde take the stage and immediately begin to squeeze her pendent breasts together and glower at the four lumber jackets who respond with a couple beery hoots.

  “Don’t you have a name?” I try again.

  “Call me whatever you want.”

  She leans forward, close enough that her hair brushes against my cheek, and I notice that it has no smell. That she herself gives off no powder or perfume or sweat.

  “But I know you,” she whispers.

  Something in her voice moves me back against the wall. Maybe it’s only that she doesn’t speak like all the other dancers with their little girl or smoky madam routines. She’s so new at this she’s still using her own voice.

  “So it’s that obvious that I’m from out-of-town?”

  She nods, and her hair shifts like poured honey.

  “Is it the clothes? Or wait a second. You saw the story on me in the local paper. There must have been a picture, too. That’s it, isn’t it?”

  She says nothing to this but rises, bending down at the waist when she’s on her feet. Once more she moves her head in a way that briefly exposes a smile, a narrow row of too-small upper teeth.

  “Going already? You haven’t even danced for me yet.”

  She laughs again, this time cracking out so loudly I expect the whole room to have noticed, but when I glance behind her all eyes remain on the stage. The girl places her hand briefly on top of mine and sends a dull shock up my arm that holds me there, waiting for her to let me go. And when she does she leaves the idea of her touch over my skin—dry as paper, bird bones and muscle strings within—long after she withdraws. Moves to the bar, her spine a slippery semicolon under the cheap lingerie. Says something to the barman and leaves by way of the door marked LADIES’ ENTRANCE.

  I finish the drink she brought in a swift gulp, pretend to watch the finale of the other blonde’s routine. The lumber jackets hollering, then transfixed and silent for the moment of lowered panties, hollering again. Her body a blue-lit phantom, a photograph come to dollish life. The men watch her. Fixed to their seats, eyes held open to the small miracle of remembered desire.

  Except for me. Eyes moving between my drink, the glowing bottles behind the bar, the closed door of the LADIES’ ENTRANCE. Trying to recall when I’d last been with a woman. Years. Not since university, and God knows even then only rarely and without success. It’s hard to discern with any precision when impotence turns from a lack of desire to incapacity. Having consulted neither shrink nor urologist in my own case, I can only guess. For me, there was never repugnance, only a flat indifference. Women could still charm and allure, but the third requisite response—the stirring mechanics deep down where it counts—was never forthcoming.

  I haven’t been with a woman in years because I know that I cannot. Cannot because there would be no rewards for her and I’m too old for new shames. But tonight with this girl there was something. The swift, passing shiver of physical longing. A pooling of warmth in the lower back, neck loose, toes curling up within the leather pr
ivacy of shoes. The need to reach out to another met by the discipline to sit still, everything left in an almost painful balance. For the time she sat near me I wanted only to diminish the air between us, pull her hair aside and stroke my knuckles over her face. I wanted only this, but at the same time wanted only for her to leave me and these feelings alone. For with this there came also an apprehension. Not of her exactly, but of seeing and touching more than I could bear.

  TWELVE

  Early the next morning, inspired by six hours of semi-adequate sleep and a larger than usual nasal breakfast, I decide to drive back up to Lake St. Christopher for another look around before taking on the day’s more pressing tasks. Outside, the rain comes down in silver curtains. Cold enough to draw the blood away from fingers, toes and face within a minute of stepping out the door. If it gets this bad up here at the end of September, what cruelties will December bring? I make a mental note to check out the army surplus store down the street and stock up on thermal long underwear.

  Then I’m in the car, head buzzing, heat cranked, crunching onto the white-frosted stones of Fireweed Road. Rain syrups down the windshield, thinks about turning to ice before the defroster’s warm breath decides the matter for it. Bringing the Lincoln to a stop in the squishing mud that has blurred the pattern of boot prints and car treads clearly visible just days ago.

  But I’m not here to take the same route down to the water as before. Instead, there’s a path that begins where the road ends and heads around the far side of the lake. Rain turns to mist as it bounces off the cover of pine needles and black ash boughs above. The air is quiet, and the turning leaves around me—yellow and red and an almost unbelievable gold—are uninterrupted for long stretches by any building, signpost or litter. In fact I have to walk a full twenty minutes around the far end before spotting the first cottage, a shabby clapboard box that wouldn’t pass for a garden shed in certain Toronto backyards. Look in its windows expecting abandonment but instead finding definite signs of life: a loaf of bread beside a knife on the tiny kitchen’s cutting board, the embers of a fire in the brick hearth, an unfinished mug of coffee holding down the sun-yellowed page of a crossword puzzle magazine. Beyond this I can see straight through and out the window at the front which takes in a view of the water and the few road-accessible cottages on the far shore.