Girls (10 page)

“Warts and all.”

“It takes a lot of energy and will to be a doctor, I guess.”

The dog lay on his round bed, panting, looking pleased to have extended himself that much. His stiff tongue stuck out dopily, and he watched us like he understood what we said.

I said, “I’ll be late if I don’t leave now.”

She nodded. She looked so sad.

“Winter camp for the overindulged,” I said.

“You like them.”

“Some of them.”

“You’re good with kids.”

Which had unwittingly led us, of course, to where we didn’t want to be. Dear Archie: What do you do when everyplace you try to go ends up the place you didn’t want to get to?

I said, “I had the funniest thing happen outside.”

She clasped her hands and moved them below the surface of the table. I knew she was holding them in her lap. I had seen her do it at the doctor’s office, waiting for news.

“No,” I said, “I just fell down and it was so deep, I could barely get up. Old friend to man over there ambled up and I leaned on him. That was all. It was like one of those ‘what weather we’re having’ remarks is all. About how much snow we’ve got in the back field, on the hill.”

“What were you doing on the hill? There’s nothing there this time of year except snow.”

I stood to carry my cup to the sink. “Exercise,” I said. “And I
wanted to confirm the rumor about there being so much snow out there.”

She hung her head like she was very nearsighted and trying to study the tabletop. She said, “Jack, you’re a little insane.”

I went over to her. “It’s better than being a lot insane,” I said.

I was talking to the back of her head. I leaned down and kissed it. I put my hand on it and felt the shape of her skull, the springiness of her hair, the heat of all her life going on. I was surprised. I had expected to find it cool underneath my fingers. I kept my hand there, and what I wanted was for information to flow between us. I wasn’t thinking so much about facts, because there weren’t many. Her, me, the house that nobody lived in with us except for a noble, unbrilliant dog—those were the facts. The rest was more like feelings, except it wasn’t anything simple like love or hate. It was in between feelings and facts and we needed to know them, I thought.

She said, “You’re squeezing the back of my neck, Jack.”

She kept her head down. I rubbed at the soft flesh under the base of her skull. I said in the voice of the half-drunk marine who had squatted behind me in Phu Lam, “Well, we’re just seeing Flash.”

I caught what I wasn’t meant to. I didn’t know all 2,200 of them, of course, but I was familiar with a lot of faces and ways of walking. I knew the habits of some of them—the kids who walked alone at night with a heavy rhythm, the ones who sat on the steps of the bookstore and chain-smoked, the students approaching the library with their heads down because they were defeated before they began. Usually, they paid no attention to us. But this one noticed me. She didn’t want me to see her. Any kind of cop will feel it. I had seen her at the other end of the first-floor lounge of the freshman dorms as she woke up. They call them first-years now. The
man
in
freshman
isn’t fair. It isn’t female.

But she was female and young and as deep in trouble as anyone I knew. I saw her there. Later, I saw her smoking outside the dining
hall. She was dressed like the rest of them, but she wasn’t. Jeans jacket and a sweatshirt, jeans torn at the knees, bright woolen gloves. But the students here were mostly clean and so were their clothes. Hers weren’t and her hair looked lousy. I only saw their hair dirty if they did hard drugs or were writing poetry that semester or wanted to die. They wore their long-billed hats backward when their hair was dirty. This one didn’t look like any of them. Her face was supposed to be tough, I think, but mostly it looked sad and cold and worried.

I saw her again in the morning, when I was investigating an open door at the receiving dock down at the foot of the campus. I took some notes and I left. That was when I saw somebody leaning against a wall near the tennis courts that were at right angles to the dock. It was the same kid. She tried to look like she was waiting for someone. Anyone playing tennis was under about four feet of snow. I smiled and walked slowly when I approached her.

“Hi,” I said. “How are you on this cold morning?”

She tapped against her cigarette like a first-time smoker, knocking off ash that hadn’t yet accumulated. She was vibrating with chill, standing on her backpack to keep her sneakers out of the snow.

“Hi,” she said, but with no welcome.

“I can give you a lift to the main campus,” I said.

“I’m waiting for someone,” she said.

Her chin was a little thick and rounded. Her nose was too small. Her shoulders looked bony under the thin jacket that her sweatshirt hardly padded up. She wasn’t pretty, she was about fifteen, and she was someone’s daughter who had run away.

“You’ve been waiting for a week or so,” I said.

She threw the cigarette at me and her shoulders slumped. She said, “Shit. Bastard. Don’t do this? Please?” Then she said, “Shit,” because she knew, whatever
this
was, I was going to do it.

I said, “You need to get warm. You need to get fed. You need to go home.”

“You know about my home?”

I shook my head.

“Maybe you wouldn’t make me go back if you knew about it.”

“I can’t let you stay here,” I said. “Listen. Somebody loves you.”

She put her hands over her face. I knew the face, with its thick chin and displeased eyes. I had seen it on a milk carton. They put photos of the lost and runaway kids on milk cartons, and people never look at them as if they are pictures of people they might see. She was ordinary. But I remembered her. She looked like somebody’s daughter.

From under her hands came “Why do you have to
do
this?”

“Because someone loves you,” I said.

I carried her knapsack to the Jeep. I helped her in and I fastened the seat belt. I drove her over to Elmo St. John’s little office in what’s known as the municipal building. As the heat rose, her smell of dirt and oil and dried perspiration came over to me. She had taken out another cigarette and was lighting it.

I said, “I can buy you a meal before we—”

“Turn me over to Social Services,” she said.

“How many times have you done this?”

“Eleven? Twenty-one? I don’t know. It isn’t a
this.
I have to get out of there. I’m getting better at it. I’ll make it work. It was the weather, for a change, that fucked me.”

“You want food?”

“No.”

“You want to tell me your name?”

“Check the milk carton.”

“How long have you been out?”

She sighed. She said, “Not long enough.”

“Look,” I said, “I don’t want you hating me. I’m just—this is what I’m supposed to do.”

“You go round up all us milk carton kids.”

“It’s really the right thing,” I said.

She blew out smoke when she said, “Sure.” She continued to shiver.

I said, “It is. You need a doctor or anything? You feel okay, more or less, physically? Look in the thermos on the floor in front of you,” I said. “There’s hot coffee. Maybe it’ll get you warm.”

She opened it, and when she smelled the coffee, she closed her eyes and leaned her head back.

“Just like home in the morning,” I said.

I was looking at the street and I couldn’t see her face when she said, “No. My house smells like K-Y jelly in the morning. And the night. You can slide downstairs on it. My daddy lays it on thick.”

I said, “What?”

I heard her pour out coffee.

I said, “
What?
”

I heard her put the top on the thermos, and then I heard her laugh into the coffee. It was to punish me, and she had been fighting all of us long enough to know it did.

Elmo St. John was as nice a man as Archie Halpern, but a lot less gentle. And he never sweated, not that I had seen. He was so lean, he was always tucking in his shirt, and that involved pulling up the cheap plastic belt that supported his plastic holster and his handcuffs. He never carried extra cartridges in the belt loops because their weight pulled down on his trousers. His shoes were also plastic, bright and glossy, like the shoes you get when you hire a tuxedo from a cheap franchise rental outfit. His feet were very wide and very long. His hands were big, and his wrists protruded from his cuffs. He was in a town cruiser in the parking lot behind the municipal building. We had turned the runaway over to a woman from Social Services. The kid hadn’t talked to me again. Every time I thought of her laughter, I wished I could ask Fanny what she thought.

We were about to head off, but I didn’t want to leave yet. I was thinking about the runaway. I was thinking about Janice Tanner. My Jeep was parked so my left window was next to his. Our engines idled as we sat and sipped coffee from paper containers and talked. There was a lot of smoke around, what with the idling exhaust of each car and the smoke from the coffee and from our mouths and Elmo’s cigarette.

“She was just sweet,” he said of Janice Tanner. “Just the nicest child. My nephew knew her. Had his ninth-grade crush on her, I believe. Although they never tell you these things.
You
know,” he said, as if Fanny and I had raised a child to be fourteen.

I nodded. Then I said, “You said was just now. You think—”

He said, “Don’t you say I said it.”

“No.”

“Well, I said it. Was. Was. Was. She’s torn up crotch to neckbone someplace. Or strangled. Or maybe beat until her bones are sandy.”

“Jesus, Elmo.”

“It’s what happens. I know a fellow in the FBI. I told you I lived a couple of years in Fort Drum, right? Talk about winter. Yeah. He had me come in for a lecture they gave for ‘local constabulary,’ they called it. That’s me and you, Jack. Local constabulary. There’s a pattern they got, nearly as predictable as a cookie cutter. Like one of those gingerbread men. It’s a male between, I forget, thirty-five and fifty-five, and he was, let’s see, abused by his mother or father or both of them, and, one way or another, it was the mother’s fault. Well, he
blames
her for it, anyway. Poor mothers. They catch all the shit, you know? And he kills girls. He’s what they call—”

“A sociopath.”

“Right. He don’t have a conscience, the way I understand it.”

“He goes on these benders. Binges. Except instead of drinking, he murders whoever he needs to. Boys, girls, pussycats, frogs, whatever it is. And he does it a way he needs to do it to scratch his itch, except it doesn’t stay scratched.”

“See? You know this shit, too. You military guys. You probably got the same lecture from the FBI.”

“Just not in Fort Drum,” I said.

“I always wished I could get over there when it was happening,” Elmo said. “Too old. Too married. Too many kids. Too pretty damned much useless, as a matter of fact. I always wanted to get there, though. When the hippies were lifting their legs on soldiers rotating back. It happened here. It made me mad as hell.”

“It made them mad a little, too,” I said. “Elmo. You’re pretty sure she’s dead, right?”

“I am, Jack. How about you?”

“She might have run away. They do. Jesus, Elmo, one of them just did.”

“Not Janice. Guaranteed.”

“Damn.”

“She was lifted, Jack. ‘Hi, sweet child, can you read this here name on the map and tell me how to find it?’ ” He made a slicing noise between his teeth. “That’s all it takes.” He dropped his cigarette butt into his coffee cup and I heard it hiss. “But you believe otherwise, I take it.”

“She might be alive. Maybe it isn’t a psycho job. Maybe he isn’t a killer. Or she. Maybe it’s a woman who needs a child, the mother thinks. Or a man who needs one?”

Elmo said, “I sure do hear you, and I said I’m on my way. Now: ten fucking
four.
” He hung up his handset. “A catastrophe of major dimensions. Kid in an old camper bus from the college slid sideways through Celia’s Floral Arrangements on her way to make a delivery. We’ve got hothouse roses all over Route Eight. You and I show up Code Three, that’ll make a deputy, my other patrol car, and us. Jack, do you think the four of us can handle this one?”

“Who’s hurt?”

“Celia’s feelings, the right leg of the student, and the flowers, of course. See you there.”

I realized that he had one of the original small posters taped to the inside of the patrol car’s side window.

He said, “Jack?”