Harmless (10 page)

“One more second, chief. Da-da-da-dee-dee.”

That’s right, talk to her like she’s a friend from the fucking office
.

He found the piece of paper, read out the number, and after he hung up he stared hard at the receiver, willing it to ring, imagining the
exact
sound of the bell, his mind mimicking the duration and the humming intervals between. He was getting the sounds right—why didn’t the phone ring?

The girls must be walking through a no-signal zone. Rebecca wanted to talk about a boy, the Facebook “stalker.” What was his name? It didn’t matter. She needed to talk, and it
was a nice evening, and she didn’t leave a note because she was mad at her mom. The girls left the house and walked up the driveway and down the road, staying on the shoulder, avoiding the passing cars. He could even see them, walking along the side of the road, hardly noticing the black car that glides past them and stops just up ahead, engine idling. Inside, the barrel-chested, bearded driver checks the rear-view mirrors; his skinny, sweating friend pats his concealed knife; the driver throws the car into reverse and stops with a jerk beside the girls. The doors swing open in unison like the wings of a vulture, disgorging the men.

Who is there to protect them?

It was pointless, but he replayed the terrible scenario—the men, the car, the doors opening in unison—until he could have picked the driver out of a police lineup.

A gauzy halo surrounding the phone reminded him he was drunk and high; his recollections derelict; his hands unsteady. A little corkboard on the wall near the phone was covered in bills and cards, but no note from the girls. They probably weren’t planning to be gone long enough to leave one. That was a possible clue, a little white stone to guide the story clear of a bloody Brothers Grimm ending. But what did it mean? He took a few steps toward the living room, as if the
TV
would have an update on the ongoing crisis, then stood in the middle of the kitchen, feeling watched by a masculine presence that assessed his efforts, assigning minimal points for ingenuity, self-control, and diligence.

Another man would have figured out where Franny was by now
, the presence said.
But look at you, spinning the hamster wheel in your mind
.

“Leave me alone!”

Why don’t you make yourself a sandwich while you’re waiting?

“Why don’t you
help
me?”

You know where this is going
.

He did: he was directly responsible for Franny’s disappearance. It was crazy, but there it was: his transgression had taken form as a monster, silently loping up behind his daughter like a giant spider, paralyzing her, and carrying her body to its lair.

“I don’t believe in you,” he said. He nodded briskly to confirm this fact, obeying a need to be seen in action, then picked up his jacket from the kitchen bench. He had extra pockets now: they could only help.

“I’m not doing any good here,” he said. “I’ll see what the others are doing.”

Outside, the yard was dark, loud with crickets. A car passed on the highway, its brightly lit interior displaying a female passenger poking at a road map that had burst open like an air bag. He imagined her as an actress in a dashboard-
GPS
ad, and he smiled as he watched the bubble of light float by until the car’s red tail lights blasted him with a feeling of complete desolation.

As he walked down the front steps he heard a rustling deep in the hedge beside the stoop. The rustling got louder when he stepped on the ground, as though his weight had jarred loose a board beneath the topsoil, then it stopped. Was there enough room in there for a girl to hide? Why
would she? He peered into the hedge but it was like staring down a dark well.

Two of his friends were watching him from beside the fire, as if waiting for the conclusion of a practical joke, the girls jumping out of the bushes to surprise him, revealing Joseph as the ridiculous city boy. He stood up, watching the silhouettes of the other adults moving against the last light in the west, calling out the girls’ names, voices as lonely as train whistles in the night. Had he ever heard a real train whistle in the night? No. He’d picked up the image from a song, and it rose up now to underscore his loss.

Not that anyone was using the word
loss
.

Julian moved along the edge of the garden and met up with another silhouette. The shadows conferred, and then Amber and Julian were calling the girls’ names, their bodies so close together that he couldn’t match the silhouettes to their respective voices, a disconnect that sent him running back to the phone.

Franny hadn’t left a message. She might be using her phone. He imagined her saying goodbye to a friend and noticing the flashing red light announcing a new message. He punched in her number, connecting so quickly to her voice mail he was sure they’d called each other at the same time. Later, when they recalled these moments in a cautionary anecdote, they’d laugh about the overlap.

God, how they’d laugh.

He tried again. When he heard her message he smashed the phone against his thigh. A strip of flypaper hung from the ceiling above him, coiling like a
DNA
strand encoded with hundreds of fly corpses. He leaned against the kitchen
wall, convinced that it would collapse without his support. Franny was going to call any second. He counted backward from ten because countdowns manage the chaos of time.

She would phone in ten seconds.

In three.

One ring and he’d answer, run outside, tell everyone the good news, and return to his real life. He would get on top of things, be the father that Franny needed, pass on his life wisdom to her.

It was back again—the watchful masculine presence.
Pass on your life wisdom?
The man’s tone was blatantly sarcastic, as though he’d just finished reading Joseph’s personal file.
What wisdom do you have to teach her?

Point taken: Joseph had no trove of proverbs and songs and myths to bequeath her, only his Party Boy stories: “Joseph, son of Don, did drink his portion at the mead-house, and loins girded he bedded the fair Joanne, daughter of Loretta, who did leave him her phone number in the morning. But Joseph, spying treasure on a far shore, did not call Joanne.” And fatherly advice? “Don’t mix your white and dark alcohol; a hash joint
isn’t
the perfect complement to the evening’s final pint; and Pink Floyd’s ‘Comfortably Numb,’ with its operatic self-pity and jaded romanticism, will guide you through the bleached-out finale of an acid trip.”

Why didn’t she call? He pressed phantom digits on his palm to reach Franny’s phone, then started on another familiar number.

Martha, it’s Joseph. No, everything’s not fine. Franny’s missing. She and Rebecca …

An hour, at most
.

We don’t know. We were out on a walk
.

I know, I fucked up. Again. I’m going to fix this
.

Look, it wasn’t just me
.

Why is it always
my
fault?

He couldn’t make that call.

Put a gun to his head. Break his fingers.

Outside, his friends had gathered around the fire, giving up on the search of the yard. He walked down the stairs, ignoring the rustling in the hedge this time.

“She didn’t answer, and there’s still no phone message,” Joseph said. They were already deep into Plan B, as if they’d known he wouldn’t reach Franny. That was a big conclusion to jump to. If he’d phoned six minutes earlier, her line might have been free, and he’d be standing by the fire laughing at the misunderstanding.

“If we’d given Rebecca her cell back we could call
her
,” Jane said to Alex.

“Yes, that’s the problem here. Rebecca doesn’t have a cell phone.”

“Did you see anything in the kitchen?” Liz’s eyebrows pinched together like she wanted to squeeze loose an important detail from Joseph’s memory. “No clues?”

“Clues? What, like ‘Mr. Mustard in the parlour’? There’s no fucking clues!”

The low fire bristled with shifting colours: orange and ash grey and blue. Was the world always so rich in concrete detail, every burning coal so
of itself
? What a terrifying thought. So much pointless detail, and they couldn’t find
two teenage girls. A broken beer bottle lay next to the fire—they’d been
that
messed up earlier.

“Go back to square one,” Jane told Alex. “Tell me everything you did.”

He rolled his eyes. “I needed to walk off my high. I walked down the road and thought about going for a swim at the neighbour’s place—a fucking
swim
.”

“You didn’t say anything about a swim before,” Joseph said.

“I didn’t go for a swim! I thought about it!” Alex paced around the fire, waving his arms like he was pushing through a crowd. Why was he, the sole adult who hadn’t gone traipsing into the fields, being made to answer so many questions?

“The pool,” Jane said, her voice wispy, as though afraid to trigger an avalanche of emotion. She held up her hand, then shook her head. “The girls wouldn’t go for a swim.”

“They might,” Joseph said. “They were high.”

She turned on him. “How do you know?”

His groin seemed to clench, pulling up his testicles. “Alex and I—”

“I tried to tell you earlier,” Alex said.

“You tried to
lecture
me about Rebecca.”

“I tried to tell you that we saw them getting high with Ruby.”

“What was Derek doing here, anyways?” Jane was staring into Mike’s petulant, defiant face, but he refused to feel guilty about buying dope on their property.

“We have to check the pool,” she said.

“Jane, I’m sure it’s fine.” It was worse that Liz said it so calmly—she had nothing to lose here.

Joseph walked beside Jane as they crossed the road onto the opposite shoulder, his steps falling into rhythm with hers no matter how hard he tried to break the pattern. Farmers’ fields stretched off to their right, a distant farmhouse and some outbuildings the only points of electric light.

He tried to focus on the lights but a terrible thought broke through:
If one girl has to drown, let it be Rebecca
.

Jane and Alex would be devastated. Nothing’s worse than losing a child—the guilt, waking up turned inside out, all bone and gristle on the outside, frayed skin and nerves within. It would be awful, but they’d get through it. They’d have to, for Liam’s sake.

If Franny died they might as well cut Joseph open and spill his guts beside the pool.

He let Jane get a few steps ahead and whispered quietly, enunciating every syllable: “Please God, take Rebecca. I’ll die without Franny.” Or worse, he’d keep on living—the shambling ghoul haunting the local schoolyard, The Man Who Lost His Daughter.

Can you imagine living with that?
parents would say.

I know I couldn’t
.

I heard he was high when she disappeared. I’m not saying it was his fault—oh God, he’s coming this way
.

They came to a bungalow set back about a hundred feet from the road, on a massive suburban-style lawn. No one ran up the driveway. Later they might run. They’d scream and implore the heavens, they’d rend hair and gnash teeth, but whatever had happened in the pool was long over.

The pool was above ground and surrounded by a chain-link fence at the side of the house.

“I hate that fucking pool,” Jane said. “It’s a death trap.”

Joseph wanted to clamp her mouth shut, silence her from using that last phrase again.

“Rebecca’s a strong swimmer,” Alex reminded her.

So Franny isn’t? She’s a great swimmer, actually. Won a silver medal
.

She would not be floating face down in the water. If anyone drowned, it wouldn’t be Franny.

Jane got to the fence first. The unlocked gate opened onto a staircase that ascended to a wide wooden deck. Joseph leaped up the stairs behind her and nearly tipped into the water to avoid crashing into her back.

There were no bodies. He thought he heard Jane whimper with relief. Alex was standing beside her now, staring into the calm water, riveted by his own reflection. Joseph kneeled down before his legs could collapse beneath him, and dangled his fingers in the water, watching the ripples roll out into the pool and expire. There was a feeling of inevitability about all of this, as if for years he’d been walking across a frozen lake, and only when the ice broke beneath him did he notice the hundreds of cracks he’d passed along the way. He was the kind of man who wrotecolumns about the challenges and foibles of fatherhood in the twenty-first century and then got stoned and lost his daughter in the countryside.

“I knew they wouldn’t be here,” Jane said.

“We had to look,” Alex said. “Just to be sure.”

“Now we’re being thorough?” She glared at him, not having to say it.
How could you have missed the girls leaving the property?

“At least I was
there
, at the farm.” Alex’s upper body was swelling with fury.

“I’m
always
there!” she screamed at him. “You fucking try it some time!” She took Joseph’s arm and turned himaway from the pool as Alex watched, stoned and horse-faced. More lines were being drawn.

T
hey were back at the fire. Why always the fire? Were they cavemen? Jane was grilling Alex again, making him walk through every detail.

“The boys were playing video games, which made me wonder where the girls were. I searched the
whole
house.”

This was good. Alex was following a rope back into memory, pulling tight any slack.

“I checked, but there was no note, no phone message, no sign of them.”

Everyone just stared into the fire, the residue of the drugs and booze hanging before them like a thin mist they couldn’t see through clearly. What were they missing?

“Rebecca’s trying to push me,” Jane said. “That’s what this is about, trying to get a reaction from her bitchy mother.”

“She wouldn’t drag Franny into it,” Liz said.

“If Rebecca went off in a huff then Franny would want in on the drama.” Joseph knew that much about Franny. “She can be
indignant
. You should hear her and her mom fight.” Actually,
he
should have heard their fights—heard
them, refereed them. “Franny gets moody. Hormones.” Was he really blaming this on hormones, as if they were the magical key to all female behaviour?