Special Topics in Calamity Physics (44 page)

"Poor fat drowned bastard," Nigel said. "No one remembers him anymore, you know?" "Who?"

"Smoke Harvey."

"Oh."

"That's what happens when you die. Everyone makes a big deal about it.

Then everyone forgets." "Unless you kill a state employee. A senator, or-or a police officer. Then everyone remembers." "Really?" He looked at me with interest, nodding. "Yeah," he said cheerfully. "You're probably right."

Customarily, when one stopped to consider Nigel—his face, ho-hum as a penny, his fiercely gnawed fingernails, his thin, wired glasses that forever evoked the image of an insect brazenly resting its tired, transparent wings on his nose—one was hard pressed to imagine
what,
exactly, he was thinking, what was the reason for the eyes that sparked, the tiny smile, reminiscent of those cute red pencils used to mark voting ballots. Now I couldn't help but assume he was thinking of his
real
parents, Mimi and George, Alice and John, Joan and Herman, whoever they were, tucked away in maximum-security prison. Not that Nigel ever looked particularly glum or brooding; if Dad were ever permanently incarcerated (if a handful of June Bugs had their way, he would be) I'd probably be one of those kids always jaw clenching and teeth grinding, fantasizing about killing my fellow students with cafeteria lunch trays and ball point pens. Nigel did a remarkable job of remaining positive.

"So what do you think about Charles?" I whispered.

"Cute but not my type."

"No, I mean." I wasn't exactly sure how to phrase it. "What's happened between him and Hannah?"

"What—you've been talking to Jade?"

I nodded.

"I don't think an
ything's happened except he thinks he's madly in love with her. He's
always
been madly in love with her. Since we were freshmen. I don't know why he wastes his time—hey, you think I could pass for Liz Taylor?" He set down the glass swan, twirled. The mink dutifully Christmas-treed around him.

"Sure," I said. If he was Liz, I was Bo Derek in
Ten.

Smiling, he pushed his glasses higher onto his nose. "So we need to find the loot. The bounty. The big payoff." He spun on his heel, then darted out the door, across the foyer, up the white marble stairs.

At the top of the landing, he stopped, waiting for me to catch up. "Actually I wanted to tell you something."

"What?" I asked.

He pressed a finger to his lips. We were outside Jade's bedroom, and though it was completely dark and silent, her door was half open. He motioned for me to follow him. We crept down the carpeted hall and into one of the guest rooms at the very end.

He switched on a lamp by the door. Despite the rose-colored carpet and floral curtains, the room was claustrophobic, like being inside a lung. The musty, forsaken smell doubtlessly was what
National Geographic
correspondent Carlson Quay Meade was talking about in the account of his excavation of the Valley of the Kings with Howard Carter in 1923, in
Revealing Tutankhamen:
"I daresay I was troubled of what we might find in that eerie sepulcher, and though there was most certainly an air of excitement, due to the sickening stench, I was forced to remove my linen handkerchief and place it over my nose and mouth, proceeding thus into the cheerless tomb" (Meade, 1924).

Nigel closed the door behind me.

"So Milton and I went over to Hannah's early last Sunday, before you showed up," he said in a low, serious voice, leaning against the bed. "And Hannah had to slip away to the grocery store. While Milton was doing homework, I went outside and took a look inside her garage." His eyes widened. "You wouldn't
believe
the stuff I found. For one thing, there's all that old camping equipment—but then, I checked out some of the cardboard boxes. Most of them were full of junk, mugs, lamps, stuff she'd collected, a photo too—guess she went through a serious punk phase—but one huge box only contained trail maps, a
thousand
of them. She'd marked some with a red pen."

"Hannah used to go camping all the time. She told us about that incident when she saved someone's life. Remember?"

He held up his hand, nodding. "Right, well, then I came across a folder sitting right on top of everything. It was full of newspaper articles. Photocopies. A couple from
The Stockton Observer.
Every single one was about a kid disappearing."

"Missing Persons?"

He nodded.

I was surprised how the reappearance of two simple words,
Missing Persons,
could instantly make me feel so, well,
disturbed.
Obviously, if Hannah hadn't launched into that hair-raising sermon about The Gone, if I hadn't witnessed her stonily reciting all those Last Seens, one by one, like some sort of severely unbalanced person, I wouldn't have been unsettled by what Nigel reported in the least. We knew Hannah, at some point in her life, had been a seasoned mountaineer, and the folder of photocopies as an isolated item didn't mean much. Dad for one, was a person with a highly impulsive intellectual mind and he was forever taking sudden explosive interest in a variety of haphazard subjects, from Einstein's early versions of the atomic bomb and the anatomy of a sand dollar, to gruesome museum installations and rappers who'd been shot nine times. But no subject matter for Dad was ever a fixation, an obsession—a
passion,
sure; mention Che or Benno Ohnesorg and a gauzy look would appear in his eyes—but Dad did not memorize random facts and recite them in a brutal Bette Davis voice while puffing on cigarettes, his eyes whizzing madly around the room like balloons losing air. Dad did not pose, posture, cut off his own hair leaving a bald spot the size of a Ping-Pong ball. ("Life has few absolute pleasures and one is sitting back in that barber chair, getting one's hair trimmed by a woman with capable hands," Dad said.) And Dad did not, at unanticipated moments, fill me with
fear,
a fear I couldn't put my hands on because as soon as I noticed it, it slipped through my fingers like steam, evaporated.

"I have one of the articles if you want to read it," Nigel said.

"You
took
it?"

"Just a page."

"Oh,
great."

"What?"

"She's going to know you were snooping."

"No way, there were fifty pages there at
least.
She couldn't notice. Let me go get it. It's in my bag downstairs."

Nigel headed from the room (before disappearing out the door he gave a sort of delighted bulge of the eyes—a silent-movie Dracula expression). He returned a minute later with the article. It was a single page. Actually, it
wasn't
an article, but an excerpt from a paperback published by Foothill Press of Tupock, Tennessee, in 1992,
Lost But Not Found: People Who Vanished Without a Trace, and Other Baffling Events
by J. Finley and E. Diggs. Nigel sat down on the bed and wrapped the mink tightly around himself, waiting for me to finish reading.

96.

Chapter 4

Violet May Martinez

So do not fear, for I am with you; so do not be dismayed, for I am your God. —Isaiah,
41:10

On August 29,1985, Violet May Martinez, 15, vanished without a trace. She was last seen in the Great Smoky Mountains National Park between Blindmans Bald and the parking lot near Burnt Creek.

Today her disappearance remains a mystery.

It was a sunny morning on August 29, 1985, when Violet Martinez took off with her Bible study group of Besters Baptist Church in Besters, N.C. They were heading to the Great Smoky Mountains National Park for a nature appreciation trip. A sophomore at Besters High, Violet was known by her peers as fun and outgoing and had been voted Best Dressed by the yearbook.

Violet's father, Roy Jr., dropped her off at church that morning. Violet had blond hair and was 5'4". She was wearing a pink sweater, blue jeans, a gold "V" necklace and white Reeboks.

The church trip was chaperoned by Mr. Mike Higgis, a favorite church leader and Vietnam Vet who'd been active at the church for seventeen years.

Violet rode in the back of the bus next to her best friend, Polly Elms. The bus arrived at the Burnt Creek parking lot at

12:30 P.M. Mike Higgis announced they'd hike the trail to Blind-mans Bald, returning to the bus by 3:30 P.M. " 'Stand still,' " he said, quoting the Book of Job, " 'and consider the wondrous works of God.' "

Violet hiked to the summit with Polly Elms and Joel Hinley. Violet had snuck a pack of Virginia Slims in her jeans pocket and smoked a cigarette at the summit before Mike Higgis told her to put it out. Violet posed for pictures and ate trail mix. She became anxious to start back, so she left the summit with Joel and two friends. A mile from the parking lot, Violet started walking faster than everyone else. The group had to slow down because Barbee Stuart had a cramp. Violet didn't stop.

"She called us slow pokes and skipped ahead," said Joel. "When she reached the last visible part in the trail, she stopped to light another cigarette and waved at us. She walked around the bend and out of sight."

Joel and the others moved on, assuming Violet would be waiting at the bus. But at 3:35 P.M., when Mike Higgis took roll,

"Where's the rest?" I asked. "That's all I took." "All the articles were about disappearances like this?" "Pretty odd, huh?" I only shrugged. I couldn't remember if my oath of secrecy extended ex

clusively over the Blueblood Histories or the
entire
night's conversation with Hannah, and so all I said was: "I think Hannah's always been interested in the subject. Disappearances."

"Oh, yeah?" I feigned a yawn and handed him the page. "I wouldn't worry about it." He shrugged, obviously disappointed by my reaction, and folded the paper. I prayed—for my continued sanity—that would be the end of it. Unfortunately, for the next forty-five minutes, as we wandered the Whitestone rooms, the dust-iced tables, the never-sat-in chairs, no matter
what
I said to pacify him, he wouldn't stop blathering about the articles (poor Violet, wonder what happened, why would Hannah have those papers, why should she care). I assumed he was simply vamping, doing Liz in
The Last Time I Saw Paris,
until his little face caught the light of a constellation —Hercules the Giant—flickering in the kitchen ceiling and I saw his expression: it wasn't affected, but genuinely concerned (surprisingly weighty, too, a seriousness usually associated only with unabridged dictionaries and old gorillas).

Soon we drifted back into the Purple Room, and Nigel, removing his glasses, instantly fell asleep in front of the fireplace, clutching the mink possessively like he was afraid it'd tiptoe out before he woke. I returned to the leather couch. A marmalade smear of morning was spreading through the sky, visible beyond the trees through the glass-pane doors. I wasn't tired. No, thanks to Nigel (now snoring), my mind was circling like a dog after its tail. What was the reason for Hannah's addiction to disappearances —Life Stories brutally cut off so they remained beginnings and middles, never an end? ("A Life Story without a decent ending is sadly no story at all," Dad said.) Hannah couldn't be a Missing Person herself, but perhaps her brother or sister had been one, or one of the girls in the photographs Nigel and I had glimpsed in her room, or else the lost love she refused to confirm the existence of—Valerio. A connection between these Missing Persons and her life, however distant or gauzy, had to exist: "People only very, very rarely develop fixations wholly unrelated to their private histories," wrote Josephson Wilheljen, MD, in
WiderThan the Sky
(1989).

There was, too, the supremely itchy feeling I'd
seen
her somewhere before, when she had a similar eggshell haircut—a feeling
so
persistent, the next day, sunny and freezing, when Leulah dropped me off at home, I found myself weeding through some of the contemporary biographies in Dad's library,
Fuzzy Man: The Life and Times of Andy Warhol
(Benson 1990),
Margaret Thatcher: The Woman, The Myth
(Scott 1999),
Mikhail Gorbachev: The Lost Prince of Moscow
(Vadivarich, 1999), flipping to the centers and inspecting the photographs. It was a pointless exercise, I knew, but frankly, the feeling, though relentless, was also sort of vague; I couldn't vouch that it was authentic, that I wasn't simply mixing Hannah up with one the Lost Boys in a production of
Peter Pan
Dad and I caught at the University of Kentucky at Walnut Ridge. At one point, I actually thought I'd found her—my heart swooped when I saw a black-and-white picture of what
had
to be Hannah Schneider reclining on a beach in a chic vintage bathing suit and headlight sunglasses—until I read the caption: "St. Tropez, Summer of 1955, Gene Tierney." (I'd stupidly picked up
Fugitives from a Chain Gang
[De Winter, 1979], an old biography of Darryl Zanuck.)

My next foray into Private Investigation led me down into Dad's study where I searched for "Schneider" and "Missing Person" on the Internet, a survey that belched up nearly five thousand pages. "Valerio" and "Missing Person" yielded 103.