The Silent Girls (9 page)

Chapter 18

T
HE NIGHT WAS
so black, Rath seemed to be driving through deep space on the desolate tract of Route 105 that wound through cedar bogs known as Moose Alley. By night, moose haunted the roadsides, licking salt left by plows. By day, one of the creatures might be spied farther off in the swamp, dipping its great head into the bog, then lifting it ponderously, water pouring in strings from a head of an outsized, prehistoric horse, sullen eyes of a cow, and drooping lower lip of a giraffe. In the summer, the slow beasts sought refuge in shoulder-deep waters to escape the clouds of gnats that crawled into and gnawed every orifice, causing the moose to toss its head madly: the largest animal of the land unable to defend itself from the most minuscule of pests.

Rath kept an eye out for moose now. The creature’s dark coat concealed it in the night, and it stood so high on its gangly legs that headlight beams shot under its belly, and suddenly you were upon it and you stomped the brakes too late, your car shattering the beast’s legs as 1,000 pounds of moose exploded the windshield, crushing you. In the time it took to flick on your high beams, you were dead.

Death lurked everywhere. Death was alive and well.

Rath shivered and cranked the heat, dead leaves rattling behind the dashboard. He eased back on the accelerator as fog swam in from the swamp, headlights illuminating it like a wall of snow.

He turned on the radio to the crackle of 980 AM for the Patriots and Jets game, catching the tail end of the regional news. A string of break-ins of vacation camps on Unknown Pond continued. Local teenagers, no doubt. The foliage season was proving to be the best in years and had drawn an historic number of tourists.

The national news broke; Senator Renstrom was refusing to backtrack on previous remarks. The candidate’s nasal voice was laced with a vitriol that brought to mind a sweat-soaked preacher under a leaky canvas tent, promising cures and salvation to the infirm—for a fee. “Government-funded murder stops with me!” Renstrom whined to cheers.

The president then spoke with the calm certitude his opponents condemned as a tone of arrogant elitism. Rath thought he simply sounded presidential. “Federal funding is audited. The fund go strictly to non-profit health services to women and girls who otherwise have no access.”

Rath yawned as he drove over the bridge into Johnson, the lights of the village as bombastic as Times Square after driving in the blackness of the swamps. The NFL broadcasters jabbered about how Belichick was in the head of Rex Ryan. Rath had heard it all before.

At the center of sleepy Johnson Village, he turned up the steep road that led to campus. The road was dark as a tar pit. The Scout heaved past a knot of kids, shadows hugging the dark shoulder as they hiked down to the pubs. The headlights illuminated three girls hitchhiking with a disturbing nonchalance. A car stopped, and the girls piled into the backseat, their nervous laughs cut off from the world as the car door slammed shut. Rath filed to memory the car’s make and license-plate number.

What were those girls thinking? They were young. Dangerously foolish. Immortal. Like everyone before them. Like Rachel.

Rath imagined that after the pubs closed, bands of drunken girls swayed up the hill, numb to the hazard of being struck by a car, never mind this road being a rapist’s fantasy.

The Scout’s headlights gashed the dark around a tight bend. Rath gasped as a girl skipped across the road in front of him like a fawn. She wagged a hand at him, smiling.

That’s all it took. One girl. One car. The car slows. The passenger door swings open. The dome light is out. The driver’s face ill lit, but smiling. He seems nice. Cute. “Wanna a lift?” he asks, smiling. The girl leans in. The driver pats the seat. “It’s cold. C’mon. Hop in.” The girl hesitates. Her head cocks, like an animal attuned to the snap of a branch, some primal instinct working deep inside her, warning her that getting into this car with this stranger goes against all she was ever taught as a child about protecting herself.

But she’s not a child anymore, is she? She’s capable. Her own person. She’d know if this guy meant her harm. There’d be something about him. A look. A smell. An aura to raise the alarm to a screeching pitch. But she senses no prickling sensation of dread. The boy’s right. It is cold out. The other girls catch rides all the time. Nothing
ever
happened to them. Bad things happen. She’s not
stupid.
Bad things happen to good girls. But not to her. Never to her. The laughter of students comes from behind her. No one is crazy enough to do something with
witnesses
just feet away.

She looks at him once more. “Why not?” she says, and gets in the car.

In fewer than thirty seconds, he’ll answer her question in unmistakable terms.

Rath pulled into the guest parking lot watching students come and go from the library and the Mountain View Café. He rested a hand on the Dress Shoppe box, wrapped with a flourish of red ribbon. He undid the ribbon. It was too much. He felt confused. Why was he here? Was he really worried just because Rachel hadn’t called in a couple days? It was absurd.

He got out of the Scout and grabbed the box.

The night was brutally cold, the temperature in free fall, and the air smelled of snow. The frozen-dirt lot was poorly lit by fluorescent lights too few and far between, and by a weak glow from the Mountain View Café windows. Students hustled out of the café. Rath’s eyes followed a girl with long, braided hair like Rachel’s trailing from beneath a wool cap, the braids slapping a puffy winter coat like Rachel’s. The girl’s gait was purposeful as she made for the glass doors of River Dorms. But the girl was not Rachel. Her jacket was zipped. Rachel had always run hot. As a baby, she’d tossed blankets off herself in the crib, and to this day, she left her jacket flapping open in the coldest temperatures, so she could
breathe.

Rath entered the dorm, welcomed by an invisible wall of warmth and music crashing from the two hallways that met at the lobby. The canary yellow cinder-block walls pained his eyes, and the linoleum floor was scuffed with black hieroglyphic boot and tire marks. The lounge to his right was sparingly furnished with the functional, beleaguered chairs and sofas.

Several students were parked in the chairs and splayed lazily on the couch, oblivious to all but the screens of their smartphones. Rath doubted that the students would glance up if he set fire to himself. A flat-screen TV played unwatched reruns.

As he passed, the students proved him wrong, gawked at the middle-aged man with a wonder reserved for a Big Foot sighting.

The hallway smelled of pizza and pot smoke, and the doors to the rooms were pasted with collages of fashion-magazine covers, quotes from dead rock gods, and the standard old white eraser board with a magic marker hanging from a string. Apparently no one had yet figured out a digital alternative for leaving important notes like
Gone 2 do laundry
or
U suck
on your friend’s door.

Rath stood in front of Rachel’s door, confronted by his daughter’s magazine clips and quotes meant to give passersby a quick glimpse into her life. A photo of the girl from
Hunger Games
was altered with a mustache and the phrase
Hunger Lame.
There was also a mug shot of Charles Manson and a gruesome magazine cover for
Fangoria.
A poster of a band called Dethknot. Under these were two quotes in Rachel’s calligraphic hand:

Women who seek to be equal with men lack ambition.—Timothy Leary

People call me a feminist whenever I express sentiments that differentiate me from a doormat or a prostitute.—Rebecca West, 1913

Rath was swept up in a rush of melancholy by the naked honesty. He felt as though he were about to take a sledgehammer to the fragile sovereignty Rachel was just starting to piece together. Still, he possessed an urgent
need
to see his daughter’s face. To
know
she was safe. It was the only way to quiet the anxiety pressing from the inside of his chest so it felt his ribs would crack. He felt stricken with the same helpless terror he’d known when Rachel had been four-years old, and she’d let go of his hand in the Littleton, NH mall. Her hand could not have been out of his own for more than two seconds. When he’d turned around, Rachel had vanished, and he’d felt such an instant, consuming anguish and paralyzing horror that he’d been unable to move or breathe or think. A saleswoman had looked at him as if he were having a stroke. He’d whipped his head around, scanning frantically for his daughter, who, he knew, just knew, had been taken. “My daughter,” he said in a squeezed whisper.

“Daddy,” Rachel’s voice had said, and he’d looked down to see her peeking out from under a circular rack of men’s shirts. The relief had nearly felled him.

He put his ear to her dorm door. No sound. No light from under the door. He raised his hand to knock when he was struck with the idea that she was in there. And wasn’t alone. And he was about to interrupt her. Them. He envisioned her tossing open the door wearing some boy’s tee, disheveled and flush and ready to tear into whatever lame friend was knocking, only to find her father. He could not do that to her.

He was turning away when he saw the note scrawled on her eraser board:

Ray Ray, Where R U?!!! You’ve friggin disappeared! Have you gone off the friggin grid or what?
Call me
- B.

His blood turned to ice.

“Excuse me,” a far-off voice said.

Rath turned slowly to see a girl with Play Doh blue hair shaved tight to her skull except for the long, straight bangs cascading in her eyes. Her eyelashes were done up as lush as a carnival teddy bear’s. She stood no more than five feet tall and was glaring up at him from behind her bangs and snapping her gum at him. Tiny as she was, her arms had a pudge to them, and a bit of bare belly peeped from under the hem of a purple hippie frock. Her faded jeans flared to bellbottoms that brushed the floor, her bare, ringed toes peeking out.

“What are you doing?” she said, her voice barbed.

“Looking for my daughter.”

She stared unblinking.

“I’m Frank,” he said, “I’m—”

“Ray Ray’s Pops?”

Ray Ray, again.

“Do you know her?” he asked.

“Everyone knows Ray Ray.”

“Do you know where she might be?”

“You tried knocking?”

Rath shrugged.

“Maybe try that.” The girl flung her eyes at the ceiling, rapped a knuckle on the door.

The door remained unopened.

She rapped again. Shrugged. “Got me.”

“Do you normally see her every day?” Rath said.

She blew a bubble with her gum. “Pretty much. Especially Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays in Romantic Lit. Not
romance
romance, like chick-lit shit, but Romanticism with a capital R. Shelley, Byron, Coleridge, Whitman. You know?”

“I know,” Rath said. “And you haven’t seen her since when?”

“She wasn’t in class Friday. Or today. And I didn’t see her over the weekend. But I was holed up banging out a term paper. Like everyone. She’s probably hunkered down. I wouldn’t
worry.
You’re paler than Jack White. Ray Ray hangs on the third floor, in back, the periodical stacks. Try there.” She rolled on her bare heels to leave.

“You know who ‘B’ is?” He pointed at the ‘B’ below the note on the eraser board.

She blew her bangs from her eyes. “Nope.”

“Who would I see about getting inside her room?”

Her eyes squinched with suspicion. “That’s
extreme.
”

“I’m her father, and I’ve been calling for days. And—”

She was staring at him, her mouth slack, gum wad hanging out. “OK. Slow down. The dorm monitor. First room back down the hall. Don’t look so glum.” She wandered down the hallway, scratching the back of her shorn skull.

The dorm monitor, bespectacled and sober in a Johnson State sweat suit, listened to Rath intently from her wicker chair, a pile of biochemistry books on her lap.

“I don’t
know,
” she said. “You have ID?”

Rath handed her his driver’s license. She studied it, then him. Unsure. He handed her his wallet and she rifled through his credit cards, insurance card, and legion of other cards that verified his existence.

She tapped the wallet on her knee, relishing this unexpected sense of control thrust upon her in the midst of her bleary gray world of study. “This is a subjective call,” she said. “Mine alone to make.” She tapped the wallet.

“This is about my
daughter.
” Rath felt like smacking some humility into that smug face.

“It involves privacy matters,” she said, voice tight with newfound authority.

“All I want is to make sure my daughter is OK. I don’t have time for–”

“Don’t bull-rush me, sir. Your daughter has a roommate, and
her
privacy is paramount, too. I’ll let you in,” she said as if allowing him in to see the Mona Lisa after hours. “But I have to be there.” She slapped his wallet back in his hand and stood, a sour odor of sweat rising around her.

The smell of flowers and a whiff of Rachel’s powdery deodorant greeted Rath, and he felt a tug of loss. He took in the room without moving, hardly breathing; this felt far too much like investigating a crime scene. The bunk beds took up the wall to the left. Each a cyclone of sheets. He recognized Boo Bear, Rachel’s first teddy bear, lying on its side on the pillow of the top bunk.

Rachel’s IKEA desk and dresser were squeezed in the far corner by a window that enjoyed a view of the parking lot. The flowers Rath smelled were tucked into the neck of a wine bottle perched on the windowsill. Black-eyed Susans. Rachel’s favorite. They were wilted, the inside of the bottle ringed with a watermark from evaporation. Two dead petals lay at the base of the wine bottle.

Clothes lay scattered on the floor and draped over chairs. The cinder-block walls, the same appalling yellow as the lobby, were plastered with posters for bands like The Dolls, Skeletons on Holiday, Xup, Deathcapades.