The Summer We Lost Alice (11 page)

There it always is, getting in the way of all my relationships. My therapist says I won't be able to love another woman until I manage to let go of Alice. Not stop loving
her, I don't have to do that. I just have to let go. He told me to write it all down, everything I could remember about that summer, and so I have. It hasn't helped. If anything, it's only cemented memories that should have faded into the forgotten past.

I can't escape the feeling that I'm going to see Alice again. Not in heaven, which I don't believe in, but somewhere real. I keep thinking that one day I'll turn a corner and there she'll be, looking in a shop window or tying a shoe. Maybe she'll be an amnesiac who doesn't remember who she is, who has been wandering for twenty years, but she'll feel a connection with me that will draw us together, even if she's married with four kids. I spin out these scenarios in my head. I
'll find her fishing off the pier in Santa Monica, or glimpse her on the set of some movie, a production assistant barking orders to extras, or discover her in a throng of tourists placing her hands in the concrete prints in front of the Chinese Theater in Hollywood, still trying to touch the past.

My therapist calls it "denial" and maybe that's all it is.

I've called Agent Wallace Myer once or twice over the years, to see if any new evidence has come up. Nothing ever has.

Everybody's moved on, including me.
Except that you can never leave the past behind, not totally. You always carry bits and pieces of it with you. Alice is a big part of my past and she'll always be with me, and I will always love her.

I fantasize about
finding Alice's killer. That's what I do, it's what my therapist calls my coping mechanism. But really, I wouldn't even know where to begin.

All I can do is remember the person she was and keep that person in my
mind and in my heart as long as I live.

That much is easy.

MIST SETTLED
around White Deer Lake when the sun dropped low. It collected on the searchers' brows like beads of sweat, but this was an October night in Kansas and the air was beginning to bite. Jackets were zippered up. The search party marched on.

They walked through the trees in a ragged line, bone-weary and irritable. Their flashlight beams spotlighted mist, scrub brush and weeds, and the occasional night forager—rabbit, mouse, opossum, skunk.

They listened for any sign that the boy was alive. A cry would be music to their ears, or a rustling in the undergrowth, anything at all. They thought of their own children and how they were safe at home, sitting down to dinner by now or hunkered over their school books, or even playing some noisy video game, and they thanked God for that grace. Three days and two nights spent tramping over the same beaten-down carpet of dead, wet leaves—three days and two nights on a quest they knew in their hearts was in vain—this was the end of it, anyway, with the night coming on and the storm rolling in. They'd be home soon enough, warm and dry, however it played out.

Two dogs argued briefly. One belonged to the sheriff, Sammy Morse Jr. The other dog was his
chief deputy's. The deputy jerked his retriever's leash and hissed his name.

"Sorry, Sammy," the deputy said.

"S'okay, Lew," said Sammy. "We're all tired, man and dog alike."

Sammy wiped the water from his face
. He knelt to give his spaniel a friendly thump on the shoulders. The dog leaned heavy against Sammy's leg, angling for a butt scratch.

"Been a long day," Lew said.

Sammy let out a slow breath. His mouth tasted rotten. The searchers had begun the day with a clock ticking away its last hopeful minutes. He'd seen the resignation in their eyes as he ordered them back to the woods for one final, inch-by-inch sweep. They'd been through the woods several times already. A gum wrapper wouldn't have escaped their attention, let alone an eight-year-old boy.

Willy
Proost had wandered off from his second-grade field trip three days before. He was wearing a light sweater, protection enough while the sun was out but woefully inadequate after dark. This would be Willy's third night alone in the woods, lost, hungry, dehydrated, and hypothermic.

They'd searched the woods, the town's streets and alleyways, the school grounds, the truck stop, abandoned wells, the ditches along
the highway. They'd looked everywhere a boy might be and they hadn't come up with a thing, not one blasted thing.

"I might as well call it off," Sammy said. "We
ain't findin' him tonight."

Sammy blew three blasts into his police whistle. He waved his flashlight in a long, slow arc that spoke of resignation. The lights in the mist flashed their acknowledgment. Names were hollered
. Distant voices announced, "We're packing it in!"

Sammy jerked the spaniel's collar
. He led him back to the lake where the cars were parked. The chief deputy walked alongside, lips pressed tight, jaw clenched while a feeling like death settled into his chest.

"Hard when it's a kid," he said.

Sammy grunted his agreement.

At the cars, the boy's mother,
Estherjane—EJ to her friends—moved among the cars like a ghost. She watched the men returning, some shaking their heads, most of them avoiding her gaze altogether. She peered into the darkness, ears keen for the call that refused to come: "He's over here! EJ—here he is!"

Sammy's walk slowed involuntarily. The deputy matched his own gait to Sammy's.

"What're you going to tell his mother?"

"That there's always hope," Sammy said.

"Even when there ain't?"

Sammy didn't answer. He could see, as headlights came on, the silhouettes of men and women loading coolers into cars. He heard the thump of trunk lids closing, the grind of engines,
the scratch of tires finding traction in the dirt.

EJ
Proost hurried his way. Her face was pinched and anxious, a tragic contortion of fear and sadness and desperate, groundless hope.

Sammy shivered under his leather jacket. He steeled himself as the woman drew near. Of course she was going to ask him about her boy.

* * *

Thunderclouds that had been massing on the horizon since sundown settled over
Meddersville during the Evening News. The barometer dropped and the earth released its scents. People commented, "It smells like rain," even before the weatherman came on with his radar screen of green, yellow, and orange Rorschach patches.

Flo stood on the front porch of her house and stared at the setting sun. Lightning flashed
. She counted the seconds until the deep rumble of thunder reached her ears. Three, four, five,
boom.
The farmers to the west would feel it first, then the storm would march into Meddersville proper.

Flo remembered a time
, when she was girl living in "the old house" (her childhood home was long gone) when all she would have seen from this spot was wheat fields and windbreaks. The grain elevators came next, then the homey stores along the new Main Street, and more houses. Fields were cleared out and carved into streets. Power lines were woven into crisscross patterns in the air over her head, and suddenly she was awash in the comfort and distraction of a dozen neighbors. She had owned this house once, and still did, technically. But spiritually and emotionally it belonged to her daughter Catherine, whom everyone but her mother called "Cat," and Catherine's two children.

The house was devoid of men. Flo's husband Bill had passed, as had Cat's husband, who had died a couple of years after the separation. The house felt lighter without them, but insubstantial, like a climbing rose with nothing to support it. She missed her Bill's solid presence in the living room where he often seemed to have gone to root in his easy chair. As things began to fall apart around the house, she longed for somebody who was handy with a hammer and saw. Bill had always had the answers. "It just needs a squirt of WD-40," he'd say, or maybe he'd scowl at it, whatever it was that had broken or stuck or stopped doing what it was supposed to do, and he'd say, "Well, that's a shame." Then he'd assemble tools and start tearing things apart. Eventually,
they would be put together again.

Now it seemed as if every appliance
, shingle, and board in the house was determined to break out of sheer spite. Flo didn't like calling repairmen. She didn't like having strange men in the house. She didn't trust them to do the job right and not charge her an arm and a leg. Even before she made the reluctant phone call to a plumber or electrician, she could imagine them spending her money on beer, buying rounds for all their bar friends thanks to the stupid old woman they'd hornswoggled that afternoon.

The same deterioration that characterized the house was evident on her face and in her joints, in the very heart that beat within her breast. She wondered when it had happened that each day became something more to be endured than celebrated. The answer came back instantly. It happened that summer, of course, the summer she lost Alice. Twenty-five years ago.

The wind kicked up and stirred the hairs that had strayed from her tidy bun. Behind her, the door creaked as it opened.

"Mother," Cat said, "why don't you come in?"

"I'll be in directly," Flo said without turning. She felt Cat's eyes on the back of her neck for several seconds before her footsteps receded into the house.

Three
, four,
boom
.

It was moving fast, this storm.

* * *

Sleepers woke to lightning and to thunder that seemed to crash inches from their ears. They rushed to slam shut windows and unplug
computers. They took the flowerpots off the porch railing before the wind got to them. Husbands and wives rushed outdoors in their robes, suddenly remembering that they'd left the car windows open or forgotten to put the bicycles in the shed. Landlocked people a thousand miles from the sea "battened down the hatches" as fat pellets of rain spattered against the window glass and spotted the walks. They crawled with wet hair back into bed, wide awake now and worried about the roof and the possibility of hail. They worried about the little boy lost in the woods. Finally, under the steady thrum of the rain, they could regain the drowsy, almost out-of-body feeling that felt like a warm embrace when you were safe and dry inside your own four walls on a stormy night.

At EJ's insistence,
she and her husband pulled on their raincoats and rubber boots and set out for the woods. She had punched him, hard, and screamed, "How can you sleep when you know he's out there?" Though he had no heart for it, Jacob Proost had decided to go through the motions. It was pointless. A hundred people had been over those woods a hundred times. It was barely a "woods" at all, just an old walnut grove that had gone wild, that and a smattering of maples and elms and oaks that had been planted by the W.P.A. If Willy was there, the search party would have found him.

He'd tried to comfort her, mumbling awkward words about Willy's being in God's hands or some such nonsense. He didn't remember exactly what it was
. He'd been half asleep when he said it.

She'd leaped down his throat for it. How could they trust in God to watch over Willy when it was God's own storm raging against him? Where was God when Willy got lost? Where was God now when they needed Him most?

So Jacob had driven to the lake and the woods in the pouring rain, and at some point chosen by EJ, guided by who-knows-what sort of feminine compass, they bailed out of the car. They trudged into the woods shouting Willy's name, only to have their voices drown in the relentless pounding of the rain.

At last the moment came, with Jacob sleep-deprived and buffeted by wind and rain, when the hopelessness of their situation wormed past his defenses and burrowed into his soul.
A blackness deeper than a void wrapped itself around his heart. He discovered in a single moment that he no longer cared if he lived or died. His own black thoughts—of death, of loneliness, of life going on under the weight of inconsolable loss—tortured him more than the elements. He was grateful for the rain that hid his tears, because he did not want to appear weak in the eyes of his wife. He moved on, placing one foot before the other, stumbling like the dead. He called Willy's name, but he had to stop, to lean stiff-armed against a tree and close his eyes to summon up a memory of his son's face, to connect the name with a living human being.

They searched until, from physical exhaustion and the cold and the wet and her own despair, EJ collapsed. One minute she had been
standing, and Jacob had turned away from her to shout "Willy!" into the whistling trees. When he turned back around she was lying on the ground as still as a corpse.

Jacob lifted her in his arms and carried her back to the car. He drove her to the hospital, worried about pneumonia, worried that he would lose his son and his wife both. Maybe she would never be the same after this. Maybe the ordeal of Willy's loss was too much for her to bear and the life would bleed out of her as surely as blood from a wound. Maybe her body was only now catching up with her spirit, a spirit that had fled to regions unimaginable by the likes of him.
Maybe he had lost her already.