Vanishing Girls (19 page)

To the right of the twin photos of the almost-matching knives were photos of Reed and Marta Dekker shot point black in their home. Which begged another question: Was it one crime, or two, or—when you factored in the vanished girls from long ago—
three
?

“I’m going to the ladies’,” Ladasha announced. On her way, she steered me out of the conference room, into the hall, and toward the nearest exit. At the top of the staircase she leaned to my ear and whispered, “
Careful
.” She stood there, watching, as I made my way out.

M
ac and Ben were just finishing lunch when I came in. I joined them, and after Ben left the table to play in the living room, I filled Mac in on my morning. He listened, half smiling, shaking his head from time to time; but not once did he challenge any of the instincts that had tossed me around the morning like a Ping-Pong ball.

“I think you can probably leave it with Billy and Dash now,” he said, after I was through telling him about my visit to the precinct. “Let them take the lead. It’s their case, and you have other things to do.”

“I know. I should.”

“You did good; now move on.”

I nodded.

“I mean it, Karin. I know Chali meant a lot to you, I cared about her, too, but we have to let the cops handle this.”

There was a strain of annoyance beneath his reasonable tone; and then something occurred to me. “Are you angry that I hired Mary without asking you?”

“Are you kidding me? I already fired Star.”

“That was fast.”

“I couldn’t take it anymore. She wasn’t competent, bottom line. I hope this Mary person is better.”

“Well, she won’t be worse.”

We left it at that. Mac was on board with giving Mary a try for both jobs, so long as he liked her when they met tomorrow. And I had done what I could, identifying my Three Musketeers and launching, or at least reinforcing, a new line of thinking for the task force—preferably steering it as far from Billy as possible. Now I would (try to) back off.

Except . . . I couldn’t stop wondering about that fourth Musketeer. Seeing him in my mind, picturing him with the others, the clump of men bigger and noisier as it moved along Smith Street to turn on Atlantic toward the bus stop.

And I couldn’t stop thinking about the impression Abby had made on me last time I’d seen her: how she had reminded me of Billy’s PTSD when it flared up. The silence. The shining cloaks of eyes that look inward but not out. That backward traveling to a scary place you wished you could forget, but it kept rearing up and dragging you back to the time you least wanted to revisit. The suspicion people felt in the face of that eerie silence, as if it was an omission of something hidden—a secret or a lie—instead of an indication of blankness because you weren’t really there anymore. You had been swept away.

Mac went back to work and I hung out with Ben. I couldn’t resist a quick Google of Edward Walczak.

There was only one listing for that name in the online white pages for Brooklyn. If it was accurate, then he still lived right here in Boerum Hill. I noted his address in my BlackBerry. Just in case.

At about three-thirty I heard a key rattle in the front door and knew that Dathi was home. Ben and I went to greet her in the front hall. She toed off her shoes and set down her backpack by the wall.

“How was school today?” I asked.

“Good.” But she didn’t seem good; she seemed exhausted. The sparkle she had carried off the plane with her was dimming. As the days passed I became more aware of how much effort every small and large adjustment took for her, from unlocking a new door to wearing different clothes to acquiring a taste for different food to adjusting to the relative flamboyance of her new schoolmates. She kept a brave front, but I knew she was struggling. Still, whenever I wondered if I had done the right thing by luring her out of her own country, I rephrased the worry and reminded myself that I had intercepted her from a terrible fate in what was essentially a rescue.

She followed us to the kitchen, where we sat around the table and the kids had a snack together. Then Dathi cleared her dishes and Ben followed suit, standing on a stool watching her hands carefully wash each item and set it in the dish drainer to dry.

“Let’s play Maretti,” he said, when she was finished.

The longing glance she cast the laptop, where it sat open on the table, told me she wanted to get online. I was learning to read her, and it felt important to respond positively, to build as many lines of communication and trust between us as we possibly could.

“Want to check your Facebook before you do homework?”

She smiled, and I saw it: a flicker of the spiritedness with which she had first greeted me.

“I want to play Maretti!” Ben said.

“I’ll play with you.” I got up and pushed the laptop to Dathi.

She started typing before she had sat all the way down. The whole time we zoomed our little cars around the living room, I could hear the keyboard clacking in the kitchen. Dathi was a focused typist. Finally she appeared in the doorway.

“I now have eighty-three friends.”

I looked up, my little race car frozen mid-race along the edge of the coffee table.

“You mean Facebook friends?” I still couldn’t quite convince myself these were actual
friends
.

She nodded.

“That sounds good.”

“Beyond my friends from home, I only know seven of my new friends. The rest are friends of friends who friended me. It’s very exciting how quickly it grows here. There are so many more people my age online than at home. The thing is . . .”

“What?” I sat back; parked the car on my bent knee.

“The one person I’m still hoping to hear from is the one person who is the most silent.”

For a moment I thought she meant Chali: that she was waiting, hoping, yearning to find her dead mother on Facebook of all places. Then I corrected that thought.

“Abby?”

“Yes. She is my best friend here.
Don’t
tell Oja I said that.”

I suppressed a smile. “I won’t.”

She crossed the living room to the front hall, where she got her backpack. On her return to the kitchen, where she had taken to doing her homework in the afternoons, she paused and dug into her bag. She pulled out a paper on which she had drawn something, and handed it to me. Standing very still, she watched me look it over.

It was a charcoal sketch, black on heavy white paper: a knot of elegant lines that revealed two women . . . or, the longer you looked at it, a woman and a girl. When I realized that it was a mother and daughter, embracing, emotion welled up suddenly. Dathi missed Chali more than I could imagine, and in a way I could hardly grasp. I knew the desolate hopelessness of a mother yearning for an absent child. But the inchoate misery of a child yearning for a mother? It was a sister universe, but a different one.

Sensing something, Ben came up behind me and looked over my shoulder at the drawing. The visceral closeness I felt as he pressed up against my back, the warmth of his breath on my neck, filled me with such powerful affection it almost hurt.

“It’s beautiful,” I said softly.

“It’s for her.”

For Chali, she meant. But again my assumption was corrected.

“For Abby.” Dathi took back the drawing. “I sent her a message about it a few minutes ago. I think she’ll like it, don’t you? Shall I mail it to her?”

“We can do better than that.” I stood up and hoisted Ben onto my hip in one arduous movement. “Come on. Get on your jacket and shoes.”

“I have homework!” But the way she said it, with such buoyant abandonment, told me that she understood what I was thinking and she knew as well as I did that her homework could wait until later.

We dropped Ben off to wreak havoc on the quiet of Mac’s new office, then headed back into the darkening afternoon, through the cold, to the subway. If there were no delays, we’d make the last half hour of afternoon visiting hours at the hospital.

Chapter 17

A
bby was alone when we got there. It was the first time I hadn’t walked in on other visitors or at least Sasha Mendelssohn. The desk nurse had recognized me and waved me on before reaching to answer her phone.

We walked through the open door and there she was: propped on a pile of pillows, reading
The Giver
. Not only was she reading on her own, but she was holding the book herself, which had to mean her broken collarbone was almost healed though you could still see a rainbow of discoloration through the open neck of her hospital gown. The cast on her leg had collected a few signatures and doodles, but not many.

Her eyes shifted to peer over the top of the book when she heard us enter.

“Hi Abby. I’m Karin, remember me? I was here a couple times before. I live down the street from you. This is Dathi; she’s twelve. She wanted to meet you.”

Her eyes flicked from me to Dathi, who smiled.

“I brought it.” She held out the rolled-up drawing. “Did you get my message on Facebook? I tried to chat you but you’re never on. Here.”

Abby let the book fall out of her hands and Dathi jumped to catch it, dropping the rolled drawing onto the bed. She laughed, and Abby’s face lit with the slightest hint of humor.

“Where is your bookmark?” Dathi looked around for it: rifling the pages, checking the bed, the floor, peeking under Abby’s covers. Finally she found it halfway across the room. “Here we go! But how will we find your page?”

Abby reached out for the book and Dathi gave it to her. Flipping through, she found her spot and Dathi stuck in the bookmark. Then Abby wiggled back on her pillows, trying to sit up straighter.

“Here.” Dathi rearranged the pillows to make it easier. “Better?”

Abby moved faster and sat straighter than I’d seen her these past weeks. But she still didn’t speak. I had warned Dathi about this and was impressed by how maturely she was handling it.

The single visitor’s chair had been pushed into the corner, and when I repositioned it beside the bed, Dathi stood back as if I was going to sit down.

“You sit,” I told her.

“No, I will stand.”

“Go ahead. I feel like stretching my legs.”

Dathi acquiesced and pulled the chair even closer. She had decided even before meeting Abby that they would be friends, and so they were, simple as that. But it wasn’t just Dathi who had evidently made a quick decision: Abby also leaned closer.

“Karin told me about you,” Dathi said. “I found you on Facebook, and now we’re friends. After school today I wrote you about this. I go to Middle School 51. Where do you go?” She unfurled the drawing and held it as flat as possible in front of Abby, whose eyes quickly took in every inch of it.

“Can you tell what it is?” Dathi watched Abby’s face. “You see? It is a girl with her mother. That’s the thing about our mothers: When you get close to them they are soft like no one else. Mine smelled like cloves. A girl at school told me her mother smells like cookies. I like cookies very much. Back home in my village in India a cookie was a rare special treat.”

Abby’s gaze now moved from the drawing to Dathi, and appeared to study her. Dathi’s hair was swept off her round, earnest face with an elastic band. Her feather earrings dangled. Despite her new American clothes, she still looked a little backward and forward at once: unable yet to wear that second skin of tween style (or what passed for it), and unwilling to belittle her intelligence by turning speech into a version of text message slang. At Dathi’s middle school, I had overheard one girl say to another: “BTW she used to be my BFF but she’s so
random
I can’t stand her LOL!” I did a double take and then decoded the sentence enough to figure out that another kid had been harshly condemned. Probably a “friend,” since now it seemed
friends
were virtual while real-life social pressures at school turned many into
frenemies
faster than they could befriend or defriend each other. I had learned a lot in a single week of hovering around Dathi, who, despite being an outsider in her new world, was a different kind of outsider than I was. That was evident here, right now, in the way the two girls clicked.

I hovered near the door, watching, trying not to intrude on the bubble they were forming around themselves and each other; that special world young girls create when they become instant citizens of the same secret planet.

“Do you want me to hang it on your wall, right there, so you can see it?” Dathi pointed to a spot across from Abby’s bed, a few feet beneath the suspended television.

Abby hesitated, then nodded.

“I will need some tape.” Dathi glanced around the room as if she might spot some.

“I’ll ask at the desk,” I offered.

On my way, I ran into the Campbells. Linda looked less stressed than last time I’d seen her, when she’d broken down and was led away in tears. Father X was with them, looking paler and thinner than before his own recent hospital stay.

We greeted each other and I asked after his health. He told me he had spent only two nights in the hospital before being released with a “prescription to reduce the stress in my life,” which made all of us laugh.

“How do you do that?” Linda said. “Do doctors think you can just pick up and move to a desert island on permanent vacation?”

“It’s called blood pressure medication.” Father X’s smile lifted his face, transforming his cheeks into red apples.

I hated him.

I didn’t know him, and maybe the onslaught of news about pedophile priests had poisoned my thinking, and obviously I shouldn’t have judged
this
priest based on the crimes of others—but I couldn’t help myself. What was he doing hanging around this orphaned child’s hospital bedside? Didn’t he have a whole congregation to think about?

“I take it Detective Staples is trying to talk to Abby again,” Father X said to me, with a tinge of mourning in his tone; and I wondered who the mourning was for: the Reeds, Abby, or himself.

“No, I came up here on my own. My daughter is in there, visiting with her.” I surprised myself, coming right out and calling Dathi my daughter.

“I didn’t realize you had a daughter,” Father X said.

“Yes, she’s about Abby’s age. I also have a three-year-old son; well, he’s practically four.”

“Do your daughter and Abby know each other from school?” Linda asked. “I have to try to gather up as much information as I can about her life and friends if I’m going to be her mother now. Not
if
. I meant
because
.” Linda’s skin blushed a vivid pink.

“You’ll get the hang of it over time,” Steve reassured her. I was impressed with what a doting husband he was, and imagined he’d make an equally doting father to Abby. The Dekkers had evidently believed he could, though their faith in Linda baffled me.

“Marta and I were good friends but I’ve realized how little I really knew about their day-to-day lives.”

“We abide in shadow,” Father X remarked in a tone meant to be soothing, but wasn’t. But then nothing he said or did could pass by me now without skepticism or even outright distrust. A line from my brief foray into Sunday school sprang from memory, when the teacher read aloud in a ridiculously ominous tone from the King James Bible:
He who dwells in the secret place of the Most High shall abide under the shadow of the Almighty.

But as soon as I thought that, I recoiled at my own arrogance. Maybe Ladasha had a point; maybe I had already decided before the evidence was in. Maybe the ideas I considered instinctive were really knee-jerk judgments that would prove detrimental to the case the more I hung around. Maybe she and Billy were right: Maybe I shouldn’t.

“That we do.” Steve patted Father X’s back. “I suppose we’ll ferret out what we can about Abby’s life, and make up the rest as we go along, right? You’re going to be an awesome mother to her, Lindy.”

“We’ll certainly have to make plenty of adjustments”—Linda gathered herself—“but I’m eager to do it. I don’t want anyone to think I’m not. Darling, since I’m thinking of it, what about Brazil?”

“That’s been booked since last year.”

“Well, I’ll stay home while you’re gone.” To me, she added: “Every spring for years now, the boys head out on their annual fishing expedition off the coast of Brazil, and we girls jet to
Paris
for a week—boo hoo.” She grinned.

“Great fishing off Brazil.” Steve smiled at the thought of it. I recalled that he’d mentioned he was a teacher. The trip sounded like a well-earned vacation, possibly the highlight of his year.

“Of course”—Linda’s cheerful tone crumbled—“it wouldn’t be the same without Marta. I don’t mind staying home this year, not at all. In fact, I’d rather.”

“We’ll tag team our trips next year,” Steve thought aloud, “or alternate years. We’ll work it out.”

Now I realized why I’d recognized Steve the first time we’d met: He was the other man in the photograph with Reed in the Dekkers’ living room. The photo had been taken on what had appeared to be a boat; I recalled their relaxed, tanned faces.

“What about you, Father?” I asked. “You must need vacations, too.”

“I rarely take time off, and when I do, I like to stay within driving distance.” He pressed out a smile and looked at the Campbells. “Shall we?”

I followed them into Abby’s room.

Dathi was partially leaning on the mattress now, talking to Abby in the dramatic whisper of a storyteller just getting to the good part, and Abby was pitched even closer than before, intently listening. When they heard our footsteps, they pulled away from each other.

“Oh, honey, you’re looking so much better!” Linda hurried to Abby’s bedside and leaned in close.

Abby kept still, a blank expression frozen on her face. Any animation she had shown with Dathi had vanished.

“How are you feeling? Almost ready to come home?” Just like last time, Linda hesitated before touching Abby’s forehead lightly with her fingertips; but this time, she didn’t burst into tears. She pulled away and continued to smile at Abby while Dathi stiffened in her seat, trying not to get in the way of the adults who had swept so forcefully into the room.

I could see the bafflement in the expressions of Father X and the Campbells as they took in Dathi, who looked nothing like me. It was none of their business, but I had called her my daughter just now, so I stepped forward.

“Dathi lives with me now. Her mother used to work for us, before—”

Father X’s effortful smile softened his surprise. “Yes, of course. Let me welcome you.” He held out his hand to her until she acknowledged it with a quick shake.

“I called her my daughter before,” I said, “because I’m hoping she will be.”

Dathi’s expression cracked with emotion a moment. Then she looked at Abby, whose light eyes seemed to darken.

“Well,” Linda said softly, to me, “then we have something in common, don’t we?”

“I guess so.”

Suddenly we were all talking but not-talking about the murder of two mothers in the presence of their orphaned daughters. A chill crept through the room, as if someone had opened a window, though no one had. I became aware of the institutional airlessness of the hospital, where temperatures were regulated in a constant transfer of air that never left the building. It was the same dusty sourness that made me dislike staying in big hotels: it suffused your lungs and before long seemed to be in your blood, replacing oxygen with a sensation of gradual suffocation. In fact, standing there in that fragile moment, I realized how much I had grown to despise institutions in general, having spent years sworn to the army and then the police force. I hadn’t recognized my disdain for other-enforced boundaries until I had been so free of them I had no choice but to rely on myself almost completely. Maybe that was partly why I was having so much trouble finishing school. Why all I really wanted these days was to bury myself in family, more and more of it, all the time. Why I found Father X, an authority figure from one of the world’s most entrenched institutions, so creepy.

“Dathi, I think it’s time for us to go home.”

She stood up, leaned down to whisper something into Abby’s ear, crossed the room, and took my hand.

Dathi and I traveled home packed into a rush-hour subway, standing inches apart, grasping the same pole.

“
The French Connection
came in the mail today,” I told her.

“Oh?”

“If you can get your homework done by the time Ben’s in bed, we can watch some of it tonight.”

“I will try my best.”

After that, we didn’t talk. She seemed absorbed in thought, but so was I: My desire to speak with Edward Walczak, the fourth Musketeer, and find out what he knew about Father X was gathering an obsessive momentum in my mind. What would be the harm? Maybe there was something to learn from him. Something important that I could pass on to Billy and Ladasha, in case they hadn’t already ferreted it out on their own. And then I would do what everyone seemed to want and mind my own business, leave it to the professionals, and get back to my own life.

That night, sharing a blanket with Dathi on the couch in our dark living room, munching from a bowl of popcorn between us, I tried to understand her attraction to a story so far flung from her own world—a 1970s New York narcotics detective on the trail of what turns out to be an international drug ring—but instead understood something else: her fascination with Popeye Doyle. It was his irreverent persistence, and the innate imperfection of his quest. He shouldn’t have dug his nose in so deeply to a dangerous underworld, but he did anyway, and the end result was nothing like what anyone might have predicted. It was, essentially, the same thing that drew me to Meg in
A Wrinkle in Time
: She’s driven by her anger and stubbornness and that is how, ultimately, she arrives at an unexpected truth.

A
t four o’clock on Saturday afternoon, Mary and Fremont Salter arrived on our front stoop. Fremont had a guitar strapped across his back, and he carried an amplifier that looked heavy. His band had a gig later that night; Mary was driving the equipment, which he hadn’t felt safe leaving in the car.