Songs for the Missing (3 page)

Here came the lights, and a single whoop of his siren as he tucked in behind her. It was just that kind of day.

Her mother’s lectures had worked. Waiting for him to get out of his car, she was terribly aware that she was Ed Larsen’s daughter.

The sheriff had to bend at the waist to see in her window. He was a regular at the Conoco, and recognized her without her uniform. “Afternoon,” he said. “You know how fast you were going?”

“Around thirty?”

“I had you at forty-eight. You know the limit here’s twenty-five.”

She had to dig in the glovebox for her registration and then wait while he sat in his car writing on a clipboard, which he brought back with him. He carefully tore off the top sheet.

“Miss Larsen, because this is your first time, I’m only giving you a written warning. You think you can keep it in check from now on?”

“Yessir. Thank you.” Did he say her name that way because of her father? Her instinct was to shred the ticket and bury the pieces in the nearest garbage can, except she had the feeling he’d hear about it somehow—at the monthly Rotary meeting or the fire department car wash.

“There’s no need to be going fifty miles an hour here.”

“Yessir.”

“You take it easy now.”

She did for a while, babying it through town. She was so late it didn’t matter, and for now her relief outweighed her irritation. When she was out on the flats of Route 7 and there was no one around she gunned it up to eighty. “That’s right,” she shouted, “you can’t catch me! No one can catch me!”

At the river J.P. kissed her and gave her shit, asking what took her so long, and she made a joke of it.

“Forty-eight,” he said, smirking. “You know what would happen to me if I got stopped doing forty-eight?”

“Your car doesn’t go forty-eight.”

“But if it did.”

The river was low, rocks sitting high and white in midstream. In the big hole below the falls Nina and Hinch floated in yellow tubes, splashing each other. Elise and Sam sat farther down on a giant boulder with their backs turned, conferring seriously (Elise had told Nina she was breaking up with him, but that was weeks ago). She had just enough time to get wet and then dry off on the ledge, lying beside J.P., her head resting on her crossed arms. The smell reminded her of her mother taking her to the town pool when she was little, the wet mark her body left on the hot concrete slowly evaporating. The stone was warm on her front, the sun beating against her back, reaching deep into her skin. She could sleep like this all day, just listening to the rush of the water.

J.P. couldn’t resist messing with her straps.

“Good luck. The hook’s in the front.”

“No fair.”

With a finger he wrote his name on her shoulder blade.

“I don’t want to go to work,” she said with her eyes closed.

“So? Blow it off.”

“I wish.”

Nina climbed out and wrung her wet hair over them. “Rise and shine, campers.”

“Actually that feels good,” Kim said. “You know what? We should both call in and make the Wiener work.”

“He’d just get Kevin and Doug-o to cover. Come on, quit stalling.”

“I really don’t feel like going in.”

“Waa waa waa. If I’m going, you’re going. I’m not going to sit there all night listening to Kevin’s war stories.”

“How long’s he been back now?” Hinch asked from below.

“I know, it’s been like two years. He was only over there five months.”

“Wooze did a whole year and never talks about it,” J.P. said.

“That’s cause Wooze has a life,” Hinch said.

Nina grabbed her ankle, and Kim kicked free. “Come on, get your ass up.” She poked her in the butt with her big toe.

“Stop. Stop, I’m getting up.”

She pulled on her cutoffs but Nina was right, it was too nice for a top.

Hinch’s brother’s friend Evan was working the door at the Three Ls, so that was the plan for later.

“Bring your big cash money,” J.P. said, kissing her.

“Yeah right,” Kim said, and pushed him over the edge. He tucked into a cannonball and took the other tube.

“Don’t miss us too much,” she called.

“We won’t.”

“Bye, Elise!” she yelled downstream, waving her towel. Elise waved back. Sam didn’t.

“I don’t get it,” Nina said as they crossed the rocks. “If she didn’t want to be with him this summer she should have just cut him off after prom.”

“It’s typical Elise. She’s got to have some kind of drama.”

“This way she gets to be the center of attention.”

“I feel bad for Sam. He’s a nice guy.”

“Hinch wouldn’t put up with that shit.”

“Neither would J.P.” But J.P. wasn’t in love with her. J.P. knew this summer was it and it didn’t bother him. In the fall he’d be in Columbus with half of their class. They were both just being realistic.

“How much you want to bet he’s there tonight?”

“Too easy.”

They climbed the winding path through the trees and up to the road, scissoring over the wire guardrail. “All right,” she said. “See you there, Squinky Square.”

They left together, headed for town on 7.

It was a race, Nina explained later. They had forty-five minutes to drive home, shower, change and make it back to the Conoco by three. By now they’d gotten it down to a routine. Nina lived closer. On a good day she could do it in thirty-two, and today was a good day. She easily beat Kim in, taking over from Dave and Leah right on time.

When Kim still hadn’t shown up at a quarter past, Nina called her cell and got her voicemail. She’d probably turned it off.

“You suck,” she said. “I already punched you in. I’m kidding. Enjoy your night off, bitch. I’ll say hi to Kevin for you.”

When Lindsay returned home from the Hedricks’ just before dinner, Kim’s suit and towel were draped neatly over the shower curtain in their bathroom as usual.

J.P. tried her around midnight from outside the DQ. In the dark corner of the lot, the open phone made his ear glow. He was semi-annoyed that she hadn’t told him, but didn’t want anyone to know. “I guess you’re asleep or just not answering. We’ll be at the Three Ls if you’re interested. I’m buying. Call me if you get this.”

They closed the place and ended up down at the beach, drinking Coronas they bought at the Conoco. The torn cardboard from the 12-packs curled, the coating burning blue. Smoke rose through the moon over the rocky arms of the breakwater. Far out on the lake an ore boat hung silent and motionless, starting its long haul back to Superior or Duluth.

“It’s weird,” Sam said, “Kim not being here.”

“I know,” Nina said. “It’s like I’m missing my twin.”

“Yeah,” Hinch said, “your good twin,” and she hit him and then snuggled back into his chest.

It was growing cold, sweatshirt weather, and the stars were out. In town, across from the cemetery, the sheriff’s cruiser sat facing the street to discourage speeders. The DQ was dark, as were the houses along Main, the streetlights shedding a dim silver tint, as if underpowered. At the corner of Euclid and Harbor, the prerecorded chimes of Lakeview United Methodist sounded two o’clock, her curfew.

Kim’s mother was asleep. Her father was asleep. Lindsay, who’d struck out twice and made a key error at second base, was asleep, Cooper snoring next to her on the bed.

In the middle of the night her father woke up to go to the bathroom and noticed the line of light under their closed door. In the morning the light was still on. Her door was open, her bed untouched. The light in the downstairs hall was on, and the outside light by the back door, invisible during the day. Her car wasn’t in the driveway.

The first person her mother called was Nina.

The second was J.P.

The third was Connie at the hospital.

The fourth was the police.

Known Whereabouts

He knew she thought he was being macho and foolish, going out alone, just as she knew he would go anyway, despite anything she might say. At this point in their marriage, negotiation was a tone of voice, a warning glance if the girls were in the room. “Don’t be an ass,” she would say when Ed was being unreasonable, and he would go quiet, removing himself. Hours later she’d find him at his tool bench in the garage or in his office, still tending an ember of resentment like a child, and though nothing was settled, she’d try to apologize.

They were both aware of the deal. While she didn’t believe for a minute that he’d succeed, she would allow him to go look, for his own sake (and somewhere beyond logic, hers). Now, quickly, while Lindsay was still asleep. The police were sending someone to take a report, and she didn’t think she could handle them by herself.

“I’ll have my phone on,” he said, kissed her and ran out the door.

He stabbed at the ignition as if he were being pursued, cranked his wrist and revved the Taurus to life, racking the shift into reverse. The rear window was frosted with condensation, and he had to hop out and slop it off with his forearm. From the kitchen she watched him slalom down the drive, thinking that if he hurt himself or someone else it would be her fault.

He hadn’t showered or shaved and felt sour and wild-haired, and was grateful none of their neighbors were out to see him take off. He tore down Lakewood, hunched over the wheel, daring anyone to cut in on him. The air in the car was chilled from sitting out all night, and he used it to wake up, charging himself the way his high school coach had pumped up the dugout, the same way he still tried to fire up his girls: “Come on now, let’s get some!”

In town he had to force himself not to pass the slow-asses in front of him. He took Buffalo to Main, her usual route, eyes flicking over the cars and pickups parked in the driveways. The Chevette was practically an antique, impossible to miss, but it was also small, and as he poked along he imagined it sitting inside every darkened garage, tucked under a tarp.

“Jesus,” he said, “drive your car!” and then missed the light at Geneva.

Maybe J.P. was lying and she’d just had too much last night and crashed at his place. Nina and Elise would back her up on principle, feigning ignorance. She wasn’t as honest with them as Fran liked to believe, and maybe that came from him. As a teenager he’d told his share of lies to stay out of trouble.

The lot of the DQ was empty, the sheriff’s cruiser gone, meaning Perry was on duty, a relief. Ed had sold Perry’s mother’s place after she died, and could count on him to be discreet.

A public person, Ed Larsen valued, above all, privacy. Like a priest or a doctor, part of his job was to keep his clients’ secrets, and know the town’s. Like right up here: a registered sex offender lived on Sandusky—a married man named Greene who’d drugged a girl Kim’s age he’d met at a bar. Ed had had problems moving a three-bedroom on the next block because of the disclosure forms. It wasn’t on his way, but for his own peace of mind he detoured into the leafy side streets, pausing at a couple of stop signs before creeping by a brown cape with a trailered bass boat in the drive. Two-car garage, fancy arrow weathervane. The lawn had recently been sodded, and a swath of dew glistened in the sun. It was a trick, and unnerving. In the pale morning light, nothing looked sinister.

He couldn’t take the time to check downtown or the strip of bars above the harbor. He was already behind schedule.

He followed 7 south out of town toward the interstate, the road splitting around the prow of a concrete island and then a grassy median before dropping down and crossing the river. Below, off to one side, stood the twin arches of the old stone bridge the new one had replaced, crumbling and tagged with bad graffiti. In the movies killers weighted their victims and dropped them into the surging current, but here the water was rusty and ankle-deep, a shopping cart capsized in midstream.

Ahead stretched the long grade to the flats, where the kids liked to drag race. As he crested the rise, the sun was just peeking over the trees, and he flipped his visor down. The shoulders on both sides were empty. He stayed in the right lane, peering at the fenced, overgrown farmland with its tumbledown barns and marshy stands of weed trees. Dirt roads edged the cornfields, then wormed back into the hills. Doorless trailers and open tractor sheds, silos and slurries, corncribs and chicken coops and pond after pond. The farther off the road, the more hiding places there were.

He was beginning to think Fran was right. He’d seized on the problem of Kim being missing and in his panic he’d jumped at the easiest solution.

It had been eighteen hours. She could be in Iowa by now. She could be in New York, or Chicago.

The zoning changed near the interstate. He slowed to scope the whitewashed Arco, pumpless and abandoned since the late ’80s, twisting in his seat as if he could see behind it. The lot of the Days Inn was dotted with semis and Harleys, a pair of power company cherrypickers backed into a corner. He signaled and turned off for a quick recon, circling the building, then gunned the Taurus up the exit and across the oncoming lanes.

He was stalling. Logically she wouldn’t be at the Conoco.

He was nearly there when a state trooper passed him coming the other way, clipping along, in no hurry. For a second he was tempted to jerk the Taurus across the median and run him down, enlist him in the search, the two of them cruising the interstate, setting up roadblocks, checking every car.

He wanted to blame J.P. and Kim’s friends. She spent more time with them than she did at home. That was exactly how it happened. Too much freedom, too much free time. He’d been a latchkey kid himself, and done things as a teenager he could only shake his head at now, stupid, dangerous shit his mother never suspected, and he worried that maybe through some poetic stroke of fate Kim was paying for his recklessness. She was more like him than Fran would ever know. He should have kept a better eye on her.

The Conoco was busy with commuters filling up for the trek to Erie. He pulled in, confirmed with a glance that the Chevette wasn’t there, then rolled around to the far corner by the air hose, where he could see trucks highballing along the interstate side by side. Across the overpass, its stem rising from the bottom of a cow pasture, a shimmering red billboard enticed eastbound drivers to try ADULT PARADISE just over the PA line. He left the car running, stepped out and stood at the guardrail, a hand over his eyes like a sailor, scanning both ways. Traffic bombed along, the gaps between filled with music from the pumps. He watched the lanes, chewing his lip, mesmerized, as if at any second she might come driving by.