The Girls Are Missing

The Girls Are Missing

Caroline Cran

Mystery Writers of America Presents

San Jose New York Lincoln Shanghai

The Girls Are Missing

All Rights Reserved © 1980, 2001 by Caroline Crane

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Originally published by Dodd, Mead & Company

ISBN: 0-595-20061-3

ISBN: 978-1-4759-1407-8 (ebook)

Contents

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2
 

3
 

4
 

5
 

6
 

7
 

8
 

9
 

10
 

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29
 

1
 

Joyce could feel the hot afternoon pressing in around her as she lay on her bed, half drowsing. Beside her, in his crib, the baby kicked and fretted, his small pink limbs flailing the air.

“Adam, what is it?” She sat up and leaned over the crib. “Why can’t you sleep?”

He refused to look at her. Perhaps he couldn’t see her yet.

“I’ve had enough of that,” she told him. “You kept me awake half the night.”

It was no use trying to rest. Not until he wore himself out. She smoothed her bed and tied back her hair to keep it off her neck. The tendrils around her face were damp. But then, so was her face, and so was her blue gingham shift.

The sun had moved to the western side of the house. Time to close the blinds. She looked out at what, until a week ago, had been a cool, luxuriant lawn. Now the grass was dry. The air seemed heavy and full of grit, just like in the city. The trees stood motionless in a light, hot haze. Beyond the stone wall, the meadow lay baking under white-gold sunshine.

With the blinds closed, the room was plunged into half-light.

“Now we can both sleep,” she said, but Adam had other ideas. The small fretful noises crescendoed to bleating cries. She picked him up and walked with him back and forth across the room. The bleats subsided into snuffles. This had gone on all night, too, the fussing, the crying, the walking. And Carl, her husband, had breathed peacefully and heavily through the hours. Carl could probably sleep through Armageddon.

She was annoyed, but could not be angry with the child who felt so tiny and snuggly, his hair as soft as a butterfly’s wing against her cheek. It was nine years since she had held a baby. Had Gail felt like this once?

With a pang, she thought: I wasn’t even there most of the time.

What a different babyhood Gail had had, growing up in that hole of a basement apartment in the city, with an impractical father, rest his soul. At least he had doted on his little girl.

And now there was Carl, who did not particularly dote on Gail, nor she on him, but that was to be expected. And for Joyce, it was as though she was really married at last, really raising a family, and not in the crowded, dirty city, but the clean, green suburbs.

“Mommy, can we go swimming?”

Gail stood in the bedroom doorway, her long legs bare and skinny below her shorts, her lank blond hair tumbled about her shoulders.

Poor Gail. After all those years of deprivation, her rescue had been short-lived.

“I’m sorry, honey, but the baby has to sleep. I know it’s a drag.” She ought to have timed it better. Had the baby in the fall, after school started.

“But I want to do something.”

“I know. Maybe tomorrow.”

If tomorrow were not more of the same, with the baby, the laundry, the endless feedings. She hadn’t gotten it down to a routine yet.

“Can I go out?”

“Of course you can.”

Downstairs in the kitchen, the telephone rang. They had turned off the bell in the bedroom extension so it would not disturb the baby. Gail answered it and held it out to her mother.

Still cradling Adam, Joyce settled herself against the pillows of the big double bed and took the receiver. A familiar wariness stiffened her when she heard the voice at the other end. It was Carl’s ex-wife.

Not that she had any reason to dislike or fear the woman. Carl and Barbara had been divorced for a long time. But there was something intimidating about Barbara, always a faintly sardonic tone, husky and superior-sounding. Was it ever possible, Joyce wondered, to like your husband’s ex-wife? Probably the reverse was even less possible.

“Well,” Barbara was saying, “I guess it’s about that time.”

Joyce did not need to ask what time it was. School had let out for the summer, the Fourth of July was over, and it was time for Mary Ellen.

“I guess so,” she replied.

“Well, now look. Are you sure it’s convenient for you?”

A brief hope. “Why wouldn’t it be?”

“I just wondered, because of the baby and all.”

Joyce had to admit that Mary Ellen would not make any difference there. It was just a silly emotional thing, wanting to keep her family to herself.

“Of course,” she said, “it’s no trouble at all. Mary Ellen’s really self-sufficient.”

“Hah! Maybe for you she is. Are you sure it’s okay? Is Carl—does he really want her to come?” “Why wouldn’t he? She’s his daughter. Barbara, is something wrong? You sound awfully negative.”

Barbara gave an embarrassed laugh. “Actually, if you must know, it’s about those girls. That just bothers me.”

“What girls?”

“ What
girls! Are you serious? Right there in your hometown. Don’t you read the paper? Don’t people talk about it?”

“No, I don’t read the paper,” Joyce said. “I don’t have time. Carl brings it home at night, and I—”

“Those two girls who disappeared. One of them just this week. You can’t mean—”

“Oh, those.” She had heard about them, of course. Cedarville was not a large community. And two of them …

“Two of them,” Barbara went on. “One you could understand, especially the first one, eighteen, she could have gone anywhere. But the kid this week was only twelve, just Mary Ellen’s age.”

“Listen, they’ve looked all over,” Joyce said. “If the girls were anywhere around here, they’d have found them. Probably they took off somewhere. Greenwich Village, or something.”

“Twelve years old?”

“It happens.” She felt irritated, wondering what Barbara expected her to do about it.

“Does Mary Ellen want to come?” she asked.

“Who knows? I guess so. Anything to get away from me.” Another embarrassed chuckle. “And it’s better for her than being stuck in that apartment with me working all day, and all her friends gone.”

“When should we expect her?”

“Well…” Barbara hesitated. “How about tomorrow?”

“Do you want me to go and pick her up?”

“Oh, no, no. You have the baby. I can take some time off. Tomorrow, then?”

Friday. A weekday. So she wouldn’t have to run into Carl.

Gail waited in the doorway. “Was that Barbara?” Joyce had no time to answer before Gail exploded. “I don’t want Mary Ellen! She’s a pest, and she never helps, and she leaves her stuff all over—I hate her.”

“Honey, she
is
Carl’s daughter, and we have this arrangement.”

Gail took a quick breath and suppressed it. No doubt she was going to say she hated Carl, too.

“Sweetie, I’m sorry. It’s hard on both of us,” Joyce said, in case that made any difference to Gail. “I’ve enough to manage without Mary Ellen, but that’s just life.” Softening, she added, “I miss last summer.” When there had been no Adam, and Mary Ellen had come for only two weeks, and it was the first year in all her adult life that Joyce had not been forced by circumstances to work for a living. It had been the three of them, a real family. They had gone on picnics, hikes, and swimming trips. Even when Carl was at work, she and Gail had had a lot of fun together.

Gail flashed her a quick grin, remembering.

The grin faded. “Mommy, why were you talking about people going somewhere?”

“Oh, you know. It’s summer, and kids sometimes run away from home.”

“Did you mean those girls in Cedarville?”

Gail was too damn smart. “Yes, Barbara saw something about it in the newspaper.”

“About them running away?”

“About them disappearing.” She had to be truthful. “Nobody really knows what happened to them.”

“Then why did you say they ran away?”

“I think it’s the most likely explanation.”

Yet maybe it wasn’t, now that there were two of them.

But it had to be.

She yawned, and her eyes felt heavy. “I didn’t sleep well

last night. Adam kept me up. I think I’ll take a little rest.” She placed Adam beside her on the bed and readjusted the pillows.

“Then can I go out?” asked Gail.

“I said you could. But, Gail—don’t go too far, will you?”

A shadow passed across Gail’s face. Because of those girls, perhaps. Gail always did worry too much. “I won’t,” she promised.

2
 

At the foot of the stairs, Gail stopped to put on her sandals. What, she wondered, was “too far”?

Her mother knew about the place. They had discovered it together on a walk in early spring. Probably her mother had forgotten, but Gail remembered. Now that summer vacation had started, she went there nearly every day.

Beside her, the grandfather clock chimed a half hour and then resumed its ponderous ticking. A fly buzzed in the sunshine outside the screen door.

She unlatched the door and stepped out into shimmering heat. Crossing the lawn, she climbed through a break in the stone wall and entered the meadow. Insects hummed in the hot, dry grasses. Beside the path stood a twisted apple tree. In the spring it had been a puff of white blossoms. She pulled at one of its branches to see how the apples were coming along. A bird darted out from among the leaves and flew squawking into the woods.

As she walked on through the meadow, over a low hill in the distance she could see part of a roof. It belonged to Mr. Lattimer. He was an old man with a dirty yellow beard, and he lived by himself. People said he was a hermit. They said the ruins behind his shack were all that remained of an estate his family once owned, but the house was gone, and he had no money, and he was a little bit strange anyway. Once Gail had passed quite close to him on the road when he was walking into town to buy his groceries, and he had smelled bad. Her mother said it was alcohol and an unwashed smell. She said he probably never cleaned his clothes or himself. Gail could believe it, for he always wore the same baggy brown pants and shapeless jacket and they were filthy.

Looking over at the roof, she saw thin smoke rising from the chimney. On a day like this? He really was crazy. She hoped she would never run into him again.

After another stone wall, the path sloped down through a wood and over a brook. There the air was heavy and full of gnats. The brook flowed slowly, passing through a wide culvert under the path. She dropped a leaf into the water and watched it disappear into the culvert, then come out on the other side and move in sluggish circles.

Beyond the brook, the path rose steeply through a jungle of dead white stalks that crackled when she touched them.

And then she was in an airy forest, where the trees made a high roof. When she looked up at the sky, she could not see the whole sun, only starry speckles of it shining through the leaves.

She left the path and climbed a small hill where the rocks were damp and moss grew on the ground. One of the rocks had a flat, jutting top, like the roof of a cave. Under it, the receding stone was broken into small rectangular surfaces that suggested many floors and rooms.