eighteen
D
ad called later, when the sky was changing from black to blue and the snowfall had slowed. It was maddening to wait for Mom to hang up the phone and tell us the news. A lifetime seemed to pass in those seconds.
“Did they find her?” I demanded the second the receiver was back in its cradle.
Mom shook her head. “Nothing. A false report.”
So Stacy Lemke wasn’t near Highway 10; she wasn’t headed north to anywhere. I didn’t understand how there could be a false report; either there was a frostbitten teenage girl wandering in the area at 4:00 a.m., or there wasn’t. It didn’t seem like the sort of thing that could be mistaken.
Aunt Julia stretched in the doorway. “They’re coming back, then?”
Mom fidgeted uneasily. “They’re taking Johnny in to look at his cut.”
“It’s that bad?” Aunt Julia asked.
“His hand will be fine. The police need to, you know, examine the cut in case there are...well, you know. Fibers and things.”
We let this sink in. Outside, Kennel began to bark.
“Is Johnny a suspect?” I demanded.
Mom swallowed. “I don’t know if that’s the word—”
Emilie asked, “What other word is there?”
The knock at the back door made us jump. I craned my neck around Emilie and Aunt Julia—hoping for what? Stacy? Dad and Johnny? It was Jerry Warczak, stamping to clear the snow from his shoulders and boots.
“I’ve been out with the search team,” he explained, peeling his hands out of his gloves. “Heard all the commotion and wondered if I could be of any help here.”
Mom started to her feet. “Oh, thank you, Jerry. Thank you. But I’m not sure—”
He flexed and tightened his fingers, working the cold out of them. “I thought maybe I could help out with the milking.”
The milking. We’d all forgotten, in the chaos of things, that we lived on a farm, that there were a hundred cows to milk. Dad usually took this early shift, heading out to the barn long before the rest of us were awake, returning to doze while Mom got breakfast going. Weekdays, he and Jerry worked together, sometimes with Grandpa’s interference. Weekends, the job mainly belonged to Johnny. It might have felt like a million years since last night, but it was only Sunday, after all—time for Johnny to begin his shift.
“Yes—that would be wonderful,” Mom gushed. “I’m sure John would be so appreciative. And I know he’ll want to thank you somehow—”
“He’d do the same for me,” Jerry said, brushing her off. Maybe he felt awkward to stand in our kitchen without Dad or Johnny there. “Well, then,” he said after a moment. “I’ll just go ahead and get started, I think.”
“Thank you again, Jerry,” Mom called as he left.
For what seemed like the first time in my life, none of us went to church that Sunday. Mom suggested we all shower and get dressed, I guess to be prepared for whatever else the day might bring. Meanwhile, she set out bread and butter and jam, just to keep busy. Aunt Julia went to her house to “freshen up,” promising to return the second we needed her.
Right now!
I thought, watching her Buick head down the driveway.
Right now, we need you.
Grandpa came over with a dozen questions Mom couldn’t answer, then wandered out to the barn to help Jerry. It was nearly eight when Dad and Johnny arrived, blurry-eyed. We reassembled around the kitchen table, exhausted. Johnny’s hand was rewrapped in a thick bandage. He slumped into his chair at the table and immediately fell asleep leaning on one arm. He’d been awake for more than twenty-four hours at this point.
“I don’t think I’ve ever been so tired,” Dad said, forcing down a few bites of toast. He looked as if he’d been gone for a year instead of a few hours. Give him some gray hair and he’d look as old as Grandpa. “And Johnny—they’ve really been putting him through the wringer.” He glanced at Mom pointedly, a glance that said he would talk to her later, without Emilie and me listening.
Mom nodded, understanding. “Hopefully he can just rest for a bit. Take a shower, sleep a little.”
“They’ll want us back at the station later, you and me, and Johnny,” Dad said. “Detective Halliday said he would send a car for us.”
“Okay,” Mom said carefully. “I’ll see if Julia can stay with the girls.”
“We can stay here by ourselves,” Emilie protested, but Dad’s look shut her down.
Dad and Mom went upstairs, closing the door to the stairwell firmly behind them. Emilie and I cleared away the breakfast dishes, most of which were untouched, and walked carefully around a sleeping Johnny. Wordlessly, we finished the tasks Mom had started and abandoned: the heap of laundry to be folded, the dishes that lurked in the sink under a few inches of soapy water.
The phone rang and Johnny bolted upright. Emilie and I stared at it as if it was a grenade about to explode.
“Think we should answer it?” Emilie asked, but someone intercepted the call on the upstairs receiver.
The morning wore on, with the entire town of Watankee checking in by phone or traipsing through our kitchen. “It’s all over the news,” Aunt Julia reported when she returned, her hair blow-dried and curled, her makeup carefully applied. Grandpa came by to tell us what he’d seen on Channel 10; Uncle Paul drifted in and out; a friend of Mom’s from the hospital stopped by with a pot of soup. Mom and Aunt Julia stood in the driveway talking for a long time. When they came inside, Mom had tears in her eyes. Jerry Warczak must have finished the milking; he left without coming inside.
After church let out, Pastor and Mrs. Ziegler came over, refusing the offer of coffee. “We don’t want to cause any additional trouble,” Mrs. Ziegler said. Pastor said a prayer in his booming voice that seemed too loud for our kitchen; afterward, Mrs. Ziegler clasped us, one by one, in an uncomfortable hug. It was as if we were having a funeral service, as if Stacy was buried and gone already. Or maybe the funeral was for Johnny; he might as well have been dead, too.
“Now you hang in there, son,” Pastor Ziegler said, putting his hand heavily on Johnny’s shoulder.
By now, I realized, everyone in Watankee must have known, from the butcher to the librarian to the kids in my fourth-grade class. Had my Sunday School class prayed about this? Was everyone staring at our empty pew and whispering, speculating, gossiping? In their minds, had they already buried Stacy, and tried and convicted Johnny?
Detective Halliday came over just before noon, his large frame filling our doorway. “We’re going to have a little meeting down at the station with the Lemkes,” he announced. “Just to get a few things out in the open.”
Dad said, “Yes, sir.”
Mom nodded, running her hands through her hair to tuck in a few stray curls. “Do you want us to follow you?”
Detective Halliday shook his head slightly. “If it’s all the same, I’ll just take you in my car.”
“Let’s go, then,” Johnny said. He swished past me and banged out the door, his coat tucked under one arm.
“Listen to your aunt, now,” Dad commanded, giving Emilie a pointed glance and me a kiss on the cheek as he went. The three of them clambered into the back of the detective’s navy sedan and left.
“Okay, then,” Aunt Julia said brightly, as the car pulled away. “Should we get some lunch together?”
In response, Emilie wandered into the living room and snapped on the television. Aunt Julia and I followed, perching mutely on the couch. We watched a string of commercials about heater repairs and used car sales before the news came on. A perky blonde woman informed us that the local area had been hit hard by snow, with the Manitowoc area receiving nearly thirteen inches in the past twenty-four hours. The roof of the Toys “R” Us in Sheboygan had collapsed. I half tuned out, picturing thousands of toys buried in the snow, when suddenly I heard Stacy’s name.
“Turn it up!” I yelped, and Emilie obliged.
“...vanished last night during the snowstorm after some car trouble in rural Manitowoc County.”
“Vanished?” I repeated, the word salty on my tongue. People didn’t just vanish. They fell into holes or got into cars, but they didn’t vanish.
“Shut up!” Emilie snapped.
“Throughout the night, volunteers from all across the county searched the neighboring fields for any sign of the missing girl.”
There was a shot then, of a field I recognized farther down Rural Route 4, and a group of men walking across it, about an arm’s length apart.
“Early this morning there was a report of a teenage girl spotted up north, close to Whitelaw, but authorities have dismissed the lead. Anyone with information about the disappearance of Stacy Lemke is asked to call—”
Emilie turned down the volume, and the reporter’s voice dissolved.
“It’s not going to help to hear any of this,” Aunt Julia said gently, touching her palm to Emilie’s shoulder. Emilie had put on Dad’s sweatshirt again; it was big enough that she could disappear inside it. Maybe she wanted to vanish herself.
“Maybe she was hurt in the crash,” I suggested, trying out the idea. “That must be what happened. She was hurt, and then she—”
Emilie waved the floppy cuff of the sweatshirt at me. “If she was hurt, she wouldn’t have left the truck. And Johnny would have said something, wouldn’t he?”
“I don’t know,” I admitted. “I’m just thinking.”
“Well, try to use some sense when you think.”
“Okay, let’s come away from the television,” Aunt Julia suggested, helping me to my feet.
“And do what? Play some checkers or something?” Emilie sniffed. “I mean, what’s the point? He’s fucking ruined everything.”
Aunt Julia frowned. “We don’t know that your brother has done anything.”
“I’ll tell you what he’s done,” Emilie huffed. “He took his girlfriend out on a date, and he didn’t bring her back. That’s all anyone is going to need to know.”
As much as I hated her for saying it, I knew she was right. All the regular things from our regular lives were pretty useless now.
Everything
was
fucking ruined.
nineteen
A
unt Julia made macaroni and cheese from a box; in between haphazard stirs of the noodles on the stove, she went out for at least two smokes. “There’s no point trying to quit during a time of stress,” she explained. The noodles ended up overcooked, limp, coated in a sticky paste of orange cheese. Emilie took one look and excused herself to lie down in front of the television again. I moved the macaroni around my plate and scraped the rest into Kennel’s bowl by the door.
“Did you tell my mom what I told you?” I asked Aunt Julia. “About the fight and everything else?”
Aunt Julia closed her eyes. “You know, I’m just not sure it’s the right time.”
“What do you mean?”
She opened her eyes, rubbing one hand across her temple. “Well, I don’t think it necessarily proves anything. They might have had an argument, but that doesn’t mean that Johnny...”
Her voice trailed off, but mine filled in the blank.
“Killed her?” I prompted, then clapped my hand over my mouth. It was a horrible thing to think, let alone to say. I had a woozy feeling that by saying the words, I’d made them true.
Aunt Julia swallowed. “Well, right. There’s a big jump between arguing with someone and hurting them. I mean, Lord knows your uncle Paul and I have had our disagreements.” She gave me a crooked smile. “And if we mentioned it right now, it might make Johnny look guilty of something he’s not.”
“But he might be,” I said, my voice small. Aunt Julia’s eyes narrowed.
Just then the phone rang, and Aunt Julia grabbed for it. She listened, then pursed her lips tightly. “The family has no comment at this time,” she announced, and placed the receiver back in its cradle. She looked at me. “That was a reporter from the Green Bay paper.”
So Johnny’s name was out there, and people all the way in Green Bay had heard about it.
I spent much of the afternoon watching our driveway, like a sentry at a fortress, on the alert for all visitors. I was alone with my uncomfortable thoughts—Emilie slept away the afternoon, Aunt Julia disappeared to talk with Grandpa for an hour, and Jerry Warczak came once to check on the cows, this time without stopping by the house. Throughout the day, the phone rang, as if it was a living thing on its own.
Detective Halliday’s car didn’t turn down our driveway until nearly seven. Aunt Julia had made us peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, but I hadn’t been able to take more than a bite. Dad and Mom, climbing out of the backseat, didn’t look at each other. Dad went straight to the barn, and Johnny, more like a ghost than a person, headed upstairs before I could say anything to him. But what would I have said?
“I’m so exhausted,” Mom groaned, collapsing into a chair. “I feel like I could sleep for days.”
“So there’s still no word?” Aunt Julia asked.
Mom shook her head, her eyes closed. “There are still people out there, searching.” She went quiet, letting her sentence hang in the room. There was an odd choking noise in her throat, and I realized she was trying not to cry.
“Oh, Alicia,” Aunt Julia said. “Oh, you poor thing.”
“You should have seen the Lemkes, Julia. For God’s sake, she’s only sixteen years old. If it was Emilie or Kirsten, I don’t know what I would do.” Mom looked directly at me, and I squirmed under her glance. Suddenly I felt guilty that I was safe and Stacy wasn’t, that Johnny was safe but Stacy wasn’t.
“Bill kept saying these awful things, like how he knew Johnny wasn’t ever good enough for his daughter. And the pregnancy test—my God. Johnny just sat there the whole time and took it, and Bill and John ended up screaming at each other. And Sharon Lemke couldn’t even stay in the room during the questioning, she was so hysterical.” Mom bit her lip. “I tried to comfort her, but what could I say? If they don’t find her, Julia—”
I swallowed hard, trying to imagine Mrs. Lemke as anything less than perfectly poised, her hair coiffed, her linen dress starched wrinkle-free. I thought of Mr. Lemke at the party, singing happy birthday in a big, showy voice. He’d orchestrated the whole show that day, from the tour through his house to the grand unveiling of Stacy’s Camaro, as if the day had been as much about him as about Stacy. He was someone who liked to call the shots, but where did that leave him now?
Aunt Julia put her hand on top of Mom’s. Her skin was still somehow dark, although it had been months since she’d tanned on her deck. “We can’t think like that, Alicia,” she said, rubbing her thumb back and forth in an oval across Mom’s pale skin.
“What about Johnny? What’s going to happen to him?” I asked, but Mom kept talking to Aunt Julia as if I wasn’t even there.
“I don’t know what to think,” Mom whispered, her voice strained with exhaustion. “There’s really no proof of anything from that night, one way or another. Johnny says they went to a movie in Sheboygan, but he didn’t keep the stubs. He told them all about the movie, but admitted that they’d seen it once before, so that didn’t prove anything. The officers have interviewed the employees from the theater, and no one remembers seeing them.”
“But Sheboygan is a bigger city than Watankee,” Aunt Julia said. “So there wouldn’t necessarily—”
Mom continued, not listening. “And the detective asked him why he went all the way to Sheboygan, twenty-some miles away, when Manitowoc had a perfectly good theater, and snow was coming?”
I’d wondered the same thing.
Aunt Julia nodded. “What did Johnny say?”
Mom shrugged, smiling grimly. “That they wanted to get away from everything for the night, just be by themselves.”
“Well, that’s understandable.” A hint of a smile had crept into Aunt Julia’s voice. “They’re teenagers, after all.”
“No one remembers them at dinner, either,” Mom continued, still whispering. Maybe, I realized, she didn’t want Johnny to hear. “Johnny says they went to The Humble Bee in Cleveland. He described exactly what they ordered. The waitress remembered some young couples in there, but the officers showed her a picture of them and she said they didn’t look familiar.”
“Hmm,” Aunt Julia said. “It doesn’t prove anything either way, does it?”
I pictured the inside of The Humble Bee, where we’d stopped a few times coming back from Sheboygan, all of us piling into one of the round corner booths. Dad had described the decor as “fussy”—with bright yellow curtains and bumblebees printed on the menus. It wasn’t Johnny’s kind of place, either, but I could see how Stacy would like it.
“And no receipt?” Aunt Julia prompted.
“He thought it might have fallen out of his pocket sometime last night, while he was trying to push his truck out of the ditch, or later, with all the running around we were doing.”
“Of course,” Aunt Julia murmured. She was still touching Mom’s hand, her thumb kneading Mom’s skin.
“I don’t see how I have any choice but to believe him.” Mom slid her hand from Julia’s grasp and leaned wearily against her. “But it doesn’t look good.”
We heard Dad’s boots on the stairs and froze. He came in, still wearing the mask of a hundred-year-old man.
“John—” Aunt Julia began, rising.
“I’ve got to get some sleep,” he mumbled, shuffling past us, a ghost, just like Johnny. His footsteps clumped heavily on the stairs. I listened to him walk down the hallway, pause at Johnny’s door, and continue on.
“What about tomorrow?” I asked, my throat suddenly tight. “It’s Monday. We have school.”
Mom seemed startled, as if she hadn’t realized I’d been sitting there the whole time. “For now, we’re all just going to stay right here.”
I nodded, thinking of Kevin and the spelling bee, of my desk at the front of the room with my textbooks waiting inside. School would go right on along without me, without Emilie and Johnny, without Stacy.
“I think that’s a good idea,” said Aunt Julia. She smiled at me, bright and false. “I’m going to go check on Dad and then head home for the night. I’ll be over first thing tomorrow morning....”
Mom gave a crooked, thankful smile.
“But what’s next?” I demanded. “What’s going to happen to Johnny? Is he under arrest?”
“Of course he’s not,” Mom said immediately, reflexively. “But...we don’t know what’s going to happen next.”
At the doorway, Aunt Julia looped a scarf around her neck several times and pulled on her coat. “Want to walk me out, Kirsten? You’ve been cooped up all day.”
I looked to Mom, who nodded absentmindedly. “Wear your coat,” she said.
The chill was surprising, even in my too-big hand-me-down winter coat and snow boots. We crunched our way around the side of the house, past Grandpa’s house. A light was on in his living room; he was sitting in one of the matching recliners with his heating pad. He did this every night after dinner, but tonight he was leaning forward, his head in his hands.
“This is going to kill him,” Aunt Julia murmured.
“What?” I asked, not sure I’d heard right, but she shook her head.
It was dark but clear, the wind calm, the snow settled into stiff peaks like meringue. If it had been like this yesterday, I thought, Johnny wouldn’t have driven off the road. If it had been like this yesterday, Stacy would have made it home. Only twenty-four hours ago, Johnny and Stacy had been driving back through a storm. Only twenty-four hours ago, Johnny had watched Stacy walk away, her red hair and green coat visible for a few moments, before being sucked away into the night. Except...except. I kept thinking of what Mom had said, that no one had seen Johnny and Stacy on their date, not at the movies and not at dinner, which meant that maybe they hadn’t been on a date at all. My stomach churned, thinking this. If that was true, what had they been doing? How had Johnny come home safe and Stacy not at all?
We passed the long rectangle of Grandma’s old garden, which Grandpa tended haphazardly in the years since her death. Deep furrows of new footprints, partially hidden by new snow, trailed across the boundaries of our property, to the outbuildings and the farm itself. The men must have been out here, crisscrossing our property in their search.
“Doesn’t this feel good, to be out of the house for a minute?” Aunt Julia asked. Her words came out in a thick puff of air.
“I guess.” Suddenly I worried that I was missing something important that was happening inside our house, the phone call that said Stacy Lemke was okay or Johnny’s confession of what had really happened that night. “How far are we walking?”
“Let’s head over to see the fence,” she suggested, her gloved hand gesturing to the place where our property met up with the Wegners’ property.
We approached the line of firs at the front of the yard, the moon bright and the stiff branches in dark relief against the snow. It was the sort of winter night you’d find on a Currier and Ives cookie tin, where the cold looked harmless. At the side of the yard I paused and looked back at our house. The kitchen light was still on; Mom, I imagined, was still at the table, too exhausted to move. It was dark upstairs, except for a light in Johnny’s room. For a moment his shadow darkened the window, passed, then returned. He was pacing back and forth, his back hunched. What was he thinking? Was he going over every moment he’d ever had with Stacy? I shivered, and not just from the cold.
We picked our way across the field, which for three short seasons of the year was dotted with dandelions and clover and other weeds Dad cut back with the riding mower. The snow was deeper here, and I fell behind, my footsteps landing in the deep depressions where Aunt Julia’s feet had been. I wasn’t wearing snow pants—under ordinary circumstances, Mom would have killed me for wandering through thigh-high snow with nothing more substantial than a pair of jeans to protect my legs from the chill. But these weren’t ordinary circumstances; I realized sharply that the rules I’d followed my whole life were no longer important. Who cared about snow pants or eating dinner on time? Maybe there would be no more ordinary circumstances, ever.
The snowdrifts were deeper close to the fence, and Aunt Julia took my hand, hoisting me onto the bottom slat. She was much taller than me, of course; the snow barely came to the top of her boots. In the middle of the pasture, the snow was flat and smooth; at the fence line it had gathered in curved ridges. I wondered if they had searched this field, too—if men had walked arm’s-length apart through the Wegners’ horse pasture, scanning the snow for the slightest clue—fresh footprints, a dropped glove.
“Kirsten, listen to me,” Aunt Julia said suddenly, as if she’d been chewing over the words for some time. “Things are going to get tricky from here on out.”
I nodded, a movement so slight that Aunt Julia couldn’t have seen it, but she continued anyway.
“People are going to be saying things and speculating—making assumptions—about Stacy and your brother. Do you understand?”
The cold caught in my throat. “Yes.”
“I’ve lived in Watankee my whole life,” she continued. “I’ve seen that it can be the best place in the world. When Paul’s mother had cancer, I swear to you that everyone in town must have stopped by with a casserole for us. But it can also be the kind of place where people gossip, where people turn against each other....”
“I know,” I said, leaning back from the fence, letting the weight of my body swing free while my hands gripped the top slat. Even the people we knew, friends of my parents, members of our church, stared at me curiously, whispering to each other:
She’s so small!
“I’ve lived here my whole life, too.”
“Of course you have,” she chuckled, then continued seriously. “Our family has been in a tight spot before, when your parents were first together. It takes a lot of courage to go on living your life when everyone’s watching you.”
For once I knew what she was talking about without having to ask, although try as I might, I couldn’t imagine a younger version of Mom, pregnant with Johnny. I knew there had been some bitterness between Mom and her parents, who had retired to Arizona and only called on Christmas, and between Mom and Dad’s parents—particularly Grandpa, who was critical of her every move.
“Why can’t people just...” I shook my shoulders helplessly.
She sighed. “I don’t know, sugar. I don’t know what it is in people that we like to find something to pick on. I guess we want someone to take the blame when things go wrong. This is something so big...bigger than Stacy and Johnny, you know. It’s bigger than Hammarstroms and Lemkes. The whole town is going to take sides. It won’t be hard to find someone to blame. I think you should know that, because it’s going to be tough for Johnny, and for your mom and dad, and for you and Emilie, too.”