Songs for the Missing (36 page)

“I can’t do this anymore,” she said, and wept while Ed held her.

They both stayed up until Lindsay came home.

“How are you doing?” Fran asked.

“Okay,” Lindsay said, as if nothing had happened.

“It’s up to you if you want to go to school tomorrow.”

“I have to. I’ve got a test in AP Bio.”

“That’s fine. Your father and I may be staying home, we’re not sure. Everything’s kind of up in the air.”

It seemed like her mother wanted an answer to this, so Lindsay said, “I can make it up if I have to.”

“No, that’s fine. We just wanted to give you the option.”

“Thanks.”

Upstairs, safely in bed, Lindsay listened to Cooper breathing fitfully. For more than a year, while she’d lived with the probability that Kim was dead, she’d also cultivated a fantasy in which she’d run away and was living anonymously in some city, working during the day and going out at night with friends, reading in her warm apartment—the life Lindsay herself had begun to dream of, away from Kingsville and the shadow of Kim. Now she hated herself for ever being so stupid. To rid herself of it, she pictured Kim under the snow and the dead leaves and the dirt where James Wade had buried her. She thought she should be able to hear her thoughts, as if they shared a telepathy just because they were sisters, except they never had before, and all she could think of was the snow and the darkness.

Ed, likewise, in the long, empty moments before sleep, decided that James Wade had killed her. Only Fran refused to accept it, out of reflex more than any honest consideration. She needed Kim’s death to mean something, and Wade was a total unknown. There was no way she could have foreseen him. It was easier to believe that Wozniak had killed her. Once again, she felt cheated by the world’s incoherence.

In the morning, the TV trucks dieseled in the dark, and Ed had to escort Lindsay out the back and across the frozen yard to her car. Wade was on the front page, along with a tiny picture of Kim, the same photo they’d used for the poster. Even if they wanted to go in to work, they couldn’t. For the time being, the world was closed to them.

Braden had news. Unable to corroborate Wade’s stories, Indiana pressed him for exact locations of the bodies. The state assumed he was using them as leverage, as if Wade had designed every step of his end-game. To show good faith, his lawyer had gotten him to comply in the most recent case. Armed with his directions, search teams were combing a county park outside of Valparaiso.

Ed wanted Wade dead, if it was true, but wanted Kim home more.

Braden asked Fran if she could describe Kim’s jewelry.

“Why?” she asked, giving Ed a look. “You already have all that.”

“Would you have any pictures of it?”

“We’ve been through this.” She didn’t have any of the cameo ring or the friendship bracelet Nina had given Kim, but she’d been wearing the butterfly in her prom picture.

“You’d tell us if they found her,” she asked.

“They haven’t found her,” Braden said. “They’re for the FBI. They want everything. Can you e-mail it to me?”

Minutes after Fran sent the picture, Braden called back with the reason they needed it. He apologized—he’d just gotten the news himself. Around noon the FBI would be making an official statement. This morning they’d opened two safety deposit boxes Wade kept under an alias in Michigan. They were full of jewelry.

“I don’t like it,” she said when they’d hung up. “Everything’s going too fast.”

“We’ve never had the FBI working for us.”

“Obviously we should have.”

Ed didn’t say it, but if this was the end, he wanted it to be quick, and then, an hour later, when the phone rang again, rescinded his wish.

Neither of them moved to get it. Fran pointed to him.

“You get the next one,” he said.

He reached for the receiver, feeling lightheaded. He thought, ridiculously, that it might be a wrong number, or Connie.

It was Braden, and Ed turned to Fran.

“I’m telling you this unofficially,” the detective said, “so I have to ask you not to talk to the media. Mr. Larsen?”

“Yes.” He beckoned her with his free hand.

“They found the woman in the park.”

“They found the woman,” he told Fran, at his side now, stock-still. “What does that mean to us?”

“It’s not a hopeful sign. I’m sorry.”

Ed meant to thank him for letting them know, but Braden was gone.

He set the phone in its cradle and Fran held him. His instinct was to make a saving joke—he wished they’d gone in to work. He vetoed it, angry with himself, and wondered why he’d even thought of that. Was he really such a shallow person? He wanted to think he was just overwhelmed. They both were. And yet, rubbing her back, he felt hollow and heartless.

“I need to lie down,” Fran said.

He went up with her to their bedroom. They took off their shoes and spooned on top of the covers, Fran dabbing her eyes with a ragged tissue. The room was too bright to sleep, yet they did easily, deeply, as if, after so many months of hoping, they could finally rest.

The phone in his pocket woke him. The room was gray and his mouth was dry.

“Who is it?” Fran asked, still facing away.

It was Braden. Ed thought that he’d talked with him enough for one day.

“Mr. Larsen, I’m so sorry. I’ve got some bad news.”

Ed sat up, steeling himself to hear that they knew where Kim was. He needed to be there to take her home, so did Fran. Maybe then this endless waiting would be over.

“They just found Wade in his cell. I’m sorry. He killed himself.”

Article L02-37

Fran identified the butterfly from a digital picture the FBI sent. It was a formality—the agent had told them the pendant was among the effects—yet it was a shock to see it isolated like a specimen with a ruler below to show the scale. She was hoping they’d made a mistake, and even then her mind seized on the possibility that it might be some other girl’s. Penney’s probably sold thousands of them every year.

There was no trace of Grace’s cameo ring or Nina’s bracelet. The page they sent her showed fifteen different gold chains, none of which was the box weave, and she imagined the other mothers clicking on the windows and leaning into the screen. She was supposed to sign an affidavit stating that the pendant was Kim’s, have it notarized and include any documentation of ownership, then wait until they were finished with their testing. After the first month she realized it might be a while.

The state police were closing their investigation, leaving only the nonprofit K9 teams to pursue Wade’s clues. As Fran went on the air to appeal to the public one more time, she had the feeling he was still preying on their hopes. She made a new page for the website, including a transcript of his confession and a map of the I-90 corridor from Erie to Toledo. The area in question was massive. Ed had already started checking out self-storage facilities, every weekend inching his way west. She didn’t have his faith or his energy, and envisioned quitting, as if she was beaten.

The weather was bad, and because they were looking for a body, the new search lacked the urgency to attract volunteers. After a while he was out there by himself. When she could she went with him, cruising the county roads off of each successive exit. There was nothing but truckstops and farmland, and when they did locate a self-storage it was invariably ringed by a cyclone fence and the ground was covered with snow.

They debated Grace’s suggestion of hiring a private detective, or just someone who could dedicate himself to the case full-time. In the end they spent five thousand dollars on a retired cop who submitted a beautiful three-inch-thick report that said he couldn’t find her.

Over spring break they took Lindsay on a tour of the nearby colleges on her shortlist, stopping in Ann Arbor and Chicago, awkwardly sharing a motel room. Lindsay liked Northwestern, right on the lake, and riding the L into town, but the city scared Fran, the sprawl of it, the rundown neighborhoods. Driving out and back on 90 she couldn’t help but think that at any second they might be passing Kim and never know it.

They celebrated her at every occasion. For Arbor Day they dedicated a tulip tree in the circular turnaround of the high school. The branches were cluttered with yellow ribbons, a fundraiser for the booster club.

In May, after much discussion, they held a memorial service on what would have been her twentieth birthday. Father John and Ken Wilber, the choir director, helped plan it. The hardest part was seeing Kim’s headstone for the first time. They’d picked out the white granite together, and spent hours tweaking the design and the inscription (BELOVED DAUGHTER in Anglia cursive), but to see the span of her life set in stone was too much, and Fran had to turn away. Holding her, Ed assured the owner it was what they wanted.

So many people came that they couldn’t all fit—the first time that had happened, Father John said. Blown-up photos of Kim at every age leaned on easels along the communion rail. Across the aisle, Nina and Elise and J.P. sat together, and Ed asked if it was all right if he invited them back to the house after. She thought they had nothing to apologize for, but said it was all right, and in front of everyone he walked over to their pew and hugged Elise and then Nina and then J.P. In the receiving line he embraced them again and nodded tearily, while Fran shook their hands, thanked them for coming and passed them on to Lindsay.

“I’m sorry,” she said that night, after everyone was gone. “I can’t just turn my emotions on a dime like that.”

“You knew they’d come.”

“It would have been nice if you’d told me ahead of time you were going to do that. That’s what threw me.”

“It wasn’t their fault.”

“They lied,” she said. “Maybe I’m a bad person for holding that against them.”

“It had nothing to do with what happened, we know that now.”

“We
didn’t
know that, and it could have, but they didn’t care, they were more concerned about themselves. That’s what makes me so mad.”

“I think they understand that. Did you talk to them?”

“I talked to Elise. You know Nina and J.P. are dating? That’s a little odd.”

“Maybe,” he said.

“You don’t think that’s odd?”

“Think about what they’ve got in common.”

Like us
, she might have replied.

Publicly the service succeeded, providing the illusion of finality, an ending to the story. Privately whatever peace it brought them was temporary.

The stone was permanent, and so close. Though there was nothing buried under it, Fran stopped by after work, bringing leftover flowers from the gift shop and taking away the old ones. Kim’s friends left unopened packs of Newports and full bottles of beer, which Fran dropped in the garbage bag with the flowers. Once, on her way to lunch, she saw a pickup with a Marine Corps decal parked by her plot, and a goateed dude she suspected was Dennis Wozniak paying his respects. She pulled into the lot of the Dairy Queen and sat there like she was eating, waiting for him to leave. On top of the stone he’d placed a Big KitKat, Kim’s favorite. Ed went with her on weekends, but confessed that sometimes he came by himself as well. He’d seen Wozniak too, and the KitKat. While Fran didn’t care for Wozniak, she was glad Kim had her regulars. As far as she knew, Lindsay hadn’t been back since the service.

And then, before Fran was prepared for it, Lindsay was off to camp, taking her car, which didn’t seem to bother Ed. He said it was still too early to go back to coaching, but helped Jerry once a week, throwing batting practice and hitting fungoes to the girls. On weekends he had projects around the house. She was attempting to resurrect her garden. Sundays they visited Grace, who was doing better. They worked and fished and went out to dinner, but she found herself drawn to the cemetery more and more, as if Kim was really there.

In her dreams Kim appeared, completely fine. Fran asked her where she’d been.

“I was right here,” Kim said, like Fran was making a big deal of it.

She spent too much time alone in the house. Cooper was going deaf, and every once in a while he jerked his head up, alert, turning as he tracked a sound only he could hear, as if someone was creeping down the hall.

“Who is it?” she asked him.

They used to joke that they had ghosts. Now she wished they did.

She missed Kim, but she also missed keeping vigil. Often when she was trying to lose herself in weeding or watching TV she felt an inner spur, as if she needed to stop wasting time and go look for her. That obstinate hope had sustained them for so long. It was impossible to just switch it off.

She used the second anniversary as an opportunity to do good, staging a walkathon for autism. She went on the radio and asked for everyone’s help bringing Kim home, but with no expectations.

She thought she’d resigned herself to this limbo when, one Friday at the beginning of August, she came home and found a pink receipt on the front door saying a package was being held for her at the post office. She didn’t bother to go inside. She took the rest of the mail with her—catalogs and all—and drove downtown. She got there with five minutes to spare, along with everyone else. Standing in line, she found herself wishing for the impossible—that she’d been wrong, the butterfly wasn’t Kim’s.

The package was in the back. When the clerk returned with a slim padded envelope, it seemed too small to Fran. Though Sandy knew her, she showed her ID before she signed.

She didn’t open it there, where people could see. She drove home with it on the seat beside her like a bomb. Ed was due any minute, but she brushed off the thought of waiting for him. She carried the package upstairs to Kim’s room and closed the door, took the scissors from the wire cup on her desk and sat on the edge of her bed with the sun falling on her lap and neatly cut off one end of the envelope.

The paperwork cushioned a flattened cocoon of bubble wrap, through which she could see the curve of one wing. It took her several tries to slide the point of the scissors under the strapping tape, and then the plastic pulled open easily.

The pendant was bent, the thin gold noticeably bowed. The sun flashed off the finish as Fran tilted it in her hand, and she wondered if they’d polished away any fingerprints. The delicate eyes at the tips of the wings where the chain attached were still intact. After a while she stood and pressed it against the top of her dresser with her palm to see if she could fix it. When she saw that she couldn’t, she slid it off, pressed it to her chest—it was cold on her skin—then brought it to her lips and kissed it. She held it there a moment with her eyes closed, as if making a wish.