The Missing (17 page)

Ronnie didn’t know what that meant. He didn’t
want
to know. He and his friends used to have this joke back in high school. When you drank too much and the spins had you laid up in a corner or kissing a toilet, you didn’t hold anybody back. “Save yourself!” you cried, and your friends went to their party, or hooked up with their girls while you fended for yourself. Ronnie thought about that now. He wanted somebody to shout, “Save yourself!” so he could bolt.

“I gotta get to work,” Noreen said, and if he didn’t love her already, he fell for her right that second. She squeezed his hand, and this time he was glad for it.

The light in the room was almost gone. Lois’s eyes were shiny black orbs, and even though he wanted to go, those eyes held him where he stood. They touched his skin until it crawled. For a second he thought he could feel her inside him. It was a bad feeling, like an enemy in your bed, and he wondered if he’d ever really known Lois at all. “Was it worth it, what you did to me?” she asked.

“We’re in love,” Noreen insisted, only it sounded like a question:
We’re in love?

Lois grinned. She didn’t look like the girl he’d dated. She wasn’t gentle. She wasn’t sweet. She was bitter, just like her mother.

“You could come to the wedding.” Noreen mumbled. It was so absurd, probably even to Noreen’s own ears, that the room got quiet. Then Lois laughed. Not a quick chuckle. A mean-spirited, monotone bray.

His skin literally crawled.

Noreen started shaking, and he thought maybe she was shivering until he looked at her. She was crying. She wiped her nose with the sleeve of her pink scrub top and said, “I do these things. I can’t help myself, Lois, but you were my best friend. For real. I miss you. I’m sorry. I really am.” What shocked him was that she sounded sincere.

The shriveled thing in the bed smiled while Noreen cried, and he knew for sure that it wasn’t Lois Larkin. Anybody with a beating heart, even his old roommate Andrew, would take pity on Noreen right now. They’d understand she was trying, and with Noreen, trying counted for a lot.

Lois brayed harder, and he realized that the gap in her teeth had gotten smaller. In fact, she hadn’t lisped once tonight. He squeezed Noreen hard. This thing,
not Lois
, it meant harm.

Together, he and Noreen backed away. Noreen wasn’t crying anymore. She was shaking, and he knew that she was scared, too.

Before he turned for the door, a red glow against her windowpane caught his eye.
Shit! Blood!
he thought at first, but it wasn’t blood. It was a reflection. There was a bird feeder out on the ledge, and in the summer Lois liked to watch them gather and sing their songs. Like a pied piper, animals had always been attracted to her. Once during a picnic, a whole slew of ladybugs had landed on her yellow sweater and jeans. They’d moved across it so that her clothes had looked alive, and for a second there he’d thought Lois Larkin was magic.

On the sill was a pile of cardinal red feathers. His eyes focused, and he saw the bird’s sticklike bones, too. The pile was far away, but he thought he could make out a skull, and, yeah, a tiny claw.

He turned fast and started for the door.

“Ronnie!” Lois called. Her voice was rasping and wet.

He kept walking, calm as he knew how.
Please,
he thought.
Don’t say it. I’m begging you, Lois Larkin. Don’t say it
.

“I told you I was hungry,” she said.

He gave up the pretense of a dignified exit. Holding Noreen’s hand, he ran.

T W E LV E
‌

God Only Knows

F

enstad Wintrob was whistling. The tune was the Beach Boys’ “God Only Knows,” and he smiled as

he strode down the hospital corridor. He and Meg had slept curled like spoons for the last few nights, and for the first time in a long while, he hadn’t thrashed from bad dreams.

Humbled by the sight of Meg’s injury, and by exten- sion the frailty of her parents’ health, Maddie had been genuinely pleasant at the breakfast table this morning. She’d eaten her entire grapefruit, and gone so far as to bus the table and run the dishwasher. She’d donned the motley of a court jester (purple hair
and
lace stockings), but neither he nor Meg had objected. In its way it was charming, and so was she.

Before leaving for work he’d kissed Maddie’s cheek. She’d grinned so wide that her green eyes had sparkled, and he realized that one day somebody besides Enrique Vargas would see past her thrift-store hand-me-downs and black eyeliner. They’d recognize her for the swan she really was, and that day would break his heart.

The first order of business was outpatient group ther- apy. Sheila, the heavyset bag lady with the rich son, was the first to arrive. She’d double-wrapped a chain-link

bicycle lock around her waist like a belt. As she sat down on the couch, the chain rattled.

“What are you wearing?” Fenstad asked. Likely it was the same lock that Meg had swung at Albert.

She fussily lifted a link and then dropped it again so that it plinked back into place. “My lucky charm!”

Bram and Joseph arrived soon afterward. In Albert’s absence the session was dour. Fenstad tried to address their grief, but they weren’t ready, so instead he just checked the dosage on their meds. “Coulda been me,” Sheila muttered, then drew her linked belt tight around her waist like an autistic’s hug. “I saw the look on his face. He’da hit me, too.”

“He’s very sick,” Fenstad said.

Bram interrupted. He was the most functional of the group, and over the last two years had managed to hold down a job editing copy for the
Sentinel
. “He was my friend.”

“I’ll miss him,” Fenstad said, and as soon as he said it, he knew it was true. He was going to miss toothless, Tourette-ticking Albert Sanguine. Something about the guy, despite this bad business, had always seemed genu- inely good-natured. Decent, even.

After group therapy, Fenstad’s schedule was free. The rest of his appointments, all six of them, had canceled due to a virulent chest cold making the rounds through town. He decided to visit Albert. When he got to Al- bert’s room, his foot collided with the IV tree on the floor and its metal stand swiveled. Wire tubing ran the length of its stand, and the needle attached to it was on the floor. Fenstad spied a small pinprick of dried blood on the white sheets. Other than that, all traces of Al- bert were gone.

Fenstad poked his head out the open window. The chart hanging from the bed had been updated only an

hour ago. There was no way Sanguine could have made the jump. It was a ten-foot drop to the parking lot. Last he’d checked, Albert had been too weak to stand.

Fenstad notified the attending physician. An hour later hospital security had checked every closet, empty room, and gurney in the building, but Albert was no- where to be found. Fenstad was in the middle of search- ing the inpatient mental health ward when something occurred to him: Meg. If Albert had beaten all odds and gotten loose, she might be in danger. He called her from Cyril Patrikakos’s station straightaway.

“How are you?” he asked when she picked up the phone.

She moaned like she was in pain. “No one showed up for story hour. Molly says it’s all my fault: I killed the library.” Then she lowered her voice, and in good hu- mor whispered, “Crusty hag!”

“I’ve got something to tell you,” he said. “Uh oh. What now?”

“Albert Sanguine is missing. Last I checked he had one foot in the grave, but there’s a possibility he es- caped. I wanted you to know because he might go back to the library, since it’s a place he feels comfortable.”

Meg didn’t say anything, so he filled in the silence. “He was too sick to lift his head Tuesday night. My guess is he crawled off some place looking for booze, and died there.”

Meg didn’t answer. He tried to think of additional words of comfort, but his mind went blank.

“Fenstad?” she finally asked. “Yes?”

“I want to come home.” Her voice cracked. She was whispering so that Molly didn’t hear. It surprised him how quickly she’d turned from cheery to weeping. And then he got it. She was still in shock. Two days ago her

friend had beaten her senseless, and in self-defense she’d opened his liver. Recovering from such a trauma would take time. She should never have gone to work today.

“That’s a good idea,” he told her. “I don’t want to be alone.”

For one brief instant, his reason left him. She couldn’t be talking about Nero, could she?

“So you’ll stay with me?” she asked.

He closed his eyes and squeezed the bridge of his nose between his index finger and thumb. How could he keep misinterpreting her this way? Was it possible that something was seriously wrong with him? “Yeah. My patients all canceled. I’ll come right home.”

H

e found Meg propped on the love seat in the tele- vision room with her cast lifted awkwardly on

the arm of the furniture. She was watching
All My Children,
which meant she was in bad shape. He hadn’t seen her watch daytime television since her baby blues with Maddie. For two months she’d refused to brush her hair and had threatened to leave him. And then, just as suddenly as she’d become a stranger, she’d re- turned to herself and started keeping house again.

The room was dark, and the curtains were all drawn. It was so unlike Meg to take anything this hard that he was thrown by it. “He’s not coming for you. And if he does, I’ll stop him,” he said.

She didn’t answer for a long while. On the televi- sion, Susan Lucci was telling her husband that she was actually his long lost half sister so they’d have to get divorced, but they could still exchange cards over Christmas. “It’s not just that, Fenstad. Something hap- pened.”

Room 69 at the Motel 6 flashed into his mind. It was

on the ground floor, and the sweaty blankets had been maroon and gray. “What is it?” he asked.

“I want to pretend I imagined it,” she said.

He lifted her injured leg and sat beneath it. With his fingers he reached inside her cast and scratched. “I’m listening,” he said. It was a joke between them; the shrink of the house, always listening. It had become less of a joke during the early years, when he’d worked too hard to come home for dinner or help around the house, or even discipline the children. But she smiled again, like the misgivings between them were a river that had run dry.

“Remember how Daddy wouldn’t come to our wedding?”

Fenstad nodded. Her father had been the loud, pot- bellied vice-president of a men’s loafer company in Phil- adelphia. He’d never approved of Fenstad, and because of that he’d died without meeting his grandkids. The rest of his children still lived at home. They worked odd jobs like convenience store clerk and door-to-door Mary Kay lady. None of them married. Frank Bonelli hadn’t wanted the competition, so he’d crushed every instinct in his children that had smacked of indepen- dence or ambition. As the eldest, Meg had been his fa- vorite, which explained why she’d been the only one strong enough to leave.

“Yeah. I remember your dad,” Fenstad said.

“Did you tell Albert about him in group therapy?” He shook his head emphatically. “No personal infor-

mation. You know that.”

She shrugged like she wasn’t quite sure she believed him.

He reiterated. “I never said a word, Meg.”

She frowned. “Then I must be crazy . . . Do you know what he said to me? He made me sit on his lap—I didn’t

tell you this part because I knew you’d get upset, but he held me down. I thought he was going to . . . Well, you can guess what I thought he’d do.”

Fenstad’s hand paused in mid-scratch.
That sneaky bastard
. “Go on,” he said.

Meg continued. “He was holding me so hard. And then he said that thing my dad said to me the morning we got married: ‘Where did I go wrong?’ And the worst part, you won’t believe this, Fenstad, but he
sounded
like my dad. He really did.”

Any other woman, Fenstad wouldn’t have believed it. He would have guessed that she was still hysterical, or in shock, or even delusional. But Meg wasn’t prone to fits of fancy. If he didn’t know for a fact that such a thing was impossible, he’d believe her simply because she was Meg. “He sounded like your father?”

Her eyes were watery, and he pulled her close. Her mean-spirited father. Things came into focus, and he understood this crisis she’d lately been suffering from. Her father had died ten years ago, but for Meg his mem- ory was still strong. Frank Bonelli was still whispering that nothing she did and no one she loved was good enough. It explained her anger, and the way, every once in a while, she looked at him and Maddie like they were strangers. In a way, it even explained Graham Nero.

She sighed. “Just telling you about it, I know it can’t be true. It was probably a coincidence. But at the time, I don’t know. I felt like I was looking at my dad, not Albert Sanguine . . .”

He started scratching her leg again. “It’s not silly. Albert’s sick, but he’s smart. People like him can ma- nipulate without even knowing it. He’s known you for years. Maybe you once mentioned your dad to him, and he guessed that it was a sore point. So he used it.”

She didn’t say anything for a while, and then finally

nodded. “That makes sense,” she said. It made him feel good, and useful. The way a man
should
feel.

“Let me fix you something to eat,” he said.

He started to get up, but she pulled him back onto the edge of the couch, so that he was sitting by her waist. Then she unbuttoned her blouse. “After he said that to me, I thought of you. How you’re so much bet- ter than most of the men I’ve known.” She was looking at him when she said this, and he knew she meant it.

The diamond pendant he’d given her for their tenth anniversary sparkled between her breasts. He laid his palm flat over it, and watched for a reaction. She arched her back. “Think you can be gentle?” she asked.

“I can try,” he said.

T H I R T E E N
‌

Make Friends and Solve Crime in Your Spare Time!

F

ate!
Jean Rizzo had decided when she saw the an- nouncement last week. She’d been eating a peanut