What Has Become of You (22 page)

 • • • 

The next day was afflicted with a heavy, grayish, pelting rain. Vera went into the bodega on her morning walk to school to pick up some coffee, struggling with closing her umbrella and getting her big, wheeled suitcase through the door. She was waiting in line behind someone buying scratch-off tickets, selecting which ones he wanted with the indecision and anticipation of a kid picking out penny candy, when she saw the newspaper headline.

Pulling the paper off the rack, she saw Jensen Willard’s face looking up at her, one eye half shut against the camera flash and wall-to-wall bookshelves behind her. Vera recognized this as the photo Jensen had written about, the one taken in Dr. Rose’s apartment on Riverside Drive; the girl would be mortified, Vera thought, to know
that
was the photo the newspaper chose to run.

Feeling that peculiar sense of calm that sometimes overtook her at the least likely times, she added the paper to her purchase, being careful to zip it in her suitcase so that it wouldn’t get wet. She had just enough time to read it before her first-period class started. It was the first thing she did when she arrived in her classroom; she didn’t even remove her coat or turn on the classroom lights or stop in the ladies’ room to fix her running mascara.

15-Year-Old Scholarship Girl Missing

Authorities in Dorset have begun a search for a scholarship student enrolled at the Wallace School who disappeared Friday evening and hasn’t been heard from since.

Jensen Willard, 15, was last seen on Friday at about 7
P.M.
, when she was dropped off at a Wheaton Road address by her stepfather. Willard had told her parents she was attending a sleepover at this address, but the elderly couple who resides there do not know Willard and did not receive a visit from a teenage girl that night. According to Dorset Police Officer Gerard Babineau, none of the neighbors spotted her, either.

“It is uncertain at this time whether she vanished voluntarily,” Babineau said.

Willard is described as a white female with dark-brown hair and brown eyes. She is 5 feet 2 inches tall and weighs approximately 98 pounds. She is believed to be wearing olive-colored pants, a black T-shirt, combat boots, and a long black coat. She was also carrying an army knapsack. Her mother, Linda Willard Cudahy, and her stepfather, Les Cudahy, are hopeful that making her photo public may help her to be found.

Anyone with information regarding the girl’s location is urged to contact the Dorset Police Department.

Vera was reading through the brief article a third time when Chelsea Cutler and Kelsey Smith came in. “Why is it dark in here?” Chelsea asked.

Vera wiped at her mascara-smudged eyes, ran a hand over her dampened hair, and got up to turn on the lights. “Is that today’s paper?” Chelsea asked, looking on Vera’s table. “Did you see that story about Jensen Willard being missing?”

“I did,” Vera said. She took the newspaper and folded it back into her suitcase, as though doing so might curb any further discussion on the issue. She removed the file of handouts she would need for the day.

“My aunt says they’re going to talk to all the registered sex offenders.”

“Oh my God, that’s so creepy,” Kelsey Smith said. “Are we having another assembly today? I heard we were going to.”

Other girls were starting to come in. Some had heard about the morning news, and some had not. Those in the know were happy to fill in those who weren’t.

“As far as I know, yes, there
will
be an assembly today,” Vera said, raising her voice above the hullabaloo the girls were creating. “I don’t really know what it’s going to entail.”

“It’s really weird to think about missing persons,” Loo Garippa said. “To think somebody can just be there one day, and the next day they’re just gone. And sometimes they’re never found at all. It’s like they never even existed.”

Vera tsked
a little. “I am
sure
Jensen will be found.”

“Yeah,” Loo said. “She might be found like Sufia!”

“Now, listen . . .” Vera began.

“My aunt says it’s suspicious,” Chelsea said. “She says they know a lot of things that they can’t say in the newspaper yet.”

“I heard Jensen had a boyfriend somewhere,” Jamie Friedman said. “But he’s older. He’s, like, in his thirties or something. Maybe he had something to do with it.”

“Please,” Vera said. “Stop it. It’s bad enough that you’re speaking about the girl when she isn’t here. Worse still that you’re referring to her in the past tense. Everyone take out your copies of
Literary Horizons
. In addition to our regular assigned reading from
The Bell Jar
, there will be an essay test on the poems of Edgar Allan Poe tomorrow.”

She had never spoken so severely to her class before. Some of them looked as though they’d been stung, while others—Loo Garippa, Harmony Phelps, and the two modelesque girls especially—put on sullen expressions so quickly that Vera suspected they’d been keeping them in reserve.

Vera directed the girls to “Annabel Lee.” She realized, as she began reading it aloud, that this poem that focused on the loss of Poe’s very young ladylove was perhaps going to be more difficult to discuss than she’d anticipated.

“It’s so singsongy,” Loo objected when Vera had finished the reading the poem out loud.

“I think it’s beautiful.” Jamie, the class conscience, seemed to be trying to make amends for her comment about Jensen and a boyfriend. “It sounds like a rhyme a child would say, and maybe that’s because he was in so much pain that he was reduced to childlike state.”

Vera let the class take the discussion with little interference. She feared she would not have been able to say much even if she’d wanted to, for a large lump had lodged itself into her throat and stayed there. She reserved a few minutes at the end of class to review some of the literary terms she wanted the students to be aware of for the next test. When class was over, an announcement came on the intercom—Dean Finister’s voice—summoning them all to the auditorium for another assembly at 10:00
A.M
.

 • • • 

The mood in the auditorium was different from the mood during the assembly memorializing Sufia Ahmed. Instead of appearing wounded and disoriented, the students and faculty presenters seemed tense, as though Jensen Willard’s disappearance were just one other thing that was meant to test their endurance.

“Jensen Willard,” Dean Finister was saying from the stage, “our newest sophomore and already one of our finest students, has now been missing for several days.” Next to Dean Finister, a photo of Jensen Willard filled the old movie screen—that unfortunate photo from Dr. Rose’s apartment again. As Dean Finister talked, all Vera could think about was Jensen’s account of how he’d buttonholed her in the halls to tell her,
You look sad today.
Would he mention that sadness, Vera wondered? Did he even make the connection between the girl whose blown-up image stood next to him and the girl who’d wept in his office till her makeup bled? If he did, he gave no sign of it. The dean spoke of Jensen’s close relationship with her parents, of her past writing award, and of the “independent nature” that several of her teachers had described her as having. Vera compared this to what she had heard from the girl’s teachers in Sue MacMasters’s office and, with supreme effort, kept a derisive sound from coming out of her closed-up throat. She leaned against the wall, arms wrapped around her stomach, away from the rows of chairs where the students sat.

The students were unusually quiet and attentive during this assembly. They became even quieter when Dean Finister introduced police officer Gerard “Gerry” Babineau. As Babineau got up from his metal seat onstage and approached the podium, Vera found herself shrinking back against the wall, hoping he wouldn’t notice she was there. “We want you to continue your classes as normal,” the officer said, “and go about your daily lives just as normal, too. But at the same time, we ask you to keep your eyes and ears open. One bit of information that may be helpful: Jensen said she was going to visit a friend named Phoebe when she was last seen. Her parents don’t recall the exact last name Jensen gave them. Their best guess is Collins or Crawford. We do know that the address and phone number she gave for Phoebe was false, but we have not been able to identify who Phoebe is, if she is in fact a real person. If any of you know someone with a name like Phoebe Collins or Phoebe Crawford, this could be of great help to the police.”

Vera could have sworn she felt a stirring as some faces in the seats turned toward her. She picked out Martha True’s face, pale and troubled. Officer Babineau was still talking, reviewing statistics of missing persons and missing teenagers in particular, but Vera heard only his closing lines: “Let’s do what we need to do to get Jensen home right away.”

Some of the students started to clap. The smattering of applause grew until it seemed to rise in the air and warm the whole auditorium, creating a dense, bright heat.

Vera realized that she was having a difficult time balancing the weight of her own body. She stumbled down the aisle of the auditorium, past other standing teachers, and toward the exit, where she saw Sue MacMasters standing there, blocking her way.

“Are you all right?” Sue exclaimed over the applause.

“No,” she said. “I mean—it’s my stomach. I feel very faint.”

“Go home,” Sue said without hesitation. “I can get someone to cover your other two classes.”

“Oh, Sue, I’m so sorry.”

“Don’t even worry about it. You look awful. You’ve probably already pushed yourself too hard today.”

Vera mumbled a thank you and fled, stopping only to retrieve her things from the teachers’ lounge. Tim Zabriskie was in there, tucked into one of the small round tables. “Bailing out on the assembly?” he said. “I figured I’d hide in here and get caught up on some work. Don’t tell anyone.” He was correcting a set of math exams, writing
X
’
s next to errors with the zeal of one solving a puzzle.

Vera nodded, avoiding his eyes as she put on her coat and hat and grabbed her suitcase by the handle. How could he not notice something was wrong with her? Why was it that so few people ever noticed anything?
And how could he not know just from looking at me,
Vera thought,
that I would be the last person to ever tell anyone anything?

 • • • 

Home in her studio apartment, Vera logged into the Center for Missing and Exploited Children website and typed
Jensen Willard
into the search window. Sure enough, Jensen’s picture—a different one from what the newspaper had printed—appeared on the screen along with a list of basic information: case number, case type, sex, race, date of birth, height, weight, hair color, eye color. The photograph looked like a Wallace School ID picture; it had the same unforgiving, muddy-gray backdrop as Vera’s own faculty ID, which had been snapped in the admissions office.

What was it about seeing a stark photo of a missing person that inspired such terror? Was it the not knowing—the possibility that the person had slipped away into someplace more terrifying than life, more terrifying than death?

Vera remembered being a very young child and having her first exposure to the idea that children could go missing—that unimaginable things could happen to them: things even worse than being adopted into a cult, worse than being sold on the black market to the underground sex trade. As a precocious eight-year-old, she had been leafing through one of her mother’s
Reader’s Digest
s
and read a story about Dee Scofield, the ponytailed girl with the slightly overlapping teeth who had gone missing from a Florida shopping center in 1976. Dee had never been found. Vera had looked her up on this very same website once and had seen the age-advanced, computer-generated photo of what Dee might look like if she were alive today: The image of the smiling, bespectacled woman could well have been a friendly children’s librarian or a church organist. But in all likelihood, this version of Dee Scofield had never existed—had been denied the chance to exist.

Was it quick, Dee? Did you call for your mother right in those very last moments? I hope it was quick.

But it was foolish to think that way, to even make this comparison. Jensen was surely not in harm’s way. Surely this disappearance was of her own design.

In Jensen’s school photo, her wary eyes looked a little more sunken than they looked in real life. She looked as though she could be any number of ages—anywhere along the spectrum of late childhood to the middle years of womanhood. Below Jensen’s photo were a few brief lines of text.

Circumstances: Jensen was last seen on March 30 of this year. She was wearing olive-green pants, a black T-shirt, a long black trench coat, and black combat boots. She was carrying an army knapsack. Jensen has one small chicken pox scar above her left eyebrow and a small brown mole on her upper right arm. She has never had any dental work.

Vera let that last thought sit for a while. She guessed “has never had any dental work”
meant that Jensen had never been to a dentist, which was not so unusual among Mainers; that meant no dental records, if she should ever be recovered.
Recovered
—the word specifically used when a dead body was brought home. She shivered.
Found,
she corrected herself;
use the word
found
.

Closing out the window, Vera typed the words
Jensen Willard
into a Google keyword search. The search term turned up the article in the
Journal
, and something else. On a homespun website called BRING JENSEN HOME, Vera saw the older, more familiar picture of her student; above it, a curving green font seemed to swim across the screen.

Are you a whiz at computers? Handy at making flyers? Able to give some of your time to answer phones and help our busy police? Are you caring, dependable, and passionate?

BRING JENSEN HOME is a volunteer group working with Our Missing Kids, a nonprofit group out of Concord, New Hampshire, that assists law enforcement in finding missing loved ones. We are accepting applications for our search and rescue committee, which is spearheaded by Jensen’s parents, Les and Linda Cudahy, and the supervising Dorset Police Department.