What We Lost in the Dark

  She recalled Sativa and Sensamilla, twin daughters of a young girl who apparently liked her weed.

  “I’d bet every dollar I have that they’ve changed their names by now,” Bonnie said. “Probably to Ann and Jane.”

  There were twins Dallas and Houston. Elegance and Eloquence. Hunter and Trapper. Imaboy and his sister, Imagirl. Precious and Patience. Rock and Star.

  The singletons were just as awful.

  Gracious Gal.

  Cyborg.

  Raven.

  Kale.

  I said, “That’s a vegetable, right?” Bonnie nodded and kept on reading, swearing us to secrecy forever as she did.

  Euclid.

  Grasshopper.

  Bus Stop Number Nineteen.

  “You’re making that up!” I said.

  “That has got to be commemorative name,” Chris said. “Like Bathroom Floor, Holiday Inn.” I liked Chris. For a few minutes, because he was funny, I forgot that I was mourning. It was actually refreshing to have a friend. Bonnie kept clicking, egging us on. She showed us Camaro. Champ. Mercury. Passionette. Serendipity. Sherlock and Watson.

  “That last one is too twisted,” Chris said, cracking up. “Think about those kids!”

  “Maybe their mom walked into the wrong movie,” I said.

  We hadn’t heard the outer door open and close. We looked up, and Garrett Tabor was standing in the door of the big office.

  He said nothing. We said nothing. But I could hear my breath begin to come in gasps, ragged and loud as a dog’s.

  Bonnie crossed to the printer and removed the page that showed the Japanese characters that matched the necklace. Without looking down, I closed my hand over the pendant and slid it on to my lap.

  How long had he been there?

  “Let’s get to work,” Bonnie said. “Chris, I want to show you something interesting.”

  “Mom, I’m totaled. I’m going home,” Chris told his mother. “Nice to see you, Allie. Hi, Coach.”

  Garrett Tabor nodded. Chris’ younger brother—Bonnie’s son Elliott—was just twelve. A skier, Elliott wanted to be one of Tabor’s aerial all-stars, as Juliet had been.

  Bonnie went back to her office. Tabor went back to the little lab he’d used when I was doing my community service. Then, he reappeared.

  “What are you up to, Allie?” Tabor said. “I think you may have something that isn’t yours. Wouldn’t it be wise to give it to me?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “I think you do,” he said. “Maybe your memory is foggy from the night you went diving and Rob had his little incident. You think anything’s seriously wrong with Rob? You think he’s maybe about to check out? He doesn’t look well.”

  “Shut up,” I said.

  “Maybe Bonnie’s son will give you some of that comfort you need if Rob doesn’t last too long.”

  “Shut your fat mouth, creep, or I’ll call Bonnie.”

  He turned for the door. “You go ahead and play your little game. Merry Christmas. My family and I are headed up to Canada to ski for the holidays. It could be a long while before we see each other. Will you miss me?”

  I didn’t answer but retrieved my files and began doing the filing that was part of my job.

  “You shouldn’t keep things that aren’t yours,” Tabor said, from the hall, as he picked up his heavy pea coat. “They could turn out to be bad-luck charms, don’t you think?”

  I stared down at my files, focusing my eyes so determinedly that my vision swam and the letters on the death certificates blended and danced.

  “Allie, do you understand? That could be a bad-luck charm for not just you. For all kinds of people.”

  “Leave me alone,” I said. “Don’t mess with me.”

  “Oh, nobody should mess with you,” Tabor said. I felt him step closer, and, unable to help myself, I glanced up. He had his coat over his arm, and he lowered the neck of his collared shirt to reveal miniature riverbeds of raised red flesh. I lowered my eyes again to my big stack of manila folders. I felt rather than heard Tabor move away. When he wanted to be, he was catlike, materializing and dematerializing as though he were not human.

  He was not, in fact, human.

  A slice of cold air whirled around me as the door opened. “You never got it, Allie,” Tabor said softly. “I love her, too.”

  The door closed. He was gone. If he were smart, he’d never come back.

  If he did, though, I would be waiting. I was closer—closer than I’d ever been.

  Rob had left me because I couldn’t love him until I figured out what had really happened to Juliet, and to these other girls. My loss, and their loss, had to count for something.

  A plan began to form at the back of my mind. I would do more than set up the camera Rob had given me as a parting gift. I would do more than monitor Tabor’s comings and goings. He wasn’t even going to be around. I could take advantage of that time to photograph something else, something that would prove him to be the beast I knew he was. The camera had a waterproof housing. It could withstand pressure up to nearly two hundred feet down.

  But I couldn’t carry out my plan until after my family had our Christmas. I had to wait, but I didn’t have to waste time.

  As soon as I saw the lights on Tabor’s big truck sweep an arc over the thick verge of black pine at the edge of the parking lot, I turned back to my computer. This time I looked for missing girls. Missing girls who might have some connection with the pendant. Someone who was Japanese. Someone named Sky. For what felt like hours, I kept paging, paging, paging, looking at hundreds of faces on websites from all over the upper Midwest, every seam and shore of Superior. Then I went beyond, to Nebraska and Colorado, Kentucky. A day’s drive. Two days. How few girls actually remained missing after a year, or at most, two, was really quite a small number.

  Most of them ran away and then turned up, and usually they were repentant, if kind of worse for wear. Some grew up and then got in touch.

  Most of the little kids weren’t taken by strangers. The parent who didn’t have custody kidnapped them. Usually, the young children were found, unharmed.

  In a few appalling cases, the father murdered the children to punish the mother. Always the father. The one case of a mother murdering her children, in order to be free to marry a rich man who had no interest in “the daddy thing” was famous and particularly distressing.

  I tried to forget about little kids.

  The girls that I’d seen chained under the bluff near Tabor Oaks were not children. But they were somebody’s children. Somebody was wondering where they were.

  No one missing, from anywhere, who could have had those bones seemed to be linked to the necklace, in a way I could imagine.

  Sena. Seva. Sienna. Soya. Zoya. Sklyer Schuyler. Skyla.

  No Sora.

  No Sky.

  Not one of those names on anyone missing anywhere. Not for ages. Back I went.

  Back for more than two years. More than five.

  Chris Olsen and I had to be wrong about what the pendant meant. Or maybe his first suggestion was right: her hobby was stargazing. Someone had loved this girl enough to care about what she loved. Maybe she wasn’t Asian at all. Maybe her father or mother did business in Japan. I began to think of her as a person, someone with friends and hobbies.

  “He really does scare you, doesn’t he?” Bonnie asked suddenly. I jumped in my chair. My back cramped.

  “I’m afraid of him,” I said finally.

  “Can you tell me why? I know he gives you the creeps.”

  “I don’t want to tell you more.”

  “Allie, I know you think that Tabor had something to do with Juliet’s death.”

  I swallowed. My throat was dry. “How do you know that?”

  “It’s not because I eavesdrop. I can’t help but hear you talking to Rob, sometimes, and it’s always about him. It’s always about Tabor.”

  “I …” And quickly, before I could repent, I told
Bonnie what I knew for sure—how Tabor had abused Juliet sexually when he was her ski coach, the encounters starting when Juliet was only fourteen.

  Bonnie’s face was impassive. “That’s very disturbing,” she said.

  “You think?”

  “Well, he won’t hurt you.”

  “What’s to stop him?”

  “When you first came to work here, I told you to watch out for him outside the lab. You still have to do that, but really, out there, Allie, he’s hardly an unsub … He’s hardly an unknown commodity …”

  “A what?” I was sure she’d used the criminal forensic term for “unknown subject.” Bonnie went on. “He’s well-known in this community. If he were to come anywhere near you in a way that felt threatening, he would stick out like a sore thumb—”

  “You called him an ‘unsub,’ ” I interrupted. “That means ‘unknown subject.’ As in, of an investigation. It’s what I’ve read in my criminology books. Why would you use a word like that?”

  “TV,” Bonnie said. “I do have some leisure time.” Lightly, she touched my back. “You should go home now.”

  “I’ve done nothing but sleep. And Rob and I … well, he’s gone with his family for Christmas, away to Colorado. And we, well, I think we broke up.”

  “That won’t last,” Bonnie said. “Everybody breaks up.”

  “The way he said it, I think it might. Things haven’t been right between us since Juliet died.”

  “How could they be? Neither of you could possibly feel anything but terrible. It’s bound to cause some bumps for you two.”

  For a moment, I let myself believe that Bonnie might be correct—that what had come between Rob and me was a bump, and that we would both pick ourselves up and realize how impossibly dear we were to each other.

  Just then, the computer dinged with the result of one of my searches.

  Five years ago, a new graduate from Toronto’s International High School set out to meet a friend whose family had moved to Minnesota. They intended to backpack across Canada together, after a visit with the friend’s family, who lived in … Iron Harbor. The Canadian girl never met her friend at the bus stop, as planned. Her family never heard from her. For a year, posters had circulated all around Canada and in Minnesota. A joyous, outdoorsy girl, she loved to ski, camp, and ride horseback. The eldest of four daughters, she wanted to be a physical therapist. In one of the photos on the poster, she wore a red sweater and her gold pendant was clearly visible. It was a gift from her father, a book editor who spoke Japanese fluently. She never took it off.

  Her name was Samantha Kelly Young.

  Everyone called her Sky.

  14

  BLUE CHRISTMAS

  All I could think about was Sky, floating in her grave.

  Her parents and sisters were spending another Christmas without her, just as Tommy and Ginny, and I, were spending our first without Juliet.

  It didn’t exactly make for holiday cheer.

  With her native Boston in every syllable, my Grandma Mack showed up the day before Christmas Eve, took one look at me and said, “You in love?” (I nodded miserably.) “That will do it,” she said. “I’ve been in love a dozen times! Twenty! Each one worse than the last.”

  “You can say that again,” my mother muttered.

  Matthew Mack, the grandfather I never knew, died in a sailing accident when my mother and her brothers were children. Despite raising three kids alone, my grandmother had been conducting a cheerful search for a second mate.

  She was still looking.

  “Are you happy, Allie?” my grandmother said.

  “Love doesn’t make you happy,” I told her.

  “I’m glad you’re figuring that out young,” said my mother, who was still pissed at me.

  “Thanks, Mom. You were the one that practically talked me into this. You were the one who wanted me to have the right boy at the right time, remember?”

  She couldn’t deny it.

  “I’m going to lie down,” I said.

  “No, you are not,” Jackie told me. “Brian and Carmel will be here any minute, and you are going to make the turkey stuffing while I finish the desserts. And it better be perfect, because you know how Carmel is.” My Uncle Brian’s wife, Carmel, was beautiful and talented, a musician who was Irish-from-Ireland, but also was some kind of super born-again person. Their two little girls went to a semi-prison religious school that even Brian (a devout Catholic, at least compared with my mother and her other brother) considered, as he put it, “a little much.”

  The meal had all the makings of a freewheeling disaster.

  “Give her a few unraveled Brillo pads and she could knit a Sub-Zero,” my mother says of Carmel. And that’s when she’s being nice.

  My mother is suspicious of people who can’t be satisfied with a nice DKNY sweater from Macy’s but have to prove something by making their own. She’s also suspicious of anyone who doesn’t have a job outside the home, and she has been known to use the word “parasitic.” Carmel always made a big deal about how being a good wife and the best mom possible to Merit and Maria (I found myself thinking of Bonnie and Chris and how they’d laugh at the name Merit) was “more important than anything I could do in the world.” It was all Jackie could do not to curl her lip. This was one of the areas of life where Jackie and I agreed, and I even admired her for sticking to her devoutly independent ways. My mother was basically fearless.

  And so was I. I was fearless in most ways … except where Garrett Tabor was concerned.

  And cooking.

  Of course, I also shared my mother’s profound lack of proficiency in the kitchen. It bred fear. At my mother’s knee, I’d learned to make two things: ground nut stew with sweet potatoes and ginger, and curry, which my mom, a lifelong vegetarian, served as often as other moms served frozen pizza. At least she wasn’t going to force tofurkey on us. We were going to have a free-range turkey (“It chose to give up its life,” I told Angela) and pumpkin pie. For the latter, my mother, horrifyingly, had butchered a pumpkin, following instructions on a YouTube video. Clearly she had something she wanted to prove to Aunt Carmel, who had offered to bring the pies, the bread, the sides of broccoli, the desserts, the cranberry flip—everything but the tablecloth.

  While my grandmother and I chopped onions and celery for the stuffing (my mother would not touch meat and stuffing a dead animal with something was particularly reprehensible to her), Grandma Mack said, “You know the stuffing can really sink a Christmas Eve dinner.”

  “Thanks, Grandma,” I said, my anxiety now trebled.

  For something made of wet stale bread and seasoning, it could apparently get complicated. Usually, it’s too dry, and people seem to love that: it reminds them of their own mothers, who also were bad cooks. If it’s too wet, it’s just a nasty gob of ballast, the size of a soccer ball.

  Fortunately, there was a YouTube video for sage-and-onion stuffing, too.

  Soon, we’d finished it.

  My mother was still crafting her two pumpkin pies. We had a public radio station on playing classic-not-cheesy Christmas carols, but that made our own silence even more harrowing. Just as the pies began to smell lovely and aromatic, my uncle and his family arrived—with Carmel and the little girls wearing those kind of discreet but awful matching Christmas sweaters that probably cost two hundred dollars each.

  Uncle Brian and Aunt Carmel mixed a bowl of punch for the adults and one for the children and began unloading presents from their car.

  My mother took the pies out of the oven. They looked perfect, until the middle of both pies rose as though some kind of demon was trying to fight its way out of a marshmallow Peep. Then each pie sank, leaving a deep depression, like the cone of a tropical storm.

  Angela said, “You, like, killed it.”

  I stared at Angela, wondering if my mother’s wrath would cause some kind of physical event like what had happened to the pies. I was glad that Angela, still relatively little and cute, had said this instea
d of me. This had nothing at all to do with pie: it was a referendum on who was a better mother.

  “I can just fill that with meringue,” my mother said.

  “Meringue doesn’t go on pumpkin pie,” I said, very slowly. “And I’ve heard that meringue is a very, very dangerous thing in this very way, like with sinkage. Whipped cream goes on pumpkin pie.”

  “I could fill that hole with cinnamon ice cream and freeze the whole thing and then put warm brandy on top,” my mother said.

  “You could put the whole thing in a blender, too.”

  “Fine,” Jackie said. She picked up the phone and called Sweet Things, claiming the last two pies in Iron Harbor. She said she had an emergency, and she made it sound as if it was a medical emergency, as if people called senior nurses in on holidays for such things. When she put down the phone, her eyes were overly bright, a sign that Jackie might cry. But then, armed with the pies, Mom went outside. As Brian and my grandmother watched, she sailed first one pie and then the second at the path to the woods. She was surprisingly strong about the upper arms, and the pies whapped through the sky like Frisbees.

  “Get your coat, Angela,” I said, “We’re going to the bakery.”

  “Can I come?” my grandmother asked.

  “Nope. She’s your daughter.”

  Angie and I fled, but not before we heard my mother’s comment as she came back into the kitchen.

  “At least the raccoons will dine well,” Mom said.

  It was a great dinner. The next morning, I opened Mom’s big present to me. A dive camera.

  15

  IN THE DEEP

  It was December 29, a dark day with nothing going on.

  My extended family had moved up to The Timbers, the big ski resort on Torch Mountain, where my mother’s other brother, Uncle Sean, with his new wife and new baby, would soon join the rest of us. This holiday was a splurge that was always on Grandma Mack’s dime: she loved to ski, and we did more night skiing than most families do in two years during those few days. I was a proficient skier, but Angela was a demon, soaring down the Black Diamond runs without benefit of poles. She literally had grown up on skis. Juliet had herself taught Angela, beginning when Angela was only four.