When the story went out on the wires the next day, people began to report having spotted her as far north as Quebec. There were dozens of sightings of an eighteen-year-old girl with white-blond hair—at rest stops, all-night diners, after-hours clubs. But, as Gaffney told Kathryn, hundreds of people say they’ve seen the Loch Ness Monster, too. It may exist, but there’s never been any conclusive proof. And until there is, the case is no closer to being solved than it ever was. “A mystery like this is a powerful thing,” he said. “It gets under your skin. You keep thinking you’re going to figure it out; the girl’s going to turn up, you’re going to find that piece of the puzzle that shows you the whole picture. And then, when you don’t…” His voice trailed off. “Nobody wants a case like this. It eats at you for the rest of your life.”
Intent on the papers in front of her, Kathryn is startled when a Bagel Shop employee addresses her. The girl is wearing a kerchief over her dark, frizzy hair and balancing a tray of dirty mugs on her hip. “Done with that?” she says, gesturing toward Kathryn’s half-eaten roll and cold coffee.
“Uh, sure,” Kathryn says. She looks around and notices the noontime crowd filling up the tables. “I guess I’ll get some lunch,” she says apologetically. The girl nods and moves away, and Kathryn goes up to the counter to order a bowl of matzo-ball pea soup—a comforting if peculiar combination she remembers from high school. She used to order this soup on winter days when her mother brought her downtown to the Grasshopper Shop across the street for a rare mother-daughter spending spree. Laden with bags of 100-percent-cotton shirts from Guatemala and leggings from Esprit, they’d stagger into the Bagel Shop for a ritual lunch. They both pretended the shopping was a bribe, but Kathryn secretly liked these lunches as much as her mother did. The only thing was, her mother always insisted on ordering the most traditional Jewish food possible—pickled herring, gefilte fish, chopped liver. “When in Rome …” she’d say brightly, and then spend an hour pushing the food around on her plate.
Settling back into her booth with the brimming bowl of soup, Kathryn leafs through the pages from Jennifer’s folder that Gaffney let her copy. The file was open, and it would be until she turned up, but Gaffhey said he wanted to keep some of the information from the general public, like the interview with Jennifer’s mother. He allowed Kathryn to read it at the station, but not to take it with her and not to allude to it in any articles. The folder also contained pages from Jennifer’s senior-year diary, a document remarkable mostly for its lack of distinguishing detail. “Tuesday, November 14,” one typical entry read. “Went to school early with Will, finished chem report. Read 20 pages of Catch-22 for English. After school went to Dairy Queen with K.C.”—at the sight of her name, Kathryn’s stomach tightens—“Made plans for the wknd. Orienteering. Wiped. An early night.”
Orienteering. It was a club Jennifer belonged to—or a sport; Kathryn couldn’t remember the distinction. Mr. Hunter had started it the spring of their junior year. It grew out of a segment of gym class where they were sent into the wooded acres around the school with compasses and hand-drawn maps and taught how to navigate their way out. Most of the kids got lost on purpose and used the time to smoke or fool around or head off to the parking lot to gossip for an hour in an unlocked car, but a small core of people really got into it. They studied it like a foreign language, figuring out how to read the position of the sun in the sky, the shadows of the trees, bent stalks, matted grasses, the minute gradations of a quivering compass, the inscrutable crosshatchings of a poorly photocopied contour map. The whole exercise held little interest for Kathryn, but Jennifer was captivated. When Mr. Hunter convened an after-school group, she was one of the first to sign up. “It’s an amazing concept,” Jennifer enthused. “It’s what the Indians have been doing for thousands of years. Once you learn to find your way out of the wilderness on your own, you’ll never be lost.” She went on about how to identify desire lines, the foot trails people create through unmarked territory. “How can you not want to know this stuff?”
“When am I going to need it?” Kathryn said, rolling her eyes. “You may not have noticed, Jen, but we live in towns these days. With paved roads and sidewalks and these newfangled things called street signs. I’m not planning on getting lost in the woods anytime soon.”
“What about hiking?”
“Wherever I want to go hiking, I can promise you, somebody has already been. And there are clearly marked paths and rest stops and other hikers to say hello to along the way. Wandering out into a forest or up some obscure rock face is not my idea of a good time.”
Jennifer grinned. “You’re a wimp. And I feel sorry for you if something ever happens and you actually need those skills to survive.”
“Like what?” Kathryn said, imagining a camping trip gone wrong.
“Like, I don’t know. World War Three.”
“What are you talking about?”
“It could happen,” Jennifer said. “And I’m going to be ready for it, and you’re not.”
Kathryn looked at her for a long moment. “Where are you getting these crazy ideas?”
Jennifer pulled back. She didn’t answer. Finally she said, “All I’m saying is, this stuff could be useful to know.”
Kathryn nodded and they dropped the subject. After that, Jennifer didn’t talk much about it, except to say that she’d been hiking near one northern lake or another and saw a moose, or watched the ice break up on a warm day.
In class, Kathryn kept an eye on Mr. Hunter to see if she could detect a strain of freakish nationalism, but he gave nothing away. Whenever she asked him a direct question—about the citizens’ right to bear arms, about nuclear stockpiling or the function of government, he always turned the question around: “What do you believe?” When she pressed him, he said, “My opinion is irrelevant. It’s more important for you to figure out what you think.”
“Oh, he’s just playing teacher,” Will said when she told him. “You know how Hunter does that. I’m glad Jen is so interested in something.”
“A little too interested.”
“Nah, it’s just something to do,” Will said. “If I were a shrink I’d say it’s probably a way for her to have some control in her life. Finding her own way out of the woods and all that. We all have our thing. You, for instance, are unnaturally obsessed with the literary magazine. I’ll bet you dream in four-page spreads.” He laughed, and she had to admit there was some truth to that.
Leafing through the photocopied pages of Jennifer’s journal as her soup gets cold, Kathryn notices that the references Jennifer makes to orienteering become more cryptic, and more frequent, as the year progresses. “OT practice at the university, 2 hrs,” she writes in October. By March, the entries have become “OT P.M.,” or “OT A.M.,” twice a week. How often did the group meet? Kathryn had thought it was only on Wednesdays. She makes a note to ask Jennifer’s sycophantic friend Abby Elson, who joined the club in the spring of their senior year.
Kathryn pushes the soup aside and gathers up the papers she’s spread out on the table. There are a lot of people to talk to, and she’s not sure where to start. “Don’t expect anyone to be happy to see you,” Gaffney told her. “It’s been a long time, and people have come to terms with this in their own ways. You can’t make someone talk. Anyway, these people have already said what they have to say. It’s unlikely you’ll uncover any evidence that’s policeworthy. But—” he shrugged and pushed his sunglasses back on his nose—“it could happen, I suppose. You knew the girl. She might’ve said one thing to one person and one thing to another, and nobody figured out how to put the pieces together. Who knows, you might already have some information you don’t even realize you’ve got.”
“So you don’t think she was kidnapped by some random lunatic,” Kathryn said.
“She could’ve been,” he acknowledged. “But it’s unlikely. As long as I’ve been on the force in Bangor we’ve never had a stranger-to-stranger abduction.”
It chills Kathryn
to think that she might know something, that she might have known all along. “The first thing you look for is motive,” Gaffney said, but that’s just the problem—she doesn’t understand her own motives, much less anyone else’s. Her father always said, “The world is very simple, Katy,” and she wanted to believe him, even after he left them and the simple fact of their family was exposed as a lie. His leaving was so complicated a betrayal that she could only handle thinking about it in the most elemental of ways: Her mother was good, her father was bad, they didn’t need him, Margaret was a slut. This impulse to see the world in black and white affected everything she did. In high school she had considered Jennifer her best friend, but did she ever really try to understand her? She didn’t know what Jennifer thought about her father’s death, and when Jennifer ended up in the hospital herself, Kathryn was only too willing to believe that it wasn’t serious.
It was a month to the day after her father died that Jennifer swallowed the pills—fifteen Halcion capsules she stole from her mother’s medicine cabinet and downed in one big gulp. Will had come home from a football game to find her on her knees in the bathroom, puking her guts out, sobbing into the toilet bowl, and he heaved her into the car and drove her to St. Joseph’s, where they pumped her stomach and made her stay a few days in the psych ward for observation.
The doctor said it was a classic cry for help—too little time alone and too few pills to do serious damage. It was what they all wanted to hear; it was inconceivable to think otherwise. But the first time Kathryn saw Jennifer after it happened, she knew that explanation was too simple. “I did want to die, in a way,” Jennifer whispered, her face drawn and blank. “I guess in a way I didn’t.”
“And that’s why you’re still here,” Kathryn said gamely. They had told her to be upbeat.
“I’m still here because I planned it wrong.” She almost smiled. “Now I know: more pills—more time.”
Kathryn felt a band of fear constrict her chest. She squeezed Jennifer’s arm. “Don’t even think of leaving me in this place.”
“You’d be fine.”
“Jesus, don’t talk that way.”
Jennifer looked at her for a long moment. Then she turned away. “I’m just tired.”
“If there’s anything I can do … We’re all here for you, Jen,” Kathryn said, a little desperately, trying to strike the right chord. “Will is freaking out. We all are. We all just … We care about you so much. You believe that, don’t you?”
She nodded absently, distractedly, as if she didn’t.
“Your mother is out there crying. She hasn’t stopped for two days.”
Jennifer shrugged.
“By the way, we haven’t told anyone,” Kathryn says. “As far as anyone at school knows, you’ve been out with the flu.”
“I don’t care if the whole fucking town knows.” She turned her empty eyes toward Kathryn. “I just really don’t care.”
When Jennifer came back to school, everyone acted as if nothing had happened. And from the outside, things looked fine. She was polite to the teachers, friendly with the other kids. Kathryn knew that once a week she went to see a shrink at the hospital, but Jennifer never talked about it, and Kathryn never asked. It was easy to believe what the doctor said, that taking the pills was an adolescent impulse, an extreme, onetime reaction to her father’s death.
But Kathryn saw that something inside her had changed. Jennifer became evasive and moody. She couldn’t be counted on to show up even if she said she would; she disappeared for hours without explanation; she began spending more and more time alone. She rarely called Kathryn anymore, though she seemed happy enough when Kathryn called her, and she didn’t seem to want to make plans. She applied to college halfheartedly, at her mother’s insistence, and when she got into Colby early admission, she withdrew her name from the other places she’d applied, put the acceptance letter in a box under the bed, and didn’t talk about it again.
When, after Jennifer disappeared, the reporter covering the case asked if she had been disturbed or upset, Kathryn didn’t mention the suicide attempt. Nine months had passed; it was ancient history. It was almost as if it never took place. But somebody did tell the reporter; there was a paragraph in one story about how distraught Jennifer had been over her father’s death, and how, in a particularly low moment, and quite understandably, she halfheartedly attempted to take her own life—an attempt that failed because it was never intended to succeed in the first place. Since then, the reporter said, things had seemed to improve for her. Her suicide attempt was only a sad footnote in the case; it didn’t explain anything.
Still, when Kathryn reflects on that year, she wonders whether they all downplayed the significance of it because they feared the truth: that maybe she was a lot more serious about it than anyone wanted to acknowledge, that it wasn’t halfhearted at all, that Jennifer wanted to die. Jennifer was expert at hiding what she really felt—she always had been. It made her a good actress and a complicated friend. And so, Kathryn thinks, maybe they were all complicitous in her deception, taking her at face value, wanting to believe that how she acted was how she felt. And meanwhile she slipped through their fingers and out of their lives, leaving only questions and puzzles behind.
ON THE WAY to her car Kathryn passes the Grasshopper Shop and decides to go in. She browses in the racks for a few minutes, finding an Indian-print skirt on sale for half price. It’s a style she hasn’t worn since college, but, suddenly nostalgic, she buys it anyway. She’s tempted by a pair of blue suede clogs, but they’re not on sale, and though her mother is pretty much supporting her for the moment, she knows the money in her bank account won’t last long. I have to start writing these pieces and get a little income, she thinks—not that it will be much money, just a few hundred dollars for the first piece, Jack had said, and then, if things go well, he would see about more. But the more she gets into the story, the more the idea of writing about Jennifer’s disappearance makes her anxious. She wonders if she’s exploiting this, exploiting Jennifer, for her own gain. Is she just stirring up trouble to take her mind off her own problems? The question bothers her, and she tries to push it out of her mind. She starts to leave the store and then, impulsively, goes back and buys the clogs.
Crouching on the floor, she takes off one of her sneakers and slips on the wooden shoes. “There’s no place like home,” she says to the salesgirl, and she clicks the clunky heels together three times. The girl feigns a smile and turns to another customer, and Kathryn sighs to herself. I’m turning into one of those strange and slightly desperate women I used to make fun of when I was her age, she thinks, the kind who tell inside jokes that nobody gets and try to seem younger and hipper than they are. She looks down at the clogs, velvety blue, and brushes the suede in one direction. Her feet are like snails, nestled and safe in their shells. She puts her old sneakers in the empty shoebox and leaves it on the floor, a little present for the girl behind the counter.
ON THE WAY home, Kathryn swings by the real-estate agency where her mother shares an office when she’s not out showing houses. The building is a tidy two-story colonial with window boxes of red geraniums and well-trimmed shrubs; it looks like a Disney version of a new house. Inside, it’s decorated like somebody’s idea of what house buyers might aspire to: fake Orientals, Waverly swags, gleaming Bombay Company furniture.
The receptionist at the front desk is new. She insists on taking Kathryn’s name and getting an okay from her mother before letting her past the foyer.
“God, it’s like getting in to see the president,” Kathryn grumbles, sinking into a chair in her mother’s office.
Her mother puts down the document she’s been reading. “Hello, sweetheart,” she says pleasantly. “What brings you here?”
“I was just passing by. And oh, I have a message for you: ‘Gaff says hi.’”
Her mother leans back in her chair. “I had a feeling you’d run into him sooner or later.”
“So, Mom,” Kathryn says w
ith a teasing smile, “what’s the story?”
She places her fingertips on the desk, like two little tents. “What did he say about me?”
“Nothing. He said to ask you. So what did you do to him to make him so nice to me?”
“Oh, for goodness’ sake,” her mother says, shaking her head, “your mind is in the gutter.” She cranes her neck over the desk and looks at Kathryn’s shoes. “What on earth have you got on your feet?”
“Don’t change the subject,” Kathryn says.
“I haven’t seen a pair of clogs in fifteen years.”
“Well, you’re obviously not up on the latest trends. These are all the rage these days.”
“I didn’t realize my daughter was so cutting-edge.”
“I guess you haven’t seen my navel ring.”
Her mother rolls her eyes, and Kathryn smiles. She likes seeing her mother at work, with her flying-toasters screensaver, her blinking telephone and framed print of historic Bangor on the wall. “So,” she says. “Was it a full-fledged affair, or just a one-night stand?”
Sighing, her mother says, “Ed is a sweet, sweet man. We spent some time together a few years ago.”
“Was it serious?”
“Not really. We’re too different. But I have to say, he is one of the gentlest, most sensitive men I’ve ever met.”
Kathryn thinks for a moment, trying to reconcile the buttoned-up detective she met—with his two-way radio, pistol, handcuffs, and keys hanging off his belt like a giant charm bracelet—with the man her mother is describing.
“By the way,” her mother says, clasping her hands together, “there’s something I want to talk to you about. Frank has asked me to go to his camp next weekend. How would you feel about that?”