The Night My Sister Went Missing

  "What do you mean?" Lutz asked.

  "If I hadn't told about the pregnancy, nobody would think a lot of melodramatic island twaddle about ... Stacy needed to get rid of Casey Carmody. I've never heard of anything so out there."

  "But you yourself said Stacy has personality problems" Lutz stumbled a little.

  "I said problems—scratch the personality. I think she's ... responding as normally as anyone would if they had her life. In fact, I think she's a saint!"

  "Nothing's perfect, but most of the people who came through here tonight think her life is pretty nice."

  "Mm, mm, mm." Alisa giggled but barely smiled. "Her house and car are 'pretty nice.' It's what goes on inside the house that makes the person. But leave it to everyone on this godforsaken island to forget that so quickly. It's convenient, isn't it, if you've got a personal problem with rich people? And just about everybody does. Why is it that everyone loves to see the rich person get flushed down the toilet? Why is it people will spend four dollars to buy a magazine just so they can read about some Hollywood star's divorce? Or arrest? Or bad luck? I have no idea what Hollywood crimes have actually been told truthfully, but at least I have the brains to say I don't know." She giggled again at her little piece of irony. "What I'm blown away by is the way people act. People want the rich to be guilty."

  "People want Stacy to be guilty," Lutz parroted. His eyes looked really tired.

  "That's part of it. The money stuff. The rest of it?" She sighed and rubbed her eyes. "It has to do with the fact that she's ... different."

  "A number of people told me she bought a gun."

  "Yeah, that's different." Alisa giggled again, some high-pitched but tired thing.

  "Can you verify that?"

  "Verified." She nodded with a groan. "I heard about it a while ago, in a McDonald's one night. All Stacy did was admit to having bought it. We never talked about it again."

  "So you have no idea why?"

  "Nope. That's different, too, isn't it? She'd admit to buying a thing like that and then offer no explanation. She's got a flare for drama"

  "She's got no vendetta against Casey Carmody?"

  "No. Don't get Stacy wrong. She's kind of riled up and wrathful in her personality. But it's just a sprinkle that kind of goes everywhere—a little. She's got no deep problems with any one person."

  "So you don't feel she fired a gun up on the pier?"

  "No."

  "Do you know where she was when the shot was heard?"

  "No. She'd left me and Mark."

  "Heading in which direction?"

  Alisa inhaled and thought about it for a long time before she exhaled and spoke. "It's hard to say. The moon went under. She turned her back, started straight across the pier, like to where Kurt Carmody was talking to Billy Nast. But the night, um, swallowed her. Not that I was paying total attention. My ex-boyfriend was flirting with another girl right in my face. Stacy's ex-boyfriend was spewing around that Stacy was pregnant. I was trying to live with the fact that despite my magnificent brain fart in telling her dark secret to Mark Stern, Stacy wasn't mad at me. She told me it was a brain fart, but then she was trying to console me for feeling guilty. How's that for a decent friend? I just wanted to take my IQ and go die somewhere"

  "You sound very convinced she has a lot of good qualities."

  "Beyond good."

  "Tell me about them."

  Alisa drew in a deep breath. "Stacy's generous. She'll give anyone the shirt off her back. She got a credit card from her grandfather for whatever stuff she needs. She could be blowing huge wads on herself. Her grandfather's so glad to finally have her in his life, I don't think he'd care if she charged diamonds and pearls. Last year True Blueman had this toothache and confessed to us she hadn't seen a dentist in four years because her dad doesn't have dental insurance. Well, she went to the dentist, had two teeth drilled, got the usual kid sealant she never got when she was small. It cost a lot. Guess who paid for that?"

  "True didn't mention that," Lutz noted.

  "True doesn't know. I walked in on Stacy one night, and she was giving Dr. Rubenstein's office her credit card number. She was saying to call the Bluemans' house and tell them it was covered by the bogeyman. Call Dr. Rubenstein and ask him whose credit card number is on True Blue-man's dental bill."

  Lutz made a note of that. I thought he was going to ask a question, but Alisa was on a roll. "Then she hangs up the phone and turns around and sees me standing there. She was all, 'Bitch, did you hear that? Tell, and I'll have the Connecticut mafia come fucking waste you.' If you can get past Stacy's mouth, she's generous to a fault. And she's also Johnny-on-the-spot if you're in trouble"

  "Like how?"

  "I could give you hundreds of examples. Take ... she stood by Casey when she broke her neck and no one else could stand to hear her whine about that halo a minute longer. We were all like, 'Casey. Can you be even slightly less superficial? Frankly, nobody gives a damn what you look like.' Stacy seemed to ... understand. She's like a mother. Everybody's mother."

  "I wouldn't say anyone tonight described her as 'a mother.'"

  "You're right; they were describing her as a thoughtless b-word. Right? In her case her mother's the thoughtless b-word. Stacy's a package deal. All the caring, all the mouth"

  "Even if you did spill her secrets, it sounds like you're a good friend to her," Lutz noted.

  Some of the defensiveness in Alisa's face softened away. She looked downward and said with a pinch in her voice, "I know her better than anybody. But there are lots of things about Stacy that nobody knows. Not even me."

  Lutz froze the pen on the page. After a long silence he said, "The guys on the force call this the questioning room. You can still smell the paint on the walls, can't you? I'm hoping I'll get to call it the answering room. Answers to investigations come, but only after the questions are raised. You can raise your questions here, too, Alisa. Maybe we can find the answers together."

  I wondered if she was getting to whatever had kept her here until three in the morning. She stared at the tabletop, only sending her gaze sideways to Lutz after saying, "Okay. Here's a question: Who's the father?"

  Lutz tapped his pen on the paper and finally said with what seemed like care, "If you're talking about the notion that Stacy is pregnant—yes, I've heard that. Do you have some reason to believe that Mark Stern isn't the father?"

  "Yes. Contrary to popular opinion, not every girl sleeps with her Joe."

  Mark had blathered on at the yacht club about how Stacy was no-give, I remembered hazily. And some sophomore snot had said, basically, not half an hour ago, She'll jump anything, so long as he's from the city and not from here. Even the guys she turned down called her a slut. I wondered at that.

  "If you don't mind my saying so, you don't make a baby with spit." Lutz laughed uncomfortably.

  Alisa stared down at her fingers, laced together so her nails were digging into the backs of her hands. "I can only say what's out there, what's been said. She told me in January she knew Mark was a horn-toad, but he was in a slump, and she figured she could cheer him up. Little Miss Do-gooder. There's a prime example for you. Stacy realizes a horn-toad is in a slump, so it becomes her solemn duty to become his girlfriend so she can cheer up his life. She said she could keep him under control. She told me in April she had never done it with him. She told me in June that she was so glad she hadn't. Last Friday I went with her to a clinic, and she turned up two months pregnant."

  "Did she confess at that point to having had a lapse in judgment?"

  "No."

  "She didn't mention somebody else?"

  "No."

  "Do you ... think she was raped? Is that why she bought a gun?" Lutz, with raised eyebrows, poised the pen to write, as if something finally made sense.

  Alisa let go of a long exhale behind tightly pinched lips. I thought she might puncture the backs of her hands with her nails. "I asked when we came out of the clinic if she'd been raped, and she said no.
"

  After a minute Lutz turned his watch slightly toward himself. "We're not so sleep deprived that you're going to pass off an immaculate conception on me. Was she proposing that she might have been raped and repressed the memory? If that doesn't work, I'm out of ... far-out notions."

  "It's far out, but yeah, that's what she was saying. I just can't see why she would lie to me about not having any memory of being with some guy. I mean, to say something like that is a lot weirder than saying you got raped. Why add crazy to scandalous?"

  "People say all sorts of nonsensical things when they've been victims of an assault. Try to explain what makes you think she really doesn't remember and wasn't just lying to you. And please don't tell me, 'Because you can just tell.'"

  Alisa was probably sharper than the other girls in our crowd. We knew she pulled straight As without cracking a book, but because she never bothered mentioning it, her sharpness wasn't an issue with us. But in certain situations, it showed. She watched Lutz's eyes and, from behind them, picked up the notion that everyone before her came in making accusations about Stacy ending with "Because you can just tell."

  "You know ... if people on this island were able to 'just tell' things so easily, why was it so hard for them to see that Stacy was in obvious danger, living in her own house?"

  Lutz sat frozen, but Alisa just went on. "She doesn't talk about her past much. I take it she wasn't very happy before she came here. She refuses to talk about her life in Connecticut. It's like her whole family is a taboo subject. If you mention her grandparents, she gets uptight, like her parents might be next for examination. That's been the only real, um, weirdness for me. I'm from a big family. I've got twenty-five first cousins, so I could tell stories about my family forever. It's been tough sometimes, having a friend who has nothing to say in reply—I mean nothing, nada, zilch. Her family, but especially her parents, are in the black hole, along with a few other subjects. Some questions you just don't bother with. If she brings up a subject herself, it's cool. If you bring it up, you'll just never get a straight answer."

  So there it was: the reason Alisa had stayed until three in the morning. I just felt myself kind of float and drop as the concept of incest started coming clear. I wondered suddenly if all this eavesdropping was a good idea. I had my sister to think of, and listening in seemed more productive than sitting in the back lobby with the gossip squad. But I had never known an incest victim. A molestation victim? Probably. You hear things like that around school secondhand, and you think of it when you see the person floating around the corridors. But there's some sort of big bad leap from molestation to incest—from the guy up the street to your dad. I couldn't quite describe it any better than a leap—and it's simply not something you'd want leaping out of books and television and onto your podunk island.

  I glanced at Drew, but he was just watching. We'd heard all kinds of shit tonight, and I wasn't sure he was as awake as I was.

  "After the pregnancy test came back positive, twice, Stacy told me she wanted to go see a shrink, but a special kind of shrink—the kind that can hypnotize you and, after a few weeks of it, maybe pull out a repressed memory."

  She looked at Lutz, and despite his being deadpan, she put her palms out as if to apologize. "I know this sounds totally crazy. But it seemed less crazy than some alternatives. Here's one thing about Stacy people don't know: She's scared of the dark. She can't walk the beach at night by herself, and in her grandparents' huge old house? She tells me she lies awake at night, like, listening for spooks. I know that old house creaks and groans all night long; I've slept there. But at this point she started talking about ghosts. Like she was having moments of wondering out loud if the ghost of Eddie Van Doren got her, or if she was carrying the spawn of Satan ... I was all, 'Okay! Time for a shrink, Stacy! Good idea!'"

  Lutz wrote some notes, not looking too happy. This wasn't exactly making Stacy appear sane, but I could see Alisa's dilemma—and I figured she had done right. Some things you have to try to confess to someone responsible if you care about your friend.

  "So you went to a shrink?" Lutz encouraged her.

  "I wish. We called a few, but they were really expensive, and Stacy only had fifty bucks cash and her credit card. She has the kind of charge that sends her grandfather an e-mail every time something's put on it. She was afraid he would see the charge and jump to the conclusion that her father had been messing with her, when that might not be true at all."

  I felt Drew rise slowly to his feet beside me and decided he was now awake. We watched Lutz write, and I thought of one of my dad's young girl characters swearing up and down all day that her uncle Chris was a great guy, though many nights Uncle Chris was molesting her. The girl couldn't remember her nights during her days. I wondered if Dad had made that up because it sounded good, but knowing how my dad loves to research human behavior, I doubted it.

  Alisa apologized again. "I'm very crazed over all this myself. But I'm not going to bag on my friend when she needs me the most. God knows, none of the other people she's ever helped is going to stand by her now. Not True, not Mark, not even her family. She decided not to see a shrink because she was afraid her grandfather would leap to the wrong conclusion."

  "That's quite a leap for her grandfather to make," Lutz said. "Stacy wants to see a therapist, therefore her father is molesting her."

  "It's not a leap in this case. I didn't exactly tell my mom about the pregnancy yesterday, but I totally begged her for anything in the grown-up channels that might be so awful that the kids never heard it. My mom's not a motormouth like Cecilly's mom, but I think she could see that Stacy was having trouble, and she confided something to me. She said the reason Mr. Kearney actually left was not that he'd found out about Mrs. Kearney's cheating. The husband's always the last to know, and supposedly Mr. Kearney is still clueless. It was that Mr. DeWinter had found him just outside the door of Stacy's bedroom a couple times in the middle of the night."

  I froze as the vivid image of Mr. Kearney suddenly struck me. He had a slightly swollen beer gut, drooping mustache, muscular arms, and muscular neck. Add all that to the fact that he sometimes liked to go three days without shaving. And if he was out doing lawns, he could get that greasy, unwashed sweat all over his face. I couldn't remember the name of his lawn business on the T-shirts, but I could remember the slogan: PIT BULLS ARE BETTER THAN POODLES.

  "I'm gonna throw up," Drew said. I guessed he was wide awake and sharing my mental pictures.

  Lutz tapped his pen a couple times. I gathered this was new territory on an island where nothing ever happens. He finally uttered, "Did your mother say, um, where she got this information?"

  "Yes. From Mrs. DeWinter."

  "Directly from Mrs. DeWinter," he repeated, like that was important.

  "Yeah. My mom's been keeping the books for the DeWinter Foundation since Mr. DeWinter had heart surgery last summer. She and Mrs. DeWinter have been spending a lot of time together. Mrs. DeWinter swore her to secrecy and said they had every family problem under control—including this one. I guess that means they threw Mr. Kearney out for that reason. But the secret's been driving Mom crazy. She loves Stacy, too, and when I started nagging her for info, it didn't take much to get it."

  Lutz wrote and wrote. Something made me think that maybe he was stalling for time to think of questions in this mess. He inhaled, held his breath for a few strokes, then exhaled. "So Stacy didn't see a therapist for fear her grandfather would see the charge on the credit card and leap to what could be a wrong conclusion..."

  Alisa nodded. "Yeah. So instead, we took her fifty bucks and twenty I had from waitressing that day, which is still far less than six visits to a shrink would cost, and we went to see Crazy Addy."

  Lutz looked at her and dropped his chin into his hand.

  "We walked in, and Crazy Addy took us upstairs to her kitchen, and Stacy said she needed to know the truth about something. And before we even sat down, Crazy Addy said, 'You've been raped.'"

&nb
sp; Alisa raised her right hand slowly, staring at the captain. "All true. I swear."

  He rolled his eyes, though his voice stayed as polite as possible. "And, uh ... who did Ms. Gearta say was the, uh, culprit?"

  "She didn't. I mean, not by name. Stacy babbled something about she might as well have gotten pregnant from a toilet seat, and Crazy Addy cut her off. She didn't laugh or anything. She just said, 'It is whom you suspect.' That was before I talked to my mom, so as far as I knew Stacy suspected Mark. We'd talked briefly about a date-rape drug. Stacy hadn't said much, but she didn't mention it as an impossibility in her mind. But when Crazy Addy said, 'It is whom you suspect,' Stacy screamed and ran out of there. But I've never asked her who it is. I can't. Stacy was a real basket case afterwards. If she wants me to know, she'll tell me. But still ... I know who it is"

  She and Lutz exchanged blinks and chimed, "You can just tell."

  Alisa looked slightly amused beneath her sadness, but Lutz twisted his mouth up and muttered, "I hope you, um, didn't pay Ms. Gearta your hard-earned diner tips for that, um, forthcoming bit of logic, Alisa."

  "But how'd she know Stacy was raped before we'd said anything but our names?"

  "Mm, mm, mm." He rolled his eyes. There could be a thousand answers to that.

  Drew leaned forward, holding on to his stomach. He muttered at the glass, "Ask the question! Ask the question!"

  Lutz came out of his glazed stupor and sat up straight. "I suppose we could sit here and speculate about Wally Kearney, and it would not give us proof of anything. I'm working on one crime here and need to solve it before I start in on any other. So despite all you've said, I have to ask you this: Did Stacy seem to you in a state of mind to shoot somebody?"

  "Thank you," Drew muttered.

  "Absolutely," Alisa said, which made Lutz raise his eyebrows in surprise, despite her little smile. "But not Casey Carmody. Stacy really doesn't have any problem with her. If Stacy wanted to hurt anybody in our crowd, it probably would have been Mark Stern. In spite of Casey, tonight he asked her to go back with him."