Disappearance at Devil's Rock (12 page)

Elizabeth scoops up her phone and there are five motion-detection-triggered notifications on the home screen. “Dammit, I slept right through them.” She sits back down on the bed. “The camera was set off a bunch of times!”

Janice: “It went off after Kate and I got up and went into the kitchen and living room.”

“Oh, yeah, right. But hey, there's a couple notifications from when we were all sleep.”

The first notification was at 2:11
A.M.
and has an accompanying snapshot of the living room. There's nothing there in the still photo: no diary pages on the floor, no person walking through the door or into the room. Nothing out of the ordinary that she can tell.

Janice: “See anything?”

“The first one is just a picture. And nothing. Room's empty. So why did the camera go off. Something had to set if off, right?”

Janice: “Not necessarily. You were complaining last night that the camera wasn't working right.”

Elizabeth checks the second notification, which was at 4:34
A.M
. She says, “Hey, there's a video clip!”

Janice turns on the bedroom overhead light even though the room is plenty bright enough with the morning sunlight bullying through the windows, and then she sits in the plush chair. Kate slowly walks over to the bed, next to Elizabeth, and cranes her neck to watch the video on the small screen.

Elizabeth hits Play. A pile of pages are already there on the living room rug. The clip runs and she tenses up, waiting for something to happen but there's nothing. No movement, no sign of how the pages got there.

“Pages on the floor but that's it. How did they get there without the camera going off, right? Hold on, hold on . . .” She hits Play again.

Kate says, “Mom.”

Elizabeth: “Wait. Okay, the pages are already there. Did I miss something? I had to have missed—holy shit! See that! See that shadow? There was a shadow right there next to the front door!”

Kate: “I saw it, too!”

Elizabeth looks up at Kate and then over to Janice. “Come on, you have to watch this.”

Janice and Kate crowd closer around Elizabeth and the phone, and she replays the video. Five seconds in Elizabeth says, “There! Did you
see it? Let me go back. Did you see that? There was a shadow of someone standing there, long and thin, and then shrunk down to nothing, like it winked out or went offscreen or something. Did you see it?”

Janice: “I'm not sure. Maybe?”

She plays it again. And a third and fourth time. No one says anything.

“Now I can't see it. Wait. I saw it. It was there. You said you saw it, Kate, right?”

“Yeah. But I don't know now.”

Janice: “Maybe it was how you were holding or tilting your phone that first time, and you saw a weird reflection.”

Kate says, “Mom,” again, like she wants something from her.

“No, it was there. You saw it, too. It was there. And the pages are there and something had to set off the motion detector.” She keeps hitting Play. She wants more. She wants to see more.

Kate: “Mom.”

“What, Kate, what?”

“You really should go read the pages, like now,” Kate says. “They're on the kitchen table.”

Elizabeth goes to the kitchen and sits at the table. She reads the pages and then she reads them again, and the possibility of what is and isn't on the camera footage gives way to the certainty of despair, that something unimaginably awful has indeed happened to Tommy, or maybe even worse, will happen to Tommy, and there's nothing she or anyone else can do. There's no overt or obviously stated threat within the pages. But the possibilities, the horror of possibilities. Then a manic third read. Each read happening faster, the words beginning to be memorized, categorized, but their meanings, their stories, their poor representations of what it was that actually happened are still out of reach. During a fourth read, Janice and Kate's distant rumble of recriminations and arguments and accusations explodes. Kate is all
but screaming her denial that she is the source of the mysteriously appearing diary pages.

Elizabeth stands, and she yells, “Shut up! Both of you! Just shut the fuck up for once! Can you do that? Can you?” It isn't fair and she doesn't mean it. The outburst is not really directed at them, but at the avalanche of the what-ifs smothering her.

Elizabeth can't look at either her mother or her daughter. There's a light sniffling coming from one of them. She says, “Look, I'm sorry. I shouldn't have said that. Please, we need each other. We can't do this or be like this, you know? And I'm—I need it quiet right now. Okay? I'm calling Detective Allison.”

Allison answers after the second ring. Janice and Kate stand in their respective corners of the kitchen. Kate runs her fingers through her hair, pulling it over her face. The coffeemaker needs more water and it flashes a blue light on Janice's elbow. Elizabeth tells Allison she's found more of Tommy's diary pages, and she describes their content. When asked where the pages came from, Elizabeth says she has yet to find their source, and that Tommy had stuck them in different places in his room and the house. Elizabeth says she doesn't know why he would spread those pages out like that, but she will keep looking and digging around and let her know if she finds more. Allison asks if she can come pick up the newest pages now. Elizabeth says, “Yes. Come on over. We'll be here,” and hangs up.

Janice says, “What are we going to say to the detective about the surveillance cam?”

“Nothing. Unless she asks.”

“If she asks?”

“The truth. I'm watching our front door and our living room for—”

“For who, Elizabeth?”

“For whoever it might be.” Elizabeth stares at Janice until she looks away.

Kate walks out of the kitchen and goes to the bathroom and turns on
the fan. Janice tends to the coffeemaker. Elizabeth stays at the kitchen table and reads the pages once more. Then she turns them over, print side down. She goes back to her phone and studies last night's snapshot and video clip. She's convinced that when she first watched the video Tommy's shadow was there. Just like he was there that night in her room. He was there in the video, a shadow hiding in the dark, huddled in the kitchen. There. He was there even if he isn't there now. She compares the snapshot to paused stills in the video, searching for subtle variations in the tone, color, depth of the images. She's missing something, and maybe if she watches the video the right way at the right angle, he'll be there again.

D
etective Allison Murtagh meets with Luis's parents at their house, sequestered just off the kitchen, sitting at the dining room table that likely isn't used for very many family meals. Their dining room table has no tablecloth. The tabletop is thick, darkly stained, and as weathered as a New England farmhouse with deep gouges and cup rings eating into the wood. Mrs. Fernandez apologizes for the dusty table and for the place being a mess. Allison stops herself from blurting out
If you want to see a mess, you have no idea
.

Three months ago Allison moved her eighty-four-year-old father (suffering with Alzheimer's) into a nursing home, and she has since moved out of her condo to live in her family's old house in Ames. She uses her parents' old dining room table as an open filing cabinet. With a single chair (the rest of the set is moldering in the basement) situated in the middle of the table lengthwise, the right side of the table is covered in legal documents, Medicare forms, communiqués from the lawyer and nursing home, tax records, each and all part of an ongoing legal evolution that began over six months ago after her father signed
over power of attorney, allowing Allison to make decisions regarding his health care and finances. On the left side of the table are piles of Dad's bills and receipts arranged into stalagmites of varying heights. All of her waking off-hours (which, these days, aren't many, given how much time she's dedicated to the search for Tommy Sanderson) are spent visiting Dad or holed up in the old house trying to get her father's affairs in some sort of order. The only time she's ever been more exhausted, physically and emotionally, was when she broke up with her longtime girlfriend, Amy, three years ago.

Mr. and Mrs. Fernandez offer Allison a coffee or water. She refuses both and places a notebook on the table. A black pen bookmarks the bulging spine. The Fernandezes are polite if not grim, serious, difficult to read. More cooperative than most. She tells them about Tommy's diary pages that were found this morning, but not more than they need to know. And she tells them about a man named Arnold who spent time with the boys, and she would like to ask Luis about him.

Allison says, “I'm certainly a long way away from being able to say that Arnold is in any way related to the disappearance, but he is someone I'd like to know more about.” She's careful with pronouns, to say that
she
wants this information and not use
we
, even if it would be a
royal we
. Allison knows that at times a more personal approach in interviews is better than portraying herself as a mouthpiece of the State, as Amy so lovingly used to put it.

Mr. Fernandez says, “I'll go get him.”

Luis walks in with his dad's heavy hand on his back—a gesture of comfort or a push, Allison cannot tell. Mrs. Fernandez moves her chair over and tells her husband to bring the other chair around so that the three of them are sitting on the same side of the table, with Luis the farthest away from Allison.

“Hi, Luis.”

“Hello, Detective Murtagh.”

Allison can't get over his size, or lack of size. Everything about him is small and young, especially his face; gaunt, all dark eyes, smooth skin without a hint of the transformation to come. That he's poised to be an eighth grader is, frankly, shocking. His middle school experience must be similar to the smallest gazelle on the Serengeti.

“Ms. Sanderson found some diary entries of Tommy's, and in them he writes about you guys hanging out with someone named Arnold.” She stops there, knowing that she hasn't really asked a question. She wants his reaction.

“Okay, yeah. Arnold.” He's sheepish, but a normal sheepish, the appropriate level of distrust within a room full of adults watching you being interviewed by an authority figure.

“He's older than you are, correct? Any idea how old?”

“Definitely out of high school. Early twenties maybe. Midtwenties? Don't know for sure.”

“How long have you known him?”

“We met him earlier this summer. In June. Not too long after school got out.”

“Where and how did you meet him?”

“We rode our bikes to the 7-Eleven at Five Corners. We did that a lot this summer. To buy soda, gum, candy.” He pauses and looks at his parents. They both nod. “And me and Josh and Tommy, you know, the three of us, hanging out front. Arnold came by and he started talking, and . . .” Luis shrugged. “And we started hanging out together.”

“Where did you hang out together that first day?”

“First just at the 7-Eleven, but then, we met him, later, in the afternoon, at Borderland.”

“Any particular place inside the park?”

“Yeah, at Devil's Rock.”

Allison could almost hear Mr. Fernandez's knuckles tighten into
fists he's keeping hidden under the table. Mrs. Fernandez is turned away from Allison and watching her son.

Allison says, “What were you guys doing?”

That shrug again. “Hanging out. Talking.”

“Anything else?” Allison sits up straight in her chair and pushes her notebook away, but not far enough away that she can't consult it or add to it.

“He, uh, he brought a six-pack?” Luis says it like a question, but it still comes off as confident and surprisingly composed, especially for a kid admitting he was drinking beer with some random older guy in the woods, the same woods and same spot from which one of his best friends has gone missing. It's a reminder that he is indeed older than he looks.

Mr. Fernandez sighs at this and then folds his arms across his chest.

Allison: “Did you drink?”

“Yeah. Just one, though. First one ever.”

“Did the three of you ask him to buy for you when you were at Five Corners? Charlie's Liquors is right there.”

“No. No.” Luis turns to his parents and says, “None of us asked him to buy or bring anything. He just showed up with them, I swear.”

“Do you know his last name?”

“No, he's just Arnold.”

“What does he do?”

“I don't know. He mentioned something about being between jobs, taking the summer off.”

“How much of him did you see this summer?”

Luis looks up and to the left. “Like . . . five times at Split Rock, I think. And we ran into him sometimes kinda randomly at the 7-Eleven, too.”

“Randomly?”

“Yeah. We never really planned anything with him. We were there a lot with nothing to do and sometimes he'd show up and we'd go to Devil's Rock.”

“You mean Split Rock.”

“Yeah, same thing, I guess. Detective?”

“Yes.”

“Are you asking me about Arnold because you think he has something to do with Tommy disappearing?”

“I'm asking to find out as much information as I possibly can. Why hasn't Arnold come up before today? You and Josh were very forthcoming in providing a list of Tommy's other friends' and classmates' names. Why not Arnold?”

“I—uh—I didn't think of him like that.”

“Like what?”

“Like a friend.”

“So he's not a friend? What is he then?”

“No, I guess he is. That's not what I mean . . .”

“How did you mean it then?”

“I don't know, it's hard for me to—to describe, I guess? I thought you were asking for kids our age, you know, for places Tommy might go to.”

“Really, Luis?” Allison tries to muster the right amount of sarcasm to lighten the blow but at the same time make her point. Why didn't he and/or Josh give up this guy's name days ago?

“Yes, really,” he says, and his voice goes high-pitched whiney and he's a little kid all over again. “We hadn't seen him in a few weeks and we don't know where he lives or have his phone number or anything like that. Tommy wouldn't know where to find him even if he wanted to.”

Mr. Fernandez blurts out, “I can't take this. This is bullshit. You and Josh didn't tell the police about this Arnold guy because you were
covering your own asses, not wanting to get in more trouble for sneaking out and drinking and doing who knows
what
else with some goddamn loser. Probably, what, your drug dealer too, right? Is that it?”

“What? No! It's nothing like that, Dad!” and all three Fernandezes are yelling over one another.

Allison doesn't interrupt and waits for the storm to pass. It does only after Luis throws his cell phone on the table and dares his parents to check the phone numbers and text messages. The three of them stare at the phone and are breathing heavily. Luis lifts his feet onto the chair, wraps his arms around his knees, rolled up tight in a little ball of anger.

Allison locks eyes with Mr. Fernandez when he reaches out for his son's phone. She says, “Is it all right if I continue?”

He says, “Yes. Sorry about that.” He has the phone in his hand but places it in front of Mrs. Fernandez. “Sorry. Go ahead.”

“Thank you. I understand this isn't easy. Luis, to be clear, I'm not accusing Arnold, you, or your friends of doing anything wrong. I'm trying to get all the information I can. I appreciate you being so helpful. Okay?”

Luis nods and loosens back into his original posture.

She says, “Let's go back. I'd like you to tell me more about that first time with Arnold at Split Rock.”

“Okay.”

Now that Arnold was up on the rock with them, he seemed bigger than he did when they were sitting on their bikes at the 7-Eleven. He wasn't
huge
, there were some guys bigger than him at the middle school, but he was a shade taller than Tommy's five feet eleven and three quarters. Luis wouldn't let Tommy call himself six feet until he was actually six feet. It was only fair. Arnold was thicker and
outweighed Tommy by a good forty pounds, which wasn't saying much given how stick-man thin Tommy was. Arnold had on jeans that weren't tight but not quite baggy, either, and were too long in the leg; the bottoms pooled around his feet and were all dirty and frayed from being dragged across the ground. He wore black Chuck Taylors on his feet, the logo scratched off, and a tight long-sleeved shirt, black with green stripes, the sleeves pushed up past his hairy forearms and over his elbows. He had one of those survival bracelets that you could unravel into ten feet of camo-colored emergency nylon rope. Luis had had his mom buy him one for his birthday in the spring, insisting she get a regular adult one, not kiddie-sized. He didn't wear it because it was like a hula hoop for his wrist and he could slide it up to his elbow. Arnold didn't have a beard but maybe what he had would be considered a full-blown beard if he didn't shave tomorrow. If not for the facial hair, he could pass for high school, or college, or whatever came right after college. Luis didn't know for sure as he categorized anyone more than a few years older than him into a nebulous, vast galaxy of adults younger than his parents and teachers. Arnold's dark brown hair was short on the sides and slightly longer at the top, pushed up into a faux hawk, a point at the top of his head. His chin came to a sharp point, too. His lips were pulled tightly over his sizable front teeth. He had thin but clearly delineated eyebrows, like borders on a map. His eyes were dark and always up, never down, and you knew when they were looking at you.

Arnold said, “Drink it or don't. No pressure. Not a big deal. It's all good.” He plucked cans from the six-pack like he was choosing the ripest fruit from a tree.

Luis almost dropped the beer when Arnold tossed it to him underhand. Tommy caught his with one hand and then opened it right away in a show-off motion that was pretty cool until the foam volca
noed out. Tommy laughed and started drinking, trying to catch it all. After he pulled the can away he covered his mouth with the back of his hand and his eyes were big, blinking, and watery.

“Sorry about that. The long walk in here shook them all up.” Arnold smiled and he looked at Luis and said, “Tap on the top of the can like this for a little bit before you open it. Helps calm down the suds.” Luis did as instructed and tapped the can with his pointer finger, tapping hard enough that his woodpecker-like fingertip went pleasantly numb. He stopped when Arnold stopped. Josh did the same. Luis dug his fingernail underneath the tab and pried it up. The crack and fizz was loud, and there was no foam. The smell hit him right away, and it smelled like the recycle bucket his dad used to keep in the garage and now kept out by the shed. The first mouthful expanded and filled Luis's head, and it was too warm, too bitter and sharp. His throat, with some limbic mind of its own, constricted, and he struggled to swallow it all. He was abnormally aware as it slid down through him and then leached out from his middle. That people enjoyed drinking this seemed like a secret he'd never be privy to. But the second sip was a little better than the first. The same with the third. He could do this.