Lost Girls (12 page)

''What I'm interested in, to be precise, are news stories having to do with the lost girls.''

With this he remains perfectly still for a nearly uncomfortable length of time. Then, briefly, a smile appears and recedes into the fur of his beard.

''Then you'd be Bartholomew Crane,'' he says. ''I'm Doug Pittle. We ran a story on you in the last issue.''

'' 'We'?''

'' 'I,' actually. Aside from being head librarian, I'm also publisher, sales director, and editor in chief of
The Murdoch
Phoenix
. I hope you don't mind the publicity, but it's nothing too terribly inflammatory, I assure you. In fact, I think you'll find that the
Phoenix
--that is,
I
--have taken a more balanced view of the case than even the Toronto papers and considerably more than the television news, needless to say.''

''A profile? Where did you get my bio? As far as I'm aware, I'm not yet listed in the
Who's Who
.''

''I'm a researcher, Mr. Crane. It's amazing the things you can find if you look in the right places.'' As he speaks he guides me to the pantry and pushes the door half-closed to provide a level of privacy as well as a flow of oxygen into the tiny room. ''If you need any help, I'll be here until we close at six.''

''How did you--''

''It's a small town,'' he says flatly, and retreats back to his desk.

Before I get started I wonder at how Doug Pittle so smoothly resisted a prolonged exchange and at the same time left me with the impression that further conversation would come later. No doubt he had himself a long experience of living among the damaged goods that constitute the better part of Murdoch's population, and he knew that, in time, another like himself would have to eventually seek refuge in the one place where they could be surrounded by the calming presence of books.

So it is that I find my nose stuck in the crimpled pages of the May seventeenth issue of
The Murdoch Phoenix,
when the girls were first reported missing. The initial story ran as a front-page blurb noting that two local students had not been seen since the previous Thursday (the
Phoenix
was published every Tuesday) and that, the girls being close friends, it was suspected by police that they'd most likely ''run off for the weekend.'' The next issue featured two pictures of the girls, the same yearbook portraits published in every paper in the country. Smiling, floral Sunday-best dresses, side by side, blanketing the top half of the front page. One light haired and dimple chinned, the other dark and freckled, blue eyed both.

The story below told of how the police were now of a radically different opinion from that of the week before, how search teams were being arranged throughout the area, how armed forces helicopters were brought in to run aerial patterns over a hundred-square-mile grid, and how two senior Ontario Province Police homicide detectives had been assigned to the case to ''explore potential foul-play scenarios.'' In the weeks that followed, stories chronicling the frustrated search appeared on every front page, and never failed to include a vague quote from the detective in charge (''Every avenue of investigation is being pursued,'' ''All of the department's resources have been made available,'' and, later, ''It's true that we are now treating the case as a homicide, although of course we remain hopeful''). Then, during a heat wave in the week following Labor Day that registered the highest temperatures the town had experienced since 1937, Thomas Tripp was arrested and charged with two counts of firstdegree murder. The police weren't releasing anything to the press that wasn't already known: the girls were last seen after school that Thursday getting into the back of Tripp's car, both wearing white summer dresses, and that authorities were now ''marshaling the full extent of the evidence for the Crown.'' At the bottom of the page a small photo of the accused inset at the lower left-hand corner, a face carrying the bewildered look of those who have suddenly found themselves in serious trouble.

Having read through every story from the beginning to the present (''Tripp Hires Prestigious Toronto Firm for Defense''), I bring the entire pile out of the pantry and stand it on a table next to the library's lone photocopier. After an hour of holding my head over the machine's blinding flashes I amass an inky heap as thick as a nineteenth-century Russian novel.

When I'm finished Pittle stands, moving around to lean against the shelf that holds the magazines--
Time, PopularMechanics, Maclean's
--all neatly labeled and untouched.

''Can I help you with anything else?''

''Maybe you can. Do you have anything in the way of a local atlas or history? Something that might provide a kind of general overview of the town?''

''You're a historian as well, then?''

''Not at all. I just like to know what I'm dealing with.''

''You mean
where
you're dealing with,'' he laughs, dark as coffee. ''I know just the thing.''

He slides around the corner into the stacks and in a few seconds returns with a large, apparently untitled hardcover book.

''A History of Northern Ontario Towns,''
he announces. ''Compiled by Murdoch's own late Alistair Dundurn, honored World War II veteran, amateur historian, and, in his later years, well-known eccentric who walked the town's streets talking in a language known only to himself. I remember him, although he died just a couple of years after I arrived. Found him frozen solid in the middle of a snowdrift beside the doors of Our Lady of Perpetual Help after the big blizzard of eighty-four. Everyone thought it was a funny thing, his choosing to impersonate an ice cube outside of a Catholic church, being a die-hard Presbyterian all his life.''

''Sounds interesting,'' I say, meaning not the book but the way its author died.

''Some of it is,'' Pittle says, meaning the book.

He holds it out to me and it instantly shrinks in the transfer from his hands to mine.

''It's got a good chapter on Murdoch in there,'' he says critically. ''Histories both official and unofficial.''

''My thanks. I guess I should haul all this stuff out of your way now, though. What do I owe you?''

''Well, I don't imagine you've counted all those copies, and I'm certainly not about to, so why don't we just call it even. And as for the book loan, consider yourself an honorary member of the Murdoch Public Library. Or perhaps more a visiting scholar.''

''That's quite a designation.''

''It comes with one condition.''

''Yes?''

''When it's all over--the trial, I mean--you agree to give me an exclusive interview. A few remarks for
Phoenix
readers.''

''Agreed,'' I say, and, sticking the heavy wad of paper and book into my leather document bag, walk out the library's front door and back down Ontario Street through a bitter autumn rain that, although varying in its intensity, has been falling since the day I arrived.

Back in the honeymoon suite I take out the copied articles and arrange them chronologically on the bed. Then, without an idea in my head, I take the rest of the afternoon to tape them all in this order to the wall next to the desk, the dresser, the window frames, and then, standing on a chair, in a series of lines beneath the wood moldings of the ceiling around the entire perimeter of the room. When I'm finished I consider the fruits of my work and marvel at its pointlessness, at the way I've voluntarily made an ugly room even uglier. Put together like this, the smudged print of text blends together so that only the yearbook photographs and banner headlines (''No Sign in Search for Local Girls,'' ''Our Little Sweet One: A Father Talks,'' ''Lost Girls' Teacher in Custody'') stand out. It's as though the walls themselves now disclose a tale of their own. A story told largely without words, and the few that could be seen acting only to provide different titles to rename the same recurring image. Although the girls' smiles are unchanging, their intimations are subtly enhanced as I walk around the room, transformed from something innocent to ironic to tragic to, by the end, a mocking ambivalence.

I wasn't aware of their names until now.

Of course I'd seen them typed out on police reports and witness statements and in every news story I'd read about them but, my mind on other things, they failed to register as
names
.

Krystal McConnell.

Ashley Flynn.

Names of the times. Borrowed from soap-opera characters of prominence fifteen years ago who have since been replaced by spiffy new models: the social-climbing
Brittany
now an unscrupulous
Burke,
the generous
Pamela
a refitted, urbanized
Parker
. But when Krystal McConnell and Ashley Flynn were named deep in the heart of the eighties, the thing was cuteness. Pink cotton perfumed with designer fragrances. A belief in the transformative powers of positive thinking, spring water, German-made automobiles, and avocado. Brand names in banners beneath made-up family crests, galloping polo ponies and green reptiles embroidered over every heart. And everyone named according to a particular version of the pedigree fantasy.
Ashley:
transplanted Southern privilege, a destiny lying in sorority mixers and a marriage of health-club memberships, state-of-the-art appliances, and night courses in nouvelle cuisine.
Krystal:
light refracted through the grooves and crests of fancy cut glass, a fragility tempered with the Eastern European heartiness of an imported K.

I look again at the grainy pictures on the wall. Pointillistic dots in varying degrees of light and dark that blur up close but magically assemble into faces as I pull away. Ashley and Krystal were their names. And that, at the moment they obligingly smiled at the corny joke told by the school yearbook photographer, was what they looked like.

Three days of wading through police notes and warrant documents, of prepackaged ham sandwiches purchased from the corner store beneath Tripp's apartment a couple blocks away, of sleeping in the desk chair and listening to the rain tap-dancing on the eaves. Three days of working alone, and Barth Crane could use a little entertainment.

''Evenin','' the concierge says to me when I reach the bottom of the Grand Staircase.

''Good evening. Any messages?''

He lowers his head either to check for notes that may have fallen to the floor or to give me a better view of his vein-mottled baldness. When he rises again he squints at me through the lobby's gas-lamp gloom.

''Nope. Nothing but--just more of the same.''

''Fine. If I get any serious calls, could you have your staff please refer them to my room?''

''Staff! Ain't no staff but me!''

He makes a clacking sound against the roof of his mouth that one immediately wishes one had never heard.

''Well, I suppose that explains why the phone was left ringing off the goddamn hook the other night.''

''What's that?''

''Nothing. Thanks so much for your help.''

''Not a worry.''

Then he lowers his head once more in what I can only take to be a bow of some kind, but I prevent myself from looking again at his awful scalp. Instead I turn and pull open the door to the Lord Byron Cocktail Lounge, stepping into an even greater darkness than the one I'd come from.

At first the only appreciable light emanates from the small stage at the far end of the room, and even this is of the purple fluorescent kind known only to strip bars and adolescent basement bedrooms. At the moment, however, the stage is empty, and after my eyes adjust I see that most of the bar is empty as well. Four beards in lumber jackets slumped around a table of half-consumed pitchers, three loosened ties with rolled sleeves spotted around the stage, and what I assume to be one of the dancers sitting at the bar in a transparent blouse and bike shorts, her impossibly long blond hair hanging down her back as though the plumage of an extravagant nineteenth-century hat. In the background the muted rumblings of cheesy jazz, a barely recognizable ''Little Girl Blue.''

Acquire a double rye-and-ginger and take a table near the stage but well off to one side against the wall where the darkness is almost complete. For a while nothing happens, and nobody seems to mind, not even the lumber jackets, who look the sort who wouldn't stand for excessive delays in the delivery of entertainment. I finish my drink and raise my arm to the barman for another.

Then, without the usual PA introduction and change in music that signals a new dancer's arrival, a young woman takes the stage and immediately drops her slip to the floor. She's blond as well but unbleached and, judging from the taut smoothness of the flesh at the back of her thighs and under her arms, could be no more than twenty years old. But as she dances it's impossible to get a good look at her because of hair so loosely feathered, it shrouds most of her face. The kind of hair one finds on those embarrassed by a scar or spotty skin, yet the few glimpses she offers suggest she's as likely pretty as not. Moves without interest in her movement, fingertips running down over her ribs and stomach as though checking for dust. Hips swaying a little too slow for the music so that she's always a half beat behind, hands now squeaking up the brass pole at the side of the stage. Raises her arms above her and the whole of her body, slender and pale and high, is clinically displayed.