Mislaid (5 page)

Thus Peggy believed that while Lee might set the wheels of justice turning, he would hesitate for days before calling her parents. Yet it was summer vacation, and they would be calling Stillwater to see when she was bringing the kids to swim in the pool. She decided to drive up and preempt them.

She knew where the key was hidden, but she rang the doorbell. “My, my!” her mother said. “Aren’t you tan!” She let her in, looking her up and down. “You’ve been playing tennis again!”

Peggy laughed. “No, Mom, I’ve been gardening.”

“I would know if you’d been gardening,” her mother said. “The back of your neck would be red and wrinkled as a turkey. No, you’ve been playing tennis. At your age you should be riding or playing golf. Something you can wear a hat and gloves at.”

“Well, isn’t this a surprise,” Peggy’s father said. “What brings you to our neck of the woods?”

“Let me get Mickey,” she said, turning back toward the car. “I didn’t know if you were home.”

“Where’s Byrdie?”

“School,” Peggy said. “What a great kid.”

“He’s a little spoiled, but he’s a fine boy,” her father agreed.

“How’s Lee?” her mother asked.

“That’s what I wanted to talk to you about. Lee’s not—as a matter of fact Lee and I are not getting along. We separated.”

“You’re not living with Lee?” Her mother drew back in dismay.

“I’ve got my own place. Be honest, Mom. Lee Fleming! How long was that going to work?”

Her father chortled.

“Well, is he fine with it?”

Peggy sighed. “Sure. He has a new girlfriend.”

Her father guffawed.

“Are you getting a divorce?” her mother asked.

“Not so far.”

“Do you have a lawyer?”

“I’m not getting a divorce, so why would I need a lawyer?”

“Lee’s out there right now, deceiving you with some two-bit hustler,” her mother said earnestly. “I don’t remember you signing any premarital agreement. He’s going to have to settle something on you. We’ll force him.”

“You and what army? I’m telling you, I cut out of there with
no forwarding address. If I go to a judge, Lee will get custody of Mickey, too, not just Byrdie. I couldn’t make Byrdie come along. He didn’t want to, not with a choice between me and the Playboy of the Western World. Now name me a judge Lee’s not related to. I wouldn’t touch a court of law with a ten-foot pole. Screw me over, fuck you. Screw me twice—”

“Watch your language, young lady!” her father interrupted.

“Anyhow, he’s broke. He won’t have a cent until his mom buys the farm, and that’s going to take forty years. If she dies first, his dad marries some deb and we never see a cent.”

Peggy’s mother took Mickey by the hand and stood in the archway to the dining room, making as though to take her someplace else to play, but not wanting to miss anything. “Let’s play boats,” Mickey said.

“I don’t have boats. I guess you don’t have boats anymore either, now that you don’t live on Stillwater Lake.”

“Mommy made the lake fall down. Now we play boats in the yard.”

“Where are you living, honey?”

“We got a pyramid, and blue butterflies!”

“Where do you live?” Peggy’s father said, addressing himself to Peggy.

“Rented house,” Peggy said. “Nothing special.”

“Where?”

“I’d rather not say. I don’t want Lee serving me with papers.”

“I’m concerned about you, honey.”

“I can make my own decisions.”

Her father laughed. “I noticed! Do you have a phone, where we can call you?”

“Not in the house. There’s a party line at a bait shop.”

“You should get a phone for safety. Just list it under a fake name.”

Peggy stopped off at her dad’s churchyard to let Mickey play. The church was one of the oldest in the country, nearly square, with gated pews shining pale green and the Ten Commandments in loopy gold script on alabaster tablets at the front. Austere, creaky, ancient. She picked up a bench and let it fall. The echo ricocheted off the walls and made Mickey jump. They walked around the outside, stroking the soft salmon brickwork with its tracery of lime and the dark pottery of the glazed headers. In the graveyard a solitary angel kept watch over a boxwood. Broken columns—the oldest graves. The next era, bas-relief willows and skulls. Then cast-iron crosses. Then the newest graves, granite monoliths. The names were always the same. Except for one. The cemetery had apparently been integrated. A cluster of mauve plastic roses poked up from the foot of a tiny mound. At the head was a temporary marker, a cross made of unfinished pine, already weathered, reading
KAREN BROWN
1970–73.

Peggy remembered the Browns. A nice black family who lived on the school property like her parents. Not neighbors exactly, but close by. And here they had lost a child like Mickey. A child who ought to be older than Mickey, but would always be younger. How sad. She looked at her daughter, and then she did something terrible. She drove to the courthouse, to the county registrar, whom she knew, and said, “Morning, Lester!”

“Miss Peggy! How do you do?”

“Fine, thanks. It’s beautiful out! My dad asked me to come down here. He’s doing Leon Brown’s back taxes and now the IRS says they need a birth certificate for their little daughter that died. Because of the deduction. He didn’t want to ask Leon for it.”

“Ain’t that a shame.”

“Her name was Karen.”

He fired up the Xerox machine and dug around for his notary stamp, then pulled out a hanging file tabbed with a B.

In the car on the way home, Peggy glanced at Mireille repeatedly and said, “Karen. Karen? Karen. Karen.”

“Who’s Karen?”

She poked her in the side. “You are Karen! You can’t go to school with a boy’s name like Mickey! You have to have a girl’s name, and your girl’s name is Karen. Karen Brown. My girl’s name is Meg. Meg Brown. Meg and Karen Brown.”

“We’re girls,” Mickey said.

“You bet your sweet rear end we’re girls!”

W
here the yard ended, the pines started. Among them were
old ruined houses, just humps left of their two brick chimneys, and little burial grounds. They were popular destinations. Along with thin slabs of marble, some still standing, they had beer bottles, mattresses, and old car seats. The nearby ponds had their banks trampled down from fishing.

Every time they came back from a voyage of discovery, Peggy would examine her house carefully from the deep cover of the underbrush on the edge of the yard. But there was never any sign that anyone had dropped by. No tire tracks in the mud.

Peggy had not forgotten the intellectual and social ambitions she had started life with only a decade before. Years so weary and routine laden, they seemed like a single year that had repeated itself. She wanted to be creative and self-reliant. Her plan was to be a successful playwright. With her earnings from royalties she would one day have a comfortable home again, worthy of Mickey and Byrdie. Though she had her doubts about whether Byrdie would visit, or even want to talk to her, and how all that would make her feel.

First she had other things to attend to. She had saved housekeeping money for years in a sock and had enough to spare to buy provisions. They were not big eaters. They would need a kerosene heater and lamps, but not until the fall. First renovations were in order. She nailed down linoleum to keep from falling through rotten places in the floor. There was a fair-sized gap in a corner of the kitchen, under a dead boiler that sat flaking rust. She discovered the hole when a possum crawled out and startled bumbling around like a fool. Luckily she had a broom and could herd it back down into the crawl space.

The lawn never needed mowing because of the standing water. The bug situation was correspondingly dire, but no worse than the Mekong Delta, as some poets called Stillwater Lake. Still, she fixed the screen doors before she covered the cesspool. That was the obvious order of priority. She acquired a camp stove to heat water. It was easy to sell Mickey on the virtues of simple foods that require no cooking or dishwashing, such as potato chips and cocktail wieners.

She set up her portable typewriter on the table. She would write under a pseudonym as did the Brontës. Anne, Emily, Charlotte, and Branwell. Also known as Acton Bell, Ellis, Currer, and—did the boy Brontë even write? Or just drink himself to death?

She couldn’t remember. She had no place to look it up. She had snagged some books of plays on her way out the door: Shaw, Hart, Synge. She hadn’t thought to take the one-volume
Columbia Encyclopedia
.

It didn’t matter to her plan. She could still copy the basic principle. Publish under a fake name while dwelling in the lonely fastnesses of the moors. She wasn’t clear on what moors were, but the Brontës made them sound every bit as damp as Tidewater. As well as freezing and tubercular, but that wasn’t her problem.
She would be the Brontë of warm, malarial moors, the dramatist of the Great Dismal Swamp.

After the big money started coming in, she would move to New York. From her picture window above Astor Place, Mickey and Byrdie at her side, she would laugh at Lee’s creaky house, his stagnant lake, his noblesse oblige pseudo-income.

Lee had distractions, what with his work at the college and keeping track of where Byrdie was at any given time (students were lined up to babysit and passed him like a baton), but he got a judge to issue a warrant. The charges: kidnapping, reckless endangerment, vandalism, and something about the welfare of a child.

The judiciary was happy to help. The police were not so responsive. Lee called them several times a day, wondering where they were. He wanted them to take copies of Peggy’s fingerprints. She hadn’t stolen any money when she left. Ergo, he surmised, she would soon embark on a life of crime, endangering Mireille’s safety in a criminally insane manner.

But the sheriff and all his deputies seemed to regard Peggy as a grown woman with a right to run away. And who would have expected her to abandon a little daughter? It troubled them more that she hadn’t taken the son.

As they fantasized (a primary investigative tool of law enforcement) freely and at length about her motives, alone or over drinks with friends, the sheriff and his deputies consistently came to feel that getting her son away from Lee ought to have been her first priority.

After they finally came and went, Lee dragged himself around the house to eradicate all traces of her. Clothes she hadn’t worn in ten years. Light reading for ladies such as the Foxfire books and
Virginia Ghosts
. Her Mirro omelet pan, open admission of her
inability to make an omelet. Cher records. They all went into the trunk of a beat-up Volvo and from there into a Dumpster at a wayside. Except the Cher records, which he abandoned on the shoulder of a deeply shaded back road, to make sure no one would suspect he had anything to do with them.

“You’re suffering from female trouble,” Cary told Lee over lunch at the Bunny Burger. “It’s time you sought professional help.”

“A shrink only helps when you don’t know what you want. I feel I’m in touch with my desires, thank you.”

“I meant a psychic. Your aura is navy blue.”

“Cary.” He used the tone his daughter used to say “Daddy.”

“I took a course at Edgar Cayce,” Cary protested. “My ESP is very strong!”

“And when did you get the diagnosis? In the poetry workshop business, we always wait until the check clears.”

“I have a heightened sensitivity to feelings. Some people only know what you’re feeling when you’re looking at them, but us psychics can feel it over hundreds of miles. We’re tapped into the web of life.”

“And what do you call people who know what you’re feeling and don’t give a shit?”

“That’s why they call it female trouble.”

“My wife is masculine as a mailed fist,” Lee said, paraphrasing a necktie ad from a magazine. “Did you get it on under the pyramid yet?” The Edgar Cayce Center in Virginia Beach was famous for its rooftop pyramid, modeled on the geometric eternity machines of the Egyptians, under which lunch meat would not spoil and orgasms were exceptionally rapturous.

“You want my help finding them or not? You got anything on you now that belongs to one of them? Something related to them, a picture or something.”

“Peggy gave me these gray hairs,” Lee said. “And she might have bought me this shirt.”

“Let me touch it.”

Lee held out his arm. “And? What’s she feeling?”

Cary closed his eyes and stroked Lee’s cuff. “Oh, yes. It’s almost there. Her emotions are coming into focus. I can read you now, baby. It’s so strong. She thinks you need to lose twelve pounds.”

Lee turned his dispassionate gaze on his sandwich. “With friends like you, who needs marriage?” he said, taking a large bite. He thought of Montaigne and Étienne, and felt something was missing from his life.

Lee’s parents hired a private investigator, who drove to Caroline County to see whether she was at her parents’ house. Just because they said she wasn’t there didn’t mean she wasn’t there. He reported back that the Vaillaincourts’ apathy made his blood run cold, as a hardened professional. Peggy’s mother had referred him to her husband, as though the search were a business matter, and Mr. Vaillaincourt had told him, “She knows where to find us!” He claimed to be expecting a call any day. If it never came, well, that was Peggy’s problem.

The Flemings understood the Vaillaincourts better than the detective did. A ruling class is made up entirely of hardened professionals, insofar as it does not sire sissies. Where more sentimental men might remark of their daughters’ marriages, “I’m not losing a daughter, I’m gaining a son,” Peggy’s father had been heard to say no such thing. When two females vanish from a patriarchy, both of them attached to a homosexual, the ripples can be truly minimal.

Soon the detective, a working-class townsman, sympathized with Peggy. If a woman ran away from people like that, might
she not have reasons? He didn’t have to know Lee was gay to dislike him. He had other reasons to feel distaste for the Flemings, such as the way they confined him to their front hall, never asking him to come in or sit down.

With his assistance, they placed a newspaper ad featuring Peggy’s senior portrait from high school. The picture showed a big-eyed, arrogant girl in an off-the-shoulder drape. Her long hair, straightened on curlers under a dryer hood for the occasion, was pinned up into a chignon. The likeness was not good. Lee had neglected, in ten years of marriage, to take a close-up picture of Peggy. All his snapshots were from a distance, his wife holding a child or underexposed in the light of a campfire.

The ad appeared many times in newspapers all over the state.
MISSING PERSON
, it announced, with a generous reward.

Thousands of people saw it, but no calls came in. Simple, truthful, educated people, the kind who could read and believe a newspaper, sipped their coffee and felt sorry for the parents whose daughter had run away. Not patronizing the haunts of runaways—heroin shooting galleries and red-light districts and whatnot—themselves, the upstanding citizens had no cause to examine their consciences for signs of Peggy.

Nor would they have found anything anyway. The runaway was keeping a very, very low profile.

She couldn’t help herself. Life with Lee had been so drab that running away had a bounden duty to be exciting. She felt she had a right to ask that much. That was why the dramatic flight, the abandoned houses, the new identity.

She hoped he would hunt her with all his might so she could spite him and laugh. Yet she was not in a hurry to deal with stress. Her game was to be invisible. She knew Lee well, and by
heading southeast, she had hidden in the folds of his own cerebral cortex. She knew he felt contempt for her. He would imagine her growing old in food service somewhere along Route 1, at Allman’s or the Dixie Pig, dreaming of New York City, never getting the money together to get past DC. He would never imagine her fleeing a rural backwater for its murkier depths.

She was right on all counts.

Lee’s first stop, Transient City: Fredericksburg, an hour south of Washington, DC, on Route 1. Home ownership rate 5 percent. The local gentry had surrendered to solvent government employees and Beltway bandits. Sold every stitch of land, skedaddled to Stafford County or points west. The city was a half-empty ghetto with foreign immigrants. The place you would fetch up if you were trying to get over the Mason-Dixon Line and failing, in Lee’s opinion.

He had lunch at Woolworth’s without seeing his wife. He sat down on a bench in front of a gift shop (the new suburbanites still came into town when they needed kitsch) to wait for her.

He was like a man buying the first lottery ticket of his life. He reads the notice on the back warning him that the odds against him are twelve million to one, and he concludes that he has a chance of winning.

Lee looked up and down the street, watching for slight women with brown hair. He watched for women with blond children. He watched for anyone at all. It was a quiet afternoon, paced by the rhythm of traffic lights. He stood up and walked, thinking he might ask after her, if he happened to see her kind of store. He walked the length of town and as far as the railroad tracks. Ice cream, real estate, musical instruments. Porcelain figurines and teacups. He shook his head at his own dumbness, got back in the car, and sat.

He imagined doing the same thing in Fairfax, Manassas, Reston, Falls Church—all the sprawling towns where he and Peggy
knew no one. Where she was driving around in a candy-apple-red ’66 Fairlane. Why was he looking for her, when he could be looking for that car?

He drove to AAA in Richmond. He acquired maps of the state that showed every gas station. He needed a map because without zoning, businesses could crop up anywhere. Almost at random, you might see a barber pole or a green sign with yellow block script announcing the Department of Motor Vehicles. A one-and-a-half-lane highway would round a blind curve and there you were—already past it—the town you were looking for with its post office, gas pump, and population of four.

He returned to northern Virginia, where gas stations grew thick on the ground. But the second day of searching brought no sign of Peggy. Neither did the third.

From being mired in lottery-style thinking, Lee drifted toward magical thinking. He no longer demanded that divine providence reveal Peggy and Mireille in an instant. He was certain if he tortured himself long enough, quizzing gas station attendants on whether they’d seen a conspicuous car containing a woman and a little girl, his persistence would be rewarded. The car was black now, and the woman was routinely addressed as “sir” because she’d given herself an inept crew cut, but he didn’t know that.

His task would have been easier if he’d ever granted her a credit card beyond the one for his father’s Amoco station. It had his own name on it. He discovered it in his wallet, transferred there from hers. It was her way of telling him she had gone through his wallet and taken nothing. She didn’t even have a bank account. Financially, she existed as a tax deduction. A deduction Lee would go on taking whether she lived with him or not. It was only fair. She was much more expensive after she left than before.

Stillwater Lake retreated far from the bamboo grove. It stood in yellowish-gray mud streaked with reddish brown that looked to Lee like diarrhea. The shore went out for forty yards and down six feet before the first puddles appeared. The standing water was almost white, writhing solid with mosquito larvae like maggots in a corpse.

The college could not be relied upon to fix the lake. What it had lost in aesthetics, it had gained in acreage. The lakeshore was the property line. The administration planned to build a spacious campus center on land that used to be underwater. Lee’s parents told him to wait a couple of years for grass to grow and he wouldn’t know the difference.

But the level kept dropping. The college hired a civil engineering bureau to produce a hydrogeological report.

Stillwater Lake, the engineers said, was unnatural, built using a method commonly used to create cattle watering holes in areas without streams. But on the much, much larger scale made possible by slave labor. The Great Pyramid of puddles, concocted from a limestone depression by a forgotten megalomaniac. The lake bed was thousands of tons of clay, dug from riverbanks farther east, plastering an enormous hole.