The Missing Place (2 page)

“Still, I can try.” She forced a smile. “I'll have the cab driver take me around, and if there really isn't anything, I'll have him take me to an all-night restaurant.”

“Well . . .” The man tugged at his collar, clearly wanting to say more. “Call Silver Cab, then, I'll wait until he comes. Shouldn't take him too long. It's just seven-oh-one-five-S-I-L-V-E-R. But you best tell him . . . you know.”

Impatience flashed through Colleen. “Why? The longer he has to drive me around, the more I'll end up paying.”

“It's just, the Buttercup, that's the only restaurant that stays open all night besides the truck stops, they won't let nobody stay in a booth all night no more. Not since folks started trying to sleep in them. They cracked down.”

“Well, I—” Colleen wanted to protest that she wouldn't be like them, those other people, trying to sponge off the restaurant. She was only even considering it out of desperation. She'd leave a very
large tip, payment for the time she spent there, the pot of coffee, the restroom, all of it. “I won't sleep, then.”

She tapped the number into the phone and waited, forcing a smile, staring at the man's shirt. The vest gapped open, and Colleen saw that above the pocket was stitched the name Dave.

The phone rang and rang. After six or seven rings, Colleen gave up and lifted her gaze to Dave's face. His expression had gone from concerned to something more like dread. She supposed he thought he was going to get stuck with her.

“Didn't answer, huh?” Dave didn't wait for her to respond. “They get busy. Him and the other outfit, Five Star. Doing runs from the bars, see. They'll be pretty busy from now until after closing time. Which is one a.m.,” he added.

“I understand, but—” The feeling of panic that had been simmering inside Colleen threatened to burst into full bloom. “I wonder. Is there any way—I mean I would pay you, of course, and I'll wait for you to finish here, but could you just give me a lift to that restaurant? The one you were telling me was open all night? I'll wait there until the cabs are available.”

The building was eerily quiet save for the buzz of some fluorescent fixture. A moment passed, Colleen's fingers tight around the handle of her suitcase.

“I'll be glad to take you,” Dave finally said, sounding anything but, “but do you mind me asking what you're doing here? In Lawton?”

Colleen had prepared an answer to that question, but she'd hoped she wouldn't need it until later, after she'd settled in. In the morning, when she came back to rent a car, they would ask her where she was taking it. She had planned to say she was visiting relatives, but now it seemed painfully clear that she could never have relatives in a place like this. Who would live in a place where the
nearest civilization was two hours away, where there were only two flights in and out per day?

“I came . . .” she said, and tried to come up with another story. If she invented relatives, she had a feeling Dave would insist on driving her to their house. If she made up a job, a company whose business brought her here, he would want to know why they hadn't booked her a room—and besides, what could she possibly say she did? She knew nothing about the oil industry, only what Paul had told her, and that had been precious little.

Dave waited, and the fluorescent light buzzed, and the smell of exhaust reached her. All of it harsh, all of it wrong.

“I came to find my son,” she blurted. A huge sob bubbled up from inside her, taking her breath and leaving her gasping, and her eyes filled with tears.

“Hey,” Dave said, alarmed. “Hey. Here.” He plucked a box of tissues from the rental car counter and offered it to her. “Did your son come up here to find work?”

Colleen nodded, pulling tissues from the box and dabbing at her eyes, but she couldn't seem to stop crying. “Back in September. He got a job right away, with Hunter-Cole Energy. He stays at the Black Creek Lodge. He was just home over Christmas. And then he came back here and we didn't hear from him and that's not like him . . . last week my husband called the company and they said he hadn't come to work. No one let us know. I'm sure he would have listed us, an emergency contact at the very least, but they didn't call or anything. They didn't tell anyone. If Andy hadn't called them . . . And he hadn't been in his room at the camp, either, Andy talked to someone at the lodge, they gave away his room. Paul wouldn't do that. He wouldn't just . . . quit and not tell anyone. They said, the police said they can't do anything about it. So I'm here. I've come to find him.”

A change had come over the man's face. He already knew the story, Colleen could tell; recognition mixed with concern in his eyes. Well, so at least people up here were talking about it. The cops had made it sound like boys went missing all the time, but that wasn't true, and this man Dave knew it.

She put her hand on his arm, feeling the warmth of his skin under the rough cotton of his shirt. “Do you know something? Have you heard something?”

“I heard . . . I mean, I don't know if it's the same one, if it's your son, but they say two boys went missing from the Black Creek camp a couple weeks ago. Hunter-Cole Energy boys—one was still a worm. Went by Whale and, uh, can't remember the other boy's name.”

“Paul. My son is Paul.” She didn't know about any other boy. The police, the men from Hunter-Cole Energy—she'd kept calling until they transferred her all the way to the company's headquarters in Texas—had never mentioned that. She didn't know what he meant by
worm
and
whale
, and what did it mean that there were
two
of them—that had to be worse, didn't it?

“All I know is the handles they used up here. I'm sorry, I shouldn't even, I don't know if it's the same ones.”

“When did these ones go missing?”

The man squinted, as though the question caused him pain. “Let's see, I heard it Thursday last. They were moving a rig out Highway Nine east of town, the boys didn't show. I got a friend on Highway Patrol, is how I know.”

“It's him, then! He went missing the same day, that's the first day he didn't come back to his room.”

“Well, listen. There's someone you maybe ought to see.”

“You know something? Anything. Anything at all, please tell me.”

The man took a deep breath and let it out, shrugging off his vest. He folded the vest in half and began to roll it up, not meeting her eyes. “I don't know a damn thing. Wish I did. But
she
might, and I'll take you to her right now.”

“Who?”

“The other mom.”

DAVE CALLED HIS
wife to tell her he'd be late. As he drove, he told Colleen he had moved to Lawton from southern Missouri during the last boom, in the late 1970s. He met a local girl, married her, and stayed. The airport job was a good one, and he didn't miss the work on the rigs, or the prospect of losing his job when the boom started to fade.

The snow was coming down more heavily now, dusting Dave's windshield between each swipe of the wipers. His truck smelled pleasantly of oil and tobacco. It seemed like the only traffic on the road was trucks—pickups like Dave's, bigger than those Colleen saw around Boston, many of them jacked up on larger-than-life wheels, but mostly long-bedded vehicles both empty and loaded with equipment. Traffic moved slowly, giving Colleen a chance to watch the town go by outside her window.

Lawton seemed to be one long stretch of four-lane highway, lined with gas stations and restaurants and lumberyards and storage facilities. A huge Walmart looked like it was open for business despite the hour and the weather. They passed two motels, both with brightly lit
NO VACANCY
signs and parking lots full of pickups.

Dave hadn't actually met the woman he was taking Colleen to see. He only knew where to find her because his wife's sister worked at the same clinic as the woman who'd rented the other mother her motor home.

“But how can she be staying in a motor home in this weather?”

“Generator.” He didn't seem inclined to say anything more on the subject.

Dave pulled onto a street lined with shabby ranch houses at the edge of town; the cars and trucks in the driveways looked old and battered. He drove slowly, reading addresses on mailboxes. Televisions flickered in windows.

“This'll be it,” he said at the end of the block, pulling in front of a small house with white siding. Parked at the side of the house was the motor home, several feet of snow piled on its roof.

Colleen felt her stomach twist. “Would you—I mean, you've done so much for me already, and I insist on paying you, of course . . .” She dug in her purse for her wallet. “But could I ask you to come with me? To make sure she's here?”

“Put your money away,” Dave said roughly. “Of course I'll go with you. Let me come around, it's a big step down.”

Colleen's stomach growled as she waited, and she realized she hadn't eaten anything since a protein bar in the Minneapolis airport, many hours earlier. Dave offered his hand and she took it, letting him help her out of the cab.

He got her suitcase from the back and waited for her to walk ahead of him. Colleen's boots made neat prints in the snow that had fallen since the drive was last plowed. She tugged her scarf tighter around her neck so that only the center of her face was exposed to the bitter chill. Once she got close, she could hear voices from inside the motor home. She took a breath and knocked on the door.

It opened almost instantly. Standing inside was a small woman in a navy blue sweatshirt several sizes too big for her, printed with a tornado and the words
FAIRHAVEN CYCLONES FOOTBALL.
Bleached, kinked hair was loosely piled on top of her head; much of it had
come loose and cascaded around her shoulders. She had startling blue eyes ringed with thick black eyeliner. Colleen got a whiff of the air inside—pot and pizza. The television was on; that's where the voices were coming from.

“Brenda called over,” the woman said. “You must be Whale's mom.”

THE WOMAN ACROSS
the tiny table looked as though a tap with Shay's little pink craft hammer would shatter her into a thousand pieces. Which you might expect, except Colleen Mitchell looked like she'd been this way forever, long before the boys went missing. You didn't get lines as deep as the ones between her eyebrows and around her mouth in a single week.

“You're lucky you found someone to drive you,” Shay said. “We're supposed to get six more inches by morning.”

“Lucky,” Colleen echoed, like the word was in a foreign language.

Dave took off as fast as he could without being rude. Shay knew how
that
went too. Most people didn't like to be around bad luck; it was as though misfortune was contagious. But the men here in Lawton had surprisingly old-fashioned manners. In the three days since she arrived, strangers had opened doors for her, let her cut in line at the coffee shop, and even offered to carry her groceries to her car.

“I know what you need,” she told Colleen.

“Oh, I—I couldn't,” Colleen said quickly, eyeing the bottle on the table. Shay had been drinking weak Jack and Cokes, smoking and thinking, before Brenda called, and she hadn't put the bottle away because there wasn't anywhere to put it.

“Oh, no, I didn't mean that, though a drink might not hurt. You need something to eat. I'll make you something.”

“No, thank you so much, but I'm not hungry.”

“Yes, you are,” Shay said patiently, the way she'd talk to Leila. “Come on. You been on a plane since, what, this morning? Probably didn't have any lunch?”

“I had something,” Colleen said miserably. Her eyelids were crepey, makeup collected in the creases. Her lips were pale and flaking. She gave off a faint smell of fabric softener and sweat. And she looked like she was about to cry.

“Well, now you're going to have something else. What time is it in Boston, anyway? An hour ahead, right? That's almost one in the morning.”

Shay kept up a steady stream of conversation while she got the bread out of the little fridge, the ham, cheese, mustard, and put a sandwich together. Colleen answered a word or two at a time, her voice dull. Both plates were dirty, so Shay served the sandwich on a folded paper towel. She poured a glass of milk and set that down on the table too.

“Eat.”

Colleen picked up the sandwich and took a bite, chewing with her eyes glazed. Shay doubted she tasted a thing. The woman still hadn't taken off her coat and scarf, though the RV was so cold that Shay didn't blame her; she herself wore long underwear and a sweater under Taylor's old sweatshirt. And that was
with
the generator blasting almost constantly. Brenda had come over after work to complain for the second time that Shay was running it too high. But since weather.com said it would get down to minus three degrees overnight, she'd decided to just turn it back up and let the bitch complain.