The Night My Sister Went Missing (10 page)

"I'm missing my beauty rest." Alisa sat down in the chair and folded her hands with slightly too much drama. She was known as our "girlie girl" in the Mystic Marvels and was always doing stuff like putting one finger under her nose and raising her pinkie to sneeze, "
Chewwww!
"

But she had a nice wit, too—the type that could make you laugh when she kept a deadpan face. She'd just done it with the "beauty rest" remark, but before Lutz could decide whether she was serious, she went on with her toned-down sarcasm. "I can't understand what you need me for. I suppose you've heard it all. Stacy bought a gun. Stacy's a
meanie. A bitch-queen, a bitch-hag, a bitch-tease, a bitch on wheels, a killer bitch, a—"

"I got it without the graphic synopsis. I'm more interested in hearing what
you
think about tonight"

Alisa went for the facts, but there weren't too many. She had started to walk to the climbing mounts to go back to the dunes so she wouldn't have to look at Todd flirt with True Blueman. She didn't see anything, didn't hear the shot, didn't hear Casey hit the water, didn't hear anything but people screaming after Casey fell. I wondered why she'd waited until after three in the morning to report only that. She could have gone home and come back after she woke up. Whatever her reasoning, Lutz took advantage of a good op. "I'll be honest with you. A lot of people are suspicious of your best friend. I thought maybe you could give me a new thesis to work with"

Alisa blinked at him a couple times in her dramatic way and said, "I know Stacy can be moody. I know she bought a gun. I know..."She raised her hand like a kid in class, but with her pinkie falling away. "Everyone on the island now knows about her pregnancy, and it was
I
who told. I am responsible for that. I was stupid. That's our crime, Stacy's and mine. Our only crime ... is that
I
was stupid."

"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!'"