The Night My Sister Went Missing (11 page)

Lutz wrote some notes, not looking too happy. This wasn't exactly making Stacy appear sane, but I could see Alisa's dilemma—and I figured she had done right. Some things you have to try to confess to someone responsible if you care about your friend.

"So you went to a shrink?" Lutz encouraged her.

"I wish. We called a few, but they were really expensive, and Stacy only had fifty bucks cash and her credit card. She has the kind of charge that sends her grandfather an e-mail every time something's put on it. She was afraid he would see the charge and jump to the conclusion that her father had been messing with her, when that might not be true at all."

I felt Drew rise slowly to his feet beside me and decided he was now awake. We watched Lutz write, and I thought of
one of my dad's young girl characters swearing up and down all day that her uncle Chris was a great guy, though many nights Uncle Chris was molesting her.
The girl couldn't remember her nights during her days.
I wondered if Dad had made that up because it sounded good, but knowing how my dad loves to research human behavior, I doubted it.

Alisa apologized again. "I'm very crazed over all this myself. But I'm not going to bag on my friend when she needs me the most. God knows, none of the other people she's ever helped is going to stand by her now. Not True, not Mark, not even her family. She decided not to see a shrink because she was afraid her grandfather would leap to the wrong conclusion."

"That's quite a leap for her grandfather to make," Lutz said. "Stacy wants to see a therapist, therefore her father is molesting her."

"It's not a leap in this case. I didn't exactly tell my mom about the pregnancy yesterday, but I totally begged her for anything in the grown-up channels that might be so awful that the kids never heard it. My mom's not a motormouth like Cecilly's mom, but I think she could see that Stacy was having trouble, and she confided something to me. She said the reason Mr. Kearney actually left was
not
that he'd found out about Mrs. Kearney's cheating. The husband's always the last to know, and supposedly Mr. Kearney is still clueless. It was that Mr. DeWinter had found him just outside the door of Stacy's bedroom a couple times in the middle of the night."

I froze as the vivid image of Mr. Kearney suddenly struck me. He had a slightly swollen beer gut, drooping mustache, muscular arms, and muscular neck. Add all that to the fact that he sometimes liked to go three days without shaving. And if he was out doing lawns, he could get that greasy, unwashed sweat all over his face. I couldn't remember the name of his lawn business on the T-shirts, but I could remember the slogan:
PIT BULLS ARE BETTER THAN POODLES.

"I'm gonna throw up," Drew said. I guessed he was wide awake and sharing my mental pictures.

Lutz tapped his pen a couple times. I gathered this was new territory on an island where nothing ever happens. He finally uttered, "Did your mother say, um, where she got this information?"

"Yes. From Mrs. DeWinter."

"
Directly
from Mrs. DeWinter," he repeated, like that was important.

"Yeah. My mom's been keeping the books for the DeWinter Foundation since Mr. DeWinter had heart surgery last summer. She and Mrs. DeWinter have been spending a lot of time together. Mrs. DeWinter swore her to secrecy and said they had every family problem under control—including this one. I guess that means they threw Mr. Kearney out for that reason. But the secret's been driving Mom crazy. She loves Stacy, too, and when I started nagging her for info, it didn't take much to get it."

Lutz wrote and wrote. Something made me think that maybe he was stalling for time to think of questions in this
mess. He inhaled, held his breath for a few strokes, then exhaled. "So Stacy didn't see a therapist for fear her grandfather would see the charge on the credit card and leap to what could be a wrong conclusion..."

Alisa nodded. "Yeah. So instead, we took her fifty bucks and twenty I had from waitressing that day, which is still far less than six visits to a shrink would cost, and we went to see Crazy Addy."

Lutz looked at her and dropped his chin into his hand.

"We walked in, and Crazy Addy took us upstairs to her kitchen, and Stacy said she needed to know the truth about something. And before we even sat down, Crazy Addy said, 'You've been raped.'"

Alisa raised her right hand slowly, staring at the captain. "All true. I swear."

He rolled his eyes, though his voice stayed as polite as possible. "And, uh ... who did Ms. Gearta say was the, uh, culprit?"

"She didn't. I mean, not by name. Stacy babbled something about she might as well have gotten pregnant from a toilet seat, and Crazy Addy cut her off. She didn't laugh or anything. She just said, 'It is whom you suspect.' That was before I talked to my mom, so as far as I knew Stacy suspected
Mark.
We'd talked briefly about a date-rape drug. Stacy hadn't said much, but she didn't mention it as an impossibility in her mind. But when Crazy Addy said, 'It is whom you suspect,' Stacy screamed and ran out of there. But I've never asked her who it is. I can't. Stacy was a real
basket case afterwards. If she wants me to know, she'll tell me. But still ...
I
know who it is"

She and Lutz exchanged blinks and chimed, "You can just tell."

Alisa looked slightly amused beneath her sadness, but Lutz twisted his mouth up and muttered, "I hope you, um, didn't pay Ms. Gearta your hard-earned diner tips for that, um, forthcoming bit of logic, Alisa."

"But how'd she know Stacy was raped before we'd said anything but our names?"

"
Mm, mm, mm.
" He rolled his eyes. There could be a thousand answers to that.

Drew leaned forward, holding on to his stomach. He muttered at the glass, "Ask the
question!
Ask the question!"

Lutz came out of his glazed stupor and sat up straight. "I suppose we could sit here and speculate about Wally Kearney, and it would not give us proof of anything. I'm working on one crime here and need to solve it before I start in on any other. So despite all you've said, I have to ask you this: Did Stacy seem to you in a state of mind to shoot somebody?"

"Thank you," Drew muttered.

"Absolutely," Alisa said, which made Lutz raise his eyebrows in surprise, despite her little smile. "But not Casey Carmody. Stacy really doesn't have any problem with her. If Stacy wanted to hurt anybody in our crowd, it probably would have been Mark Stern. In spite of Casey, tonight he asked her to go back with him."

"Really?" Lutz wrote that down, letting nothing show
on his face to indicate that he'd heard the exact opposite version: Cecilly had reported that tonight
Stacy
had asked
Mark
to go back with
her.
Mark had told us the same thing.

I glanced at Drew, who looked puzzled.

Alisa laughed. "That's what kind of an idiot he is—he'll pop a question like that, with me right there in Stacy's house. He's too stupid to think I wouldn't be watching her back, right outside the door, if he asked to talk to her alone about something. Stacy had broken up with him because she was completely sick of his sex-on-the-brain routine. And here he was, going out with Casey Carmody and coming on to Stacy, as if that made him look like a knight in shining armor. She laughed in his face."

"You heard this yourself?"

"Plain as day. He said, 'I miss you. Don't you miss me? Why don't we do something about it and never say we did?'"

"You sure it wasn't the other way around? Her looking for a father in a moment of desperation? Without thinking?" Lutz hinted.

"Plain. As. Day. You can ask Stacy yourself"

"Do you know where she is?" he asked.

"She told me she was going home."

They exchanged stares.

I figured Stern was a big liar, but Alisa threw me off guard again. "Stacy said to Mark, 'If I were really Casey's friend, I would crank up my little rootin'-tootin' cowboy
gun and put you out of your misery, lowlife. You're lucky I'm lukewarm on Casey these days.'"

"'Lukewarm'?"

"Well, Stacy and I started talking, in, like, April that we are suddenly lukewarm on all of our friends. Life around here just seems like a big bore."

I looked at Drew, and his eyes rolled to mine. Boredom seemed to be the Mystic Marvel plague.

"But that's what lukewarm
is,
Captain Lutz: lukewarm. You don't shoot a person because they suddenly seem dull and boring."

He tapped his pen on the table. "Why'd you tell Mark about the pregnancy?"

"I don't know anything about repressed memories. Truth? Yeah, I think that concept is way out there. But I kept getting back to the fact that Mark is so self-absorbed and stupid sometimes, maybe he used one of those date-rape drugs on her, the kind that you only have hazy memories afterward, if any. Stacy defends her dad all the time, almost as if to let me know she's really sure he didn't do anything to her. I can't stand the sight of the guy, but every once in a while I can get to believing her. Tonight? I believed her. I thought I would tell Mark, being that Stacy would die before showing she needed people. And as the father he ought to help Stacy make a decision. He's been irresponsible for too long. But I knew as soon as it was out of my mouth that it had been a brain flake."

"He didn't make any admissions?"

"No. In fact, he marched up to Stacy and called her a slut. I thought he was going to slap her. Then he told Cecilly Holst, just to get even, I guess. Put it this way: If he drugged Stacy and date-raped her, he wouldn't be running around telling the biggest gossips on the island that she is pregnant. He'd be begging for Stacy's silence and for the privilege of paying to terminate the pregnancy. Right?"

Lutz said nothing at first. He shook his head. "I don't know. I can't find a starting point tonight that helps make everything I'm hearing believable. You sound sincere, Alisa. But let me tell you something: Your story about a girl not remembering getting pregnant is like Noah not remembering he built the Ark. There's something wrong with the story. It was either a serious date-rape drug, or a serious, serious incest problem."

Alisa crossed her arms defensively. "And we're back to ground zero. There are things about Stacy even I don't know. And I know just about everything. I mean, it's no big deal for two best friends to talk about their romps with their Joes, even their mistakes with their Joes. Why would I care if Stacy took a quick break from her almighty Catholicism? I'm Protestant." She smirked but didn't smile. "Unless it's someone utterly raunchy and disgusting and beyond belief. I guess that's why I'm missing my beauty sleep to be here. I don't know anything about Casey Carmody. I didn't see anything. But someone needs to look into Mr. Kearney."

Lutz drummed his fingers on the table, nodding, and Alisa drummed hers on her arms. "Well then, tell me this, since I told you so much, Captain Lutz."

"I'll try."

"Does a girl who's being abused like that by her father ever go to crazy lengths to protect him?"

"Happens often," he said after a moment. "Lots of girls will continue to love their parents when their behavior is beyond belief. The girl feels responsible, feels like she's sending Daddy to jail. There's all sorts of motives like that."

She stood up slowly, rolling her eyes. "Okay then. Well, you solve it—after you solve this one. I'm just here to help Stacy. As for the pier, I heard and saw nothing ... I never even heard a splash."

I got a chill again over that stupid splash. That
nonsplash.

I barely paid attention, trying to imagine my sister treading water ... or snoozing on a boat with her airhead face half into a pillow. Any image that made me think of her alive was good.

Alisa was talking again. "... when everyone up on the pier came running, at first I thought they were making it up. You know the stories these guys can tell about the ghosts and goblins wandering around up there. I thought this was some ... Eddie Van Doren's ghost just fired his suicide pistol at Casey Carmody or something..."

Lutz caught my full attention by pushing his chair back with a
g-g-g-g-grunt.
"Well. Since we've got no body, no
blood, and a whole lot of people claiming to have heard a pistol shot from a gun no one claimed to fire, you might not be too far off." Lutz stood up with a sarcastic smirk followed by a yawn.

I don't think he'd have smirked if he'd known what was coming his way next.

The surf club on Mystic is made up of three core guys, one core girl, and maybe a dozen other stragglers. They're not really a club in that they hold club meetings or do anything in an organized way. It's just that you might see a pack of eight or nine of them on the beach, or in the Pirates' Den, or in the surf shop, and that core of four was generally always there.

Lutz brought in the three guys at once, because somehow Indigo Somers hadn't come up onto the pier. The three guys made the room look kind of crowded. At the same time, it was odd to see Jon Hall, Ronny LaVerde, and Brin Olahano without Indigo and a crew of stragglers. They seemed like a body with an arm chopped off.

And they didn't look happy about being questioned,
either. They stood inside the doorway, kicking at the floor with their bare feet until Lutz said, "Take a seat"

"Dude, we don't know anything," Jon said with a polite but nervous laugh.

"Are you busting us again?" Ronny asked. He turned his pockets inside out with a pleading look.

"Because they've been good, both of them." Brin jerked his thumb down the row. "They've been going to meetings"

"Yes, I know." Lutz nodded hard.

"Wednesday we did Step Eight," Jon said pleadingly.

"And we were just
up there,
tonight, not doing anything we shouldn't on the pier. Except ... being on the pier in the first place. Ha-ha!" Ronny laughed nervously.

"You know, we were just examining the stars and all," Jon said.

Drew muttered with a yawn beside me, "Huey, Dewey, and Louie," meaning that despite how Ronny was a blond and Brin was Hawaiian, these three were so much alike sometimes it could get confusing to listen to them. One thing the surf club was organized about was keeping their voice inflections the same. They all said "yah" instead of "yeah" and "bod" instead of "bad"