The Night My Sister Went Missing (12 page)

Lutz said, "Nobody's busted tonight. This is just friendly, just routine. Who knows? You might have seen something that you didn't know you saw."

"'Cuz the three of us were hanging out way off in the foundation of the old haunted house," Jon said. The Haunt was the first thing that burned to the ground up on the pier,
but the metal girders were still in place. They worked like rusty benches.

"Look," Lutz said, rubbing the bridge of his nose, "something potentially very serious happened on that pier tonight. I'm not interested in anyone's marijuana escapades right now. I'm more interested in ... what you observed on the pier."

"You mean, like, who was acting strange?"

"If anyone was, yes"

"The only strange sight I saw was Bill Nast." Jon gave a nervous giggle. "You wouldn't expect to see him at one of our parties. It's like a duck in a gaggle of seagulls. How's that? Good analogy?"

"But he wasn't doing anything. Bill's a good guy. He does my chemistry for me in school," Ronny added. "Ha-ha."

"Did you hear a shot fired?" Lutz asked them collectively.

"Yah."

"I heard it."

"Absolutely. But we didn't know it was a gun until people started running past us. It sounded like a ... like a cap gun," Brin said.

"Did you see the gun?"

"No," Brin went on. "We heard later that a bunch of the Marvels were passing it around, but it never made it over our way. Carmody and Nast were standing a ways down from us. I think I saw Carmody give something small back to Mark Stern."

I heaved a little sigh of thanks, thinking Brin was one
witness for me in case Nast had slung his head up his butt and couldn't remember things right.

"Yah, that was all we saw," Ronny said.

"Did you hear anyone say who fired it?"

"They were pretty focused on getting off the pier and going down to the water to try to find Casey," Jon said. "Only thing I heard was that the gun belonged to Stacy Kearney."

"But Stacy gets a bum deal around here." Ronny nodded again.

"How do you mean?"

"People want to grind her up. It's hard to explain. You have to be like us..."Ronny made a circling motion to include his two friends. "You have to be on the outside looking in at the M&M's, but with a view close-up."

"The M&M's?" Lutz asked.

"Yah. The Mystic Marvels." Brin looked at his two friends, and they laughed a little. "Hey, we don't have much problem with the M&M's. We share the same beaches, same parties ... When we get lucky, we even share the same babe pool. They're pretty nice—Kurt Carmody and those guys. They don't hassle us. But you kind of have to notice that some of those kids, they're, um, intolerant?"

"Intolerant how?"

Brin rubbed his forehead, like the exercise in hunting for words was tough. "Maybe
intolerant
is a bod word. That means, like, about gay people and Islamic people and all of
that. For them it's just ...
anybody.
And usually it's just one person, because they won't take on a crowd. But they'll, like, take on one of their own and totally annihilate that person, slowly but surely."

"Happens to somebody every year," Ronny put in. "I'd have been nervous seeing Billy Nast up there. But this season it's been Stacy Kearney so far. So I figured Bill was relatively safe. Ha-ha."

"Were people speaking ill of Stacy tonight that you heard?"

"Yah," Jon said. "They were like frothing curs over that Stacy is pregnant."

"And how did Stacy respond to this?" Lutz asked.

"She looked okay to me." Ronny shrugged. "She just came past like she was looking for somebody to talk to, and she stopped to joke with us for a minute."

"I totally felt, like ... she was holding her head way up. Though maybe her head weighed a ton," Jon said. "Is that a good one? Ha-ha."

"What were you talking about with her?"

"Uh ... we were talking about the moon," Jon said. "How it went behind this cloud, and the whole Mystic Marvels, like, disappeared. And you could only hear them, but they were like the ghost of Eddie Van Doren. All you could see was Casey Carmody's white sweatshirt. She looked like a huge white ghost in her bro's sweatshirt. Stacy, she just looked and said, 'How could a beautiful girl like Casey look
so
el-huge-o?
That moon is not doing her justice.' Something like that. It wasn't totally funny, but we were cracking up with her. You had to be there." Lutz kept writing.

"We didn't mention it, like, 'Yo, are you really pregnant?'" Brin said. "We just wouldn't do that. We figured, you know, that's her business."

"So then what happened?"

"She walked away and we, like, stuck our heads together kind of immediately." Brin grinned sheepishly. "We didn't want to hurt her feelings or anything. But we were wondering about this thing Mark Stern said to her on his way past to the ticket booth, which is the toilet. You know..."

"What did he say?"

"He said 'slut-cheater' to her on his way past. She flipped him the sign language. Two and two makes four, ya know? He wouldn't be calling her a slut-cheater if he was the dad, and she wouldn't be flipping him the bird if she wanted him as the father. So we came up with our own theory about who's the father."

"And what is that?"

The three of them looked at one another and cracked up.

"No..."

"No..."

"No. Uh-uh."

Lutz laid down his pen and rubbed at his eyes. His polite grin was starting to look petrified in place.

"I don't think it's going to help you find Casey Carmody," Brin said.

Lutz cleared his throat. "Well, why don't you let me decide that. There's every other officer on the force down on the beach and bay right now. It's my job to get some mileage out of you guys. Is your, um, theory based on something you saw?"

"Yah, lots of times. And it makes sense," Jon said, "though in a strange way."

"And what's weirder is there were six of us hanging out in my backyard after the coast guard told us to clear the water and quit trying to help. And, like, all at once, we
all
drew the same conclusion," Brin added, crossing his arms defensively.

"And all of us were clean and sober. Completely." Jon X-ed his T-shirt with his pinkie. "Well, all of us except one"

"Dude." Ronny glanced sideways at him in a disapproving way.

"Well, we're practicing Step Ten! Don't let any secrets back up on you," Jon argued.

"Yah, but Lutz doesn't need to know who wasn't sober, so long as it wasn't one of us!" He snapped his head around to face Lutz. "Right?"

Lutz let a stream of air out of his nose. "So long as it wasn't someone I've busted before."

"No," Jon said. "It was just Tito."

Tito Consuelez, I would almost say, is "core" in the surf club.

"He was all smoked up, but he was having a bod day. He lost his new board in the water," Jon said.

They watched Lutz write this down, and their eyes turned fearful.

"Don't be like that!" Jon begged him. "Tito just got the thing! It cost over five hundred dollars! His ankle strap came loose. The board must have gotten caught in a rip under the pier. I mean, we looked everywhere. He wasn't taking it so well—"

"On surfer beach? Just south of the pier?"

"Yah," they all chimed.

"We decided it was in Van Doren's Dungeon," Brin said remorsefully.

"I'll just make a note of it. If the coast guard comes up with a stray board, we'll call Tito and see if the ID matches. All right?"

They started to relax.

Van Doren's Dungeon refers to Eddie Van Doren and all the surfboards that have been lost under the pier during the summers. Rumor had it that his ghost rises out of the surf to steal some poor bastard's surfboard, and suck it down to some hell under the pier, aka Van Doren's Dungeon.

I'd say that on Mystic we'd always lost two boards a summer under the piers before Van Doren's suicide. The massive pilings that cause riptides and sea froth could occasionally suck a board. The board would seem to absolutely disappear. More surfboards
did
seem to disappear after Van
Doren's death—like, last year there had been four boards lost. But the mature people on the island wrote the increase off to the barrier islands chronically shifting and the surf patterns changing. One board recovered a mile out by a fishing trawler last summer didn't kill that Van Doren rumor. Eddie Van Doren's ghost spit that one out, was all.

"With two choppers and two coast guard cruisers out there, maybe Tito'll get lucky," Lutz said, reinforcing that he wasn't interested in drug adventures. "So what's our big theory? Can we relate this to who fired a gun and potentially hit Casey Carmody? Or is it just another dose of Mystic garble?"

They were all three quiet, except for a nervous laugh or two.

"Captain Lutz, you just had to be there. You had to be up on that pier at the half moon," Jon said, edging forward in his chair. "The half moon shines with an eerie light, more eerie than a full moon, because it plays more tricks. And the stars get totally bright at the half moon. Like flashlights. We were watching this ... this just one little baby cloud that came along slowly in front of the flashlight stars, and then passed right over the half moon. Stacy was standing there talking about Casey Carmody looking like a ghost in a bulky white sweatshirt. It was like ... a
prophecy
or something. Because two minutes later Casey Carmody totally disappears."

They all three shuddered, and I tried to ignore the spit gathering in my mouth.

"I thought ... you said Stacy Kearney gets a bum rap around here," Lutz muttered, not looking up from his paper. "Now you're implying she pulled the trigger?"

"No!" they exclaimed.

This time Ronny urged himself forward. "We were talking about Eddie Van Doren's ghost. And later it struck us—do you know when Eddie Van Doren died?"

Lutz sighed, as if he was expecting something I couldn't figure out. The date, being his first day as police captain, was so clear to him that he spouted it. "Sunday, September second—three years ago, Labor Day Weekend"

"Well, Indigo was in my backyard tonight, and we were all talking about this just as the police car came up," Jon said. "She pointed out that Stacy Kearney arrived on Mystic the day before school started their freshman year. She arrived
the day after
Eddie Van Doren died. Doesn't that strike you as odd?"

Lutz just watched with his chin in his palm and three fingers across his mouth. I thought he might be trying not to respond.

"The one way we've all described Stacy is ... cold. Frigid. And nobody really knows her, knows much about her life before she got here. But a kid dies, and she shows up, right?"

Lutz sat frozen.

"Well,
what if
... What if
she's,
like ... otherworldly?" Ronny asked quietly. "What if the father is Eddie Van Doren? What if it was Eddie Van Doren's gun that went off
tonight? These are nice, peaceful people around here, Captain Lutz! They don't fire guns at each other! And since no one claims to have fired the gun on the pier—"

Brin jumped in. "Maybe every few years Stacy and Eddie are going to find some beautiful young babe, or some promising young stud, and suck them down the hole into Van Doren's Dungeon with all the surfboards, until half this island is ghouls."

Lutz glanced at the ceiling, then dropped his pen on the table with a thud. My stomach was backing up, and after a moment I realized Drew was pulling at me, telling me to come away from this bullshit, that I wasn't in a good state of mind to hear it. But I was riveted, unable to tear my feet from the floor.

"Try to think of a better explanation!" Ronny encouraged him. "We've got a baby without a father, a girl who's always acted way too mysterious, almost like ...
she's haunted.
We have a gunshot without a shooter, and now ... a missing girl who everyone saw fall off the pier. And then nobody heard a splash! I can't tell you exactly where she is, Captain Lutz. But I'll tell you this much—I don't think you're ever going to find her."

Lutz stood up slowly, and without meeting their eyes said, "I will try, gentlemen. Thank you for your time."

I let Drew pull me along to the public areas. Yeah, it was time for a break.

Drew and I didn't go into the back lobby, where it sounded like a smaller bunch of kids were still waiting. I thought I heard Cecilly's voice, which wouldn't have surprised me. The gossips wouldn't leave until the last drop of intrigue had been drunk. We went outside and rested our backs against the huge concrete lions that were supposed to make some sort of a statement about our "roaring" police force.

The night was still, save for the far-off drone of choppers. If I looked southeast, I could barely make out the glow above what must have been a dozen searchlights.

"I want to go back down to the beach," I said, but Drew shook his head.

"Please don't."

He wouldn't look up, wouldn't look at me. I looked at my watch. 4:09. In another hour, my cell phone would ring,
the cops would answer it, then hand it to me. It was looking very much like I would have nothing good to tell my parents.

"I just don't know how I can tell my mom and dad that I hadn't even been checking the beach myself," I said.

"That's the last thing they'd want you to do."

He was implying that at this hour it was more likely that I would stumble on something that would haunt me forever. I just wanted to holler my brains out. Watching these interviews turn from weird to unbelievable kept my mind busy, but not my fried gut. It was screaming that Jon, Ronny, and Brin were not so far off. You start realizing that your sister is probably dead, you don't need to add ghouls. Your horror is just as complete without them.

I started to think really strange things—thoughts that still kind of circled around the here and now without landing on it, but they were getting pretty close. I started seeing myself trying to explain my life to someone after going to college where no one knew me:

"
You got brothers or sisters?
"

"
... I had a sister but she died.
"