The Night My Sister Went Missing (15 page)

Lutz looked at them, more than slightly annoyed. "Why not prosecute?"

"Prosecute Wally?" Mrs. DeWinter sat forward in her bewildered way. "Because Stacy insists her father never touched her."

"The victims don't always need to testify. You could get her to talk to a shrink, and the shrink could testify."

"We asked her to see Dr. Holst and she refused. Hasn't Stacy been forced through enough?" Mrs. DeWinter came to life again.

I remembered True's story about the cell-phone spying, and how Dr. Holst hadn't been on the list of shrinks Stacy had tried to call. I gathered they had no idea how much their granddaughter thought she
should
see a shrink. Sometime, when this night was long, long behind us, I wanted to sit with my dad and ask him hours of questions. It seems like in families with this big a secret, so many things never get said. Stacy was a hotbed of secrets—secrets she kept from her own family as well as from us.

Mrs. DeWinter continued, "Captain Lutz, we might not look like good citizens in this case. But we are good family people. We have to think of our granddaughter first. We offered Wally quite a settlement after we found this gun, if he would simply leave Mystic, leave Stacy's haven, so she can run the beaches freely, go about with her friends, and be a kid! We could prosecute him, in Connecticut, as soon as she has time to think and breathe! That's all we want. Call it Grandma's instinct, but I don't think Wally has a ... a thing for young girls in general. I think it's specific to our granddaughter."

"That's a dangerous assumption," Lutz said.

"I agree with my wife," Mr. DeWinter said. "When I offered him the settlement, he said, 'I'm not leaving without Stacy!' Isn't it true that certain pedophiles feel their love for the victim is, er, sacred or something?"

Mr. DeWinter went on in a wheezing rant, "Stacy has been through a lot. But no matter what she's been through, she would not buy a gun and plan to shoot a young person.
No matter what happened at the pier, I'm sure she did not pull the trigger on her friend."

Lutz cleared his throat, and I held on to the window ledge as he dropped the bomb. "Did you know that Stacy's pregnant? And that the boyfriend is denying paternity?"

They sat totally frozen, and I couldn't hear Mr. DeWinter even breathe until he finally sucked in the biggest gulp of air yet. I turned my back.

"I can't hear this. I can't watch this," I blathered. I held on to my stomach as Drew spoke up.

"I don't get it. Didn't Mr. Kearney move out in
January?
So how..."

"I don't know," I said, though the unanswered questions banged through my head. Alisa had just sworn that Stacy couldn't remember any rape ... So why would she buy a gun over something she couldn't remember? Was she just saying she couldn't remember because it was too hard to confirm to someone? Because she felt responsible? Could she have visited her father? At the yacht club, Mark had said he'd called her once and heard her brothers arguing in the background. Why would a girl go visit her father, and her brothers who stood behind him, if he would do something like that? Nothing made sense, and something told me that a lot of this never would. I glanced at my watch again stupidly. 4:31.

"We'll get the pregnancy terminated. First thing tomorrow." Mr. DeWinter's voice came through more strongly than I would have imagined.

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

"She didn't come back to the house tonight," Mr. DeWinter muttered.

"Do you mind if we search your place?" Lutz asked.

"Of course not. Anything that helps..."

I turned as a seat roared backward. Mr. DeWinter was on his feet, having turned toward the door. Mrs. DeWinter stood up, too, and though I'd predicted it, I was not ready to see it—Mr. DeWinter suddenly dropped. Mrs. DeWinter raced for him.

"Jeezus, that is so unjust," Drew muttered as I turned my back again. I even put my fingers in my ears to cover the sounds of Mrs. DeWinter calling her husband's name. Their family embarrassments went back thirty years, supposedly. The camel's back was breaking.

"Closeness of where they keep the ambulance will probably save him," Drew muttered. He was looking over my shoulder, and I heard Lutz talking to the paramedic squad, which kept its ambulance directly across the street at the firehouse. "But I almost hope ... it doesn't save him."

I watched Drew look guiltily through the glass. He said, "I was just ... being a little selfish here. And a little crazy, too. I keep hearing Crazy Addy bellowing, saying she could feel someone's heartache and anguish, and that person would die close to morning."

I shut my eyes and couldn't hold back a half-baked smirk. "Jeezus, we are losing it, bro." It seemed to me Crazy Addy had babbled about a "she," not an old man, but
Drew's confusion between reality and myth backed up on me, too.

"The guy's old. He's lived his life." Drew laughed nervously.

I didn't argue.

But by the time the paramedics were in the room with Mr. DeWinter, he was already sitting up, refusing an oxygen mask. He looked very gray, but very alert. Not near death.

Before Lutz could bail on the questioning to end up in the ambulance with Mr. DeWinter, one of the deputies came through. He said they'd found Stacy Kearney. Wally Kearney had been speeding off of Mystic in her Audi. When a cop pulled him over, they'd found Stacy in the trunk of the car. The officers, knowing they had just saved Stacy, were not watching her as they arrested Wally. She had taken off into the night.

But they had Wally Kearney in the chief's office, in handcuffs.

I don't know what came over me—maybe that fight-or-flight syndrome my dad's always writing into his Mike Atlas stories. But I turned and followed the little corridor around to the bigger one and stalked into the back lobby. I was going to punch this guy's lights out.

Drew must have sensed my growing anger, because he was grabbing at me again and saying, "Don't get stupid ... you're exhausted, is all."

"I gotta do something! I
am
exhausted from standing around and doing nothing, that's all! He started all of this—"

If it hadn't been for her father, Stacy wouldn't have gotten twisted up enough to buy a gun. It wouldn't have ended up on the pier, and my sister and I would be home sleeping
right now. I felt like I was being torn in half all of a sudden—half of me was worried for my sister and half for Stacy.

Things are not always the way they look. And though it looked like Stacy tried to hurt my sister, something inside of me was still insisting that was all too easy.

"Let's pick on the rich kid that everyone hates," I muttered with sarcasm, and tried to get Drew off my arm. "Think they'd be so busy hating her if they knew what we know?"

"I don't think this has anything to do with the fact that she's rich," Drew argued.

"Am I the only person on this goddamned island with any imagination?" I yelled. "Give me an ending I couldn't predict, please!"

I said it so loud that Drew backed off. But the police had their own yelling match going on, so no one was paying much attention. All the kids were finally gone, and Mr. Kearney was alone with Little Jack outside Chief Aikerman's office. I don't know where the arresting officers were, but Mr. Kearney was having a loud say.

"—ain't telling you nothing! I want a lawyer! And I want you to tell those two ... Neanderthals who brought me in to go find my kid that they scared off!" With his hands cuffed, he was pointing his index fingers toward Little Jack's chest. But he dropped into a chair as Lutz came out of the questioning room.

"Gee, that's funny, Wally." Lutz moved to the coffeepot
with some crazed, exhausted laugh. "I don't suppose she was at all scared by being in the trunk of the car!"

"I ain't saying nothing." Mr. Kearney looked down, and I suddenly wondered at the value of punching out a guy with a pissed-off cop and an exhausted police captain surrounding him. I came toward him, though. I think I was going to grab him by the collar and shake his head loose. But he looked up and pointed both fingers at me.

"I'll tell you where she is ... she's off trying to find
his
sister! She decided she wouldn't leave until the Carmody girl was found. So me and my sons, we stuffed Stacy in the trunk. She was leaving now, tonight, with me and her brothers. That was what the four of us decided at midnight, so—"

"You trash heap—" I reached for him, but Lutz was faster and got me in some kind of a strong hold without even spilling his coffee. I managed to say, "Stacy wouldn't go anywhere with you!"

"Split 'em up, Jack!" Lutz roared, and I supposed he meant for Little Jack to take Mr. Kearney into the other room, but Mr. Kearney still wasn't budging from his chair.

"Wait, Lutzie!" Mr. Kearney looked from him to me. "The kid's sister is missing ... he's gotta be half-crazed. I ain't talking to you, but I'll talk to
him.
My daughter likes him! Let him go! He ain't gonna do nothing to me."

I wondered how he knew so much, and I wondered what he meant by "My daughter likes him." I had only seen
Mr. Kearney—and had barely said hello to him—the times I saw him at Stacy's house over the years. But he had seemed to recognize me pretty quickly.

Lutz loosened his grip slowly. Maybe he thought he could get some information this way. He held on to my arm as Little Jack pulled a chair up so I was facing Mr. Kearney, but from about six feet away. "Wally, if you say one thing to upset this kid, I will find something to add to the lengthy list of charges we got going now—"

Mr. Kearney stared at me, but he laughed. "Gee, I'm so frightened. I wasn't even speeding. What have you got on me?"

"You
were
speeding ... that's why you got stopped"

"That's a crock—you recognized Stacy's car."

"Driving a stolen vehicle, attempted kidnapping ... We'll stop there for the time being."

Lutz must have thought I didn't know about the worse crimes or that I was staring at a complete pig. I supposed this was part of the ending I could never have guessed—that I'd be sitting across from a child molester who was trying to talk to me while in handcuffs. I sat frozen.

"Stacy has this theory about what happened to your sister." He leaned forward and I felt myself leaning back, though he didn't appear to notice. "It ain't necessarily good, but it ain't the worst, either. That little derringer I just found out about tonight ... We'll talk about my feelings on that later. Stacy said that after she got it, she couldn't stand herself until she tried to fire it once. So she secretly took it
down to the south end, where the jetty is, and she loaded up the chambers and fired it once when nobody was around. She said the barrel is slightly bent. She said the gun went off when she fired it, but the bullet only travels about twelve feet, and she found it on top of the sand. It didn't even get enough crank to dig itself a hole."

"Stacy fired the gun?" I muttered, not getting it. I just got a flash of how somebody ought to say something before the night was over that didn't make Stacy sound atrocious.

"She's a little over the top sometimes, I'll give you that," Mr. Kearney said. "But she wouldn't shoot at nobody, and don't miss the point:
The gun ain't shootable.
I mean, it'll go off, but the bullet don't travel. In other words, whoever fired it—whether they meant to hit your sister or not—they didn't hit her. She ain't shot."

My head spun. If he was telling the truth, then the "little hole" Stern said he saw in the sweatshirt was a barnacle bite. And why the hell didn't Stacy tell me at the yacht club that the gun was defective? Maybe she figured her word was worth less than zero around here—not that the whole thing mattered as much as Mr. Kearney seemed to think.

"Sorry, but I don't feel better," I muttered back. "My sister fell three stories into a riptide because of the very presence of that gun—"

"She
dove.
Stacy says she dove. D'you hear a splash?"

The ill-fated nonsplash. At 4:34—I glanced at my watch—I wondered if we'd all been taking stupid pills ... listening to too many pier spook stories.

"No," I confessed, embarrassed, but he laid it out anyway.

"What does that tell you? What does a clean dive sound like when there's swells coming under a pier?"

I said nothing, feeling a combination of retarded and irritated. I couldn't understand why Stacy would be having this long conversation with the guy who'd turned her life on its head, to put it mildly.
Can she really have memory loss at times?

"Stacy said your sister's been wanting to try that dive since she could walk and talk. She said she's a good enough diver to try it if she thought she had to ... and airy enough to forget there's a hurricane four hundred miles east, sending its hells into the riptides."

He was probably right on both counts, which made me more irritated. I looked him over, vaguely aware of this feeling that I was talking to a complete stranger. Mr. Kearney's voice was the same, but he looked very different than the last time I'd seen him, which had to have been a year ago. He'd dropped maybe forty pounds. He was shaved, and his hair was cut nice. For once he was wearing a button-down shirt instead of the
PIT BULLS ARE BETTER THAN POODLES
T-shirt I'd never seen him without. He had a scalded look around his collar, like men get when they've cleaned up after working outside, but he didn't look like an oversized dog-dump. He'd have passed for a white-collar professional if he'd kept his mouth shut.

"Stacy said two pretty good swells rolled in after your sister went over. If she had the sense to stay on top of the water, she probably didn't get nailed by the pilings, and she'd have gotten taken out to the down-seas in a rip. She's swimming in from the down-seas—slowly—trying to find her way in between rips. That's what Stacy hopes."

That's what everyone hoped. I did get the news flash that because Stacy had so many problems of her own, it seemed rather unselfish that she would be out looking for Casey. And here was this guy sitting in handcuffs, watching me dead-on, while he was about to be charged with god-knows-what-it's-called. I felt like I should hate him more than I suddenly hated him—if that makes sense. Not much was making sense.