The Night My Sister Went Missing (16 page)

"You're saying my sister dove because she thought she was being shot at."

"Yeah. That's what Stacy said."

"So who shot at her?"

"Well..." He sat up with a disgusted laugh. "That's the sixty-four-thousand-dollar question, ain't it? All I knows is ... my daughter comes to us all in hysterics around midnight, saying she's about to be charged with murder. She was bawling about swells and riptides and how it's her fault because of the gun belonging to her." He spun his head and glared at Lutz. "Me and my boys, we're all, 'What gun? Where's the gun now?' She don't know. She said she never saw it up on the pier, but she's assuming it's either hers or
it's another gun that belongs to some spook ... I don't pay no attention to no spook stories. It's hers. Bloody Christmas ... So my big boy, Richie, says to me, 'What the hell have we been waiting for? We don't even own a couch. What furniture we've got is all rental. So let's go—
now.
'" "You were going back to Connecticut?" Lutz asked. "To hide Stacy?"

A lot didn't make sense still, but I thought,
Damn, what a predicament for Stacy: Get devoured by your friends and arrested by the police, or risk an escape with your disgusting old man.
Maybe Mr. Kearney spiffed up so he wouldn't gross her out. Who knew.

He responded to Lutz, "Did I say yet I was answering
your
questions? I just wanna help the kid." He looked me up and down again. "My daughter likes him, all right? His sister's missing."

The silence was long, and I realized he was waiting for me to ask
my
questions. Just to be a prick I almost said,
So you were going to Connecticut to hide Stacy?
But I held on to it.

"So you don't know who fired the gun"

"She didn't tell me that part."

"How the hell could she not tell you
that
part?" I demanded. "That's seventy-five percent of it"

His answer really chilled me. "Stacy tells what she wants to tell. She holds on to what she wants to. If she's an expert on anything, it's how to tell the
what
and hold on to the
who
when somebody's guilty of something. I'd say it's almost second nature to her to protect people who are guilty."

He swallowed. The silence hung so thick, I thought for a minute we were getting a confession on the spot. But he went on with what almost sounded like nonsense, looking dead at me. "I got a lot of time on my hands in the winters, kid. Grass don't grow much after October, so you know what I do? I whittle. I make picture frames, and I had all these whittled picture frames of my kids all over me and Sam's bedroom. I made one a couple years back, and Stacy snatched it from me, all, 'You don't need another of those, silly,' which is her way of saying, 'Thanks, I'll take that.' It was a little one. So I seen it a couple weeks later. Fell out of her handbag. Had a picture in it of you and her taken out at the mall early on in high school. You remember that picture?"

I didn't. "Sort of."

"You were clowning around in front of Macy's. Anyway, that ain't the only picture of you she had, by far. So in her not-talking-about-it way, she's made me feel sort of like I've known you well. And being that you've been the center of a lot of attention tonight, I don't suppose you've missed any juicy gossip."

I didn't contradict him, but starting with Billy Nast and ending with hiding out by the questioning room, I hadn't been the center of activity. But I could see where he was going. He didn't say the word
pregnant.
I didn't say anything. I shifted uncomfortably, realizing he'd read the truth in my eyes.

He turned to Lutz. "Don't jump too fast or too far,
Lutzie. Don't go arresting me yet. You'll be sadly disappointed once the facts come in."

You could have heard a feather hit the floor.

"I'm not jumping fast." Lutz's voice sounded devoid of anything, even suspicion. I wondered how he could do that. Was he starting to think it was Stern again? Even if he did, he let Mr. Kearney go on.

"I'm going to tell you all a story.
One
story, because then I get my one phone call, and then I'm getting out of here. And kid, here is one story you need to hear that you will never hear from Stacy. Because it has to do with people, and my Stacy, she can't talk about people."

I got that same sickening ring-of-truth feeling, as when Stern had asked, "When did you ever get a straight answer out of Stacy?" Stacy talked about cars and weather and sports scores—in fact, some days she rarely shut up—but it's your thoughts about
people
that bring you closer to someone. Stacy never said a good—or a bad—word about anyone, I realized. It's like people had all the importance of sand by the sea as far as her talking went. Her actions said otherwise, but I thought that was a very dead-on statement her father had just made. I sat frozen because I was this combination of intrigued and appalled at myself for being intrigued by this guy.

"It has to do with why we came back here. Me and Stacy's mom had money problems, I ain't denying that. But we were okay ... happy as most couples, probably a lot of it was because my boys weren't college material. But it was
looking like Stacy was, and the missus got this idea in her head that we try things her parents' way for once—we make up to them so we give Stacy a chance. With me in charge of it, Stacy'd have ended up at some community college for two years and that's it.

"Me, I couldn't stand the DeWinters from day one. They used to make Sam crazy, and I realized that two seconds into the first time I talked to her. But she threatened to divorce me if I didn't do like they said and come live with them until we could get enough cash together for our own place near them. I never had my stones so much in other people's pockets, but I ain't got nothing if I don't have my family.

"But the biggest part wasn't the hell of living with your in-laws. It was watching my wife turn from seminormal into a vegetative state—and I don't mean by
seminormal
that Sam wasn't my best friend. She just was always prone to headaches and these little ... I called them mental attacks, when she thought people were trying to break in, or one of the kids was gonna get stolen, or she was dying of cancer. After we moved here? It got worse. Not only that kind of stuff, but she'd wake up screaming from these nightmares, and she could never tell me what they were about. Before a year was up she was so doped on Valium she didn't know me half the time, and when she did it was like she was a zombie.

"I ain't no shrink, but I ain't so very stupid. All these questions I'd had over the years, they started backing up on
me until they weren't just questions. They were obsessions—like, I had to know the answers. Like, how is it Samantha DeWinter could fall in love with
me,
when she could have had any stinking rich Harvard-type guy on the island back then? Why'd she agree to get married at seventeen? Why was she always getting headaches and freaking out, and then being fine again? After we moved here,
what in God Almighty's name was going on?
She'd wake up screaming with these nightmares, and I'd be all, 'Sam! What'd you dream?' And the only answer I could get was, 'I remember!'

"You got any idea where I'm going with this, kid?"

"No..."

He turned toward Lutz. "I bet you do, don't you?"

Lutz was trying to look blank, but it wasn't working so well. For one, his jaw dangled. Drew cleared his throat, which brought Mr. Kearney's gaze back around to me.

"Kid, you're important to my daughter, so you're important to me, too," he said like a broken record. "And you'll hear the truth someday soon, anyway. My wife, she wasn't
dreaming
... she was
remembering.
Being in the house brought some things back to her that you wouldn't be able to believe that a person could ever forget."

Lutz put a hand toward me, saying, "A paternity test will tell." He wanted me to get up and leave, as if Drew and I were too naive to hear this sort of thing. Maybe I was, but I didn't want to move.

Mr. Kearney just laughed in disgust and said, "You cops, you always have to have your evidence. Even if common
sense tells you the truth. You ain't gonna keep me here in handcuffs until you've got that kind of evidence. Get my cell phone out of Stacy's car. Call my boys. Ask them where Stacy's been living for the past two months. She's been living with us. Now, why might that be?"

"I'd rather hear that from Stacy," Lutz said.

"Hear it from whichever of my children you want! But you probably heard some story that I got thrown out of DeWinter's house after he found me outside Stacy's room one night. Isn't that what flies through your little gossip channels? Being that nobody would ever believe me, and I couldn't prove nothing—not even to myself—I didn't add my own info to that trash heap. But let me ask you a question: What in the hell was Clifford DeWinter doing outside my daughter's bedroom in the middle of the night, to find me outside her bedroom? Where I'd been suspiciously keeping watch for weeks?"

I couldn't decide where the gross ache was coming from—my head or my stomach—or whether it was late or early ... My watch floated in front of me automatically. 5:07. I just shot up out of the chair. It was gut instinct moving me, because I did not have any sense left to think with.

"Gotta take a leak...,"I said, but after I walked casually back to the rest room, I shot out the front door and sprinted the block and a half to the beach. Two girls in white-hooded sweatshirts ... I kept seeing them both in my mind, and I couldn't tell which was my sister and which was Stacy, but suddenly they were equally important to me.
One might still be out in the water—the other was carrying some evil spawn, and if I was very, very lucky, she wasn't out there in the water by now, too.

I ran over the dune shouting, "
Casey! Stacy! Casey! Stacy!
"

I realized the only way to find my sister might be to brush up against her when I was knee-deep in surf. I was ready for anything now that I'd got through the ending of Stacy's horrific tale, the ending that I'd begged Drew for—the one that I would never have guessed.

High tide had been around midnight, and now it was dead low. The beach was a vast black canyon, with only little moving neon lines far off, where waves crashed at the ebb of the tide. I ran into the waves without stopping and waded out into the water up to my thighs. The thought of something clothed bumping me kept my scalp crawling, but there was some overwhelming sense of duty to this. The water was bathtub temperature, and I wished it were cold to keep me sane and sober.

If you've lived here long enough, somebody could blindfold you and stick just your feet in the water up to your ankles, and you'd be able to tell whether the tide is coming in or going out. It had just started to come in.
Between now and noon ... this is when bodies wash up.

I looked toward the eastern horizon, where the blotch of dark gray against black looked wider, and I knew that as dark as it was now, the sun would start showing up within half an hour. My eyes got a little more accustomed to the dark, and I strained them, forcing myself to check for something pitch-black on the now gray-black surf lines.

"Casey!" I screamed, then "—asey!—asey!" figuring I was screaming to either girl. But there was no response except the surf, which had calmed somewhat, I realized. The storm at sea must have stopped its ranting ... maybe had fizzled down over Greenland. The ocean moaned like usual, but it was no longer booming.

"Casey?" I meant for it to come out louder, but suddenly I was having black breezes like crazy. A thousand eyes watched me from behind, from the sides and above, laughing, whispering about dead spooks and child molesters. The island was inside out ... bad was good, good was bad, and people who were best friends turned on each other. Secrets were screaming in the black breezes. The questioning room had given me and Drew some opportunity to play God in a way—hearing people's inner thoughts, like they were being shouted from the rooftops. You could blow up, knowing what God knows. Out there in the black I felt small and petrified, certain I was about to bump into my sister's body. My toes caught on a piece of seaweed, and I all but jumped out of my skin before realizing it wasn't hair. I stubbed my toe on a jetty rock and decided maybe this walking in the water was no good.

Dragging myself in to shore and huffing, I caught sight of a long ragged hunk of inky blackness up ahead in what appeared as black-gray air. Out here all alone, the pier took on strange dimensions. I did automatically what I used to do while driving with my dad, and we would name shapes we'd see in the clouds. Every piling looked like the barrel of a gun to me. The clusters of burned-out building frames on top looked like skeleton fingers reaching for the dark sky, but unable to straighten. Rigor mortis had set in.

Something kept me from screaming my sister's name again—maybe some strange certainty that I was about to see Eddie Van Doren ...
And why shouldn't I? If Mr. Kearney turns out to be a good father, and Mr. DeWinter a monster, why is it weird to think spooks are real? Nothing is too weird, if that's the case.

"Casey..." I tried, but her name was stuck in my throat while the worst black breeze yet laced its fingers around my neck and squeezed. I had never been down here alone before at night, I realized. At least not after ten at night, when I'd walk back from a friend's with little on my mind but our dinky problems.
Navel Academy, shit. What made me ever think that was so important?

I watched the skeleton fingers on the pier, waiting for something to move. It almost seemed impossible to me that I
wouldn't
see Van Doren dashing from one black shape to the next, trying to stay invisible, trying to lure me up there where he could—

When I saw a body dart quickly from one burned-out
shell to the next, I thought my eyes had tricked me. I stopped and watched again. Nothing moved this time, but the outline of a head and legs had been unmistakable, replaying in my mind several times. It looked like the body was missing.
He's just a head ... shot himself in the head and now...