“I don’t know. I don’t know where, and I don’t know why.”
Vic stared at her, incredulous. “What do you mean you don’t know why?” Vic asked her. “He isn’t coming home because of you, Mom. Because he can’t stand you. Because all you ever do is bitch at him, stand there and bitch when he’s tired and wants to be left alone.”
“I’ve tried so hard. You don’t know how hard I’ve tried to accommodate him. I can keep beer in the fridge and dinner warm when he gets home late. But I can’t be twenty-four anymore, and that’s what he really doesn’t like about me. That’s how old the last one was, you know.” There was no anger in her voice. She sounded weary, that was all.
“What do you mean, ‘the last one’?”
“The last girl he was sleeping with,” Linda said. “I don’t know who he’s with now, though, or why he’d decide to take off with her. It’s not as if I’ve ever put him in a position where he had to choose between home and the girl on the side. I don’t know why this time is different. She must be some nice little piece.”
When Vic spoke again, her voice was hushed and trembling. “You lie so bad. I hate you. I hate you, and if he’s leaving, I’m going with him.”
“But, Vicki,” said her mother in that strange, drifting tone of exhaustion. “He doesn’t want you with him. He didn’t just leave me, you know. He left us.”
Vic turned and fled, slamming the door shut behind her. She ran into the early-October afternoon. The light came at a low slant through the oaks across the street, gold and green, and how she loved that light. There was no light in the world like you saw in New England in early fall.
She was up and on her embarrassing pink bike, she was riding, crying but hardly aware of it, her breath coming in gasps, she was around the house and under the trees, she was riding downhill, the wind whining in her ears. The ten-speed was no Raleigh Tuff Burner, and she felt every rock and root under its slim tires.
Vic told herself she was going to find him, she would go to him now, he loved her and if she wanted to stay with him, her father would find a place for her, and she would never come home, never have to listen to her mother bitch at her about wearing black jeans, dressing like a boy, hanging with burnouts, she just had to ride down the hill and the bridge would be there.
But it wasn’t. The old dirt road ended at the guardrail overlooking the Merrimack River. Upriver, the water was as black and smooth as smoked glass. Below, it was in torment, shattering against boulders in a white froth. All that remained of the Shorter Way were three stained concrete pylons rising from the water, crumbling at the top to show the rebar.
She rode hard at the guardrail, willing the bridge to appear. But just before she hit the rail, she dumped her bike on purpose, skidded across the dirt in her jeans. She did not wait to see if she had hurt herself but leaped up, gripped the bike in both hands, and flung it over the side. It hit the long slope of the embankment, bounced, and crashed into the shallows, where it got stuck. One wheel protruded from the water, revolving madly.
Bats dived in the gathering dusk.
Vic limped north, following the river, with no clear destination in mind.
Finally, on an embankment by the river, under 495, she dropped into bristly grass, among litter. There was a stitch in her side. Cars whined and hummed above her, producing a vast, shivery harmonic on the massive bridge spanning the Merrimack. She could feel their passage, a steady, curiously soothing vibration in the earth beneath her.
She didn’t mean to go to sleep there, but for a while—twenty minutes or so—Vic dozed, carried into a state of dreamy semiconsciousness by the thunderous roar of motorcycles, blasting past in twos and threes, a whole gang of riders out in the last warm night of the fall, going wherever their wheels took them.
Various Locales
IT WAS RAINING HARD IN CHESAPEAKE, VIRGINIA, ON THE EVENING of May 9, 1993, when Jeff Haddon took his springer spaniel for the usual after-dinner walk. Neither of them wanted to be out, not Haddon, not his dog, Garbo. The rain was coming down so hard on Battlefield Boulevard that it was bouncing off the concrete sidewalks and the cobblestone driveways. The air smelled fragrantly of sage and holly. Jeff wore a big yellow poncho, and the wind snatched at it and rattled it furiously. Garbo spread her back legs and squatted miserably to pee, her curly fur hanging in wet tangles.
Haddon and Garbo’s walk took them past the sprawling Tudor home of Nancy Lee Martin, a wealthy widow with a nine-year-old daughter. Later he told the investigators with Chesapeake PD that he glanced up her driveway because he heard Christmas music, but that wasn’t quite the truth. He didn’t hear Christmas music then, not over the pounding roar of the rain on the road, but he always walked past her house and always looked up her driveway, because Haddon had a bit of a crush on Nancy Lee Martin. At forty-two she was ten years older than him but still looked much like the Virginia Tech cheerleader she had once been.
He peered up the lane just in time to see Nancy coming out the front door, with her daughter, Amy, racing ahead of her. A tall man in a black overcoat held an umbrella for her; the girls had on slinky dresses and silk scarves, and Jeff Haddon remembered his wife saying that Nancy Lee was going to a fund-raiser for George Allen, who had just announced he was running for governor.
Haddon, who owned a Mercedes dealership and who had an eye for cars, recognized her ride as an early Rolls-Royce, the Phantom or the Wraith, something from the thirties.
He called out and lifted a hand in greeting. Nancy Lee Martin might’ve waved back, he wasn’t sure. As her driver opened the door, music flooded out, and Haddon could’ve sworn he heard the strains of “Little Drummer Boy,” sung by a choir. That was an odd thing to hear in the spring. Maybe even Nancy Lee thought it odd—she seemed to hesitate before climbing in. But it was raining hard, and she didn’t hesitate long.
Haddon walked on, and when he returned, the car was gone. Nancy Lee Martin and her daughter, Amy, never arrived at the George Allen fund-raiser.
The driver who had been scheduled to pick her up, Malcolm Ackroyd, vanished as well. His car was found off Bainbridge Boulevard, down by the water, the driver’s-side door open. His hat was found in the weeds, saturated with blood.
IN LATE MAY OF 1994, IT WAS JAKE CHRISTENSEN OF BUFFALO, NEW YORK, ten years old and traveling alone, flying in from Philadelphia, where he attended boarding school. A driver had been sent to meet him, but this man, Bill Black, suffered a fatal heart attack in the parking garage and was found dead behind the wheel of his stretch limo. Who met Jake at the airport—who drove him away—was never determined.
The autopsy revealed that Bill Black’s heart had failed after absorbing near-lethal doses of a gas called sevoflurane; it was a favorite of dentists. A faceful would switch off a person’s awareness of pain and make him highly suggestible—a zombie, in other words. Sevoflurane wasn’t so easy to get—you needed a license to practice medicine or dentistry to obtain it—and it seemed a promising lead, but statewide interviews with oral surgeons and the people they employed went exactly nowhere.
IN 1995 IT WAS STEVE CONLON AND HIS TWELVE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, Charlie (Charlene, actually, but Charlie to her friends), on their way to a father-daughter dance in Plattsburgh, New York. They ordered a stretch limo, but it was a Rolls-Royce that turned up in their driveway instead. Charlie’s mother, Agatha, kissed her daughter on the forehead before she left, told her to have fun, and never laid eyes on her again.
She saw her husband, though. His body was found, bullet through the left eye, behind some bushes, in a rest area off Interstate 87. Agatha had no trouble identifying the body, in spite of the damage to his face.
Months later, in the fall, the phone rang in the Conlon house, a little after two-thirty in the morning, and Agatha, only half awake, answered. She heard a hiss and crackle, as of a long-distance connection being made, and then several children began to sing “The First Noel,” their high, sweet voices quivering with laughter. Agatha believed she heard her daughte
r’s voice among them and began to scream her name: “Charlie, Charlie, where are you?” But her daughter did not reply, and in another moment the children hung up on her.
The phone company, however, said no call had been made to her house at that time, and the police wrote it off as the late-night fantasy of a distraught woman.
AROUND FIFTY-EIGHT THOUSAND NONFAMILY CHILD ABDUCTIONS occur each year in America, and in the early nineties the disappearances of Marta Gregorski, Rory McCombers, Amy Martin, Jake Christensen, Charlene Conlon, and the adults who vanished with them—with few witnesses, in different states, under various conditions—were not connected until much later. Not until well after what happened to Vic McQueen at the hands of Charles Talent Manx III.
Haverhill
IN LATE MARCH OF VIC’S SENIOR YEAR, HER MOTHER WALKED IN ON her and Craig Harrison in Vic’s bedroom at one in the morning. It wasn’t like Linda caught them screwing, or even kissing, but Craig had a bottle of Bacardi and Vic was pretty drunk.
Craig left with a shrug and a smile—G’night, Mrs. McQueen, sorry we woke you—and the next morning Vic took off for her Saturday shift at Taco Bell without speaking to her mother. She wasn’t looking forward to getting home and certainly wasn’t ready for what was waiting when she did.
Linda sat on Vic’s bed, which was neatly made up with fresh linens and a plumped-up pillow, just like a bed in a hotel. The only thing missing was the mint.
Everything else was gone: Vic’s sketchbook, Vic’s books, Vic’s computer. There were a couple of things on the desk, but Vic didn’t immediately register them. The sight of her cleaned-out room made her short of breath.
“What did you do?”
“You can earn your things back,” Linda said, “as long as you stick to my new rules and my new curfew. I’ll be driving you to school from now on, and work, and anywhere else you need to go.”
“You had . . . you had no right . . .”
“I found some things in one of your drawers,” her mother continued, as if Vic had not spoken. “I’d like to hear your explanation for them.”
Linda nodded at the other side of the room. Vic turned her head, this time really taking in what was sitting on her desktop: a pack of cigarettes, an Altoids tin containing what looked like red and orange Valentine’s Day candies, some sampler bottles of gin, and two banana-scented condoms in purple packages. One of the condom wrappers was torn open and empty.
Vic had bought the condoms from a vending machine at the Howard Johnson’s and had torn one open to make a balloon character out of it, inflating the rubber and drawing a face on the side. She had dubbed this character Dickface and had amused the kids in third-period study hall with him, walking him across her desk while the teacher was out of the room. When Mr. Jaffey returned from the men’s, the room smelled so strongly of bananas that he asked who had brought pie, which caused everyone to bust up.
Craig had left the cigarettes one night when he was over, and Vic had held on to them. She didn’t smoke (yet), but she liked to tap a cigarette out of the packet and lie in bed smelling the sweet tobacco: Craig’s smell.
The Ecstasy tablets were what Vic took to make it through the nights when she couldn’t sleep, when her thoughts whirled shrieking through her head like a flock of crazed bats. Some nights she would close her eyes and would see the Shorter Way Bridge, a lopsided rectangle opening into darkness. She would smell it, the ammonia stink of bat piss, the odor of mildewed wood. A pair of headlamps would blink on in the dark, at the far end of the bridge: two circles of pale light set close together. Those headlights were bright and terrible, and sometimes she could still see them glowing before her, even when she opened her eyes. Those headlights made her feel like screaming.
A little X always smoothed things out. A little X made her feel like she was gliding, a breeze in her face. It put the world into a state of smooth, subtle motion, as if she were on the back of her father’s motorcycle, banking into a turn. She didn’t need to sleep when she was on Ecstasy, was too in love with the world to sleep. She would call her friends instead and tell them she loved them. She would stay up late and sketch tattoo designs to help her across the gap between girl next door and fuck-you-dead stripper. She wanted to get a motorcycle engine above her breasts, let the boys know what a great ride she was, and never mind that at seventeen she was, pathetically, almost the last virgin in her class.
The little gin samplers were nothing. The gin was just something she kept on hand to swallow Ecstasy.
“Think what you want,” Vic said. “I don’t give a fuck.”
“I suppose I should be grateful you’re at least using protection. You have a child out of wedlock, don’t expect me to help you. I won’t have anything to do with it. Or you.”
What Vic wanted to tell her was that that was a pretty good argument for getting pregnant as soon as possible, but what came out was “I didn’t sleep with him.”
“Now you’re lying. September fourth. I thought you slept over at Willa’s. In your diary it says—”
“You looked in my fucking diary?”
“—you slept with Craig all night long for the first time ever. You think I don’t know what that means?”
What it meant was that they had slept together—with their clothes on, under a comforter, on Willa’s basement floor, with six other kids. But when she woke, he was spooned against her, one arm over her waist, breathing against the back of her neck, and she had thought, Please don’t wake up, and had for a few moments been so happy she could hardly stand it.
“Yeah. It means we screwed, Mom,” Vic said softly. “Because I was tired of sucking his cock. Nothing in it for me.”
What little color was left in her mother’s face drained out of it.
“I’m keeping your personal items locked up,” she said. “I don’t care if you are almost eighteen, you live under my roof, and you’ll live by my rules. If you can follow the new program, then in a few months . . .”
“Is that what you did when Dad disappointed you? Locked up your pussy for a few months to see if he’d get with the program?”
“Believe me, if I had a chastity belt somewhere in the house, I’d have you wearing it,” her mother said. “You dirty-mouthed little hooker.”
Vic laughed, a wild, agonized sound.
“What an ugly person you are inside,” she said, the most vicious thing she could think to say. “I’m out of here.”
“If you leave, you’ll find the door locked when you come back,” her mother said, but Vic wasn’t listening, was already on her way out the bedroom door.
Out in the Cold
SHE WALKED.
The rain was a fine sleet that soaked through her army-navy jacket and made her hair crunchy with ice.
Her father and his girlfriend lived in Durham, New Hampshire, and there was some way to get to them by using the MBTA—take the T to the North Station, then switch to Amtrak—but it was all a lot of money Vic didn’t have.
She went to the T station anyway and hung around for a while, because it was out of the rain. She tried to think who she could call for train fare. Then she thought fuck it, she would just call her father and ask him to drive down and get her. She was honestly not sure why she hadn’t thought of it before.
She had only been to see him once in the last year, and it had gone badly. Vic got into a fight with the girlfriend and threw the remote control at her, which by some wild chance had given her a black eye. Her father sent her back that evening, wasn’t even interested in her side of the story. Vic had not talked to him since.
Chris McQueen answered on the second ring and said he’d accept the charges. He didn’t sound happy about it, though. His voice rasped. The last time she’d seen him, there had been a lot of silver in his hair that hadn’t been there a year ago. She had heard that men took younger lovers to stay young themselves. It wasn’t working.
“Well,” Vic said, and was suddenly struggling not to cry again. “Mom threw me out, just like she threw y
ou out.”
That wasn’t how it happened, of course, but it felt like the right way to begin the conversation.
“Hey, Brat,” he said. “Where are you? You okay? Your mom called and told me you left.”
“I’m at this train station. I don’t have any money. Can you come get me, Dad?”
“I can call you a cab. Mom will pay the fare when you get home.”
“I can’t go home.”
“Vic. It would take me an hour to get there, and it’s midnight. I have work tomorrow at five A.M. I’d be in bed already, but instead I’ve been sittin’ by the phone worrying about you.”
Vic heard a voice in the background, her father’s girlfriend, Tiffany: “She’s not coming here, Chrissy!”
“You need to work this out with your mother now,” he said. “I can’t go choosing sides, Vic. You know that.”
“She is not coming here,” Tiffany said again, her voice strident, angry.
“Will you tell that cunt to shut her fucking mouth?” Vic cried, almost screamed.
When her father spoke again, his voice was harder. “I will not. And considering you beat her up the last time you were here—”
“The fuck!”
“—and never apologized—”
“I never touched that brainless bitch.”
“—okay. I’m going. This conversation is finished. You’n spend the fucking night in the rain as far as I’m concerned.”
“You chose her over me,” Vic said. “You chose her. Fuck you, Dad. Get your rest so you’re ready to blow things up tomorrow. It’s what you do best.”
She hung up.
Vic wondered if she could sleep on a bench in the train station but by two in the morning knew she couldn’t. It was too cold. She considered calling her mother collect, asking her to send a cab, but the thought of asking for her help was unbearable, so she walked