“You’re a funny girl.”
“When I remembered, I went into the guest room and it was empty.”
“You said the only guy not afraid of her dad is Stack?”
“Yeah, he says he’s taken Mary for coffee a couple of times. Walks right up to the door and starts a conversation. Mr. Wells treats him different than other boys. At least that’s what Arney says.”
“Arney’s a politician,” Logs says.
“Arney’s fearless,” Hannah says back. “Or crazy.”
As she says it, Arney walks up. “Hey, Hannah, how strange is this?”
“Stranger than you think,” Hannah says. “I was with Mary last night.”
Arney looks bewildered. “Last night? That’s not . . .” He starts to walk away, turns back. “When?”
“Near midnight,” Hannah says. “I almost ran her down. She was way zoned out, walking down the middle of the road. . . .” Hannah finishes her story much as she gave it to Logs.
“Wow, that doesn’t sound like Mary. You took her home?” He looks at students coming out of the woods. “So how does all this happen?”
“My home, not hers,” Hannah says. “What’s the matter with you, Arney? You think I’m making this up?”
“No, no,” he says, shaking his head. “Just doesn’t sound like Mary, that’s all.”
“Well, she may very well be missing from her place for two days,” Hannah says, “but she isn’t gone. And like I said, she was whack.”
“What did she say?”
“That she didn’t want to go home.”
“Why would she not want to go home?”
“She’s Mary Wells, Arney. Would you want to go home if your dad was Mr. Wells? I don’t even know her dad’s first name, unless it’s Mister.”
“His name is Victor,” Arney says. “And he’s not such a bad guy if you don’t let him intimidate you. Shoot, I’ve been out with Mary.”
“You guys have been out out?”
“A few times,” Arney says. “A movie, whatever.”
“A movie,” Hannah says. “Little Mermaid?”
Arney shakes his head. “Her situation isn’t as bad as everybody thinks. Most of that stuff is rumor.”
“Yeah, right.”
Arney turns to Mr. Logs. “So we calling this off?”
“Officer Rankin is on the phone with Mr. Wells now,” Logs says. “They’ll give us direction soon.” He turns to Hannah. “Can you remember anything else?”
“No. I should have asked more questions, I guess.” She looks up to see Arney next to the police car, talking with Officer Rankin. She laughs. “Arney has to be in the middle of everything.”
A Lexus pulls into the parking lot. The driver’s-side door flies open and Victor Wells steps out. Officer Rankin approaches him from the patrol car and they exchange quick words, then approach Hannah.
Rankin says, “Victor Wells, this is . . . I’m sorry, young lady, I didn’t get your name.”
“Hannah. Murphy.”
“Nice to meet you,” Mr. Wells says. He doesn’t extend his hand. “Officer Rankin here says you claim to have been with my daughter last night. Might I ask why it took you so long to say so?”
Wells is a tall man, well over six feet, and athletic. Hannah stiffens. “I don’t claim to have been with her. I was with her.”
Wells looks Hannah up and down. “What time was that?”
Rankin says, “I told you, sir, around—”
Wells holds up a hand. “I want to hear it from the young lady.”
“I found her around midnight. She was walking on the road.”
“And what were you doing out at that time on a school night?”
Logs takes a deep breath, closes his eyes.
“You know,” Hannah says, “drinking, smoking dope, looking for cheap, easy sex.”
“Young lady, do you think this is funny?”
“I think,” Hannah says, “that it’s none of your business what I was doing out that late and if you want to know about Mary, you should ask me about Mary.”
Wells glares at Rankin, who shrugs.
“I’m sorry,” he says to Hannah. “I’ve been upset. Did my daughter tell you anything that might help us find her?”
“I offered her a ride home, but she didn’t want to go, and I’m probably breaking a confidence here, but it was because of you.”
“She has no reason—”
Hannah gestures surrender. “She didn’t want to go home. The rest of it is none of my business. She was kind of, like, disoriented, and not all that informative. I took her to my house. When I got up this morning she was gone. I thought she’d gone to school, then I heard on the news she was missing.”
“Nothing else was said?”
“Well, I offered her an alibi.”
“Excuse me?”
“You know,” Hannah says, “an excuse for being gone; ’course I didn’t know she’d been gone this long.”
“Why in the world would you do that?”
“To keep her out of trouble,” Hannah says. She glances over at Logs. Sheesh. Is this guy a mammal?
“I guess that’s what passes for loyalty these days,” Wells says.
“Actually,” Logs says, “that passes for loyalty in any days.”
“You’re sure it was my daughter. Mary.”
“I’ve gone to school with her for four years,” Hannah says.
“She’s never mentioned you.”
“Until today I probably haven’t mentioned her. I didn’t say we were friends, I said we’ve gone to school together.”
“I suppose there’s no reason to believe you’re not telling the truth.”
“I could be personality disordered,” Hannah says.
Wells ignores her.
“We need to call off the search,” Officer Rankin says. “Mr. Logsdon, could you help us call these kids back to the bus? I’ll catch up with your principal. You all might be able to actually get some education in today.”
Hannah slugs Logs’s shoulder. “That would make it different from most days, huh, Teach?”
“You make it hard to defend America’s youth sometimes, little girl.” To the officer, he says, “Yeah, I can get these kids rounded up and back to the learning factory.” He punches speed dial on his cell to let Dr. Johannsen know they’re coming back, then goes to round everyone up.
Logs walks toward Victor Wells, who’s now standing next to his car. “Mr. Wells, how can I help? Obviously your daughter hasn’t been abducted, but you still don’t know where she is. I’ve been worried about her lately; she’s not been in my noon gathering.”
Mary’s father regards Logs warily. “I have to tell you, Mr. Logsdon, I’m not a fan of your ‘noon gathering.’”
“I can’t say I’m surprised.”
“It’s elements like—what do you call it, eighth period?—that put ideas into kids’ heads that come to this.” He waves his hand over the parking lot and the students now returning.
“You think my Period 8 is to blame for you and your daughter’s troubles?”
“What makes you think my daughter and I are having trouble?”
“Obstinate as she can be, Hannah Murphy doesn’t make things up. Your daughter’s gone, she has to know you’re worried, and she isn’t doing a thing to alleviate that worry. In my book that indicates trouble. Look, Mr. Wells, it’s none of my business what goes on in anybody’s home, if it isn’t abuse, other than how it affects a student in school. I’ve had Mary in one class or another since she was a freshman. She’s been a phenomenal student and for the life of me, before this last week I can’t remember her missing a class. Forgive me, but when I see a perfect student drop over the edge, I figure there’s a lot I don’t know. So, if there’s anything I can do to help, I’m offering it.”
Mr. Wells’s expression softens. “I appreciate that, Mr. Logsdon, but I’m afraid the kind of help you have to offer in this situation isn’t really help.”
“Suit yoursel
f, sir. The offer stands.”
“That was an interesting way to start the day.” Justin Chenier leans back in his seat across the aisle from Paulie and looks out the bus window. “Look at Arney,” he says. “Gettin’ all friendly with the cops now.”
“Crazy, Hannah finding Mary wandering around in the middle of the night,” Paulie says. “You talk to her?”
“Shit no,” Justin says. “I think she’s still pissed at me for the other day in Logs’s lunchtime extravaganza.”
“Naw, Hannah’s not like that. She’ll be pissed at me forever, but you can say any shit you want to her.”
“Just got to be careful what you do, huh?”
“Exactly.”
Justin shakes his head. “Whew. Guy like Wells hollers, folks come runnin’. He’s a strange one.”
“He’s not as strange as everyone makes him out to be,” Arney says, plopping in the seat next to Justin. “A little uptight, maybe, but he’s a pretty cool guy if you get to know him.”
“Yeah, but Arney,” Paulie says, “room’s messed up big time. She’s gone two days and then he reports her missing, but meanwhile the room gets cleaned? Come on, man. I’ll bet Mary Wells hasn’t spent three nights away from home since third grade. Think about it: she’s wandering around all fucked up at midnight, he doesn’t, like, check with the school or any of us, then runs to the cops hollering foul play.”
“Right on,” Justin says, “and by the way, we’re still missin’ a virgin.”
“That we are,” Arney says. “That we are.”
.6
After school, Paulie heads for the lake. Logs may come later, but he’s buried in teachers’ meetings and a damage-control local news conference.
Paulie lays his wetsuit out on the dock, thinking about Hannah and Mary Wells and how his life has taken a turn for the bizarre. A paraphrased H. L. Mencken quotation he has taped to his bedroom wall pops into his head: “For every complex question there’s a simple answer—and it’s wrong.” He thinks too about All the Pretty Horses, a novel he read in English this year. The main character, John Grady Cole, says, “There ain’t but one truth. The truth is what happened.” There was a time when Paulie thought it was as simple as that: learn the truth and tell it. It started with a Sunday school lesson back in elementary school, one taught by a kind of hippie throwback youth minister who believed finding the truth and exposing it was Jesus’s modus operandi. You wouldn’t tell some poor kid that you recognized the shirt he was wearing because it used to belong to you, or chide someone for some other reality that could only hurt. But with the big things, the things that bore consequence, well, you told it; you told what happened. But as he gets ready to hit the water, Paulie thinks it’s a little more complicated than that. He told Hannah what happened. She didn’t want to hear more. What happened was all she needed to bring the curtain down on what Paulie had considered the best thing that ever happened to him. Hannah knew how Paulie felt about his father’s wanderings, about the hours upon hours he’d sat listening to his mom. She was there the night his mother went totally off and broke nearly every breakable thing in the kitchen—dishes, glasses, CorningWare—packed a suitcase, and stormed out.
“Guess she’s finally had it,” Hannah had said, holding Paulie’s hand as they stared at the carnage.
“It just means a new set of dishes,” Paulie had replied. “This time tomorrow night there won’t be a trace of this.”
In the end Hannah had agreed with Paulie: his dad was a horn dog and his mother was weak.
But there were things Paulie admired about his father. His dad had saved more lives than Paulie could count. He had pulled bleeding or burned victims from the edge of death; he had even gone into a freezing river once to rescue a woman and her baby from the roof of a car. His pay was modest, the hours unpredictable, and failure at times inevitable. Paulie admired his dad’s toughness but he’d vowed never to turn into that guy when it came to relationships.
But what Paulie did wasn’t like that. It wasn’t.
The idea of swimming without the wetsuit—in only his Speedo—tempts him. He knows the water is in the low fifties, testicle-numbing at best, but if you can take it for just a few minutes, the body actually feels warm. Stay in too long and you flirt with hypothermia, but he’s done it before and it’s pretty exhilarating as extreme sports go. He stuffs the wetsuit back in the car and walks toward the end of the dock, hyperventilating, determined, laughing inside when he considers he’s providing his own punishment. Ten feet from the end he takes three long strides and dives.
Hannah walks into her bedroom after coming up empty scanning the guest room for possible missed clues, throws her car keys and cell on top of the dresser, and flops onto the bed. She wishes she had asked Mary more questions. Mr. Wells was weird today—if she’d gone missing, her parents wouldn’t have been asking witnesses what they were doing out so late; they’d have been desperate and welcoming of any useful information. And what about Mrs. Wells?
She clicks the remote, looking for the evening news. A local talk show host pops on the screen so she hits the mute button, rolls over, and gathers her pillow. For those few quick moments this morning when she thought Mary Wells might be . . . well, dead—in the time between when she saw the news on TV and then the impossibility of that news registered—she also thought about Paulie. What if something happened to Paulie? Would this be how she wanted her last time with him to be? There was a moment of clarity that almost made her text him.
She rolls over to see Dr. Johannsen filling the flat screen, standing before a mike with a large 4 on it. Mr. Logs stands in the background. Hannah un-mutes.
“. . . news of Ms. Wells’s disappearance. It was kind of automatic,” Dr. Johannsen is saying. “We got parental permission for the students we sent and it was the most natural thing to load a bus and see if we could assist. A teacher supervised and the police department directed the operation.”
“Were there students present without parental permission?” Mallory Preston, local TV reporter, asks.
Dr. Johannsen looks at her askance. “Not that I know of,” she says, and smiles. “I’ll have a better idea about that tomorrow morning. The important thing is, those students are safe and the young woman in question, whatever her difficulty, seems not to have been the victim of foul play.”
“Speaking of Ms. Wells,” the reporter says, “do you have any further knowledge of her whereabouts?”
“I don’t,” Dr. Johannsen says. “I’m sure more will become apparent in the next few days.”
“Have you had a conversation with her father since the search was called off?”
“No. We’ll handle it through our attendance office like any other absence. This is a good student with an exemplary record, both academically and socially.”
“I wonder—”
“What will happen,” Dr. Johannsen interrupts, “is something newsworthy, and you folks will concentrate on that and we’ll get on with the business of finishing up our school year. Thank you, but I have work to do.”
Right on, Dr. Jo! Hannah thinks. Slap that nosy bitch! Hannah’s cell has been ringing every ten minutes and she knows Mallory Preston and her colleagues want her on the record about her encounter with Mary, which is not going to happen. Fifteen minutes of fame, my ass, she thinks. I’m saving mine for something fun.
Paulie pulls himself onto the dock after nearly forty-five minutes in the icy reservoir. It was a good, fast workout and he feels on top of the world, warm and strong. Warm will give way to violent shivering in minutes when sensation returns and his body reacts to the astonishing cold. He slides his feet into his flip-flops, rushes to the car and pulls on his sweats, slips into the driver’s seat, and cranks the heat to high while backing away from the dock. As he approaches the city limits, the shivering starts and a half-mile later he pulls over because he’s paying way more attention to his vibrating body than to his driving. If I died right now they’d set my time of death two hours ago based on bo
dy temperature. He laughs at the thought and sits another twenty minutes with the car heater slowly bringing him back toward 98.6. When the intensity of the shivering has diminished enough to let him clutch the steering wheel with a degree of confidence, he drives home, strips out of his sweats, and lowers himself into a bath. He considers the events of the past few days, wondering if he should go ahead and tell all he knows.
“Bobby Wright!” Paulie says as The Rocket door cushes closed behind Bobby. He looks at his watch; ten fifteen. “Aren’t you out past curfew?”
Bobby looks confused.
“I’m messing with you, man. What can I do for you? Still got coffee that’s almost fresh. A day-old croissant?”
Bobby frowns again.
“Still messin’ with you, buddy. What do you need?”
“Like a pop or something,” Bobby says.
Paulie nods toward the cooler. “Pop we got. Coke, Pepsi, hell we even have Jolt and Red Bull in the back. Keep you hoppin’ all night.”
Bobby’s eyes shift side to side. “Is that what you’ve been drinking?”
“Naw, man. I’m just bored. Got an hour and a half to go.”
Paulie watches Bobby walk toward the cooler. The kid moves like he’s afraid he’ll trip a landmine. He stands staring through the glass at the soda pop, unable to decide. He opens the cooler door, closes it again, opens it.
“No matter which one you pick, you’re gonna wish you’d got the other one,” Paulie says.
Bobby turns around. “Huh?”
“Messin’ with you again. Grab one, it’s on me.”
“I can pay for it.” Bobby reaches in his pocket, shows Paulie a five.
“Yeah, man, but you don’t have to. I’m buyin’. All you gotta do is stay here to drink it.”