Read Living Dead Girl Online

Authors: Tod Goldberg

Tags: #Mystery

Living Dead Girl (6 page)

I WIND THROUGH
the trail, stepping over small boulders and shrubs, and through dense pockets of berry bushes. Everything is overgrown. Obviously Molly
hasn’t been through here in weeks. There would be some kind of evidence: a shoe print, a wrapper from a Power Bar, the label from a bottle of Gatorade.

Molly always littered.

“It’s an inherited trait,” she’d say, dropping a piece of gum on the ground. “You should know that.”

I do know that. But what I never told Molly was that the same reason she littered was the same reason she had a fear of falling, of being left alone, of being in the dark and in enclosed spaces. Molly never wanted to hear my theories on why we act the way we do. She just wanted to keep on living in a fashion she found comfortable. And if that included unfounded fears and littering, then so be it.

Tall weeds sprout up in front of me. I stop and measure one by sight. It’s about three feet high. Again, it’s clear no one, not even Molly, has been through this area of the trail for weeks. The weeds would be trampled or broken.

“Shit.” I lean up against a tree and take a sip from my water bottle. I’ve been walking for just over two hours and I know that it would be foolish to continue on. She hasn’t been through here. The only reason she ever did before was to get away from me or to invigorate her mind for painting. But there wasn’t a single easel set up inside the house.

Nobody can say I didn’t look for her.

No one can say that I haven’t worried about her.

She is my wife and I do love her.

No one can say that I haven’t missed her.

Maybe the police are the best solution. She’s been gone several days and there’s no sign of where she might be. The boat is moored. And she couldn’t really have a lover, could she?

The locksmith.

She’s sleeping with the locksmith.

“Just shut up with that,” I say and a cluster of birds, frightened by my voice, flutter out from the weeds.

She wouldn’t take a lover. It’s not like her.

No one can tell me that she’s in love with someone else.

The police will want to drag the lake. Men in frogman suits will dive off slow-moving boats and search the water for her.

She was probably sleeping with the locksmith all along. How else could she convince him to come out and change her locks?

“Just stop that,” I say. “Okay? Finish it. It’s not true.” So I’ll go see Bruce Duper and tell him that we need to fill out the necessary papers, inform the next of kin (which is me), get a team of detectives out to do some searching because I can’t find her. He’ll tell me that’s what should have been done from the get-go,
but I’ll ignore him. The guilt can’t be mine. Molly is gone because of something beyond my control. If I could have controlled her, we’d be living here, we’d have children playing in the water, fires burning in the hearth, and cones lined up on windowsills.

I CUT THROUGH
the underbrush and walk along the jagged shoreline back to the house, weaving into the forest when the water’s edge gets sharp and craggy. I find Ginny sitting on the edge of the dock in a swimsuit, a spiral notebook open next to her and her 35mm camera slung around her neck. The day has warmed up to near seventy-five.

“Making progress?”

Ginny whips around, startled. “Jesus,” she says. “I thought you’d be gone for a lot longer.”

“It became pointless,” I say. “No one had walked through there in weeks.”

“So what now?”

“I guess have Bruce call the sheriff,” I say. “Get a professional out here to take a look around.”

“We can’t just go running off then,” Ginny says.

“Probably not,” I say. “I’ll have to go back across the lake and call the school, let them know it might be a few days before I can get back. Call it a family emergency.”

“Isn’t it one?”

“Yes,” I say. “I suppose it is.”

“I’ll have to call my mom,” Ginny says. “She’ll think I’m dead in a ditch somewhere if she doesn’t hear from me.”

“She has a lot of faith in me,” I say and try to force a chuckle. Ginny’s mother thinks I’m a child molester—she’s only six years older than I am.

“She just doesn’t know you very well,” Ginny says. “But that will change.”

“Right,” I say.

Ginny stands up and wraps her arms around my neck. “I’m sorry you didn’t find anything,” she says.

“It was a long shot,” I say, “but I had to look.”

“I spent some time poking through the house, looking for clues or whatever,” Ginny says. “I hope you don’t mind.”

“No,” I say. “That’s fine. Did you find anything?”

“Your wedding album,” she says. “Some letters you wrote. Pictures of your girl.”

“We spent a long time here,” I say, but inside I’m boiling.
Pictures of my girl
. She had a name.

Your wedding album
. It was ours. Not mine. Ours.

“Which letters did you find?” I ask.

“I didn’t read them,” Ginny says. “There was just a big stack of them tied up with string in a kitchen drawer. I left them there.”

“I’ll go through them,” I say. “Maybe something I wrote Molly set her off or something.”

“What do you mean?”

“Molly went through phases,” I say. “She’d relive things from the past over and over. It was masochistic, really, but she said it made her feel strong. It was just bullshit.”

Ginny lets go of me so that she can pick up her notebook. She starts jotting something down. “That’s good,” she says. “That’s a good character trait. Kind of whimsical, don’t you think? I like that.”

“It’s not a trait,” I say.

“You know what I mean,” she says and continues writing.

“This isn’t some story,” I say, grabbing her by the arm. “It’s my life, Ginny. Okay? It’s my fucking life here. You aren’t going to marginalize my wife by saying she had traits. Do you understand me? She didn’t walk out of a page. I met her someplace. I met her and we had children and a life and now she’s not here. Do you understand me? Am I getting through to you?”

“You’re hurting me, Paul.”

“Am I getting through to you?”

“Paul,” Ginny says too calmly. “Let go of my arm right now. You’re scaring me.”

I could break her arm. I could snap it like a twig.

I look down at Ginny’s arm. My knuckles are white. She’s flexing her hand.

“I’m sorry,” I say, letting go.

Ginny yanks her arm away and starts rubbing it, never taking her eyes from me. “Don’t you ever touch me like that again,” she says.

“I don’t know where I went,” I say. “That was wrong.”

“That was abuse,” she says. “If there were a phone here I’d call nine-one-one.”

“I didn’t mean to hurt you,” I say. “I just wanted you to stop and understand me. I didn’t think I was getting through to you.”

“Oh, I hear you loud and clear. I’d hate to tarnish the memory of the woman who left you.” Ginny stomps away toward the house, head down like a battering ram.

I know what I’m supposed to do. I’m supposed to call after her, beg apology, whisper into her ear how much I care for her. Make mad passionate love to her in the sand. Like
From Here to Eternity
.

I’ll let Ginny dream. She can turn this lousy moment into a movie on her own.

WHILE GINNY FUMES
in the living room, I go through the stack of letters she unearthed in the kitchen. Most of the letters are recent, from the last year, and when I read my words I feel stupid and small:
I’m sorry … I love you … I can make it better … We can try again
. I sound like a self-help manual—a personal twelve-step program on how to grovel for your marriage.

She never wrote me back, which was fine. I knew her opinions about the subject.

“Are you ready to apologize to me?” Ginny says, standing in the doorway.

“I said I was sorry,” I say. “I overreacted.”

“You called me a little girl,” Ginny says.

“No I didn’t,” I say.

“You sure did,” Ginny says.

I stop and think for a moment, trying to focus on my exact words, but it’s impossible. It seems like an eternity ago. “If I did,” I say, “I didn’t mean to. I know you’re not a child.”

“I don’t really think you do,” she says.

“I apologize,” I say. “I was just tired and angry and, God, everything just seemed to fall down on me at once there. You can’t race an avalanche. I don’t know what else I can say.”

Ginny stares at her bare feet and wiggles her toes against the wood floor for a long time without speaking. “I need to call my mom,” she says flatly.

“I thought we’d do that tomorrow,” I say. “Today already seems ruined.”

“You need to call the police.” Ginny says. “And I
don’t plan on spending the rest of my life on this fucking lake waiting for you to do it.”

“Ginny,” I say.

“Either you fire up that boat outside or I start rowing,” Ginny says. “It’s up to you.”

“Look,” I say, “if we go into town today, Bruce is going to think this is a great big deal and he’ll have people and bloodhounds and all kinds of crap. I don’t feel like I can handle that today.”

“This
is
a great big deal,” Ginny says. “Either you deal with it now or I deal with it. Someone’s got to be the adult around here.”

WE PILE INTO
the Whaler and set off across the lake. It’s near three o’clock and the sun has settled low in the sky, giving everything a misty glow. Ginny sits silently beside me, a sun visor tugged down just above her eyes.

The sheriff will have questions for me. He’ll want to know how long Molly and I have been apart. He’ll want to know why I didn’t call him right away. He’ll want to remind me that we’ve met before.

When my daughter died, he came across the lake with the coroner. He sat in my living room and took a statement from Molly and one from me. He said that he’d never had children himself, but that he’d always wanted one.

He told me his wife was dead and that he knew what I must have been feeling.

He looked at me like I was a murderer.

“You’re doing a good thing, Paul,” Ginny says now, the boat slicing through the water. “You know that, don’t you?”

“I do,” I say.

Ginny leans over and pats my thigh. “I know you are under terrible pressure,” she says, “and that you still have feelings for Molly. You’re just not thinking straight, that’s all.”

“I guess I’m not,” I say.

“Listen to me, Paul,” she says. “If you start feeling like you can’t keep things under control, just tell me. Just give me a sign or something and I’ll talk to Bruce or the police or whatever. Okay?”

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“If you feel like you need to see a doctor or something,” Ginny says. “I don’t want you to be afraid to be afraid, do you know what I’m saying?”

“Yes,” I say. I know what she thinks. She thinks that I’m losing it.

Chapter 5

T
he marina at Granite Point Park is bustling. We dock the Whaler next to a houseboat loaded with college-age boys. When Ginny steps off the boat they turn and look at her in the obvious way college boys look at everything. Like they are invincible.

“Looks like you have a fan club,” I say, but Ginny ignores me. She’s playing a role now. She’s the ADULT. She’s the ROCK. We walk up the landing toward Bruce Duper’s house hand in hand. Bruce is standing out front talking to another college kid. This one is shirtless and has a cooler at his feet. When Bruce spots us, he shakes hands with the kid and meets us before we reach his house. “Damn frat boys,” Bruce says, “they bring a bunch of eighteen-year-olds out here to haze them and make them drink warm beer. Every year, one of the kids gets sick and they gotta drag him
back to Spokane in an ambulance. You’d think they’d learn.”

“You’d think,” I say.

“I guess that’s not what you wanna talk about though?”

“I think we need to call the police,” I say. “There’s no trace of Molly out there.”

Bruce pinches his bottom lip between his index finger and thumb and nods his head slowly. “Damn,” he says finally. “I thought maybe you’d get out there and she’d be sitting on the dock painting or something.”

“So did I,” I say.

“Sheriff Drew is about all the police we got, you know.”

“I know,” I say.

Bruce kicks at something with his shoe and then sighs heavily. “All right then,” he says. “Let’s get on the horn.”

“I need to make some calls, too,” Ginny says. “Is there somewhere private I can go while you call the police?”

Bruce gives me an odd look. “Everything going all right out there?”

“Yes,” I say. “She just needs to call her family. Let them know where she is.”

“That right, miss?”

“Yes,” Ginny says.

“When we get inside,” Bruce says, “I’ll show you upstairs. You can call from there.”

Ginny doesn’t say anything, but I think that maybe she’s going to call her parents and tell them that she needs someone to come and get her. She’ll tell her parents that they have always been correct—that I am not right for her. But then Ginny gives my hand a squeeze and says, “Unless you want me to stay with you while you make your calls.”

“No,” I say. “Let your family know what’s going on.”

Bruce leads us inside and then takes Ginny upstairs. I stand in the entry hall and try to figure out what I’m going to say.
My wife is missing … My ex-wife is missing … My wife, who separated from me after the death of our daughter, is missing
. None of it sounds right. People don’t just vanish. There has to be a cause and effect. Asteroid plunges into Earth, the dinosaurs die. Australopithecine moves from the trees and gets stronger and faster, more adept at catching game, arboreal relatives fall prey to natural selection.

Child dismembers animals; child grows up to be a serial murderer.

What had Molly done beside decide that I wasn’t a good husband?

Bruce comes down the stairs holding a cat in his arms. “Thought McTavish here might be a calming
influence on you,” he says, stroking the cat’s head. “Saw on
Dateline
how animals help people to recover from all kinds of pain.”

“It’s a nice thought,” I say.

“Hell, Paul,” he says, “I don’t know what I’m talking about.”

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