“I keep hearing this,” I said. “The perfect kid.”
“Right,” he said. “And who the fuck wants that?”
“Tommy,” Mai Nghiem said to him.
“No, no, really.” He held up a hand. “I mean, Amanda, okay, she was nice. She could be pleasant and personable. But, you know that saying about there being no
there
there? That’s her. I had her in microec last year and macroec now, and she was my best student in both. And yet? Couldn’t tell you thing-one about her outside of her work. Not one. You ask her a personal question, she turns it back on you. Ask her how things are going, you get, ‘Fine. You?’ And she always seemed fine. She did. Always seemed content. But you’d look in her eyes and you’d get the impression she was approximating human behavior. She’d studied people, learned how to walk and talk like one, but she was still outside looking in.”
“You’re saying she was an alien.”
“I’m saying she was one of the loneliest people I’ve ever known.”
“What about her friend?”
“Sophie?” A cold chuckle. “ ‘Friend’ is a generous word.”
I looked over at Principal Nghiem. She gave me a small shrug.
“I heard from another faculty member that Amanda and Sophie were pretty much joined at the hip.”
“I’m not saying they weren’t. I just said ‘friends’ wasn’t how I’d describe the relationship. It was a bit more
Single White Female
than that.”
“On whose end?”
“Sophie’s,” Mai Nghiem said, nodding to herself. “Yeah, now that Tom mentions it. Amanda was oblivious, I think, but Sophie clearly idolized her.”
“And the more Amanda didn’t notice,” Tom Dannal said, “the higher Sophie pushed her up the pedestal.”
I said, “So, I guess I got a new million-dollar question.”
Tom nodded. “Where’s Sophie? Right?”
I looked over at Principal Nghiem.
“She dropped out.”
My eyes widened. “When?”
“Beginning of the school year.”
“And you don’t think there could be a connection?”
“Between Sophie Corliss deciding not to come back for senior year and Amanda McCready not showing up for classes after Thanksgiving?”
I looked around the empty classroom and tried not to let my frustration show. “Anyone else I can talk to?”
• • •
In the student lounge, I met with seven homeroom classmates of Amanda and Sophie. Principal Nghiem and I sat in the center of the room with the girls arrayed before us in a half-circle.
“Amanda was just, ya know,” Reilly Moore said.
“I don’t,” I said.
Giggles.
“Like, ya know.”
Eye rolls. More giggles.
“Oh,” I said, “she was
like
ya know. Now I get it.”
Blank stares, no giggles.
“It’s, like, if you were talking to her,” Brooklyn Doone said, “she, like, listened? But if you waited for her to tell you stuff, like, who she dug or what apps were on her iPad or like that? You’d, like, wait a long time.”
The girl beside her, Coral or Crystal, rolled her eyes. “For, like, ever.”
“Like, ev-er,” another girl said, and they all nodded in agreement.
“What about her friend, Sophie?” I asked.
“Ewww!”
“That daggy bee-atch?”
“That chick was wannabe-dot-com.”
“Dot-
org
.”
“I’m sayin’.”
“I heard she, like, tried to list you as her friend on her Face-book page.”
“Ewww!”
“I’m sayin’.”
After my daughter was born, I’d considered buying a shotgun to ward off potential suitors fourteen or so years up the road. Now, as I listened to these girls babble and imagined Gabby one day talking with the same banality and ignorance of the English language, I thought of buying the same shotgun to blow my own fucking head off.
Five thousand years of civilization, more or less, twenty-three hundred years since the libraries of Alexandria, over a hundred years since the invention of flight, wafer-thin computers at our fingertips, which can access the intellectual riches of the globe, and judging by the girls in that room, the only advance we’d made since the invention of fire was turning
like
into an omni-word, useful as a verb, a noun, an article, the whole sentence if need be.
“So none of you knew either of them well?” I tried.
Seven blank stares.
“I’ll take that as a no.”
The world’s longest silence broken only by some fidgeting.
“ ’Member that guy?” Brooklyn said eventually. “He looked kinda like Joe Jonas.”
“Like, he’s so, like, hot.”
“The guy?”
“Joe Jonas. Duh.”
“I think he looks, like, so queer.”
“Uh-ah.”
“Uh-huh.”
I focused on the one who’d brought it up. “This guy—he was Amanda’s boyfriend?”
Brooklyn shrugged. “I dunno.”
“What
do
you know?”
This annoyed her. Sunshine probably annoyed her. “I dunno. I just saw her with some guy once at South Shore.”
“South Shore Plaza? The mall?”
“Uh,” she pulsed her eyes at my cluelessness, “yeah.”
“So you were at the mall and—”
“Yeah, like, me and Tisha and Reilly.” She indicated two of the other girls. “And we ran into them coming out of Diesel. They didn’t buy anything, though.”
“They didn’t buy anything,” I said.
She looked down at her nails and crossed her legs and let out a sigh.
“Anything else?” I asked the room.
Nothing. Not even blank stares. They’d all decided to investigate their nails or their shoes or their reflections in the windows.
“Well, thank you,” I said. “You’ve all been very helpful.”
“Whatever,” two of them said.
• • •
On the front steps, I exchanged business cards with Principal Nghiem and shook her small, smooth hand.
“Thank you,” I said. “You’ve been a huge help.”
“I hope so. Good luck.”
I started down the stairs.
“Mr. Kenzie.”
I looked back up at her. The sun had popped out, hard and strong. It turned last night’s snow into a brook that gurgled as it rushed along the gutters toward the sewer grate.
Mai shaded her eyes. “Those exams she missed? Those overdue papers? If you get her back here soon, we’ll find a way to make up all that work. Without damage to her academic file. She’ll get that scholarship to a great school, I promise.”
“I just have to find her soon.”
She nodded.
“So,” I said, “I’ll find her soon.”
“I know you will.”
We acknowledged the gravity of the situation with the briefest of nods, and I felt something else in the exchange, too, something a little warm and a little wistful and better left unacknowledged and unexamined.
She turned back and entered the school, and the heavy green door closed behind her. I walked up the street to my Jeep. As I clicked the remote to unlock the door, a girl came out from behind it.
She was one of the seven I’d just interviewed. She had dark eyes pooled in shadow and lank dark hair and skin as white as Styrofoam. Of the seven girls in the room, she was the only one who’d said nothing.
“What’re you going to do if you find her?”
“Bring her home.”
“What home?”
“She can’t stay out there by herself.”
“Maybe she’s not by herself. Maybe ‘out there’ ain’t so bad.”
“It’s pretty bad sometimes.”
“Have you seen where she lives?” She lit a cigarette.
I shook my head.
“Well, break in sometime, m’ man. Check out the microwave for starters.”
“The microwave.”
She repeated it as she blew a series of smoke O’s out of her mouth. “The mi-cro-wave. Yes.”
I looked in her dark eyes, which were fringed by even darker eye shadow. “Amanda doesn’t strike me as the kind of girl who takes friends by her house.”
“I never said it was Amanda who brought me into her house.”
It took me a few seconds. “You went there with Sophie?”
The girl said nothing, just chewed the left corner of her upper lip.
“Okay. So is Sophie still there?”
“Might be,” the girl said.
“And Amanda—where’s she?”
“I honestly don’t know. Swear.”
“Why are you talking to me if you don’t want me to find her?”
She crossed her arms so that her right elbow was cupped in her left palm as she took another drag. A smattering of pink scars rose up her inner arms like railroad ties. “I heard a story going around about Amanda and Sophie. I heard five people went into a room over Thanksgiving. You with me so far?”
“Yeah, I think I can follow.”
“Two people in that room died. But four people walked back out.”
I chuckled. “What are you smoking besides that cigarette?”
“Just remember what I said.”
“Could you
be
more cryptic?”
She shrugged and bit a nail. “Gotta go.”
As she walked past me, I said, “Why talk to me?”
“Because Zippo was a friend of mine. Last year? He was more than a friend. First more-than-a-friend I ever had.”
“Who’s Zippo?”
Her façade of apathetic cool collapsed and she looked about nine years old. Nine years old and abandoned by her parents at the mall. “You’re serious?”
“I am.”
“Christ,” she said, and her voice cracked. “You don’t know anything.”
“Who’s Zippo?” I said again.
“Buzzer’s buzzed, man.” She flicked her cigarette to the street. “Gots to get my education on. You drive safe.”
She walked up the street as the melted snow continued to rush along the gutters and the sky turned to slate. As she vanished through the same door Principal Nghiem had gone through, I realized I’d never gotten her name. The door closed, and I climbed in my Jeep and drove back across the river.
W
hile I’d spent the morning interviewing annoying prep-school girls, Angie’s friend, PR, had agreed to watch Gabby for a few afternoons. So it was that my wife joined me on casework for the first time in almost five years, and we drove north of the city to meet Sophie Corliss’s father.
Brian Corliss lived in Reading on a maple-lined street with wide white sidewalks and lawns that looked like they shaved twice a day. It was a solidly middle-class section of town, leaning toward upper maybe, but not to an elitist degree. The garages were two-car, not four, and the cars were Audis and 4Runner Limiteds, not Lexuses and BMW 740s. All the houses looked well cared for, and all were adorned with Christmas lights and decorations. None more so than the Corliss house, a white Colonial with black shutters and window trim, a black front door. White icicle lights dripped from the gutters, porch posts, and railings. A wreath as big as the sun hung above the garage door. In front of the bushes on the front lawn stood a manger replica and figures of the three kings, Mary, Joseph, and a menagerie of animals arrayed around an empty cradle. To their right stood a somewhat incongruous menagerie of snowmen, elves, reindeer, Santa and Mrs. Claus, and a leering Grinch. On the roof, a sled sat by the chimney and more lights spelled out
MERRY CHRISTMAS
. The mailbox post was a candy cane.
When we pulled up the driveway, Brian was in his garage, unloading groceries from the back of an Infiniti SUV. He greeted us with a wave and a smile as open as a heartland prairie. He was a trim man who wore a denim Oxford unbuttoned over a white T tucked into a pair of sharply pressed khakis. His canvas safari jacket was maroon with a black leather collar. He was in his mid-forties and looked to be in exceptional shape. This made sense, because he’d made his living the last ten years first as a fitness trainer and then as a fitness guru. He traveled New England speaking to small companies about how they could raise their productivity by getting their employees into better shape. He’d even written a book,
Lose the Fat and All That,
which had become a local bestseller for a few weeks, and a cursory study of his Web sites (he had three) and his autobiography suggested he hadn’t neared his career ceiling yet. He shook our hands, not overdoing the grip the way a lot of workout fiends do, and thanked us for coming and apologized for not being able to meet us halfway.
“It’s just the city traffic, you know? After two, forget about it. But I mentioned it to Donna and she said, ‘But won’t the detectives have to drive back in that same traffic?’ ”
“Donna’s your wife?”
He nodded. “She had a point. So I feel guilty.”
“But we’re imposing on you,” I said.
He waved that off. “You’re not imposing at all. If you can help bring my daughter back to me, you’re most definitely not imposing.”
He lifted a grocery bag off the floor of the garage. There were six of them, and I reached for two. Angie took two more.
“Oh, no,” he said. “I can get them.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Angie said. “It’s the least we can do.”
“Jeesh,” he said. “You’re very kind. Thank you.”
He closed the hatch of the Infiniti and I was mildly surprised to see one of those moronic 9/11 Terrorist Hunting Permit decals on the rear window. I suppose I should have felt safer knowing that if Bin Laden dropped by to borrow a cup of sugar, Brian Corliss was ready to put out his lights for America, but mostly I just felt annoyed that the thousands who had died on September 11 were being exploited for a dumb fucking decal. Before my mouth could get me into trouble, though, we were following Brian Corliss up the path to the black front door and entering his two-hundred-year-old house.
We stood by the granite kitchen counter as he unloaded the groceries into the fridge and cabinets. The first floor had been gut-remodeled so recently you could smell the sawdust. Two hundred years ago, I doubt the builder had seen the need to go with the sunken living room or the pressed copper ceiling in the dining room or the Sub-Zero in the kitchen. All the window frames were new and uniform eggshell. Even so, the house had a mismatched feel. The living room was white on white—white couch, white throw rugs, off-white fireplace mantel, ash-white logs in the ivory metal log basket, a huge white Christmas tree towering over it all from a corner. The kitchen was dark—cherrywood cabinets and dark granite counters and black granite backsplash. Even the Sub-Zero and the chimney hood above the stove were black. The dining room was Danish Modern, a clean, blond hard-edged table surrounded by hard-edged high-backed chairs. The ultimate effect was of a house that had been furnished from too many catalogs.
Framed pictures of Brian Corliss and a blond woman and a blond boy sat on the mantel, on the shelves of a credenza, on top of the fridge. Collages of them hung on the walls. You could follow the boy’s growth from birth to what looked like four. The blond woman was Donna, I assumed. She was attractive the way sports bar hostesses and pharmaceutical reps are—hair the color of rum and lots of it, teeth as bright as Bermuda. She had the look of a woman who kept her plastic surgeon on speed dial. Her breasts were prominently displayed in most of the photos and looked like perfect softballs made of flesh. Her forehead was unlined in the way of the recently embalmed and her smile resembled that of someone undergoing electroshock. In a couple of the photos—just a couple—stood a dark-haired girl with anxious eyes and an unsure, fleshy chin: Sophie.
“When was the last time you saw her?” I asked.
“It’s been a few months.”
Angie and I looked across the counter at him.
He held up both palms. “I know, I know. But there were extenuating . . .” He grimaced and then smiled. “Let’s just say parenting is not easy. You have any kids?”
“One,” I said. “Daughter.”
“How old?”
“Four.”
“Little child,” he said, “little problems. Big child, big problems.” He looked across the counter at Angie. “And you, miss?”
“We’re married.” Angie tilted her head toward me. “Same four-year-old.”
That seemed to please him. He smiled to himself and hummed under his breath as he put a dozen eggs and a half-gallon of skim milk into the fridge.
“She was such a happy child.” He finished emptying the bag and folded it neatly before putting it under the counter. “A joy every day. I fully admit I was unprepared for the day she turned into such a Sullen Sally.”
“And what turned her into . . . that?” Angie asked.
He peered at the eggplant he pulled from the next bag, frozen for a moment. “Her mom,” he said. “God rest her. But, yes, she . . .” He looked up from the eggplant as if surprised to find us there. “She left.”
“How old was Sophie when she left?”
“Well, she left with Sophie.”
“So, she left you. She didn’t leave Sophie.” Angie glanced at me. “I’m a little lost, Brian.”
Brian put the eggplant into the crisper drawer. “I regained custody when Sophie was ten. She—this is hard—Sophie’s mother? She developed a chemical dependency. First on Vicodin, then on OxyContin. She stopped acting like a responsible adult. Then she left me and went to live with someone else. And they created a wholly unfit environment for a child to grow up in, believe me.” He looked at both of us, waiting, it appeared, for an indication of agreement.
I gave him my best empathetic nod and commiserating gaze.
“So I sued for custody,” he said, “and eventually I won.”
“How many years was Sophie with her mother before that?” Angie asked.
“Three.”
“Three . . .”
“Sophie’s mother was addicted to painkillers throughout that time?” I asked.
“Eventually. I mean, she stopped, or claimed she did. For the full three years.”
“So what created the unsafe environment?”
He gave us a warm smile. “Nothing I feel comfortable discussing right now.”
“Okay,” I said.
Angie said, “So you brought Sophie back here when she was ten?”
He nodded. “And at first it was a little awkward, because I hadn’t been a permanent fixture in her life for six years, but then, I’ll tell you something, we figured it out. We found our rhythm. We did.”
“Six years,” Angie said. “I thought you said three.”
“No, no. Her mother and I separated when Sophie was just turning seven and then I had to fight three years for custody, but the six years I’m talking about were the first six years of her life. I was overseas during most of that. And Sophie and her mother were here.”
“So really,” Angie said with an edge in her voice I wasn’t real keen on, “you missed her whole life.”
“Huh?” His open face closed and darkened.
“Overseas, Brian?” I said. “As in military?”
“Affirmative.”
“Doing what?”
“Protecting this country.”
“No doubt,” I said. “And thank you. Sincerely. Thank you. I’m just wondering where you served.”
He closed the fridge door and folded and stowed the last of the paper bags. He gave me that warm, warm smile of his. “So you can second-guess the gravity of my contribution?”
“Definitely not,” I said. “It’s just a question.”
After an awkward few seconds, he held up a hand and smiled wider. “Of course, of course. I apologize. I was a civil engineer with Bechtel in Dubai.”
Angie kept her voice light. “I thought you said you were in the military.”
“No,” he said, his eyes fixed on nothing. “I agreed to your partner’s description when he said
as in
the military. When you’re in the Emirates, working for a government friendly to ours, you may as well be in the military. You are most certainly a target of any jihadist who decides to blow you into meat scraps because you symbolize his cockeyed idea of Western corruption and influence. I didn’t want my daughter growing up in that.”
“So why take the job in the first place?”
“I’ll tell you, Angela, I’ve asked myself that a thousand times, and the answer’s not one I’m proud of.” He gave us the hapless shrug of a charming child. “The money was too good to pass up. There. I admit it. The tax break, too. I knew if I worked my tail off for five years, I’d come home with a king’s ransom I could put toward my family and toward building my personal-training enterprise.”
“Which you obviously did,” I said. “And quite well.” I was good cop, today. Maybe even kiss-ass cop. Whatever works, says I.
He looked from his kitchen bar at his living room like a modern-day Alexander with no worlds left to conquer. “So, yes, it was not the greatest idea to think I could hold a family together while I was six thousand miles away. And I own that failure. I do. But when I returned, I came home to a wife with substance abuse issues and a value system I found”—he shrug-winced—“distasteful. We fought a lot. I couldn’t get Cheryl to see how destructive she was being to Sophie. And the more I tried to get her to see the truth, the more she retreated into denial. One day, I came home to an empty house.” Another wince, another shrug. “I spent the next three years fighting for my rights as a father and, eventually, I won. I won.”
“You got sole custody?”
He led us into the sunken living room. Brian and I took seats on the sofa, while Angie sat on the love seat across from us. On the coffee table between us was a white copper bucket filled with bottled water. Brian offered us the bottles and we each took one. The labels advertised Brian’s weight-loss book.
“Once Cheryl died, I did, yes.”
“Oh,” Angie said, her eyes wider than usual, her jaw working to mask her frustration, “your wife died. And
then
you, uh, won custody?”
“Exactly. She contracted stomach cancer. I’ll go to my grave knowing it was the drugs that did it to her. You can’t abuse your body that way and expect it to continually repair itself.”
I noticed that the skin closest to his eyes, where the crow’s feet should have been, was whiter and tighter than the rest of his face. Circles the size of sand dollars indented the flesh. Like his wife, he’d had work done. Apparently his body didn’t repair itself continually.
“So you received sole custody,” Angie said.
He nodded. “Thank God they were living in New Hampshire. If it had been Vermont or here? I’d probably have had to fight another three years.”
Angie looked over at me. I gave her my flattest gaze, the one I reserve for situations that make the hairs on the back of my neck stand up.
“Brian, excuse me for jumping to conclusions,” she said, “but are we talking about a same-sex-marriage issue?”
“Not marriage.” He placed the tip of one index finger on the coffee table and bent it until the flesh turned a pink-lemonade shade. “Not marriage. Not in New Hampshire. But, yes, a domestic partnership of that nature was being enacted in full view of my daughter. If they’d been allowed to marry, who knows how long the custody fight could have worn on?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Excuse me?”
Angie said, “Did your ex-wife’s partner—?”
“Elaine. Elaine Murrow.”
“Elaine, thank you. Did Elaine legally adopt Sophie?”
“No.”
“She ever begin proceedings in pursuit of that?”