The Missing (9 page)

The doctor had found the mole during a routine checkup. The Boston surgeon took out a good chunk of the skin cancer from her arm and many of her lymph nodes. He couldn’t reach the melanoma that had already settled inside her lungs.

Sheila had refused chemotherapy because she knew it wouldn’t help. Two experimental treatments had failed. Now it was just a matter of time.

Darby dropped her back-pack on the kitchen chair. Stacked near the back door were two cardboard boxes full of carefully folded clothes. She spotted a pink cashmere sweater. Darby had bought
the sweater for her mother this past Christmas.

Darby pulled out the sweater and was pierced by a memory of her mother standing in front of Big Red’s closet. It was a month after the funeral. Sheila, holding back tears, had touched one of his flannel shirts and then pulled her hand back as though something had bitten it.

‘Your mother cleaned out some of her closets today,’ the nurse said. ‘She asked me to drop them off at St. Pius on my way home. For their fundraiser.’

Darby nodded. Packing up the clothes, she knew, was her mother’s way of trying to help ease her through her grief.

‘I’ll drop them off,’ Darby said.

‘Are you sure? I don’t mind.’

‘I drive by St. Pius on my way to work.’

‘Before you drop off the clothes, you may want to go through the pockets. I found this.’ The nurse handed Darby a picture of a pale, freckle-faced woman with blond hair and striking blue eyes taken at what appeared to be a picnic.

Darby had no idea who the woman was. She put the picture on her mother’s tray. ‘Thanks, Tina.’

Sheila was sitting up in bed, reading the new John Connolly mystery. Darby was glad for the soft lighting from the two lamps. It made her mother’s face look less gaunt, less sick. The rest of her was covered up by blankets.

Darby placed the tray across her mother’s lap, careful of the IV drip for the morphine.

‘I hear you had a good day.’

Sheila picked up the picture. ‘Where did you find this?’

‘Tina found it the back pocket of a pair of jeans you’re donating. Who is she?’

‘Cindy Greenleaf’s daughter, Regina,’ Sheila said. ‘You and Regina used to play together. They moved to Minnesota when you were around five, I think. Cindy sends me Christmas cards every year with Regina’s picture.’

Sheila tossed the picture inside the wastebasket and glanced briefly at the wall behind the TV.

After the diagnosis, Sheila had taken the pictures from downstairs and more from the photo albums, had everything framed and hung on every amount of available wall space so she could see them from her bed.

Seeing the pictures made Darby think of the wall outside Carol Cranmore’s room. Then Darby thought of Carol’s mother, her words about how having children was more love than your heart can hold. The love you felt for your child, Darby had been told, was all-consuming, and all-encompassing. It owned you until you were buried.

The woman you found underneath the porch looks like a famine victim,’ Sheila said.

‘It looks even worse up close. She had scars and cuts all over her body, and these sores.’

‘What happened to her?’

‘I don’t know. We don’t know who she is or where she came from. She’s being treated at Mass General. Right now, she’s sedated.’

‘Do you know her condition?’

‘She’s got sepsis.’ Darby told her mother about her discussion with Jane Doe’s doctor and what had happened at the hospital.

‘Survival rates for sepsis depend on things like the patient’s overall health, how effective the antibiotics work against the infection, the patient’s immune system,’ Sheila said. ‘Given what you told me about Jane Doe’s low blood pressure, some of her organs starting to fail, I’d say she’s gone into septic shock. The doctor’s in a tricky situation, trying to treat the sepsis while keeping her sedated.’

‘So prognosis doesn’t look good.’

‘I don’t think so.’

‘I hope to God she wakes up. She might know where Carol is – she’s the missing teenager. Carol Cranmore.’

‘I saw it on the news. Any leads?’

‘Not much, I’m afraid. Hopefully, we’ll find something soon.’ Hopefully. Hope. Darby was spreading it around too thin. It left her nerves feeling frayed and vulnerable.

She sat down in her father’s old recliner. It had been brought up from downstairs and set up next to her mother’s bed so she could sleep here at night.

At first, Darby wanted to be here in case her mother woke up and needed something. Now Darby wanted to be here so she could hold her mother when the time came to say good-bye.

‘I ran into Carol’s mother about an hour ago,’ Darby said. ‘Talking to her, seeing what she was going through, it made me think of Melanie’s mother. Do you remember the first Christmas after Mel disappeared, you and I were in the car, on the way to the mall or something, and we saw Mel’s parents standing out in the cold, nailing a piece of plywood with Mel’s picture to a telephone pole on East Dunstable Road?’

Sheila nodded, her pale face pinching tight at the memory.

‘Everyone in town knew about Victor Grady, and Mel’s parents were standing out there in the bitter cold either refusing to give up hope, or refusing to face the truth,’ Darby said. ‘I wanted you to stop the car and you drove past them.’

‘I didn’t want you to suffer anymore. You had suffered enough.’

Darby remembered looking in the car’s side-view mirror, watching as Mrs Cruz turned her back to a blast of wind, clutching the sheets with Mel’s picture against her chest so they wouldn’t blow away. Melanie’s mother grew smaller until she finally
disappeared, and right then, Darby wanted to throw the door open and run back there and help them.

Was Helena Cruz’s love for her daughter just as intense now, after two decades? Or had she learned how to mute it, make it less sharp and easier to carry?

There was nothing you could have done to help them,’ Sheila said.

‘I know. I know they blamed me for what happened to Mel – they probably still do.’

‘What happened to Melanie wasn’t your fault.’

Darby nodded. ‘Seeing that look on Dianne Cranmore’s face… I just wanted to do something to help her.’

‘You
are
helping her.’

‘It doesn’t feel like we’re doing enough.’

‘It never will,’ Sheila said.

Chapter 19

Daniel Boyle unlocked the basement door and moved around the desk, walking past the computer monitors and the mannequins dressed in the costumes he wore. What he was looking for was inside the next room. He took out his keys and unlocked the filing cabinet.

The hanging file folders were arranged chronologically with his most recent projects near the front for easy access. The older projects were in the bottom drawer. The folder marked
BELHAM
was in the far back.

Dust rose from the folder as he flipped past the yellowed newspaper clippings of Victor Grady. In the back he found the bundled stacks of Polaroids.

The colors had faded in the pictures, but Melanie Cruz’s face was clear enough. She stood behind the locked bars of the wine cellar. The other five pictures showed what he had done to her. Boyle stared at the pictures and felt the beginnings of an erection.

He had taken other pictures – ones of Melanie Cruz lying dead in the ground out in the Belham woods. Those pictures, along with a map showing where she was buried, had been burned away in the
fire. Boyle remembered how he had set the fire but couldn’t remember where he had buried Melanie Cruz or the other women.

He picked up the stack of pictures belonging to a teenage girl with dark red hair and striking green eyes. He removed the elastic bands and flipped over the first picture.

The teenager’s name was Darby McCormick. She bore a striking resemblance to the crime scene investigator he had seen at the hospital.

But was it the same person?

Boyle took out his cell phone and dialed information to get the number for the Boston Crime Lab. The operator connected him. Less than a minute later, he was listening to the lab’s automated phone system instructing him on how to contact someone at the lab. Two choices: enter the person’s extension or the first four letters of the person’s last name.

He punched in the letters and flipped through pictures of a heavy-set blond woman named Samantha Kent. Boyle remembered how she had refused to eat. How she got weak and then sick. How he had brought her out to the Belham woods to strangle her and was interrupted by Darby McCormick and her two friends – Melanie Cruz and the blond girl he later stabbed inside the foyer. What a mess that was. He was trying to remember the blonde’s name when the voice mail picked up.

‘You’ve reached the office of Darby McCormick. I’m either away from my desk or on another line –’

Boyle hung up and leaned back against the wall.

Chapter 20

Boyle stared up at the wall crammed full of pictures of the women he had hunted over the years. Sometimes he sat here for hours, staring up at the faces and recalling what he had done to each of them. Pleasant thoughts to pass the time.

Tacked to the bottom corner was an old picture of Alicia Cross. She had lived two streets over, on the other side of the woods behind his house. She was riding her bike along a long stretch of empty road when he pulled up next to her. Alicia’s mother, Boyle had told the twelve-year-old, had sent him to come get her and take her to the hospital. Alicia’s father had been in a serious car accident. Alicia was so upset she left her bike on the road and got into his car.

She was too scared to fight, too small to fight. Boyle was sixteen and strong.

For an entire week – the second week of his mother’s monthlong vacation in Paris – police and volunteers combed through the woods and surrounding neighborhoods. Boyle watched them through his bedroom window. For three days, police and volunteers from the neighborhood searched the
woods around his house. He recalled the long summer afternoons he sat by the window, listening to Alicia’s mother call out her daughter’s name over and over again while he stimulated himself.

At night, he would go downstairs into the wine cellar and remove Alicia’s restraints. Sometimes he chased her through the dark basement. There were many places to hide.

While that was fun, nothing compared to the hot, blinding rush of excitement Boyle felt when he strangled her.

The night he killed her, he couldn’t sleep. Strangling Alicia was magnificent, but it wasn’t as fulfilling as watching the fear in her eyes, the way she stared at the rosary beads on the floor while she feebly clawed at the rope around her neck.

Boyle felt a tremendous sense of power – not the power to kill, no, that was too easy. What he held in his hands was the power to alter and shape destinies. He could change the shape of the world around him any way he wanted. Gripped in his hands was the power of God.

Early the next morning, while it was still dark, Boyle headed out into the woods with a shovel. When he came back for the body, he found his mother standing in the kitchen. She had come back from her Paris trip early. She didn’t say why, didn’t ask why his clothes were so dirty or why he was sweating. She made him take her luggage and shopping bags up
to her bedroom and then spent the rest of the day sleeping.

Later that night, he dumped Alicia’s body in the grave. Boyle stood over her body, gripped with a peculiar sadness. He shouldn’t have killed her. He should have strangled her until she passed out. That way, when she woke up, he could do it all over again, as many times as he wanted.

Boyle heard a branch snap behind him. He turned around and saw his mother, her face clear in the moonlight. She didn’t look angry, or sad, or disappointed. She looked blank.

‘Hurry up and bury it,’ was all she said.

She didn’t talk to him during the long walk back to the house. He spent the time wondering what would happen. Two years ago, when she caught him strangling a cat, she sent him to his room. She waited until he fell asleep and then came in and hit him with the buckle end of a belt. He had the scars to prove it.

His mother locked the front door. ‘Did you keep her in the house?’

He nodded.

‘Show me.’

He did. Alicia’s rosary beads were on the floor. They must have fallen from his pocket.

‘Pick it up,’ his mother said.

He did. By the time he stood, his mother had locked the door to the wine cellar.

During his two-week confinement, he used the
same slop bucket Alicia had used for her bathroom needs. He slept on the cold concrete floor. His mother didn’t visit him. She didn’t bring him food.

Trapped alone in the cool dark that never went away, Boyle never cried or called out for his mother. He used the time constructively, thinking about what he would do next.

He had some wonderful ideas for his mother.

One day he woke to voices. There was a vent in the adjoining room and he could hear his mother talking to someone upstairs – the police. His mother had called the police. Panic gripped up and then floated away when he heard his grandmother’s voice.

‘You can’t leave him down there forever,’ Ophelia Boyle was saying.

‘Fine,’ his mother said. ‘You can take Daniel home with you. I’ve been thinking he should be spending time with his father, anyway. Should I bring Daniel by the club or the office?’

Boyle had been told his father had died in a car accident before he was born.

This isn’t the first time Daniel’s done something like this,’ his mother said. ‘I told you about the animals who disappeared around here last summer – and let’s not forget the time Marsha Erickson caught him peeking inside her daughter’s window in the middle of the night.’

Boyle thought about his cousin, Richard Fowler. Richard was Marsha’s friend. He had been inside her
house several times, had stolen her money and lacy underwear – Richard was the one who had put the sleeping pills in Marsha’s beer. When she passed out, Richard called Boyle and said to come over. The two of them spent a wonderful night playing with Marsha inside her bedroom. Her parents were away for the weekend.