Disappearance at Devil's Rock Read online

  Kate asks, “What do you think?”

  “We’ll give it a shot tonight, I guess. Maybe I’ll return it tomorrow. Go brush your teeth and get ready for bed. I’ll meet you in your bedroom.”

  Elizabeth adjusts the camera so she gets a shot of the front door and the living room, and nothing of the hallway or kitchen. She meant what she said to Janice about ruling out someone sneaking into the house. She speaks into the phone: “Hello? Hello?” There’s a second or two lag from the phone to the camera’s speakers, and she hears herself distorted and tinny, like the treble on an old stereo turned all the way up. Would Kate even know what treble is? She wants to cry that she’s already thinking of Kate as being singular and without Tommy.

  Elizabeth says into the phone, “Is anyone there?”

  Kate calls out from down the hallway: “Mom? Mom? Are you talking to someone?”

  “No one. Myself. Testing the speaker.”

  “Okay. Come on, let’s go. I’m ready.”

  Elizabeth follows Kate into her little yellow bedroom. Kate says, “Don’t turn off the lights until I’m in bed.” She’s still so young sometimes. Middle school almost broke Tommy in sixth grade, as it almost breaks all of us, and Elizabeth can’t think of Kate being in that place by herself. Elizabeth slides into wild contingencies and scenarios that don’t make any practical sense: Janice moving in and homeschooling Kate for a year (never mind that Mom has no teaching experience), or paying (with what money?) a rotation of tutors to teach Kate what she needs to pass the sixth-grade state exams, or begging the town to let her repeat fifth grade for her own emotional health and well-being and to keep Kate in a safe place for one more year, just one more year.

  “You can turn the light out now.”

  “Right. Sorry.”

  Kate curls up under the covers. She makes Elizabeth promise to wake her up if she sees anything. She also makes her promise not to stay up all night watching her phone. Elizabeth gives noncommittal okays to both.

  Kate flips onto her stomach, and with her head turned away from Elizabeth she says, “This is hard, Mom.”

  “The hardest.”

  Kate says, “I want Tommy to come back home.”

  “Me too.” Her words are an exhale and a resignation to play the part, to see this through until the end, whenever that might be, even if it’s never.

  “Do you believe he will?”

  “I’m trying, Kate.”

  “Or do you believe he’s a ghost?” Kate whispers ghost.

  “It’s awful but—I think I do. I don’t know, Kate. I don’t.”

  “You don’t know what you believe?”

  “Yeah. Is that weird?”

  “No. That’s how I feel, too.”

  Elizabeth sits at the edge of the bed and rubs Kate’s back until her breathing is deep, long, rhythmic. Kate doesn’t move when Elizabeth finally lifts her hand away. Elizabeth turns on the camera app and inspects the empty living room and implacable front door, staring into the corners and crevices of the screen, looking for shapes, for shadows. How can she not watch this all night?

  Elizabeth tiptoes out of Kate’s room and into the hallway. She listens and only hears the hum of the refrigerator. She holds the phone up to her face and whispers, “Are you there? Tommy?” and her digitally transmogrified words echoes back down the hallway. “I’m so scared.” Her pixilated voice limping back to her is the loneliest sound in the world. She can’t bear to hear it again.

  Elizabeth opens her bedroom door and remains standing in the doorway. She considers spending the night on the couch and having a staring contest with the camera’s eye, to see who blinks first, when there’s a knock, or bump, and a shuffle, or something rubbing, sliding on the floor, perhaps. The sounds are mixed up, doubled, an echo within an echo, and Elizabeth realizes the noises are coming from two places at once. Muffled, distant, a thunderstorm at least five-Mississippis away, the sounds originate from the living room, it has to be the living room, and those same sounds, compressed and static filled, filter out of the tiny speaker in her phone.

  “Hey? Hello? Is someone there?”

  Elizabeth runs down the hallway into the living room and finds it how she left it: dark and empty. She stands in front of the couch and listens, listens so hard, willing those sounds and its unknown source to regenerate, to show itself, or (as she hopes and fears) himself. She goes to the app’s audio menu, finds that nothing was recorded, nothing was saved.

  She falls backward, landing on the couch, and her phone vibrates with the motion detection alert, then a video clip opens of her sitting on the couch, light spilling out of her eyes.

  “Elizabeth? Elizabeth? Are you up?”

  Elizabeth pulls her head from between the pillows. It’s painfully bright in the room. She cocks one open eye to her bedroom doorway. Janice is standing there, but Kate is there, too, peering out from behind as though her Nana is a hiding spot.

  Janice says, “Sorry, honey. I’m glad you actually got some sleep, but there are more pages on the living room floor.”

  “Shit! What time is it?” Elizabeth sits up quickly and paws around the bed for her phone.

  Janice: “A little after 8:30. I was the first one up. Found the pages there. Same spot. I haven’t read them yet, but Kate just did.”

  “Phone’s on the floor. There.” Kate edges halfway into the room and points.

  Elizabeth scoops up her phone and there are five motion-detection-triggered notifications on the home screen. “Dammit, I slept right through them.” She sits back down on the bed. “The camera was set off a bunch of times!”

  Janice: “It went off after Kate and I got up and went into the kitchen and living room.”

  “Oh, yeah, right. But hey, there’s a couple notifications from when we were all sleep.”

  The first notification was at 2:11 A.M. and has an accompanying snapshot of the living room. There’s nothing there in the still photo: no diary pages on the floor, no person walking through the door or into the room. Nothing out of the ordinary that she can tell.

  Janice: “See anything?”

  “The first one is just a picture. And nothing. Room’s empty. So why did the camera go off. Something had to set if off, right?”

  Janice: “Not necessarily. You were complaining last night that the camera wasn’t working right.”

  Elizabeth checks the second notification, which was at 4:34 A.M. She says, “Hey, there’s a video clip!”

  Janice turns on the bedroom overhead light even though the room is plenty bright enough with the morning sunlight bullying through the windows, and then she sits in the plush chair. Kate slowly walks over to the bed, next to Elizabeth, and cranes her neck to watch the video on the small screen.

  Elizabeth hits Play. A pile of pages are already there on the living room rug. The clip runs and she tenses up, waiting for something to happen but there’s nothing. No movement, no sign of how the pages got there.

  “Pages on the floor but that’s it. How did they get there without the camera going off, right? Hold on, hold on . . .” She hits Play again.

  Kate says, “Mom.”

  Elizabeth: “Wait. Okay, the pages are already there. Did I miss something? I had to have missed—holy shit! See that! See that shadow? There was a shadow right there next to the front door!”

  Kate: “I saw it, too!”

  Elizabeth looks up at Kate and then over to Janice. “Come on, you have to watch this.”

  Janice and Kate crowd closer around Elizabeth and the phone, and she replays the video. Five seconds in Elizabeth says, “There! Did you see it? Let me go back. Did you see that? There was a shadow of someone standing there, long and thin, and then shrunk down to nothing, like it winked out or went offscreen or something. Did you see it?”

  Janice: “I’m not sure. Maybe?”

  She plays it again. And a third and fourth time. No one says anything.

  “Now I can’t see it. Wait. I saw it. It was there. You said you saw it, Kate, r
ight?”

  “Yeah. But I don’t know now.”

  Janice: “Maybe it was how you were holding or tilting your phone that first time, and you saw a weird reflection.”

  Kate says, “Mom,” again, like she wants something from her.

  “No, it was there. You saw it, too. It was there. And the pages are there and something had to set off the motion detector.” She keeps hitting Play. She wants more. She wants to see more.

  Kate: “Mom.”

  “What, Kate, what?”

  “You really should go read the pages, like now,” Kate says. “They’re on the kitchen table.”

  Elizabeth goes to the kitchen and sits at the table. She reads the pages and then she reads them again, and the possibility of what is and isn’t on the camera footage gives way to the certainty of despair, that something unimaginably awful has indeed happened to Tommy, or maybe even worse, will happen to Tommy, and there’s nothing she or anyone else can do. There’s no overt or obviously stated threat within the pages. But the possibilities, the horror of possibilities. Then a manic third read. Each read happening faster, the words beginning to be memorized, categorized, but their meanings, their stories, their poor representations of what it was that actually happened are still out of reach. During a fourth read, Janice and Kate’s distant rumble of recriminations and arguments and accusations explodes. Kate is all but screaming her denial that she is the source of the mysteriously appearing diary pages.

  Elizabeth stands, and she yells, “Shut up! Both of you! Just shut the fuck up for once! Can you do that? Can you?” It isn’t fair and she doesn’t mean it. The outburst is not really directed at them, but at the avalanche of the what-ifs smothering her.

  Elizabeth can’t look at either her mother or her daughter. There’s a light sniffling coming from one of them. She says, “Look, I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have said that. Please, we need each other. We can’t do this or be like this, you know? And I’m—I need it quiet right now. Okay? I’m calling Detective Allison.”

  Allison answers after the second ring. Janice and Kate stand in their respective corners of the kitchen. Kate runs her fingers through her hair, pulling it over her face. The coffeemaker needs more water and it flashes a blue light on Janice’s elbow. Elizabeth tells Allison she’s found more of Tommy’s diary pages, and she describes their content. When asked where the pages came from, Elizabeth says she has yet to find their source, and that Tommy had stuck them in different places in his room and the house. Elizabeth says she doesn’t know why he would spread those pages out like that, but she will keep looking and digging around and let her know if she finds more. Allison asks if she can come pick up the newest pages now. Elizabeth says, “Yes. Come on over. We’ll be here,” and hangs up.

  Janice says, “What are we going to say to the detective about the surveillance cam?”

  “Nothing. Unless she asks.”

  “If she asks?”

  “The truth. I’m watching our front door and our living room for—”

  “For who, Elizabeth?”

  “For whoever it might be.” Elizabeth stares at Janice until she looks away.

  Kate walks out of the kitchen and goes to the bathroom and turns on the fan. Janice tends to the coffeemaker. Elizabeth stays at the kitchen table and reads the pages once more. Then she turns them over, print side down. She goes back to her phone and studies last night’s snapshot and video clip. She’s convinced that when she first watched the video Tommy’s shadow was there. Just like he was there that night in her room. He was there in the video, a shadow hiding in the dark, huddled in the kitchen. There. He was there even if he isn’t there now. She compares the snapshot to paused stills in the video, searching for subtle variations in the tone, color, depth of the images. She’s missing something, and maybe if she watches the video the right way at the right angle, he’ll be there again.

  Allison and Luis, Luis and the Devil at the Rock

  Detective Allison Murtagh meets with Luis’s parents at their house, sequestered just off the kitchen, sitting at the dining room table that likely isn’t used for very many family meals. Their dining room table has no tablecloth. The tabletop is thick, darkly stained, and as weathered as a New England farmhouse with deep gouges and cup rings eating into the wood. Mrs. Fernandez apologizes for the dusty table and for the place being a mess. Allison stops herself from blurting out If you want to see a mess, you have no idea.

  Three months ago Allison moved her eighty-four-year-old father (suffering with Alzheimer’s) into a nursing home, and she has since moved out of her condo to live in her family’s old house in Ames. She uses her parents’ old dining room table as an open filing cabinet. With a single chair (the rest of the set is moldering in the basement) situated in the middle of the table lengthwise, the right side of the table is covered in legal documents, Medicare forms, communiqués from the lawyer and nursing home, tax records, each and all part of an ongoing legal evolution that began over six months ago after her father signed over power of attorney, allowing Allison to make decisions regarding his health care and finances. On the left side of the table are piles of Dad’s bills and receipts arranged into stalagmites of varying heights. All of her waking off-hours (which, these days, aren’t many, given how much time she’s dedicated to the search for Tommy Sanderson) are spent visiting Dad or holed up in the old house trying to get her father’s affairs in some sort of order. The only time she’s ever been more exhausted, physically and emotionally, was when she broke up with her longtime girlfriend, Amy, three years ago.

  Mr. and Mrs. Fernandez offer Allison a coffee or water. She refuses both and places a notebook on the table. A black pen bookmarks the bulging spine. The Fernandezes are polite if not grim, serious, difficult to read. More cooperative than most. She tells them about Tommy’s diary pages that were found this morning, but not more than they need to know. And she tells them about a man named Arnold who spent time with the boys, and she would like to ask Luis about him.

  Allison says, “I’m certainly a long way away from being able to say that Arnold is in any way related to the disappearance, but he is someone I’d like to know more about.” She’s careful with pronouns, to say that she wants this information and not use we, even if it would be a royal we. Allison knows that at times a more personal approach in interviews is better than portraying herself as a mouthpiece of the State, as Amy so lovingly used to put it.

  Mr. Fernandez says, “I’ll go get him.”

  Luis walks in with his dad’s heavy hand on his back—a gesture of comfort or a push, Allison cannot tell. Mrs. Fernandez moves her chair over and tells her husband to bring the other chair around so that the three of them are sitting on the same side of the table, with Luis the farthest away from Allison.

  “Hi, Luis.”

  “Hello, Detective Murtagh.”

  Allison can’t get over his size, or lack of size. Everything about him is small and young, especially his face; gaunt, all dark eyes, smooth skin without a hint of the transformation to come. That he’s poised to be an eighth grader is, frankly, shocking. His middle school experience must be similar to the smallest gazelle on the Serengeti.

  “Ms. Sanderson found some diary entries of Tommy’s, and in them he writes about you guys hanging out with someone named Arnold.” She stops there, knowing that she hasn’t really asked a question. She wants his reaction.

  “Okay, yeah. Arnold.” He’s sheepish, but a normal sheepish, the appropriate level of distrust within a room full of adults watching you being interviewed by an authority figure.

  “He’s older than you are, correct? Any idea how old?”

  “Definitely out of high school. Early twenties maybe. Midtwenties? Don’t know for sure.”

  “How long have you known him?”

  “We met him earlier this summer. In June. Not too long after school got out.”

  “Where and how did you meet him?”

  “We rode our bikes to the 7-Eleven at Five Corners. We did th
at a lot this summer. To buy soda, gum, candy.” He pauses and looks at his parents. They both nod. “And me and Josh and Tommy, you know, the three of us, hanging out front. Arnold came by and he started talking, and . . .” Luis shrugged. “And we started hanging out together.”

  “Where did you hang out together that first day?”

  “First just at the 7-Eleven, but then, we met him, later, in the afternoon, at Borderland.”

  “Any particular place inside the park?”

  “Yeah, at Devil’s Rock.”

  Allison could almost hear Mr. Fernandez’s knuckles tighten into fists he’s keeping hidden under the table. Mrs. Fernandez is turned away from Allison and watching her son.

  Allison says, “What were you guys doing?”

  That shrug again. “Hanging out. Talking.”

  “Anything else?” Allison sits up straight in her chair and pushes her notebook away, but not far enough away that she can’t consult it or add to it.

  “He, uh, he brought a six-pack?” Luis says it like a question, but it still comes off as confident and surprisingly composed, especially for a kid admitting he was drinking beer with some random older guy in the woods, the same woods and same spot from which one of his best friends has gone missing. It’s a reminder that he is indeed older than he looks.

  Mr. Fernandez sighs at this and then folds his arms across his chest.

  Allison: “Did you drink?”

  “Yeah. Just one, though. First one ever.”

  “Did the three of you ask him to buy for you when you were at Five Corners? Charlie’s Liquors is right there.”

  “No. No.” Luis turns to his parents and says, “None of us asked him to buy or bring anything. He just showed up with them, I swear.”

  “Do you know his last name?”

  “No, he’s just Arnold.”

  “What does he do?”

  “I don’t know. He mentioned something about being between jobs, taking the summer off.”