Missing Persons Read online

  A huge gust of wind whooshed from the west. I didn’t sense it coming and the blunt force of the gale almost blew me over. When I finally caught my balance I looked toward the mountains the way somebody might look to check the identity of somebody who just sucker punched him. My conclusion? The forecast Chinooks had definitely arrived; the slopes of the Front Range were already haloed in snow that was being whipped off the glacial ice of the distant Divide.

  I braced my feet and tried Sam on his cell, but didn’t get an answer. I waited until the sheriff’s deputy and Sam drove up, told Sam what had happened, and wished I could start the day all over again.

  Lauren was planning to hang out with Grace on Saturday morning and then the two of them were going to do some clothes shopping at Flatiron. Later in the day, winds permitting, they were planning a mother-daughter “tablecloth restaurant” visit someplace Gracie kept insisting was a big secret. I spent the morning hoping to hear from Raoul or Sam. Didn’t. I filled the time writing a couple of reports that were long overdue, and did a few chores around the house before I cleaned up, hopped in my car, drove the few miles west to my office, and prepared to see Bill Miller.

  I wasn’t looking forward to the visit, and half hoped he would bag the session because of the Chinooks.

  65

  Bill was waiting for me.

  His car was parked where Diane usually left her Saab, not too far from the doors that led from our offices to the backyard. He was standing between the taillights, leaning back against the trunk, his arms folded over his chest. The January sun was already low over the southwest mountains and the fierce wind gusts were blowing anything that wasn’t bolted down from the west side of town to the east. Some day soon, one of these Chinook events was going to propel our rickety garage from our side of downtown to the other.

  I stopped my wagon parallel to his car-but a few feet farther from the rickety garage than usual-and stepped out. I didn’t like that his car was parked in back. I didn’t like that he wasn’t waiting for me by the front door.

  He greeted me with, “You knew.”

  I chose defensiveness. Wise? Probably not. “I’d given my word to the police, Bill. I also knew you’d find out what happened soon enough. I’m sorry I couldn’t tell you. It would have made things easier for both of us.”

  He nodded; he’d probably traversed that territory himself. “What’s your role in all this?” he asked. “Why were you at Doyle’s last night? And those other times?”

  His voice seemed to carry better in the wind than mine did; mine felt like it was being swallowed up like spit in the ocean. “It has to do with what was making me concerned about the dual-relationship problem I talked about.”

  Bill nodded as though he understood. But I wondered how he could even hear, let alone understand. The nod must have meant something else.

  “When we talked last night did you know that Doyle was dead?” he asked. I had the sense that he was methodically going down a list of questions. I also had the sense that he didn’t really expect to learn anything novel in my responses.

  “Same situation, Bill; I couldn’t talk about it with you. I knew you would find out this morning anyway.”

  He turned his head momentarily so he was gazing west toward the mountains, frankly into the wind. His hair flew back behind him like he was a character in the cartoons. “Do you know where my daughter is?” he asked.

  I half heard him, half read his lips. “No, I don’t. I wish I did,” I said.

  “You’re sure?”

  “I am.” Almost reflexively, I asked him the same question. “Do you know where she is, Bill?”

  “No.”

  “What’s the third option? The other night you suggested the possibility that running and kidnapping weren’t the only options.”

  “Hiding.”

  “Hiding? From what?”

  He surprised me by taking a quick step closer to me, closer than I liked. “Life. Yes, hiding. I have a story to tell you.”

  In retrospect, that was the point when I should have stopped him. Walked away. Told him therapy was over, or that it had never really begun. Handed him my license and let him use it for a coaster. Given him the phone number of the state board that censures wayward psychologists, like me. Something.

  But I didn’t. I still had a scintilla of hope that Bill knew something that would help me find Diane.

  “One day last spring,” he began, “I came home from work and found Doyle Chandler inside my house, sitting at my kitchen table drinking a beer. My beer. My records-my files, my bills, my checkbook, you name it-were spread out all over the table in front of him.”

  “Bill, I-” I tried to interrupt him. Why? Something visceral was still telling me to get him to stop.

  “I’m not done.” He raised both eyebrows and through a hissing exhale said, “Give me this. I deserve this.” I stepped back involuntarily. He immediately closed the distance between us. “Doyle knew everything about me. Said he’d spent almost a month going through my things. Paperwork, letters, tax returns, computer files. Passwords. Everything. He knew about Rachel, her… problems. He knew the kids’ grades, their teachers’ names. Knew I have a swollen prostate, that my LDL’s too high. Everything that makes our family different from the Crandalls across the street, everything that makes us who we are, he knew.”

  I had an incongruous impulse to comfort, to tell Bill the truth about Doyle Chandler, his neighbor, and the truth about Doyle Chandler, the boy who’d died in a car accident in Roanoke with his parents back in 1967. I wanted to try to placate Bill with the fact that he’d been had by a damn good con man.

  A blast of wind sandblasted my skin. The impulse passed.

  Bill went on. “I was irate. I asked him what he was doing in my house. He just laughed. I demanded that he get out, that the kids were coming home any minute. He stood up and walked over to the refrigerator and pointed at our family calendar. He said, ‘No, they’re not. Reese is at hockey practice till seven. Coach usually keeps them late, you know that. And it’s Kyle’s mom’s turn to drive, anyway. Last time she stopped and got the kids dinner at Pizza Hut, remember? She’ll probably do something like that again-Frannie’s like that, such a sweetheart. And Mallory is studying at Kara’s. Cute kids, Mallory and Kara. Really cute kids.”

  “He knew it all. Everything. Take a minute, try to imagine it. Go ahead, try. What that would be like. He knew every secret. Every intimacy. Every dirty detail. When you think you know how bad it feels, double it. Then double that. That’s what it was like.”

  I tried to digest what that kind of intrusion would feel like to a father. Surreal.

  A huge piece of Styrofoam jumped the fence to the west and crashed into the side of Bill’s car. I ducked; he continued to seem oblivious to the fierce gales. I forced myself to observe him, to try to read what I could about his affect. I wasn’t getting a clear sense of where he was at that moment. It was apparent that he had no trouble summoning the rage he felt at Doyle Chandler. But there was something else present in the mix, some other emotional component that I couldn’t put a finger on.

  “Doyle had already gone through every last thing I owned and decided that simply stealing my identity wasn’t enough of a payoff for all his effort. He wanted money, of course,” Bill said. “Lots of it.”

  “Why didn’t-”

  “-I go to the police? Because I have things to hide. He knew by then that I couldn’t go to the police. Same reason I couldn’t turn over Mallory’s diary when I found it after she disappeared.”

  “Things to hide?”

  “Everybody has something they don’t want the world to know. Everybody. For some people, it’s something embarrassing. Maybe even humiliating. For some, it’s something… worse. To save my family, I did some desperate things years ago. I made hard choices. For me it was something worse.”

  “Rachel and Canada?” I said, guessing that Bill’s secret had to do with money. Instantly, I wished I hadn’t guessed, at least not o
ut loud.

  “Do you know? I’m not sure… doesn’t matter. I’ll tell you.”

  “Bill, it’s not-”

  “Shhhh. I’m not done.”

  For a fleeting second, right then, I felt menace from him. The scent of peril was fleeting, like a waft of perfume as a lovely woman waltzes by. I allowed myself the luxury of believing that I’d misread him, and I somehow convinced myself that it was okay to dismiss the menace as an illusion, to allow it to be carried away on the wings of the Chinooks. In retrospect, that was a bit of a mistake.

  “Rachel’s illness almost buried us financially. When we came to see you way back when it was already bad, but after? That year after? Lord. The medicine, the doctors, the hospitals. Not to mention all the damn weddings. There were always more and more damn weddings, always. Rachel was better when she went to weddings, much better. The voices weren’t as frequent, not as scary. So I fed the beast, paying for the outfits, the gifts, everything. I was in so far over my head. Mortgaged to the hilt, credit cards maxed out. Every month I was borrowing from a new Peter to pay an old Paul.

  “I was about to declare bankruptcy. I didn’t know what else to do. Then the voices began telling Rachel-demanding-that she had to move to Las Vegas or…” He took a moment to reflect on some ugly, ugly room in his wife’s private hell. “And that meant she would need even more money. I begged her not to go, but the voices were too frightening. I thought I was going to lose everything then. The house, the kids, Rachel.

  “Then I got handed a way out. My boss had just been promoted to western regional manager-a big deal for him. His wife threw him a surprise party up at the Flagstaff House just before Christmas. Late, close to two in the morning, I was driving behind him down Baseline and…” Bill shook his head, disbelieving. “He was distracted, I guess. I don’t know what it was, but a pedestrian was walking from the Hill over to Chautauqua, right across Baseline. I saw her clearly from a block and a half away-she had her hands in her pockets, her head down against the cold. Walter just mowed her down.

  “She must have flown a hundred feet in the air. Turned out she was a young mother, an orthodontist. He never even touched his brakes; he just plowed into her. I still see her body flying. Sometimes, I feel the impact when I’m asleep.

  “He killed her, of course. She was dead at the scene.”

  He paused, and I reminded him that he’d told me about the accident years before when he’d stopped by to thank me for my help with Rachel.

  “I didn’t tell you the next part. Walter was in shock. Kept saying, ‘What happened, Bill? What happened?’ I saw an opportunity. I told him to shut up and listen to me. As out-of-it as he was, he did. When the cops came, I told them what I saw. A white van was coming up Baseline in the other direction. The woman walked out from behind it. My boss couldn’t have seen the woman. I told them I was right behind him and I didn’t see her until she was in the air. It wasn’t Walter’s fault at all. That was my story.”

  “You made up the van?” I asked.

  “It was two in the morning. I figured I was the only witness. My boss matched his story to mine. It worked. Why wouldn’t it? Turned out his blood alcohol was just a hair below the legal limit so he wasn’t even arrested. He was never charged with anything. He didn’t go to prison. His promotion was secure. His family… was safe.”

  “You saved his ass?”

  “I did it for me, not for him. I was saving my family. I told you I was desperate. I don’t even like Walter. He’s a prick.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said. But I did. Before I’d left her office, Mary Black had suggested enough that I could guess the rest.

  “I knew Walter would be grateful.” Bill suddenly seemed out of breath.

  “The promotion you got,” I said, filling in a blank for him. “The one you told me about years ago?”

  “Yes, that promotion. My salary went way up, and then it went up again. I began getting regular Christmas bonuses. That was eight years ago. I had a good job, better than I deserved. I was making enough money to make ends meet here and enough to keep Rachel safe in Vegas, barely.”

  “Until Doyle Chandler showed up at your kitchen table?”

  “I’d kept a record about everything that happened in case Walter ever turned on me. When Doyle starting coming into my house he did it simply to steal my identity, but then… then he ended up finding every last thing I’d kept about Walter and the orthodontist. Newspaper clippings. Notes. Everything. Once he understood what I’d done, and how vulnerable I was, he changed his plans. Doyle wanted a cut.”

  “How much?”

  “He asked for ten thousand a month. We settled on five at first. But I knew I couldn’t do five for long. Canada was demanding more and more money to keep doing what he was doing for Rachel in Las Vegas. As she got sicker he had to pay more people more money so that she would be… left alone. What choice did I have? What could I do? I was in so deep.

  “When Doyle moved out in the fall and put his house on the market, I thought he might have realized that the till was empty, you know? Hell, he knew my finances as well as I did. Better, maybe. I thought-God, I was naive-I thought things might be over. But that’s when Doyle went to Walter and started blackmailing him, too. Walter and I realized he’d moved away so that we couldn’t find him. My boss wasn’t happy. He’s not a pleasant man when he’s not happy.”

  The sky was getting dark and, despite the warming winds, I felt winter and January all the way to my bones. It wasn’t just the temperature, though; I knew that.

  “Bill, would you like to come inside?” I said. “Sit down?”

  He looked around as though he’d needed to remind himself we were indeed outside, nodded, and followed me to the back door of my office. Once we were in I flicked on some lights and sat across from him as though we were doctor and patient.

  Were we? Partly yes, partly no. Mostly no. All the ethical guidelines I’d always held so dear were designed to keep therapists from feeling the ambiguity of roles I was feeling right then, were designed to keep patients from suffering the conflict-of-interest vulnerabilities Bill was floating in right then. What a mess I’d made.

  The thing was, I wasn’t too upset about it.

  Bill crossed his legs, uncrossed them, stood suddenly, and moved to the southern windows. His back was to me, and he seemed to be focused on the advancing sunset that was visible through the skeleton of the ash trees. My sense was that he wasn’t sure how to resume his narrative. I could have drawn the shut-up-and-wait arrow from my quiver. I didn’t. To help him find a way to restart his story I chose an option that I thought was a gimme: “That’s when you found out he’d dug a tunnel? The day Doyle showed up in your kitchen.”

  “No, I had no idea that’s how he’d gotten in. Learning about the tunnel last night was a complete surprise to me. A tunnel? Never crossed my mind, not for a second. I thought Doyle had a key to our house, that he’d discovered where we hid our spare, or had somehow gotten hold of one of the kids’ keys. That’s what he’d led me to believe. He had told me not to get an alarm, not to change the locks. Told me I’d regret doing any of those things. When he’d threaten me with what I was going to regret if I didn’t cooperate, he’d always mention the kids.”

  “He threatened them?”

  “He tried. I threatened him right back. I told him if he came into my house when the kids were home, I’d kill him. If he so much as talked to them, I’d kill him. I think he believed me.”

  She was scared. That’s what Bob had said about Mallory. She was scared.

  Was that why she was scared?

  “What did Mallory know about all this?” I asked.

  “Mallory,” he said in a long exhale. His breath temporarily clouded the window glass in front of his mouth. “Mallory.”

  I thought he was about to cry.

  66

  “She hasn’t had a good Christmas since she was six.” Bill said into the glass. “That’s eight years, most of her life. She ha
tes Christmas.”

  She misses her mom. Diane had told me that Mallory missed her mom. The year that Mallory was six was the year that Rachel abandoned her family for the lure of Las Vegas weddings.

  Psychotherapy 101: Christmas for Mallory was irrevocably linked to loss.

  Finally, I thought I understood why Mallory had felt so compelled to see Hannah Grant for psychotherapy: Mallory hadn’t had a good Christmas since she was six. She went to see Hannah because she didn’t want to have another bad Christmas, another Christmas when her primary emotion involved desperately missing her mother.

  “She’d get so scared,” Bill said. “Every year, right after Thanksgiving she’d start to get scared.”

  Scared? That’s what Bob had said about Mallory, too. She was scared. Why scared?

  “Scared?” I asked. I would have suspected that Mallory would show signs of anxiety or depression on the anniversary of her mother’s abandonment. But fear?

  Bill wiped at his eyes with his fingertips. “She thought it was going to happen again. She couldn’t be comforted. No matter what I tried to do over the years to help her deal with it, nothing worked.”

  Rachel had deserted her family eight years before. Was Mallory afraid that her father was going to leave, too? Was that the vulnerability she felt? “What, Bill? Mallory thought what was going to happen again?”

  He turned back from the window. His face was pink and bright. “What happened eight years ago on Christmas? Mallory thought she’d be next. Every year since that year, she’s been afraid that she’d be next. That the same man was coming to get her.”

  Oh my God, what an idiot I am. Mallory was scared because of the murder of her friend. “They were friends? When they were little?”

  “Classmates. A sleep-over or two. You know what it’s like for girls when they’re that age. That Christmas, Mallory was already so vulnerable because of… what was going on with her mom. What happened that night scared her so much. She used to cry and cry every time she saw the pictures on TV. And those pictures were everywhere.