Little Girls(85)

In 1988, Hal Albrecht was laid off from his job at the steel mill. He put on a good face and even fantasized about picking his family up and moving them out of Dundalk and away from Sparrows Point for good. He said he’d like to go to Florida, which is where some older friends of his had relocated after retirement. But Hal hadn’t retired—he’d been laid off in the wake of big changes in the industry. He needed to find another job, just as most of his coworkers needed to find other jobs after facing similar layoffs. Hal did not have a college education—he’d just barely made it through high school—and the job search in 1989, despite economic prosperity for much of the country at that time, was demoralizing. Hillary Albrecht began taking in “homework”—mending dresses, suits, slacks for local neighbors who felt sorry for them—as did their eldest daughter, Caroline. Hal got a job working nights at a 7-Eleven while going on job interviews during the day. On weekends, and because he knew some of the dockhands from his days at the mill, he picked up some hours at the shipyards. It was untaxed pay, under the table as they say, and although it helped put food on their table and while Hal was genuinely grateful, he didn’t know how long he could keep up such a sleep-deprived schedule. As it turned out, he maintained that impossible schedule up until the day his daughter disappeared.

On April 28, 1989, around eleven-thirty in the morning, Hillary Albrecht handed a brown paper bag to her daughter Tanya. It was Hal’s lunch, which he had forgotten to take with him to the shipyard that morning—a corned beef sandwich, a plastic cup of apple sauce, a wedge of apple streusel wrapped in cellophane that Hillary had baked the night before, and a can of Diet Coke. It was not the first time Tanya—or one of the other girls—had to run lunch to their father. The man had become a roving zombie and he had begun to forget a good many things, Hillary knew, and the thought was not without compassion.

“You know the way to go,” Hillary said to Tanya as the girl pulled on her sneakers at the kitchen table, her father’s brown bag lunch balanced in the crook of her lap.

“Yes,” Tanya said, exasperated. They had gone through this a hundred times before. “Be like Dorothy. I remember.”

To “be like Dorothy” meant that once she crossed Kingland Terrace and stepped foot into the industrial park, she was to locate the cement path that had been spray-painted bright yellow—the “yellow brick road”—until she reached the bank of terminals down at the port. To veer off the yellow brick road could be dangerous—there were too many things out there that eagerly awaiting the nimble fingers and tasty toes of a curious young girl.

Hillary watched her daughter lace her sneakers while she cleaned the countertop. Later, when describing to police what her daughter had been wearing, she told them of the sneakers. They were fake Chuck Taylor’s—the Albrechts could not afford real ones—which the kids endearingly referred to behind their parents’ backs as “Fucks.” Before leaving, Tanya offered her mother a sweet smile. Hillary knew her daughter might never be what society considered a “real beauty”—June was the prettiest of the three girls, at least in the traditional sense—but Tanya had a brilliance inside of her that sometimes managed to shine out, usually when you least expected it. Her smile held that brilliance, radiating it across the tiny kitchenette in the Dundalk row house. And although she had no idea why, Hillary forced herself to take a mental snapshot of that smile, impressing it upon her brain the way prehistoric bugs impressed themselves into sediment which, over millennia, fossilized to permanence. It was the last time Hillary Albrecht would see that smile.

The last person on record to see Tanya Albrecht alive was a man named Chester Karski. Karski lived by himself in a one-bedroom flat on the corner of Kingland Terrace and Highpoint Boulevard. His front windows faced Highpoint, which was a crumbling tributary of a roadway through which patches of blond grass sprouted in the summer. His single bedroom window looked out upon the more nicely paved blacktop of Kingland Terrace and the plateau of parking lots of Sparrows Point beyond. This section of Kingland ran beneath an overpass—one of the extensions off the Key Bridge—and even in broad daylight, Karski could see people moving around beneath the shade of the overpass, no doubt up to no good. On this particular afternoon, Karski had been sweeping grit off his front porch when little Tanya Albrecht came walking up the street. She was carrying a brown paper satchel and wore a pleasing little smile on her face. From where he stood on his porch, Karski could hear the girl humming happily to herself while she kicked the occasional pebble out of the road.

“Hi there, Dorothy!” he called to her. “On your way to see the great and powerful Oz?” Chester Karski was in on the yellow brick road game; he had walked it a few times in his life, too, back before he retired from the shipyards.

“Yes, Mr. Karski!” Tanya called back. “My dad forgot his lunch again!”

“You tell him I said hello.”

“I will.”

“And you be careful, darling, crossing that road.”

“I will!” She raised a hand high and waved it back and forth over her head.

Karski returned the gesture. When the girl reached the intersection of Highpoint and Kingland, Karski paused in his sweeping to make sure the girl made it across safely. He did not realize he’d been holding his breath until she reached the opposite side of Kingland. Yet it wasn’t the road Karski worried about. As Tanya crossed beneath the shade of the overpass, Karski went back inside his house, down the hall, and into the bedroom. He peeled the plastic shade away from the window and peered out. Tanya was a speck on the roadway, her shadow stretched out of shape and trailing behind her on the pavement. Karski averted his eyes, peering now into the dark depths beneath the overpass. It was just about noon, still a bit early for the hoodlums to take up residence beneath the overpass, but that didn’t mean some strung-out crackhead hadn’t spent the night down there. She shouldn’t walk through there on her own. Not at her age. She’s a little bit of a thing. On this morning, however, Chester Karski could see no one. By all appearances, it seemed the Albrecht girl was alone. It gave Karski much relief.