The Lost Girl of Astor Street(23)

Detective Cassano exhales long and slow. “I get how hard it is to sit and wait. And, after talking to your headmistress today, I have no doubt that you would knock on doors or even take the L to the shadiest neighborhoods to look for her there. So while I really appreciate your spirit, and while I look forward to meeting with you tomorrow and going over your notes, it doesn’t seem very safe to have you do anything more.”

I feel myself flushing. What all did Headmistress Robinson tell them about me? “I’m many things, Detective Cassano. But safe isn’t one of them.”

There seems to be a tinge of amusement in his voice when he says, “I’ll see you tomorrow at three, Miss Sail.”




I awake the next morning to bright sunshine streaming into my room. My eyes are raw and crusted, and my lips chapped after a night of weeping.

At two this morning, I had dragged myself down to the kitchen for a glass of water. The memory of what I’d seen when I went downstairs makes me shudder even now. Father had been asleep in his armchair, an empty tumbler in his lap and a shotgun propped beside him. The gun froze me on the bottom stair, made my blood roar through my veins. Guns have always unnerved me. (“Good,” my father once said when I told him this. “Then stay away from them.”)

I couldn’t take my eyes off the firearm. Why was it out? Why was his chair angled toward the front door?

I crept to his chair, careful to avoid the side with the gun, and removed the tumbler from his limp hand. I draped an afghan over him and carried his empty glass to the kitchen. Just the smell of the strong liquor burned my throat.

As I rinsed it, my mind wouldn’t let go of the gun. Lydia being gone had us all on edge. Is that what this was?

“What are you doing up?”

Walter’s voice drew a yelp out of me. He filled the doorway of the kitchen staircase, the one that led to Joyce’s living quarters. He wore striped pajamas, and his curls were rumpled, but he seemed too alert to have been awakened by me.

“You scared me.”

“Sorry.” He studied my face a moment. “You look like you haven’t slept at all.”

I combed my fingers through my hair. “Probably because I haven’t.”

“Want to get some air?”

“Sure.”

Walter pulled a flannel blanket from the linen closet and draped it around my shoulders once we’d settled onto the back stoop. We sat in silence for a while, the rhythm of breathing and the comfort of being with a friend lulling me like a bedtime song.

I yawned. “I could sleep, I think, but somehow it feels wrong. Like I have no right to be comfortable in my bed when Lydia isn’t in hers.”

“Doesn’t help her any for you to lose sleep.”

“I know it’s senseless. But I’m a girl.”

“You’re not the senseless type, though. And don’t change that.”

We fell silent again, and my mind drifted to the notebook sitting up on my desk, the one I intended to give to Detective Cassano. In the last hour, my writings had started to sound like those of a lunatic. I had gone so far as to brainstorm reasons why my future stepmother or Ms. Underhill might have taken Lydia.

“Oh, Walter, where is she?” Tears brewed from exhaustion and anxiety dripped from my eyes. “The detective said it looks like she didn’t just run away, but who would have taken her?”

He coaxed me against his shoulder. “I don’t know. But it makes me never want to let you or Mother out of my sight again.”

The scenario that had plagued my thoughts all night long finally emerged. “What if someone did take her and she has a seizure?”

Walter’s breath caught, and I knew he too was thinking of the Other Lydia. Lydia with the rolled-back eyes, absent mind, and soiled skirts. “I don’t know.”

“Father’s asleep in the front room. He . . . he has his gun out.”

“He’s just nervous, is all. Eighteen-year-old girl goes missing from the neighborhood. Not only does he have an eighteen-year-old girl, but also a long list of criminal-types who he’s angered over the years.” Walter squeezed my shoulder. “Nothing for you to be worried about, though.”

Now as I stretch awake in the late-morning sun, last night’s conversation seems far away. Outside, birds hum merry songs and the lemon-yellow light declares that this is a beautiful late-spring morning. I should have been at school hours ago. Right now, I would be sitting in Ms. Underhill’s stupid class, making a dress that will never fit me right and suffering her distaste for me.

What I wouldn’t give to be living that day instead of this one.

My stomach groans with hunger. No surprise considering it’s after eleven, and I only picked at my supper last night. But instead of finding breakfast, I cross the room to my desk. The notebook sits where I left it before venturing downstairs. I rip out the last page, full of incoherent rambling, and review my other notes. A list of neighbors and their relationships with the LeVine family. A list of all the household staff I could remember, and who had been fired when and for what reason. A list of any members of the community whom Dr. and Mrs. LeVine didn’t seem to get along with (that list was the shortest by far), and another list of everything I could remember talking about recently with Lydia.

I think of the gun lying against Father’s chair and poise my pen above the notebook. But what about that could possibly be helpful to the detectives? Walter was probably right; my best friend went missing from three houses down, and it naturally made my father paranoid. That’s all it was.