NOS4A2(34)

IN LATE MAY OF 1994, IT WAS JAKE CHRISTENSEN OF BUFFALO, NEW YORK, ten years old and traveling alone, flying in from Philadelphia, where he attended boarding school. A driver had been sent to meet him, but this man, Bill Black, suffered a fatal heart attack in the parking garage and was found dead behind the wheel of his stretch limo. Who met Jake at the airport—who drove him away—was never determined.

The autopsy revealed that Bill Black’s heart had failed after absorbing near-lethal doses of a gas called sevoflurane; it was a favorite of dentists. A faceful would switch off a person’s awareness of pain and make him highly suggestible—a zombie, in other words. Sevoflurane wasn’t so easy to get—you needed a license to practice medicine or dentistry to obtain it—and it seemed a promising lead, but statewide interviews with oral surgeons and the people they employed went exactly nowhere.


IN 1995 IT WAS STEVE CONLON AND HIS TWELVE-YEAR-OLD DAUGHTER, Charlie (Charlene, actually, but Charlie to her friends), on their way to a father-daughter dance in Plattsburgh, New York. They ordered a stretch limo, but it was a Rolls-Royce that turned up in their driveway instead. Charlie’s mother, Agatha, kissed her daughter on the forehead before she left, told her to have fun, and never laid eyes on her again.

She saw her husband, though. His body was found, bullet through the left eye, behind some bushes, in a rest area off Interstate 87. Agatha had no trouble identifying the body, in spite of the damage to his face.

Months later, in the fall, the phone rang in the Conlon house, a little after two-thirty in the morning, and Agatha, only half awake, answered. She heard a hiss and crackle, as of a long-distance connection being made, and then several children began to sing “The First Noel,” their high, sweet voices quivering with laughter. Agatha believed she heard her daughter’s voice among them and began to scream her name: “Charlie, Charlie, where are you?” But her daughter did not reply, and in another moment the children hung up on her.

The phone company, however, said no call had been made to her house at that time, and the police wrote it off as the late-night fantasy of a distraught woman.


AROUND FIFTY-EIGHT THOUSAND NONFAMILY CHILD ABDUCTIONS occur each year in America, and in the early nineties the disappearances of Marta Gregorski, Rory McCombers, Amy Martin, Jake Christensen, Charlene Conlon, and the adults who vanished with them—with few witnesses, in different states, under various conditions—were not connected until much later. Not until well after what happened to Vic McQueen at the hands of Charles Talent Manx III.





Haverhill


IN LATE MARCH OF VIC’S SENIOR YEAR, HER MOTHER WALKED IN ON her and Craig Harrison in Vic’s bedroom at one in the morning. It wasn’t like Linda caught them screwing, or even kissing, but Craig had a bottle of Bacardi and Vic was pretty drunk.

Craig left with a shrug and a smile—G’night, Mrs. McQueen, sorry we woke you—and the next morning Vic took off for her Saturday shift at Taco Bell without speaking to her mother. She wasn’t looking forward to getting home and certainly wasn’t ready for what was waiting when she did.

Linda sat on Vic’s bed, which was neatly made up with fresh linens and a plumped-up pillow, just like a bed in a hotel. The only thing missing was the mint.

Everything else was gone: Vic’s sketchbook, Vic’s books, Vic’s computer. There were a couple of things on the desk, but Vic didn’t immediately register them. The sight of her cleaned-out room made her short of breath.

“What did you do?”

“You can earn your things back,” Linda said, “as long as you stick to my new rules and my new curfew. I’ll be driving you to school from now on, and work, and anywhere else you need to go.”

“You had . . . you had no right . . .”

“I found some things in one of your drawers,” her mother continued, as if Vic had not spoken. “I’d like to hear your explanation for them.”

Linda nodded at the other side of the room. Vic turned her head, this time really taking in what was sitting on her desktop: a pack of cigarettes, an Altoids tin containing what looked like red and orange Valentine’s Day candies, some sampler bottles of gin, and two banana-scented condoms in purple packages. One of the condom wrappers was torn open and empty.

Vic had bought the condoms from a vending machine at the Howard Johnson’s and had torn one open to make a balloon character out of it, inflating the rubber and drawing a face on the side. She had dubbed this character Dickface and had amused the kids in third-period study hall with him, walking him across her desk while the teacher was out of the room. When Mr. Jaffey returned from the men’s, the room smelled so strongly of bananas that he asked who had brought pie, which caused everyone to bust up.

Craig had left the cigarettes one night when he was over, and Vic had held on to them. She didn’t smoke (yet), but she liked to tap a cigarette out of the packet and lie in bed smelling the sweet tobacco: Craig’s smell.

The Ecstasy tablets were what Vic took to make it through the nights when she couldn’t sleep, when her thoughts whirled shrieking through her head like a flock of crazed bats. Some nights she would close her eyes and would see the Shorter Way Bridge, a lopsided rectangle opening into darkness. She would smell it, the ammonia stink of bat piss, the odor of mildewed wood. A pair of headlamps would blink on in the dark, at the far end of the bridge: two circles of pale light set close together. Those headlights were bright and terrible, and sometimes she could still see them glowing before her, even when she opened her eyes. Those headlights made her feel like screaming.