Vanishing Girls(24)

I arrived early, when the crowd was thinner, and a few dozen people were milling around, keeping a careful distance from the yellow police tape marking off the scene of the disappearance. We all had to sign in, like we’re guests at someone’s really awful wedding. I’ve watched enough Law & Order to know the cops are probably hoping the pervert—if there is a pervert—will show up to get his rocks off and smirk about being smarter than the cops.

Reflexively I fish my cell phone from my bag. No further word from Nick. No texts from Parker, either. I’m not surprised, but I still get a little dip of disappointment in my stomach, like going over a hill too fast.

“This is how it’s going to go. We’re going to move east in a line. You should be close enough to touch your neighbors’ shoulders.” The cop holds out his arms like a drunk trying to steady his balance on the line. “Keep your eyes on the ground and look for anything and everything that doesn’t belong. A barrette, a cigarette stub, a headband, whatever. Maddie had a favorite bracelet—silver, with turquoise charms. She was wearing it when she disappeared. If you see something, give a shout.”

He hops off the concrete divider, and the crowd responds like a uniform pool of water, rippling outward, dispersing, breaking apart into smaller groups. The search party fans out across the beach, while cops shout orders and instructions and the camera crews click and buzz away. From above we might look like we’re playing a complicated game, an intricate pattern of Red Rover, all of us spread out in a line and silently calling for Madeline to come over, to come back. The sand is studded with the kind of trash that accumulates at the edge of parking lots: pulpy cigarette packs, plastic wrappers, soda cans. I wonder whether any of it is important. I imagine a featureless man sitting outside on Friday night, sipping a warm Coke, watching the firefly flicker of taillights in and out of the Big Scoop parking lot, watching two girls, Kennedy and Sarah, walking with their arms linked to the warm bright glow of the ice-cream shop, leaving a small girl huddled in the backseat.

I hope she’s alive. Even more: I believe. It strikes me that that’s the point of the search party. Not actually to turn up clues, but as if the power of our collective belief, our joint effort, will keep her alive. As if she’s Tinker Bell, and all we have to do is keep clapping.

At least it’s a little cooler when we move down toward the water, but the mosquitoes and the horseflies are worse, swarming up from hidden pockets and piles of beach wood. The going is painfully slow, but even so, moving across the sand is exhausting. Every few minutes someone shouts, and the cops rush over and squat, prodding at some garbage with long, white-gloved fingers: a tattered piece of fabric, an empty beer can, the remains of somebody’s fast-food lunch, probably chucked out of a passing car. The cops bag a silver bracelet, though I see Madeline Snow’s mother shaking her head, lips pressed together. The beach is barely a quarter mile wide; at no point are we out of sight of either the parking lot or the houses and motels perched high on the dunes. It seems impossible to imagine that anything bad could happen here, in this short strip of land, so close to the everyday churn of cars and restaurants and people sneaking outside to smoke cigarettes on the beach.

But something bad did happen here. Madeline Snow is gone. Nick and I used to pretend that there were goblins waiting in the woods; she told me that if I listened hard enough, I could hear them singing.

If you don’t watch out, they’ll grab you, she’d say, tickling me around the middle until I shrieked. They’ll take you to the underworld and turn you into a bride.

And just for a second, I imagine Madeline vanishing into thin air, lured by a song too soft for the rest of us to hear.

“You’re Sharon Warren’s daughter, aren’t you?” the woman on my left blurts out. She’s been blatantly staring at me for the past ten minutes, and I’ve been doing my best to ignore her. Her face is sugared with too-heavy makeup, and she’s been tottering along in wedge heels over the sand, windmilling her arms like she’s on a balance beam.

I almost deny it but decide there’s no point. “Uh-huh.”

“I’m Cookie,” she says, blinking at me, as if expecting me to know her. Of course her name is Cookie. No one who wears bright-pink lipstick and heels to search for a missing girl could possibly have any other name. “Cookie Hendrickson,” she adds, when I say nothing. “I live in Somerville, too. I did admin at MLK High when your mom was principal there. I knew your grandfather, too. Great man. I was”—she lowers her voice as if she’s telling me a secret—“at the funeral.”

Last December, three days after Christmas, my grandfather died. He’d lived in Somerville all his life and, in fact, worked for two summers for the last mill before it got shuttered in the fifties. Later on he coached Little League and even briefly got elected town chairman, a position he abdicated as soon as he, and the rest of town, realized that he didn’t give a shit about politics. Nick and I called him Paw-Paw, and half of Somerville was at his funeral in January. Everybody loved him.

Later that night Nick, Parker, and I got blitzed on SoCo in Parker’s basement. Nick went upstairs to get water, and I started crying, and Parker put his arm around me and I kissed him. When Nick came downstairs again she made the funniest face, like she’d just walked into a party where she didn’t know anyone.

Still, Nick and I slept together that night, side by side, the way we did when we were kids. It was the last time.