Vanishing Girls(64)



The woman’s eyebrows—plucked to near invisibility—shoot up a fraction of an inch. I’m worried she’ll question me further or refuse or—the possibility occurs to me only now—tell me that he’s gone home for the night.

But she does none of those things. She picks up the phone, an ancient black beast that looks like it was salvaged from a junkyard sometime in the last century, punches in a code, and speaks quietly into the receiver. Then she stands up, sliding sideways a little to accommodate her belly, revealing for the first time that she is pregnant.

“Come on,” she says. “Follow me.”

She leads me down a hallway made narrow by file cabinets, many of them with drawers partially open, crammed with so many files and papers (ever more paper) they look like slack-jawed monsters displaying rows of crooked teeth. The wallpaper is the weird yellow of smoked cigarette stubs. We pass a series of smaller rooms and move into an area of glassed-in offices, most of them empty. The whole layout of the place gives the impression of a bunch of cubic fishbowls.

She stops in front of a door marked CHIEF LIEUTENANT HERNANDEZ. Hernandez—I recognize him from photographs online—is gesturing to something on his computer screen. Another policeman, his hair so pale red it looks like a new flame, leans heavily on the desk, and Hernandez angles the monitor slightly to give him a better view.

I go hot, then cold, as if I’ve been burned.

The woman knocks and pops open the door without waiting for a response. Instantly Hernandez adjusts the computer monitor, concealing it from view. But it’s too late. I’ve already seen rows of pictures, all those girls dressed in bikini tops or no tops at all, lying or sitting or passed out on a vivid red couch—all those pictures taken of the same room where Dara was photographed.

“Someone to see you,” the receptionist says, jerking a thumb in my direction. “She says it’s about Madeline Snow.” She pronounces the words almost guiltily, as if she’s saying a bad word in church. “What’d you say your name was, sweetheart?”

I open my mouth, but my voice is tangled somewhere behind my tonsils. “Nick,” I finally say. “Nicole.”

Hernandez nods at the redheaded policeman and he straightens up immediately, responding to the unspoken signal.

“Give me a minute,” Hernandez says. In person, he looks tired and rumpled, almost, like a blanket that’s been washed too many times. “Come in,” he says to me. “Have a seat. You can just go ahead and stack those anywhere.” The chair pulled up across from his desk is piled with manila files.

The redheaded cop gives me a curious look as he slips by me, and I catch a brief whiff of cigarette smoke and, weirdly, bubble gum. The receptionist withdraws, closing the door, leaving me alone with Hernandez.

I still haven’t moved. Hernandez looks up at me. His eyes are bloodshot. “All right then,” he says lightly, as if we’re old friends, sharing a joke. “Don’t sit if you don’t want to.” He leans back in his chair. “You have something to tell me about the Snow disappearance, you said?”

He’s being nice enough, but the way he asks the question makes it clear that he doesn’t think I’ll have anything important to tell him. This is a question he’s asked a dozen times, maybe a hundred, when some random woman looking for attention comes in to accuse her ex-husband of abducting Madeline, or a random truck driver en route to Florida claims to have seen a blond girl acting strange at a rest stop.

“I think I know what happened to Madeline,” I say quickly, before I can second-guess myself. “And those pictures you were looking at? I know where they were taken.”

But as soon as I say the words, it occurs to me that at Beamer’s I didn’t see a room like the one pictured in Dara’s photographs. Could I have missed a door somewhere, or a secondary staircase?

Hernandez’s right hand tightens momentarily on the armrest. But he’s a good cop. He doesn’t otherwise flinch. “You do, do you?” Even his voice betrays no signs, one way or the other, about whether or not he believes me. Abruptly, to my surprise, he stands up. He’s a lot taller than I expected—at least six-three. Suddenly the room constricts, as if the walls are shrink-wrap grabbing for my skin. “How about some water?” he says. “You want some water?”

I’m desperate to talk. With every second it seems as if the memory of what happened at Beamer’s might simply disappear, evaporating like liquid. But my throat is dust-dry, and as soon as Hernandez suggests water, I realize I’m desperately thirsty. “Yeah,” I say. “Sure.”

“Make yourself at home,” he says, indicating the chair again. This time I recognize not just an invitation, but an order. He moves the pile of file folders himself, dumping them unceremoniously onto the windowsill, already mounded with papers, creating a landslide effect. “I’ll be right back.”

He disappears into the hall and I sit down, my bare thighs sticky on the fake leather seat. I wonder if it was a mistake to have come, and whether Hernandez will believe anything I say. I wonder if he’ll send out a search party for Dara.

I wonder if she’s all right.

He reappears a minute later, carrying a small bottle of water, room temperature. Still, I drink eagerly. He takes a seat again, leaning forward on the desk with his arms crossed. Outside the glassed-in office walls, the redheaded cop goes by, consulting a file, his mouth pursed as if he’s whistling.

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