Vanishing Girls(68)

In the meantime, I still have your number and will try and reach you this evening.

Best,

Dr. Leonard Lichme, Ph.D.





EMAIL FROM KEVIN WARREN TO SHARON MAUFF, DATED MARCH 7, 10:00 P.M.

Sharon,

I finally spoke with Dr. Lichme. Have you talked to him yet? To be honest, I wasn’t too impressed. He suggested that you and I might benefit from Al-Anon, for example, to help “resolve our impulses to ‘fix’ Dara.” I told him he’s the one who’s supposed to be fixing her.

He said he’s actually more worried about Nick. Because Dara acts out, takes drugs, and hangs out with God-knows-who, she’s expressing her feelings and so she’s supposedly healthier than Nick, who’s never given us a day’s worry in her life. Isn’t that a pretty paradox? He kept trying to convince me that because Nick never shows any signs of being in trouble, she’s actually the one who is in trouble. And for this we’re paying $250 an hour (speaking of, you owe me your portion for the month of February. Please mail a check.).

I suppose he knows what he’s talking about, but I’m simply not convinced. Nick is a great big sister, and Dara is lucky to have her.

See you on the sixteenth. I hope we can keep it civil.





Kevin


P.S. I wasn’t implying you should look for my golf clubs (!). I simply asked whether you had seen them. Please don’t make everything a battle.





Nick


1:45 a.m.

As soon as I’m back on the highway, I grab my phone and punch in Parker’s number. For a second, I’m worried it won’t connect: my phone is flashing every five seconds, showing 2 percent battery. Come on, I think, come on, come on.

Then it’s ringing: four, five, six times before clicking over to voice mail.

“Come on,” I say out loud, and punch the steering wheel with a palm. I hang up and redial. Three rings, four rings, five rings. Just before I click off, Parker picks up.

“Hello?” he croaks. I’ve woken him. No surprise. It’s nearly 2:00 a.m.

“Parker?” My throat is so tight, I can barely say his name. “I need your help.”

“Nick?” I hear rustling, as though he’s sitting up. “Jesus. What time is it?”

“Listen to me,” I say. “My phone’s about to die. But I think Dara’s in trouble.”

There’s a short pause. “You think—what?”

“At first I thought she was just messing with me,” I rush on. “But I think . . . I think she might be involved in something big. Something bad.”

“Where are you?” When Parker speaks again, his voice is totally alert, totally awake, and I know he’s gotten out of bed.

I could kiss my phone. I could kiss him. I do want to kiss him. This fact is huge and solid and impassible, like an iceberg rising suddenly out of the smooth dark water.

“Route 101. Heading south.” I feel a growing sense of vertigo, as if the road in front of my headlights is in fact a long pit and I’m falling.

You can’t let me have anything of my own, can you? You always have to be better than me. Dara’s voice comes to me at once, a voice as loud as memory. And then I know: I am remembering. She said those words to me. I’m sure she did. But the second I try to grasp for the connection, to follow the slick handholds of memory down beneath the water, my mind is enveloped in the same numbing cold, the same undifferentiated dark.

“You’re driving?” Parker’s voice inches higher, disbelieving. “You need to pull over. Do me a favor and pull over, okay?”

“I need to find her, Parker.” My voice cracks. My phone beeps at me even more insistently. “I need to help her.”

“Where are you exactly?” he repeats, and his room unfolds in front of me: the old baseball lamp in the shape of a catcher’s mitt casting a warm cone of light on the navy-blue carpet; the rumpled sheets that always smell faintly like pine; the swivel desk chair and the clutter of books and video games and faded T-shirts. I imagine him wriggling into a shirt one-handed, rummaging under the bed for his Surf Siders.

“I’m heading toward Orphan’s Beach,” I say, because it’s the only thing I can think to do. Andre must have a second location, a private place where he brings girls to be photographed. The answer lies along the beach, close to Beamer’s, maybe even inside it. They might have a secondary basement; or maybe I missed a doorway somewhere, or a converted storage shed closer to the water. I need proof.

I have an ever-growing sense that this was all planned, at least initially, by Dara. She intended me to find her phone, and the pictures on it. She was leaving me clues so that I would be able to help her.

It was a cry for help.

“Orphan’s Beach?” On Parker’s end, a door opens and closes with a firm click. Now I see him moving down the hall, navigating by feel, keeping one hand on the wall (papered with faded patterns of ribbons and dried flowers, a design he despises). “Where we went last year on Dara’s birthday? Where we found the lighthouse?”

“Yeah,” I say. “There’s a bar just down the road called . . .” The words turn to dust in my mouth.

Suddenly I know. Images and words flash through my head—the neon Beamer’s sign, cocktail napkins imprinted with a logo of twin headlights, to beam, a sweep of light—and just like that I know exactly where Andre takes his girls, where he has his parties, where he photographed Dara and Sarah Snow, where something terrible happened to Madeline.