Vanishing Girls

It’s nearly 1:00 a.m., but I pull up my home number anyway. More and more, I’m convinced that Dara stumbled onto something dangerous, something involving Andre and Sarah Snow and Kennedy and maybe even Nicholas Sanderson, whoever the hell he is. Maybe Dara figured out that Andre was responsible for what happened to Madeline.

Maybe he decided to make sure she kept her mouth shut.

I press my phone to my ear, my cheek damp with sweat. After a while, my home answering machine clicks on—Dara’s voice, tinny and unexpected, asking the caller to speak now or forever hold your peace. I quickly hang up and try again. Nothing. My mom’s probably passed out cold.

I try my dad’s cell instead, but the call goes straight to voice mail, a sure sign that Cheryl has spent the night. I click off the call, cursing, shoving a sudden mental image of Cheryl, nipped and tucked and freckled, walking around my dad’s house naked.

Focus.

What next? I have to talk to someone.

A cop car has just pulled into the McDonald’s, and two guys in uniform lumber out, laughing about something, One of them has a hand looped into his belt next to his gun, like he’s trying to draw attention to it. Suddenly my next move is obvious. I check my phone again to verify the name: Chief Lieutenant Frank Hernandez, the officer in charge of the Madeline Snow case.

My phone is protesting its low battery, flashing a weak warning light in my direction when I make the last turn indicated by my GPS app and arrive abruptly at the police station, a hulking stone building that looks like a child’s idea of an old prison. The precinct is set back on a small parking lot, which someone has attempted to make less bleak by inserting various strips of grass and narrow, dirt-filled garden plots. I park on the street instead.

Springfield is four times the size of Somerville, and even at 1:00 a.m. on a Thursday, the police station is buzzing: the doors hiss open and shut, admitting or releasing cops, some of them hauling in doubled-over drunks or kids high on something or sullen-eyed, tattooed men who look as appropriate to the landscape as those pathetic flower beds.

Inside, high fluorescent lights illuminate a large office space, where a dozen desks are fitted at angles to one another and thickly roped cables snake from computer to computer. There are stacks of paper everywhere, in-boxes and out-boxes overflowing, as if a blizzard of form work had recently passed through and then settled. It’s surprisingly loud. Phones trill every few seconds, and there’s a TV going somewhere. I’m struck by the same feeling I had earlier, standing in the Beamer’s parking lot and trying to imagine Madeline Snow vanishing in full view of the Applebee’s: impossible that dark things bump up against the everyday, that they exist side by side.

“Can I help you?” A woman is sitting behind the front desk, her black hair slicked into so severe a bun it looks like a giant spider clinging desperately to her head.

I take a step forward and lean over the desk, feeling embarrassed without knowing why. “I—I need to speak to Lieutenant Frank Hernandez.” I keep my voice low. Behind me, a man is sleeping sitting up, his head bobbing to an inaudible rhythm, one wrist handcuffed to a chair leg. A group of cops walk by, rapid-patter talking about a baseball game. “It’s about Madeline Snow.”

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.