The Year of Disappearances

We’d barely crossed the New Jersey state line when my cell phone rang. The Citrus County Sheriff ’s Office had tracked me down.



The detective told me at the beginning that they were “following leads,” but that Mysty hadn’t been found. My sick feeling intensified.



He said. “Did she say anything to you about leaving town?”



“No.” I went over the substance of my phone conversation with her, twice. But it all seemed so trivial. “She sounded happy, yes. She had a date with Jesse that night, she said. Jesse Springer. He’s Autumn’s brother. No, I don’t know him well.”



The detective asked where I’d been the night she disappeared, and I told him home. I knew better than to tell him about my vertigo that night, or about sensing the presence of something evil. I agreed to come in to the sheriff ’s office after we’d returned.



“Mãe?” I said. “When will we be home?”



The truck was merging onto the New Jersey Turnpike. “Tomorrow night, I guess. We still need to eat and sleep.”



I told the detective that I’d come in on Tuesday morning, and hung up. “I wonder where she is.” The cab was cold, and I wrapped my arms around myself.



“You don’t think she ran away?” Mãe drove the way she danced—smoothly and rhythmically. She rarely used brakes.



“No.” I couldn’t picture Mysty having the gumption to run away. “She was bored, sort of, but she was in love. Or she thought she was.”



“How about you?”



My mother’s mind didn’t work the way my father’s did; it impulsively jumped from idea to idea, while his was methodical, even when it leapt to connect disparate concepts.



“Are you asking if I’m in love?”



She lifted her right eyebrow. (I couldn’t lift only one. I’d tried.) It was her way of saying You know very well what I mean.



“No.” I said it decisively. Whatever I’d felt when I saw Michael, it wasn’t love. More like regret, for what might have been if Kathleen had lived.



One thing I’d learned: the death of a loved one changes everything for those who survive.



Later that day I noticed the capsules’ bulge in my jeans pocket and took them out. Mãe asked what they were, and I told her.



“A pill to make people vampires,” she said. “Not possible.”



“I thought maybe we could have them analyzed.” I wondered who was selling the stuff.



“Good idea.” She flicked the truck’s turn signal. “We’re in Maryland now. I say we stop for lunch. We’ll find a good seafood place.”



I said okay, even though I didn’t have much appetite.



We stopped for the night at a hotel in South Carolina and got an early start the next morning. We drove into Homosassa Springs as the sun was setting. It sank between patches of trees, a fierce tangerine-colored orb.



As the truck idled at a traffic light, I saw, stapled to a power post, the first sign: MISSING, the headline read. A photo of Mysty (younger, wearing no makeup) smiled beneath the words. The sight of it chilled me, made her disappearance not an absence, but a scary presence.



The light changed and we drove on. The poster was on every third electric pole.



When we finally turned onto our road, and into our driveway, I felt weary relief. This was home, not Saratoga Springs. Lights within the house glowed yellow through the windows (real windows—the glass had been replaced). Forever after, yellow lights against a darkness have meant home for me, and home always signifies love and mystery.



Dashay didn’t wait for Mãe to switch off the engine before she came outside, carrying Grace to greet us.



“So,” she said. “Do you want the bad news first? Or do you want the bad news?”



Inside, we heard the bad news: she’d got a report back from the Department of Agriculture researchers who had analyzed our dead bees. They’d found multiple pathogens in the bees, possibly caused by pesticides or a virus, along with evidence of mite infestation.



“You’re going to love this part,” Dashay said to me. She perched on the arm of a chair, adjusting her turban-like towel. She’d taken to washing her hair every night, something Mãe said was “typical of lovelorn women.” “The mites are called varroa mites, little parasites that suck the life out of the bees. Their nickname is ‘vampire mites.’ Nice, huh?”



Mãe stretched her arms over her head and interlocked her hands to crack her knuckles. “Lovely,” she said.



“Where do they come from?” I asked.



“From Asia, years ago. Some bee nut probably brought them over, in a suitcase. They already wiped out most of the feral bees. And medicines won’t kill them.”



“Mites and pesticides have been around for years.” Mãe’s eyes were focused on a spot far away. “Healthy hives like ours have been pretty much resistant. I suppose moving them during the hurricane might have made the bees vulnerable.”



“We have to destroy the hives.” Dashay looked at Mãe.



“I’ll do it tomorrow.” She sounded numb.



“I’ll help.” Dashay took a deep breath. “And now you want the bad news? The deputies were here today. They went through the house and all around the property.”



Mãe unclasped her hands and dropped her arms. “Did they have a warrant?”



“No. They asked me if they could look around, and I said we have nothing to hide. They swooped through here and then they left. They didn’t take a thing. I watched to make sure.”



I dipped a shrimp into a bowl of red sauce and ate it. “Dashay, did you really think they’d steal our stuff?”



She and my mother looked at me with disbelief, then sympathy. “Not steal,” Mãe said. “She meant take away evidence.”



It took me a few seconds to come to terms with the idea: the sheriff ’s deputies thought I might be involved in Mysty’s disappearance. Meantime, Grace jumped onto the sofa between my mother and me. I petted her.



“That other girl, the one who came into Flo’s with her that night?” Dashay waved her hands, as if to conjure a name.



“Do you mean Autumn?”



“Autumn, yeah. She was here. She came last night, rang the buzzer on the gate. She wanted to talk to you.”



“She has my phone number.” Grace licked my arm and began to purr. Did she love me, or was she after the shrimp?



“Yeah, well. She said she needs to talk to you, and she said she’ll be back.”



But Autumn didn’t return that night. We went to bed early, mindful that the next morning I would be talking to the police.



The Citrus County Sheriff ’s Office was a brick building in downtown Inverness, and the interview took place in a pale green room with a large table, plastic chairs, and a huge United States flag mounted on a wall. Mãe was asked to be present. The detective, whose name was Pat Morley, was a balding man of medium height wearing dark trousers and a white shirt with short sleeves. He had a face and voice so ordinary that you’d never remember them. His gray eyes looked as if they’d been bleached. He sat opposite us, and he asked me questions in a low voice, taking notes on a pad.



He asked me the same questions he’d asked on the phone: how I’d met Mysty, how long we’d been friends, how much time we’d spent together, where I’d been the night she disappeared; he looked at Mãe from time to time, inviting her to confirm what I’d said, and she always said, “That’s correct.”



He asked about our trip to the mall, and I told him about my lunch with Mysty. “I had a sense that someone was watching us,” I said.



“What kind of sense? Did you see someone?”



“I felt it. I didn’t see anyone.”



He didn’t bother to write it down.



He asked about Jesse in more detail: Did he and Mysty have a relationship? How close were they? And he knew about Jesse’s visit to our place the week before she disappeared. What had we talked about?



Then it became awkward. Up to that point, I’d answered every question honestly, without cheating—in other words, without listening to his thoughts. But now I needed to know what was in his mind, so I tuned in. And what I heard shocked me, so much so that my face must have shown it, because Mãe sent me a thought, Be careful.



Detective Morley didn’t really care what I said! He was going through the motions, asking questions, but his notes were mostly scribbles that would never be transcribed. He’d made up his mind: Jesse had killed Mysty. It was only a matter of time, he was sure, before her body was found.



“We talked about drinking and driving,” I said, my voice clear and emphatic. “I told him he needed to stop drinking.”



Morley said, “Yes, he told us that. He has a very high opinion of you.”



But he was thinking, Dumb kid. Lost control one night and ruined his life, and for what? A little tramp like that?



I began to say, “Mysty is not a tramp,” but I stopped myself. “Mysty isn’t a bad girl,” I said. “She’s bored with her life, maybe. And Jesse isn’t a bad guy.”



He thanked us for our time.



Mãe said, “Wait. What are you doing to find her?”



“The family put together a search team,” he said.



Something was bothering me, something I couldn’t quite remember. I went over all of his questions again in my mind, and then it came to me: the man in the van.



I told Detective Morley about seeing the van the day I’d met Mysty and Autumn, and again on the night they’d walked out of Flo’s. He opened his eyes a little wider, and he took some notes—real ones, this time. “What kind of van was it?”



I tried to visualize it, to see it as it moved out of the parking lot. “It was beige. There was a name in silver on the back door,” I said slowly. “Chevrolet.”



“Did you notice its license plate?”



“No,” I said, “but the driver—” I’d been going to say, “had no eyes,” but I got a strong warning from my mother not to say it. “He was leering at the girls, the first time I saw him,” I said.



The detective wasn’t interested in that.



“He was heavyset,” I said. “He was bald.”



We left the station and got into Mãe’s truck—her own, not the rental van, which Dashay was beginning to unload back at the house. She waited until we were out of the parking lot before she said, “Why didn’t you tell me about seeing the blind man?”



“I tried,” I said. “Twice. Both times, other things intervened.”



We drove back to Homosassa Springs without talking.



As she pulled into the lot in front of Flo’s Place, I said, “I’ve seen him before. In Sarasota.”



She said, “Okay.”