The Year of Disappearances

“Have you seen him, too?”



“No, but I’ve heard about him.” She switched off the engine and turned toward me. “Didn’t your father ever tell you about harbingers?”



Harbingers, she explained over an early lunch at Flo’s, are signs of things to come.



“Not everyone sees them,” she said. “I don’t. But your father has seen the blind man twice, and it sounds as if you’ve inherited him.”



“The blind man in Glastonbury.” I remembered my father talking about seeing the man in England, not long before my father was made a vampire. I’d seen the man in Sarasota; the next day, the hurricane hit and our condominium caught fire. Of course, he couldn’t be blind. He drove a van.



“But who is he?” The mere thought of the blind man made me uneasy.



“Your father thinks harbingers are Jungian shadows.” She took a bite of her grouper sandwich.



I’d read only a smattering of Jung and Freud. My father had treated their essays as fiction, by and large. “Do you mean they’re not real?”



“They’re very real to those who see them.” She took another bite and chewed it slowly. “Jung thought shadows were visions of our own unconscious selves, which we repress.”



“But I saw the man in the van.” I knew he was more than a shadow. “So did Autumn and Mysty.”



My mother believed me. “Yes, you saw a man in a van. But was he really blind? You saw what you most fear: someone full of malice, someone with an absence of vision. He’s your shadow man.”



I asked, “Do harbingers always mean bad news?” Flo’s was unusually noisy that day, and I had to raise my voice to be heard.



“For your father, yes. But not for everyone. Dashay’s harbinger is a black bird, a grackle, that swoops at her. It happens when change is coming, for better or worse.”



The concept of a harbinger didn’t make much sense to me.



Logan, the bartender, came over to our table—a rare occurrence, since he liked to stay behind the bar. “Heard you were visiting the sheriff this morning,” he said to Mãe.



One aspect of living in Citrus County that I never liked: everyone knew everyone else’s business. Someone had spotted Mãe’s truck and lost no time spreading the word.



Mãe said, “Yes, and why were we there?”



He grinned and pointed at the TV set over the bar. The Tampa station was broadcasting a photo of Mysty, then shots of two distraught-looking people; the caption read PARENTS OF MISSING GIRL.



“Only one circus in town this week.” Logan looked at me. “So you knew this Mysty?”



“I knew her,” I said. “But not well.”



“She and her friend looked like trouble waiting to happen. Still, it’s shameful when a girl disappears.” Logan turned to my mother again. “Remember the last one?”



She nodded, her eyes on me. “There was another one?” I asked.



“Over the years there have been a few,” Logan said. “The worst one was the last one, two years ago. They found the little girl buried in her neighbor’s yard—”



“You have customers.” Mãe tilted her head toward the bar. She didn’t want me to hear the details. She didn’t want me to be further upset.



But in the days to come I heard all sorts of details, things that I’d never imagined. While I was growing up in Saratoga Springs, sheltered from TV and newspapers, learning about philosophy and mathematics, people were disappearing all over America—all over the world, really. Every year, tens of thousands of people vanish—most of them adult males. But the media attention tends to go to pretty girls and children—about three hundred children are abducted every year and never return. More than a million teenagers run away from their families every year. Most return home within a week, but roughly seven percent—seventy thousand teenagers—are never heard of again.



It was hard for me to believe such things happened at all, let alone with such frequency. I felt as if the world I lived in was only a façade—that beneath its skin, a darker world raged and rampaged. I’d glimpsed that world before, but I’d never known how vast and malignant it might be.



Afterward, whenever we drove in Mãe’s truck, I noticed teenagers wearing music earbuds or talking on cell phones, paying no attention to either world—to the posters of Mysty, or to strangers who might be watching them. I wondered who would disappear next.



When we returned home, Mãe and Dashay burned the trays of the beehives. I didn’t help. I didn’t want to see them burn. The acrid air came into the house and lingered for days.



For dinner that night I made a salad, but none of us ate much. Mãe excused herself and went off to have a bath. Dashay and I played Crazy Eights, but we both were thinking of other things and played poorly. The game dragged on.



When the front gate buzzed, Dashay said, “It’s that girl again.” And a second later, Autumn’s voice came through the intercom.



When I went down to the gate, she was waiting for me. She wore sunglasses, tight black jeans, and a tank top with one word printed on it: NOT.



“I need to talk to you,” she said.



“Why didn’t you call me?” I unlocked the gate and beckoned her inside.



“Cell phones can be traced. Or bugged.” She wheeled her bicycle up the driveway.



We sat in the moon garden. Even though the sky was growing dark, Autumn kept on her sunglasses. The air stayed hot and humid. It didn’t bother me, but Autumn wiped her forehead with her hand from time to time. “I hate Florida,” she said.



“Weren’t you born here?”



“Yes,” she said, “and I’m counting the minutes until I leave. So, what did you do to Mysty?”



I hadn’t expected that question. When I tried to hear what she was thinking, all I heard was a static-like buzz. Who are you? I thought.



I heard, in response, a soft, high-pitched whining sound. It came from Autumn—not from her mouth, but from somewhere inside her.



Then Dashay was there, her back to me, bending toward Autumn.



“Somebody call me?” she said softly. She took off Autumn’s sunglasses, and Autumn didn’t move.



I craned my neck and had a brief glimpse of Autumn’s eyes—wide open, with light moving across her left iris.



Dashay moved to block my view.



“Yes, my pretty pretty,” she said. “You’re the one calling me. I hear you now. I can’t hear you! I hear you loud and clear. You’re not there! I don’t hear anything.”



She went on, crooning nonsense (“I see you, I can’t see a thing. I can feel you, you’re no place at all”). I wondered if Dashay was mad—if Bennett’s disappearance had disconnected her sanity. Discomfort, hot and prickling, climbed up my spine.



But I didn’t leave. I closed my eyes, and my eyelids turned colors, twists of violet. After a minute or so, I heard the whining sound again, and then a sudden popping noise.



I opened my eyes. Dashay turned away from Autumn, her face triumphant.



“Want to see?” she said to me, She held out her right hand, clenched tight.



Part of me did, but I shook my head. “It’s Autumn’s demon, isn’t it.”



“She had a sasa in her, yes. I heard it. Sometimes they sing at night. Sure you don’t want to see? ’Cause I need to drown it quick.”



I took a quick glance. Something small, dark, and slimy looking quivered in her palm. Then she closed her hand and walked off toward the river.



Autumn hadn’t moved while we’d talked. She sat, her eyes open, breathing normally, her palms flat against her knees. She blinked and stirred. “So what do you think happened to Mysty?” Her voice was matter-of-fact, as if nothing had happened.



I told her I didn’t know. She nodded, but she was thinking, She knows more than she’s saying. I could hear her thoughts, now that the sasa was gone.



I wondered what she’d done to acquire a sasa.



“Jesse took a lie detector test yesterday.” She said it so casually. “Today they told him he failed and he has to take two more.”



“Poor Jesse.” I hoped that being hypnotized hadn’t affected his performance.



“My brother is no liar,” she said. “He says she stood him up that night.” But she was wondering, Did he kill her?



“I don’t think he did it,” I said. “He doesn’t have that kind of temper. Besides, why do you think she’s dead?”



“It’s been four days.” Autumn hunched her narrow shoulders. “They’re usually dead by now.”



“You don’t seem very upset,” I said.



“Well, it’s not like she meant that much to me.” Autumn stood up to leave. “It’s not like I even knew her very well.”



But she was lying. Mysty was the only friend she’d ever had.



I walked her down to the gate. “Aren’t you scared to be out alone at night?”



She draped one leg over her bike and mounted it. “I’d like to see somebody try to come after me,” she said.



Chapter Seven



Once upon a time, my mother thought that place names with the letter S in them were lucky. That’s the entire reason she’d chosen to live in Saratoga Springs, and later, S attracted her to Homosassa Springs.



Conversely, she decided that places that began with the letter D were unlucky. She thought they attracted negative energy. For her, that explained why so many murders and other crimes occurred in places like Deltona and DeLand, Florida.



But Mãe outgrew those superstitions. Luck, she decided, was more about a person’s attitude than about anything else. Good and bad things happened randomly, everywhere.



Attitudes aside, when bad things happen it’s natural to try to find reasons, to look for patterns. “Bad things happen in threes” was a saying I heard often in Homosassa Springs, after Mysty disappeared. It’s always quoted after two bad things have happened, and people go out of their way to find number three. If I’m sure of anything, it’s this: number three will find you.



I never did learn who started the rumor that I killed Mysty. Before Autumn lost her demon, she might have done it; after her encounter with Dashay, she lacked sufficient malice. Most likely it was one or more of Jesse’s friends, trying to shift attention away from him.



Dashay was the one to tell me. The lunch crowd at Flo’s Place thought that Mysty was dead (“like that other poor girl two years ago”) and that I was somehow responsible, since I was apparently the last person who’d talked to her.



I’d been deep in conversation with Mary Ellis Root when Dashay burst in, wearing a striped shirt, white jeans, and red sneakers—it had been her summer uniform that year. She looked particularly jaunty next to Root, who wore a lumpy dress and oversized men’s sunglasses. I didn’t appreciate being told in front of Root that the town thought me a killer, but Root enjoyed the spectacle; I could tell from the way she clasped her hands. I’d never been able to hear her thoughts; I decided that she must block them all, all the time. She must be a vampire, I thought. Yet I hated to think she was one of us.