Vanishing Act Read online

  Several healthy-looking spider and ivy plants hung from hooks positioned in front of the window over the sink. The lettering on a set of blue ceramic jars clearly proclaimed they housed sugar, flour, and salt. A variety of kitchen implements sat in a matching blue and white splatterware pitcher. The salt and pepper shakers were also blue and white. So were the wall clock and the potholders.

  Of course, the blue and white motif didn’t quite go with the dozen or so Corona bottles sitting on the counter. Or maybe it did. After all, Corona’s label was blue, wasn’t it? A guy who color-coordinates his beer with the decor can’t be all bad—although I had a feeling Mrs. Hayes wouldn’t have seen her son’s interior decorating style that way. I also had no doubt she wouldn’t have been pleased to see the condition her son had reduced her kitchen to. I’d be willing to bet the room had been immaculate when Melissa and Mrs. Hayes had been here. But not now.

  Now the white Formica counter was spotted with food stains, the sink was overflowing with dishes, the garbage can smelled as if it needed to be emptied, and the white linoleum floor had sticky black patches on it. Evidently housework wasn’t Bryan’s forte. But then, it appeared several other things weren’t either: like coming up with answers to the questions I was asking him.

  For the second time in as many minutes, Bryan eyes shifted to the newspaper article I’d laid out on the kitchen table and then back up at me.

  “What’s your point?” he finally said.

  As I moved my chair a little closer to the table, Bryan’s scent washed over me. He smelled as if he needed a bath. I pointed to the poem. “My point is what these lines indicate.”

  “They don’t indicate anything. Jill was her friend. She felt lousy when she died.”

  “Her wings were plucked? Who plucked them?”

  “Jill was a girl with a lot of problems.” Bryan ran his fingers through his hair. “Missy felt responsible for her, but then, she felt responsible for everyone.”

  “Including you?”

  “Yes. Including me.”

  “So what kind of problems did Jill have?”

  Bryan shrugged and scratched his side. “The usual college-coed kind.”

  “And what are those?”

  “In a word—guys.”

  “Guys in general or one guy in particular?”

  “One guy in particular. She was having a relationship. The guy dumped her and she got all depressed.”

  “Depressed enough to throw herself out the window?”

  Bryan shrugged again. “I guess.”

  “You don’t seem that upset.”

  “What do you want me to say?” he demanded.

  “You could pretend to be concerned.”

  “I could, but I’m not going to. What she did was stupid. Wasteful. Thoughtless. She wasn’t sick. There was nothing wrong that couldn’t have been fixed. You don’t take the gift of life and just toss it away.”

  “You’re thinking of your mother, aren’t you?” I asked softly.

  Bryan picked up the lacquered rose petal I’d found lying on top of the article and gently stroked it was his thumb. “My mom used to make these before she got really sick.” He took his wallet out of his pants pocket and opened it. “See,” he said, showing me his petal. “Every year she’d give Missy and me new ones. It’s a good-luck charm. It means that Christ will protect you.” He reverently lay both petals on the table. “Although in this case it doesn’t seem as if He’s doing a very good job, does it?” He ran his hand through his hair again, then pushed his glasses back up the bridge of his nose. “God, I hate this not knowing. It’s making me crazy.”

  “I can imagine.”

  “I can’t concentrate on anything anymore. I go to the store and I forget what I went in for.”

  The morning sun streaming though the window highlighted the circles under Bryan’s eyes, the ashy undertone of his skin, and the stubble on his chin. Constantly moving his hands and shifting his weight around in his chair, he seemed unable to find a comfortable place to sit.

  “What’s that?” he asked, pointing to the bag I’d found in Melissa’s closet.

  I pushed it across the table.

  Bryan wrinkled his nose when he opened it. “Running stuff. I think I can throw this stuff in the trash,” he told me, hastily closing the bag back up.

  “It was in the back of her closet.”

  Bryan’s laugh ended in a choked little sob. He moved the petals around with the tip of his finger. “I remember once she forgot to put my clothes in the dryer. My mother discovered them in the washing machine a week later. She was furious. No matter how many times we washed them after that, we could never get the smell of mildew out. We finally had to throw them away.”

  Bryan reached for the petals. “Do you mind?” he asked, picking them up. When I told him I didn’t, he put both petals in his wallet and put the wallet back in his pants pocket. “Did you find anything else up there?”

  “What I showed you is it.”

  He grunted and took a sip out of the can of Coke in front of him. “What now?”

  “I think we have to talk.”

  “We are talking.”

  “No. I mean really talk. If you want me to find your sister, you have to start being honest with me.”

  “I have been.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yes.” Bryan picked up his pen and doodled a tulip in the margin of the paper he’d been editing.

  I watched the dust motes dancing in the air around Bryan and listened to his breathing. He had a slight wheeze I hadn’t heard before. I wondered if it was stress-induced.

  “I don’t think you have been.”

  Bryan kept drawing. His eyes were fastened on his paper. “Why do you say that?”

  “For openers, you didn’t tell me you’d been arrested for threatening someone with a gun.”

  Bryan’s hand froze. Then he put down the pencil. “That was a long time ago. And I wasn’t threatening, I was waving the gun around.”

  “I like the distinction.”

  “I don’t see what that has to do with my sister going missing.”

  “Why’d you have a gun in the first place?”

  He leaned back in his chair and ran his finger along the edge of the table. “I needed it for protection.”

  “Who were you protecting yourself from?”

  “I owed some guys some money.”

  “For what?”

  “What difference does it make?” Bryan raised his voice.

  “Was it for drugs?”

  “It was a gambling debt, if you have to know.”

  “That’s not the story your mother told me.”

  Bryan bowed his head. “I didn’t want to upset her. She had enough on her plate.”

  “How charitable. What happened to it?”

  “The gun? The cops confiscated it.” Bryan picked up his pencil, drew a top hat, and began carefully coloring it in.

  “You never got another one?” I asked. I was curious. Most people I know who have had a gun continue to want to have one.

  “No.” Bryan laid the pencil back down. He blinked his eyes and looked down at the floor. “No, I didn’t.”

  He was lying. “Are you sure?”

  “Of course I’m sure.”

  I didn’t say anything. The refrigerator began to hum. The condenser had turned on.

  “Why? Who told you different?” he demanded after a couple of moments.

  I still didn’t say anything.

  “It was Tommy, wasn’t it?”

  I hoped this kid never got it into his head to play serious poker. “As a matter of fact, it wasn’t.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  We glared at each other. Two crows sitting on the branch of the oak tree outside the house cawed. Recently Syracuse had become inundated with them. They seemed to be everywhere.

  Bryan swallowed. “What are you implying?” he finally said.

 
“I’m not implying anything. I was just asking if you’d ever gotten another gun.”

  “What if I did?”

  “Can I see it?”

  “It was stolen.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Someone broke into our house and took off with some stuff.”

  “Stuff?”

  “Yeah. Stuff.” Bryan’s tone was truculent. “Some of Melissa’s jewelry. My gun. The cash we used to keep by the refrigerator in the kitchen.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “The middle of October.”

  “I don’t suppose you happened to report the break-in to the police?”

  “Melissa did.”

  “If I checked, would I find the report?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “Would I find the gun mentioned in it?”

  Bryan didn’t answer.

  I answered for him. “I wouldn’t, would I? Because it wasn’t registered.”

  “So what! Big deal! Lots of people have unregistered guns.”

  “True. But their sisters aren’t missing.”

  Bryan got up, strode over to the sink, turned on the tap, filled a glass with water, and took a long swallow. As he drank, I noticed his hand was trembling slightly.

  “See, this is why I didn’t tell you about the gun in the first place.” He drained the glass, put it in the sink, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand. “You do a couple of bad things and they follow you around for-fucking-ever.”

  “I take it that’s also the reason you didn’t tell me you were sent away when you were younger.”

  “That has nothing to do with now.”

  “I understand that among other things you had problems with your sister. I understand that’s why you were sent away.”

  Bryan’s jaw muscles tightened. “Is that what my mother said?”

  I moved a bread crumb away from the edge of table with my finger. “Not directly. But she certainly implied it.”

  Bryan crossed his arms over his chest and planted his feet about six inches apart from each other. “The reason I was sent away was because my mother was never here to look after me. That’s the reason I was sent away.”

  “Then you never hurt Melissa?”

  “No.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I was a kid. Kids do dumb things. We got into a fight. I don’t do that kind of stuff anymore. Period. End of story.”

  I thought about Bryan’s run-in with Tommy. Somehow I didn’t think it was. “Your mother is worried that you have.”

  “Is she now?” Bryan’s eyelids dropped slightly, giving his eyes a hooded appearance. He jiggled his left foot up and down.

  “She loves you.”

  “She sure has a funny way of showing it.” The jiggling got faster.

  “She asked me to make sure nothing happens to you.”

  Bryan twisted his mouth in an imitation of a smile. “It’s a little late now to be so concerned. You can tell her to relax. I’ve got everything covered.”

  “She’s worried.”

  Bryan laughed bitterly. “I just bet she is. Don’t look at me like that.”

  “Like what?”

  “You were staring at me.”

  “Sorry, I didn’t realize I was.”

  He hit the edge of the sink with the flat of his hand. “How would you feel if your mother suspected you of killing your own sister?”

  “I don’t think suspect is the right word.”

  “It seems right enough to me.” Bryan began pacing back and forth in front of the sink. “No matter what I do, it’s never good enough. No matter what I do, she’s never going to trust me.”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “The fact that my own mother—” He lifted his hands in the air and dropped them back down. “That she ... do you know what that makes me feel like?” he demanded.

  “Not good, I imagine.” I lit a cigarette. “What kind of gun was it anyway?”

  Bryan poured Rice Krispies and milk into a white bowl. “Just a cheapo Saturday night special. No big deal. The gun was a mistake. I admit it. But I like having one around. It makes me feel safe,” he told me as he fished a spoon out of the sink and rinsed it off. Then he sat back down next to me.

  I put my lighter away. “Did you get another one?”

  “No. I didn’t. You know the old saying, three strikes and you’re out. I figured two were enough in my case.”

  What Bryan was telling me might be the truth—although I doubted it—but I let it go. I wanted to hear what else he had to say.

  “Anyway, you shouldn’t be talking to me, you should be talking to Tommy,” he informed me, going back to his old song.

  “I’ve spoken to him.”

  “And?”

  “And I don’t have anything to link him to Melissa’s disappearance.”

  “Speak to him some more.” He ate a spoonful of cereal.

  “Why are you so set against him?”

  “Because the guy’s a schmuck.”

  “That covers a lot of territory. Could you be a little more specific?”

  “I bet he didn’t tell you how upset Melissa was when he told her they weren’t going to get married.”

  “No, he didn’t, but you didn’t tell me either,” I pointed out. “In fact, you didn’t even tell me they were planning a wedding. I wasn’t sure that you knew.”

  “Oh, I knew all right!” Bryan pushed his cereal bowl away. “I spent all night trying to get Missy to calm down.”

  “Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I had my reasons.”

  “Which were?”

  He lifted the spoon up and brought it back down with more force than he should have used. Little droplets of milk splattered onto the table. “I was afraid you’d tell my mother,” Bryan said, mopping up the spots with a paper napkin. “She doesn’t need to deal with that on top of everything else.”

  I leaned forward. “Why is that so horrible?” I inquired, thinking of Melissa’s relation with Beth. Mrs. Hayes would probably have liked that a lot less. “Did Tommy calling it off have anything to do with her relationship with her roommate?”

  “No,” he snapped.

  “Because Beth—”

  “Beth is an idiot. And a liar. She looks nice but she’s one of those people who likes causing trouble for the pleasure of it. You can’t believe a thing she says.”

  “Then what did it have to do with?”

  Instead of answering, Bryan looked away from me, twisting his head toward the doorway that led to the hall, as if he were expecting someone to appear there, and mumbled something I couldn’t understand.

  “What did you say?”

  He turned back and looked at me. “I didn’t say anything.”

  “Yes you did.”

  He glared at me. Mr. Defiant.

  I don’t know, maybe he expected me to beg him. I pushed my chair back and got up instead. Suddenly I was tired of Bryan, tired of his games, tired of trying to root out snippets of information from him. I wanted to get back to my store and my dog. I’d been leaving her alone too much lately. And I wanted to call George.

  “Where are you going?” Bryan demanded.

  “Back to work.” And I told him why.

  “You can’t.”

  “Why? There’s no point in staying if you won’t talk to me.”

  Bryan’s expression turned sulky. Maybe he didn’t like having his fun interrupted. “All I said was that Tommy’s father is a putz.”

  I put my backpack down and perched on the edge of the chair, ready to get up if Bryan stopped talking. “Tommy told me his father was responsible for the marriage being called off.”

  “Just because he’s got all this money now he thinks he’s better than everyone else.”

  That’s America for you. The Land of Upward Mobility. “It sounds to me as if you knew Mr. West before your sister became involved with his son.”

  Bryan frowned. “I did.”

  “And,”
I prodded, making a come-on motion with my hands.

  “My mom used to work for him when he first started out. She did the bookkeeping for him.”

  “I thought you told me she sold dresses.”

  “That was later.”

  “Why did she switch?”

  “Because the bastard had her blackballed,” Bryan confided in a burst of bitterness.

  “Was she stealing money?”

  He scowled, indignant at the suggestion. “My mother would never do anything like that. She was fired because she wouldn’t sleep with him.”

  Chapter 24

  It just goes to show, you learn something new every day, I thought as I left Bryan’s house and drove over to the campus to keep my appointment with Dr. Fell.

  Mrs. Hayes and Mr. West.

  Who woulda thunk it? Bryan’s fixation on Tommy was beginning to make more sense. Bryan’s mother had gotten involved with Tommy’s father, Bryan’s sister with the son. We were talking soap opera-land here. I wondered if that was the reason Mr. West hadn’t wanted his son seeing Melissa.

  Could be.

  Did this connect with Melissa’s disappearance in some way? Had she not known and just found out about it and decided to run away? Had she provoked a fight with Tommy? Or, despite what Bryan had said, had he found out about the wedding and tried to stop Melissa? Had the disagreement escalated the way family matters often do?

  Or had the bluebird of happiness come and taken Melissa away?

  Tune in next week, folks, and find out.

  I paused in front of Fell’s office and looked at what was to become the new computer center. Sheets of blue tarping were draped over the girders of the building like fabric on a mannequin, shrouding the workers inside from view. Every once in a while a gust of wind would pull the tarps aside and I’d catch a glimpse of a man scurrying around on the newly laid floor. The building was definitely coming along.