The Disappeared Girl Page 24

  The man with the unsettling eyes took a long, leisurely breath and exhaled into her face. Then he did it again. The more she struggled, the more she felt herself slipping, like falling into a hole. Not afraid for herself. Terrified for the daughter who might never be born, who might die without ever knowing her mother’s name. At least Melissa had that now—she had that. As darkness edged in, a diamond flash of clarity. It came to her as a question: Were these the same hands that killed Julia Limon?

  “It is true what they say, Melissa, so true.” He dug his fingers deeper into the soft sides of her neck and whispered in her ear. “What they say about curiosity killing the cat? Oh yes, yes, yes, it can.”

  Chapter 58

  Christensen noticed the Ford Falcon as he raced down Howe Street, scanning desperately for a place to park. He’d heard the car mentioned twice in the past twenty-four hours—once on a website, again by Beatriz Vargas—and both times as a dark symbol of Argentina’s past. He hadn’t seen one in years, but there it was—ancient, well-preserved, and wedged into a space a discreet two blocks from his house. It stood out among the BMWs, Benzes, minivans, and SUVs parked bumper-to-bumper along the Shadyside curb.

  His heart rate shot even higher. Call it instinct, or fatherly intuition, but he’d always sensed when one of his daughters was in trouble, like the night he’d found Melissa in the tub. The Falcon sighting sent his needle off the chart. If nothing else, it was a weird coincidence. By the time it really registered, though, he was a block past it, nearly home, and damn close to panic. He wedged the Explorer into an end space, partly blocking the alley, and cranked the parking brake. Its motor was still running, its driver’s side door wide open, as he bounded up the front steps. He shoved open the front door and shouted, “Melissa!”

  His voice rang through the hollow silence of the house.

  “Baby? You home? Anybody?”

  This time there came a noise, a dull thud, like something bumping a wall. Upstairs? Downstairs? He imagined his sleep-fogged daughter bumping out of bed, and was halfway to the stair landing when he heard the sound again among the woody creaking of his own footsteps.

  Downstairs.

  He followed the sound down the hall, toward the home office he and Brenna shared. Nothing seemed amiss when he stepped through the open door. Then he heard another sound, the guttural rasp of a desperate breath. Something moved, mostly hidden in the far corner behind his desk.

  What registered first were the calamitous folds of Melissa’s blue terry robe. They were spread across the office’s hardwood floor. Her pale legs jutted from one side, but Christensen couldn’t see her head. It was blocked by a broad and undefined shape. Then the shape unfolded. It rose on two legs and turned. Now it had a face.

  “Call an ambulance,” the man said, nodding to the telephone on the desk. “I am afraid she is not well.”

  The man was out of breath, and Christensen followed a bead of sweat as it rolled off his forehead, down his nose, and into a thatch of bushy mustache. Melissa’s upper body and head were still hidden behind the stranger’s legs. She wasn’t moving.

  “Step away from her,” Christensen said.

  “I would not wait. She is really quite ill.” He held up a leather medical bag. “My supplies are limited.”

  “I said step away.”

  The man shrugged and moved toward the desk.

  Christensen reacted without thinking to the sickening sight of Melissa’s face and neck, bending to her in a rush of adrenaline and dread. He probed the cold and bruised skin above her carotid artery for a pulse, encouraged when he saw her blink. Suddenly, a jolt—somewhere between a karate kick and a lightning strike. Every nerve in his body came alive with searing pain as he spun around and screamed, “Gaa!”

  Christensen could manage nothing else before his body began to convulse. He felt his eyes bulge and a crackling sensation inside his skull. His hands scrabbled for something, anything, to grab, but found only space. He landed face up on the hardwood floor beside Melissa, desperately trying to breathe.

  The man stood across the room, watching him thrash like a palsied marionette at the end of two electrified strings. He approached slowly, something black in one hand, and then dropped to one knee about two feet away.

  When the spasms subsided, Christensen tried again for purchase. Reaching out, his fingers hit thin metal—a belt buckle—and a smooth length of leather. He caught the belt with three fingers, trying to leverage the man forward and off balance, but his muscles were weak. His attacker simply pulled away, holding something small and dark in the palm of his hand. He held it by its sculpted grip, and Christensen read the embossed words along its side: Stun Monster.

  Christensen made a conscious effort to move his right leg, testing his motor control. It moved as his brain and muscles commanded, more or less, but with an extraordinary amount of pain. He already knew this was a fight for his life, and Melissa’s life—if she was still alive. When the man moved a foot closer and bent over, Christensen sucked in a breath and brought his knee up as hard as he could into the man’s nose, catching him off guard. He heard the mushy pop of cartilage as the blow sent him back against the drawers of his desk.

  The impact rattled loose a framed photograph of their blended family—Brenna and him, Melissa, Annie and Taylor—and it smashed to the floor in an explosion of glass. His attacker flinched and readjusted, holding his bloody nose with one hand while pinning one of Christensen’s weakened arms to the floor with his knee. His other hand closed tighter around the monster’s pistol grip.

  “Now—” The man spoke through his own bloody fingers, breathing through his mouth and trying talk at the same time. He adjusted something on the stun gun. “Now you will know real pain.”

  Christensen’s free right hand found something, an irregular angle of broken glass about the size of a postcard. It cut into his palm as his desperate fingers closed around it. His attacker noticed when Christensen raised his arm.

  “No!”

  Christensen managed one last, reckless slash, aiming for the carotid artery in the side of the man’s neck. The cutting edge found flesh just beneath his ear, but Christensen felt only a light sprinkle of warm blood on his face. The cut was superficial, and the glass slipped from his tingling fingers. The man swore in Spanish as it shattered, then reached for something on the bookshelf behind the desk. When he raised it high above his head, Christensen saw that he’d grabbed the engraved ingot that the Steel City Psychological Association had given him the year before to recognize his breakthrough memory research.

  “I said no, goddamit!”

  The words came from a distance. They seemed less nasal, the voice deep and sure. And familiar. Christensen turned toward it just as a shadow moved above him. When the ingot smashed down on his forehead, a million pinpricks of light exploded behind his eyes. A moment of pain, then the rest of his body went numb.

  “Stop it, Ramon.”

  Christensen felt nothing for a moment, not even tingling. He was still conscious, though, hearing that voice. That radio voice. It was answered by another.

  “You are … too late … Michael,” the man above him panted. “What is done … is done.

  “For Chrissakes, Ramon. Oh Jesus.”

  Christensen opened one eye, and it immediately was covered in a veil of his own blood. But he could see his brother-in-law moving slowly into the office, one hand to his forehead, the other holding his handgun loosely at his side.

  “Oh God, Ramon. Oh fucking God. What the hell—”

  “We had … no choice, Michael.”

  “Christ, no.”

  “They knew … the truth. Much too dangerous.”

  “Have you lost your mind? Not Melissa. Jesus—please not Melissa.”

  “Think, Michael, of all that you have to lose. Of all that I would lose.” The man waited to catch his breath. “They would have destroyed us. How could we let that happen, Michael? Everything we have worked for, these lives we have built since we fl
ed Argentina.”

  “We?” Dorsey said. His voice was suddenly high and wavering. “You fled, Ramon. I came home.”

  “Ah yes, Michael, home. Home with your secret bastard children and your ugly compromises.” He waited. “You knew all along, did you not? That the things you did, the choices you made, could ruin you someday? These people—they know our secrets, Michael. Are you prepared to lose everything?”

  Christensen felt his perspective begin to change, like he’d always heard it did at the end. He imagined he was watching from just above the scene. Melissa sprawled limp and maybe lifeless beside him. His own useless body pinned to the hardwood by a man trying to crush his skull. Michael Dorsey watching it all.

  “Answer me, Michael. Are you prepared to lose everything? Your wife? Your career? Your moral authority, Michael? Because that is precisely the choice you face.”

  Christensen again forced one eye open and blinked away the blood. In that single, clarifying moment, he saw Dorsey’s face reflecting the horror he’d created, his every sin etched on it. Dorsey was seeing the devil’s choice he now faced, and he cleared his throat as he slowly, surely raised the gun.

  “Use it, Michael. Finish what you started.”

  “What I started, Ramon?”

  “The deal you struck twenty-two years ago—your lover for your children. You knew they planned to pick her up because of her writings. That there was nothing you could do.”

  “The—the die was cast.”

  “You knew that. You even told them when she would be home cooking dinner so you could be away when her time came. Oh, Michael, my friend—a bigamist is one thing. A bigamist who trades an inconvenient woman to her enemies—well, I think you can see how this might not play well in the American press.”

  “You say it like I had a choice.”

  “Oh, but, Michael, you did.”

  Dorsey swore under his breath. “You’ve got secrets, too.”

  “Our secrets bind us, then, do they not?”

  Dorsey was weeping openly now.

  “You knew someday it could come to this. So finish it, Michael. Let the gun preserve our secrets. Use it now.”

  “I—I can’t.”

  “Listen to me, cabrón. Finish. What. You. Started.”

  The command was followed by the click-release of the handgun’s safety. Then nothing. Christensen used the last of his strength to open his eye. His brother-in-law’s outstretched hand was wavering, but he was clearly aiming it at his head. After a tense eternity, Dorsey’s face crumpled. The arm holding the gun fell back to his side. Christensen closed the eye again.

  The stranger above him sighed. “Americans,” he said. “Always looking for a bargain.”

  Christensen was at the edge of darkness now, aware only of a subtle shift in the weight above him. He imagined his killer raising the ingot high to bring it down for the final blow that would smash his head. The sound he heard next might have been that, or it might have been the shattering crack of a single gunshot. Or both. By then it didn’t matter. He felt a lightness he’d never felt before.

  Chapter 59

  A summer drizzle had slicked the grass covering the rolling hills of Allegheny Cemetery, so Melissa stepped slowly and carefully around the granite monuments and marble headstones in the massive cemetery’s northeast corner. Until six weeks ago, she hadn’t even known she had a brother. Now she was here to bury him, twenty-two years too late, and alone except for the deputy county coroner who helped coordinate the identification and offered to drive her here. He carried Baby Michael’s bones.

  No birds sang. The only sound beside her footsteps was the wet sizzle of rolling tires as cars passed along Stanton Avenue, just beyond the fence. Her neck brace made it hard to look down, so she followed the morgue guy, Hasch, as he led her from his parked pickup to the depressingly tiny cut in the soil. The Braddock cop who’d come along waited at Hasch’s battered Ford F-150. She’d told him everything she knew, but he was still asking questions. Jim, Molly, Michael Dorsey. What did they know and when did they know it?

  “Still with me?” Hasch said, looking back.

  Melissa just waved. Talking was still rough.

  Hasch set the gunmetal gray box in the wet grass beside the open grave. It wasn’t heavy—nothing inside except a small toothless skull and the few bones recovered from the wreckage of the sunken plane. But Baby Michael’s bones were her bones, his blood her blood, and she felt profoundly connected to those sad fragments.

  “Thank … you,” she managed.

  Hasch told her he’d read the newspaper stories, which gleefully chronicled the details of Michael Dorsey’s fall—the scandal of his bigamy, the hypocritical gulf between his private life and public persona, the collapse of his radio career at the very brink of his breakthrough. The stories also described how it all unraveled—how the airplane recovery had triggered flickering memories in Melissa, how her simple questions led to impossibly complicated answers, how the renowned memory expert who unwittingly adopted and raised Dorsey’s biological daughter had helped her grope, hand over hand, into her past. With its combustible mix of scandal, sex, celebrity, and death, the Michael Dorsey story had legs. Six weeks after it broke and Melissa was still avoiding reporters’ calls.

  Hasch toed the edge of the canvas tarp covering the small pile of dirt beside the grave. He gestured to the cop. “I’m gonna head on back to the truck, give you a few minutes to make your peace here. You all set, ma’am?”

  When she nodded, he handed her the tight mixed bouquet he’d brought along. The Gidas Flowers price tag was still stuck to the cellophane wrapper. She added them to her own armload of long-stemmed lilies and touched his shoulder.

  “Beyond … the call,” she said.

  He shook his head. “Tell you something about this job. You mind?” Hasch took a breath. “Lot of people wonder about it, ask me about it. All the time dealing with, you know, people who got chewed up and spit out by life. Death all the time. People hurting people. Murdering. They want to know how I handle it, and I tell them it’s real simple. I focus on the lives, not the deaths. We’ve all got a number; we’re all gonna get called. Me. You. Every single one of us. That’s a guarantee. I see that every freaking day, pardon my French. But before every death there’s a life. I try to honor that.”

  Hasch rearranged a small mound of dirt with his foot. He wasn’t looking at her now, but at the metal box of her infant brother’s bones.

  “Every once in a while I get one like this, where it ended too soon. He was what? A few days old? Those are the ones that stick with me. Who would he have been? Roberto Clemente? Mario Lemieux? Jonas Salk? Maybe not him, but maybe he would have been the dad of somebody like that. Or the granddad. These ones—they’re a break in the life chain. They’re the tough ones for me, the ones where you just don’t know, can’t know, who they were. So I always try to come out, pay my respects to what might have been.”

  Melissa swallowed with some effort. “Appreciate it.”

  “When you’re ready, you just leave things here as they are,” Hasch said. “The cemetery folks’ll finish up. They’ll take good care, set the flowers real nice and all once you’ve said your goodbyes.”

  They both turned at the same time toward the low thrum of an approaching car’s engine. Brenna’s Legend crept along the narrow road that snaked through the cemetery, its intermittent windshield wipers counting a sober cadence, a slow-thwacking dirge. Melissa squinted into the car through the tinted glass, but the rain obscured the view. The rear doors popped open as the car coasted to a stop behind Hasch’s battered truck.

  Annie and Taylor slid from the backseat, comically solemn in their fancy clothes and uncomfortable shoes. Her Aunt Carole followed, looking like she’d stepped out of a Vogue spread on “Fashion’s New Sobriety.” Brenna was wearing simple black, and she shot a matching umbrella into the gap between the driver’s side doorframe and the car as she stepped out. She hustled around the front end, headed for the passenge
r door. When she opened it, Melissa heard herself gasp as Jim set his feet slowly, carefully on the pavement, followed by the rubber tip of his walking cane

  “Family?” Hasch asked.

  Melissa nodded. “My dad. He’s not supposed to be up.”

  They watched as Brenna and Carole helped Jim stand and steady himself.

  “Read about him,” Hasch said. “Hurt pretty bad. Sounds like he was there when you needed him, though.”

  “Always.”

  “But he’s really having trouble remembering?”

  Melissa winced. A Pittsburgh Press story had noted the absurdity of Jim’s dilemma. He was one of the world’s leading experts on human memory, but the blows to his head had rocked his brain, wiping away significant swaths of his long-term memory. Some of it was back already, but not all. And he had no trouble remembering what had happened in the week before he was hurt. But his childhood? Hers? Molly? He had only unassembled pieces of the puzzle. Her dad maintained a research office at the Harmony Brain Research Center across the river. Now he was a patient there as well.

  “He’s working on it,” she said. “Won’t know for a while how much he’s lost.”

  “I’ll say a prayer for him, too,” he said. “You still need a ride home?”

  She shook her head. “We’ll double buckle. Thanks.”

  The deputy coroner reached for her hand and shook it, then touched her swelling belly with the odd familiarity pregnant women come to expect but never really get used to. “It’s an amazing gift you’re giving—life.”

  Melissa watched until Hasch and the cop drove off. Near the cemetery entrance, they passed a black Lincoln Navigator that slowed and stopped several hundred yards away, at the crest of a hill. She focused instead on the group shuffling up the slope across the slick wet grass. She’d left Jim in bed at home five hours before, telling him her plans to bury Baby Michael. Now here he was, in clear violation of his doctor’s orders. Here they all were. She couldn’t have been happier to see them.