Storekeepers in the area of the Skatskill Day School and along Marissa Bantry’s route home were questioned. At the 7-Eleven store in the mini-mall on the highway, so often frequented by young people, several clerks examined photographs of the missing girl, solemnly shook their heads and told police officers no, they did not believe that Marissa Bantry had been in the store recently, or ever. “There are so many children...” Questioned about Leah Bantry, whose photograph they were also shown, the eldest clerk said, carefully, that yes, he recognized this woman, she was a friendly woman; friendlier than most of his customers; but he could not say with certainty if she had been in his store on Thursday, with or without her daughter. “There are so many customers. And so many of them, they look like one another especially if they are blond.”
Detectives queried teenagers, most of them from Skatskill High, and some no longer in school, who hung out at the mini-mall. Most of them stiffened at the approach of police officers and hurriedly shook their heads no, they had not seen the little blond girl who was missing, or anyway could not remember seeing her. A striking girl with electric blue hair and a glittering pin in her left eyebrow frowned at the photo and said finally yeah she’d maybe seen Marissa “like with her mother? But when, like maybe it wasn’t yesterday because I don’t think I was here yesterday, might’ve been last week? I don’t know.”
Skatskill Day School was in a stage of siege. TV crews on the front walk, reporters and press photographers at all the entrances. Crisis counsellors met with children in small groups through the day following Marissa’s disappearance and there was an air in all the classrooms of shock, as if in the wake of a single violent tremor of the earth. A number of parents had kept their children home from school, but this was not advised by school authorities: “There is no risk at Skatskill Day. Whatever happened to Marissa did not happen on school grounds, and would never have happened on school grounds.” It was announced that school security had been immediately strengthened, and new security measures would be begun on Monday. In Marissa Bantry’s sixth grade class children were subdued, uneasy. After the counsellor spoke, and asked if anyone had a question, the class sat silent until a boy raised his hand to ask if there would be a search party “like on TV, people going through woods and fields until they find the body?”
Not after a counsellor spoke with eighth graders, but later in the day, an eighth-grade girl named Anita Helder came forward hesitantly to speak with her teacher. Anita was a heavyset girl with a low C average who rarely spoke in class, and often asked to be excused for mysterious health reasons. She was a suspected drug-taker, but had never been caught. In class, she exuded a sulky, defiant manner if called upon by her teacher. Yet now she was saying, in an anxious, faltering voice, that maybe she had seen Marissa Bantry the previous day, on 15h Street and Trinity, climbing into a minivan after school.
“...I didn’t know it was her then for sure, I don’t know Marissa Bantry at all but I guess now it must’ve been her. Oh God I feel so bad I didn’t try to stop her! I was like close enough to call out to her, ‘Don’t get in!’ What I could see, the driver was leaning over and sort of pulling Marissa inside. It was a man, he had real dark hair kind of long on the sides but I couldn’t see his face. The minivan was like silver-blue, the license plate was something like TZ 6... Beyond that, I can’t remember.”
Anita’s eyes welled with tears. She was visibly trembling, the memory so upset her.
By this time Skatskill detectives had questioned everyone on the school staff except for Mikal Zallman, thirty-one years old, computer consultant and part-time employee, who wasn’t at the Skatskill Day School on Fridays.
It was an ugly expression. It was macho-ugly, the worst kind of ugly. It made him smile.
Feeding my rat. Alone.
Alone he’d driven out of Skatskill on Thursday afternoon immediately following his final class of the week. Alone driving north in his trim Honda minivan along the Hudson River where the river landscape so mesmerizes the eye, you wonder why you’d ever given a damn for all that’s petty, inconsequential. Wondering why you’d ever given a damn for the power of others to hurt you. Or to accuse you with tearful eyes of hurting them.
He’d tossed a valise, his backpack, a few books, hiking boots and a supply of trail food into the back of the van. Always he traveled light. As soon as he left Skatskill he ceased to think of his life there. It was of little consequence really, a professional life arranged to provide him with this freedom. Feeding my rat.
There was a woman in Skatskill, a married woman. He knew the signs. She was lonely in her marriage and yearning to be saved from her loneliness. Often she invited him as if impulsively, without premeditation. Come to dinner, Mikal? Tonight? He had been vague about accepting, this time. He had not wanted to see the disappointment in her eyes. He felt a tug of affection for her, he recognized her hurt, her resentment, her confusion, she was a colleague of his at the Skatskill School whom he saw often in the company of others, there was a rapport between them, Zallman acknowledged, but he did not want to be involved with her or with any woman, not now. He was thirty-one, and no longer naive. More and more he lived for feeding my rat.
It was arrogant, was it, this attitude? Selfish. He’d been told so, more than once. Living so much in his own head, and for himself.
He hadn’t married, he doubted he would ever marry. The prospect of children made his heart sink: bringing new lives into the uncertainty and misery of this world, in the early twenty-first century!
He much preferred his secret life. It was an innocent life. Running each morning, along the river. Hiking, mountain climbing. He did not hunt or fish, he had no need to destroy life to enhance his own. Mostly it was exulting in his body. He was only a moderately capable hiker. He hadn’t the endurance or the will to run a marathon. He wasn’t so fanatic, he wanted merely to be alone where he could exert his body pleasurably. Or maybe to the edge of pain.
One summer in his mid-twenties he’d gone backpacking alone in Portugal, Spain, northern Morocco. In Tangier he’d experimented with the hallucinatory kif which was the most extreme form of aloneness and the experience had shaken and exhilarated him and brought him back home to reinvent himself. Michael, now Mikal.
Feeding my rat meant this freedom. Meant he’d failed to drop by her house as she had halfway expected he would. And he had not telephoned, either. It was a way of allowing the woman to know he didn’t want to be involved, he would not be involved. In turn, she and her her husband would not provide Mikal Zallman with an alibi for those crucial hours.
When, at 5:18 P.M. of Friday, April 11, returning to his car along a steep hiking trail, he happening to see what appeared to be a New York State troopers’ vehicle in the parking lot ahead, he had no reason to think They’ve come for me. Even when he saw that two uniformed officers were looking into the rear windows of his minivan, the lone vehicle in the lot parked near the foot of the trail, because it had been the first vehicle of the day parked in the lot, the sight did not alarm or alert him. So confident in himself he felt, and so guiltless.
“Hey. What d’you want?”
Naively, almost conversationally he called to the troopers, who were now staring at him, and moving toward him.