Nor did their names mean anything to her. “Jude Trahern,” “Denise...” The third name she’d failed to catch.
The girls were moist-eyed with emotion. So many neighbors had dropped by to express their concern, Leah supposed she had to endure it. The girl who’d given Leah the bouquet, Jude, was saying in a faltering nasal voice how sorry they were for what had happened to Marissa and how much they liked Marissa who was just about the nicest girl at Skatskill Day. If something like this had to happen too bad it couldn’t happen to — well, somebody else.
The other girls giggled, startled at their friend’s vehemence.
“But Marissa is so nice, and so sweet. Ma’am, we are praying for her safe return, every minute.”
Leah stared at the girl. She had no idea how to reply.
Confused, she lifted the bouquet to her face. Inhaled the almost too rich paperwhite smell. As if the purpose of this visit was to bring Leah... What?
The girls were staring at her almost rudely. Of course, they were young, they knew no better. Their leader, Jude, seemed to be a girl with some confidence, though she wasn’t the eldest or the tallest or the most attractive of the three.
Not attractive at all. Her face was fiercely plain as if she’d scrubbed it with steel wool. Her skin was chalky, mottled. You could sense the energy thrumming through her like an electric current, she was wound up so tightly.
The other girls were more ordinary. One was softly plump with a fattish pug face, almost pretty except for something smirky, insolent in her manner. The other girl had a sallow blemished skin, limp grease-colored hair and oddly quivering, parted lips. All three girls wore grubby blue jeans, boys’ shirts, and ugly square-toed boots.
“...so we were wondering, Mrs. Bran-, Bantry, if you would like us to, like, pray with you? Like, now? It’s Palm Sunday. Next Sunday is Easter.”
“What? Pray? Thank you but...”
“Because Denise and Anita and me, we have a feeling, we have a really strong feeling, Mrs. Bantry, that Marissa is alive. And Marissa is depending on us. So, if—”
Avril came forward quickly, saying the visit was ended.
“My sister has been under a strain, girls. I’ll see you to the door.”
The flowers slipped through Leah’s fingers. She caught at some of them, clumsily. The others fell to the floor at her feet.
Two of the girls hurried to the door, held open by Avril, with frightened expressions. Jude, pausing, continued to smile in her earnest, pinched way. She’d taken a small black object out of her pocket. “May I take a picture, Mrs. Bantry?”
Before Leah could protest, she raised the camera and clicked the shutter. Leah’s hand had flown up to shield her face, instinctively.
Avril said sharply, “Please. The visit is over, girls.”
Jude murmured, on her way out, “We will pray for you anyway, Mrs. Bantry. ‘Bye!”
The other girls chimed in Bye! bye! Avril shut the door behind them.
Leah threw the flowers away in the trash. White flowers!
At least, they hadn’t brought her calla lilies.
...in motion. Tracing and retracing The Route. Sometimes on foot, sometimes in her car. Sometimes with Avril but more often alone. “I need to get out! I can’t breathe in here! I need to see what Marissa saw.”
These days were very long days. And yet, in all of the hours of these days, nothing happened.
Marissa was still gone, still gone.
Like a clock’s ticking: still, still gone. Each time you checked, still gone.
She had her cell phone of course. If there was news.
She walked to the Skatskill Day School and positioned herself at the front door of the elementary grades wing, which was the door Marissa would have used, would have left by on Thursday afternoon. From this position she began The Route.
To the front sidewalk and east along Pinewood. Across Pinewood to Mahopac Avenue and continue east past 12th Street, 13th Street, 14th Street, 15th Street. At 15th and Trinity, the witness had claimed to see Mikal Zallman pull Marissa Bantry into his Honda CR-V van, and drive away.
Either it had happened that way, or it had not.
There was only the single witness, a Skatskill Day student whom police would not identify.
Leah believed that Zallman was the man and yet: there was something missing. Like a jigsaw puzzle piece. A very small piece, yet crucial.
Since the girls’ visit. Since the bouquet of dazzling white flowers. That small twitchy smile Leah did not wish to interpret as taunting, of the girl named Jude.
We will pray for you anyway, Mrs. Bantry. Bye!
Important for Leah to walk briskly. To keep in motion.
There is a deep-sea creature, perhaps a shark, that must keep in motion constantly, otherwise it will die. Leah was becoming this creature, on land. She believed that news of Marissa’s death would come to her only if she, the mother, were still; there was a kind of deadness in being still; but if she was in motion, tracing and retracting Marissa’s route... “It’s like Marissa is with me. Is me.”
She knew that people along The Route were watching her. Everyone in Skatskill knew her face, her name. Everyone knew why she was out on the street, tracing and retracing The Route. A slender woman in shirt, slacks, dark glasses. A woman who had made a merely perfunctory attempt to disguise herself, dusty-blond hair partly hidden beneath a cap.
She knew the observers were pitying her. And blaming her.
Still, when individuals spoke to her, as a few did each time she traced The Route, they were invariably warm, sympathetic. Some of them, both men and women, appeared to be deeply sympathetic. Tears welled in their eyes. That bastard they spoke of Zallman. Has he confessed yet?
In Skatskill the name Zallman was known now, notorious. That the man was — had been — a member of the faculty at the Skatskill Day School had become a local scandal.
The rumor was, Zallman had a record of prior arrests and convictions as a sexual predator. He’d been fired from previous teaching positions but had somehow managed to be hired at the prestigious Skatskill School. The school’s beleaguered principal had given newspaper and TV interviews vigorously denying this rumor, yet it prevailed.
Bantry, Zallman. The names now luridly linked. In the tabloids photos of the missing girl and “suspect” were printed side by side. Several times, Leah’s photograph was included as well.
In her distraught state yet Leah was able to perceive the irony of such a grouping: a mock family.
Leah had given up hoping to speak with Zallman. She supposed it was a ridiculous request. If he’d taken Marissa he was a psychopath and you don’t expect a psychopath to tell the truth. If he had not taken Marissa...
“If it’s someone else. They will never find him.”
The Skatskill police had not yet arrested Zallman. Temporarily, Zallman had been released. His lawyer had made a terse public statement that he was “fully cooperating” with the police investigation. But what he had told them, what could possibly be of worth that he had told them, Leah didn’t know.
Along The Route, Leah saw with Marissa’s eyes. The facades of houses. On 15th Street, storefronts. No one had corroborated the eyewitness’s testimony about seeing Marissa pulled into a van in full daylight on busy 15th Street. Wouldn’t anyone else have seen? And who had the eyewitness been? Since the three girls had dropped by to see her, Leah was left with a new sensation of unease.