It looked like any room in process, a room in a house that someone was going to redecorate. Maybe we can do that, I thought. Maybe it would be good for us to look at wallpaper and paint. We’ll buy a gallon of flat ceiling white, I thought. And some new rollers, and a low-luster oil-based paint for the windows and molding and doors. We’ll take home paint chips and hold them up to the wall, and we’ll talk about colors.
I looked at the quarter-round molding I might replace with something a little more ornate. I was good at mitering cuts of forty-five degrees. I might box in the windows with four-inch casing, I thought. The dog had a length of splintered stud, and he chewed it, shaking it in his teeth once or twice in case it was alive. I kept my back to the corner of the room in which we had stood Hannah’s crib.
The new one was nearly eighteen, a Filipina with a black father and missing from a school for troubled girls in Oneida County, probably too far from us for the maniac to be the same. Her face in the grainy, sun-blurred photograph looked taut, thoughtful, dubious about something. They could have printed a picture of an owl dropping a pellet and I would have read a lot of emotions into it.
I wondered if girls had been kidnapped, murdered, preyed upon for years. Maybe it was the times, and therefore everything human and otherwise from when we began might not be at fault. Including, maybe, nature and God and the universe and Captain Marvel and Mother Teresa. Elmo gave me the details and showed me the poster, which had been mailed from the Oneida County Sheriff’s Department. It was battered and stained, as if they had dug through snowdrifts to get it into the mail.
Perhaps it was the times. Or maybe it was the Tanners. They had enlisted so much help, even from passing truck drivers and people stopping for coffee on the Thruway going north-south as well as east-west. An item ran in the Binghamton papers about their posters. The reward was now $7,500, and I’d heard it was Mrs. Tanner’s pension money and Reverend Tanner’s life insurance, which he’d borrowed on. There was talk of a home-equity loan to bump the reward into more impressive ranges if they didn’t hear something soon. They were stripping themselves to get her back. It made sense. What could you use the money for if she didn’t come back? So maybe the parents of other victimized girls were following the Tanners’ lead. Everyone was crying for help. That was what the Tanners were teaching them. Don’t wait quietly. Do what you can. Call for help. Praying, Mrs. Tanner would call it, I was sure.
We had a run of days with temperatures closer to ten than to zero. Students walked around gloveless in what was, of course, ferocious cold, their coats open, no hats or scarves and their work boots untied. I knew they didn’t believe in a dangerous world. Yet they fastened posters to their windows and they stood in corridors, waiting for class or a meeting with a teacher, staring at the faces of vanished children. Men tied up children and flayed their skin in measured strips. Women sometimes helped them. Little boys were penetrated by middle-aged men using bottle necks and broom handles. Girls were raped in the mouth by men they later called Granddad. And these children I watched out for didn’t trouble to lace their boots.
I was running an equipment check on my Jeep, something I’d suggested to all of the staff. It was early in the day, and I was in the little parking lot in front of the security building, a small gray-and-white Cape Cod cottage on the edge of the campus. I folded the blankets, looked inside the first-aid kit for what can save someone’s life — rubber tourniquet, sharp, heavy knife for the tracheotomy none of us thought we’d be able to perform, the inflatable plastic sleeve that would immobilize a compound fracture and keep a jagged bone from piercing an artery. I had a wire brush for cleaning battery terminals, the extralong jumper cables that were getting a workout this year, a miniature air compressor that ran off the cigarette lighter and could generate pressure to swell a tire enough to get someone to a service station. I had a folding shovel, wire grids for traction, a ten-pound bag of ice melter, a five-gallon can of gas, a gallon of antifreeze. I found Sergeant Bird’s summary.
I knew it had made its way into the back of the Jeep because I didn’t want to read it. I hadn’t seen the Tanners in days. I’d haunted myself with their daughter, but I’d done nothing to help them or her. So I closed the back hatch, buckled myself behind the wheel, started the engine, and, while it heated, I read about Janice Tanner.
It started with a detailed physical description. She was thinner and in general smaller than I’d thought. Her underthings were white, according to her mother. The Tanners must have hated giving that information. Thinking why is like learning the worst in advance, I thought. Her feet were narrow. She liked to wear a ponytail with a velvet-covered rubber band around it.
She had no personal problems. Period. She was happy. Period. She participated in extracurricular events. She helped her mother in Sunday school. She was excellent in school except for math and science, in which she was given C’s and D’s. I knew about those. She volunteered two hours a week in the library, where she helped to shelve books and do clerical work for the librarian. She played the coronet in the middle school band. She was friendly and had charmed all of her teachers without wooing them.
She was friendly. That was why. It was why she’d given someone directions while standing close to his car. Why she’d gone into somebody’s house or trailer or truck. Why she was never coming home. Janice was a friendly child.
But maybe still alive, I insisted, though I didn’t believe myself.
They had done a fine job, as troopers always did, of canvassing. Every house in the hamlet had been covered, of course. And two reports referred to a car the witnesses were certain did not belong to anyone in town. One talked about “one of those long, low things that makes all the noise when it starts off.” Another said it had “a bump in the front.” Both thought it might be black or dark blue or brown.
I went back inside and told the dispatcher I’d be off the air for a while, that I was cooperating with the state police.
She said, “That big black one? Over?”
I said, “He asked me if you dated. Over.”
I had no business leaving the campus for an hour or more, but I did. Instead of filling the tank at our pump, I drove into town and filled it halfway full out of my own pocket. My conscience didn’t feel twelve gallons better, but my conscience was going to have to take care of itself. I drove north, then west, and went over the hill to Masonville. I could see black clouds coming in briskly, and I knew we’d have a storm. I thought I ought to call Fanny and warn her, but warning people of storms, for the past several weeks, was the same as calling up to tell them to look outside.
In Masonville, I parked outside the post office, which was on a corner and gave me a view of the broad street that ran down from the school to the northern route to the Thruway. I was willing to bet he made his New York pickups either on the Thruway or the Onondaga Reservation, and, either way, he’d have to pass me. Of course, he might sleep until two in the afternoon. He might be out of town. He might even, from time to time, attend class. I had to respond to the report, and the car with a bump in the front, that arrogant air scoop, and its glasspacks or shot-out muffler, seemed to be the only reason to have asked for and read the report. It contained nothing. They had nothing to work with. If Janice Tanner was going to be found, a lucky accident had to happen. I was maybe their luck.