Stephen White - Missing Persons

“Then I got handed a way out. My boss had just been promoted to western regional manager-a big deal for him. His wife threw him a surprise party up at the Flagstaff House just before Christmas. Late, close to two in the morning, I was driving behind him down Baseline and…” Bill shook his head, disbelieving. “He was distracted, I guess. I don’t know what it was, but a pedestrian was walking from the Hill over to Chautauqua, right across Baseline. I saw her clearly from a block and a half away-she had her hands in her pockets, her head down against the cold. Walter just mowed her down.

“She must have flown a hundred feet in the air. Turned out she was a young mother, an orthodontist. He never even touched his brakes; he just plowed into her. I still see her body flying. Sometimes, I feel the impact when I’m asleep.

“He killed her, of course. She was dead at the scene.”

He paused, and I reminded him that he’d told me about the accident years before when he’d stopped by to thank me for my help with Rachel.

“I didn’t tell you the next part. Walter was in shock. Kept saying, ‘What happened, Bill? What happened?’ I saw an opportunity. I told him to shut up and listen to me. As out-of-it as he was, he did. When the cops came, I told them what I saw. A white van was coming up Baseline in the other direction. The woman walked out from behind it. My boss couldn’t have seen the woman. I told them I was right behind him and I didn’t see her until she was in the air. It wasn’t Walter’s fault at all. That was my story.”

“You made up the van?” I asked.

“It was two in the morning. I figured I was the only witness. My boss matched his story to mine. It worked. Why wouldn’t it? Turned out his blood alcohol was just a hair below the legal limit so he wasn’t even arrested. He was never charged with anything. He didn’t go to prison. His promotion was secure. His family… was safe.”

“You saved his ass?”

“I did it for me, not for him. I was saving my family. I told you I was desperate. I don’t even like Walter. He’s a prick.”

“I don’t understand,” I said. But I did. Before I’d left her office, Mary Black had suggested enough that I could guess the rest.

“I knew Walter would be grateful.” Bill suddenly seemed out of breath.

“The promotion you got,” I said, filling in a blank for him. “The one you told me about years ago?”

“Yes, that promotion. My salary went way up, and then it went up again. I began getting regular Christmas bonuses. That was eight years ago. I had a good job, better than I deserved. I was making enough money to make ends meet here and enough to keep Rachel safe in Vegas, barely.”

“Until Doyle Chandler showed up at your kitchen table?”

“I’d kept a record about everything that happened in case Walter ever turned on me. When Doyle starting coming into my house he did it simply to steal my identity, but then… then he ended up finding every last thing I’d kept about Walter and the orthodontist. Newspaper clippings. Notes. Everything. Once he understood what I’d done, and how vulnerable I was, he changed his plans. Doyle wanted a cut.”

“How much?”

“He asked for ten thousand a month. We settled on five at first. But I knew I couldn’t do five for long. Canada was demanding more and more money to keep doing what he was doing for Rachel in Las Vegas. As she got sicker he had to pay more people more money so that she would be… left alone. What choice did I have? What could I do? I was in so deep.

“When Doyle moved out in the fall and put his house on the market, I thought he might have realized that the till was empty, you know? Hell, he knew my finances as well as I did. Better, maybe. I thought-God, I was naive-I thought things might be over. But that’s when Doyle went to Walter and started blackmailing him, too. Walter and I realized he’d moved away so that we couldn’t find him. My boss wasn’t happy. He’s not a pleasant man when he’s not happy.”

The sky was getting dark and, despite the warming winds, I felt winter and January all the way to my bones. It wasn’t just the temperature, though; I knew that.

“Bill, would you like to come inside?” I said. “Sit down?”

He looked around as though he’d needed to remind himself we were indeed outside, nodded, and followed me to the back door of my office. Once we were in I flicked on some lights and sat across from him as though we were doctor and patient.

Were we? Partly yes, partly no. Mostly no. All the ethical guidelines I’d always held so dear were designed to keep therapists from feeling the ambiguity of roles I was feeling right then, were designed to keep patients from suffering the conflict-of-interest vulnerabilities Bill was floating in right then. What a mess I’d made.

The thing was, I wasn’t too upset about it.

Bill crossed his legs, uncrossed them, stood suddenly, and moved to the southern windows. His back was to me, and he seemed to be focused on the advancing sunset that was visible through the skeleton of the ash trees. My sense was that he wasn’t sure how to resume his narrative. I could have drawn the shut-up-and-wait arrow from my quiver. I didn’t. To help him find a way to restart his story I chose an option that I thought was a gimme: “That’s when you found out he’d dug a tunnel? The day Doyle showed up in your kitchen.”

“No, I had no idea that’s how he’d gotten in. Learning about the tunnel last night was a complete surprise to me. A tunnel? Never crossed my mind, not for a second. I thought Doyle had a key to our house, that he’d discovered where we hid our spare, or had somehow gotten hold of one of the kids’ keys. That’s what he’d led me to believe. He had told me not to get an alarm, not to change the locks. Told me I’d regret doing any of those things. When he’d threaten me with what I was going to regret if I didn’t cooperate, he’d always mention the kids.”

“He threatened them?”

“He tried. I threatened him right back. I told him if he came into my house when the kids were home, I’d kill him. If he so much as talked to them, I’d kill him. I think he believed me.”

She was scared. That’s what Bob had said about Mallory. She was scared.

Was that why she was scared?

“What did Mallory know about all this?” I asked.

“Mallory,” he said in a long exhale. His breath temporarily clouded the window glass in front of his mouth. “Mallory.”

I thought he was about to cry.

“She hasn’t had a good Christmas since she was six.” Bill said into the glass. “That’s eight years, most of her life. She hates Christmas.”

She misses her mom. Diane had told me that Mallory missed her mom. The year that Mallory was six was the year that Rachel abandoned her family for the lure of Las Vegas weddings.

Psychotherapy 101: Christmas for Mallory was irrevocably linked to loss.

Finally, I thought I understood why Mallory had felt so compelled to see Hannah Grant for psychotherapy: Mallory hadn’t had a good Christmas since she was six. She went to see Hannah because she didn’t want to have another bad Christmas, another Christmas when her primary emotion involved desperately missing her mother.

“She’d get so scared,” Bill said. “Every year, right after Thanksgiving she’d start to get scared.”

Scared? That’s what Bob had said about Mallory, too. She was scared. Why scared?

“Scared?” I asked. I would have suspected that Mallory would show signs of anxiety or depression on the anniversary of her mother’s abandonment. But fear?

Bill wiped at his eyes with his fingertips. “She thought it was going to happen again. She couldn’t be comforted. No matter what I tried to do over the years to help her deal with it, nothing worked.”